The Exercise of Vital Powers

Denny Hastert as a new blog. I’d like to think he stole the site design from me.

Miers pulled her nomination! woohoo!

By a 2:1 margin, voters in Brazil reject a ban on firearm sales.

From The Straight Dope:

This May 2000 Congressional Research Service Report (usinfo.state.gov/topical/global/traffic/crs0510.htm) describes human trafficking for prostitution and forced labor as “. . . one of the fastest growing areas of international criminal activity and one that is of increasing concern to the U.S. Administration, Congress, and the international community. The overwhelming majority of those trafficked are women and children. An estimated 1 to 2 million people are trafficked each year worldwide; 50,000 to the United States. Trafficking is now considered the third largest source of profits for organized crime, behind only drugs and guns, generating billions of dollars annually.”

Since trafficking is the third biggest illegal money maker behind drugs and guns, then if we use the logic of the Libertarian Party we should legalize slavery! That will reduce the profit motive in human trafficking and thereby reduce crime!

Bruce Bartlett takes George Bush to the woodshed over at TownHall.com

…the point is that George W. Bush has never demonstrated any interest in shrinking the size of government. And on many occasions, he has increased government significantly. Yet if there is anything that defines conservatism in America, it is hostility to government expansion. The idea of big government conservatism, a term often used to describe Bush’s philosophy, is a contradiction in terms.

Conservative intellectuals have known this for a long time, but looked the other way for various reasons. Some thought the war on terror trumped every other issue. If a few billion dollars had to be wasted to buy the votes needed to win the war, then so be it, many conservatives have argued. Others say that Bush never ran as a conservative in the first place, so there is no betrayal here, only a failure by conservatives to see what he has been all along.

Of course, this doesn’t say much for the conservative movement. At best, conservatives were naive about Bush. At worst, they sold out much of what they claim to believe in.

The Miers nomination has led to some long-overdue soul-searching among conservative intellectuals. For many, the hope of finally turning around the judiciary was worth putting up with all the big government stuff. Thus, Bush’s pick of a patently unqualified crony for a critical position on the Supreme Court was the final straw.

I suspect the cost of getting another Reagan will be four years of another Carter.

A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

“We’ve found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,” said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

Full Story

Big Brother is Watching

First up:

In one of television’s inadvertently funny moments, the NBC News correspondent was paddling in a canoe during a live report about flooding in Wayne, N.J. While she talked, two men walked between her and the camera _ making it apparent that the water where she was floating was barely ankle-deep….

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Next we have photographers in Iraq getting staged shots of “insurgents”.
(link)

Katrina Myths

Finally, TCS has a piece on how Katrina exagerations cost lives.

heh

To hell with NASA, this is the future of space travel:

Today’s communications satellites demonstrate how an object can remain poised over a fixed spot on the Equator by matching its speed to the turning Earth, 22,300 miles (35,780 km) below. Now imagine a cable linking the satellite to the ground. Payloads could be hoisted up it by purely mechanical means, reaching orbit without any use of rocket power. The cost of launching payloads into orbit could be reduced to a tiny fraction of today’s costs.

(link)