Should Blacks Join the Culture War?

The Urban League just issued its annual “State of Black America.” The state, writes Errol Louis in the New York Daily News is “Not so great, could be better.” What is needed, he writes, “is a culture war,”

Specifically, we need aggressive, concerted action by members and institutions of the respectable black middle class to do open combat against the rise of an ancient enemy: a bold, seductive street culture that exalts lawlessness, addiction and anti-family behavior like pimping, sexual promiscuity, ignorance and personal selfishness.

Indeed. We need a war to combat the problem, as Jonah Goldberg writes, that

Black men, particularly those who do not finish high school, have been falling off a cliff for decades. If you include blacks in prison or not seeking work — which conventional unemployment surveys don't — the true jobless rate for black men in their 20s without a high school diploma is 72 percent.

We know how to solve this problem. Have done for ages. For sure, as Louis argues;

More teachers, preachers, politicians, journalists and other black Americans with a pulpit need to enlist in the battle against the self-defeating lure of street culture... [and the] purveyors of vulgarity and irresponsibility.

But there’s another way, one that blacks already possess in their churches. It is through the miracle of the Christian god, “a lover,” as Spengler writes in the Asia Times, “who demands love in return.”

This is the paradoxical offer that Christianity makes to the drug-addled homeboy and his rage. God loves you, even you, the least and the lowest. He only asks that you love him in return. It is a startling offer, when made to the down-and-outer who has just spent ten years spiralling downwards into rage and self-hatred.

The amazing thing is that it works.

On Immigration The Issue is Inhumanity says Liberal

The brilliant columnist to the world, Mark Steyn (perm) said it all when he talked to Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday. He illustrated the shocking double standard that liberals use when approaching any political question. And it applies in spades when it comes to immigration, of which Mark Steyn has personal knowledge as a legal immigrant from Canada:

If you're a legal immigrant, and you enroll your children in a local grade school, they want to know whether they've had all the shots, you know, for this and that.

...

If you actually just say okay, scrub that, they're not legal immigrants, I want them redesignated as illegal immigrants, then you won't be asked for any paperwork.

Liberals insist on the strictest adherence to the law from middle-class Americans, from corporations, and from fundamentalist ministers. But when it comes to their liberal clients, hey, it’s inhuman to insist that they follow the law. That applies in the workplace where they insist on the most rigorous adherence to the law by employers but insist that employees are helpless victims. It applies to the criminal law where liberals insist that the polics cross every “T” and dot every “I” but insist that their marginalized gangbangers go free on the slightest pretext.

And it applies in spades to immigration. On Chris Matthews Hardball left-wing Pacifica Radio host Amy Goodman asserted that it was “inhuman” to build a wall on the southern border of the United States. In other words, the laws of immigration should not be applied to people illegally entering the United States from Mexico.

This double standard has served the power interests of liberals for over a century. It has brought them money, power, votes, fame, and the love of beautiful women.

It is time to bring the liberal double standard to an end. The law must apply to everyone. Even liberals. Even liberal clients.

Bush and Truman: Incompetent Boobs

One thing seems to be a constant. Our educated elites don’t like bold, decisive presidents. Sixty years ago President Harry Truman was beginning to make the decisions that would shift the nation’s strategic focus from defeating Nazism to containing communism. Then as now, people talked about the little man in the White House.

The start of the cold war was similar to the start of the war on terror. Writes Alan Dowd in the Weekly Standard:

[Truman] drew a line around Moscow's empire and promised to wage global war if Stalin crossed it; and spent billions to rebuild European industry and revive European democracies.

In our time it is the underappreciated President Bush who is waging global war on terror and spending billions to rebuild Iraq and spread democracy in the Middle East.

[Truman] created the super-secret National Security Agency by executive fiat, with the goal of having a central node for monitoring and deciphering information from all over the globe.

On top of that he created the CIA and “retooled” the FBI to catch “spies and saboteurs.”

The president’s critics tore him to pieces as the
“Cold War's first four years... 'were filled with starts and stops rather than any considered policy or long-range goals.'”

Now, of course, we look back at the Truman Administration as an era of giants. Will they do the same for the Bush Administration?

Teach Immigrants to Love America

We teach immigrants to become cultural Americans. We teach them to become economic Americans.

But we do not teach immigrants to become political Americans, to love this country with heart and mind.

That is what Peggy Noonan writes in OpinionJournal.com. And being Peggy she is very polite about it. Instead of sweeping her snickersnee through a platoon of the usual suspects she just writes:

Who is at fault? Those of us who let the myth die, or let it change, or refused to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual...

In fact, the United States is a political, cultural, and economic miracle, the prototype for the global community of all the nations, all the faiths, and all the races. It is a witness that the people in the village down the road and the city across the world need not be enemies. They could be friends.

When you don't love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it.

For over a generation educated Americans have been taught that the sophisticated position on life is an ironical detachment, especially with regard to the United States, its people, and its culture.

Of course, they have been taught nonsense. The only thing to do with life, and the only thing to do with the United States is to love it.

And if you do, America will love you back.

What the French Students are Saying

Suppose you had been watching the French riots on your TV. Which ones, you ask? They do seem to run together.

Let us start with the riots of Fall 2005 when the young folks from the banlieues expressed their rage and frustration.

Many compassionate and sensitive analysts voiced their concern about the “root cause” of the riots. They pointed to the 25 percent youth unemployment that reached, in the banlieues, 50 percent. It was time for the French government to do something about the sclerotic economy and social deprivation that tossed its young people onto the scrap heap.

What then is the meaning of the elite French students’ street protests, in which the students of France’s top university, the Sorbonne, are protesting the proposal of French Prime Minister Villepin to introduce a law to make it easier to fire young people from their jobs?

British essayist Theodore Dalrymple writes in the London Times that we should not overlook the obvious.

We should never forget that to break a shop window for the good of humanity is one of the greatest pleasures known to Man. Trying to topple governments by shouting insults is also great fun.

But we are looking here for meaning, not for sarcasm, even if it is also one of the greatest pleasures known to Man. So Dalrymple gets to the point.

Whether they know it or not, the people on the streets in France were demonstrating to keep the youth of the banlieues... exactly where they are, namely hopeless, unemployed and feeling betrayed.

A little arithmetic makes Dalrymple’s point for him. If the youth unemployment is the banlieues is 50 percent and the youth unemployment in France generally is 25 percent, then

there must be a considerable section of the young population in which unemployment is less than a quarter, actually much less. One would hardly have to be de Tocqueville to guess in which section of the young population the unemployment was less: the section from which the demonstrators, or at least their leaders and agents provocateurs, are drawn.

Yes, those lefty student demonstrators and their union allies are the ones with the jobs, or the ones most likely to get the good jobs as soon as they graduate. They are anxious to preserve their privileges, as any good aristocrat would.

But the facts on the ground aren’t going to change. Talk to a French small businessman or construction worker and they will tell you that

The French labour regulations make employment of untried persons completely uneconomic for them.

And there is nobody more untried or uneconomic than an angry young teenager in an American inner city or a French banlieue.

Now It's College Graduates That Can't Write

Here in the United States colleges have complained for years about students who need to take remedial courses before they can start their freshman classes. But in Britain, if that is possible, things are worse, according to Minette Marrin. In Britain

huge numbers of children arrive at secondary school unable to read properly for their age or for their studies. That is well known, despite new Labour’s empty claims of success in education. What is less well known is that most students arrive at university or at colleges of further education unable to write properly. Most of them have little or no idea of how to set out an essay or of how to express themselves in writing at all.

And it seems that a lot of them don’t even know how to think properly after they leave the university. So why bother to hire university graduates? Good point.

The director of the Heads, Teachers & Industry trust recently said “there is a growing sense in industry that [university] graduates are no more useful as employees than [high] school-leavers. Transferable and functional skills such as communication, writing and comprehension are lacking, and companies often find it more cost-effective to employ school-leavers and train them themselves.”

So what’s the point? What is the point of having government elementary schools that fail to teach students to read and write properly. What is the point of having government secondary schools that fail to deliver students to the university with the skills to write a term paper? The cost of primary and secondary education in Britain, as in the United States, is about 4.5 percent of GDP.

It’s hard to remember now but back in the day the argument that the government education activists made was that only the government could mobilize the children of the nation, educate them, and prepare them to contribute to society in the challenging modern world. But now the government education system clearly is not bothering to educate the children in its charge. And it sounds as though it doesn’t matter because employers will spend the money to train their employees instead.

So why spend the money on the government schools?

Will Immigration Really Hurt Republicans?

Every time Washington DC is consumed by a controversial national issue, there seems to be an assumption that Republicans are the most vulnerable.

In the present immigration flap, everyone assumes that Republicans are in danger of splitting. Dick Morris writes that at least there is a chance that Republicans can get out alive. In the Washington Post David Ignatius writes that the Democrats are a party ready to pounce. Meanwhile the Gallup Poll announces that more voters identify as Democrats than as Republicans.

But Tony Blankley looks at the numbers.

A Gallup poll (March 27, 2006) finds 80 percent of the public wants federal government to get tougher on illegal immigration. A Quinnipiac University Poll (March 3, 2006) finds 62 percent oppose making it easier for illegals to become citizens (72 percent in that poll don’t even want illegals to be permitted to have driver’s licenses).



Time magazine’s recent poll (Jan. 24-26, 2006) found 74 percent favor "major penalties" on employers of illegals, and 70 percent believe illegals increase the likelihood of terrorism. Fifty-seven percent would use military force at the Mexican-American border.



NBC/Wall St. Journal’s poll (March 10-13, 2006) found 59 percent opposing a guest worker proposal. Seventy-one percent would more likely vote for a congressional candidate who would tighten immigration controls.

Just where in these numbers would the Democratic Party come out ahead of the Republican Party.

This looks like one of those issues that cuts another slice of reluctant Democrats away from the party of their parents. The media will drone on about helpless immigrants and incompetent Bush and mean-spirited Republicans. But on election day there will be another group of Democrats that went missing.

Hispanic Media Organized Protests

So now we know. About a week later. The apparently spontaneous marches and demonstrations against the immigration bills now before the U.S. Congress were organized by the Hispanic Media.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s a free country. But you’s expect better performance from professional journalists raised in the Who What When Where Why and How school and supported by professional editors, researchers, and fact-checkers.

According to KCET in Los Angeles the marches

were organized, promoted or publicized for weeks by Spanish-language radio hosts and TV anchors as a demonstration of Hispanic pride and power.

...

[S]aid Felix Gutierrez, a professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. "If the mainstream media had been paying better attention, there would not have been the surprise about the turnout."

Will the protests affect the bills before Congress? Almost certainly, it will make Congress a little less inclined to send all the illegals home and a little more inclined to sneak through an amnesty. Perhaps amnesty was always in the cards but was being held back as a bargaining card.

Pity about the people didn’t get the instructions from the parade organizers: “Carry an American flag.”

NBC: News Before Context

Yesterday, if you were a conservative blogreader you would have read InstaPundit or Road to the Middle Class and learned about this report from StrategyPage.

StrategyPage reported that war in Iraq against the insurgency, Al Qaeda and the Saddamites, is all but over. Now the conflict was going to be between the official government and the Sadr and Badr militias. The government was getting ready to deal with the Iran-backed parties and their armed followers.

But of course when NBC’s Brian Williams reported that very day that Iraqi special forces assaulted a militia stronghold in Iraq we got first the Sadrist accusations of US forces attacking a mosque. Later did we hear from an American commander denying that the building attacked was a mosque.

But we never got to hear about the new strategy of the Iraqi government. All we could see was that the big explosions and the bloodshed continued.

In addition, NBC also reported on people marching in the US against immigration reform without telling us who is organizing and participating in the marches.

Who is organizing them, Brian Williams? Liberal activist groups? The Democrats? Labor Unions? Chicano groups funded by US philanthropic foundations? Authentic organizations of the undocumented workers? The world would like to get some context here, as in Who What When Why, and so forth.

When the MSM has a dog in the fight they are punctilious about cutting to their analyst and making sure that their great unwashed audience understands what to think. But when it comes to immigration and the War in Iraq then they would prefer to have the American people feel that they are being attacked on their TV screens by confusing, incomprehensible forces.

Don’t forget, MSM, that when you refuse to provide context you allow other people to offer context and meaning. Karl Rove: any ideas?

The Cranes are Flying in Eckert, CO

Enough of politics. Let’s return to the important stuff, the cycle of generation. It is spring and everywhere the birds and the bees and doing what comes naturally.

Right now the sandhill cranes are flying through Eckert, in western Colorado, on their way from New Mexico to their breeding grounds at Grays Lake, Idaho. At Eckert Crane Count they count the birds as they come in every night to roost around Fruit Growers Reservoir. Yesterday, March 26, there were about 2,500 birds taking off in the morning. Today, March 27, there were about 1,000.

There’s an audience at Fruit Growers Reservoir every morning around 9:00 am, as people drive up to watch the birds take off at about 9:30 am. And until the sandhill cranes get the urge to jump into the air and slowly circle up catching the first suggestion of a thermal, you can always look at the coots, the cinnamon teal, the pintails, the Canada geese, and the meadowlarks.

Can Iraqis Stop the Revenge Killing?

Let’s change the subject in Iraq. According to StrategyPage “Deaths from revenge killings now exceed those from terrorist or anti-government activity.”

Al Qaeda is beaten, and running for cover. The Sunni Arab groups that financed thousands of attacks against the government and coalition groups, are now battling each other, al Qaeda, and Shia death squads.

That puts a different aspect on events in Iraq. It takes the focus off the initial conflict in Iraq after Saddam, the effort of Saddamite remnants and Al Qaeda to prevent the emergence of a new national government and its security services. There were, after all, 30 years of Saddamite oppression, and hundreds of thousands of victims and their families.
And many of the Shia majority aren’t too exercised about a little bloodletting.

Many of the terrorists carrying out the revenge killings belong to militias of the extremist Shia political parties. This presents the emerging elected Iraqi government with a challenge and an opportunity.

Iraqis, even Shia Arab Iraqis, have always been fearful, and suspicious, of Iran. Iraqi Shia Arabs fought against Iran during the 1980s war, not because they loved Saddam, but because they feared Iranian domination. The Sadr and Badr groups are vulnerable in this area, and the government is apparently going to exploit it.

But it obviously isn’t going to be easy. You can imagine that our beloved media will be running stories about Iraq on the point of inter-Shia civil war for months, if not years.

Here’s a prediction. The international left is going to start talking about Shia “death squads” sponsored and tolerated by the United States. And the MSM is going to pick up the meme and give it credibility.

Saturday French-bashing

It’s been a rough week in France. First of all, the French are determined to teach Apple Computer a lesson and tell them how to sell iPod and iTunes in France. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

French politicians have approved an online copyright bill that will require Apple to break open the exclusive format behind its market-leading iTunes music store and iPod players.

This is a great relief. Finally someone is coming to the rescue of battered consumers and teaching our big American tech giants how to run their businesses. And there is nobody as qualified as the French to do this.

Of course there is always the danger that Apple will just decide not to sell iPods and iTunes in France. And why not? The French, being a cultured people, surely do not need the ersatz music offered by cowboy American corporations. They can make their own music.

The iTunes kerfuffle is bad enough. But then also this week the president of the French Republic couldn’t take it any more. As reported by Tom Braithwaite and Tim Smyth in the Financial Times “Jacques Chirac stormed out of a meeting at the European Union summit...because he had been "profoundly shocked" to hear a French industrialist speaking in English.”

Despite the appearance that the French president often presents of being an arrogant old man completely out of touch with his nation and the times this incident makes it clear that he is, in fact, profoundly sensitive. Anyone would get upset when subjected to the kind of insult President Chirac suffered when he heard

Ernest-Antoine Seillière, the head of the Unice employers' organisation, explain he had decided to deliver his speech in English because it was "the language of business".

As usual in such cases, the politicians are trying to shut the stable door long after the horse has bolted. The rule at Alstom, the French electrical manufacturer is that email is conducted in English and that any meeting at which a non-French person is present is conducted in English. Braithwaite and Smyth agree. According to their source Jean-Loius Muller:

the rise of English in French boardrooms appeared unstoppable: "I witnessed a meeting at [engineering group] Alstom where there were only French managers in the room but English was still the language."



Business French has become peppered with anglicisms - from "les roadshows" to "le spin-off" - and few managers prefer "une marge brute d'autofinancement" to "le cash-flow".

It’s enough to make a grown Frenchman cry. And what is worse, we know that this is just the thin end of the wedge.

Sooner or later (cue the Fram oil filter guy) the French are going to have to ditch their vaunted Social Model and accept reality, the Anglo-Saxon (and rapidly becoming Indo-Chinese) cowboy model.

They can do it now, or they can do it later.

Saving American Lives in Iraq

It’s an untold story. And the mainstream media isn’t telling it.
According to Mark Yost in the American Spectator there has been a remarkable improvement in the care of the wounded over previous US wars.

"Soldiers are walking on prostheses that wouldn't have lived before," said Lieutenant Colonel Clark Searle, an Army orthopedic surgeon who served in Iraq in 2003 with the 86th and 21st Combat Support Hospitals. "People are keeping limbs that ten years ago they would have lost."

It’s a story of teamwork and dedication, as you might expect, but it starts right on the battlefield with better training.

[T]he U.S. military has started giving basic first-aid instruction to as many soldiers as possible -- not just medics and corpsmen -- through a program called Combat Lifesavers.

The key to the program is the control of bleeding. Mostly they can get a wounded soldier to a hospital in 20 minutes, because “‘a major arterial bleed will cause you to die within five minutes,’ said Major Lisa Maxwell.”

[In] combat medicine [they] used to refer to "the golden hour" to describe the all-important initial care that a soldier receives after being wounded. Today, thanks to Combat Lifesavers and some of the new medical technology, the talk is about "the platinum five minutes."

The improvements go on from there. They can save limbs that used to be amputated as a matter of course, and the new prostheses are amazing. And, of course, the body armor is crucial as it prevents abdominal wounds that simply can’t be fixed in time before a soldier dies.

But it all comes down to teamwork, a “seamless chain” that starts with the Combat Lifesavers and goes on up the line.

Unfortunately, not everyone is helping. The lefties at Code Pink have

regularly gathered outside the gates at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in suburban Washington. The purpose? To heckle amputees going out for dinner and a movie.

It’s good to know that the rest of us support our troops.

Manliness and Iraq

As we have seen here at Road to the Middle Class, the MSM don’t like Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness. And you can understand why. The whole concept of manliness, the masculine trait of confident risk-taking goes against the central principle of the progressive class and their Precautionary Principle, the idea that you should not risk anything unless you are really sure that nothing can go wrong.

It therefore makes complete sense that the MSM would be against the Iraq War. Just read what Mark Steyn has to say on the Hugh Hewitt Show (perm) about why. It’s the passivity, stupid.

Oh, we can't do this, and we can't do that, because something may go wrong, and it may not be easy, and this will happen, and that will happen. And we don't understand any of these strange, wacky foreign places anyway. That passivity will end freedom in the world.

We know where that passivity comes from. Liberals have spent half a century doing everything in their power to build a society without traditional gender roles. Actually, that is not strictly true. They have tried to stamp out the difference between the sexes by stamping out manliness, the manliness of the patriarch, the manliness of the soldier, the manliness of the prudent risk-taker.

So when a world-historical challenge emerges, like the eruption of Islamism, they are completely flummoxed. The only response is manliness, to take measured, courageous action, balancing all the risks, and having the courage and the fortitude to see it through.

But that is just what liberals have just spent half a century saying you must not do. No wonder they are angry and confused, hoping against hope that Bush is wrong, and calling him a jerk.

Because if Bush is right then liberals are wrong. And that just cannot be.

Is It Civil War Yet?

Here at Road to the Middle Class we have said: Of course there is civil war in Iraq. There are parties contending for power, parties that mobilized for war after the collapse of the Saddam regime. What else are you going to call it?

But Ralph Peters in The New York Post says no. You want civil war, he writes, try this definition:

I'd define it as a broad internal conflict between at least two contending governments, each of which has the overt support of a substantial portion of the population and each of which fields organized (if not always professional) military forces.

Indeed, the strategy of the terrorists in Iraq is to provoke a general civil war in which the Iraqis are mobilized into general conflict their entho-religious parties: Shia, Sunni, and Kurd.

Clearly, general civil war hasn’t happened, not yet. But it might, and the parties have been building militias just in case.

Meanwhile there is a great civil conflict in Iraq, and our western media isn’t doing anything to help, as White House reporter Helen Thomas this week seemed determined to prove.

The MSM and the Democrats need to be careful here. The president says, as he did in response to Helen Thomas’s question on Monday asking him why he went to war in Iraq when “Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true.”

I'm never going to forget the vow I made to the American people that we will do everything in our power to protect our people.

You can tell that he invited Helen Thomas to make her question so that he could wrap himself in the flag as the protector of the American people.

Liberals like to sneer about the president wrapping himself in the flag. They are wrong. The president’s job is first and foremost to protect the American people from enemies foreign and domestic. All the other stuff, the pensions, the rights, the programs, the promises, all that is mere bagatelle.

So when the president says that his entire effort is to protect the American people, you’d better be sure of your facts before you call him a liar. That is why Bush carefully, and politely makes sure to call Helen Thomas on her accusation.

I think your premise -- in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist -- is that, you know, I didn’t want war. To assume I wanted war is just -- is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect --

All that stuff about “due respect” and “lifelong journalist” is gentlemenly politeness, packaging around the basic message: You are flat wrong.

The problem is that our news media and our educated elite just don’t get it. Not on the war, not on the economy, not on the social issues, not on the war on terror, and certainly not on civil war in Iraq.

Andrew Young Shills for Wal-Mart!

Another Wal-Mart nightmare. Famed civil-rights activist Andrew Young has gone over to the dark side. Yes, here he is boogie-ing with Wal-Mart workers at the grand opening of a Wal-Mart in a black area of Atlanta. And judging from the photo, a grand time was had by all.

It was just a month ago, reports Errin Haines of the Associated Press, that Andrew Young and his company GoodWorks International were hired

to promote Wal-Mart at public appearances, in interviews and in op-ed pieces, said Kevin Sheridan, spokesman for Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group organized with backing from the company.

Guess what: The inequality police aren’t happy.

Akinyele Umoja, a professor of black studies at Georgia State University, complained: "What he's doing is providing credibility and legitimacy for some of these corporations that have policies that just reinforce inequality."

You could see that coming. It’s a pity that the learned scholars in our nation’s universities are still peddling this immiseration stuff, 150 years after the proletarians of the nineteenth century got good jobs, bought houses, and starting driving around in big cars.

On Wednesday, Young hugged customers, signed autographs and posed for pictures with local dignitaries while singing Wal-Mart's praises. He cut the ribbon at a store that replaces an abandoned Kmart that closed two decades ago in the mostly black neighborhood.



The new store has received more than 8,000 applicants for 500 jobs.

That’s a bit over the average for Wal-Mart. They usually expect about 10 people to apply for every job at a new store.

Good luck to the customers and the new employees at the new Wal-Mart in Atlanta. Because who knows, the evil Wal-Mart may end up making eevil Republicans out of them.

Wal-Mart to Sell Sushi

As if Wal-Mart didn’t have enough on its plate, what with every sushi-loving liberal sneering at its products and its shoppers and trying to unionize is employees, now Wal-Mart wants to sell sushi.

Its new Plano, Texas, store will be targeted at a higher income demographic, according to David Koening of Associated Press. The new store will come

with an expanded selection of high-end electronics, more fine jewelry, hundreds of types of wine ranging up to $500 a bottle, and even a sushi bar.

Of course, we all wish Wal-Mart the best in its new venture, but still, there’s a feeling of regret. Wal-Mart has come to represent everything that liberals love to hate, from its low prices to its limited employee “benefits” to its out-and-out bigness. And we conservatives loved Wal-Mart for that.

We loved it when Chicago told Wal-Mart to get lost, and Wal-Mart opened a store right across the city line in Evergreen Park. And we loved it that 23,000 people applied to work at that Wal-Mart store.

Of course, it isn’t going to be easy for Wal-Mart to go upscale.

"The challenge they face is value, and upper-end consumers define value differently than a moderate-income shopper," said Patricia Edwards, who helps manage retail funds for Wentworth, Hauser and Violich investment counselors.

The whole point of upscale shopping is that other people can’t afford it. It’s like the old story about a reporter asking J. Pierpont Morgan how much it cost to own his yacht, the Corsair. “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it,” replied America’s banker.

But perhaps Wal-Mart can prosper by selling upscale stuff cheap. That way people can show off their upscale loot to their upscale friends but fail to mention that they got it cheap at Wal-Mart.

But when we read that Wal-Mart is chi-chi-fying itself, well, something dies inside, that’s all.

School Choice Advocate Offers Steak Dinner

Are you an opponent of school choice? Do you know in your bones that taking money away from the “common school” will hurt kids? Do you have a pile of academic, peer reviewed studies sitting on your kitchen table that prove without a doubt that choice choice is “right-wing utopianism?” Now is your chance to teach the school choice shills a lesson and win a steak dinner!

School-choice advocate Matthew Ladner is offering on NRO a steak dinner to anyone who can

provide two random assignment control-group studies of the attitudes of parents who have actually used a private school-choice program showing anything less than substantial improvement in satisfaction with their child's school.

Actually he is offering more than that. “I'll even throw in drinks and dessert — the whole nine yards,” he writes.

Of course, nobody is going to be fooled by that. You can see that Ladner is really a mean-spirited conservative after all. A confident, non-conformist liberal would have offered steak dinners for two, not just for one. Anyway, the liberal would not have offered a bloody gunky mess of a steak dinner, but a fair-trade meal at a vegetarian restaurant.

This all started when

Jon Talton of the Arizona Republic... used a Sunday column to describe a school-choice program that passed the Arizona legislature with bipartisan support as "right-wing utopianism,"

Ladner was outraged. Why, he had shelves full of studies showing that school choice worked. Where had Talton come up with the notion that school choice was mere right wing vaporware? So he wrote a reply to Talton challenging him to back up his fighting words.

If within the week Mr. Talton can provide two control-group studies of the attitudes of parents who have actually used one of the private school choice programs showing something less than substantial improvement in satisfaction with their child's school, I will happily buy him a steak dinner at a downtown restaurant of his choice. I can produce a large number of studies that demonstrate the opposite, but two will do the trick for Mr. Talton.

Thus far, Ladner reports, Mr. Talton has not collected on his steak dinner. But perhaps that is because he is a vegan liberal and would not want to be seen dead in a steak restaurant.

Imagine a News Media That's Customer Focused and Market Driven

Will there be newspapers in 2010? People are beginning to wonder. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds thinks there will be newspapers in 2010, but maybe not on paper.

What must the media do to stay in business? Get back to basics, of course. It must get back to its forte, “actual gathering and reporting of truthful, accurate, hard news.”

But it has got to get out of the union mentality. That makes sense, of course. You can only have unions, with their workplace rules and their “attitude” when there is a rent-seeking opportunity.
Rents are down in the newspaper business. Sorry about that, unions.

Reynolds expects that the new reporters will do it all:

I'd expect a broader range of competency: My reporters would also all be photographers, equipped with digital cameras, and videographers, shooting clips of video that could be placed on the website along with their stories.

See what I mean? Right now, reporters are reporters and photographers are photographers. Reynolds also suggests that the media forget about leaning left. It insults their readers, who do not—lean left. But here is his really revolutionary suggestion:

I'd get readers involved. I'd incorporate readers and bloggers into the reporting, fact-checking, and revision of news stories. I'd be generous about handing out credit, too -- people will do a lot for a little bit of ego gratification. With digital cameras, cameraphones, etc., all over, there's usually somebody on the scene when something happens. I'd take advantage of that. I'd also take advantage of readers with special expertise in particular areas -- in fact, I'd build a roster of those people and use them as color commentators on stories in their areas. If union rules interfered, well...

Exactly. It’s time to forget about union rules and lifetime employment. It’s time to get the community involved, with stringers and part-timers, and photo and video clips from readers.

In the future the news business will be a business like any other service business: customer focused, flexible, market-driven.

It won’t be your father’s Oldsmobile.

The other question is: where will the news media get its advertising revenue?

Study: Whiny Kids Turn into Conservative Adults

It just confirms the suspicion that every liberal has had since childhood. Remember those whiny, insecure kids in elementary school? They all turned into bible-thumping conservative Christian bigots, didn’t they?

Yes, it’s true. Now a researcher has confirmed what many liberals suspected. By following 100 children from Berkeley, California, through their lives they have found a 7% correlation between whininess and conservatism. According to Kurt Kleiner in the Toronto Star:

In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality.

...

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

...

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests.

Oh dear. The truth is out at last!

Needless to say, conservative bloggers like Red America’s Ben Domenech are not amused.

But let us face it, the study just confirms what another study from Berkeley discovered a couple of years ago.

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:



* Fear and aggression

* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity

* Uncertainty avoidance

* Need for cognitive closure

* Terror management



"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

No doubt the learned professors are right. Conservatives are prone to a little rigidity on things like the rule of law and the meaning of the constitution. Rather in the way that liberals are rigid about the meaning of Roe v. Wade.

Rather than representing conservatism—or liberalism—as a pathology, we could try a non-pathological world-view, for instance the developmental psychology of Clare Graves. Popularized by his students Don Beck and Christopher Cowan as Spiral Dynamics (see here,
here and
here,
and a site devoted to Clare Graves here), it experiences Bible-believing conservatives as “purposeful blue,” creative businessmen and artists as “adventurous orange,” and touchy-feely liberals as “communitarian green.”

Here is how the Graves system works. You start out an “impulsive red” victim. You rise to blue by accepting Jesus into your life; you rise from blue to orange by deciding that life is a game to be won; and you rise to green caring and sharing when you decide that the life of the ego isn’t that important after all.

However, dear reader, there is a higher, better level, “integrated yellow,” where you and I reside. Yellow looks out on all these lesser levels and colors with lordly understanding and benign tolerance. Unlike those mean-spirited liberal social science professors!

But what I don’t understand is how all this meshes with the Pew Research Center’s recent Are We Happy Yet? poll. In that poll, it turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals, and church-going conservatives happier still. Are they whiny because they are happy, or happy because they are whiny? And conservatives have been happier than liberals since they started the periodic study in 1972. What is the meaning of that?

Clearly more research is needed.

School Choice: What are They Afraid Of?

Libertarian ABC journalist John Stossel is still getting grief for his documentary “Stupid in America,” a critique of the public school monopoly. So he’s taking his liberal critics on one by one.

Yes, he says, you can skew survey results to show that public schools do better than private schools. The National School Boards Association

claims "America's public schools outperform private schools when variables ... are controlled."

OK. Except that the study they used showed that private schools outperformed public schools.

When studying education performance, it is far more accurate to compare schools using random assignment -- using kids assigned schools by lottery so that those attending public and private schools come from the same population. Eight such random-assignment studies have been done. All eight find that private school students did better.

But the problem is that the bribed apologists for the government education monopoly just don’t get it. They say that

"Public schools were created to provide a 'public good': education for all, regardless of a family's ability to pay ... By contrast, under a voucher system that gives public dollars to completely unmonitored private schools, there is no such right to expect or demand accountability for student performance or how tax dollars are spent." They don't get it. Competition brings accountability. Private schools may be "unmonitored" by bureaucrats, but... [p]arents' desire for a good education for their children is a much more powerful check on schools than any politician's law or union rule.

The problem is to persuade the American people of this truth. Because while the American people are confident that they can be the best judge of their childrens’ education they are not sure about other people.

Anyway, why do these folk protest so much?

If public schools are good, they have nothing to fear from school choice. Students and parents will choose them.

Of course, on the other hand if public schools are overgrown government monopolies that don’t deliver good service, then that’s different. Then the public schools advocates are right to be afraid.

Chavez Will End in Tears

What are we going to do about President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela? Alvaro Vargas Llosa, author of Liberty for Latin America, appeals to the left to understand how everything Chavez does goes against everything they believe.

He’s spending money on an arms buildup, he’s creating a huge militia that answers to him and not to the armed forces. He sells his oil to the US and profits from the refining of his high-sulfur oil.

And in Venezuela, poverty has gone up on his watch.

Vargas is wrong, of course. The left doesn’t care what Chavez does and whether he goes against everything they believe. What counts for the left is that Chavez is against the US. With the end of the cold war we can see that during the cold war the international left was not so much on the side of the Soviet Union as against the United States. Today, with the Soviet Union gone, the left sides with anyone willing to cock a snook at the US.

Is Chavez a fascist dictator? Who cares? At least he is trying to make trouble for the United States.

That is what it means to be on the left. It means that you are against the United States of America.

So what should we do about Chavez? Probably not very much. Hugo Chavez is going to end up ruining Venezuela, and a couple of other South American nations as well. Maybe he’ll have a cozy little war with one of his neighbors. But he will leave behind poverty and despair.

And that is a tragedy. Vargas writes that

There are between 30,000 and 50,000 Cuban advisors in Venezuela, helping with everything from building up the intelligence system to lending “social” services in the government-funded “missions.”

I wonder what the Cubans in Venezuela will do after Fidel shakes off this mortal coil.

NYT and WaPo Vote Against "Manliness"

Anyone for Manliness? No thanks, old chap, say the book reviewers at The New York Times and The Washington Post in their review of Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness. Writes Walter Kirn in the NYT Book Review:

Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men."

And in the Washington Post Ruth Marcus sneers

"The problem of manliness is not that it does not exist," Mansfield concludes. "It does exist, but it is unemployed." Well, um, excuse me, but I think -- it's just my opinion, now, maybe you disagree, and I'm sure we could work it out -- Mansfield has it exactly backward. Manliness does exist. The problem is that it's overemployed -- nowhere more than in this administration.

You can understand the problem. Professor Mansfield argues that manliness is “confidence in the face of risk.” The whole point of the liberal project is to create a world without risk, a world in which you would not need people with the quality of dealing with riskiness. So we’ve got to put a stop to this right away.

But if you go to the reviews on Amazon, the shock and outrage isn’t quite as thick. Here’s a self-described “free-thinking, liberal, confident female” who agrees with Mansfield.

I absolutely agree with Mansfield's opinion that being a man is about having "confidence in risky situations".
...

However, when a man is not courageous or confident, he simply cannot feel like a man, and loses self-respect -- which has a disastrous effect on his life, in his raltionships with women in particular, but also in relation to men; and that negatively affects his overall functioning in society.
...

I also agree with Mansfiled's assertion that a man cannot be a gentleman until he is a man first.

Yes. Well, that is not the sort of thing that a president of Harvard is allowed to say in public. And evidently, just to be on the safe side, it is not something you would want to write in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Is it permissible to suggest that the world needs the complementary masculine and feminine attributes of manliness and womanliness? We need people who can take calculated risks and not lose their heads. And we need people who focus on nurturing and caring. Both skills are needed in the central task of life, getting fledglings off the nest.

The core of the great western project is the socialization of men to the team instead of the gang. It is this achievement, getting men to work in productive, profitable teams instead of destructive gangs, that has raised the west to world-historical domination. As Lee Harris wrote in Civilization and its Enemies, the war on terror is a conflict between the western team and the “eternal gang of ruthless men.”

To beat the trickery of reckless, ruthless men and their gang you need a team of trustworthy men trained and confident in the face of risk.

That is something that our liberal friends just do not understand. That is why they have been in a consistent funk over the war on terror, forever talking about exit strategies. That is why they want to take risk out of the workplace, replacing the employment at will contract with worker protections, tenure, benefits, and regulation. That is why environmentalists want to impose the “precautionary principle” on economic actions. They don’t want to be exposed to any risk.

Unfortunately the world don’t work that way.

Stupid Left Tricks

Which is worse? To have journalists jump down your throat every time you say something foolish? Or is it to have journalists politely ignore your stupidity?

Whenever TV evangelist Pat Robertson says something foolish, it gets on the nightly TV news, and we understand from the reporter’s tone of voice that this time preacher Pat has really demonstrated that he has got a screw loose.

But when a lefty does something stupid, we don’t get the same reaction.

For the last week French students have been rioting because the government wants to take a small step away from the policy of lifetime employment. The government wants to allow employers to fire employees under 26 during their first two years of employment without giving a reason. In the Anglo-Saxon countries this is called employment at will. But the French students are livid at losing the protections that they have not yet obtained. And so, writes Mathieu von Rohr in Der Spiegel “It's youth against the establishment.” But socialists are on the side of the students.

Ségolène Royal, the left wing's likely presidential contender, announced that employers in her départements would no longer receive government funding if they signed what she called "cheap contracts."

OK. A century ago you could still have argued that without protection the workers would be shockingly exploited by the bosses. But not now. We now have 200 years of capitalism and we know that the workers, especially well-educated students at the university, are not helpless. And we know that a rigid labor market, such as the one in France, is a labor market that doesn’t create jobs. Rigidity leads to stagnation; flexibility leads to prosperity.

If French students have not learned this, then someone has been hiding the truth from them.

Then there’s the stupidity going on in South America, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez playing the cacique and distributing low-cost heating oil to left-wing groups all over the Americas. According to Jorge Rueda from the Associated Press “Venezuela agreed Monday to sell fuel oil under preferential terms to an El Salvador association created by a group of leftist mayors.” This is similar to a program he has set up to send low-cost heating oil to the poor in the United States. And while he was at it Chavez lashed out at free trade, using

Monday's signing occasion to criticize U.S.-backed free trade agreements such as the one El Salvador joined March 1.

"They're making deals with the devil, the devil himself," Chavez said.

It’s a pity that when lefties say things like that nobody in the media responds in with lofty scorn. Because we know, as well as we know anything, that the road to prosperity is paved with free trade, low taxes, secure property rights, and an absolute minimum of special subsidies.

At least Pat Robertson gets to hear it when he says something stupid.

The Vision of Hope for Iraq

On the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, blogger Mohammed of Iraq the Model relives his experience.

First of all there is the experience of living under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Life stopped and time stopped when Saddam ruled Iraq, actually that totalitarian regime was moving backwards and dragging us with it and nothing could stop the deterioration that began the moment Saddam came to power.

Then the Americans invaded and suddenly Iraqi and American were face to face.

Now the two strangers had to work together to accomplish a goal Iraqis knew almost nothing about; they knew that America wanted to topple Saddam and secure the oil fields but that's all they knew while America was thinking of a huge transformation for the entire Middle East with Iraq being the key to that transformation.

It’s a humbling thing to think how the Iraqi people were suddenly to become the guinea pigs for the US plan for the Middle East, the plan to rip up the old order and try to plant something else in its place.

Will it all work and will Iraq come through its present sufferings?

We will not be defeated and orphans of the dark past will get what they deserve and our sacrifices and the sacrifices of those who stand with us shall not go in vain, our sacrifices will pave an easier road for those want to follow us when they decide it's time for them to change.

Mohammed is a brave young man, and we must hope that he and his generation will live to plant a society of hope and freedom in the suffering Land Between the Two Rivers.

Nancy Pelosi Champion of Free Enterprise

When they passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to stop the Enron debacle from ever happening again they estimated that it would cost about $1.2 billion a year for corporations to fill in the forms to comply with the new law.

Actual outcome? “Recent estimates from the American Electronic Association, for example, show that U.S. companies are spending $35 billion annually” to comply with the law, according to Mallory Factor in OpinionJournal.com.

Guess who is outraged by this dreadful burden on public corporations? Why the long time friend of private enterprise House Minority Leader and Democrat Nancy Pelosi.

Ms. Pelosi acknowledges specifically the need to "ensure Sarbanes-Oxley requirements are not overly burdensome," and endorses reform. Meanwhile, the scourge of Wall Street, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, is criticizing Sarbanes-Oxley's "unbelievable burden on small companies" and its possible role in "preventing some initial public offerings."

Factor credits Pelosi with being “quicker to recognize what many traditional champions of free enterprise have been slow to see: the law's disastrous consequences for our nation's ability to compete.”

Actually, I doubt that. I’d guess that up to now the “traditional champions of free enterprise” have been afraid to talk because they expected to be mau-maued by liberals, Democrats, and the TV news.

But now that the Democrats have come out for reform, that’s great! Let’s go for it. Let’s have a bill out by Memorial Day and on the president’s desk by the Fourth of July.

And could we try to learn a lesson from this? It was already illegal to defraud investors before Sarbanes-Oxley and its onerous reporting requirements. The problem was that people that saw illegal things going on didn’t have the courage to do something about it. And accounting firms, now the beneficiaries of Sarbanes-Oxley, were working both sides of the street, doing consulting for the firms they were supposed to be auditing.

Dems Seek Votes from Singles

Everybody knows that the Republican Party is the party of white, religious, married people. And the Democratic Party is the party of non-white, secular, single people. For instance, Bush won in 2004 by 57-42 percent among married people. He lost among single people by 58-40. That’s a pretty big “marriage” gap. But married people represented 63 percent of the voters and single people 37 percent. Which group would you go after?

The Democrats have decided to win in 2006 by focusing on single people, according to Peter A. Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in RealClearPolitics.com.

The Democrat’s group Women’s Voices analyzes the single vote in an 80 page report.

It goes into great detail about how unmarried people are likely to be poorer and more alienated than their married counterparts - with the obvious implication that these are prime Democratic targets.



And, no doubt they are, except for a big chunk of the group, single white men, who are probably the most Republican of all demographic groups.



But the vast, vast majority of the rest fit the profile of Democratic voters. They are either female or racial minorities or low income, or all three.

It is striking that Democrats don’t really even attempt to think about how they could appeal more to white, married people. Instead they see their future in ginning up higher turnout among single women.

Can that really be the path back to power?

Crunch Time in Iraq

Most great battles seem in retrospect to have been forordained. But Waterloo was reported by the Duke of Wellington as a close-run thing. And many other battles could have gone one way or another.

So we can say that the Battle of Iraq is approaching decision time. Some people are saying that it is all over. In Time Joe Klein quotes all his friends who say that the Iraqis are ungovernable and that “the only plausible reason for remaining in Iraq is to prevent an even greater catastrophe.”

Then in the Sydney Morning Herald Miranda Devine says that it’s the media that has lost its head.

The violence of revenge attacks on Sunnis across Iraq, after last month's bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra, led many commentators to declare the civil war they have been predicting for three years had arrived. But others point to signs the crisis has spurred Iraq's political leaders to sort out their differences and work to form a national unity government, three months after their third successful election.

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi tells the Daily Telegraph that things are at a crisis:

"We are losing each day an average of 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more," he said. "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is. Iraq is in the middle of a crisis. Maybe we have not reached the point of no return yet, but we are moving towards this point.

Iraqi dentist Mohammed of Iraq the Model is optimistic and thinks that Operation Swarmer to clear out an area near Samarra is really a training operation for the Iraqi Army. And he wonders whether the intervention of Iran and Syria in Iraq has really been a benefit to them.

The truth is that the Battle of Iraq is at the crucial stage. All the parties to the conflict are making their final effort: Saddamites, Shi’ite militia leaders, Iran, Syria, and Al Qaeda. Every month allows the Iraqi government security forces to grow stronger, and the Iraqi government to increase credibility. The insurgents must win soon or lose the battle.

Fifty Years of the Shipping Container

In case you forgot, this year we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the shipping container, that ubiquitous item that is forever traveling on ships, trains, and trucks across the oceans and continents.

It has provoked an explosion in world trade. And the reason is the same it always is. The container has radically reducing the cost of shipping.

When the first container ship, the Ideal-X, a converted World War II oil tanker, made its first trip in 1956 from Newark to Houston with 58 containers aboard, it reduced the cost of loading by over 95 percent. According to the Economist (needs sub) of London, the cost of loading loose cargo into a medium-sized ship back in 1956 was $5.83 per ton. It is estimated that it cost $0.16 per ton to load the Ideal-X.

That is a big deal. John D. Rockefeller merely reduced the cost of illuminating oil by 90 percent. Andrew Carnegie was a piker. He only reduced the cost of steel by about two-thirds.

Of course it has been rough on the dock workers. They used to do pretty well enjoying the odd “breakage.”

But the change opened up all sorts of possibilities.

Instead of manufacturing goods locally, a company could afford to replace its overcrowded multi-storey factory in Brooklyn with one in Pennsylvania, where taxes, electricity and other costs were lower, and then ship its goods to New York in a container. Later the factory might move to Mexico; it is now probably in China.

Here’s a factoid to think about. The new container ships on the drawing boards “ill be able to carry enough containers to fill a line of trucks 68 miles long.”

Tony Blair and the Twilight of the Third Way

Remember the Hosannas when the Third Way rode into town in the 1990s? How the media loved Bill Clinton, who was going to show us a middle way between the extremes of right and left.

And then the British got to have their very own Bill Clinton in the person of Tony Blair, and the British people fell in love too.

What was it all about, really? The Clintons threw away all the good will in a disastrous two years that ended up with a Republican Congress. And now Tony Blair, who promised “education, education, education,” is shuffling into the sunset with a pathetic Education Bill that changes nothing, that leaves the “bog-standard” comprehensive schools in place to level the school kids of Britain down to mediocrity (Of the 100 best schools in Britain, one is a comprehensive school).

What was it all about? Well, it was about sleaze, for one thing. Remember the Sleaze Factor with which the media regaled us here in the US in the 1980s? The British media went chasing Tory Sleaze in the early 1990s.

But then when Blair and his New Labour got into office, the media weren’t interested in sleaze. And that’s odd, points out Matthew Parris in the London Times, because there was plenty of it from the start. “Mittal, Dr Kelly, Scarlett, Caplin, Campbell, Hutton, Butler, Berlusconi, Cherie, Patel, Garrard, Townsley, Levy,” the roll of the Blair scandals is long and sonorous, just like the Clinton scandals from the White House Travel Office to the White House silver. But nobody was interested.

But now they are. Now finally Blair has got everyone’s attention.

Parris has decided to put it out “delicately.”

I believe Tony Blair is an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged. I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head, and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster.

And then he goes on to liken Blair to that notorious cad in David Copperfield: “the engaging, handsome and popular James Steerforth,” the well-born man that scarred his governess when a boy and in his adulthood despoiled Little Em’ly, the childhood friend with whom David had innocently played on the beach by the old boat in which Em’ly lived with Mr. Peggotty, Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge.

It is occasionally reported that some poor woman falls in love with a professional fraud and remains his wife for years without realising what she has married. The British electorate are such a woman. Mr Blair’s misdeeds are persistently overlooked, and his excuses credited. By the time we wake up he may have torn his party and its programme apart.

In the last week it came to light that Tony Blair had received several loans from rich benefactors to help finance the last election. Blair had not reported the loans to the Labour Party. Now he is all contrition and wants to reform party funding.

But why should Blair want to reform fundraising now and not earlier. “You know why. He never meant to put matters right. He has been caught out.”

We, who always had our questions about the Third Way and its immaculate conception, are left to wonder. Both Blair and Clinton were so gifted, how could it have come to this?

What exactly was the Third Way all about, apart from being a marketing ploy?

Wearing o' the Green

While we are celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, let us not forget to celebrate the Irish economy. Ever since its landmark economic reform the Irish economy has been showing a lot of green, and not just on St. Paddy’s Day.

The Irish economy doubled during the 1990s, with economic growth hitting 15 percent. Now growth is down to a modest 6 percent annual growth. And Ireland’s per capita GDP is $34,100, ahead of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.

How did it happen? Well, we supply-siders point to a simple fact. The keystone of the economic reform was a modest reduction in income tax rates and a cut in the corporate tax rate from 50 percent to 12.5 percent. It all started in 1989 “with economic reform, tax cuts, welfare reform, more competition and a ban on borrowing to fund current spending,” according to Wikipedia.

Hmm. 1989. Could the US tax cuts of 1981, introduced by Ronald Reagan, a son of Ireland, have inspired the Oirish?

In fact here are the tax cut numbers, as we published here in June 2005.

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%

The Wall Street Journal has its own little feature today on Ireland’s booming economy. And the Tax Foundation moans that while Ireland booms along with its 12.5 percent corporate tax rate here in the US We're Number One in corporate taxes.

Negotiations with Iran: What's Up?

What is going on? In The New York Times Michael Slackman and David E. Sanger report that Iran has invited the United States to hold negotiations on “how to halt sectarian violence and restore calm in Iraq.”

So what does this mean? Does it mean that Iran feels that they have the whip hand in Iraq and that the militias they have sponsored have the power to take over? Are they offering the United States a face-saving way to get out of an untenable position? Iran’s man Ali Larijani said

"I think Iraq is a good testing ground for America to take a harder look at the way it acts," Mr. Larijani said in his office shortly after making the announcement. "If there's a determination in America to take that hard look, then we're prepared to help."

Or do they see that the new political and security establishment in Baghdad is gradually stabilizing Iraq and that they need to get some sort of a deal with the United States to prevent its power from turning next against them?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Sydney, Australia, that talks with Iranian envoys in Baghdad could be "useful" but would be limited to discussions on Iraqi security. "This isn't a negotiation of some kind," she said.

In the Washington Times, as reported by Joseph Curl, it looks like it might be the Iraqis who are pushing the talks.

Iraqi Shi'ite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim had urged Shi'ite Iran to become involved in the talks in an effort to address U.S. accusations that Iran is meddling in Iraq.


"We will accept the proposal to help resolve the problems in Iraq and establish an independent government there as it was made by Mr. Hakim," said Ali Larijani.

What is going on? Obviously, something is up. But we ordinary mortals don’t know what it is, and probably won’t know for a while.

UPDATE: But here’s an interesting take from James Kurfeld of Newsday. He’s upset that the administration is sounding just like it did in the runup to the Iraq invasion.

It was that same combination of a bellicose National Security Review and saber rattling from Cheney that set the stage for the invasion of Iraq.

Back then it just looked like a threat—until Bush and Cheney actually went ahead and invaded. Kurfeld is afraid that they really mean it this time too.

But suppose that the Iranians agree with Kurfeld. They might want to tame the beast by accomodating the US in Iraq.

Iraq: Two Views

It is now three years since the invasion of Iraq. What was the point, and what have we gained?

At Princeton University, former Secretary of State George Schultz called for a dual track of military strength and diplomatic outreach, according to Regina Lee of the Daily Princetonian.

"The world has never been in a situation of better promise than now," Shultz, who served as secretary of state for seven years under President Ronald Reagan, said. "The terrorists must not be allowed to abort this opportunity. We win the war against them by positive action and helping people see these improvements."

Schultz noted the three stages of the terror war. First was the period prior to 9/11 when the US did nothing. Second was the active phase when the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and the third phase of consolidation requires “economic and military sustainability.”

In the London Times Gerard Baker relates what might have happened if the US had not invaded Iraq.

in Iraq Saddam strengthened his hold. Shia “enemies” disappeared by the tens of thousands; even Kurds no longer felt safe.



Outside Iraq, in the Middle East, it was business as usual. The region remained immune, as it had done for 600 years, to the currents of democratic change that had swept through the rest of the world. Syria tightened its grip on Lebanon, with targeted murders and intimidation.

And in Iran the mullahs took Saddam’s ability to escape attack as a green light for them to proceed with their expansionary adventure.

It’s easy to point to all the mistakes made in Iraq. It is always easy to criticize any endeavor. But the fact is that the US has got Iran and Syria surrounded by inserting itself into Afghanistan and Iraq. If you were a mullah in Iran you would regard the US occupation of Iraq as a very serious obstacle for your plan to rule the Middle East.

Maybe that is why Iran wants to talk to the United States about Iraq.

Teachers' Unions Say the Darndest Things

A couple of weeks ago ABC’s house libertarian John Stossel did a “TV special on education, Stupid in America, which was critical of union work rules.” Stossel is an advocate of school choice.

Pretty soon, a posse of teachers-union types turned up at his office to protest. They came to make “a demand for respect for teachers and students.” (Why should this be necessary, anyway?)

But the protesters turned out to be pretty clueless. They told Stossel that

school choice, whose value I had shown in the broadcast, would "take money away from . . . our union leaders" and a special program they had built to pay college tuition for a special-interest group within their union.

Oh my. That would never do. Then they told him that

a country without strong public schools "lends itself to authoritarian thinking."

...

I guess having a unionized government monopoly running most of our schools, and forcing students to attend those schools regardless of whether they or their parents approve of what's taught there, will make sure that the government can never indoctrinate our children -- and neither can labor unions.

One speaker insisted that public education was needed to ensure that children got an education “regardless of income . . . or geography.”

But that is exactly what school choice provides. It gives the parent the right to send their children to the schools of their choice, regardless of income, or geography, or the reigning fashions at the Department of Education.

How long till we free our children from the influence of these clueless timeservers?

You Can't Do That, Say Educrats

The provost of King’s College in New York City just couldn’t take it any more. So the provost, Peter Wood writing in NRO, decided to close the college’s undergraduate school of education.

Why bother with a bachelor’s degree in education, Wood decided? If you want to teach in New York state, you have to get a Master’s degree eventually. Meanwhile the state has mandated “that we offer dozens of intellectually vapid courses far below the College’s standards for the rest of the curriculum” for those students majoring in education.

Education majors would just have to take the same silly courses all over again in grad school. So Wood encouraged would-be teachers to major in the college’s “interdisciplinary politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE) program” and take a “concentration” in education instead of a full major.

Oh no you don’t, retorted the New York state educrats. The college

can adopt the five-course sequence with courses such as “The History of American Education,” “Philosophy of Education,” and “Educational Policy,” but we absolutely cannot call the sequence a “concentration in education.” That would be misleading.

Wood thought about it and then agreed with the educrats. To call his intellectually rigorous course by the same name as “New York applies to its approved pablum would indeed be misleading.” So he called it something else!

Anyone listening? Anyone paying attention? Does any of this bureaucratic pettifogging have anything to do with education? Don’t forget, we are paying the education establishment about $500 billion a year to come up with this nonsense.

Playing the Impeachment Card

Republicans learned an important lesson in 1998. Americans don’t want their president impeached. They figure that they voted for the guy. Now let him do his stuff.

Back then the MSM, or plain media as it was then, was delighted to tell the Republicans what Clinton-hating Puritans they were. And so, in accordance with the constitution, two Republicans had to resign to pay for Democrat Bill Clinton’s lie: “I did not have sex with that woman, Ms Lewinsky.”

That was then, this is now. Back then, the sense of annoyance that Republicans felt towards Bill Clinton was considered rather shabby and unattractive by the media. Today the spluttering rage of Democrats over President Bush is shared by the MSM. They hate the guy, just as Al Gore taught them to hate back in November 2000 when he decided to contest the Florida election.

Their boiling hatred is the energy that Senator Russ Feingold wants to exploit in his motion to censure the president. He hopes his motion will energize the left-wing netroots as he cranks up his run for the presidency in 2008. Elect Democrats to Congress, he seems to say, and we will impeach the president.

As The Wall Street Journal writes in an editorial, Feingold is doing us all a favor, and especially Republicans, by pushing his censure motion. He is telling us what a Democratic Congress would want to do if the voters elected one this Fall.

He's doing voters a favor by telling them before November's election just how Democrats intend to treat a wartime President if they take power.


Not only do they want to block his policies, they also plan to rebuke and embarrass him in front of the world and America's enemies.

Even The New York Times can see that there is a problem. Reporter David D. Kirkpatrick notes that the censure talk could work to the Republicans’ advantage. But don’t worry about impeachment:

Few lawmakers in either party think there is much chance of impeachment even if the Democrats do take the House. Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, called the idea "not realistic" but nonetheless useful. "It shows people how extreme the leaders of the Democrat Party actually are," Mr. Forti said.

Nobody here but us chickens, eh?

Back in 1960 Richard Nixon decided not to contest the close election that was probably stolen in the Democratic machine bastions of Illinois (Dick Daley, prop.) and Texas (Lyndon Johnson, prop.). He thought it would be too divisive.

In 2000 Al Gore elected to contest the close election in Florida, and ginned up his supporters up with divisive partisan rhetoric. When his effort was put down by the U.S. Supreme Court he conceded only grudgingly, and his supporters understood that the attacks on the president could continue.

Ever since the Democrats have been paying for his bad faith. Because when you divide America into conservatives and liberals it turns out that that the conservatives win.

The Problem of Incapacitated Heads of State

What do we do if the President is incapacitated? Or a drunk, or a depressive?

That’s the topic of an interesting essay by David Owen in QJ Med. Lord Owen was British Foreign Secretary in the Labour Government from 1977 to 1979.

We all know that President Wilson was completely incapacitated by a stroke in 1919. But did you know that President Mitterand of France was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981 and became almost incapacitated later on in his second term as president? No, you probably don’t because they kept it pretty secret.

And Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain was fueled with amphetamines throughout the Suez Crisis of 1956.

What should we do about presidential incapacitation, and how much secrecy is acceptable?

Winston Churchill, of course, was a depressive and endured many attacks of the “black dog.” He had a heart attack in the White House in 1941. And what about his drinking?

In May 1953, Churchill as Prime Minister was standing in for Eden as Foreign Secretary weeks before he had a very serious stroke. A diplomat from the Foreign Office records lunching with him and his Private Secretary, ‘The lunch lasted for three and a quarter hours. A varied and noble procession of wines with which I could not keep pace — champagne, port, brandy, cointreau; Winston drank a great deal of all and ended with two glasses of whisky and soda’. It is hard to imagine functioning on such an input, but he had been used to it for over fifty years.

What should be the rules regarding the health of the head of government, and when should we step in and replace them?

A View of the War on Terror

How well do we understand the war on terror? How well are we doing? What is it we are fighting against? You could read A View from the Eye of the Storm by Haim Harari in FrontPage Magazine to get a broad strategic sweep.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel had joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine had existed for 100 years.

And this great region with 300 million people has

a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone.

...

Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers.

There are four main pillars of the conflict: the suicide murder, lies, money, and the “total breaking of all laws.”

And this conflict is power by three “concentric spheres supporting death and murder.”

The first sphere is the terrorists themselves. “They are surrounded by a second wider circle of direct supporters, planners, commanders, preachers.” Then there is the outer sphere,

the third circle of so-called religious, educational and welfare organizations, which actually do some good, feed the hungry and provide some schooling, but brainwash a new generation with hatred, lies and ignorance.

We’ll win, of course. But meanwhile how are we doing?

Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon.. [Both] Iran and Syria are now totally surrounded by territories unfriendly to them... This is a significant strategic change and it applies strong pressure on the terrorist countries...
I do not know if the American plan was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the resulting situation.

Read the whole thing.

Health Care is a Right, as They Say

We know how goverment monopoly health care works in Canada, because we got a look with the Canadian movie The Barbarian Invasions. The way to get things done and actually get health care, it appeared, was a bit of bribery.

OK. We know those Canadians are wusses. But what about in the home of government health care in the Anglosphere, the United Kingdom with its beloved National Health Service?

Things are not too good, according to Dr. John Crippen an NHS doctor and blogger.

Here’s how things are going in his NHS hospital:

Third patient in is Mary, one of the local speech therapists. She is approaching retirement. I sent her husband into hospital three weeks ago in rip-roaring heart failure... The nursing care is appalling. He has developed pressures sores on his sacrum and heels.

Wanna see what a Grade IV pressure sore on the sacrum looks like? Try here. On second thoughts, you probably don’t. Meanwhile you’ll be glad to know that the nurses are eating dinner.

The nurses were all eating take-away Pizza. Deep Pan pizza from Pizza Hut... Mary thinks her husband is dying... The nurses over the weekend do not speak English. She tried to tell them that her husband is partially sighted but they do not understand. They show here the nursing assessment. Under “visual problems” it says "none".

Yep. Read the whole thing.

Handicapping Election 2006

It will take a gain of 15 seats for the Democrats to take control of the House of Representatives this fall. Can they do it?

Long time elections expert Michael Barone says maybe. It would seem that gaining 15 seats should not be that hard, given that the Republicans gained 52 seats in 1994 to take the House. But this isn’t 1994. At least not yet.

Democrats' chances of taking those 15 seats are not very good — if the voting patterns and political contours that have held steady since the 1995-96 budget showdown continue to prevail.

And that’s the point. Voting patterns have stayed steady for about the last ten years. The Republicans gains came from three sources, says Barone. First was the Democratic Class of 1974 that had won in fairly Republican districts. Twenty years later, as those incumbents moved on, their seats reverted back to the Republicans. Then Republicans benefited from an improvement in candidate quality, the movement of the conservative South into the Republican camp, a remarkable anti-incumbent feeling, and finally an anti-Clinton feeling among voters who in 1992 thought they were voting for a moderate and instead got tax increases and national health care.

How do those factors work this time around? Not too much. It doesn’t seem likely that Republicans are in for a perfect storm like Democrats were in 1994.

In his analysis, Jay Case writes in RealClearPolitics.com that we should not underestimate the difficulty of unseating an incumbent congressman. There are only about 17 Republican open seats and most of them are districts that voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004.

Then he goes through the conventional wisdom that points to a Democratic pickup in November. Democrats could win if they could unify around a set of issues. Republicans are in trouble because they are not united. Right track/wrong track polls indicate trouble for the Republicans, and so on.

All wrong, says Case. The fact is that 95 percent of Republican congressmen are running for reelection. And the open seats are mostly in districts that voted for Bush. That makes it almost impossible to retake the House unless the sentiments of the voters change significantly before November.

So it ain’t over yet.

A Look Inside Iran

Here’s an interesting look inside Iran. The Iranian establishment is increasingly worried by the actions of the president of Iran, according to John R. Bradley in the Washington Times.

Iran's clerical and business establishments, deeply concerned by what they see as reckless spending and needlessly aggressive foreign policies, are increasingly turning against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad was elected on a populist platform to root out corruption and to give priority to the needs of the poor. Is he ever!

Iran's long-term planning calls for vigorous efforts to reduce the size of government and to curb subsidies to state-owned entities, which account for an estimated 75 percent of the economy. But the Ahmadinejad budget boosts spending by 25 percent and envisions a 31 percent increase in spending on state enterprises.

We’ve seen this before. This sort of reckless expansion of the government sector to throw subsidies at the poor always ends in tears. The economic strength of a nation comes from its productive sector. And that means business enterprise not government enterprise. This isn’t too difficult to figure out, is it.

The clerical establishment has close ties with the capitalist class and is said to be appalled at the rapid slide of the economy since Mr. Ahmadinejad's inauguration. The clerics are also thought to be deeply apprehensive about the president's aggressive foreign policy.

The Iranian establishment wants the West to ease off on the confrontation with Ahmadinejad. “Let the Iranians deal with him,” they say. Then he’ll be a failure and out of power within a year.

The Outlook for Energy

Ever since Col. Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania back in 1859 people have been solemnly forecasting that oil is about to run out.

They forecast it back in the 1860s, and they forecast it just before they discovered oil in Texas. Now the current fad is “peak oil,” the idea that we just passed by the peak in oil production and that it is downhill from now on.

Maybe they are right. But it really doesn’t matter.

Actually, the forecast that we are running out of energy goes back even before the oil age. In the early nineteenth century they were worrying about the wood energy crisis in Britain. The iron smelting industry was cutting down all the trees to melt iron, and everyone knew that they would soon run out of energy. Then they discovered coal in Newcastle.

In TCSDaily, Max Schulz does a good job of showing why the peak oil hypothesis has the whole problem upside down.

The chief problem with those who say the world is running out is that they have always looked at the issue the wrong way. Questions about energy supply shouldn't be thought of in terms of how much is available, but in terms of how good mankind is at finding and extracting it.

Leave aside that extraction technology is always improving. Leave aside that there is a ton of coal out there, and then there is nuclear.

In a hundred years or less we could be erecting solar panels in space and bringing the energy back to the earth by microwave or down the umbilical chords of space elevators.

Evergy is not a question of finite resources. It is a question of human ingenuity.

And what, you might ask, is really real? Material resources or human ideas? The truth is that we just don’t know.