Can Obama Stimulate Republicans?

After the thunder of the Wall Street Journal conservative edit-page folks, now we get the opinion of the liberal news side (don’t ask why the Journal has two opinion pages).

Today the Journal’s Gerald F. Seib wonders whether President Obama will be able to sweeten the stimulus pot enough to attract some Republican votes. President Obama’s heart is in the right place, but the stimulus package creates a conflict between the need for fast action on the economy and his promise of an end to partisan wrangling.

The passage of the bill without a single Republican vote showed the tension between those dual Obama goals. By ceding so much authority to House Democratic leaders to write and then steer the initial version of the big stimulus package — as opposed to offering his own version and trying to dictate legislative strategy — Mr. Obama got action quickly. But he also got a bill with fewer concessions to Republican wishes than the president himself seems willing to make, and the vote showed it.

A stimulus plan without Republican support would be a replay of the first year partisanship of the Carter and the Clinton administrations. In neither case did the overt liberal partisanship turn out too well for the president and his party. That contrasted with President Reagan, who did get bipartisan majorities for his proposals.

Preventing a similar outcome now likely requires expansion and modification of the tax portion of the stimulus package to accommodate Republican wishes for a more business-friendly mix, and further reduction of the questionable spending provisions in the House bill. Republicans need a reason to swim against the tide in their party.

But here’s an idea. How about a stimulus package that actually stimulates the economy? Loyal partisan that he is, Seib rather dances away from the fact that the stimulus plan is nearly 90 percent to-the-victor-goes-the-spoils. There really is no reason for Republicans to sign on to any stimulus package that doesn’t genuinely stimulate the economy.

So far all we’ve seen from the Obama adminstration is silly subsidies and tax credits. That sort of thing reduces the real economic issues into special interest goodies.

If the Obama adminstration wanted to do one thing to help Americans rather than Democratic supporters (who really don’t work in the real economy, if they work at all) it would be to lower the corporate income tax rate. If it did that it could at least hold its head up at liberal dinner parties because it had avoided the awful sin of lowering personal income tax rates on the rich. And it would lower the water level in the economy so that more corporations could get their feet on the bottom of the pool.

Meanwhile here’s some unsolicited advice to Congressional Republicans. Don’t cave unless you get something that really helps the economy and really helps ordinary Americans.

That Stimulus Sickness

Everybody now knows what happens when the government decides to give everyone “affordable housing.” It takes a while, but eventually it takes down the whole financial system. That’s because, Virginia, when worthy Democratic voters that don’t pay their bills get mortgages, banks and Fannies and Freddies end up with toxic assets and nobody knows if they are worth anything..

So now our Democratic friends are proposing to stimulate the economy with a spending bill that, wait for this, increases the subsidies for health care. That’s according to the Wall Street Journal edit page.

The more we dig into the pile of spending and tax favors known as the "stimulus bill," the more amazing discoveries we make. Namely, Democrats have apparently decided that the way to gun the economy is to spend even more on health care.

The intriguing thing about all this is that experts now agree, both from the left and the right, that life-style is the key ingredient in health and life expectancy. This means that when the government increases the subsidy for health care they are gunning the engines on the national cigarette boat. So now we are heading towards the sound of the next big economic waterfall, the point at which government will have to cut back on health care, even faster than before.

The provisions are innocent enough. The Feds are going to increase the federal share of Medicaid reimbursement. They are going to offer Medicaid to the unemployed. They are going to subsidize Cobra benefits for people laid off. This is all very compassionate and thoughtful. Except for one thing:

When you subsidize people not to work, you get more nonworkers.

That’s the problem with the whole welfare state. People work because they have to. They work for food, for housing, for health care, for transportation. When the government subsidizes it then more and more people, especially the low-skilled, low-paid, decide against work. You can’t blame them. Who would work unless they have to?

We’ve been saying here for a while that the only way we are going to reform the welfare state is after it “hits the buffers.” We have mixed feelings about this. Good people, ordinary people are going to be hurt. And even people that never gave into the temptation of the welfare state are going to be hurt.

On the other hand, if you believe that “free” health care or “free” education isn’t going to cost you in the end, we’ve got a bridge we want you to look at.

Stimulating Democratic Voters

Here’s a thought for you eternal optimists. Maybe the Democratic stimulus bill is so egregious that it will give stimulus a bad name.

Any Republican that wanted an excuse to oppose it now surely has enough ammunition. You could get all the ammo you needed just from today’s Wall Street Journal.

First, there is the top editorial. The Journal edit page folks point out that there isn’t much economic stimulus in the bill at all.

Some $30 billion, or less than 5% of the spending in the bill, is for fixing bridges or other highway projects. There’s another $40 billion for broadband and electric grid development, airports and clean water projects that are arguably worthwhile priorities.



Add the roughly $20 billion for business tax cuts, and by our estimate only $90 billion out of $825 billion, or about 12 cents of every $1, is for something that can plausibly be considered a growth stimulus.

Twelve cents on the dollar of stimulus ain’t exactly going to stir the sleeping beast.

Next, there’s supply-side economist Alan Reynolds. He points out that the stimulus is mostly going to sectors of the economy that aren’t suffering too much from the recession. Like government employees.

The December unemployment rate was only 2.3% for government workers and 3.8% in education and health. Unemployment rates in manufacturing and construction, by contrast, were 8.3% and 15.2% respectively. Yet 39% of the $550 billion in the bill would go to state and local governments. Another 17.3% would go to health and education — sectors where relatively secure government jobs are also prevalent.

Well, OK. No serious person imagines that the stimulus is much more than a payoff to Democratic voters. Of course, you needn’t expect the MSM to point that out to alert voters. Move along there; nothing to see here. In fact you might even expect a loyal MSMer to worry that there wasn’t enough money for government in the stimulus.

Lastly, there is the Journal’s house liberal. Wouldn’t you know that Thomas Frank chooses this exact moment to criticize the notion of privatizing roads and bridges. He’s worried about the danger that the stimulus bill might include incentives to privatize infrastructure development. He sneers at privatization lobbyists who urge that governments lock in private investment before private investment money gets committed to other projects.

But there’s good reason to be reluctant to privatize. It doesn’t take an MBA to figure out that we didn’t build our Interstate highways in order to create opportunities for venture capitalists. The purpose was public service.

Oh really. I thought the whole idea of infrastructure development was to give jobs to union workers, fees to investment bankers and kickbacks to state and local politicians. Silly me.

It is the canard of “public service” that fuels the self-dealing monstrosities like the current stimulus bill in Congress. When can we ever hope for a time in which politicians (and particularly Democrats) stop dumping these wasteful proposals on the American people with the assistance of willing accomplices in the media like Thomas Frank? It ain’t public service, Mr. Frank. It is just politics as usual.

The idea behind bridges and highways is not “public service.” It is economic development. We want to build economic infrastructure that will help move goods and services around and save human and natural resources in doing so. It is, if you like, public service to build a road in Yellowstone National Park so people can drive around in an area of natural beauty. But for regular infrastructure, the purpose is economic. Modern political and economic theory and practice tells us that profit-seeking businessmen are much better at doing this than vote-seeking politicians.

Some day even dyed-in-the-wool liberal MSMers like Thomas Frank will admit this. But probably not before liberals bring the entire economic house down around our ears.

The truth is that almost everything the government does is a cruel waste of scarce natural and human resources. And it looks like the current victory-lap stimulus bill of President Barack Obama and Speak Nancy Pelosi and liberal commentator Thomas Frank is no exception.

But there is always Hope for Change. Maybe the more that ordinary Americans get to see of the stimulus bill the less they will continue to Hope that the Obama Administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress represent anything within a country mile of Change.

When in "Doubt"

When I saw a trailer for the Meryl Streep movie “Doubt” I was turned off. You could just tell what a movie about accusations of sexual misconduct at a Catholic school would be all about.

But then, reading reviews, I started to wonder. Maybe it was doable, after all.

After seeing it last night, I can say that the movie is a miracle. No, the miracle is not the acting of Streep as the Catholic high school principal nun or Philip Seymour Hoffman as the priest that the nuns suspect is abusing a young high-school boy. Make no mistake. Their peformances were excellent. No, the miracle is the screen-play by writer-director John Patrick Shanley. The plot beautifully lived up to its title.

(Plot spoilers ahead) Did Father Flynn actually abuse the boy? We never know for sure. Is the authoritarian go-by-the-rules style of Sister Aloysius a relic of the Stone Age? The movie does not say. Is Father Flynn a practiced liar? Who knows? Was Aloysius right to pursue Flynn out of the parish? And what good did it do if he just gets shifted to another parish and another school? Good question. The movie, miraculously, doesn’t tell us what to think.

We also get charming cultural touches. We see the celibate nuns eating in solemn silence under the baleful eye of Aloysius; but the celibate priests laugh and smoke at their meal.

I’ll tell you. Just when you think that Hollywood cannot be redeemed, Hollywood comes up with a movie called “Doubt”that really deserves to be called a triumph.

Liberal Law Takes Freedom Away

It’s amazing how many people look at the current sue-mad society and wonder what’s the problem. It isn’t that hard.

The problem is fairly simple. It is the tangle introduced into the law by powerful government. Today we have the notion of law as the balancing of interests competing with the liberal law of “rights” all gummed up with the forest of adminstrative law that arises out of the enormous reach of government.

President Obama has called for a new era of responsibility, writes Philip K. Howard. It’s a wonderful idea. Just don’t try it out yourself or you’ll get creamed.

But there’s a threshold problem for our new president. Americans don’t feel free to reach inside themselves and make a difference. The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into everyday choices.

The examples are all around us.

Most doctors say they wouldn’t advise their children to go into medicine. Government service is seen as a bureaucratic morass, not a noble calling. Make a difference? You can’t even show basic human kindness for fear of legal action. Teachers across America are instructed never to put an arm around a crying child.

Again. It’s not that hard. These problems are all problems because politicians, acting with the consent of the voters, have injected government power into areas that didn’t used to have government involved.

We have taught people to expect miracles from medicine. So people sue when medicine isn’t perfect. We have created vast bureaucracies to second-guess private actors. And it’s not surprising that teachers need to watch their step. They are acting as custodians of the nationi’s children in government custodial facilities. Of course their every action should be governed by administrative law.

Philip K Howard thinks he has a solution. He just wants to create a zone of freedom.

Freedom has a formal structure. It has two components:



1) Law sets boundaries that proscribe what we must do or can’t do — you must not steal, you must pay taxes.



2) Those same legal boundaries protect an open field of free choice in all other matters.

That’s all very well, but you can’t allow government officials “an open field of free choice.” The whole point of government is that government spending and regulation must be tightly regulated or it will descend into corruption, and spending money for no return.

If you want an open field of free choice then you’ve got to take the government out of it. So if you want teachers to touch children again, you’ve got to scale back government schooling. If you want doctors free of lawsuits you’ve got to take 3rd party payment out of the equation so that doctors have a one-on-one relationship with their patients.

But that goes against the very grain of modern society. The whole idea of modern society is that an educated elite gets to call the big shots on everything, generally through big government adminstrative programs or through big government administrative law.

You can’t have responsibility in that kind of a culture. Instead you get jealously guarded rights and endless second-guessing and punitive lawsuits.

Don’t like the era of rights and second guessing? Then get government out of the way.

Rove Sets Out Bush Legacy

People haven’t been obsessing about Bush’s legacy the way they obsessed over the Clinton legacy eight years ago. What was that Clinton legacy, anyway, and does anyone care?

But Karl Rove knows his duty, and so he’s set forth his list of has boss’s achievements.

• First, Bush was right about Iraq
  
• Bush was right to go after nations that harbored terrorists.
  
• Bush was right to fight AIDS in Africa.
  
• He was right to cut tax rates, on wages, dividends, and capital.
  
• “Mr. Bush was right to match tax cuts with spending restraint.”
  
• He was right to do Medicare Part D drug benefit.
  
• He was right to do No Child Left Behind.
  
• He was right to be pro-life.
  
• He was right not to respond to Democrats who called him “a liar and a loser.”
  

It’s helpful to have Karl Rove’s take. It provides a benchmark on what the Bush administration thought it was doing, and wants us to think of it, now that it’s all over. For this conservative, what is palpably missing is a serious effort to start a movement away from the welfare state culture of compulsion.

The truth is, I’m not sure I know where to start.

Actually I do. The effort to reform the welfare state and move towards a welfare society begins with women. When women decide that they don’t want the important things in their lives—health care, education, and welfare—run by the government on a model of universal compulsion and brute force masquerading as compassion, then things will start to change.

It’s up to us to help in any way we can.

The Liberal Tipping Point

I sent this to some liberal friends on January 20:

I think we should remember the generation before mine that did the heavy lifting on civil rights and that made today possible.

• The African Americans who fought in WWII in an army that was desegregated by President Truman after they came home.
  
  
• Liberals like Hubert Humphrey who had the courage to split the Democratic Party over civil rights in 1948.
  
  
• Lawyers like NAACP Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall who argued segregation before the Supreme Court rather than in the streets.
  
  
• Activists like Dr. King who led African Americans in an exemplary campaign of non-violence.
  
  
• The African American rank-and-file who overcame their fears to offer their bodies and their lives in the cause of freedom.
  
  
• The young freedom riders, often Jews, who went into the South to register voters at risk of their lives.
  
  
• President Johnson, a Southerner, who pushed the civil rights and voting rights acts through Congress even though he predicted that Democrats would lose the South for a generation.
  
  
• And so many more.

We are inheritors, standing on the shoulders of those who came before. And I am glad to know several liberal men now in their 70s and 80s and appreciate the generosity of spirit that still shines from that generation as it heads for the exits.

What I did not say was this:

Right after the triumph of the civil rights acts came the Tipping Point (to coin a phrase). In 1965 a young Assistant Secretary of Labor put out a report entitled “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” which “hypothesized that the destruction of the Black nuclear-family structure would hinder further progress towards economic, and political equality.” That man was a Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and he was told to shut up.

The year 1964 was liberals’ finest hour. The year 1965 began the descent into hubris. It began the descent into the liberalism of today: cruel, corrupt, unjust, and deluded.

After the Bailout

Many conservatives are skeptical about the bank bailout last fall. All that money thrown at Wall Street fat cats and what do we have to show for it, we grumble.

It is annoying, but the simple fact is that the government cannot let the credit system collapse. Period. And anyway, the banks are not really true private sector institutions. They are GSEs like Fannie and Freddie, only not quite as government-sponsored. Only a little bit pregnant.

No doubt, as Donald Lambro writes, the money expended in the bank bailout in purchase of toxic assets, in preferred shares and so forth, will come back to the government and reduce the deficit. (That will create a new problem, as solons decide they want to spend it rather than save it.)

No, the bigger problem is the way the government has learned to use the credit system to subsidize its favorites and to imagine that it can ease the business cycle. In Britain, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown used to boast that he had abolished “Tory boom and bust.” Now they are ramming his boast down his throat weekly at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Let’s stipulate that the government can do something to ease the business cycle. The question is: how much is enough? And when should it be done and when should the government just get out of the way? Obviously the credit operations of Fannie and Freddie are egregious errors, worse than a crime, a blunder. But we obviously need the government to print money and issue lots of debt when it has a war to fight.

The fact is that the way that the government “helps” in a down cycle is by the resort to inflation. That’s what happened in the Great Depression. That’s what happened in the inflationary/recessionary Seventies. And that’s what happened when Alan Greenspan brought interest rates down in 2001-2003. The key to these interventions is to know when to stop. And the record shows that the government doesn’t know when to stop. That’s why it took $20 to buy an ounce of gold in 1900 and now it takes $800. Today’s dollar will buy the same amount of gold as 2 1/2 cents in 1900.

But why worry? Government bonds are yielding 3 percent right now. From the government’s point of view, it doesn’t matter what it does to the value of the dollar as long as it can sell its bonds on the world market.

Well, it may not matter to the government and all the folks who got to eat lunch in the Capitol Rotunda on January 20. But it matters a lot to the rest of us. Debauching the currency is a crime. It is a crime upon the ordinary people that put their hard earned savings in bank accounts and fixed income securities.

But will we mend our ways after staring into the abyss last fall? Don’t bet your nestegg on it.

Godspeed President Obama

President Obama issued a strong call to service in his inaugural speech today. Recognizing the crisis he spoke firmly about the need for all Americans to participate in the effort of recovery. First he spoke about the problems:

Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

He remembered the previous generations, who toiled that we might enjoy our present prosperity. He celebrated our mongrel heritage.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.

Then he urged America to come together to solve the problems.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies...


Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true... What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

All this is true, and glorious. And in these words we can see in President Obama’s words the opportunity for greatness.

As a conservative, what comes through to me clearly today is that the whole liberal project has come down to this great moment, the day when an African American became president. All over the United States our liberal friends are fulfilled. Today the risks and the courage of the early civil rights movement, when it was dangerous to advocate for civil rights, are redeemed.

For that we say to our liberal friends: well done thou good and faithful servant.

But we reminid our liberal friends of the costs they have burdened on our nation as they pursued this vision. These include the devastation of the low-income family, the gigantic size and weight of government, the truculence of liberals in their government sinecures, and the flight from responsibliity to “rights.”

When President Obama invokes the old things: “hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism,” conservatives shake their heads. Where have you been all this while, Mr President? And what chance do you have in turning your political base, which advocates for people who don’t work much, which doesn’t believe in manly courage, which calls its adversaries haters and worse, and which sneers at patriotism when it’s not accusing people of questioning its patriotism?

When I look at America, I see liberals in the schoolhouse door, liberals making health care cumbersome and expensive, liberals mucking up the housing market, liberals devastating families, liberals discouraging thrift and good husbandry. In January 2009, more than ever, the word must go forth: physician, heal thyself.

If President Obama can turn liberals from hate and the worship of political power to love and the old things, then he will truly take his place as a great President of the United States.

MLK Vision Fulfilled, say Blacks

On the first Martin Luther King holiday since Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, most blacks say the King vision is fulfilled, according to a CNN Poll.

The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King’s vision has been fulfilled in the more than 45 years since his 1963 "I have a dream" speech — roughly double the 34 percent who agreed with that assessment in a similar poll taken last March.

So, you can say that the election of Barack Obama has about doubled the faith of blacks in America.

But then there are whites, and whites are less inclined to believe that King’s legacy has been fulfilled.

"Whites don’t feel the same way — a majority of them say that the country has not yet fulfilled King’s vision," CNN polling director Keating Holland said. However, the number of whites saying the dream has been fulfilled has also gone up since March, from 35 percent to 46 percent.

What does it all mean, anyway? To ask whether King’s vision has been fulfilled is a “feelings” question. It really asks whether the respondent feels good about race relations.

When blacks are asked about King’s vision, what to they think it means? When whites are asked about King’s vision, what do they think it means?

The truth is: whatever people feel, the objective facts are that blatant racism, expressed in laws that limit the rights of non-white races in the public square, is a very small problem today.

And that’s a good thing.

Bush Farewell Address

Last night President Bush, with one weekend left of his term as President of the United States, addressed the nation in a final speech.

It was, as you would expect, almost all about the war on terror. As the president said:

As the years passed [since 9/11], most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning, I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe.

We all tussle and argue about how to direct the firehose of government programs in our direction. But for the president, the reality of his job is omnipresent: to protect the nation from enemies, foreign and domestic.

And so the president laid down a marker, a marker that will be sitting on the desk of the new president.

There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions. But there can be little debate about the results. America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil.

Democrats were insistent that 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch and therefore Bush was to blame. Well, on January 20th, the watch changes, and the new officer of the watch knows that anything that happens after that date happened on his watch.

Conservatives can be glad that President Bush also laid down the gauntlet on good and evil.

America must maintain our moral clarity. I’ve often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.

Some things are wrong, like “murdering the innocent.” Some things are right, like “freeing people from oppression and despair.” It is intriguing that the president uses left-of-center language to speak to his critics on the left.

President Bush, the fair-minded can agree, came to the presidency at a tough time. He served at the end of a time of conservative resurgence, and inherited a bunch of foolishness, from the “wall of separation” between foreign and domestic intelligence that the Clinton adminstration erected in the interests of civil liberties to the follies of Fannie and Freddie that Congress refused to see until the mortgage giants collapsed into a smoking ruin.

President Bush lacked the ability and the desire to dominate the national conversation from the president’s bully pulpit. Some have complained of this almost as a betrayal.

But the truth is that the national conversation is our job, the job of conservative thinkers and commenters. It is up to us to plant and water the seeds that someday a conservative president will display as dazzling blooms in the White House. President Bush served in a time when the old Reagan blooms were fading, with no new ones ready for display.

But we must not despair. We can see, even as we celebrate and honor the historic accession of President-elect Obama, that our Democratic friends have nothing to offer the American people except same-old-same-old.

Our Democratic friends will find out soon enough that the American people demand more than happy talk about Hope and Change. The American people know that something is wrong, and that reform is needed to sweep away the encrusted corruptions and decay of the past. It is a fact that most of those accretions are Democratic and liberal.

We conservatives know that the answer to the concerns of dispirited Americans does not lie in another expansion of government power but in a reduction in the power and the span of the political sector.

A great nation like the United States of America needs a careful balance between the three sectors of society. It needs a Greater Separation of Powers between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

Our liberal friends have built up, over the last century, a society in which everything issues out of the hegemony of the political sector, the sector of force and compulsion. They do not see, and cannot understand, that you cannot have a society of freedom, trust, care, and compassion if everything is decided in the cockpit of political power.

But we conservatives do understand this. It is our duty, and our destiny, as President Bush leaves office, to once more raise high the banner of freedom—political, economic, and moral/cultural—against the tired culture of compulsion that that our liberal friends continue to offer the American people.

China's Cultural Wrench

If you are willing to read just one thing on China, try China’s Massive Wrench by Francesco Sisci over at Asia Times. It is the best thing I have seen that tells just how massive the change is, day to day, in China.

First of all there is the simple notion that China is changing in 30 years, from rural agricultural to urban industrial, what took 200 years in Europe and the US. But China has been undergoing a parallel cultural change.

But this is just a small part of a larger phenomenon: in the past 150 years, China’s complex cultural values have been under constant attack, forcing revision.

Take the Chinese family.

The change started with the family, the cell and basis for society and the state. The ideal family in the 19th century was unchanged from the times of Confucius, some 2,000 years before: three generations under one roof. The older man had many wives and even more children. Each male heir also had many wives and children, all living together in a large courtyard, resembling a small village of dozens of people.

Now, with the single child policy, Chinese society has been turned upside down. Now there are four grandparents and one grandchild.

In the old system, you could hope for one of the many children to distinguish themselves and enter the mandarinate by passing the state examinations. Today, that hope is focused impossibly into a single child.

Then there’s the end of the emperor system. For over 2,000 years the emperor has embodied the state and its people, down even to Mao, the Communist emperor. Even today parents bring their children to Tienanmen Square for a photo dressed as an emperor. But now the state is run by small men who do not embody the state.

For 2,000 years China had, as a religion, a combination of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist notions. That was overthrown during the Communist era, to the extent that, in 1979 when Deng took over, China had no religion. Now the Communist Party is discussing the importance of returning China to religion. The Falungong demonstrations taught the party that if religions with sensible ideas were banned then religions with crazy ideas would fill the gap.

Yet, it also revealed that Chinese people wanted religious values, and the government had to be open to them. Buddhism was favored: it was a religion that had been in China for hundreds of years, Chinese people were very familiar with it, and Buddhist monks had been among the first to denounce the dangers of the Falungong in 1998.



Furthermore, the Chinese leaders realized that the much-feared Christian faiths were not so dangerous after all. In 50 years of communist rule, despite ruthless oppression, Christian Protestants and Catholics had never staged demonstrations in Tiananmen, as Falungong followers had...



Religion is no longer an issue of public security that can be handed over to the police - it is a top social and political issue involving all aspects of society, and therefore all politburo members must be aware of it.

China is changing, more rapidly, perhaps, than any great people has changed in history. Right now, about 15 million people are moving to the city every year. The outcome of the wrenching change in China, economic, political, and cultural, will affect the whole world.

Muslims Return to Sacrifice

What is the meaning of sacrifice? Frederick Turner defines it this way.

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor.

But sacrifice, like anything else, can be abused. In particular, rulers have a way of making their people sacrifice for their own acts of impurity. In the story of Iphigenia in Tauris the king of Tauris (in the Crimea), agonized by his crimes, decides to sacrifice to the gods the next stranger that arrives in Tauris.

In its extreme abuse, sacrifice becomes a blood frenzy. You can see this in the Ghost Shirt movement in the US among the young warriors of the Native American tribes on the western plains, and you can see it in the young men of the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century in China.

So when Ralph Peters talks about the orgy of self-sacrifice among Muslim terrorists, you can get some perspective on what he is talking about.

The big thing about the three Abrahamic religions is that they stopped the blood sacrifice. It starts with Abraham, about to sacrifice his son Isaac when God tells him to sacrifice a ram instead. Then in Christianity, God sacrifices his Son so human fathers don’t have to sacrifice their sons. The same thing happened in Islam, according to Peters.

The Prophet sought to purify the idolatrous devotions of his people, to do away with heartless desert cults...

But now the young men of the Muslim faith are returning to the barbarities of the days before the Prophet.

What’s the meaning of those beheading videos and suicide bombings, the slaughter of fellow Muslims and the exploitation by pagan cults, such as Hamas, of masses of the faithful as human shields? Why stone 13-year-old girls to death? What’s this celebration of blood lust all about?



It’s about the threatened collapse of the Middle East back into an age of human sacrifice - the precise sort of gruesome travesty the Prophet inveighed against.

The thing is: this is not unexpected. When a culture is failing, when everything is going wrong, that is when a society reaches back into the past for the old ways.

After the defeat of World War I, the people of Germany, “the most advanced country in the world,” felt utterly humiliated. It seemed that the new ways that had been developed in the 19th century had failed them. So they found it easy to return to the old ways of Blood and Soil offered to them by Hitler. They were willing to sacrifice in order to find the right way forward.

One of the old ways is human sacrifice. And the greatest sacrifice of all is for a young man to sacrifice his own life. So it’s not surprising in the tumultuous Middle East, reeling from centuries-long humiliations, should turn to the ancient way of human sacrifice.

WattsUp, Pharyngula and Robbers Cave

It’s a nip and tuck battle today between Watts Up With That, run by independent businessman Anthony Watts and Pharyngula, run by P.Z. Myers. They are finalists in the 2008 Weblogs Awards for Best Science Blog that ends today. But it looks as though WUWT will win.

There’s a big difference between the two blogs. Let Pharyngula proprietor P.Z. Myers tell why:

"I want my commenters to be uncivil. There is no virtue in politeness when confronted with ignorance, dishonesty, and delusion.”

Myers, by the way, advertises himself as “a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.”

One commenter on WUWT had this to say about Pharyngula:

I used to subscribe to Pharyngula, but unsubscribed from it due to the excessive frequency of posts and excessive percentage of political and anti-religious posts.

There’s a reason why WUWT is the “nice” site and Pharyngula is the “naughty” site. You can read all about the phenomenon at The Robber’s Cave Experiment performed on a group of boys back in 1954. The concept is simple. When you have two groups of guys in proximity they immediately form into warring gangs, and they immediately differentiate themselves to sharpen their differences. If one group likes to swear, the other group will decide not to swear.

If you want them to stop warring you have to get them to cooperate on a common project. That’s what they did with the two warring tribes at Robber’s Cave, and it worked.

Joe the Plumber Asks a Question

Joe the Plumber goes to Israel and insists to a flock of media that he is not the story.

Ask this chap (pointing to his handler), if you want a story, says he, as the Pajamas Media camera rolls.

Then Joe the Plumber asks a Reuters guy whether he thinks that Israel has a right to defend itself. The reporter responds, yes.

“Have you said it on air,” asks Joe the Plumber?

I’m just a reporter, is the reply.

It’s the liberal way. Don’t look at me, I’m just a reporter. Nothing I can do about it, old chum.

Yeah, you won’t want to do anything to risk your career in media would you?

It’s easy to be a liberal media guy and file sob stories about the latest fashionable victim. It’s easy to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted when you are runninga story using the standard liberal template on a certified liberal protected class.

But when the subject is the hypocrisy of liberalim, then our brave liberal media guy runs for the exit.

That means that our liberal media friends, day by day, miss the great story of our time: the cruelty, the corruption, and the injustice of our liberal political power.

Pelosi's Politics

I often like to say that the Democrats have learned nothing from the last 30 years of Reagan/Bush economic policies. But I have to admit that, privately, I don’t believe it. Surely they must have learned a thing or two about the economy, and twigged onto the 140 year old notion of marginal value that was invented in the single year of 1870 by about three different economists in three different countries.

But when you read Nancy Pelosi in the Washington Post saying, according to Paul Kane:

"Put me down as clearly as you possibly can as one who wants to have those tax cuts for the wealthiest in America repealed[.]"

Well you have to wonder. Doesn’t she get that income tax collections on the wealthy have soared over the Reagan Bush years as marginal tax rates were decreased? Doesn’t she get that when the government increases marginal tax rates as she wants to do then economic growth will be reduced and less jobs will be created?

I know why she doesn’t get it. It’s the politician’s version of reality. Nothing really exists except reelection. That means that nothing exists except having more money with which to buy votes. So why would anyone give up revenue with tax cuts?

Well, the absolutist monarchs of the Enlightenment loved revenue as much as anyone, but they came to realize that you got more revenue with a healthy economy. In their day, they wanted the lovely lolly for their armies. Today, of course, politicians want the money to pay their armies of entitlement beneficiaries. But the principle is the same. Bigger economy equals more revenue equals more money to slosh around among your supporters.

According to Larry Kudlow the Obama people seem to get this. Sort of. His “stimulus” package is still full of pork, of course.

However, it’s interesting just how much the Obama plan has changed since the election. The size has been roughly constant. But the mix of tax cuts and spending increases is now totally different.



Instead of $100 billion worth of tax credits, there are now $300 billion worth of tax cuts. This includes a big new piece for business, more cash-expensing for small-business investment, and a restoration of the five-year tax-loss carry-back, which will especially help banks and homebuilders. It might even result in tax refunds for businesses, and might also allow banks to rid themselves of toxic assets, since the losses will now be spread over many years.

And the Obama people are talking about keeping the Bush tax rate cuts until 2011. Unfortunately the Obama guys are still living in the pre-1870 world. “The problem is that they’re not reducing marginal tax rates on large and small businesses or individuals.”

I say, chaps. How about getting with the consensus on marginal tax rates? The science is in on this, you know. And anyone who is holding out on Marxian labor theories of value, or the prior notions of “exchange” value and “intrinsic” value is really dealing in superstition.

You might even call them “deniers.”

RU Sophisticated?

Time was, Paul Johnson writes, when “sophisticated” was a pejorative—as in “sophist” and “sophistry.” But now it means that you are the cat’s pajamas.

Given that we all now want to be “sophisticated” how do we know if we are?

Not to worry. Doctor Johnson is in, and he will advise you. Here is his ten-point test. Passing grade is 7 out of 10.

1. “Can you remain truly indifferent to what people say or think about you?” If you can (be honest now) you are sophisticated.
   
2. “A sophisticated person knows all, or a very great deal, but rarely chooses to display knowledge.” This is too hard. Who amongst us can resist the temptation to display knowledge and scatter pearls before swine?
   
3. “[I]t is vital to be able to command behind-the-scenes knowledge.” Johnson uses an example: “Did Benjamin Britten first lose interest in choirboys when their voice broke or when pubic hair sprouted?” Hmmm. Maybe I don’t want to be sophisticated after all.
   
4. Then there’s the amusing anecdote. “A sophisticated person ought to be able to make you laugh.” But they would never go on and on and make you bored. Oh no! That would be the worst!
   
5. Then there is behavior. “[A] sophisticated man never inflicts pain except in an attempt to extract information in a good social cause.” The sophisticate is, of course, a gentleman, but more.
   
6. You must never ask to go to the bathroom. Particularly important for women. That means, of course, that you must limit your input of adult beverages.
   
7. “Granted only one moderate-sized suitcase, what do you pack for a weekend at Highgrove or Sandringham?” Oh dear. Don’t have a clue.
   
8. “After such an event, which servants do you tip, and what, and how exactly do you do it?” Worse and worse.
   
9. Finally, if you call on the President, how do you avoid politics? “And how do you decide when it is time to leave?” OK, I know the answer to that one. Keep an eye on the president’s aide.
   

When you think about it, who needs to be sophisticated? It sounds like too much work.

If Ann Coulter Didn't Exist...

Exactly. We’d have to invent her. And if liberals didn’t have such pompous thin skins, Ann Coulter wouldn’t have a job.

The flap over Ann Coulter and her new book, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America is par for the course. Liberals cannot help getting all riled up when Coulter comes into the room.

Did NBC “ban” Coulter from its airwaves? Or did they put her off for a day because of the important Gaza conflict? Who knows; who cares?

But we do know that liberals hate everything about Ann Coulter and everything she writes.

Oh yes, of course. Her humor is “sophomoric.” No doubt that’s why she is so popular with college conservatives. Someone has to do the sophomoric humor. There’s a market for that sort of stuff, you know. With liberals it involves a lot of f-words and s-words. For conservatives it makes much more sense to make fun of liberals.

You have to say that Harry Smith’s pompous interview of Coulter on CBS was iconic, as media critic Brent Bosell demonstrates.

Harry Smith hosted Maher on CBS just months ago on his faith-mocking movie "Religulous" and didn’t say one discouraging word to him about his caustic remarks about Cheney or his hateful anti-Christian bigotry. Not one word.

But with Coulter, it’s another tone completely.

[Smith] called her "goofy," "simplistic," "sophomoric" and a "whiner." "You should have a cross," he said dismissively. "You should put yourself up on a cross."

And on Hannity and Colmes when Coulter indicted liberals for attacking the nuclear family and encouraging single-parent families, Alan Colmes asked her why she wasn’t married.

Warning to conservatives: Don’t you try that. Conservatives aren’t allowed to make sexist comments like that: “Why aren’t you married?” It could be career ending for you. And not just in the liberal media.

While we are at it, let’s put up Ellwood and Jencks 2004. It tells you what liberals have done to America.

Never forget. Liberals did that. Liberals deprived millions of children of the right to have a mother and a father. At home. With them where they live.

Why the Culture War Matters

Why is it that performers at cultural events seem to think it is ok to make politicized comments, as Jay Nordlinger notes?

The indefatigable Mark Steyn takes a stab at it.

Liberalism is the default mode of the culture — to the point where the left-of-center position is so pervasive it’s no longer a position at all, but rather something uncontentious, received wisdom, part of the air we breathe.

Yes, he says, people from Hollywood sidle up to him and say “how much they agree with my book but please don’t mention it to anyone.” But so what?
The trouble is that there is no payoff from people sidling up to you. Crypto-conservatives are just that: hidden. When the culture is default center-left then you can expect most people to be default center-left.

If the non-political sphere is permanently left-of-center — the movies, the pop songs, the plays, the sitcoms, the newspapers plus the churches, schools and much else — it’s simply unreasonable to expect people to walk into a polling booth every other November and vote conservative. The culture is where the issues get framed and the boundaries set.

There’s a good argument to make that there is a pretty substantial rejectionist front out there, people who are disgusted with the cultural liberalism and determined to do something about it. Then there are those who are naturally conservative in their habits and who just do not like the rude, crude culture of Hollywood and liberal politics but just sit there and do nothing.

Right now the conservative orientation is a subculture and doesn’t look to be making much progress any time soon. If you are a kid in college, the default youth culture is the licentious liberal culture of the hookup and girls gone wild. If you are a women working in government the default culture is feminist multiculturalism that celebrates Halloween but mumbles about “holidays” during the Christmas season.

It won’t change until we do something about it.

A Good Year for Climate "Deniers"

The whole point about being a conservative is to stand against liberal group-think. Who knows? Liberals may end up being right on everything. But why do they all have to act like the Japanese under their emperor Hirohito: A hundred million hearts beating as one?

The science is in. The earth is dangerously overheating. We must act now. All that liberal group-think on climate just sticks in a conservative’s craw.

And now it is beginning to look as though something is changing in the earth’s climate. Temperatures are down.

It looks like we are getting two La Ninas in a row. It looks like the oceans are flipping from a warm cycle to a cool cycle. And Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick, the graph that shows stable temperatures over the last millennium suddenly shooting into the stratosphere in the last century, is slowly disappearing into Stephen McIntyre’s wood chipper.

Here are a couple of end-of-year pieces from another denier website, Watts Up With That:

First, there’s All Quiet on the Solar Front, an analysis of the much-extended Solar Minimum. There’s a strong suggestion that when sunspots are absent from the sun then the earth’s climate gets cooler. With the current Solar Minimum betwen Cycle 23 and Cycle 24 going on and on, we are going to get a lot of solar data from all the satellites that have been launched in the last generation to record the doings on the Sun.

Then there’s the curious case of the Decline in the Solar Geomagnetic Ap Index. It suddenly dropped in 2005 and has continued to decline since then. What does that mean?

For us climate deniers, there are troubling questions about the science of global warming. Our modern climate scientists are not amateur scientists like Charles Darwin laboring away in his country estate. They are closely connected with politicians who are pushing a large-scale political project to “do something” about global warming. They have obligingly developed a lot of science to provide “corroborative detail designed to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” to quote the Lord High Executioner from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado.

But when statistical experts like Stephen McIntyre start to analyze the work of climate scientists, it all starts to look pretty rocky. The corroborative detail turns out to be not that good.

In the coming years, the deniers are predictive a triple threat of a possible extended sunspot minimum combined with cool phases in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. That’s denier-speak for Little Ice Age.

Are the deniers on to something? Or are we just as dumb and blinkered as the bribed apologists of Al Gore?

Voters Think Dems are "Center Right"

You gotta give President-elect Obama credit. He managed to get the voters to think that the Democrats are a center-right party. That’s some achievement. And voters think that the Republican Party is a hard-right party. That’s according to a poll by Target Point Consulting discussed Wednesday by Stephen Moore.

[S]ays [pollster Alex] Lundry. "Democrats are seen as a center-right party, while Republicans are seen as dominated by the right."

I know what you are thinking. If only. Heck, if the Democrats truly were center-right we could give up on the limping, wounded GOP and join the parade. Liberals could desert the Democrats and create a Huffington-Kos Party, and the rest of us could live happily ever after.

Still, the key base of the Republican Party shrank in 2008. White males were for Bush by 24 points in 2004 and that gap closed to 16 points in 2008. You can see why. White males are instinctively center-right, and when Obama came through as the candidate most likely to give Americans a tax cut, well...

What about white women? McCain won them 53 to 46 percent, according to David Paul Kuhn in Politico, probably because of Sarah Palin.

Here are the spreads, updated from a variety of polls, using Jay Cost’s data from 1996-2004.

Republican Margin of Victory/Defeat: Selected Demographic Groups 1996-2008
	1996	2000	2004	2008
White Men	+9	+24	+25	+16
White Women	-5	+1	+11	+7
African Americans	-72	-81	-77	-95
Hispanics	-51	-27	-9	-36
Overall	-8.5	-0.5	+2.4	-7

So what does it all mean? It means that, just as Karl Rove knew in 2000 and 2004, the future lies with the Hispanics.

And the future also lies with defining the Republican Party as center right, which is what it really is, and defining the Democratic Party as center left. Which is what it really is.

And one more thing. The Republican Party is the party of tax cuts. Really.

UPDATE: Pollster Alex Lundry emails to say he was misquoted. Voters think that
the Dems are a center-LEFT party, after all. What a pity! I thought there was
strategic opening here. So the only opportunity is to move the voters
towards thinking that the GOP is really a mushy center-right party instead of
the Democrats’ favorite image of a party dominated by racist, sexist rich-bitch homophobes.

The Conservative View from 2008

Because so much happened in 2008 on such an epic scale, it is hard to know what it means.

Take the election of Barack Obama to be President of the United States. Is this primarily the election of the first African American president? Or just the election of yet another Harvard Law School grad, the liberal elite taking care of business?

What about the epic collapse in the credit markets? Will this result in a ratchet upwards in political control of the economy? Or will it cause the politicians to lower the risks in the credit market by reducing the amount of subsidy for highly-leveraged borrowing?

What about the eruption of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber? Conservatives loved them and liberals hated them. What is that all about? Does it mean that the Republican Party has become a party of the yahoo white working class? Or does it mark the decisive turn of the party towards aspirational America?

What we all do in exciting times is project our hopes and fears upon the climactic events. Conservatives hope for a conservative renaissance; liberals hope for the birth of another FDR era of Democratic dominance. And both sides propose their standard solutions. Conservatives say we need tax cuts; liberals say we need stimulus spending. Nothing has changed since the Reagan revolution of 1981.

While we worry about our jobs and our 401ks, the real story will probably be told in India and China. Let’s assume that the US will struggle through the meltdown and emerge in a year into a decent economic rebound. But China and India may experience much more turmoil that we do in the US. If all goes well, they will emerge as economic, cultural, and political powerhouses. If things go wrong, and they might easily do so, then there will be untold misery for hundreds of millions, and doubtless wars of frightful ferocity.

But what about the threat of Islamic extremism? It’s a problem, but I regard it as a similar problem to the ruthless revolutionaries in the west in the tradition of Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Che. The Muslim extremists will be a problem, but they will fail just as the other ruthless revolutionaries failed. In the modern world, power is not enough. Power doesn’t issue from the barrel of a gun but from the wealth of the modern economy.

What about conservatives here in the United States? Shouldn’t we get to work and repair the damage of the Bush years? Exactly. The important thing to do is to reformulate conservatism into a sadder, wiser creed, and one that directs its appeal to the most important democraphic group in America: white women. Despite all we’ve heard over the past half-century, women care mainly about their marriages, their children, their health care, and their safety. Get right with women on that and you have got their support and deserve it.

That can’t be so hard, can it?