Jet Jockey Travolta On Global Warming

What’s not to like about John Travolta.  He urges his fans to “do their bit” for global warming according to London’s Evening Standard.

Er just a minute fellahs. Did you know that Travolta has a known association with jet airplanes, and actually flies them himself?   

But although he readily admitted: "I fly jets", he failed to mention he actually owns five, along with his own private runway.

 And here are two of them all tucked up for the night at Travolta’s Florida residence which looks, frankly, more like an airport control tower than a home.

Mind you, that Boeing 707 in the picture is getting to be a museum piece.  And loud!

I know what you are thinking.  Al Gore, eat your heart out!

Dueling Realities on Health Coverage

What does our nation need on health care?  Or rather, what should we force other people to pay for?  That is what we are talking about when we talk about health care plans and presidential candidate.  

Columnist Roger Simon went to listen to the Democratic candidates talk about it.  Here is what John Edwards promised.

I would cover all Americans. There would be shared responsibilities: Employers must cover their employees or pay into a fund. The government would create health care markets, and you could choose your health care provider. Some would be private and some would be Medicare-plus -- kind of single-payer (i.e., government-run) plan. Everyone in America will be required by law to be covered by a health care plan.

It would cost, he said, “$90 billion to $120 billion per year in government costs.” 

Hillary Clinton, she of HillaryCare fame, was more circumspect.

A lot of people like what they have now. We don’t want people feeling that government will come in and tell me what to do and what doctor I want to go to. We will give people a choice. We have to look at that as a framework.

So although she was all in favor of a universal system she put its implementation out into the future.

I want universal health care coverage by the end of my second term

On another planet is Robert J. Cihak, retired physician.

Look for “disruptive innovation” in your health-care future, he advises.

About a year after his diabetes diagnosis, he started using his own handheld blood glucose meter. He used it to observe how his blood sugar responded to... food... exercise... and other life activities... He then knew much more about his body’s response to his diabetes than his doctors ever could.

But of course, he’s not allowed to get his own “HbA1c test (glycosylated hemoglobin)” test.  For that he has to go into hospital for a three-hour procedure.  And then the results are reported to his doctor, not to him, the expert.

But then a new company offered a $16 do-it-yourself test kit. He "put two drops of blood on a strip, mailed it back to them, and three days later, they sent me my HbA1c score."

Do you get the feeling that the Democrats will have their universal health care just about put in place by the time that medical advances make it completely obsolete?

Kinda like their government pension scheme, and their government education scheme?

Let’s see now.  Let’s get the current government spending numbers on all that, before we get universal health care.

United States Federal, State,
and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2007
Amounts in billions of dollars

Pensions: $872.7
Health Care: $844.4
Education: $744.8
source: usgovernmentspending.com

Hey.  What’s another $100 billion on top of that?

Business Boring? Please!

The chap at the BBC explained why they don’t put much business on TV. “It’s seen as just a bunch of boring men in suits, sitting behind desks.” Not enough sex, presumably, and not enough progressive values.

Oh please, writes business editor Jeff Randall:

Business is full of brilliant, eccentric, dynamic, flawed, creative, venal, visionary, devious, generous and crooked people. It’s drama. It’s greed. It’s lust. It’s envy. Boring, it ain’t. Business is the constituency of control-freaks, show-offs, workaholics, plotters, schemers, bullies, wimps, winners and losers. Some are obsessed about becoming super rich. Others couldn’t care less. Their drug is glory.

The most boring 15 months he worked was as sports editor.  Sports is boring

I soon discovered that dealing with most sports folk was mind-numbingly dull, compared with swimming alongside sharks such as Tiny Rowland and Bob Maxwell. Like Lord Byron, they were mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Our modern society seems to have an infatuation with dull.  It loves the mayhem of sports on TV.  But don’t ever get into the real thing, like battling Islam for world domination!

Well, real life has a way of elbowing its way into the living room whether you like it or not.  And that is when you need the dangerous people to get you out of trouble—mad, bad, eccentric, creative, devious, and all the rest.

The War Will Go On

In a sense, military historian Victor Davis Hanson has it backwards.  Never mind about the tactical considerations of Iraq vs. Afghanistan, he says.

Depending on how we leave Iraq, this global war against radical Islamic terrorism will either wax or wane. But it will hardly end.

Wrong, Mr. Hanson.  On the contrary, whatever we do in Iraq, the global war of Islamic terrorism against us will go on. 

After all, we don’t give a damn about whether Islam lives or dies.  As far as we are concerned we are the future and the Islamists are a bunch of parallel-cousin-marrying barbarians.

It is the fact that the Islamists won’t live and let live that we are in this war, pace the Noam Chomsky brigade.

But, of course, we are just quibbling.  Hanson is making the point that Iraq is just a battle, a tactical or operational question.  We can win it or lose it. But win or lose in Iraq the war with an enraged Islam will go on.

Most likely, it will take a western city or two damaged by a dirty nuclear bomb before the West gets mad enough to get serious.

The trouble with barabarians is that you don’t know when to take them seriously.  Usually they are just a nuisance.  But sometimes they can take down an empire.  It happened to the Roman Empire, and it happened a few times to the Middle Kingdom, most notably when Genghis Khan and his chaps took over in the 1200s and inspired Coleridge:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea

and so on.

Strategically speaking, the next item on the agenda is what the Democrats will do when they are next in power.

Because that is a very different thing from being in opposition.

Housing Bust: Minorities Hardest Hit

Unfortunately there’s a lot of truth in the old joke about the final news item from the mainstream media: “World Ends, Minorities and Women Hardest Hit.” 

Because when disaster strikes it is the least experienced, the most vulnerable, those least able to adapt who suffer the most.

So you’d expect that minorities would be having a hard time in the current housing bust.

And you’d look to The New York Times to tell you all about it.

From the vantage point of 34th Street, things don’t look good, at least not across the Hudson in Jersey.  Report Kareem Fahim and Ron Nixon:

Broad swaths of Newark are groaning under the weight of mortgage debt, much of it accumulated in the building boom of recent years that has transformed some parts of the city with gleaming redevelopment.

You have to feel sorry for these folks:

[A] heavy mortgage debt has led thousands of residents — many of them first-time homebuyers — close to financial ruin, experts and local officials say.

And here we go: sub-prime loans rear their ugly heads.

Federal lending data show that a high percentage of mortgages for homes on the north, south and west sides of Newark — as much as 50 percent in some neighborhoods — are subprime loans.

Expect the question of sub-prime loans to surface in the campaigns of the Democratic presidential contenders.  These are Democratic voters that are hurting, and it’s time the government “does something.”

How Do You Spell C-r-e-d-i-t-C-r-u-n-c-h?

It’s always a mystery how the economy swings from easy credit—when lenders are filling the airwaves with loan ads—to the good old credit crunch when you can’t get a loan if your life depended on it. 

But maybe the story of New Century Financial Corp. gives us a clue.

Reuters’ reporter Jonathan Stempel tells today how New Century can’t sell its paper to the government-sponsored mortgage giants any more. 

New Century said it decided voluntarily on Monday to stop selling or being the main servicer of loans for Freddie Mac, the second-largest U.S. home loan financier. Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM - News), the largest financier, cut off its own ties with New Century earlier this month, saying the company breached some contracts.

Hum.  Just when poor folks are going to need credit the government decides to cut the cord.  Or at least the quasi-monopoly government-sponsored politically-connected mortgage-bond floaters cut the cord. Or pull in their horns.

Just to be on the safe side.

It ain’t fair. 

But does it mean a credit crunch, or at least a continuing slide in the housing market?

The simple answer is that we don’t know.  We’ll know in about another year as we look back.  Pundits will knowing say either:

1. You could have seen that coming, or
2. Well, those perma-bears were wrong again.

But right now, you can place your bets.  There is still time.

Go For It: usgovernmentspending.com!

It’s a great story of rags to riches.

First it was an idea.  Then it was an article on roadtothemiddleclass.com.

Last Thursday it was up on a website completely modern with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).  On Friday night it was propagated worldwide as usgovernmentspending.com.

On Saturday we sent a sitemap to Google.  On Monday night we were indexed and searchable on Google.

On Tuesday, our regular article was publicizing usgovernmentspending.com on The American Thinker.

Today Andrew Sullivan has linked from The Atlantic on his Daily Dish:

Here’s a great new online guide to where your taxpayers’ dollars end up. The vast majority goes to the elderly in pensions and healthcare. Some acerbic commentary can be found here. I’m just glad the web can expose the reality of government spending and redistribution.

Dare I send an email to Rush?  Would it demolish the site?

Oh the nightmare of success!

UAW Says It's Full of Fight

You’ve gotta hand it to the UAW.  They’re not ready to roll over and play dead.  Why, the whole idea of bankruptcy is absurd, a management trick, as Tom Krisher reports from the UAW bargaining convention.

(By the way, Tom does not tell his readers whether he is a union member.  It is the official position of us here at Road to the Middle Class that all journalists should disclose their union membership status when writing about labor unions.  Anyone that doesn’t isn’t really a journalism professional.  Disclosure: Nobody at Road to the Middle Class is a union member.)

Martin Shawl, 53, a 28-year Delphi Corp. and General Motors Corp. worker from Bay City, said he doesn’t believe the Detroit automakers are in financial trouble.

"It’s voodoo accounting," he said, questioning the timing of the Chrysler Group’s losses and GM’s restatement of earnings due to accounting troubles

He said the union shouldn’t give back anything to the companies, and it should end a two-tier wage scale that pays new hires less than longtime workers.

God bless the fellow!  It’s all smoke and mirrors designed to exploit the working stiffs on the shop floor and to force give-backs.

Tell you what, Marty, old chum.  I just checked the financial box scores today. General Motors is capitalized at about $18 billion.  Google is worth about $144 billion.

Now I don’t know what kind of voodoo goes into the pricing of common stock on the global finance markets.  Probably there is a fair amount—dead chicken, entrails, the whole Haitian thing. 

But when General Motors is worth about 12 percent of upstart Google it has to mean something beyond smoke and mirrors. Old sport.

Politics Has Always Been Risky Business

The recent Scooter Libby case moves columnist John Podhoretz to mourn that anyone taking a top government job ought to have his head examined. 

If you were interviewing a candidate for such a job, he writes, you would have to tell the candidate that the chance of

having to hire a lawyer at some point during your employment with us around 40 percent.

Who would be so crazy to do that, when the lawyer fees alone might be enough to ruin you?

It’s certainly true that politics has gotten rougher in the last twenty years.  Maybe.  But then politics has been contested more in the last twenty years.  Conservatives and Republicans have been less and less inclined to go with the flow of more and more government programs and more and more inclined to contest the issue with their liberal and Democratic friends.

And now of course they can turn to usgovernmentspending.com and get the figures.  Just how much is enough for government health care or government education?  $700 billion? $800 billion?  A trillion or two?  When would liberals cry Uncle?

Liberals and Democrats have noticed this.  They wonder what ever happened to the gentlemanly Republicans they used to know.  They remember the Ev Dirksen and Jerry Ford show on TV.  Now there was a pair of decent Republicans! Now they are all so coarse and rude—and, you know, religious.

But the fact is that politics has always been a rough game.  In our day the worst that can happen to you is disgrace and imprisonment.  But in the good old days it was treason, attainder, execution, and banishment, spiced by the occasional episode of torture.  And all because you joined with the wrong people or excited the suspicion of a powerful peer of the realm.

So it’s true what J-pod says:

Every single person who has worked in the highest reaches of the U.S. government in recent memory has worked intimately with someone who has gone to jail, been convicted of a crime or been impoverished by legal fees - someone they know to be a fine person, a dedicated person with a family, who is the farthest thing from a criminal and yet whose name is dragged through the mud and whose reputation is trashed.

 But it was ever thus.  That’s why they call fame a bitch goddess. 

Barone on Gore's Secular Faith

It’s an inexhaustible topic, the solipsism of the baby-boom generation, the idea that the world revolves around the wonderful evolved people who came to consciousness in the 1960s.

And that goes for Al Gore, baby-boomer almost, and his global-warming belief system, writes Michael Barone.

Gore and his followers seem to assume that the ideal climate was the one they got used to when they were growing up.

We’re told in effect that the climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s was, of all those that have ever existed, the best of all possible climates. Not by science. But as a matter of faith.

The trouble is that the climate of the earth has always fluctuated—in all times scales.  And in the past climate has changed a lot faster than it is doing right now.

Writes Barone: “Even The New York Times bridles” at Gore’s exaggerations.

After Gore won the Academy Award for his film on climate change, the Times printed an article in which respected scientists — not Republicans, not on oil company payrolls — charged that Gore has vastly exaggerated the likelihood of catastrophic effects.

 It comes down to a matter of spirituality, the baby-boomer word for religious faith.

The natural human yearning for spirituality has produced in many people educated in secular-minded universities and enveloped in an atmosphere of contempt for traditional religion a faith that we vulgar human beings have a sacred obligation not to inflict damage on Mother Earth.

Of course, Gore and his pals do not intend to change their ways.  It is the great unwashed, you and me, who will make the great sacrifice to propitiate the climate change gods.

Welcome to usgovernmentspending.com!

Here at the Road to the Middle Class we are frequently disturbed by the lack of comprehensive data on government spending.  We want to know important facts like:

• How much do we spend on education?
• How much do we spend on welfare?
• How much do we spend on government pensions, from Social Security to federal pensions to state and local pensions?

It is difficult to get information like this, because most of it is split up between federal and state-and-local programs. And our rulers like it that way.

But now we have usgovernmentspending.com.  Now you can find out what the great heads of government spending cost us all: federal, state, and local.

Want to know what the Big Three are?  No it’s not the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.  Right now, in 2007, here are the Big Three Government Programs:

1. Government Pensions: $873 billion
2. Government Health Care: $844 billion
3. Government Education: $745 billion

Go ahead, check out the details at usgovernmentspending.com. The thing is: all three big programs are a mess:

1. Governments have way overpromised on pensions.
2. Government health care doesn’t really give us much in the way of additional life expectancy. Some third-world nations have a life expectancy almost a long as the US.
3. Government education over the last 160 years hasn’t budged the literacy rate of 90 percent.  Maybe it’s even gone down.

Our liberal friends love to remind us of General Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex.

They would do well to think about the beam in their own eye—actually three beams: the government pension complex, the government health complex, and the government education complex.  Those guys make the Pentagon contractors look like pikers.

Britain's Labour Proposes Tax Cuts

In Britain this week they had a Nixon Goes to China Moment.  The Labour Party finance minister Gordon Brown proposed marginal tax rate cuts.

He cut two percent from corporation tax, from 30 percent to 28 percent, and he cut two percent from the “basic rate” of individual income tax, from 22 percent to 20 percent.

For conservative commentators like Simon Heffer it was the last straw.  For months they have been complaining that the Conservatives under  “Dave” Cameron have been making a bad mistake by holding back on proposing tax cuts and instead talk about responsible stewardship and balancing public and private needs by “sharing the proceeds of growth.” 

This strategy was in ruins, Heffer complained.

It crashed spectacularly, and at a velocity nearer the speed of light than of sound, at about 1.15pm yesterday, when Gordon Brown announced he was cutting tuppence off income tax.

 But did it?  Is it not a good thing when the left-wing party proposes tax rate cuts?

The problem that the British Tories have had for the last ten years is that whenever they proposed tax cuts the Labour Party (and the chattering class) immediately accused them of turning their backs on schools and the National Health Service.

But if Labour now thinks that tax rate cuts are a good idea, then tax rate cuts are on the table—for everyone.

Anyway, the British people don’t seem that impressed by the proposed cuts.  According to an overnight opinion poll:

Seven out of 10 people believe Gordon Brown’s give-and-take Budget has left them worse off or will make no difference to their family finances[.]

Place your bets.  How much am I bid for a tax cut?

Plain Old Patronage: A Theory of Government

In the excellent TCSDaily, Arnold Kling proposes a theory of government.  He calls his idea “The Arbiter With The Golden Scepter.” 

People get into disputes, he writes. 

In order to resolve these disputes peacefully, people must submit disputes to an Arbiter, who makes impartial decisions in light of common law.

But of course, it is one thing for an Arbiter to issue a decision. The problem is to enforce it.

In order to ensure that the Arbiter’s decision is final, and that the loser does not resort to violence, people have to give the Arbiter overwhelming power to quell violence. I call this overwhelming power the Golden Scepter.

This, of course, is the contract theory of government upon which our own constitution and government is based.  It assumes that the people forming “a more perfect union” get together from a state of nature without government to write a contract to govern their relations.

But anthropology teaches us something different.  People do not start out in a Hobbesian state of nature.  They start out in families.

And in families it is usual for the father to resolve disputes.  In the old days the father had the power of life and death over all members of the family.  That is what patriarchy means: rule of the fathers.

Of course, even in those days, fathers went to bed.  And in the interval between going to bed and getting up in the morning, they often found that they had made the wrong decision.  So they changed their minds.  Nobody knows how this happened, although Agatha Christie in her Autobiography hints at how it worked in the notoriously patriarchal Edwardian age.

The movement of the progressive peoples, wrote Sir Henry Maine in Ancient Law, is from status to contract.  So it is, but in the movement from family and clan to city, government grows from an outgrowth of fatherly justice to an organized entity with its own interests, interests separate and distinct from the interests of fathers.

And so we find, as Maine found in Roman society, that government slowly supplants the power of the father with the power of the government.

It takes over something else besides the power to resolve disputes.  It takes over the power of patronage. 

Yes.  You noticed.  Patronage and patriarchy both start with the Latin root patr-, as in pater, father.

Our modern welfare state is a living testimony to the fact that people still want to live under a father.  They want to enjoy his patronage, to receive his favors, to nestle within the circle of his power.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the people to rage most bitterly against the patriarchy are the ones who insist on the fatherly embrace of the welfare state.

So Arnold Kling’s Arbiter with the Golden Scepter is really just a father.

When do you think that the people of the welfare state will grow out of their adolescence and choose to live as free human beings, free from the protection and the power of the father?

Good Old-fashioned Democratic Politics

If you are a Republican the worst fear about Democrats taking over Congress was that they might have changed.  They might have given up their old ways of badgering businessmen and solving every problem with government spending.  What would Republicans do then?

But not to fear.  The Democrats running Capitol Hill are the Old Democrats of spending, subsidy, privilege, and micro-managing regulation.

Democrats are trying to add $24 billion in pork to President Bush’s $95 billion request for Iraq, reports Donald Lambro.

Most of the added money stuffed into the emergency supplemental bill, expected to come up for a vote today, is for the kind of costly, pork barrel, special interest, vote-buying handouts Democrats promised they would end if they won control of Congress.

Since the Democrats haven’t changed their spots the political space traditionally occupied by Republicans and conservatives is still available. Even though the Republican Congress sadly betrayed the trust of their supporters in recent years and created an opening for a new, moderate Democratic Party, the Democrats have decided they like their old ways best. 

So let’s get back to the important work of formulating ideas and policies to reform the corrupt welfare state and its steadily deteriorating performance in pensions, in education, and in health care.

The American people are counting on us. 

Globalizing Health Care

Here at the Road to the Middle Class we are not so sure about the 15 percent of GDP spent on health care.  When it comes to improving life expectancy, expensive bio-medicine isn’t exactly outperforming sanitation and baisc OB-GYN care  to keep infant mortality down.

And then there’s the regulation and the licensure and the special interests, not to mention the herioc end-of-life care that doesn’t relieve suffering and doesn’t extend life.

So it’s good to see the chaps at Democracy Project doing a bit of thinking. They don’t like

the status quo or various extensions of the status quo such as proposals for a single payer system, mandating employee coverage, mandating employer coverage, health spending accounts[.]

Everyone, Democrat and Republican, wants to give the present system a few tweaks.  But nobody is thinking big ball.

The problem with our health care system is over-regulation. Yet, all the Republican solutions and Democratic solutions involve extending or reshaping the regulation.

Why not sidestep regulation altogether?

This can be accomplished through overseas medical treatment.

 What, medical tourism, risking life and limb in third-world countries?  Well, not so fast.

Back in the 1950s, many Americans believed that goods "made in Japan" were of low quality. As it turned out, by the 1970s "made in Japan" meant better quality than U.S.-manufactured goods. There is no reason why health care can’t be provided in the third world.

What makes you think that medical care in say, India, won’t be competitive with the US in 10 years or so? 

The beauty of it is that it would force the US health care industry to start cutting costs and improving quality.  Just like the US auto industry had to do.

We’ll find out, along the way, just how privileged and subsidized our vast health industry has become.  And we can expect our doctors and nurses and adminstrators to go screaming to Congress for relief from medical “dumping.”

But we won’t pay a blind bit of attention to their screeching.

Forget Racial Profiling, Now It's Political Profiling!

Who was not outraged by the shocking practice of law enforcement officials racially profiling minorities.  Why, they were picking up blacks all over the place, way disproportionate to their actual representation in the community.

(Of course, blacks have tended to commit crimes at up to ten times the rate of other races, but that doesn’t count.)

But now a new front has been opened in the fight against profiling.  In a breathless article in E Pluribus Media Donald C. Shields and John F. Cragan announce that the Bush Justsice Department has targeted Democratic elected officials for investigation far more than Republicans. 

Our ongoing study of the Bush Justice Department (to be published in 2009) investigates the implications of the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzales Justice Department’s blended religious -fundamentalist and neo-conservative rhetorical vision.

It was un-biased economist Paul Krugman who first publicized this scholarship.  And instapundit picked it up.

We will leave it to others to remind the two scholars that “religious-fundamentalist” and “neo-conservative” are not strictly scholarly terms but political perjoratives which change their meanings according to the present needs of Democratic politicians and activists.

And of course the findings of the study don’t really justify the scare headlines.

If you actually look at the numbers they cite you see that at the national level the “profiling” is not that great.  In their Appendix B Shields and Cragan show that the Bush Justice Department is currently investigating the following state-wide and federal elected officials: 36 Democrats and 30 Republicans.

But it is at the local level in Appendix C where the disparity rears its ugly head.  Here the Justice Department is investigating 262 Democrats and 37 Republicans.

How could this be, other than the bigotry of religious fundamentalism and neo-conservatism?

Well, if you look at the names on the list it is amazing how many of them come from notorious cellpools of corruption: New Jersey (30 under investigation), Baltimore (20 in a “wide-ranging investigation”), and so on.

And it is a shocking fact that Republican elected officials are grossly underrepresented in the corrupt inner cities of America.  (Why is this?  More research is needed.)

It couldn’t be, could it, that the Bush Administration is just doing its job, trying to root out corruption where it is most likely to be found, in Democratic controlled big cities?

President Bush Draws a Line

Republicans are fit to be tied about pusillanimous Republicans that won’t fight back against Democratic attacks.

As David Limbaugh sees it:

From the war on Iraq, to Gitmo, to the NSA surveillance program, to the Wilson-Plame fiasco, to global warming, to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, deceitful Democrats engage in relentless warfare against Republicans, and Republicans -- way too often -- roll over without even returning fire.

Actually, whenever Republicans do fight back they get skewered as mean-spirited and Puritan.  So, they figure, what’s the point?

There’s another problem.  Republicans don’t believe in fighting other Americans.  We believe in fighting foreign terrorists, not foolish mouthy Democrats.  We are professionals, business owners, and investors.  We believe in voluntary cooperation, following the rules, and serving our fellow men.  That’s what successful people do under democratic capitalism.

But Democrats do believe in fighting other Americans.  They believe that justice can only be achieved by political fight, by fighting for the people against the powerful, in the immortal words of Al Gore.  And they believe that it is not enough to write laws to work towards justice, or commutative justice.  They believe in distributive justice, taking stuff from some people and giving it to others.  They only sorta believe in democratic capitalism.  What they really believe in is politics.

Today, it seemed that President Bush has his limits when it comes to truckling to the Democrats.  In a statement to reporters about the US Attorney firings he said:

I will oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials.

It’s not exactly a ringing counterattack to the Democrats’ charges but it’s a start.

Who Do You Believe?

Who do you believe in the recent Atlanta shooting?  A National Guard soldier, Spc. Craig Perkins, claims he was taunted by young Muslim men and was pursued by them to his girl-friend’s apartment.  The young Muslims said they:

were simply out for a walk with two women when they passed through Perkins’ apartment complex. [They] told police Perkins came out of his apartment and confronted them for allegedly looking at him or his girlfriend.

That’s according to  David Simpson in The Atlanta Constitution.

Perkins and his girl-friend lived in an apartment complex whose renters were mostly “refugees of violent conflicts around the world.” Perkins

said he could feel the animosity when he walked by his Middle Eastern neighbors in his Guard uniform.
Women and older men tended to be polite, but the younger men were hostile, he said.
On many occasions, he said, he received signs of disrespect he knew from Iraq.

And then it ended in a confrontation in which Perkins shot one of the Muslims in the leg. 

It’s an interesting story.  Who do you believe?  The black US soldier in uniform whose service in the “National Guard helped him straighten out after a series of scrapes with the law as a young man?”  Or do you believe Tareq Ali Bualsafared, a student from the United Arab Emirates?

The question is, as it always is: Who is the victim?

But, as a conservative, I’m just not qualified to judge.

The Other "Creationism"

One of the great tasks to which our liberal friends are called is to champion the cause of “science.”  They mean by that witnessing for Darwinian explanations of reality against Christian “fundamentalism.” Yet while busily plucking the speck of dust out of the eyes of the creationists and the Intelligent Design activists, David Horowitz explains, they are letting the nation’s universities truckle to a different band of religious activists.

Yet at that very moment professors in American universities were teaching a form of secular creationism as contrary to the findings of modern science as the Biblical claim that the God had made the world in seven days.
...
The name of this theory is “social constructionism,” and its churches are Women’s Studies departments situated in universities across the United States...

These priests and prophets maintain that differences between men and women are not biological but “socially constructed” by a patriarchal society.

Even though it is scandalous to say so in an American university, the science is in on this one.

The scientific evidence is summarized in a recent book, Sex Differences in Cognitive Ability, whose author, Diane Halperin, is president of the American Psychological Association and was a social constructionist herself before reviewing the scientific literature.

Yes, socialization is important.  But underneath it all are biological factors that cannot be explained away as social conditioning.

But you are not allowed to say that at Harvard, at least, not if you are President.

Tom DeLay on Rush

Everyone has forgotten about Tom DeLay, who was “gotcha-ed” last year by the Democrats in the run up to the mid-term elections.

But now Tom Delay has a book out, No Retreat, No Surrender: One American’s Fight, and Rush Limbaugh interviewed him on Friday.  Major take-away from the interview is DeLay’s appreciation of the Clinton machine.

You cannot discount, Rush, the massive, unseen-before-in-my-lifetime coalition that the Democrats have been able to build over the last six years.
...
When they needed an organization, Harold Ickes created America Coming Together, which is a group that has 1400 full-time employees that canvass. They needed somebody to do media for the 527s. They created the Media Fund.
...
They’ve investigated probably every sitting Republican that we know of right now through a group called CREW, and Democracy 21 and Common Cause... To fund it, you’ve got George Soros foundations, hundreds of foundations, like the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation, the Soros Foundation pumping money in. The unions.

This, of course is the Clinton machine that is being built to put Hillary Clinton in the White House.  But where are the ideas, the vision of the future?  What they have built is a political machine to do the bare knuckle work of political street fighting to get across the finish line.

RUSH: ... You don’t defeat your enemies; you destroy them.
DELAY: That’s the Democrats. They don’t have any ideas. They don’t have a vision. They don’t have an agenda. How do you think they won in 2006?

That raises the big question.  Suppose the Demcrats get into power in 2008?  What will they do with it beyond just pumping money through to the “programs?” 

The Ancien Regime of the Good Old USA

OK I admit it.  When I read Jacob Aronson’s article Conserving and Consolidating the Progressive Liberal Tradition in TCSDaily, I blew a gasket.  Writes Aronson:

One of the core challenges now facing the Party is the collapse of the New Deal coalition and adaptation to the underlying economic realities that brought it about. Bill Clinton’s rallying cry to "end government as we know it" was an attempt to reform government along private sector lines.

Well, yeah!  But since then the Democratic Party has turned away from Bill Clinton’s attempt to reform it.  It is now driven partly by street brawlers like Markos Moulitsas who want to make the Democrats into a fighting party again, fighting the big corporations that are now more powerful than governments, and partly by the new progressives like Jacob Aronson.

But “reforming government along private sector lines” or using it to fight for the people against the powerful, as Al Gore wanted to do back in 2000, is delusional.  Let us look at government in the United States.  Let us follow the money in this unified table of government spending in the United States in 2004.  It is obtained by combining two spreadsheets, one from the US Census Bureau on state and local government spending, and one from the President’ s budget documents.

Here is the top line result for 2004:

• Programs for seniors: $1 trillion
• Programs for youth: $700 billion
• Programs for defense: $700 billion
• Programs for the poor: $660 billion
• Programs for transportation: $175 billion
• Interest on the debt: $400 billion
• All other programs: $2 trillion

Now it seems to me that the great power, the great interests in the land, the folks for whom we work at our jobs and for whom we pour the most money through our government is: senior pensions and health care, education of children, defense against enemies foreign and domestic, relief of the poor, and transportation.

And this is a huge commitment.  In fact, it is a commitment that can’t be met.

That is what politics is going to be about in this century.  It is a sideshow to talk about management along private sector lines, or using government to punish corporations. 

The question is: how long can we go on like this?

When Multiculturalism Hits the Wall

We should all avoid ethnocentrism and phallocentrism and logocentrism.  That is to say, we should recognize that our own viewpoint on the world is not the only one.

That’s easy to say, easy to demand on a talking head show, easy to write in a blog.  But what about when cultures actually clash in the real world, as in Asian forced marriages in Britain?

Theodore Dalrymple (and it’s high time he was appointed an RMC Chappie) raises the question in reviewing Shame by Jaswinder Sangheera.

Sangheera is the child of Punjabi Sikh parents in Derby, England.

The author’s parents arranged a marriage for her when she was 15 years old, and in order to escape it she ran away with the boyfriend she was not supposed to have. Unusually in this situation, he stuck by her, and tried his best to support her.

The dark side of all this, of course, is that these girls of Asian parents who resist a forced marriage are subject to very heavy-handed persuasion.  Sometimes it ends in death.

When Dalrymple was an inner-city hospital physician in Birmingham, England, he writes, he used to interview young women like Sangheera “several times a week.”

I know of no suffering, short of civil war, greater than that of girls and young women put in the situation the author describes.

But let us look at the big picture.  Arranged marriage was the norm before the industrial revolution everywhere in the world, at least among anyone with property, because the preservation of property (i.e. land) from generation to generation was critical to survival.  But the industrial revolution changed all that.  In Marxian terms, it changed the productive forces, and the social superstructure had to adapt.  Freed from the land, young people can marry anyone they like because in the industrial world anyone can get a job and support themselves.  Land doesn’t matter.

All young women emerging from traditional society into the modern world face this situation.  Socialized into the modern world by their schools and their peers they find that they must rebel against their traditional parents.

It is said that the Broadway musical is precisely about the problem of the American immigrant girl wondering whether to “marry out” of her ethnic identity into the enticing world beyond the ghetto.

Beyond the trite gargling of multiculturalism, “we,” that is you and me, the enlightened, common-sense people of the west, could start doing some serious thinking about how we frame the situation of young women emerging into the modern west from their traditional families.  How much do we say: these are the rules of the west and if you violate them you are going to jail, diversity or no diversity, multiculturalism or no multiculturalism?  And how much do we accommodate people still seeking the safety of their traditional, premodern culture?

If we make up our minds, we could spare a lot of suffering.

Now There's an Inconvenient Truth About Africa

Who would have thunk it?  The government of Canada has issued a report on foreign aid to Africa, according to Jeremiah Norris, and the news is not good.  The Standing Senate Committee of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has issued a report and concluded that:

"Development assistance has been a holding pattern for Africa at best, and a direct facilitator of poor governance and economic mismanagement at worst."

 In numbers, “the per capita GNP in Sub-Saharan Africa [was] at 17.1% of the world average in 1965, falling to 9.7% in 2004.”

In other words, half a century of foreign aid has had zero positive effect on backward Africa.  In fact, it has probably damaged it.

Now what do you think the Canadian Senate committee proposed to do about this?

[Aid] donors should only give assistance to countries that are instilling a pro-growth business environment. Rather than a focus on providing social welfare programs, such as education, Canada should re-direct its assistance on economic development and agricultural productivity.

Moreover,

The Committee also concluded "that international development assistance is not the long-term answer for Africa. Vibrant economies and good governance are the answer for Africa. These are the conditions that can only be generated and sustained from within Africa, not from without."

This is unexceptional, of course.  It dovetails with research at the family level.  In The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas J. Stanley,William D. Danko write about the “economic outpatient care” (EOC) that many parents provide their adult children.  Adult children assisted in this way tend to work less and spend more than similar adults that lack EOC support.

Michael Novak on President Bush

The two hits on President Bus, writes RMC Chappie Michael Novak, is that he has lost the war and that his administration is incompetent.

Certainly, he has made mistakes on the war.  But

the president has now changed strategy, as well as the generals charged with pursuing it. He now has commanders who believe in victory and who, in fact, designed the way to get to it.

You can argue that the president’s strategy to keep as low a profile and let the Iraqis do it was a mistake, since it encouraged local warlords to step into the power vacuum.  But now the president has responded and changed.

The other argument is incompetence.  But let’s be realistic here.

A long-established lesson is that even in the best of times, government is mightily incompetent—and the bigger government gets, the more incompetent it becomes.

The buck stops here, and the president is responsible for every government mistake and miscue.  But let us not forget

the decisive steps President Bush took [after 9/11] allowed our economy not only to recoup the dreadful financial losses of September 11 but also to climb unparalleled heights.

We should not forget the recent epiphany of Theodore Dalrymple, in which he realized that the welfare state is built on the concept of failure, from top to bottom, and that its invariable response is to reinforce failure.

Of course if you believe, with President Bush and Michael Novak that “single most dominant issue we face remains the threat from jihadism,” then the question of whether we lose the battle of Iraq is a minor one. 

The ugly words broadcast by the jihadists may seem mad, but they are matched by steady actions upon a world-wide front. Their stated aim is to convert us forcibly to Islam or to exterminate us until the caliphate stretches around the world: one religion, one polity.

 If we believe that we are called to resist the militant surge of Islam then we have to do something about it. 

In response to the jihadist threat President Bush set out to bring democracy to the Middle East. You can say that he is having quite a struggle. But you can’t say he didn’t have a plan, and you can’t say that he just sat around twiddling his thumbs.

Earning the MSM's Trust

The mainstream media may be liberal, but you can still get a fair shake from them writes Bruce Bartlett.

More than that, “Major newspapers like The Post and New York Times are now pretty even handed in their news coverage” compared to the good old days back in the 1970s.  Of course the reporters are still liberal and the editorial pages decidedly so.  That goes without saying.

Years ago, Bartlett relates, when he was a young Capitol Hill aide, Republicans were taught always to return the calls of the media and always to deal straight with them.  There’s a payoff for this.

Over many years, I think I’ve earned the trust of a few top reporters at papers considered by conservatives to have a strong liberal bias. They will now take my word for things because I’ve never steered them wrong. These reporters have also told me of other people on both sides of the political spectrum that they will never trust or give a break to because they have lied or intentionally misled them.

 Of course, if the news coverage isn’t as reflexively liberal as it used to be, that means that it has moved to the right.  So when liberals complain of today’s coverage, they have a point.  From their point of view, it’s not as good as it used to be.

But liberals should stop whining and get a clue, advises Bartlett.  The fact is, they got lazy.

They just assumed the major media would automatically take their side, do hit jobs on conservatives and basically do their job for them.

So here’s some advice for our liberal friends.

You had a long free ride, and now it’s over. Get used to it, and learn how to use the media. Take a page from the conservative handbook and go around it. Figure out why talk radio works for conservatives and has dismally failed for liberals. Learn how to marshal facts and argue cogently instead of haranguing people and using ad hominem attacks on those who disagree.

On the other hand, if you prefer, don’t change.  Just keep on keeping on.  We won’t stop you.

Gross? As $300 million?

We red-blooded American males have been suffering for years.  Denied our all-American heroes in the movies we have had lefty anti-heroes rammed down our throats for over a generation.  Our anti-hero way of rage against the Man and the machine or the highway, said Hollywood’s creative finest.

Or, to paraphrase a famous American: Anti-heroes yesterday, Anti-heroes today, Anti-heroes forever.

When the United States was savagely attacked by rich Saudi Muslims, we were taught to worry about “why they hate us.”  And Hollywood refused to provoke our moderate Middle-eastern friends.  You know the ones that don’t just want to bury us.  They want to kill us.  After all, we are only infidels.

So now along comes a bunch of schmucks nobody’s ever heard of — graphic novelist Frank Miller, director Zack Snyder, and a couple of other writers — to pull in $70 million over the weekend with a movie about a handful of brave warriors who stand up against the limitless central-Asian hordes, iron men vs. effeminate oriental voluptuaries, and patriots against robotic slaves. How was this picture allowed to be made?  

By now everyone knows that the movie “300” is not really a video-game style recreation of the battle of the Spartans against the Persians, but really...  Nod, nod, wink, wink, know-what-I-mean.

So scriptwriter David Kahane is conflicted.

Help me out here, because I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around a few things: When, early in the film, a sneering Persian emissary insults King Leonidas’s hot wife, threatens the kingdom, and rages about “blasphemy,” the king kicks him down a bottomless well. And yet nobody in Sparta asks, “Why do they hate us?” and seeks to find common ground with the Persians on their doorstep. Why not?

Does that mean he can now write scripts about true American heroes smiting the mind-numbed robots of the world’s thugocrats?  Or is it back to Nazis and crazed Christian militias?

Romney bets on tax cuts to win

What will it take to win the Republican nomination for president in 2008?  Mitt Romney seems to be placing a bet on tax cuts, reports Donald Lambro.  He recently addressed the Detroit Economic Club. 

"What is the better course for America? A European model of high taxes and regulations, or low taxes and free trade, the Ronald Reagan model? That’s the choice the next president is going to make," he said, adding ominously that the Democrats were "already working hard to implement a massive tax increase."

 As the saying goes, if Republicans don’t stand for tax cuts, who will?

Romney is not just giving speeches about tax cuts, he is loading up his team with tax cutters.

• Vin Weber, “who is chairman of Mr. Romney’s domestic policy board”
• Cesar Conda, “a key player in Republican tax cut battles of the last two decades”
• R. Glenn Hubbard, a “staunch tax cutter”
• N. Gregory Mankiw, “a free market economist at Harvard” 
• John Cogan, “one of the architects of the Bush tax cut plan.” 
• Brian Reardon, “helped put together the president’s 2003 plan to accelerate the tax cuts”

What do you call a team like that?  Lambro calls them “committed Reaganite supply-siders.”

The New "Time": Big and Brawny?

For many of us, it is years since we subscribed to Time magazine.  Maybe decades.  Why?  Is it the reflexive media liberalism?  Is it the dumbed-down punchiness, the emphasis on graphics?  Or is it the fundamental unseriousness?  Who knows?

But this week, Time is redesigning into four basic sections: “Briefing, The Well, Ideas and Arts,”according to Keith J. Kelly at the New York Post. The “Well” will be, well, read for yourself:

The Well will be home for features, what Stengel calls "big, brawny stories" on world, national and business affairs and the main cover story.

Doesn’t exactly make you run out and buy it.  What is it now? A truck?  Do we hear the clang of hammers on anvils?

For Katharine Q. Seelye at The New York Times it’s all a bit of a joke—the end of Time’s signature inverted syntax.

All I know is that my mother asked what to do about Time about five years ago, when she just couldn’t take it any more.  Try The Economist, I said. 

Japanese Day Traders Try "Carry" Trade

Remember 1999-2000?  That was the heyday of the day traders, amateurs trying their hand at making money in the stock market during their coffee breaks at work.  It was an early warning of the NASDAQ meltdown: when the little guy gets in, it’s time to head for the exits.

It’s happened before.  In 1929 Joe Kennedy (yes that Joe Kennedy) reckoned it was time to get out of the market when his shoe-shine boy started giving him stock tips.

It’s deja vu all over again.  In Friday’s Wall Street Journal Yuka Hayashi writes about "Japanese Addiction: Currency Bets" (sub. required).  A lot of Japanese small investors are borrowing yen to buy foreign currency.  In other words, they are engaging in the "carry" trade just like the big boys in the hedge funds.

Only, of course, we are probably in the last days of the "carry" trade.  It worked so long as people could borrow yen at nearly zero percent interest and then use the proceeds to buy other currencies and get five percent on their money.

But notice what happens if the yen goes up.  That means that the other currency goes down.  If it goes down by five percent or more, the investor is under water.

Take the case of Naomi Kashiwazaki.  Hayashi writes:

She trades currencies from her small apartment in Tokyo’s suburbs.  She started about a year and a half ago to supplement the income from her online store... In recent months, she has earned an average profit of $8,600 per month.

But probably not in the last month, for since March 1 the yen has suddenly risen by about four percent against the dollar.

This sounds like something that is going to end in tears. 

The Case of Hillary and the Vanity Mirror

Now we know why our Democratic friends hate Karl Rove with a passion.  Read what he did, back at the beginning of the Bush administration, as reported by Kane Webb.

Of course, this is Rove’s version of events.  You know what that means.

Karl Rove tells the story that he inherited Hillary Clinton’s old office at the White House.  That, according to Rove, “irritated her.”

Now prepare for the dread political cunning of Karl Rove.  He upped and told the media that there was a vanity mirror behind the filing cabinets in this office.

Pretty soon he met Hillary and she told him that she didn’t put that mirror there.

Never said she did.  So Rove put the story out to the media again.

Pretty soon, Rove ran into Hillary.  Again.

“‘I told you I didn’t put that mirror there,’” he said she said, with her Hillary-esque conviction.

Oy!

Now you see the depth to which Karl Rove will descend, the complexity and the sophistication of his political cunning.

For who would want to elect a woman to the presidency who is so vain that she wants everyone to know that she is not so vain that she put a vanity mirror in the White House?

At the Center of the Health Care Mess

Everyone agrees that the health care system is a mess.  But that is where agreement ends.  Democrats believe that the solution to the mess is universal health care, maybe a single-payer system like Canada.

Republicans think that the problem is rather different.  It is that few people actually know what they are paying for health care.  What is needed is a true market in health care so that the price system can do its magic, just like it does in houses, in automobiles, and in movie tickets.

As Scott W. Atlas writes:

Unlike other products and services, consumers use medical care without having any idea of its true costs. Can you imagine buying a house, a car or a dress without knowing what it would cost? Without price information, it is impossible to be an informed customer.

It’s the old, old problem that we spent the entire twentieth century arguing about, although Ludwig von Mises resolved the it with a paper in 1920, subsequently expanded into a book, Socialism. 

The problem with a socialist commonwealth, he wrote, is that you cannot compute prices, and that means that you don’t have a clue what things cost.  For that reason, Mises predicted, three years after the Bolshevik Revolution, that socialism would never work.

In the United States we have our own socialized sector and it is just as messed up as the old Soviet economy.  In education, in health care, and in government welfare, nobody knows the cost of anything, and nobody cares.

President Bush has proposed that the cost of health insurance should be exposed by limiting the amount you can deduct in your income tax return.  That’s a start.  But Atlas recommends also that:

• “the prices of medical procedures be fully available and clearly presented to patients before any medical procedure”
• “qualifications of doctors be made available to their potential patients”

That is surely not too much to ask.

Of course, if we make the health care system “transparent” it is going to change everything to do with health care.  Given that health care is 15 percent of the economy, the transition will be staggering.  People will be looking for someone to blame for the pain of it all.

Look for the innocent to be lynched, and the guilty to go free.

School Choice--On the Front Lines

What do you think about this 16 year old kid, Rontrell Matthews, in Johns Island, South Carolina?  He turned up last summer at the doors of Capers Preparatory Christian Academy with $32.86 earned from his job at Subway.  He wanted to buy his way out of his failing public school, as Brendan Miniter reports.

Founded in 2003 by Faye Brown, a 55-year-old retired public school teacher, Capers is one of a handful of "independent schools" that serve the state’s rural poor. It operates out of rented office space, has a total of 42 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, and makes do on an annual budget of about $160,000 a year. Nearly all of its equipment—desks, books and the eight iMacs in its computer lab—were donated to the school.

Now let’s see.  What are we talking about in the cost per student department? With 42 students and $160,000 budget, that makes $3,809 per student.

Yes, but what about the results?  Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman.  Nobody talks about outcomes in the education arena.  Do you imagine that education is like a business, where people insist: “Does it pay?”

Yes, but we are talking about private education, not sacramental public education.  Although nobody would think of raising the question of outcomes and profit in a church of public education, Capers is different.  It is a private academy.  So outcomes do matter.  After all, the people sending students to Capers—and in the case of Rontrell Matthews, sending themselves—are spending their own money.  They expect results.

The school places a heavy emphasis on reading, writing and math. As a result the school’s average SAT score, 1150, is 164 points above the state average, and this year the school expects every one of its graduates to go on to college. St. Johns High School, the public school these students would be attending if not for Capers, has an average SAT score of 788.

So that would make the state’s SAT average a rather dismal 986.

It seems that things never change.  It was about 140 years ago that the young Booker T. Washington traveled half way across the Old South in search of an education.  And you know what happened to him.

In those days it was white conservative racists that were preventing young black men from getting an education.  Today it is white liberal racists that are standing in the school house door.  What’s the difference?

Bush: Chavez's Economic Model Leads to Poverty

It shouldn’t need to be said, of course.  It ought to be the common knowledge of every street urchin in the Third World.  Government control of the economy leads to poverty.

Here’s what Bush actually said on his Latin American tour, according to AFP:

"I strongly believe that government-run industry is inefficient and will lead to more poverty," Bush replied to a question on Chavez’s economic model, which includes nationalizations and muscular state intervention.

"So the United States brings a message of open markets and open government to the region," he said.

The question is: Why would anyone ask such a question?  It’s a matter of the science.  We know that politically-run enterprise doesn’t work.  It’s been tried again and again, and it never works.  In fact it was tried repeatedly in scientifically-designed nation-state experiments, a privilege rarely extended to social scientists.  The results were repeatable.  And government-run industry failed, every time it was tried.

The answer is: Power.  People who seek political power are people who are practitioners of power.  Power is what they understand; power is what they do; power is what they are good at.  And, whatever else he may be, President Chavez of Venezuela is certainly good at a crude, thug-dictator kind of power.

Of course, it is not just general economic policy where the inefficiency of government-run industry appears.  As Arnold Kling writes in “The Political Economy of Alternative Energy,” if you take a look at the proposals of the global warming crowd, it is all about privilege, subsidy, and rent-seeking, with Al Gore as chief rent-seeker with his peculiar carbon-offset company. If the global-warming enthusiasts succeed in implementing their agenda, Al Gore will make a lot of money with his Generation Investment Management LLP.

The most important, inconvenient truth about energy policy is that there is no justification for a subsidy for good energy. Subsidies for wind farms, solar energy, ethanol, and so forth, whether they come from government "energy policy" or personal carbon offsets, are pure pork.

“Pork,” of course, is a polite term for “rent-seeking,” itself a polite term for political power.  And political power is a polite term for force.

How About An Apology For "Fraudulent Education?"

The two legislative chambers of the Commonwealth of Virginia have recently passed an apology for slavery, “after 400 years,”writes the British Guardian.

“Isn’t that nice,”writes Walter Williams, a descendant of slaves.  Now that we are in the apology business how about apologies for the millions killed by the Soviet Union, by Mao’s China, and so on?

And more to the point, how about getting a bit closer to home, apologizing for the mess in Virginia?

Did you know, for instance, that Richmond, Virginia, is “the city with the third-highest murder rate in the nation, according to a 2005 FBI report?”

Did you know that in Virginia:

black education is a disgrace. In 2003, 51 percent of black eighth-graders scored below basic; 49 percent at or above basic; of these, only 11 percent scored proficient.

“Below basic” means what it seems to mean.  Illiterate.

As a descendant of slaves, Williams reckons that the apology for slavery is a “cheap insult.”

The next time the Virginia General Assembly gets into an apologetic mood and wants to pass another resolution aimed at its black citizens, here are my suggestions: The Commonwealth of Virginia apologizes to its black citizens for not protecting them from criminals who prey upon them and make their lives a daily nightmare. The Commonwealth also apologizes for our government-sanctioned school system that delivers fraudulent education, thereby consigning many of its black citizens to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

Now we’re talking. 

Newt's Ideas at Cooper Union

Years ago in the 1990s a political cartoonist drew a memorable line of filing cabinets, each drawer marked "Newt’s Ideas."  Way out on the end was a drawer marked "Newt’s Good Ideas."  At least the good ideas were on the right end of the filing cabinets.

But of course, anyone with good ideas will be found to have generated plenty of ordinary ideas.  It’s like the salespeople say: Each No is one step closer to Yes.

Former House Speker Newt Gingrich’s latest idea is one-on-one debates between presidential candidates: half hour speeches from each candidate and 30 minutes for questions.  No journalists, just a time keeper.  He tried out the format in a debate with former NY Governor Cuomo on February 27, 2007 at the Cooper Union in New York City, as reported in the New York Times by Eleanor Stables.

It’s obvious why Newt likes the idea.  It’s a good format for a candidate with a lot of serious ideas. Like Newt.  If you watch the Cooper Union event here you see Newt in complete command.  He hits his marks; he gets the ideas out that he wants; he illustrates his points with interesting anecdotes; he worries for his grandchildren; and he finishes on time.  Newt was all about the problems of today and a vision of hope for the future.

In comparison Mario Cuomo spent a lot of time talking about the perfidy of Republican tax cuts of twenty years ago, and more money for health, education, and welfare.  He ran over his time, and didn’t have any compelling prescription for the future.

The debate showed indirectly that politicians don’t just come up with political ideas out of thin air.  It takes a lot of work to assemble and shape up a set of ten point plans.  Without the spur of an election campaign, politicians just sit around rehashing the past.  Newt’s running, so he’s got ideas.  Cuomo isn’t, so he’s just dusting off old ideas and current partisan talking points.

What about Newt’s ideas?  He is right down the middle on the current conservative agenda. 

• He wants reform of health care so that people can shop for prices. He talks of the difference between a colonoscopy for $5,700 in the Northeast and $3,300 in Salt Lake City. 
• He wants reform of Social Security so that we can do something about the main difference between the rich and the poor.  The rich have investments and the magic of compound interest.  So let’s have a Social Security that puts real investments and real compound interest to work for poor people. 
• On the War on Terror Newt favors creating trouble for Iran and North Korea.  It is passing strange, he seems to think, that the one refinery in Iran that supplies gasoline hasn’t yet been sabotaged.  And it would be a good idea to fund smugglers to make things difficult for the government of North Korea instead of giving food to the government of that nation.

Michael Novak on the Recent Atheist Books

What are we to think about the recent apologia for atheism?  We mean Richard Dawkins’  The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, and Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.  How does a believer deal with these withering critiques of religion? Michael Novak, RMC Chappie, has crack at answering them in National Review. 

He uses his daughter to make his strongest argument.  She went off to university at Duke as an atheist, but the professors there cured her of it. 

What got to her most was the affectation of professors pretending that everything is ultimately absurd, while in more proximate matters putting all their trust in science, rationality, and mathematical calculation.

 It’s an interesting paradox, isn’t it?  You do your research and your science with an admirable faith in reason.  But you believe the world is ultimately absurd.  What do you call that?  Religion?

Anyway, Novak’s daughter now calls herself an  “agno-theist.”

There’s a lot more, including a quick Apology for Christianity in four parts:

1. A Theology of the Absurd (to counter the Duke professors)
2. The Burden of Sin (you know, the things you know you shouldn’t do)
3. The Bright Golden Thread of Human History
4. The Point of the Cosmos is Friendship

Atheists like Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett are all very well, and they are excellent fellows, writes Novak.

To be sure, some individual atheists “of a peculiar character” and academic distinction, brought up in habits inculcated by the religious cultures of the past, can go on for two or three generations living in ways hard to distinguish from those of unassuming Christians and Jews. These individuals continue to be honest, compassionate, committed to the equality of all, and firm believers in “progress” and “brotherhood,” long after they repudiate the original religious justification for this particular list of virtues. But sooner or later a generation may come along that takes the metaphysics of atheism with deadly seriousness. This was the fate of a highly cultivated nation in the Europe of our time.

He means Germany, for those of you who are historically challenged. 

And in Britain, close by the spires of Oxford where Professor Dawkins lives and works, there are plenty of people taking the metaphysics of atheism seriously.

It’s all very well for the academic elite to be pleasantly aware of the absurdity of life.  But for most of us, the strain is intolerable.  We must know that our life on earth has a purpose.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

Democrats and Social Security -- And Americans

Speaker Pelosi made much of her grandchildren at the opening of the new Congress: “We’re here for the children,” she said.

That is appropriate, for as Carrie Lukas writes, the big government programs are a kind of compact between Americans and their grandchildren.  “Policymakers should evaluate policies based on how they affect future generations.”

Yet politicians — Pelosi herself chief among them — have viewed Social Security as a convenient political weapon, not a problem to be solved. In 2005, when the president launched his effort to place Social Security on firmer financial footing, then Minority Leader Pelosi... sought to squelch debate and use the issue for political leverage... So much for thinking about the children.

Social Security is based on the same premise as the defined-benefit pensions at big corporations.   These programs are based on the idea that there will always be money somewhere out there in the future to pay the pensions.

The corporate defined-benefit programs are now about defunct.  Because it turned out that although General Motors looked as though it would rule the world forever back in 1950 it turned out that it didn’t.

The same thing is going to happen to Social Security.  The only question is: How is it going to play out?  Will the senior citizens grind their grandchildren into the dirt forcing them to pay taxes to support them?  Or will the grandchildren rebel?

And of course, the Social Security problem is minor compared to the Medicare problem.

The interesting thing about this developing train-wreck is that the folks who have represented themselves to the world for over a century as the very incarnation of care and compassion are the very people who are proposing to turn the screws on the grandchildren.

It is cruel and heartless to force young couples struggling to start families to support an older, richer generation, to keep them in their empty homes, to supply them with heroic medical care, while young families go without.

As a 60-year-old, I regard this coming injustice with outrage.  We baby-boomers should not be a dead weight upon the youngsters coming up.  If there is help to be given it should be to the young strugglers, not to the old reprobates.

Someday soon, we conservatives will be called upon to clean up this mess.  We will have to make a decent provision for the older people who listened to the Democrats and believed that they could live a bump-on-a-log life and expect the government to take care of them.  Yet we must also right the injustice and render justice to the young people and their young families. 

It won’t be fun. 

“”

MSM Soft-pedals ACLU Child Porn Suspect

Child porn is a pretty disgusting subject.  It involves the depiction of the rape of children.  But the American Civil Liberties Union has been active in opposing the installation of porn filters in public library filters.  Good for them.

So much for the First Amendment.  But Bill O’Reilly asks:

How many of you have heard of Charles Rust-Tierney?

 You haven’t?  Well maybe you remember this, as quoted by O’Reilly:

On Dec. 1, 1998, Tierney issued this statement: "Recognizing that individuals will continue to behave responsibly and appropriately while in the library, the default should be maximum, unrestricted access to the valuable resources of the Internet."

Charles Rust-Tierney is a former ACLU chapter president.

On February 24, 2007 the Washington Post published this teensy-weensy Virginia Roundup, headlined “Ex-ACLU Head Seized in Porn Case.”

An Arlington County youth sports coach and former ACLU chapter president was arrested on child pornography charges by federal agents who accused him of viewing Web sites filled with explicit images of pre-pubescent girls.

Charles Rust-Tierney, 51, of Arlington was charged with receipt and possession of child pornography. He was ordered detained pending a preliminary hearing Wednesday. Prosecutors said Rust-Tierney coaches various youth sports teams in and around Arlington. A 2002 Virginia ACLU newsletter identified him as the group’s president.

So far, none of the MSM has picked up the story.  Conservatives, of course, are all over it now that O’Reilly has broken it wide open.

Now imagine that this youth sports coach was not a “former ACLU chapter president” but a “fundamentalist” Christian minister.

Exactly.  The arrest report would not be buried on page B05.

Here’s an idea.  We ought to hold our own guys to a higher standard than the other guys.  Just an idea.

New Hope for Climate Deniers

We holocaust, er sorry, global warming deniers are having a rough time these days, as super energy hog Al Gore gets an Oscar for his Inconvenient Truth. And girl columnists like Maureen Dowd call us names.  So it gives us a warm fuzzy feeling to know that this week on TV in Britland they’ll be showing The Great Global Warming Swindle.  Now that’s more like it!  The film doesn’t parrot the official UN line of consensus science that the current global warming is driven by human carbon emissions.

Instead the documentary highlights recent research that the effect of the sun’s radiation on the atmosphere may be a better explanation for the regular swings of climate from ice ages to warm interglacial periods and back again.

Let’s back up on that one.  Given that the current climate of predominant ice ages interspersed with shorter interglacial periods have been going on for millions of years, it couldn’t be driven by human action.  Obviously there are other climate-forcing causes at work.

And there is this, my favorite from Daniel B .Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies.

Nature changes over essentially all time scales

Another way of saying this is that if the world weren’t getting warmer it would be getting colder. And we don’t know why.

Apparently there’s a good quote from an African official:

James Shikwati, Kenyan director of the Inter Region Economic Network, says: ’The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy, but for us we are still at the stage of survival.’

Africa as a continent is notable for being a plateau usually above 1,000 feet.  Most of its rivers have cataracts fairly close to the sea, making river navigation difficult.

For Africa, a bit of global warming might be a benefit.

Lefty Lifestyles of the Rich and Cheap

You assume that lefty writer Barbara Ehrenreich is, what the Forsytes would call, a warm woman.  Her best-selling travelogue of working with the minimum-wage set, Nickeled and Dimed, has made her more than nickels and dimes.  It is said to be required reading in freshman orientation at several colleges. So when her son Ben Ehrenreich decides that “we” can’t afford the cost of fixing a broken ankle, you have to wonder.  Says Ben:

My girlfriend had broken her ankle and needed surgery. She was between jobs and between health insurance plans. We couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars the surgery would have cost at a private hospital. So I bundled her up at 4 o’clock one cold morning in January, drove to Boyle Heights and checked her in at the emergency room at L.A. County-USC.

Now I always thought that the practical reason for family was the security of people who care about you.  When a member of the family hits a pothole then the family rallies round to help fix the jalopy.

But apparently not in the Ehrenreich clan.  And apparently Ben’s girl friend didn’t think to avail herself of the opportunity of continuing to pay for her health insurance while she was “between jobs.”  And apparently Ben didn’t offer to pay for her hospital bills.

What is it about these progressives?  Look at the chain of irresponsibility here.  First of all you have the girl friend, who doesn’t think it worthwhile to continue her health insurance payments.  She is too cheap to make a proper provision for accident or ill health.

Then you have Ben, a journalist and novelist, presumably enjoying the favors of this young woman.  He is too cheap to help out the woman with whom, Planned Parenthood aside, he could at any moment share the blessings of future parenthood.

And what about mother Barbara, the successful writer of left-wing bestsellers?  Where was she while all this was going on?

Why do these wealthy, educated left-wing people expect us to pay for their health care?

Giuliani The Details Man

Funny how things work.  We’ve had months of fainting and gushing by the MSM over Democratic Senator Barack Obama. 

But on the Republican side, under the radar, suddenly Rudy Giuliani emerges as the frontrunner.  No media orgasm, not huge publicity campaign.  How does it work?

Never mind.  The question is: What kind of a man is Giuliani. David Frum, taking Fred Siegel’s excellent book Prince of the City, tells us all about him.

Giuliani is an intense student of government - not politics, although he cares about that too, but government: the mechanics, the institutions. Unlike George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, he is very much a details man.

And probably that is what you need to be to achieve what Giuliani achieved in New York City.  Because when you realize that New York City is the very citadel of the progressive class and the central slum of their clients, well let Frum say it.

Giuliani’s accomplishments as mayor almost dazzle the eye:

Crime reduced, work restored, poverty down, taxes cut, revenues increased, private home ownership up, civic spaces restored ....

and these were not coincidences, the happy result of being in the right place at the right time. Every achievement can be directly traced to a policy adopted or imposed by Giuliani, almost invariably over the vociferous objection of the city’s most powerful interest groups and influential media.

Yes.  Let’s repeat that.  Every policy change was achieved over the dead body of liberal special interests and the MSM.

And when you think of the vast range and extent of the welfare state, its hundreds and thousands of nice little programs and sinecures that run on and on, unreformed, forever, the task of reforming it is daunting. 

Unless you are a tough customer and a detail man, a man like Rudolph Giuliani.

The Virtue of Debates

Newt Gingrish and Mario Cuomo met recently to give speeches at Cooper Union in New York, reports Stephen Spruiell.  The idea was to revive the memory of Abraham Lincoln’s speech there in 1860, and to use it as an inspiration for the 2008 campaign.

Gingrich proposed that the 2008 candidates agree to a series of debates and discussions in the spirit of Lincoln’s devotion to “language, ideas, and reasoned thought.”

That’s a good idea, and not just because of a nostalgia for the good old days of reasoned debate.

Republicans desperately need a venue in which they can publicly advertise their ideas to the voters.  On a normal day all Americans hear is the reflexive liberalism of TV news and liberal activists.  They rarely get a chance to hear conservatives talking amongst themselves.

Whether the Republicans presidential candidates can really sustain a series of substantive debates is questionable.  It’s all very well to be in favor of debate and dialog.  It is another to actually deliver it.  For the truth is that the candidates are not members of a friendly debating society where the purpose is to chomp down on big ideas and masticate them.  They are engaged in a high-stakes bid for the brass ring.  And they know very well that their next unscripted remark could be the one that hits the TV news and sinks their campaign.

So don’t expect any real debates.  The candidates can’t afford it.

But it sure would be nice to have some more conservative ideas out there in the public square.

Aiming for Hegemon

Wonder what the Chicoms are doing and why?  It’s not to hard to figure out, according to William Hawkins.  It’s the simple “divide and conquer” strategy that goes all the way back to the Qin dynasty.  If you recall the Qin were the chaps who unified China in 221 BCE at the end of the Warring States period.  Qin Shi Huang, the chappie buried at the terra-cotta soldiers burial complex near Xian, was the first Qin emperor.

Beijing has adopted a traditional Chinese strategy dating back to the ancient Warring States period. This era, when Qin rose from a weak position within a system of competing powers to unite China in 221 B.C., plays a role in Chinese thinking similar to that of the Founding Fathers in America. In the winter Chinese Journal of International Politics, Wei Zongyou, a professor at the Shanghai International Studies University of Foreign Studies, has described Qin’s strategy as one of "divide and conquer" as it sought to prevent other states from uniting to block its rise as the new, dominant hegemon.

So that’s all right then.  

Beijing has been using this strategy to isolate the United States in the six power talks over North Korea, and in stirring up trouble among the thug dictactor trouble-makers throughout the world. And, of course, you haven’t exactly seen the Chinese helping in Iraq.

No doubt we shall see this start to work it way out as the Chinese move northwards into Siberia and penetrate the longest flank in the world, the Russian Empire.

The question is, will the dog hun?  It’s one thing to have a strategy as a rising power.  It’s another thing to actually become the future hegemon.  One thing that the Chinese are a little short of is a surplus of young men.  The One Child policy kinda took care of that.  You can’t really create an expansionist empire upon an aged and declining population.

But you can certainly try.