Feb

And Now for the Good News

There isn’t a ton of good news to report lately, but today there are three stories that might lift your spirits.

Hit and Run has the scoop on a British publication retracting a story tying vaccinations to autism.

The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet is fully and formally retracting the 1998 study that sparked the autism/vaccine scare. That study allegedly found: …

That story isn’t entirely good news, though. The anti-vaccine crowd is already jumping to the defense of the paper’s writer.

Even better, and more astonishing news comes from Patterico filling in at Hot Air.

Via Michelle, it’s rare good news from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That’s the court that declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, is emptying California’s prisons, and never met a death sentence it liked. Yet even they couldn’t stomach the prospect of an Al Qaeda terrorist receiving a mere 22 years in prison after he was caught with powerful and deadly explosives that he planned to use to blow up LAX airport. …..

If the above stories haven’t made you smile, maybe this will. (Via Free Republic)

[Barney] Frank was responding to the question about how Fannie and Freddie could be structured to avoid moral hazard and a too cozy relationship with the regulators. After stating that we should separate the liquidity creation function from the subsidy objective (which we already knew he supported), he said:

I think the answer is you separate out the function of providing the equity in general for the mortgage market and doing some subsidy and in my judgment, the subsidy again, as I said before, should be focused on affordable rental housing, not in pushing low income people into owning homes that they can’t afford.

Can I get an “Amen!”? If someone cannot afford a house, they should not be encouraged to purchase a house. The logic couldn’t be simpler. And yet, over the past decade it was utterly ignored. I’ve never understood why renting is viewed as so shameful or low class. I’ve rented my entire adult life. I once had a supervisor pushing 50-years-old with a wife and two kids that probably made over a million-dollars-per-year, and he still rented.

Wonders never cease. Now, can we get rid of Barney Frank and his plan for subsidizing the rental industry?

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