Quick hits

Some quick things I've run across, offered with little or no comment:

Ouch: “Short of writing ‘get whitey,’ It's difficult to imagine how Judge Sotomayor could have fouled up the Ricci case any more than she did. Let's count the ways.”

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Nah, no need to read bills before voting on them: TARP tax break recipients include NASCAR race track builders, Burger King, and a London rum producer. Let’s rush through cap and tax!

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Michael Kinsley on health care rationing: “Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he’d get it and you wouldn’t, it’s rationing.”

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BOTWT reader Joe Engel asks if a gay lawmaker voting against gay marriage is hypocritical, isn’t also the smoker Obama signing anti-tobacco legislation hypocritical? It has to be both or neither.

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Strange headline here: "Analysts say home loans will soon be hard to get with bad credit". Good news, but why “soon”? Why would it have ever been otherwise? The ability to repay should be the only consideration for determining whether loans should be granted.

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Ann Coulter nails the fatuousness of yet another of Obama’s moral equivalencies, this one from the Cairo speech:

Obama said, "Now let me be clear, issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam." No, he said, "the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life."

So on one hand, 12-year-old girls are stoned to death for the crime of being raped in Muslim countries. But on the other hand, we still don't have enough female firefighters here in America.

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Glen Reynolds on Al Franken: “Caligula sent a horse to the Senate. Minnesota is just sending part of the horse.”

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The first lady's unfortunate disrespect of Queen Elizabeth showed that one does not have to be white to be white trash.

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Megan McArdle: “There’s a reason that most countries do not attempt to fund large welfare states with a very progressive income tax, the way we do. The income of the wealthy is fungible, mobile, and volatile. These are not strengths from the vantage of the tax system.”

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Populism in action: “A health care rally drew only four people to U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker’s office Thursday. Sponsored by MoveOn, a national public policy advocacy organization, the rally was intended to support expanded health care for the poor.”

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Jeffrey Miron: “The fundamental problem underlying the financial crisis was government policy. Instead of undertaking enormous new policies, we should try to fix or eliminate bad policies and focus on efficiency rather than redistribution. Doing nothing new and simply working with pre-existing procedures would have been much better than anything we’ve done so far.”

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A call for honesty from James Gibney:

Every product whose ingredients benefit from a subsidy should include the following language on the label:
"This product has been subsidized by the U.S. government at taxpayer expense. For more information, please visit usda.gov."

And every product that benefits from tariff protection should have the following language on the label:
"This product is protected from foreign competition by U.S. import tariffs. Its price is higher as a result. For more information, please visit usitc.gov."