Open Comment Thread (2015-01)

Yayyyy! Happy New Year! Here's the new Open Comments thread.

For your New Year's weekend amusement, the a Keith Principle

It was probably my comments with Pik about Romney, Jeb Bush, and other Republican presidential contenders that got me thinking about this. Anyway, feel free to beat up on or refine this however you want:

- The less qualified as a chief executive officer the President is (e.g., the more dependent on an ersatz-mommy like Valerie Jarrett), the larger and more bureaucratically self-governing the federal government must necessarily grow to be to continue functioning coherently at all.

- The smaller we make our government, the more skilled our chief executive officer must be at actually running it, i.e., making it go and, even more importantly, making it not go when and where it shouldn't.

- Presidents who are more ideologically qualified than CEO skill set-qualified will inevitably bend their ears to the guidance of some type of grand vizier more skill set-qualified in something than they are, someone, by definition, you didn't elect. Therefore, the best way to elect your federal team is to put the strongest CEO you feel is sufficiently ideologically qualified at President and your strongest ideological leaders in active legislative roles, i.e., where ideology gets translated into the reality of law or non-law.

Okay, there you go, have at it.

"Satan will fool ya"

Cops save black lives

Lee Habeeb argues that cops have a right to be angry at the false witness being born toward them, and I agree. Excerpt:

New York cops are mad at Mayor de Blasio in particular because he failed to mention that 2013 ended with the lowest number of fatal shootings by the police in 40 years in their city. Only eight people died from police gunfire, with a police force of over 30,000. And all of the victims were armed with either a gun or a cutting instrument. But none of those leaders bothered to report these narrative-busting facts — nor did the media.

And no one bothered to mention that New York City is on track in 2014 to have the fewest murders in 50 years. As of the beginning of December, there had been 290. That’s down from 2,200 in the early 1990s. The majority of lives saved were black, because the overwhelming majority of murder victims in the city are black. Do the math. Tens of thousands of black lives have been saved in the past two decades by cops in New York, but Mayor de Blasio couldn’t manage to share that fact in his heartfelt speech.

Cops save black lives. Sensible people see this truth.

I wonder, though, how eager a policeman will be to rush toward 911 calls in some neighborhoods now, knowing that they may face a decision between having either his life or his career ended. Or, will he even feel like patrolling those neighborhoods? Will there be some time in the future when patrolling the worst neighborhoods will be given to the C-average cops? This already is somewhat the case now, or at least there is anecdotal evidence which seem to confirm this. Nobody disputes that some policemen are better or smarter than others, or that some policemen are downright corrupt.

We shouldn't forget that these men know and are fully aware that they may be killed or hurt badly every time they suit up. But we as a nation need to support the police. Sea of Blue is an attempt to counter the lies and support good men (and women) in the police force. If we didn't have company on Saturday I would have gone downtown to add my support.