Putin's problem isn't what's under his shirt, it's what he has under his pants........

......it's that his geopolitical 'member' is so tiny and prone to limpness.  Russia doesn't have the cojones necessary to project power much less sustain it.  Yeah, they can humiliate doddering, impotent Ukraine or Georgia for time but any country that actually has functional geopolitical wedding tackle and the willingness to deploy it will make Russia go limp almost immediately.


And the problem is that all of the geopolitical Cialis and Viagra are in the west.  All the West needs to do is progressively restrict Russia's access to 'hardener'.

As my friends used to say in Oklahoma when I was a kid:  deep down Putin's a "Pussy" who don't know it yet.

Who thinks it's good for public employee unions to fund the politicians that they negotiate with over wages and working conditions?

FDR thought it was a horrible idea.  So evidently do most voters.  But the Democrats at the end of the money conveyor with their pockets bulging - they dig it.  And as was demonstrated in Wisconsin will break laws, constitutions, contracts and the basic human norms of decency to keep their gravy going.  The estimable Ann Althouse:

In the NYT: "Union Leaders Gird for Battle Against Republican Running for Governor of Illinois."

While struggles over the role of unions have boiled over in recent years in Republican-held Midwestern states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio, a fight in Illinois, President Obama’s home state and a Democratically controlled union stronghold, marks new ground. His Democratic opponent in November, Gov. Pat Quinn, is seen as vulnerable....

“I’m not anti-union,” [Rauner] said last week. His complaint, he says, is with public sector union leaders who donate to political leaders. “When government union power can influence politicians in the contract negotiations for pensions, for pay scales, for health care, it’s a direct financial incentive — in effect as a bribe — with someone across the negotiating table.”

With the new SXSW Austin goes meta.

"It sometimes feels like we’ve gotten too much of what we wished for with South by Southwest."

"South by Southwest has upped the ante of what Austin is, and Austin is trying to play this game with itself, to try to compete with itself, to see if it can succeed in pulling this off."

Wow. Meta baby, very meta.  Hattip Althouse.

It used to be that IRS Commissioners refused to screw with the President's enemies

Randolph Thrower was fired by Nixon for not going after Nixon's enemies as the IRS had done for Johnson and Kennedy before him.  This would be unimaginable in the Obama administration.  The firing, I mean.  Because during the first Obama term the IRS actively harassed hundreds of conservative organizations and the harassment was coordinated by over 300 visits to the White House by the Acting Commissioner and Chief Counsels of the IRS - as compared to the one visit by the IRS commissioner during the entire Bush administration.

I guess they were coordinating the Easter Egg roll's tax status.

This is what happens when you cater to women's toilet obsessions

Thousands of little boys - mostly 2-3 years old get hurt.  Badly, with their penises' crushed badly enough to go to the emergency room.  Ann Althouse has the tale.

If you go to the summary of the study, at Chalabi's link, you'll easily picture how it happened, and it's not cute or funny at all. There were 13,175 genitourinary injuries related to toilet seats in the U.S. in the years 2002–2010.

The most common mechanism involved crush from accidental fall of toilet seat, described in 9011 (68.4%, 95% CI 6907–11 115) cases.

Most crush injuries were isolated to the penis (98.1%). Of crush injuries, 81.7% occurred in children aged 2–3 years and 99.3% occurred in the home. Crush injuries increased over the period 2002–2010 (P = 0.017) by ≈100 per year, ending with an estimated 1707 (95% CI 1011–2402) by 2010.

The journal, remember, is Pediatrics. These are very little boys just learning to pee at the toilet, with their penis in a vulnerable spot, after they've swung the seat into an incompletely upright position. Once you visualize the problem, the design defect of the toilet seat is actually quite shocking. And yet here is Chalabi — supposedly into statistical revelations — transforming this information into something like a joking parting shot for the article. The reader is prompted to laugh at a grown man — perhaps a bad "date" — who can't even protect his own penis when he opts to pee standing up. 

All because their mothers demand to have the seat down when they stroll in to do their business.  If GM inflicted this kind of carnage it would be lawsuits and shocked, horrified commentary.  If it happened to little girls it would be a criminal catastrophe.  But once again it is glorious womanhood that is imposing cruel carnage on their sons so no big deal, except as an Ezra Klein 'funny'.  Har, har, har.

Looked at as an isolated fact it isn't that big a deal but when taken with all of the other ways that women abuse little boys, from overmedication, to the criminalization of boy style play, to the constant and cruel attempts to turn boys into girls it just is too damn much for me to take.  Women, leave your sons alone, fathers stop your damned wives and their cronies in the schools - what they're doing to your sons is political and immoral.  As immoral as laughing at hurt toddlers.

Glenn Reynolds: Our criminal justice system is a crime

I honestly don't know how any practicing lawyer or judge much less legislator can look at themselves in the mirror without throwing up.  Ah well, lawyers are nothing if not morally flexible.

Mommas don't let you babies grow up to be lawyers.  More at the link.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/03/19/law-enforcement-clue-jury-criminal-column/6490641/

Mommas don't let your babies grow up to be accused of College Rape

If your son is in college and particularly if he lives on campus he is at great risk of having his life destroyed by any woman he gets involved with who decides that she has been scorned or slighted. This is because it is a trivial task for her to accuse him of rape and almost impossible for him to defend against.  New Federal regulations (not law, because this is the Obama administration, they don't need no stinkin' laws) requires that colleges that routinely deny those accused of sexual assault due process rights utilize a 'preponderance of the evidence' standard for convictions (the Obami don't need no stinkin' Constitution either).  So the typical rape tribunal 'process' is a kangaroo court where the accused has no representation, no right to cross-examine witnesses and who is usually summarily expelled with his 'crime' being put on his permanent record.  KC Johnson is a professor who has been chronicling this obscene trend ever since the Duke rape hoax.  Here's his short essay on the matter.  Make you kid read it.

So unless you can persuade your son to spend his college years Gay or celibate I would recommend that you counsel him severely and if possible persuade him to live off campus where the Constitution - at least for the time being - still applies.  And date real women, not college girls.  Easy, huh?

Obama unilaterally rewrites Freedom of Information Act to suppress 'inconvenient' leaks

The Obama administration is an example of how lawless our Federal government can become when the press and intelligentsia choose to look the other way.

Put simply, our bien pensants are despicable cowards and criminal enablers. They don't appear to have any principles beyond will to power and fashion.

Disgusting. At the link.

Who does your local, deeply committed, compassion filled progressive care about? #2

So in our previous episode we highlighted the celebrated 'progressive' and frequenter of Cuban non-union subsistence wage resorts cum whorehouses, BIll DeBlasio's decisive efforts to cut the bottom rungs off of the opportunity ladder by smashing the best performing public schools in NYC - the charters.  You go get 'em Bill, kick those little kids asses, don't they know that the unions own the schools?  It's just the way things are.

Now we turn our spotlight to the oh so progressive burg of Seattle.  Filled to the brim with compassion, love for diversity and alternative lifestyles and innovative business models, surely Seattle progos are, you know, progressive.  Sigh, silly glasshopper, ploglressive politician not interested in plogless, interested in power!  Carpe Diem has the tale:

On Uber’s blog yesterday, it announced a new series of price cuts for uberX:

 What a lot of folks don’t know about Uber is how inexpensive it is to ride uberX. For the last two years, we have worked our asses off to introduce low-priced alternatives to cities worldwide. We’ve rolled out uberX in dozens of cities and rolled out dozens of price reductions across the country. It’s hard work but has big pay off with millions more people able to experience the Uber magic.

Today we’re taking things to a whole new level.

What if Uber was actually the cheapest ride in every Uber city? What if we lowered rates in 16 of our 24 uberX cities? And what if some of those cuts pushed the envelope of what we even think is possible? That’s exactly what we’re doing. On average across all Uber cities, uberX is 26% cheaper than a taxi.

We’re cutting prices by 15-34% in Chicago, SF, Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Orange County. And ten additional cities will also see cuts – Minneapolis, Atlanta, Sacramento, Tucson, Indianapolis, Denver, Dallas, Baltimore, Charlotte, Nashville.

Here’s how one local taxi cartel is responding, with the assistance of its city government enablers in Seattle:

Seattle on Monday became the first city to limit the number of drivers for so-called rideshare companies such as Lyft, uberX and Sidecar.

The regulations, approved unanimously by the City Council, will limit each company to 150 drivers on the road at the same time, collectively limiting them to 450. UberX, Lyft and Sidecar — which together have more than 2,000 drivers in the city — say the limitation destroys their business model and ability to maintain speedy response times.

Taxi owners and drivers breathed a sigh of relief when the caps, which would last at least another year, were approved.

So who does this 'common sense' regulation by Seattle help?  Consumers who will find it harder to find and pay more for transportation?  Or the people who would have been employed by Uber and co? Or the Taxicab Cartel?  Hmm.  It doesn't seem to be diverse, or innovative or hip or frankly anything but - ooh, I know!  another money conveyor belt:  monopoly rents to the medallion owners who pass some of it back to their oh so progressive pals in the government.  "After all, only the rubes get nailed and who ever got ahead in politics by worrying about rubes?  If they're stupid to vote for us regardless they deserve their reaming."

Frederic Bastiat had some good advice on his deathbed:  “Treat all economic questions from the viewpoint of the consumer, for the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race.”

And the interests of progressive urban politicians are the interests of power hungry, authoritarian thugs in thrall to monied interests.

It's all so progressive.

Who does your local, deeply committed, compassion filled progressive care about? #1

The poor?  The weak?  The vulnerable?  Outsiders?  Fat fucking chance.  Here's a current example from New York City:  First in the nation and first in the hearts of....the teacher's unions.  Bobby Jindal explains:

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio has embarked on a systematic campaign to destroy the city’s burgeoning charter school movement. He’s diverting more than $200 million in funding marked for charter schools, and has also thrown hundreds of students out of their promised school buildings. He has also declared his intent to nullify arrangements that allow charters to locate in existing public schools rent-free.

The mayor’s open warfare against Eva Moskowitz, who founded a network of 22 charter schools, has all the markings of a petulant tyrant holding low-income students hostage. De Blasio has said, “There’s no way in hell Eva Moskowitz should get free rent” — as if the 6,700 students in the charter schools she runs were a mere afterthought in his personal vendetta against a fellow Democrat.

And they do a much better job:

In New York, four in five charters outperformed comparable public schools in recent state tests; Moskowitz’s schools scored in the top 1 percent in math, and top 7 percent in English. In the president’s hometown of Chicago, one network of charter schools boasts a college graduation rate three times the average of Chicago public schools.

Its progressive to love and serve the powerful!

Heck, even if they didn't do any better than the public schools they do it with vastly less money per student.  We could shift the entire nation to charters and privates and rebate half of the money we spend - no, I mean waste on K-12 education.  Which is why DeBlasio is smashing the charters.  They threaten the progressive money conveyor from taxpayers to bloated public institutions to public employee unions and contractors to the oh so progressive Democrat party.

And only few short weeks ago DeBlasio was inaugurated to the Hosannas of elites everywhere, CNN covered his bloody inauguration live and Bill Clinton - no mean judge of power - spoke at it.  And that's it, isn't it?  Behind the yelps for progress is the cold, cruel hunger to dominate, punish, coerce, rule.  Because when it comes to NYC Education and Bill DeBlasio Il Duce's old dictum rules:

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state

 It's all so progressive.

PS:  and if you say "well our local Dems don't do that" you're forgetting that the modern 'progressive' Democrat party is run almost exclusively by people from the northeast and Northern California with PR managed by big media.  That's where the money, the energy and the functionaries are from.  Just ask West Virginians what happens to loyal Democrats who no longer fit in.  Or for that matter, ask all of those poor minority kids who were just evicted from their schools.

Here's another classic example of progressive partnership with powerful economic interests to the detrimient of the 'little ones'.

And Richard Corry went home last night...

...and put a bullet in his head.  Paul's song describes Mick's longtime Gf's suicide by scarf.  Of course L. Wren was a fashion designer.

Nothing satisfies our restless longings. Nothing. It's God's primary curse. Probably because after trillions of years He recognizes the pointlessness of existing for the sake of existing.

Or as He would put it: I Am that I Am. Which is a cry for help if I ever heard one.

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2014/03/mick-jaggers-long-time-girlfriend.html?m=1

Cretinism Running Amuck at NASA

Saying earth is doomed DOOMED! Because we're running out of raw materials - despite the massive tech driven explosion in production happening in front of them. And because of income inequality which has been plummeting world wide for decades. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that time serving space bureaucrats are as shallow as Guardian editors.

Must be some of those "quality Hanson hires"

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists

Are the Democrats just a Labor party in drag?

In NYC DeBlasio sides with the teachers union and crushes the charter school network that was beating them blind.

I think it is more accurate to describe Dems as the party of the state and it's parasites. More at the link.

    http://nypost.com/2014/03/17/bill-de-blasios-war-for-poverty/

Federal regulator or medieval stationary bandits?

Extortion by our public servants.  More Tony Soprano than Thomas Jefferson. Then again state supremacist triumphalism has encouraged a flowering of lawless state oppression. Hope and Change indeed. At the link.

http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303973704579353342283922028?mobile=y

What does the Mercatus State Fiscal Solvency Report tell us about governance in the US?

Mercatus* came out with an unusually thorough and transparent evaluation of state fiscal solvency.  You can see the results here.  It would be easy to point out that with the exception of Appalachian Kentucky and West Virginia all of the states in the most desperate fiscal straights are deep blue, mostly one party states.  And it is super easy to observe that with the possible exception of purple Ohio, all of the top 10 fiscally solvent states are Red and that none of the top twenty are 'blue' states.  Indeed it is child's play to note the first blue state is #23 Washington state and it doesn't have a state income tax so from a fiscal standpoint it really isn't that 'blue'.

But it would be a bit unfair to compare tiny whitebread Tball states with large complex urban ones.  I think we need to break the league table into two divisions:  big and/or very urban vs. small and/or less urban with the dividing line being having or being part of a city >2 million.  Here's how it stacks up:

The ten sickest big city states are all blue.

What's interesting is the worst performers are a who's who of states with huge advantages:  NY has the richest mega city in the world, NJ and CT have millions of NYC's affluent suburbanites, MA is the best educated state in the nation and these four states have huge, rich institutions (Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia) coming out their ears.  Not to mention California which in terms of natural and entreprenurial endowment is without a doubt the richest place on the planet.  Illinois has Chicago, the greatest concentration of wealth and commerce between the coasts.  And yet even Minnesota (!) is fiscally outclassed by inbred, cousin marryin' knuckle draggin' states like AL and OK.

So just why are blue states so bad at managing their financial affairs?  It's not like they're all poor, exactly - even after adjusting for inflation IL and MA are among the richest, although RI, CA, NY are at the bottom of the barrel. They don't all have traditions of criminal political machines - certainly MN and CA don't, and their economies aren't collapsed ruins. Yet in consumer terms most of them would have a hard time getting a credit card.  What gives? Why are states with the blue ideological predisposition which they point out is more 'sophisticated',  'modern', 'compassionate', and of course 'progressive' such bad financial actors?

There are two generic narratives about what the left side of the political divide stands for.  The first which I'll call the 'Classical' or 'Optimate' critique argues that leftist politics is simply an updating of the Roman appeal to the mob pioneered by the Gracchus brothers and used to good effect by Julius Caesar:  promise the rubes goodies, get in power and then use the public fisc to pay your debts to favored constituencies and to cultivate more support.  Fiscal accountability, keeping your promises, protecting the next generation are irrelevant. What matters is power and your will to grasp it, you'll use that power to balance the books somewhere down the line, preferably on the backs of your enemies.

The other, which I'll call for want of a better name the "Deweyite-Sinclair Rejoinder" argues that the left has a principled preference for state action when the private market or society fails to address serious problems like the environment, poverty, plutocracy, and so on.  In this view the left is not obsessed by power but by the public good and policies that increase it.  Sometimes that means that the left will take greater fiscal risks for a time but by investing in people, those risks will pay off.

But if you argue that the second is more true (there are of course many shades of gray) wouldn't the government's credibility, its honesty, its probity be absolutely crucial to the "good government left's" leaders? Because if you are an advocate for principled government intervention then you need to make sure that the government is seen as being clean and trustworthy to undertake these great tasks.

The paradox is that the situation has changed almost 100% from a century ago.  In 1914 the states that were fiscally responsible were overwhelmingly northern industrial or west coast and the profligate, populist states tended to be...southern or agrarian.  Of course back then the the south was solid for...Democrats and the northern industrial states....  Oops, never mind.

So what does the relative rankings of all heavily blue, often one party states have to say about which type of 'progressive' dominates our Democratic party's leadership ranks?  People like Bill Clinton who retired to roar around the world amassing a hundred million dollar fortune and no doubt a stable of adoring and accommodating playmates? or Harry Truman who when he was done in DC retired with his wife to the family's wood frame home in Independence (sort of like GWB did to Crawford but I would never, ever compare GWB to a 'righteous' Democrat)?  And what do you think BHO's Presidential payoff is going to be?  Or more to the point:  how many years to his first hundred mil? After all he's a 'world historical' figure with his very own Nobel Peace Prize Prize. (God forgive me but I laugh every time I read that)

The history of the Roman Republic was bookended by the republican heroes of Rome like Cincinnatus who took power for a time, served the state and then returned to his plow and the Caesars - Julius and his adopted son Octavian, the plutocratic imperialists who killed it.  Likewise our republic had its Cincinnatus in Washington and as late as Coolidge or Truman (or GWB - I know, I know, eeeviiil) who took back up their plows as well.  Yet today what kind of leaders are we cultivating?  Small 'r' republican magistrates or the world's most popular stationary bandits?  You be the judge.

*Admittedly Mercatus is a free market thing tank but as I said earlier, this is a very transparent and non-controversial ranking. Everyone knows who's at the bottom and the top even before the rankings. So click on the link and judge for yourself.

The US: drone innovation leader, lags in commercial drone use due to Federal inertia

The Federal Stupor State, in the guise of the FAA has led to the US falling further and further behind other countries in exploiting the benefits of drone technology.  It is typical of the Federal Government to do destructive things simply because it's too much effort to do the right thing expeditiously.  We have such a rotten, corrupt Federal clusterbuck.  And it's getting worse by the day.

God help us everyone.

HT Marginal Revolution.

Matt Walsh: An open letter to liberal feminists

One of the ironies of America is that women, who live longer, get more education, are treated better by the criminal justice and education systems and so on and so forth are presented as 'victims' of the evil patriarchy.  The 'Ban Bossy' is the latest execrable example. Perhaps that was true in the past but it is not true now.  Matt Walsh lays out the thoughtful, coherently argued and respectful argument here.

Everyone knows that men are infinitely more likely to go to prison, but did you know they even receive longer sentences for the same crimes? Indeed, women convicted on the same charges are twice as likely to avoid incarceration altogether.

Is this what you call “male privilege”?

Privileged to be drugged as a child, expelled from school as a teenager, and incarcerated as an adult? Privileged to bad grades, a psychiatric diagnosis, and an early death?

Sure, you can argue your case by throwing around the same old misleading statistics. How much money does a woman make for every dollar a man makes? Is it 77 now? 81? It doesn’t matter. Better question: how did you arrive at that figure.

Wait, do you even know how you arrived at that figure?

Must read internet.

Anything led by Harry Reid is guaranteed to be batshit crazy

Reid leads charge on Dems midterm Koch boys font of all evil campaign thrust.  Electorate doesn't give a hoot.  Atlantic Magazine despairing of their homeboy's hysteria.  The Democrats Foolish Koch Obsession.

It's terrifying when the leaders of  your political persuasion turn out to be loons.

I say kick his fellow travelling ass bloody for selling his people out for a mess of power and money pottage

Blue Dog Democrat settin' up for whippin'.

Poll shows 38-year Democratic congressman down 14 points. This is astonishing for several reasons. Rahall, first elected in 1976, is now the seventh most senior member of the House, with three of the more senior members retiring (John Dingell, Henry Waxman, George Miller) and another with a serious primary challenge (Charlie Rangel). Moreover, his district in southern West Virginia has historically been very Democratic; in its previous boundaries it voted for Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan in 1984. Rahall won in 1976 by 46 percent to 37 percent over Ken Hechler, his predecessor in the seat, who after losing a Democratic primary for governor ran as a write-in candidate; the Republican nominee received only 18 percent of the vote. From 1978 to 2008, Rahall was re-elected with at least 64 percent of the vote, except in 1990 when he beat Republican Marianne Brewster by only 52 percent to 48 percent.

But this is coal country, and Rahall’s margins have gone down after President Obama was elected president. In 2010, Rahall won by a reduced margin of 56 percent to 44 percent, and in 2012, his margin was only 54 percent to 46 percent. Obama’s unpopularity surely cost him: John McCain carried the district within its then-boundaries by a 56-percent to 42-percent margin in 2008, and Mitt Romney carried the current district 65 percent to 33 percent in 2012. Rahall is ranking Democrat on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and was Chairman of the Natural Resources Committee when Democrats had a majority in the House; these are committee positions of importance to a mountainous coal district, but apparently they are not enough to help him now.

39

Ockham's razor says: The IRS is a criminal enterprise

Instapundit.com relates Tax Prof's tracking of the IRS epidemic (I know, I know, I just questioned his grasp of logic on law school rankings but he's actually a good guy for a tax weenie - look if you expect me to be consistent...then to hell with you).

The IRS Scandal, Day 311. Key bit:

We need to remind ourselves that there is a lot more potential abuse going on at the IRS than what’s been associated with Lois Lerner. Here are a few examples. I talk to many practitioners who (a) don’t want to be identified, probably for fear of retaliation, and (b) question the independence of the IRS Appeals Office. That is a big problem.

In 2012 a high-ranking IRS executive said in a speech that she believes the government has a higher duty than that of a private litigant. “The government,” the executive said, “represented by the tax administrator, should not pursue a particular outcome and then look for interpretations in the law that support it. The tax administrator should do nothing more or less than find the law and follow it, regardless of outcome. The separation of powers, a bedrock principle of our Constitution, demands it."

I have a few questions. How many private tax litigators believe that’s actually how the IRS operates? If this noble statement is taken seriously by others in the IRS, why did Tax Analysts have to go to court to get training materials? And why is the IRS being questioned so strongly by Congress on its belief – or, more accurately, the lack thereof — in the bedrock principle of the separation of powers?