Yeah, I’m sure these folks went home and ruminated long and hard on the injustices being committed in Tibet. I rest my case.

From Zombietime (with the full album here):

Socialists in France are incensed with conservative Prime Minister Sarkozy for…helping the poor?

From the Herald Tribune:

“France’s opposition Socialists accused President Nicolas Sarkozy of helping some poor people by penalising others on Friday after he said he would fund a new state benefit by cutting tax breaks for low income workers.”

And here’s a gem of a quote:

“He is redistributing money from the poor to the poor instead of taking it back from the rich,” said Segolene Royal, the Socialist candidate who lost last year’s presidential election to Sarkozy.

Oh, the irony…

The buzz is getting louder, and more people are starting to take notice that liberal enviro-fascist policies and Al Gore’s ethanol subsidies are chiefly to blame for the developing world’s widespread starvation.

The Chosen One Barack Obama, as it so happens, is also complicit (The Corner via Obama’s website):

“In 2005, Obama passed amendments to the 2005 Energy Policy Act which would double the amount of ethanol used in our gasoline supply by 2012 (from 2 billion to 8 billion gallons*)”

The mainstream media is now beginning to acknowledge the role of ethanol, and U.N. officials are beginning to compare what’s happening to a genocide.

Mona Charen talks about the dangers of ill-conceived global warming policies that never undergo a cost-benefit analysis.

Talk show host Glenn Beck is also doing his part in exposing Al Gore’s inconvenient truth.

And here’s why if you don’t care about global warming, you should. (Hint: More idiotic plans to regulate climate change that will cost taxpayers billions and lead to more tragedies like the current food shortage.)

Democrats are up in arms after Senate Republicans blocked a vote on a bill that would circumvent the strict 180 day deadline for employees to file pay discrimination claims. Democrats made their obligatory denunciations of Republicans for being in bed with Big Business, while Republicans cited the costs imposed by plaintiffs’ lawyers who opportunistically extort settlements from innocent employers.

I want to provide some comforting thoughts to those out there who feel that somehow women’s civil rights were eroded today…

Women are gonna be just fine.

First, the notion that a gender income gap exists as a result of discrimination is exaggerated and simply specious. Women in the aggregate earn less than men, not because they’re judged by different standards, but because of childbearing and rearing, and differences in experience and interests. Most women give birth to children, after which many decide to stay out of the workforce for some time. Interruptions of their careers costs them work experience and seniority, which affects their incomes relative to men who work continuously in the meantime. Moreover, most studies measuring income differences only compare weekly salaries, which overstates the gap because women generally work fewer hours per week. In contrast, women who are similarly situated to men and don’t have children earn slightly more.

Simple statistics don’t take these factors into account, yet women’s groups continue to make vacuous claims like “women earn 77 cents to a man’s dollar.” Such assertions become silly once you disaggregate the numbers and realize that the gap is predominantly attributable to preferences and choices between the sexes rather than bias and discrimination. The differences in domestic responsibilities and their effect on income cannot be dismissed in the debate.

Second, employers face competitive labor markets. If they discriminate against women with similar experience and skills, employers run the risk of being left at a competitive disadvantage in industries where there is a high demand for labor. A simple Google search for “Best Employers” will bring up thousands of employer websites, all boasting that one publication or another has named them this year’s best employer for women. The fact that firms so vigorously try to enhance their reputations as ‘women-friendly’ further suggests that competition for labor absolutely includes women, and that it’s to their advantage to attract the most qualified job applicants, irrespective of gender. The implication of this, of course, is that to attract the most qualified job applicants you must offer competitive and equal pay.

Third, don’t underestimate the deterrent effect of litigation, especially when punitive damages are involved. With the plaintiffs’ bar more than happy to play “Gotcha!”, an employer would be committing financial suicide by short-changing women. But make no mistake, too much deterrence can be dangerous. The threat of punitive damages is often leveraged by plaintiffs’ lawyers to exploit innocent firms’ fears of protracted and costly litigation in order to extract settlements. The easier it becomes to sue, the more tempting it becomes to abuse the power of litigation. If the 180-day limit was extended to apply to any paycheck, as the Democrats wanted, you would certainly be opening the door to more abusive lawsuits. Employers’ resultant higher cost of doing business would harm everyone –firms, employees, consumers– except the lawyers.

John McCain was right: This kind of legislation does open all kinds of problems.

Lawmakers tomorrow will pass the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. As its name implies, the bill would make it illegal to discriminate against people with genetic predispositions. Health insurers would be barred from requesting or using genetic information to adjust premiums, and employers could not use genetic information in hiring and firing decisions.

This bill is a disaster waiting to happen.

Politicians have been using the rising costs of health care as a talking point for quite some time now. While presently DNA testing provides limited information, there’s reason to believe that with time doctors will be able to more accurately diagnose future health conditions and preemptively mitigate their cost of treatment. Don’t get too excited though, because Congress’ decision to interfere will actually lead to higher insurance premiums.

Imposing an informational disadvantage on insurers and forbidding them from adjusting premiums on the basis of DNA tests to more accurately reflect their costs, will place them in financial distress. Actuaries’ ability to discriminate between high and low risks is critical to insurers’ solvency. If DNA testing becomes more accurate, those who are revealed to be healthy and at low risk will rationally adjust the scope of their health coverage downward, while those at higher risk will adjust it upward. In other words, those who would cost insurance providers the most would purchase more coverage on the cheap, while the least costly would purchase less. After all, there’s no reason to opt for a more expensive comprehensive plan if you know in advance that you face reduced risk.

The increased payouts to the less healthy, compounded with reduced revenues from the more healthy which are needed to subsidize the risk pool, would result in a negative cash flow. Since they’d be prevented from discriminating against those whose DNA tests reveal a higher risk of disease, insurers’ only recourse to stave off insolvency would be to indiscriminately increase premiums across the board for everyone. This would price out those who are already struggling to afford health insurance.

In short, a bill passed with noble intentions will result in a perversity. Luckily for the politicians who vote for it, the short-term memory and economic illiteracy of the general public will insulate them from blame. Lovely, isn’t it?

Earlier this week, I wrote about Obama’s response to the question of whether and how far to increase the capital-gains tax and pointed to his disturbingly palpable anti-capitalist sentiment. Today, Sallie James over at the Cato Institute makes a similar observation.

Here’s an excerpt:

In other words, to Barack Obama, soaking the rich and discouraging investment is worth it for its own sake, even if it can’t raise more money. The objective isn’t to raise revenue, it’s to inflict pain on those perceived as relatively well-off.

Her article is worth reading, if only to get a picture of the kind of ominous “change” Obama really has in store for you.

Hillary takes PA by 10, breathing new life into her campaign, and we can take joy in knowing that the self-destruction of the Democratic Party will continue. It would’ve been a shame if the trainwreck that brought us gems like ‘3 A.M.’, ‘Goddamn America!’, ‘Bittergate’, and ‘Shame on You Barack Obama!’ had come to an end tonight.

Right on queue, the Obama camp launched the spin just minutes after PA was called:

“Tonight, Hillary Clinton lost her last, best chance to make significant inroads in the pledged delegate count”

“The only surprising result from Pennsylvania is that in a state considered tailor-made for Hillary Clinton … Barack Obama was able to improve his standing among key voter groups since the Ohio primary.”

“The bottom line is that the Pennsylvania outcome does not change dynamic of this lengthy primary”

But nobody expected Clinton to make any inroads in the pledged delegate count- that seized from being the goal since the Potomac Primaries. At this point her goal is to stay in the race as long as possible, in hopes video surfaces of Obama in the pew listening to the pastor from hell. Tonight’s win gives her the chance to find out. Yesterday her financials showed her in the red, but tonight she claimed a personal fundraising record:

Clinton’s campaign said that as of 11:30 p.m. ET Tuesday night, they had raised nearly $2.5 million since the state was called for the New York senator – what they called their “best night ever” — with 80 percent of that money coming from new donors.

The $2.5 million is a nice bounty, but the real treasure is the fact that it came almost entirely from new donors. If she can start tapping into small donors like Obama, there’s no way this isn’t going to Denver.

Of course the beauty in all this is that tonight’s real winner is John McCain, and every dollar Hillary gets from now until August will be a dollar for him too.

From Red State via ABC:

“Morgan has been writing his own blog on the race, so at first he decided to remain neutral. He said Obama fans in particular were incensed with him for doing so. His tires were slashed and a complaint was lodged with the Internet service provider for his blog. Morgan is now supporting Clinton.”

Imagine what they’ll do in November when they realize many Americans like to choose for themselves, aren’t godless heathens, like to go hunting, and understand the significance of the word ‘illegal’ when it comes before the word ‘immigration.’

Developing countries have been rocked lately with waves of deadly rioting as a result of increasing food prices and looming famine. They can thank, in no small part, our very own Noble Prize Winner Al Gore for their hunger and starvation. In getting caught up in his own hype and hysteria as Mother Earth’s savior, this inconvenient jackass never stopped to consider the incentives and catastrophic consequences his alarmist agenda would create.

The impetus behind rising food prices? The government subsidies to ethanol production pushed by Gore and his cadre of enviro-fascists. Here’s what he said in 1998 about the subsidies, nine years before he regaled us with an Oscar-winning performance:

“I was also proud to stand up for the ethanol tax exemption when it was under attack in the Congress — at one point, supplying a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save it. The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be.”

Fast-forward to the present and surprise, surprise: heavily subsidizing ethanol distorted farmers’ economic incentives and grossly shifted the use of corn from feed and human consumption (read: food) to the production of more ethanol as a substitute for gasoline.

The US is one of the largest contributors to the world corn market, and thus even a modest diversion away from corn used for feed and human consumption would have a rippling effect on global food prices. Because of subsidies, however, US farmers reallocated over a quarter of the acreage devoted to food grains to acreage devoted to ethanol production. The reduced supply in food grains coupled with added demand from growing populations has, naturally, led to higher food prices.

The current crisis is, by and large, a result of willful ignorance by an opportunistic politician of the dangers of government meddling in the market. It should come as no shock, then, that our laureate himself has a financial stake in pushing bio-fuels down our collective throats. His private equity firm has invested millions of dollars in a deep portfolio of renewable energy businesses, and the mad dash toward bio-fuels has netted him a fortune.

As for reducing our dependency on oil and shifting to more eco-friendly energy, well, wouldn’t you know it, ethanol and other bio-fuels have proven terribly inefficient substitutes and aren’t so green after all.

Now that’s an inconvenient truth.

Do you remember your law school admissions essay? You know, the one wherein you touted your fanciful and borderline absurd desire to save the world? Funny, isn’t it, that we all more or less made the same sales pitch? Well, if you weren’t full of shit like the rest of us (as it turns out) and you still want to be a do-gooder, your best bet in doing your part is cashing in as a corporate lawyer and aiding efficient capital formation and deployment.

From Prof. Bainbridge:

“You want to help make society a better place? You want to eliminate poverty? Become a corporate lawyer. Help businesses grow, so that they can create jobs and provide goods and services that make people’s lives better.”