Today’s ‘Read the Whole Thingers’ (051707)
Don Luskin on the AARP and its non-stop advocacy of ever-higher taxes, from National Review Online last Friday:
If you’re of a certain age, you probably carry in your wallet the little red-and-white card of the AARP — the association for older Americans. You pay twelve and a half dollars a year for that card, and it gets you discounts on insurance, movies, and travel. It also funds political lobbying aimed at increasing taxes, expanding the size and scope of government, increasing government spending, and fighting entitlement reform.
That’s right. If you think the AARP is about saving some gray heads a couple bucks at the movies, you’re sorely mistaken.
….. I’ve torn up my AARP card. I’ve decided that the twelve and a half bucks I was paying to the AARP was getting me the most expensive discounts in history. Why save a couple bucks on a movie if I have to pay that back thousands of times over in higher taxes?
___________________________________
This one will have to be a lunch-timer, but it’s also a should-not-miss — Christina Hoff Summers, in a cover essay (HT Instapundit) in the Weekly Standard (”The Subjection of Islamic Women, and the Fecklessness of American Feminism”).
It’s hard to pick a couple of favorite paragraphs, but this one gives a quick idea of how out-of-whack the rad-fem agenda is:
(Nation columnist Katha) Pollitt casually places “limiting young people’s access to accurate information about sex” and opposing abortion on the same plane as throwing acid in women’s faces and stoning them to death. Her hostility to the United States renders her incapable of distinguishing between private American groups that stigmatize gays and foreign governments that hang them. She has embraced a feminist philosophy that collapses moral categories in ways that defy logic, common sense, and basic decency.
__________________________________
Walter Williams, at his usual level of succinctness in the middle of a multi-topic column:
In the interest of truth in packaging, I think we should rename “gun-free zones” to “defenseless zones.”
