Friday miscellaneous (8/3)

With the Audit the Fed bill being voted on in the house, my inbox was getting a steady stream of solicitations from the Ron Paul advocates (I signed up for his email list lase election, and apparently they just dusted off an old list). What I haven’t heard is any real criticism of the measure. Until, that is, the National Review examined it:

Before we give Congress more authority over monetary policy, let’s consider how it’s doing with fiscal policy: The federal government has annual deficits running in excess of a trillion dollars, a $16 trillion national debt, endless partisan fights over the tax code, the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, special-interest loopholes to help favored businesses at the expense of everybody else — none of which suggests that Congress is likely to do a better job with monetary policy than the Fed. And that’s with a Republican House.

After reviewing their book on marriage, Tim Challies has turned his attention to Michael and Debbi Pearl’s book on child training.

So with the Olympics taking place this week, NBC has its work cut out for it. Between the number of events and the time zone difference, I don’t envy their technical team. (They did, however, omit the tribute to London’s terror attacks from the opening ceremony.) What I didn’t realize was the amount of sound editing that goes into the broadcasts.

And speaking of the Olympics, have you heard about the blind South Korean archer who is breaking records? Or the badminton players who got expelled for trying to lose their matches (video here)? If they had been US athletes, one could speculate that they were simply to avoid the taxes that come from winning. Fortunately, none were from North Korea, where it is suspected that losers are penalized by more than taxes.

And as for mistakes, it’s hard to beat the White House’s response to a journalist who wrote about the return of the Churchill bust to Great Britain (which was on loan after the 9/11 attacks). But one researcher tried—he thought he hit the jackpot with some incriminating photos of a female journalist and a male Senator. What the researcher didn’t know—but does now—is that the two are married to each other.

Mark Mitchell weighs in on the culture wars:

Culture war suggests a battle to the death. But the metaphor is wrong and therefore fosters poor thinking. A culture is not something with which to do battle, either as an offensive weapon or an object of attack. A culture is a living thing, an inheritance, passed on from generation to generation. It is preserved by loving care not militant brow-beating. It cannot survive as a merely negative opposition to something perceived as its opposite. It is a creative, developing expression of a people’s view of the world that reaches ultimately to the highest things: to the good, the true, and the beautiful. To weaponize culture is, therefore, to destroy the very thing for which the battle is ostensibly waged.

Art of Manliness is doing a series on Leadership Lessons from Dwight Eisenhower. I didn’t realize that he had minimal leadership for his first 30 years in the army, and wasn’t promoted to leadership until he was 52 years old.

On the Romney’s campaign’s Anglo-Saxon comment—someone has been playing too much Britannia.

“Anglo-Saxon” is acceptable shorthand for “English” or “British.” I suppose the Normans figure in there too. But they were imperialistic, colonialist oppressors, so the left shouldn’t mind their non-mention.
Perhaps the Jutes have a complaint for not being included with the Angles and the Saxons. I always said that Romney doesn’t look Jutish. There goes the Danish-American vote, I suppose.

Thomas Sowell explores the much talked about one percent.

A left-leaning think tank is calling for entitlement reform.

The next round of litigation in the health reform debates has begun and a federal court halted the application of the contraception mandate pending the outcome.

Liechtenstein, where abortion is illegal, has been facing its own abortion debate. After the prince vetoed the popular referendum to legalize abortion, another effort was started to strip the royal family of its veto power. That effort failed miserably when the prince announced that, if the veto power was taken away, the royal family would renounce the throne.

Peter Jackson’s two-part Hobbit is becoming a three-part Hobbit.

And finally, here are some other possible slogans for the Obama campaign (which show, if nothing else, what can happen when all regard for context is lost).