Political Provocateur

Josh already posted some thoughts about the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts last night, but here are some links for what other people around the interwebs are saying.

Notes From the Massachusetts Senate Race, Reason Magazine

Little Guy Sends Message to Washington: Drop Dead, Washington Examiner

The People’s Seat, The American Spectator

Post Partisan: Washington Post writers weigh in on the results.

Boston Tea Party: Massachusetts Voters tell Democrats to Shelve ObamaCare, Wall Street Journal. 

Megan McArdle has an interesting new assessment of the state of the media industry:

I think we’re witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it.  The economics just aren’t there.  At some point, industries enter a death spiral:  too few consumers raises their average costs, meaning they eventually have to pass price increases onto their customers.  That drives more customers away.  Rinse and repeat …

For twenty years, newspapers have been trying to slow the process with increasingly desperate cost cutting, but almost all are at the end of that rope; they can’t cut their newsroom or production staff any further and still put out a newspaper.  There just aren’t enough customers who are willing to pay for their product what it costs to produce it.

The numbers seem to confirm something I’ve thought for a while:  we’re eventually going to end up with a few national papers, a la Britain, rather than local dailies.  The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times (sorry, conservatives!) are weathering the downturn better than most, and it’s not surprising:  business, politics, and national upper-middlebrow culture.  But in 25 years, will any of them still be printing their product on the pulped up remains of dead trees?  It doesn’t seem all that likely.

I think McArdle’s economic analysis of the newspaper industry itself is pretty spot-on. But I tend to take more of a non-pessimistic outlook. Newspapers as we know them are indeed declining, but I have confidence that the market will produce something else to take their place. Do I have any idea what it will be? No, I know that journalists will always be needed. News will always need to be disseminated. Does it really matter how it gets out there?

McArdle ends with this sad thought on the journalism profession:

Maybe there will be jobs, online.  But if so, more web outfits are going to have to get into the habit of paying salaries that will support an adult middle-class life.  Right now, a lot of web outfits tend to churn through twenty-somethings who are also building their resumes … but I’m not sure how well this works in a world where a job churning out blog copy for pennies a word is the last stop in a journalistic career, rather than the first.

Lovely.

::Enter new, pessimistic thoughts::

For once, it seems as though the Obama administration may be getting something right. Let the “thank goodnesses,” and “it’s about time’s” abound!

Via the Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration won’t seek to arrest medical-marijuana users and suppliers as long as they closely conform to state laws.

Under a new policy spelled out in a three-page legal memo from the Justice Department, federal prosecutors are being told it isn’t a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state law.

The guidelines do, however, make it clear that federal agents will go after people whose marijuana distribution goes beyond what is permitted under state law or use medical marijuana as a cover for other crimes. (See the full text of the memo.)

The memo advises prosecutors they “should not focus federal resources in your states on individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.”

This is a significant departure from the policies of Obama’s most recent predecessors, Bush and Clinton, who had a zero-tolerance policy on the substance even when used for medical purposes. But this is the most sensible thing that has come out of Washington in a long time. Let’s hope this is only the first step in Obama reversing the absurd policies that make up the War on Drugs, but actually limit individual freedom.

We’ll see how this new policy pans out though, before bestowing too much laud and praise on it.

Oh, and in case you’re curious, the 14 states that do allow medical marijuana are Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

Associate Professor of Business at Georgetown, John Hasnas, wrote this wonderful essay a while back about well, what it feels like to be a libertarian. I can’t help but wonder, was Hasnas actually looking into my soul when he wrote this?? Ok, probably not, but his insights are spot-on.

Some snippets:

I’ll tell you. It feels bad. Being a libertarian means living with an almost unendurable level of frustration. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events. How does it feel to be a libertarian? Imagine what the internal life of Cassandra must have been and you will have a pretty good idea.

Imagine spending two decades warning that government policy is leading to a major economic collapse, and then, when the collapse comes, watching the world conclude that markets do not work.

Libertarians spend their lives accurately predicting the future effects of government policy. Their predictions are accurate because they are derived from Hayek’s insights into the limitations of human knowledge, from the recognition that the people who comprise the government respond to incentives just like anyone else and are not magically transformed to selfless agents of the good merely by accepting government employment, from the awareness that for government to provide a benefit to some, it must first take it from others, and from the knowledge that politicians cannot repeal the laws of economics.

It is human nature to want to shoot the messenger bearing unwelcome tidings. And so, for the sin of continually pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, libertarians are attacked as heartless bastards devoid of compassion for the less fortunate, despicable flacks for the rich or for business interests, unthinking dogmatists who place blind faith in the free market, or, at best, members of the lunatic fringe.

Whole thing worth a read here.

Via Matt Welch at Reason. 

Paul Krugman has an interesting new column today in the New York Times. His arguments goes something sorta like this: Conservatives oppose Obama’s policies because they…don’t like Obama and want him to fail. How does Krugman know this? Because some conservatives expressed happiness at the fact Chicago didn’t win the bid for the Olmypics. And that, by the way, only proves that conservatives oppose healthcare reform only because they…are against Obama.

With me so far? Good, because Krugman also wrote that the modern conservative movement has the “emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year old.”

Krugman may be close to hitting the mark on that point (a group of D.C. conservatives were caught on tape cheering when Chicago lost the bid. It’s hard to believe they were cheering for any reason other than the fact Obama lost- which is absurd and a little childish), but the rest of the article is full of untruths and logic gaps. According to Krugman, conservatives have a problem with spite. It’s the reason they cheered when Chicago lost the bid, and it’s the reason they oppose healthcare reform. Yes, Krugman concedes that liberals and conservatives follow two very different philosophies, so opposition is normal. However, the Democrats have opposed in the past with much more thoughtfulness and rationale:

In 2005, when Democrats campaigned against Social Security privatization, their arguments were consistent with their underlying ideology: they argued that replacing guaranteed benefits with private accounts would expose retirees to too much risk.

The Republican campaign against health care reform, by contrast, has shown no such consistency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim — based mainly on lies about death panels and so on — that reform will undermine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party’s traditions and with what conservatives claim to believe.

The Republican campaign against health care reform has been about keeping Medicare? Uh, one neoconservative (that would be Michael Steele) and a few other Republicans writing op-eds about not doing anything to Medicare hardly characterizes the entire movement of opposition.

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.

So to Krugman, conservatives opposing policies really means that they’re secret agenda is to undermine Obama’s right to govern. How about it just means that conservatives really, really dislike liberal policies?

 And…was Krugman around this past August when Americans spoke out by the thousands, protesting Big Government and healthcare reform? And yes, I’m pretty sure most of those protestors would identify as conservative or libertarian. So the public does “buy the conservative ideology.”

(While it’s rediculous to be happy the 2016 Olympics won’t be in Chicago simply because Obama lost, I do think it is a “blessing in disguise.” Reason contributor Steve Chapman explains why).

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the passing of Nixon speechwriter and conservative New York Times columnist, William Safire, who died today at the age of 79.

I don’t have much to say about Safire, except in my extensive research into Nixon’s presidency, I was very much impressed with the tact and cleverness with which Safire put together speeches. He was also a refreshing voice of conservatism and liberty on the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

The world will surely miss him.

A better tribute here.