"The Way to Stop Discrimination"

It’s located right at the end of Chief Justice John Roberts decision in the case of Parents Concerned with Community Schools vs. Seattle School District (pdf).  You know what I am talking about.

We are talking about John Roberts’ deliberate sound bite neatly inserted into the pages and pages of close legal reasoning.  You know how it goes already.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

My, that’s a concept that we could use around here.  It is a sound bite that we should all hope will echo down the decades ahead.

But I wanted to get the context.  Where did Chief Justice Roberts put the sentence that he knew would be extracted and would be the symbol for the Parents vs. Seattle decision?  The sentence is located right at the end of “Opinion of ROBERTS, C.J.,” right before he writes:

The judgments of the Courts of Appeals for the Sixth and Ninth Circuits are reversed, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings.
It is so ordered.

Good idea, eh? Reversing opinions from both the Sixth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit Court of Lefties in gross as you might say.

And it is also right before “Opinion by THOMAS, J.”  Justice Clarence Thomas begins his concurring opinion with the words:

Today, the Court holds that state entities may not experiment with race-based means to achieve ends they deem socially desirable. I wholly concur in THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s opinion.

Well, now, that’s a thought.  It recalls the moment in the old Beyond the Fringe sketch where Jonathan Miller talks about Prime Minister Harold Macmillan pressing the nuclear button “or not, as the mood takes him.”  That’s the kind of government liberals like.  It’s the kind of government that can do anything that seems socially desirable.

The only reason, Justice Thomas writes, that he is writing a concurring opinion is “to address several of the contentions in JUSTICE BREYER’s dissent.” As well he might.

But here is Justice Roberts’ sound bite in context:

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300—301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis.  The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

Of course. That is the essential link. Chief Justice Roberts is directly linking his opinion with the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case of 1954.

That was when you could get the Supreme Court to vote 9-0 against racism.  Today you can only get a 5-4 vote to stop discrimination on the basis of race. 

That, I suppose, is progress.

"An Incredible Week"

Let’s just pause for a moment, because for conservatives this week has been Mae-Westian, as in “fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”  It’s been up and down all week.

Some people are getting triumphal, as in Mark Tapscott’s:

First, there was the success of the Right side of the Blogosphere in stopping the attempted revival of the Bush/Kennedy/McCain immigration reform bill in the Senate.

I think that we need to temper the enthusiasm.  The Washington Times’s  Stephen Dinan has it about right.  It was going to be “a defining moment for the old guard.”

Instead, the young guns &mdash, a small, wily group of junior Republican senators, most of them with less than a full term in the upper chamber — sent the bill into a tailspin, tying Democratic leaders into legislative knots and earning enough opposition among senators to block the Senate bill, culminating in yesterday’s vote to kill the measure.

It was the young guns, assisted by the firepower of the conservative New Media, that got the job done. But we can agree with Mark Tapscott to this extent:

Nobody can legitimately doubt now that conservative New Media has genuine political power to shape American public policy.

But let us not get above ourselves.  The New Media is a blunt instrument, like a great army.  The key is to appoint generals who can use the army to fight a great battle and win. 

That is what politicians are for.  When they are not deep in the trough giving out pork to their clients.

After this week, politicians all over America will be getting the message on immigration.

Here is the defining issue for me from Stephen Dinan:

"Those of us who have been on the campaign trail in the last couple of years have had to talk about immigration reform and we’ve campaigned — [Sen. David] Vitter made campaign promises, I made campaign promises — we should not reward those who came here illegally with a path to citizenship," said Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican.

That checks with the results of the cloture vote taken on Thursday, reported here.  The biggest group of Democrats who voted to kill the bill were in Class I, elected to the Senate last November.

No doubt they, like Jim DeMint, were out on the campaign trail talking about immigration reform and making promises.  So they have a pretty good idea about the sentiments out there on immigration.

And I’ll bet that you’d find that about 80 percent of the American people would agree with the notion that “we should not reward those who came here illegally with a path to citizenship.”

And then there was the Supreme Court’s decision on race and schools.  What a concept from Chief Justice Roberts:

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race[.]

Do tell.

Dems Who Voted Against Cloture

The Senate immigration bill didn’t just fail by a whisker.  The vote for cloture on S.1639 went down 46-53. Check the U.S. Senate website.

What’s interesting is the 16 Democrats who voted with the 53 of Senators, Democrat and Republican, to deny cloture.  Let us get this clear. There were 16 Democrats and 37 Republicans who voted against the comprehensive immigration bill brought to the Senate by President Bush, Senator Kennedy, and Senator McCain. Here is the list of the Democratic Senators voting against cloture. Alongside each senator is their class and the most recent year that they faced or will face the voters:

Senator Class Closest election Baucus (D-MT) II 2008 Bayh (D-IN) III 2010 Bingaman (D-NM) I 2006 Brown (D-OH) I 2006 Byrd (D-WV) I 2006 Dorgan (D-ND) III 2010 Harkin (D-IA) II 2008 Landrieu (D-LA) II 2008 McCaskill (D-MO) I 2006 Nelson (D-NE) I 2006 Pryor (D-AR) III 2010 Rockefeller (D-WV) II 2008 Sanders (I-VT) III 2010 Stabenow (D-MI) I 2006 Tester (D-MT) I 2006 Webb (D-VA) I 2006

Notice anything?  The biggest group of senators was recently elected in 2006.  What’s to bet that they said they would stand strong on protecting the border, and they don’t want to be on the wrong side of that promise.

The next biggest group is up for reelection in 2008.  What’s to bet that they want to be on the right side of the voters next year.

The smallest group is up for reelection in 2010.  They are the folks who are the least concerned with what the voters think right now.

This immigration thing isn’t all that hard.

1. Enforce the law
2. Build the fence
3. Clear the backlogs
4. Process the legal immigrants
5. Then... amnesty the illegals

What’s not to like about that?

After Blair: It's the Culture, Stupid

We know now that the Third Way was the left’s backhanded admission that the Reagan and Thatcher years marked the end of left-wing economics.  No longer could center-left politicians propose to direct the economy from the top, backing winners and assuming that only an activist government could keep the economy from running off the rails.

In fact the opposite is true.  The government’s job (and it is a vital one) is to set the legal framework for enterprise and then get out of the way.

The years that led up to the Reagan/Thatcher revolution were the years of the Broken Economy, Andrew Neil writes.  People thought that the healthy growth of the nineteenth century and the immediate post-war era was a thing of the past.  We had entered an era of limits,they realized, and the job of the elite was to manage decline.

Baloney, said Reagan and Thatcher, using the ideas of Hayek, Friedman, and Mises.  The only area of limits, they argued, was the limited grasp of economics and capitalism on the part of the academic middle class.  And then they took power and showed ’em.

But now the center-left gets it, or at least the political cadre does. Or at least it sorta does.

So we won that one.

As a result the era of the Broken Economy is over.  Now we have entered the era of the Broken Society.  As Neil writes:

During the Blair—Brown decade social concerns -- what kind of society we have become -- have gradually replaced economic worries. People fear that we have become an increasingly fragmented, boorish, more violent society.

Now, as then, Britain is in a bigger mess than the United States, and the reason is the same now as it was then.  The British people are more in thrall to the power and the influence of the academic middle class than Americans in the United States.

But the problem, the breakdown of the family and of society at the bottom and the formation of a feral underclass, is the same.  And it issues from the same cause.

The cause is the progressive welfare state.  Today the government showers money upon the non-working poor.  It rewards poor people for failure and it utterly marginalizes lower-class males.

As Patricia Morgan argues,

[T]he state, by providing extensive welfare provision, by financing child-care services and by taxing families on an ever-greater proportion of their income, provides strong incentives for families to break up rather than to hold together, and to form family relationships that are hidden from the authorities. Government policy has crowded out voluntary welfare within families and caused otherwise law-abiding people to commit fraud on a very extensive scale.

The fact is, she argues, women cannot afford to bring up children on their own. Nearly all women need help in time or money, or both.  A mother can either get help from the father, civilizing him into a provider and a role model for her children. Or, in today’s society, she can get it from the state.

The result, we know, is the Broken Society of feral children and single parenthood that infects our inner cities and is always threatening to break out into the general middle class.

Today in Britain, conservative commentators are worried that Gordon Brown has the tactical advantage.  They worry that David Cameron’s conservatives are concentrating too much on wooing upper-middle-class voters with talk about work-life balance and global warming.  They warn that Cameron is creating an opening for Brown to pose as the friend of the middle class who will mend the Broken Society that threatens peoples’ children with street violence and a lousy education.

Maybe.  But the center left still does not understand that it is the very structure, the very nature of the programs that they have brought into government that are the cause of the problem. 

And anyway, if Brown actually fixed the Broken Society, that would realize the vision of the Conservatives.

But is it not likely the Gordon Brown in Britain, or Hillary Clinton in the United States will solve the problem of the underclass or of lousy schools. 

To solve the problem of the Broken Society will require that the left gives up its patronage and its power: over the poor, over education, over health care.  Before it does that it will try every top-down government program in the world.

But the conservative answer will remain the same.  There is such a thing as society; it is just not the same as the state.  The health of a society  comes from the strength of its little platoons, the civic society of voluntary give and take, of charitable giving.  It is precisely what big government programs crowd out.

And I don’t know a single liberal friend who gets it.

Can Government Deliver on Education?

Tony Blair, everyone’s darling, has resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and now Gordon Brown has been appointed by the Queen to serve as his successor.  Everyone is full of advice, of course.

Anatole Kaletsky advises him to concentrate on education. 

If Mr Brown really wants to show that he can think afresh and that he is in touch with the concerns of ordinary voters he should recognise that the people of Britain are far more worried about the daily disappointments of their children’s education — not to mention the physical threats they face on the way to school, as they run the gauntlet of outlaw gangs increasingly addicted to violence

Britain is the home of the “bog-standard” comprehensive school.  If you don’t know exactly what that means, you can still guess. 

But can a centralized government education system ever deliver?  Well, we shall see.

The welfare state is something like 100 years old and in Britain and the United States centralized government education is about 150 years old.  And it shows.

The great promise made by the academic middle class a century ago for its education and welfare state project was that they, the educated and the experts, could make government actually do something to help people.  Don’t trust those dangerous businessmen, they said.  They don’t care about people.  But we do.  Trust us, they said.

And the academic middle class believed themselves.  Yes, they could make government into something it had never been. They could make it deliver.

Let’s face it.  Government is really a patronage and clientage game, always was, always will be.  As long as politicians stick to rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies they know what they are doing.  But when it comes to actually running something, like education or welfare, or immigration (and yes, immigration is just as screwed up in Britain as it is here) government seems to be a complete disaster.

Therein lies our opportunity.  We conservatives should recognize that there is a real possibility that we are entering an end game on government education.

You can put all the funding you like into education (and we have) but it really doesn’t matter.  That’s because it really doesn’t matter if the principals and the teachers in a government education system do their job.  They still get paid and the politicians pay more attention to them than to the voters.

Expect the concept of government education to be tested to destruction in the next twenty years.  Then we should be ready to grab the chance to do some real reform. 

Because we conservatives care about kids.

After all, there’s a difference between conservatives and liberals.  Conservatives have more children.

Flip-flopping: Do We Care?

Apparently there’s a lot of heat about flip-floppers in the Republican presidential race.

Particularly over Mitt Romney.  And people like eyeon08 don’t like it.

But Patrick Ruffini calls for a reality check.  Of course the candidates are flip-flopping.  They are trying to win the support of the Republican base in 2007.  So they are trimming their sails to catch the wind. 

But don’t worry too much that they’ll tack back.

After his public conversion and being pilloried as a flip-flopper, do you seriously think that Romney can walk back his pro-life position without destroying himself? Does anyone actually think that Romney would be so stupid as to advance public funding of elections after running as the enemy of BCRA [McCain Feingold campaign reform]? If Romney runs and manages to get elected as a conservative, why would he revert to a non-winning position?

Ruffini takes a look at recent presidents and finds that they governed pretty well as they campaigned.

Slippery as he was, Clinton ran as a Third Way Democrat and governed that way. Bush the Father was the mixed bag we expected him to be. Once he became pro-life, he stayed pro-life. But no one expected him to be Ronald Reagan ("kinder, gentler nation") and he wasn’t. And what you saw was what you got in Ronaldus Maximus.

So let’s relax and sit back and let the politicians continue with their sweet talking.  Will we or won’t we?  Well, honey, Ah’m not sure that Ah’ve even thought about that.

The Fix Is In

As the Senate voted 64-35 to take up the immigration bill, we the unwashed have to feel that there is something going on that we aren’t a party to.

OK, so Julie Hirschfeld Davis says that the victory of the president and the bill’s backers was a sometime thing.

Their victory was fleeting, though, giving way just hours later to stalling tactics by GOP foes. Conservatives succeeded in delaying until Wednesday consideration of a package of amendments designed to pave the way for a final vote on the bill.

But is all this real, or just kabuki, as Michelle Malkin writes?

More and more, I am beginning to think that the events of Hurricane Katrina are representative.  They represented a failure of government at all levels: federal, state, and local.

We can expect more such failures.  Government is never very good at anything, but the more that it sucks into its orbit the worse that it does.

And today we have a government that just doesn’t care.

This immigration bill is not about doing anything or solving anything.  It is about “doing something,” and that is different.  It won’t really secure the border because that is too hard and governments don’t do hard things.  It won’t solve the illegal immigration problem because the lure of the US economy is just too great. 

The American people will pay for this, of course, good and hard.  And the suits will just ride off into the sunset. 

Michael Novak on Hillarynomics

We’ve already cast a jaundiced eye on Hillary Clinton’s “on your own” speech at a technical college in New Hampshire in which she castigates the “on your own” policies of the Bush administration and proposes her “we’re all in it together” economic plan of taxes, spending, and regulation.

Now Michael Novak takes a look at the economic policy of the future Clinton administration revealed in her speech.  First he takes a look at the vision of the Bush administration.

Bush has set forth a realizable dream of universal ownership for all Americans -- the dream of owning their own personal Social Security accounts, their own medical accounts, their homes or apartments, and their own investment plans. He proposes this as real, life-changing help for the poor, by way of independence and self-determination, in local communities of caring. Senator Clinton transforms this vision into the spinning, hellish “on your own” society.

Democrats are always suggesting that Republicans just don’t care about people.  So Clinton reminds the students:

“We have sent a message to our young people that if you don’t go to college and you don’t have a high-paying job -- something like a basketball player or an entertainer, or maybe someone in a corporation -- that you’re thought less of in America.”

Only someone “who doesn’t know any craftsmen, manual workers, or independent electricians and plumbers (who nowadays can bring in more than a hundred grand a year)” could say something like that, according to Novak.

What the Irish saloonkeeper Mr Dooley should have said: “The fella what said that Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels underestimated th’ possibilities of Compassion.”

In short, the dream of economic reds is not a vision of an America driven forward by new entrepreneurs, new inventors, and those untamed “animal spirits” that are released by a good system of incentives. Rather, it is a vision of rule-making, curbs, limitations, bureaucratic selection among alternatives, new burdens on the private sector -- and larger powers unwisely given to the federal government.

The question is whether the $100,000 plumbers will vote for the economic redness, the dependency and victimhood of Hillary Clinton, or whether they will vote for independence and ownership.

Global Warming: 4 Legs Good; 2 Legs Bad

That’s basically what the Society of Environmental Journalists believes.  They have put out a convenient guide to climate change, writes Debra J. Saunders, and it helpfully tells you who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

So, the Society of Environmental Journalists put together a guide on climate change that lists a number of publications on global warming, scientists and seven environmental groups, each with positive descriptions. Under the "Deniers, Dissenters and ’Skeptics’" category are four listings — all negative.

Isn’t that special?  Of course, they don’t try to debunk the ideas of the skeptics.  Oh no.  They only criticize their associations.

The joke about all this is that, as Saunders writes, and others, like Nils Axel Mörner confirm, all the big money these days is going to research to support the global warming hypothesis.

Let us make this clear.  If you are an academician interested in the money and the kudos, you’d better shut your mouth about your doubts about global warming.  Otherwise you won’t get the grant you need to advance your career.

Single Payer Means Filthy Hospitals

Before we all collapse before the tightly reasoned ideas of Michael Moore and his documentary about health care, SiCKO, let’s take a look at what “single-payer” health care really means in practice.

It means filthy hospitals.  As in single-payer Britain.  It means an epidemic of MRSA and HAI (Hospital-acquired infection.

Writes Harriet Sergeant:

Cases of MRSA in England and Wales have increased by 600% in the past decade alone, according to government figures. Britain has one of the worst records in Europe. The danger of contracting a bug here is more than 15 times higher than the next safest countries.

 In US terms, with a population five times the British population, it would translate into 1,500,000 cases of HAI a year and up to 100,000 deaths from HAI a year.

What is going wrong in the hospitals of Britain?  It’s the old story.  No accountability and no delegated responsibility.

One former matron, now in audit work, pointed out the difficulty of disciplining a nurse for incompetence in the NHS today. Modern management is meant to “nurture” its employees. “You can’t bawl them out or they’ll sue you for harassment,” she explained.

Hospital cleaning in Britain is done by contract cleaners, which is fine, except that nurse supervisors have no authority to demand that the cleaners actually clean.

And nobody enforces standards.  Hospital rules require a nurse to put on gloves and an apron before attending to a patient.  But Sergeant saw a nurse come into a room and handle a patient without putting on gloves, right in front of a matron and an infection control manager.  Here’s the reaction of the hospital officials:

The matron tut-tutted. “You’ve got to have eyes in the back of your head with these girls,” she said. The infection control manager nodded sympathetically. “Doctors are far worse,” she added.

No why would these women be so cavalier about this?

Lefties like Michael Moore want a world in which people just get world-class health care without lifting a finger.

But what happens if the people delivering world-class health care subscribe to the same world-view, that everything should be arranged for them? Suppose they believe that they have no responsibility beyond sitting around and tut-tutting?

Someone, somewhere has to lift a finger.

The best way to ensure that someone does care about delivering service is to make sure that it is delivered by a private company.

One thing that everyone agrees on, from the wackiest leftie to the rock-ribbed conservative.  When a corporation falls down on the job, everyone agrees, it is not to be endured.

The Incredible Shrinking New York Times

The trouble with being a national institution is that when you start going down the tubes the whole nation is there to gawk at your agony. 

And if you are The New York Times the whole blogosphere is goggling at you in its pajamas.  

The blogosphere is full of experts, as Dan Rather could tell you. Thomas Lifson is not just proprietor of The American Thinker but also a management consultant.  So he has the expertise to translate the NYT earnings numbers into dollars and sense.  He observes that recently NYT CEO

Janet Robinson told investors at a Newspaper Association of America conference in New York that the company would be raising the price of single copy newspapers and home delivery subscriptions. At the same time, the company has suddenly accelerated and apparently made more drastic a previously-announced plan to shrink the physical size of the paper and cut the amount of news provided to readers.

So, Lifson tells his readers, here is what is going down.

[T]he company is composed of a large newspaper business decaying faster and faster, slightly offset by a medium-sized, nicely-but-not-spectacularly-growing internet publishing business, and a half interest in a Manhattan skyscraper under construction.

Of course there’s nothing actually wrong with a nice, medium-sized internet business.  In fact, life can be much more fun on a zippy frigate that on a ponderous ship-of-the-line.

The thing is that when it comes to invitations to important competitive social events, it helps to be the captain of a ship-of-the-line.  It helps with the ladies, too.

What Do These Professors Want?

The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz has built a career out of publicizing prosecutorial overreach, most notably in the fantastical abuse cases brought against the operators of day-care facilities back in the 1980s, most notably the Amirault Case.

Now she turns her attention to the two notable abusive prosecutions of the last year: the political lynching of Scooter Libby and the racial lynching of the Duke University lacrosse players.  But the Duke case was more than a racial lynching by a cynical race-baiting prosecutor.

It was in its searing way an educational event, not just about prosecutorial ambition run amok, but about a university world—reflective of many others—where faculty ideologues pursued their agendas unchecked and unabashed. Here was a nearly successful legal lynching, applauded by a significant chunk of the Duke faculty, proud to display their indifference to questions of guilt or innocence.

What is it about the faculties of our universities?  Why are they so utterly consumed with obsession over race, class, gender, and sexual orientation? 

Ordinary Americans plunk along in their lives.  They get jobs, get married, have children, and rub along pretty well.  Yet right next door there’s the frantic world of the academy where everything is viewed in the garish light of frightful oppression, and where the prudent keep their heads down, even prudent people like college presidents.

The great consuming career goal of our college and university presidents—with the exception of oddities like Harvard’s Larry Summers—has for more than two decades been the same: to avoid any word or deed that might incur the wrath of their gender- and race-obsessed faculties and allied campus activists.

And let Larry Summers be a warning to you college presidents!

Here is the irony.  There has never been a time, at least not since the dawn of the agricultural age, where race and class and gender have been less important.  The whole point of democratic capitalism is that it reduces everything to the cash nexus.  It doesn’t matter too much what class or race or gender you are.  So long as you can do the job and render service to your fellow man, you can participate and you can prosper.  Indeed, where race and class and gender oppression still lurk there are profit opportunities for the wily entrepreneur.

Yet we live in a time where the academic middle class is utterly consumed with fashionable theories about race and class and gender.  What is going on?

As Rush Limbaugh insists: Follow the Money. 

And the power.

Hamas Wins Gaza: What Now?

With Israel surrounded by proxies of Iran, what should they give away now?

And what should the United States do to “advance” the peace process?  Do we now divide up the Palestinians into:

Hamas, who are beyond the pale, and Fatah, with whom we can do business.

This is delusion, writes Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan.

The reason for this deluded approach is the fundamentally flawed Western belief that the ‘two state solution’ will end the Middle East impasse. The fact is that the ‘two state solution’ has been on offer since 1922.

But, of course, the Arabs don’t want a two-state solution.  They have always met the peace process with new demands and new violence.

With the victory of Hamas in Gaza the Iranian proxies are threatening Jordan and Egypt.  Maybe it’s time to put the Palestinian problem on their backs.

Long-term, the solution lies in Jordan and Egypt exercising their own self-interest. A Jordan-West Bank confederation is now being floated; the same logic would mean Egypt reoccupying Gaza.

There is only one thing that threatens this sensible arrangement, and that is “the US/UK axis of appeasement.”

Stay tuned.

The Adolescent Cult of "Getting it Right"

Journalist and writer David Halberstam, tragically killed in an auto accident, lived by the modern journalist’s code.  When you take down the politicians and the generals: Get It Right, writes James Bowman, author of Honor, A History.

In championing the culture of “getting it right,” today’s journalists are only following the culture of the academic middle class, which generally lives by observation and the bon mot.

Unfortunately the dirty work of living in the world involves action.  And as the saying goes, if you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t learning anything.  Life is a trial-and-error process of getting things wrong and then acting to make it right.

"Getting it right" is of course an admirable ambition for a journalist, but it is an exercise that has little in common with what generals and politicians must do, which is to lead others through situations of mortal peril with appallingly incomplete and inaccurate information to guide them. Getting it wrong is a given...  For the man who must act and not just observe, the only question that matters is how quickly he can recognize and recover from his mistakes and how strong is his will to keep fighting in spite of them and the inevitable setbacks they cause.

The criticism of President Bush in recent years, like the routine criticism of businessmen, betrays this adolescent view of life. 

And of course it is appropriate that liberals and Democrats and academicians all celebrate being right and mercilessly criticize anyone who makes a mistake.  In the bureaucratic and education and media sector hardly anyone is involved in real action.  There is no bottom line for professors and journalists; win or lose they keep drawing their salaries.

But in the real world you struggle from mistake to mistake, and you try to learn as you go along.

People who make with the criticism reveal the adolescent fuzz on their cheeks.  Nobody who ever had responsible charge of a real project, and had made real mistakes in their life, would talk like that.

Follow the Money on Immigration

What are the real issues on the current immigration bill?  Milton Friedman said it best, according to Robert Rector.

It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state,”he warned.

Why not?  Because of the political bargain represented by the modern welfare state.

In the “transfer state,” government taxes the upper middle class and shifts some $1.5 trillion in economic resources to lower-income groups through a vast variety benefits and subsidies.

It’s not just welfare, but a whole raft of complex benefits and subsidies that are administered by the welfare state’s middle men, liberals.

So when we open the borders to low-skill immigrants we open the floodgates to expanding the welfare state.  We change the political balance by increasing the number of people likely to want and likely to vote for benefits and subsidies.

Elections in modern societies are, to a considerable degree, referenda on the magnitude of future income redistribution. An immigration policy which grants citizenship to vast numbers of low-skill, low-income immigrants not only creates new beneficiaries for government transfers, but new voters likely to support even greater transfers in the future.

There is only one practical way for conservatives to view the immigration debate.

“Go ahead. Dismantle the welfare state. As soon as you’ve got that finished, let us know, and then we’ll talk about open borders.”

And that leaves out the real crime of the welfare state, that it delays and hinders the natural adaptation of the immigrant and the low-skilled to the ethos of the modern society, the idea that you prosper by meeting the needs of other people. 

The welfare state teaches people that you prosper by forcing other people to meet your needs because you are a helpless victim.

The welfare state is essentially a reactionary idea, a rejection of the principle of voluntary cooperation to meet other peoples’ needs and return to the agricultural era, its servile relationships and its compulsion.

Talk about SiCKO.

"Women with Needs" Tells It All

What kind of voter would you imagine that Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) is attracting to her presidential campaign?  Anne E. Kornblut and Matthew Mosk have the answer.

Clinton is drawing especially strong support from lower-income, lesser-educated women — voters her campaign strategists describe as "women with needs." Obama, by contrast, is faring better among highly educated women, who his campaign says are interested in elevating the political discourse.

Ah yes.  Elevating the political discourse.  We are all in favor of that.

But Republicans should pay attention.  This "women with needs" thing tells it all.  That is what the Democratic Party is for: meeting the needs of "women with needs." 

People Have Needs, they say, as if the answer is obvious: Another government program.

The task for Republicans and conservatives and libertarians and anyone who wants to move from the agricultural era of patronage and clientage is to move the discourse.  To elevate it, if you like.

Civilized society, that is city-based society, has developed a culture in which people meet their needs with astonishing facility.  They work for the benefit of others in the global economy; they marry; they belong to and contribute their time and money to mediating institutions like families, churches, neighborhood associations, mutual-aid associations, affinity groups, and charities.

What they do not do is imagine that government is the place to go to meet their needs beyond the common defense from enemies foreign and domestic and the rule of law.

They know that government is in the compulsion business, and the less of that the more that people will be able to meet their needs in voluntary service to others in the global economy.

Thanks to Hillary Clinton for reminding us of this important truth.

Republican Elite vs. Republican Voters

Now that the Republicans are out of power in Congress and President Bush is a lame duck, the Republican base doesn’t seem to feel the need for party discipline.

So when the Republican Party elite presented the Republican voters with a comprehensive and mandatory omnibus immigration bill we all upchucked, encouraged by our friends the talk-show hosts.

Why not?  There was no point in good manners and obedience.  Our guys aren’t in power any more. 

You can tell that Queen Victoria is not amused about this.  Sen. McCain (R-AZ) has talked about “my friends,” always a dangerous sign, and Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) has opined that talk radio is running America.  “We have to deal with that problem.”

Oh goodie, says talk show host Michael Graham:

Sen. Trent Lott has seen the enemy, and he is us.  Well, actually: me.

But let us have some compassion and sensitivity for our august Republican leaders.

What the reckless Republican base is demanding is quite over the top.  It is demanding accountability from the government.  It is demanding that before we give the government the right to amnesty 12 million illegals they should prove to us that they are controlling the border.

The effrontery!  Why, government has never been subjected to accountability like that before!  It’s unprecedented!  There’s no accountability on Social Security.  There’s no accountability on Medicare, or on VA hospitals.  There’s no accountability on education. 

Why in the world would people suddenly get the idea that we should hold the government accountable on border security?

You can see why the Sen. Lotts and Sen. McCains of the world would be upset.  They didn’t get where they are today so they could take directions from a bunch of talk-radio hosts.  They will, at a pinch, subject themselves to the agony of appealing to the voters once every six years, but enough is enough.

It’s almost enough to get a solon to give up politics in disgust.  Almost.

Something tells me that in all this sound and fury the political plates are shifting under our feet.  Or, if you like:

They’re changing the guard at Buckingham Palace
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.

As the song goes. But who knows who will be on guard after they have changed it. It won’t be all nice and jolly like the song.  Probably the GOP will have to go into the political wilderness for a while and do some hard thinking.

But that’s ok.  As they said about the buboes of bubonic plague during the Black Death:  They need time to ripen.

And the buboes of the welfare state aren’t going to go away.  They will be there when we get back.

Cameron Speaks, Media Underwhelmed

David Cameron gave a speech in Tooting, London on Monday, “Our Society, Your Life,” and the conservative press was unimpressed.

Cameron spoke of his political philosophy, the idea that there is such a thing as society, it is not the same as the state.  The idea is one of social responsibility.

Social responsibility means that every time we see a problem, we don’t just ask what government can do. We ask what people can do, what society can do.

And he drew a dividing line between the Conservative Party and Gordon Brown’s Labour Party.  “We believe in social responsibility, he believes in state control.”

That’s all fine and good, says  The Daily Telegraph.

Mr Cameron’s philosophical generalisations are certainly compelling and could provide the basis for effective opposition, and the next few months will require specifics and the hard-headed resolve to defend them.

But are the specifics important, or is it the atmospherics?  The nasty truth is that political parties win because the voters are ready to throw the other party out.   When Ronald Reagan was elected president in the United States it was because the voters were utterly fed up with Jimmy Carter and they decided in the last week of the campaign that, despite the reputation Ronald Reagan had as a bomb-thrower and a flake, that they would give him their votes.

Maybe all David Cameron has to do to win the next election after 10 plus years of Labour is to seem like a safe pair of hands and let voter fatigue do the rest.

Democrats and Taxes. Again

The Democrats plan to solve the problem of the Alternative Minimum Tax (it hurts the rich in Democratic states) with a tax surcharge on the rich nationwide.  Share the suffering.

And now they want to raise taxes on the private equity guys, according to Larry Kudlow.  Well, they are just making too much money.

Do they know what they are doing, he wonders?

Ironically, all this is happening while low-tax Reaganomics is spreading worldwide. Hence, this would be the exact wrong moment for U.S. politicians to raise taxes and impair American economic competitiveness.

One fine day, the Democrats will realize that they have to harmonize US tax rates with the rest of the world, indeed that it wouldn’t hurt to have tax rates lower than the rest of the world.

But it looks like they will have to learn the hard way.

But don’t worry.  The Democratic suits won’t suffer.  They will get theirs.  It’s you and I that will have to pay the price of their tax-raising follies.

Reid's "Incompetent" Gaffe

So Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace that he was incompetent, and then the lefty bloggers denied it. According to Michael Goldfarb, quoting a semi-lefty blogger, Reid said:

Pace is also a yes-man for the president and I told him to his face, I laid it out to him last time he came to see me, I told him what an incompetent man I thought he was.

It’s interesting how Reid illustrates the no-win situation of the US military where Democrats are concerned.  For doing what the president wants he’s a yes-man.  But imagine what would happen if Pace had actually rebelled against the president’s policy (particularly if the president were a Democrat).  Then we’d be hearing about the civilian control of the military and the danger of the military industrial complex. 

But really, the dispiriting thing is that Reid can go on like this until the cows come home and he’ll never  pay a price.

The rules are simple.  Democrats always get a pass.  You could look it up.  It’s in the constitution.

Hollywood and Abortion

Politically, we all know that Hollywood is pro-abortion.  But, with the release of Knocked Up, several commentators have noticed that Hollywood seems very reticent to celebrate abortion in its movies.

Gerard Baker writes:

In Knocked Up, the very word is avoided completely — the closest is when one of the characters suggests maybe the heroine should have a procedure that rhymes with “shmashmortion”.

It is not just in Knocked Up, and feminists have noticed, Baker points out.

They point out that in Hollywood, for decades — in everything from Sex and the City to Parenthood — women confronted with an unplanned pregnancy almost always choose to keep the baby.

Actually, that’s not quite true.  The 1999 move The Cider House Rules celebrated abortion, or at least illegal abortionists, and it grossed $56 million.

But Cider House Rules, you could argue, was an art-house film, whereas Knocked Up ($73 million after two weeks) is a movie marketed as the general unwashed.

Baker wonders if Hollywood’s reluctance over abortion tells us something.  Maybe we all know that abortion is a bad thing, whatever we say, and so we don’t want to be confronted with it when we’ve checked out for a bit of fantasy at the movies.

I’m convinced that we will some day come to view it in the way we now view slavery, a moral abomination that generations simply became inured to by usage and practice.

That’s a thought.

The Germans, of course, have no such squeamishness. In Edgar Reitz’s vast panorama, Heimat, the cellist heroine undergoes an illegal abortion in The Second Heimat on camera and nearly dies.  But she was impregnated not by the noble artistic hero but by one of couple of rich kids.  So that’s different.

CAFE: Bad Ideas Never Die

Back in the 1970s our august Solons thought it was time to issue a ukase to the auto companies and tell them what gas mileage their cars should get. 

The result was that station wagons disappeared and people gravitated to minivans, SUVs, and light trucks, because they had a less stringent gas mileage requirement.

Actually, the minivans, SUVs, and light trucks were and are bigger and heavier than the evil gas-guzzling station wagons they replaced.

Now the Democratic Senate is proposing to raise overall gas mileage to 35 mpg including light trucks.  Do these people understand what they are doing?  They are proposing to legislate people out of their big minivans, SUVs, and trucks.

Enter the law of unintended consequences. James H. Burnley writes.

Regulatory schemes like CAFE can come with a number of unintended consequences — things like putting smaller, sometimes less-safe vehicles on the road; pricing some vehicles beyond the reach of many Americans; and artificially creating winners and losers in a highly competitive environment like the auto industry.

And the chance is pretty good that another CAFE lurch upwards will do for GM and Ford, which are capitalized at about $10 billion each compared to over $200 billion for Toyota.

Look Democrats, why not just confine your foolishness to handing out subsidies to your alternative energy friends?   

Don’t get into things that can’t be solved by ordering people around, holding hearings, and repeating flashy acronyms.

There isn’t a magic hybrid solution here, ether.  Accelerating 4,000 lbs of SUV up to 60 mph takes a ton of energy.  Braking it to a stop uses up a lot of energy too.  Hybrids really only work for liberals driving in yeasty urban neighborhoods, not for average Americans driving on the freeway.

Russia: Coming to Terms With Reality

Russians want to believe that their country is great.  But the trouble is that it is not, writes Strategy Page.  Even in the days of the Soviet Union its greatness was an illusion.

In the early 1990s, when economists and accountants got the first good look at the Russian economy since the early 20th century, it was found that the Russian GDP was about four percent of the U.S. GDP.

But what an illusion!  The Soviet Union flexed its muscles and paraded weapons in Red Square, and we all believed.  The trouble is that the ordinary Russians believed too.

The really bad news is, most Russians are still not aware of how screwed up their Soviet era military was.

They thought that the brutality and incompetence of the Soviet era military was normal and inevitable.  And they remember how the Red Army beat the Germans in WWII.

Unfortunately the Germans probably beat themselves in WWII—and Stalin was not afraid to throw an entire generation into the meat grinder in order to win.  And it didn’t hurt that the US motorized the entire Red Army with Lend Lease.

Now we are back to the old, old game.  The rest of the world wants to contain Russia, but “to many Russians, the West is still out to destroy them.”

That’s an illusion too.  The ugly truth is that the West doesn’t give a damn about Russia.  It just wants to contain it.

Blair Whines About Media He Helped Create

It really is too bad of Tony Blair to complain about the savagery of the modern media.  After all, it was Bill Clinton and he that created and developed to a fine art the modern “war room,” ready 24-7 to demolish the opposition.  And it is George W. Bush and David Cameron that are trying to find a way beyond the ferocious Clinton/Blair campaign methodology that is based on a win-at-all-costs approach to politics.

In his speech today he characterized the media, according to George Jones, as a “feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits.”

That reads exactly the way that the Republican Party experienced the Clinton politics of personal destruction and the Conservative Party experienced the Blair media bulldogs like Alistair Campbell.  The Clinton/Blair war rooms operated on the Al Davis principle:  “Just Win Baby.”  And it didn’t matter what they said and who they destroyed in order to get to the finish line first.

The tragedy is that both Clinton and Blair entered office with a media in love with them.  Once elected they didn’t need the politics of personal destruction.  But once they had got the war room genie out of the bottle and had seen what it could do for them they could never bring themselves to put it back.

So when Blair’s New Labour Party got into office it governed on the basis of constant media-friendly “eye-catching initiatives.”  Governing, the deadly dull business of making things work, came a very definite second. 

Now Tony Blair leaves office whingeing about the unfairness of it all. The real unfairness is the legacy of ten years of Labour Party domestic policy: a huge increase in public spending but very little in the way of genuine reform.

What a waste.

A Modest Marriage Proposal

In Britain the Law Commission is worried about the rights of cohabiting couples, writes Libby Purves.  It thinks they should have all the rights of married couples.

Why bother, wonders Purves?  Anyone that wants the rights of married people can get married.  Even gays can obtain similar rights now that civil partnerships are recognized under the law in Britain.  It isn’t exactly a secret that marriage tightens the obligations of sexual partners.

Women — who traditionally get the short end of the stick — should be aware that marriage is a safer basis for scaling down work to raise a family, and that if they eschew it or are denied it, then they had better make arrangements.

But the idea of automatically formalizing cohabitation rights gives Purves an idea.  Why not declare that any couple that has a child together is automatically married?

If the Law Commission really wanted to put a spoke in the wheel of feckless and exploitative lovers, it could simply decree that the birth of a child creates, ipso facto, a marriage — with all the property and pension rights which that implies. Imagine the terror, imagine the caterwauling of complaint — not least when chaps found themselves “married” to multiple women, and instead of the weedy Child Support Agency were faced with complex crypto-divorce proceedings and settlements.

That would really change the terms of trade, wouldn’t it?

Democrat Budget & New Taxes and Spending

Does nobody care what the Democrats are proposing in their budget resolution?  Thank goodness Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, does:

This five-year budget blueprint, a partisan plan designed and passed by congressional Democrats with no input from Republicans, will weigh down the economy with the largest tax increase in U.S. history, hundreds of billions in new spending, and billions of dollars in new debt.

Had enough?  There’s more.

The budget also is unrestrained in its embrace of new spending on Washington programs. Wasting no time, this budget in fiscal 2008 will spend $82 billion, or 9 percent more than fiscal 2007 levels. In total, discretionary spending jumps $205 billion over the president’s request during the next five years, while entitlement spending grows unchecked by $402 billion during the same period.

Here’s what I think.  I think the Democrats are heading into a wood-chipper.  They are so eager to get their hands on the lovely lolly, the spending dollars, and hand them out to their special interests that they haven’t stopped to think about what will happen if they actually get what they want.

That’s because, at the critical turning points in economic policy in the past generation, Democrats were AWOL.

The job of Republicans and conservatives is to make sure that when the economy heads south the voters get to understand who did it.  Good and hard.

It Couldn't Happen Here. Could It?

You’d think that when you have a centralized Nataional Curriculum, like the British do, that you’d at least guarantee that the flaky and the positive-self-esteem fluff would be kept to a low roar.  But that is not the case.  British think tank Civitas reports that the National Curriculum is a cess-pool of left-wing fashion.

The traditional subject areas have been hi-jacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government’s social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students.

And that includes physics.  Here’s a cri-de-coeur from a physics teacher, Wellington Grey.  He writes about how he got out of the private sector because he wanted to teach.  Physics.  For a few years he was happy.  But then something changed.

My subject is still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in physics, but that exam doesn’t cover anything I recognize as physics. Over the past year the UK Department for Education and the AQA board changed the subject. They took the physics out of physics and replaced it with! something else

Whereas students used to learn about theory and equations now “pupils debate topics like global warming and nuclear power.”  In fact, global warming has just about taken over the curriculum.

On top of everything, the questions asked in the government’s GSCE test weren’t covered in the government’s syllabus specification.

My pupils complained that the exam did not test the material they were given to study, and they are largely correct. The information tested was not in the specification given to the teachers, nor in the approved resources suggested by the AQA board.

But really, when the whole point of high-school physics is to learn the correct line on global warming, who needs a syllabus?  Who needs to sit in class?

Just pump out the politically-correct answer, kid, and you’ll do OK.

And don’t think it couldn’t happen here.

Sarkozy allies head for landslide

Count me among the amazed as the French voted overwhelmingly for reform in their parliamentary elections Sunday.

According to Jon Boyle:

Mr. Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party won 39.6 percent of the vote, while the opposition Socialists had 24.7 percent, the Interior Ministry said.

And Sarkozy’s party campaigned frankly on a platform of economic reform, as in:

1.  Make overtime exempt from taxes
2. Make mortgage interest tax deductible
3. Eliminate 95 percent of the death tax
4. Put 50 percent cap on individual taxation
5. “No performance, no bonus” limit on executive golden parachutes
6. Give universities more freedom to recruit staff, link with private sector
7. Minimum jail sentences for repeat offenders

And the French government is also proposing to modify the standard lifetime work contract to “loosen firing rules.”

It’s true.  Change can happen.  Now all the French need to do is actually implement the reforms 

Bush Defines G-8 on Climate Change?

The advance word on the G-8 meeting in Germany was that hostess Angela Merkel and poodle-in-chief Tony Blair would bring President Bush around to the advanced, sophisticated European way of thinking on climate change.

But that’s not what happened at all, according to Kimberley A. Strassel.  See any mandatory targets?  Any anti-growth sentiments?  Let’s read her take.

Yesterday’s declaration, far from mandatory targets, instead sets a "global goal" of halving emissions by 2050. It invites the "major emerging economies" to join in this endeavor. It acknowledges that different approaches across the world can "coordinate rather than compete." It reports that "technology is a key to mastering climate change" and lauds government "incentives." It admits that "over the next 25 years, fossil fuels will remain the world’s dominant source of energy," and talks up the "peaceful use of nuclear energy." It even explains that any program "must be undertaken in a way that supports growth in developing, emerging and industrialized economies."

Democrats want to rush in and swing huge government powers around to save the planet from global warming. That’s OK.  It’s what Democrats do. But when they really get a chance, in 2009, it may be that the train will already have left the station.  On George W. Bush’s schedule.

What Were They Thinking?

It’s easy to say that after the fact.  You wonder: What planet are they on?  President Bush and leading Republicans should never try to run a controversial bill past the Republican base in the dead of night.   A proper immigration compromise requires leadership.  It requires that the bill sponsors go out and move the country. 

That’s what President Bush told the New York Times back in 2000 when its editorial board told him that the American people didn’t support tax cuts.  Then I’ll have to move the country, he responded.

In retrospect it is clear that the negotiators on the Senate immigration bill knew this.  They knew they didn’t have the country, and they knew that they didn’t have time to build support and move it.  So they tried the bum’s rush.

Conservative commentators are talking this morning about the fact that people don’t trust the federal government.  They don’t trust it to be serious about border security and they don’t trust it to be serious about employment enforcement.  And we know that at the local level the liberal counties and cities turn a blind eye to illegal immigrants in their faces. 

The truth is that ordinary Americans don’t like that.  They don’t like it because they think that the law is the law, and the government ought to enforce the law.

It is probably true that the welfare state today is finding itself ministering to hordes of illegal immigrants and that one of the main drivers of the immigration bill is the desire of the welfare state administrators and line workers to have recognized in law what they are already doing in fact.

But that is the government’s problem, not the people’s problem.

Could the Immigration Issue Hurt the Democrats?

The usual procedure after a big showdown like the immigration bill that was just withdrawn in the US Senate is that it means bad news for the Republican Party.  Remember how the gender gap has always been a Republican problem, not a Democratic problem.

Of course, the withdrawal of the bill by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, writes Julie Hirschfeld Davis provoked the usual response. 

The defeat set off a bitter round of partisan recriminations, with Democrats and Republicans each accusing the other of killing it.

Oh well, I guess we will all survive it.

But it is clear that US politics is entering the post-Bush era, and it is also evident that the tectonic plates are shifting.

The interesting thing about immigration is that it is Republicans who are most opposed.  Yet you would think that rank-and-file Democrats would have the most at stake and be the most damaged by competition from low-wage immigrants. 

What gives?  Why don’t we hear from the Democratic rank-and-file?  My feeling is that lunch-bucket Democrats don’t have a direct voice in politics.  They are only represented by elite-led interest groups like organized labor and AARP.  The netroots operate at the individual level, but they are clearly college-educated liberals, not ordinary workers. 

Theda Skocpol, defenestrator of Larry Summers, wrote about this in Diminished Democracy.  She realizes that modern democratic politics is conducted by memberless cadre lobbying groups.  In the old days politics was driven by the leaders of big membership organizations.

You could argue, of course, that the reason the Republican Party picked up a majority in the past quarter century was because unhappy Democrats could never get their leaders to listen to them.  As elite anti-war liberals and feminists talked to each other about liberal issues Reagan Democrats left them on national security and patriotism and religious Democrats left them on abortion and school prayer.

Suppose that in the next few years secure-border Democrats leave the party on the issue of immigration.  Is it possible?  Who knows?  Nobody ever asked the rank-and-file Democrats for their opinion.

Democrats on Bush's "bumper-sticker" war

Democratic presidential candidates are pretty well all agreed that the war on terror is “Bush’s War,” a bumper-sticker business gussied up for purely political purposes.  

Unfortunately, the attempt to tie the war on terror around Bush’s neck tells us rather more about the Democrats than they might want, writes William Murchison.

We need to look carefully at the phrase "George Bush’s war." It tells us everything we need to know about this field of candidates. Not our war — not America’s. Mr. Bush’s war.

Because on the day before the latest Democratic presidential debate a crew of Islamists from the Caribbean were arrested for conspiring to blow up New York’s JFK airport.  The New York Times reported the arrests on page 30.

Republicans are taking the wrong approach to the Democrats.  The best way to persuade the American people that the Dems are no good is to vote them into office.  Already the new Democratic Congress is proving a disappointment to the voters.

Imagine what they would think if a Democrat were elected president, and, and...

Yes, just what would a Democratic president do about the jihadists and the adventure in Iraq?  Sooner or later we are going to need to find out.

Here’s a guess.  Our lefty friends in the netroots won’t like it.

Ted Kennedy Bridge Joke

You can’t do enough Ted Kennedy bridge jokes, any more than you can have enough of the time that Ted Kennedy visited a bond-trading floor in Manhattan.

“Any of you ladies need a ride home,” boomed a loud voice.

There’s a Ted Kennedy joke involving the late Pat, Mrs. William F. Buckley, Jr., told by Linda Bridges. 

Ted Kennedy was staying in Gstaad and had visited the Buckleys along with the Galbraiths one afternoon.  The Galbraiths left early but Ted stayed on. 

Finally it was time for him to return to Gstaad, and rather than take the train he asked if he could borrow a car. “You certainly may not,” said Pat. “There are three bridges between here and Gstaad.”

Yep.  You can’t get enough of that sort of thing. 

How Do You Spell Freedom?

Back in the old days childhood was different.  Kids had more freedom, as Alice Thompson reports from Britain. She talked to her mother about life as a child during World War II.

Life as a child in those days was delightful.  The adults were far too busy to pay any attention to children. 

We broke into requisitioned houses and made camps; we spent our afternoons canoeing down the Cam without life-jackets, eating sausages out of tins and, when it rained, we slipped into the cinema to watch unsuitable love stories and horrifying images of the liberation of the concentration camps.

Of course, one time a man tried to force himself on her as she cycled to a friend’s house.  But she never thought of telling anyone until she got home. 

Thompson’s childhood was not much different.  She took the London subway home from school with her younger sister from the age of five.

Today things are much different.  According to a survey “Fewer than one in 10 eight-year-olds walk to school alone” in Britain today and there are signs in public playgrounds warning parents that is against the law to leave their children unsupervised.

And Alice Thompson is just as smothering a parent as everyone else:

I walk my three-, four- and six-year-old to school every day, clutching their hands.
Their every moment in London is supervised, with playdates and trips to museums.
I drive them to football and tennis. No wonder they love going to the country where they can spend all day making camps in the garden, pretending to be orphans.

In fact though, children have about the same risk of murder or kidnapping as a generation ago.

And though they have much less risk of being orphaned, they do have a pretty significant risk of being abandoned in divorce.

The difference is that government and media have learned that there is money and power and ratings in scaring mothers half to death. 

There ought to be a law.

What the MSM Won't Tell You

Abortion is a political issue so reports about medical research around the subject of abortion are politically charged also.

But sometimes the science really makes you sit up, as Melanie McDonagh discovered when she went to a lecture by pro-life researcher Dr. Byron Calhoun.

In his 2003 paper, “Induced Abortion and the Risk of Later Premature Births,” Dr. Calhoun reported that the risk of premature birth is doubled for a woman who has had two or more induced abortions, and nine times for a woman who has had four or more abortions. 

It made McDonagh sit up.

In other words, for a woman who has never had an abortion, the chances of having a baby before 34 weeks are about 3 per cent; in women who have had an abortion in the past, the rate doubles to 6-12 per cent.

Calhoun reviews the risks of abortion more generally in this paper Another Abortion Risk: Preterm Birth, including:

• Increased risk of maternal mortality
• Increased risk of breast cancer
• Significant emotional impact

And so it goes.

Daring to Use the F Word

It’s not that surprising that the Republican candidates haven’t trotted out the F word yet.  Two of the three leading candidates are divorced.  So if they start talking about “family” they’ll be accused of hypocrisy.

But then who isn’t a hypocrite.  It’s the homage that vice pays to virtue.

If the candidates aren’t willing to talk about family, Kay Hymowitz & W. Bradford Wilcox are.  And to make it easy they boil the political importance of family down to four issues.

1. Limited Government. “The foundation of limited government lies in strong, self-governing families.” 
2. Law and Order. It was 40 years ago that Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out that “crime is a marriage and fatherhood issue.”
3. The American Dream. Our national “prosperity depends on strong families.”  Simply put, married people earn more money than single people, and they save more.
4. The Vote. Married people vote more than single people, and married people vote Republican.

As we like to say these days: The science is in on this.  So how about it, candidates?

Dem Problem: How to Get Past the Crazies

At least President Bush has the guts to brush off his entire Republican base in rejecting our concerns about his immigration bill.

Democratic presidential candidates in debate have no such luxury, as Michael Graham reports.  

They've got to be against the war to satisfy the nutroots.  Yet they can't help looking over their shoulders at their eventual rendezvous with the general election voters in November 2008.

The more the first-tier candidates talked last night, the more it became apparent they were struggling to reach out to the crazies without becoming crazy themselves. Clinton, Obama and Edwards had no answer to the Kucinich challenge (If the war is really immoral, how can you continue to fund it?), so they blathered nonsense about who was really against the war first.

They also probably understand that when they ascend the rostrum in January 2009 they will still have a war on terror to fight.  So they blather on hoping for the best.

Senator Clinton, of course, has another important goal.  She needs to dispel her image as a shrill, divisive partisan.

Sen. Clinton was her usual, professional self: prepared, pleasant, generous. She knows her greatest challenge is her image, and she took every opportunity to appear friendly and collegial.

It’s a pity that when she’s on the stump she can’t think of anything better than tired sound bites about President Bush’s “on your own” society against her glorious vision of a “we’re all in it together” society.

Hillary Clinton "On Her Own"

We’ve already expectorated here on Sen. Clinton’s characterization of President Bush’s Ownership Society as an “on your own” society. It is deeply offensive to the American spirit to claim that the independence secured to Americans by their work and wealth is a selfish and individualistic thing.

Of course, Rich Lowry comments

she offers a collectivist vision of “shared responsibility for shared prosperity,” making the case for it based on a farrago of mistruths about the state of the economy

And the first mistruth is the idea that a high-tax high-spending state has anything to do with sharing anything.  Government is always about force and compulsion.  It is the democratic majority voting to tax the rest of the country to spend money on its projects.  Sharing and responsibility are things that people do out of trust and reciprocity, not out of compulsion.

Now she wants “to hit the restart button on the 21st century and redo it the right way,” she says.

Sorry, Senator.  I’d say that the achievement of President Bush in avoiding a major economic meltdown in 2001-2002 (remember: it was the biggest bear market of our lives) is something to be celebrated on both sides of the aisle.  It makes the idea of hitting the restart button not merely ignorant but dangerous.  You want to go back and go through all that again?  And risk getting the policy mix wrong?  And put the American people in harm’s way again?  Come on Senator, you know better than that.

The problem with speeches by Democratic politicians that utterly misrepresent the past, that completely miss the contribution of spending restraint and capital gains tax cuts to the prosperity of the 1990s, that utterly blanks out on the touch-and-go months of 2001-2002 in the aftermath of the collapse of the tech bubble, is that they fail to educate the very ignorant Democratic party faithful about economic reality.

You could say that Democratic leaders and the Democratic base like it that way.  But the American people are going to have to pay for this misrepresentation some time down the road.

Because when you don’t look at the past with an open mind it means that you are going to have to learn the lessons of the past the hard way.

And that, in an elite politician like Senator Clinton, is inexcusable.

Because it is never the suits that pay the price.  It is the ordinary people.