Cheney as President

Well, apparently the Vice President has assumed Presidential powers for the next few hours while Bush undergoes surgery. Under Section 3 of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

"Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President."

What surprises me somewhat, is that since the 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967 it has been invoked only two other times. Bush himself has used it once before, and Regan used it once. I find it somewhat startling that no one else has surrendered their Presidential powers temporarily. In the last six years, I personally can think of three or four medical emergencies that would have rendered me at least temporarily unfit to act as President. No one has has a root canal as President?

Personally, I probably am not fit to act as the President on any given Tuesday or Thursday night after a couple Miller Lites (which is of course when most of my policy ideas come out). Maybe this leader of the free world gig would be less exhausting if the President could take some time off and temporarily surrender his powers.

Why oh Why....

via Reuters:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a former Democrat who turned independent because of his staunch backing for the war, ripped into lawmakers pushing to bring combat troops home before their mission is completed.

Funny, I thought he became an independent for another reason.

The Work Week

via Joanna

Another strange proxy for me is the traditional work week. In more industrial times, with a less diverse market and more standardizing forces like unions and labor laws, establishing a workweek was useful. Now it’s not. Forty hours of factory work is forty hours of factory work. Forty hours of office work can easily be 10 hours of productive, revenue-producing time padded with 30 hours of nonproductive busywork, goofing off with coworkers, and YouTube watching. Take a look at government agencies (or just hit yourself in the head with a hammer) and you get zero revenue-producing time because there are no revenue incentives and you’ve got maybe 10 hours of increasing the size and scope of government and 30 hours of the same things as cubicle farms. Or if you’re an ambitious bureaucrat you’re entrenching The State for closer to the full 40 hours (shudder).

referral traffic

How much do you suppose the front page of the Disney website generates from people clicking the "no thanks" button on porn sites?

I remember this sort of stuff from college

One of the things that I remember liking least about college was that you were often encouraged to take any set of facts and give them a unique analysis. Since that time, I have pretty much accepted the fact that maybe such reliance on my own interpretation makes for some bad theories. I 'm not that smart, and certainly not that knowledgeable about most areas of public policy that I can synthesize my my own ideas from scratch.

Over the last couple of years I have largely avoided many of the more progressive news sources I used to rely on heavily when I was more... progressive.

This article irked me more than probably anything I have read today. Here Mr. Rainmondo alleges that:

Thirty years ago, Hitchens was hailing the secular socialist Saddam as the greatest Arab ”visionary” of his time: today, he hails Saddam’s overthrow by the US as an act of “liberation,” and this even as the horrifically bloody aftermath continues to inflict terror on the prostrate peoples of Iraq. What changed?

Nothing, really: it’s just that, back in 1976, it looked like the Third World tyrants, “secular socialists” like Saddam, were winning. Today, it looks like the US is winning. As Orwell noted in his “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” a certain kind of intellectual worships power, and will ally himself with the strongest brute out of “idealistic” idolatry, and a sense of invincible power.

How does one argue against this? Can I prove that Hitchens is interested more than just personal enrichment? Is Rainmondo's assertion valuable just because he asserts it (presenting no evidence)?

Great Blog

Everyone should check out The American Scene blog. They have some excellent writers over there. I highly recommend it.

Sabato's "new ideas"

It is interesting that with Bryan Caplan's book setting the poli sci/econ world on fire recently we can have a look at what the other side is up to. Larry Sabato in an upcoming book makes various suggestions which I assume are designed to increase the public's role in civil society further.

One proposal that comes up periodically is that of mandatory public service for young people. This idea I have always found akin to consciption. Why is not going to college and/or contributing to the economy enough for young adults to do?

Something Weird

I was just looking through the logs and I realized that this blog had run for exactly 100 posts.

Well here is the 101st.