Congress Can't Do Nothin' Right

Thank goodness for one thing. What with the spiraling increase in food prices the leaders of our beloved Congress are going to fight for the people against the powerful on ethanol.

They are going to lower ethanol subsidies, according to Stephen Dinan.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer allowed as how this was a case of “unintended consequences.”

"The view was to look to alternatives and try to become more dependent on the Midwest than the Middle East. I mean, that was the theory. Obviously, sometimes there are unforeseen or unintended consequences of actions," Mr. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, told reporters yesterday.

Well, why don’t we go a bit further and say that whenever Congress enacts a subsidy it is almost bound to screw things up.

It’s just that when you start playing the subsidy game with energy and food you have a much better chance of creating a mess than, say subsidies for college.

That’s because there is an open market for energy and food. But college is a witch’s brew of privilege and rent seeking that simmers away in a back room.

Actually, college subsidies—including subsidies paid to students and subsidies paid directly to colleges—probably directly hurt people in just the same way as etehanol subsidies divert food-producing cropland into ethanol production. But the effects are more difficult to tease out, and don’t have the headline potential of soaring fuel and soaring food prices.

OK. Congress is going to take a baby step back to energy sanity. Now let’s do something serious about energy. Let’s drill for oil. Let’s open up the ocean for drilling. And let’s start building nuclear plants again.

After all, even the “consensus” scientists now say that global warming catastrophe is a little further off than they thought.

They’d have to. Global temperatures haven’t risen in ten years.

MoveOn dot Next?

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

It’s pretty obvious.

MoveOn there folks, nothing to see here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that would never do.

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

Defining Obama for America

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those Aborted Black Babies

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

You Can't Say That

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not any more.

The Company You Keep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

What Price Education?

When you subsidize sometehing then you get more of it.

If you subsidize mortgages you get a housing boom.

If you subsidize college you get a ton of colleges.

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

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

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

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

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

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