NYT: Take a Powder, Dems

The nation’s newspaper of record finally said it. Responding to a letter
“from an opponent of the invasion who urged the American left to `get over its anger over
President Bush’s catastrophic blunder’ and start trying to figure out how to win
the conflict that exists,”
The New York Times opined:

No one wants a disaster in Iraq, and Mr. Bush’s critics can put aside, at least temporarily,
their anger at the administration for its hubris, its terrible planning and its inept conduct
of the war in return for a frank discussion of where to go from here.

Oh good. So now after encouraging the crazies for two years the Times has suddenly decided it
is time to get responsible. Maybe that is because Bush has almost won the war (it certainly is telling
that the noted strategic expert Sen. Kennedy (D-MA) has recently called the Iraq War a quagmire).

On the matter of Sen. Kennedy, Tony Blankley thinks that
“Ted Kennedy and the exit strategy crowd” can be explained by modern developmental
psychology. At a certain age, children get to believe that they can manipulate the world through mere wishes.
“Babies cry and mother brings them milk... They cry and mother changes their nappy. Thus the immature mind develops the magical idea that
the physical world can be manipulated by merely wishing for something.” It is telling that Sen. Kennedy would
never think of developing an exit strategy for something he believes in. Like government education.

Liberals have been telling this Vietnam Quagmire story to themselves for a generation.
But there was never a quagmire, and the American people never turned against the war. What happened was
that liberals turned against the war and managed to pitch President Nixon out of office.
Then a Democratic Congress cut the funds to support South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese
invaded the south, and that was the end of the Republic of South Vietnam.
After it was all over liberals needed a narrative that exculpated them from
their responsibility for sending twenty million people into slavery. They decided that their policy
to get out of Vietnam at any cost was a noble attempt to extricate the United States from its Vietnam quagmire.

Free Education for Africa?

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown want the rich countries to donate $7 billion a year for free
education in Africa. But the BBC sent a team to Africa, reports
James Bartholomew,
author of The Welfare State We’re In,
and found that there’s a vibrant private education system in Africa. In Nigeria it outperforms the
free state education sector.

Prof Tooley organised tests of 3,000 children at a random selection of state
and fee-paying schools in Lagos. In every subject, children at the fee-paying schools did
considerably better. In maths, they scored an average of 56 marks whereas children at the
free state schools got 41. In English
they scored 65 marks whereas children at the free schools got only 42.

Bartholomew reports that “many extremely poor parents in the shanty town of Makoko on the Lagos lagoon in Nigeria make great financial sacrifices to send their children to”
the fee-paying schools. Now why does that sound familiar? Because James Mill, father of John
Stuart Mill, made an inspection of fee-paying schools in England in the early nineteenth century.
Mill “wrote of `the rapid progress which the love of education is making among the
lower orders in England.’ He noted that

There is hardly a village that has not something of a school; and not many children
of either sex who are not taught more or less, reading and writing. We have met with
families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet
for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”

This fee-paying system brought England to almost universal literacy in 1870 when the government
started taking over the schooling of children. Today, according to Bartholomew, functional illiteracy
in Britain in about 20 percent of adults.

NY Times Notices Ireland

Did you know that Ireland is the richest country in Europe? You did?
No doubt you read widely, and don’t rely on The New York Times for
your news.

But if you are a Times reader, you are no doubt all
charged up as you learned for the first time from
Thomas Friedman in an opinion piece that

the country that for hundreds of years was best
known for emigration, tragic poets, famines, civil wars and
leprechauns today has a per capita G.D.P. higher
than that of Germany, France and Britain.

How did Ireland do it? Well, here of course, Friedman tells only part
of the story. This is The New York Times after all. The Irish implemented

a program of fiscal austerity, slashing corporate taxes
to 12.5 percent, far below the rest of Europe, moderating wages and
prices, and aggressively courting foreign
investment. In 1996, Ireland made college education basically free...

But if you want the rest of the story, you’ll need to turn to
Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA)
the evil Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
“Happy Saint Patrick’s Day,” he chortled, as he published the following facts on
the Irish economic miracle:

IRELAND TAX FACTS 1985 2002 % change Top corporate tax rate 50% 12.5% -75% Top marginal income tax rate 60% 42% -30% Top capital gains tax 60% 20% -67%

Marginal tax rates, Tom. Marginal tax rates. It’s the secret
Republican weapon. Just thought you’d like to know.

Let's Teach Liberals the Virtue of a Dead Constitution

How do you like your constitution? Living or dead?
Conservative Jonah Goldberg
says he’d rather have it dead.

What, you say?
“Without a ‘living’ constitution, slavery and other such evils would still be constitutional!”

Come now. Tell the truth and shame the devil. Slavery and women’s suffrage were achieved with
the dead letter of the constitutional amendment. When we talk about the “living” constitution
we are talking about judge-made amendments to the meaning of the constitution.

The sad truth is that liberals will only discover the virtues of a dead constitution on the day
that their
ox is gored by the living constitution.
For twenty years, liberals loved the independent counsel law enacted in the aftermath of
Watergate. It was the most tremendous fun to put Republican officials on the rack. But when
Republicans started using the law to investigate President Clinton and his administration, then
liberals suddenly discovered that they didn’t like the idea of an independent counsel at all.

What would be a good issue to start on, to teach liberals about the danger of a living constitution?

“Experience keeps a dear school,” Benjamin Franklin said, “but a fool will learn in no other.”

All Power Corrupts...

Just in time for the contradictory Supreme Court decisions regulating the public display of the Ten Commandments, the
indispensible Lee Harris
explains what is going on.

There is nothing ludicrous or stupid about the Supreme Court issuing murky or contradictory
opinions. When people ask you to make decisions about every little thing for them, you
take advantage of it. Because when people let you decide everything for them, what you
have is power.

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued that those with power had an unlimited
right to exercise this power, and observed that they invariably will seek to push this right to
the utmost extreme that they can get away with -- anticipating Lord Acton’s
famous remark about the corrupting effects of absolute power.

Even back in the nineteenth century foreign observers noted the exaggerated respect that
Americans had for the Supreme Court. And in the era of the liberal court since 1954 of course, liberals
have made a national cult out of the Supreme Court because the court was willing to share
power with them.

Fortunately, Spinoza also remarked that there is a way out of this nightmare. Eventually people
get fed up with the abuse of power, and they rise up to “cast out the few who have arrogated
to themselves mastery over the fate of the many.”

The trouble is that people with power seldom go quietly into the night.

Ignore that Laffer Behind the Curtain

Democrats are still holding their hands in front of their eyes refusing to believe in the supply
side revolution, but the rest of us can take a look at the facts from government tax collections
this year.

Supply side economics says that the critical factor in economic performance is the marginal
rate of taxation, i.e., the share of your next dollar of income that the government demands. In the
Bush 2003 tax cuts:

The capital-gains tax (for gains held at least one year)
was cut to 15 percent from 20 percent while the maximum tax rate on corporate dividends
was slashed to 15 percent from 38.6 percent.

This year, according to
Michael T. Darda,
there has been a “45.2 percent fiscal year to date surge
in corporate tax revenues and [a] 35 percent jump in non-withheld (i.e., capital gains) receipts.”
In any estimation, this has to be remarkable.

What’s that? Oh, of course, I agree Democrats. This surge in revenue just couldn’t be due to the supply-side Bush tax rate cuts.
It just couldn’t be. No, there is no chance. Not a chance in hell. No, there must be another reason,
a completely different reason. But whatever the reason is, it couldn’t be the result of a healthy expanding
economy responding to the Bush tax cuts, the Bush tax rate cuts.

Steyn: Burn Baby Burn

What do you think we conservatives are? Wimps? You think we need a
flag-burning amendment to deal with a few lefties burning
our flag? Why, the whole point about Old Glory to
Mark Steyn is that

A flag has to be worth torching. When a flag gets burned,
that’s not a sign of its weakness but of its strength. If you can’t stand the heat of
your burning flag, get out of the superpower business. It’s the left that believes the
state can regulate everyone into thought-compliance. The right should understand that the
battle of ideas is won out in the open.

So we don’t need no flag-burning amendment to the constitution.
Go ahead lefties, we say. Be our guest. Be like the sainted Rachel Corrie why don’t you.
Burn baby, burn!

Mehlman Accepts the Challenge

The Republican faithful always complain that Republican leaders have no spine, that they cave
before egregious Democratic attacks and run for cover. But it looks as though the GOP is ready
for a rumble on the Karl Rove flap, in which Democrats everywhere are expressing outrage at
Karl Rove when he said:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9-11 and the attacks and prepared for war;
liberals saw the savagery of the 9-11 attacks and wanted to
prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

Says
Ken Mehlman on the Democratic reaction:

It’s outrageous that the same Democrats who stood by Dick Durbin’s libeling of our
military are now expressing faux outrage over Karl Rove’s statement of historical fact.
George Soros, Michael Moore, MoveOn and the hard left were wrong after 9/11, just as it
was wrong for Democrat leaders to stand by
and remain silent after Dick Durbin made his deplorable comments.

And then he backs it up with pages of quotes from liberals and Democratic angel George Soros recommending
a restrained therapeutic response to the 9/11 attacks.

What would the Democratic Party be like if its activists were all falling over each other to recommend
a therapeutic response to the rise of the dreaded religious right?

Did the Profs Cry Uncle?

All of a sudden, according to
David Horowitz, it seems that the academic establishment has called for a peace
process in the academic freedom wars. For the last couple of years Horowitz has been campaigning for
universities to adopt his Academic Bill of Rights, a manifesto
“that would foster intellectual diversity, fairness and equity in higher education.”
For his pains, Horowitz has been “compared to McCarthyites, Maoists, and Orwellian thought police by some of [his] overheated opponents.”
But now

The American Council on Education and a coalition of 22 college and university
associations, including the American Association of University Professors (who had declared our
bill a “grave threat to academic freedom”) have issued a statement that endorses the central
principles of our bill
and represents a great step forward in the academic freedom struggle.

Is it real, or is it Memorex? Only time will tell, of course. But the safest thing to do is follow
the money. Universities are non-profit entities that collect money from students, foundations, corporations,
alumni, and government and then spend it. The ideal situation for a university administration is for
happy contributors to give money without strings attached so that the university can spend the money
as it thinks fit. Of course, this ideal situation never obtains. The university is always under
pressure from a variety of special interests that each applies pressure to the university to spend money in a way
that benefits the interest. The job of the university administrator is to judge where the
sweet spot lies that will maximize contributions with the minimum of pain. But the bottom line is:
he or she will do whatever it takes to keep the money flowing.

Beware of Close Relationships

Marriage is a problem. On that we can all agree. And so a number of people have decided to do something about it. Let’s replace family law with “close-relationship” law, they say.

Suzanne Fields gives us a little intro to the close-relationship movement and a report about changing ideas on marriage in the academy.

Influential advocates from politically correct academic and legal organizations sneer at traditional marriage as another bad example of “ethnocentric” thinking that promotes “old-fashioned ideological stereotypes.” These advocates accuse the law of dismissing “diversity.” By diversity they mean the experience of racial minorities, women, single parents, divorced and remarried persons, gays, and lesbians. A large body of social science and psychological data demonstrate that not all forms of parenthood are equally child-friendly, but these advocates say that’s merely a point of view to be replaced by “close relationship” law.

It becomes harder and harder to parody the thinking coming out of our universities. But maybe the challenge to marriage is a good thing. It’s good for us to fight for our beliefs; it helps us understand who we are and what is important. As a well-known American once said: “Bring it on.

French-bashing on Sartre's Centenary

Conservative philosopher
Roger Scruton
does a retrospective on Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frenchman who tried to
find a meaning for life after God is Dead. It’s a problem.

For the religious world-view, self-consciousness is a
source of joy, proof of our apartness from nature, of our special
relation to God and of our ultimate redemption, as we leap from the
world into the arms of our creator. For Sartre, self-consciousness
is a kind of all-dominating nothingness, a source of anxiety:
proof of our apartness, certainly, but also of our loneliness,
which is a loneliness without redemption, since all the doors
on our inner walls have been painted
there by ourselves and none of them will open.

Since Sartre, of course, the entire French elite and latterly their epigones in the American
academy have lived by banging into the doors on their inner walls. That
is fine. Let them wreck their lives if they want to.
The trouble
is that Sartre ended up wrecking France.

The French have not recovered from Sartre and perhaps
never will. For they have had to live with an intellectual
establishment that has consistently repudiated the two things that
hold the country together: Christianity and the idea of France.
The anti-bourgeois posture of the left-bank intellectual has entered
the political process, and given rise to an elite for whom nothing
is certain save the repudiation of the national idea.

Read the whole thing.

What's The Point?

News reports indicate that House Republicans are drafting a Social Security bill
that
strips out personal accounts. If that is true, then
what’s the point of it? There is no point in doing anything with Social Security unless
we start the process of sucking money out of the government’s coffers and into individual
Americans’ pockets. The current Social Security surplus just allows the
federal government to spend money on Democrats and buy their votes. Then, in ten years, the
idea is to raise taxes
on Republicans to pay Social Security to aging liberals who have done nothing except
show up for work for the last 30 years.

Anything short
of personal accounts just keeps shoveling money at Democratic voters with no end in
sight.

Tell me that I’m missing something here.

Cheer Up Chaps!

Ever since the election, conservatives have been down in the dumps.
Cheer up, conservatives, write John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, British authors
of The Right Nation, you chaps are still winning. After the orgasm of November, of course
you are going to feel sad.

The bottom line is that conservatives are the optimists in America.
They write:

the Republicans are more optimistic, convinced that the future
will be better than the past and that they can determine their own futures. Democrats,
on the other hand, have a European belief that “fate,” or, in
modern parlance, social circumstances, determines people’s lot in life.

On top of that, Bush won in the places where people are having children. Kerry won in the
cities where people are not. The fact is that liberals just aren’t having children.
Studies show, after all, that the people most satisfied with their sex
life is... well who do you think?

Right first time: married conservative women. Who would have thought that back in the Sixties?

Victim of the Welfare State

For over a century progressives have dined out on the misery of the poor. It was
all the fault of capitalism, they said. It was the inevitable consequence of
an uncaring society blinded by a mean-spirited ideology to the sufferings of the poor and
the unfortunate, the helpless
victims of ruthless capitalism. But after a century of the welfare state,
we are seeing another kind of victim, people victimized by the culture and the ethos
of the rule of the experts.
Minette Marrin
tells the story of one such victim, memorialized in Stuart: a Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters.
It’s a story of abuse and incest, and step-parenting. Of course.

Laffer Rides Again

Remember the Laffer Curve, the curve that economist
Arthur Laffer drew on a napkin
in a restaurant meal in 1994 with Ford Administration biggies Rumsfeld and Cheney and the late, great
Bob Bartley?
Stephen Moore reminds us what
happens when a government implements the Laffer Curve by lowering tax rates. Tax revenues take a jump.

Individual and corporate income tax receipts have exploded like a cap let off a geyser, up 30% in the two years since the tax cut.

Tax collections from non-withheld income (i.e., dividends and capital gains) are up over 30 percent
in the last year.

The Science of Free Trade

Democrats had a grand time in 2004 congratulating themselves as being the party of science (i.e.,
pro embryonic stem cell research) while the Republicans were the party of superstition that would
shut of hope for Alzheimers sufferers.

Of course when it comes to economics, the shoe is on the other foot, as
Thomas Sowell
reminds us. Ever since the early economists came up with the law of comparative advantage, the
advocates of economic privilege and clientage (which today means Democrats) have struggled against it.
The law of comparative advantage says that it is always mutually beneficial for two or more
people to engage in economic interchange untrammeled by monopoly and trade barriers, in short, that
free trade works. But those that have extracted monopoly privileges out of the government stand to lose from
a removal of trade barriers and government economic regulation. They agitate against the removal of their
privileges.

When Democrats rail against “outsourcing” they are railing against the law of comparative advantage.
They are also railing against economic growth, lifting the poor out of poverty, and they are shilling
for special interests like the sugar lobby.
So whose science are you on, Democrats?

Productivity Rules the World

Why is the US the most advanced industrial nation in the world? Because of productivity.
OK. But aren’t the Japanese more productive than US corporations? That is
true, in the manufacturing sector. But Japanese retailers are 50 percent less productive
than the US. And productivity

in food processing [is] about a third of the US. And
food processing, although it’s a manufacturing industry and it’s not
heavily traded, it has more employment than steel, automotive,
computers, and machine
tools added together. So it’s much more important.

So, in the end it is the overall productivity that counts, not the headline
manufacturing corporations.

What about education, you ask? Good question. Despite everything you have heard, education is not very
important. Corporations the world over can train their employees to roughly the same productivity whatever their educational level. In

Houston, the US industry was using Mexican agriculture
workers who were illiterate and didn’t speak English. So they were not
any different than the agricultural workers who were building similar
high rises say in Sao Paolo. And yet
they were working at four times the productivity.

So what is holding back the Third World? It is two things. The informal sector
can undercut efficient formal sector enterprises by not paying taxes and by counterfeiting
brand merchandise. And domestic producers have the power to erect
trade barriers that prevent efficient producers from making money.

It’s a breathtaking story. Read the whole thing as
Nick Schultz
interviews William Lewis, author of The Power of Productivity.

Our Favorite French Babe

Any time you want, link to
Liberté Chérie, the web site of enlightened French youth, symbolized by activist
Sabine Herold. Here’s an article by
Veronique de Rugy
that mentions her visit to the American Enterprise Institute. A couple of years ago Herold created a sensation
by staging a demonstration against public employee strikes. About 80,000 people turned up.

The educated youth of Europe have an interesting challenge. Do they accommodate to the schlerotic
economic and political culture of Europe or do they try to break the mold? Herold and her group
are break out of the death grip of the superstate and are trying to learn the lessons that the US learned a generation ago from Ronald Reagan.

Benefit Fraud in Old Europe

For over a century conservatives have struggled against the welfare state’s claim to be “helping people.”
But the problem about helping people is: what if they are lying? Here’s an article about benefit
fraud in Sweden written by an Iranian immigrant,
Nima Sanandaji.

Nima relates how the Swedish welfare state shovels money at beneficiaries, and how it really doesn’t
pay to be responsible and work. There is a presumption of helplessness:

Social security secretaries assumed that the people that they supported had no sense
of responsibility. Also, they were responsible to see that each person had enough money to live a
decent life at all times. If you told them that you had spent all your money at the beginning of the
month and didn’t have any left, they gave you some more. If you told them that your children cried
every day in want of new toys, they helped you.
If you told them that a neighbor had stolen all you clothes, they helped you.

The system might have worked half a century ago when people still possessed a strong work
ethic. But now people are responding to the economic incentives in the system. If you can only earn
five percent more after earning a college degree, why bother?

In Britain, according to
James Bartholomew in The Welfare State We’re In, the government estimates
that the incidence of fraud among people claiming “benefit” ranges from 10 percent for the
disabled to 23 percent for the unemployed and 27 percent for single parents.

There’s got to be a way to make this into the great political issue of the age.

HSAs Equal First Party Payment

Experts agree that the “third party” payment system in health care is one of the big
factors driving up health costs. People just don’t pay much attention to costs when a third party
is paying for their health care. But it looks as if the tax-advantaged Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)
are beginning to change all that.

HSAs are accounts that consumers use to pay routine health costs. They
are usually combined with a high-deductible health insurance policy.
Michael Barone reports that there are already over a million Americans with HSAs and
employers are planning to move more of their employees into them. And health cost inflation is beginning
to slow down. Could it be a coincidence, or is there cause and effect in operation here?

Democrats Still Don't Get The Eighties

What are the lessons to be learned from the Eighties? In an interview
with John Ehrman, author of the eponymous book,
Orrin C. Judd
reviews the tumultuous decade in which Ronald Reagan changed American
politics and the old smokestack economy morphed into the entrepreneurial
startup nation that we live in today. “Many Democrats understood
these changes and knew that their party needed to change its ideas
and programs if it was going to rebuild its majority,” says Ehrman.
“But none of them was strong enough to challenge Reagan’s success
or the Democratic party’s entrenched interests.”

What’s amazing is that this still is the case.
It has been sixteen years since Reagan left office, and the
Democrats still have not been able to modernize their ideas or
break the holds of their various traditional factions.
Even as talented a politician as Bill Clinton was unable to do this,
although he tried during his first term. The Democrats’ situation has
only gotten worse since 2000, as their anger at George W. Bush has
made it hard for them to think clearly about how to formulate
politically strong alternatives to Republican policies.

That is the real danger of the Dean Offensive and all the
Democratic talk about “attack machines.” It puts off the day when
Democrats really start to think about what a progressive majority
party would look like and formulate the strategery to get there.

Jesus Fights AIDS

There is one thing that cannot be true, must not be true for our liberal friends. And that is that religion really is a necessary part of the human experience. But the conservative David Brooks witnesses to this truth. He goes to Africa and concludes that when it comes to AIDS, it is not the technique of condoms and treatment that matters. “The problem is that while treatment is a technical problem, prevention is not. Prevention is about changing behavior. It is getting into the hearts of people,” like the women in a little church with a tin roof in southern Mozambique.

But after a while [the women] slip out of the language of safety and into a different language. They say, “It is easier for those who have been touched by God to accept when a woman says no.”" They talk about praying for the man who beats his H.I.V.-positive wife, and trying to bring him into the congregation. They have polygamists in their church but say God loves monogamy best.

What is going on in such simple wisdom that is missing in the technical talk of condoms and drug therapies? It is something that liberals do not want to talk about, the power of religion and faith to save peoples’ lives.

The Tipping Point: $24,000

The new Democratic group Third Way
has done a poll of the electorate, and they have found that white
voters just don’t like the Democrats. Middle income whites start voting
Republican when income exceeds $23,900 per year, and middle income
whites think and vote similarly to upper-income whites. Hispanic voters
are trending rapidly Republican as their income increases.

The Democratic savior is the black vote. Blacks are the only group
that do not trend Republican with increased income, voting Democratic by
90-10. Even upper-income blacks vote 80-20 Democratic.

Fear and Loathing in Manhattan

Let us not get mad at Howard Dean for tagging the Republican Party as monolithically
“white Christian.” He is just reflecting the mainstream belief in his Democratic
Party, writes
Don Feder.
The same sentiments are routinely advanced in the elite media and with rather less moderation
by wacko lefties in the academy.

It is easy to be outraged by Dean’s hate speech, or alternatively chuckle at the gift that keeps on giving. But there is a bigger problem.
What is to become of America when one of its political parties is so radically anti-religion?

Smart Guys on Janice Rogers Brown

Judging from the mournful comments of left-wing law school professor
Erwin Chemerinsky, the successful nomination of Janice Rogers Brown to
the DC Court of Appeals is the end of life as we know it. You can get
a flavor of the left-wing take on Brown in Chemerinsky’s comments
on the Hugh Hewitt Show captured by
Radio Blogger.

I think Janice Rogers Brown is pretty much as far to the right on the political spectrum as you’re going to get for a federal Court of Appeals. She said that she believes the social security program is unconstitutional. She said that she believes that the Bill of Rights shouldn’t be applied to the states. She was ranked unqualified by the commission that evaluated her for the California Supreme Court. The ABA committee gave her the lowest possible evaluation that would pass her for the position. I think it’s really a sad day for America that she has a lifetime position on one of the most important federal Courts of Appeal.

You get a certain frisson of excitement reading that someone actually
has the courage to declare Social Security unconstitutional. Law school professor
John Eastman reminds us what the judge battle is about, what liberals are defending and
what conservative want to change:

Let me go back. I mean, liberal scholars have been trying for seventy years to find a rationalization to defend what happened in the Court signing off, ultimately under pressure in the New Deal. Bruce Ackerman has come up with a theory that we somehow have collective Constitutional moments, as the way we amend our Constitution now. That’s not what the Constitution requires. And the notion that it is off limits even to challenge the illegitimacy of what went on seventy years ago, is to simply throw in the towel on any notion of Constitutionalism, and law becomes whatever the most recent pronouncement of the Court says it is. That’s a dictatorship of nine. That’s not the democratic republic we have. And we are at risk of losing our Constitution system itself, if we’re not even able to challenge the principles on which that Constitution is based.

That’s it. Liberals want to put the jurisprudence of the last 70 years off limits, and that’s
why they head for the fainting couches when conservatives like Janice Rogers Brown are nominated
to the federal bench.

Bush Stays on Message

According to American strategy expert John Boyd, we have two options in life:
“To Be or To Do.” In an interview with
Neil Cavuto
on Fox News President Bush told us the choice he has made as president.
He has decided To Do: to advance his Social Security reform, to advance his
energy plan, to advance his “ownership” agenda.

Naturally, the president’s critics
(here
and here) are not amused.

Democrats Not Sure About Judge Compromise

Two weeks ago conservatives were mad as hell about the compromise on judicial filibusters and liberals
were smug. Now liberals are not so sure. In the Washington Post liberals are expressing their shock
about Janice Rogers Brown, “one of the most extreme nominees” ever to come before the Senate. In
the debate on Brown’s nomination on the floor of the Senate, according to reporter
Charles Babington:

Democrats recited a litany of Brown’s controversial statements,
including several from a 2000 speech titled "Fifty Ways to Lose Your Freedom."
She said senior citizens "blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a
right to get as much`free’ stuff as the political system will permit them to extract."
Elsewhere, Brown has said: "Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society
disintegrates. . . . When government advances . . . freedom is imperiled, civilization itself [is]
jeopardized."

Gee fellas, what’s the problem? You been in a liberal echo-chamber all these years? Actually, we
can understand the liberal outrage. The quotes from Brown are “gaffes,” true
statements that liberals, like aging drama queens, have forbidden anyone to articulate in their presence.
“Omigod, I can’t believe I just heard that?”

Americans Like Their Religion Straight

It’s an old story. Conservative, strict churches are growing, and liberal, secular churches are
shrinking. According to sociologist
Rodney Stark, it’s always been like this.
But it doesn’t hurt to get a second opinion. So
David Shiflett
has written a book about it:
Exodus: Why Americans are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity.

People want meaning, purpose, and connection to something bigger than themselves. They get it from
a life and from a faith that makes demands upon them.

What Would President Hillary Be For?

Global content provider
Mark Steyn
takes a look at the prospect of President Hillary in our future, and rates the chances at 50-50.
Senator Clinton is the only Democrat running for president that can afford to ignore the sacraments of
peace and abortion. So she is the only Democratic candidate that can appeal to middle America.

But the question is: what would President Hillary be for? Surely, the Democrats have tested to
destruction the old formula of the rule of the experts and pensions for the people. Tony Blair and
New Labour are busily testing the concept to destruction in Britain: one-size-fits-all education, welfare,
and health care leads to not much of anything except bureaucracy, rationing, targets, schemes, regulators,
and jobs for Labour Party voters.

Could the Hillary Clinton of Hillary Care, of the Children’s Defense Fund, of “reforming”
the government school system of Arkansas ever turn from the cult of the rule of the experts and
help restore an America of self-government? There is a Nixon-Goes-to-China opportunity here, if Senator
Clinton is smart enough to grab it.

The Experts Can't Read

The problem with our glorious empire of experts, where experts pronounce, and we the people genuflect, is this. What if the experts are wrong, and fails to teach about 20 percent of kids to read? What if they have pronounced a one-size-fits-all regime of “whole language” reading for every schoolkid, and it turns out their program is wrong?

Don’t think about it. Just praise the lord that the experts and their political masters have
finally seen the light, as Minette Marrin does. Britain’s Labour Party has finally agreed that “whole language” reading is a disaster and now they are going to change the entire British education system to teach phonics.

But enquiring minds are bound to ask the deeper question here. Aren’t we progressive types supposed to believe in diversity, and hate monoculture? Yes, of course we do, when it comes to fields of monoculture wheat and forests of monoculture Douglas-firs. But we seem to have a blind spot when it comes to humans.

Surely, if it means anything, diversity means no one-size-fits-all programs for our nation’s children. For what if the expert designers of the one-size-fits-all program are wrong?

The trouble is, you are not allowed to tell liberals they are wrong. When liberals hear criticism, they label it hate speech.

The End of the Expert

Experts gave us the defined-benefit pension, now dying in the bankruptcies
of the steel companies and the airlines. Experts gave us Social Security
with its promise that is not a promise.
Michael Barone sees that we are moving away from all that
stuff.

But some people haven’t got the message. Democrats attacking the
president’s reform of Social Security fail to see that there is a risk
in Social Security just as there is a risk in personal retirement accounts.
But there is one difference. You can control the risk in your own
retirement account. But Social Security is different. With
Social Security you are dependent on the government. Who knows where that will end up.

Forget the Dieting!

Nutritionist Sandy Szwarc has been telling this story for some time. Studies show that dieting doesn’t work. In fact, women that diet experience worse health outcomes that women that don’t diet. Scientists conducted a randomized clinical trial of two groups of women:

For six months, half of the women participated in a traditional diet and weight loss program, complete with social support; standard nutritional guidance to moderately restrict calories, on how to count calories and fat, read food labels and shop, maintain food diaries, and monitor their weight; and were given information of the benefits of exercise and behavioral strategies for successful dieting. The other women were instructed to let go of restrictive eating habits and not weigh themselves, were counseled to eat according to their natural appetites, given standard nutritional information about healthful foods, and participated in a support group designed to help them become more accepting of their larger bodies, develop a positive self image, and enjoy their bodies.

Guess what. “While the dieting group that had initially lost weight, it had regained almost all of it two years later, while the nondieters’ weights had remained stable.” And the non-dieters showed healthier blood pressure and lower cholesterol levels.

Go on. Read it all.

Ryanair's Cost-cutting Frenzy

Did you know that Mike O’Leary, boss of Europe’s Ryanair, has now stopped employees charging
their mobiles (cellphones to you) at the office? And that they have to cadge pens
and highlighters? There’s worse. Ryanair is now charging for checked baggage. The idea is not to
make baggage a revenue item. Oh no. The idea is that
if nobody checks baggage then Ryanair can cut costs because they don’t need to pay for baggage-handling at the airport. Still not impressed?

The Scotsman, quoting Ryanair’s own figures, writes that the carrier handles 10,000 passengers per employee, compared to no-frills rivals EasyJet’s 6,300 and British Airways’ 760.

Go on. Read the whole thing, written by
Val McQueen.

Right Wing Noise Machine

Now it is John Kerry that is complaining about the right-wing message machine that is drowning out the liberal message, according to Jeff Jacoby:

’’Several times a day, their message is amplified," grumbled the former Democratic standard-bearer.`’We don’t have anything like that."

This is absurd, as Jacoby writes. Sure there is Fox and Rush Limbaugh and The Washington Times. But there is also CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, etc.

But the question is: do the Democrats really believe this stuff, or are they just blowing smoke to rile up their supporters? It is beginning to appear that they really believe their own propaganda. And that is not good. Not for them, and not for America. The worst lies are the lies that we tell to ourselves.

America's Polarized Politics

Used to be that liberals were liberals before they were Democrats, and conservatives were conservatives
before they were Republicans. Not any more. The extinction of the Southern Democrats means that
all the conservatives live in the Republican Party, according to
Bruce Bartlett.

On top of that is the little problem for the Democrats that the middle class votes for the Republican Party.
The moderate Democrats are trying to understand what is going on, writes
Stephen Dinan.
They have found that, viewed from the
perspective of family income, the Republican Party gets a majority a mere $5,000 above the poverty line.

Among white voters, President Bush got a majority of support beginning at an income threshold of $23,300 -- about $5,000 above the poverty level for a family of four.

Only African American voters do not trend Republican as income rises to middle-class levels.

Reacting to Globalization

Tony Blankley puts the French “non” in the context of
“globalization and its reaction.” Everyone is putting their
own spin on the event, just as everyone put their spin on the results
of the presidential election last fall. But
Blankley
asks us to step back a little
and think more generally.

But globalization and its reaction are the big facts of our era. The Islamist insurgency and terror is part of that reaction. Pat Buchanan’s protectionism and America Firstism is part of that reaction. And Europe’s vote Sunday is another form of the Great Reaction to globalization. In ways either benign or malignant, peaceful or violent, conservative or radical, the peoples of the world are beginning to defend their cultures against the cold, soulless intrusion of the globalizing leviathan. The struggle is only beginning. It will, in the end, transform our ways of life.

Actually, we could paint an even broader canvas. Globalization has
been going on for the last 500 years. And everywhere it has been it has extinguished
comfortable, face-to-face society with the challenge of indirect, contractual
and market relations. Let’s see now, it all seems very familiar:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Thanks Chuck. We needed that.