Obamanation

Spills, Agendas, and Money

By Justin Katz | August 11, 2010 |

After an excellent description of the process and risks of deep sea oil drilling, Mario Loyola turns political (see PDF here if you don’t subscribe to National Review): What is more startling is that, judging by appearances at least, Obama may be trying to advance his agenda by intentionally causing a fuel shortage. The moratorium…

It’s the Authority, not the Debate

By Justin Katz | June 19, 2010 |

Further to this morning’s post about the use of science as an irrefutable cudgel in moral debates, I’d like to draw your attention to Eric Cohen and Yuval Levin’s comparison of the Bush and Obama treatments of the President’s Council on Bioethics. In effect, Bush’s version was designed to have an authority of its own…

It’s the Authority, not the Science

By Justin Katz | June 19, 2010 |

Jonah Goldberg spotted in the news an instance in which the Obama Interior Department appears to have misrepresented the opinion of some scientists whom it consulted regarding a possible ban of offshore drilling: The draft these experts saw was substantively different from the document that bore their names. The draft called for a moratorium on…

Weakness and Blame

By Justin Katz | June 10, 2010 |

Chris Stirewalt makes a point about President Obama’s hypocrisy when it comes to blame taking and partisanship. Pop culturally, we make a great deal of hypocrisy in this country, but as Stirewalt intimates, it’s really the weakness beneath that tastes of blood in the water to political sharks. I thought of something similar during the…

Formerly Admirable, Now a Bad Example on the Way to Obviation

By Justin Katz | June 9, 2010 |

Bringing his military eye to the topic, Theodore Gatchel provides an astute summary of the Obama movement in government: Two competing schools of thought have developed. One holds that the government’s role should be one of educating people about the risks so that they can make informed decisions. The other school holds that the issues…

Insider and Outsider “A” Students

By Justin Katz | April 26, 2010 |

As a matriculated “A” student, now a carpenter, I’m not sure I can accept P.J. O’Rourke’s thesis: America has made the mistake of letting the A student run things. It was A students who briefly took over the business world during the period of derivatives, credit swaps, and collateralized debt obligations. We’re still reeling from…

The Common Wisdom of the Newsroom

By Justin Katz | April 16, 2010 |

Odds are that Philip Marcelo doesn’t recognize how much he’s bowed to the left-wing common wisdom of the American newsroom, as indicated by this paragraph in his profile of Colleen Conley: Still, for many detractors, it is telling that the national Tea Party movement began not in the eight years of enormous federal spending during…

The Healthcare System Sinking In

By Justin Katz | April 6, 2010 |

It’s probably not really worth mentioning, but Joe Baker’s column in yesterday’s Newport Daily News is an astonishing bit of cheer leading for the policies of the Obama administration. Most of it has to do with the economy and how wonderfully the stimulus program worked. Perhaps it’s enough to note that he claims the recovery…

A Newly Aware America Confronting Old Tricks

By Justin Katz | April 3, 2010 |

Andrew Breitbart pulls together some of the threads related to the post-healthcare-vote anti-Tea Party redirection, concluding: Who is calling the shots here? Is it the White House, by way of Chicago? Or is it Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? The press refused to tell you the truth about this president. It refused to tell you…

The Obama-Era Binge

By Justin Katz | April 2, 2010 |

One gets the sense, watching state and national politicians in action, that paying for things is by far a secondary or tertiary consideration. As Ed Achorn puts it: The government will borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends this year. Under the most optimistic scenarios, borrowing will continue at historically high levels, putting a…