The meme continues, no surprise from Bruce Bartlett. Salient point about Bush’s incompetence:

The reason Bush’s Social Security proposal was incompetent was not because of its content. He should have pressed it right after the Social Security commission report came out, when people were primed for action. Instead, he deep-sixed the report and did Medicare instead. After having made our long term budgetary situation vastly worse with the prescription drug give-away, Bush no longer had any credibility on the budget. Any savings achieved from Social Security reform would have been less than the spending increase from the prescription drug plan. Thus, not only was the prescription drug plan bad policy, it also killed Social Security reform.

Read Bruce Bartlett, who uses Steve Chapman’s column as a starting point.

Brought to you by Ars Technica.

The WSJ has an interesting article on wedding websites:

Wedding Web sites — also known as “Wed sites” — were originally conceived as a convenient way for couples to notify guests of wedding events, provide directions and link to gift registries. Now they are turning into elaborate hubs of matrimonial exhibitionism, with confessional stories, courtship videos, and blow-by-blow accounts of the preparations.

I’m not allowed to link to gift registries on my wedding website. Apparently, it’s presumptuous.

Read the whole thing here.

Artie Lange will leave the Howard Stern show in January, if not sooner. When he does, he will not be replaced by a yet to be determined 3rd comedian, but instead will be replaced by a returning Jackie Martling. Martling will stay until Stern retires at the end of his contract.

Artie, of course, is throwing away the opportunity of a lifetime, the potential to become Stern’s successor on Sirius. Now that will likely go to Bubba the Love Sponge, who while occasionally funny, simply cannot hold a candle to Stern. Lange, on the other hand, could have pulled it off, maintaining a lucrative franchise for the remainder of his life. But he’s throwing that away.

Further prediction: Lange is found dead before Stern retires. I suspect it will be less of a Chris Farley or John Belushi type death and more of a John Candy type of death.

Apparently, Giuliani polls well with social conservatives. As I’ve said before, it’s a matter of priorities:

But, like Dwight Eisenhower’s in 1952, Giuliani’s national security stature after the Sept. 11 attacks more likely explains his continued popularity within the religious right, whose voters have long held hawkish positions on the issue.

“These voters care about moral issues, and many of them are conflicted because understandably they see the defense of Western civilization being perhaps the most important moral issue of all,” Bauer says.

I think that’s just about right.

Read more here.
(via RCP and the Rudy PR machine)

This is great:

You know how bad things have got when Jimmy Carter’s critique of your presidency is taken seriously. This week the former US President attacked the current one, saying that, “as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world�, George Bush’s Administration had been “the worst in history�. It’s one thing to have to listen to Bill and Hillary Clinton claim that things were better when they were in the White House, but Jimmy Carter? Being told by Mr Carter that you’re the worst president in history is like being told by William McGonagall that your poetry stinks.

Read Gerard Baker.

Some years ago, Leonard Peikoff sold the rights to make a movie version of Atlas Shrugged, divorcing himself from any responsibility for what becomes of it. What looks like is coming is a horror show:

Wallace says he has finished the screenplay, and it’s been “greenlit� by the studio. Angelina Jolie has been signed to play Dagny Taggart, and the movie may be in theaters next summer.

Wallace was nominated for an Oscar for his script for Braveheart, another movie popular with many libertarians. He first read the novel when his son at Duke University recommended it. Wallace gave his son C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which suggests some interesting dinner-table conversations. (He’s also writing a screenplay for Lewis’s Screwtape Letters.)

Wallace found a familiar theme in Atlas Shrugged:

“The assertion that change occurs when heroic individuals are willing to stand up–and further, that people in the herd want to be heroic individuals but aren’t encouraged to do so until they find a leader worth following–is very much in Braveheart, and it’s something thoroughly ingrained in the American psyche.”

Wonderful. The film is going to be made by a man who doesn’t like ideas (let alone the ideas in the book), but rather the idea of big ideas. And Angelina Jolie? I had heard her beau Brad Pitt was a Rand fan, but it’s really hard to imagine the two of them doing justice to the book when they spend all their spare time hanging out in Africa adopting babies and cavorting with the UN.

Frankly, Atlas Shrugged should be a three movie series, like Lord Of The Rings. We’ll just have to wait for copyright reform to put the book into the public domain for a decent adaptation to happen I suppose.

(via hit and run)

Some friends of mine were featured in today’s Globe:

Read the story behind ultimate frisbee.

Behold:

Khalid Sheikh O’Donnell

I am sick and tired of peestrians in Boston, intentionally and obnoxiously prancing out into traffic as if the world revolved around them. So is Mike Mennonno:

One gentleman this morning walked out into oncoming traffic only to glance over midway across the street, seemingly surprised that several cars and cyclists had come to a screeching halt for him. This resulted not in him putting a little hustle in his bustle, but in a little sneer in our direction as he actually slowed his pace to show us what was what.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that sneer, and the intentional slowing down of pedestrians. We need to hand out hefty j-walking fines like they do in LA. I don’t know why that is so controversial.

(via universal hub)