"Target Failing Families" or "More Responsibility"

In Britain’s Daily Telegraph recently Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted that his policies on crime and social breakdown hadn’t worked.  Although things had really improved and crime rates had gone down during his premiership (a claim that many dispute) there was still more to be done.

[T]he proper answer is to add to the ASB laws measures that target failing and dysfunctional families early, and place those families within a proper, structured, disciplined framework of help and insistence on proper behaviour.

Well, sorry Prime Minister, but that didn’t go down too well in the comment section.  As in:

• “Utter drivel.”
• “The problem is, you have not been tough on crime - you just say you have.”
• “This man’s capacity for delusional thinking knows no limits.”

The Telegraph thoughtfully produced an op-ed by Leader of the Opposition David Cameron two days later.  Cameron was able to expand upon the theme he articulated upon his election to Conservative Party leadership over 18 months ago.  Society is not the same thing as the state.

(Try that concept on a liberal friend.  Chances are that they won’t get it.)

In criticizing Blair’s proposal for a government program to target the tiny minority of dysfunctional families Cameron writes:

Only a Labour politician would think that you can pump billions of pounds into public services and expect crime to fall and social wellbeing to rise in direct consequence...
Labour’s intentions may have been good, but its approach failed because its only instruments were taxpayers’ money and mechanical central control.

Labour’s government solution to crime and incivility is wrong.  What is needed is “Not more control. Not more money. But more responsibility.”

That is what I mean when I say that ’’there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state’’. When Labour politicians talk of ’’society as a whole’’, they mean the state. For me, ’’society’’ is more plural and unstructured. It is composed of all the institutions and associations that individuals form for business, pleasure and social action. It is here that the real answers to crime and incivility lie.

For Cameron the comments section was more diverse, as we postmoderns say. 

• More piffle and tosh...
• “I believe that this is a reasonable and well thought article. Changing behaviours takes a generation, so this is not a simple subject to tackle.”
• “Well said Mr. Cameron. What’s lacking today is peer pressure from society[.]” 

There were plenty of complaints like “piffle and tosh.”  There were demands for specific policies.  But there was also genuine approval. 

What Cameron does not say, and what his readers do say is that if the “institutions and associations” are to get bigger then the state has to get smaller.  There’s no getting away from that.  It is the power of the state that has decimated the little platoons.  To recruit and re-form the little platoons we need to stop the state from controlling them and bossing them around.

As Arthur C. Brooks writes in Who Really Cares, when government spends an extra dollar on social services it crowds out a little less than 50 cents in charitable assistance.  If you figure that private charity is about twice as productive as government then you are backing out private effort dollar for dollar. 

Is this all we have achieved after a century of the welfare state?

Go Ahead, Make My Day

Former Senator John “Two Americas” Edwards told Democrats in California that he would raise taxes at least back to the Clinton levels, according to Stephen Dinan.  Said Edwards 

What I believe is the starting place is to go back to the Clinton levels[.]

Go ahead, Senator Edwards.  We Republicans have the reputation of being the stupid party.  That means that we really need help from the opposition in order to win elections and get into power.

Democrats raising taxes has been a real winner for Republicans in the last generation, and if you don’t get that, well, that’s ok with us.

Of course, we understand that when you are talking to a convention of government-employed Democrats you must never suggest that the gravy train must come to an end.

Chances are though that Edwards will never get close to a tax increase.  The current collapse of the dollar will mean a return, sooner or later, to the economic policy of 1981-83.  The way to recover the dollar and the economy at the same time, as President Reagan demostrated a generation ago, is high interest rates balanced by tax cuts and spending cuts.

And chances are by January 2009 the next Democratic president will find that spending cuts and and tax cuts will be the only solution to the country’ economic problems.

But that’s ok.  Democrats advertise themselves as the reality-based community, so we can be confident that they will want to use proven economic science in fixing the economy.  

Just How Smart Are Dems?

Everyone seems to think that the Democrats are brilliantly managing the politics of the Iraq war in preparation for the 2008 election.  And when the Democratic Senate passed its war-funding bill complete with deadlines, S.A. Miller reports, they had their sound bite ready.

"We hope the president will reconsider his stubbornness and his refusal to listen to the American people," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat.

Of course all the Democratic candidates at last night’s presidential debate—18 months before the election—were all against the war.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, said the war is "not America’s war to win or lose."

I think rather that the Democrats are steering a narrow and dangerous path between their angry-left base and the amorphous middle of the US electorate.  If they had their druthers, I suspect they would just set back and complain and wait for 2008.  But they know that the netroots demands that they do something.

Conservative Rich Lowry sees scoundrels and cynical operators.

Harry Reid had a bright, shining moment of honesty when he said that the war in Iraq is lost.

But he couldn’t admit it, and so retreated into “fog of evasion, contradictions and groan-inducing implausibilities.”

Reid said that he agreed with Gen. Petraus’s statement that the war was only partly military.  But then he was too busy to listen to the general’s report on the war.

"No one wants us to succeed in Iraq more than the Democrats," Reid maintains. What a pathetic canard.

Pity a poor Democrat.  The United States has the most patriotic population of any of the western nations.  But there are plenty of people who are not patriotic, and they are almost all members of the Democratic base.  So Democratic leaders are torn between the majority of Americans with their simple pride in America and their liberal base that’s been taught to believe in a post-patriotic, supra-national world.

Democrats are trying to ride two horses at once.  Chances are, it’s not going to work.

Regulating Speech on a Slippery Slope

Liberals are all riled up about conservative talk radio.  So they want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine and “require "equal time" be given to opposing political views,”  as Cal Thomas observes.

That’s an outrage, of course, a direct attack on the First Amendment.  But conservatives have their own agenda.

Some conservatives, aided by the FCC, want to regulate violence on broadcast television and, for the first time, cable television.

The only trouble is that the FCC can’t come up with a decent definition of violence.  Oh well, maybe Congress can do it.

So what do we do about it?

Increasingly, I meet parents of young children who have decided not to have a TV in the house. Having grown up with TV, they say they experience a period of "withdrawal," similar to that of breaking free of nicotine or other addictions. Soon, however, they are communicating more with their children, reading books to them and enjoying time together. Their lives are better without TV.

Imagine that!  Of course, you wonder about the kids of TV-less families.  My parents never had TV while I was a kid, so I spent my entire time at university watching TV.  Of course that was different.  It was back in the Golden Age of TV.

But, let’s be honest.  It was still mindless.

The thing is, if we conservatives believe in responsibility then we have to allow people, other people, to be irresponsible.  In a free society people have to make their own decisions to turn away from childish, addictive behavior towards the sunny upland of duty and responsibility.

We have a word for the situation where you are forced to be responsible.  It is called childhood.

Class Warfare Taxes May Sink Dems

First thing the Democrats are doing in the new Congress is to exempt most taxpayers from the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).  They propose to pay for it by, wait for it, increasing tax rates on the highest income taxpayers.  

Cesar Conda says, careful what you wish for Democrats.  Leaving aside that economists now agree that high marginal tax rates on rich people hurt the overall economy, there is a political aspect to tax rate increases.  Soak the rich tax policy doesn’t seem to have been politically successful in recent years.

For example, in 1988 the Democrat-controlled Congress passed a universal catastrophic health-insurance plan, which was financed by a surtax of 15 percent on upper-income seniors... But to the surprise of the Democrats, senior citizens — even those not subject to the surtax — protested so strongly... that Congress voted to repeal the program and the surtax the following year.

Then there was George  Bush senior.  He reversed his “Read my lips, no new taxes” pledge and was reversed out of the White House.

Then Clinton and the last Democratic Congress raised marginal tax rates on upper income Americans.

Once again, this soak-the-rich tax policy backfired politically. Republicans regained control of Congress in 1994 by opposing the Clinton tax increases and supporting tax relief.

Should Republicans be saying: “Go ahead, make my day?”

Obama: The New Reagan?

After the surprise showing by Sen. Barack Obama in the fundraising stakes,  Sean Higgins is ready to call him the “black Ronald Reagan.” That’s because:

Of all the candidates running, only Obama truly exemplifies one of Reagan’s most popular characteristics: his sunny optimism.

But after plowing through Obama’s first major foreign policy speech, Dean Barnett feels that he

has a strange gift for using several pretty-sounding paragraphs to say virtually nothing.

Actually, there is a better model for Barack Obama.  He is not like Ronald Reagan.  Not at all.  He is the latest model of third way politicians Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.  They both came to office brimming with optimism.  Everyone loved them.  The media went into a swoon.

But what did they do?  Nothing.

And the reason is simple.  There was nothing they could do without stepping on the oxygen supply of the left-of-center electorate which lives in the demi-mode of government employment, government pension, or government subsidy.

And that, of course, was out of the question.  You do not run for office in order to suffocate your supporters.

You can be sunny and optimistic all you want.  But politics is about dealing, in the end, with the cold hard world.

That was the difference with Ronald Reagan.  His sunny optimism was a means to an end.  He had spent years thinking and reading and writing before he came to the presidency. (Of course, nobody knew it at the time.  Everyone, even conservatives, thought he was a bit of a lightweight.)

And Ronald Reagan led a party that was ready for change.

He won the cold war, stopped inflation, and restarted the US economy.  That, as the saying goes, is some kind of a legacy. 

It All Dovetails

If you’ve ever watched The Larkin Chronicles (the Brit TV series that was the breakout hit for Catherine Zeta Jones) you’ll remember the fatuous woman character, Mrs Jerebohm, who kept insisting that it all dovetailed.

But sometimes it really does dovetail.

Here we are in 2007 and we are up to our keisters in problems:

• Murdering hordes from south-west Asia
• Welfare state that has wrecked the working class
• Dumbed-down education
• Murdering adolescents in college
• Corrosive adolescent music/movie/video-game culture
• A corrupt, powerful academic ruling class

At a time like this it always seems that there’s no way out.  Except if you are a Republican.  Then you have a nasty feeling that Republicans are on their way out—of power.

But usually in the course of human events the solution to our problems is right in front of us.  Some people—Christians, Zen Buddhists, that sort—go even further.  They say that the solution is always right in front of us.

For people of a literary turn, solutions mean books, and the suspicion that the books are already out there.  Indeed they are. 

•  William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity. Education is important, but not critical for most people.  You can train people on the job for most things in this world.  So why spend $750 billion on government education that doesn’t care?
• David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State.  It’s amazing, but the respectable lower-middle and working class built their own welfare state in the 19th century and it worked pretty well. So why spend $400 billion on a welfare system that just doesn’t care?
• Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption. Where did we get the idea that children were soft clay in the hands of their parents.  Children model themselves on older children, and when we crowd them together in factory schools, we create the adolescent culture that is rotting our youth.  That $750 billion again.
• Robert Epstein, The Case Against Adolescence.  We are shamefully infantilizing our teenagers.  Like we used to infantilize blacks and women.  We should reverse this and emancipate children as soon as they can pass competency tests.

Books are all very well, but what is in it for conservatives?

Quite a lot.  First of all there is the challence of Islamofascism.  Do we really think we are going to win the war on terror until we take the beam out of our own eye, the dreadful western culture of dreck?  First step in doing that will be to get our children away from their adolescent culture.  And how do you do that, make teenagers responsible?  Why, you break up the adolescent culture by pitching the adolescents into the adult culture.  You give teenagers responsibility as soon as you think they can handle it.  Conservatives all all in favor of responsibility, right?

But here’s the kicker.  Suppose we emancipate children. Suppose we reduce the years of compulsory education.  Suppose we let kids work.  Suppose we let them start businesses.  Suppose we let them drive, and drink, and smoke, and love, and suppose we abolish the juvenile justice system so that when kids break the law they get the adult justice system they deserve?

Who is going to be really crossed up?  Why the Democrats, of course.  They are the guys sitting in all those educational, justice, welfare sinecures.  If we abolish the adolescent society, Democrats will be out of a job.

Then we’d have purged the corrosive adolescent culture, which will help on the terror front.

And guess what.  All those working teenagers will help pay for the baby boomers’ retirement.

It all dovetails, like I said.

Private Education in the Slums

He was in Hyderabad, India looking at the city’s main tourist attraction, the Charminar, when, as Clive Crook relates in The Atlantic Monthly, education professor James Tooley

came across a school for the children of slum dwellers. To his surprise, he found that this was not a state school but a private one&mdashproviding education to the extremely poor and collecting fees (of a few rupees a day, or less than a dime) for its services.

Tooley was an education researcher so he got some money from the Templeton Foundation to research education in the poor areas of Hyderabad.

Tooley and his team&mdashconfining their search to poor areas lacking amenities such as running water, electricity, and paved roads&mdashcounted 918 schools.

Sixty percent of the schools were private and about a quarter were black-market schools, unregulated and unknown to the authorities.  They were outperforming the government schools, as you might expect.  And there was something more.

Remarkably, some of the slots in these private slum schools were offered free or at reduced rates: The parents of full-fee students, desperately poor themselves, willingly subsidized those in direst need.

Tooley doesn’t get on very well with the international development community.  Well, old chap, I mean, he’s been consorting with libertarian and conservative think tanks.  Not really cricket, old man.

But now James Tooley has been given $100 million “to invest in private schools for the very poor in developing countries.”

But Clive Crook has good news.

Development professionals need not be concerned, however. The money is from a private foundation. It won’t waste any country’s aid budget.

Thank goodness for that! In the United States we are spending about $750 billion a year on government education.  And everyone knows that education is woefully underfunded.

Liberal Issues Dems Don't Push

In a rumination on the incompetence of Alberto Gonzales, Mickey Kaus wonders if the incompetence wasn’t deliberate.  Gonzales’ incompetence lets President Bush stumble-bum all over affirmative action, helping to end it without seeming to be responsible for the death.  And he doesn’t need to do anything anyway.

[R]ace preferences... are being killed anyway, by the voters . That’s even better for Bush. His fingerprints aren’t on the corpse, and even Republican judges’ fingerprints aren’t on the corpse.

Kaus continues by noticing that Democrats aren’t that outraged about the setbacks to affirmative action.

Affirmative action may be joining gun control on the list of liberal issues Dem candidates don’t push very hard because they want to win.

That’s a good point.  What other issues don’t Democrats talk about too much?  Guns, as Mickey mentioned.  Abortion, of course.  Single-payer health insurance is quiet, although ready to burst out of the shadows if anyone offers encouragement.  The war: Democrats need to placate their base but they know they have to be careful. Gay marriage: Democrats pretend to be all in favor of traditional marriage even as they encourage the gay marriage advocates.

The big problem for Democrats is not that Americans disagree with them on hot-button issues.  It is that their Big Three programs: pensions, health care, and education, together amount for over half of all government spending.  And you ain’t seen nothing yet as baby boomers start to retire.

The good thing is that about half of the spending is complete waste, so we don’t really need it.  But who will have the courage to wield the ax and cut the bloat?

Reform vs. Stagnation in France

What a clarifying event an election can be.  In France, report the editors of National Review, the first round of the French presidential election has presented the French people with a clear choice.

The battle lines are thus unusually sharp and well-defined. It is liberal economic reform versus socialist stagnation.

Naturally the French are divided between those who think strong medicine is needed, those who think that more of the same is needed, and those who think that reform should exclude any pain.

The result, a win for conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, is a reminder about the essential shamefulness of politics.  For years, right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen railed about

crime, immigration, the Muslim challenge, loss of  sovereignty to supra-national bodies, the divisive failure of multiculturalism, and the crumbling of national identity.

IN the 2002 elections he rode his issues to second place.  Now the mainstream parties have stolen his issues and he is reduced to fourth place.

You could say that his career sends a message to all practical politicians.  Keep an eye on the fringes.  That’s where the future is being born.

When the Tax Cuts Expire

Years ago neoconservative Irving Kristol advised Republicans to cut taxes, cut, and cut again.  Apart from the economic benefit, there was the political benefit of forcing Democrats to increase taxes when they wanted to increase spending.

President Bush may be incurious and unintelligent, but it looks like he is taking Kristol’s advice.  The talk is all about how to avoid economic damage in the immediate future as taxes are scheduled to increase unless Congress does something. Patrice Hill quotes Dimitri B. Papadimitriou of the Levy Economics Institute: 

[T]ax burdens are scheduled to rise at a much faster pace than incomes or economic growth. In the past, rapid growth taxes as a percentage of the economy has preceded recessions, he said.

Right now, Democrats are blithely proposing to let all of President Bush’s tax rate cuts expire, so that there is room for lovely spending.

And then there is the Alternative Minimum Tax which disproportionately hits middle and upper income people in blue states.

Somehow I think that this happy dream is going to turn into a nightmare for Democrats.

Murder in America

How bad is it?  In the wake of the V-Tech mass murder the Europeans are tut-tutting about a US history of violence.

The official story since 1900 is not pretty: two huge murder waves, one peaking in 1933 and one peaking in 1991.  See Bureau of Justice Statistics Homicide Trends chart.  Interestingly, according to Eric Monkkonen in Murder in New York, murder has not been a unique New York City phenomenon.  Murder in New York was under the national average right through the first half of the 20th century.  Until the murder wave that began in 1965.

You can see country-by-counntry murder rates on this page from Wikipedia.  At the beginning of the 20th century the murder rate in the United States was about the same as the United Kingdom: about one per 100,000 inhabitants.  In about 1905 the murder rate took off in the US, peaking in the 1930s and the 1980s at 10 per 100,000.

Now it’s down to 5 or 6 per 100,000.

Where will it go next?

VT: The Tradeoffs in a Free Society

The horrific Virginia Tech shootings have, as they should, inspired every political activist to use the event as a hook to their perennial issue.  As usual, commentator Charles Krauthammer does so in as sensible a way as possible.

There are, we should never forget, tradeoffs that a free society makes in favor of freedom and against safety and security.

It is true that with far stricter gun laws, Cho Seung Hui might have had a harder time getting the weapons and ammunition needed to kill so relentlessly... [S]tricter controls could also keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens using them in self-defense. The psychotic mass murder is rare; the armed household burglary is not.

How many innocent lives would be saved by stricter gun laws and how many violent crimes would be deterred by more guns in homes?

Maybe a deeply disturbed person like Cho should have been institutionalized.

But in a trade-off that a decent and tolerant society makes with open eyes, we allow freedom from straitjackets to those on the psychic edge, knowing that such tolerance runs a very rare but very terrible risk.

What we can all agree, surely, that the kind of rambling political nonsense generated by presidential candidate Barack Obama is not the solution.  At a speech captured by Politico’s Ben Smith he connected the Virginia Tech violence with Don Imus’s radio insults.

Obama then cites bad schools and bad neighborhoods as forms of violence, before finishing with, for good measure, Darfur[.]

But if that is what Sen. Obama believes let us hear more of it.  It is not, after all an extremist position.  That sort of political free association is exactly what passes for serious political analysis among our liberal friends.  It’s all part of the “cycle of violence” paradigm, “arms are for hugging,” and other magical thinking that proceeds from the assumption that humans are naturally peaceful rather than naturally violent.  And nothing so exactly represents the mood as the comment made on The Volokh Conspiracy:

Schools and guns do not mix. Period.

One is tempted to quote Sir Toby Belch:  “Thy exquisite reason, dear knight?” 

Iraq war is 'lost' says Harry Reid

The US “surge” is failing to bring peace to Iraq, according to Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), and so he believes “that this war is lost.”

as reported by Breitbart.com, Reid said: 

"I know I was the odd guy out at the White House, but I told him at least what he needed to hear ... I believe the war at this stage can only be won diplomatically, politically and economically."

 Oh, so he doesn’t actually believe that it’s all over bar the shouting.  He just believes that the US should use non-military means in its war with... yes, that’s a good point. 

What would Sen. Harry Reid say that “the war at this stage” is all about?

Is it a war to bring peace to Iraq?  Is it a war to contain the imperialist designs of Iran?  Is is a war to contain the spread of Islamofascism.

And what exactly does Sen. Reid mean by winning “diplomatically, politically and economically?”

By economically, does Sen. Reid propose, for example, that the United States should increase nuclear power generation and domestic hydrocarbon exploration and production so as to reduce demand for Middle East oil?

Or does he just mean that we should wave our hands and threaten sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran while the Islamic Republic of Iran continues its program to acquire nuclear weapons?

Liberal Foundations Equals Liberal Costs

It’s not just that charitable foundations often end up doing exactly the opposite of what their founders intended.

The problem is that they spend so much money doing it. As William Rusher writes:

Robert Wood Johnson’s charitable contributions for 2005 were a majestic $419 million. But the "administrative expenses" required to distribute this largesse totaled $69 million. Kellogg contributed $285 million, but chalked up "administrative expenses" of $65 million. And the Rockefeller Foundation, in the course of giving away $148 million, found it necessary to spend $36 million on — you guessed it — "administrative expenses."

That’s a pretty big tariff.  Of course, when you are hobnobbing with grantees with expensive tastes no doubt you have to meet and beat their expensive tastes. 

I mean, there’s an argument that in discussing compassionate and sensitive programs to help women and children with like-minded compassionate souls you can’t really be super-sizing it at McDonalds.  A more nuanced location for nuanced thinking and planning is needed.  And that costs money.

But still, giving yourself 25 cents of every dollar you give away does seem excessive.

Especially when you consider the case of The Walton Family Foundation—you know, the foundation founded by Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton.

The Walton Family Foundation managed to give away $232 million in 2005, while charging expenses of only $2 million. As Neal Freeman, Chairman of the Foundation Management Institute, remarked, "Ol’ Sam would be proud of that 1.2 percent mark-up."

Of course, Wal-Mart was always a low-rent corporation.  No class.

The Adolescent Society

Don’t expect a big liberal best-seller like John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society.  But you and I can talk about the Adolescent Society, you know, as adult to adult.  And the epicenter of adolescence, of teenage adolescence verging into adult adolescence, is the modern government mega-university.  As Michelle Malkin puts it

There’s no polite way or time to say it: American colleges and universities have become coddle industries.

Coddling for liberals, of course.  They have “safe places” to protect students from hurtful conservative opinions while they turn a blind eye to lefty mobs.

Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.
And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense.

How about a “culture of self-defense,”says Malkin. 

And Mark Steyn makes much the same point.

On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Er, just a minute, Geraldo.  Those are not children at Virginia Tech.  They are women and men.  Or at least, at any other time and any other place in history they would be considered men and women.

Or perhaps, as Steyn argues in America Alone, they are adult adolescents.  With all their basic needs met they live a life buying toys and entertainment with their allowance while they show up at class.

We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom's security blanket. Geraldo-like "protection" is a delusion: when something goes awry -- whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus -- the state won't be there to protect you. You'll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision.

Thats why voices from all across the political spectrum are beginning to wonder how to do away with adolescence.

The problem is, as always, how to get there from here.

After VT: Gun Control Doesn't Bark

After the horror of the shootings at Virginia Tech and the innocent lives cut down, two thoughts.

First of all, has nobody thought about just what a cruel place the modern university is?  It is perhaps the epicenter of privilege and injustice in the modern world.  You cannot just walk into a university like a Wal-Mart and say, here’s my $50; I’d like to take a course.  Oh no.  First of all, you put on your knee pads.  And that’s just the beginning of humiliation.

OK, so we learn that dozens of people knew about the killer Seung Cho.  And they had told the administration and the campus police about him.  And the powers-that-be did nothing.

This is where conservatives have something to say.  About the mediating institutions between the megastructures—like government and big research universities—and the individual.  Healthy societes have a vibrant space for the mediating institutions.  Welfare states and the like are constantly attacking the mediating institutions because they believe in top-down control by the educated elite ensconced in government.

We conservatives mourn, deeply mourn, that we haven’t done enough to get this message through.  Why not?  It’s so obvious, so self-evident.  People are social beings, they need to be embedded in social networks.  And social networks mean mediating, voluntary institutions free of the dead hand of government.

Second, did you notice the dog that didn’t bark?  Democrats like Sen. Harry Reid are saying: Gun control?  What gun control?

What is going on here?

Democrats are soft-pedaling gun control because, as Roger Simon writes, Democrats believe they lost the 2000 election because of gun owners.

Had Gore won his home state of Tennessee, Clinton’s home state of Arkansas or the Democratic state of West Virginia, he would not have needed to win Florida in order to gain the presidency. But he lost them all. And guns had a lot to do with it.

We conservatives believe that the gun control issue is an epiphenomenon.  It stands for something much bigger, that people should be responsible for their own lives.  That the government cannot promise to make everyone safe with its big programs and its reckless promises.  People must look to their own resources. They must build and maintain their own networks of mutual aid and security.

And not the least of the value of these networks is to fold adolescent loners into the social network of community.

So for conservatives the spectacle of an adolescent loner going berserk in a government megastructure like a government university makes complete sense.

For us the question is: why doesn’t it happen more often?

It is our job and our sacred mission to tell the world how to walk back from the dreadful anti-social society that the educated middle class has built in the last century.  In this society everything has been stripped away except government power and individual helplessness.

We know better.  And we live with the awful truth that we have failed to make our voices heard.  We have failed to break through the wall of liberal power to demand an end to the monstrous society of alienation and privilege.

So today we start again.  Break down the megastructures!  Shatter the privileges!  Grow the human-scale mediating institutions like families, churches, associations, and clubs!

And above all connect the adolescent loners back into society.

Let's Don't Kill All the Lawyers

The Duke “rape” case was won by good defense lawyering, writes lawyer Randy E. Barnett, and don’t you forget it next time you tell a lawyer joke.

When innocent people go to jail is is usually because of an incompetent defense.

In every case I knew about where an innocent person had been convicted, there had been an incompetent defense lawyer at the pretrial and trial stages.

In a competent legal system, moreover, the defense has a difficult problem.  If the prosecutors are competent then people tend to assume that anyone accused of a crime is probably guilty.

While knowing that mistakes do happen, the accuracy of the system leads everyone, including defense lawyers, to assume that anyone who is charged is probably guilty. After all, they usually are. Notwithstanding the legal "presumption of innocence," in a system that generally gets it right, there is a pragmatic presumption of guilt.

So if you are accused of a crime and you really are innocent, you have to prove your innocence.  That means that you have to hire good defense lawyers.  And the Duke case defense lawyers were good.

Their skillful questioning at pre-trial hearings revealed the prosecutor’s misconduct that eventually forced him to give up control of the case and now threatens his law license. They uncovered compelling exculpatory evidence and made it available to the press; they let their clients and their families air their story in the national media.

All’s well that ends well.  Just don’t forget how much you depend on a good defense when the legal system says: “J’Accuse!” 

Kill the Tax Monster

It’s all very well for Paul Greeberg to call for the end of the current federal income tax system.  No doubt he’s right that

For the average American family, filling out a tax form has become like attacking a puzzle to which, often enough, there is no right answer. But we’re all supposed to swear, on penalty of perjury, that we’ve done our best to find it.

But are people really as upset as he thinks?  First of all, only about half the American people actually pay income tax.  Rush Limbaugh has a permanent feature, Truth About Taxes, on his web site that trumpets the fact that 50 percent of the taxpayers pay 96.7 percent of the federal income tax. 

Then people like “beating the system” with the home mortgage deduction and the various tax credits.  It’s like weekly supermarket specials.  Supermarkets could just keep their prices low.  But instead they advertise loss leaders every week—and that means that other prices must go up to balance the loss leaders.  Why do they do it?  Women like the fun and excitement of hunting for bargains and clipping coupons.

Still, the federal income tax is enormously wasteful and complicated.  For the sake of national hygiene we should replace it.

Greenberg wants to replace the current income tax with a flat tax.  He’s right.  The president’s budget for 2008 anticipates income tax collections of $1.246 trillion.  That’s about 9 percent of GDP.  For that we need a complicated schedile of tax rates going up to nearly 40 percent and a forest of deductions, credits and allowances?

Come on.  America can do better. 

Just Who Has the Conflict of Interest?

It was noble of Newsweek to allow a climate change denier, climate scientist Richard Lindzen, to write a column in their global-warming scare issue.  But they wanted you to know that Lindzen “receives no funding from any energy companies.”

Oh really.  So we are to believe, writes Jeff Jacoby, that

Apparently Lindzen’s scientific and professional credentials aren’t sufficient to lend authority to his views; readers must be explicitly reassured that "energy companies" haven’t paid him off.

The cluelessness of Newsweek’s clarification is this.  Don’t they realize, and don’t Newsweek’s readers realize, that the “conflicts of interest” are all on the scare side of the global warming debate?

To begin with, staggering sums of money are channeled to researchers who emphasize the human role in global warming.

You know: grants.  Research money.  Not to mention promotion and advancement.

And then there are the prizes.  Big ones.

ASA’s James Hansen, a prominent global-warming Cassandra, won a $250,000 Heinz Award in 2001. Last month he was a co-winner of the Dan David Prize and its $1 million purse. Other awards and other purses have frequently gone to other prophets of doom. And the potential rewards don’t stop there. For those who toe the politically correct line on global warming, there have been big book contracts, hefty speaking fees, worshipful magazine profiles, softball TV interviews — even an Academy award.

Yeah.  Let’s talk about conflicts of interest.

The Passing of Unsung Conservatives

Liberals we know all about.  They are celebrated from a thousand MSM mouthpieces.  But when conservatives pass on we find, from the reminiscences of friends and acquaintances, that we hardly knew ’em.

Here is Milton Friedman remembered by Charles H. Brunie.

Once when Milton was in New York visiting some of Oppenheimer’s clients, we had a cocktail party after a long day. A young man asked him a question in an exceedingly rude manner—again and again. Milton’s response was very gracious. The next morning Milton was debating James Tobin, another Nobel laureate, at the Institutional Investor conference, with perhaps 1,000 attendees. Tobin asked almost the exact same question as had the young man the prior evening, but he did it very politely. Milton went at him hammer and tongs. Later, I asked Milton why he was so polite to the young man and so aggressive with Tobin. He replied, “The young chap didn’t know what he was talking about. Conversely, James did—it was an ambush question, and I wasn’t going to let him get away with it.”

Now we have the reminiscences of Pat Buckley, Mrs. William F. Buckley, Jr. from NRO.  Writes William Rusher: 

The news of Pat Buckley’s death prompted two quite diverse reflections. The first was the memory of her many quiet kindnesses. Indeed, “quiet” is hardly an adequate word; “secret” might be better. In any case, they were wonderful. By pure chance, I learned that she had visited one friend every day for the last two weeks of his life, as it ebbed away owing to a mortal illness. To be there when you really needed her: That was Pat.

Well, who knew?  A rude young man graciously tolerated?  A New York socialite making the time for daily visits to a friend in the last two weeks of life?

Maybe that’s how it should be.  For if our good works are “known only to God,” what’s the problem?  You need to have your charity and your generosity celebrated in the newspaper Life section?

Virtue, it is said, is doing good when nobody can see you.

Hypocrisy Week

If shock jock Don Imus went to his reward, what about Malik Shabazz?  If it’s an outrage to make a racial joke about some basketball players then what about calling an Asian American woman a prostitute to her face on cable TV?  That’s what happened to Michelle Malkin.

Next, one Malik Shabazz, leader of the "New Black Panther Party," refuses to apologize for lynching the innocent Duke lacrosse players—and then proceeds to call me a "political prostitute" and mouthpiece for whites. Like I haven’t heard that a half-million times before.

Yeah.  Malkin’s heard it all before.

Comes with the territory when you’re an uppity brown woman who strays from the liberal plantation, you know.

And I gotta say, if they are insulting Michelle Malkin, then for me it’s personal.

James Bowman explains all this in Honor, A History.  Honor for men is standing in the line of battle and not running away and leaving your brothers in the lurch.  Honor for women is chastity.  You think that stuff is all old hat?  Then, writes Bowman, call a man a wimp and a woman a whore.

Our liberal friends, of course, have tried to upset this instinctive business of honor, with the anti-hero who makes a point of not standing with his brothers and the modern concept of women and “a sexual life.”

But of course, when it’s about race it’s different. In the liberal playbook race beats the all-important sexual revolution.

But watch for honor to make a comeback.  It’s probably more important than we think.

How Liberal Censorship Works

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a documentary focusing on the struggle of moderate Muslims to battle the forces of Islamofascist extremists would be a natural for PBS’s “America at a Crossroads” series.

But you would be wrong.

PBS has decided that the documentary “Islam vs. Islamists” produced by a group including conservative defense advocate Frank Gaffney, Jr. was too extreme and too one-sided to be shown on PBS.    

In other words, a documentary that compellingly portrays what happens to moderate Muslims when they dare to speak up for and participate in democracy, thus defying the Islamists and their champions, is not fit for public airwaves — even in a series specifically created to bring alternative perspectives to their audience.

Not that that ever worried PBS when they had a lefty documentary to show.

And that was the least of it.  PBS also:

• Tried to get Gaffney removed as an executive producer for the show
• Allowed “a series producer with family ties to a British Islamist to insist on sweeping changes to its "structure and context" that would have assured more favorable treatment of those portrayed vilifying and, in some cases, threatening our anti-Islamist protagonists.” 
• Hired, as an advisor to select the documentary films, an admirer of the Nation of Islam—which gets money from the Saudis to set up black Wahhabi mosques.  But this Saudi assistance is a feature of Gaffney’s documentary.  Talk about a conflict of interest.

More interesting than the he-said-she-said accusations is the bigger issue.  What exactly do these liberals think they are doing by covering for radical Islam?

Maybe it’s because that’s what liberals do for a living.  You identify a victim class worthy of support by compassionate and enlightened people.  Then you defend it from mainstream America—which all enlightened people know is racist and bigoted.

Up to now this approach to politics has worked a treat for liberals.  Over the last century they have successively identified workers, blacks, women, gays, illegal aliens as helpless victims.  Then they translated support for these victim groups into political power.  Hey, if it works...

But you wonder if that liberals haven’t gone a bridge to far by cozying up to radical Islam.

Let's Abolish Adolescence

Did you know?  They don’t have adolescence in most societies.  At some point children go through a coming-of-age ritual and they become adults.

Now Robert Epstein in The Case Against Adolescence argues that we should abolish adolescence.  Instapundit Glenn Reynolds is interested. 

Epstein’s new book argues that adolescence is an artificial and unnecessary part of life that people are better off without.

An argument against adolescence is made also by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption. Harris asks why we are throwing teenagers together in adolescent-only institutions like high school and college if we want them to conform to our adult culture.

By herding teenagers together we allow them to achieve strategic concentration and combine against us.

There are additional links on Epstein’s book here and here.

We at Road to the Middle Class are all in favor of adultifying teenagers, for a number of reasons.

The advocates of the welfare state have insistent that their compulsory education and child labor laws were all for the children.

But underneath the mask of concern is a reality of self-interest.  Ever since government education got started the educationists always want to extend the period of compulsory education.

And labor unions have an obvious interest in making the low-wage competition of teenagers illegal.

The thing is: parents and children should have the right to control their own destinies, and not be ordered around by government experts.

Remember, adult literacy in the United States has not changed in the 150 years since the dawn of compulsory government education of children.  What does that tell you?

Freeman Dyson: Optimistic Rebel

Physicist Freeman Dyson makes a cameo appearance in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Dawkins takes him to task for accepting an award from the pro-Christian Templeton Foundation. Dawkins makes it clear that organizations like the Templeton Foundation should be named and shamed. They should not be allowed to appropriate the authority of an eminent physicist.

Now Freeman Dyson has a book out, The Scientist as Rebel, and he talks to Benny Peiser at TCSDaily.

Asked about the growing pressure on scientists to follow the “scientific consensus,” he replies:

Certainly the growing rigidity of scientific organizations is a real and serious problem. I like to remind young scientists of examples in the recent past when people without paper qualifications made great contributions.

For instance there’s the mule-driver who ended up as astronomer and second-in-command to Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory.

But don’t worry about the future, Dyson advises.

Amateurs and small companies will have a growing role in the future of science. This will compensate for the increasing bureaucratization of the big organizations. Bright young people will start their own companies and do their own science.

Then he talks about a new development in genetic science, a gene sequence called Human Accelerated Region 1.

In “the genomes of mouse, rat, chicken and chimpanzee” it is strictly preserved. But in the human genome it “appears grossly modified with eighteen mutations.” What is going on here?

And get this. He attributes the current gloom-and-doom mood to the British class system. No, not the division between the bosses and the workers. We are talking about the class war in the middle class!

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.

Yes. Margaret Thatcher, grocer’s daughter. There must be some mistake!

And the worst of it is that the British welfare state, the only child of the academic middle class, is self-destructing as we speak.

Go on. Read the whole thing!

John Edwards' Two Americas

Conservatives and Republicans like to go to bed at night secure in the knowledge that liberals are not the sensitive compassionate people of a thousand puff pieces but snobs and rich bitches.  And not just that but mean and stingy, as Arthur C. Brooks suggests in his Who Really Cares.

But our objective media seldom satisfy our deepest yearning.

Which is odd, when you think about it.  Imagine the circulation potential in “liberal hypocrite” stories!

But at last we have hit pay dirt. We have Elizabeth Edwards and the “rabid, rabid Republican” story.  And it couldn’t be better.

Now Leah Friedman of the Chapel Hill News & Observer has been to see Monty Johnson, the rabid, gun-toting neighbor of the high-flying, presidential campaigning Edwards family.

"I’d just like to know why she has such hard feelings to me," he said. "They say they’re for poor people."

Monty, according to the story, is a 55-year-old retired landscape gardener, and when reporter Friedman caught up with him he was on his way home with a cooler full of catfish. 

What got his goat, he says, was Edwards’ calling his 42-acre property "slummy."

Actually, you could make a reasonable argument that when the ambulance-chasing lawyers move in it is they who are lowering the tone of the neighborhood.

Anyway, the Edwards won’t have Monty Johnson around much longer.  Edwards has his “slummy” property up for sale.  And he’s open to offers from the Edwards.  No hard feelings in that department.

But Johnson would like an apology.

Liberal Censorship! Oh No!

In the age of talk radio it has become much more difficult to bury egregious examples of liberal censorship.

It’s always been a major national problem.  But hitherto the power of the mainstream media meant that liberals could always squash anything that made them looke like the bad guys. 

Liberals are all in favor of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable as long as no liberal oxen are gored.  But you’d better not try afflicting comfortable liberals!

So now PBS has “censored” a documentary piece about moderate Muslims versus the extremists because, as Jennifer Harper reports:

the film would "demonize Islam" and promote public fear of Islamic organizations.

Of course, conservative super-hawk Frank Gaffney Jr. of the Center for Security Policy is associated with the film “Islam vs. Islamists,” and that is bound to promote public fear—among liberals, anyway. 

But think of all the liberal documentaries down the ages that have demonized people.  Think of the granddaddy of them all, CBS’s “Harvest of Shame” back in the 1960s.  Think of how that landmark documentary demonized farmers and promoted public fear of farming organizations.

And what about all those helpless Southern racists demonized by documentaries about civil rights?

Of course, it’s perfectly OK to run features demonizing Wal-Mart, or the notorious right-wing militia movement.  That’s different.  Why, Wal-Mart is in danger of promoting public fear of high prices.  And that would never do.

But the biggest problem in the United States was unearthed by Bolce and De Maio in The Public Interest years ago.  Liberals hate Christian fundamentalists.  They hate them with a passion that Bolce and De Maio measured using generally accepted social science interview techniques. 

So PBS should really be worrying about documentary films that demonize Christians and that encourage secular liberals in their dangerous anti-religious bigotry.  Because much of what passes for liberal journalism promotes public fear of the ordinary evangelical Christians next door.

A Liberal Mourns His Favorite Republican

Just what was it about John McCain that liberals loved so much?  Was it because he ran against the Republican Party base in 2000?  The way columnist E.J. Dionne remembers it:

He spoke out too forcefully in 2000 for campaign finance reform and against "the demands of big-money special interests." He condemned the "self-appointed" leaders of conservative groups — a rather influential constituency — and singled out Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "the agents of intolerance."

Really?  McCain is against big-money special interests?  No kidding! First I’ve heard of it.  I imagine that he’d also be against incumbent protection acts.

Yet everything that “right-wingers” loathed about McCain is “what his party most needs now.”

His reform enthusiasms stand as the perfect antidote to the corruption of the past Republican Congress.

It’s telling, isn’t it.  Dionne’s idea of a good Republican is one that would make the party take its medicine.

But Dionne has got it wrong.  We folk in the Republican base don’t like McCain because we don’t like his truckling to the liberal media.  We don’t like his attack on the First Amendment.  We don’t like his corporative approach to commerce.  We don’t like his government-comes-first approach to tax cuts.

And we don’t like him joining the liberal linebackers piling onto Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. 

The liberal half of this nation has a serious problem with anti-religious bigotry.  The last thing the nation needs is presidential candidates taking pot-shots at religious leaders—even if many of them are just as flawed as our political leaders.

The Social Work Bullies at Missouri State

This would be funny if it weren’t so sad. The president of Missouri State University, Michael T. Nietzel, recently publicized a report on the university’s School of Social Work, saying that the report was “as negative a review of an academic program as I have ever seen.”

In the report, according to Anne D. Neal,

the external auditors describe a “toxic environment” in which students are bullied, discriminated against because of their faith, and coerced “into certain belief systems regarding social work practice and the social work profession.”

 Don’t be too quick to blame the school, writes Neal.  What about the accrediting agency, the Council on Social Work Education?

Policy Section 4.2 requires that CSWE-accredited programs “integrate social and economic justice content grounded in an understanding of distributive justice, human and civil rights, and the global interconnections of oppression.” 

Yes, a highly academic approach to the concept and practice of social work.

But let us read between the lines.  Who are the students likely to be studying at the MSU School of Social Work?  Not white males, obviously.  And probably not to many white females, either.  Social Work lacks the prestige it enjoyed a couple of generations ago. 

No.  What you can expect is that most of the students in a modern School of Social Work will be minority females.

And that is who the thugs of the bullying class are coercing.

There’s a temptation for conservatives to take the Leninist line about all this.  What do we care about nasty goings on in the nether regions of the liberal bureaucracy?  The worse the better.

But it won’t do.  Because the thugs of the bullying class are beating up on our fellow Americans.  And conservatives just don’t like that.

We want all Americans to be free and independent, even the dupes and the victims of the bullying class, even people who will never vote for a conservative or a Republican in their lives.

A liberal, they say, is someone who wants to be paid to help people.  A social worker, apparently, is someone who demands to be paid to bully people. 

Rush Babies: They're Out There!

The Drive-Bys aren’t reporting this, of course, but there’s a whole new generation out there brought to adult consciousness by uber-talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.  And this morning a young Rush baby checked in:

When I first started listening to you, I was just kinda coming out of high school.  I can’t say I was the brightest person in the world, 2.3 GPA.  A lot of what you’ve said as far as going above and beyond and being more than you could be, so to speak, it has kind of helped me drive myself through college.  I’m 24 working on my second masters now.  You’ve really helped me[.]

“Joseph from Akron” had been raised in a union household, he told Rush. And Joseph’s father:

He’s a hundred percent, hard-core union guy. I grew up a liberal, and pretty much that was the only side of the coin I saw[.]

His mother would cry when a conservative got elected president.

You can see why some of our liberal friends are anxious to return to the good old days of the FCC Fairness Doctrine.  We’ve got to put a stop to this sort of thing.

You know, I just want to thank you for paving the road to enlightenment, so to speak, and like I said it’s hard to find resources out there to really combat the — I won’t really call it ignorance, but — misinformation that’s out there.

Yep.  This sort of thing could get really out of hand.  The critical moment comes when people break out of the helplessness syndrome after excessive studying at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.

They oughta make a law to stop it before it’s too late.  Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

After Pelosi, time for some thinking

The trouble with Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Damascus was the thinking behind it, writes Michael Barone,

the thinking that gave Pelosi confidence she could produce progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
At the heart of that thinking is this proposition: We’re the problem.

Crudely put, it’s the Blame America First way of thinking.

(Actually, in the larger view, we are the problem, but not in the way the Blame America Firsters think.  It is our global commonwealth of trust and trade that is pitching the backward, parallel-cousin-marrying Middle East into chaos.)

 The problem, writes Barone, is the woman at a Democratic fundraiser who said:

“we were very safe under the Clinton administration.” No, we weren’t “very safe” — we just thought we were.

The depth of misunderstanding in a remark like that is telling.  The woman did not, after all, come up with that notion out of thin air.  She was just repeating what the Democratic zeitgeist was telling her.

Talk about “Bush Lied!”  To push a meme like that out among the Democratic faithful is setting up trouble for the future. 

And maybe the only way America can deal with it is to put a Democrat in the White House and force him—or her—to deal with reality. 

Don’t believe us evil warmongering Republicans. Get out there and experience reality for yourself, pal.

Then you’ll find out whether American is really the problem.  And you’ll find out whether we were really “very safe” in the Clinton years.

And then it will be time for some thinking.

Thinking Beyond the Welfare State

As Tony Blair heads for the exits conservative Brits are thinking about what the Conservative Party should offer against the high-tax high regulation, badly-run public services of New Labour Britain.

Iain Martin has a go.  From Tony Blair’s expected successor, Gordon Brown, we can expect “a bit less of the same,” the refrain of Clinton and Blair.  He’ll continue with the welfare state only it will be better managed.

High taxation will continue, our Armed Forces will be overstretched and real reform of public services postponed.

Conservatives need to offer the genuine alternative to this slow death by unreformed government bureaucracy.  They need to offer

a revival of social responsibility, relying on free institutions rather than Labour’s big state... and dramatic improvement in the lives of the poorest, who are currently held back by welfarism, violent crime and woeful education.

This points out the real issue with regard to the welfare state.  Suppose the Brits achieved “real reform of public services” tomorrow.  It’s unrealistic, of course, because of the power of public service providers to resist any reform, real or otherwise.

That would mean that the public services are organized to deliver public services in the context of 2007.  They will still be organized to deliver those services 2007-style in 2017, 2027, 2037, and so on.  When, do you think, would they get to be reformed again?  Not for a generation, at least.  Probably not for 50 years.

But that is the optimistic scenario, assuming that the public services got a full reform today.  In reality schools, health care, and welfare will continue unreformed, based on the ideas of fifty or a hundred years ago.

That is why they must be refomed and replaced by free and flexible institutions.  Until then the inflexible, unreformable big state will go on being inflexible and unreformable.

Lefties Want to Get Paid To Blog

Radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt chuckles at the frustration of lefty bloggers that their top dogs don’t link to and promote the the little puppy blogs.

Why, complains Kathy at Shakesville, the right-wing blogs do it all the time.  There’s no way, she complains, that “Jihad Watch and LaShawn Barber’s Corner and BLACKFIVE and Mudville Gazette and Wizbang” could have got to the top 25 of Truth Laid Bear’s blog ecosystem rankings on talent alone.

It does not make me happy to know that people whose worldview is so narrow, intolerant, exclusive, and hateful are so much better at supporting their ideological soulmates than we on the left, whose values run to diversity, inclusiveness, a place at the table for everyone, human needs before defense contractors’ wish lists.

You have to read stuff like that to believe it!  By the way, if you want to know how governments in the United States do in fact put human needs before defense contractors’ wish lists, or at least pay liberals to supervise other peoples’ human needs, just pop over to usgovernmentspending.com.

Of course, maybe the answer can be found in Arthur C. Brooks’ Who Really Cares? Religious conservatives are just more generous and more charitable than secular liberals.

The trouble is that people are just not being generous enough with the lefty bloggers. Kathy quotes from The Nation.

As bloggers become some of the progressive movement’s most effective voices, the left still has not figured out how to provide them with the resources they need to keep going.

Solution? The George Soros types should be paying lefty bloggers to blog.

Those lefties.  They really are something. 

No Affirming for Christians in Holy Week

A permanent fixture of our calendar is Black History Month in which our media run dozens of affirming little features about the nobility and suffering of African Americans down the ages.

But the climax of the Christian calendar in Lent and Holy Week seems to be an opportunity to run attacks on Christianity, as reported by Brian Fitzpatrick:

Beginning on February 26, the news and entertainment media have fired a stunning barrage of criticism at religious beliefs, religious practice, and religious symbols. Nothing is too sacred to attack this year, not even the most crucial teachings of Judaism and Christianity.

And this even includes “guy” channels like the History and Discovery Channels.  You’d think that they at least would keep themselves apart from media fashion.

But I’ll bet that the media execs and producers serving up this stuff have no idea that they are dissing organized religion.  It just wouldn’t occur to them.  Imagine a TV mazazine show producing a feature during Black History Month that, say, investigated the financial affairs of race hustler Jesse Jackson.  Exactly.  It could not happen.  The thought wouldn’t even come into a network producer’s mind.

It’s not deliberate, it’s just the media template.  If it’s Lent then it must be time to run stories about Does God Exist.  If it’s Black History Month then it must be time to run stories about an obscure woman of color who suffered under the patriarchy.

Meanwhile, there is the “inconvenient truth,” told by Arthur C. Brooks in Who Really Cares, that conservative religious believers are more generous, more charitable, and happier than secular liberals. 

Yet religious believers are all ignorant bigots, we are told.  What is going on here?

Let's Talk. About Taxes

Let’s talk, said Hillary Clinton.  Of course she wanted to just talk pretty in pink, not actually talk about real things like the real money that the government is taking out of our pockets.

In this blog Michael Barone discusses the coming impact of the Alternative Minimum Tax as a political issue.  AMT was a soak-the-rich wheeze back in the late 1960s when Democrats suddenly decided that they were shocked that some millionaires weren’t paying income tax.  But now the AMT is hitting a core Democratic constituency, rich liberals in blue states.

In the American, American Enterprise Institute’s new magazine, former House Ways and Means staffer Alex Brill takes up my point that the upper middle-income people being swept into the AMT are concentrated in heavily Democratic constituencies.

It turns out that the AMT hits particularly hard in states with high state income taxes, so you can see why the blue states would be hardest hit.

Barone speculates that the public employee unions will soon weigh in on this as they are likely to be hardest hit if the AMT starts to bite blue-state finances.

But here is the kicker on taxes.

The Democrats would like to see most of the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010 or sooner; their House and Senate budget resolutions envision obtaining more revenue from unnamed sources and don’t envision extension of most of the Bush tax cuts.

Over my dead body, pal.

That sets up a clear issue difference between the parties, reflecting their genuine convictions on tax levels. But the AMT complicates things for the Democrats.

Good.  They deserve it.

I hope that all Republican operatives are working hard on the tactics that they are going to use against Democrats in 2008 when Democrats, ably assisted by their bribed apologists in the mainstream media, are going to be running away from the very idea that they intend to raise taxes.

Oh no, Democrats will say.  You have got it all wrong.  We wouldn’t think of raising taxes on the American people!  Just a few rich Republican fat cats and evil oil companies!

The question is whether we concentrate on growing the economy so that it can afford the massive bill for the baby-boom retirement or whether we just tax the economy to fund the baby-boom retirement.

There is a difference between the parties on this.

No Pelo-phany on Road to Damascus

Both left and right agree that Nancy Pelosi’s bumbling journey to Damascus was an embarrassment.

Writes the Washington Post editorial writer:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered an excellent demonstration yesterday of why members of Congress should not attempt to supplant the secretary of state when traveling abroad.

 And from the right John Podhoretz:

On the road to Damascus, St. Paul became one of the revolutionary figures of world civilization.
Nancy Pelosi - not so much.

OK, so everyone makes mistakes, and suggesting that Israel was ready to negotiate peace with Syria was not Nancy Pelosi’s finest hour.

But there’s a bigger question here.  Obviously this trip to Damascus was not just a sudden brainstorm in the head of the speaker.  It was probably set up months ago as an interlocking piece in the puzzle of Victory 2008.

Are we to understand that the Democrats are starting to believe their own demagoguery, that the only problem in the Middle East is the blundering incompetence of President Bush?

The subtext on Speaker Pelosi’s trip is that all that is needed to solve the problem between Israel and Syria is the will to find peace.

I guess that is unremarkable coming from a Democrat, since that is what Democrats keep telling us they believe.  The only thing preventing peace is the “cycle of violence” that makes macho men keep on warring when they could be jawing.

But there’s a problem with such a Pollyanna view of international relations.  Says the Washington Post:

As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug[.]

This cycle of violence notion is all very well in polite liberal circles, but we are dealing with thug dictators here.  Power and thuggery, bloodshed and violence is the very life of thug dictatorship. Not peace.

Any of these thug dictators could, whenever they want, throw the whole thing up and go live in Paris—you know, right next to the widow of Yasser Arafat.

But they don’t.  They prefer power.  And making fools of foolish American politicians.

When Christian Students Want a Special Day...

It’s one thing to have a “Day of Silence” that celebrates the difficulties and the angst of gay students.  But it is quite another when Christian students want to observe a “Day of Truth.”

Writes Michael Johnson:

The idea of the “Day of Silence” is that students and educators go all day without talking, while flashing a card at those around them explaining that the quiet is their way of showing solidarity with the culturally-oppressed kids who get bullied “just for being who they are.”

It’s a wonderful idea.  Everyone should have a day like that.  Because we are all misunderstood and we all live under frightful pressure to conform.

Imagine what it is like for a conservative like me to live in “Baghdad”Jim McDermott’s Seattle.  We could use a little surcease from liberal bullying around here, I can tell you.

But then Christian students requested a Day of Truth “with some thoughtful discussion of differing views — religious, scientific, social, personal — on homosexual behavior.”  And that was different.

Requests for “Day of Truth” events are perfunctorily denied, students who initiate discussions or even wear philosophically provocative T-shirts quickly find themselves on the short list for detention, even suspension.

It’s part of a pattern.  Liberal agenda events are fine.  But don’t bring your conservative bigotry or your religion in here, pal.

Even when student protests don’t call for open discussions, debates, and conversation — as in the pro-life Days of Silent Solidarity, which focus on calling attention to abortion — educators and government officials move fast to shut down what are usually quiet, respectful, non-aggressive demonstrations.

The delicious thing about this is that students are getting a clear message.  If you want to rebel, if you want to create a stink, if you want to really get the adults riled up, then there is one thing that really gets their goat.

Try to bring your religion into the government school.

Not your average, run-of-the-mill government-approved secular religion like civil rights, or feminism, or gay rights, or racial quotas.  No.  We are talking about the God thing.

They just cannot stand it.  And that is strange, because we live under a constitution that says that:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech...

But hey, it’s one law for us and another law for the peons.

Let's Call It "Hewitting"

First it was Fisking.  That’s the process, according to Britain’s Observer, of:

savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the internet.

It is named after lefty Brit reporter Robert Fisk, who often deserves it.

But now it is time to talk about “Hewitting.”  That’s the interview technique in which radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt interviews an MSM journalist and exposes him (or her, but usually him) as a pompous weasel.

The latest victim of Hewitting is Los Angeles Times media critic Tim Rutten. Hewitt had him agreeing that Rosie O’Donnell is a disgrace.  Then Hewitt steers the interview into more dangerous territory, the LA Times itself.  In the interview, he relates,

We also range over the sale of The Tribune Company to Sam Zell,  the Andres Martinez resignation, the deathly dull nature of the paper, and who’s to blame.

 And so off High Hewitt goes:

HH: Do you have any responsibility, Tim Rutten, for the poor performance of the newspaper over the last seven years?
TR: Do I personally have any?
HH: Yeah.
TR: No, I think I’ve done about as well as I could.
HH: Do any of your colleagues in the newsroom have any responsibility?
TR: Sure. Some of them do.
HH: Which ones?
TR: Oh, I don’t!I’m not going to go there, you know that.

Now we are getting the victim softened up.  So Hewitt goes in for the kill.

HH: But can you name for me the conservative columnist who is full-time at the Los Angeles Times?
TR: Who is full-time?
HH: Yeah.
TR: We don’t have a full-time political columnist at the newspaper.
HH: No, are any full-time columnists at the Los Angeles Times conservative?
TR: Not that I would characterize!I think not that you would recognize as conservative, no.
HH: Or that you would. I mean, they’re just not there.
TR: That I would? No.
HH: Okay, are there liberal columnists at the Los Angeles Times?
TR: Sure.
HH: How many of them?
TR: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t think about my colleagues that [w]ay.

Really, liberal journalists ought to be issued a Miranda warning before being interrogated like this.

Surely they deserve the same rights as a common criminal suspect.

When Politics is Only About Spin

Ten, fifteen years ago in the heady days of the Third Way fashionable commentators were all agog about Spin.  Clinton did it.  Blair did it.  Everyone swooned.  It was so cool.

Later, when President Bush made his case for the invasion of Iraq, of course, the swooners were nowhere to be found.  It is one thing to do a bit of advocacy for the good guys, but another thing to shill for evil neo-cons.

But now, in a British row about taxing the income of pension funds according to  Robin Harris, people are even fed up with spin from Third Way progressives like Blair and his designated heir, Gordon Brown.

Now people can see the spin for what it was, trying to square circles.

New Labour’s strategy of gaining power was to be at once fresh and reassuring, to split every difference and to be all things to all men. Accordingly, generalised pledges, bland phrases and a selection of well-judged soundbites provided a substitute for philosophy.

The reason for this, of course, the substitution fo spin for political philosophy was the same for New Labour as it was in the case of Clinton spin. New Labour and Clinton Democrats were trying to do the impossible, keeping their lefty base happy by not really reforming the welfare state while assuring the rest of the country that they had left their old lefty ways behind and would be accountable and deliver government services just like market-driven retail giants.

Eventually all this was going to come crashing down, despite the best efforts of the MSM deniers.  The science is in on this.  You can’t deliver good public services with big government.  You can’t deliver flexibility; you can’t deliver efficiency.

The science is in.  Government is good for force and compulsion, and it’s none to good at that.  But we have to put government in charge of force and compulsion because the alternative to government is to have private armies floating around rather like China in the 1920s to 1940s and Iraq and Lebanon right now.  Not a nice place for peaceful people who just want to get on with their lives.

But for anything else, government is a loser.

The problem is that there are many people—bright, educated people—who don’t want to see this.

One day they will wake up from their dogmatic slumber.  They will join with us in building a better society that empowers people in the mediating structures between government and the individual. 

But that day is not yet.

Partisans Applaud as Bush Bashes Democrats

President Bush has finally started to lob a few shells at the Democrats who passed a supplemental funding bill for the Iraq war with a timetable for withdrawal.

Gateway Pundit is encouraged:

This speech today could have been made months ago.

Maybe so.  But presidents, at least the ones that are not terminally shameless, have this quaint notion that they are president of all the people. 

And a Republican president labors under a particular handicap.  The mainstream media is very quick to jump to the support of their Democratic friends when they feel that they are being unfairly attacked.

So the president has to choose his moments carefully.

And an unconstitutional bill to micromanage the war in Iraq certainly fits the bill.

It also makes a difference that the Democrats have control of Congress.  That allows the Democrats to actually do things for the president to criticize.

But let us echo the president:

Democrat leaders in Congress seem more interested in fighting political battles in Washington than providing our troops what they need to fight the battles in Iraq.

As for me, I think it is time for the Democrats to run the war against terror.  What is their policy?  What is their Plan?  They do have a plan, don’t they? 

America would like to know.

Are the Mullahs Desperate?

With the mullahs in Iran staging another hostage incident, you have to wonder if it is deja vue all over again. 

Embarrassing as it is for the Brits, maybe that’s all the Iranian mullahs know how to do: Stage another hostage crisis.

That’s what Austin Bay thinks. 

But this latest hostage-taking incident smacks of desperation, not revolutionary fervor.
Late spring 2007 finds the Iranian "revolutionary government" facing an extraordinary range of internal and external problems.

 There are several, shall we say, insurgencies going on inside Iran.  (Could the bumbling Bush have anything to do with that?)

But the mullahs have an even bigger problem.

The mullah’s core problem is the Iranian people. Under-30 Iranians have had it with the mullahs’ failed revolution.

According to RMC Chappie Eric Voegelin that is important.  A legitimate government is not a government that wins elections.  It is a government that is accepted by its people as legitimate.

Then there is the humiliation of the Arabs next door in Iraq making halting progress towards democracy.  If there is one thing your average Iranian knows, it is that he is superior to the Arabs.

The problem with all these thug regimes built upon natural resource sales is that they aren’t learning how to make it in the real world of products and services, exchange and trust.

Sooner or later it catches up with you.  Ask the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

What About Those Free Trade Deniers?

How come that fashionable New York Times columnists are so quick to make moral monsters out of people that question the authority of global-warming enthusiasts?

Nobody seems to give a damn about another kind of denier, the free-trade denier, as >Donald Luskin complains.

Such people are in fact standing athwart 250 years of economics, and an overwhelming consensus of living economists. These protectionists are denying the enormous gains in standards of living and human freedom that are the direct result of free global trade.

 When Maureen Dowd made a nasty little remark about people who didn’t agree with her about global warming she implied that the climate-change deniers were putting us all at risk.

But you can make a good argument that the free-trade deniers are far more dangerous.

There is a good argument that free trade is the one big thing that has powered the extraordinary rise in human well-being in the last 200 years, and we are talking about life expectancy as well as crude material wealth.

But free-trade deniers are allowed to write in major national publications and are accorded respect in national councils.  Where’s the shame?  Where’s the blame?

Of course there’s a common thread here. 

The free-trade deniers and the global-warming people are all folks with a taste for compulsion.  They want to take our money and spend it for us.  One day they want to spend it on helpless workers.  Another day they want to spend it on saving the planet.

But it is always Other Peoples’ Money.  And it is always about compulsion.

Bigger, Bolder, Brighter for 2007

Don’t tell me.  April 1 is a foolish day to launch a site redesign.  But what’s a father to do?  It’s spring and every young man’s fancy turns to spring cleaning the old site to make it brighter, bolder, and more compelling.

So now we have a new logo and a new top menu with two level menuing.

And we have a blog column, an oped column, and over on the right a list of the latest links that I’ve tagged on del.icio.us.

The new color is firebrick, #B22222.

I’ve no idea what it looks like.  I’m colorblind.