Simian students throw feces at conservative speakers

On March 11, I joined a growing fraternity – conservatives who’ve been prevented from speaking on college campuses.
 

Student storm troopers have become the final arbiters of who may speak and what views may be expressed in academia – once dedicated to free inquiry and open discussion, now as intellectually open as a Stalinist gulag. The academic archipelago?
 

I was invited by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Republicans and Young America’s Foundation to speak on hate crimes laws as a threat to free speech and religious freedom.
 

That there is a national epidemic of hate crimes incited by hate speech – which drastic action is needed to curtail – is sacred dogma for the sensitivity goons.
 

To question these assumptions is sacrilege. When challenged here, leftists react like Muslims in a murderous rage over Mohammed cartoons.

That does a lot to explain what transpired when I tried to speak at the collegiate zoo in Western Massachusetts – that and the fact that the administration refuses to keep the animals leashed.
 

Half of the audience of 300 came not to listen, question or debate, but to disrupt.
 

The mob scene was coordinated by the International Socialist Organization (a group found only on college campuses and in the Obama administration), the Pride Alliance, the Coalition Against Hate, and the Campus Anti-War Network. Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Committee for Justice for Sacco and Vanzetti were conspicuous by their absence. Continue reading . . .

Yahoo! vs. the Obama Justice Department

Yahoo! announced on Wednesday that it will only be holding on to user behavioral data for 3 months, instead of the previous 13 months, according to the Washington Post.

Unfortunately for Yahoo!, the Obama administration’s Justice Department may push for ISPs and other web companies to hold on to information for more time, rather than less. Eric Holder, a former Clinton administration Deputy Attorney General, is slated to be America’s next Attorney General and Holder has stated publicly that he thinks companies should hold on to data so that law enforcement can access it when necessary.

This is a threat to privacy, an interference in how the issue of privacy is sorted out in the free market, and will make for an interesting fight between the Obama administration and regulators in the EU who are pushing for short data retention time lines.

Read the full post on the subject at techliberation.com

Trashing Taxpayers

A recent article in today’s New York Times details the perils of an industry that is greatly impacted and propped up by government regulations: the recycling industry. Recycling, like any business, it has its up and downs. Prices for recyclables can vary widely from one year to the next, making the industry more or less competitive with other disposal options like landfilling. Because recycling has an almost religious following that makes it a politically popular industry, everyone laments when waste goes to a landfill because the recyclables have little value in the marketplace, as is the case today. Continue reading . .

Unbelievable Gall from the New York Times

• Unbelievable Gall from the New York Times - OpenMarket.org

As economists and the Wall Street Journal have noted, the Community Reinvestment Act was an important ingredient of the financial crisis, by pressuring banks to make risky loans to people in low-income, predominantly-minority neighborhoods…

You’ve Just Got to Love Britain’s Health Care Bureaucrats

First the National (Un)Health Service said if you wanted a drug that it wasn’t willing to provide–too expensive for the purpose of saving your miserable life!–and decided to buy it yourself, then you would lose ALL medical care under the NHS.  That is, if you wanted a potentially life-saving treatment, you might have to bankrupt your family to pay for the rest of your treatment.  Just love those bureaucrats.  How I want that kind of treatment here, but I digress.

Under fire from just about everyone, NHS reversed itself. Now you can buy the drugs and continue your treatment under NHS.  But what about families that did ruin themselves financially under the old rules?  Reports the Daily Mail:

The health service is set to face a string of compensation claims from cancer patients after its U-turn on top-up payments. Continue reading . . .

Health Care Bureaucrats Take Care of Themselves

For years observers have noted the phenomenon of public school teachers sending their kids to private schools–especially in cities with the worst and deadliest public facilities.  Teachers at government schools might not be able to teach their own kids, but they can send them to safer, better private alternatives.  So it appears to be with health care in Great Britain.

Reports the Daily Telegraph:

The money was used to bring in physiotherapists to help workers recover from muscular-skeletal injuries at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds.

Bosses said it prevented them from leapfrogging NHS patients and enabled them to return to work more quickly.

However, the private treatment, which amounted to £12,116 for 271 appointments over the past year, was described by critics as “shocking”.

Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “Their staff should have to wait like everybody else.

“Perhaps if they experienced it as their customers – that is the taxpayer – experienced it, they might be a little keener to improve their waiting times.” Continue reading . . .

Happy Anniversary, Big Tobacco

In the 1990s, state attorneys general launched massive, unprecedented lawsuits against major tobacco companies, claiming the companies owed the states for the past costs of treating sick smokers.

The tobacco “Master Settlement Agreement” was signed ten years ago this month by 46 state attorneys general and major tobacco companies. Contue reading . . .