Plausibly Undeniable
The good news is there’s one less thug in Dallas. (And you know it wasn’t his bike, either.)
The bad news is too many people at the Dallas Morning News still don’t understand the basics of guns and gun laws in Texas.
Hall then pulled out his licensed pistol and shot Lewis multiple times, according to police.
One more time: Guns are not licensed in Texas, nor are they registered. People can get a license to carry a concealed handgun.
He says things like this:
But if we hope to continue to attract world class businesses and corporations to Dallas and avoid bigger cuts in future budgets, the answer is clear: We must increase taxes in order to preserve and enhance the quality of life for all our residents.
Seriously.
This is the kind of ignorance of basic business 101 that rivals former Dallas City Councilman Leo Chaney, who once told me that investors would build another Mockingbird Station in his district if only he got the area zoned for it. Never mind things like demographics, traffic, demand, or any of the other fundamentals retail developers weigh.
Every time there’s a budget crunch, they cut the kind of services that anger people enough to where they accept a tax increase — cutting library hours, community pools, park maintenance.
What they don’t do is cut, or don’t cut enough, is where it counts — city payroll and civil service pensions.
Oh, and how’s that $500 million city-owned hotel working out? Glad they’re spending half a billion smackers on that?
She once asked why the Pathfinder didn’t photograph the U.S. flag that was planted on Mars in 1969, and says that Tea Party members are Klansmen without sheets.
Now she tells us that today there are two Vietnams.*
(*For those of you enrolled in or employed by DISD, Vietnam has been united since 1975.)
(h/t Moe Lane)
¡Ay caramba!
Methinks the Dems are coming undone when they can’t handle a single question about ObamaCare.
Doesn’t bode well for the Left come November.
In one story we see everything wrong with the sheltered, uninformed readership of the New York Times.
And in one paragraph within that one story, we see what lies at the heart of everything wrong with the New York Times.
But one day it occurred to me: how would they know? All of these buzzy social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter sort of crept up on us. The government never mailed fliers to every household explaining what it’s all about.
Emphasis mine. As if I really needed to add that.
I mean, just, wow.
The New York Times has an illustrious history of employing some of the worst columnists ever to put fingers to keyboard. Frank Rich, Tom Friedman, ad nauseum. With every new column they reach new heights of cluelessness. These columnists serve to protect the readership of the New York Times from the real world, and provide talking points for people with little intelligence and less imagination.
Bob Herbert is only remarkable because he’s so forgettable. Everything he writes is mundane, shallow, paint-by-numbers liberalism. He’s the left wing, print version of the Fox & Friends morning hosts.
But today, with a straight face, Herbert serves up a most classic example of how the left is wholly ignorant of economics.
The collapse of the economy in the Great Recession gave us the starkest, most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans.
Bob, it’s not laissez-faire economics if government works in alliance with business. The two things are mutually exclusive.
As my friend Tim Rogers once said: not every black person is brilliant.
Behold.
Blast from the past
But to be fair, a good deal of the other party’s opposition to our agenda has also been rooted in their sincere and fundamental belief about the role of government. It’s a belief that government has little or no role to play in helping this nation meet our collective challenges. It’s an agenda that basically offers two answers to every problem we face: more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations.
The last administration called this recycled idea “the Ownership Society.” But what it essentially means is that everyone is on their own. No matter how hard you work, if your paycheck isn’t enough to pay for college or health care or childcare, well, you’re on your own. If misfortune causes you to lose your job or your home, you’re on your own. And if you’re a Wall Street bank or an insurance company or an oil company, you pretty much get to play by your own rules, regardless of the consequences for everybody else.
Powerful stuff. (emphasis mine)
Total horse hockey, but great for the kabuki theater crowd.
The last administration and the GOP from 2000-2006 grew government spending and government regulation by more than any administration since Nixon, it turns out.
And while we watch BP and Obama scramble to get one up on each other over the continued oil spill, let’s just remember that a $75 million maximum liability that BP faces for the oil spill is a product of regulation, not the free market.
(h/t Hit n Run)
It’s been proven time and again that FDR’s New Deal actually worsened the Great Depression. Keynesian economics just don’t work, not matter what trollish hacks like Paul Krugman preach.
Now a study from Harvard Business School shocks its very authors, who are surprised to find that increased government spending results in increased unemployment.
Recent eesearch at Harvard Business School began with the premise that as a state’s congressional delegation grew in stature and power in Washington, D.C., local businesses would benefit from the increased federal spending sure to come their way.
It turned out quite the opposite. In fact, professors Lauren Cohen, Joshua Coval, and Christopher Malloy discovered to their surprise that companies experienced lower sales and retrenched by cutting payroll, R&D, and other expenses. Indeed, in the years that followed a congressman’s ascendancy to the chairmanship of a powerful committee, the average firm in his state cut back capital expenditures by roughly 15 percent, according to their working paper, “Do Powerful Politicians Cause Corporate Downsizing?”
“It was an enormous surprise, at least to us, to learn that the average firm in the chairman’s state did not benefit at all from the unanticipated increase in spending,” Coval reports.
So, you wonder why unemployment is so high and this recession has lasted twice as long as normal recessions?
Here’s why.
Did I do that?
Look, let me say first I love downtown Dallas as much as anyone else. I live in the DFW because I love the DFW*.
And then today I read this little platitude from Mayor Leppert.
You all have understood, that so goes downtown, so goes Dallas, and so goes North Texas.
Um, not really. In fact, hard statistics for the past 30 years show otherwise. Despite decades of valiant efforts, downtown Dallas consistently has the worst rate of occupancy for both commercial and residential real estate.
This has been true consistently despite both booms and busts everywhere else in the DFW area. During several periods of massive population, retail, spending and business growth all over DFW, downtown Dallas has still just plodded along well behind the rest of the pack.
Downtown Dallas may be important to our hearts, but what happens to downtown Dallas has almost zero impact on the rest of the Dallas-Fort Worth economy. Downtown is not the core of Dallas-Fort Worth — it’s just one more submarket in a huge metropolitan area that has no center.
* (offer void in Garland)