George Rebane

– Public service unions are bankrupting cities
– Pelosi’s shameful conduct
– Obamacare’s mindbending apologetics
– iPad is a good start
– Profiling and air travel security
– Obama’s job at Harvard

The evidence that public service unions are a public menace has been clear and abundant for years as I have reported on RR and in The Union.  Now this evidence has become a gusher.  Former union leader Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office stated flatly that “Unions have priced themselves out of a job.”  Led by LA, untold number of other cities across the land are finding their voices and declaring the disaster that these unions have brought upon the public weal.  Only the most uninformed and/or hard-line progressives still try to circle the wagons around this obviously rapacious bunch.  More in the 1apr10 WSJ’s ‘Cash Poor Cities Take on Unions’.

Representaive Hank Johnson (D-GA) is a man seriously ill with a form of Hepatitis which makes him obviously unfit for service in the US Congress (see video).  This has been pointed out to Speaker Pelosi for some time now.  But Johnson’s compliant vote on key liberal issues outweighs simple human decency on the political scale that Pelosi uses to inform and guide her actions.  That she still parades him in the public eye on congressional committee hearings is reprehensible.  It is all of a piece with that woman.

People of otherwise good intellect on the left seem to have a disconnect when they defend Obamacare.  ‘Yes, it may not be the best healthcare program, but we had to pass something since the status quo is unacceptable.  And since Republicans didn’t fix healthcare on their watch, they have no basis for opposing this legislaton and suggesting their own alternatives.’  Now there is a heap of logic to fill your brainpan.  So what is Obamacare, some kind of spiteful leftwing retribution against America??  But for the sake of argument, accept that Republicans didn’t fix healthcare (although the situation was a bit more complicated than that).  Does this mean that the obviously better ways toward a fix, like addressing the cost of delivery instead of imposing a fraudulent insurance mandate, were now out of consideration?  Apparently so, according to progressive logic.

Apple’s iPad hit the market yesterday.  Consumer advocate and tech products guru Mossberg gives a good overview of it here.  It came out as the successor to the various ereaders that Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and others brought out over the past year or so.  I prognosticated then that these one tune gizmos that could only deliver ebooks would not last.  Adding to your gizmo count would require that the thing would also do more stuff like surfing, productivity apps, and communicating.  Well, Apple agreed and now we have the iPad that will cause everyone else to change course and provide their own functional upgrades or die.  But I don’t think that the iPad is quite there yet.  For example, as a minimum it needs a cover (from a third party?) and a USB port or two.  In short, my prediction is still that the iPad and its act alikes need to become the successor to the notebook computer.  The notebook is getting slimmer and trimmer by the month, and has no trouble incorporating an ereader.  For the same reason that netbooks (light, limited function web surfing gizmos) are having trouble getting a toehold in the market, so will the iPad and its copies.  But just wait a bit, and they’ll get there.

[update] My friend Dr Larry Press, who also follows and teaches all this computer and communications stuff, has posted some worthwhile thoughts on the iPad here.

We now have a new air security system designed to do a better job at catching terrorists on US-bound flights with bombs in their shorts, or stuffed into even more intimate places.  Political correctness has delayed the development of more reliable systems to detect these killers by banning something called ‘profiling’.  Profiling is the popularized pejorative for using effective Bayesian estimation techniques to finger these people by giving more effective attention to the more obvious suspects.  Instead of taking time and effort to randomly spread eagle seventy-something northern Europeans or Chinese or Japanese, Bayesian approaches would have us take a closer look at swarthy middle easterners, southern Asians, and Africans who have a much higher likelihood of being Muslims.  Well, the new system apparently has quietly incorporated these attributes or their near proxies (“nuggets of intelligence”) so as to pass the west’s self-deprecating sniff test.  Short of such common sense improvements, it would be just a matter of time until some TSA worker, pulling on her lubricated gloves, would approach granny at the gate and tell her to ‘bend over and spread them’.  More here.

Now that the constitutionality of Obamacare is being challenged by the Attorneys General of almost half the states, it pays to recall the mentality that is behind this progressive atrocity.  For example, recently President Obama argued on camera that a tax is not really a tax if the government decides that it is ‘for your own good’.  Really??!  And this man was supposed to have taught constitutional law at Harvard?  At least now we have more evidence as to why he has not released any of his writings or course materials from his academic days.  But a legitimate question still begs – on what basis did Harvard hire him to teach something that he obviously knows so little about?