Life without Newspapers Will Be Just Fine

Life is rough for the folks in the metropolitan newspaper business, and some people (OK, most of us) are ready to gloat.

Be careful what you wish for. That’s the message of Debra J. Saunders, the conservative columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Yes, fewer reporters mean fewer biased stories about lesbian immigrants fighting an unsympathetic establishment. But there also won’t be as many stories about sanctuary city policies gone bad, the latest zany law out of San Francisco City Hall or the growing bite that public employee pension systems are taking out of city and county services.

It’s natural for the folks watching their privileged newspaper industry collapse around them to imagine like Napoleon: “Apres moi, le deluge.” Or darkly warn, like David Copperfield’s boss Mr. Spenlow at the monopolistic Doctors Commons in early 19th century Britain: “Touch the Commons, and down comes the country.”

But the awful truth probably is that things will be just fine. One of the telling things about the news business is that the reporters had to unionize to keep their jobs. This suggests that there is pleny of talent out there ready to report the news. It suggests that in the natural order of things reporters and columnists would come and go, and nobody would make a career out of it.

You have to have a guild in order to keep the amateurs out.

In the future we are likely to see lots of unpaid or nearly-unpaid journalists writing the news.

And maybe that will be better than the current setup. For all the pompous insistence by the MSM that only professional journalists can speak truth to power, the truth is that the MSM behaves like puppy-dogs towards the powerful until the moment that there is blood in the water.

I expect that unpaid journalists will be a lot more courageous in speaking truth to power—and that will mean government employees and government employee unions in the future—than the current incumbents, dependent as they are on advertising revenue from controversy-shy corporations.

Lopez Lomong: US Soft Power

Our liberal friends, led by Joseph Nye and his book Soft Power, have been making a big deal lately about the importance of “soft” power, the influence of culture and diplomacy, against the “hard” power of Bush-Cheney military force.

So what do you make of Lopez Lomong, the native of Sudan’s Darfur region, an American for just 13 months, who will be carrying the US flag at the opening ceremony?

You call it soft power at work.

Even on the US Olympic team, according to Elizabeth Merrill, most people didn’t know Lomong’s history of exile from his native land and a childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp. But by the time they got to Beijing, they did. Not that Lomong was reticent or anything.

When he boarded a plane for China last week, [Lomong] told a handful of his peers, "Man, I would like to be the one carrying that flag." On Wednesday night, when team captains from each sport met in the village — some in person, some by conference call — Lomong was selected.

It’s a great American story, isn’t it? Immigrant struggles to get to the US, and then overwhelmed with pride when his country accepts him and honors him. Sends a little soft power message to the Chinese government on the question of Darfur.

Maybe Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) should spend a moment with the young athlete, who will be competing in the 1,500 meters. Said Obama to a young person earlier this week:

"America is no longer what it could be, what it once was... And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children."

But this is what Lopez Lomong says about America:

“Now I’m running for America and I’m grateful for that,” he said. “America is a land for everybody.”

Sen. Obama, please get a clue.

Catch 22 on Drilling

Our Democratic friends, led by Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), insist that we can’t drill our way out of high energy prices. The reason changes from moment to moment, of course. Sometimes it’s because of the “peak oil” argument, the notion that we have already passed the peak of oil production because there just isn’t that much oil left to find.

Alternatively, they argue that drilling at ANWR won’t put a dent in oil prices because it will take seven years to get the first drop of oil out. Or that the amount of oil won’t be that much so it isn’t worth drilling. You get the point.

Imagine the surprise of young intern Joel Alicea when he found an article entitled “The Effect of Opening Up ANWR to Drilling on the Current Price of Oil” by Morris Coats et al.

Guess what the article says.

If an amount of newly discovered oil is significant enough to reduce prices in the future . . . [this indirectly] reduces the current price of oil just as if there were a reduction in the marginal costs of extracting oil now.

Well, that happens to be exactly what Republicans are saying. Conservatives are claiming that the reason that oil prices have taken a dive lately is that President Bush has rescinded the federal ban on offshore drilling, so speculators must take into account the odds that oil supplies will increase in the future. This could really contribute to the debate, couldn’t it?

But here’s the twist. The article was rejected by The Energy Journal. Not orignal research, old boy.

It’s a Catch 22. Democrats go on and on about how the law of supply and demand doesn’t work when it comes to energy. But you can’t get an article refuting them into a scholarly journal because it’s not original research. Here’s what the rejection letter said to Coats et al.:

Basically, your main result (the present impact of an anticipated future supply change) is already known to economists (although perhaps not to the Democratic Policy Committee) . . . It is our policy to publish only original research that adds significantly to the body of received knowledge regarding energy markets and policy.

These days, the American people really do need to be rocket scientists. Because they only get one chance to read about important economic findings. After that, it’s too late. Vieu jeu old chap. Old news. Can’t print that sort of thing.

But it sure is convenient for economic fabulists like Al Gore and Barack Obama.

McCain and the Internet

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) don’t know nothin’ about the internet. Doesn’t even use email, apparently. And Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has run an internet-savvy campaign. Everyone knows that.

So when McCain’s campaign put up the celebrity spot on YouTube, suggesting that Sen. Obama was a celebrity like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, the experts howled. McCain was crazy for trying to make a mark being hip.

Only now it seems he was crazy like a fox.

Celebrity Paris Hilton has issued a video in which the heir-head is lounging on a pool-side chaise lounge discussing her “hybrid” energy plan, mid-way between McCain’s oil-only plan and Obama’s conservation and renewables-only plan.

Make that young woman Secretary of Energy!

She did get one thing wrong though. Sen. McCain has recently updated his energy thinking. Now he favors an all-of-the-above energy plan that includes oil exploration, oil shale development, battery technology and renewables. So the plucky Paris was really touting McCain’s plan.

You can imagine that McCain’s Tucker Bounds was not slow to point this out.

“It sounds like Paris Hilton supports John McCain’s ‘all of the above’ approach to America’s energy crisis - including both alternatives and drilling. Paris Hilton might not be as big a celebrity as Barack Obama, but she obviously has a better energy plan.”

And according to Ann Althouse the Paris video and the McCain retort made it on the liberal morning shows.

Yep. That McCain guy is too old and too slow to figure out the internet.

Dueling Energy Futures

Republicans believe that we should let the market figure out the future of energy. Will we run out of oil? Can wind and solar make the difference? Is nuclear a viable option? Ultimately, entrepreneurs, inventors, and speculators will tell us. The government’s job is to think seriously about the rules, particularly the environmental rules.

Democrats see the future in more apocalyptic terms. They see the future as a question of saving the planet: from pollution, from Big Oil, from global warming.

So it is healthy that there is a big battle brewing in this election over the energy future. That means that the American people get to choose. Do they want to prepare for a future in which fossil fuels will be absent, and a radical reorientation of the economy will be necessary to stave off disaster? Or can we rely on the price signals of the market?

Right now, both parties are playing politics with energy. With Republicans running a Drill, Drill, Drill campaign, Democrats are willing to let their vulnerable members vote for drilling. They figure they can afford to wait, and then come back next year with a comprehensive energy policy that is long on conservation and wind and solar.

Republicans think that Democrats are just wrong, that all the apocalyptic rhetoric is just wrong. We think that Democrats and politicians are just giving in to their natural instinct to call for the moral equivalent of war.

The thing about the future is that nobody knows nothing. You can do all the predictin’ and prophesyin’ you like. But the future will turn out to be different.

That’s why Republicans prefer to let businessmen and speculators make the bets on the future. If they are wrong, then they get to pay, at least in part, for their mistakes.

In politics it is different. In politics it doesn’t matter if you are wrong, so long as you can successfully point the finger at someone else. If our Democratic and environmentlist friends are wrong about “peak oil” and global warming, it will be the American people that will pay for their mistakes.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89

What can we say about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn except to say that he was a Witness. He was a witness to perhaps the greatest evil mankind has ever seen. We shall not see his like again.

Solzhenitsyn’s place in history is his witness to the horrors of the Soviet penal camp system. His Gulag Archipelago describes the gruesome islands of labor camps that were spread across the Soviet Union. An estimated 60 million people entered those camps, millions of them to die.

But Solzhenitsyn did not thunder in his witness. He could have issued a thunderbolt to rock the world. Instead he launched an earthquake. He laughed. He laughed at at evil. That is the great takeaway from Gulag. The laughter.

In the New York Times obituary we are treated to a quote from Susan Sontag.

“We were laughing and agreeing about how we thought Solzhenitsyn’s views on the United States, his criticism of the press, and all the rest were deeply wrong, and on and on,” she said. “And then Joseph said: ‘But you know, Susan, everything Solzhenitsyn says about the Soviet Union is true. Really, all those numbers — 60 million victims — it’s all true.’”

Er, no, Susan. In Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the West, made in his address at Harvard in 1978, he was exactly right.

Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its “hasty” capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country’s music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.

But you can understand why a liberal wouldn’t have liked his critique.

Alekxandr Isayevich was, before everything else, a Russian. And it will be as a Russian, and as a Witness to evil, that he will be remembered.

Good Old Rush

Rush Limbaugh was just getting into a riff about the stupidity of Sen. Barack Obama’s plan to take money out of oil company profits and give it to people to help pay the cost of energy. It was the 20th anniversary, on August 1, 2008, of the Rush Limbaugh program on radio.

And guess who the first caller was on Open Line Friday? It was the three Bushes, President Bush 41, President Bush 43, and former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. They called from Maine to wish Rush well on the 20th anniversary of the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.

And well they might. Rush Limbaugh and his “jaunty optimism” add up to a force of nature, and a considerable talent who talks “fun, frolic, and a serious discussion of the issues” 15 hours a week. It is Rush Limbaugh that keeps conservatism in the game even when it’s on defense.

Jaunty optimism is a powerful combination. FDR had it. Ronald Reagan had it. And, with the end of the Reagan-Bush era, conservatives need the morale-raising optimism of Limbaugh more than ever.

The mark of a true talent is to make it seem effortless. If you want to find out how difficult it is to sing like an opera singer, don’t listen to Luciano Pavarotti. He makes it sound easy. Listen to a grad student in voice, and hear the effort behind the performance. Rush is like Pavarotti. His easy blend of entertainment and political analysis is a tour de force. Nobody does it better. If you want to know how hard it is to do a radio show don’t listen to Rush. Listen to some beginner trying out his wings in the dark watches of the radio night.

A few months ago, the TV script writers went on strike and we found out, in case we didn’t realize, that the late night TV talk-show hosts are all scripted. Rush Limbaugh is not. He really does write his own stuff. Only he doesn’t write his own stuff. He just makes it up as he goes along.

It is said that God looks after children, drunks, and the United States of America. He certainly seems to have a special care for American conservatives too.

Best of luck Rush, you harmless little fuzzball, you. We appreciate your success and your influence more than you can ever know.