The Right Coast

The harm a bad president can do Tom Smith

JFK was hopelessly out of his depth.  The Kennedy myth is not quite dead unfortunately.

California prisons: Medical parole bid for an incapacitated prisoner is denied - latimes.comTom Smith

Reporting from San Diego—

The reasoning seemed disarmingly simple: In a time of fiscal crisis and over-crowded prisons, why should California spend hundreds of millions of dollars retaining prisoners so sick, aged, paralyzed or otherwise infirm that they are no longer a threat to the public?

via www.latimes.com

I'm not feeling it for this guy.

The New Egypt - Mona Charen - National Review OnlineTom Smith

Post-Mubarak Egypt is a reminder of the dangers of chaos. During the Tahrir Square demonstrations in February, religious differences were papered over. “We are all one: Muslims and Christians are one,” demonstrators chanted. That spirit hasn’t lasted even a season. In the course of the past few weeks, repeated clashes have erupted between Copts and Muslims in Egypt. Two enormous Coptic churches have been torched, and dozens of people have been killed and wounded in street battles. A Muslim crowd estimated at 15,000, armed with Molotov cocktails, clubs, and guns, attacked a much smaller group of Copts who were demonstrating outside a Cairo television station. The police were absent as usual. The violence was belatedly halted by the army.

via www.nationalreview.com

Welcome to democracy in Egypt.

WHO: Cell phone use can increase possible cancer risk - CNN.comTom Smith

Radiation from cell phones can possibly cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization. The agency now lists mobile phone use in the same "carcinogenic hazard" category as lead, engine exhaust and chloroform.

via www.cnn.com

If you're on your cell phone so much that it's giving you cancer, you probably deserve to die.

Home Prices Still Falling - WSJ.comTom Smith

U.S. home prices fell 4.2% in the first quarter of 2011, hitting a new post-bubble low and sending the battered housing sector into a double dip, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index released Tuesday.

Twelve of the 20 metropolitan areas tracked in the index posted new lows in March, and prices nationally have fallen 5.1% in the last year, pushing them back to 2002 levels.

via online.wsj.com

I figure it's like the tree in the forest. If you don't visit zillow, your home value has not fallen. Or quantum mechanics.

Harvey Mansfield: Sociology and Other 'Meathead' Majors - WSJ.comTom Smith

The bad choices are more attractive because they are easy. Picking not quite at random, let's take sociology. That great American democrat Archie Bunker used to call his son-in-law "Meathead" for his fatuous opinions, and Meathead was a graduate student in sociology. A graduate student in sociology is one who didn't get his fill of jargonized wishful thinking as an undergraduate. Such a person will never fail to disappoint you. But sociology has close competitors in other social sciences (including mine, political science) and in the humanities.

via online.wsj.com

My father practically begged me to do the BA in Jurisprudence rather than PPE at Oxford, but I figured I would get enough law at law school. It didn't turn out that way.

The Numbers Are Grim - NYTimes.comTom Smith

More troubling in the latest figures, consumer spending — the largest component of the economy — was especially slow. Stagnant wages and higher prices for gas and food are squeezing family budgets, while falling home equity hurts consumer confidence. That suggests more bad news to come.

via www.nytimes.com

You might encounter the NYT paywall.

Democrats Haven't Learned the Economic Lessons of Europe - NewsweekTom Smith

It’s certainly true that the economies of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal—the three countries committed to austerity programs as conditions for European and International Monetary Fund bailouts—have shrunk over the past year. The unemployment rate is above 10 percent in all three. Meanwhile, the U.K. economy is growing sluggishly. But to infer from this that the United States can postpone serious attempts at fiscal stabilization would be completely wrong—and deeply dangerous.

via www.newsweek.com

I want to know how much gold Herr Doktor Professor Krugman has in his portfolio. My guess he's keeping the Nobel money in old Krugerrands.

Soldiers Tom Smith

Here.

And here.

Modern American culture Tom Smith

You probably should keep up on this sort of thing.  I'm old enough to remember hating disco both the music and the people who liked it.  I can't say hiphop does much for me either.