Democrats and Social Security -- And Americans

Speaker Pelosi made much of her grandchildren at the opening of the new Congress: “We’re here for the children,” she said.

That is appropriate, for as Carrie Lukas writes, the big government programs are a kind of compact between Americans and their grandchildren.  “Policymakers should evaluate policies based on how they affect future generations.”

Yet politicians — Pelosi herself chief among them — have viewed Social Security as a convenient political weapon, not a problem to be solved. In 2005, when the president launched his effort to place Social Security on firmer financial footing, then Minority Leader Pelosi... sought to squelch debate and use the issue for political leverage... So much for thinking about the children.

Social Security is based on the same premise as the defined-benefit pensions at big corporations.   These programs are based on the idea that there will always be money somewhere out there in the future to pay the pensions.

The corporate defined-benefit programs are now about defunct.  Because it turned out that although General Motors looked as though it would rule the world forever back in 1950 it turned out that it didn’t.

The same thing is going to happen to Social Security.  The only question is: How is it going to play out?  Will the senior citizens grind their grandchildren into the dirt forcing them to pay taxes to support them?  Or will the grandchildren rebel?

And of course, the Social Security problem is minor compared to the Medicare problem.

The interesting thing about this developing train-wreck is that the folks who have represented themselves to the world for over a century as the very incarnation of care and compassion are the very people who are proposing to turn the screws on the grandchildren.

It is cruel and heartless to force young couples struggling to start families to support an older, richer generation, to keep them in their empty homes, to supply them with heroic medical care, while young families go without.

As a 60-year-old, I regard this coming injustice with outrage.  We baby-boomers should not be a dead weight upon the youngsters coming up.  If there is help to be given it should be to the young strugglers, not to the old reprobates.

Someday soon, we conservatives will be called upon to clean up this mess.  We will have to make a decent provision for the older people who listened to the Democrats and believed that they could live a bump-on-a-log life and expect the government to take care of them.  Yet we must also right the injustice and render justice to the young people and their young families. 

It won’t be fun. 

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MSM Soft-pedals ACLU Child Porn Suspect

Child porn is a pretty disgusting subject.  It involves the depiction of the rape of children.  But the American Civil Liberties Union has been active in opposing the installation of porn filters in public library filters.  Good for them.

So much for the First Amendment.  But Bill O’Reilly asks:

How many of you have heard of Charles Rust-Tierney?

 You haven’t?  Well maybe you remember this, as quoted by O’Reilly:

On Dec. 1, 1998, Tierney issued this statement: "Recognizing that individuals will continue to behave responsibly and appropriately while in the library, the default should be maximum, unrestricted access to the valuable resources of the Internet."

Charles Rust-Tierney is a former ACLU chapter president.

On February 24, 2007 the Washington Post published this teensy-weensy Virginia Roundup, headlined “Ex-ACLU Head Seized in Porn Case.”

An Arlington County youth sports coach and former ACLU chapter president was arrested on child pornography charges by federal agents who accused him of viewing Web sites filled with explicit images of pre-pubescent girls.

Charles Rust-Tierney, 51, of Arlington was charged with receipt and possession of child pornography. He was ordered detained pending a preliminary hearing Wednesday. Prosecutors said Rust-Tierney coaches various youth sports teams in and around Arlington. A 2002 Virginia ACLU newsletter identified him as the group’s president.

So far, none of the MSM has picked up the story.  Conservatives, of course, are all over it now that O’Reilly has broken it wide open.

Now imagine that this youth sports coach was not a “former ACLU chapter president” but a “fundamentalist” Christian minister.

Exactly.  The arrest report would not be buried on page B05.

Here’s an idea.  We ought to hold our own guys to a higher standard than the other guys.  Just an idea.

New Hope for Climate Deniers

We holocaust, er sorry, global warming deniers are having a rough time these days, as super energy hog Al Gore gets an Oscar for his Inconvenient Truth. And girl columnists like Maureen Dowd call us names.  So it gives us a warm fuzzy feeling to know that this week on TV in Britland they’ll be showing The Great Global Warming Swindle.  Now that’s more like it!  The film doesn’t parrot the official UN line of consensus science that the current global warming is driven by human carbon emissions.

Instead the documentary highlights recent research that the effect of the sun’s radiation on the atmosphere may be a better explanation for the regular swings of climate from ice ages to warm interglacial periods and back again.

Let’s back up on that one.  Given that the current climate of predominant ice ages interspersed with shorter interglacial periods have been going on for millions of years, it couldn’t be driven by human action.  Obviously there are other climate-forcing causes at work.

And there is this, my favorite from Daniel B .Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies.

Nature changes over essentially all time scales

Another way of saying this is that if the world weren’t getting warmer it would be getting colder. And we don’t know why.

Apparently there’s a good quote from an African official:

James Shikwati, Kenyan director of the Inter Region Economic Network, says: ’The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy, but for us we are still at the stage of survival.’

Africa as a continent is notable for being a plateau usually above 1,000 feet.  Most of its rivers have cataracts fairly close to the sea, making river navigation difficult.

For Africa, a bit of global warming might be a benefit.

Lefty Lifestyles of the Rich and Cheap

You assume that lefty writer Barbara Ehrenreich is, what the Forsytes would call, a warm woman.  Her best-selling travelogue of working with the minimum-wage set, Nickeled and Dimed, has made her more than nickels and dimes.  It is said to be required reading in freshman orientation at several colleges. So when her son Ben Ehrenreich decides that “we” can’t afford the cost of fixing a broken ankle, you have to wonder.  Says Ben:

My girlfriend had broken her ankle and needed surgery. She was between jobs and between health insurance plans. We couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars the surgery would have cost at a private hospital. So I bundled her up at 4 o’clock one cold morning in January, drove to Boyle Heights and checked her in at the emergency room at L.A. County-USC.

Now I always thought that the practical reason for family was the security of people who care about you.  When a member of the family hits a pothole then the family rallies round to help fix the jalopy.

But apparently not in the Ehrenreich clan.  And apparently Ben’s girl friend didn’t think to avail herself of the opportunity of continuing to pay for her health insurance while she was “between jobs.”  And apparently Ben didn’t offer to pay for her hospital bills.

What is it about these progressives?  Look at the chain of irresponsibility here.  First of all you have the girl friend, who doesn’t think it worthwhile to continue her health insurance payments.  She is too cheap to make a proper provision for accident or ill health.

Then you have Ben, a journalist and novelist, presumably enjoying the favors of this young woman.  He is too cheap to help out the woman with whom, Planned Parenthood aside, he could at any moment share the blessings of future parenthood.

And what about mother Barbara, the successful writer of left-wing bestsellers?  Where was she while all this was going on?

Why do these wealthy, educated left-wing people expect us to pay for their health care?

Giuliani The Details Man

Funny how things work.  We’ve had months of fainting and gushing by the MSM over Democratic Senator Barack Obama. 

But on the Republican side, under the radar, suddenly Rudy Giuliani emerges as the frontrunner.  No media orgasm, not huge publicity campaign.  How does it work?

Never mind.  The question is: What kind of a man is Giuliani. David Frum, taking Fred Siegel’s excellent book Prince of the City, tells us all about him.

Giuliani is an intense student of government - not politics, although he cares about that too, but government: the mechanics, the institutions. Unlike George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, he is very much a details man.

And probably that is what you need to be to achieve what Giuliani achieved in New York City.  Because when you realize that New York City is the very citadel of the progressive class and the central slum of their clients, well let Frum say it.

Giuliani’s accomplishments as mayor almost dazzle the eye:

Crime reduced, work restored, poverty down, taxes cut, revenues increased, private home ownership up, civic spaces restored ....

and these were not coincidences, the happy result of being in the right place at the right time. Every achievement can be directly traced to a policy adopted or imposed by Giuliani, almost invariably over the vociferous objection of the city’s most powerful interest groups and influential media.

Yes.  Let’s repeat that.  Every policy change was achieved over the dead body of liberal special interests and the MSM.

And when you think of the vast range and extent of the welfare state, its hundreds and thousands of nice little programs and sinecures that run on and on, unreformed, forever, the task of reforming it is daunting. 

Unless you are a tough customer and a detail man, a man like Rudolph Giuliani.

The Virtue of Debates

Newt Gingrish and Mario Cuomo met recently to give speeches at Cooper Union in New York, reports Stephen Spruiell.  The idea was to revive the memory of Abraham Lincoln’s speech there in 1860, and to use it as an inspiration for the 2008 campaign.

Gingrich proposed that the 2008 candidates agree to a series of debates and discussions in the spirit of Lincoln’s devotion to “language, ideas, and reasoned thought.”

That’s a good idea, and not just because of a nostalgia for the good old days of reasoned debate.

Republicans desperately need a venue in which they can publicly advertise their ideas to the voters.  On a normal day all Americans hear is the reflexive liberalism of TV news and liberal activists.  They rarely get a chance to hear conservatives talking amongst themselves.

Whether the Republicans presidential candidates can really sustain a series of substantive debates is questionable.  It’s all very well to be in favor of debate and dialog.  It is another to actually deliver it.  For the truth is that the candidates are not members of a friendly debating society where the purpose is to chomp down on big ideas and masticate them.  They are engaged in a high-stakes bid for the brass ring.  And they know very well that their next unscripted remark could be the one that hits the TV news and sinks their campaign.

So don’t expect any real debates.  The candidates can’t afford it.

But it sure would be nice to have some more conservative ideas out there in the public square.

Aiming for Hegemon

Wonder what the Chicoms are doing and why?  It’s not to hard to figure out, according to William Hawkins.  It’s the simple “divide and conquer” strategy that goes all the way back to the Qin dynasty.  If you recall the Qin were the chaps who unified China in 221 BCE at the end of the Warring States period.  Qin Shi Huang, the chappie buried at the terra-cotta soldiers burial complex near Xian, was the first Qin emperor.

Beijing has adopted a traditional Chinese strategy dating back to the ancient Warring States period. This era, when Qin rose from a weak position within a system of competing powers to unite China in 221 B.C., plays a role in Chinese thinking similar to that of the Founding Fathers in America. In the winter Chinese Journal of International Politics, Wei Zongyou, a professor at the Shanghai International Studies University of Foreign Studies, has described Qin’s strategy as one of "divide and conquer" as it sought to prevent other states from uniting to block its rise as the new, dominant hegemon.

So that’s all right then.  

Beijing has been using this strategy to isolate the United States in the six power talks over North Korea, and in stirring up trouble among the thug dictactor trouble-makers throughout the world. And, of course, you haven’t exactly seen the Chinese helping in Iraq.

No doubt we shall see this start to work it way out as the Chinese move northwards into Siberia and penetrate the longest flank in the world, the Russian Empire.

The question is, will the dog hun?  It’s one thing to have a strategy as a rising power.  It’s another thing to actually become the future hegemon.  One thing that the Chinese are a little short of is a surplus of young men.  The One Child policy kinda took care of that.  You can’t really create an expansionist empire upon an aged and declining population.

But you can certainly try.