He/she/it bites

For the “surprised it didn’t happen sooner” file:

The Massachusetts House of Representatives has given its initial approval to a bill that would require all future legislation be written in language that is gender neutral.

The one-paragraph bill says legislation should contain non-gendered phrases such as “he/she” or “his/her,” instead of following past practice and using the masculine pronoun by default.

Since most legislation applies to groups rather than individuals (and any law that doesn’t apply to everyone should be suspect) why don’t legislators just use the gender-neutral plurals “they,” “them” and “theirs”? Is there any clumsier construction in the English language that “he/she”?

Food fight

If you still haven’t decided between McCain and Obama, here’s just the thing that will probably tip it for you:

As far as we could determine, McCain is a regular-guy diner-out, happy to follow Arizona custom with a Tex-Mex combo platter but also loyal to the modestly adventurous gourmet food available near his ranch north of Phoenix. The Obamas’ favorite spot for a night out in Chicago is the alta cocina Mexican restaurant Topolobampo, said Michelle Obama spokeswoman Katie McCormick Lelyveld.

Chicagoans know Topolobampo as the quieter, slightly classier sister restaurant of Frontera Grill, both owned by award-winning chef Rick Bayless. Sun-Times restaurant critic Pat Bruno has praised its “creativity and quality.”

Sadly, no help for me, as neither candidate was revealed to be a “chili dog for breakfast” kind of guy. So they both have a weakness for Mexican food, huh? Hmmmn.

Ready for a risk

In the latest NYT/WSJ poll, Barack Obama has a 47-41 percent advantage over John McCain, which is no great surprise. Fuurthermore:

But Obama’s lead over McCain expands to 13 points when third-party candidates Ralph Nader and Bob Barr are added into the mix — with Obama at 48 percent, McCain at 35 percent, Nader at 5 percent and Barr at 2 percent. However, it’s important to note that the pro-Obama vote (48 percent) and anti-Obama vote (adding up to 42 percent) is consistent with the result from the two-way match up.

“This remains Barack Obama’s election to win,” Hart says. “In the end, the election is about reassuring voters and removing doubts.”

Or maybe not. Also according to the poll, 55 percent think Obama would be the riskier choice for presidency; just 35 percent say that of McCain. With only 13 percent thinking the country is headed in the right direction (the lowest percentage in the history of the poll), the voters seem to prefer the risk over same-old same old.

White hole

Newt, Newt, Newt. As one boring white guy to another, I wonder about this:

“What I’m afraid of is that if Sen. McCain picks one more relatively boring, normal, mainstream Republican white guy … he just makes the ticket seem boring compared to the level of energy and drive and excitement that (Democrat Barack) Obama has,” warned Gingrich, himself a silver-haired, middle-aged white politician out of central casting. 

Boring white guys still run this ountry, and we’ve always had someone to represent us in the vice presidency! Are we to be left directionless? Will we become homeless and have to seek government assistance?

Oh, wait. Evan Bayh is said to be on Barack Obama’s “very short list.” Maybe we’ll be covered after all.

A fast one

The Nanny State marches on:

A proposal that would place at least a one-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in a broad swath of neighborhoods, mostly in South Los Angeles, won unanimous support from a Los Angeles City Council committee Tuesday.

If approved by the full council and signed by the mayor, the law would prevent fast-food chains from opening new restaurants in a 32-square-mile area, including West Adams, Baldwin Village and Leimert Park. The moratorium would be in effect for one year, with the possibility of two six-month extensions.

The measure, proposed by Councilwoman Jan Perry, whose 9th District includes much of South Los Angeles, defines a fast-food restaurant as “any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers.”

Restaurant lobbyists were initially against this idea, but the story says they’re now working with the council and are waiting to see how they define “fast food.” Hey, if the government can be used to be rid of some of the competition, that’s what capitalism is about, right?

Is it safe yet?

I don’t have any idea what this means, but I’m sure McCain and Obama will explain it all:

Over half of American voters (51%) now believe the United States and its allies are winning the war on terror, the highest figure recorded in nearly four years by Rasmussen Reports in a nationwide survey.

Only 16% now think the terrorists are on top, while 27% view it as a stalemate. Prior to this week’s survey, the number who believe the terrorists are winning had never fallen below 20%.

[. . .]

Forty-four percent (44%) of voters think the United States is safer today than before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but 39% disagree. Both figures are roughly comparable to the most optimistic figures on record.

Such numbers could be used by either side of the argument. Either what we’re doing is working, and we should do more of it, or the threat isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, and we can start relaxing.

How Mideast peace was achieved

Today’s joke:

A woman was walking on the beach when she came upon a lamp. She picked it up and rubbed it, and, of course, a genie popped out. “I will give you one wish,” the genie said. “That’s easy,” the woman replied. “I want peace in the Mideast. Look at the countries I’ve got marked on this map, and make them stop fighting each other.”

The genie threw his hands up in despair. “Lady, don’t you know there are hatreds and rivalries going back thousands of years in that part of the world? Why, the religious differences alone would take a dozen genies a hundred years to figure out. How about a different wish?”

“Well,” the woman said,  “I really think Barack Obama could achieve peace if he becomes president. But he’s got this one little flaw that might prevent his election — he’s an awfully somber and serious person. So my wish is for you to give Obama a sense of humor.”

“Oh, all right,” the genie said. “Let me see that damn map!”

AAA

Good news: 

Indianapolis - State officials say an improved credit rating will save money by reducing interest rates on public debt.

Gov. Mitch Daniels announced Monday that Indiana has for the first time received the highest credit rating from Standard & Poors.

Office of Management and Budget director Ryan Kitchell says the AAA rating will allow the state to refinance some of the debt on Lucas Oil Stadium, saving the state $850,000 a year.

He said school systems also should see lower interest rates on their bond issues.

Jill Long Thompson made the best of it, saying that “while the credit upgrade was positive,” the state’s unemployment rate had also increased. But unemployment has gone up just about everywhere, but not many states have so improved their credit rating.

Putting the bite on feeding hands

A grand jury in San Francisco is reporting that the city spends $186 million a year in city funds to finance homeless programs. As a result, 50 to 75 percent of the “street people” actually live in taxpayer-supported housing. Still, the pandhandling persists, and people seem baffled:

“We just warehouse addicts,” said the grand jury’s Stuart Smith. “Granted, it is a nicer place for them, but it doesn’t address the problem.”

In short, the jury is reflecting the views of many San Franciscans who made the choice to live here. They understood that housing and taxes would be higher, and so would the cost of a meal in a restaurant. They understand and believe that the city needs to provide for its poorest homeless residents and don’t begrudge what the grand jury says is $186 million a year in city funds spent to finance homeless programs.

But, they ask, can’t someone stop the panhandling? And, given all the programs and services, is it unreasonable to ask those who are being given supportive housing to start making some effort to be self-sufficient?

You get more of the behavior you subsidize. If that one simple truth could be pounded into liberals’ heads, more than half of what’s screwing up this country could be corrected.

Knock knock Barack

Today’s joke:

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Interrupting Barack Obama.

Interrupting Bara …

Change you can believe in!

FTFCC

Well, we’ll all sleep better now, won’t we?

A federal appeals court on Monday threw out a $550,000 indecency fine against CBS Corp. for the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that ended with Janet Jackson’s breast-baring “wardrobe malfunction.”

The three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Federal Communications Commission “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” in issuing the fine for the fleeting image of nudity.

The 90 million people watching the Super Bowl, many of them children, heard Justin Timberlake sing, “Gonna have you naked by the end of this song,” as he reached for Jackson’s bustier.

The court found that the FCC deviated from its nearly 30-year practice of fining indecent broadcast programming only when it was so “pepervasive as to amount to ’shock treatment’ for the audience.”

Next, we’ll have more arguments and the continuing and expensive litigation over whether unscripted expletives (like Bono’s “F” word) should be fined.  Isn’t it time to just dissolve the FCC? The only excuse for its existence — allocation of limited spaces on the electromagnetic spectrum — has beeen eliminated.

Tax-and-spend, etc.

Barack Obama (and, to be fair, Democrats in general) keeps saying that those George Bush tax cuts benefited mostly those evil rich folks. And if he gets in, he’s going to finance his host of new programs by increasing their share of the burden and decreasing everybody else’s. But look at the numbers:

The nearby chart shows that the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years. The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he’s going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that’s also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.

[. . .]

The idea that this has been a giveaway to the rich is a figment of the left’s imagination. Taxes paid by millionaire households more than doubled to $274 billion in 2006 from $136 billion in 2003. No President has ever plied more money from the rich than George W. Bush did with his 2003 tax cuts.

And just so you don’t think I only care when Democrats get stupid about money, here (from National Reivew, of all places) is something about overspeding by Republicans in the last eight years — a $125 billion binge in domestic spending:

Under Ronald Reagan, non-defense discretionary spending grew at an annual rate of 2.6%, about the rate of inflation. Under George W. Bush, it has grown at an annual rate of 6.2%

Raising the political bar

Today’s joke:

Barack Obama walks into a bar with a duck on his head.

Bartender looks up and says, “Say, where’d you get the Chicago-influenced secret Muslim with the angry, unpatriotic wife?”

“You ignorant, ill-informed, right-wing alcohol pusher,” Obama replies. “This is NOT a Chicago-influenced secret Muslim with an angry, unpatriotic wife. This is a duck.”

“I was TALKING to the duck.”

Hard times

Good lord. Nothing like giving a guy a Nobel prize to make him start taking himself too seriously:

The United States should be making all of its electricity with renewable and carbon-free energy in 10 years, former Vice President Al Gore said Thursday.

The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” Gore said.

In a speech at Washington’s Constitution Hall, Gore touched on an array of the nation’s current woes, saying the economic, environmental and national security crises are all related.

“I don’t remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously,” Gore said.

To begin to fix all the problems, Gore said, “the answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels.”

The country as we know it is at risk? More things going wrong simultaneously than at any time in our history? More than during the Civil War or the Great Depression? Barack Obama promises a role for Gore in his administration, which would be one of the strongest reasons to vote against him, except that John McCain is just a sentence or two behind them on the same page.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste on the “alternate energy” religion, via Instapundit.

Shock of the month

They needed a poll to figure this out?

John McCain is facing an excitement deficit.

While overall interest in the presidential campaign has swelled since last fall, backers of Barack Obama are more fired up and express more loyalty to their candidate than McCain’s do, a poll by The Associated Press and Yahoo News showed Friday.

Wonder if this is going to be a bad year for Republicans? Send those pollsters out again!

Have you heard . . .?

Today’s joke:

Why is an elephant big, grey and wrinkly?

Because if it were small, white and smooth, it would be a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy spreading vicious rumors about Barack Obama.

A clever way to bring up Obama’s big ears, eh?

Nice work if you can get it

What’s wrong with this picture?

ALBANY — Senator Joseph L. Bruno, who led the State Senate for 14 years, has offered many reasons why he is leaving the Senate by the end of the week after a public career of four decades.

[. . .]

There is another factor to consider, though.

Mr. Bruno, a Republican, is likely to get a significant raise from the state by retiring.

He is paid the base legislative salary of $79,500, but his pension, which is a percentage of the average of his three highest-salary years, will be $90,000 to $100,000, because until June he received an extra $41,000 a year for being majority leader, according to the state comptroller’s office. He would be giving up somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,300 a month, before taxes, by remaining in office.

Indiana’s legislators have a pretty generous pension plan, but at least they get only part-time pay while they’re actually serving.

Problem solved

Well, it’s a start:

A company that owns 11 McDonald’s restaurants in Nevada was fined one million dollars Wednesday after pleading guilty to employing 58 illegal immigrants.

No work, no incentive to come here illegally. Make it a lot more companies and a few billion in fines, and there will be no more illegal-immigration crisis.

A conservative for Obama

Here’s one of those “lifelong conservatives” who are voting for Barack Obama, Larry Hunter, who worked in the Reagan White House and helped write the Contract With America. He’s against McCain because that would be to endorse George Bush’s foreign policy of “unjustified war and unconstitutional abridgment of individual rights.” But what about Obama’s domestic agenda, which goes against just about everything conservatives stand for?

Plus, when it comes to domestic issues, I don’t take Obama at his word. That may sound cynical. But the fact that he says just about all the wrong things on domestic issues doesn’t bother me as much as it once would have. After all, the Republicans said all the right things - fiscal responsibility, spending restraint - and it didn’t mean a thing. It is a sad commentary on American politics today, but it’s taken as a given that politicians, all of them, must pander, obfuscate and prevaricate.

That does sound cynical, profoundly so. But there’s also a practical consideration. If you don’t “take Obama at his word” domestically, why would you assume he’s being truthful on foreign policy matters?

Listening to all of the candidates’ foreign policy statements, I have the feeling McCain might be too quick to intervene militarily when there were still other options available, Obama too slow to intervene when it became obvious there was nothing left to do. Each of us will have to decide which of those faults is the most acceptable. And when it comes to the Constitution and individual rights, I’m not sure I trust either of them.

Today’s joke

How many members of the Obama campaign does in take to screw in a lightbulb?

That’s racist, you rightwing smear-monger!

(With apologies to the genius who came up with the feminist lightbulb joke.)

Tears in the Mideast

OK, I don’t know much about diplomacy and the intricacies of international relations, but this seems like a bad deal to me:

Hezbollah on Wednesday handed over the bodies of two Israeli soldiers seized by its guerrillas two years ago, in a prisoner swap greeted with triumph in Lebanon but anguish in Israel.

“Today we hand over Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev,” Hezbollah official Wafiq Safa said at the Naqura border crossing between Lebanon and Israel as men placed two black coffins on the ground amid a crowd of onlookers.

The mood in Israel had been sombre as it waited to learn the fate of Goldwasser and Regev , whose capture in a deadly cross-border raid in July 2006 triggered a devastating 34-day war in Lebanon.

“Both soldiers have been identified,” an army spokeswoman told AFP after forensic tests on the remains.

The International Committee of the Red Cross handed to Hezbollah the bodies of 12 fighters, under the exchange  which was also to see the release of five Lebanese, including Israel’s longest serving Arab prisoner.

Dead soldiers in return for live terrorists, who will now be free to create more dead soldiers. And Israel is supposed to be the tough one? This banner on the Lebanese border pretty much tells the story: “Lebanon is shedding tears of joy. Israel is shedding tears of pain.”

Moving the furniture

Not exactly a stunner:

This report compares the 2007-2008 textbooks that are currently posted on the website of the Saudi Ministry of Education with those analyzed in our 2006 study, and shows that the same violent and intolerant teachings against other religious believers noted in 2006 remain in the current texts.

 They assert that unbelievers, such as Christians, Jews, and Muslims who do not share Wahhabi beliefs and practices, are hated “enemies.” Global jihad as an “effort to wage war against the unbelievers” is also promoted in the Ministry’s textbooks: “In its general usage, ‘jihad’ is divided into the following categories: …Wrestling with the infidels by calling them to the faith and battling against them.” No argument is made here that such references to jihad mean only spiritual and defensive struggles.

Aren’t allies wonderful?  This analysis concludes that what the Saudis are doing amounts to “moving around the furniture, not cleaning the house.” That conclusion is significant because the Saudis, after negotiations with the U.s. “committed” to the removal of intolerant teachings ffrom all Saudi textbooks by, um, September of this year. Maybe the U.S. should have insisted on a timetable for the withdrawal.

Daddy President

We have an energy crisis because President Bush has not given a speech asking Americans to drive less:

If we can’t be trusted to glean satirical intent from an over-the-top New Yorker cover, how can we be trusted to buy less of something when the price goes up? It’s Daddy President 101, with the added nuance of the media demanding a catalyzing call for action from a guy with an approval rating south of 30 whom they assure us no one in their right mind takes seriously.

The post has a link to the actual vido of the stupid reporter asking the stupid question.

The messy market

Welcome to the brave new world:

Today’s global economy baffles experts — corporate executives, bankers, economists — as much as ordinary people. Countries are growing economically more interdependent and politically more nationalistic. This is a combustible combination. The old global economy had few power centers (the United States, Europe, Japan), was defined mainly by trade and was committed to the dollar as the central currency. Its major countries shared democratic values and alliances. Today’s global economy has many power centers (including China, Saudi Arabia and Russia), is also defined by finance and is exploring alternative currencies to the dollar. Major trading nations now lack common political values and alliances.

It is no more possible to undo globalization than it was possible, in the 19th century, to undo the Industrial Revolution. But our understanding of international markets, shaped by impersonal economic forces and explicit political decisions, is poor. Countries try to maximize their own advantage rather than make the system work for everyone. Considering how much could go wrong, the record is so far remarkably favorable. Alas, that’s no guarantee for the future.

But people tend to talk about the “global economy” as if it’s a finite phenomenon with discrete and fixable components rather than a growing, ever-changing fact of life. And politicians make insane promises based on that mistaken premise. Exports are better than imports, so let’s stop all this free-trade nonsense and get back to “”fair” trade.

Markets are messy things. The global market will be messier than anything that has gone before. We’re going to be interconnected, as countries and economies, in ways we will barely be able to understand, let alone control. Get used to it.

This is reasonable?

The weasels in D.C. government are responding to the Supreme Court’s Heller decision with proposed rules showing they truly do not get it:

Here’s what they’re proposing:

• Allowing an exception for handgun ownership for self-defense use inside the home.
• If you want to keep a handgun in your home, the MPD will have to perform ballistic testing on it before it can be legally registered.
• There will be a limit to one handgun per person for the first 90 days after the legislation becomes law.
• Firearms in the home must be stored unloaded and disassembled, and secured with either a trigger lock, gun safe, or similar device. The new law will allow an exception for a firearm while it is being used against an intruder in the home.
• Residents who legally register handguns in the District will not be required to have licenses to carry them inside their own homes.

How grateful D.C.’s citizens must be. They will be allowed to use a handgun — one that’s been taken to the police for ballistic testing, of course — against an intruder in the home, after they’ve taken it from the gun safe, assembled it and loaded it. Sure hope there are some slow intruders in the nation’s capital.