What's a Kerry?

A political gaffe, we know, is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth.

So what do we call Senator Kerry’s (D-MA) “Stuck in Iraq” comment?

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.

(Emphasis added.)

Because it’s not true. The men and women in the US Armed Forces are in fact better qualified and better motivated than the general population. Here’s a report from the Heritage Foundation on the subject. And if you still aren’t convinced you can always check over at Michelle Malkin’s blog as outraged family members of active-duty warriors write in.

So what do you call a gaffe that’s objectively false? A Kerry?

Still, at least Senator Kerry isn’t taking things lying down. First he issues a defiant written statement that includes these fine issue-oriented words:

I'm sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did," Kerry said. "I'm not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me.

Now, according to Fox News, he has made a personal statement.

"I apologize to no one for my criticism of the president and his broken policy," Kerry told reporters in a press conference in Seattle. "My statement yesterday, and the White House knows this full-well, was a botched joke about the president and the president's people and not about the troops."

But here’s a warning to Republicans. Don’t you try the “botched joke” excuse. Only millionaire Democrat senators get to use it.

Senator Kerry is a gift that keeps on giving.

Bureaucracy Comes Before Kids' Reading

For over a century the education establishment has pushed the idea of “whole language” reading instruction. As Geoffrey D. Cronin writes, it is based on the idea that

learning to read is a natural progression, like learning to speak or listen.

And maybe the educationists are right, where their own children are concerned. You can easily imagine that nearly all children in literate, middle-class homes where there are lots of books will insist on being taught to read.

But the common school system was not set up for that. It was set up to educate and Americanize the millions of immigrants, especially dangerous Irish Catholic immigrants. The idea was to take the children of feckless and illiterate immigrants and make ’em learn to read and write and figure whether their parents liked it or not.

In fact, the government education system has always suffered from a kind of schizophrenia. The officials and activists in charge have never decided whether to make the schools respond to the needs of their own children or to the perceived needs of other peoples’ children.

So things kinda dragged along getting slowly worse.

After a century of failure with the whole language method, people finally started to take notice, and a program called Reading First was included in the No Child Left Behind Act.

It is actually having a positive effect.

The independent Center on Education Policy's Keeping Watch on Reading First finds that this initiative "is having a significant and positive impact on student achievement, and has led to many changes in curriculum, instruction and assessment." ... So far, the direct beneficiaries are 1.7 million students and 100,000 teachers, and the results are especially impressive, since Reading First money has only been aimed at the highest-poverty, lowest-performing schools. Further, the achievement gap is closing, as reading scores for black and Hispanic 9-year-olds have reached all-time highs.

You would know that a success like this would not go unpunished.

Now, after several years of political pressure from vendors of the failed programs of the past, comes a report from the Education Department's inspector general, blasting Reading First management for being too aggressive and stocking its review committee with SBRR advocates.

Oh no!

[T]he IG pores through a bunch of e-mails to try to show that Reading First's implementation was slanted toward certain program designs over others.

Good Lord! This is scandalous. We should start a government-wide campaign to stop the stacking of review committees with program proponents. As if. As if the whole idea of any government program is to push a particular agenda and impose it on the American people whether they like it or not.

Still, we shouldn’t get to worked up about this. Because education is not the job of the government. Education is the job of the family, and the government would do better to keep out of the way. Literacy in the United States was as high or higher 150 years ago before the government took control of education.

If we were really serious about education we would get the government out of it. Forever.

Why Won't They Tell Us?

Week in and week out Hugh Hewitt has MSM types on his program and he asks them about their political views. And week after week they refuse to tell him.

Look, said Hewitt today to Mark Halperin, author with John F. Harris of The Way To Win: Taking The White House In 2008, “let’s get our plumb lines down...
Did you vote for Kerry or Bush last time around?” Blah, blah, blah, responds Halperin:

So I don’t discuss my political views. I don’t discuss — I will say, somewhat controversial in the minds of some, I don’t vote, because I think that just opens up the question of how can I say I’m being objective, and fighting for truth, if I’m making a decision about who to vote for in a presidential race.

Later on Hewitt returns to the fray, getting Halperin to agree that it would be improper for a journalist to report on a business in which he had an investment. Then what is different about reporting on an issue in which you are “invested?”

I work very hard to take whatever beliefs I have, and bend over backwards to make sure that no one is treated unfairly by coverage that I impact.

Of course, and so would any man. But the reason we have conflict of interest rules in reporting on business is that, where money is concerned, you can’t be too careful.

If journalism is as important as we are led to believe, then surely we can’t be too careful about the appearance of fairness.

If a newspaper covered global warming, for instance, we would want to know that they had a balanced team working on the project. So that the enthusiasm of one member would be checked and balanced by an opposing enthusiasm.

So how can we trust journalists if they won’t tell us about their political “enthusiasms?”

The Party of the Rich

We all know that the Democratic Party is the party of privilege. That is to say, Democrats believe that people cannot survive in the world without special privileges granted by the government, whether it is minimum wages, tenure for professors, civil service exemption from the employment-at-will contract, or economic regulation.
But now we must face the fact that the Democratic Party is just flat-out the party of the rich. Read what Peter Schweizer has to say. Let’s lay it out in bulleted form.

• “Thus far in 2006, 17 of the top 25 contributors to 527 advocacy groups are funding liberal/Democratic causes, including liberal billionaires George Soros, and Peter Lewis.”
  
• In 2002, people who gave a million dollars or more “gave $36 million to the Democrats and only $3 million to Republicans, a 12:1 ratio.”
  
• In 2000, “lawyers gave $182 million (75 percent to Democrats) and Hollywood donated $32 million (70 percent to Democrats).”
  

Of course, eevil Big Oil gives about $25 million a year, “80 percent of it to the GOP.” That is almost as much as Hollywood gives to Democrats. Outrageous.

Then there are the rich Democratic office holders. And it’s not just rich Ted Kennedy we are talking about.

• The United States Senate, we know, is full of millionaires. “Of the five U.S. senators worth more than $25 million (John Kerry, Herb, Kohl, John Rockefeller, Dianne Feinstein, and Lincoln Chafee) according to Roll Call, only Chafee is a Republican.”
  

And some Republicans are unwilling to consider Lincoln Chafee as a real Republican, given his liberal voting record.

You can look at it this way. The Democratic Party is the party of the rich and the poor, people who don’t need, or don’t expect the economy to work for them.

The Republican Party, on the other hand as Camille Paglia puts it, is centered on “small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it's job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy.”

They are people who need a vibrant and level playing field upon which to develop their talents and their skills. That’s why they are Republicans.

But here’s the kicker. If you have a level playing field in the economy and low tax rates it makes it easier for the small businessman to grow his business and challenge the super rich, the Kennedys, the Kerrys, the Rockefellers, and the Chafees for the choice locations in Aspen, the houses in the Hamptons, the rich young heiresses, and all the other loot that the Democratic super rich enjoy.

And we can’t have that now, can we. Why, those coarse Republican businessmen are nothing more than jumped-up barrow boys.

The Stem Cell Flap

Ever since they ginned up Ron Reagan to make a speech on stem cell research at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Democrats have been doing a land office business on the proposition that Republicans oppose stem cell research.

And that is what the flap over actor Michael J. Fox’s commercials in support of Democratic senate candidates, including U.S. Rep. Ben Cardin, the opponent of Republican Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele in Maryland, is about. It’s all rehearsed here.

As is usually the case in politics, the Democrats are trying to pull a fast one on the American people.

Republicans are all in favor of stem cell research. They just don’t want federal funds spent on new lines of embryonic stem cells.

And there’s an additional kicker. Adult and umbilical cord stem cells have already proved to have applications in a number of degenerative diseases.

But embryonic stem cells have not proved useful, at least not yet. So the issue, which the MSM has not highlighted at all, is this:

Mr. Steele supports stem cell research using adult stem cells and stem cells from umbilical cords, which have already been used to treat and improve several dozen degenerative diseases.



Mr. Cardin and Mr. Fox support stem cell research using embryos, which has not yet been proven to yield any cures for diseases, but which some scientists say could do so.

We wait eagerly for the MSM to make this clear.

They would be doing a public service. My personal researches indicate that my liberal friends have no idea that embryonic stem cells are a “risky scheme” whereas adult stem cells are already saving lives.

They just know that Republicans are against stem cell research because Pat Robertson is against it. Or was it Jerry Falwell?

And where are the environmentalists and their Precautionary Principle on all this?

The Paglia Interview

She thinks the Foley trick was a disaster; she listens to talk radio; and she thinks the Republican Party is the party of “small businessmen” and “practical people,” rather than Brahmins and fat cats.

She is Camille Paglia, conservatives’ favorite Democrat. Salon recently interviewed her and put the interview online.

But make no mistake, she carries no brief for President Bush:

I'm not a Bush hater. I've always viewed him as a decent fellow who was pushed into the presidency because he was his father's son. But he's been out of his depth in foreign affairs from the start.

And the mess in Iraq reflects that.

When Salon prefaces a question with Republicans as “Brahmins, to be self-interested and not affected necessarily by the decisions they make,” she sets ’em straight.

The Democrats' portrayal of Republicans as fat cats out of touch with ordinary Americans just doesn't fly anymore, and they should drop it. I think the center of the Republican Party really is small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it's job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy -- not government intervention and government control, that suffocating nanny-state mentality.

The trouble is that the Democrats can’t “drop it.” Their party is built upon the conceit that they are disinterested experts and activists protecting the people from the fat cats. The taxes and the programs are all designed to help the helpless people, and have nothing to do with tenure, sinecures, and pensions for the experts and the activists. If they dropped that, what would be the point of the Democratic Party?

It’s good to hear Paglia’s voice again. She ought to be the current holder of the Howard Cosell Memorial Chair of Telling It Like It Is. Ought to be? She is.

The Decline of the Public Library

Here in Seattle we have just finished spending hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding the downtown library and rebuilding a number of branch libraries.

But Helen Rumbelow thinks that public libraries are going the way of the Victorian bath house. Back in the day, there were numerous communal bath houses. But not any more. People have their own baths, thank you.

The public lending library, another great Victorian institution, has had its day. To pretend otherwise is like bursting in on a woman luxuriating in a private bubble-bath and telling her to take her behind out to a public washroom for a good old hose-down. She has no need of that now, thank you.

So it makes sense that Seattle would just have spent a ton of money on a headline architect designed public library.

All the things we used to need a library for—looking up medical information, queueing up for bestsellers—all that stuff can be done on the Internet.

What about those who, like me, used to enjoy exchanging juvenile comments with others in the margins of library books? Well, the internet can do that kind of thing too. It’s called blogging.

Actually, she’s wrong about that. Kids exchange juvenile comments on social networking sites and IM. That is when they are not exchanging juvenile comments texting on their cell phones.

So let us get real.

Let us admit that people can buy their own books if they want to. The one exception to this is children -- libraries are vital for encouraging reading and literary tastes. Children’s libraries should be lavished with funding but could be located in the kind of places where they go anyway, such as play centres or after-school clubs -- all the better for helping with homework.

Children’s libraries. And maybe a bunch of other community-type activities. But forget about adult books. Libraries should be putting their collections online before the books fall apart.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, we have still got to pay off the bonds on our shining new white elephant. Thirty years should do it.

What is Going On in Iraq? Part II

What is going on in Iraq? President Bush isn’t saying.

That has to be the takeaway from the meeting of conservative journalists with the president, recorded by Byron York.

The latest plan to retake the offensive on defining victory is the so-called benchmark. “The idea is to develop with the Iraqi government a series of benchmarks -- oil, federalism, constitutional reform, there’s like 20 different things -- and have that developed in a way that they’re comfortable with and we’re comfortable with,” Bush said. Progress toward those goals would give the administration new ways to point toward overall progress in Iraq.

But this is bureaucratic number-crunching. The question really is: What do we want out of our Iraq venture? Is it democracy in Iraq? Is it Peace in the Middle East? Is it containing Iran?

Or, to put it bluntly, how do we define Winning in Iraq? Right now it looks like it is nothing more than standing up the puppet regime we installed. But do we really care about that? How bad would it be if the warlord Muqtada Al Sadr took over? Ralph Peters thinks that the current Iraqi government is already truckling to Al Sadr.

And that leads to a bigger question? How does each—or any—nation (for want of a better word) advance into the modern culture of capitalism, markets, and democratic rule? One thing is for sure. It ain’t easy.

In the nineteenth century, the European nations engaged in a Race for Africa, tore up its traditional boundaries, imposed western rule, and then withdrew it. The result, as we know, was misery and genocide.

Why should things be any different in the Islamic Middle East?

What is Going On in Iraq?

Just what exactly is going on in Iraq? Is it civil war? If not, just what is it?

Frederick Turner is willing to guess. It is the hour of the vigilante.

He asks what civil society can do when it is opposed by refuseniks, people who refuse to give up when they have been defeated, but still keep up a desultory fusilade of bombings and suicides?

The answer is that you send out the death squads. The official government cannot do it. So it must delegate it to vigilantes.

Basically the killers are posses of self-organized vigilantes, who know their local area, who know who the bombers are, and who the bombers' relatives are.

...

But death squads are rational, in their own horrible way. They may prove, as they did in Latin America, to be a pretty effective method of wiping out implacable enemies of social order and preparing the way for democratic and law-abiding government. In living memory almost every decent and legal regime in Latin America was preceded by a chaotic period in which ordinary men armed themselves with guns, said goodnight to their families, and went out in groups to kill some local dissident.

...
The work of the vigilantes is the hideous and dark crime that Socrates and the Greek tragic dramatists hinted must underlie all civilization.

Is that what is going on in Iraq? The truth is, we do not know. We will only know after it is all over, whatever it is that is going down in Iraq right now.

The Real Culture of Corruption

Conservatives have wonderful ideas—for education, for health care, and for income security. But you do not get elected on great ideas. Americans aren’t that interested in ideas. You get elected when the other guys screw up.

Conservative reform of education and Social Security will not happen through a free and fair discussion of the issues. It will happen because Americans get sick of pervasive liberal corruption in the public sector.

Last week we saw the institutional corruption reported at an ordinary community college in California.

Now here’s a story of corruption in a research university, reported in The New York Times. Reported by Jeneen Interlandi, it’s a story about a professor at the University of Vermont, convicted in federal court of

lying on a federal grant application and admitted to fabricating more than a decade’s worth of scientific data on obesity, menopause and aging.

What had Eric Poehlman done? Well, according to graduate student Walter DeNino, the whistleblower who had turned him in, Poelman had routinely altered data on clinical studies to make it support his hypotheses. So in a study of the change in fat levels in the blood over time, Poehlman just changed the data in a spreadsheet on which DeNino was working.

In the initial spreadsheet, many patients showed an increase in HDL from the first visit to the second. In the revised sheet, all patients showed a decrease. Astonished, DeNino read through the data again. Sure enough, the only numbers that hadn’t been changed were the ones that supported his hypothesis.

In this high-stakes research business where money, power and the roar of the crowd depend on a continuing flow of government research dollars we can assume that there is a lot of this kind of stuff going on.

Everyone agrees that the private sector is hopelessly compromised by its selfish pursuit of profit. Whereas university professors professors and government civil servants are all good guys.

But the Poehlman case shows how a committed cheater can elude detection for years by playing on the trust — and the self-interest — of his or her junior colleagues.

Before we can change the culture we have to discredit the incumbents. The American people have to grow to understand that “our” teachers, professors, doctors feeding in the public trough are all crooks and liars. You know, just like businessmen.

Then we can start to talk to them about reform.

Meanwhile former professor Eric Poehlman will be spending a year in jail.

The Ebb and Flow of Politics

At two weeks to go before the 2006 mid-term elections everyone is agreed that... well it would be hard to disagree with the idea that Democrats have a good opportunity to seize control of both houses of Congress.

In fact, if Democrats don’t win control of at least one house, they ought to be ashamed.

Republicans are disappointed in their party, and they should be. The Republican Congress has been very short on legislating beneficial reform, and that is bad.

The folks on conservative talk radio have been insisting that Republicans must rally to reelect a Republican Congress... or else.

But the purpose of politics is not to legislate and reform. The purpose of politics is to avoid civil war.

In recent years the Democrats have become so utterly enraged that they have started to develop conspiracy theories, the sort of conspiracy theories that they have utterly deprecated when they came from the right. In fact, any party gets angry and conspiratorial after many years in the wilderness.

We need to put the Democrats back in power. We need to say to them. OK, if George W, Bush is so stupid, and Republicans are so eevil, then show us what can you do.

The last time we did that, in 1992, the American people vomited the Democrats back up in two years.

Because the long-term fact about American politics is that the Republican Party is the party of enterprise, and the Democratic Party is the party of tenure. Republicans are people who live and work in the enterprise sector, Michael Barone’s Hard America. Democrats are people who live and pick up paychecks in the tenured sector, Michael Barone’s Soft America.

And it is all that Democrats can do to protect and preserve the pensions and the tenure and the sinecures that they have awarded themselves and their supporters over the last seventy years.

Let’s fight like hell, but let us remember the old adage of Benjamin Franklin:

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

Americans, foolish or not, must alternate power between each party and see what each can do. It’s the democratic thing to do.

Mark Steyn and the 300 Millionth American

Maybe we conservatives are living in a dream world. While we are worrying about the demographic disaster in Europe, with child-shy women refusing to generate a new generation, liberals are wringing their hands as the US population soars north of 300 million.

And it’s all very well for Mark Steyn to chortle about his publicist tipping the
folks at the Census Bureau to announce the 300 millionth American just as his America Alone was hitting the bookstores. Subtitled “The End of the World As We Know It” his book could just as well be titled “It’s The Demography, Stupid.” It’s all very well for him. His wife has already presented him with three children.

Anyway, the patriarchal Mark Steyn really has a lot of fun with the “overpopulation” crowd.

"At 300 million," noted [Dowell Myers] the professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California, "we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation."

Oh please, titters Mark.

If you think it's crowded here, try living in the Netherlands or Belgium, which have, respectively, 392 and 341 inhabitants per square kilometer compared to 31 folks per square kilometer in the United States.

Probably the whole “overpopulation” schtik goes back to the “voluntary motherhood” crowd of the early twentieth century. If you are a woman, like, say, the feminist Simone de Beauvoir, and you want to write books instead of having children, then it makes a lot of sense to fortify your decision with a throwaway comment about “overpopulation.”

But the inescapable demographic fact is that people that don’t have children have not provided for their old age. Who is going to look after you, old chap, if you don’t have any children?

If you want to think clearly about the meaning of the word “unsustainable” don’t think about global warming. Think about global cooling between the sheets.

When there are too many people you can always cull a few million in a convenient war. But when population is declining, then you heading over the cliff.

Rees-Mogg on Ralph Harris

The talent of a great journalist is to bring together all the detritus of the world, like a magpie, but to serve it all up as a delicious meal with the talents of a great chef.

Marking the death of Arthur Harris, director of the think-tank Institute of Economic Affairs, William Rees-Mogg, war horse of British broadsheet journalism, tells just how remarkable Harris’s achievement was: to have changed the elite consensus in Britain from the Fabian “Butskellism” of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s in which Britain became the sick man of Europe.

[Harris] converted a whole generation of politicians and journalists to the free-market ideas in which he believed; he converted most economists as well. We are all, or almost all, Harrisites nowadays. I was one of his intellectual converts, became a colleague of his in the House of Lords, and regarded myself as a friend.

Then Rees-Mogg continues with remarkable frankness to write how he himself was a mind-numbed robot of the Keynesian consensus, the conceit that a political elite of experts could operate the levers of the economy through regulation and subsidy.

Most economic theory then taught in universities was Keynesian; industrial policy was based on nationalisation and trade union power. Wartime regulations were still universal; rates of taxation went up to 90 per cent or higher. This was the triumph of the managed socialist economy in a democratic society.

Rees-Mogg remembers discussing ideas back in the late 1950s with Harris and his collaborators at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Even then my own economic ideas, though broadly Keynesian, were not Fabian. Yet, as I listened to Ralph [Harris] and John [Wood], I thought that they were out of touch with contemporary trends, even that they were likeable cranks. How wrong I was. It was I who was trapped in a false consensus from which I had to break free.

You can’t say fairer than that. Then came the crisis of the 1970s.

In the 1960s and early 1970s the IEA moved from the fringe to a position of rising influence, largely as the result of the failure of economic controls. Many free-society pamphlets were published, brilliantly edited by Arthur Seldon. Meetings were held, lunches were given and [F.A.] Hayek and [Milton] Friedman were introduced to a new British audience. The IEA became a focus of criticism when the Heath Government did a U-turn and tried to fight inflation by price and wage controls -- by a policy that I was ignorant enough to support. What folly that now seems.

It is now, as these great men are dying, that we can begin to grasp the enormity of the challenge they faced, and the remarkable achievement of their lives as they succeeded in turning the great ships of state both in Britain and the United States.

Rees-Mogg concludes: “[Harris] deserves a statue: he helped to save the freedom of his country.”

But you could say that the proper memorial for Ralph Harris would the same as that for Sir Christopher Wren, builder of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.

"Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice" ("Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you").

Don't Blame MSM For Gloom and Doom

If you wonder why the mainstream media isn’t shooting off the fireworks about a record close above 12,000 on the Dow, you probably think that it is all about Bush hatred.

But Dean Barnett reminds us that there is another good reason.

For most Americans who work in most industries, the economy is chugging along quite nicely, thank you very much. But if you happen to work at a legacy media outpost, the good ship prosperity has left the harbor without you. Newsrooms across America are cutting staff and not giving raises. Circulation numbers (and ratings) continue to decline with no floor yet in sight. It’s understandable enough that if you work in the media, even if you happen not to be a raging-leftist-borderline-socialist, you’re probably having trouble perceiving that the rest of the country is enjoying prosperous times.

Like they say: A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose your job.

Jeff Jacoby, he relates, thinks that the legacy media

powers that be in their clumsy efforts to fix things resemble a group of ink-stained Herbert Hoovers.

Take the example of The New York Times.

The product the New York Times gives away for free on the web is actually superior to the dead tree version you have to lay out your hard earned cash to purchase; the virtual edition is updated with headlines throughout the day and the maniacal rantings of Paul Krugman and company are kept safely behind a subscription-only firewall.

Thank goodness for that. And, of course, just yesterday The New York Times reported 39 percent lower profits.

As if on cue, a bunch of Democratic pols led by Sen Edward Kennedy (D-MA), wrote to the publisher of the New York Times Co. urging him to “resist pressures to cut staff and other resources” at the ailing Boston Globe.

Meanwhile Google announced record profits and its stock soared into the stratosphere.

The times they are a-changing.

Ralph Harris, Architect of Thatcherism

They are dying off, one by one. The great lions of the conservative renaissance, the men that provided the intellectual horsepower that drove the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, are going to their rest.

On October 19, 2006, Ralph Harris, Baron of High Cross, died. And we honor his towering achievement.

Today the bien-pensant left talks occasionally about building their own think tanks—as if the planet isn’t already groaning under the weight of left-liberal opinion—but when
Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon, and chicken entrepreneur Antony Fisher opened the Institute for Economic Affairs in 1957, it was a joke.

Antony Fisher had read a condensed version of F.A. Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom

and was determined to do something about it.

For ten years the IEA was a shoestring operation, young and cheeky. Said Harris, as quoted in The Daily Telegraph obituary

A lot of our thinking was deliberately intended to affront [the establishment] and to wake them up.

But with Harris’s charm and fundraising abilities the IEA was able to secure funding to achieve financial stability. Then in the disastrous 1970s conservative politicians like Keith Joseph, Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher began to pay attention to the IEA and its ideas.

When Thatcher was elected British prime minister in the election of 1979 it was the intellectual output of the IEA that provided the agenda for reform.

Today, of course, Reaganism and Thatcherism seem like an inevitable force of history. At the time, of course, they seemed more like Forlorn Hopes charging against the massed ranks of the left-liberal establishment.

And what these noble warriors inspired in their adversaries was hate. We all know about the foaming hatred of the Bush bashers. It was no better in Britain during the Thatcher years. The lefties hated Margaret Thatcher, hated her with every fiber of their beings. According to The Times obituary

[Harris] confirmed the extraordinary emotions she incited. “I see chaps in the House of Lords whom I know, who were contemporaries of mine at university. They won’t talk to me, and I’m not even Thatcher. I didn’t like Harold Wilson as Prime Minister, but I never felt the hatred and animus towards him that they have towards her. Itching to kill.”

It says something about our liberal friends that, faced with an honorable and spirited foe, they so easily descend into hatred and often find respectable support in their political parties and in the intellectual elite for their barbarism.

It is a tribute to men like Ralph Harris that they never allowed themselves to descend into the gutter with their opponents.

We shall not see their like again.

A Horror Story from the Affirmative Action Front

Our friends in the mainstream media love a human interest story. They love to put up a helpless victim on the nightly news and show how more government intervention and spending is needed. People have needs. Needs must be met.

Here’s a story that won’t make the nightly news, or a multi-part story in The New York Times. It’s a story about ordinary, routine corruption at a community college, a story about government bureaucrats in the diversity office blatantly violating the rules to get their buddy a job. You can read all about it here.

It tells you “What’s the Matter With Kansas,” and why so many New Deal Democrats are now Republicans.

Robert Allgeyer’s parents were children of the Depression, high school dropouts. But he went to the local state college.

In 1998 after selling his business he was teaching part-time at a community college just after Prop 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, had passed. The one and only full-time instructor in his department was retiring and so he applied for his job.

But the powers-that-be had something else in mind.

[A] faculty member in another department had caused a stir. He expressed his belief that I had been originally hired, and retained, by the "white old-boy network."

...

Let me tell you something about that outspoken faculty member: he was black. But not just any African-American! He was the son of a Ph. D. from the University of Michigan. His father was on the faculty of a Midwestern private college. Junior had gone to a prep school, then to dad's private college for his undergraduate work (in the same department where dad taught), then to dad's graduate school, UMich. Can you say "legacy"?

So Allgeyer’s application was essentially blackballed. But guess who eventually got hired?

The recommended candidate was a white male, who had gone to the same private university as two members of the committee. I'm sure he was a fine man. But with or without Proposition 209, there had been several violations of state regulations or internal rules, in the review of applications. Each of them involved an "affirmative action" rule that had been written for the advancement of women and minorities. No matter; rules are rules. The violation of those rules had the direct effect of subjecting my own application to unlawful non-review.

Robert Allgeyer recommends to the people of Michigan that they pass the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative this November. Whatever they may think that affirmative action and preferences does for them, the chances are that it will allow government hiring managers to hire someone from their “old-boy network,” and it will screw ordinary people without connections.

The Gathering Storm of Extremism in Europe

As Mark Steyn’s new book

America Alone
climbs up the bestseller lists, with its message of demographic collapse for our European friends we had better pay attention to the other side of the story.

It is the rise of right-wing parties in Europe.

We all tut-tutted when Jean-Marie Le Pen beat the socialist candidate to advance to the runoff in the last French presidential election. But nationalist parties are gaining strength elsewhere.

In local elections in Belgium on October 8, according to Emanuele Ottolenghi, “the Vlams Belang won 20 percent of the overall national vote, reaching almost 33 percent in the city of Antwerp and even more in smaller communes.”
The Vlams Belang is a far-right Flemish nationalist party.

The reason for the explosion in the far-right vote is not hard to figure out. Voters are afraid of the rapid increase in Muslims in their countries and they are angry that the center parties have done nothing about it.

For many Europeans, the multiplying list of outrages where an intolerant, aggressive, violent, and retrograde Islam openly challenges liberal values such as freedom of speech and gender equality is a sign that a strong response is in high order. If they vote for the extremists, it is not necessarily because they have become extreme, but because the parties at the political center, which should best interpret this anxiety and give it concrete political expression, are paralyzed by political correctness, fear of antagonizing a growing Muslim electorate, or simply too naïve to understand what is at stake.

It is ironic that the Left, which believes in giving no quarter to extremism on the right, is relaxed about Muslim extremism.

When confronted with Islamic extremism, they make the claim that by talking to them and engaging them, the Muslim extremists will gain a stake in the political process and thus become more moderate — the exact opposite policy they advocate for right-wing extremism.

The Hard Left, of course, sees the Muslims as a new revolutionary class that they can lead against the Great Capitalist Satan, the United States.

Stay tuned. This problem is going to get worse before it gets better. And that assumes, pace Mark Steyn, that Europe will actually be around demographically in the years to come.

They Fined Newt Gingrich For Teaching a College Course

Yeah! Remember when they gang-tackled Newt for—get this—teaching a college course? And made him pay a $300,000 fine?

The folks at Investor’s Business Daily take us on a little political review as the feeding frenzy on Sen Harry Reid’s obscene real-estate profits fails to spread to the mainstream media.

We remember the feeding frenzy over former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's alleged violation of federal tax law in using tax-exempt funds to fund his allegedly political college course, "Renewing American Civilization."

After a 3 1/2-year ordeal, and a $300,000 fine paid to the House Ethics Committee, the IRS finally ruled that the sponsoring organization, the Progress and Freedom Foundation, "did not serve the private interests of Mr. Gingrich" and was both apolitical and completely legal.

Oh good. Now of course, there is no doubt that Harry Reid’s real estate deals in Las Vegas have nothing to do with private profit, as I argue here. Oh no. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is just helping the people of Las Vegas by getting more raw land available for development and using his power and influence to get politicians and bureaucrats to surrender their little hoards up to the people. So that they can find a place to live and work and raise a family.

Still, if dear old Newt had to be sentenced first and investigated second—for the heinous crime of teaching a college course—why can’t we apply the same rules to Dingy Harry?

Even if Sen. Reid is a Democrat and therefore pure as the driven snow.

How About That Precautionary Principle Now?

Some years ago environmentalists set up the Precautionary Principle as a dodge to stop economic development. You shouldn’t do anything, they insist, unless you are pretty certain that it is safe.

Now they argue that, since everyone agrees that global warming will melt the glaciers on Greenland and inundate the low lying areas of the world that we should cut back on greenhouse gas production in coal and hydrocarbon burning. It is the precautionary thing to do.

But what about the new research that links cosmic ray intensity with cloud cover? According to Steven Milloy two Danish researchers, Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, have established an experimental link between the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the earth and low-level cloud cover.

Their hypothesis was based on a strong correlation between levels of cosmic radiation and cloud cover -- that is, the greater the cosmic radiation, the greater the cloud cover. Clouds cool the Earth's climate by reflecting about 20 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space.



The hypothesis was potentially significant because during the 20th century, the influx of cosmic rays was reduced by a doubling of the Sun's magnetic field, which shields the Earth from cosmic rays.

A hypothesis is fine, but does it check out? Thank you, Mr Vice-President, I’m glad you asked, because I know you will be anxious to update your documentary An Inconvenient Truth with the latest science.

Svensmark published a paper last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in which he claimed that his team “had experimentally verified the physical mechanism by which cosmic rays affect cloud cover.”

Here is the press release announcing the experimental results. It shows that cosmic rays do indeed form minute aerosols of sulphuric acid as hypothesized.

But at RealClimate they are having none of it. They list five “missing steps” between establishing that cosmic rays create “ultra-small aerosol particles” and that cloud cover is controlled by the combination of cosmic rays and variations in the sun’s magnetic field.

The chaps at Junk Science are quite excited. They aren’t as vested in the “enhanced greenhouse hypothesis” as the chaps at RealClimate.

So the controversy continues.

Of course, whatever the science says the question is: what should we do about climate change? What is the precautionary thing to do?

Should we try to reverse anthropic changes like the increase in greenhouse gages over the last century? Or should we adapt to any changes in climate and sea level as they occur?

And anyway, how do anthropogenic changes play out against natural fluctuations such as earth orbit oscillations, solar radiation fluctuations, and anything else going on that we haven’t even noticed yet?

Mr President, are we safe?

Sunnis Worry About Shi'ite Power

Back in the first Bush Administration I remember a Bush administration official explaining the Iraq strategy, and I paraphrase. With the current set up we are screwed, he said, so we are going to toss everything in the air and hope that the result turns out better.

Well, at least we don’t have Saddam to worry about any more. But we do have a lot of worried Sunnis, as Terence P. Jeffrey makes clear in a report of Secretary of State Rice’s recent visit to the Middle East.

Now, it is an ironic fact that among those who ought to be praying most fervently for the success of the teetering U.S. experiment in democracy in Iraq are the non-democratic leaders of nearby Sunni Arab regimes.

...

Her agenda included the efforts to restore stability in Iraq and to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.



Sunni Arab leaders now see these causes as intimately linked -- because they see themselves sinking into a Cold War, or worse, with a Shi'ite Iran that is exploiting the unrest in Shi'ite-majority Iraq.

So the net effect of the U.S. adventure in Iraq has been to change the worry from Saddam’s aggression to Iran’s aggression.

But the Sunnis are not helpless. They could help stabilize Iraq.

If the Sunni Arab regimes want to avert the catastrophe they envision, they should use every means possible to pressure their Sunni co-religionists in Iraq to shut down their insurgency -- before it's too late -- and cut a deal with the coalition government.

Do you think it is doable?

Racial Discrimination at the University of Michigan

In Michigan this November the voters are deciding whether to pass the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (Proposal 2 on the ballot). As the ballot language says, it is

A proposal to amend the state constitution to ban affirmation action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes.

Only time will tell what the voters of the State of Michigan will decide, but one thing is for sure. There is plenty of preferential treatment going on at the University of Michigan. Writes Roger Clegg,

Severe discrimination favoring black applicants over white and Asian applicants was found at all three schools [undergraduate, law school, and medical school] in all four years for which data were received... Hispanics were also favored, but by less; frequently whites were given preferences over Asians, although to a still smaller extent.

The full report on racial discrimination at the University of Michigan is given here(pdf).

In Michigan the voters have a choice. They can vote to continue the current system under which, for 2005,

the median black admittee’s SAT score was 1160, versus 1260 for Hispanics, 1350 for whites, and 1400 for Asians.

(Boy, you sure have to be smart to get into the University of Michigan if you are an Asian.)

On the other hand, voters can vote to judge candidates for university on the basis of their test scores and the content of their character.

The Long Tail in Education

Back in the nineteenth century education reformer Horace Mann promised that centralized, professional, government schooling would work wonders. He said:

Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities... and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete.

Fortunately, he didn’t say when.

Mann was inspired by the Prussian state education system that had been designed to help create an army that could beat the French. He didn’t explain how the Prussian situation applied to the United States.

Ever since education has been centralized, politicized, and run on Prussian lines by the government and its functionaries. In the United States in the early nineteenth century, before the advent of the common school, literacy stood at about 90 percent. It is no higher today.

But there is hope. With the rise of the Internet the vast government education monopolies are facing competition. And people can experiment, try new ideas out, and find other people with similar needs and ideas.

There are even education bloggers like Mr. Chalk who are busy spilling the beans on the nightmare in the inner city schools.

Here’s a education site that’s recently joined the conversation. Whole Teaching is a project of teacher and parent Teresa Piddington of Seattle. Teresa is developing the site to provide information and resources related to the use of Creative Systems Theory in child education. The theory, she writes, appreciates and enhances

what is unique about each child while simultaneously supporting every student as he or she engages in the formative process of learning.

In her article Temperament and The Writing Process with Young Children Piddington writes about her experience in applying the Creative Systems Personality Typology developed by Charles M. Johnston MD.

[The typology] correlates temperament type to particular stages in creative, formative processes... For example, in formative processes such as learning, teaching, and writing there is an early (inspiration) stage, a middle (perspiration) stage, and a late (finishing and polishing) stage.

Piddington describes how this typology helped her to respond to the different needs of her students in a second grade project to create cloth-bound books. It helped her to identify strengths and problem areas for each child and develop strategies that responded to the individual strengths and anxieties of each child.

Understanding that "earlies" need creative freedom within structure, "middles", timely feedback and affirmation, and "lates" ample time to embellish their work has strengthened my ability to differentiate and respond to the individual needs of my students.

Projects like Whole Teaching help us to realize that there is a whole new world out there. We are all so used to the top-down hierarchy of the education system that we fail to see what is staring us in the face. Education is an obvious area where the Internet can help teachers, parents,and students get together to solve problems from the bottom up. In fact Google has already stepped in with Google for Educators to help get things going.

Then there is Chris Anderson’s idea of

The Long Tail.

So far people have tended to think only of its potential in business where a host of small niche firms can thrive alongside the behemoth market leaders.

But why shouldn’t the Long Tail be just as powerful in education? If the Internet can bring together buyers and sellers why can’t it bring together teachers and students? Nowhere is the need more urgent than in the area of child education, perhaps the most regulated and cartelized area of American life.

It is now 160 years since Horace Mann gave us the government “common school.” Alas, nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code are nowhere close to obsolete.

Perhaps we are already have the solution in our hands.

A Tale of Two States

In Florida, it is the best of times for Republicans. In Ohio, it is the worst of times.

In Ohio, writes Kimberley A. Strassel, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Ken Blackwell, is down by double digits. The voters don’t like the GOP and you can’t blame them. The Republican governors for the past 16 years have delivered tax increases and scandal.

Republicans have practiced one-party rule in the state since 1994--more than enough time to lose one's principles. Former Gov. George Voinovich set the standard in 1992 by breaking his word and signing tax hikes. His successor, Bob Taft, with the help of the GOP legislature, in 2003 broke pledges not to raise taxes without voter permission. Some $3 billion in tax increases later, Ohio jumped to fourth place in the rankings for state and local tax burdens. (It was 23rd in 1994, when the GOP took over.) Over their first 10 years in power, Republicans increased Ohio's general operating budget by 71%--the highest increase in the nation.

Had enough? But in Florida the Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist is ahead by double digits. There’s no problem in figuring out why.

Florida Republicans have passed tax cuts every year of the eight Mr. Bush has held office--a whopping $19 billion, including the elimination of the infamous "intangibles" tax, levied on investments. While Florida's budget has grown at a rapid clip, Mr. Bush vetoed more than $2.1 billion in wasteful spending, earning him the nickname "Veto Corleone" among frustrated state lobbyists. He's trimmed 11,000 state jobs.

Tort reform? Did it. Overhauling the child welfare system? Done.

Education reform? You got it. Medicaid reform? How about a spot of privatization?

Florida today has the highest rate of job creation in the country, and an unemployment rate of 3.3%. It's bond rating hit triple A. Revenue is pumping into the state coffers, giving Florida $6.4 billion in reserves. Gov. Bush's approval rating stands at 55%.

Oh, and did you know? Florida doesn’t have a state income tax.

Really, there isn’t any mystery in all this. If you keep spending down and tax rates low and the playing field level, the economy will boom.

And Republican candidates will get elected.

Conservatives Must Hang Together

At the end of the Bush administration and after 12 years of Republican Congresses the members of the Republican coalition are getting a little testy. Some people in the coalition are even talking about splitting up.

That would be a mistake, writes Jennifer Roback Morse. The three parts of the Republican coalition, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and libertarians, need each other.

She’s reviewing Ryan Sager’s
Elephants in the Room,
which argues that “the future of the Republican party’s coalition of social conservatives and libertarians” depends on abandoning the agenda of the Christian Right.

He seems to say that the only way to win is for social conservatives to abandon the issues that matter to them, and become plain vanilla fiscal conservatives.

But back in 2001 Roback wrote

Love and Economics.

I hoped to convince my libertarian and fiscal conservative friends that they needed to pay more attention to the family.

Even though the work of mothers and fathers is private, it has public consequences, not least in the cost of single parenthood and family breakdown.

Family breakdown has been extremely expensive, not just to the individuals who suffer from it, but to the public sector as well.

...

Health care, mental health care, and educational remediation are all services taxpayers provide disproportionately to over-extended unmarried parents.

And so on.

Morse was surprised by the response to her book. Her libertarian friends paid almost no attention to it. Instead she found herself being invited to address social conservative groups.

When I wrote Love and Economics, it had never entered my mind to appeal to this audience. I literally didn’t know who they were. But they appreciated the fact that I was making their case in a way they had never heard before. I appreciated the fact that they’d talk to me.

Libertarians and fiscal conservatives had better understand that they and the social conservatives are joined at the hip, whether they like it or not. We high-class conservatives may be embarrassed by the simpleness of our social conservative allies, but we should be careful.

It might be prudent to think of social conservatives and the Religious Right as the conscience of the conservative movement.

Like it or not, a political movement must have at its core some moral purpose. The rational creed of fiscal conservatism and libertarianism doesn’t penetrate to that level. It does not address the ultimate purpose of life on this earth. It only deals with process.

Let us not learn that the hard way.

What It Means to be a Liberal

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone laments that the word “liberal” has become a pejorative in the 38 years since Richard Nixon was elected president. And he thinks that is a shame. Proud of being a liberal, he has published “What it means to be a liberal” in the Chicago Tribune for all to read and reflect upon.

We all owe Professor Stone a vote of thanks for setting forth “10 propositions that seem to me to define ‘liberal’ today.” And we should honor his courage. When you nail your principles to the mast then you are inviting people to compare theory with practice, and you are asking people to cry “hypocrite.”

Well, everyone is a hypocrite, and nobody lives up to their principles. But still, liberals might like to know just where conservatives think they fall down.

1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that I haven’t noticed too many liberals doubting their truths lately. To me they seem embattled and closed-minded in their devotion to their liberal shibboleths.

2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that in my experience the hallmark of actual liberals is the striking lack of respect and tolerance they display towards people that disagree with them. Indeed, in my experience, they are ruthless in using institutional power to persecute those who disagree with them.

3. Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that in my experience liberals believe that only liberals and their clients have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate. Other people better watch what they say, because liberals like to silence people that disagree with them by calling them “racists” and “bigots.”

4. Liberals believe "we the people" are the governors and not the subjects of government, and that government must treat each person with that in mind.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that I find it hard to believe that any government that spends about 35 percent of national income, that is the income created by the work of the American people, is treating the people as anything other than “subjects.”

5. Liberals believe government must respect and affirmatively safeguard the liberty, equality and dignity of each individual.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that the experience of a lifetime prompts me to say that in my experience liberals have absolutely no regard for the liberty, equality, and dignity of people like the white working class and “fundamentalist” religious believers. In fact there has been research done on this.

At the Democratic convention of 1992, Bolce and De Maio reported in The Public Interest, over half the delegates rated Christian fundamentalists on a “feeling thermometer” graduated from 0 to 100 —at an ice cold zero.

Half of the active liberals assembled at the Democratic Convention couldn’t have imagined having a more negative opinion of Christian fundamentalists. They must, one assumes, rate them equal to rapists and axe murderers.

6. Liberals believe government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support government programs to improve health care, education, social security, job training and welfare for the neediest members of society.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that over the last twenty years it is liberals who have utterly refused to consider any attempts to improve the government programs you mention. Education? Liberals are standing in the schoolhouse door. Health care? Liberals refuse to reform it. Social Security? Liberals use it as a way to scare seniors into voting Democratic.

7. Liberals believe government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that liberals act on the basis of their sectarian faith all the time, call it what you will: liberalism, secular humanism, modernism. Let us tell truth and shame the devil. People bring their faith to the public square, even liberals, and they usually want the government to legislate their faith into law, especially liberals.

8. Liberals believe courts have a special responsibility to protect individual liberties. It is principally liberal judges and justices who have preserved and continue to preserve freedom of expression, individual privacy, freedom of religion and due process of law.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that liberals only seem interested in the protection of their own liberties and the liberties of their clients. But if you study the history of law you discover that the great weight of legal precedent deals with the slow and painful development of developing rules to govern transactions between people, the broken fence, the damaged goods, the contract gone wrong. Liberals seem to have little understanding of the difficulty of securing justice in the common vicissitudes of life.

9. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that I have to try very hard to give liberals credit for concern about the safety and security of average American citizens from enemies foreign and domestic.

10. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, without unnecessarily sacrificing constitutional values.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that I have always been led to believe that liberals believed in a living constitution. So what constitutional value are we protecting this week?

Oh, I forgot. The constitutional right of Al-Qaeda telephone callers to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

Peggy Noonan: Left Lacks Grace

Today, on Friday 13th, America’s Mom Peggy Noonan asks Democrats to ask themselves a question:

Why are we producing so many adherents who defy the old liberal virtues of free and open inquiry, free and open speech? Why are we producing so many bullies? And dim dullard ones, at that.

She produces as evidence four anti-free-speech events of the last ten days:

1. The silencing of Jim Gilchrist, immigration activist, at Columbia University. Gilchrist is head of the Minutemen, a group that patrols the Mexican border.
   
2. The outrage over the comments on CBS News’ “Free Speech” segment by the father of a boy killed at Columbine High School. He said
   “For over two generations the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum... We teach there are no moral absolutes, no right or wrong, and I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.”
   
3. Barbra Streisand’s outburst against a man who voiced an objection to her anti-Bush segment at her Madison Square Garden concert.
   
4. Anti-gun Rosie O’Donnell’s tirade against a mom who said that women have a right to defend themselves.
   

Peggy Noonan speculates that there seems to be missing from the left in America “an element of grace” that accepts that disagreement is part of the fabric.

What also seems missing is the courage to ask a question. Conservatives these days are asking themselves very many questions, but I wonder if the left could tolerate asking itself even a few.

Well, yes. Because when you start asking questions you have to accept the risk that you may not like the answer.

Progessives Tire of White Working Class

In Britain as in the United States the progressives have gone sour on the white working class. Writes Andrew Gimson.

Our rulers do not think of themselves as being in the slightest bit prejudiced. They know they are the most open-minded people since records began.

But when it comes to the white working class, they have gone on the bigger and better things. Like race.

The white working class is an inconvenient relic, and the sooner it ceases to exist, the better. That is the underlying assumption of our political establishment. The white working class is not just expected to seek salvation by acquiring bourgeois virtues: it is blamed for failing to acquire those virtues more quickly.

It sounds like the United States where Democrats got impatient with the white blue collar class during the school busing crisis a generation ago. Remember? The Southies of South Boston wanted to keep their children going to school in their Irish neighborhood. But the judges and the politicians had other ideas.

The result is that the working class in Britain is expected to keep voting for Labour just as they always have for a century, but they are beginning to flirt with the right-wing BNP. Here in the United States the white ethnics have been slowly leaving the Democrats for a generation.

In Britain, the Conservative Party is self-consciously moving to gain the votes of the moderate educated metropolitan vote and seem to be ignoring the working class completely. In the United States, the Republicans seem to be doing better.

Let us not be patronising. But the problem is that the white working class has more or less sold its soul to the welfare state. A century ago the white working class proudly belonged to labor unions and friendly societies and drinking clubs that they had built with their own hands. Today they get all their social safety net from the government. And it shows.

Sometime soon, some politician is going to figure out how to win the votes and the enthusiasm of the white working/blue collar class. Why shouldn’t it be a conservative?

Federal Deficit Cut in Half

Of course Democrats are not impressed, according to Stephen Dinan. They look at the budget surplus inherited by President Bush’s administration and see nothing but failure.

"No amount of Republican Party spin can obscure the bottom line: The Bush administration and congressional Republicans inherited a projected 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion in 2001, and in just 70 months turned that surplus into a projected deficit of $4 trillion," said House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat.

It’s their right to ignore the recession and the tech crash and imagine that President Clinton gave the economy to President Bush in fine fettle.

But it certainly is impressive that, despite the huge increases in federal spending over the last six years, and despite the huge tax rate decreases, and despite the three years of economic flatline after the NASDAQ took its tumble we are back to a federal deficit of 1.9 percent of GDP.

Of course the real story on the federal budget is the $10 trillion unfunded deficit on Social Security and the $40 trillion unfunded deficit on Medicare. The smart assumption to make is that the government will renege on its promises. That is going to cause a lot of suffering.

But meanwhile President Bush can savor a small victory.

"We have now achieved our goal of cutting the federal budget deficit in half and we've done it three years ahead of schedule," the president said, crediting his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts with spurring economic growth and thus more tax revenue.

As he should, of course, he doesn’t take all the credit. It’s not just his fiscal policies but “the hard work of the American people” that did the trick.

Don’t forget supply-side economics, either. That’s the idea that when you reduce marginal tax rates you speed up the economy.

Dems Deathbed Conversion to Missile Defense

Twenty years ago Democrats poured scorn on President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. They called it Star Wars.

In the Clinton Administration Democrats forced a slowdown in missile defense research and development.

According to WorldNetDaily,

RNC research notes that during the Bush administration, Democrats have voted against missile defense nine times, while Chairman Mehlman notes, 'It is simply not credible that the same Democrats who've opposed missile defense for decades have in the month before the election discovered North Korea's long-range missile capability.'

And according to Sheryl Gay Sholberg in The New York Times missile defense is starting to get traction on the campaign trail.

Democrats, including [Senate candidate] McGavick’s opponent, Senator Maria Cantwell [D-WA], say they would support a missile defense program if one were proven effective.

So that’s all right.. After twenty years of opposition to missile defense research and development, Democrats now say they would support a system if it “were proven effective.”

It all reminds me of the two attitudes that Scientic American magazine used to have towards defense programs. It was opposed to effective systems on the grounds that they would be destabilizing. And it was opposed to ineffective programs on the ground that they were a waste of money.

And Democrats wonder why serious people don’t take them seriously.

Has Bush "Squandered the Political Authority of a Great Country?"

It used to be, writes Alice Miles in The Times, that “the world would wait to hear what the president of the United States had to say” about a crisis event like the North Korean nuclear test. But not any longer.

This time, when President Bush intoned gravely about “a threat to international peace and security” she found herself saying “oh sod off.” As if “the world would care.”

[I]t reveals, I think, a sad truth: the 43rd President of the United States of America has squandered the political authority of a great country.

That is certainly one way of looking at it. And it is true that the transnational elite has closed ranks remarkly against George W. Bush. But that might say more about them than about President Bush.

It might be more correct to say that the European elite picked up on the meme developed by the Democrats during and after the 2000 election: first that Bush was a boob, and second that he was illegitimate, selected not elected.

It then became convenient for the unpopular German Chancellor Schroeder and the ineffective French President Chirac to run anti-American campaigns for reelection. They could afford to. The United States had won the cold war for them a decade earlier and they no longer needed the military strength of the Yanks to push back the evil empire of the Soviet Union.

The question always returns to this. What do you think about the prospect of a thug dictatorship with nuclear weapons having control of all the oil in the Middle East? That is the strategic possibility that every US President must fight to prevent.

It is not something that the elites of New York and Europe have to worry their heads about. Not yet.

Put North Korea on China's Back

So the North Koreans either did or did not successfully explode a nuclear device last weekend. Or it fizzled. Or it was all a big hoax. What’s the point?

The point seems to be that if you have nuclear weapons then people can’t mess with you.

That was the lesson that Saddam Hussein learned in the retreat from Kuwait in 1991. The only mistake he made, he realized, was not getting his nuclear weapons before invading Kuwait.

Of course, it’s laughable that a basket case like North Korea should imagine that it can solve any of its problems with nuclear weapons. When you implode, you implode. Nuclear weapons have nothing to do with it. The lands of the Former Soviet Union are testament to that.

And the word on North Korea is that the implosion will come soon, as we pointed out recently.

Meanwhile the strategy of the United States should be to put the monkey on China’s back.

You ChiComs wanna have Japan go nuclear? You wanna have South Korea go nuclear? Go right ahead, pal. Let Kim Jong Il fire up his rockets and his nuclear weapons.

How To Make Our Schools Safe

What do we do about the school shootings? Ban handguns? Make schools into secure zones like airports? What do you think?

Dave Kopel takes a look at the situation in NRO. He proposes a menu of common-sense protection for our children.

To start with, don’t put the perpetrator’s face on magazine covers. We don’t want them to achieve celebrity with their evil deeds.

Then there must be active defense. The cluelessness of Columbine where police and SWAT teams sat outside while the killers killed inside has fortunately been fixed.

Now, the standard police response to an “active shooter” is immediate counter-action. For example, at a March 2001 attack on Santana High School in Santee, California, the police response was immediate, and saved lives. It was the first time ever that a school shooting had been met with prompt police counter-action.

Are anti-bullying programs the answer? Hard to tell, but one thing that works is for students to come forward and warn school authorities about developing problems. It’s the old truth about policing. It can do nothing without informants.

It’s important for would-be assailants to understand that schools are not soft targets. That’s why gun-free zones are not a good idea.
But it is a good idea for assailants to fear that someone at the school may be carrying a weapon.

But what about self-defense training for students? Shooting incidents are not like muggings. Shooters are interested in killing people. So potential victims can best help themselves by taking out a shooter before he gets control of a situation.

Self-defense training also teaches that it is dangerous to let a criminal take control of your surroundings; even if a criminal is pointing a gun at you, you are probably better off to try running away, than to let him put you in a car where he can transport you to an isolated location.

But some people are outraged by self-defense proposals.

[To them] the idea that teachers and students should be encouraged to learn active resistance is outrageous.



Our nation has too many people who are not only unwilling to learn how to protect themselves, but who are also determined to prevent innocent third persons from practicing active defense. A person has the right to choose to be a pacifist, but it is wrong to force everyone else to act like a pacifist. It is the policies of the pacifist-aggressives which have turned American schools into safe zones for mass murderers.



School shootings are the ultimate form of bullying, and long experience shows that the more likely and more effective the resistance, the less the bullying.

You can see the tenor of Kopel’s ideas. There is no substitute for people capable and willing to defend themselves from aggression.

$20 Tickets at the Met

Earth to Metropolitan Opera! Your audience is dying off!

Seriously though, the new general director at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera is perfectly aware of that. So Peter Gelb is handing out $20 tickets. $20 for a night at the Metropolitan Opera. Here’s how Robin Pogrebin describes the offer.

Last week, the opera house announced that it would sell 200 seats for every weeknight performance for just $20 each. Tickets for these seats, which would normally sell for $100, go on sale two hours before curtain time. On Tuesday, the day of the announcement, 160 tickets were sold in 20 minutes. The remaining 40 were sold out by 7:10 p.m.

Here in Seattle, we wish the Metropolitan well. The general director of Seattle Opera, Speight Jenkins,
is indefatigable in working to build the audience. For the last 20 years he has done anything, everything to sell opera to Seattle.

You can see the results in the flesh on any night at the newly refurbished McCaw Hall. The audience may be dying off at the Met, but not in Seattle. There are a lot of young things parading around wearing dresses off the shoulder. Which is as it should be.

But every time my eyes rest lightly on one of these young things, I thank Speight. He’s the guy, ably assisted by the people at Seattle Opera, that did the heavy lifting.

Metropolitan Opera, please copy.

Big Families: Here They Come

Give this trend another year, and it will be on the cover of Time.

You know what I’m talking about: the trend towards large families.

Right now, the attitude seems to be: Why not? We can afford it, so why not? The threat of “overpopulation” is over, so why not? Our kids are a lot of fun, so why not?

Not to mention this: We’ve got a gigantic McMansion, so why not?

Of course, parents of big families still encounter a lot of judgmentalism, according to David Crary. And that is wrong. Bonny Clark, mother of three, was pregnant with twins.

"There were a lot of unwelcome comments, like, 'If I had three kids and was having twins, I'd kill myself,'" Mrs. Clark said.

You and I, tolerant non-judgmentalists, may be excused if we are shocked by the mean-spirited attitude behind such judgmentalism. And to think that they were probably made by women!

Mrs. Bennett, mother of five with a sixth on the way,

says the main reaction she gets from mothers with fewer children is, "How do you do it?"



"My answer is I don't think about it too much," she said. "You do what you need to do, and you have to just let go of a few things. Don't expect things to be perfect every day."

Still, you’d think she’d stop at five, in deference to that other Mrs. Bennet, mother of Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia.

Kudlow on Hastert

Never mind about Denny Hastert’s handling of the Foley incident, writes Larry Kudlow, although his performance was bad enough. It’s the failure on the big things that really demand that he should go.

I would describe Mr. Hastert's leadership of the House in general as negligent.

...

Rather than a winning message of economic growth, a strong defense and optimism for the future, Mr. Hastert has given us silence.

...

Tax reform has gone by the wayside. So has spending reform. So has free trade. So has true immigration reform.

So what’s the point of Denny Hastert?

Maybe there are only a few things that Congress can do. But there is always virtue in talking about what we want to do. That’s because you can’t change anything until you have ventilated it in the public square, boldly and courageously put your ideas out and pushed and pushed and pushed.

The trouble about the Bush/Hastert years is that there has been no contest in the public square, no daily effort to change the conversation in America.

Maybe it’s because the Bush team has been too focused on the war on terror. Maybe it’s because they have decided they can win elections just by getting the base out. But someone needs to be out talking to the great moderate middle, talking conservative ideas and trying to win them over with ideas that make sense for them and their families.

Because America’s best days are yet to come. And Americans need to know it.

Feeding the Underclass in Britain

Last week in Brixton, an eternally rough section of London, two teenagers were shot as they waited in line at McDonalds, according to the BBC. This week it is the turn of the pundits to tell us what it all means.

In the London Spectator Alistair Heath writes about “The Mean Streets of Britain,” the violent, lawless, and workless inhabitants of the inner cities. But the Brits seem to be resigned to it.

[I]t no longer shocks a public numbed by the regularity of it all, and disillusioned by the apparent powerlessness of the authorities to do anything about it.

And the levels of pathology are climbing into the stratosphere.

In Calton, a district of east Glasgow which epitomises the worst of underclass Britain, a boy born today can expect to live just 53.9 years, at least three decades less than someone born in London’s Kensington.

...

Calton residents are seven times more likely to die a drugs-related death than the rest of the country, 61 per cent have no qualifications and 37 per cent of children grow up in workless households. Around 57 per cent of adults do not work — and with only 8 per cent registered as unemployed, most are clearly content to live on benefits.

The astonishing thing is the level of apathy over the manifest failings of the welfare state. What do you mean, “57 percent of adults do not work?” It seems that the cultural power of the liberal elite in Britain, as here, short-circuits any anger over this sort of outrage.

The thing is, we know what to do.

The problems of the underclass, while monumental, are not intractable, but would require extraordinary political will to put right, including a market-led revolution in education, a dramatic reform in welfare to make work pay, the removal of the incentives for family breakdown, a much tougher ‘broken windows’ strategy for policing, and a changed cultural message that promotes decency and respect.

Why don’t we do something? It is because anyone proposing to do something gets shot down as a racist or a fascist by the liberal elite.

So the misery of the underclass will have to get deeper.

But let us be clear. If this sort of outrage were occurring in the nineteenth century, you know, when the evil bourgeoisie was in charge, the heavens would be ringing with the bellows of outrage from our progressive friends.

It's All About Iran

I’ve said again and again that if you want to understand what the United States is doing fumbling around in Iraq, the answer is “Iran.”

As a world power the United States does not intend to allow another power to dominate the Middle East and its oil.

There will come a time when the Middle East and its oil will not be worth a pitcher of warm spit, but that time is not yet.

And so the United States has deployed its armed forces to prevent Iran from achieving its strategic aim: to destroy Israel and dominate the Middle East. Here is what Amir Taheri has to say, reviewing a book by former Iranian President Rafsanjani.

Rafsanjani seems to be planning to get control of the Iranian Assembly of Experts.

[H]e hopes to lead an anti-Ahmadinejad coalition in next December's elections for the Assembly of Experts - the body that can choose or dismiss the "Supreme Guide," the Islamic Republic's true leader.

Nobody would care about elections in a fairly poor nation of 60 million in the Middle East except for two things.

The first is that the Islamic Republic has had a secret nuclear program for almost two decades while taking the International Atomic Energy Agency for a ride. The second is that the leaders of the Islamic Republic - who felt no discomfort in discussing the use of nuclear warheads and other weapons of mass destruction two decades ago - don't seem to have abandoned their strategy for reshaping the Middle East.

And that is why the United States will be in a convenient strategic position if its troops are in Iraq when Iran goes nuclear. It makes it rather difficult for Iran to rumble across Mesopotamia and the Arabian desert and take control.

How About the 2008 Election?

Enough of the Foley kerfuffle. Let’s talk presidential politics for 2008 and the book The Way to Win by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris.

The Wall Street Journal’s John H. Fund takes a look at their book, and finds there is a lot to think about. Helperin and Harris, as Old Media mastodons, reconize that the

Old Media of TV networks and prestige publications now suffer from "fading power and diminishing options." The New Media
of cable news and the Internet are creating a
"Freak Show," they say, stripping away the
restraints and minor courtesies that used to govern campaigns and public debate.

And at the center of the freak show is good old Matt Drudge ("salacious, reckless, superficial and unfair") whose site possesses “singular power” that any candidate ignores at his peril.

One of the powers of Matt Drudge is that all the Old Media read him.

Of course, there are some of us that believe that if the New Media is a “freak show” then the Old Media is a drugged-out wreck, fueled by privilege and access and outraged at the energy and the talent of the young-uns who seem to operate on a wing and a prayer instead of the proper institutional structure of multi-level editing and fact-checking.

But the 2008 election will be quite a spectacle.

Do The Right Thing

I agree with Tony Blankley. Speaker Hastert should resign over the Foley matter. Because it’s the right thing to do.

Yes, it’s true that the real person to blame is resigned Rep. Foley. And it is true that Speaker Hastert is not Foley’s keeper. And it is true that the congressional pages are not exactly children. But then they are not exactly adults.

And I frankly dislike the bureaucratic gamesmanship we have been hearing for the last few days, with people proposing the exact bureaucratic procedure that House Republicans should have followed in protecting the congressional pages.

It is never going to be possible to devise the perfect bureaucratic procedure to “keep our pages safe.”

On the other hand, as some of the French soixante-huitards, the radicals of 1968, discovered in the end: what matters is process, the dull, boring middle class due process of democratic politics. And the crowning glory of the west is its democratic process, people acting in good faith and insisting that their side of the political divide strives to act in good faith no matter the provocation.

The important thing is to do the right thing. Denny Hastert should resign.

Rumsfeld vs. Rice on Iraq

We’re going to win in Iraq, says President Bush. But what does that mean?

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Rice have been contesting just that question, writes Rich Lowry.

[There] was a constant tension between Rice and Rumsfeld. She wanted to do more; he wanted to do less.

That is what comes out in Bob Woodward’s new book State of Denial.

According to Woodward, "Rumsfeld said strongly and repeatedly, the Iraqis need to be given the chance to fail and fall on their faces, and only then would they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and come up with solutions."

But Rice wanted to build “a classic counterinsurgency operation,” clearing out the insurgents and presenting Iraq on a platter to the new government.

For my part, I go with Rumsfeld. Every government must earn the right to hold a monopoly of force within its borders. Usually that means it must fight and win a civil war, or at least fight some sort of war.

The United States government earned the right to govern its territory by force of arms against the British and then against the South. The British government is the direct descendant of the power plays after its civil war in the seventeenth century.

And then there were the wars of German unification. Prussia earned the right to head a unified Germany by beating in war first the Austrians and then the French.

Right now, the Iraqi government is clearly a puppet of the United States. It must earn the right, by force of arms, to rule the territory of Iraq.

If “We” win in Iraq, it means nothing. The government of Iraq must win. Until then, nothing has been won.

Page Storm Reaches Hurricane Force

Could Republicans lose control of Congress over an instant message? If they do, it would certainly be the moment at which the internet went prime time.

And according to Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny in The New York Times, the issue is resonating with voters. Said Rep Ray LaHood (R-IL):

“The first three questions I was asked when I arrived in Peoria,” he said, “were not about immigration, the war or taxes. It was, ‘What are you going to do about the page program?’”

It’s a beautiful scandal for Democrats, because when gays are concerned its heads we win and tails you lose. If Republicans had publicized and reprimanded Rep. Foley for inappropriate contact with congressional pages before last Friday when ABC News publicized the inappropriate IM conversations that Foley had with a congressional page, then they would have been roundly criticized as the homophobe party.

Now they are being criticized for being soft on child molesters.

Well, right or wrong, there is a higher standard of behavior for Republicans in public life. To adapt the words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair: they have to be whiter than white.

And that’s how it ought to be. If House Republican leaders knew about inappropriate behavior and did nothing about it then they should resign.

Never mind the if, ands, and buts.

Speaker Denny Hastert said: “Would have, could have, should have.”

But that’s not good enough. Not good enough for Republicans.

Why Democrats Prefer Scandal to SoSec Reform

You gotta admit it. The Democrats know how to expose and coordinate embarrassing revelations about Republicans. Right now we have the Foley page e-mail scandal, the new Woodward book scandal, and the NIE leak on Iraq all going full bore and it is still four weeks till the election.

But even a good liberal wonders what it is all for.

In the Washington Post Sebastian Molloy wonders what happened to the Democrats’ principles.

Most Democrats in Congress seem bereft of ideas or the courage to stand up for them. They clearly want power, but they have no principles to guide their use of it.

They are opposed to the Bush Administration’s policies on terror but frightened to vote against them. And then there is Social Security.

A conservative group circulated a petition calling for bipartisan talks on Social Security, with all potential solutions to be part of the discussion. Rather than embracing this eminently sane idea, top Democrats in Congress loudly slammed the door on it.

I have a theory about this. Democrats really don’t want a solution on Social Security. If you privatize Social Security then Democratic voters don’t have to look to the political system for financial support. They will be able to support themselves.

For a cruder look at how this works, read Dick Morris and Eileen McGann on President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Chavez understands that his power depends on keeping the poor grateful for his handouts.

He buys popularity in Venezuela by distributing massive amounts of oil revenues to the poor. While careful to keep them in poverty by repelling business and deterring foreign investment, he uses his petrol wealth to distribute free food and to pay for imported Cuban doctors in the barrios.

What would be the point of helping the poor become proud and self-sufficient? Much better keep them grateful and dependent.