It's a Conservative not a Republican Problem

A lot of conservatives have been blaming the feckless Republican Congress for the loss last November, writes Charles R. Kesler.  For them the election defeat was “a rejection of a party that had strayed too far from the conservative path.” 

Not so fast, says Kesler.  If only it were true that all Republicans needed to do was to swing in line with conservative ideas and reap a gratifying majority!  On the contrary, conservative ideas since the end of the Cold War have been a mish-mash.

Upward floated the balloons of civil society conservatism... "third wave" conservatism (technology to the rescue), and national greatness conservatism (McCain was an early enthusiast)... Libertarianism, emboldened by socialism’s pell-mell retreat, enjoyed its moment, too, though less than one might have expected.

Meanwhile the twenty-year Reagan boom has allowed the government to offer tax cuts and spending increases at the same time.  There is no automatic conservative majority today.  And President Bush’s ad-hoc adventure in Iraq does not exactly inspire confidence in the heartland.

It’s time for conservatives to admit the need to rethink and clarify their own precepts. To be sure, there are verities to which the wise and good may always repair, and conservatism is distinguished by its reverence for them. But these must be relearned in every generation, restated in the idiom of life, and applied to new circumstances. The challenge is as exhilarating as it is serious. Far from being a cause for despair, conservatism’s perplexities may contribute to making this the most illuminating political season in 30 years.

Let us call the era just past the Reagan Era.  It was a glorious summer and glorious things were done for America and for the world.  Now it’s time to retreat to winter quarters, to think and to plan.

Don’t worry.  The problems are still going to be there 5 years, 10 years from now.  That’s because our liberal friends only know how to spend and elect, privilege and subsidize.  Every now and again they run out of money.  That’s when the American people call for conservatives to come in and sort things out.

Here Comes The Eco-industrial Complex

You have to feel for the climate change enthusiasts. If George W. Bush can spend $100 billion a year on his war, why shouldn’t they have some cash to subsidize vital carbon reduction programs, like building wind farms and carbon-neutral switchgrass processing plants?

And if Bush can do it with taxpayers’ money, why not the venture socialists?

Yes, Virginia. There are venture capitalists and there are venture socialists. And you know the difference.

Right now the venture socialists—ok, environmentalists—are busily co-opting Big Business into an eco-industrial complex, according to Stephen Milloy. Here’s how it works.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, it has been increasingly difficult for the Left to advance its social agenda through the public political process. This has certainly been true on environmental issues, in general, and global warming, in particular.

So the lefties have learned to use other methods to advance their agenda. One method is by pressure campaigns against big corporations. And it works. Now that General Electric Co. has teamed up with environmental activists to “champion global-warming regulation” it has found it much easier to do its PCB cleanup in the Hudson River.

Just this week the so-called U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) announced its presence and called for "the federal government to quickly enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions." USCAP members include: Alcoa, BP America , Caterpillar Inc., Duke Energy, DuPont, Environmental Defense, FPL Group, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, Natural Resources Defense Council, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, PG&E Corp., PNM Resources, World Resources Institute.

As usual, the capitalists are selling us out. They don’t care. Business is business. After all, they won’t be spending their money.

French Candidate Holds Rally in London

Imagine, if you can, the next Republican candidate for the presidency campaigning in Toronto.

That is about what French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy just did. He held a campaign rally in Billingsgate fish market in London, England.

Why on earth would he do that? Well, how about 300,000 French people living and working in London?

Anyway, the French expats loved it. According to Anthony Browne

Police struggled to control the crowd of hundreds of French citizens living in Britain as they attempted to see the dynamic Interior Minister, who is favourite to succeed President Chirac.

That was not all.  Read this:

Addressing 2,000 cheering expatriates at the old Billingsgate fish market, Mr Sarkozy spelt out his vision of a modern France no longer trapped in the past. The audience of students and business people shouted “Sarko!”, waved the Tricolour, and sang La Marseillaise as video screens declared: “Together, everything is possible.” They then broke out into Happy Birthday — in English — in tribute to the centre-right candidate’s 52nd birthday on Sunday.

Yes, the French in London are not the French we love to hate.  We took a look at them a while back on Road to the Middle Class. Nice chaps.

The Party of Resentment

As you may know by now, Hillary Clinton “really resents” that Bush’s War may not be over by January 2009, the month of her inaugural.

Columnist and neo-con son John Podhoretz duly took note.

It’s rare to hear questions about difficult policies discussed in terms of personal resentments, but perhaps this is one of the areas where Hillary Clinton will blaze a new presidential trail.

He should be careful.  Hillary Clinton may not be the smartest woman in the world, but she has certainly used her womanhood to good effect in her political career, most notably when Senate candidate Rick Lazio made the fatal mistake of invading her “personal space” during a campaign debate.

Everyone understands that Hillary Clinton is probably going to win the presidential election in 2008 because she will bring millions of non-voting single women to the polls.

And what do you suppose is something that single women really connect with?  You got it.  Resentment.  That Hillary.  She is some smart woman.

And it is not just the non-voting single woman that is into resentment.  In a review of the monstrous Duke Rape case, Thomas Sowell chides his fellow African Americans.

The larger tragedy is what this case revealed about the degeneration of our times and the hollowness of so many people in "responsible" positions in the media, in academia, and among those blacks so consumed by racial resentments and thirst for revenge that they are prepared to lash out at individuals who have done nothing to them and are guilty of no crime against anybody.

Yes. Resentment.  “Anger felt as a result of a real or imagined wrong done.”  Our liberal friends have a more sophisticated word.  “Passive-aggressive.” That’s what they call it.

Now we are getting somewhere.  Isn’t it really the case that the entire Democratic Party is the party of resentment?  Isn’t the primary emotion of your average bump-on-a-log American nothing more than resentment? 

Here’s how it works. Don’t ever ask your average bump-on-a-log Democrat to take responsibility for anything.  They got their rights, after all.  But don’t, whatever you do, ever forget to send that check every month.  Otherwise they might resent it.  But they certainly won’t forget to vote for a Democrat.

Here’s another word definition.  Democratic politician.  One who knows how to stir up resentment among the voters.

The Lessons of the Michigan Civil Rights Victory

In Michigan last November the voters spoke loudly on the question of race, affirmative action, and “diversity.”  They voted against it.  Ward Connerly gives us a chance to review the state of the fight against race preferences. There are ten points that need to be made, he argues:

1. Just because the Supreme Court votes against “diversity” it doesn’t mean that the fight is over.
2. Self government means that we must listen to “the collective wisdom of the people.”  And they voted against the “exhortations of nearly every component of the Michigan establishment — social, civic, political, and business.”
3. The race industry is now reduced to persuading white women to support affirmative action.  It has now failed in Michigan, California, and Washington State.
4. Americans now believe that affirmative action equals race preferences.
5. Even “larger-than-life” figures like Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, and Barack Obama can’t persuade Americans to support race preferences.
6. The term “ minority” has ceased to have anything to do with numbers.  It just means “social and economic disadvantage.”
7. However nobly it began, “affirmative action is viewed as an entitlement for ‘women and minorities,’ not only to ‘level the playing field’ but to achieve the amorphous objective of ‘diversity.’”
8. The race preference advocates are amazingly disciplined.  It amounts to a “national ‘diversity’ industry.”
9. Republicans who run away from race are despicable.
10. The victory in Michigan is big.

Connerly now proposes that it is time to deliver the coup de grace on affirmative action.  He proposed a “Super Tuesday for Equality” election in November 2008 with a civil rights initiative in several states at once.

PHP Arrays and XML-RPC

Are you frustrated by the XML-RPC technology?  Having trouble figuring how to get a hold of items after they have been transmitted over XML?  So was I.  Now I think I have figured it out.

Blog Ping

Let’s look first of all at a weblog update call using XMLRPC implementation by Keith Devens. You are going to send a ping to weblogs.com.

First, you start with an array:

$params = array(XMLRPC_prepare("my Blog"),XMLRPC_prepare("http://myblog.com/"));

Then you send it off.

$method = "weblogUpdates.ping";

$result = XMLRPC_request( "rpc.weblogs.com", "/RPC2", $method, $params );

When you pack it into the XML file it looks like this.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<methodCall>

    <methodName>examples.getStateName</methodName>

    <params>

      <param>

        <value>

          <string>My Blog</string>

        </value>

      </param>

      <param>

        <value>

          <string>http://myblog.com</string>

        </value>

      </param>

    </params>

</methodCall>

When you get it back from XML into PHP you will want to look at it in a PHP array. Suppose you get the parameters like this:

$xmlrpc_request = XMLRPC_parse($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);
$params = XMLRPC_getParams($xmlrpc_request);

Now you want to know how to get your three parameters. You do it like this:

$blogName = $params[0];

$blogURL = $params[1]

It’s that simple.

Blog Post

OK. Now let’s look at doing a blog post using the metaWebLog API. Now we have to put together a struct. What then?

A struct looks like this in PHP.

$struct = array (

’title’ => ’Blog Title’,

’description’ => ’Blog Post Content’);

When it gets to XML it looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<methodCall>

  <methodName>metaWeblog.newPost</methodName>

  <params>

    <param>

      <value>

        <string>id</string>

      </value>

    </param>

    <param>

      <value>

        <string>user</string>

      </value>

    </param>

    <param>

      <value>

        <string>pass</string>

      </value>

    </param>

    <param>

      <value>

        <struct>

          <member>

            <name>description</name>

            <value>

              <string>Blog Post Content</string>

            </value>

          </member>

          <member>

            <name>title</name>

            <value>

              <string>Blog Title</string>

            </value>

          </member>

        </struct>

      </value>

    </param>

  </params>

</methodCall>

You then get it out of the XML file like this:

$xmlrpc_request = XMLRPC_parse($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);

$struct = XMLRPC_getParams($xmlrpc_request);

How to get the values? Like this:

$title = $struct[’title’];

$content = $struct[’description’];

And that’s it.

The Rule of the Idiots

Suppose that you applied for health insurance and the insurance company said that they wouldn’t insure you because of some pre-existing condition. What should you do?

1. Call your congressman to write a law forcing all insurance companies to insure you.
2. Find an insurance company that will insure you anyway.

As Arnold Kling writes, the two choices represent the market approach to life or the philosopher king approach. Plato vs. Milton Friedman.

One solution, that might be traced to the expression "philosopher-king" associated with Plato, is to hand the reins of government to the best and the brightest. Since the late 19th-century, the Progressive Movement in American politics has championed this approach. The Progressive vision, which [Progressive Brad] DeLong embraces, is to channel brains and technical know-how through government in order to improve people’s lives.

The other approach is the Milton Friedman way. It is the wayof limiting the power that other people have over us, with constitutions andmarkets.

Friedman’s insight is that a market limits the power thatothers have over us; conversely, limiting the power that others have over usallows us to have markets.

Progressive DeLong has a saying, according to Kling: “Why oh Why Are We Ruled by These Idiots?” It’s a good point. But what is the best way to avoid such misery? Find bright, intelligent, wise people to rule over us, or limit the power of any person to rule over us?

That, of course is the great Question of our time and of every time.

A "Civ-Con" Is Born

It must be a measure of the breadth and depth of the American conservative movement that it has such a complex taxonomy.  There are, as John Fonte writes:

economic conservatives, social conservatives, national-defense conservatives, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, and even “crunchy” conservatives or “crunchy cons.”

But is that really enough? There is no better time to think through and revise the organization of the fighting forces than after electoral defeat.  And Fonte wants to try a new label.  

If I had to choose from the labels above, national-defense conservative would come the closest. But it doesn’t quite fit. So let me try a new label. I am a civic conservative, a “civ-con.”

Yes but what is a  “civ-con?”

At the level of highest principle civic conservatism emphasizes the Unum in E Pluribus Unum and puts American national cohesion over any group interest.

In other words it puts the national identity of the United States as the primary group identification.  And that means a certain approach to politics.

In terms of contemporary policy, civic conservatism emphasizes the following principles: the equality of American citizenship; the learning of America’s history and values, properly understood; the imperative of assimilating immigrants patriotically into the American way of life (what we proudly used to call Americanization); and the indivisibility of American sovereignty.

Who could argue with that?  Well, plenty of people.  Our liberal friends, for example. 

Liberals believe that the “traditionally marginalized” deserve special privileges; they subsume American history and values beneath a post-nationalist narrative about a one-world government; they don’t believe in an American way of life, and they don’t believe in American sovereignty.

Ordinary Americans do believe all these things.  A conservative movement that presented a soaring civic-conservatism to Americans could earn and could deserve their political support.

Why Tolerance Is Not Enough For Gays

Ordinary people may wonder at the energy with which gays advocate for “gay marriage” and “gay adoption.” Surely, isn’t tolerance enough?

Philosopher Roger Scruton provides the answer.  The problem with tolerance is that is still regards the heterosexual as normal and the homosexual as abnormal.

[T]his attitude does not satisfy the activists. For to tolerate is to disapprove. It is only when conduct offends you that you need to exercise your toleration, and the activists want people to treat homosexuality as normal.

For homosexuality to consider itself normal, it must acquire the same trappings as heterosexuality: partner benefits, marriage, adoption, inheritance. But God is not mocked, as they say.

The propaganda that has tried to rewrite heterosexuality as an “orientation” is really an attempt to persuade us to overlook the real truth about sexual union, which is that it is, in its normal form, the way in which one generation gives way to the next.

You can say that sexuality is just an “orientation” as much as you like, and you can bully people into agreeing with you.  But alas, it doesn’t make it so.

Middle-Class Secret of Success

Democrats like Senator Jim Webb claim that the middle class is in crisis. In his “barn-burner” of a speech responding to President Bush he claimed:

Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world. Medical costs have skyrocketed. College tuition rates are off the charts. Our manufacturing base is being dismantled and sent overseas. Good American jobs are being sent along with them.

In short, the middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

Well, is Jim Webb right?  Money columnist Liz Pulliam takes a look.  Are people “helpless pawns in a game that’s rigged against them” as Jim Webb claims?  Or could it be that they are screwed because it’s their “Own Damned Fault?”

I believe a middle-class life is still possible for most people. But you have to be smarter, more cautious and faster on your feet than ever before. You have to obey some deceptively simple rules. And one thing is certain: Wherever you currently stand on the economic ladder, the surest way to rise is to pull yourself up.

And that sums up the truth in Jim Webb’s diatribe.  We Americans have to be smarter.  We can’t just live a bump-on-a-log life and expect the world to ladle out the gravy.  Sure wages and salaries are low compared to corporate profits.  But then where do higher wages and salaries come from?  Our manufacturing base is being dismantled.  But Americans now work in front of computers, not in front of steel furnaces.

It’s easy to rail about the effects of globalization in barn-burning speeches.  But the only way to stay No. 1 is to work harder and smarter than No. 2.

The problem is that some people may think that a chap like Jim Webb can come along and bring back the good old days of lifetime employment and guaranteed pensions. 

Ain’t gonna happen. 

And Jim, here’s a question.  If medical costs have skyrocketed and college tuition rates are off the charts why would that be?

It couldn’t be that health care and college education are both riddled with government subsidy, could it?

Let's Get Serious About Energy

Why do we keep on this chimera of “energy independence?” Ever since the oil shock of the 1970s the government has been talking about it.  And as Charles Krauthammer notes,

By my count, 24 of the 34 State of the Union addresses since the oil embargo of 1973 have proposed solutions to our energy problem.

Now we have another call for energy independence—to switch to ethanol, of all things, ethanol made from switchgrass.

[T]he happy talk displaces any discussion about here-and-now measures that would have a rapid and revolutionary effect on oil consumption and dependence. No one talks about them because they have unhidden costs. Politicians hate unhidden costs.

There are three serious things we can do now: Tax gas. Drill in the Arctic. Go nuclear.

Oh dear.  We wouldn’t want that now, would we?

Now, let’s do a quick analysis to see who is serious about energy in the United States.  Who opposes these serious things?

• Tax gas—conservative oppose
• Drill in the arctic—liberals oppose
• Go nuclear—liberals oppose

So that means that conservatives win in the seriousness stakes, 2 to 1.

No Sex Please, We're Married

Everybody knows that back in the bad old days husbands and wives never saw each other.  And as for sex.  Well, no wonder nobody talked about it.

So now everything is better, right?  Now everybody can talk it out when they have a problem and then get back to bonking.

Not quite, as Lesley Thomas reports.  Even though couples today are intimate, best friends, and all that, they are actually having less sex than they thought.  Or that anyone thought back in the good old days of the sexual revolution.

Esther Perel thinks she has found the anser to the problem.  It is too much intimacy.  In Mating in Captivity she argues that:  

For a pleasing sex life, couples need to create some distance. If the atmosphere in your marital bedroom is to be even vaguely erotic, there must be an edge. Love needs closeness, she says, desire does not. Spend some time apart.

Well, men have been longing for that since—well what do you think the story of the Garden of Eden was about?  Adam and Eve had been getting along famously until Eve took a bite into the apple.  Then they took a look at each other and discovered they were naked.

It’s about time.  This intimacy thing is ruining a whole generation of men.  Men need to be tough and distant, not hanging around the house all the time. 

It’s called the battle of the sexes.  Women want men to be more intimate.  Men want women to be more mysterious.  The trick is to make sure that neither sex gets what it wants.

Ben Stein: They are Lynching My President

There was American Spectator columnist Ben Stein sitting back watching the president’s State of the Union speech. “I thought it was darned good. Realistic, gracious, modest, sensible.”  But as soon as it was over the media started in on it. 

Then, whaam, as soon as the speech was over, ABC was bashing him, telling us how pathetic he was, how irrelevant he was, how weak he was, how unrealistic he was.

NPR even dragged singer Merle Haggard in to say how bad things were.

And suddenly it hit me. The media is staging a coup against Mr. Bush. They cannot impeach him because he hasn’t done anything illegal. But they can endlessly tell us what a loser he is and how out of touch he is[.]

So they are.  But how bad is it really?  After all, every Republican president since Eisenhower—no scratch that, Coolidge—has been painted by the media as a complete nitwit.  So what’s new? 

OK, so we get Hillary as president in 2008.  So what does she do?  A tax increase and universal health insurance?  Let’s see.  Something went really wrong for the Democrats when the Clintons tried that in 1993-94.

Let’s give the media their due.  Bush has been in for six years and it’s time for everyone to say that they would never have voted for him given what they know now.  That’s how democracy works.

But I don’t know that I’d want to be a Democratic president in 2009.  Too many chickens coming home to roost.  And not much lovely money to spend on Democratic voters.

And frankly, if I were the Democrats I’d hold off on universal health insurance.  If the already government-dominated health system were taken completely under the government’s wing, the mess would be indescribable. 

And you never know.  Voters might blame Democrats for the mess.

It's For The Children

Conservatives often complain about the way that liberals always say that every program, every expansion of government they propose is “for the children” writes Jonah Goldberg.  Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is playing the children card this week as she demands the reauthorization of "SCHIP", the State Child Health Insurance Program. 

Goldberg tells us where the children thing got started.  It was Marian Wright Edelman and the Childrens Defense Fund back in the 1970s.  Edelman realized that it would be better to advocate for programs for “the children” rather than for their poor and minority parents.  Then, of course, advocates could turn around and marginalize their opponents.

By making The Children the beneficiaries of welfare rather than the adults, the left could portray any attempt to curb the welfare state as "anti-child."

Goldberg wants to get away from all this cant, particularly since, when the Clintons start to talk about The Children they make partisan points while claiming that they want to take the welfare of children out of “political or ideological debate.”

Children are hugely important. But they shouldn’t be a Trojan horse for policies you can’t sell fair and square. If saying so makes me anti-child, so be it.

But Goldberg is wrong.  Children should be at the center of the debate.  And the conservative line should be: How can you possibly think that yet another underperforming government program—like the failed government education program—could do anything but harm children?

We should turn the words of the liberals back on them.  Take Randi Weingarten, head of the New York teachers’ union.  She likes to hiss that anyone opposed to her just doesn’t care about kids.  Very well.

If you are against curbing teacher tenure and accountability, Ms. Weingarten, it must be because You Don’t Care About Kids.

President Bush's Health Care Proposals

In his State of the Union address, President Bush made several health care proposals. 

First, I propose a standard tax deduction for health insurance that will be like the standard tax deduction for dependents. Families with health insurance will pay no income on [sic] payroll tax — or payroll taxes on $15,000 of their income. Single Americans with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $7,500 of their income.

What exactly does this mean?  Does it mean that everyone will deduct their health insurance costs from personal income tax?  Does it mean that people paying their own health insurance can deduct?  People whose insurance is paid by their employers?  What, exactly?  And is there a cap, so that if an employer pays more than $7,500/$15,000 a year it becomes taxable income to the employee?

According to Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Robert Pear in the New York Times, the idea is that people paying for their own insurance get a tax break and people hitting the limit at work get socked.

The basic concept is that employer-provided health insurance, now treated as a fringe benefit exempt from taxation, would no longer be entirely tax-free. Workers could be taxed if their coverage exceeded limits set by the government. But the government would also offer a new tax deduction for people buying health insurance on their own.

It’s a way of giving money to Republicans and limiting the expansion of before-tax employer-paid health insurance.  Anyway, Democrats say No Way.  For now.

Then the president continues.

There are many other ways that Congress can help. We need to expand Health Savings Accounts. (Applause.) We need to help small businesses through Association Health Plans. (Applause.) We need to reduce costs and medical errors with better information technology. (Applause.) We will encourage price transparency. And to protect good doctors from junk lawsuits, we passing medical liability reform. (Applause.)

Amen to all that.  You wonder how much of it he expects Congress to pass, and how much of it is issue fodder for Republicans down the road, operating on the assumption that the solution to the health care crisis is for more Americans to pay for health care with their own dollars.

President Bush Sets Up Republican Retreat

The key question, after the Republican defeat last November, is how President Bush plans the necessary Republican retreat.  You almost always have to retreat after a defeat in battle, and the quality of that retreat is what sets up the opportunity for a new offensive.

Said the president, as reported by Joseph Curl:

For all of us in this room, there is no higher responsibility than to protect the people of this country from danger. ... To win the war on terror, we must take the fight to the enemy. Both parties and both branches should work in close consultation...

If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides.

But is this the situation?  Robert Haddick suggests what that the United States is really doing in the upcoming “surge” is not securing Baghdad but siding with Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim against Prime Minister al-Maliki and Moqtada al-Sadr.  And also trying to avoid a complete wipe-out of the Sunnis.  Yet the Sunnis are finished:

The Sunni insurgency is near its end. Far too late, the Sunnis now realize that only the Americans can protect them from the Shi’ite ethnic cleansing campaign... But even the Americans can’t help the Sunni Arabs now.

Haddick thinks that we are trying to help the Sunnis as a favor to the Saudis.  But what will be the result of stirring the pot?

Domestically, we can read that the president is setting up some issues on which he can deal with the Democrats—immigration reform and alternative energy, for instance.

But he is also throwing down markers.  His proposal to allow workers that lack company benefits to pay for health insurance with pre-tax dollars is one.  His call for school vouchers is another.  It is significant that Democrats immediately said: no deal.

No doubt.  But you win elections with issues, taking down immovable objects with irresistible forces.  With his markers on health care and education, Bush is setting up the Republican army for the future.

On top of that is the minefield that Bush has laid down on taxes.  With the Alternative Minimum Tax and the expiration of many tax rate cuts passed in the early 2000s, Democrats are going to find themselves in a very nasty place some time in 2009 and 2010.

All in all, not a bad plan for a measured retreat.  Now let us start planning for the next offensive.

Milton Friedman, E-mailer

Back in July 2006 the Wall Street Journal was emailing with Milton Friedman about China and exchange rates and economic policy.  Was he worried, for instance, about the low US savings rate?  No, he wasn’t. 

The right saving rate is whatever satisfies the tastes and preferences of the public in a free and unbiased capital market. Market can adjust to any rate. This is a very complicated question. Present estimates probably understate actual savings because of treatment of capital gains. In any event, the present situation does not raise any problems for the economy.

Did he think China should float the Yuan?  Yes, it should. 

If they do insist on pegging the yuan, they will sooner or later run into a situation in which they are either accumulating an excessive amount of U.S. dollars or they are in debt for an excessive amount of U.S. dollars and they will have a foreign exchange crisis.

And that, as they say, is not good.

Among other recommendations, Friedman recommended that a computer program run the US monetary policy and that the outlook for India was better than China.

China has maintained political and human collectivism while gradually freeing the economic market. This has so far been very successful but is heading for a clash, since economic freedom and political collectivism are not compatible. India maintained political democracy while running a collectivist economy. It is now unwinding the latter, which will strengthen freedom of all kinds, so in that respect it is in a better position than China.

Milton Friedman: Nobel laureate and great American.  Rest in peace.

Behind the NYT Happy Single Women Story

Good show for the New York Times. Their story on single women reported by Sam Roberts—that 51 percent of women are not living with husbands—required them to do a bit of massaging.  They lumped single teenaged girls and women whose husbands are on assigment into the “single” column, reports  NR But all the men of suitable age and educational level insist on sex on the first date, and she’s not interested. I hear from young people who would love to get married and stay married because they don’t want to put their own children through the misery of divorce that they endured.

 Morse says she hears from women “whose husbands abandoned them and their children, for no particular reason.”  And then there are the women.

Some divorced women leave their husbands with huge credit-card debts and three screaming children. I hear from these men all the time. And we’re supposed to just celebrate women’s freedom?

Let’s get real shall we?

Marriage is the most basic form of social cooperation. It is the institution in which children are born and reared.

If the New York Times, its radical experts, and its liberal readers want to replace marriage with something else then it’s about time they told us what that something is.  And I’d say that the burden of proof is on the liberals to prove that their alternative is better.

Some people have suggested that the reason that liberals are so down on marriage is that they all work for the government.  Failed marriages equals more government, so failed marriages means more jobs for liberals.

But I do not believe that liberals think that way.  I think that the liberal distaste for marriage is visceral, instinctive.  And, of course, it is a matter of liberals getting with the Zeitgeist.

UPDATE: In the New York Times Sunday review of the single women story by Kate Zernike they had this to say.

The last 30 years have seen a huge shift in educated women’s attitudes about divorce. Mr. Martin, who has written about women and divorce, said that three decades ago, about 30 percent of women who had graduated from college said it should be harder to get a divorce. Now, about 65 percent say so, he said.

But for less educated women and for men, the numbers have not changed; only 40 percent — a minority — say it should be harder to get a divorce.

That ties into Kay S. Hymowitz’s findings in Marriage and Caste in America, interviewed here by Kathryn Jean Lopez.

But with that big a change in public opinion, someone is going to find themselves in a buzz-saw pretty soon.

What Should We Do About Education?

After a century of government education we still have large swathes of the population that just don’t get education.  Writes Niall Ferguson

In Britain today, fully 40 per cent of adults who left school at the earliest opportunity are now unemployed.

Then he goes on to talk about an “an uneducated and unemployable underclass” that is our biggest problem.

Here we are spending about five percent of GDP on primary and secondary education every year.  Yet millions of children grow up without acquiring basic literacy and numeracy.  What is going on?

But let us step back a bit.  Notice anything about those unemployed and unemployable adults?  They aren’t starving to death.  Let’s put it another way.  Although you and I wouldn’t be caught dead without our 20 years of education and our college degrees, the fact is that education is not a matter of life and death.  People who studiously avoid education are doing fine.

In fact our society actually gives money to people without education and without skills.  On the other hand, it takes money from people with an education.

As economist Ludwig von Mises said half a century ago.  People who are unemployed today are people who can afford not to be working today.

Maybe we need to change the whole structure of incentive in our society.  Here are a few mean-spirited ideas.

• We abolish the public school system but the government (or government contractors) runs free literacy/numeracy clinics for all ages 6 through 60.  Graduates get a certificate of literacy and numeracy.
• Kids under 14 cannot work unless they have a certificate of literacy and numeracy.
• Teenagers who want to quit school and work must pay a 20 percent literacy tax unless they carry a certificate of literacy and numeracy.
• Single parents that show up for government benefits must enroll in a literacy program and demonstrate basic literacy skills before they can get government housing or rent subsidies.  Children are farmed out to foster homes until certificate of literacy and numeracy is obtained by the parent.
• People that apply for unemployment benefits must show a certificate of literacy and numeracy before they get full benefits unless they are enrolled in a literacy/numeracy clinic.
• People can’t get a driver’s license unless they hold a certificate of literacy and numeracy.

And so on.  Nothing special going on here.  It is just that if we believe that literacy and numeracy are essential in the modern age then let us demonstrate how serious we are.

And the way to show our seriousness is to get serious about illiteracy.

Liberals should like this program.  They are all in favor of compulsion.

Collapsing Venezuela. Who Cares?

Now that the price of oil is going down we shall start to see the consequence in the thug dictator nations, natural resource states like Venezuela.   Richard W. Rahn reminds us the dimensions of the corruption in that unhappy country and of the collapse to come. 

It has been widely reported that Mr. Chavez has been increasingly taking control of the oil, telecommunications and energy sectors, as well as the media. What has not been reported is the full extent of the corruption in Venezuela and how this ultimately will destroy the economy.

The financial scandal taking place is far bigger than Enron, and may ultimately even exceed the U.N. "oil-for-food" scandal, the biggest financial disgrace of all time.

Who cares, you might ask?  After all, the Chavez regime isn’t the first to nationalize the economy and go straight down the tubes.  And it won’t be the last.  After all it was in 1758 that Benjamin Franklin wrote in “Poor Richard’s Almanac”  that:

Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.

Maybe a century ago it was possible to dispute that capitalism was the only way to organize economic cooperation.  Maybe fifty years ago it was still just possible as left-wing enthusiasts confidently expected that the Soviet Union would “bury” us.

But not any longer.  We can predict, with as much certainty as is possible in economic affairs, that the consequence of the nationalization and politicization of the Venezuelan economy is that the Venezuelan people are entering a period of economic misery.  And everyone knows how to avoid it.

"Have Your Baghdad Civil War Without Us"

What is the difference between a serious commentator and an unserious one?

Answer:  Occasionally, the serious commentator can be detected in an original thought.  That is why Charles Krauthammer is a serious commentator.

He asks: What’s the point of the “surge?”  The problem is that is does nothing to make the Maliki government get serious about the Shiite militias.  Right now it is protecting the militias and the Iranians.

So let’s do something that really does threaten the Maliki regime.

We say to Maliki: you let us down and we dismantle the Green Zone, leave Baghdad, and let you fend for yourself; we keep the airport and certain strategic bases in the area; we redeploy most of our forces to Kurdistan; we maintain a significant presence in Anbar province where we are having success in our one-front war against al Qaeda and the Baathists. Then we watch. You can have your Baghdad civil war without us. We will be around to pick up the pieces as best we can.

A redeployment like that would reduce US casualties, maybe to zero, but would still maintain US military presence.

Back to the bottom line.  It is embarrassing to Bush and the US that we haven’t built a democracy in Iraq.  But it is only an embarrassment.

The bottom line is that US strategy requires that Iran doesn’t get to be the hegemon of the Middle East.  In that effort Iraq is just a useful pawn. 

Meanwhile, the Iran economy is in the toilet.

A Small Step towards Education Reform

The New York City Department of Education is taking a small step towards reform.  As reported by Ryan Sager, in the future the standard process will: 

Require principals from now on to actually recommend teachers for tenure.

 Up to now, 99 percent of probationary teachers got tenure after three years.  Now the system will take a tiny step to change this.

1. Principals must sign a form positively recommending teachers for tenure
2. Principals will be educated “as to their existing right to refuse to grant tenure.”
3. Start using hard data, like student test scores, in tenure evaluations.

Well maybe.  It could make a little difference.  But don’t expect the principals to change that much.  After all, it’s no money out of their pockets.

The reason that people go to work for the government is that they want the tenure.  They want, after the first probationary months and years, to have absolute job security.

After they get job security then they decide that they should have the money too.

Maybe they should have that right.  Some people are very risk-averse, and they have a right to be.  But not with our kids. And not for hourly wage rates that are equivalent to that earned by technical professionals with no tenure.

Generally, in the real world you must pay for security, especially job security.  It is like insurance.  You pay a premium for the right to allocate risk to the insurance company.

There is a word for a world in which people that have complete job security earn as much or more than people exposed to the full risk of the modern global economy.  Unjust. 

Why Isn't The President Fighting For His Plan?

Radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is fit to be tied about the lackluster media offensive for the president’s plan for a “surge” in Iraq.  The president sent Tony Snow out to talk to the bloggers and the talk-radio shows, he gave his speech, appeared on 60 Minutes, and sent folks out on the weekend talk shows, he notes.

And that was it.

Media offensive over.

 Why aren’t the president and his administration fighting and getting their message out?

If, as the president has argued, and as I believe, the war—in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia and across the globe—is the central calling of our time, then the men and women in charge of winning it need to embrace the very difficult task of persuading a public bombarded every day with a contrary argument.

Every day. In many places. With passion.

So the question is: Are they tired, worn out by five years of brutal opposition?  Or do they judge that the Democrats aren’t going to stop the surge, so why bother?

Or is the fix in?  Are Democrats privately saying: “Go for It, Mr. President,” even as they butter up their anti-war base with withering criticism and non-binding resolutions?

Maybe the Bushies feel that there is no political will to do anything about the War on Terror until the American people get riled up by another atrocity on American soil.

Or maybe they think they are doing fine, and that the media opposition is just a sideshow.

The truth is that we just don’t know.  All we do know is that the Bush administration is not working hard to build public support for the war.

In Defeat: Defiance or Renewal?

WWinston Churchill famously advised: “In victory: magnanimity; in defeat: defiance.”  But in recent history defeat for liberals has usually led to denial, and for the American conservative movement, defeat has often led to renewal, as Rich Lowry writes:

The recent history of conservatism is that in disaster there is renewal. Barry Goldwater’s shellacking in 1964 paved the way for the conservative transformation of the Republican party. Jimmy Carter’s 1976 victory paved the way for Reagan. And Clinton paved the way for Gingrich. Will Nancy Pelosi pave the way for something positive, and if so, whom or what?

And this weekend National Review Institute is hosting a conservative summit,  with lead-off speaker Newt Gingrich.  There will be policy analysis and also late-night partying, er, make that night owl sessions. 

Friday night is ladies night, featuring Mona Charen, Laura Ingraham, Kate O'Beirne, Michelle Malkin, and Kathryn Lopez.”

Saturday night is for the guys, with Mark [Steyn], Jonah Goldberg, and Rob Long.”

Yes.  In 2007, conservatives know how to have fun, even in the depths of defeat.

French Lefties Dodging Wealth Tax

You feel a bit guilty about it.  After all, we conservatives shouldn’t be indulging in German vices like Schadenfreude.  But when the Great Left Hope of France, Segolene Royal, gets in trouble for dodging the French wealth tax by the very capitalist device of incorporating herself and her husband into a real-estate company,  well, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer couple.

Here’s what Sego did, as reported by Peter Allen.

Not only does she part-own three impressive homes with her boyfriend, François Hollande, the Socialist Party chairman, but the couple have set up a real estate company to manage the properties.

This has enabled them to reduce the amount they pay in l’impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF), a notoriously high tax imposed on anyone with assets of more than €500,000.

I know what you are wondering.  What is the French for “limousine liberal?”  Thank you for asking.  It is “gauche caviar.”

Pretty cute, eh?  Lefty with caviar taste. 

Democrats Out Of Ideas

We’ve already looked at the agenda-less Democrats here at Road to the Middle Class, and tut-tutted here and here about the venality of just wanting to control Congress for the power.

We wondered if this could really be so.  Could Democrats really be that cynical?  Yes they could, reports Tony Blankley.   In an interview with the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, Clintonoid and now Congressman Rahm Emanuel said that Democrats would not be pushing any controversial or unpopular measures, like universal health care or Social Security reform in the new Congress.

"The secret for the Democrats, says Emanuel, is to remain the party of reform and change. The country is angry, and it will only get more so as the problems in Iraq deepen... It’s Bush’s war, and as it splinters the structure of GOP power, the Democrats are waiting to pick up the pieces."

Don’t get mad, conservatives; get even.  This is not bad news.  This is good news.  If the Democrats don’t feel that energized about passing important reform legislation, but prefer just to sit there talking about “reform and change” that means they are past their prime.

For sure they will get the presidency when it is  Buggins’ Turn, as the Brits say.  But when they get there Democrats will find that they don’t have a mandate to do anything.  And they will find, as they did after 1992, that if they take a sharp left turn the voters will deal with them just as decisively as they did in 1994.

Honesty is the best policy.  That’s what Mom said. 

Tell you what, Democrats.  Tell us what you stand for. 

Told that the American people didn’t agree with his proposals about tax cuts, Candidate George W. Bush responded that he’d just have to persuade them, and “move” the country.

You could do the same.  Try to persuade us.  It might work.

Michelle Malkin in Baghdad

A few weeks ago conservative columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin took out after the AP for relying on unreliable sources in Iraq.  The upshot was a visit to Baghdad.  Just back from the front, Malkin writes:

I came to Iraq a darkening pessimist about the war, due in large part to my doubts about the compatability of Islam and Western-style democracy, but also as a result of the steady, sensational diet of “grim milestone” and “daily IED count” media coverage that aids the insurgency.

I left Iraq with unexpected hope and resolve.

The question is whether US resolve to “bring security to Iraq, one neighborhood at a time” can bring peace to Iraq short of a real civil war in which the future of the nation is proved by a trial of strength.  Read the peripatetic Spengler as he recommends civil war to the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.

[C]ivil war is the sine qua non of nationhood. Permit me to try to sell you on the merits of having a civil war of your very own. Think of a civil war not as a luxury, but as an investment.

Real nations, as opposed to romantic visions of nations, have no room for irredentists and other rejectionists... Having a civil war is de rigeur. All the right people do it. It shows that the prospective nation has the grit to sort out its own problems.

The problem is that a civil war is much better when you can do it yourself with a minimum of interference from outside.  Outside interference (think Thirty Years War, Spanish Civil War) just makes the civil war longer and bloodier.

That’s what is really scary about the Iraq situation.  Everybody is muscling in—the US, the Saudis, the Iranians, the Syrians—when really the Iraqis should be getting on with it themselves.

But thanks to the courageous Michelle Malkin for going to Iraq and learning about that nation with boots on the ground.

Too Hot or Too Cold?

How should Congressional Republicans behave?  As pit-bulls or as lap-dogs?  That’s the hot political story today taken up by Rush Limbaugh. 

According to Christina Bellantoni:

Several Republicans confirmed privately that more than two-thirds of House Republicans are favoring a slow approach, while a minority of members think the attacks on Democrats should come rapid-fire.

Rush Limbaugh isn’t happy.  He was grumbling this morning about 40 more years in the wilderness if the Republicans don’t show a bit of backbone.

But Rush, let’s not put the cart before the horse.  Republicans should, of course they should, oppose the usual Democratic menu of privilege, subsidy, and government control—a welfare state that doesn’t care about welfare.

But until Republicans come up with a new agenda, good ideas that resonate with the American people, they’d be better keeping quiet. 

Anyway, the ugly truth about politics is that the voters get tired of the same old same old.  They are tired of Republicans just like they were in 1992.

But as I remember, it took just two years to upchuck the Democrats after the 1992 election.  The Year of the Woman was followed by the Year of the Angry White Male.  And no wonder.  The New Democrats of Bill Clinton turned out to the the same old San Francisco Democrats that Americans had repeatedly rejected.

Let’s not waste all our political bandwidth on opposition for the sake of opposition.  Let’s develop an agenda of reform so that, when Republicans are returned to power they can boast of a mandate from the voters.

And then implement it.

A Bollywood Marriage -- Made in Heaven?

Let’s analyze the announcement that has all India dancing in the streets, the engagement between Bollywood stars Aishwarya Rai (Bride and Prejudice) and Abhishek Bachchan. I mean, let’s do some cultural analysis. 

First of all, the engagement was announced by the father of the groom, himself a famous Bollywood star.  According to Jeremy Page in Delhi the engagement was announced this way. 

“The children have decided. We are very happy and thought we should go ahead with the engagement ceremony,” Amitabh Bachchan told The Times of India.

Exactly.  You certainly would never have the parent of a Hollywood star making an announcement about the “children.”

Of course, no Bollywood event would be complete without a big production number. The fans knew just what to do.  They set up a big song and dance production number right outside Bachchan’s house.

As news of the engagement spread, hundreds of fans sang and danced through the night outside the house.

But there’s a problem.

Ms Rai is widely reported to be manglik, meaning she was born under a poorly placed Mars that can bring bad luck and even premature death to her husband.

It is interesting that, with all the interest in horoscopes in the West and the song “Age of Aquarius,” you know what with the Moon in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligned with Mars, it would be unthinkable for the US supermarket tabloids to worry about an in auspicious horoscope.

Before getting married, manglik women are traditionally required to go through a symbolic wedding to an idol of the Hindu god Vishnu or to a peepal or banana tree. It is still unclear if Ms Rai has been through such a ritual.

Ah yes, very important that, and very prudent.  In fact, it would probably do Britney Spears a power of good.

The important thing to realize is that Hindu gods are, like Americans, deeply into personal transportation.  Each god has a “vehicle.” 

Vishnu’s vehicle is Garuda, described as “king of birds, half-man and half-bird.”  So that’s all right.  Hollywood stars, of course, go in for private jets, so there’s a clear connection.

[T]hey were then seen visiting a Hindu temple with their parents in November and emerging with marigold garlands around their necks -- usually a sign of engagement.

Indian media also reported that their families had offered prayers on the banks of the River Ganges at the holy city of Varanasi to help to clear up potential conflicts in their horoscopes.

Quite a family affair, very much like the Bollywood movies themselves, which always seem to have a mother in complete charge of the universe and a father who struts around very importantly but ineffectively.

Now back to Prince William and Kate Middleton.  What about their engagement announcement?

When Underclass Pathology Reaches into the Middle Class

The thing about underclass pathologies is: Who Cares?  It’s all so far away.  The closest that ordinary middle-class people get to it is watching the local news on TV or reading about “bad choices” in a magazine article about troubled teens.  But what about when it comes a little too close to home?

In Britain this fall the nation was transfixed by a series of five murders of young drug-addled prostitutes in the middle-class town of Ipswich.  Worse was the news that some of the girls had come from what we like to call “good homes.”

How could it happen, we wonder?

It’s difficult to find out because the poor don’t write books or magazine articles.  It takes an activist, a Jacob Riis and his How the Other Half Lives or a Michael Harrington and The Other America, to bring the lives of the poor to the respectable classes.  And you always wonder about the activists: what’s their game?

But here’s a woman who actually became one of those Ipswich hookers and lived to tell the tale. Her name is Rhea Coombs and her book is My Name is Angel.  The book is being excerpted in The Daily Telegraph.

All I know about my father is that he had a drink problem and that he and my mother split up when I was about one.

Her mother was a bohemian who had fled her dreadful middle-class Fifties parents for the European music scene.  

From the moment I became conscious of my own thoughts, I was aware of a mismatch between my body and my soul. Later as I edged towards adolescence these feelings of “unbelonging” intensified and manifested themselves in prolonged outbreaks of sobbing whenever I was alone.

Of course, her mother

had never been a bad parent but she had dragged me across Europe with her love-and-peace addled friends. She was often absorbed with boyfriends and the combination of being in perpetual motion and getting accustomed to different men had unsettled me.

There’s a thought.

Rhea started out in a Rudolf Steiner school but felt out of place and moved to a “tough comprehensive in inner-city Bristol when I was 12.”  She and her friend Carole smoked cannabis “with an evangelical commitment.”

Then she got a 24-year-old boy-friend and then he wanted her to earn money.  Eventually he put her on the street.

She entered a downward cycle of drink and drugs and abusive relationships and then came the day when her ex-boy-friend took her kids away until she could deal with her crack habit.

Maybe the children of the hippie generation had it coming.  Or maybe our generation lacks the Charles Dickens or the Sinclair Lewis to wake us up from our selfish slumber.

Whatever it is, something out there ain’t right.

UPDATE: Here’s Part Two of Rhea Coombs’s compelling story.

Has Bush Blundered into Victory?

Did the Bush administration blunder into the best policy in the Middle East?  That is the suggestion of Edward N. Luttwak.

The Bush administration launched the Iraq invasion as the centerpiece of an ambitious effort to bring democracy to the Middle East.  Well, that dream is over.  But it seems that it has inadvertently brought about a strategic win, with “divide and rule, the classic formula for imperial power on the cheap.”

What?  The collapse of Saddam Hussein has meant that that the polarity in the Middle East is now between Sunni and Shia, and with the growing power of Shiite Iran the Sunnis are nervous.  And that is bringing them into the arms of the United States.  In Lebanon there is an open US-Sunni alliance, fueled by Saudi money.

But paradoxically the Shias of Iraq also need an alliance with the US—to help them beat off the Sunni insurgency.

On Dec. 4, 2006, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of Iraq’s largest political party, went to the White House to plead his case with President Bush... [A]s the chief leader of Iraq’s Arab Shiite population, he has no choice... [The Shiites] need all the help they can get, especially American military training for the Shiite-dominated army and police.

Huh?  Yes, it’s all a bit confusing if all you hear is the mainstream media drumbeat of disaster in Iraq.

Not only that, but al-Hakim is willing to help bring down rival Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi militia army.

The Iraq war has indeed brought into existence a New Middle East, in which Arab Sunnis can no longer gleefully disregard American interests because they need help against the looming threat of Shiite supremacy, while in Iraq at the core of the Arab world, the Shia are allied with the U.S. What past imperial statesmen strove to achieve with much cunning and cynicism, the Bush administration has brought about accidentally.

The strategic interest of the United States in the Middle East for the last generation has been to contain the power of militant Iran.  That hasn’t changed.  What has changed is the interest of the non-Iranian parties in the Middle East.  All of a sudden they feel the need to cosy up to the United States.  For now. 

People are Getting Better and Better.

Back in the 1500s there was nothing people liked more than a good old cat-burning.  Now, says psychologist Steven Pinker, “such sadism would be unthinkable today in most of the world.”

Here’s what Stephen M. Kosslyn another Harvard psychologist thinks, as reported by Arnold Kling.

Just as a body builder can do curls to build up biceps and dips on parallel bars to build up triceps, we can design computer-game-like tasks that exercise specific parts of the brain&mdashmental muscles, if you will.

Maybe so.  Things are going to get better and better as our knowledge, our physical wellbeing, and our moral reasoning improves.

But I’ve just been reading Judith Rich Harris’s Nurture Assumption, and what all these people are missing out is Harris’s Big Idea.  Groupness.  We all belong to groups and we think that our group is best.

That’s why university professors all think that the world can be saved with a bit more scholarly research.

Let us take warfare.  In the lasts 500 years here in the West we have made astonishing advances in the technology of war, both on the hardware side and also on the organizational side.  Yet what really has changed?  The chaps in the Middle East have found a new way to wage war that is designed to neutralize the Western advantages in technology and in human organization.  They’ve organized themselves into small, village-sized cells that conduct old-fashioned border wars on the lumbering modern western beast.

Here’s what progress does.  It raises the stakes.

The Politics of Stem Cell Research

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed a bill that expands the federal presence in embryonic stem-cell research.

As you can see in the report by Christina Bellantoni the Democrats believe that they have a winner on this one. 

“We have a moral obligation to provide our scientific community with the tools it needs to save lives,” said Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland. 
The bill states that the research would be done under “strict ethical guidelines” and that funding would only apply to stem-cell lines from embryos that “would otherwise be discarded by fertility clinics.”

No question, the stem-cell debate has been helpful to the Democrats as a wedge issue.  It paints Republicans as bigoted opponents of saving lives.  And celebrities like presidential son Ron Reagan and Michael J. Fox have given the issue emotional impact.

It doesn’t matter that conservatives have pointed out again and again that embryonic stem cells have not yet shown to be effective in fighting degenerative disease, whereas adult stem cells have.  Our friends in the MSM have been remarkably reluctant to differentiate the two types of stem cell.  But you would expect that.

In recent days, of course, there has been a startling announcement on the stem cell front.  According to Karen Kaplan in The Los Angeles Times:

Researchers have found that some stem cells in human amniotic fluid appear to have many of the key therapeutic benefits of embryonic stem cells while avoiding their knottiest ethical, medical and logistical drawbacks, according to a study published Sunday.

Er, which demonstrated therapeutic benefits would that be, Karen?

Columnist Charles Krauthammer reminds us that the stem-cell question is not just black and white.  We have to draw the line at harvesting human life somewhere—don’t we?

There is also the rather difficult question about embryonic stem cells.  They often turn cancerous.  Amniotic stem cells seem likely to be more safe, according to Krauthammer.

Even better, amniotic fluid might prove to yield an ideal stem cell — not as primitive as embryonic stem cells and therefore less likely to grow uncontrollably into tumors, but also not as developed as adult stem cells and therefore more “pluripotential” in the kinds of tissues it can produce.
If it is proved that these are the Goldilocks of stem cells, history will record the amniotic breakthrough as the turning point in the evolution of stem cell research from a narrow, difficult, delicate and morally dubious enterprise into an uncontroversial one with raw material produced unproblematically every day.

But then it wouldn’t be such a useful political issue.

Bush Admits Mistake, but Strategy Stays The Same

President Bush admitted last night that he should have increased the troops in Iraq last year, according to Joseph Curl and Stephen Dinan in The Washington Times. 

Mr. Bush yesterday said he was wrong both in his decision-making and in his assumptions.

"Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me," he said. "The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people — and it is unacceptable to me."

But by pushing for an escalation, Mr. Bush runs smack into Democrats, the new majority party in Congress, who say they reflect American voters’ desire to begin bringing troops back home.

And it will be interesting to see how the Democrats play this.  Up to now they have criticized the president without offering an overall strategic appreciation.  It’s worked so well for them that we should not expect any changes.

The president announced, in fact, a change in tactics at what the Germans used to call the operational level.  The goal still appears to be to “stand up” the Iraqi government so that it can succeed as the sole monopoly of force in Iraq.

Maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t.  The point is that, win or lose, the strategy in the Middle East appears to be unchanged.  It is to preserve Israel and contain the aggressive intentions of Iran.

The bigger question is whether Islamic radicalism is a global threat to democratic capitalism or whether it is a wildfire that will eventually burn itself out.  Obviously the response depends on how seriously you take the threat.

Whatever the actual threat, it seems unlikely that 300 million Europeans, a billion Chinese and a billion Indians—let alone 300 million North Americans—will just sit down and let a rich-kids’ Islamic teenage gang take them out.

But you never know. 

Is Bush's Troop Surge All For "McNaught?"

Last night President Bush announced a troop surge for Iraq, and all Americans wish him well.  But everyone is bound to ask: Is the moment auspicious for a change in strategy?  Is victory in the stars?

I’m glad you asked.  It just so happens that Comet McNaught is in the evening sky right now.  In fact the best time to see it is this weekend, according to Britain’s Daily Mail.  Says astronomer Nick James: 

“You will need a clear western horizon and should start looking as soon as the sun sets. The comet should be obvious and the tail will be pointing almost straight up from the horizon.”

But that doesn’t really tell us what to expect in Iraq.  And the trouble is that even if the troop surge succeeds in pacifying Baghdad, what then?  Do the Iraqis feel enough of a sense of “Iraqiness” to unite under their unity government? 

Anyway, according to the mainstream media it’s all doomed to failure.  “Most Americans oppose President Bush’s call to send additional U.S. military forces to Iraq,” reports Jon Cohen in the Washington Post.

Most worrying of all is the name of the comet.  It’s called “NcNaught” after the Scot Robert McNaught who discovered the comet, his 31st, from a telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Does that mean that Bush’s new policy will amount to “NcNaught?”

Happiness Needs a Sense of Control

Everyone worries about happiness these days, and in Britain, Tory leader David Cameron calls for attention to the General Wellbeing (GWB) rather than Gross Domestic Product.  But Minette Marrin worries that you can’t expect people to be happy unless they are in control of their lives. 

Yet not just in charity but in almost everything else the individual is losing that sense of control or hope for the future. We live in a democracy, yet more and more people feel that they are not represented, their wishes are ignored and they can do absolutely nothing about it.

When everything is run by the nanny state then people don’t have control and responsibility for their own lives.

Illegal and criminal immigrants stay here with impunity yet at the same time ordinary people’s civil liberties are being eroded. Stealth taxes have gone up without the promised reforms. The auditing of schools is shown to be pretty much useless, maniacally exhaustive though it is, and our children are being betrayed. National Health Service hospitals are diseased and debt ridden. Nobody can think what to do about the Asbo set. Labour’s youth employment schemes, hugely expensive, have been a total failure. Pensioners are driven to despair by tax and neglect.

In other words, government doesn’t work and it is making us miserable.  But does that stop the nannies?  Certainly not.  Jonah Goldberg compiled a little list today from the NY Post.  It’s the list of all the things that New York City banned last year.

1. pit bulls;
2. trans-fats;
3. aluminum baseball bats;
4. the purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds; f
5. oie gras;
6. pedicabs in parks;
7. new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers;
8. lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency;
9. vehicles in Central and Prospect parks;
10. cell phones in upscale restaurants;
11. the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute;
12. mail-order pharmaceutical plans;
13. Candy-flavored cigarettes;
14. gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily;
15. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus;
16. Wal-Mart.

People need control over their lives, but instead we have the nanny state prescribing in ghastly detail what kind of fat we may eat.

The rule of thumb for a free society should be that it infringes liberties rarely, but when it does so it is for important reasons.

Yeah.  So what are we going to do about it?

We could take back control of our lives from the state.  Then we will be freer, and probably happier.

Chavez. What Planet is He On?

You have to wonder.  After a century of socialism, thug dictators are still extolling its virtues.  As reported by Theresa Bradley and Alex Kennedy, socialism is going to be the salvation of the country.

"Building Venezuela's way to socialism, that's the only way to redemption and salvation of our country," Chavez, 52, said in his inaugural address to the National Assembly this morning in Caracas.

Oh yeah?  reported by Juan Forero the financial markets had other ideas. 

Financial markets from Buenos Aires to Caracas reeled on Tuesday following Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's announcement that he plans to nationalize some private companies

Well, we know what is going on.  Chavez is a populist.  He appeals to voters in Venezuela who think that they are poor because others are rich.  Whatever Chavez really thinks about the path to prosperity, he isn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.  If he can get away with assembling all the power in Venezuela into his own hands, why not?  It didn't do Fidel Castro any harm, after all.

Or maybe the ideas of Douglas North, the rational expectations guru, apply.  Reported by Arnold Kling, North and his collaborators claim that the natural order of political power is a "limited access" order.

Limited-access orders are societies that provide meaningful political and economic rights only to narrow elites... [North] argue[s] that limited-access orders are the "natural state:" they are stable, they resist economic progress, and they only rarely make the transition to open-access orders.

Maybe a limited-access order is better than disorder.  But in the twentieth century many of these limited-access orders went straight down the toilet.

Are the Democrats for Real

What is it that really worries Republicans and conservatives as we lick our wounds after November?  It is the nagging fear that the Democrats didn’t just win because it’s an off year election and the voters are in a foul mood.

Not that the voters don’t deserve to be a foul mood, mind you.

But what if the Democrats were executing a secret plan, a grand strategic concept, a new approach to politics and we right-wing foot-soldiers didn’t have a clue what hit us?  That is what keeps us awake at night.

Fortunately an evil Republican spy has come up with the answer.  She sneaked into the Pelosi victory party with all the heavy hitter Democratic contributors. 

And everything is ok.  There’s no "there" there in the new Democratic Congress.

Writer Lisa Schiffren talked to a contributor, a real-estate developer, at the party. 

I asked the real-estate developer what he thought of Pelosi. “I spent a lot of time with her. She told me she could win. She said she had a plan.” What was the plan? “The idea was that they would just criticize whatever plans the Republicans put out there”. They would tear them down -- like they did with Social Security -- and not put out their own plans. They have been very disciplined.” Indeed. No stray substance at all -- and this sharp businessman had forked over $25 grand in support.

So that’s all right.  That six point plan was just what it seemed to be, a lot of nothing.

Of course, the assembled party faithful had some interesting things to say.  Take a load of this.  Here’s what Schriffen’s real estate developer had to say about the issues.

“All the wealthy people I know, they only care about having their taxes cut. I don’t think that’s right.” “What are the issues you really care about?” I asked. “Rich and poor in this country. It’s not right,” he said, as if it was obvious what that implied.

OK, conservatives, stop laughing and get back to work.  When are you going to come up with the next brilliant conservative idea to reform the Democrats’ corrupt and unjust welfare state? 

You can’t beat nothing with nothing, you know.

AJAX and The innerHTML Problem

Here at Road to the Middle Class we are nothing if not modern.  That means that the site ought to be LAMP compliant, using Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP, and so it does.  But now, according to The Economist and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, it appears that a truly modern site should use AJAX as well.  AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and Xml) is the technology that Google uses on GMail.

Well, how hard could it be?

The standard demonstration of AJAX on W3Schools.com shows how to use an AJAX setup to update text hints on the fly.  You press a key to enter a character in a text box and every time you release the key your page requests a new text hint from the server with an HttpRequest.

When the response comes back from the server you update the text hint element like this:

document.getElementById("txtHint").innerHTML =xmlHttp.responseText

And everyone is happy.

But there’s a problem.  The best use of AJAX here at Road to the Middle Class is to fold/unfold blog entries.  We conserve real estate by showing only the first 50 words of a blog and allow you to click a link to get the whole article.  But that means that the content coming back from the server is going to include HTML markup.  What happens if the responseText isn’t just simple text but includes embedded HTML? 

Good question.  It turns out, using the W3Schools example, that embedded HTML works on Firefox but not on our friends at Internet Explorer: IE6 and IE7.  The IE boys take one look at the embedded HTML and decide that it’s not a job for innerHTML.  They return an "unknown runtime error".

Here’s how you update your page with AJAX when the responseText is complex and includes embedded HTML as it is here at Road to the Middle Class.  I call it the Double Span Solution.

First of all, you surround your text with two <span> elements, like this:

<p><span id=blog101><span id=blog101s>
<p>Text including a <a href="">link</a> and stuff.</p>
</span></span>
</p>

The idea is that when you want to replace the text in the middle of the two <span> elements you replace the entire inner <span> element.  You delete the old <span> and add a new <span> with the responseText and all of its HTML markup.

First of all you set up the new <span> element, preserving the element id from the old <span> element and adding in the responseText from the server.

var elem = document.getElementById("blog101s")
var newSpan = document.createElement(’span’)
newSpan.id = elem.id
newSpan.innerHTML = xmlHttp.responseText


Now remove the "blog101s" element and anything else floating around.

for (var i = 0; i < document.getElementById("blog101").childNodes.length; i++) {
   var n = document.getElementById("blog101").childNodes[i]
   n.parentNode.removeChild(n)
}

OK.  Now append the new <span> element right under "blog101".

document.getElementById(gBlogid).appendChild(newSpan)

And that should do it.

Dont Forget Most Old Media is Union Shop

Dear old TIME magazine is slimming down, according to The New York Times.  Writes reporter David Carr

Time Inc. management, with the help of air cover from the consultants from McKinsey, is trying to cut costs to reflect brutal realities in the mass magazine business. At the end of the month, there will be significant layoffs at the magazine division, and it will not end with Time’s 280 editorial employees.

You can imagine that American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson isn’t exactly in tears. 

Does the world need TIME? I can’t think of a reason why. I have to wonder if McKinsey [TIME’s expensive consultant] didn’t present shutting down the magazine as one of the main options for management to consider.

The thing to remember is that Old Media is organized in a hauntingly similar way to Big Auto.  The help is all unionized.  You may not realize this, because when journalists write about labor relations they do not add a little tag "full disclosure: reporter is a union member," which they would do if, say, writing about their alma mater.

Yes.  Any time you read an article by a big-foot journalist you are probably reading words written by a member of the Newspaper Guild.  The guild is now part of the Communications Workers of America.  That means, of course, that they are probably being paid way above what the market would bear.

And that makes the situation of the MSM even more tricky.  Because they are stuck with a cost structure that is way out of line with reality.

Back in the old days the only way you could get your name in print was on somebody else’s dead tree.  And the barriers to entry in the dead-tree business meant that the union journalists could charge monopoly rates for their services.

Those days are over and the dead-tree titles are desperately trying to slim down.

Here for instance, is a report in Editor and Publisher about print unions complaining about the slimming down of The Wall Street Journal.

The union [IAPE] representing staffers at the Journal took out an ad today in a rival, The New York Times, calling into question Dow Jones’ commitment to quality journalism.

Well, surely you wouldn’t expect them to take out an ad in the Journal?  And you surely don’t expect them to take a "proposed increase -- 400% according to the IAPE -- of health care costs" without complaint?

Do You Believe in Education Myths?

With something as politicized as education you always wonder about what you read in the paper or watch on the news.  After all, the media is not called the media for nothing.  It is a medium, a channel of communication.  There is a lot of money in education.  Money and power.  With all that money and power, how much of what we know about education is true? 

Jay Greene is an expert on education policy and he’s written about his findings in Education Myths.  The full title is Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools--And Why It Isn’t So.  So you can see where he is coming from.  Greene writes: 

Over the past 30 years, many of our education policies have been based on beliefs that clear-eyed research has recently shown to be false. Virtually every area of school functioning has been distorted by entrenched myths.

OK.  Let’s have a test of education knowledge.  Which of the following generally accepted ideas are true?

• Schools are underfunded.
• Teachers are underpaid.
• Schools can’t be expected to overcome the effect of social problems.
• Smaller class sizes produce better results.
• More credentials means better teachers.
• Penniless public schools can’t compete against rich private schools.
• School choice and school vouchers don’t work.

The answer, of course, is none of the above.  All of the above ideas are education myths.  Want to know the correct answers?

• Schools have received a vast increase in funding in the last 30 years. 
• Teachers are paid at about the same hourly rate as engineers, architects and other professionals.  They are less well educated and have better tenure than the other professionals.
• Schools can make a dent in social problems; in fact that is what the father of the common school, Horace Mann, promised 150 years ago. 
• Smaller class sizes don’t seem to make much of a difference. 
• Credentials don’t seem to make a difference. 
• Public schools have much more money per student than private schools, and that is still true if ignore the money spent on bureaucracy and special needs.
• And, of course, school choice and school vouchers work, not just for the kids at charter schools and private schools but at the public schools forced to compete with them.

It’s a grim prospect.  How could we all be so wrong?  But Greene isn’t discouraged.  He takes the long view.

Disentangling popular misconceptions from our education system--and establishing fresh policies based on facts that are supported by hard evidence--will be the work of at least a generation.

Go ahead, read the whole thing.

Let's Not Blame Conservatives On Education

Oprah is getting a bit of flak because she is funding a school for girls in South Africa, according to Clarence Page.

"I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools (in America) that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there," she said. "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school."

And just because she amazed and delighted conservative commentators,  "that doesn’t mean she’s wrong."

In fact, Page agrees with Oprah.

She’s not blaming the victims. Our kids don’t know anything except that which they are taught by parents, peers, teachers and other role models.

If kids just want iPods, then it’s what just what they are taught.  "We" are all to blame.

Excause me, Mr Page.  "We" are not to blame.  You are to blame.  You liberals.

For over 150 years we have had a one-size-fits-all government school system run most of the time by liberals.  It bores most kids out of their minds, and it does nothing to channel the group activities of teenage boys into beneficial channels.  This system was set up by liberals and it is presently run by liberals.

And it is liberals that are standing in the school house doors stopping education reform in its tracks.

What shocked and amazed conservative commentators about Oprah was that any liberal would break ranks and criticize the current system.  Oprah is saying that she’d be wasting her money by building a school in this country.

And hey, it’s her money.

Besides, if we really want our kids to appreciate education, we should follow Oprah’s example: Fix up the old, crumbling structures into which we herd too many of our students here at home. If we want our kids to appreciate education, we have to show some respect for it, too.

Oh really.  What planet are you living on.  Most of the schools in this country are palatial.  And they still don’t educate.

Let’s try something new.  Let’s give parents the right to send their children to the schools of their choice.  What a concept!