What Henley said

Verbatim Bill Kristol:

The way you puncture euphoria is reality, or to be more blunt, fear. I recommend to Senator Clinton the politics of fear.

Jim Henley:

[T]he thing to note here is that Kristol identifies fear and violence (he goes on to tie the fear theme to attacking Iran) with “reality.” Fear is reality in his equation. The national greatness conservatives spent the 1990s arguing that national life without a higher purpose lacked meaning. They’ve spent the Naughts settling for a low one.

Wow. Just, wow.

It’s hard to list all the things that are terrible about this idea:

A ban on the sale of cigarettes to anyone who does not pay for a government smoking permit has been proposed by Health England, a ministerial advisory board.

The idea is the brainchild of the board’s chairman, Julian Le Grand, who is a professor at the London School of Economics and was Tony Blair’s senior health adviser. In a paper being studied by Lord Darzi, the health minister appointed to oversee NHS reform, he says many smokers would be helped to break the habit if they had to make a decision whether to “opt in”.

The permit might cost as little as £10, but acquiring it could be made difficult if the forms were sufficiently complex, Le Grand said last night.

The people behind this idea are surprisingly aware of (some of) its potential problems. Unfortunately, they don’t really see them as problems:

“Breaking the new year’s resolution not to smoke would be costly in terms of both money and time … [This] would probably have a greater impact on poor smokers than on rich ones, hence contributing to a reduction in health inequalities.”

Sounds like a great plan to me: Reduce inequality by introducing legislation that is systematically unequal in its effects. How could this go wrong?

The paper, written by Le Grand and Divya Srivastava, an LSE researcher, acknowledges: “Administratively it would require addressing the problem of the existing black markets and smuggling in tobacco; but this should probably be done anyway.”

Translation: “Implementing this would make the black markets worse and drive more economic activity underground, causing more danger for all involved, and this will in turn require still greater militarism from our law enforcement and spending even more of the taxpayers’ money, but hey, we were going to do that anyway!”

Mark my words: They’re coming for our Krispy Kremes next.

(Full article at The Guardian)

A brief splash of honesty

I feel like giving brief kudos to columnist David Carr, who in a sudden attack of disclosure came clean about how he found the sources for two “person on the street” quotations in one of his columns:

Mr. Finesurrey, a sophomore and an Obama supporter at the University of Wisconsin whom I found in the process of researching this column (translation: he’s a friend of my daughter).

And:

When Sara Verkuilen, 22, a senior at Edgewood College in Madison (translation: my daughter’s roommate) is looking for political news, she goes with CNN, but not because of the gadgetry.

I don’t read Mr. Carr regularly, so maybe he is always this scrupulous. Regardless, kudos to him for being transparent about one of the more misleading traditions in journalism: Using people from within one’s own social circle to comment on a trend or current event.

It would be nice to see his colleagues follow suit more often.

Two options

Option 1: The New York Times thinks its readers can’t do basic math.

Option 2: The New York Times relies on its readers to read between the lines to suss out government lies.

You be the judge:

But an intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because surveillance operations are classified, said: “It’s inevitable that these things will happen. It’s not weekly, but it’s common.”

A report in 2006 by the Justice Department inspector general found more than 100 violations of federal wiretap law in the two prior years by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, many of them considered technical and inadvertent.

Let’s see…100 violations in two years…52 weeks a year…sounds like “weekly” to me.

(Yes, yes, you could make a tiny argument that the reporter meant to imply that “these things” were Really Big Violations, not the garden variety of — wait a second, are we actually buying into the claim that some violations of the law are just technically wrong and not, you know, actually wrong? Phooey on that.)