Month: May 2012

Political blogging is becoming dangerous – at least for the partisans. It appears that conservative bloggers are being targeted by some on the left for “SWATting,” a despicable tactic where someone spoofs a phone call to 911, posing as the blogger and claiming they just killed someone at their house in an attempt to draw a SWAT team (or at least policemen) with guns blazing.

Patterico lit up the conservative Interwebz on Friday with his detailed account of his experience that almost got him killed. Now a RedState blogger is claiming to have been attacked in the same way, although he had a much calmer encounter with his local law enforcement, perhaps due to precautions he had taken to alert the sheriffs about this very tactic.

What’s funny to me is that Patterico and most of the commenters have a (generally right-wing) perspective where the people who built the hoax are the “evil” and “demented” bad guys that need to be brought to justice, and the police are good guys that just happened to get caught up in this and almost accidentally kill an innocent man. “I don’t blame the police for any of their actions,” the blogger says. “But I blame the person who made the call.”

The right’s reaction reminded me of what how the left ignores government mistakes in other sectors. Take the recent hullabaloo about the J.P. Morgan trade that lost $2 billion and how that allegedly justifies the Volcker Rule or other forms of complex financial regulation. Democrats imagine a static world where there are specific problems with rules or people that the government can isolate and fix. Add a new law on top of the old one. Replace the corrupt or incompetent regulator with someone nobler or smarter.

Continue reading Hurting Enemy Bloggers With The Oops Cost

Early Tuesday morning, SpaceX launched their Falcon 9 rocket with its Dragon capsule into orbit, where it is now hurtling towards the International Space Station where it will hopefully become the first “commercial” or “private” spacecraft to dock at the ISS.

It is a little hard to appreciate the importance of this, as human beings have been launching rockets for decades. But until recently, outer space has been limited to the domain of large governments that had the enormous resources required to figure out how to escape earth’s gravity and design giant vehicles that could do it, all while being able to absorb delays and setbacks into a big government budget.

Continue reading The Privatization of Outer Space

Remember last year’s debt ceiling debate? Congress finally raised the ceiling, but our growing government may hit the new limit before the year is over. When Speaker of the House John Boehner said Republicans will fight for spending cuts this time, too, there were immediate outcries of hypocrisy.

As @ObsoleteDogma paraphrased: “Regulatory uncertainty is bad. But default uncertainty is good.” Many also find it ironic that the Republicans are setting up for another showdown even as they are trying to undo the results of the last showdown. (The last deal set up some defense cuts, among other things, but Republicans are now trying to override them.) Others wonder why the GOP even pretends to really care about deficits since they raised a fuss about “$535 mln Solyndra loan guarantee, but just voted to expand a $140B corporate welfare bank.”

The established economist view is that the US should not at all be restricting its borrowing as it tries to spend its way to a recovery that will get enough people off assistance programs and generate enough tax revenues to finally start worrying about the deficit later (nevermind that some of that spending just gets wasted). That’s why economist Justin Wolfers says “Boehner is nuts. The House Republicans are nuts. Congress is nuts. The idea of a debt ceiling is nuts. Nuts nuts nuts.”

Continue reading Another Insane Debt Ceiling Showdown?

Indiana Republican Richard Lugar has served in the Senate for almost thirty-six years; he started before the first Star Wars movie released. But after a long string of unopposed victories his time is finally coming to an end, as he lost his party’s primary on Tuesday to the more conservative Richard Mourdock.

Mourdock is pro-government enough to disappoint libertarians, but he wants to abolish several federal departments and was backed by the Tea Party. He tried to paint Lugar as an out-of-touch liberal, noting, for example, that Lugar voted to raise the debt ceiling fifteen times.

In a way, this was unfair to Lugar, because raising the debt ceiling was one of those things that pretty much everybody in Congress has done for decades; there’s nothing especially “liberal” about it. But in a way, that’s also the point – Lugar was deeply embedded in the “status quo” that got us where we are today. (Don’t get me started on his lobbying connections.) Apparently this Washington insider thought he could represent the state for the rest of his life when he didn’t even own a home in Indiana anymore.

Now the media wasted no time lamenting Lugar’s loss and bemoaning how terribly extreme the Republican party is becoming. NPR said he was a “legend undone by his greatest strength” and that he lost because “his friendship with Obama… in the cauldron of hyperpartisanship, was most vividly turned against him by his own party.” CNN said Republican voters were “punishing him for the qualities he considered assets: seniority, expertise in foreign policy and a penchant for bipartisan cooperation.” And those weren’t even the opinion pieces. Ezra Klein said Lugar’s loss shows how much Republicans are to blame for polarization in Congress.

Continue reading The Fuzzy Line Between Moderate and Establishment