Archive for March, 2014
Posted by Richard on March 18, 2014
When you combine a light-weight, portable beverage carbonator with beer concentrate, you end up with what I nominate as the best invention of the decade:
We’ve written about Pat’s Backcountry Beverages Carbonator, the Nalgene-size system for fizzifying your drink of choice where ever the trail takes you. And while we’ve talked about Pat’s alcohol-packed beer flavors—the world’s first beer concentrate, according to the company—we haven’t put them to the test. Until now.
As a backpacker and a booze writer, when I heard about Pat’s first two beer flavors(complete with alcohol!) I couldn’t resist checking them out. After all, who among us hasn’t fantasized about some sweet suds at the end of a long, hot hike? But could these “beers” pass the taste test of an admittedly picky beer drinker? The short answer—Yes.
You add a 1.7-ounce packet of Pat’s liquid beer concentrate ($10 for four) to cold water and use Pat’s Backcountry Beverages Carbonator to charge it with CO2. The result sounds pretty good:
So what’s the bottom line? While it’s a struggle to get the drink as carbonated as you’d want (the best I ever got was analogous to a draft beer that had been sitting out for a good half-hour), the flavors are on-point. The Pale Rail is still a tad too sweet, but the Black Hops is most definitely worth the price of admission. I’m absolutely bringing it on my next trip, and if you’re a beer lover, I suggest you do the same.
I haven’t been backpacking in years, but this might just tempt me to pack up and head out this summer. One question: are bears attracted to beer?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: backpacking, beer, inventions | 1 Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 18, 2014
The Obama administration has ignored laws, unilaterally changed laws, and administratively enacted laws, demonstrating complete indifference to the separation of powers and contempt for the legislative branch. Now it seems poised to also demonstrate its contempt for the judicial branch. Michael Cannon at Forbes (bold emphasis added):
As readers of this blog know, the plaintiffs in Halbig v. Sebelius and three similar cases are challenging the IRS’s attempt to issue certain subsidies and impose certain taxes where it has no authority to do so: in the 34 states that have chosen not to establish a health insurance “exchange” under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Oral arguments in Halbig are scheduled for March 25 before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Read all about the these cases here.
On Wednesday, March 12, government lawyers filed with the court a brief but strange “notice of supplemental authority” that seems to suggest the IRS will keep issuing those subsidies and imposing those taxes even if the court declares the agency has no authority to do so.
Instead of jailing “climate change deniers,” we should jail “Constitution deniers.”
The Cato Institute has lots more about Halbig and related cases.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: abuse of power, courts, lawlessness, obama, obamacare | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 18, 2014
Michael Schaus at Townhall Finance:
An assistant philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology has proposed a bold plan to settle the debate on Global Warming. Lawrence Torcello wrote an essay suggesting that scientists who fail to fall in line with global warming alarmists should be charged with criminal negligence, and possibly even be thrown in jail. Nothing screams academic freedom like a little intellectual Fascism. Right?
RTWT.
The safety and efficacy of vaccines is considered “settled science” in the medical community. So maybe we should jail Jenny McCarthy.
And a scientific consensus now exists that the federal corn ethanol mandate is actually bad for the environment. So maybe we should jail all the members of Congress who voted for it.
Hmm … now that I think about it, the latter idea sounds rather tempting.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: climate change, fascism, global warming | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 17, 2014
A week or so ago, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg started a campaign to ban the word “bossy” (apparently, Sandberg isn’t familiar with the First Amendment). Allegedly, the patriarchy uses the word to stigmatize girls who assert themselves, or something like that.
A number of people have pointed out that Sandberg is a major Hillary Clinton supporter and donor, and speculated that this plays into her motives. Glenn Reynolds described it as “astroturf battlespace preparation for Hillary.” And suggested an appropriate bumpersticker, which promptly came into existence:
But my favorite comment on the “ban bossy” idea is from Steven Hayward (emphasis in original):
So we’re supposed to ban “bossy” from our vocabulary, eh? This, coming from the same folks who imposed the mandate that we all buy health insurance from government-run exchanges, and dictate exactly what that insurance policy must have in it. I mean, if liberalism today isn’t about being bossy, then it hardly has a reason for being. …
Just about the bossiest person I can think of is Michael Bloomberg. By all means, let’s ban bossiness.
UPDATE: Apparently, the people who want to ban “bossy” have no problem with using it to describe white male Republicans.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: bossy, hillary, liberals, politics | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 15, 2014
Did you see the poster of a “bad boy” version of Sen. Ted Cruz? The Senator did, and responded with humor:
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: humor, politics, ted cruz | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 15, 2014
I saw a brief story on the news tonight about demonstrations in Moscow both for and against Putin and Russian intervention in Ukraine. Not much detail. AFP had more information:
Around 50,000 people marched through central Moscow on Saturday in protest at Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, a day before the Crimean peninsula votes on switching to Kremlin rule.
Waving Ukrainian and Russian flags and adopting the chants of Ukraine’s popular uprising, prominent and ordinary Russians urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to pull troops back from ex-Soviet Ukraine.
Marchers carried placards reading “Putin, get out of Ukraine” and others comparing Kremlin’s decision to send troops to Crimea with the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland as Europe rushed headlong into World War II.
…
Members of anti-Kremlin punk Pussy Riot compared Russia’s invasion of Crimea that plunged the country into a Cold-War style confrontation with the West to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
“How can a referendum under the barrels of guns be legitimate and fair?” Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina asked during a rally after the march, a Russian flag in her hand.
The Blaze has the AP story and some of the pictures tweeted from the protest march. As for the pro-Putin counter-demonstration (emphasis added):
Not far away near the Kremlin, several thousand people dressed in matching red costumes marched in formation to show their support for Russian intervention in the region.
Sounds like a real spontaneous grass-roots demonstration, doesn’t it?
What’s the Russian word for “astroturf”?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: protests, russia, ukraine | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 15, 2014
In a Slate article this morning, Jeff Wise presented evidence suggesting that Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 may have been hijacked and flown to somewhere near the border of Kyrgyzstan and the Chinese province of Xingiang. He noted that:
A violent separatist Uyghur separatist [sic] movement is active in that area. Two weeks ago, eight knife-wielding Uyghur separatists attacked passengers at a train station in Xinjiang, killing 29 people. According to its manifest, 153 of the 227 passengers aboard MH370 are Chinese.
He failed to provide any information about the Uyghurs (a.k.a. Uighurs) beyond their separatism, so I’ll fill in the blank for you. At least some of them are radical Islamists.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: air travel, hijacking, jihad, malaysia | 2 Comments »
Posted by Richard on March 15, 2014
In a recent Cato Policy Report, Brian Domitrovic contrasted the growth of government in the past 15 years with the comparable period before that, and suggested that what this country needs is another tax revolt:
For about 15 years now, the federal government, in all its myriad activities, has been in major expansion mode. The Federal Reserve, the regulatory apparatus, the tax code, the police and surveillance machinery of the state — all of these extensions of the government have broadened their reach, power, and ambition in significant fashion since the late 1990s.
The basic metric that reflects all this is the level of federal spending. In 2013 the government of the United States spent 55 percent more money — in real, inflation-adjusted terms — than it did in 1999. Economic growth in that 14-year span has been 30 percent. …
…
The moment is apt, then, to reclaim a tradition of our recent history, a tradition that the big-government 21st century is striving to suppress. This is the great successful effort to slow Leviathan of a generation and a half ago — the effort that gave us the Ronald Reagan revolution of the 1980s.
By all means, read the whole thing. But this graph clearly illustrates one of the key points:
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: big government, economics, economy, reagan, tax cuts | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 13, 2014
A natural gas explosion destroyed two apartment buildings in East Harlem yesterday, killing at least seven people. Rep. Charles Rangel, who represents the neighborhood, described it as “our community’s 9/11.” That offensively separatist bit of hyperbole drew lots of negative reactions on Twitter, and Twitchy collected some of them.
At Breitbart’s Big Government, Frances Martel pointed out that 9/11 was Harlem’s 9/11:
Harlem was among the communities most impacted by the September 11 attacks by virtue of location alone. Harlem artists have contributed significantly to September 11 memorial events and artistic works. Rep. Rangel himself worked on a bill to extend unemployment benefits as a way to stimulate the economy after September 11. The neighborhood is home to its own September 11 memorial in Inwood, which fell prey to vandalism in an incident last December.
Rangel never passes up an opportunity to get in front of the microphones, and it doesn’t matter how stupid or offensive he is. His constituents love him because he brings home the bacon, and the Socialist Democrat Party loves him because he delivers lots of black votes. So it doesn’t matter that he’s a serial tax evader and violator of Congressional ethics. If he were a Republican, he’d have been kicked out of the House and probably gone to jail.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: new york, rangel | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 12, 2014
Pat Caddell, for one, has been arguing for some time (most recently at CPAC) that the GOP leadership is part of the beltway ruling class and would rather see an establishment Democrat elected than a Tea Party upstart who threatens the current culture of cronyism and corruption. Rick Manning cites a Georgia congressional race that proves the point.
In Georgia’s 12th Congressional District, John Stone faced only a single primary opponent (assuring no debilitating runoff) and seemed poised to take the seat from Democratic incumbent John Barrow. Stone recently pledged to support changing the House GOP leadership, and a subsequent poll showed him leading Barrow by 74% to 15%. The GOP establishment’s reaction:
Suddenly, alternative candidate recruitment by the NRCC in this otherwise extremely winnable district became a priority. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that state Representative Delvis Dutton’s entrance into the race was orchestrated by NRCC operatives who have gone so far as to set up his consulting team and even managed his campaign announcement. In addition, a fourth candidate, Eugene Yu, has left behind his longshot bid to become a United States Senator from Georgia to jump into the race at the last minute.
The impact is simple.
Democrat Congressman John Barrow is licking his chops expecting that he will, due to NRCC meddling, be facing a general election opponent who won’t even be chosen until a July 21st run-off election. In Georgia if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote in a primary, the top two candidates face off, delaying the selection of a nominee for two additional months. That opponent is likely to have a depleted campaign treasury, and will have endured two more months of rigorous negative intra-party campaigning. Meanwhile Barrow will be sitting on a $2 million bankroll ready to unleash a torrent of attack ads against the defenseless Republican who emerges from the nomination process.
There are only two possible conclusions that can be drawn by the NRCC’s blundering into the 12th Congressional District of Georgia race at the last minute and doing grievous harm to their nominee. Either they are incompetent boobs who have made it exponentially harder for a Republican to win in this Republican district by accident, or they would rather have Democrat John Barrow in the seat than a reformer who understands how politics is played in D.C. like John Stone.
Although I generally subscribe to Hanlon’s razor, I’m pretty certain that this is not just incompetence. The Boehners and McConnells of the GOP, along with their staffs, consultants, and favored lobbyists, have only one goal: to maintain a grip on the levers of power. They’d rather share that power with the Democrats than risk having it reduced or taken away by a bunch of Tea Party troublemakers who actually take the party’s limited-government rhetoric seriously.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: corruption, gop, politics, republicans | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 9, 2014
Want to know why the left has tried so hard to diminish, disparage, and destroy Sarah Palin? Because she can deliver a speech like this. Wow. Just wow.
[YouTube link]
Best take-off on “Green Eggs and Ham” ever. And like Rand Paul, she goes after the GOP establishment as well as the Dems.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: conservatives, freedom, palin | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 9, 2014
On Friday, Sen. Rand Paul reminded the Conservative Political Action Congress that the 4th Amendment is just as important as the 2nd Amendment. And he took on the GOP establishment as well as the Dems. Well worth 19 minutes of your time.
[YouTube link]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: bill of rights, civil liberties, conservatives, rand paul | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 6, 2014
On Tuesday, President Obama unveiled his Fiscal Year 2015 budget proposal, for what it’s worth (not much, according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, which describes it as “[i]ncomplete, inconclusive, and indecipherable”). He proposes to spend $3.901 trillion (that’s $3,901,000,000,000), almost $1 trillion (33%) more than in 2008. The Obama administration describes this budget as ending the “era of austerity.” The “era of austerity” is apparently FY2012 and FY2013, when actual outlays declined by a whopping 4% from the stimulus-swollen FY2011 level.
Me, I’d rather look back at a different “era.” Remember Bill “the era of big government is over” Clinton? He’s revered by the Socialist Democrats, and his eight years in office are viewed as some kind of golden age. Let’s set the Wayback Machine to FY1999, the last full fiscal year of the Clinton presidency.
Actual FY1999 outlays were $1.702 trillion. According to this price deflator calculator, that’s $2.266 trillion in 2013 dollars. About 42% lower than Obama’s proposed FY2015 budget. Now that’s what I call austerity — or at least a good start.
My memory isn’t what it used to be, but I don’t recall children starving, bridges collapsing, and old people dying in the streets during the Clinton years.
If we had a decent opposition party in this country, it would demand a return to Clinton-era spending levels, adjusted for inflation. Heck, I wouldn’t even mind too much if they threw in an adjustment for the 14% population growth since 1999 (even though there’s no logical reason why all federal spending should rise with population). That would still leave the budget 28% lower than Obama’s proposal.
Actually, it’s pointless spending a lot of time on the Obama budget proposal since it’s going nowhere. The Senate’s Socialist Democrats have already made it clear that they won’t be considering a budget resolution this year. Doing so would force all those vulnerable senators up for reelection to choose between rebuffing their president or going on record supporting higher taxes, more spending, and an ever-growing debt burden. This budget proposal is purely PR and talking points.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: big government, budget, clinton, obama | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 6, 2014
Nick Gillespie:
Tim Moen is a Canadian who is apparently the first federal Libertarian Party candidate to run for Parliament from the Fort McMurray-Athabasca area in Alberta.
I’m nominating this as the best political campaign poster of the year.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: canada, libertarian party, politics | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 5, 2014
Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus is going before the Supreme Court. It’s a free speech case in which the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony (SBA) List challenges an Ohio campaign law criminalizing false statements about politicians. During the 2010 campaign, SBA List claimed that Rep. Steven Driehaus’ vote for Obamacare amounted to a vote for taxpayer-funded abortions. This was an illegal false statement according to Driehaus.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Some folks associated with the Cato Institute, including P.J. O’Rourke, have filed an amici curiae brief in the case (PDF). It provides by far the most entertaining reading the Supremes will encounter all year. Here’s a sample:
In modern times, “truthiness” — a “truth” asserted “from the gut” or because “it feels right,” without regard to evidence or logic — is also a key part of political discourse. It is difficult to imagine life without it, and our political discourse is weakened by Orwellian laws that try to prohibit it.
After all, where would we be without the knowledge that Democrats are pinko-communist flag-burners who want to tax churches and use the money to fund abortions so they can use the fetal stem cells to create pot-smoking lesbian ATF agents who will steal all the guns and invite the UN to take over America? Voters have to decide whether we’d be better off electing Republicans, those hateful, assault-weapon-wielding maniacs who believe that George Washington and Jesus Christ incorporated the nation after a Gettysburg reenactment and that the only thing wrong with the death penalty is that it isn’t administered quickly enough to secular-humanist professors of Chicano studies.
HT: Steven Hayward
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: free speech, humor, politics, supreme court | Leave a Comment »
