QOTD: ""I don't understand Iranian politics," he announced in perhaps his least-misspoken statement of the day. But the Iranians understand ours, which is why, in an amusing touch, the Foreign Ministry in Tehran has enthusiastically endorsed Hagel.
Fortunately, Iran is entirely peripheral to global affairs – it's not like Chad or the Solomon Islands or the other burning questions the great powers are currently wrestling with – so it would be entirely unreasonable to expect Hagel to understand anything much about what's going on over there. So what of his other, non-Iranian interests?
"There are a lot of things I don't know about," said Hagel. "If confirmed, I intend to know a lot more than I do."
He then denied that "I will be running anything." Don't let the fact that the Secretary of Defense presides over 40 percent of the entire planet's military spending confuse you. He's not really "running" a thing – or, as he was anxious to assure us, "I won't be in a policy-making position."
Really? So what's the job for, then? Just showing up at the office and the occasional black-tie NATO banquet? Most misspeakers loose off one round and then have to re-load, but Chuck Hagel is a big scary "military-style assault weapon" of a misspeaker, effortlessly peppering the Senate wainscoting for hours on end. Late in the day, after five o'clock, he pronounced definitively: "It doesn't matter what I think."" --Mark Steyn
QOTD: "If you look at mass murders where suicidal people try to end their lives in the most infamous way possible–in Tucson, Virginia Tech, Newtown, Aurora–you have a very strong thread of mental illness running through that.
…So the long term solution is not just about background checks. It’s about why these people are on the streets in the first place. All of these killers could have been civilly committed under the civil commitment we had several decades ago. Those laws were changed, but… we [need to] move back to a more sensible position that strongly protects the due process rights of people against involuntary commitment, but also gets dangerous people off the streets." --David Kopel
QOTD: "Modern economies are too complex to be reliably modeled; their connections and correlations are loose and imprecise, the second- and third-order effects largely immeasurable, the fickle vagaries of individual and aggregate human behavior utterly unknowable. Put an economist in a powerful government job and provide levers that can be pulled to start the printing presses, set reserve requirements, fiddle with the Fed funds rate, expand the Fed’s balance sheet, and deliver indecipherable communiqués, and that economist will feel compelled to pull those levers.
He or she, like a monkey with a typewriter, might even give us Shakespeare (or Adam Smith) on occasion. But mostly that economist will spout gibberish, a mélange of untested and potentially counterproductive measures that unleash all manner of unintended consequences.
Were the meddling to actually remedy the targeted deficiency, it might well be at the cost of dangerous feedback loops and unexpected ripples growing beneath the surface into the incipient waves of tomorrow’s much larger problems." --Seth Klarman, "Why Ben Bernanke Is Like A Monkey"
QOTD: "Law-abiding gun owners will not accept blame for the acts of violent or deranged criminals. Nor do we believe the government should dictate what we can lawfully own and use to protect our families.
...we need to be honest about what works and what does not work. Proposals that would only serve to burden the law-abiding have failed in the past and will fail in the future.
Semi-automatic firearms have been around for over 100 years. They are among the most popular guns made for hunting, target shooting and self-defense. Despite this fact, Congress banned the manufacture and sale of hundreds of semi-automatic firearms and magazines from 1994 to 2004. Independent studies, including a study from the Clinton Justice Department, proved that ban had no impact on lowering crime.
And when it comes to the issue of background checks, let’s be honest – background checks will never be “universal” – because criminals will never submit to them." --Wayne LaPierre
QOTD: "California has changed not due to race but due to culture, most prominently because the recent generation of immigrants from Latin America did not — as in the past, for the most part — come legally in manageable numbers and integrate under the host’s assimilationist paradigm. Instead, in the last three decades huge arrivals of illegal aliens from Mexico and Latin America saw Democrats as the party of multiculturalism, separatism, entitlements, open borders, non-enforcement of immigration laws, and eventually plentiful state employment.
Given the numbers, the multicultural paradigm of the salad bowl that focused on “diversity” rather than unity, and the massive new government assistance, how could the old American tonic of assimilation, intermarriage, and integration keep up with the new influxes? It could not.
Finally, we live in an era of untruth and Orwellian censorship. It is absolutely taboo to write about the above, or to talk about the ever more weird artifacts of illegal immigration — the war now on black families in demographically changing areas of Los Angeles, the statistics behind DUI arrests, or the burgeoning profile of Medi-Cal recipients." --Victor Davis Hanson
QOTD: "To attack the NRA as “venal” or an organization as “Nazis” is a casual and indirect way to express contempt for millions of Americans and their beliefs while maintaining plausible deniability.
It is a lot like attacking the “Jewish lobby” while avoiding the charge of anti-Semitism. It is disturbing but unsurprising that a liberal Jew like Feinstein would fail to understand that.
My father is a Holocaust survivor and an NRA member. If more Jews had been armed during the Holocaust, there might have been more dead Nazis and fewer dead Jews by the end of the war.
Is it Feinstein’s intent to imply that people like my father are venal for wanting to make sure that the words “never again” mean exactly that?" --Eric Gollub via Ed Driscoll
QOTD: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” — Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857.
