They define a republic
to be a government of laws,
and not of men.
John Adams
Photo of the Day: Not Your Everyday U.S. Senator...
Doctors Bowers and Rand Paul (doing pro bono surgery) helped restore eyesight to legally blind people.
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There are Muslim Indians and Christian Indians, of course. I was once riding in my best Indian friend's car and asked about some artifacts on or around his dashboard. As I recall, he analogized them to the equivalent of a St. Christopher's medal for Catholics (for travel safety and against sudden death); my friend is very patient and would go into meticulous detail about Hindu gods. The author of "Don't Fly During Ramadan" (a well-known Muslim period of fasting during daylight) doesn't really rant about fellow American confusion between Hindus and Muslims, but I had to chuckle at one point during his TSA experience retelling, he writes of the authorities of bringing in a South Asian Muslim American DHS employee whom attempted to talk to him in Hindi (which the author doesn't speak). There is a certain understandable indignity about the confusion, such as cultural indignities when Americans don't recognize differences among Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans or Chinese, i.e. "Asians all look alike to me".
The author, an NYU venture capital contractor (?) who has been in the process of moving from temp housing to a New York apartment, writes of posting, as per custom, a Hindu saint poster on the wall of his new home. He was on the way to the West Coast to reunite with his parents for a several days tour of California Hindu temples when he found himself stopped for an extended security check. I'll leave it to the reader to read his detailed account; there are the usual agent thuggish threats to call airport security at the slightest hint of objection. At one point he is asked to explain a certain chemical trace, which he hypothesizes might be residue from bedbug treatment of his bed mattress.
To provide a context, he had originally opted not to go through the invasive scanner, as he had routinely done in past travel. At one point during the extended patdown procedure, he decided that he would rather just stop the madness and simply go through the machine but discovers that he has been trapped in the TSA vortex. Here are some choice soundbites, which do an excellent job exemplifying the pervasive bureaucratic arrogance and intimidation:
- Noticing my hesitation, the agent offered to have his supervisor explain the procedure in more detail. He brought over his supervisor, a rather harried man who, instead of explaining the pat-down to me, rather rudely explained to me that I could either submit immediately to a pat-down behind closed-doors, or he could call the police....He glanced for a moment at my backpack, then snatched it out of the conveyor belt. “Okay,” he said. “You can leave, but I’m keeping your bag.”I was speechless. My bag had both my work computer and my personal computer in it. The only way for me to get it back from him would be to snatch it back, at which point he could simply claim that I had assaulted him. I was trapped.
- The cops arrived a few minutes later, spoke with the TSA agents for a moment, and then came over and gave me one last chance to submit to the private examination. “Otherwise, we have to escort you out of the building.” I asked him if he could be present while the TSA agent was patting me down. "No," he explained, "because when we pat people down, it’s to lock them up."
- "What’s happening?" I asked. "I’m running it through the x-ray again," he snapped. "Because I can. And I’m going to do it again, and again, until I decide I’m done"
- "What have you touched that would cause you to test positive for certain explosives?"I can’t think of anything. What does it say is triggering the alarm?" I asked."I’m not going to tell you! It’s right here on my sheet, but I don’t have to tell you what it is!" he exclaimed, pointing at his clipboard.
- At one point, when I went to the door and asked the officer when I could finally get something to drink, he told me, “Just a couple more minutes. You’ll be out of here soon.” "That’s what they said an hour ago," I complained. "You also said a lot of things, kid," he said with a wink. "Now sit back down".
To sum up, he eventually got past airport security, only to find himself now dealing with an airliner representative whom has a battery of questions of her own and apparently objects to his answers or attitude, saying the airline wouldn't let him board on that day's flights (he would later have to schedule another roundtrip on another airline costing hundreds of dollars more). He then finds himself being questioned by a clueless FBI agent whom doesn't know the differences in faith practices between Hindus and Muslims. At one point he is asked to describe the general layout of his new apartment, including nearby parking. He finally gets to Los Angeles several hours behind schedule.
But one post-trip odd note: when he returned to his apartment, he found the picture of the Hindu saint gone off his wall. He doesn't know for sure, but he remembered being asked about the location of his apartment...
My favorite Johnny Cash hit is a cover of Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down". His distinctive baritone also shines on "I Walk the Line", "Ring of Fire" and several other hits (including an understated anti-war "What is Truth", a personal favorite I once heard myself request on the air).
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Rent control is one of the most corrupt and economically illiterate public policies ever invented, which essentially surrenders private property rights to vested special interests; when rents are artificially capped below the market price, owners have little incentive to invest in properties knowing they can't pass along costs; a limited supply of new housing drives up costs, leaving limited affordable housing for prospective lower/middle-class tenants. Airbnb is a service which allows apartment occupants to rent out, say, a spare cot or couch at a fraction of the cost of a costly hotel room in NYC. Of course, the Big City vortex wants a piece of the action (permits and/or hotel taxes) while imposing a formidable assortment of rules and regulations, which, as all "progressive" policies do, tend to suppress space availability. You might think that a city might welcome win-win opportunities, lowering the costs of visitors to frequent the area and spend tourist dollars and help lower-income tenants offset high rent costs, but Big Hotels don't like competition and really want to impose costs for which there are economies of scale.
On the Greatest President of the Twentieth Century
I think one of the great counterfactual questions is how Coolidge would have responded to the stock market crash and its aftermath. One thing is sure: not as Hoover and FDR. How do we know? Because Harding and Coolidge had inherited a bad hand in the aftermath of WWI. From The Economist review of Shlaes' book:
By the summer of that administration’s first year, though, the stockmarket had fallen by 47.8% from its peak in 1919, further than it would fall in 1929. The country was awash in debt left over from the first world war; unemployment was high. The new administration responded with austerity...Coolidge felt that his duty to the public did not include protecting Washington’s influence, and he set to shrinking it. Ms Shlaes uses Coolidge’s diaries to show how often the president met with his budget director, Herbert Mayhew Lord. They cut back on the use of pencils, changed the fabric of mailbags and lowered the tariff on paintbrush handles. Government departments that reduced expenditures were rewarded with special citations. Sensitive to the importance of personal example, he was equally tough on his own household, questioning even the amount of food on the White House table. “I am for economy. After that I am for more economy,” Coolidge said as he faced an onslaught of interests seeking cash, from the army to civil engineers to pensioners to governors..It's the following passage which really gets my blood pumping:
Coolidge was, Ms Shlaes writes, “the great refrainer”. He wanted government to support innovation by using it—he made the first presidential radio broadcast—but not get involved otherwise. “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” he said. “Let administration catch up with legislation.” Coolidge opposed the dams and power projects beloved by his successors, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. He also objected to public ownership of the Post Office, tax exemptions for municipal debt and farm subsidies, all of which have produced costs that still hang heavily over America.
Food Stamp Nation vs. Self-Reliance
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Lisa Benson and Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups Redux
The Beatles, "Girl"
