How Could This Happen, Say Libs

You gotta love our liberal friends. Here we should be wiping the floor with the Republicans, say the folks at the New Republic in Bush’s Last Laugh. Instead the situation “verges on the apocalyptic” for the Democrats.

Where it once looked like Bill Clinton and Al Gore had helped purge the party of the lame identity politics that had ruined Democratic candidates for a generation, discussions of race and gender have returned with a vengeance. Supporters of Clinton and Obama compete to prove who is the bigger victim—opponents are casually tarred as sexist or racist.

Oh yeah? Since when did Clinton and Gore do anything but use identity politics in the 1990s, appointing tons of people to administration positions because of their race or gender?

What Bill Clinton did in the 1990s was keep a low profile on race and gender. Above the radar, he was the president of the soccer moms. But below the radar he was a full-on practitioner of identity politics, careful to keep feminists and blacks on side and eager, with the Motor Voter law, to make it easy for anyone with a driver’s license (i.e. Mexican nationals) to register to vote.

And when Al Gore ran for the presidency in 2000 he ran a class warfare campaign, “fighting for the people against the powerful.”

Last time I looked, race and identity politics was going as strong as ever in the nation’s schools and universities, as Mike S. Adams experiences on a daily basis. Recently he’s been trying to get the University of North Carolina to help publicize a talk given by a notorious Christian creationist, and the university keeps losing his emails. Wrong identity, you see.

Let’s face it, the Democrats have done a land office business with race, class, and gender identity politics. But, as the good book says, those who live by the sword will die by the sword.

Just One Day In The News

Over on the right at Road to the Middle Class we run a ticker of “Readings.” Today, Friday March 28, 2008, they look like this:

• The "100-Year " Lie, how Democrats are jumping all over John McCain for saying that we could be in Iraq for 100 years.
  
• Kangaroo court is now in session, Mark Steyn’s story about the Canadian Human Rights Commissions that have nothing to do except troll for trouble in neo_nazi websites.
  
• Obama’s Former Pastor’s $1.6M Home, about the rather upper-class home that Rev. Jeremiah Wright is building in suburban Chicago.
  
• Toyota Prius proves a gas guzzler, about a Beemer diesel getting better gas mileage than a Toyota Prius.
  
• The Polar Bear Ambush, about environmentalists trying to get the polar bear listed as an endangered species so that they can get the courts to impose their global warming agenda.
  

What is the common denominator in all these news items? Liberal hypocrisy. One rule for me and one for thee.

That’s why I’m looking for a Democratic sweep this November. The American people have kinda forgotten what Democratic governance looks like. I think they need a reminder, and I think that conservatives need a vacation, a pause to get their thinking caps on and start developing a real agenda for reform.

All you need to do is go over to usgovernmentspending.com if you want to get the message about what ails this country. In fact, you don’t have to do anything. We’ll bring the details to you.

There’s where we need to go to work. Almost a trillion dollars a year in government pensions. Almost a trillion dollars a year in government health care. Almost a trillion dollars a year in government education. And what do we get for it?

Benedict XVI Baptizes a Muslim

What are we to think of the provocative act consummated by Pope Benedict XVI during Holy Week?

Here’s what the New York Times thought in a piece by Ian Fisher.

Days after Osama bin Laden issued a threat against Europe that included an accusation that the pope was involved in a “new Crusade” against Islam, Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born writer protected by Italian bodyguards because of his criticism of radical Islam, was baptized by the pope Saturday night and received his first holy communion.

You can see the liberal line here. Osama was right! The pope is leading a “new Crusade” against Islam.

You really wonder about these liberals sometimes. It’s OK for liberals to evangelize for liberalism in the schools and universities. It’s all right for 90 percent of journalists to be liberals and to be advancing their world-view every day in the media.

But God forbid that the pope should try to advance Christianity!

Of course the mysterious writer who calls himself “Spengler” got right on the case.

A self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam, whom Pope Benedict XVI baptized during the Easter Vigil at St Peter’s. Allam’s renunciation of Islam as a religion of violence and his embrace of Christianity denotes the point at which the so-called global "war on terror" becomes a divergence of two irreconcilable modes of life: the Western way of faith supported by reason, against the Muslim world of fatalism and submission.

Well, you certainly wouldn’t read stuff like that in the New York Times!

Now why do you think that Magdi Cristiano decided to convert? According to Spengler, he said that:

[T]he challenge that Pope Benedict XVI offered to Islam in his September 2006 address at Regensburg was "undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert".

So the media campaign to discredit the pope’s Regensburg address was less than a complete success.

Spengler is naturally pleased with all this.

Before Benedict’s election, I summarized his position as "I have a mustard seed and I’m not afraid to use it." Now the mustard seed has earned pride of place in global affairs.

The thing to remember in trying to understand all this is this fact. Two-thirds of the global adherents to Christianity in the Global South are women. What, you may ask, is the particular attraction of Christianity for women? After all, it’s a patriarchal religion that wants to keep women in their place, right?

That’s the liberal line, but like most liberal notions, I suspect it is wrong. No, I think that women are attracted to Christianity because it is a religion of love. God loves you, and he wants you to love him back.

For women, we know, the most important thing in their lives is relationships. That’s a silly way of saying that women live for love: love for their children, love for their mothers, love for their “best friend,” even love for their husbands. Lord Byron:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,

’Tis woman’s whole existence.

And it’s not just me saying this. Go read the pope’s two encyclicals: “Deus Caritas Est,” or God is Love, and “Spe Salvi,” In Hope We are Saved. You will find they are both absolutely drenched in love and hope. Girl stuff, right?

When women are confronted by a choice between a religion of love and a religion of world conquest, what you you think they would choose?

Back in the days immediately after the Cold War wise heads recognized that the war was conducted on two fronts, the political/military front led by the United States and the religious front led by John Paul II, the Polish pope.

Now we are in the war against Islamic extremism, and we have once again the United Staes leading on the political/military front. This time there’s a new pope, Benedict XVI, the German pope, leading on the religious front.

With an alliance like that, I’d say that something’s got to give.

Obama Ain't No Jackie Robinson

Back in 1947, relates Walter Williams, Jackie Robinson became the first black player in the major leagues.

He encountered open racist taunts and slurs from fans, opposing team players and even some players on his own team. Despite that, his first year batting average was .297. He led the National League in stolen bases and won the first-ever Rookie of the Year Award.

Jackie Robinson was the best. As the “first black player, he had to be.” Today it doesn’t much matter that there are a lot of average stumble-bum black players in the major leagues. But it would have mattered with Jackie Robinson in 1947.

Unfortunately Barack Obama, writes Williams, is no Jackie Robinson.

Barack Obama has charisma and charm but in terms of character, values and understanding, he is no Jackie Robinson.

And in the view of Williams, the first black president ought to be as good as Jackie Robinson.

The fact of Obama’s successful candidacy, Williams continues, is a tribute to the goodness of Americans and that the civil rights battle is won. Yes there are problems on the discrimination front, but the battle is won. If you want to talk about the major problems confronting the black community, they are not civil rights problems.

The major problems are: family breakdown, illegitimacy, fraudulent education and a high rate of criminality. To confront these problems, that are not the fault of the larger society, requires political courage and that’s an attribute that Obama and most other politicians lack.

The message of Barack Obama’s speech a week ago was: Don’t look for me to work on those problems. I just want to be president.

Bernanke's ARM Assist

TV personality and Wall Street man Larrry Kudlow is pleased. Ben Bernanke is my man, he writes.

I just got my latest adjustable-rate mortgage statement from the bank. When I originally refinanced this loan, it was 5.75 percent. And last summer my ARM soared to 8.25 percent. But guess what? Through February it has round-tripped all the way back to 6 percent.

So I’m now saving $2,000 a month, or $24,000 a year, because Gentle Ben has slashed the fed funds target rate to 2.25 percent from 5.25 percent last fall.

Who wouldn’t be pleased with a present like that? And with house prices plunging and home sales perking up a little, maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel. The law of supply and demand to the rescue.

Larry also notes that the gold price is down from its peak at around $1,000 per ounce and the dollar is up a bit. The Treasury yield curve is now positive, with the lowest yield on the shortest term debt.

So is the Mortgage Meltdown over? Is it time to pile into the stock market, the real-estate market, and every other kind of market?

You never know. You never know untill the fear and trembling is all over, the market is up 20 percent, and all the good deals have been snapped up. But then it’s too late!

Kudlow has this good advice. Don’t try to time the market turn. All you can do is say this to yourself. Hmm. Looks like stocks, or real estate, or Miami condos are on sale right now. Maybe I should pick myself up a deal.

As the salesmen say: There’ll never be a better time to buy than right now.

Meanwhile I am kicking myself. The Dell outlet store had some dual-core Pentiums with 2GB on sale for $259 last week. Now they are up to $299.

Democrats and Race

One of the things we conservatives constantly try to do is step out of the default liberal mindset.

It’s hard to do, even as a conservative, because liberalthink defines reality in America. To think another way requires real effort, especially for a social animal like homo sapiens.

Liberals all seem to think that Barack Obama’s speech last week was at the least a fine and principled contribution to America’s conversation on race and maybe much more. Conservatives tend to be disappointed. We wonder if Obama couldn’t have seized the opportunity and really declared for a post-racist America.

But maybe the big issue is what Obama’s candidacy is doing for race relations within the Democratic Party. The Washington Post’s Krissah Williams writes about veterans hanging out at two American Legion posts in Pennsylvania, one predominantly black, and one predominantly white.

[I]n the two worlds of these veterans, Obama’s speech was one more dividing point. Rather than bringing the men in Post 733 and Post 420 closer together, it seemed to highlight the gap between them.

White Air Force veteran Dan Dowett talks about Obama backing “a preacher that to me sounds like a treasonous person.” Black Army veteran Ross Mounds says “the controversy over Wright is just the excuse some whites are looking for not to vote for a qualified black man.”

Then there’s the view from other voters. Victor Davis Hanson asked several non-black voters what they thought of Obama’s speech last week. The reaction was significant.

“Forget the speech. I would never vote for Obama after listening to Wright.” In some cases, the reaction was not mild disappointment, but unprintable outrage.

The question is whether the liberal narrative on race really matters any more. Obama’s speech, to one liberal acquaintance, was

the best from a politician on race in a generation. He dispansionately [sic] examined interiors and exteriors of both whites and blacks.

As a conservative I would say that Obama mouthed liberal pieties, trashing the white working class and excusing black racism.

It is, of course, the white working class that has been asked to pay the most for the liberal race politics of the last half century, whether it was forced busing, integration of ethnic neighborhoods, or affirmative action at the firehouse. Educated whites might get knocked around a bit by the lefty profs in university, but they could always escape from liberal race politics by going into business and living in white middle-class suburbs.

Suppose that Rev. Wright turns out to be the last straw for the white working class?

"We're Owed and They Aren't"

Writing in The American Thinker Ed Kaitz tells of how he got to know the immigrant Vietnamese shrimp fishermen of the Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.

When they arrived in Louisiana the refugees had no money (the money that they had was used to bribe their way out of Vietnam and into refugee camps in Thailand), few friends, and a mostly unfriendly and suspicious local population.



They did however have strong families, a strong work ethic, and the "Audacity of Hope." Within a generation, with little or no knowledge of English, the Vietnamese had achieved dominance in the fishing industry there and their children were already achieving the top SAT scores in the state.

So why was it, Ed asked a casual black acquaintance, that these Vietnamese had come to America and, become, without friends and influence, “within a generation, so successful?” And why was it “so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets” and build lives like the Vietnamese immigrants?

The answer was shocking.

"We’re owed and they aren’t."

Well, words are cheap. The trouble is that this “we’re owed” attitude is probably at the root of most black social pathology: the 70 percent of black babies born to single mothers and the abysmal performance of blacks in school. After all, what’s the point of sucking it in when “We’re owed and they aren’t?”

After the great catharsis of the civil rights movement when white America confessed its racist sins, blacks had a choice. They could forgive their white oppressors or they could torment them. Under the tutelage of white liberals and black nationalists they chose to torment.

Wrong choice.

It was wrong, of course, because forgiveness is at the center of our Christian culture. It is especially appropriate to remember this during Holy Week, when we recall how God sacrificed his Son for our sins and forgives the sins of the world.

But it is also wrong at a practical level because it destroys and retards the advancement of blacks from their status as an oppressed people.

When you come to the city you come as the member of a tribe, one of the Gentiles. Living in a tribe, scratching out a living on the land, tied to the land in serfdom or slavery, you rightly mistrusted everyone outside the tribe or outside the village. The outsiders are, after all competitors for the vital land you occupy, the land that gives you life.

But in the city, things are different. In the city you prosper not because you have the best land but because you serve your fellow citizens better with products and services that they want and need. In the city you prosper not because you prudently mistrust the brigands down the road but because you prudently enlarge and extend your circle of trust. You establish a reputation for trustworthiness and you seek out those who are trustworthy.

So long as American blacks sit in their ghetto of mistrust, so long as they cling to the motto of “We’re owed and they aren’t,” so long will they fail to journey from the wilderness of racism and rage to the Promised Land of trust and love and come at last to their great reward of full citizenship in this great America.

This week in his much noted speech, Barak Obama sent out a message loud and clear.

It’s still: “We’re owed, and you aren’t.”

And that’s a shame.

Too Big To Fail

What do we do about institutions, particularly financial institutions, that are “too big to fail?”

In the current credit crunch that becomes a big deal. The government runs around worrying about the bankers. It seems like we let the little guy go to the wall, foreclose on his mortgage, and send him out into the street.

Not one penny, you might say, for the struggling homeowner, but billions for the bankers.

Last weekend, the Federal Reserve bailed out failing investment bank Bear Stearns.

Actually, the Fed didn’t quite “bail out” Bear Stearns. They gave it to JP Morgan Chase for a couple of hundred million. That means that Bear’s stockholders got two cents on the dollar. I don’t think that’s exactly a bailout. It looks to me more like a haircut.

You can tell that the Fed probably did the right thing by reading what Larry Kudlow, an old Bear hand, had to say about it. He wonders if Bear Stearns really had to go down in flames. After noting that the Fed could have let Bear Stearns in at the discount window and telling us that he used to work at Bear, he gives us this:

All of this kind of makes me wonder whether Bear Stearns wasn’t some kind of sacrificial lamb. Did government policy makers hope to convince the public that a big Wall Street firm could indeed fail? Or wouldn’t be bailed out? Listen, they were buried, not bailed out.

The fact is, Bear shareholders got creamed with the $2 per share purchase price. The shareholders include all the men and women who’ve worked there for years, and who own roughly one-third of the firm’s equity.

After the Bear Stearns creaming, the word was that Lehman Brothers might be next. But the Lehman bears got a talking to from the Fed: Keep lending to Lehman, the Fed said. You could translate the message, if you like: If you chaps keep on down this road, the Fed seemed to say, we could end up giving all you chaps a haircut too.

So maybe the Fed isn’t crazy when it makes a sacrificial lamb out of Bear Stearns. Maybe it is sending a message to the sharks: we are loading up with harpoons here at the Fed.

Maybe the Fed is crazy like a fox.

Obama Fails the Test

Everyone agrees that Senator Barack Obama delivered a great speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

But not everyone agrees with the message.

Obama was forced to give this speech because of the recent flap over the racist, hateful sermons delivered by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor for over 20 years of the African nationalist church in Chicago to which Obama belonged.

Everyone understands that Wright is a symbol for America’s present shameful secret, the one you are not allowed to voice: that the most racist people in the United States are African Americans.

There’s a simple reason for this. Liberals give blacks a pass. If anyone in the United States other than a black voices a single racist word that person is shamed and blamed. But when blacks talk racist or act racist liberals give them a pass. Well, they say, how can you expect blacks to observe the standards of the rest of America—after centuries of slavery and oppression. Or there’s this one. You can’t be racist unless you have power, and blacks don’t have power.

Senator Obama, who now has the fervent support of black voters, had the opportunity, for one shining moment, to lead America’s blacks out of the wilderness of black racism and into the land of milk and honey. He could have said: “I utterly reject the hateful, racist philosophy of Minister Wright. That sort of rhetoric has no place in America. Period.” With that speech he could have begun the post-racist era in America. He would have gone down in the history books as a Jefferson or a Lincoln.

But he didn’t. Instead he ducked. He didn’t have the courage to be a leader.

Instead of leadership he gave us the usual liberal guilt trip and the usual bromides about racism and the understandable rage of blacks who lived through the 1950s and 1960s.

But the story of race in the United States is not shameful. It is incandescent.

At the dawn of the modern era, within 20 years of Lord Mansfield famously ruling in Somersett’s Case that slavery was unlawful in England, the founding fathers attempted to do the same in the United States. They tried to make slavery illegal in the new constitution. But they were blocked by the southern states. So they compromised, agreeing not to outlaw the slave trade—yet.

It was a weak moment, because for the next 80 years the South reacted with purple rage whenever the subject of slavery was brought up. For a potted history of the slavery issue start at the Northwest Ordinance and follow the events leading up the the Civil War. That was the epochal event, you recall, in which America tossed an entire generation of young men and a year of national income down the toilet. But the Civil War decided the slavery issue once and for all.

Only one US war was as costly as the Civil War. Our American grandparents spend 130 percent of national income in World War II fighting fascism and Japanese expansionism. We decided that question once and for all too.

Then right after World War II Americans rolled up their sleeves and began to work on the lingering race issue, the de jure oppression of blacks in the South and the de facto oppression in the North. This struggle culminated in the great Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. Liberals were the leaders in this great work. It was liberals’ finest hour.

It was a courageous thing for liberals to do, as President Johnson is said to have recognized, because it wiped out the Democratic Party’s power in the South.

Unfortunately, courageous as they were to walk away from white racism in the South, Democrats and liberals were not courageous enough to act against black racism in the North.

And so today we have the corrupt system of affirmative action, quotas, and “diversity” that has so poisoned the relations between the races, and has so cruelly prevented American blacks from taking their rightful place as equal and honored members of the American family. You can’t really take your place at the family table until you give up your rage and your victimhood, put on a smile, and start to discuss family business without always bringing up ancient feuds and humiliations.

In the United States today there is no worse accusation for a white than to be called a “racist.” But blacks get a pass on racist speech and actions. Instead, for blacks, most likely, there is no worse accusation than to be called an “Uncle Tom,” or to sneered at for “acting white.”

This double standard, this injustice, is a cancer eating away at the heart of America. America is waiting, longing for the leader who will lead us out of the tar pits of racist recrimination to the sunny upland meadows of post-racism. Many Americans hoped that Barack Obama might be that leader.

Now we know that he is not.

A National Conversation on Race

For as long as I can remember liberals have liked to suggest that we need a “national conversation” on something or other.

As often as not, that national conversation was about race.

Of course, liberals were not actually proposing a real national conversation about race. They were proposing something rather different and rather more sinister.

They were proposing to tell Americans what to think about race, what to feel about race, what to do about race, and if you didn’t agree with their prescriptions you had better shut up. Because if your voiced your disagreement you would be branded as a racist.

We know what this was all about. It was all about power, liberal power. The liberal ownership of the race issue allowed them to corral about 90 percent of the black vote, ever since the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. With that vote liberals could stop any reform of the welfare state and maintain their power, their perquisites, and their tenure.

In this liberal policy on race there were good cops and bad cops. Liberals were the good cops, telling us that their race-based quotas and set-asides were all for our own good. Then there were the bad cops, the black race hustlers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and at the local level, men like Jeremiah Wright, pastor of a black nationalist church in Chicago..

The job of the good cops was to keep the white population cowed. The job of the bad cops was to keep blacks voting Democrat in a frenzy of race rage.

Then along came Barack Obama and promised Unity and Change. He was understood instinctively by white college-educated Democrats as offering a way out of the race ravine. In the words of Shelby Steele, Obama is a “bargainer,” offering “the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism.”

It’s lucky for Obama that he came along when he did. I’d say that American whites are getting close to the point where they are going to say “enough already” on race and refuse to be cowed by the race baiters.

But it turns out that Barack Obama is not exactly the race healer he pretends to be. How could he be when he has been attending a church of race hatred for most of his adult life. Barack Obama is asking us to believe that he is a race healer when he has belonged to a church, the biggest black church in Chicago, run by race baiter Jeremiah Wright.

[N]othing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable.

You know what, liberals? I think we are about to have a national conversation on race. And this will be the first one in living memory in which liberals don’t get to set the rules.

So there’s a chance that the conversation will be a real conversation. For the first time in living memory.

Another Day Another Dollar

Is there enough fear out there after the Fed moved in to stop the rot at mortgage meltdown victim Bear Stearns?

Sure, I’m scared. Who wouldn’t be?

But the job of the Fed is to act as the banker of last resort and stop the spiral of credit contraction. And that is what it did over the weekend when it gave away Bear stearns to JPMorgan Chase for a couple of cents on the dollar and a bunch of guarantees on Bear Stearns’ “dark matter.”

It was the failure of the Fed to do that in 1929-1933 that made the Great Depression a ten-year vale of misery.

Larry Kudlow is confident. But then he always is. He commends the Fed for doing the right thing. But then he takes a shot at the Democrats.

Senator Schumer is calling Bush "Herbert Hoover." But Hoover signed protectionist Smoot-Hawley, just as Hillary and Obama are today trying to break up NAFTA. Hoover signed a huge tax increase, just as Hill-Bama are preaching. The Dems are emulating Hoover. Bush is trying to stop it.

That’s a very important point. Herbert Hoover made the first mistakes that made the Great Depression “great.” He let the banks collapse, he jawboned business to keep prices and wages up, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. He increased tax rates You could read it all up at Stuck on Stupid.

Democrats really have never learned the lessons of the Great Depression. They think that it was the genius of FDR that got us out, with the NRA, Social Security, the Wagner Labor Act, and TVA.

On the contrary. All those policies made the Depression worse.

If they try the same policies again then the American people will suffer greatly.

That is you and me.

Double Standard on Bigotry

One thing that conservatives and Republicans really know. When we step into the public square we have to be whiter than white. Anything we’ve said or written that doesn’t square with the liberal zeitgeist will be hauled out and used to prove that we are bigots, racists, and homophobes.

Barack Obama has, for twenty years, belonged to a church in Chicago. His minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., has opinions that, in a conservative or a Republican, would disqualify him from the public square. As Ronald Kessler reports:

In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama’s longtime minister, friend and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president.


"Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."

It’s ok to say stuff like that if you are liberal and black. But a Republican saying that would be driven from the public square, and anyone connected with him would be convicted of guilt by association.

But in America, we have a Double Standard. Liberals and blacks get a pass when they say racist and bigoted things. Well, their hearts are in the right place.

Some day, when the American people just can’t take it any more, this double standard will crumble into dust and a new double standard will arise to wave cynically over the fruited plain.

But that day is not yet.

Bill Buckley Didn't Like Writing

What a grand life Bill Buckley had, doing what he loved, and being so good at it. That’s what young Anthony Dick said to Buckley while serving as research assistant on a book on Goldwater.

He quickly corrected me. He did not love writing. He found it difficult, tedious, and increasingly painful. Nor had he ever loved politics, which was awash in sordidness and banality. He would rather be reading, or sailing, or visiting friends, or enjoying any of the other luxuries his wealth could have afforded.

No. He worked out of a sense of duty, Buckley said, to repay for all the beauty he had received and to “resist the totalizing designs” of the folks who want to ratchet up the power of politics.

CA Homeschooling Decision an Opportunity

Conservatives and homeschooling parents are naturally worried and upset over the recent decision by a California state appeals court, in Re Rachel L, that parents lacked a presumptive right to educate their children in their own way. Parents needed to get a credentialed private tutor if they didn’t send their children to school.

But I am not discouraged. I take the view of the great Senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry. Bring. Them. On.

It’s encouraging, for a start, that both of the Smart Guys, liberal law school prof Erwin Chemerinsky and conservative law school Dean John Eastman, in their review of the case on the Hugh Hewitt Show, came out in favor of the right of parents to homeschool . Said Chemerinsky:

I think they’re going to reverse the California Court of Appeal here. I think based on the Supreme Court precedence we’re going to talk about, I think the California Supreme Court is going to say though the government has a compelling interest in making sure that children are well educated, there’s a way of achieving it that’s less restrictive of parents’ rights than completely outlawing home schooling.

Conservatives and school choice advocates must understand that the education blob isn’t going to go quietly. They have developed a government monopoly that gets paid to educate our children but that has no real accountability. Why would this protected elite give up a privilege like that for the hard work of actually having to produce results?

We need fights, public fights, that put the average homeschooling parent in the role of helpless victim being bullied by an uncaring government bureaucracy. And we need the American people to observe these fights and we need to teach them to side with the little guy. Or next time it could be them!

I sent my $100 contribution in to the folks fighting the good fight on this, thePacific Justice Institute, using their online contribution page. You can too.

Free Speech Means Free Speech

University of Notre Dame president Father John Jenkins has spproved performances of the lefty agitprop play The Vagaina Monologues at UND and conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt are upset. Hewitt doesn’t think that lefty agitprop has a place at Notre Dame. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of other places where you can go to see the Vagina Monologues.

Father Jenkins justified his action on the following grounds:

"My decision on this matter,” Father Jenkins said, “arises from a conviction that it is an indispensable part of the mission of a Catholic university to provide a forum in which multiple viewpoints are debated in reasoned and respectful exchange—always in dialogue with faith and the Catholic tradition—even around highly controversial topics.

I agree. The Vagina Monologues is, no doubt, a foolish and a hateful piece of work. But we conservatives must never deny lefties the right to be heard. What we can and must insist upon is our right to be heard.

That is the great issue upon which conservatives should plant our flag. Too often we cringe before the bullying of the lefties and do not oppose their folly and their bile with sufficient vigor.

David Allen White, Shakespeare scholar issued the following challenge to Notre Dame on the the Hugh Hewitt Show.

I will issue a challenge to Notre Dame, okay? I do it publicly. I do it on the air. I have taught Shakespeare at the Naval Academy for 27 years... Will Notre Dame let me come and lecture on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which presents a contradictory view to the Vagina Monologues? Public challenge ’“ academic freedom ’“ will they bring in a Shakespeare scholar to talk about one of Shakespeare’s plays, to give an opposing point of view?

Maybe Notre Dame will accept the challenge. But what about the 1,001 other colleges in America? Would they allow the voice of Shakespeare, Dead White Male, to compete with traditionally marginalized progressive voices of the Vagina Monologues? I don’t think so.

To Ease or Not to Ease

When the economy turns south, what should the politicians do? Sometimes they do too much. Sometimes they do too little.

In his first term, Bruce Fein relates, President Nixon vowed he would not resort to the expedient of wage and price controls. Until he did.

Nixon soon renounced his declamation in August 1971 as a presidential election year approached: "The time has come for decisive action. Action that will break the vicious circle of spiraling prices and costs. I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States for a period of 90 days."

On the other hand, the Great Depression was made immeasurably worse because the Federal Reserve Board failed to act as the lender of last resort in the four long years from 1929 to 1933. Banks failed in the thousands. Then the government ran around trying to bail everyone out in the New Deal, and that was just as bad.

So what should the government do?

Right now the Federal Reserve is doing all it can to ease the “credit crunch” of the last few months. On the other hand it is clear that the residential mortgage market was way overblown and house prices need to come down.

A recession is the natural cleanup process, the liquidation of the malinvestments of the previous boom. But a huge depression threatens the very fabric of the nation as people get desperate and flock to leaders who promise a way out of the wilderness.

Today the Federal Reserve Board, in conjunction with other major central banks, injected liquidity into the financial system, as reported by Jeannine Aversa.

The Fed announced the creation of a new tool, called the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF), geared to provide primary dealers — big Wall Street investment firms and banks that trade directly with the Fed — with 28-day loans of Treasury securities, rather than overnight loans. They would pledge other securities — including federal agency residential-mortgage-backed securities, such as those of mortgage giants Fannnie Mae and Freddie Mac — as collateral for the loans of Treasury securities.

Always remember. The one thing that really matters to the government is the market in US Treasury securities. And that means looking after “the big Wall Street investment firms and banks that trade directly with the Fed.” Before the voters, before widows and orphans, before even the majestic AARP, the government cares about the Treasury markets. Right now, of course, it looks pretty good, with short-term Treasuries yielding 1.5 percent and 30 year bonds yielding 4.5 percent.

That is fine, but the rest of the financial market is tanking. And if the rest of the market goes south then it affects the big ivestment firms and banks that do business with the Fed. So you can never be too careful, so that’s why the Fed intervened today to shore up the financial markets.

Fiddling with the Rules

If you talk to your Democratic friends they will sometimes wander off into a discussion of voting processes: the wonders of proportional voting and the single transferable vote.

All very well and good, as the British would say, but it rather misses the point of voting, and that is to create a winner.

Politics, I like to say, is civil war by other means.  Thus every election is, in its charming way, a metaphorical civil war led by the great barons of the realm.  The fight might be between Baron Reagan and Baron Mondale or between Baron Clinton and Baron Bush.  The great thing is to have a decisive result that is accepted by the vassals of each great lord.

Of course, sometimes the result is really close, and even the dullest person can see that with a little tweak of the rules, they could have won. But never mind; there is always next time.

That’s what happened in the 1960 presidential election.  There was less than 0.5 percent in the popular vote between Kennedy and Nixon and clear indication of chicanery in Illinois and Texas.  But Nixon conceded the election and everyone went home.

In 2000 the election was just as close, but Al Gore did not concede.  The result has been 8 years of political trench warfare, with Democrats—Democrats!—accusing the other party of stealing the election.

Democrats tend to feel that democracy can be improved by changing the rules to ensure more fairness, or more genuine democracy.  But the problem is that they miss the forest for the trees.  It would be nice to have the best possible expression of the people’s will, but it is really important that there is a clear winner that everyone can accept.

It’s hard for Democrats to manipulate the rules of US elections, but it is easy for them to manipulate the rules of their party elections.  In the current presidential cycle anyone can see what a mess this has got them into, as Donald Lambro relates.  Today we have a situation in which the delegates chosen in Michigan and Florida are disqualified because the primaries were too early for the Democrats’ taste.  And the proportional representation rules mean that the winner of a primary does not capture all the delegates in a state but only a majority.

Apart from the fight over Michigan and Florida, the Democrats’ proportional delegate-selection process has resulted in a race where neither Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton nor Sen. Barack Obama can pull clear of the other, and that may put the almost 800 superdelegates in the position of effectively choosing the party’s nominee at the convention in August, regardless of the primary results.

So, after all this fiddling with the rules we have a situation where the nominee of the Democratic Party may be selected by politicians in a smoke-filled room, which everyone agrees is a Bad Thing.  After all, that’s what the rules were intended to prevent!

In the Republican Party we believe in playing the game according to the rules.  We don’t expect to get to Nirvana with perfect rules; we just acknowledge the need for rules, some kind of rules, and we believe in sticking to them.

So it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of folks.  Dems everlastingly tweak the rules in search for an elusive “fairness” and end up tainting the result of the whole process.

Of course, back in the good old days, in the Civil War era, people would split parties at the drop of a hat and hold national conventions all the time.  Nobody worried about the exact fairness of the rules.  You announced a convention, you ordered up the special trains on the cool new railroads to get the delegates to the convention, and then you sat back and waited for people to turn up.  Then you had a grand old political brawl for a week.  Then everyone went home.

That was politics.

Employers Cut 63,000 Jobs in February

The lede in the New York Sun, reported by Jennine Aversa of the AP tells it like it is.

Employers slashed jobs by 63,000 in February, the most in five years and the starkest sign yet the country is heading dangerously toward recession or is in one already.

That 63,000 number is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Establishment Survey which is a report on jobs from employers.  The Household Survey, a BLS survey of households, is no better, with a reduction of 255,000 in the number of people who say they are employed.  You can see the latest numbers here. 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also lets you view their time series on employment.  You can find the URLs for them here.

The Establishment Survey graph shows employment increase slowing to a stop over the last year.  The Household Survey graph shows that employment has been flat for the last year.

The question is whether we are going into several years of depressed employment growth like we had in 2001-2003, or whether the Fed’s rapid reduction in interest rates will restart the economy quickly.

You’d think, what with the mortgage meltdown, that it will take a while for demand to revive.  But the stock market today seems to take the employment news in its stride.

The bottom line is that nobody knows nuttin’.

"Sexism" in Science

At Harvard University, writes Christina Hoff Sommers, they have a course called Math 55. Over 50 percent of students drop out. In 2006

The final class roster, according to The Crimson: "45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male."

Only 17 women have completed the course since 1990. The science on women and science uncertain.

The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, simple answer

But the gender activists are ready with a single, simple answer. They paraded before a Congressional subcommittee last fall and agreed that the dearth of women in science was due to sexism.

All agreed on the need for a revolutionary transformation of American science itself. "Ultimately," said Kathie Olsen, deputy director of the National Science Foundation, "our goal is to transform, institution by institution, the entire culture of science and engineering in America, and to be inclusive of all-for the good of all."

Rep. Brian Baird, chairman of the subcommittee asked the assembled throng:

"What kind of hammer should we use?"

The activists have the answer; Apply Title IX to science education. Title IX is the section of federal law that is currently being used to force gender equality in college sports. The activists want to force universities to have equal participation in science by men and women. And they have already started. The National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation are moving to make science more “fair.”

Already, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is administering a multimillion-dollar gender-equity program called ADVANCE, which, as Olsen told the subcommittee, aims to transform the culture of American science to make it gender-fair.

Except, of course, that women, mostly, don’t choose science education. Just as men, mostly, don’t choose education for the caring professions.

We Leninists believe that the only way to effect change is through the maelstrom of disaster: “the worse the better.”

But it certainly seems to be a pity that we will have to destroy education in order to save it. But really, will the activists be content with anything less than a complete bonfire of education as we know it?

Not Just a 50-50 Nation

Mark it down. It’s not just a 50-50 Nation any more.

Everyone agrees that politically, the US is a 50-50 nation, split down the middle between religious, married-with-children, private-sector Republicans and secular, single, childless, public-sector Democrats.

Except that this year I think we can expect more like a 55-45 nation as the nation’s moderates expectorate the Republicans.

But now, after the primaries in Ohio and Texas, it looks like we’ve got a 50-50 Democratic Party.

Well, not really. The liberal, educated, leadership cadre doesn’t add up to that many votes. But when they are added to a race-based supermajority of blacks supporting the First Black Candidate, then a Senator Obama can rise to 50 percent of the Democratic Party vote.

Of course, they are kidding themselves. The purpose of the Democratic Party is privilege, handing out patronage to the loyal rank-and-file. The real work of the Democratic Party is cutting checks, and for that you couldn’t do better than vote for Hillary Clinton, the patronness of the “women with needs.”

The liberal elite likes to elevate the grubbiness of this into something idealistic, something compassionate.

But as we all know, it ain’t compassion when it is Other Peoples’ Money.

Especially when the Other Peoples’ Money is Other Peoples’ Taxes.

But for now we have a 50-50 Nation and a 50-50 Democratic Party.

Michael Medved writes that the 50-50 Nation has endured for 50 years, ever since the end of the FDR years. Nobody has won big except when a popular incumbent has faced a weak opponent.

They call the current setup in the United States the Fifth Party System. The question is: what would the Sixth Party System look like? Be careful what you wish for. Big realignments in politics come with big upheavals. Think slavery in the 1850s and the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Meanwhile we can sit back and enjoy the hit show “50-50 Democrats.”

Texas v. Ohio

As Texas and Ohio voters go to the polls the Wall Street Journal edit page wants you to compare the two states.  Texas is booming and Ohio is hurting.  Here are the numbers according to the WSJ editorial.

The state [Ohio] has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000, home foreclosures are soaring, and real family income is lower now than in 2000. Meanwhile, the Texas economy has boomed since 2004, with nearly twice the rate of new job creation as the rest of the nation.

In fact, over the last ten years Texas has added 1.6 million jobs and Ohio has actual had a net reduction of 10,000 jobs.

Who will tell the people, as a lefty once titled his book?  Well, not Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  They are busy telling Ohioans that they would roll back NAFTA.  But Obama seems to be in a spot of bother because his economics chappie told the Canadians not to worry.  His opposition to NAFTA was just for the benefit of Ohio voters.

The problems of the rust belt couldn’t perhaps be due to the high taxes and heavy unionization, could it?  Or Big Government?  The Journal reminds us:

Ohio politicians deplore plant closings even as they impose the third highest corporate income tax in the country (10.5%) and the sixth highest personal income tax (8.87%).

In fact, the jobs in Ohio are not threatened so much by Canadians and Mexicans as by evil corporations in other American states.

Ohio, Indiana and Michigan are losing auto jobs, but many of these "runaway plants" are not fleeing to China, Mexico or India.  They’ve moved to more business-friendly U.S. states, including Texas.

Guess what.  General Motors is going to open a new plant to build hybrid cars.  But not in Ohio.  Oh no.  Their new plant will be near Dallas,Texas.

Dems Trash NAFTA

Democrats like to tell us how they believe in science—unlike those knuckle-dragging holy-rollers in the Republican Party who believe in superstition.

Actually, it really doesn’t much matter what people believe about the Creation.  It doesn’t really affect how we live our daily lives.

But then there’s NAFTA, the free-trade treaty between the US, Canada, and Mexico.  Last week, Senators Obama and Clinton were competing in Ohio to see who could trash NAFTA more.  Writes a San Francisco Chronicle editorial writer:

The politics here aren’t surprising: Ohio Democrats blame the North American Free Trade Agreement for the state’s rust-belt slow-fade of factory closings, job losses and declining income.

There’s only one problem with that.  The science.  We know, as well as we know anything, that the more trade between people and between countries the better.  It all comes from the basic theory at the foundation of economics, the Law of Comparative Advantage.

The law says that even if you  are a highly skilled person that is better at everything than anyone else, it is still better for you to concentrate on the skill that you are best at and buy the other things from other people rather than try to do it all yourself.  In short, trade it don’t make it.

The problems in the rust belt are not due to NAFTA.  They are due to the privileges and subsidies awarded by the government to the big industrial corporations and unions fifty years ago.  The privileges were unsustainable, and the economy has been dying a slow death for the last twenty years as the subsidies and privileges slowly unwind in layoffs and corporate bankruptcies.

It’s a pity that politicians can’t bring themselves to tell the truth, and that the voters don’t want to hear it.

That means that the sufferings of the rust belt will continue.