Hot Air » Blog Archive » Chaos in Iran: I’m ready for martyrdom, says Mousavi; Videos: Woman murdered in cold blood; Update: Obama calls on regime to end violence; Update: Obama goes out for ice cream; Rumor: 150 dead? Report: Mousavi’s office sends letter to Obama?.

The Case for Working With Your Hands – NYTimes.com.

Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

American capitalism gone with a whimper – Pravda.Ru.

GEITHNER:  We face again this deep recession, damaged financial system.  And our immediate imperative still is to get growth back on track.  That requires us to do things that are expensive, that cost money, in the short term will raise deficits.  At the same time we do that, we have to commit to Americans, to investors around the world that we’re going to be able to get back to living within our own means when the crisis passed and when the recovery is established, we’re going to have to get back to living within our means.  And that’s going to require demonstrating to people we’re willing to stop doing things they’ve been doing, give up things that we don’t want to give up, and that will be a challenge.

RUSH:  Whoa wait a second, who’s he talking about here?  Because I know damn well he’s not talking about the government giving up things.  He’s talking about you and me and apparently his own kids.  So it’s our fault.  All of this is our fault.  The reason we’re in a recession is our fault and the government, to save us, has to spend all this debt, all this money.  And once this crisis is over, we’re going to have to get back to living within our means and that’s going to require demonstrating to people willing to stop doing things we’ve been doing, give up things that we don’t want to give up, and that will be a challenge.  What’s going to be the challenge?  They’re going to make us.  They’re going to make us give up these things.  So there’s your future, from the Treasury secretary of the Obama administration.  You caused this, you gave us this recession, your irresponsibility, your desire, you wanted too much.  You haven’t given enough back.  Now, when we get out of this recession you’re going to have to give up a lot of things.  We’re going to have to return to a more austere lifestyle.

The Final Push: What a father does in the delivery room.

People don’t stop killers. People with guns do

via People don’t stop killers. People with guns do.

On Monday, as the news of the Virginia Tech shootings was unfolding, I went into my advanced constitutional law seminar to find one of my students upset. My student, Tara Wyllie, has a permit to carry a gun in Tennessee, but she isn’t allowed to have a weapon on campus. That left her feeling unsafe. “Why couldn’t we meet off campus today?” she asked.

Virginia Tech graduate student Bradford Wiles also has a permit to carry a gun, in Virginia. But on the day of the shootings, he would have been unarmed for the same reason: Like the University of Tennessee, where I teach, Virginia Tech bans guns on campus.

In The Roanoke Times last year – after another campus incident, when a dangerous escaped inmate was roaming the campus – Wiles wrote that, when his class was evacuated, “Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness. That feeling of helplessness has been difficult to reconcile because I knew I would have been safer with a proper means to defend myself.”

Mass public shootings are a horrific feature of modern life. Many of the bloodiest examples of this scourge have occurred on college campuses. As professors, we are particularly sensitive to this danger.

Despite this – no, because of this – we support a bill currently pending in the Texas Legislature that would permit the concealed carrying of firearms on college and university campuses in the state by holders of concealed-handgun permits.

Any public policy involving matters of life and death should be decided only after weighing carefully the competing risks. Examining the relevant facts and data indicates that permitting Texas permit holders to carry weapons on college campuses would improve safety because:

•The best available empirical evidence shows that concealed-carry laws reduce the incidence of mass public shootings.

•Mass public shootings occur almost exclusively in places – like universities – where concealed carry is proscribed.

•There are numerous examples of firearms owners acting to disarm would-be mass murderers, thereby saving lives.

•Concealed-handgun-permit holders are overwhelmingly law-abiding individuals.

If gun bans truly reduced the risk of mass public shootings, then gun-free zones would be refuges from such havoc. Sadly, the exact opposite is true. All multiple-victim public shootings in the United States with more than three fatalities have occurred where concealed handguns are prohibited. Moreover, the worst primary and secondary school shootings have occurred in Europe, despite its draconian gun laws.

via Day, Liebowitz and Pirrong: Guns make colleges safer | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Opinion: Viewpoints.

President Pantywaist Obama should have thought twice before sitting down to play poker with Dick Cheney.

via Hot Air » Blog Archive » Cheney formally requests release of two CIA memos on detainees.

At the Telegraph, Gerald Warner says good going, President Pantywaist:

That is why he opened Pandora’s Box by publishing the Justice Department’s legal opinions on waterboarding and other hardline interrogation techniques. He cynically subordinated the national interest to his partisan desire to embarrass the Republicans. Then he had to rush to Langley, Virginia to try to reassure a demoralised CIA that had just discovered the President of the United States was an even more formidable foe than al-Qaeda…

Obama promised his CIA audience that nobody would be prosecuted for past actions. That has already been contradicted by leftist groups with a revanchist ambition to put Republicans, headed if possible by Condoleezza Rice, in the dock. Talk about playing party politics with national security. Martin Scheinin, the United Nations special investigator for human rights, claims that senior figures, including former vice president Dick Cheney, could face prosecution overseas. Ponder that – once you have got over the difficulty of locating the United Nations and human rights within the same dimension.

THE DEATH OF ROMANCE

This is why pop songs no longer feature promises of “endless love” and “always and forever.” In 1971, the protagonist of the Temptations’ hit “Just My Imagination” saw a beautiful girl walk past and dreamed:

Soon we’ll be married

And raise a family.

In a cozy little home out in the country

With two children, maybe three.

If such visions of wedded bliss occupy no part of the youthful imagination today, why not? Perhaps because children are indoctrinated to believe that marriage is strictly for grown-ups — heaven forbid an 18-year-old boy should get a job, marry his high-school sweetheart, and start their life together in a tiny little basement apartment. What about college? What about your career? What about the upwardly-mobile ambitions of middle-classness?

If this status idolatry isn’t anti-marriage, what is it? I’m reminded of the fourth chapter of Timothy:

Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; Forbidding to marry . . .

If young Christian conservatives want to be “pro-family,” then, they need to be getting married and having babies. And what a youth rebellion that would be, huh? “No, mother, I’ve decided against law school. As a matter of fact, Jennifer and I went to the courthouse and got married last Saturday and . . .” Strange to say that the most shocking thing a young person can do in 2009 is to get married. They can change the world one “I do” at a time.

via The Greenroom » Forum Archive » ‘Forbidding to Marry’ (Reply to Laura).

When the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) intervention was first outlined by the Bush administration, it did not call for any transfer of stock, of any sort, to the government. The Democrats demanded, as a price for their support, that the taxpayers “get something back” for the money they were lending to the banks. House Republicans, wise to what was going on, rejected the administration’s proposal and sought, instead, to provide insurance to banks, rather than outright cash. Their plan would, of course, not involve any transfer of stock. But Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) undercut his own party’s conservatives and went along with the Democratic plan, ensuring its passage.

But to avoid the issue of a potential for government control of the banks, everybody agreed that the stock the feds would take back in return for their money would be preferred stock, not common stock. “Preferred” means that these stockholders get the first crack at dividends, but only common stockholders can actually vote on company management or policy. Now, by changing this fundamental element of the TARP plan, Obama will give Washington a voting majority among the common stockholders of these banks and other financial institutions. The almost 500 companies receiving TARP money will be, in effect, run by Washington.

via TheHill.com.