Noonan Unhinged, Ctd

Larison is on the same page as me:

If a President does not actively “take charge” and is not seen as “doing something,” he is ridiculed as weak and ineffective, when according to any vision of a less activist, less interventionist, less intrusive government the President would not involve himself closely in most events similar to this oil spill. It is a bit more absurd in the conservatives’ case. They are horrified by the tyranny of the individual mandate, but most otherwise seem content to demand the firm smack of a strong executive and the protections of an omnicompetent managerial state. Having mocked Obama’s more enthusiastic supporters for wanting him to be a savior of sorts, some Republicans seem genuinely annoyed that he has not been able to work miracles.

Drones: Better Than You Thought

Ackerman gets his hands on a forthcoming study that posits:

As of 1 April 2010, there have been a total of 127 confirmed CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, killing a total of 1,247 people. Of those killed only 44 (or 3.53%) could be confirmed as civilians, while 963 (or 77.23%) were reported to be “militants” or “suspected militants.”

Ralph’s Cultural Reach

Pig1

A reader writes:

FYI, this painting is the subject of a 2009 Oscar nominee for best live action film – a Danish submission called "Grisen," or "The Pig".  The felicitous leaping swine becomes a source of contention between a patient undergoing various colorectal procedures who has been charmed and comforted by the image and his Islamic hospital roommate who is religiously offended by it and insists that it is removed. It's cute and mildly thought provoking, and well worth a watch, if you can find it.

Help me with this: someone "undergoing various colorectal procedures" is comforted by a leaping pig? Ooookaaay. And for the record: I'm with him, not the Muslim.

The Traffic Cure

Avent defends tolls:

Congestion pricing really isn’t that hard. Congestion is a classic negative externality. When a driver gets on the road, he doesn’t have any reason to think about the additional traffic he is creating, and since the same is true for everyone using scarce, valuable road space, drivers opt to drive until traffic grinds to crawl. We confront problems like this all the time. We tax cigarettes because of the public health costs of smoking. We have used market pricing to limit emissions of various pollutants, and other countries have done the same for carbon. If you set the price to use a valuable piece of road high enough, then you don’t get congestion.

Will this lead to the end of driving? Obviously not. The idea is to allow cars to use the road as intended, at appropriate speeds, predictably and efficiently. If driving falls below the level at which congestion is a problem, you drop the price. In the mean time, we cut out the billions in annual losses due to time and gas wasted in traffic.

Triple amen. And use the money to build bullet trains.

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

Have you not watched the news this week?  Every station shows a deserted coastline as the oil begins to wash up.  Where are the feds?  In 40 days why have they not dispatched booms and clean-up workers to the beaches?  They have dragged their feet getting the Army Corp of Engineers to help the coastal states set barriers up to protect the beaches and marshes.  On Hardball, Chris Matthews hammered the Coast Guard Admiral on the fact that there is no comprehensive plan to clean-up the spill.
 
When even center-left commentators are joining conservatives in criticism you seem to have forgotten your own moto :

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle".

My reader has a point. Not being glued to cable, I wasn't thinking of the clean-up. But I need to look into it further before I concede the point.

Insane In Relation To What?

Friedersdorf wants to give libertarians a fair shake:

If returning to the gold standard is unthinkable, is it not just as extreme that President Obama claims an unchecked power to assassinate, without due process, any American living abroad whom he designates as an enemy combatant? Or that Joe Lieberman wants to strip Americans of their citizenship not when they are convicted of terrorist activities, but upon their being accused and designated as enemy combatants? In domestic politics, policy experts scoff at ethanol subsidies, the home-mortgage-interest tax deduction, and rent control, but the mainstream politicians who advocate those policies are treated as perfectly serious people….

As the most egregious excesses of the war on terror so clearly demonstrate, libertarian ideology doesn’t always lead its adherents to lunacy, and being “in the mainstream” isn’t always a self-evidently desirable characteristic, nor has it ever been in the long history of American politics.

Frum is much less forgiving. I find marginalizing a set of views because they are not "mainstream" as opposed to "being wrong" is, well, classically lazy journalism and classically cheap politics. Conor is right. The insanity we take for granted every day – the Afghanistan war, for example – is a lot crazier than the gold standard.