Karl Rove and Bush's Legacy

On his last day at the White House, long-time Bush aide Peggy Noonan asks Bush to offer a hand to his adversaries. With the qualified success of the “surge:”

It would be good to see the president calming the waters. Instead he ups the ante. Tuesday, speaking to the American Legion, he heightened his language.

It might.  But I’m inclined to believe that that opportunity was spurned 6 years ago when Democrats decided that they weren’t going to concede the 2000 election, not even after the US Supreme Court ruled on it.  It’s Prisoners Dilemma stuff.  If the other guy stiffs you, you have to stiff him back.

Anyway, I’m not convinced that the Democratic leadership is as left-wing and mad at Bush as they want their base to think.  They know that, whatever the mess in Iraq, we are still in a conflict with fundamentalist Islam for the long haul.

And Bush knows they know it.

Bush to Help Subprime Borrowers

Obviously some sort of assistance to financially strapped homeowners was coming down the pike, and today President Bush is outlining his proposals, Ded Riechmann writes.  Bush will:

- Urge Congress to pass legislation that would give the Federal Housing Administration more flexibility in assisting mortgage holders with subprime mortgages.

- Pledge to work with Congress to reform the tax code to help troubled borrowers rework their loans.

- Call for rigorously enforcing predatory lending laws and strengthening lending practices.

That last item is the classic government ploy of shutting the barn door after the horse has escaped.

Fortunately Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke stands ready to prevent the mortgage crisis from spilling over into the rest of the economy, according to Jeannine Aversa:

The Fed "will act as needed to limit the adverse effects on the broader economy that may arise from the disruptions in financial markets," [he said.]

All I can think is the words of Ludwig von Mises.  A recession, he wrote, is the period of liquidation of the mal-investments of the previous boom.

Actually, you could gussie this up a bit.

• A recession is the period of liquidation of other peoples’ mal-investments made in the previous boom.
• A depression is the period of liquidation of my mal-investments made in the previous boom.

This way of thinking says that neither Presidents nor Feds nor principalities nor powers can end the business cycle.

How to Reclaim the Streets

In the old days, we all know, adults used to correct children who misbehaved.  They corrected their own children and they corrected other peoples’ children.  In public.

But in our day, this ancient practice has become controversial.  Partly it is because all men approaching children are assumed to be sexual predators, and partly it is, as Theodore Dalrymple writes in the London Spectator, that many

parents regard their children as being inherently beyond reproach and will, for example, take the side of their children in any disciplinary dispute with a teacher or other person in authority.

The result is the response of three 10-year-olds to Lord Phillips of Sudbury, who reproved them for cycling on the sidewalk in Sudbury, England.  As Boris Johnson relates, the young sprigs did not respond respectfully to Lord Phillips attempt at correction. 

The 10-year-olds shrieked at the noble lord, who has been married since 1968 and who has three children. They called him a "pervert, a poofter and a paedo".

When one of these little innocents knocked Lord Phillips’ bicycle to the ground he was moved to respond.

He asked a passer-by to call the police, saying to the child: "If you think you can behave like this, you are dead wrong." To which, the boy replied, with a chilling grasp of the changed relationship between children and adults: "I am going to have you for holding me."

When the police arrived they reproved the noble lord for attempting to exercise authority in any way.

There is the problem of modern youthful misbehavior in a nutshell.  If we are to reclaim the streets there cannot be the slightest doubt in the mind of a young sprig that any adult has the right to correct him for misbehavior.  And there cannot be the slightest doubt that ordinary citizens have the power, police or no, to arrest troublemakers.

When modern government restrains citizens from keeping the peace it is wrong, dead wrong.

The Three Principles of Government

Now that I’m getting into the guts of Montesquieu’s  The Spirit of Laws, it is time to start dealing with the principle that he asserts underlies each form of government. 

Republics (both democratic and aristocratic) require Virtue, meaning the ability to see beyond your own interest to the general interest; Monarchies require Honor, an unwritten code followed by the nobility in protecting their interests from the monarch; Despotisms require Fear.

The first thing that a conservative like me thinks on reading that is: what about today?  We conservatives think in terms of rules. Virtue to us is the life lived according to the rules.  Honor is the instinctive patriotism we all feel.  Fear is what policemen do to criminals.

What do liberals think?

• Liberals don’t believe in government by virtue, and they do not expect it of their followers.  In fact in the aftermath of the New Deal they constructed a political philosophy that asserted that the good state was the precipitate of the competition of interests.
• Liberals don’t believe in government by honor.  Honor, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History is the courage of the soldier staying in line during battle.  But liberals believe that the height of courage is to be an anti-hero that steps out of line.  Dissidence is the highest form of patriotism, and all that.
• Liberals don’t believe in government by fear.  At least they say they don’t, but they use fear freely in controlling their institutions like schools and colleges where conservatives fear to tread.  And now they are jailing people who defy land-use regulations.

So what do our liberal friends believe in?  We looked at that earlier this week in looking at the failures of education.  We determined that liberals believe in liberty, the notion of “I shall,” and socialism, the notion of “You must.”  They do not understand the conservative notion of “We should.”  We also know that liberals believe that compassion for others justifies government compulsion.

In fact, I believe, liberals believe in anything that gives them power.  They appeal to virtue when it suits them, honor when convenient, and fear when they can get away with it.

And I suspect that they do it in all the wrong places.

Blacks Move to SF Suburbs: Liberals Hardest Hit

The liberal issue de la semaine as we French linguists have it is blacks moving from San Francisco and especially from their traditional home in the Fillmore district.  As John Ritter reports in USAToday:

African-Americans are abandoning this famously progressive city at a rate that has alarmed San Francisco officials, who vow to stop the exodus and develop a strategy to win blacks back to the city. In June, Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed a task force to study how to reverse decades of policies — and neglect — that black leaders say have fueled the flight.

You mean that blacks are acting like every other immigrant group that ever huddled in an American city?  They are moving to the suburbs?  No!

American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson can’t take it any more. For instance, did none of these liberal reporters know that the reason that blacks came to live in the Fillmore?

Yet none of the papers bothers to note that African-Americans came to the Fillmore in large numbers only because the previous Japanese-American residents were forcibly evacuated to internment camps during World War II.

Oh really?  Blacks, Lifson notes, are represented in San Francisco at about their California average of 6.7 percent. So what’s the big fuss?  Nobody got all bent out of shape as the white percentage in San Francisco declined from 89.5 percent in 1950 to 53 percent in 2000.  And nobody is mourning about how the Irish moved out of the Castro district as gays moved in.

It just shows how one-track and ignorant your average liberal reporter is.

Because the fundamental demographic movement in the United States is that once an ethnic group gets its skills and its income up it moves from the inner city to the suburbs.

And you know why?  It’s one of the little secrets of American life.  Women like living in suburbs.  So really it’s a good sign that blacks are moving out of San Francisco, as Lifson writes, to:

genuine American Dream suburbs like fast-growing Tracy California, which welcomes all races and hosts a proud and growing African-American community that includes a number of people of my acquaintance.

Here’s a dark thought.  Don’t spread it around too much.  Do you think that some of those blacks that Lifson knows in Tracy, CA could be conservatives or, worse, closet conservatives?

Can Peaceful Christianity Beat Militant Islam?

Robert Spencer’s book Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t raises an interesting question, according to a review by John Derbyshire.

If, as the subtitle of his book declares, Christianity is a religion of peace, while Islam is irredeemably militant, what on earth does Spencer think is likely to be the outcome of a conflict between the two?

Good old John Derbyshire.  He comes right to the point.  All this talk about whether Islam is or isn’t a religion of peace, or whether Christianity is more peaceful rather misses the point.  The question is: how to prevent militant Islam from taking over the world.

Spencer gets to reply to Derbyshire here.  The Derb responds here, and Spencer gets the last word here.

But maybe it doesn’t matter.  After all, the nation of shopkeepers beat back the challenge of militant secularist France. Commercial empires US and Britain beat back nationalist and then national-socialist-German-workers Germany.  The US beat back the militant communist Soviet Union.

So maybe it isn’t a question of Christianity vs. Islam.  Maybe it is a question of whether “we” really want to push back on militant Islam.

Whoever “we” are.

Is It Over Yet?

The Dow was down another 280 points today, and so Bill Steigerwald asked Fed historian Allan Meltzer if it’s over yet.

I think it’s too soon to say it’s over. It’s the result of errors on the part of both the regulators but especially the banks and financial institutions. The banks and financial institutions were making loans that they had every reason to know could not possibly survive.

There are, as there always are, two questions here.  The first is liquidity.  Can perfectly sound businesses get credit?  The second is solvency.  Are we going to see a lot of businesses going to the wall in the coming year.

The Fed’s job is to make sure that sound business can get credit.  But as for the future, nobody knows.  Will the mortgage mess cause consumers to stop spending and start saving?

Right now, all the experts except the professional contrarians are saying that the economy is sound.

But then they would say that.  From President Bush to Chairman Bernanke to Wall Street they have to say that everything is all right.

Meltzer thinks that the Fed should make it clear that it won’t be bailing anyone out, that it will support the economy but not the bad actors.

But that is exactly what the Fed cannot afford to say.  Who knows which way the political winds will blow in the next few months?

The Fed can’t say anything about bailouts because it hasn’t a clue what will be coming down the pike.  In the final analysis, the Fed will do what it is told.

Appoint a Special Prosecutor?

In the wake of the resignation of Albert Gonzales as Attorney General, Hugh Hewitt thinks not.  He thinks that a confirmation process is a splendid opportunity to take the war on terror to the Democrats.

The confirmation hearing of the right nominee is in fact a great stage for the defense of the Administration’s national security policies, including the recent revisions to FISA.

What is needed is a very sharp and experienced prosecutor who has overseen the investigation, indictment, trial conviction and sentencing of a terrorist or many terrorists in a proceeding that employed evidence that was available only because the government’s full powers of surveillance were deployed.  The nominee needs to be smart on the law and fully aware of what we are up against.

The point is: The administration doesn’t have to get an Attorney General on board by the middle of next week.  It can afford to dance and delay.

And there is the useful fact that the American people believe in the need for surveillance of terror suspects and Democrats apparently don’t.

Fixing the System For Highways

Everyone is naturally outraged by the collapse of an interstate highway bridge over the Mississippi river in Minneapolis.

And because it happened on President Bush’s watch it’s his fault.

Obviously, it is not just the bridge that is broken but the system.  How could the sensible maintenance of bridges have been so neglected, Americans ask?

The answer is the usual one.  Liberals.  There was a time when government didn’t do too much, and one of the major tasks that people expected of it was infrastructure.  There used to be a joke that the job of the Secretary of Commerce was to light the lighthouses and put the fishes to bed every night.

But then came liberals.  And they expanded the menu of programs for which government was responsible.  In particular they vastly expanded social programs, the payment of cash directly to people for not doing anything, or not doing very much.

Then came liberal environmentalists.  They decided that we were “paving over America” and they set to work to block the building of highways.  Much better spend the money on mass transit, they said, and so the states all renamed their Highway Departments as Departments of Transportation.

Not surprisingly, as highway building became controversial, it didn’t happen too much.  For politicians, it was too hard to push against the special-interest opposition in favor of the general interest.

Now it is time to do something, but what?

 Peter Ruane is president and chief executive officer of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, and he writes that:

We need and deserve a system that not only invests in reconstructing, repairing and maintaining aging highways and transit network but also invests in intelligent transportation systems that facilitate efficient and safe movement of goods and people.

You have to agree with him.  And, if you need something to concentrate your attention, there is this:

Since the mid-1990s, China has built 25,000 miles of new, multi-lane highways and has announced plans for 52,000 miles of modern expressways by 2020 -- more than the 46,000-mile U.S. Interstate system.

So what does Ruane suggest?

For the sake of safety and global competitiveness, the U.S. must focus on pushing through in 2009 a real 21st-century transportation bill -- one that will be the envy of the world, not the bane of millions of American drivers and businesses.

That’s where I have a problem.  Any transportation bill passed in Congress today is going to be wasting a huge amount of resources just buying off liberals with enormous environmental studies and mitigation, and building useless bike paths and light rail. 

You can understand why liberals don’t give a damn about the economic benefits of a good transportation infrastructure.  They aren’t integrated into the economy like the rest of us.  They are well-born trust-funders, or they are tenured professors, or they are well-born trust-fund environmentalists or they are government managers, or they are government employees or they are government pensioners of all ages.  What do they care about freight hauling and intercity highways?

Is it really worth while having to buy liberals off?

I’d say that the freight haulers and the road builders would do better to get together and fund the transportation improvements they need without public money.

Here in America we are at least a generation away from utterly discrediting liberals.  So we need to develop strategies to cope until we can set public policy without having to buy them off with outrageous bribes.

But the government can help by selling the concept for new transportation corridors.  Look at the fuss over the so called NAFTA Super Highway from Mexico north through Texas into the heartland of America.  Paleo-Conservatives are bent out of shape on this one because evil foreign Mexican trucks, using special FAST lanes at the border crossings, will be speeding like bullets into the heart of the United States.

The problem is that the Bush Administration is trying to configure the NAFTA Super Highway under a blanket instead of making it into a national show-piece.  You can understand why: unions are opposed because containers will be unloading at Mexican ports.  Liberals are opposed because they hate concrete.  Environmentalists are naturally opposed to the idea of building a ten lane highway anywhere.  Motorists are opposed to toll roads.

Sooner or later we’ve got to stop this tip-toeing around and go public with a new program of transportation improvement. 

But let’s try to minimize the role of the government.  Right now, government just doesn’t work.

The End of Secularism

I had tagged the New York Times Magazine article by Mark Lilla on “The Politics of God,” meaning to get to it later.  Now I find that the irreplaceable “Spengler”, the Asia Times columnist, has detected in the article an important social and political inflection point.  It represents, he writes, a declaration of defeat by the secular liberals.

Not only does he admit that the foundation has crumbled beneath the secular-liberal position but, even better, he lays bare the rank hypocrisy that infected this position from the beginning.

Lilla mourns that after all the progress of the last 200 years we are back in the 16th century.

[W]e find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty.

Earth to Lilla: we are always entangled in conflict over competing revelations.  It’s just that you chaps won’t admit that your secular-liberal religion is a religion, complete with revelation, dogmatic purity, secular duty, and a longing for atonement.  For the last 200-300 years you chaps have been insisting that you are above all that, the superstition, the bigotry, the infamy.

But it was all a lie, and worst of all, it was a lie that you were telling to yourselves.

OK, you say, so the libs have finally admitted defeat.  Now let’s get on with in.

But there’s a problem, according to “Spengler.”

Lilla does not love Reason; he merely hates Christianity. He is beaten, and knows he is beaten, but cannot bear to surrender to Western Christians; instead, he proposes to surrender to the Muslims.

The truth about secular liberalism is that it has always been a war against Christianity.  So it makes sense that its last act would be to betray the Christians to the Muslims.

Well, there are some of us that just don’t want to surrender to the Muslims, and we don’t feel that we have deputized our liberal friends to enter into surrender negotiations with anyone.  Regarding the war on terror we take the Reagan position during the Cold War.  We win, they lose.

The big question is how far down the road to ruin the secular liberals will take us before the people of the west cast them off and demand to be led to victory.

My guess is: a lot further down the road that any of us would like. 

Education: What to Do?

The other day, rancher, military expert, and college teacher Victor Davis Hanson went shopping in his hometown, the town where six generations of Hansons had gotten “a good, competitive K-12 education.&rdquo:  Not any more.

I noticed that the 20-something cashier could not count out change. The next day, at the electronic outlet store, another young clerk could not read -- much less explain -- the basic English of the buyer’s warranty.

As another school year is set to get under way, it’s worth pondering where this epidemic of ignorance came from.

What should we do about it?  More testing?  That’s not what the Democrats want.  Writes Debra J. Saunders, quoting Rep. George Miller (D-CA):

"Many Americans do not believe that the success of our students or of our schools can be measured by one test administered on one day, and I agree with them. This is not fair."

The reason we have testing, of course, is that the federal government has been churning out cash to local school districts and most of the money has been wasted.  When you dole out taxpayers’ money to government bureaucrats it is very difficult to get any accountability unless you are ruthless about reporting and results.

But parents don’t like it when little Johnny flunks a grade, and teachers don’t like anybody telling them what to do.

So what do we need?  More money?  More compulsion?  More programs?

How about some radical change?  How about we let parents decide where they want their children to go to school?

It’s interesting that the biggest increase in male literacy in Britain was in the years immediately around 1870.  That was the year that Parliament passed a law providing for board schools to fill the gaps in private education.  But by 1880 when British education became compulsory, literacy was already up to 95 percent according to Clark in A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Here’s the point.  In the United States, literacy was always high, whatever education system we had.  In Britain, literacy rose throughout the 19th century and reached a peak right about the time that education became compulsory, i.e., before it had a chance to educate a new generation of children.

So let’s try something different.  Let’s not pretend that government can educate our children.

Let’s return the responsibility for education to parents.

The Politics of Demonization

Why do Democrats hate Karl Rove so much?  And why do Republicans hate Senator Clinton, asks political scientist Jay Cost? 

He quotes from the e-mail of a partisan, who believes that Karl Rove has “a serious lack of ethics.”  Rove is “capable, vindictive and mean-spirited... and he has run dirty campaigns...”

Leaving aside the obvious code words from the Democratic side of the divide, Cost reminds us what this is all about. 

It’s all because of the necessities of politics. 

Both political parties offer us a ready-made worldview, a lens through which we can look at our political environment and make sense of it... These partisan worldviews... are explicitly crafted to induce us to political action. One way that we can be induced to political action... is if we believe that our political universe contains heroes and, of course, villains. The demonization of Karl Rove (and, for that matter, Hillary Clinton) is therefore part and parcel of a partisan worldview.

The easiest way to summon people to action is through hate and rage.  That’s why politicians do it.

But if you try to think about the other side using a “good faith assumption,” writes Cost, then you begin to perceive politics not as a battle between good and evil but a “conflict between competing interests.”

Then we can look at the Democratic Party as a coalition of the single, the secular, and the government employee.  And we can look at the Republican Party as the coalition of the religious, married with children who work in the private sector.

And we can see that each party’s goals and interests are sensibly aligned with the interests of its partisan supporters.

And obviously the actions of the other party’s political actors in blocking our own party’s agenda is unethical and mean-spirited.  Or worse.

Women Like Big Government

Yes, they really do.  John Lott has run the numbers in his new book Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t, says Bill Steigerwald, and he’s found that government expenditure starts a rapid climb anywhere as soon as women get the vote. 

And the climb in government spending pretty well tracks women’s vote count.

Let’s take a look with John Lott at a woman over her lifetime “(men pretty much stay the same over the course of their lives in terms of their political views, for better or worse)”:

• Single young women are liberal relative to single young men.
• When women get married they get more conservative — about half of the gap between men and women is eliminated.
• When women get married and then have kids, about half of the remaining gap — or about 75 percent of the original gap — gets eliminated.
• When women get divorced, with kids, they become much more liberal than they were to begin with.

And I think that we can also add that when women become widows they also become more liberal.

What we see here is the fundamental practical outlook of women.  Woman understands that she needs backup.  If there’s no husband in her life then she chooses government as her backup.

My own feeling here is that women do what they are told.  They go to school and actually learn stuff—unlike men.  So of course when they are taught at the government school to love government they lap it up.  Until they get married and have children and find out that the government is taking too much money away from them, their husbands,  and their children.

Women are not like men.  For women, life is serious and you don’t get any second chances.  So what makes women really mad is to get a bum steer, so that they look back on the last ten years and feel it was all wasted.

My judgment is that some time in the next generation western women are going to figure out that government really screws up a woman’s life.

When that happens, watch out liberals!

A Conservatism of Fraternity

Let’s do some serious thinking.  That’s the watchword now we’ve reached the end of the Bush era.  What should conservative ideas be based on and how should we persuade the American people that our ideas help them in their lives?

Danny Kruger is a special adviser to David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, and he’s recently published On Fraternity: Politics beyond liberty and equality, a paper that appropriates for conservatism the rather neglected third part of the slogan of the French Revolution: Libert&eacute! Egalit&eacute! Fraternit&eacute!

Think of it this way, he writes:

• Liberalism is the philosophy of the individual. Its ethic is liberty and its characteristic is autonomy -- the freedom of the will from external constraint. It says ’I shall!’.
• Socialism is the philosophy of the state. Its ethic is equality and its characteristic is coercion -- the power, in the last resort, to exert force over individuals and groups. It says ’you must!’.
• Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority -- the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ’we should!’.

What is not to like?  I’m even inspired to put all this in a table. 

System	Phil.	Ethic	Character	Exhort	Relation
Liberalism	Individual	Liberty	Autonomy	"I shall"	Contract
Socialism	State	Equality	Coercion	"You must"	Program
Conserva-tism	Society	Fraternity	Authority	"We should"	Covenant

The column on the right is my idea. It identifies the way that people relate to each other under each system. In liberalism it’s the contract. In socialism it’s the government program. In conservatism it’s the covenant.

Each is perfectly proper in its own area of human interaction.  The problems begin when one system starts to overwhelm the others.

Your School Kid is "Invisible"

Senator Hillary Clinton has recently been reported asserting that ordinary people are “invisible” to President Bush.

She would know, of course.  At the recent convention of the National Education Assocation, writes Phyllis Schlafly,

U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., told delegates that she will fight school vouchers "with every breath in my body."

In other words, when it’s a question of your kid or the teachers, your kid is “invisible.”  The only thing that matters is keeping your tax money in the government monopoly schools and spending it on union teachers. 

God forbid that you should get the money to spend on the school of your choice.  God forbid that you could take the money from a failing government school and spend it on a little start-up neighborhood school run by one of your neighbors where the people actually know your kid and treat your kid like one of the family.

“Invisible” is a word like “Choice.” It all depends on the context. 

Bernanke's "Rookie Mistake?"

For the last two weeks the Federal Reserve Board and the European Central Bank have been adding massive liquidity to the financial markets.  Yet the Fed declared that “declared that inflation was their paramount challenge just two weeks ago,” as Bloomberg’s Craig Torres writes.

"It was a rookie mistake,’’ said Kenneth Thomas, a lecturer in finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in Philadelphia. The Fed "underestimated liquidity needs" of investors and the fallout from the housing recession, he said, adding, "This demonstrates the difference between book-smart and street-smart."

Well, that’s one man’s opinion.  But the Fed’s job is to fight inflation while making sure that there isn’t a market meltdown.  Based on results so far, it seems to have achieved this.

The big deal right now is that the Treasury yield curve has gone positive, whereas the Libor yield curve is still inverted.  That means that the Fed Funds rate at 5.25 percent is nearly 400 basis points above today’s 1 month Treasury bill rate of 1.5 percent.  A week ago, the T-bill rate was at 5.0 percent.

The thing to remember about the Fed is that it is playing with your money.  Back in 1907 during the crash J. Pierpont Morgan forced his banker buddies into a room and they did triage on the corporations that were caught in the liquidity squeeze. They lent money to the businesses that were solvent and refused to bail out the ones that were insolvent.  And they did it with their own money.

Imagine that happening today!

Climate Change Deniers

It’s turning out to be a rough year for the Climate Change Deniers, you know, the chaps who deny that the main driver of the Earth’s climate is the Sun.  And it’s a bit embarrassing when a blogger, albeit an older, well-qualified blogger shows up NASA and its claim that 1998 was the warmest year in US history.  Roy Spencer explains:

First, NASA’s James Hansen and his group had to fix a Y2K bug that a Canadian statistician found in their processing of the thermometer data. As a result, 1998 is no longer the warmest year on record in the United States - 1934 is.

Amanda Carpenter got to interview Steven McIntyre, who runs climateaudit.org, and to lead him through his interactions with NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies.

What comes out clearly is that NASA doesn’t really want anyone looking at how they came up with the numbers.  McIntyre knew about the difficulties of normalizing temperature data, given the vagaries of weather stations and their locations, and he was interesting in finding out how NASA adjusted their data.

So, that type of adjustment is a statistical issue that interests me. And, so I wrote to NASA in May and asked them for the source code for the adjustment software that they used to fix these stations and they refused to provide it.

Why on earth, you wonder?  Well, it’s not really remarkable. Data adjustments are fiendishly difficult to do well, and the chances are that NASA’s adjustment is a fudge.  Naturally, they are reluctant to give anyone the chance to look through their data and find problems with it.  Bureaucrats are self-selected for the quiet life.  They don’t want to have to spend all their time explaining their mistakes.

And they were right.  They should never have let that chap Steven McIntyre near their data or anything else.

The bigger problem is that the whole temperature series that is used to validate the global warming hypothesis is probably a gigantic fudge, guided by the knowledge that “of course” the planet is getting warmer, and of course a comprehensive and mandatory global government program is needed to save the planet.

Maybe, of course, the planet is getting warmer, and maybe man is responsible for a good deal of it.  And maybe the Greenland icecap will melt and maybe we will all have to run for higher ground.

That’s an awful lot of maybes when you are proposing to compel people to change their way of life at a cost of trillions of dollars

Dem Dodges on School Choice

Presidential candidate and United States Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) sent his children to private schools.  Why not to government schools, Joe, like the government schools you force everyone else’s kids to go to?  Kathryn Jean Lopez has the answer.

Well, you see, Biden’s wife and daughter were killed in a car accident and so his two children were living with his sister.  His sister worked at a private school and so it was just the right thing to do to send them to a private school.  Said Biden at a Democratic debate:

My kids would not have gone to that school were it not for the fact that my wife and daughter were killed and my two children were under the care of my sister who drove them to school every morning.

When his children were older Biden sent them on to Catholic high school.

“I’m a practicing Catholic — it was very important to me they go to a Catholic school, and they went to Catholic school.”

Yeah.  Well, Senator, I’m a practicing libertarian conservative and it goes against the grain for me to see little children forced to go to crumbling, incompetent, dangerous government schools.

In Britain things have got so bad that parents are having their children’s school uniforms lined with Kevlar to guard against knife attacks.

Children are now going to school with body armor.

You see, Senator, those parents are practicing parents.  It is very important to them that their children not be attacked and harmed at school.  But of course most parents aren’t as rich as United States Senators and they can’t afford to send their kids to safe private schools.

And after all, the votes and the contributions of union teachers are really much more important than the education of “invisible” poor kids.

Rove on Rush

Karl Rove was on the Rush Limbaugh Program today for about 15 minutes, and spoke about what it was like to be in the White House, and work for President Bush.

Then Rush Limbaugh asked Rove what he would “like people to know about the president that they don’t know.”  Rove replied:

Look, the thing the American people need to know about him is he is just as passionate today about doing his job of protecting America and of growing the economy and being focused on big reforms that will make America better and safer and stronger in the years ahead, as he was in the day that he came in, and he walks into that office and lights up that building with — you know, it sounds corny, but it’s inspiring to work around him.  He’s got a wonderful spirit. He’s got a great sense of humor. He treats people with the greatest respect and dignity, and that goes from the guy swabbing out the floors on the first floor of the White House to, you know, some foreign head of state. He treats everybody with respect and dignity, and he sets such a wonderful tone and serves as a wonderful model for people who work around him.

That is something to think about.

But the big takeaway of the interview is the things the Rove had to say about Hillary Clinton.  He was so direct and so prepared that you might think he was conducting a campaign briefing for the Republican candidates for 2008. 

He said that, even though it is very difficult to win three presidential elections in a row, Hillary Clinton faces a huge hurdle:

There is no front-runner who has entered the primary season with negatives as high as she has in the history of modern polling.

Then he went into some of the negatives on Hillary.  On domestic policy:

Senator Clinton voted against the prescription drug benefit for seniors. Senator Clinton voted against allowing people to save tax-free for their out-of-pocket medical expenses. Senator Clinton opposes giving every American a standard health deduction so that they can deduct from the cost of their income taxes, their insurance premiums...  Yet Senator Clinton, who deems to lecture this president on health care, opposed allowing people to do either save tax-free for their out-of-pocket medical expenses, or, she also opposed — she also opposes — allowing there to be a tax deduction for people to take off their income tax costs of their insurance premiums.  She’s against having a level playing field so that the guy who has to pay for health care for his family or her family out of their own pocket, gets the same tax break the big corporations get for providing health insurance to their employees.  She’s against allowing people to buy health insurance across state lines like we routinely buy auto insurance today so you can shop for the cheapest price and the best product for your family’s needs.

Then on foreign policy:

You know, this is a woman who has been less than supportive of the policies that those men and women who are in the frontlines of the global war on terror fighting.  This is like a woman who has opposed the Patriot Act that gave us the tools to defend the homeland.  This is a woman who opposes the terrorist surveillance program that allowed us to listen in on the conversations of bad people who are calling into the United States.  She opposed the FISA reforms that would allow us to listen into communications and see the communications of international terrorists who are communicating with other international terrorists, even outside the country whose messages simply happened to flow through US telecom networks. 

What are the odds that a lot of people are going to be parsing these remarks of Rove very carefully over the next few days?

Time to Curb "Sanctuary Nation?"

The United States has laws to identify and pick up illegal aliens and deport them.  But they don’t work, reports Michelle Malkin.

The reason they don’t work is because open-borders interests have sabotaged them by restricting funding for them, objecting to them on civil liberties grounds, and pushing local and state governments to forbid public employees from checking them to verify citizenship status.

This is yet another case of America’s big problem.  Want to know what it is?  Liberals get to exempt themselves from any law they don’t like. 

It’s the civil disobedience idea.  Liberals are so ethical that they have the moral stature to non-violently violate laws they don’t like.  After all if you are ethical, and all liberals are, then it stands to reason that any law you don’t like must be immoral and unjust.

The so-called “sanctuary cities” are liberal jurisdictions where liberal councils and state legislatures flagrantly order public employees to ignore federal laws intended to empower law-enforcement to identify, capture,  and deport illegal aliens. 

As Malkin reports, the sanctuary city concept is causing Rudy Giuliani a problem right now because New York City is a sanctuary city and has been ever since Ed Koch declared it a sanctuary in 1989.

Giuliani actually filed suit against the feds when Congress passed a law that “forbade local governments from barring employees from cooperating with the INS.”

In January 2000, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, but Giuliani vowed to ignore the law.

Some day, one day, Americans are going to have to bite the bullet and insist that liberals obey the laws, even the ones they don’t like. 

Maybe the 2008 election would be a good time to run the idea up the flagpole and see if the American people salute.

Beyond Rove, The Hard Thinking

Beyond the Rove Myth, there is reality, and Fred Barnes dishes it out.  Political advisers like Karl Rove can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. 

They can advise a candidate or a party how best to deal with a situation. But they can’t change the situation. And they can’t transform the circumstances at the time of an election.

Karl Rove can’t do magic, like make political realignments happen.  But Karl Rove certainly helped. Five elections out of six ain’t nothing.  If the Republican Party becomes the majority party again it will help to have a Karl Rove on hand.

But the real traction will come from political ideas and politicians who can speak to the American people, appeal to their better natures, and show them how to be the best they can be.

It is up to conservatives to start doing the thinking and the writing that will provide the firepower to a new generation of US politicians.

My own idea is this.  We conservatives need to bake a three-tier cake of political ideas.

• The philosophical tier, that must meet and beat the secular modernism of the academic middle class.  My candidate to lead this up political philosopher Roger Scruton who combines the conservatism of Burke and the modernism of Kant.
• The emotional tier, that must shame and blame the adolescent, diminished-responsibility culture of the academic middle class.  My candidate for this is George Gilder and his 1970s books on sexual suicide.  Yes, thirty years ago, before he got into high tech, Gilder forecast the child-dearth of the modern welfare state based on his analysis of its negation of men as husbands and providers.
• The mechanical tier, that must out-analyze and advocate at the policy analysis level.  This is actually already pretty well achieved.  Conservatives know what to do, and we have the programs pretty well outlines: privatize the welfare state with private pensions, private health care, and private education.

That’s all it takes, so let’s get going.

Now They Tell Us

The much-typed “surge” is working.  Even the global MSM is noticing, as  Instapundit Glenn Reynolds observes.  “There seems to be a lot of turnabout going on, all of a sudden,” he writes.

Exhibit A is this cover story in Germany’s Der Spiegel:

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq — it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq... are essentially pacified today.

Well, do tell.  Der Spiegel’s reporter Ullrich Fichtner goes on.  It’s a story that the world doesn’t really want to hear, he writes,

a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.

The glorious thing about the world’s hegemonic class, the international academic middle class and its bribed apologists in the center-left political parties, is that it can turn on a dime.

It can say at one moment that Bush is a liar and the worst president in history.  One week it can have a fawning media breathlessly reporting the latest political ploy of Democrats in Congress to end the war.

The next week we can have the same people writing with wide-eyed innocence, that things aren’t as bad as “everyone” thought.  Why, maybe Ronald Reagan wasn’t a complete dunce, maybe government control of everything wasn’t such a good idea after all, maybe the Americans are making progress in Iraq.

In fact, the next step is to say that Ronald Reagan didn’t achieve that much after all.  Or that if the right people had been in charge in Iraq then the whole thing could have been wrapped up much sooner.

Yes, we’ll be seeing that pretty soon.  Democrats will be elbowing people out of the way to get to a microphone to declare that they were in favor of the “surge” strategy all along and had been trying to get the stupid Bush administration to adopt it for three years without success.

What we, the great unwashed, should understand is that the people we are dealing with represent a ruling class in its declining phase.  Softened by the perquisites of power they are just trying to keep the game going a few years longer.  Almost everything they have foisted upon us has been a miserable and expensive failure: government pensions, government education, government welfare.

But by golly it has got them votes and it has got them power.

You can’t argue with that.  For now.

Karl Rove Resigns

Love him or hate him, Karl Rove is the outstanding Republican political operator of our time.  Between him and Bill Clinton it would be tough to choose. 

And think of what he achieved.  He got a rather unexciting candidate elected twice to the White House.  And he kept the Republicans in control of Congress up until the always-vulnerable second-term off-year election.

That is a stunning achievement.

Why is he leaving now?  New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg says he had to leave now or wait till the end of the administration.

[Rove] said his hand was forced now when the White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, recently told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day he would expect them to stay through the rest of Mr. Bush’s term.

Of course the New York Times chappie can’t help salivating over the prospect of Congress calling Rove up to testify.

But from the time he leaves office, Mr. Rove will no longer have the protection of White House lawyers and will be more on his own when it comes to dealing with Congressional subpoenas.

But we Republicans hope that Rove will get some rest, write a book, and get ready to resume his life’s work.

Mr. Rove had vowed to build a lasting Republican majority, and... has portrayed the defeat in the 2006 midterm elections as a temporary setback, and said in the interview he believed Republicans were still on track for victory in the next election.

My own feeling is that it would be in the long-term interest of Republicans to lose the 2008 election.  Just like Karl Rove, Republicans need a rest—reculer pour mieux sauter as the French say.

Just wait till next year!

End of Civil Liberties?

Is the new warrantless wiretapping law passed by Congress last weekend the end of civil liberties as we know it, or just a prudent measure to allow the government to monitor terrorists?

You can guess where liberal E.J. Dionne would stand:

The episode was the culmination of a shameful era in which serious issues related to national security and civil liberties were debated in a climate of fear and intimidation, saturated by political calculation and the quest for short-term electoral advantage.

Naturally, the Wall Street Journal edit page took a different tack. 

Goaded by the ACLU and much of the press corps, many Democrats want to use the courts and lawsuits to restrict Mr. Bush and future Presidents in their ability to gather intelligence in the war on terror.

When you read the Journal’s appreciation of the bill, you can see that there are a lot of issues that E.J. passed over in silence.  Like what kind of liability that telecommunications companies might have if they cooperate with the administration in monitoring terrorists.

The intriguing issue for me is the enormous energy that is brought to the wiretapping issue.  You can see why.  Liberals and their friends on the left live in fear that one day they will need to organize the overthrow of an evil fascist Republican administration.  With warrantless wiretapping they could be easily picked up by the police for plotting revolution.  Therefore all their communications should be private and off limits to government investigators.  Just in case

After all, if a liberal were plotting revolution, it would be justified as civil disobedience and the absolute right to oppose evil right-wing fascist oppression.

But for 97.3 percent (or thereabouts) of Americans, all this fuss over the monitoring of terrorist communications is a storm in a teacup.  After all, the only kind of trouble they are likely to get into with the government is on taxes.  And the government already has the power to look at everyone’s financial activity.  And it gets everyone’s wage information routinely every pay day and on W-2 day.

The civil liberties issue that conservative really care about is the right to give money to the candidate of your choice.  But that right is currently snagged in a web of restrictions and regulation.

But liberals don’t seem to care about that.

US Tipping Balance of Power in Mideast

It’s been notable to me that the o-called “surge” in Iraq has involved US troops ganging up with Sunni militias to drive Al Qaeda out of the Sunni heartlands.  There has been very little news about US forces doing anything about Shia militias. 

According to Robert Haddick the US policy has not gone down well with Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. al-Maliki has no interest in helping Sunnis.  “He sees the Sunnis whom General Petraeus is now arming as mortal enemies.”

But, of course, if the US can’t build a peaceful democracy in Iraq, then the next best thing is a balance of power in Iraq and in the region.

[T]he U.S. is pursuing a balance of power strategy in the Persian Gulf region...  Instinctively or not, it is U.S. policy to prevent any one player from achieving too much power in the Persian Gulf region.

Haddick provides quick review of the last half century to demonstrate how this has always been US strategy.  The problem right now is the power of Iran.  That means that the US wants Iraq as a counterweight to Iran.

And really, so long as oil fuels the Middle East it will be a trouble spot, and the US will want to make sure that no single power ever dominates the region.

Army Says Beauchamp Articles False

It looks like it could be time to start rolling out the long German words with respect to the anonymous New Republic Baghdad diarist now revealed as Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp.  The word I am thinking of is Schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others.  Even the New York Times is getting into the act in a modest way.  Reports Patricia Cohen

An Army investigation into the Baghdad Diarist, a soldier in Iraq who wrote anonymous columns for The New Republic, has concluded that the sometimes shockingly cruel reports were false.

“We are not going into the details of the investigation,” Maj. Steven F. Lamb, deputy public affairs officer in Baghdad, wrote in an e-mail message. “The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made.”

And it was the Weekly Standard and conservative bloggers that raised the alarm on Beauchamp’s writings. 

Well, actually, I don’t take much pleasure in the troubles of the New Republic.  It seems to me that both Beauchamp and the editor of the New Republic, Franklin Foer, are inexperienced young men who just got in too deep.

The big lesson to learn about politics is knowing when you can lie with impunity and when you cannot.  It’s a nice point, and it takes a bit of experience to master it.

Anyway, the New Republic is a liberal title and standards just aren’t as high for liberals as they are for conservatives.  This can give liberals a false sense of security, because they are used to getting the benefit of the doubt when they get into trouble.

A New Look at the Industrial Revolution

Why did the industrial revolution begin in Britain?  And why did it begin in the decades before 1800?  Economist Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms has thinks he has divined the answer from centuries-old data on births and deaths and wills.  Nicholas Wade (Before the Dawn) reviews his book in the New York Times.

What happened was the the rich in Britain had more children and the violent poor were slowly squeezed out of society.  Thus British society became more peaceful and cooperative.  Over the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution the population slowly exhibited more and more of the “middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save.”  The rest is history.

Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or evolutionary adaptation, the English population at last became productive enough to escape from poverty, followed quickly by other countries with the same long agrarian past.

Before the growth of this middle-class culture, mankind was unable to escape the Malthusian Trap of overpopulation.  And indeed, agriculturalists were probably poorer and worked more hours than hunter-gatherers. 

But the result has ben a Great Divergence.  The peoples who have followed the British example have become unimaginably wealthy.  Those that have not have got poorer than ever. 

Education Fatties Won't Diet

The government education monopoly eats about $500 billion a year for K-12 education.  Check usgovernmentspending.com for the details.  And literacy hasn’t budged in 150 years.

So Newt Gingrich went on TV to tell folks to do something about it, reports Henry Payne.  Detroit seems to be as bad as anywhere.  So Newt burned in like a laser:

“The Detroit Public School system currently graduates 22 percent of its entering freshman. If you’re an African-American male, you have 73-percent unemployment in your 20s if you drop out of school.”

It may be worst in Detroit but it’s the same all over.  I talked to a twentysomething Canadian this weekend.  His mother said that she had been taught in school by nuns in India, and boy, were they strict.  “I was taught by morons,” he asserted.

As Randi Weingarten, New York teachers’ union leader puts it:  There are people out there who “just don’t care about kids.”  She means evil people who won’t vote more money for schools.

Henry Payne points to another possibility where Detroit is concerned. 

Trouble is, the locals don’t care. And no amount of bold national solutions will matter until they do.

Ignoring the staggering statistics Gingrich cited, Detroit leaders instantly manned the ramparts to shoot the messenger. Detroit Federation of Teachers President Virginia Cantrell said Gingrich should “leave Detroit alone.”

Hum.  It’s easy to take the Leninist strategy: The worse the better. 

But we are conservatives, and even liberal kids deserve better. 

Is DailyKos Really Rush for Liberals?

We right-wingnuts and hatemongers look at the output of the DailyKos with bemusement.  Because conservatives are sensitive, with good reason, about seeming negative and hate-filled and mean-spirited.  We expect to be pilloried for hate-filled rhetoric.

Yet the writers at the DailyKos (forget the commenters) spew out hate and conspiracy theories on a daily basis, observes blogger John Hawkins. 

OK.  There are always wing-nuts out there in the tall grass.  Yet mainstream Democratic politicians are going to the YearlyKos convention.

[W]hen someone like Harry Reid writes a diary on the Daily Kos or when Hillary Clinton goes to the Yearly Kos convention, it indicates that they’re comfortable associating with people who hold those sort of radical views.

Mainstream Republicans would be terrified to have their names associated with far-right websites.  So why are the Democrats so comfortable with left-wing virulence?  Hawkins writes:

Ten years ago, a liberal website that featured diarists who thought American soldiers were "morally retarded," that called for revolution, and that speculated that the President was going to declare martial law to retain power, would have been considered to be on the farthest fringes of the Left.

Yet now they think it is OK?

A conservative and Republican is bound to think that with the Kos connection the Democrats are cutting themselves off from the moderate middle that every candidate needs in order to win election to national office.

So why do they seem so comfortable with the Kossacks?  Do they know something we don’t know?  E.J. Dionne calls the Kos phenomenon the left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh.  Rush mobilized people on the right, he writes.

Democrats and liberals realized they needed a mobilizing force of their own but could not match Limbaugh’s reach on the radio. Enter the Internet, and Markos Moulitsas.

But are Democrats really short of a mobilizing force?  And is the relentlessly optimistic Rush Limbaugh really the right-wing version of the much more negative Kos community?  According to Dionne:

Democratic candidates know they owe a debt to Moulitsas. They’re paying homage to him because he has started to beat Limbaugh and O’Reilly at their own game. No wonder O’Reilly is so annoyed.

But there’s a basic difference here.  Rush Limbaugh was the first publicly partisan conservative voice on the general media.  People used to call up and wonder that he dared to say such things because they knew that you weren’t allowed to criticise and make fun of liberals in public.

On the other hand, Democrats have never lacked for partisan voices to get their message into the public square.  After all, everybody in the US in 1980 knew that Ronald Reagan was a B-movie actor who had appeared in a movie with a chimpanzee.  How did the Democrats manage to get that partisan message out without Mark Moulitsas and DailyKos?

Here’s my two cents worth.  I think that the Kos phenomenon is going to hurt the Democrats.  I think it is going to balance the party too far to the left and it is going to offend a lot of Americans, particularly moderate women.

Most average Americans are reflexively patriotic.  The relentless and often unanswered anti-Bush propaganda has had the effect of demoralizing them.  But when a Republican presidential candidate comes along and remoralizes them next year, then the political sands are going to shift. 

And Democrats may be surprised to find that the Kos connection has cut them off from the American people.

Bush Attacks Excess Dem Spending

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says it’s “only” $22 billion.  But President Bush had a different attitude, threatening to veto nine of the 12 appropriation bills, as Joseph Curl reports.

The president said yesterday he already has proposed increasing discretionary spending by 6.9 percent, but that Democrats want to add $205 billion in additional spending over the next five years.

Well, it’s about time.  Couldn’t the president have started vetoing six years ago? Perhaps the Republican Congresses weren’t as egregious in their spending plans.  But we know where Democrats stand on spending.

Although the House has passed most appropriation bills, each has added additional spending not proposed by the president. While Mr. Bush proposed numerous reductions in his $433 billion request for non-defense programs, Democrats have restored money for those proposed cuts, while also adding additional spending.

But Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) justifies the increases, saying that Bush has damaged the federal budget:

the Bush administration’s "reckless" fiscal policy has turned a $236 billion surplus into a $248 billion deficit, leaving key domestic programs unfunded or underfunded.

Say that again?  “Leaving key domestic programs unfunded or underfunded?”  Is that French for failing to throw enough money at key Democratic constituencies, or does it refer to something else?

Either way, what’s not to like?

What Voters Know That Isn't So

You can call it economic illiteracy, as John Stossel does.  Or you can talk about the The Myth of the Rational Voter as Bryan Caplan does, arguing that “most voters cast their ballot on the basis of irrational biases about economic matters.”  As Stossel writes:

People tend to acquire their wrong opinions about economic policy packaged in worldviews they inherited while growing up. They never test their views against the evidence because that would be unsettling. No one likes having his worldview challenged. So people vote for candidates who make them feel good. They vote irrationally.

Actually, I think that is unfair.  Most people do not really experience the market.  They live in market-sheltered enclaves, as employees or as government dependents.  They really do not experience the operation of capitalist economics.

But sheltered away from the market as they are, they suffer from four common-sense biases that confirm the old adage that it’s not what you don’t know, it’s what you know that isn’t so.

• Antimarket bias: people think that the market is a zero-sum game
• Antiforeign bias: people mistrust foreigners and try to protect themselves against cheap foreign goods
• Make-work bias: people think that jobs make us rich, not the products of jobs
• Pessimistic bias: “any economic problem is proof of economic decline”

Really these biases are not irrational.  They are only irrational in politicians, academicians, and businessmen who ought to know better. 

In people who do know better, but who demagogue to get votes or subsidies anyway, we are not talking about irrationalism either.  We are talking about evil.

Murdoch Gets the Prize

Yesterday Rupert Murdoch finally overcame the finicky objections of the legacy Dow Jones owners and bought Dow Jones for about $5 billion, report Richard Perez-Pena and Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. 

The decision signals the end of an era for Dow Jones and the Bancroft family, an intensely private clan that for generations had allowed The Journal to operate independently and become one of the nation’s most prominent and trusted newspapers, even as its finances deteriorated.

Now who knows what will happen.  Murdoch!

The truth, so resolutely ignored by our liberal friends, is that Rupert Murdoch is a businessman, first and last.  He wants to make money.  He has taken advantage of the fact that the introspective liberalism of the mainstream media has left gigantic market niches available for media titles occupying a center-right perspective.

But Rupert Murdoch is not the right-wing ideologue that our more fevered friends imagine.  The proof of that is that in the mid 1990s he swung his British titles behind New Labour and Tony Blair. 

Now he is reported to have established ties with Hillary Clinton and made contributions to her campaign.  Of course he has.  News media is not called the Fourth Estate for nothing.  It is entangled with politics and always will be.

What Murdoch can do with his new Dow Jones properties is make the center-right media into a world-wide force that can seriously counter the center-left media that dominates the culture today.

For conservatives that is a cheery prospect, not least because it makes business sense.