Day: February 19, 2013

From TechDirt:

“I’m not attacking libraries, I’m attacking the concept behind libraries, which is no longer relevant.”

[I]t’s been 150 years, we’ve got this idea that we’ve got an entitlement to read books for free, at the expense of authors, publishers and council tax payers. This is not the Victorian age, when we wanted to allow the impoverished access to literature. We pay for compulsory schooling to do that.

And if you need some mental sorbet after reading that rant, here’s an interview with Neil Gaiman about his love of libraries:

I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be the person that I am, I’m very very certain that without libraries I wouldn’t have the career that I have. I had a fairly decent local library, I used to get my parents to drop me off there on the summer holidays on their way to work, and I would just read my way through the children’s library and as an adult I would read my way through the adult library. I was much more selective in the adult library; in the children’s library I would just read everything: you know, start with the A’s. . . . They had a wonderful subject index, like an old card index, I would go to that and I’d look up robots, or ghosts, or something, and it would list all the books they had, all the fiction works they had with robots or ghosts or whatever, and I would go and read them.

From Think Progress:

Yesterday, Missouri state Rep. Mike Leara (R) proposed legislation making it a felony for lawmakers to so much as propose many bills regulating guns. Leara’s bill provides that “[a]ny member of the general assembly who proposes a piece of legislation that further restricts the right of an individual to bear arms, as set forth under the second amendment of the Constitution of the United States, shall be guilty of a class D felony.”

There are many problems with this bill, not the least of which is the fact that the scope of the Second Amendment is very much in flux. Last week, the NRA announced it would launch of blizzard of litigation intended to expand gun rights while the courts are still controlled by very conservative judges. So a lawmaker who introduces legislation that is perfectly constitutional could conceivably find that their bill suddenly violates a new understanding of the Second Amendment after the NRA wins another lawsuit — and thus could suddenly be hit with felony charges.

From Think Progress:

In his State of the Union address, President Obama made the case for universal early childhood education — an idea that isn’t sitting well with conservatives.

On Friday, Fox Business host Stuart Varney and Fox News host Steve Doocy attacked preschool access as a government handout intended to extend “literally, the nanny state.” Varney echoed an argument used by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney that Obama won the election by giving “gifts” to women and minorities. Even though Obama cannot run for office a third time, the host warned the president is using preschool to entice a whole new generation of toddlers to support him when they’re eligible in 15 years: