Why Democrats Prefer Scandal to SoSec Reform

You gotta admit it. The Democrats know how to expose and coordinate embarrassing revelations about Republicans. Right now we have the Foley page e-mail scandal, the new Woodward book scandal, and the NIE leak on Iraq all going full bore and it is still four weeks till the election.

But even a good liberal wonders what it is all for.

In the Washington Post Sebastian Molloy wonders what happened to the Democrats’ principles.

Most Democrats in Congress seem bereft of ideas or the courage to stand up for them. They clearly want power, but they have no principles to guide their use of it.

They are opposed to the Bush Administration’s policies on terror but frightened to vote against them. And then there is Social Security.

A conservative group circulated a petition calling for bipartisan talks on Social Security, with all potential solutions to be part of the discussion. Rather than embracing this eminently sane idea, top Democrats in Congress loudly slammed the door on it.

I have a theory about this. Democrats really don’t want a solution on Social Security. If you privatize Social Security then Democratic voters don’t have to look to the political system for financial support. They will be able to support themselves.

For a cruder look at how this works, read Dick Morris and Eileen McGann on President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Chavez understands that his power depends on keeping the poor grateful for his handouts.

He buys popularity in Venezuela by distributing massive amounts of oil revenues to the poor. While careful to keep them in poverty by repelling business and deterring foreign investment, he uses his petrol wealth to distribute free food and to pay for imported Cuban doctors in the barrios.

What would be the point of helping the poor become proud and self-sufficient? Much better keep them grateful and dependent.

Fox News: Libs Still Don't Get It

Fox News is ten years old this week, and the liberals still don’t get it. Don’t agree? Then read this quote by Fox News chief Roger Ailes in USA Today, reported by Peter Johnson.

[Ailes] was at a dinner party recently when one of the guests asked him, "Isn't Fox News too conservative?"



"I said, 'Are you comfortable with CNN?' He said, 'Yes.' How about CBS, ABC, NBC? 'Absolutely.' What about The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times? 'Fine.' National Public Radio and PBS? 'Very good.' So I said, 'But this little cable channel is making you crazy?'"

The truth is that liberals don’t want any conservative voice out there. Each of the three network news shows has higher ratings than Fox News, but Fox News is a problem.

But the liberal propaganda works.

Jane Skinner, a daytime [Fox News] anchor, says friends who work at local TV stations around the country are constantly asking her what it's "really like" to work at Fox News.

Get it? What is it really like to have the conservative line rammed down your throat every day by the eevil conservative suits at Fox News?

All this is frustrating, if you are a conservative. But we should be glad. So long as your opponent is grasping the wrong end of the stick you are going to move ahead. Can’t help it.

You start to worry when your opponent starts to get it.

Bill O’Reilly? He’s a ranter. The key is to realize that he is a non-liberal ranter, not a conservative ranter. Hannity and Colmes? One conservative and one liberal. What could be more fair-and-balanced? Greta van Susteren? This is a conservative?

Yep. Fox News is ten years old, and liberals still don’t get it.
It doesn’t get any better than that.

Evil Wal-Mart Overrruns Democratic Bastion

The Wal-Mart PR guys just sent an e-mail to announce the opening of the first Wal-Mart in Chicago, so naturally as a mind-numbed Wal-Mart robot I am blogging about it.

The first reaction was shock. I thought that Chicago didn’t want no stinkin’ Wal-Marts polluting its pristine neighborhoods.

The second reaction was wonder. I wonder how close the new store is to downtown Chicago?

According to Google Maps, it is a mere 7 miles from downtown, so the Democrats entrenched there ought to be able to hear the rumble of the guns out at 4650 W. North Ave. Maybe the staff of City Council should drive out and take a tour of the Western Front.

The new Wal-Mart is only five miles from the faculty lounge at DePaul University. So the social science faculty could start field trips out along W. North to let the students take a look at the enemy.
Students majoring in Labor History could get credit for, let’s see, organizing the workers at Wal-Mart!

After all, something like 80 percent of John Kerry voters have never shopped at Wal-Mart. Yet they all seem to know enough about to be able to tell Wal-Mart management how to run the store.

An article in the Chicago Tribune had some interesting facts about the new store. According Emma Graves Fitzsimmons many of the 490 workers at the new store are making more money than at their old jobs.

Wal-Mart sales associate Tinesha McKay, 26, a mother of three from Austin, said she makes $7.70 an hour, a $1.50 increase from her previous job as a clerk at a blood bank in Glenview. Her commute has been cut from over an hour to 10 minutes, she said.

...

Victor Calderon, 27, a father of three from Humboldt Park, said he had been working at a rubber factory through a temp agency before getting a full-time job at Wal-Mart stocking shopping carts.

He is making “about $2 an hour higher than at his previous job.”

This is pretty shocking, you’ll agree. Everybody knows that Wal-Mart employees are shockingly underpaid. Yet these workers are reporting that they are getting more money at Wal-Mart than at their old jobs. In addition, of course, they are reducing their commutes.

Shopper Therea Flores is not impressed. Interviewed after a two hour shopping marathon filling her shopping cart “with groceries, cleaning supplies and clothing,” she

said the workers deserved higher wages. She said she was disappointed the big-box ordinance [mandating higher wages] did not pass.



"I believe Wal-Mart can afford it," she said. "I wasn't buying the fact that they wouldn't open stores here. There's too much money to be made."

Thank goodness that Theresa Flores can now afford to shop at Wal-Mart.

Born on the Fourth of July

She died on Tuesday, September 26, aged 90. She might have been an ordinary aspirational American, born to immigrants from Japan and graduating from UCLA in 1940 with a bachelor’s degree in zoology, “hoping to become a physician,” according to Richard Goldstein in The New York Times. But then things went wrong for Iva Toguri.

In the summer of 1941, she visited an ailing aunt in Tokyo at the request of her mother. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, she was stranded in Tokyo, knowing virtually no Japanese, deprived of a food ration card by the authorities after refusing to become a Japanese citizen and hard-pressed to find work.

She ended up as an announcer and disk jockey for Radio Tokyo’s propaganda broadcasts and became accused of being “Tokyo Rose,” the sexy-voiced announcer who urged American GIs to give up a hopeless cause.

In 1949 she was tried for treason, convicted on a single count, and jailed for ten years with a $10,000 fine. After getting out of jail she moved to Chicago and worked for her father.

She ran an Asian grocery store and gift shop on Chicago’s North Side that family members had opened after their release from a wartime internment camp in Arizona.

But her treason conviction was based on perjury and media hysteria.
According to The Times

In 1976, after a second media campaign led by Bill Kurtis, of CBS, the news anchor Morley Safer produced an item about Iva Toguri on the mass-audience 60 Minutes show. This revealed not only the true nature of Toguri’s enforced wartime occupation, but the extent of the perjury and tabloid feeding frenzy that had led to her arrest and conviction.

In 1977 she received a pardon from President Ford.

Last January, according to Ben Goldberger Toguri received

the World War II Veterans Committee's Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award. As guests sipped champagne around an ice sculpture of a swan, Ms. Toguri pronounced it "the most memorable day of my life."

Because, it turned out, she had used her earnings in Japan to help the GI prisoners of war with whom she worked.

Iva Toguri was born in the United States in 1916 on the Fourth of July.

More Than "School Choice" Needed

How much of a difference do the current initiative on school choice make? Not much, according to Frederick M. Hess.

[C]harter-school enthusiasts, including President Bush and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, have touted the remarkable work of the high-performing KIPP Academies and the new teachers recruited by Teach For America. However, these entrepreneurial ventures are gnats alongside the $550 billion a year behemoth that is K-12 education.

The fact is that most Americans aren’t too riled up about school non-performance. They prefer in-school reform to any radical changes. “School choice” is a nice slogan, but if we are talking about real improvement in education we are talking about entrepreneurial challenge to the status quo.

Ultimately, supply-side dynamism isn’t about “choices;” it’s about Darwinian selection and creative destruction.

...

Vibrant markets in any sector require entrepreneurs, adequate capital, skilled employees, entrance to markets, and so on. Creating good new options requires opportunities for entrepreneurs to enter the field, obtain resources, recruit talent, try new approaches, develop new products, compete fairly, and benefit from their successes. Choice fosters entrepreneurship only to the extent that it promotes these opportunities.

And right now, as told by Judith Kleinfeld, there is the huge problem of the underperformance of boys in school. Here’s one shocker statistic:

White Twelfth-Graders of College Educated Parents Scoring "Below Basic" by Gender and Subject Subject Male Female Reading 23% 7% Writing 25% 6% Mathematics 19% 17%

Can this really be true? One quarter of the white sons of college graduates are reading “below basic” in the twelfth grade? That means that one quarter of the sons of white college graduates are basically illiterate.

It it is true we need more than “in-school reform.” We need an education revolution led by radical entrepreneurs.

Why Did the Brits Invite Clinton and McCain?

Why do the Brits like to have American politicians address them at their political conferences?

This week Bill Clinton, his mind cleared after telling off Chris Wallace on eevil Fox News, gave the Labour Party a pep talk at its annual conference in Manchester. Don’t make the same mistake we did, he told them.

Next week Senator John McCain is going to address the British Conservative Party at its annual conference in Bournemouth. And so the British Spectator’s Matthew d’Ancona is in Washington to interview the man who has his name on a law that diminished Americans’ free speech rights and now has opposed President Bush’s efforts to interview terrorist suspects.

Of course, thousands would argue that Fox News’ tactics in the famous Clinton interview consistuted torture banned by Common Article Three of the Geneva Convention, particularly the prohibition in Section 1(c):

Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.

So maybe John McCain should be working on legislation banning Fox News from asking questions that might hurt the positive self-esteem of Democratic former presidents.

But back to McCain. What would the British Conservative Party want to be doing with John McCain? But it seems like the Brits like him because he appears as a centrist, and that is how David Cameron is “rebanding” the Conservatives.

But it makes you wonder. Is there something about John McCain that we conservatives just cannot see? Some brilliant approach to governing, some stunning record of judgment that is too obvious for us to grasp?

Or are we the guys that understand McCain only too well: too much “honor,” too much senatorial pride, too much desire to be well-thought-of by the media, and a live-long question in the judgment department?

As Hugh Hewitt says: “[John McCain] is a great American, a lousy senator, and a terrible Republican.”

The question still remains: Why do those Limeys like to have US politicians over, over there. Particularly when the Brits really don’t like the US and aren’t afraid to say so.

Harris on Ratzinger at Regensburg

There is perhaps no more exciting thinker living than Lee Harris, a student of philosophy and some time owner of an auto tint shop, whose first book Civilization and Its Enemies, proposed the present unpleasantness as a war between the western team and the “eternal gang of ruthless men.”

Now he has published a long article entitled “Socrates or Muhammed?”
in theWeekly Standard about—what else—the recent speech of Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg.

But, he confesses, the pope does not speak as the infallible head of the Roman Catholic Church.

He stands before his learned audience not as the
pope, but simply as Joseph Ratzinger, an intelligent and thoughtful man, who makes no claims to any privileged cognitive authority. He has come, like Socrates, not to preach or sermonize, but to challenge with questions.

The question that Ratzinger formulates is the basic question that has dogged us ever since Kant.

The Greeks felt that they could reason about anything and everything--about the immortality of the soul, metempsychosis, the nature of God, the role of reason in the universe, and so on. Modern reason, from the time of Kant, has repudiated this kind of wild speculative reason. For modern reason, there is no point in even asking such questions, because there is no way of answering them scientifically.

But how do we deal with a religion like Islam that asserts that reason has nothing to do with it? What is the position of the atheist who believes in reason when confronted with a culture like Islam for which reason does not enter into it?

Ever since Kant the intellectual and cultural elite have asserted that it is a matter of subjective choice what people believe about God. But Ratzinger challenges this notion.

He has thrown out an immense challenge to modern reason and to the modern world. Is it really a matter of subjective choice whether men follow a religion that respects human reason and that refuses to use violence to convert others? Can even the most committed atheist be completely indifferent to the imaginary gods that the other members of his community continue to worship?

To put it crudely, does it matter to an atheist whether he lives in a society with a dominant religion that respects human reason or a society with a dominant religion that uses violence to convert others?

Lee Harris has a forthcoming book for next year. It is called The Suicide of Reason.

But first, read the Weekly Standard article.

“Read the whole thing.”