Moderates Don't Like Dems

The Gallup Poll has just found that Americans want the government to promote "traditional values." Dog bites man, you'll say. But that's not the whole story.

According to Byron York, the poll shows that Americans trended away from the idea that the government should support traditional values in the 2005-2008 time. That was the time when President Bush and Republicans were very unpopular. So Americans weren't so sure they wanted Bush and the Republicans as the arbiters of national values.

Now all of a sudden, after six months of the Obama administration, the American people have decided that they do too want the government to promote "traditional values" by 53 to 42 percent. Republicans haven't changed their minds. Democrats haven't change. But Independents have.

Last year, independents were overwhelmingly in favor, by 55 percent to 37 percent, of the government not favoring any set of values. In the new survey, those numbers are almost reversed, with 54 percent saying the government should promote traditional values and 40 percent saying it should not.

I have a different take on the Bush popularity explanation and the sudden change in the opinion of independents. In the Bush years, it wasn't so much that Bush was unpopular as that liberals and Democrats were determined to make him unpopular. With their daily vitriol they made the "compassionate conservative" into a hard-right theocrat. They made the moderate bumbling by all levels of government during Hurricane Katrina into a specific failure of Bush. They did everything they could to run Bush down. They succeeded.

Well, when you do that, you are likely to bring moderates and independents along with you. Studies show repeatedly that moderates and independents are less knowledgeable about politics and less interested in political issues. They just go with the Zeitgeist.

The Democrats were suggesting in their attacks on Bush that it didn't have to be that way. Democratic government would be moderate and centrist, especially when compared to the hard-right cowboy politics of Bush.

What the independents and moderates have got is clearly a hard-left government that is trying to jam down everything in the liberal agenda, using every trick in the book, before the American people wake up and upchuck them.

Let us leave aside the profoundly immoral and unjust nature of this project. The whole point of civil government is to try to do things as much as possible by consensus. Because government is force, and force works both ways. The whole idea of laws and rules is to limit the use of force and make politics run within the rules, rather than break the bounds of civility, and ultimately, peace.

When you break the rules, you'd better remember Al Davis' famous line: "Just win baby."

I'm predicting that the Democrats are making a gigantic strategic mistake. I think that the outcome of the present Democratic jam-down will be a staggering backlash.

Liberals and the MSM and their activist talking heads create a narrative every day that they tell and retell to the American people. It is that the American people need all the vast expense and structure of big government. Otherwise children would go hungry and illiterate, mothers would die in childbirth, and the unemployed would live in shanty-towns. Government is a measure of our compassion.

It's just not true. Humans are social animals; they create society wherever they go. And the purpose of all social relations is precisely to care for children, to raise them to useful work, and to help the unfortunate. Without government, this society would be brimming with social relations and compassion.

When you have government do all this, it gets done badly. Because government is force. You don't use force to do things that need compassion.

So the liberal effort to effect the complete takeover by liberals of all social relations is bound to fail. Because the more that government does, the more it does badly. And the more it forces, the more it forces compassion out of society.

If the American people get a notion that all this government is just a waste, a corrupt bargain that just funnels money to liberals so they can boss everyone around, and if some populist leader arises who can articulate such a message, then we could see real hope and real change. For a change.

Laffer's Four Prosperity Killers

Liberals have had a lot of fun with Arthur Laffer, author of the Laffer Curve. That's because the last thing they'd ever want to admit is that tax rates matter.

Never mind about that. The other day Larry Kudlow did a blog and listed Laffer's four prosperity killers. Let's take them one by one.

1. Rising tax rates. That's the Laffer Curve. When you raise tax rates, as the Obama administration proposes to do, you discourage people from saving and investing. That means you kill prosperity.
   
   
2. Inflationary money. The Fed is printing money like mad right now to soak up the $2 trillion deficit. The way that government does inflation is that it pays for government spending by printing money. As the value of money goes down, people start to avoid holding money. They start to buy real estate and jewelry and precious metals to try and hold onto their wealth. This is not what creates a healthy economy. We want people with savings to invest in businesses that will increase productivity and wealth. Inflation is a prosperity killer. As anyone from Zimbabwe.
   
   
3. Trade protectionism. The Obama administration just slapped duties on cheap Chinese tire imports. That means that the US government is preventing US producers and consumers from buying low and selling high. High tariffs helped to deepen and prolong the Great Depression.
   
   
4. Government control/re-regulation. The Obama administration is proposing to put about 15 percent of the economy under direct government control with its health care reform, and regulate CO2 as a pollutant. Government control always creates waste and crony capitalism. Government is a prosperity killer.

None of this is rocket science. On the contrary, it is common sense. The rocket science is this: Nobody can know how badly the Obama administration will damage the US economy with its prosperity killing policies.

But usually, in spite of the government, the economy manages to struggle through.

A Pact with the Devil?

Irving Kristol was important enough that he got to be the obituary in The Economist last week. You'd expect The Economist to damn him with faint praise, and you wouldn't be disappointed.

But there is one egregious swipe that needs careful analysis.

[Neoconservatism had given conservatism an impulse,] a moral and philosophical dimension (expressed, in the early 1980s, in an alarming Faustian alliance with evangelicals), for conservatism without religion was “thin gruel”.

The writer is saying here that the inclusion of the Christian Right into the Republican tent is a pact with the Devil. Let us be clear here. Liberals really believe this.

If liberals believe this then they profoundly misunderstand the relationship between the more secular parts of the conservative movement and the more religious parts. Nobody is making a pact here, unless the compromises in any political party are necessarily demonic. The secular Rush Limbaugh, for instance, seems to regard God-fearing conservatives as people to be honored for their moral witness, especially since liberals go out of their way to insult them. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

When the economic conservatives joined up with the social conservatives in the 1970s it was not because anyone was trying to sell their soul for political, but because both sides were thrown together by the aggressive secular agenda of liberals. Liberals had written all conservatives out of respectable society, so they really can't be shocked that the folks they revile got to like each other.

Then there's the Kissinger Effect. Henry Kissinger was an expert of foreign policy had had original things to say about it. But the rest of his political opinions were off-the-shelf, basically Rockefeller Republican. This applies to political parties. People bring an agenda into the party, and after a time, the rest of the party takes it up. Thus economic conservatives start to pick up the opinions of their religious conservative allies, and the religious conservatives start to see the point of supply-side economics. There's nothing diabolical about this. It arises out of the nature of humans as social animals.

In a way liberals do us a favor by misunderstanding the relations within the conservative movement. There's nothing better in war than when your opponents don't take the trouble to understand you and your culture.

And with the Obama administration it looks like liberals have failed to understand about 60 percent of the American people. They will pay for this in the only coin they know: political power.

If there is a Faustian bargain in the modern era, it can only be the disastrous bargain that the working class made with the socialists. They sold their soul to the liberals, and for what? They got piddling pensions and benefits, but lost their families and their robust working-class culture and their self-respect.

Briffa in the Chipper

Regular readers will know that the infamous Michael Mann Hockey Stick went into the chipper years ago.

The reason was simple. Michael Mann, the climate professor from Kent State, had developed a dataset of climate proxies that demonstrated a Hockey Stick shape. It showed that global temperature had been pretty constant over the last 1,000 years (the shaft), but then suddenly shot up in the last century (the blade). But it turned out that there was a catch. Only a few proxies showed the Hockey Stick signal.

Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit showed, again and again, that if you remove the few proxies with the Hockey Stick signal then you are back to the status quo ante, that the Medieval Warming Period was probably warmer than today.

The Hockey Stick signal was contained in a limited set of bristlecone pines in North America assembled by Donald Graybill and his team. There was also a Tiljander record that the Mannites got upside down (i.e., it showed cooling in the 20th century). Then there was Yamal, worked up by Keith Briffa at the British Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

For years, Steve McIntyre has been trying to get the raw data on the Yamal series, but Keith Briffa wouldn't release it. But he accidentally published his results in a journal (Phil Trans B, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences) that required public archiving of data, so McIntyre and others put pressure on the journal to enforce their publication policies. On some day in September 2009, Briffa archived the Yamal data, the tree ring data from Siberia.

And it is a scandal. Briffa cherry-picked about 10 tree-ring cores, and boosted it up with data from 400 km away.

But hey Keith, there's plenty of data near by. Why not use that? Because the data is completely different from the cores that Briffa used and published. If you add that data, the Hockey Stick signal for Yamal disappears.

Go to Climate Audit and take a look. It's breathtaking.

We understand that Keith Briffa is presently ill. We extend our best wishes to him and his family for a swift recovery.

G-20 Protests: Racist, Sexist, Classist

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Democrats, liberals, and MSMers were describing the convivial, peaceful 9/12 protests as racist. Not that you could tell, directly, but these experts knew what was really in the hearts of Americans protesting big government and high taxes.

There's no difficulty in describing the violent protesters at the Pittsburgh G-20 summit on Thursday. They are racists, sexists, and classists. And unlike the anti-establishment 9/12ers, the G-20 protestors are echoing ideas and ideologies they were taught at their government schools. They play-act being anarchists and underdogs, but really they act with the encouragement of the progressive educated elite. Here's how.

Everyone knows that evil bankers are rich white capitalists, bent upon paying themselves gigantic bonuses while the poor and the disadvantaged, disproportionately women and minorities, are losing their homes to foreclosure.

So the protestors are racists. They hate and fear white bankers.

So the protestors are sexists. They hate and fear white men.

So the protestors are classists. They hate and fear the rich.

But where did these young people pick up these ideas? Not from down-market rabble-rousers spawned in the agony of defeat in war. They get it from their government university professors. There is scarcely a university in the land that does not have its Womens Studies center, which teaches sexism. There is scarcely a university in the land that does not have its African American Studies center, which teaches racism. And every university has a labor history department that teaches class hatred.

That's the real problem in America. Our leaders and our thinkers are teaching and spewing out the most vile hate, and they are spewing it from the universities that once provided a counterweight against the power of government. And these haters are feted and honored. Paid for by the taxpayers.

That is something that is really scary.

Liberals' Tin Ear

In the roar of Obama administration initiatives crashing to earth, let us just look at one little flap: the effort by the Obama administration to stop Humana from communicating to its customers.

You know the story. Humana sent a mailing to its Medicare Advantage customers warning them that under the administration's plans their benefits would be cut.

Can't have that! So Senator Baucus (D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, asked the Department of Health and Human Services to take action. Here's Sen. Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) version of what happened:

Let's review: at the instigation of the Chairman of the Finance Committee, the author of the health care legislation now working its way through Congress, the Executive Branch, through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has launched an investigation into Humana for explaining to seniors how this legislation might affect their coverage.

One more time: a private health care provider told its elderly clients how health care legislation might affect their lives. And now the federal government is putting its full weight into investigating that company at the request of the senator who wrote the legislation in question.

Of course, it turns out that Humana was right. The Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that the administration plan would implement cuts to Medicare Advantage. So Sen. Baucus was wrong on the facts.

But the bigger thing is the hypocrisy. Liberals get up in the morning worrying about "chilling effects" to free speech. And woe betide anyone who even lowers an eyebrow at a liberal exercising their right to free speech.

But when it comes to other peoples' free speech, particularly the rights of corporate entities, liberals have a tin ear. They think nothing of gagging and regulating commercial speech. They think nothing of using government power to win policy arguments. They think nothing of persecuting conservatives and Christians in the university.

There's just a chance that non-liberal Americans are getting to the point where they are not going to take it any more. There are signs all over the place of rustling in the grass roots. I am thinking Free Enterprise Nation, Smart Girls Politics, Tea Parties, Town Halls, etc.

Maybe it won't amount to anything. Or maybe it will combine into a perfect storm.

Palin: What's not to like?

Governor Palin made her first speech since resigning as governor of Alaska to bankers in Hong Kong recently. The speech wasn't open to reporters, but it was reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Here's what Palin told the bankers:

• She blamed the financial crisis on government excesses.
• She said China makes a lot of people nervous.
• She asked whether the change that Americans voted for was really for more government.
• She criticized redistributive government policies.
• She criticized the Federal Reserve's low interest policies for setting up the financial crisis.
• "She called for tax cuts as well as the elimination of the capital gains and estate tax."
• She mentioned "death panels" and called for market-based health care reforms.
• She criticized Nancy Pelosi on Afghanistan.

Really. What's not to like? Palin is positioning herself as a strong free-enterprise conservative. That should look amazingly fresh and comforting to Americans by 2012 after four years of feverish left-wing activism.