Advice from Irving Kristol

Passed on by Mary Eberstadt:

About editing: Always just cut the text if you have to, he advised, never add to what's there.

About responding to critics en masse in a published venue: When answering letters written in response to something you've written, don't use the authors' names. Just lay out their common themes. That way you won't get caught up personally and can just stick to the ideas.

Much more in the WSJ. Kristol died a week ago.

District 42: Del. Steve Lafferty's top 20 contributors in 2008

For more detail, see Del. Lafferty's page on the SunLight Foundation's website FollowTheMoney:

$1,000 CHURCH LANE CENTER
$1,000 DMS DEVELOPMENT LLC
$ 750 BALTIMORE COUNTY FIRE FIGHTERS
$ 750 PICORP INC BALTIMORE
$ 750 PLUMBERS & STEAMFITTERS LOCAL 486
$ 650 MARYLAND REALTORS ASSOC
$ 600 LAFFERTY, JEAN W
$ 600 MARYLAND STATE TEACHERS ASSOC
$ 600 MARYLAND STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY
$ 600 21 WEST LLC
$ 600 CANNOLES & CLASING CHARTERED
$ 500 HANOVER BRIDGE LLC
$ 500 ACCURATE INFRASTRUCTURE DATA INC
$ 500 BARBARA HOFFMAN CONSULTING
$ 500 JUSTIN J KING ATTORNEY AT LAW
$ 500 THOMAS KELLEHER CONSULTING SERVICES INC
$ 500 SCIENTIFIC SYSTEMS & SOFTWARE INTERNATIONAL CORP
$ 500 LEWIS, KENNETH MORGAN
$ 450 CONSTELLATION ENERGY

UPDATE: See also top contributors for: Del. Sue Aumann, Del. Bill Frank, and Sen. Jim Brochin.

District 42: Del. Bill Frank's top 20 contributors in 2008

For more detail, see Del. Frank's page on the SunLight Foundation's website FollowTheMoney:

$2,000 STEELE FOR MARYLAND CMTE, MICHAEL
$1,300 MARYLAND STATE MEDICAL SOCIETY
$ 750 HEALTH POLICY LEADERSHIP ALLIANCE
$ 680 MARYLAND REALTORS ASSOC
$ 606 AUMANN FRANK VICTORY SLATE
$ 600 TOWSON VETERINARY HOSPITAL INC
$ 550 JIMS PLUMBING & HEATING
$ 500 CARNEY FOR CONGRESS 2010
$ 500 TOWLE, GEORGE W
$ 500 THOMAS BUILDERS
$ 450 POLLARD TOWING CO
$ 410 AMERICAN COLLEGE OF EMERGENCY PHYSICIANS - MARYLAND
$ 400 HOUK, PAUL D
$ 400 MID-ATLANTIC PETROLEUM DISTRIBUTORS ASSOC
$ 400 MARYLAND SOCIETY OF ANESTHESIOLOGISTS
$ 350 MARYLAND ASSOC OF CPAS
$ 350 MARYLAND BANKERS ASSOC
$ 300 ASSOCIATED GUN CLUBS OF BALTIMORE
$ 300 BALTIMORE COUNTY LICENSED BEVERAGE ASSOC
$ 300 BANK OF AMERICA

UPDATE: See also top contributors for: Del. Sue Aumann, Del. Steve Lafferty, and Sen. Jim Brochin.

District 42: Sen. Jim Brochin's top 20 contributors in 2008

For more detail, see Sen. Brochin's page on the SunLight Foundation's website FollowTheMoney:

$2,750 POLLARD TOWING CO
$2,500 BALTIMORE COUNTY ORGANIZED LICENSED TOWERS INC
$2,000 GLENEAGLES OFFICE LLC
$2,000 WINTERS RUN WEST LIMITED PARTNERSHIP
$2,000 CITIZENS FOR FROSH
$2,000 HILL MANAGEMENT SERVICES INC
$1,750 MILLER MURTHA & PSORAS LLC
$1,500 APARTMENT SERVICES INC
$1,500 MARYLAND PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
$1,500 BAYVIEW MANAGEMENT LLC
$1,500 SIGAMBRIS, HARALAMBOS
$1,500 CARBROC LLC
$1,500 MARYLANDERS FOR THE PRESERVATION OF FIREARMS OWNERSHIP
$1,250 MARYLAND NEW CAR & TRUCK DEALERS ASSOC
$1,250 PLUMBERS & STEAMFITTERS LOCAL 486
$1,000 LEXINGTON INSURANCE SERVICES INC
$1,000 WINAKER, RONALD M
$1,000 MAROCCO CONSTRUCTION CO INC
$1,000 SPELLMAN LARSON & ASSOC INC
$1,000 MARYLAND REALTORS ASSOC

UPDATE: See also top contributors for: Del. Sue Aumann, Del. Bill Frank, and Del. Steve Lafferty.

District 42: Del. Sue Aumann 2008 top 20 contributors

For more detail, see Del. Aumann's page on the SunLight Foundation's website FollowTheMoney:

$2,000 STEELE FOR MARYLAND CMTE, MICHAEL
$1,000 EBERT, CATHERINE
$1,000 SABERG, KARL
$ 800 CONSTELLATION ENERGY
$ 750 ASSOC OF MARYLAND PILOTS
$ 750 BALTIMORE COUNTY FIRE FIGHTERS
$ 600 BROOKE MCDONALD & ASSOCIATES
$ 600 MARYLAND REALTORS ASSOC
$ 600 HEALTH POLICY LEADERSHIP ALLIANCE
$ 500 ADVANCED MEDICAL MANAGEMENT INC
$ 500 CARNEY, KEVIN
$ 500 BROOKE, ANN
$ 500 LAW OFFICES OF JOHN M HALL JR LLC
$ 500 LAW OFFICES OF J BRIAN TANSEY LLC
$ 500 TANSEY & HALL
$ 500 ALBERTINI, GUY
$ 500 DARBY, WENDY
$ 500 BROOKE, BRIAN W
$ 450 INGERMAN & HORWITZ LLP
$ 450 ARNOLD SEVEL & GAY PA

UPDATE: See also top contributors for: Del. Bill Frank, Del. Steve Lafferty, and Sen. Jim Brochin.

Remembering a cool bumper sticker from the 1960s

From an article by Salena Zito in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

The majority is not silent – the government is deaf.

Right on!

On having your ideas attacked . . . clues that you're winning the debate . . . and the common fate of dissenters

In The Black Swan--which was published in 2007 and foreshadows/explains the economic meltdown of 2008--Nassim Nicholas Taleb has strong opinions about some well-known professors of finance & economics including Myron Scholes, Stephen Ross and Martin Shubik.

This bit is from page 280:

It was symptomatic that almost all people who attacked my thinking attacked a deformed version of it . . . . Some even had to change my biography. At a panel in Lugano, Myron Scholes once got in to a state of rage, and went after a transformed version of my ideas. I could see the pain in his face.

Once, in Paris, a prominent member of the mathematical establishment, who invested part of his lifeon some minute sub-sub-property of the Gaussian, blew a fuse--right when I showed empirical evidence of Black Swans in markets. He turned red with anger, had difficulty breathing, and started hurling insults at me for having descrated the institution, lacking pudeur (modesty); he shouted "I am a member of the Academy of Science!" to give more strength to his insults. (The French translation of my book was out of stock the next day.)

My best episode was with Steve Ross, an economist perceived to be an intellectual far superior to Scholes and Merton, and deemed a formidable debater, gave rebuttal to my ideas by signaling small errors or approximations in my presentation, such as Markowitz was not the first to ..." thus certifying that he had no answer to my main point.

Later (on page 283) Taleb points out that, as always, critics of conventional wisdom face plenty of hostility:

The insightful scholar Martin Shubik, who held that the degree of excessive abstraction of these models, a few steps beyond necessity, makes them totally unusable, found himself ostracized, a common fate for dissenters.

All you ever wanted to know about ACORN

The Washington Times has a round-up of ACORN coverage here. It's a long list.

via Instapundit.

"not one ACORN employee seemed to flinch"

Go. Go now. Go to BigGovernment.com and start scrolling.

Especially if you're a Democrat who get's most of his news from the New York Times.

Here's the thing: if Democrats do not rise up quickly to denounce ACORN--and strip away its government funding--it seems to me that President Obama and the whole Democratic party will be in deep, deep trouble. And the tipping point could come very quickly.

Mike Flynn captures the essence of the ACORN scandal with this bit:

not one ACORN employee seemed to even flinch when presented with the ridiculous scenario of a pimp and a prostitute trying to get a mortgage to house a dozen or so underage El Salvadoran child-prostitutes. They just oozed seamlessly into conjecture about whether or not a child prostitute could be considered a “dependent” for tax purposes. What do these employees hear on a daily basis that this scenario was just another problem that needed fixing?

Here are the videos. Watch them all:

#1. ACORN office in Baltimore, MD
#2. ACORN office in Washington, DC

The videos from Baltimore and DC elicited this response from Bertha Lewis, ACORN's Chief Organizer.

This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen.

Her quote is a nice segue to yesterday's release from Mr. O'Keefe and Ms. Giles:

#3. ACORN office in Brooklyn, NY

And for good measure, here's today's release:

#4. ACORN office in San Bernardino, CA

James O'Keefe's intro for this vid included this nice touch, a quote from Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:

#8: Keep the pressure on. Never let up.

If you ask me, ACORN is history. And if Obama and the Democratic party don't recognize it quickly enough, they will be too.

UPDATE: For background on Andrew Breitbart, founder of BigGovernment.com, go here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds interviews Andrew Breitbart about ACORN

ACORN staff advise pimp & prostitute how to cheat on taxes

The ACORN staffers in Baltimore were unfazed by the pair's plan to conduct child prostitution. From the Washington Post:

BALTIMORE -- The group ACORN has fired two employees who were seen on hidden-camera video giving tax advice to a man posing as a pimp and a woman who pretended to be a prostitute.

. . . On the video, a man and woman visiting ACORN's Baltimore office asked about buying a house and how to account on tax forms for the woman's income. An ACORN employee advised the woman to list her occupation as "performance artist."

The pair also claimed they planned to employ teenage girls from central America as prostitutes, and an ACORN employee suggested that up to three of the girls could be claimed as dependents, according to transcripts of the video posted online by conservative activist James O'Keefe.

O'Keefe [said] that he was shocked by the ACORN employees' helpfulness.

9/11 memorial: Tribute in Light

Click image to see larger version. Image from Wikipedia.

Obama on treasury-draining health care entitlements: "We'll make it up on volume"

The Wall Street Journal's reaction to President Obama's health care speech:

Mr. Obama began by depicting a crisis in the entitlement state, noting that "our health-care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers," especially Medicare. . . .

On this score he's right. Medicare's unfunded liability—the gap between revenues and promised benefits—is currently some $37 trillion over the next 75 years. Yet the President uses this insolvency as an argument to justify the creation of another health-care entitlement, this time for most everyone under age 65. It's like a variation on the old Marx Brothers routine: "The soup is terrible and the portions are too small."

Obama's timidity on malpractrice reform

Toward the end of his big health care speech last night, President Obama decried the current state of affairs where

only timidity passes for wisdom.

Fourteen paragraphs earlier, he said this:

I don't believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet, but I have talked to enough doctors to know that defensive medicine may be contributing to unnecessary costs.

May be contributing? Ya think?

MSM FAIL

Wright. Jones. Freeman. Edwards.

Things I hadn't known about baseball gloves

A friend and I had a very pleasant interaction a few weeks ago with a twenty-something sales manager at the Dick's Sporting Goods store in Hunt Valley. Some tidbits we picked up from him:

1. Many gloves these days come with oil already injected into the leather. When that's the case, you shouldn't apply extra oil to the glove.
2. Professional shortstops and second basemen tend to use smaller gloves than I had thought (around 11.5 inches).
3. Professional infielders (except perhaps first basemen) don't insert their hand fully into their glove. They leave the bottom of the hand visible (the inch or so that includes the base of the thumb). This is partly to prevent wrist injuries when diving for ground balls so the glove can fall off rather than breaking or spraining the wrist.
4. Many advanced players put both the ring finger and the pinky finger into the last finger hole. The middle finger goes into the ring finger hole and the index finger goes in the middle finger hole. This helps to create a larger pocket.
5. Some pros now have "flared" corners on their gloves (the corners at the ends of the thumb and pinky). This lets the open glove cover a larger area, when compared to a glove with corners that curl around the ball.
6. A quick way to break in a glove: smear a small dabs of shaving cream on several areas of the glove (the inside of the pocket, the back of the fingers [and the palm of the glove?] and put it in a 300 degree oven for five minutes.
7. Some pros now have "flared" corners on their gloves (the corners at the ends of the thumb and pinky). This lets the open glove cover a larger area when compared to a glove that has more curl around the ball at the corners. But some pros prefer the non-flared gloves.
   
8. One way to build up your arm strength: cut a slit in a tennis ball, fill it with pennies, seal it up with duct tape, and play catch (gently) for 10 minutes or so on a regular basis. Some caveats: don't throw too hard or too far, don't do it for too long and don't do this with your best glove, because it causes extra wear and tear on the glove.

My friend spent more money than he had planned to, but I think he got something that suits him much better and will last longer than the one he had originally planned to buy.

Please read David Goldhill's article on healthcare in the September issue of The Atlantic

I stopped in at Dutch Ruppersberger's Timonium office last week and dropped off a copy of Mr. Goldhill's article. The title is How American Health Care Killed My Father.

I attached a note to Dutch that said (roughly):

Dear Dutch -- This article is one of the best pieces of analysis and explanation that I have read on any topic, ever. Please read it. I hope you will incorporate parts of it in your thinking and in your public statements on health care. After you read it, I'd like to discuss it with you. Please call me on my cell at 410-xxx-xxxx.

Thank you.

To everyone else out there, please read the article and send a copy of it to your Congressman.

By the way, Dutch has scheduled a town hall conference call for September 21st at 7:30 PM. Details such as the call-in number and passcode are TBD.

Councilman Samuel Moxley guilty of DUI ... 2nd incident in five years

Bryan Sears* has the story in the Catonsville Times. The punishment:

. . . a suspended 60-day sentence . . . two years of monitored probation . . .

[his] car [to] be equipped with a steering wheel interlock device, a mobile breathalyzer that requires the driver to blow into a tube to prove he is not intoxicated before starting his vehicle and at random times while on the road . . . 85 hours of community service in Baltimore [City].

The article also mentions suspension of Moxley's driver's license for a year, but the article doesn't make clear whether that is for the 2009 charge or the 2005 charge.

Moxley really needs to resign.

A good question from ASA John Mitchell:

“How many bites at the apple will he get before he goes to jail?”

Here are some details of Mr. Moxley's drunk driving record from his Wikipedia page:

In 2005 Councilman Moxley was sentenced to year of supervised probation for driving under the influence.

On July 23, 2009, Councilman Moxley was arrested on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol.

According to a Baltimore City Police report, Moxley was involved in a four vehicle accident on Route 40, near the 400 block of N. Pulaski Street in west Baltimore. . . [he] failed to stop at a red traffic signal at Rt 40 and N. Pulaski Street striking a vehicle. . .

Authorities say Moxley failed a field sobriety test and refused to take a breathalyzer.

*Bryan seems like a very nice guy, but his blog photo has a definite Lex Luthor look to it.