Liberal Issues Dems Don't Push

In a rumination on the incompetence of Alberto Gonzales, Mickey Kaus wonders if the incompetence wasn’t deliberate.  Gonzales’ incompetence lets President Bush stumble-bum all over affirmative action, helping to end it without seeming to be responsible for the death.  And he doesn’t need to do anything anyway.

[R]ace preferences... are being killed anyway, by the voters . That’s even better for Bush. His fingerprints aren’t on the corpse, and even Republican judges’ fingerprints aren’t on the corpse.

Kaus continues by noticing that Democrats aren’t that outraged about the setbacks to affirmative action.

Affirmative action may be joining gun control on the list of liberal issues Dem candidates don’t push very hard because they want to win.

That’s a good point.  What other issues don’t Democrats talk about too much?  Guns, as Mickey mentioned.  Abortion, of course.  Single-payer health insurance is quiet, although ready to burst out of the shadows if anyone offers encouragement.  The war: Democrats need to placate their base but they know they have to be careful. Gay marriage: Democrats pretend to be all in favor of traditional marriage even as they encourage the gay marriage advocates.

The big problem for Democrats is not that Americans disagree with them on hot-button issues.  It is that their Big Three programs: pensions, health care, and education, together amount for over half of all government spending.  And you ain’t seen nothing yet as baby boomers start to retire.

The good thing is that about half of the spending is complete waste, so we don’t really need it.  But who will have the courage to wield the ax and cut the bloat?

Reform vs. Stagnation in France

What a clarifying event an election can be.  In France, report the editors of National Review, the first round of the French presidential election has presented the French people with a clear choice.

The battle lines are thus unusually sharp and well-defined. It is liberal economic reform versus socialist stagnation.

Naturally the French are divided between those who think strong medicine is needed, those who think that more of the same is needed, and those who think that reform should exclude any pain.

The result, a win for conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, is a reminder about the essential shamefulness of politics.  For years, right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen railed about

crime, immigration, the Muslim challenge, loss of  sovereignty to supra-national bodies, the divisive failure of multiculturalism, and the crumbling of national identity.

IN the 2002 elections he rode his issues to second place.  Now the mainstream parties have stolen his issues and he is reduced to fourth place.

You could say that his career sends a message to all practical politicians.  Keep an eye on the fringes.  That’s where the future is being born.

When the Tax Cuts Expire

Years ago neoconservative Irving Kristol advised Republicans to cut taxes, cut, and cut again.  Apart from the economic benefit, there was the political benefit of forcing Democrats to increase taxes when they wanted to increase spending.

President Bush may be incurious and unintelligent, but it looks like he is taking Kristol’s advice.  The talk is all about how to avoid economic damage in the immediate future as taxes are scheduled to increase unless Congress does something. Patrice Hill quotes Dimitri B. Papadimitriou of the Levy Economics Institute: 

[T]ax burdens are scheduled to rise at a much faster pace than incomes or economic growth. In the past, rapid growth taxes as a percentage of the economy has preceded recessions, he said.

Right now, Democrats are blithely proposing to let all of President Bush’s tax rate cuts expire, so that there is room for lovely spending.

And then there is the Alternative Minimum Tax which disproportionately hits middle and upper income people in blue states.

Somehow I think that this happy dream is going to turn into a nightmare for Democrats.

Murder in America

How bad is it?  In the wake of the V-Tech mass murder the Europeans are tut-tutting about a US history of violence.

The official story since 1900 is not pretty: two huge murder waves, one peaking in 1933 and one peaking in 1991.  See Bureau of Justice Statistics Homicide Trends chart.  Interestingly, according to Eric Monkkonen in Murder in New York, murder has not been a unique New York City phenomenon.  Murder in New York was under the national average right through the first half of the 20th century.  Until the murder wave that began in 1965.

You can see country-by-counntry murder rates on this page from Wikipedia.  At the beginning of the 20th century the murder rate in the United States was about the same as the United Kingdom: about one per 100,000 inhabitants.  In about 1905 the murder rate took off in the US, peaking in the 1930s and the 1980s at 10 per 100,000.

Now it’s down to 5 or 6 per 100,000.

Where will it go next?

VT: The Tradeoffs in a Free Society

The horrific Virginia Tech shootings have, as they should, inspired every political activist to use the event as a hook to their perennial issue.  As usual, commentator Charles Krauthammer does so in as sensible a way as possible.

There are, we should never forget, tradeoffs that a free society makes in favor of freedom and against safety and security.

It is true that with far stricter gun laws, Cho Seung Hui might have had a harder time getting the weapons and ammunition needed to kill so relentlessly... [S]tricter controls could also keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens using them in self-defense. The psychotic mass murder is rare; the armed household burglary is not.

How many innocent lives would be saved by stricter gun laws and how many violent crimes would be deterred by more guns in homes?

Maybe a deeply disturbed person like Cho should have been institutionalized.

But in a trade-off that a decent and tolerant society makes with open eyes, we allow freedom from straitjackets to those on the psychic edge, knowing that such tolerance runs a very rare but very terrible risk.

What we can all agree, surely, that the kind of rambling political nonsense generated by presidential candidate Barack Obama is not the solution.  At a speech captured by Politico’s Ben Smith he connected the Virginia Tech violence with Don Imus’s radio insults.

Obama then cites bad schools and bad neighborhoods as forms of violence, before finishing with, for good measure, Darfur[.]

But if that is what Sen. Obama believes let us hear more of it.  It is not, after all an extremist position.  That sort of political free association is exactly what passes for serious political analysis among our liberal friends.  It’s all part of the “cycle of violence” paradigm, “arms are for hugging,” and other magical thinking that proceeds from the assumption that humans are naturally peaceful rather than naturally violent.  And nothing so exactly represents the mood as the comment made on The Volokh Conspiracy:

Schools and guns do not mix. Period.

One is tempted to quote Sir Toby Belch:  “Thy exquisite reason, dear knight?” 

Iraq war is 'lost' says Harry Reid

The US “surge” is failing to bring peace to Iraq, according to Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), and so he believes “that this war is lost.”

as reported by Breitbart.com, Reid said: 

"I know I was the odd guy out at the White House, but I told him at least what he needed to hear ... I believe the war at this stage can only be won diplomatically, politically and economically."

 Oh, so he doesn’t actually believe that it’s all over bar the shouting.  He just believes that the US should use non-military means in its war with... yes, that’s a good point. 

What would Sen. Harry Reid say that “the war at this stage” is all about?

Is it a war to bring peace to Iraq?  Is it a war to contain the imperialist designs of Iran?  Is is a war to contain the spread of Islamofascism.

And what exactly does Sen. Reid mean by winning “diplomatically, politically and economically?”

By economically, does Sen. Reid propose, for example, that the United States should increase nuclear power generation and domestic hydrocarbon exploration and production so as to reduce demand for Middle East oil?

Or does he just mean that we should wave our hands and threaten sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran while the Islamic Republic of Iran continues its program to acquire nuclear weapons?

Liberal Foundations Equals Liberal Costs

It’s not just that charitable foundations often end up doing exactly the opposite of what their founders intended.

The problem is that they spend so much money doing it. As William Rusher writes:

Robert Wood Johnson’s charitable contributions for 2005 were a majestic $419 million. But the "administrative expenses" required to distribute this largesse totaled $69 million. Kellogg contributed $285 million, but chalked up "administrative expenses" of $65 million. And the Rockefeller Foundation, in the course of giving away $148 million, found it necessary to spend $36 million on — you guessed it — "administrative expenses."

That’s a pretty big tariff.  Of course, when you are hobnobbing with grantees with expensive tastes no doubt you have to meet and beat their expensive tastes. 

I mean, there’s an argument that in discussing compassionate and sensitive programs to help women and children with like-minded compassionate souls you can’t really be super-sizing it at McDonalds.  A more nuanced location for nuanced thinking and planning is needed.  And that costs money.

But still, giving yourself 25 cents of every dollar you give away does seem excessive.

Especially when you consider the case of The Walton Family Foundation—you know, the foundation founded by Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton.

The Walton Family Foundation managed to give away $232 million in 2005, while charging expenses of only $2 million. As Neal Freeman, Chairman of the Foundation Management Institute, remarked, "Ol’ Sam would be proud of that 1.2 percent mark-up."

Of course, Wal-Mart was always a low-rent corporation.  No class.