I realize I haven’t posted any links in a while, but I have been busy with moving and my new job, and I am posting this from my hotel in downtown Charleston where I am covering a conference.  Still, I am going to put up some extra links today to make up for lost time.

Your guess as to what this is all about is as good as mine.

A very accurate and hilarious description of every TV news story.

Canadians do not fuck around when it comes to hockey.

Because everyone loves Engrish.

The Importance of Being Earnest: Even gayer than previously thought.

I desperately want this to be true because it would make me one of the most civilized people on Earth.

If you are going to waste time at work, especially like this, you should probably make sure you aren’t in the background of a live television feed.

Gallup recently conducted a poll asking Americans how they feel about different terms such as “big business”, “small business”, and “federal government” etc.  The terms that Americans liked most are “small business”, “free enterprise”, and “entrepreneurs” with 95, 86, and 84 percent of Americans feeling positively about the terms respectively.  Given that a relatively meager 61 percent of Americans have positive feeling about “capitalism” libertarians would likely be best served by talking about the free enterprise system or the free market rather than capitalism.  I’m not exactly sure why people view capitalism so much more negatively than free enterprise, but my hypothesis is that capitalism is associated with the current American “crony capitalist” system where the government gives massive subsidies, bailouts and other privileges to large corporations.  That explanation would also go some way in explaining Americans’ split opinions on “big business” with 49 percent holding positive feelings and 49 percent holding negative feelings.

Furthermore, while I am heartened that a majority of Americans have negative feelings toward the federal government, I’m alarmed that 36 percent of the people in this country feel positively about “socialism”.  I am certain, however, that when most Americans hear the term “socialism” they do not think of the revolutionary socialism of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao but the social democracies of Europe…at least I hope so.  But most confounding of all is that 20 percent of self-described conservatives like socialism.  Now, there are a few conservatives who do actually admire European style welfare states, but very few, so I’m willing to bet that this means that 19 percent of conservatives either don’t know socialism is or they don’t know what conservatism is.  Either way, it’s pretty entertaining.

Link via Hit and Run.

I will not be watching the State of the Union address tonight.  And what will I be missing, really?  These things are all pretty much the same, regardless of the president or the actual state of the country.  The president will walk in, say the state of the union is strong or something similar, and then proceed to list a series of policy goals that range from the silly to the insanely ambitious and only about half of which we will ever hear of again.  All this will be interrupted repeatedly by thunderous applause that is too long by half and would make Augustus Caesar blush.  It’s one big rhetorical gesture, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

Instead of watching such a profoundly stupid performance, I’m going to go out and celebrate my move back to Saint Louis, which happens tomorrow.  I will spend times with my friends and have fun–ya know, the things that really matter.

Thanks to my employer’s book club, I finally got around to reading Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose, and in their chapter about equality, they make an important point that libertarians sometimes make but not nearly enough: the market actually makes us more equal in what we are able to consume.  Consider:

Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, all of the great wonders of the modern ear have meant relatively little to the wealthy.  The rich in Ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing: running servants replaced running water.  Television and radio–the patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading artists as domestic retainers.  Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets–all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life.  They would have welcomed the improvements in transportation and in medicine, but for the rest, the great achievements of Western capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person.  These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.

Sure there are still vast differences in what we people can afford to consume, but many of these differences are largely superficial.  For instance, flying first class is no doubt more comfortable than flying coach and bestows a certain status on the passenger, but both the first class and coach passengers arrive at their destination at the same time.  Furthermore, the internet, which is almost undoubtedly the greatest advance since the Friedmans wrote their book in 1979, is affordable to almost every household in America.  And while connection speeds may vary, ultimately no matter how rich or poor a person is, he is still consuming the same good as every other internet user.  Though a person may have tremendous wealth, it is likely harder now than ever before to buy something that is completely unlike what a normal person can afford.

Sorry for the lack of posts here over the last week, but I have made a number of posts over at the Show-Me Daily blog, which is somewhat more important as they employ me now.

In my latest post, I argue that Missouri should not force health insurance companies to cover treatments for autism.

Here I make the case that best method of tort reform is not through caps on damages but through the institution of a loser pays system.

This post explains why a cap on interest rates will actually end up hurting the very poor people its proponents seek to help.

I hope to have some new content for you tomorrow, but for now this will have to suffice.

Last week news broke that MIT economist Jonathan Gruber failed to disclose that he was paid almost $400,000 to consult with the White House on health care reform.  Gruber never mentioned this even though he repeatedly commented favorably on the Democratic health care proposals.  That’s bad enough, but Jane Hamsher at the Huffington Post points out that Gruber’s comments on the bills have been treated as independent analysis by the White House and Congressional Democrats and then in turn repeated by the media.  Here’s Hamsher with some of the details:

How did the feedback loop work? Well, take Gruber’s appearance before the Senate HELP Committee on November 2, 2009, for which he used his microsimulation model to make calculations about small business insurance coverage. On the same day, Gruber released an analysis of the House health care bill, which he sent to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post. Ezra published an excerpt.

White House blogger Jesse Lee then promoted both Gruber’s Senate testimony and Ezra Klein’s article on the White House blog. “We thought it would all be a little more open and transparent if we went ahead and published what our focus will be for the day” he said, pointing to Gruber’s “objective analysis.” The “transparent” part apparently stopped when everyone got to Gruber’s contractual relationship to the White House, which nobody in the three-hit triangle bothered to disclose.

But that was child’s play compared to the effort that went into selling Gruber’s analysis of the bill unveiled by the Senate on Wednesday, November 18. Two days later on Friday November 20, Gruber published a paper entitled “Impacts of the Senate High Cost Insurance Excise Tax on Wages: Updated,” claiming that the excise tax would result in wage hikes of $234 billion from 2013 through 2019.

And it was off to the races.

The next day on the 21st, Ron Brownstein wrote in the Atlantic about Gruber’s effusive praise for the cost-cutting measures in the bill: “Everything is in here….I can’t think of anything I’d do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn’t have done better than they are doing,” says Gruber.

On Monday the 23rd, the DNC was sending the Brownstein column around in its entirety…one of 71 emails they would send touting Gruber’s work. It was also included in OFA’s Monday Morning News Clips on BarackObama.com.

And so forth.  This actually bears an uncanny resemblance to the way the Bush White House spread its faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq War.  Scooter Libby in the White House fed Judith Miller at the New York Times the bad intelligence, and when she reported it, White House officials used the stories as third party verification of their claims.  Just goes to show that it doesn’t matter what part is in power; they both still act like used car dealers lying straight to your face to unload a junker on you for top dollar.

Link via Peter Suderman at Hit and Run.

Despite Obama’s lofty rhetoric about taking on the special interests with health care reform, most of the special interests are fully on board with reform and expect to profit handsomely from it.  Don’t believe me?  Well, why else would all the major health care lobbyists be lining up behind Martha Coakely, the Democrat expected to fill Ted Kennedy’s old seat in the Senate?  The intrepid Tim Carney takes a look at the invitation for Coakley’s next Washington fundraiser:

Of the 22 names on the host committee–meaning they raised $10,000 or more for Coakley–17 are federally registered lobbyists, 15 of whom have health-care clients. Of the other five hosts, one is married to a lobbyist, one was a lobbyist in Pennsylvania, another is a lawyer at a lobbying firm, and another is a corporate CEO. Oh, and of course, there’s also the political action commitee for Boston Scientific Corporation.

All the leading drug companies have lobbyists on Coakley’s host committee: Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Sanofi-Aventis, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Astra-Zeneca, and more. On the insurance side of things, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Cigna, Humana, HealthSouth, and United Health all are represented on the host committee.

Those HMOs (like Aetna) or drug companies who don’t have lobbyists in Coakley’s top tier of fundraisers? They’re covered, because the host committee includes four lobbyists representing the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), two representing America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), and one representing the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO).

This bill has always been one that favors the health care industry; it forces people to buy one of their most expensive products for God’s sake!  And when it passes, industry insiders will be the ones who control how it is implemented as they rotate from the corporate world into the government and back through again.  To believe that this bill has anything to do with making people healthier is the height of naivete.  Like all legislation, this is about lining the pockets of the powerful.

Link via Hit and Run.

Sorry for the lack of links the last few weeks, but the holidays kept me very busy and since then I’ve been searching for a new apartment.  Nevertheless, I have been derelict in my blogging duties, so here are some good links to cheer the start to your work week.

My nomination for best local news story of the holiday season.

It’s a Frap!

Peter Bagge + Alan Moore + Kool Aid Man = Awesomeness

I wonder when the social conservatives will start the campaign to censor nature.

I know some people who talk in their sleep, but I’ve never heard anything as crazy as the stuff this guy says.

Yesterday, the A.P. interviewed Defne Bayrak, the wife of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, who killed seven CIA employees in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.  What would make a doctor travel thousands of miles and die to kill some people he’s never met?  According to Bayrak “her husband was outraged over the treatment of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison and the U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

This is direct evidence that American foreign policy motivates terrorists.  Now, it’s true that Bayrak could be lying, and her husband simply hated Americans because we allow booze and strip clubs, but that doesn’t make much intuitive sense.  Who gets more pissed off about the licentious behavior of foreigners than the torture and violent deaths of the people he identifies with most–in this case his fellow Muslims?  I’m sure there are some people out there who will become terrorists just because they want to kill the infidels, but an American foreign policy that continually hurts Muslims (or is at least perceived that way) only pushes more people in that direction.