MoveOn dot Next?

Now that Sen. Barack has “courageously” thrown his pastor under the bus, after telling us for months that Reverend Wright was his inspiration, What next?

It’s pretty obvious.

MoveOn there folks, nothing to see here.

While Reverend Wright remains in the news ordinary Americans might tumble to the truth about race relations in this country. They might start to resent the double standard on race. They might start to wonder why it is OK for black Reverend Wright to have cheap, shoddy opinions on racial differences when white Reverend Wrong would get sent to the wood-shed quick as a flash for the wrong opinions on race.

Remember when Herrnstein and Murray got sent to the wood-shed for suggesting, in The Bell Curve, that blacks had a lower IQ than whites and Asians? They didn’t try to say why, but that didn’t matter. White guys aren’t allowed to say things like that.

People might think that they’d had enough of being whacked around on race.

They might even, the more headstrong among them, decide that they are not going to vote for a black candidate ever again unless he can show that he has never been within a country mile of a smooth race hustler and hater like Reverend Wright.

They might decide that they want a racial politics based on the simple content of a man’s character rather than the color of his skin.

Thye might decide that they don’t particularly like a smooth politician like Barack Obama who so brazenly both runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds.

They might decide that they don’t belong in a political party that reduces everything to the correct party line of the moment on race and gender.

They might decide that they belong in the Leave-Me-Alone party rather than the class-and-race-and-gender party.

And that would never do.

So you’d better shut up about Wright and wrong and race and Obama. If you know what’s good for you.

Defining Obama for America

The first rule of politics, they say, is to define yourself and your opponent before he gets to define himself and define you.

Right now, you can’t be too happy if you are a Democrat.

Day after day, Barack Obama is being defined as a liberal, elitist, corrupt, racist-hugging radical. Bitterquiddick, Reskorama, Wrightology. It just goes on and on.

And what is John McCain doing? According to Jennifer Rubin at New York Observer McCain is touring the backcountry.

While Obama was fending off stories about his flag pin and his wife’s comment that she had never been proud of America, McCain was reveling in nostalgia over his family’s military service and the sacrifices he made in service of “a cause greater than [himself].”



While Obama deals with question after question about his spotlight-dwelling mentor Reverend Wright, McCain introduced us to his salt-of-the-earth English teacher who, McCain says, influenced his character and values. The implicit message is that the other guy has Wright’s invective and McCain has Mr. Ravenel’s honor code.

Don’t worry, Rubin continues. Eventually McCain will have to talk about foreclosures, health care, and education: The Issues.

She’s wrong, of course. RIght now, McCain is running around defining himself to ordinary voters that aren’t too politically active. As he defines himself, he contrasts himself with his opponent and defines his opponent.

And once you have defined yourself and defined your opponent for the voters it becomes very difficult to change their first impression. That’s the second law of politics.

It can’t hurt that McCain really is a crusty old white guy who believes in character and values. And Obama is not, as he maintains, the candidate of “unity” and “change” but a Sixties retread on domestic policy and a 1930s retread on foreign policy, as Thomas Sowell writes.

Although Senator Obama has presented himself as the candidate of new things ’” using the mantra of “change” endlessly ’” the cold fact is that virtually everything has says about domestic policy is straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s.

Sowell tells the story of baseball player Paul Waner making his 3,000th hit. The fielder didn’t handle the ball cleanly, so Waner asked the scorer to record the hit as an error.

One day America will elect a black president, reckons Sowell. Let’s make sure he’s a good one.

Those Aborted Black Babies

One of the whackier aspects of Reverend Wright’s sophisticated worldview is the unthinking acceptance of liberal doctrine on abortion.

In his celebrated “Government Lies!” rants he came out four-square against undoing Roe v. Wade.

As a confirmed racist he seems to have got confused. Why would a black racist approve of a policy that reduces the number of black babies? Reverend Wright is hopping mad about the white plan to decimate blacks through inventing AIDS. But what about Planned Parenthood, founded by a eugenics enthusiast, Margaret Sanger, who clearly intended to reduce the number of “unfit” babies?

Conservative bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr. is concerned about Planned Parenthood and black babies, citing the following facts:

• “[E]xperts estimate that 75% of Planned Parenthood centers are located in close proximity to minority neighborhoods.”


• “[O]ver 35% of the total number of babies aborted in the nation” are black.
  
• “Planned Parenthood facilities around the country have been accused of accepting contributions from racist donors.”
  
• “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” said Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.

When you think about life exclusively in racist terms, you’d have to believe that you’d want to keep black women as far away from Planned Parenthood as possible.

You Can't Say That

Our lefty friends call it “controlling the narrative.” In plain English it means controlling what people are allowed to say.

Whatever nonsense people talk about the First Amendment it remains patently clear that you are not allowed to say certain things. The name of the game in politics is to be the guys to control what is allowed to be said, who get to say: “I can’t believe what I just heard!”

In the aftermath of his month from hell, Senator Obama doesn’t want us to talk about character and the company he keeps. He wants to talk about the issues. Translation: He wants to stop people talking about his snooty Whole Foods arugula culture and his disreputable lefty friends.

And even John McCain has got into the act, sending a message to the Republican Party in North Carolina imploring them to stop running an ad featuring the racist Rev. Wright. But Instapundit Glenn Reynolds wonders what the flap is all about.

MICKEY KAUS: "What exactly is so terrible about that North Carolina GOP ad?" Seems like a pretty typical political ad to me, too. Watch it yourself and see what you think.

An emailer writes to Instapundit to explain the whole thing. It’s an extension of the Democrats’ “Don’t question our patriotism” meme.

Don’t question their patriotism, don’t question their economic policies, don’t question their tax policies, don’t question their record in office, don’t question their character, don’t question their shady business and political deaings, don’t question, period.

The great thing in politics is to get your ideas into the public square, to get people talking and thinking about them. But first you have to brave the nay-sayers who will say: “Who is the turkey/racist/sexist/homophobe who just said that?”

Back when Rush Limbaugh was just starting out people would call into the program and breathlessly say: “Rush! You’re not allowed to say that!”

Not any more.

The Company You Keep

Remember the old saying? You can tell a man by the company he keeps.

On the other hand, you can say that you can’t judge a book by its cover.

So the question facing US voters this Fall is whether it matters that Barack Obama counts among his supporters Sixties radical terrorists like Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dorhn.

Maybe it wouldn’t matter if Ayres and Dohrn had renounced their radical follies, but they haven’t. As Hugh Hewitt writes,

Guy Benson, a young journalist friend of mine who works for Chicago’s Sandy Rios Show in my network and hosts his own weekend radio show, went digging, and what he found was the tape from a 2007 reunion of the SDS, on which both Ayers and Dohrn talk at length about how they view America today[.]

What you hear in the tapes is unreconstructed left-wing extremism, with the United States as incipiently fascist, the belly of the beast.

So the question is: can we trust the judgment of a politician who freely associated with these left-wing terrorists? We can deal with his down-the-line big-government-for-every-problem philosophy. It’s wrong, and it hurts millions of people every day. But it is still mainstream.

But of even more concern than his ideas is the fact that his judgment about people and ideas is terribly flawed. It had to have been not to have been able to see the quite obvious anti-American extremism of Ayers and Dohrn or to have objected not just to a handful of Pastor Wright’s sermons but to much of the material published in his church’s bulletin.

We’ve been here before, of course. In the 1950s conservatives raised the question about liberals who had been Communists in the 1930s, and maybe still were. Could we trust them?

The response of liberals then and ever since was telling. How dare you question our patriotism, they said. How dare you accuse us of being Communists. Anyway, you have no right to ask. Anyway, even if we did associate with Communists, what of that? How dare you accuse us of guilt-by-association. They decided that the whole thing was a McCarthyite “witch hunt.” And ever since, whenever anyone raises a question about the allegiance of a liberal, the McCarthyite bloody shirt is waved and we get to see on TV Senator McCarthy looking and sounding sleazy at the Army McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.

Of course, if a Republican senator had ever been within a country mile of an abortion clinic would-be bomber, his career would be toast. All the fine distinctions and the questions about guilt by association would mean nothing in such a case. Nor should they. We expect Republican senators and presidential candidates to have good judgment and we expect to judge their whole lives when they run for President of the United States.

But enough of the finer points. The problem for Democrats is that the Reagan Democrats just aren’t going to vote for a man like Obama. They just don’t trust a guy that has palled around with terrorists. Hewitt:

The Democratic voters of Pennsylvania, like those of Ohio, are the core of the old Democratic Party, the party of Roosevelt, Truman and JFK...


They aren’t going to buy the Obama package, no matter how wonderfully wrapped...


It has nothing to do with race, and it isn’t because they question Obama’s patriotism.


But they don’t and won’t trust his judgment. And they will never be friends with his friends.

That, as they say, is a problem for Democrats in a year when they ought to win the presidential election going away.

What Price Education?

When you subsidize sometehing then you get more of it.

If you subsidize mortgages you get a housing boom.

If you subsidize college you get a ton of colleges.

And other things don’t get made or built or done. The simple rule is that subsidy is a net waste of resources, because resources are scarce. If you overuse them, becuase someone is handing them out for free, then you abuse them.

Conservative Thomas Sowell makes this point rather clear in his three part article on The Economics of College. Part II, and Part III. If people had to pay the true costs of college, they would use much less college, he writes.

But what about the poor? Well, they could raise the money by issuing stock in themselves. Savvy investors could make money off them with equity participation in their careers. And the price would be much less because if college education weren’t subsidized then it wouldn’t cost as much.

Here at Road to the Middle Class we believe that even K-12 education should be free of government subsidy. Most people can afford 3-4 years of basic education. (And charities could help those that can’t.) Then most people would probably do better going to work at 12 or 13 and doing their education in apprenticeships or internships as they went along.

What? Child labor? Yes, and it would do them a power of good. After all, we are not talking about sending children into textile mills or down the mine. We are talking about sending them to McDonalds or even onto the construction site.

But what about 12-year-olds operating construction equipment? Why not? At 12, young boys might actually take instruction from their elders. By the time their hormones are really kicking in at 16 they might be competent behind the wheel. Unlike now.

Liberals Against the Tide

Last week the US Supreme Court decided a Kentucky death penalty case. It ruled that a three-drug sequence for execution by lethal injection was not cruel and unusual punishment. But a day later, to the delight of the New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, Justice John Paul Stevens “renounced the death penalty.”

Er, not to put too fine a point upon it, Your Honor, but the death penalty is the law of the land. You are sworn to uphold it.

Did you know, by the way, that liberal groups are working like mad to stop Ward Connerly’s Civil Rights Initiatives, coming up for a vote in four states in November? They are contesting the initiative in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and Nebraska. But they are not arguing on the merits. Oh no. As Harry Stein writes in City Journal:

Knowing that such anti-preference initiatives enjoy strong public support... the activists have zero interest in waging these fights on the merits. Rather, their goal is to keep the initiatives off the ballot by any means necessary, up to and including political chicanery and outright physical intimidation.

Let’s see. Missouri. Reminds me of the Missouri Compromise. Nebraska. Reminds me of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Sound familiar? They should. They were fateful milestones on the road to the Civil War back in the early to mid nineteenth century.

Then, as now, an intransigent minority was putting road blocks in the way of civil rights. In those days, before the Civil War, the political argument was over allowing slavery in the newly-admitted states. Now it is an argument over when, if ever, we are going to stop race-based preferences in government employment, contracting, and schooling.

Here’s what I suggest to you liberals. Play fair. Don’t try, as Justice Stevens is apparently trying to do, to subvert the will of the people with shenanigans on the Supreme Court. The people are strongly in favor of a death penalty.

Don’t try, as these lefty groups are trying to do, to trip up Ward Connerly and his Civil Rights Initiatives. The whole point of democracy is that the people get to decide. If they are wrong, then it is probably better to let them have their way and experience their mistake for themselves.

But if you hold up the will of the people, and dam up their clearly-expressed preferences in tactical shenanigans then the chances are that when the dam bursts, as it will in the end, it will end up flooding the fruited plain with a raging river. And that’s not good for anyone.

Obama's Three Unforced Errors

Government is always the rule of the few over the many. Always.

You may think that is obvious, but a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to convince us otherwise. Politicians, for example.

But if government is always the rule of the few, then politicians are always elitists. That puts politicians in a bit of a box because the royal road to winning elections is to convince the voters that “s/he cares about people like me.”

That is why Senator Obama’s three recent unforced errors could be so damaging. They spoil the tear the comfortable illusion that Obama the elitist is OK because he cares about people like me.

They also penetrate the veil of illusion that the Democratic Party maintains that it is the party of the little guy, civil rights, and patriotism despite all the evidence to the contrary.

In the Bittergate (or Bitterquiddick) incident we have Obama treating the working-class whites of Pennsylvania as objects. It’s true his remarks were, from an elite point of view, understanding and thoughtful. But they still showed that for Obama, the working-class whites are the Other. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the “little people.” Bittergate seemed to suggest that it was not.

In the Rev. Wright controversy another veil was punctured. Democrats are supposed to be the party of civil rights. This has been more and more difficult to maintain over the years as Democrats have supported race-based policies and condoned the frank racism of black leaders. Democrats didn’t need to have the racist Rev. Wright in the news.

In the Ayres/Dohrn flap voters are being reminded that the domestic terrorists of the 1960s are considered Just Folks in the Democratic Party. Most Americans, particularly white male Americans don’t get a pass like that. Imagine a Republican candidate with pals in the Ku Klux Klan or militia guys like Timothy McVeigh. Voters don’t need to be reminded that the reflex of many elite Democrats is to Blame America First.

Rush Limbaugh this morning says that none of this matters to Obama supporters. For them, Obama is a likeable chap who believes in the future. The past is the past. Forget it.

As usual, Rush is right. The question is whether the Obama image of a likeable uniter working for the future is getting a little tarnished of late.

Because the truth about Obama is that he is the representative of an old and discredited politics of the past.

The Way to Rise in America

Today America’s thoughtful Mom, Peggy Noonan, muses over the Obama setback, the end of the honeymoon and the revelation of Senator Obama as a normal politician.

The problem is his obvious inexperience, a problem for older voters. “They are not hostile to his race, they are skeptical of his inexperience.”

But then she writes a little about the charge of elitism, which is obviously particularly grating for Michelle Obama, child of a working-class home. How could she be possibly branded as elitist?

But America is full of people who started low, rose high and internalized what the right people think, which is another way of saying what the elites think. To rise in America is to turn left, unless you are very, very tough or protected by privilege of the financial or familial kind.

She is right, of course. You can rise in the United States in the flyover country of business, but you don’t really “rise;” you don’t exist in the way that a rising star in politics, media, culture, or academia exists.

That’s because politics, media, culture, and the academy are all solidly liberal and solidly closed to people who “don’t think like us.” The female university administrator Jane Canney put it so well, according to Mike S. Adams. She didn’t want to invite black conservative Star Parker to speak at the university, she said, because she just didn’t feel “comfortable” with the sponsors, the Young America’s Foundation.

There you have the challenge for the next generation of conservatives. It’s not that the liberal go along to get along culture is corrupt, although it is. It is not that the liberal menu of political issues is stale and harmful to ordinary Americans, although it is. It is not that the liberal-staffed government sector is dysfunctional and wasting dollars by the trillion, though it is. It is not every time you turn around you are being bothered by a liberal health Nazi, a liberal safety Nazi, or a liberal climate-change Nazim, although you are.

The problem is that a conservative of good will has a terrible struggle developing and sustaining a career in the public square against the “disomcomfort” of the reigning liberal administrators.

That is something we must change.

Dems Get Tough Questions

Democratic partisans are outraged today after ABC’s Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos asked tough questions at the Dem debate the previous night in Philadelphia.

Tom Shales in the Washington Post.

It was another step downward for network news — in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

The problem is that they were asking questions about Bittergate and Sixties lefty terrorist William Ayres.

Hugh Hewitt liked the debate.

Senator Obama looked terrible last night —halting and apologetic, constantly on the defensive even though Gibson and Stephanopoulos did not press him beyond a follow-up or two on his most damaging associations with Pastor Wright and William Ayers.

What do you think? Was Hewitt watching the same debate as Shales?

Hewitt has been making a point recently of running audio clips on his show featuring halting ad libs by the Great Unifier. I guess that is what you call “defining” the candidate of the other side.

Of course, the Democrat partisans are right. What does it matter if Obama sat on a board a decade ago with William Ayres? Obama is what he is and you shoudn’t convict him of guilt-by-association.

But we would appreciate a little fair play and consistency.

After all, every Republican officeholder in the land knows that if he accidentally stood next to David Duke at an airport check-in counter 30 years ago, he is automatically a racist. If he did that he’s gone. No complaint about guilt-by-association, no trial in the court of public opinion. No need for that; no time for that. He’s gone.

At NRO, Jim Geraghty has a message for Sen. Obama

Welcome to the big leagues, rookie.

But, dahling, this is all so sophomoric!

McCain: Dem Tax Increase is "Change"

We knuckle-dragging bitter-end conservative Republicans have been worried about John McCain. And for good reason. He opposed just about every sensible economic policy that President Bush put forward. He opposed the recession-fighting tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. Just what planet was he on?

Yes, of course. Beltway, Third Rock from the Sun.

But now that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee for president he’s coming home to the logical, epistemological, and moral reality of being a Republican candidate for president.

The reality of being a Republican candidate is that, if Republicans aren’t for tax cuts, then what’s the point of the Republican Party?

So John McCain in his economic policy speech Monday started out by riffing on “change.”

[M]any in Congress think Americans are under-taxed. They speak as if letting you keep your own earnings were an act of charity, and now they have decided you’ve had enough. By allowing many of the current low tax rates to expire, they would impose — overnight — the single largest tax increase since the Second World War. Among supporters of a tax increase are Senators Obama and Clinton. Both promise big "change." And a trillion dollars in new taxes over the next decade would certainly fit that description.

So he’s going to lower the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, extend the Bush tax cuts, eliminate the AMT, and he’s signing onto the alternate flat tax concept that’s been floating around.

What we need is a simpler, a flatter, and a fair tax code. As president, I will propose an alternative tax system. When this reform is enacted, all who wish to file under the current system could still do so. And everyone else could choose a vastly less complicated system with two tax rates and a generous standard deduction.

So that’s all right.

But the real long-term job is making a start on dimantling the liberal patronage state. You know what I mean (2008 numbers):

• Pensions: $911.6 billion
  
  
• Health Care: $925.0 billion
  
  
• Education: $848.2 billion
  
  
• Defense: $730.8 billion
  
  
• Welfare: $445.2 billion

Compassion or no compassion, there’s a lot of pure patronage in there and not a lot of money helping people.

But don’t expect John McCain to do much about that.

Theocracy Here We Come!

Liberals have been worrying for six years about the looming theocracy. Well, it’s obvious. Bush is a Christian. Jesus is his favorite philosopher. And he went on a Crusade in Iraq.

Now he’s the first president ever to greet a pope on his landfall in the United States. “Bush Cozies Up to Pope.” That’s the subhead of an ABC News article about the pope’s arrival and Bush’s decision to go out to Andrews Aif Force Base to greet him.

It’s the first time that Bush will leave the White House to greet a foreign dignitary[.]

Two and two makes four. ’Nuff Said.

The point of Pope Benedict is not Bush or theocracy, or even the issue du jour, the Church’s sex abuse scandal.. It is his clear and direct strategy to revive the mission and the spirit of the church. Christianity is the religion of love. That is why the pope’s first encyclical was titled “Deus Caritas Est,” or God is Love. Then there was the second encyclical, “Spe Salvi,” or Saved in Hope.

Now the pope is coming to the United States, the most religious and most Christian modern nation in the world. In fact, religious adherence has increased in the United States in the modern era instead of decreasing, as it has done in Europe, according to Finke and Stark in The Churching of America

Do you think this guy has a Message or something?

Liberals' and Obama's God Problem

A liberal friend confided the other day that Democrats were having a problem communicating with the American people about God.

I replied: Well of course. Liberals champion the Enlightenment. Their political party, the Democratic Party, is the secular party.

That is essentially what Senator Obama confirmed to a group of well-heeled San Francisco liberals when he excused the “bitterness” of working-class voters in Pennsylvania and the rust belt.

It’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment. . . .

And it’s not surprising that Obama would say this to a bunch of San Francisco Democrats. That’s what elite liberals believe and what they say to each other in their faculty lounges, in their activist meetings, and in their liberal churches.

In this view of reality, of course, liberals are the enlightened ones that are able to mediate between the cruel world and the helpless bitterness of their victim constituents. Liberals compassionately provide programs to ease the pain.

Against this “conventional wisdom,” to use the words of the most conventional liberal of them all, John Kenneth Galbraith, are the words of a Chinese man, a “Dr. Wu.” His words are retailed by David Aiken in Jesus in Beijing, a study of Christianity in China.

(It is an astonishing story.)

For years, decades, “Dr. Wu” said, the Chinese people have wondered what made the West so powerful. What was it, the magic bullet that had allowed the upstart West to dominate and humiliate China, the Middle Kingdom, most ancient and most glorious of civilizations?

At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful.

Obviously there is a powerful disconnect between “Dr. Wu” and the conventional liberal position, shared by presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), that religion is merely a superstition for frightened and bitter minds.

But that just raises another question. What is it about Christianity that makes it so powerful? And if it so powerful, why are liberals driving it out of the public square?

Politics is Politics, But...

Are you becoming as offended as I am by the Democrats’ unilateralist approach to foreign policy?

I thought that Democrats were all supposed to be noble multilateralists and concerned about America’s good name in the world.

Obviously, Democrats are deeply concerned that the world think well of us when it comes to dealing with global Islamic extremism. But it’s obvious that they don’t give a damn when it comes to trade.

Here’s news item from Joshua Goodman and Mark Drajem at Bloomberg reporting on House action on the free-trade pact with Colombia.

The Democratic-controlled House voted 224-195 yesterday to deny President George W. Bush’s request for a vote on the trade pact within 90 days, likely postponing action until after the November elections. It is the first time Congress has refused a presidential request to pass a trade agreement.

You wonder, of course. Why would the Democrats give a damn about trade? It’s not as if Democrats have any dog in the race. They all work for the government (including government universities) or for non-profit foundations. Why should they care if the last five industrial-union workers lose their jobs in Pennsylvania?

And anyway, the pact is mainly about lowering import tariffs in Colombia, not the US!

It’s not as if the notoriously partisan President Bush hasn’t gone the extra mile adding to the free-trade pact with Colombia stupid labor and environmental provisions that Democrats like in order to appease their labor and environmental base.

It’s a bit late for Democrats to be standing up for hard-pressed workers in Pennsylvania. The cake was baked fifty years ago when the political culture taught union leaders to fight for labor agreements that basically promised billions in future corporate profits to the workers on the rather rash assumption that a corporation that was earning big bucks in 1948 would still be doing so 50 years later.

One thing you can say for Democrats. For one shining moment, back in the 1960s, they led the nation; they stood on high principle. They made the nation deal with its race problem.

But that’s about it. On everything else, it is Republicans that appeal to the better angels of our nature.

On top of that, watch President Obama or Clinton push the pact through Congress anyway on a quiet weekend in 2009.

Earth to Dem voters: Does it bother you that your leaders keep doing this to you?

Is Google Smart or What?

Earlier this week a new website went up. It is usgovernmentrevenue.com. It uses the technology developed for usgovernmentspending.com and applies to it government taxes and revenue.

Announcing usgovernmentrevenue.com!

Now you can go to usgovernmentrevenue.com and get the scoop on government receipts for all governments, federal, state, and local in the United States. Right now the data is complete for 1970 to 2013. Our crack data analysis team is extending the reach of the data by ten years every day. So tonight we should have data back from 1960 online.

And you can get all the graphs and charts you could imagine.

This is the website that could save the planet.

Of course, as soon as we got the domain name propagated across the internet, our crack sitemap team at usgovernmentrevenue.com immediately set up a site map and sent it to Google.

Oh all right. I admit it. That’s not quite true. We tried to set up the site with Google about 8 hours after the usgovernmentrevenue.com domain had been created and ran into a brick wall. The servers at Google said they’d never heard of it. So we had to wait a couple of hours for Google’s domain servers to catch up. Imagine!

Today is a day which will live in history.

Today the first Google Search was recorded on SiteMeter. Amazing, you might say, for a site up only a few days. How did the eager searcher have the patience to dig down through pages and pages of search results to find usgovernmentrevenue.com?

Ah, ye of little faith. Have you no confidence in Google?

Someone did a search for “historical federal revenues graph” and Google put usgovernmentrevenue.com as the #1 search item.

Is Google smart or what? They just know what’s important.

Are We Safe, Mr. President?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) tells it like it is. Yesterday, he told his colleagues on the Senate floor:

“Is the war in Iraq making America safer? By all accounts, the answer…is ‘no.’”

He’s right, of course, but for the wrong reason. Of course the Iraq War isn’t making us safer, not in the sense that seatbelts make us safer.

But it is pretty certain that a pullout from Iraq, as Gen. Petraeus testified yesterday, would make us less safe.

The war in Iraq is a battle in the great western war of conquest, the war of the modern commercial world of cities and trading against the ancient world of tribe and pillage.

The Middle East is the last holdout against this vast project and so that is where the battle is being joined.

Five hundred years ago when traders from Europe wanted to trade with the fabulously rich country of India they had to wait until they could do ocean navigation, build ships big enough to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean. They had to do that because the rapacious rulers of the Middle East, like robber barons in the mountain passes of the Alps, took too much in tribute from the trade between India and Europe to make it worthwhile.

Yesterday General Petraeus reported on the gradual progress that the United States is making in Iraq. Nobody can know if it will all work out.

So we cannot know if we are safer.

But we do know that the world of cities and freedom and trading and trust, and the world of the western team is our way. And the world of the tribe, of piracy and slavery and plunder, is their way.

Some people say that there is no good reason for the conflict in the Middle East. Maybe there isn’t

But we know that the west has always needed a navy and an army to enforce its regime of trading and trust. So why should things be any different now?

The Real Meaning of Honor

Honor is a much abused word.

Mostly it is abused by people who say: How dare you question my honor?

Honor, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, is bravery in men and chastity in women. If you think that’s all baloney, then try telling a man he’s a wimp and a woman she’s a whore and see where it gets you.

The point is this. Honor in men is the absolute commitment not to break and run when standing shoulder to shoulder with his fellow soldiers in the face of certain death.

It was honor, writes W. Thomas Smith, that made John McCain refuse the Vietnamese offer of a ticket home.

Wracked with dysentery, having been tortured as a POW for nearly eight months (he would be imprisoned for another five years), at times suicidal... and beaten and bayoneted during his capture; McCain simply said “no.”

McCain’s honor saved him from the dishonor of providing the North Vietnamese with a stunning propaganda stunt, to

Show the world a “merciful” North Vietnamese government, while simultaneously creating a sense among other American prisoners that the “blue bloods” among the POW ranks would easily accept preferential treatment.

John McCain’s father was an admiral, at that time commander of naval forces in the Pacific. Imagine what the anti-war folks could have done with that.

However politics or business may work, an armed service needs people of honor. It is not a noble thing, but a practical thing.

Putting others ahead of oneself, being honest, and – to borrow an oft-uttered phrase – “being a Boy Scout” is a part of the mix which drill instructors have always tried to whip into raw recruits. Moral men simply make better, more-disciplined fighters who will put the unit above themselves. So as a consequence, former fighters are, more often than not, going to be good, moral people.

Of course, our liberal masters don’t really like this. They understand that the spirit of honor that permeates the armed forces is a culture that could one day be turned upon them.

That is why they work so hard to attack the US Armed Forces whenever they are accused of wrongdoing.

More People Entering Work Force

The unemployment rate was out today, up to 5.1 percent. As usual the headline “80,000 Jobs Slashed” was not the important story.

If you look at the Labor Department’s press release (archived) you will see that the interesting number is in the Household Data. It shows that the Civilian labor force increased by 410,000 last month and that the number of people “not in labor force” declined by 225,000.

What does that mean? Does it mean that people are flooding into the labor force looking for jobs so they can avoid foreclosure on their homes? Does it mean that people see job opportunities? Does it mean that laid-off people are starting new businesses?

At this time of the business cycle, the numbers in the Household Survey (from a BLS survey of households) are typically more optimistic than the numbers in the Establishment Survey (from a survey of employers). But what does that mean?

Anyway, the stock market is going sideways today. That’s because the unemployment rate is usually considered a lagging indicator. Financial markets are typically looking round the corner, six months to a year ahead.

The trouble is that you can’t really see what’s round the corner. That is why markets fluctuate.

Who's The Fighter?

Academics and government employees like Barack Obama for president, writes Michael Barone, because they are peacable souls who don’t like conflict.

Academics and public employees (and of course many, perhaps most, academics in the United States are public employees) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war.

Of course there is more than sentiment here. War competes for public-sector dollars with education and domestic government programs.

But Clinton and McCain are fighters. They appeal to the Scotch Irish types in America, the kind of people who supported Andrew Jackson went he ran against John Quincy Adams for president in 1828.

Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, "If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you."

In other words, if Obama gets to be the Democratic nominee for president we really will have a choice not an echo.

In my view, the idea that academics prefer the arts of peace is a little overdrawn. Academics have been ruthless in their purging of conservative voices in the academy and in their general marginalization of conservative ideas. And when it comes to opposing reform of the welfare state they stop at nothing.

But academics like to have someone else do the dirty work for them: policemen, tax collectors, and human rights commissions.

But I get the point.

Dem Divide: It Really Isn't Funny

It’s easy for Republicans to snigger at the problems the Democrats are having in nominating a candidate for president.

After all, they deserve it. For forty years since the civil rights era they have sat at the political table and played race card after race card.

Har, har, they would say to the white-faced players at the table as they cleaned up, and not just money, but power and the love of beautiful women.

But now it is looking as if their race politics is forcing the Democrats to nominate a very not-ready-for-prime-time candidate for president.

And there’s nothing the Democrats can do about it. That’s because their candidate is black. If the Democratic superdelegates ditch Obama—for another flawed candidate—then they are risking the fundamental base of their party support, the almost unanimous support of the black electorate. James Edmund Pennington calls it the Democrats’ devil’s bargain,

[the] devil’s bargain with American blacks, a bargain that promises, in exchange for nearly all black votes all the time, fealty to certain imperatives, be it a continuation of social policies that are poisonous to blacks and the nation, silence and denial in the face of widespread destructive behavior patterns at the root of much of the black American dilemma, obsequious veneration of hate mongering, racial arsonist black "leaders", or, as in the case of Obama, the nomination of dangerously untested, thinly-resumed candidates who may be deeply flawed and unelectable. For forty years this has been the bargain and it must hold now.

Devil’s bargains end in an almighty smash-up. When it comes, it’s not going to be at all funny.

But let’s face it, American blacks were going to have to come face to face with reality, the reality that life is not just race and slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination.

Why not this year?

Education vs. Family

In the sleeper movie hit “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” the heroine Toula breaks away from her imprisonment in the family Greek restaurant by getting some computer classes at the local college.

That’s a common pattern, a liberal friend told me. Children who don’t get an education are stuck in the ghetto of their family and don’t “get on.”

But for me, a light went off. For if the mission of the university is to break children away from their traditional family community, then isn’t the mission of every liberal program the same? Whether it’s education, health care, or welfare, every government dollar loosens a woman’s tie (and it’s usually a woman) to her family.

Isn’t that just what liberals want?

The question is: how much of a good thing is this, really? We westerners may all agree that it’s important to free women from patriarchal domination. But when does a government program get to the point of breaking up family ties so much that children grow up stunted from lack of parental attention, as Minette Marrin argues.

Increasingly it seems parents can’t or won’t spend time and care on their children. Increasingly both parents are working; increasingly single parents are anxious, harried and time-poor; increasingly children are consigned to inadequate day care and nurseries; increasingly they are offered wraparound educare (promoted by Gordon Brown [and Hillary Clinton]). Increasingly we see the results.

Many of us take it for granted that it is a good idea for adults to have independent fulfilling careers and consign their children to the care of help professionals. But there seems to be a cost.

[H]alf of all toddlers arrive at primary school unable to speak properly for their age. Their numbers are growing. To say this suggests a widespread failure of socialisation is surely an understatement.

When you take people away from their families and put them into institutional settings, be it childcare, school, factory, or office park, you lose something.

And we did not just get here by accident. We got here because the progressive class wanted us here.

The job of conservatives in the next few years is to develop a compelling critique of the liberal world in which we live. Then we should offer the American people a way out of this death spiral. We should offer them family and hope.