— National Politics —

February 23, 2013


As the Sequester Dominates the Weekend Political Talk.....

Marc Comtois

....keep this in mind.

1) There are no cuts as regular people define them. Just a reduction in the planned for "regular" growth that Washington, D.C. cooks into the budget pie year after year.

2) The sequester was President Obama's idea in the first place. Bob Woodward:

My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise. Nabors has said, “We didn’t actually think it would be that hard to convince them” — Reid and the Republicans — to adopt the sequester. “It really was the only thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.”

A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government.


December 21, 2012


Cicilline on the Congressional Budget Committee

Patrick Laverty

As if we needed any further evidence of how messed up our Congress is, we certainly got that yesterday with the news that Congressman David Cicilline is being appointed to the House Budget Committee.

Wow. The very same David Cicilline who left Providence in "excellent financial condition" which I assume means only a $110M deficit.

All I'm left with is that the Democrats either believe that if he can reduce the national deficit to $110M, we'll be in great shape. I'd completely agree with that. Or, they want to find out how to delay audits and keep the information from the public until it's politically feasible to do so. Shouldn't appointments to committees be based on the person's strengths and where they can best help the country? Putting Cicilline on the Budget Committee is like dropping a non-swimmer in the middle of the ocean.

Maybe the apocalypse did happen after all.


November 19, 2012


City Politics, Country Politics

Justin Katz

Over on Anchor Rising, Marc Comtois has pulled together a handful of stories in the subcategory of "two Americas":

Hendrickson puts some stock in the so-called "Curley Effect", named after the former Boston Mayor. Basically, it has two parts: first, that politicians provide enough incentives to their own voters to ensure continued support; second provide enough disincentives such that their political opponents decide to move out, thereby increasing said politicians vote share, etc. (Seems to be working in RI, too).

Yet, while that may explain continuing support for Democrats amongst those receiving government assistance and public unions, Hendrickson asks, "Why do affluent, white-collar, highly educated citizens in these cities tend to be liberal and vote Democratic?" In a word, insularity.


As often happens, over there, the comment-section discussion is worth reading, as well. That especially became true with the very agitated commentary of young urban-dweller Mangeek. As I've commented at the above link, I find a number of intellectual and philosophical problems embedded in his self-admitted rage.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


November 18, 2012


A Nation Divided

Marc Comtois

Two Americas? The idea is nothing new. We learn that almost 23% of Americans are open to the idea of seceding given the recent election results. And we've heard reports that 37 Chicago precincts, 59 Philadelphia precincts and multiple others in urban areas gave President Obama 99% support--some with 0 votes for Romney.*

Mark Hendrickson of Forbes notes that the largest divide is between city-dwellers and the rest of America:

Basically, the urban metropolises are Democratic blue and the vast expanse of most of the rest of the country is overwhelmingly red. If presidents were elected by acreage rather than by head count, Republicans would win national elections by landslides.

Look at it another way: take Philly out of Pennsylvania, the Big Apple out of New York, the Motor City out of Michigan, the Windy City out of Illinois, Cleveland out of Ohio, Milwaukee out of Wisconsin, St. Louis out of Missouri, etc., and a lot of blue states would instantly be red. What explains this pronounced and hugely significant partisan divide between urban and nonurban areas?

Hendrickson puts some stock in the so-called "Curley Effect", named after the former Boston Mayor. Basically, it has two parts: first, that politicians provide enough incentives to their own voters to ensure continued support; second provide enough disincentives such that their political opponents decide to move out, thereby increasing said politicians vote share, etc. (Seems to be working in RI, too).

Yet, while that may explain continuing support for Democrats amongst those receiving government assistance and public unions, Hendrickson asks, "Why do affluent, white-collar, highly educated citizens in these cities tend to be liberal and vote Democratic?" In a word, insularity:

[P]eople who live in cities are relatively insulated from how difficult and challenging it can be to produce the food, energy, equipment, devices, etc., that comprise the affluence that urbanites enjoy. In their urban cocoons, city-dwellers take for granted the abundance and availability of the economic goods that they consume. For instance, many well-to-do, educated urbanites see no downside to supporting stricter regulations and higher taxes on energy producers, because to them, energy is something that is always there at the flip of a switch (except during the occasional hurricane, as some New Yorkers recently discovered). Life in the city for affluent Americans creates the illusion that all they have to do is demand something and—presto!—it will be there when they want it.

Affluent denizens of our metropolises see no inconsistency in supporting the Democratic jihad against “greedy corporations” and “the rich” while also expecting their every whim to be supplied, often by those same corporations and successful entrepreneurs. This is because they are removed from some of the harsher daily realities of life that confront those who are on the front lines of mankind’s ongoing economic struggle. They have forgotten that mankind’s natural state is poverty and that strenuous, heroic efforts are required to produce the astounding affluence and abundant paraphernalia of our modern, affluent lifestyles. To use Marxian terminology, urbanites have become alienated from economic reality.

Yes, we see it in urbanite political ideas and how they view such things as the estate tax:
Rancher Kevin Kester works dawn to dusk, drives a 12-year-old pick-up truck and earns less than a typical bureaucrat in Washington D.C., yet the federal government considers him rich enough to pay the estate tax -- also known as the "death tax."

And with that tax set to soar at the beginning of 2013 without some kind of intervention from Congress, farmers and ranchers like Kester are waiting anxiously.

"There is no way financially my kids can pay what the IRS is going to demand from them nine months after death and keep this ranch intact for their generation and future generations," said Kester, of the Bear Valley Ranch in Central California.

Two decades ago, Kester paid the IRS $2 million when he inherited a 22,000-acre cattle ranch from his grandfather. Come January, the tax burden on his children will be more than $13 million.

For supporters of a high estate tax, which is imposed on somebody's estate after death, Kester is the kind of person they rarely mention. He doesn't own a mansion. He's not the CEO of a multi-national. But because of his line of work, he owns a lot of property that would be subject to a lot of tax....

"The idea behind the estate tax is to prevent the very wealthy among us from accumulating vast fortunes that they can pass along to the next generation," said Patrick Lester, director of Federal Fiscal Policy with the progressive think tank -- OMB Watch. "The poster child for the estate tax is Paris Hilton -- the celebrity and hotel heiress. That's who this is targeted at, not ordinary Americans."

But according to the American Farm Bureau, up to 97 percent of American farms and ranches will be subject to an estate tax where the exemption is set at $1 million. At that rate, the federal government will pocket $40 billion in 2013 and up to $86 billion in 2021. That contrasts with just $12 billion this year.

They think they're going after Paris Hilton, but it is actually Old MacDonald and his kids--land rich and cash poor--who bear the brunt of the estate tax. But they know all about Paris Hilton (and so do the suburban and urban youth voters, incidentally) and don't know much about farmers--unless of course they're buying organic at the Whole Foods. It's all about personal experience and it won't change any time soon.

=============================
* Check out these results from Cuyhoga County in Ohio, for instance. There do seem to be some statistical anomalies amongst those results.


November 6, 2012


Today

Marc Comtois

So today is the day. Big election. The fate of thousands of politicians is in our hands. And our own too. No matter what the result, life will go on, albeit with sunnier or cloudier skies depending on your outlook. It’s unfortunate that who we elect for President (or for any office) is as important as it is on our daily lives. Smaller government is less intrusive, which means those who would hold the reins would be less important and less impactful on the lives of everyday citizens. But that’s not the case, especially here in the Ocean State. So we make choices.

For me that means supporting those who would work to shrink government, yes; but also those who would work to make it more efficient and effective where it is needed. More than ever, I’ve come to appreciate competence. Most importantly, though, we need people who will lead. That means leading before a crisis hits, not just during or after. Leadership means taking steps to head things off at the pass, not taking the reins of the runaway stagecoach as it’s going over the cliff (and then being applauded when only 3 of the 4 wheels came off). So, competence and leadership.

One way or another, we’ll learn several things after this election. Big questions will be answered--smaller or larger government?--as will small ones--were the polls accurate?--but not everything will be determined for all time based on what happens on November 6th, 2012.

It may just feel that way for a while.


October 13, 2012


Democrats Try to Put Fighter Pilot Back in the Kitchen

Marc Comtois

Rhode Island native Martha McSally is running as a Republican for the 2nd Congressional District in Arizona. Her opponent is Ron Barber, winner of a special election in April and former aid to Gabby Giffords. Nancy Pelosi's Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is running this ad against McSally:

McSally thinks the ad's portrayal of her is "laughable".

“The fact that they use this theme of Martha McSally in a kitchen cooking up recipes is…overtly sexist and insulting to any woman, but it certainly doesn’t fit specifically with me,” she said in a phone interview. “For crying out loud, I served 26 years in the military. I was too busy shooting 30 mm out of my A-10 at the Taliban and al Qaeda to spend any time in a kitchen.”

As Mary Katherine Hamm writes, "Nowhere in the country perhaps is the irony of the Democrats’ 'war on women' attack more glaring than in McSally’s race."

McSally has flown some 300 combat hours over Iraq and Afghanistan, earning the Bronze Star during her time commanding a combat squadron in Operation Enduring Freedom during 2005 and 2006.

McSally also sued her bosses at the Department of Defense in the early 2000s to change Pentagon policy forcing women service members to wear the abaya— Muslim body covering— when they went off base in Saudi Arabia. The policy changed. She uses that powerful example when constituents wonder if she’ll simply toe the party line once she gets to Washington, she said.

“I’m a conservative and I’m an independent thinker.”

Wish she'd move back to Rhode Island.


October 9, 2012


RI Governor Gives Nation a Preview of Obama’s Public Welfare Project

Justin Katz

People across the United States should consider Rhode Island as a canary in the ObamaCare coal mine, whistling the tune of the President's larger public welfare project.

When he spoke on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, RI's Lincoln Chafee introduced himself as "the nation's only independent governor." That's "independent" as in belonging to no political party. He went on to claim the mantel of "moderate" and to upend the dictionary with a new, inverted definition of "traditional conservative," applying that label to himself, as well.

Actual moderates and conservatives should be wary of Chafee's brand of independence.  The most stunning reason is his state's status, in July, as one of only three to have lost employment since the end of the U.S. jobs free fall in February 2010. A more subtle, but profound, reason is the vision of health benefit exchanges toward which he is hurrying his state.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


October 5, 2012


Employment: October Surprise or October Miracle?

Justin Katz

A lot of people who watch policy and politics relatively closely were very surprised, this morning, to hear that the unemployment rate had fallen to its lowest level during the Obama presidency — a level last seen in January 2009.  As James Pethokoukis notes, of the seasonally adjusted 873,000 jump in employment from August to September, 582,000 were people who want to work full-time but had their hours cut or were unable to find full-time work, involuntary part time, as they're called.

Given the sheer size of the jump in employment, though, some cynical folks on the political right are finding it to be a bit suspicious. In their view, the move would be in keeping with the Obama administration's request to defense contractors not to notify employees before the election of possible layoffs and promise to cover the cost if they are sued for it.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


September 29, 2012


Warren: Ethical Controversy for Another New England Democrat Candidate

Justin Katz

Retired Providence Journal political columnist M. Charles Bakst has offered, via Ted Nesi's Saturday column, a cute analysis of how both Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren could wind up in the U.S. Senate next session.

While RI's mainstream press ponders hypotheticals about the Senate race next door, Rhode Island blogger and Cornell law professor William Jacobson has been investigating whether Warren has been practicing law illegally in that state:

As detailed below, there are at least two provisions of Massachusetts law Warren may have violated. First, on a regular and continuing basis she used her Cambridge office for the practice of law without being licensed in Massachusetts. Second, in addition to operating an office for the practice of law without being licensed in Massachusetts, Warren actually practiced law in Massachusetts without being licensed.

Monique has mentioned that post already, here, receiving the biggest "if" in Jacobson's analysis, as articulated by Joe Bernstein in the comments: "If Warren only practiced in Federal court, a MA license wasn't required as long as she was licensed somewhere at the time."

In his post, Jacobson details what information is available about Warren's licensure, in Texas and New Jersey. Oddly, she resigned her New Jersey license on September 11 of this year, which, Jacobson says, "made it more difficult for the public to determine her pre-resignation status."

Since then, Jacobson has continued to argue that the objections are irrelevant to the law and, in any event, "Warren did represent a Massachusetts client in Massachusetts on a Massachusetts legal issue." With that, the peer-review process of the blogosphere has been operating, and Jacobson passes along a concession by a skeptic that the facts look "really, really bad for Professor Warren."

Indeed, they do. This election cycle, though, things that look really, really bad for Democrat candidates in national races have had a way of slipping through the media cracks.


September 18, 2012


Things We Read Today (13), Tuesday

Justin Katz

Days off from retirement in Cranston; the conspiracy of low interest rates; sympathy with the Satanic Verses; the gas mandate; and the weaponized media.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


September 12, 2012


Things We Read Today, 9

Justin Katz

No deep theme, today, but bad British commentary, union priorities, stimulus as wishlist, the fame of Dinesh, and a response to Dan Yorke's Congressional District 1 analysis.


September 11, 2012


Things We Read Today, 8

Justin Katz

Today: September 11, global change, evolution, economics, 17th amendment, gold standard, and a boughten electorate... all to a purpose.


September 9, 2012


Things We Read Today This Weekend, 6

Justin Katz

First, scroll down and read Monique's postings on Rep. Spencer Dickinson. Then...

The topics of hope and hopelessness pervaded this weekend's readings, from absurd labor rules in schools, to the likely outcome of Make It Happen, to Spencer Dickinson's insider view, and then to Sandra Fluke.


September 6, 2012


Things We Read Today, 4

Justin Katz

Today, I touch briefly (for me) on long-term vs. short-term recovery, who's better off, RI's long spiral (and potential for quick resurgence), and the significance of different ballot types in Cicilline-Loughlin.


September 5, 2012


Things We Read Today, 3

Justin Katz

Today's short takes address misleading labeling at the DNC, misleading fact-checking, fading national competitiveness, and the September 10 mentality.


September 4, 2012


Things We Read Today, 2

Justin Katz

Today's quick(ish) hits touch on:

  • Partisanship as evidenced by Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, and Nick Gillespie.
  • The libertarian-conservative divide and this year's election.
  • Ed Fitzpatrick's one-way love of fact checking.
  • The dependency nation as an existential threat.

Read all about it on the Ocean State Current...


August 24, 2012


When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be a Crony

Marc Comtois

I can't confirm if this was filmed in Rhode Island or not (h/t):

"I'm gonna fight for MY piece of the taxpayer pie."

"What's a crony?"

"It's like having a best friend who gives you other people's stuff."

"We take care of our friends."

"We get to spend taxpayer money any way we want."

"Why be a taxpayer when I can be a tax spender?"

Yup, it had to be filmed here, right?


August 21, 2012


Rasmussen Explains Gap Between Mainstream America and Official Washington

Marc Comtois

Pollster Scott Rasmussen explains how common poll questions offered by Beltway "professionals" make no sense to average Americans:

In Washington, it's a given that more government spending is needed to help the economy. Most Americans hold the opposite view. So when you ask whether cutting spending or helping the economy is more important, the question doesn't make sense. For most Mainstream voters, one leads to the other.

To gain a sense of how strong this belief is, consider the fact that voters are fairly evenly divided when asked whether they fear the government will do too much or too little to help the economy. At Rasmussen Reports, we asked those who wanted more government intervention what they would like the government to do. Most said cut spending. Overall, 66 percent of voters believe that the best thing the government can do for the economy is to cut spending.

The same dynamic exists when it comes to repeal of the national health care law. Rather than being seen as a diversion from talking about the economy, 43 percent believe repeal would help the economy. Just 27 percent think it would hurt. That's part of the reason most voters consistently support repeal. So, once again, it's not a choice between repealing the health care law and focusing on the economy. They're part of the same plan.

In other words, (gasp) voters have a more sophisticated understanding of the economy than Washington pollsters--and politicians--give them credit for.


August 10, 2012


10 News Conference - Justin and RIFuture's Bob Plain

Justin Katz

Jim Taricani invited me and RIFuture.org owner/editor Bob Plain to sit in for 10 News Conference, this morning. The topics leaned more toward politics than policy, but we bloggers did manage to pull the conversation toward political philosophy a bit. Specifically, we discussed economic development, the RI economy, the Congressional district 1 race, and the presidential race.

Watch video and continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


August 6, 2012


Recoveries: The Difference the Debt Makes (Not to Mention the Government's Focus)

Justin Katz

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds linked to an American Enterprise Institute post by James Pethokoukis, drawing on charts from economist John Taylor showing that the United States economy hasn't been returning toward where it would have been without the crash, and that this is unusual for prior downturns.

 

The reasons, I think, can be inferred from this chart, which I created with a view toward answering the question of whether it's reasonable to continue expecting 7-8% returns on pension fund investments:

U.S. Stock Market Growth Compared with National Debt, Consumer Credit, and GDP, 1943 to 2010

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


August 4, 2012


Barone: Intellegentsia Got the Partisanship the Asked For

Marc Comtois

Michael Barone:

I ascribe much of the partisan tone of today's politics to two changes urged by the political scientists I studied in college nearly half a century ago.

One was the idea that we should have one clearly liberal and one clearly conservative party. This was a popular enough argument in the 1940s and 1950s that Gallup used to test it in polls.

Political scientists and sympathetic journalists were annoyed that there were lots of Southern (and some non-Southern) conservatives in the Democratic party and that there were a fair number of pretty liberal Republicans in big states like New York and California.

Wouldn't it make more sense, they asked, to have all the liberals in one party and all the conservatives in the other? That way, they said, voters would have a clear choice and the winning party (the liberals, most of them hoped) would be able to enact its programs into law.

There are indeed rational arguments for this. For years Southern whites clung to the Democratic label because of memories of the Civil War, while many liberal Northerners supported Republicans because they disliked big city Democratic political machines. Neither party was ideologically coherent.

Today it's clear that the prayers of the midcentury reformers have been answered. The Republican party is a clearly and nearly unanimously conservative party, while the Democratic party is the natural home for liberals.

As a result there are more party-line votes in Congress than there were half a century ago. There are fewer friendships and alliances across party lines. Parties with supermajorities can enact their programs (e.g., Obamacare) even in the face of hostile public opinion.

Hm. It hasn't happened in Rhode Island yet, though. He continues:
Another idea peddled by political scientists and some thoughtful liberal politicians half a century ago was that there should be more party discipline in Congress.

Rep. Richard Bolling, frustrated that Democratic House speakers didn't force Southern conservatives to vote the liberal line, wrote two books in the 1960s advocating this. Liberal political scientists and columnists liked the idea.

So when Democrats won big majorities in the Watergate year of 1974, San Francisco Rep. Phillip Burton, in a typical backroom maneuver, engineered the election of Democratic committee chairmen and important subcommittee chairmen by secret ballot.

House Republicans adopted a similar rule, providing for election by an elected steering committee, after their big win in 1994.

There's a certain logic to this, and I believe the results on balance have been positive. You don't see senile chairmen frozen in office by the seniority system (a progressive reform in 1911) any more, and both parties have generally chosen competent chairmen.

But -- and here's the answered prayers department -- you also get more partisan politics. Anyone wanting a chairmanship some day had better not dissent from party orthodoxy very often.

A reputation for bipartisanship doesn't help you get ahead when members of the other party don't get a vote.

Instead, you get called--often quite appropriately--a DINO or RINO.


August 3, 2012


National Poll Shenanigans

Marc Comtois

Take a look at the Real Clear Politics' 2012 Presidential poll averages and you'll see, for the most part, Obama and Romney are within 2-4 pts of each other with Obama leading most of them. Then Pew released a poll showing Obama with a 10 point lead. How'd that happen? Well, several experienced and astute poll watchers noticed the discrepancy between the Democrats and Republicans sampled, which Pew itself laid out:

The current survey finds that 45% of independents back Romney and 43% Obama, which is virtually unchanged from earlier in July. Over the course of the year, independent support has wavered, with neither candidate holding a consistent advantage.

Both candidates have nearly universal backing within their party: Nine-in-ten Democrats support Obama and an identical share of Republicans support Romney. Obama’s overall edge at this point is based on the healthy advantage in overall party identification that Democrats have enjoyed in recent years.

Pew's aggregate shows that they significantly over-sampled Democrats compared to Republicans. That's how, even though 9 in 10 of each party stayed true and Romney has a slight lead over the President with Independents, Obama manages to have a 10 point lead. How can this be a legitimate way to conduct a poll when no one--and I mean no one--really things the Democrats will have a 10 point turnout advantage in November? Hugh Hewitt asked the Quinnipiac pollster--who also tends to over-sample Democrats--the same question.
HH: I want to start with the models, which are creating quite a lot of controversy. In Florida, the model that Quinnipiac used gave Democrats a nine point edge in turnout. In Ohio, the sample had an eight point Democratic advantage. What’s the reasoning behind those models?

PB: Well, what is important to understand is that the way Quinnipiac and most other major polls do their sampling is we do not wait for party ID. We ask voters, or the people we interview, do they consider themselves a Democrat, a Republican, an independent or a member of a minor party. And that’s different than asking them what their party registration is. What you’re comparing it to is party registration. In other words, when someone starts as a voter, they have the opportunity of, in most states, of being a Republican, a Democrat, or a member of a minor party or unaffiliated.

HH: Okay.

PB: So what’s important to understand is what we are doing is we’re asking voters what they consider themselves when we interview them, which was in the last week.

HH: Now what I don’t understand this, so educate me on it, if Democrats only had a three point advantage in Florida in the final turnout measurement in 2008, but in your poll they have a nine point turnout advantage, why is that not a source of skepticism for people?

PB: Well, I mean, clearly there will be some people who are skeptics. This is how we’ve always done our polls. Our record is very good in terms of accuracy. Again, remember, we’re asking people what they consider themselves at the time we call them.

HH: But I don’t know how that goes to the issue, Peter, so help me. I’m not being argumentative, I really want to know. Why would guys run a poll with nine percent more Democrats than Republicans when that percentage advantage, I mean, if you’re trying to tell people how the state is going to go, I don’t think this is particularly helpful, because you’ve oversampled Democrats, right?

PB: But we didn’t set out to oversample Democrats. We did our normal, random digit dial way of calling people. And there were, these are likely voters. They had to pass a screen. Because it’s a presidential year, it’s not a particularly heavy screen.

HH: And so if, in fact, you had gotten a hundred Democrats out of a hundred respondents that answered, would you think that poll was reliable?

PB: Probably not at 100 out of 100.

HH: Okay, so if it was 75 out of 100…

PB: Well, I mean…

For whatever reason, more Democrats seem to be answering the pollsters calls. There could be any number of reasons for this. The obvious error here is believing that people who pick up the phone for pollsters is an accurate reflection of those who will actually vote in November. Even though pollsters seem to know that the model isn't really incorrect, it sure is good for a headline, isn't it?


July 19, 2012


Like it or Not, Red Team/Blue Team is the American Way

Marc Comtois
I’m tired of playing the same old Democrat versus Republican game. It’s like watching professional sports, only it will seriously impact your life. Our modern political culture has been shaped in such a way that we debate our politics like we root for our favorite football team. Doesn’t matter that the candidate may not share our ideology, it just matters that they’re wearing the right colors. ~ Matt Allen
Let that party [the Jeffersonian Republicans] set up a broomstick, and call it a true son of Liberty, a Democrat, or give it any other epithet that will suit their purpose, and it will command their votes in toto! ~ George Washington

You see, contrary to what Matt Allen wrote, it's not just our "modern political culture", it's simply a basic characteristic of our political culture to have two dominant parties and it's been that way since 1800. What is true is that it's very hard for another "team" to arise under our system. Occasionally a third party has arisen to try to harness the frustration of voters with looser ties to--usually--one of the parties. Such movements were successful early on. After the Federalists were essentially wiped out by the Democrat-Republicans (the Jeffersonian Republicans that Washington refers too who would eventually become the Democratic Party) in 1800, the Whigs eventually arose to contend against the Democrats, though not very successfully. Before the Civil War, a new coalition of Whigs, Abolitionists and Northern Democrats was formed into the Republican party. This new party nominated Abraham Lincoln and the rest, as they say, is history.

There hasn't truly been a successful third party since then.

Teddy Roosevelt formed the Bull Moose party when he knew he wasn't going to be nominated by the Republicans. His party, comprised of progressive Republicans, succeeded in siphoning off enough votes to see Democrat Woodrow Wilson elected President. Ross Perot's movement of independent-fiscal/small-government (mostly) conservatives siphoned off enough votes from George H.W. Bush to see Bill Clinton win the presidency with around 44% of the vote. Ralph Nader's Green Party in 2000 is commonly accused of skimming from Al Gore's vote total. You can see what all of them have in common: each of these third-parties undermined the party from which they sprang and succeeded in getting the party they most disagreed with elected. Most recently, Americans Elect tried and failed to find a third way. Meanwhile, the Libertarians still hold out hope.

Yet, Allen isn't necessarily talking about a third party so much as another option. He recently wondered if the high number of independent candidates contesting elections here in Rhode Island was indicative of people tired of the same old parties and way of doing business.

I do think he's onto something. The level of frustration is palpable and I have little doubt that many of these independent candidates are fed up with business as usual in the Ocean State. And who has been running business as usual in Rhode Island? The Democratic party. Since most incumbents are Democrats, I think the number of independents running this time around is less a statement of frustration against both parties--as Allen seems to believe--than it is about candidates taking on incumbent Democrats and strategically deciding to avoid appending the poison "R" to their name on the ballot. (I won't get into the number of conservative Democrats we have in this state). In short, if this were any other state, I have little doubt that most of these independents would have picked the Republican team.

Allen has been expressing his frustration with the Blue Team/Red Team more and more recently.

Political types like me should tune into debates and stump speeches and hear the lines being drawn between those who want more dependency versus more self-reliance. We should be looking at supporting a candidate that will draw a stark line between what has become the most egregious big government era in American history and one where people have to earn what they get. We don’t have that candidate....I’m tired of voting for one man because he’s not as bad as the other guy. “Well you can’t let Obama back in.” That’s what I hear from people. I agree. However shouldn’t we at least try to put up some kind of candidate that can actually have a philosophy that we can all draw a line through? A point of view that we can all somewhat support and believe in so that when we do support “our guy” we don’t have to hold back our dry heaves?
While his exasperation is understandable, his idealism--and that of many of his regular callers--is, unfortunately, unrealistic in the real-world of politics, particularly with a looming election. Parties exist as a way to organize voters who hold similar views. The goal isn't to have 100% agreement within a national party (though those accused of being DINO's or RINO's probably don't think that), but to recognize differences--often geographical--and allow variety amongst those within the party, which is why both try/claim to be "big tent".

As a result, the internal gravity of a party often results in positions or votes being cast by elected officials that are most amenable to the majority within a party (ie; those that will help them get re-elected). That also means many party voters are left less than pleased and get the impression that they aren't being listened to by their party. (The corollary is that they often believe their own Congressman or Senator is listening to them on any particular vote, hence the high incumbent reelection rate. See, it works). The truth is, it's not always the same "disgruntled" party members reacting to this or that vote. It's the same phenomena we see in Rhode Island. We all hate what the General Assembly does, but our guy is pretty good.

However, if the party base is ticked off enough, it will turn over it's own party. Witness the conservative, small-government, low-tax Tea Party movement, which chose to work within the Republican party (for the most part) and oust so-called big government conservatives. They successfully elected their candidates to several Congressional seats in 2010. Thus far, it seems those elected under that banner have acted as their constituents expected, even as they are often demonized by those within and outside their party for being "roadblocks to compromise" by not voting for compromise legislation that, say, "cuts" expected government growth from 7% to 3%. Those Tea Party Republicans who strayed may feel the pain in 2012. We'll have to wait and see.

In the end, most conservatives--Tea Party, Libertarian or otherwise--are Republicans and most liberals or progressives are Democrats. Allen may not think that team denotes ideology, but it usually does.

So, it's hard enough to find a local politician that we agree with. That is magnified 1,000 times on a national scale. There is no ideal candidate that will broadly appeal to the American electorate, particularly people with strong ideological beliefs. It's almost impossible in our fractured culture. A case in point would be the libertarian Republican Ron Paul (big tent, right?). He has a passionate following, but he simply hasn't got the broad appeal that his followers think he deserves. His mix of small-government conservatism with individual moral freedom doesn't appeal to a broad enough base (yet..., right Paulites?). Why this is so--stupid people, MSM conspiracy--doesn't matter, it's simply the truth. Instead, political parties have a process--the primaries--where they try to find the candidate that the most party members agree with the most. The party can only pick from those who run. This all translates to the broader American electorate, too. It's not exactly inspirational, but reality.

I think that it is often the case that the minority of us who are politically minded tend to over-emphasis the differences amongst those who generally agree on 80-90% of the same thing (especially in the primary season). Much of Allen's reticence about Romney is related to RomneyCare=Obamacare. That's understandable, but I'd bet that he agrees with Romney on much more than he disagrees. And the opposite is clearly true with Obama.

We also can put too much meaning into short-term topics that flare up in the political silly season. Allen is disappointed in the way Romney has responded to the Obama camp's Bain attacks. He's not alone. But then we see that the polls haven't moved (and Romney may have even re-taken a slight lead) while these attacks were all over the place. It would seem the American polity doesn't really care about Bain.

We politically-minded get wrapped up in differences that take up an out-sized place in our thinking. Unfortunately, sometimes this gets translated into a sort of "pox on all their houses" attitude, which may translate into staying at home--and encouraging others to do the same--on election day because "all politicians are the same and they don't care about the average American". It's an emotionally gratifying way to deal with our disappointment. It's also naive and doesn't take into consideration the very real differences that exist between the parties and those within them.

Look, I know the choice we have to make relies less on inspiration and more upon whether or not we think we need to go into damage control. Yes, it stinks. It might get better in the future, especially if, post-election, the idealists like Allen (and myself, incidentally) continue to point out the flaws in our system and--more importantly--if new, better leaders emerge. (Let's not forget the role of contingency here. It's a more important force in history than we often realize.)

But it's nut-cuttin' time right now and you have to pick a side. It's a dead horse, but I'll beat it again: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good (or passable, in this case). Sitting it out may be emotionally satisfying, but, as history has shown, it will only serve to present you with your own worst-case scenario. Will you be better off with four more years of Obama because you don't "buy into the system"? I don't think so.



Credit for Building, Blame for Dividing

Justin Katz

President Obama's teleprompter style has been the subject of substantial (often mocking) critical commentary, and with some justification, as this nearly parodic 2010 video from a Virginia classroom proves:

Given recent political events, one can sympathize with the desire of public officials to avoid extemporaneous speech. In a world in which one's every public utterance can be recorded, scrutinized, and exploited, one can't rely on an audience's capacity to get your drift and give you the benefit of the doubt. And it's all to easy to blurt out a sentence such as the now infamous, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that."

Predictably, in the realm of commentary, the debate has moved to the meta matter of whether commentators are deliberately misconstruing the President's meaning. On Slate, Dave Weigel charitably infers "a missing sentence or clause" that Obama neglected to utter because he was "rambling." On Reason, Tim Cavanaugh rejoins that "at some point it helps to look at that thing above the subtext, which is generally known as 'the text.'"

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


July 4, 2012


Happy Independence Day?

Justin Katz

The Ocean State Current encourages readers to spend some time today reading the Declaration of Independence and considering its continuing significance in our times.

Some of the particulars resonate as if addressing present issues:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. ...

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. ...

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation ...

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent ...

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers ...


But more profound, naturally, is the spirit of the document, and the pondering of it may lead one to question whether it does continue to have significance for many Americans — for enough Americans.

Continue reading on the Ocean State Current...


June 28, 2012


Supreme Court Rules Individual Mandate Survives as a Tax

Marc Comtois

Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion. Upholds Individual Mandate as a tax under Congress' taxing powers. Apparently a complicated opinion. Others are more equipped (and have the time) to analyze, but feel free to comment!

ADDENDUM (snarky version): Roberts joined with the courts liberals, so it was 5-4. Not quite the 5-4 decision anyone anticipated, to be sure. What are liberal supporters of the Health Care act going to say about Roberts now? Does this mean the Supreme Court is all-of-a-sudden legit again?

ADDENDUM (serious version): Some are arguing that by upholding the mandate by calling it a tax while expressly ruling that it's NOT legit under the Commerce Clause, CJ Roberts has managed to give liberals a political win while also pushing back against big government overreach, which is something conservatives like. Jay Cost:

First, the Roberts Court put real limits on what the government can and cannot do. For starters, it restricted the limits of the Commerce Clause, which does not give the government the power to create activity for the purpose of regulating it. This is a huge victory for those of us who believe that the Constitution is a document which offers a limited grant of power.

Second, the Roberts Court also threw out a portion of the Medicaid expansion. States have the option of withdrawing from the program without risk of losing their funds. This is another major victory for conservatives who cherish our system of dual sovereignty. This was also a big policy win for conservatives; the Medicaid expansion was a major way the Democrats hid the true cost of the bill, by shifting costs to the states, but they no longer can do this.

Politically, Obama will probably get a short-term boost from this, as the media will not be able to read between the lines and will declare him the winner. But the victory will be short-lived. The Democrats were at pains not to call this a tax because it is inherently regressive: the wealthy overwhelmingly have health insurance so have no fear of the mandate. But now that it is legally a tax, Republicans can and will declare that Obama has slapped the single biggest tax on the middle class in history, after promising not to do that.

UPDATE: Key components of Roberts writing on the SCOTUS ruling (PDF) upholding individual mandate (after the jump):

Continue reading "Supreme Court Rules Individual Mandate Survives as a Tax"


Levin: Politics and the Supreme Court aren't Incompatible

Marc Comtois

NB: Probably the quickest notice of the Supreme Court ruling will be posted at the SCOTUS Blog. Hope their servers can handle it!

Writing about the anticipatory condemnations of the soon-to-come Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare, Yuval Levin makes an observation about what liberal commentators and politicians--who are expecting at least the individual mandate to be overturned--are saying about the so-called politicization of the Court (as if it's something new):

These people are actually saying that any outcome except the one they want must be driven by an outcome-oriented political crusade. Only their view could result from an actual engagement with the question before the Court, and any other view could only be a function of corruption or of cynicism. It must be nice to be so enlightened.

More interesting, however, is what such an argument implies about one’s view of politics....observers on the Left seek to draw a stark distinction between political and judicial thought, and it reveals their very low opinion of political ideas. They imply that there ought to be no connection between the most basic political divisions that define our public life—crudely encompassed in the Left/Right division—and ways of understanding the Constitution. This is a profound mistake, and a very telling one. As the Left often does, they underplay the substantive seriousness and significance of the Left/Right divide, presumably because they do not think of themselves as possessed of a particular worldview and believe they are merely objectively analyzing the obvious realities of the world around us....

...If we understand the contours of that debate, we can have some sense of where serious people on either side are likely to fall much of the time. After all, the liberals on the Supreme Court are at least as predictable (indeed more so, as is evident in the Obamacare speculation) as the conservatives. [The Left is] too. And that makes sense: They hold certain views for reasons that we and they can understand, and they seek to apply them thoughtfully to particular instances.

This debate is indeed a political debate, in the best and highest sense. But that does not make it a cynical debate, or an illegitimate one. On the contrary. The apparent inability of many left-wing commentators to see that point tells us more than all their diatribes in recent days. Their anger about the very possibility that the Court might disagree with them about Obamacare suggests that they do not believe that there can be such a thing as a serious political debate—they take serious and political to be opposites.

Read the whole thing because Levin also quotes from a previous piece he wrote tracing how today's "Left" and "Right" are actually two sides of a "liberal" coin, which is an interesting discussion all its own.

ADDENDUM: The points made by Levin are even stronger now that the SCOTUS ruled the way the Left wanted.


June 19, 2012


Pew: RI Still has "Serious Concerns" About Unfunded Pensions & Health Care

Marc Comtois

The Pew Center on the States is out with an "update" (PDF) on public employee retiree pension and health care benefit debt owed by the states (h/t ProJo).

They provide three ratings for the two categories: Solid Performer, Needs Improvement and Serious Concerns. Despite giving Rhode Island (report here) positive marks for addressing it's pension problem with "an unprecedented package of reforms," the fact remains we are so far behind the 8-ball that they still rate our pension liability as a having "Serious Concerns." As for Health Care, they note Rhode Island has a $775 million liability and had not funded any of it by 2010. Again, they rated it as having "Serious Concerns." In 2010, Rhode Island did pay 100% of the "recommended" contribution to fund retiree pensions, but only 69% of "recommended" contribution to fund retiree health benefits.

Nationally, Rhode Island joined ten other states who had serious concerns in both categories (Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey & New Mexico). Several states were "Solid Performers" in one while they didn't do as well in the other category. Only one state was deemed a "Solid Performer" in both categories: Wisconsin. I wonder what they did?


June 17, 2012


Review: The Price of the Ticket by Frederick Harris

Marc Comtois

Fredrick C. Harris is a Professor of Political Science and the Director of Columbia University's Center on African-American Politics and Society. In the world of academia, his racial/political bona fides are beyond reproach. so when he proposes that our first African-American President hasn't adequately addressed racial inequality, it's worth a read. In his Price of the Ticket, Harris explains that the election of President Obama has allowed the country to feel good about itself for choosing a black man as President, even as this President has done little to forward the causes for which so many of his fellow African-Americans have long fought. Harris hopes to put "Obama's race-neutral campaign strategy and approach to governing within the context of history, politics and policy."

Much of the book does just that. Harris spends a few chapters providing historical context that explains the two strategies (and the tension between them) used by African Americans to achieve political power:

The coalition-politics perspective calls on black voters to build coalitions with whites and other racial and ethnic groups to develop support for issues and policies that help most everyone. The independent-black-politics perspective presses blacks to work independently of other groups to push for community interests with the aim toward building support with other groups around both universal policies and community-specific issues.
Harris' telling of the evolution of these strategies over the decades is an interesting story and he provides valuable insights as to how the political campaigns of Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson and the late-Chicago Mayor Harold Washington laid the groundwork for Obama's successful 2008 run for the Presidency. Focusing on Obama, Harris contends that the race-neutral politics of the President--which go hand-in-hand with coalition politics--"has marginalized policy discussions about racial inequality."
Proponents of "race-neutral" universalism fail to acknowledge that policies that help everyone--what can be described as a trickle-down approach to eradicating poverty and social inequality--are not enough to correct the deep-rooted persistance of racial inequality. In many ways, the majority of black voters have struck a bargain with Obama. In exchange for the president's silence on community-focused interests, black voters are content with a governing philosophy that helps "all people" and a politics centered on preserving the symbol of a black president and family in the White House.
This is the "price of the ticket" and it's clear that Harris is no proponent of coalition-politics. To bolster his point, he contrasts the gains made by the LGBT community under the Obama Administration to the lack of progress made on racial equality. The former, Harris contends, has kept the pressure on Obama (as has, according to Harris, the Tea Party) and been rewarded while the black community has given the President a pass, a dynamic he delves deeper into in his chapter, "Wink, Nod, Vote."

Further, Harris argues that Obama has become a "hollow prize" for Black America because the President has been forced to contend with an economic downturn instead of turning his attention to implementing policies--however modest--that dealt with racial inequality. Worse yet, by Harris' contention, Obama hasn't adequately addressed inequality even within the context of the economic downturn. When asked in 2009 about the "mounting problem of black unemployment" and why he hadn't targeted it:

Obama provided the same pat answer. Obama acknowledged that black and Latino workers were disproportionately affected by the great recession, but he still insisted that policies that helped everyone would cure the catastrophic unemployment rate in minority communities.
This was in contrast to a proposal by the Congressional Black Caucus, for instance, that:
...incorporated the principle of "targeted universalism"; an approach that would geographically target government-sponsored job projects in communities most affected by the recession and with the greatest concentrations of poverty. By default, such legislation would not help everyone equally but benefit those most affected by the recession.
In other words, blacks and other minorities.

In a comparison between Herman Cain (running for the Republican Presidential nomination at the time Harris' was writing the book) and President Obama, Harris finds that both fall short of the promise that politically powerfull African-Americans are supposed to fulfill.

When you place Cain next to Obama, who appears to be too timidly strategic to raise questions about--and work overtly against--racial inequality, the actions (or in the case of Obama inactions) of both diminish black interests on the national political scene. One black candidate for president spouts bigoted views about blacks and the poor. The other is silent on issues of racial inequality and poverty. In the end, neither political party is a vehicle for blacks to directly confront inequality, because both parties push black-specific issues to the margins of national policymaking. This development tells us something about the durability of racism as an ideology in American politics. Instead of fading away in an era celebrated as "postracial," race as ideology demonstrates convincing staying power, endowed with the ability to readapt and readjust as new political situations arise. {emphasis added}
Thus, we see that Harris' critique of Obama is rooted in his apparent belief that America, as whole, is still a racist society. By Harris' interpretation, electing a black man president is not to be taken as a symbol of the end of widespread, institutional and cultural racism, but rather a signal that such racism has changed and "readjusted."

The problem is that his interpretation is based on his contention that Obama hasn't done enough to address what Harris refers to--multiple times--as racial inequality. Yet, he never truly defines that inequality and the reader not versed in contemporary African-American politics is left wondering, "so what could Obama do in the realm of addressing racial inequality that will make Harris happy?"

Harris does spend time giving examples of, and discounting, what he calls the "politics of respectibility" (Bill Cosby comes in for some criticism on this front). But without more specificity as to what policies Harris supports towards racial equality, as opposed to explaining what he doesn't support, we are left guessing. In the end, Harris has provided a fine history of the development of contemporary black political strategies. He is less convincing in supporting his contention that President Obama's decision to govern America as a coalition--and not focus on acute issues affecting African-Americans--marks Obama as a failure as an African-American president. As a result, we're just not sure, exactly, what President Obama could have done to have been a success in Harris' eyes.


June 6, 2012


The End of Democracy

Patrick Laverty

Yep, democracy is over. Scott Walker won by ordering the Wisconsin National Guard to stand in front of the voting booths and shoot any likely Tom Barrett voter who entered. Yes, democracy is dead.

Wait, what? Walker won because the opposition successfully pulled off getting a recall vote but then more voters sided with Walker over Barrett? Gee, that sounds exactly like democracy to me. Will these same people be crying (literally) when Obama spends more than a billion dollars on his election campaign?

(h/t Helen Glover Show)


May 24, 2012


The [Sheldon] Whitehouse Standard

Marc Comtois

David Scharfenberg points to an interview that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse did with ThinkProgress in which he claims the five Supreme Court justices who ruled against Whitehouse's preference on Citizens United shouldn't have even been allowed to rule because they didn't have the right experience to judge:

Unfortunately you had the five right-wing judges, none of whom have ever run for any office ever and have zero political experience between the five of them, offering opinions about what money can do in elections...The President asked me who I thought, you know, what were the characteristics of somebody that should be appointed to the Court, and I said I think it should be somebody who has some actual political experience out there so that they are not operating in this political arena with absolutely no knowledge. Even if they wanted to come to the result that Citizens United came to, I think those judges would have had a hard time getting there if they’d had actual practical political experience because they would have known what a preposterous finding they were making.
What a facile viewpoint (and I'm pretty sure that none of the 4 liberal judges meet the Whitehouse standard, either). Well, if that is the new standard by which we're supposed to adjudicate, or legislate, then I can think of any number of things that Senator Whitehouse should stay away from. So I guess we should expect him to refrain from speaking or offering legislation on anything but silver spoons and tort reform from here on out.


April 30, 2012


Political "Compromise" and Gridlock: Cause and Effect?

Marc Comtois

In a recent column, Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, authors of the new book It’s Even Worse Than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, state that the Republicans are to blame for congressional gridlock. As I tweeted earlier, my main problem with this theory is that they are actually taking a snapshot of the current gridlock in Congress (and relying upon their "40 years of watching Congress" to buttress their claims) while ignoring the evolution of how we got here.

During the last decade (at least) power plays have been made by Democrats as well as Republicans and to conveniently blame the party to whom both authors are ideologically opposed (don't let his ties to AEI fool you, Ornstein is a liberal) during an election year should raise some eyebrows before being accepted whole cloth.

The right-side of the blogosphere has already offered up plenty of rebuttals to Mann and Ornstein (here, here and here), including many examples of the Democrats contribution to the current culture of gridlock, thus showing how the situation has evolved. Politics ain't beanbag, but it IS retributive. As several of the aforementioned point out, there is also an argument to be made that the more recent GOP gridlock that is so troubling to Ornstein and Mann...is pretty much what the voters wanted when they voted the Republicans back into power in the House in 2010.

In a review of Jonah Goldberg's The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, Roll Call's John Bicknell does a fine job defining what the so-called conventional wisdom (ie; the mainstream media's interpretation of what's pragmatic) would have us believe is political compromise:

They’re just for what “works.” What works, of course, is liberals getting their way. If liberals want to spend $10 billion on something, and conservatives don’t want to spend anything on it, liberals make a deal with moderates to spend $5 billion this year and call it a compromise, knowing they’ll get the other $5 billion next year.

That’s putting ideology into practice. But it’s not a compromise. It’s modestly deferred gratification for liberals.

In a compromise, everybody gets something. In this case, repeated ad infinitum over most of the past century, liberals get the money, moderates get to be seen as pragmatic (that’s like heroin for moderates), and conservatives get to watch as the government grows ever larger.

Perhaps, then, the current gridlock is actually the desired result of voters who were tired of the gridlock-breaking "compromises" that still resulted in government growing and more tax dollars being spent.


April 15, 2012


Iowahawk On the Fiscals of Romney Vs Obama

Monique Chartier

Presumably referencing the divisive and pointless class war which the campaign of President Barack Obama (and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse) feels it needs to wage in order to win re-election, David Burge, aka Iowahawk, tweeted this remark Friday night. (H/T Instapundit Glenn Reynolds.)

Apparently, I'm supposed to be more angry about what Mitt Romney does with his money than what Barack Obama does with mine.

March 24, 2012


More than a Political Narrative

Justin Katz

Back in college, it was a matter of some classroom literary discussion that relativist thinkers still went about their daily lives as if they believed something to be true. (True enough, it appeared often to be that they deserved tenured sinecures that allowed them freedom to ruminate.)

To broad readers of conservative political commentary, this sort of peculiarity feels like cognitive dissonance, especially in Rhode Island. The world is crumbling around us and the sense is that we must flee to cover, and still people behave as if partial turn of the key will open the door. From the town level to the national level, the sense of leaders' message is that some minor technocratic tweaks will be sufficient to set things right.

In my view, RI's pension reform was a spectacular example, erroneously capturing the imaginations of even those on the right.

Yet, we read (and agree with) the warnings of Mark Steyn:

"We are headed for the most predictable economic crisis in history," says Paul Ryan. And he's right. But precisely because it's so predictable the political class has already discounted it. Which is why a plan for pie now and spinach later, maybe even two decades later, is the only real menu on the table. There's a famous exchange in Hemingway's "A Place In The Sun." Someone asks Mike Campbell, "How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways," he replies. "Gradually, then suddenly." We've been going through the gradual phase so long, we're kinda used to it. But it's coming to an end, and what happens next will be the second way: sudden, and very bad.

And so, one wishes to believe that Rick Santorum's new video is much too like the latest eerie prime time series to be other than a laughable dramatization of a political message:

Here's the thing: Our society encompasses a range of experiences. For some people, some families, some towns, Santorum's prognostications will prove understated. For others, especially among the upper classes who make up our upper crust of decision makers, the lives of the lowly are already akin to televised fiction.

A deeper problem, one supposes, is that the remedy ultimately does not require an active fix from Washington or the State House, but the determination of people to turn their own communities around and the realization that the first step is to get distant politicians out of the way.


March 7, 2012


Edging Toward the Inevitable

Marc Comtois

Whether your response is excited, angered or tepid (ahem), Mitt Romney won 6 out of 10 primaries/caucuses last night, including the supposed bellweather, rust-belt state of Ohio. Though the latter was close, he still won it. Yet, as avowed Romney-supporter (some would say shill) Jennifer Rubin writes, you would think that Romney lost by winning (addendum--others have noted this too).

When all the nails were bitten in Ohio and all the votes counted from Massachusetts to Alaska, Mitt Romney had won six of 10 Super Tuesday contests (including all three of those states) and jumped to a commanding lead in the delegate count. Romney now leads with 415 delegates to 176 for Rick Santorum. Romney narrowly won Ohio, which before Tuesday was dubbed the must-win state for both him and Santorum, and picked up wins in every region of the country except the Deep South.

It is only in a media environment in which so many pundits are rooting for the pummeling to continue in the GOP could this be characterized as “failing to close the deal” or evidence of weakness by Romney. Unlike every other GOP nominating contest, the standard for this year appears to be that Romney should and must win virtually every state other than his opponents’ birthplaces.

She also points out that the 4 states that didn't go Romney's way--Georgia (Gingrich's home state), Oklahoma, Tennessee and North Dakota--are all reliably Republican regardless of who wins the GOP nomination. So, yes, he squeaked it out in Ohio, but, like he did in Michigan, he won in a swing state that will be crucial in November.


March 2, 2012


Rasmussen: "Why Politicians Can't Connect With the Middle Class"

Marc Comtois

Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that only 27% believe government can adequately "manage the economy" and 50% thinks it makes things worse when it tries to "help". Rasmussen focuses on why this attitude explains "why politicians can't connect with the middle class". (Incidentally, Steve Laffey's film, Fixing America provides further evidence of this point).

Upper-income Americans are evenly divided as to whether government management of the economy helps or hurts. Middle-income Americans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly view government management of the economy as hurtful.

The affluent, perhaps because they can easily gain access to the policymakers, are OK with government management of the economy. They want it done well, and many want it done in a way to benefit their own interests. That's why a plurality of Americans now believe the United States has a system of crony capitalism rather than free-market competition.

The middle class, without friends in Congress or on Wall Street, has an entirely different view. Broadly speaking, it see the federal government as a burden weighing down both the economy and the middle class. To help the economy, most simply want to reduce the burden. Seventy-seven percent of voters think that the government could help the economy by reducing the deficit. Seventy-one percent think it would help to reduce government spending, and 59 percent think tax cuts would help.

So when a politician talks of helping the middle class with a new government program, it just doesn't ring true.

It is exacerbated because, for the most part, modern political candidates can't relate to the middle-class.
Most candidates...tend to hang out with more affluent Americans. They tend to discuss how to make government work rather than how to make the nation work. To some, an issue like the price of gas is primarily a question of how it will impact potential investments in alternative fuels or whether higher gas prices are good because they encourage conservation.

To the middle class, the question of gas prices is much different. Data from the Discover Consumer Spending Monitor shows that half of all Americans don't have any money left over after paying their basic bills each month. For these Americans, rising gas prices force unpleasant lifestyle changes.

This disconnect wasn't always the case, even when the candidates were pretty well-off themselves:
To connect with the middle class requires understanding the middle class. Franklin Roosevelt did this in the 1930s. As he expanded the role of the federal government, he explained it in a manner that made sense. His greatest achievement, Social Security, was not sold as a government handout but as an insurance program with people setting aside money during their working years that could be drawn down in retirement. That attitude still resonates with 21st century Americans.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan understood the rising frustration with an ever-expanding government. In his first inaugural address, he said, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Six out of 10 voters still agree.

Yes, there is seemingly a contradiction here: the middle class supports a "big" government program but wants to cut government. But this circle can be squared if we--and the politicians looking for our votes--can better prioritize what we spend our tax dollars on.


February 16, 2012


Jobless and Taking the "Disability Option"

Marc Comtois

Glenn Reynolds points to a Republican Study Committee graphic that asks, "Where Are the Jobs?".


The above chart shows the “labor force participation rate.” This statistic represents the share of working-age Americans who are either employed or unemployed but looking for work. It is not a pretty picture. Only 63.7% of working-age Americans are currently in the workforce – the lowest in almost 29 years!

To put it another way, 36.3% of working-age Americans do not have a job and are not even looking.

What are they doing--how are they surviving--if they aren't working? Well, according to Art Cashin, evidently they are going on disability. According to a report from JPMorgan:
...increases in the number of disability benefits recipients account for about a quarter of the decline in employment participation. Furthermore during recessions the number of new disability claims actually increases, even though the number of jobs with higher injury incidence (such as construction) generally declines. Try explaining that one... Half of the benefit recipients suffer from "mental disorders" and "musculoskeletal disorders" (such as back pain). "Mood disorders" alone account for over 10% of this group. And once someone starts receiving these benefits, it's almost impossible to take the off the program. In 2011 only 1% of the recipients lost their benefits because they were no longer deemed disabled. So how much is this program costing the US taxpayer? Apparently quite a bit.
And a paper (PDF) by David Autor of MIT (summarized by Art Cashin):
Autor attributes disability's expansion mainly to liberalized, more subjective eligibility rules and to a deteriorating job market for less-educated workers. Through the 1970s, strokes, heart attacks and cancer were major causes. Now, mental problems (depression, personality disorder) and musculoskeletal ailments (back pain, joint stress) dominate (54 percent of awards in 2009, nearly double 1981's 28 percent). The paradox is plain. As physically grueling construction and factory jobs have shrunk, disability awards have gone up.

For many recipients, the disability program is a form of long-term unemployment insurance, argue Autor and his frequent collaborator Mark Duggan of the University of Pennsylvania. Benefit applications surge when joblessness rises. From 2001 to 2010, annual applications jumped 123 percent to 2.9 million. On average, recipients start receiving payments at age 49 and keep them until 66, when they switch to Social Security's retiree benefits.


January 25, 2012


(Re)State of the Union

Marc Comtois

I mean, really....it doesn't even seem like he's trying anymore.

Rehashing the same tired lines, delivered at an 8th grade reading level. It just reinforces the perception that President Obama likes the idea of being President much more than actually doing the job. Good thing the GOP has such a strong field of candidates....


January 9, 2012


Gridlock Isn't Bad When It's Wanted

Justin Katz

The Providence Journal editors did their best, Sunday, to blame Republicans and otherwise minimize the culpability of President Obama for his questionable recess appointments during the dubious recess that legislators don't believe they had. It's curious to note that no mention is made of the fact that two of the four nominees were put forward just two days before the Senate's scheduled adjournment, not leaving time for even basic background checks. Hardly gridlock.

But what's interesting is the notion that the American people care about this sort of battle:

On purely political grounds, the president would seem to be in a strong position. Many Americans can readily sympathize with his frustration since the 2010 elections saddled him with stronger opposition and a Republican-led House.

Who, exactly, do the editors believe did the saddling? (Or is "many" a term indicating "people with whom we associate"?) By the election results alone, we can see that many Americans thought it important to stop, or at least slow, President Obama's rampage through the national laws. Many of those who care about bureaucratic appointments, at least to the point of being aware that they exist, may very well want gridlock.

And even those who do not might pause to consider — as the editors do not — whether the president bears some responsibility for nominating candidates whom his duly elected opposition will find uncontroversial enough to expedite their confirmation.


December 27, 2011


GOP's Circular Firing Squad: National Edition - None of these guys are beyond reproach

Marc Comtois

I haven't committed strongly to any of the GOP presidential hopefuls, mainly because they're all different flavors of meh. But one of them is going to win and run against Obama. It's up to the GOP to figure out who has the "best chance" of beating the President. The one thing that has annoyed me the most, though, are the various supporters of each candidate getting all "holier than thou" when it comes to defending their pick vs. the others. None of these guys are "all that." Just take the three front-runners.

Mitt Romney has flip-flopped enough to warrant a website devoted to chronicling the pattern. His ideology seems to be "I'm running for President". He seems wooden and too-perfect & it doesn't "feel" like he can relate to the average person.

But before you Gingrich-ites or Paulians get all self-righteous, be careful. Gingrich was for Romney's health care reform before he was against it.

“The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system,” said an April 2006 newsletter published by Mr. Gingrich’s former consulting company, the Center for Health Transformation.
Except now, apparently, Gingrich's people are claiming that Newt didn't really write that endorsement. Uh. Yeah. That's kinda what Newt called Ron Paul out on when Paul disavowed the racist stuff in Paul's own newsletters, saying he didn't write them (which is probably correct...or maybe not.). So, memo to self--newsletters written under your own name aren't your responsibility.

As for Paul....his either an isolationist or a non-interventionist, depending on how you interpret his foreign policy stances. But it seems he doesn't let such things as moral imperatives instruct his decision-making. He said he wouldn't have fought WWII if it "only" meant saving the Jews from the Holocaust. And he thought that Lincoln fighting the Civil War to free the slaves was a mistake. 'Cause the slaves would have been freed eventually, anyway. (Of course, the fact that the South kinda started it with that whole secession thing....). Those are two pretty big, albeit theoretical, "take a pass" items.

All of them have good ideas. Despite his flipping and apparent lack of an ideological touchstone, Romney would be competent. Gingrich is a big ideas guy. Paul makes sense in some fiscal areas and when it comes to cutting government. It's just a matter of how much of the negative baggage you think the voting public can take along with the good ideas. Maybe there's some acceptable ratio. Or maybe it will just come down to media spin and "optics." Just like last time. Great.


November 15, 2011


Congress Pays

Marc Comtois

If you haven't already, take some time to watch the 60 Minutes piece on congressional insider trading. Taking the lead from work done by Peter Schweizer for his new book Throw Them All Out, the story delves into how so many of our elected officials manage to end up as millionaires after a few terms in Washington, D.C. Maddeningly, the practice is legal and not exclusive to members of one party. (And, according to WPRI, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has apparently engaged in the practice, though he--according to a spokesman--"is not actively involved in the management of this investment account"). For example, to pick a couple high-profile individuals:

During the healthcare debate of 2009, members of Congress were trading health care stocks, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, who led the opposition against the so-called public option, government funded insurance that would compete with private companies. Just days before the provision was finally killed off, Boehner bought health insurance stocks, all of which went up....former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband have participated in at least eight IPOs. One of those came in 2008, from Visa, just as a troublesome piece of legislation that would have hurt credit card companies, began making its way through the House. Undisturbed by a potential conflict of interest the Pelosis purchased 5,000 shares of Visa at the initial price of $44 dollars. Two days later it was trading at $64. The credit card legislation never made it to the floor of the House.
Schweizer explains why he wrote the book:
This is not a book about corrupt political leaders. It is instead about a compromised political system. The purpose of the book is not to single out certain individual members, but to look at a broad pattern of financial transactions and expose possible insider trading and conflicts of interest. The book reveals a pattern of suspicious stock trading by members of congress from both parties based on their financial disclosure statements and legislative activities....the political leaders named here are the beneficiaries of these trades and were anyone else in America to engage in these sort of trading patterns, they would likely receive scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Indeed, private citizens might very likely go to jail were they to do this as it relates to their own jobs.

The real scandal is that in our current system of government, these trades are perfectly legal. We wouldn’t tolerate professional athletes betting on their games. So why do we let our leaders do it on something far more important?


November 2, 2011


The Power of (Urban) Myth

Marc Comtois

This is the first time I've heard this version* of a rather infamous story involving a certain current Presidential candidate:

It was the spring of 1980.

I was 13 years old, and we were about to leave Fairfax, Va., and drive to Carrollton, Ga., for the summer. My parents told my sister and me that they were getting a divorce as our family of four sat around the kitchen table of our ranch home.

Soon afterward, my mom, sister and I got into our light-blue Chevrolet Impala and drove back to Carrollton.

Later that summer, Mom went to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for surgery to remove a tumor. While she was there, Dad took my sister and me to see her.

It is this visit that has turned into the infamous hospital visit about which many untruths have been told. I won't repeat them. You can look them up online if you are interested in untruths. But here's what happened:

My mother and father were already in the process of getting a divorce, which she requested.

Dad took my sister and me to the hospital to see our mother.

She had undergone surgery the day before to remove a tumor.

The tumor was benign.

As with many divorces, it was hard and painful for all involved, but life continued.

As have many families, we have healed; we have moved on.

We are not a perfect family, but we are knit together through common bonds, commitment and love.

My mother and father are alive and well, and my sister and I are blessed to have a close relationship with them both.

The one I've heard--umpteen times--is the Newt Gingrich served his cancer-stricken wife divorce papers while she was on her deathbed. So now it turns out she's still alive. And now, as Paul Harvey once said, you know the rest of the story.


*Which, you know, just might be the definitive version given it's an eyewitness account and all. Right. I'm sure conspiracy buffs will totally take this one at face value.


October 21, 2011


Food for (Weekend) Thought

Marc Comtois

From Kevin Williamson writes:

Between the candidates’ debates and my conversations with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, it seems to me that there is a persistent, dangerous disconnect between our political conversation and reality.
He lists some points:

1. There is no austerity.

2. There was no deregulation.

3. You can’t trust Republicans on spending.

4. Wall Street loves Democrats.

5. People who voted for Barack Obama on civil-liberties grounds are fools.

6. If you aren’t for massive entitlement reform, you’re for massive tax hikes.

7. But taxing the rich won’t close the deficit.

8. The housing bubble was largely a political creation.

9. Well-meaning politicians are just as dangerous as self-serving ones.

10. There’s no way out of this jam without big cuts to popular programs.

And here's some additional support for a couple of the above points:
8. The housing bubble was largely a political creation.



4. Wall Street loves Democrats.





How Long Do They Get To Stay?

Patrick Laverty

How long do the Occupy Providence protesters get to stay in the park with tents up, food kitchens cooking, medical tents operating? How long until the city tells them that it's time to go, they had their time for protesting and now they're done? Of course, whenever that comes, they'll all claim that their constitutional right to assembly has been violated. Was this what the writers of the US Constitution had in mind when they put that into the First Amendment?

At least the city and state has some precedent. Remember Camp Runamuck*? The tent city group who pitched their tents under the I-195 overpass as a way of protesting the homelessness problem in Providence? After a few months, the state told them it was time to go and the city promptly erected fences in the area to keep people out.

I don't think there'll be any fences put up around Burnside Park any time soon, but the Occupiers made their statement, they got their press and now what? When does it just become another tent city? If the protesters want to keep protesting, then why not have a daily or weekly march? They don't all have to live in tents to do that. Simply set a specific time each day or week and then hold the protests.

The protesters in other cities have been going at it for longer than Providence, however that shouldn't keep the authorities here from taking a stand, thanking the protesters for keeping it civil but tell them they're welcomed back any time to protest but now it's time to go.


*link is to a newspaper in New Orleans as many links to old projo.com stories no longer return any content.


October 10, 2011


Even if it's Amazing, It's not fair, so I hate everything

Marc Comtois

Trying to figure out this Occupy thing? Right now, this seems to explain it the best (h/t):


Remember this bit by Louis CK (thanks for reminding me, Will)?


Protest song!


...a sultan and student both have iPhone 4s...it's not fair

Overall, much of the logic seems to go something like this (h/t):

ADDENDUM: I put this is all under our "On a lighter note...." category because there is humor in the unknowns surrounding the Occupy movement. Still, there are serious questions that haven't been answered.

Now, a movement that started with no concrete goals as a simple protest of power must decide what to do with some power of its own. Can a leaderless group that relies on consensus find a way for so many people to agree on what comes next? Can it offer not only objections but also solutions? Can a radical protest evolve into a mainstream movement for change?
Unfortunately, from what I have heard of the solutions, they roughly approximate the tongue-in-cheek poster above. In writing about the recent passing of Steve Jobs, Kevin Williamson illustrated that there is a dichotomy:
The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that...[w]hatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an Internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values. That is not the final answer to every question, because economic answers can satisfy only economic questions. But the range of questions requiring economic answers is very broad.

I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.

And to the kids camped out down on Wall Street: Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the rat-infested subway. Visit the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, then visit a housing project in the South Bronx. Which world do you want to live in?



September 17, 2011


Well, When You Put It That Way

Justin Katz

Mark Steyn may be the perfect columnist for his times, because one really needs a flair for humor of the absurd to comment appropriately on the absurdity of modern Western governance:

The estimated cost of the non-bill is just shy of half a trillion dollars. Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that Washington was in the grip of a white-knuckle, clenched-teeth showdown over whether a debt ceiling deal could be reached before the allegedly looming deadline. When the deal was triumphantly unveiled at the eleventh hour, it was revealed that our sober, prudent, fiscally responsible masters had gotten control of the runaway spending and had carved (according to the most optimistic analysis) a whole $7 billion of savings out of the 2012 budget. The president then airily breezes into Congress and in 20 minutes adds another $447 billion to the tab. That’s what meaningful course correction in Washington boils down to: seven billion steps forward, 447 billion steps back.

This $447 billion does not exist, and even foreigners don't want to lend it to us. A majority of it will be "electronically created" by the Federal Reserve buying U.S. Treasury debt. Don't worry, it's not like "printing money": we leave that to primitive basket-cases like Zimbabwe. This is more like one of those Nigerian email schemes, in which a prominent public official promises you a large sum of money in return for your bank account details. In the case of Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, one prominent public official is promising to wire a large sum of money into the account of another prominent public official, which is a wrinkle even the Nigerians might have difficulty selling.

As Steyn points out, there is no bill to pass, yet, still:

... back on the campaign trail the chanting goes on, last week's election results in Nevada and New York notwithstanding. America has the lowest employment since the early Eighties, the lowest property ownership since the mid-Sixties, the highest deficit-to-GDP ratio since the Second World War, the worst long-term unemployment since the Great Depression, the highest government dependency rate of all time, and the biggest debt mountain in the history of the planet.

It's time we start learning, lest we prove ourselves crazy through repetition.


September 14, 2011


Two Republican Victories in Congress

Patrick Laverty

The Republicans won two US House seats by special election yesterday, in Nevada and New York. In Nevada, Republican Mark Amodel won the seat replacing Dean Heller who was appointed to replace John Ensign. The Nevada win wasn't unexpected as that district has never elected a Democrat in its history, but a 22-point victory was bigger than expected.

The more surprising result was Republican Bob Turner winning in New York's 9th district, a seat previously held by Mark Weiner, of Twitter fame. Turner's 8-point win doesn't sound like much until you learn the demographics of the district.

the district is registered three to one in favor of Democrats and the Queens party machine is strong, they had over 1,000 volunteers in the district in a get out the vote effort knocking on doors over the weekend and the past two days. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has spent more than $500,000 in television ads in the district.

Outside groups also poured money in the race and Sheinkopf estimates that the Democrats could have outspent Republicans “six or eight to one” in the race.

So if this is a heavily Democratic district with a great volunteer effort and a huge war chest and still loses, that can't be a good sign for Democrats and President Obama heading into the 2012 election season.

Turner ran a campaign that could and probably should be replicated here in Rhode Island. The focus of his campaign was to run against Congress and President Obama rather than his opponents. This makes great sense as Congress always has horrible popularity polls. Currently, realclearpolitics.com has a job approval rating of just 13%. President Obama has an approval rating of 44% and disapproval of 51%. Turner came pretty close to blatantly admitting his focus was on the President and not his Democratic opponent. One of the campaign issues was the President's stance on borders in Israel, and Turner admitted:

“It’s not about my position or his [Weprin] which are pretty identical, it’s the president’s position and if you are with the party or against it, simple as that and will this district, which is surprisingly overwhelmingly Democratic, will they go along with the president and be able to be taken for granted as it were or will they send this message of protest and dissatisfaction,” Turner told ABC News.

Maybe a similar strategy could be adopted by candidates in RI running against David Cicilline, Jim Langevin and Sheldon Whitehouse. Run against the body instead of the individual and put a focus on the job approval ratings. Individual polling numbers are often quite higher than those for Congress as a whole. However, in spite of his 17% approval rating in March, I'd be willing to guess that Cicilline might be pleased to get up to a 13% job approval rating pretty soon.

Only fourteen months to find out whether this was a sign of things to come.


September 7, 2011


Who Pays for Past Mistakes

Marc Comtois

Generational warfare: It's bound to happen here in Rhode Island with the pension crisis. It's also happening nationally on the budget deficit debate with the new Super Congressional panel set to convene. Education Policy wonk Rick Hess offers his perspective:

You're either with the kids or with those rushing to the ramparts to defend retiree entitlements. So, which is it?

Consider the President's vague calls last week to spend billions more on school construction and preserving school staffing levels (which would've been more compelling if he had offered any inkling as to how we might pay for it). Obama finds himself unable to do more than offer marginal, dead-on-arrival programs because the feds have spent more than half the budget just mailing checks to retirees, covering health care bills, and paying interest on the accumulated debt. Everything else—schools, financial aid, the FBI, defense, transportation, the environment, NASA, foreign aid, you name it—has to make do with what's left.

As Julia Isaacs at the Brookings Institution has pointed out, the federal government now spends about $7 on seniors for every $1 it spends on children....Do we really think it's a good idea to spend half of all non-interest spending on making retirement ever more comfy?

Past or future? Which will it be? He provides an important breakdown of we pay for current Medicare spending:
[T]oday's retirees have contributed taxes that amount to less than half their Medicare outlays. Today's Medicare payroll tax doesn't fund Medicare--it funds only Part A (hospital expenses). Premiums cover just 25 percent of Part B (doctor treatments and visits). And premiums for Bush's Medicare drug program (Part D) cover just 10 percent of the cost. The rest of the hundreds of billions in outlays for these programs is vacuumed out of general revenue. (See here for a good breakdown on Medicare funding.)
And Social Security:
Social Security has the government reflexively spending hundreds of billions to mail out monthly checks to the wealthiest segment of the population, without an ounce of thought as to whether that's the best use of borrowed funds (the famed Social Security "trust fund" being, you know, nonexistent). The Social Security Administration reports that more than 20 percent of those 65+ have incomes over $65,000 a year. In a nation where median household income is in the $40,000s, is it really radical to rethink how much we mail to these households every month?
As for taxes:
Toss in all of the tax deductions that President Obama called for eliminating this summer, including the corporate jet deal, and you address another $400 billion over 10 years, or less than 2 percent of the shortfall. So, just keeping the deficit from exploding will involve all those taxes and trillions more in cuts. Those demanding substantial new spending then need to raise hundreds of billions beyond that, through additional cuts or tax increases....Even with hefty tax increases, protecting existing entitlements ensures that we won't have much available for schools, colleges, or anything else.
He urges education advocates to step up to the plate and take on the AARP and similar groups so that more money can go towards kids and education.
In short, it's possible to get our house in order, free up dollars for schooling, and shift dollars towards youth. But doing so requires facing down the massive, intimidating seniors' lobby.

Shared sacrifice involves asking Baby Boomers and retirees to step up and, you know, sacrifice. It doesn't mean holding harmless the generations who voted themselves free stuff through the good times and doesn't rely almost entirely on raising taxes and curtailing benefits for the under-40 set.

Hess' bailiwick is education and his goal is to increase funding for it. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Hess' priorities, his argument helps to lay out the choice that needs to be made: should the people who benefited or made the mistakes in the past be held most accountable for those mistakes? Or should their kids and grandkids?



Toning Down the Rhetoric?

Patrick Laverty

On Monday, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, Jr, urged labor to "win the war" on the Tea Party, told the President "we are your army" and "let's take these son of a ****** out" amid cheers from the crowd.

Just your usual Teamster rally? Not exactly, not when the President then follows those words with a speech on the same stage. No condemnation for the words, nothing asking Mr. Hoffa for civility in public discourse, as he did back in January

"...only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.”

Waging war on the Tea Party? We are your army, ready to march? Take them out? This is what the President considers to be civility in public discourse?

The President has been asked to condemn the words of Mr. Hoffa and all we have so far is White House Press Spokesman Jay Carney stating,

"These weren't comments by the President," he said.

"The President wasn't there -- I mean, he wasn't on stage. He didn't speak for another 20 minutes. He didn't hear it. I really don't have any comment beyond that."

And later

"Mr. Hoffa speaks for himself and the labor movement, and the President speaks for himself."

It's now been a few days and Mr. Hoffa has had time to think about his comments. Asked what he thinks in hindsight,

"I would [say it again] because I believe it," he said. "They've declared war on us. We didn't declare war on them, they declared war on us. We're fighting back. The question is, who started the war?"

Carrying this to a ludicrous extreme, if a racist gets up on stage and goes off on a ridiculous anti-Obama diatribe and then Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann or Mitt Romney follow that speaker on the stage, will Obama and the Democrats be fine with an explanation of "Hey, those were the comments of that guy, not ours!" Of course not. That would be just as unacceptable as the President's current stance on Hoffa's rhetoric.


September 6, 2011


Whitehouse/Langevin Profiting From Wall Street Banks

Patrick Laverty

If you read things from the progressive caucus and others who follow it closely, big business, big banks and Wall Street firms are the devil. You can also read about some of their darlings like Sheldon Whitehouse and the now-near-untouchable Jim Langevin. However today, GoLocalProv.com has a front page article on the worth of Rhode Island's Washington delegation. I congratulate each of these people on their wealth and money management that they've achieved, but in the article, one part really jumped out at me:

Whitehouse also reports collecting between $15,001-$50,000 in interest each with dozens of publicly traded assets including Goldman Sachs, ... Bank of America, Bear Stearns

and

Langevin also owns stock in General Electric and Goldman Sachs (between $6,002-$17,500)

It would seem to me that these guys are trying to have it both ways. They get their base all stirred up about these big bad Wall Street banks and how they need to be investigated, but at the same time, they're financially involved in them. It sure isn't in the best interest of Whitehouse or Langevin to open any great investigations, as that could cause the stock values to plummet if there was a real negative finding. If you're making upwards of $50,000 just on *interest* in a company like Goldman-Sachs, you sure don't want to see that value drop.


September 4, 2011


A Bad Economy Is in the Democrats' Favor Structurally

Justin Katz

William Jacobson makes an interesting point regarding the intersection of the economy and electoral politics:

Workers giving up hope, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low, is keeping Obama's reelection hopes alive. If the headlines screamed that unemployment was 11.4%, even I might begin to believe [that the U.S.A. would not give Obama a second term].

We've already begun to see commentary and political cartoons attempting to smear Republicans on the grounds that it's in their electoral interests for the economy to stay sour until the next election. There is some truth to that, but inasmuch as it's a bipartisan reality with every election, it's hardly a strong moral condemnation.

Rephrased, a bit, what Jacobson is saying is that it would help the Republicans if the statistics better reflected, to voters, how bad the condition of the economy really is. But there's a deeper way in which this particular data point helps the Democrats: Workers who give up move toward dependency on the government, and the Democrats are the party of dependency. If you're struggling to find work in the private sector, you're more apt to want the market to be free to thrive, to want employers to be given more space to invest and hire. Those who throw up their hands are thereafter more likely to put out their hands to collect whatever money the government directs toward them.


August 25, 2011


Fairness Doctrine Signs Off. But Does the Senior Senator from Massachusetts Approve?

Monique Chartier

The Fairness Doctrine has been deep sixed by President Obama's FCC. Bravo.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said that the decision to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine was part of a larger mandate proposed by the Obama administration to ease regulatory burdens by getting rid of duplicative or outdated measures.

Ever since reading about this rare bit of good news out of Washington, I've been trying to match it to the fatuous comments made a couple of weeks ago by Senator John Kerry (D-Sailing).

The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.

It doesn't deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do.

... Okay, so if "the media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance", he must oppose the Fairness Doctrine, as he himself would define it. Except he's on record as supporting the Fairness Doctrine. But he wants the views of certain political groups not to get equal time from the media. So he opposes the Fairness Doct ...

Forget it. My fault for attempting to pierce the thought process of a man who once said,

I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.

I'm going back to vacuuming my car and other hurricane preparations.


August 10, 2011


Wisconsin

Marc Comtois

In case you missed it in Wisconsin

After tens of millions of dollars spent by outside interest groups, dozens of attack ads and exhaustive get-out-the-vote efforts, Democrats on Tuesday fell short of their goal of taking control of the state Senate and stopping the agenda of Gov. Scott Walker.

Republicans won four of six recall races, meaning the party still holds a narrow 17-16 majority in the Senate — at least until next week, when Sens. Robert Wirch, D-Pleasant Prairie, and Jim Holperin, D-Conover face their own recall elections....Going into Tuesday, Republicans controlled the body 19-14, so Democrats needed to win at least three seats and hold onto two more next week to take over.

"The revolution has not occurred," said UW-Milwaukee political science professor Mordecai Lee, a former Democratic lawmaker. "The proletariat did not take over the streets."

Yeesh. No wonder they didn't "take over the streets"...who the hell wants to be considered (or considers themselves) part of the "proletariat" these days?


August 9, 2011


The Whole Government Edifice Preparing to Come Down

Justin Katz

This AP article, from the pre-budget-ceiling-deal days, does nothing so well as emphasize the instability on which big-government advocates would have our entire society rest. Its main point is that the states are not well prepared to absorb cuts in the aid that the federal government sends them each year.

"We have the potential for disaster should there be a major realignment in federal funding that results in a cost shift to states," said Nevada state Sen. Sheila Leslie, a Democrat from Reno who recently discussed the issue with Obama administration officials in Washington. "In short, we are teetering on the edge right now, and a cost shift could send us over the cliff."

Now that Congress and the President have reached a deal to skirt the federal government's spending problem for a while longer, do you think that states will take the reprieve as an opportunity to trim and reform their own behavior so as to be better situated as the probability of cuts in federal funding continues to increase?

I wouldn't bet on it — not the least because the better prepared the states are, the less pressure there will be on the feds to keep the payments rolling in. Brinkmanship isn't just a periodic political strategy between the parties; it's a strategy for operating municipalities, states, and the federal government in a system built on confiscating the wealth of people who actually generate it.

Here's the only voice of sanity in the entire article:

Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell said he believes substantial funding cuts would have less of an impact on his state than allowing the federal government to stay on its current course of mounting debt.


America Learns that Rhetoric Isn't Leadership

Marc Comtois

Andrew Malcolm:

Barack Obama's weakness is thinking he can talk his way in or out of virtually any opportunity or difficulty.

Being a Real Good Talker helped him get the job heading the law review. And entering politics. And succeeding early there, albeit within Chicago's rigged system. And being an RGT thrust him onto the national stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 when delegates had the foolish notion that John Kerry and John Edwards could win.

Obama is very proud of his talking....Trouble is, real leadership is more than talking and calling for things. It takes a while, but over time listeners begin to notice rote rhetoric, predictable patterns, empty words.

Dana Milbank
The economy crawls, the credit rating falls, the markets plunge, and a helicopter packed with U.S. special forces goes down in Afghanistan. Two thirds of Americans say the country is on the wrong track (and that was before the market swooned), Obama’s approval rating is 43 percent, and activists on his own side are calling him weak.

Yet Obama plods along, raising gobs of cash for his reelection bid — he was scheduled to speak at two DNC fundraisers Monday night — and varying little the words he reads from the teleprompter.

To the above, Glenn Reynolds adds:
It’s as if, in some sort of national spasm of carelessness and self-deceit, we elected a guy entirely unqualified by experience or personal characteristics to the single most important office in the land, to serve during a period of unusual troubles that he was not equipped to address.
Tough way to learn a lesson, America.



A PolitiFact Social Security Stretch

Justin Katz

One can only wonder whether the Providence Journal's PolitiFact team reads their own newspaper. The other day, they did what they love most to do (whacking Republican candidates) and graded Senatorial candidate Barry Hinckley "false" for saying that "there's no money in Social Security." Theirs is not a new argument — it's one that partisan Democrats have been making for years:

Those who say the fund has no money, or that it has nothing more than a bunch of IOUs from the federal government, are referring to the fact that Social Security doesn't have $2.5 trillion in cash sitting in a vault somewhere. The federal government has loaned the money to itself, using the cash to pay for other expenses.

But these aren't IOUs, which generate no interest. The loan is in the form of special-issue Treasury bonds that earned $117.5 billion in interest in 2010, according to the latest trust fund report.

The reader suspects from PolitiFact's stretched analogy that the Hinckley's point is being deliberately missed:

So maybe a better analogy would be: Saying that Social Security has no money is akin to saying that you're broke if you have 20 cents in your pocket but $20 million in the stock of a heavily leveraged company.

Only if you are the sole proprietor of that company and the company itself is broke. I could draw up papers from Anchor Rising promising me a million dollar bonus, but that doesn't make me a millionaire. Even more: Currently, the government can only pay itself the Social Security IOUs because it borrows almost half of every dollar it spends, making the system not unlike a Ponzi scheme.

Indeed, the folks at PolitiFact should have read this Q&A-style article, which the Providence Journal ran on the first page of its Nation section on July 29:

Q: What about the Social Security Trust Fund? Can't that be used to pay Social Security benefits?

A: No. The government will continue to collect Social Security taxes, but the taxes flow in across the month, while the checks go out at the beginning of the month. Normally, the Treasury advances money to Social Security at the start of each month to pay that month's checks, then gets repaid as the tax money comes in. But the Treasury can't make that advance if it doesn't have cash. And while the Social Security Trust Fund has more than $2.5 trillion in assets, that money is invested in U.S. government securities. Usually, that's a good thing because U.S. government securities are considered the world's safest investment. In this case, it's a problem because if the government doesn't have money, it can't cash in the securities.

It's too bad Hinckley didn't think to cite that article as a source. It would have been amusing to see PolitiFact take it on.


August 7, 2011


... By the Way, Why Is VP Joe Biden Charging Us Rent to Protect Him?

Monique Chartier

$2,200/month, to be more specific.

As Jon Stewart asks ,

How do you collect rent from the guy you depend on to save your life?

"Hey guys, it's August 1. Where's the rent??"

"Oh, oh, I'm sorry. I must have left my checkbook in my other bullet-proof vest."


August 5, 2011


Charting Political Blame for Deficit & Debt

Marc Comtois

Byron York has a piece about how Obama supporters, Democrats, etc. take it as an article of faith that all of our economic woes are due to "the past 8 years" (ie; under President Bush). He provides some numbers from the OMB to refute that charge. In an attempt to provide a picture of what he's talking about, I also went to the OMB for data and came up with the following:

PoliDeficit.JPG

York's analysis (bulleted by me):

* Revenues fell in Bush's first two years because of a combination of the tech bust and the start of the tax cuts. But then things took off...[for]...a 44 percent increase from 2003 to 2007. (Revenues slid downward a bit in 2008, and a lot in 2009, when the financial crisis sent the economy into a tailspin.)

* [T]he Bush administration ran up deficits of $158 billion in 2002; $378 billion in 2003; and $413 billion in 2004. Then, with revenues pouring in, the deficits began to fall...[to] $161 billion in 2007...[which], with the tax cuts in effect, was one-tenth of today's $1.6 trillion deficit....Deficits went up in 2008 with the beginning of the economic downturn -- and, not coincidentally, with the first full year of a Democratic House and Senate.

* When Bush took office in January 2001, the debt was about $5.7 trillion, according to Treasury Department figures....When Bush left office in January 2009, the debt was $10.6 trillion. He had increased the national debt almost....$5 trillion over both terms (...$2 trillion came under a Democratic Congress)....The debt stood at $10.6 trillion when Barack Obama took office in January 2009. Now, it's about $14.4 trillion. The president has increased the national debt nearly $4 trillion in his first two and a half years in office.

As York continues, obviously, Bush did not have a stellar spending record (No Child Left Behind, Prescription Drugs, TSA, etc.). But it's clear that, while both parties had their hands in the cookie jar, when Democrats gained control of everything they basically just turned the cookie jar over.



The Assumptions Underlying Harrop's Insanity

Justin Katz

One would think that members of an editorial staff would offer each other the service of gently warning their coworkers when they near the deep end. Or perhaps Froma Harrop is firmly convinced of the approaching death of newspapers and is effectively auditioning for a part in the far-left blind heat machine.

Granted, her tirade against the Tea Party movement, Republicans, and even President Obama has the incongruent quality of being both inane to the point of offense and unoriginal. It's one thing for a writer with a well-paying publicly visible job to rant like an overly righteous undergrad; it's quite another if she does so with an undergrad's lack of originality, and a column that Jeff Jacoby published in the Boston Globe the same day that Harrop's diatribe ran illustrates that we'd already heard it all. Here's Harrop's version:

Make no mistake: The Tea Party Republicans have engaged in economic terrorism against the U.S. — threatening to blow up the economy if they don't get what they want. And like the al-Qaida bombers, what they want is delusional: the dream of restoring some fantasy caliphate in which no one pays taxes, while the country is magically protected from foreign attack and the elderly get government-paid hip replacements.

Americans are not supposed to negotiate with terrorists, but that's what Obama has been doing. Obama should have grabbed the bully pulpit early on, bellowing that everything can be discussed but not America's honor, which requires making good on its debt obligations. Lines about "we're all at fault" and "Republicans should compromise" are beyond pathetic on a subject that should be beyond discussion.

Oh, please, Mr. Obama, follow Harrop's advice! Better yet, Democrats, please do not hesitate to find a candidate who promises her a taste of the red meat that she knows to be just beyond the rabid foam that coats her lips.

For the sake of finding some way of salvaging intellectual discussion from Harrop's ravings, though, pause for a moment to consider what she must believe to be true in order to come to her conclusions:

In the last half century, Congress has raised the debt ceiling 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democrats. The votes were cast without drama because the idea of this country defaulting on its debts was unthinkable. This last-minute deal notwithstanding, the dangerous precedent whereby America's promise to pay what it owes can be brought into political play has been set. ...

Republicans are ultimately going to take the rap over this debt-ceiling outrage. The full faith and credit of the United States is not a matter over which reasonable people may disagree, and the larger public knows that in its heart.

Two assumptions must be met for this to be logically consistent, and I don't think the "larger public" shares those assumptions. They're certainly arguable enough that a rational person would restrain her rhetoric when standing upon them to speak (or snarl, as the case is).

First, she assumes that the debt ceiling ought to be little more than a mile marker on the highway — passed with scarcely a notice and signifying nothing of substantial concern. To the contrary, I suspect the average attention-paying American would think it reasonable for the debt ceiling to be, at the very least, a mechanism for generating real political heat whenever elected representatives pass it. This is a "real success" of the Republicans' debt-ceiling maneuvers (albeit inadequate to current challenges), as Charles Krauthammer states:

... because of the Boehner rule — which he invented on his own out of whole cloth in that speech he gave at the New York Economic Club a few months ago in which he said a dollar of debt ceiling increase has to be matched by a dollar of spending cuts (which, Jay Carney is right, there's no logical connection, but now there is a political indelible connection) — every time the debt ceiling will come up, there's going to be a debate in the country. This is a real success.

Second, Harrop assumes that every expenditure of government is akin to an immutable debt resting on the "full faith and credit of the United States." Real cuts to government spending may be difficult, but they can be accomplished without a financial default. One wonders whether the reason that the Fromarian ilk has rattled off its hinges is that they fear a society inclined to reconsider — and force their elected representatives to reconsider — whether government can in fact do everything.

Put differently, they fear a civic process in which it is no longer adequate to force a policy into law — by legislation, by executive order, by bureaucratic regulation, or by judicial decree — but rather, in which paying for that policy and its enforcement must be justified every year.



Downness and the Debt Ceiling

Justin Katz

Yesterday, I gave some thought to shifts in government policy and in American culture that may ultimately be behind our economy's failure to recover satisfactorily. Much like the productive people who have been leaving Rhode Island because they've assessed that the opposition to needed reforms is simply too powerful, many Americans know what must be done but expect it to be near impossible to make it so. In that respect, the debt ceiling was like a small-scale prod at enemy lines to test the strength of its forces.

The standard line among Democrats, and even many Republicans, is that cutting government spending would just be too hard. All of the government's "promises" are sacrosanct — from Medicare to welfare programs to public school funding — and there simply isn't enough waste and fraud to be squeezed out of the system to cover the deficits (even if officials and bureaucrats were inclined to do the squeezing).

To be fair, they've got a point. A look at Kevin Williamson's prescription for government spending cuts shows just how many powerful groups would have to be bucked. That's certain to be a problem with democracy once elected officials realize that they can stitch together bought constituencies. Everybody's going to want their own ox to be the last one gored.

But cutting has to be done. Our government has been operating with a policy-first approach — assuming that the resources will be found to do whatever politicians and their backers think is right. Rhode Island is dying proof of the silent sunset clause in such an approach. If the federal government couldn't even be forced to abide by its already-astronomical borrowing limits — if it couldn't be forced to make honest-to-goodness, non-fudged and actual cuts to projected spending — then what hope is there?

Very little. If we collectively find it to be impossible to cut spending and begin mitigating our reliance on Big Government, it might be beyond impossible to change the cultural problems that underlie our approach to civics. Another bubble may come along and allow us another decade of ignoring the disease, as the Internet and housing bubbles did, but we'd only be worse off for it, in the long run.

As it happens, Mr. Williamson commented, yesterday, to one of my recent posts, saying that he's "given up writing about the deterioration of our culture," because there's "not much left to say." In a final analysis, the deterioration of our culture is the only thing to say. Repeating the common sense analysis of our errors is the only way to make people (gradually, culturally, almost subconsciously) shift their behavior and civic practices. Even if the necessary changes are beyond our society's abilities, right now, ensuring suffering on a massive scale and initiating the risk that our weakness might inspire global-scene-changing actions on the part of other peoples, the right path will be easier to find when we've come back around to it if it is well described.


July 31, 2011


Chicago in the White House

Justin Katz

Michael Walsh characterizes President Obama's leadership style as "the permanent insurgency":

Do nothing, lie in wait, and then counter-attack. Never present a plan if you can possibly help it, but deal exclusively in bromides and platitudes as you stake out the moral “high ground” and get ready to ambush the other guy. Think of it as the Permanent Insurgency campaign.

Walsh goes on with the description, concluding:

So the later Boehner walks into the trap, the quicker Harry Reid trumps him, and the sooner Obama can can declare for the umpteenth time that the time for talk is over, emerge as a hero — and get the debt-ceiling debate safely past the shoals of the next election, which is all he really cares about. Because, in case you hadn't noticed, running for office is the only thing the Punahou Kid knows how to do.

Insurgencies emanating from the top executive office in the country seem likely to be especially dirty.


July 27, 2011


Malkin on the Denouement of the Wu Drama

Monique Chartier

Michelle Malkin's opening paragraph about Congressman Wu's announcement yesterday made posting her column irresistible.

Wu-hoo! Welcome to another freaky ethics fiasco brought to you by the D.C. den of dysfunctional Democrats. This one comes clothed in a Tigger costume, wrapped in blinders and bathed in the fetid Beltway odor of eau de Pass le Buck.

She has a good point about the timing of his departure, by the way.

Liberal David Wu is a seven-term Democratic congressman from Oregon who announced Tuesday that he'll resign amid a festering sex scandal involving the teenage daughter of a longtime campaign donor. He won't, however, be vacating public office until "the resolution of the debt-ceiling crisis." Translation: Call off the U-Haul trucks. Wu's staying awhile.

July 22, 2011


The Senate Still Scamming

Justin Katz

It would appear that the U.S. Senate is in need of some major upsets, the next election cycle:

The plan, released this week by the bipartisan "Gang of Six" senators, punts on many of the most difficult issues, leaving it to congressional committees to fill in the details later. But supporters say it provides a framework to simplify the tax code, making it easier for businesses and individuals to comply while eliminating incentives to game the system. ...

The plan would simplify the tax code by reducing the number of tax brackets from six to three, lowering the top rate from 35 percent to somewhere between 23 percent and 29 percent. That could provide a windfall for wealthy taxpayers because the 35 percent tax bracket currently applies to taxable income above $379,150.

To help pay for lower rates, the plan would reduce popular tax breaks for mortgage interest, health insurance, charitable giving and retirement savings. Other tax breaks would be spared, including the $1,000-per-child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, which helps the working poor stay out of poverty.

All told, the plan would amount to a $1.2 trillion tax increase over the next decade, which means that it's all just a political trick. Worse, it's a trick that would increase taxes on productive, charitable middle class families while decreasing them for the wealthy. (Although, the article hints that capital gains taxes might be in for an increase down the road.)

The Senators are hoping, no doubt, that they'll be able to confuse voters with talk about cutting taxes and simplifying the tax code. If that's the case, however, I think they're underestimating the extent to which Americans are now paying attention to such Rhode Islandish schemes.


July 12, 2011


It's the cuts, stupid

Marc Comtois

It's tedious to follow the debt ceiling/budget deficit wrangling, I know. Around here, we have the ProJo trumpeting tax increases as the "obvious fix" and telling the Republicans "to do what grownups do" while explaining that "the health-care reform law passed last year would have begun to kick in its projected savings for the government" by 2015. Just trust Obama, right? After all, he's proposing $3 in cuts for every $1 in tax increases (or something like that). Really (and a second source)?

Sen. McConnell has been in talks with Obama and Democrats. We wanted to do something serious and big. Yesterday, he asked point blank how much the Biden-led deal would actually cut from next year's budget. Sen. McConnell has been in talks with Obama and Democrats. We wanted to do something serious and big. Yesterday, he asked point blank how much the Biden-led deal would actually cut from next year's budget. The answer he received was $2 Billion, and it's all smoke and mirrors. In exchange, [Democrats] want $1 Trillion in tax hikes. It's not the kind of deal we're at all interested in. We won't accept guaranteed tax hikes in exchange for fantasy future spending cuts. It's not going to happen. We're going to fight like hell to do what we've said we want: Real spending cuts and caps, a vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment, and real entitlement reform. ">The answer he received was $2 Billion, and it's all smoke and mirrors. In exchange, [Democrats] want $1 Trillion in tax hikes. It's not the kind of deal we're at all interested in. We won't accept guaranteed tax hikes in exchange for fantasy future spending cuts. It's not going to happen. We're going to fight like hell to do what we've said we want: Real spending cuts and caps, a vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment, and real entitlement reform.
Got that? $1 trillion in tax hikes now and $2 billion in budget cuts. Yeah, seems fair.


July 5, 2011


Providence used as example of how "Compensation Monster [is] Devouring Cities"

Marc Comtois

Steve Malanga looks at the national problem of cities in over their heads (particularly because of pension promises) and uses Providence (and New Haven, CT) as examples:

Cities are also running out of fiscal alternatives to deal with their deficits. Like states...many cities have used one-shot revenue deals, hidden borrowing, and other gimmicks to bolster their finances. The weak economy has lasted so long, though, that these techniques have been exhausted. To balance its 2010 budget, for example, Providence, Rhode Island, borrowed some $48 million (using its fire stations and headquarters as collateral); it also drained most of its reserve fund, which shrank from $17 million to $2 million in just one year. Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings subsequently downgraded the city’s bond ratings by two notches, essentially ending its ability to use fiscal gimmicks. But Providence still faces a budget squeeze because its retiree costs amount to 50 percent of tax collections.
Nationally, the rate of growth of such local expenditures outpaced state and federal:
Local governments also helped bring on their current budget nightmares by carelessly expanding hiring and wages in recent boom years. In the decade leading up to the 2008 financial crash, the number of workers for cities, towns, and schools increased 16 percent, even though the country’s overall population grew just 12.5 percent. Wages also increased, and, of course, the hiring frenzy made those pension obligations even worse. The result: over the same decade, the total in wages and benefits that public schools paid to teachers and noninstructional staff (to take one category of public-sector worker) jumped an amazing 72 percent, despite moderate increases in student enrollment.
As Ted Nesi highlighted, albeit over a longer period, local government payrolls increased while state payrolls went down. Some argue that the cuts in state jobs have led to the increases at the local level. But, looking at Nesi's chart, it's obvious the local growth doesn't equate to the state reduction.



Stimulus = $278,000 per job

Marc Comtois

You know they're trying to hide something when they release a report on the Friday afternoon of a long holiday weekend.

[T]he White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama...reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.

Of course, that would have removed the ability of bureaucrats and friends of "O" to skim off the top.

ADDENDUM: There was a second part to this post that got "lost" in the interwebs. Honest, I included it first time around. Here it is:

Jake Tapper tweeted that the White House isn't happy with the way the report is being framed, quoting Liz Ozhorn, "a White House spokesman for the stimulus bill":

[T]he Weekly Standard report “is based on partial information and false analysis. The Recovery Act was more than a measure to create and save jobs; it was also an investment in American infrastructure, education and industries that are critical to America’s long-term success and an investment in the economic future of America’s working families. Thanks to the Recovery Act, 110 million working families received a tax cut through the Making Work Pay tax credit, over 110,000 small businesses received critical access to capital through $27 billion in small business loans and more than 75,000 projects were started nationwide to improve our infrastructure, jump-start emerging industries and spur local economic development. The nonpartisan CBO has confirmed that the Recovery Act delivered as promised, lowering the unemployment rate by as much as 2 percent, boosting GDP by as much as 4 percent and creating and saving as many as 3.6 million jobs."
Countering this, Reuters blogger James Pethokoukis tongue-in-cheek tweeted "But what about multiplier effect?" (reference) .

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty notes that, taking the White House "corrective" into account, and using higher employment estimates, then it comes out to $185,000 per job. So much better! Geraghty also notes that the White House is following a new rounding standard:

Also note that the White House does some convenient rounding of their own. In their defense, they state, “The nonpartisan CBO has confirmed that the Recovery Act delivered as promised, lowering the unemployment rate by as much as 2 percent, boosting GDP by as much as 4 percent and creating and saving as many as 3.6 million jobs.”

Actually, that stretches what the CBO actually said. Their report puts the maximum impact on the unemployment rate at 1.8 percent and as low as .6 percent, and that it boosted “(inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.1 percent and 3.1 percent.”

I'll stress it again: if it was all good, they wouldn't have released it on a Friday afternoon before the holiday weekend. It would have been a prime time speech on July 4th right before the fireworks!


June 29, 2011


About Bachmann's "Founding Father's fought Slavery" statement

Marc Comtois

Apparently we're at the point in Campaign 2012 where we play the game of dissecting political statements for "gotcha moments." The pols have to be ready for the questions, so they should work to make sure they mitigate damage by reading up beforehand. That being said, of all the things to talk to a Presidential candidate about, why focus on interpretations of who exactly was a Founding Father? But, since it was broached....

The question, from ABC's George Stephanopoulos, and Bachmann's answer:

Stephanopoulos: [E]arlier this year you said that the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence worked tirelessly to end slavery. Now with respect Congresswoman, that’s just not true. Many of them including Jefferson and Washington were actually slave holders and slavery didn’t end until the Civil War....

Bachmann: Well if you look at one of our Founding Fathers, John Quincy Adams, that’s absolutely true. He was a very young boy when he was with his father serving essentially as his father’s secretary. He tirelessly worked throughout his life to make sure that we did in fact one day eradicate slavery….

Stephanopoulos: He wasn’t one of the Founding Fathers – he was a president, he was a Secretary of State, he was a member of Congress, you’re right he did work to end slavery decades later. But so you are standing by this comment that the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery?

Bachmann: Well, John Quincy Adams most certainly was a part of the Revolutionary War era. He was a young boy but he was actively involved.

First of all, because "some" Founders had slaves doesn't mean that "some" didn't fight against slavery. This isn't an "either or" kinda thing. Besides, someone else offered an opinion on this (H/t)
Who were our fathers that framed the Constitution? I suppose the "thirty-nine" who signed the original instrument may be fairly called our fathers who framed that part of the present Government. It is almost exactly true to say they framed it, and it is altogether true to say they fairly represented the opinion and sentiment of the whole nation at that time. Their names, being familiar to nearly all, and accessible to quite all, need not now be repeated....

In 1784, three years before the Constitution - the United States then owning the Northwestern Territory, and no other, the Congress of the Confederation had before them the question of prohibiting slavery in that Territory; and four of the "thirty-nine" who afterward framed the Constitution, were in that Congress, and voted on that question. Of these, Roger Sherman, Thomas Mifflin, and Hugh Williamson voted for the prohibition...[t]he other of the four - James M'Henry - voted against the prohibition, showing that, for some cause, he thought it improper to vote for it.

In 1787, still before the Constitution, but while the Convention was in session framing it, and while the Northwestern Territory still was the only territory owned by the United States, the same question of prohibiting slavery in the territory again came before the Congress of the Confederation; and two more of the "thirty-nine" who afterward signed the Constitution, were in that Congress, and voted on the question. They were William Blount and William Few; and they both voted for the prohibition...This time the prohibition became a law, being part of what is now well known as the Ordinance of '87....

In 1789, by the first Congress which sat under the Constitution, an act was passed to enforce the Ordinance of '87, including the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory. The bill for this act was reported by one of the "thirty-nine," Thomas Fitzsimmons, then a member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. It went through all its stages without a word of opposition, and finally passed both branches without yeas and nays, which is equivalent to a unanimous passage. In this Congress there were sixteen of the thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution. They were John Langdon, Nicholas Gilman, Wm. S. Johnson, Roger Sherman, Robert Morris, Thos. Fitzsimmons, William Few, Abraham Baldwin, Rufus King, William Paterson, George Clymer, Richard Bassett, George Read, Pierce Butler, Daniel Carroll, James Madison.

Thanks for clearing that up, Mr. Lincoln.

Is this a stretch? Perhaps, but no more, really, than the gymnastics that Stephanopoulos went through just to get to this point.


June 7, 2011


NPV Would Not Make RI Any More "Relevant"

Carroll Andrew Morse

At least one motivation offered by local supporters of the the National Popular Vote compact, that NPV would lead to more attention for Rhode Island in Presidential elections, makes no sense at all.

George Will explained in a column from about a decade ago how there is no improvement in the relative importance of small states under NPV...

Were it not for electoral votes allocated winner-take-all, would candidates campaign in, say, West Virginia? In 1996 Bill Clinton decisively defeated Bob Dole there 52 percent to 37 percent. But that involved a margin of just 93,866 votes (327,812 to 233,946), a trivial amount compared to what can be harvested in large cities. However, for a 5-0 electoral vote sweep, West Virginia is worth a trip or two.
I also remember Will opining, following the 2000 Presidential election, that if the Bush campaign had had a rough idea about how things were likely to turn out that year, their best strategy for improving their odds under a popular vote scenario would have been to ramp up their turnout machine in the Houston metro area.

You could imagine a similar logic applying if the 2012 election were held under NPV rules, with the Barack Obama campaign deciding in the case of a close race not to seek extra votes in a smattering of small cities across the country, but to devote additional resources to getting every vote possible out of the President's political base in Chicago.

The Houston metro area has about 6 million people in it, and the Chicago metro area has about 9.5 million, while Rhode Island has only 1 million people. There is no serious reason to believe that NPV will suddenly make Rhode Island any less "neglected" in Presidential elections, when NPV makes large urban areas into the places that provide the most efficient possibilities for increasing electoral margins.


May 24, 2011


National Popular Vote Bill Being Heard this Week

Carroll Andrew Morse

One late addition (posted Monday for a hearing Wednesday) to this week's House Judiciary Committee agenda is a bill to have the state legislature disregard the choice made by Rhode Island voters in a Presidential election, and allocate RI's electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote instead. In 2009, a similar bill got out of committee, but was defeated on the House floor by a 28-45 vote. It should be noted, however, the current Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee has expressed support for national popular vote in the past.

Previous Anchor Rising takes on why NPV is a bad idea are available here, here, and here. The legitimate, and constitutional, solution to a perceived problem with the Electoral College is to increase the size of the U.S. House of Representatives.


May 16, 2011


Heads Up, Federal Retirees, Obama and Geithner are Tapping Your Retirement Fund

Monique Chartier

Nothing to worry about, though, it's a loan and not a confiscation. You have no problem lending your retirement to someone who is over fourteen trillion dollars in debt, right ...?

The Obama administration will begin to tap federal retiree programs to help fund operations after the government loses its ability Monday to borrow more money from the public, adding urgency to efforts in Washington to fashion a compromise over the debt.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has warned for months that the government would soon hit the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling — a legal limit on how much it can borrow. With the government poised to reach that limit Monday, Geithner is undertaking special measures in an effort to postpone the day when he will no longer have enough funds to pay all of the government’s bills.


May 1, 2011


A Message Full of Coincidence

Justin Katz

So, as Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice headed toward the climactic "you're fired" of tonight's episode, NBC periodically killed the sound to play a jingle and run ticker text about a pending important message from President Obama. The actual interruption came right as the show built up to a crest.

Apparently, Osama bin Laden has been confirmed as dead. I'm not sure if just happened or at some point today, yesterday, last week, but it sure is curious that this big announcement would have to be made on a Sunday night with only an intense twelve minutes remaining on a show produced by a political competitor of the president's.

I wouldn't take this so far as to imply political motives, but it's also very helpful to Mr. Obama, considering unrest about gas and grocery prices and growing dissatisfaction with his military activities.

10:59 p.m.

The President hasn't come on, yet, but the commentators on NBC are making bin Laden's death out to be much more than it really is. He was a symbol, but whether he's been alive or dead has been largely irrelevant for the past six years. The real success of the decade-long war effort is the lack of additional large-scale terror attacks on U.S. soil.

From the commentary, thus far, the administration has been gathering details all day and has the terror master's body.


April 28, 2011


Birtherism Dies an Easy Death

Justin Katz

At the end of a long post describing the ease with which President Obama could have ended the birther controversy long ago, Andrew McCarthy concludes as follows:

So, assuming as we should the legitimacy of the long-form birth certificate produced yesterday, the only thing that makes sense is that Obama knows the mainstream media is in his hip pocket. That is, he knew that he would not be held to the same standard as other politicians, and that if he acted in an unreasonable manner by withholding basic, easily available information that any other person seeking the presidency would be expected — be compelled — to produce, the media would portray as weirdos those demanding the information, not Obama and his stonewalling accomplices. And he also knows that, having now finally produced the document only because the game was starting to hurt him politically, the media will not focus on how easy it would have been to produce the birth certificate three years ago, or on how much time and money has been wasted by his gamesmanship; they'll instead portray him as beleaguered and the people who have been seeking the basic information (i.e., doing the media's job) as discredited whackos.

It's hard to say what's more depressing, Obama's cynicism or the zeal with which the media does his bidding.

One can imagine the media presentation had any given Republican drawn out the saga for so long, let alone a media-loathed figure like Sarah Palin. But when entire segments of society (news media, academia, Hollywood, and so on) are so slanted, politics is a different game depending whether one aligns with them or not.


April 23, 2011


Remember the Good Ol' Days (Before 2006)

Marc Comtois
Hey, remember when gas was $2.20 a gallon and the unemployment rate was 4.4%? What happened with that? …Oh, right, the Democrats won the 2006 Congressional elections.
That observation was made by Moe Lane and picked up by Glenn Reynolds. It's worth promulgating because it's a simple way to point out that what we were told was so bad back in 2006--the Bush Economy (negativity implied)--sure looks a helluva lot better to average Americans now, doesn't it? Then it all changed. Too simplistic? Perhaps. But since when is simplicity out-of-bounds in politics.

April 14, 2011


Budget "Deal" Skullduggery - Shouldn't Have Expected Any Different

Marc Comtois

So that $38.5 billion budget deficit reduction deal? Not really much of anything.

[T]he cuts ...includ[e] cuts to earmarks, unspent census money, leftover federal construction funding, and $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can't be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused spending authority from a program providing health care to children of lower-income families....the spending measure reaps $350 million by cutting a one-year program enacted in 2009 for dairy farmers then suffering from low milk prices. Another $650 million comes by not repeating a one-time infusion into highway programs passed that same year. And just last Friday, Congress approved Obama's $1 billion request for high-speed rail grants — crediting themselves with $1.5 billion in savings relative to last year.

About $10 billion of the cuts comes from targeting appropriations accounts previously used by lawmakers for so-called earmarks...Republicans also claimed $5 billion in savings by capping payments from a fund awarding compensation to crime victims. Under an arcane bookkeeping rule — used for years by appropriators — placing a cap on spending from the Justice Department crime victims fund allows lawmakers to claim the entire contents of the fund as budget savings. The savings are awarded year after year.

Conservative Republicans and Tea Party faves weren't too jazzed about all of this:
Even before details of the bill came out, some conservative Republicans were assailing it. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said he probably won't vote for the measure, and tea party favorite Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., is a "nay" as well.

The $38 billion in cuts, Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., wrote on his Facebook page, "barely make a dent" in the country's budget woes.

In all, only about $352 million in real spending was actually cut. Regardless of the reality of the actual cuts, Mark Steyn observes:
The joke re the original $38.5 billion deal was that, in the time it took to negotiate it, we added as much again in new debt (we’re borrowing about $4 billion a day). We didn’t know the half of it: Never mind negotiating, in the time it takes to type up the bill, we’ve borrowed as much as it “saves”. By the time this thing’s through, the cost of the Secret Service detail lugging the Obamaprompter to whichever grade school he announces the final definitive historic budget “cuts” at will be three times as much as any actual savings.
Just nibbling for show.


April 7, 2011


Wisconsin Watch III

Carroll Andrew Morse

According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Waukesha County's initial tally of its election returns didn't include over 15,000 votes that were cast in the Wisconsin election on Tuesday. With those votes added in, David Prosser now has a 7,000+ vote lead over Joanne Kloppenburg in the state supreme court election.

For the record, here's the observation I made at 12:51 on election night...

Well isn't that special. The number of precincts reporting from Waukesha just jumped to 100%, without the overall total jumping from the last time I checked. 96.5% of precincts in, about a 1,900 vote lead for Prosser.
I assumed at the time it had to do with the county totals and the total total being updated separately, and that someone had forgotten to punch in Waukesha's county level numbers earlier in the evening, but this may have been around the time that the error occurred.



It's Been a Good Decade: Why Public Employees Make So Much of Freezes or Minor Cuts

Marc Comtois

To those of us not in the public sector, it seems outsized when public employees and politicians make so much of temporary pay freezes or a few minor cuts (or reductions in the expected increases!). Red Jahncke adds some context that will help us understand their perspective by explaining how, nationwide, local and municipal government employee compensation has outpaced the private sector. He backs it up with two tables (6.2D and 6.5D) from the National Product and Income Accounts of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Table 6.2D shows that, nationally, state and local government worker compensation grew 45 percent from 2000 to 2007 — plus another 8 percent in the next two recession years, while private-sector compensation grew only 33 percent from 2000 to 2007 and — surprise, surprise — fell 3 percent in the recession. [Incidentally, the chart also shows that Federal Gov't grew 52% 2000-07, 11.5% during the next two recession years~ed.].

Table 6.5D reveals that, during the 2007-2009 recession, private-sector employment fell by 8 million jobs to a level below its total in 2000, while state and local public-sector employment grew by 185,000 jobs, reaching 1.3 million, or 9 percent, above its total in 2000.

As Jahncke notes, public sector salaries were ahead of private before the Great Recession. He continues:
The 2007- 2009 data speak to the issue of fairness — massive job losses and pay cuts in the private sector, continued job gains and a smart compensation boost in the public sector. In 2010, relatively few jobs were regained in the private sector or lost in the public sector.

And the data for the full decade speak to the issue of sustainability: How can slower-growing private-sector income produce the taxes to fund a public-sector payroll growing at almost twice the pace?

The answer is that it can’t, and it isn’t.

So now we get even Democrats making cuts and both they and the unions think they're making significant sacrifices. Given their experience over the last decade, I can understand why they think that. But they have to understand that the sacrifices they are making now have already been wrung from private sector employees over the last decade. So forgive us if we don't hail them as martyrs for giving some of what they earned--even during the Great Recession--back.


April 6, 2011


Wisconsin Watch Cont'd

Carroll Andrew Morse

Continuation of this post.

[10:40] According to the AP results, 10 of the 12 remaining Milwaukee precincts have come in along with the 8 previously outstanding precincts from Ashland County. Prosser still leads, now by less than 400 votes. One outstanding precinct from Dane County (73-23 Kloppenburg), one from Jefferson County (58-42 Prosser), and six from Sauk County (55-45 Kloppenburg) are potential sources of big swings in a 400-vote margin.

[10:45] Kloppenburg now up, by 140 votes, mostly as the result of Sauk County's remaining precincts. Now the question is whether the remaining Jefferson precinct gives Prosser a margin over Kloppenburg that is 140 votes greater than the remaining Democratic leaning precincts, including 2 from Milwaukee and 1 from Dane (Madison).

[10:55] In one of those the county-level changes while the totals don't occurances that happen from time to time , Dane county now shows all in, with Kloppenburg's lead holding at 140.

[10:59] Kloppenburg now up by over 350. The Jefferson County precinct that is outstanding has to have a large population that breaks big for Prosser for him to retake the lead, plus 2 Milwaukee County precincts are still out. (Note: I don't know how absentee ballots factor into the results at this point)

[2:30] With one precinct left to report, Kloppenburg is up by 206 votes. The one precinct is in Jefferson County, so I'd expect that number to tighten, but something along the lines of a 70-30 Prosser majority from a large precinct would be needed to flip the result.


April 5, 2011


Wisconsin Watch

Carroll Andrew Morse

According to the Associated Press, Joanne Kloppenburg has opened up a slight 4,000 vote lead with 57% of the precincts reporting in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election that will likely decide if Governor Scott Walker's collective bargaining package of laws is allowed to stand.

Looking at the county-by-county results, I am willing to bet that Prosser wins.

[11:20] Prosser now up by almost 20,000 (62% of precincts in) with Waukesha County, a sizeable Republican stronghold, only about 1/4 in. Waukesha's outstanding votes will likely cancel out, at least, the outstanding votes from Milwaukee and Dane (Madison) Counties.

[11:30] Prosser's lead is now less than 1,000 (67% of precincts reporting) because a big chunk of Milwaukee precincts just came in. I stand by my prediction.

[11:35] Kloppenburg now up by 600 votes, 69% of precincts reporting.

[11:40] Kloppenburg is now up by more than 5,000 votes. Dane County (currently 73-23 for Kloppenburg) has 58 precincts yet to report. Milwaukee County (currently 55-45 for Kloppenburg) has 149 precincts yet to report. And Waukesha County (currently 73 - 27 for Prosser) has 146 precincts yet to report.

[11:45] Kloppenburg up by about 7,000. No change in the big 3 county remaining precincts.

[11:53] Kloppenburg still up by more than 7,000 with 77.5% of precincts reporting.

[11:55] On the AP Board, two medium size counties still are showing 0 precincts reporting, Fond du Lac and Grant. Fond du Lac went 54% for McCain in the 2008 Presidential election and Grant went 62% for Obama, if you believe Wikipedia.

[12:00] Kloppenburg now up by about 18,000 votes, presumably due to another influx from Milwaukee. 53 precints left from Milwaukee to report, 58 from Dane, and 79 from Waukesha. Plus 77 from Fond du Lac and 52 from Grant.

[12:05] Big lead now for Kloppenburg, about 35,000 votes. Dane has 41 precincts left to report, Milwaukee and Waukesha unchanged. All but one precinct from Grant is in, but the total number of votes from the county is very small.

[12:11] Hang on folks, this is going to be a nail-biter (as if anyone is actually reading this in real time). Kloppenburg's lead is now cut to about 4,000 with 88.8% of the vote in. Amongst other things, Fond du Lac came in with a 6,000 vote margin for Prosser and 14 Waukesha precincts came in.

[12:15] 89.6% of precincts in, Kloppenburg leads by less than 4,000. 41 precincts from Dane, 29 precincts from Milwaukee, and 73 precincts from Waukesha yet to report. If it's close, the 28 precincts yet to report from Washington County (Wisconsin, not Rhode Island) could have an impact.

[12:25] 90.5% of the vote in. Kloppenburg still with a 3,300 vote lead. But if the numbers from the counties still outstanding roughly parallel their results so far, it still looks good for Prosser.

[12:30] Kloppenburg's lead is now less than 2,000, almost 92% of the vote in. Still 41 precincts from Dane to report, just 13 from Milwaukee, and 73 from Waukesha (currently 73-27 for Prosser). Other counties that could still create noticable swings are Washington, Ozaukee, and Eau Claire.

[12:33] Prosser now on top by less than 1,000 votes. Not coincidentally, 5 precincts from Waukesha County have reported since the 12:30 update.

[12:36] 93.5% of the vote in, Prosser still on top by less than 1,000 votes. But Dane County is now almost tapped out for Kloppenburg, just 5 precincts left to report.

[12:40] As Washington County finishes reporting, Prosser opens up a 4,000+ vote lead with 94% of the vote in (and a big chunk of the remaining vote to come from Waukesha County).

[12:44] About 1/3 of Eau Claire's precincts reporting in have helped Kloppenburg narrow Prosser's lead to less than 2,000 votes.

[12:51] Well isn't that special. The number of precincts reporting from Waukesha just jumped to 100%, without the overall total jumping from the last time I checked. 96.5% of precincts in, about a 1,900 vote lead for Prosser.

[12:59] A few precincts reporting from Milwaukee have put Kloppenburg back on top, by about 1,700 votes, with 96.6% of the vote in. 2 precincts left to report from Dane, 12 from Milwaukee.

[1:02] Now it's Prosser by 5,000, with 97% of all precincts reporting. Not really sure where those votes came from.

[1:15] Prosser has about a 1,600 vote lead, with 2 Democratic leaning counties (Milwaukee and Eau Claire) and one Republican leaning county (Marathon) still with a number of precincts left to report.

[2:00] 98.5% of precincts reporting, according to the Associated Press. Prosser leads by under 1,900 votes. However, almost all of the remainging precincts are from counties that are currently leaning Democratic (Marathon is completely in; Milwaukee has 12 precincts still out; Eau Claire has 21 precincts still out; Ashland County, currently going 71-29 for Kloppenburg, has 6 precincts still out and Sauk County, currently going 55-45 for Kloppenburg, has 8 precincts still out.

[2:20] According to the AP, Eau Claire is now in and has closed Prosser's lead over Kloppenburg to less than 600 votes. The 12 remaining precincts from Milwaukee, plus 1 from Dane and a few others will close the remainder of the gap if they vote in the same proportion as the rest of their counties have so far. Based on this, I now have to give a slight edge to Kloppenburg.


April 2, 2011


Ya Know, the Obama Admin's Word for W*r is Just as Silly as Sarah Palin's

Monique Chartier

Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes to reporters on Air Force One.

“I think what we are doing is enforcing a resolution that has a very clear set of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone,” Rhodes said. “Obviously that involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end.

Palin during On the Record with Greta van Susteren.

I haven't heard the president say that we are at war. And that's why I, too, am not knowing, do we use the term "intervention," do we use "war," do we use "squirmish," what is it?

Even Jon Stewart was skeptical of the admin's term.

The difference as to intent should also not be ignored. Rhodes was attempting to avoid a word that would underscore the fact that the Obama admin had initiated a bellicose action against another country.

Palin just goofed up.

Semi-related item: Let the record show that it was Jay Severin, just before his suspension this week for unrelated remarks, who first plugged the admin's term into Edwin Starr's song.

Kineticmilitaryaction!

Huh!

(Yeah!)

What is it good for??

Absolutely nothing!

Uh Huh!

Kineticmilitaryaction!

Huh!

(Yeah!)



February 20, 2011


Latest Developments in Wisconsin: Early Reports of Unquantified Concessions; Pre-Mature Floor Votes

Monique Chartier

It is now being reported that, in exchange for leaving inviolate collective bargaining rights, Wisconsin's public labor unions are purportedly ready to discuss monetary concessions. Some newspapers have reported this development as full capituation by the unions on all matters of monetary compensation in the bill. (Let's keep in mind that this would still place their compensation above that experienced by the private sector). That these newspapers may have been overly optimistic, however, becomes clear upon an examination of the actual words uttered.

The Milwakee Journal Sentinel, for example, reports that

[state Senator Jon] Erpenbach said the offer was "a legitimate and serious offer on the table from local, state and school public employees that balances Gov. Walker's budget."

Not, "the unions have agreed to Governor Walkers term's if he will abandon his proposed changes to collective bargaining". No, the union has made an offer that balances the governor's budget. Okay. On what basis does it balance the budget? How much of the offer involves the union's compensation and how much pertains to budget cuts unrelated to the union's contract?

And this, from the Wisconsin State Journal.

Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, and Marty Beil, executive director of AFSCME Council 24, said in a conference call with reporters that workers will do their fair share to narrow Wisconsin's budget gap.

Again, not agreeing to Gov Walker's terms; agreeing to take on their "fair share" of the budget gap. What does their vision of "fair share" look like?

Whatever the monetary concession involved, by the way, Governor Walker has declined to omit the language from his bill which would partially restore management rights. Or, to phrase it in public union-speak, the governor refuses to back away from his wholesale attack on collective bargaining and on unions and workers around the world.

An editorial in yesterday's Milkawkee Journal Sentinel correctly draws our attention back to the parties responsible for Wisconsin's budget mess - its prior elected officials.

Walker's predecessors are the real problem here. At least Walker is being honest about the gravity of the problem. Gov. Scott McCallum collateralized a humongous settlement with tobacco companies to plug a big budget hole. Gov. Jim Doyle raided the state transportation fund and the Wisconsin Injured Patients and Families Compensation Fund (which now, under court order, must be repaid). These one-time gimmicks allowed them to ignore the real problem and claim political success. All the while, the cost of Wisconsin's current services exceeded the revenue that was coming in.

I would only add, don't leave out prior Assemblies, who possessed the ultimate power to nix all of these bad budgets and, instead, chose to codify them.

Meanwhile, in the current Assembly, the government geek part of me was fascinated, not to say considerably amused, by an attempt of the House to bring Gov Walker's bill (yes, that bill; the subject of all of this uproar) up for a vote.

In the Wisconsin Assembly on Friday, Republican leaders had called lawmakers to the floor at 5 p.m. to take up Walker's bill to fix a budget shortfall by cutting public worker benefits and bargaining rights. But they began business just before that hour, when Democrats were not yet on the floor.

Democrats charged into the chamber and shouted to stop the action as Republican staff urged their leaders to "keep going, keep going." Republicans took the voice vote, putting the bill in a stage that prevented it from being amended in that house. Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, a Democrat, called the move an "illegal vote" and demanded that Republicans rescind it.

"Unbelievable!" Barca screamed. "Unprecedented! Un-American! Not in keeping with the values of the state! You should be ashamed of yourselves."

Minutes later, Republicans agreed to effectively cancel the vote by allowing the bill to return to a stage in which Democrats can offer amendments.

Fabulous! The drama resumes Tuesday when the Assembly reconvenes, presumably once again sans AWOL dem senators.


February 15, 2011


Polarized Politics

Justin Katz

One hears frequently about the Tea Party extremists who are binding the hands of Republican moderates (I know, I know), but a pull away from center is hardly a GOP phenomenon:

Bell's defection is one of dozens by state and local Democratic officials in the Deep South in recent months that underscore Republicans' continued consolidation of power in the region — a process that started with presidential politics but increasingly affects government down to the level of dogcatcher.

"I think the midterms showed you really can't be a conservative and be a member of the Democratic Party," Bell said.

The much-lamented polarization goes both ways, and one interpretation is that the American people are just not satisfied with the slow drift toward a bureaucratic superstate facilitated by parties of only mildly different flavor.

Another interpretation is that people are trying to pull a leftward-drifting political class back toward the center-right. Either way, the disruption of the old order is not necessarily an unhealthy development. Perhaps we'll wind up with real political competitions rather than elections that merely adjust the speed at which insiders tug the polity in their preferred direction.



At Least RI isn't Hawaii (well, in this instance)

Marc Comtois

What state has the most Democrat dominated legislative body? The Hawaii state senate. Byron York explains:

In Hawaii, there are 25 members of the state Senate. Twenty-four are Democrats. And then there is Sam Slom.

Slom, the lone Senate Republican in the state of President Obama's birth, has represented East Honolulu since 1996. He hasn't always been the only GOP senator; in the last session, there were two. But Republicans fared poorly at the polls in November, and Slom was left alone.

Which means that Democratic bills to increase state spending, to impose new regulations and mandates and to create new government departments are often passed on votes of 24-1. "I represent a point of view that would not be represented," the conservative Slom says, "even if it's just one voice."

There are 15 committees in the Senate. Most Democrats serve on three or four. But to make things bipartisan, Slom -- you may call him Mr. Minority Leader -- has to serve on all 15. That means he spends his days racing from one committee meeting to the next, making sure there's at least one question from a conservative point of view.

So cheer up RI Republicans, it could be worse!


February 11, 2011


Not Your Father's CPAC

Marc Comtois

CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, is held every year and serves as a sort of bellwether for the conservative movement. According to Roger L. Simon, there was a different twist this year:

The party staged by Andrew Breitbart for GOProud — the gay Republican and conservative group — was as close to a game changer as things get and the most interesting event at CPAC by far, at least to this point — and that’s meant as no insult to CPAC. With sexy Sophie B. Hawkins singing to a boisterous, supportive crowd, the party almost obliterated in one night the conception that Republicans are anti-gay and gave the impression that young libertarians — and some not so young — are taking over the GOP. Pretty soon it may be cool to be a Republican and square to be a Democrat.
Simon does check himself for possibly being a bit hyperbolic, but that libertarians seem to be taking over CPAC--Ron Paul is an annual crowd-pleaser--is an interesting development. Meanwhile, more socially conservative groups opted not to attend CPAC this year.



Tea Party House Members Demand--and get--More Cuts

Marc Comtois

It shouldn't go unremarked upon that the Tea Party Republicans in the US House of Representatives took a stand and prevailed earlier this week.

The revolt of freshman and conservative Republicans over spending cuts for this fiscal year ended almost before it began, because it prevailed so rapidly. The rebellion started in rumblings back in the lawmakers’ districts; gathered in the defiance of Republican dissenters on the appropriations committee; and reached full force at yesterday’s conference meeting, knocking GOP leaders back on their heels and quickly convincing them to give in to the Tea Party’s demands.

“We may be freshmen, we may be rookies in this game,” says Rep. Steve Womack (R., Ark.). “But there is no question that the leadership respects our opinion.”

GOP freshmen were frustrated when, earlier this month, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) released his proposal to cut $58 billion in non-security spending for the remainder of the fiscal year. Perhaps more than anything, they were confused. To begin with, it wasn’t exactly clear how much money they were planning to cut — in addition to Ryan’s $58 billion, the numbers $74 billion, $43 billion, and $32 billion were floating around. It seemed that few could agree, because it depended on what baseline and category of spending you were using.

Whatever the actual figure, it was short of the $100 billion Republicans had promised to cut in the “Pledge to America.”

So they blocked the measure and took on the leadership and prevailed. That's why they were sent there. Hopefully, the message has been received by the old guard. Things do indeed look to be different this time around.


February 8, 2011


Harrop's Crocodile Tears

Marc Comtois

On Sunday, ProJo columnist Froma Harrop (I know, I know....) cried crocodile tears over the loss of the Moderate Republican.

I used to vote for select Republicans running for national office. That’s become next to impossible because Tea Party groups have pushed GOP leaders to treat any cooperation with the Democratic foe as abject surrender. You might like your Republican, but your Republican is no longer free to act his or her conscience without being called all kinds of things.
Its because of the populist Tea Partiers, you see. You just can't practice the ol' noblesse oblige like ya used to!
[B]oy, it’s painful to see grown statesmen cower at the commands of puffed-up “revolutionaries” inflicting damage on their party, never mind the country...I want a two-party system that offers acceptable choices. And I want a political leadership that can do America’s business without having to sate the populist passions of folks unacquainted with economic realities or the art of compromise.
Now, the Democrats have the right idea, right? Moderates still thrive in the Democratic Party, what with the Democratic Leadership Council...oh, wait....
The Democratic Leadership Council, the iconic centrist organization of the Clinton years, is out of money and could close its doors as soon as next week, a person familiar with the plans said Monday.

The DLC, a network of Democratic elected officials and policy intellectuals had long been fading from its mid-'90s political relevance, tarred by the left as a symbol of "triangulation" at a moment when there's little appetite for intra-party warfare on the center-right.

There are also a lot of conservative Democrats fleeing to the GOP. Of course, most of those are from the South (that's why they're called "conservative" and not "moderate", incidentally) and that just doesn't count in Harropia. (Like the moderate Democrats who may be going after the individual mandate in Obamacare). The truth is that there are ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum who have always made life difficult for the middle-of-the-roaders. Plus, Harrop's problem is related to her basic misconception of what moderate really is: the country is more conservative than not, after all, so real moderates are more conservative than she allows.

ADDENDUM: Michael Barone has more thoughts.


January 29, 2011


The Message We Heard

Justin Katz

I suspect that those of you who watched the state of the union speech heard it recited similarly to this:

(via the Corner)


January 26, 2011


Impressions on the State of the Union

Marc Comtois

So what were my impressions of President Obama's State of the Union speech? Don't have any. Didn't watch it and had a pleasant night. These things have way jumped the shark and long-ago devolved into an inside-the-beltway circle jerk dominated by the post-game spinmeisters trying to tell you what it all "really" means. It took me a few years to come around--and over the last few years I've felt it was my duty as a blogger to watch 'em--but now I've decided I've just got more interesting things to do besides wasting an hour watching the annual laundry-list read. Although, I do have one question: Sputnik?


January 25, 2011


The State of the Rhetoric

Justin Katz

The first state of the union speech that I'm aware of having watched was one given by President Bill Clinton, and I remember being astonished at his series of promises to everybody. All hands out would be filled. Such speeches are little more than political drama, pumped by media organizations looking for some easy, pre-generated headlines.

It would be different if the speech were more of what one might expect of an annual presentation by the President before the legislature: A reckoning and one-night-only declaration of truth and principle. Instead, predictably, it's all about how everything that the President has done has been wonderful and successful... but the work's not done, so he's got to do a lot more. And so on.

Personally, I'm way too busy to sit down for that sort of civic obligation. If I'm going to devote my limited time to pure drama, I want it at least to be entertaining.


January 15, 2011


A Promise to Watch For

Justin Katz

Among the articles on my list to mention is this profile of House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) from the December 20 National Review. To be honest, I haven't had a chance to investigate the progress of the following promise (and it's not something that I'd expect the mainstream media to promote), but it's a worthy one, and it's worth watching:

"When I was in the minority, I saw what the majority did to destroy debate on the floor," McCarthy sighs. "Bills got written in the back of a room by a select few. In the last two years, we haven't even had an 'open rule,' which enables amendments to be offered. That model is over: My job is to ensure that good policy gets through — encouraging an honest debate, where all members, Republicans and Democrats, are equal."

McCarthy promises to immediately usher in a new operating culture on the House floor. "Any member will be able to offer an amendment on a spending bill," he says. "We will open up the floor, not only for both parties, but for the American people to get involved in the process. That'll lead to the best legislative product. From cameras in the Rules Committee to putting bills online at least 72 hours before a vote, we will enable people to know what's happening, read the bills, and understand the debate. Better ideas will emerge, and the process will keep leadership power in check. It'll be a healthy change."

McCarthy emphasizes that both Boehner and Cantor have been nothing but supportive of his sunshine-centric approach. "Looking at how many freshmen there are, and knowing so many of them, it's clear that they are the closest thing to a direct message from the American people. We get that," he says.


January 14, 2011


Romney Flashes

Monique Chartier

RealClearPolitics reports that he has chosen a political director (what the heck is that??) and a pollster.

The Boston Globe reports that, on Tuesday, he resigned from the Board of Directors of the Marriott.

Meanwhile, as we speak, Mitt Romney is on an educational tour in the Middle East.

And a poll taken last week in New Hampshire of 1,400+ likely Republican voters gives him a substantial lead in that state's fabled (overblown?) primary.


January 11, 2011


When Who You Are Is an Insult

Justin Katz

Speaking of propaganda, here's an interesting political whack from the gay-issues Washington Blade:

"No doubt [David Cicilline] will carry on the record of retiring Rep. Patrick Kennedy in ensuring Rhode Island's first district is represented by an effective congressman in promoting equality for all people," Cole said.

Cicilline defeated John Loughlin, a Rhode Island State Assembly member, who was accused by some of using gay-baiting tactics late in the campaign. Loughlin ran ads emphasizing that he's a husband and a father — possibly a reference to the fact that Cicilline is gay and single — and defended "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" during a debate.

Yes, you heterosexual breeders, simply by being proud of your family — by noting your adherence to the family structure on which Western Civilization advance was based — you are engaging in sly "gay-baiting tactics." What that assertion will translate into in a culture with same-sex marriage as the pervasive law of the land, one can only imagine. No doubt, traditionalists who refer to their spouses' opposite gender (by using the words "husband" and "wife") will be seen as insinuating bigotry.

Not recalling any instance of "gay baiting," or even of somebody accusing him of it, I asked Loughlin what the Blade might be referring to. All he could think of was this article in... the Washington Blade:

But in the final weeks of the campaign, Loughlin has made several statements that could be considered digs at Cicilline based on his sexual orientation.

In a "Voice of the Candidate" clip that aired on a local NBC affiliate in Rhode Island, Loughlin repeatedly mentions that he is a father and a husband — possibly a reference to the fact that Cicilline is gay and single.

"I've been married for 23 years to my wife, Susan, and we have two daughters," Loughlin says. "I know about the struggles of working families in Rhode Island because I'm part of one. I've had to worry about how to pay for dance lessons, summer camp and all the extras that come from raising children."


January 4, 2011


A Couple of Questions on the Debt Ceiling

Justin Katz

What's the point of a debt ceiling if Congress is going to spend in such a way as to make changing it obligatory? And shouldn't it require a vote to change the debt ceiling before enacting policies that will certainly exceed it?

The federal debt is limited to $14.3 trillion, but the debt now stands at nearly $13.9 trillion and is growing daily. Congress last raised the debt ceiling in February 2010 and is expected to consider raising it again as early as March. ...

Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said that refusing to raise the debt ceiling would essentially push the country into defaulting on its financial obligations for the first time in its history.

"The impact on the economy would be catastrophic," Goolsbee told "This Week" on ABC. "That would be a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008."

I don't believe Goolsbee's analysis; the U.S. government and the U.S. economy are not (yet) synonymous. Holding legislators and executives to a maximum budget — and the debt ceiling is a fail-safe beyond an actual in-the-black budget — will just require them to change their policies and reduce their waste. If they refuse to do these two things, then they are the ones causing the catastrophe.


December 27, 2010


Not Back to the Partisan Script

Justin Katz

The question could be posed, it would seem, whether Ross Douthat is more broadly representative in his apparent desire to return to the two-party script (emphasis added):

But in the past month of lame-duck activity, we've witnessed a return to political normalcy. The Republican midterm sweep delivered the coup de grace to the liberal fantasy by dramatically foreshortening what many pundits expected to be an enduring Democratic majority. But it also dropped a lid, at least temporarily, on the conservative freakout. (It's hard to fret that much about the supposed Kenyan-Marxist radical in the White House when anything he accomplishes has to be co-signed by John Boehner.)

Boehner should beware of listening to the pundits. He is not sufficient to "co-sign" objectionable legislation from the Democrats because his elevation as a balance to them is provisional. The Tea Party wave has no illusions that establishment Republicans are sincerely in step with them, and those who've pushed it forward can be quite recalcitrant when the subject comes up of trusting in the necessity of the GOP's brand of compromise.

Douthat gives the impression that, above all, partisan incumbents are now on safer territory. They are not.


December 17, 2010


The altered terms of the political debate in America

Donald B. Hawthorne

It is the day after the 237th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. How appropriate.

Over most of our lifetimes, the terms of the political debate were centered around who would give more goodies to the American people. Human nature being what it is, most people gladly took whatever the government gave them. Few thought seriously about the coercive nature of those governmental actions and how they created new behavioral incentives that altered future outcomes, adversely impacting our political and economic liberties. The Democrats regularly won that debate against what I used to call the (former Republican minority leader in the House) Bob Michel Republicans who offered no alternative visions of liberty and the proper role of government in our lives. The Republicans lost in large part because all they stood for was Democrat-lite spending. When you can have the whole thing, why settle for a partial handout?

Then, at points during the last decade, Republicans in the White House and Congress decided to spend like drunks and do some bailouts. From a branding standpoint, the impact was significant because the differences between the two parties on domestic economic issues became largely indistinguishable. At least until Obama, Reid and Pelosi took over.

The Obama administration and Democratic Congress during the last two years made everyone else before look cheap by comparison via their massive governmental spending increases, trillion dollar deficits, unaccountable czars, aggressive regulatory actions, and governmental bailouts or takeovers of various parts of the economy - especially Obamacare.

The impact of the overreach was two-fold:

First, by trying to have the government take over control of many parts of our life via aggressively statist policies, the American people's instinctive love of liberty arose in rebellion.

Second, the trillion dollar deficits for as far as the eye can see - together with the looming bankruptcies of Social Security, Medicare, and certain states and local governments, including their pension programs - merged with the visible consequences of similar spending/debt crises in Europe to raise the specter that there could be ultimate financial consequences to our country's well being in the not-so-distant future that would destroy the America we know and eliminate the American Dream for our children and their children.

The net effect is that the terms of the political debate in America were fundamentally altered in recent times, culminating so far in the 2010 election results, the mandate in Obamacare being declared unconstitutional, and rejection of this week's omnibus bill in the Senate. The debate is no longer about who can hand out more goodies. The debate is now about liberty and financial solvency.

What we don't yet have answers to is exactly how the altered debate will translate into truly different outcomes. Will there be a modified public understanding of the proper role of government in our lives and what new government policies would be required to reflect that modified role? Or is there still enough status quo inertia that we will hurtle off a cliff and be forced to live with financial insolvency and statist public policies that continue to take away our liberty?

It is also not yet clear whether either major political party is capable of adapting to the new terms of the political debate. If they cannot, their role in national politics will be marginalized over time because the status quo is unsustainable. There will likely be much turmoil before it all settles out but I am hopeful that, as part of the oft-messy process of change, there can be a great reawakening of our body politic that helps us rediscover the true meaning of liberty and develop a deepened attachment to the limited and constitutional government principles given to us by our Founders. We all have to admit that there has never been a period during our lifetimes with more public discussion about the US Constitution and its meaning.

As lovers of liberty, our obligation is to contribute regularly to this ongoing civic debate by offering both reasoned philosophical ideas - as we seek to persuade people who are open to such exchanges - and new policies - where we are prepared to do battle in the political trenches, as necessary, to implement the ideas.

Continue reading "The altered terms of the political debate in America"

December 16, 2010


Tabulating Rhode Island's FY2011 Federal Earmarks

Marc Comtois

For those interested, HERE is a working list of all of the earmarks contained in the lame duck FY2011 budget. I assume it will be continually updated as required (hence, the "working"). I've also broken out the RI earmarks from messr's Reed, Whitehouse, Langevin and Kennedy and you can download it HERE.

All told, according to the latest info, RI's Congressional delegation has requested $53,625,000, broken down as follows:

* Approximately $41.4 million tabbed for Department of Defense projects
* $2.65 million is tabbed for EPA--particularly wastewater improvement projects--and Parks Service projects
* $2.5 million for economic development projects (broadly defined) with money going to the John H. Chafee Center for International Business, Rhode Island School of Design and URI
* Approximately $7.12 million is going to various projects under the Dep't of Labor, HHS, & Education.


December 12, 2010


Persuasion by Proxy President

Monique Chartier

Despite a day that was keeping me on the jump Friday, I got to listen to Fred Thompson at the moment when, in his low key way, he was suggesting a more conciliatory way (in contrast with the approach taken by President Obama) that the president could have presented the unemployment-bennies-for-tax-rate-extension compromise legislation.

Such an approach would include a recitation of advantageous points about the bill to be preceeded by the caveat that

This bill is not perfect but...

In retrospect, the only flaw with this advice is that Thompson failed to specify which president should make this case.

Former President Bill Clinton made a surprise appearance Friday afternoon to speak on behalf of President Obama’s tax deal he recently struck with Republicans. The deal extends the Bush tax cuts that affect all household, even the ones that make the most income. ...

Clinton told reporters that he thought the deal was a good one and that there was not anything else out there any better.

And

There's never a perfect bipartisan bill in the eyes of a partisan," Clinton said. "But I really believe this will be a significant net-plus for the country."

Er, yes. Perhaps next time, however, we can advance to a tableau of President Obama out there solo but with a discreet earpiece to catch Coach Clinton's quiet promptings (and then eventually, out there sans earpiece) so as to preserve the image of the current president being ... well, the current president.


November 30, 2010


Step Increases in Federal Pay or How to get a raise while your pay is frozen

Marc Comtois

President Obama, triangulating his way to 2012, has proposed to freeze federal employee pay for 2 years. Given that said employees have received raises throughout the current recession, it's probably about time. But let's not forget those step increases! As regular AR readers know, year to year, each unionized employee moves up a job "step" and receives a pay bump--what many would consider a "raise". In union-speak, just going up a step isn't a raise; a "real" raise is the percent increase in each step from year to year. Last year, for instance, federal workers saw a pay increase of 1.5% (PDF).

Each GS level has ten steps, with varying built in raises. For instance, according to the basic General Service (GS) table, a GS-10 receives a $1,526 increase for each step. So, if you were at step 9 in 2010, you received a base salary of $57,979. Next year, with no raise (per se), you will move to step 10 and your base salary will increase to $59,505. That's the kind of pay freeze I'd like to have! Yet, the Federal Employee union heads and liberals are caterwauling because President Obama proposed a 2% raise in March, which, for example, would have increased the GS-10 step increases to around $1,556 (around $30/step). So instead of making $59,505, our fictional GS-10 at step 10 could have been making about $59,535. Yup, 30 bucks less of a raise than one that was once mentioned is what has 'em up in arms.

“Of course, he’s playing politics,” said Derrick Thomas, a national vice present of the American Federation of Government Employees. Thomas oversees the federation’s 2nd District, which represents 100,000 federal workers in New England, New York and New Jersey. “He’s caving in to the Republicans, to the Cato Institute, to the Heritage Foundation, at the expense of his workers.

“It’s really disappointing.”

A pay freeze could affect thousands of federal employees for years to come as their retirement benefits are dependent on the “High 3,” the highest average basic pay they earn during any three consecutive years of federal service.

“I don’t think it’s quite right; we’re going to get slammed with that,” said Roland B. Sasseville, the current Pawtucket chapter president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association. “If they freeze it now, [federal workers] are going to have a lull in their earnings.”

“Today’s announcement ... is bad for the middle class, bad for the economy and bad for business,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.

Don't let them fool you, their unionized workers are still getting raises. As for the non-union federal workers, this 2 year pay freeze is small potatoes after uninterrupted pay increases during the last decade or so, regardless of inflation or recession.


November 28, 2010


Money Out, Money In

Justin Katz

Ian Donnis makes an interesting observation:

Cicilline and other Democrats have been out front in decrying the US Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case, which unleased a new wave of 527 spending.

But US News recently found that five of the seven biggest super PACs this year supported Democrats.

The storyline one often hears from Democrats opposed to Citizens United is that evil corporate sources will unleash their financial heft to overwhelm the kind, sweet efforts of regular ol' voters, but clearly, the Left is not without its moneyed special interests. Indeed, it typically seems to be the case that Democrats are the larger beneficiaries when bigger money is allowed into campaign battles.

That makes sense, in a general way. As a group, those who would advocate for larger government stand to profit more from their investment in the party that favors it than the party that, if not opposing it, favors it less.

Why, then, do Democrats oppose change to campaign finance law that appear to benefit them disproportionately? Principle is probably part of it, in some cases, just as it is by principle that conservatives might oppose restrictions on campaign finance even though their side might be harmed more greatly by them. It appears more likely, by my lights, that Democrats and the Left are content with the imbalance that they have built up in areas immune to campaign finance (mainstream media, union activism, and so on). Perhaps, as well, they've been receiving the now-disclosed money all along through channels that are not so easily traced.


November 25, 2010


Bobby Jindal: Make Congress Part Time

Monique Chartier

Gov Jindal of Louisiana puts forth this excellent proposal in an interview with former Rhode Islander and current Human Events editor Jason Mattera. Amazingly, it doesn't even appear to be unconstitutional as the Constitution does not specify the duration of a Congressional session.

A determination of what comprises "part time" would have to be made. One month per year sounds good to me but I'm open to other suggestions. Under this proposal, members of Congress need not worry about a loss of base remuneration. They would keep their current salaries because, as Jindal points out,

We used to pay farmers not to grow crops

Similarly, we'd be a lot better off if we paid Congress not to legislate.

Concurrently, congressional staffing levels would have to be cut way back. There'd be no point in making our elected representatives part time if a full-time, non-elected bureaucracy remains in the Capitol to make mischief that can be swiftly gaveled into law when the witching month arrives.


November 20, 2010


I'm Sure Nothing Like This Goes on in Rhode Island

Justin Katz

It's all about protecting the establishment — Republican or Democrat:

[Alaskan Republican Joe Miller's] campaign has posted on their site three affidavits from voters concerned that irregular activity occurred at their polling places. One says that, although he was the tenth voter at his location, he saw a ballot box stuffed with "hundreds" of ballots. Another claims that the 15 write-in ballots she reviewed had Sen. Lisa Murkowski written in in what looked like similar enough handwriting that it could be from the same person.

There's more. And liberal radio host Shannyn Moore notes a different kind of irregularity:

Despite heavy national media coverage and historic Citizens United money spent on Alaska’s hotly contested and much-watched three-way US Senate race, the results, if we are to believe them, were a surprisingly low voter turnout. In fact, this election was one of the lowest turnouts since they started tracking ballots cast versus registered voters in the mid-1970s.

It's almost as if the circumstances were massaged to make it possible for a once-a-century write-in candidacy success. The Alaskan Republican Party is asking Miller to concede, naturally.


November 19, 2010


A Cautionary Note for Republicans

Justin Katz

A self-reinforcing ailment appears to be involved with Nancy Pelosi's retention of her leadership role in the U.S. House:

"She is the face that defeated us in this last election," declared Florida Rep. Allen Boyd, who was among those who lost re-election fights. However, Pelosi, who presided over big Democratic gains in the 2006 and 2008 elections, remains popular among the liberals who dominate her caucus more than ever. Dissident moderates could not find enough votes to force her aside.

In fact, the Democrats kept their entire leadership team intact despite election losses that President Barack Obama called "a shellacking." They elected Steny Hoyer of Maryland to keep the No. 2 post and Jim Clyburn of South Carolina to hold the third-ranking position, which will be renamed "assistant leader."

As Democrats in less-liberal districts lose their seats with the shift of independents back toward Republicans, the liberals' voice in the national party will become more overwhelming. That doesn't mean that certain scenarios wouldn't lead them back to dominance of the House, but it does mean that the competition will remain the Republicans' to lose. Americans, generally, don't like what they've seen in the Democrat Left.

Republicans should learn an additional lesson. Among the reasons they lost Congress and the Presidency over the last decade was their drift from principles of limited, transparent government. Sticking to that unifying theme doesn't mean — as libertarians, liberals, and "moderates" like to aver — that elected officers should suppress the issues of their conservative base. But it does mean that conservatives shouldn't allow short-term victories on their issues to overwhelm the message or the practice. They can and should work to control immigration, stop the advance of same-sex marriage, and end the practice of abortion, for example, but they shouldn't, like the Democrats, throw the rules of government out the window and ignore clear messages from voters in the process.



Frustrated Populism

Marc Comtois

Charles Krauthammer summarizes why touching our junk has become a tipping point:

Homeland Security's newest brainstorm - the upgraded, full-palm, up the groin, all-body pat-down. In a stroke, the young man ascended to myth, or at least the next edition of Bartlett's, warning the agent not to "touch my junk."

Not quite the 18th-century elegance of "Don't Tread on Me," but the age of Twitter has a different cadence from the age of the musket. What the modern battle cry lacks in archaic charm, it makes up for in full-body syllabic punch.

Don't touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter. Don't touch my junk, Obamacare - get out of my doctor's examining room, I'm wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don't touch my junk, Google - Street View is cool, but get off my street. Don't touch my junk, you airport security goon - my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I'm a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?

With regards to airport security in particular, it is Krauthammer's last point addresses the chief annoyance about our current system. Others have noted that the TSA "provides far more security theater than security" as it proceeds with a politically correct approach that treats everyone as a suspect--including 10 year old girls, grandmothers and nuns--while refusing to apply even the most basic of profiling. Many have mentioned the Israeli approach and, having been through that particular process myself, I can attest that it is both effective and reassuring, but it can be very time consuming (especially if you're a single male--of any race--traveling alone). So, I'm not sure if that can be extrapolated to a U.S. scale. The bottom line is that there has to be a better way than what we're doing now.

Krauthammer's larger point is that this airport security brouhaha is the latest in a pattern of "Big" everything (government, business, brother) pushing around average Americans, who've had just about enough, thank you. Americans are mad as hell and are starting to lash out at anything they perceive as ridiculously hypocritical or antithetical to common sense. Like entities that benefit from a different rule set--from Wall Street bankers to government employees to health care waivers--than they do. Or like looking up a nun's habit but not screening cargo from Yemen. The resulting mood, frustrated populism if you will, isn't going to go away any time soon.


November 16, 2010


A Moratorium on Controversy Requires Postponement of Change

Justin Katz

So a group of gay conservatives and some Tea Party figures are urging the Republican Party to keep away from social issues while they've got a role in untangling our big-government mess. One particular comment highlights, in a humorous way, the strange assumptions that social liberals make about the universality of their causes:

"When they were out in the Boston Harbor, they weren't arguing about who was gay or who was having an abortion," said Ralph King, a letter signatory who is a Tea Party Patriots national leadership council member, as well as an Ohio co-coordinator.

I'd suggest that anybody who'd been openly gay or advocating for abortion may very well have found himself in the water with the tea. The notions that governments should redefine marriage to eliminate its opposite-sex character and that people had an unassailable right to kill their own children in the womb would not have come up because the would have been found universally appalling.

This is not to say that our forebears, right on taxation and representation, were necessarily correct in their social views. But unity on civic matters is easier to separate from social matters when there's already cultural unity on the latter.

What this means for current conservatives is that the libertarian types cannot expect their socially conservative allies to tie their own hands while liberals advance their own causes. What it must mean not "to act on any social issue" is that libertarians and social conservatives must accept the status quo and work together to prevent attempts at radical change while the economic and political-theory issues are predominant.

That'll be a tough promise to keep. After all, judges must still be appointed, and social conservatives, with an eye on the long term, will not forgo the opportunity to change the judiciary's take on Roe v. Wade. On the other side of the coin, the persistence of liberals on such issues as same-sex marriage may require social conservatives to seek a Constitutional amendment just to maintain the current state of affairs.

What libertarians and "moderates" usually intend when they urge conservatives to hold off on "pushing" social issues is for liberals to keep up the fight for their shared causes while conservatives sit on their hands. That's not likely to prove feasible.


November 13, 2010


Hitchens Splendidly Rips Apart the President's "Enemies" Remark

Monique Chartier

... twelve days ago in Slate.

Keep in mind that this dissection is carried out by a supporter of President Barack Obama. Christopher Hitchens voted for the president and, elsewhere in this article, states his readiness to defend the president and his policies during the campaign. (Hitchens points out that he was pre-empted from doing so by ... well, the president's inexplicable unwillingness to do so himself).

Much worse, though, was the president's remark last week, made on a Univision radio show, in which he expressed disappointment with Spanish-speaking voters who proposed to "sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.' " Almost everything is wrong with this statement. The first is its awful tone: a crude appeal to ethnicity and to a spoils system of reward and punishment with which to accompany it. The second is the unspoken but highly dubious assumption that Americans (or future Americans) of Mexican and Cuban and Guatemalan and Salvadoran origin can all be collectivized under the lump headings of Hispanic or Latino. The third is the patronizing supposition that this putative bloc is somehow owned by the Democratic Party. And the fourth—to restate my objection above—is that it legitimizes any politician who couches his or her appeal in ethnic or tribal or confessional terms. Again, and whoever opens it, such an auction will always be won by the sectarians. Why, it could almost be called divisive.

November 12, 2010


Where the Jobs Are

Marc Comtois

First, according to USA Today:

The number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President Obama took office...Federal workers earning $150,000 or more make up 3.9% of the workforce, up from 0.4% in 2005....Since 2000, federal pay and benefits have increased 3% annually above inflation compared with 0.8% for private workers, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Second, Newsweek reveals that 7 of the 10 richest counties in America are suburbs of Washington, D.C.

I'm sure this is just a coincidence.


November 10, 2010


What a difference: Chafee versus Christie

Donald B. Hawthorne

RI governor-elect Chafee.

NJ governor Christie.

Night and day.

Prepare yourself for the next generation of Kremlin-style lies from the RI NEA and recall how Anchor Rising publicly destroyed their lies several years ago in East Greenwich - here and here.

ADDENDUM #1:

More Christie here, here, here, and here. You just have to watch the videos to get the full sense of Christie's leadership in difficult times.

This public sector union response to Christie should not surprise you.

RI has a choice over the direction of its destiny. Will it eventually choose a courageous path (more here) or simply continue with the status quo as the state hurtles toward the cliff?



Letting People Help Themselves, and Each Other

Justin Katz

The line that I've italicized from an article by John Miller that profiled then-Senate-candidate Marco Rubio in an October issue of National Review helps to explain why Rubio won, and why conservatives are so excited about it:

Rubio's favorite subject is American exceptionalism. It's at the heart of virtually everything he says, whether he's addressing a classroom of college students at Southeastern University in Lakeland or trying to summarize his candidacy in the one minute Univision allotted for closing remarks. "America is not just different, America is better," he says. "People didn't vote for a left-of-center, Western European social democracy — and that's not what Obama sold us, either." He warns that if the United States stays on its present course, debt and taxes will sap the entrepreneurial spirit that has defined it from the start. "Big government doesn't hurt the people who have it made," he says. "Big government wipes out the people who are trying to make it."

We've particular reason to take that assertion to heart, in Rhode Island, because the policies that are strangling the state aren't harming the very wealthy (as local progressives like to claim) so much as the young and ambitious who wish to build something for themselves, their families, and their communities. As a consequence, such people have been fleeing the state for years, and there's no hope of recovery unless that trend is reversed.


November 9, 2010


Winning Without Winning

Justin Katz

Jeffrey Anderson offers some context for the Senate election results:

In the midst of a resounding national rebuke at all levels of government, the Democrats have been taking some solace in having held the Senate. But to put the Republicans' Senate gains this week into perspective, Republicans won an even higher percentage of Senate races than House races (they won 65 percent of the 37 Senate races, versus approximately 56 percent of the 435 House races). And, counting Lisa Murkowski as still being a Republican (a spokesman for her campaign says the Alaskan would caucus with the GOP if she beats Joe Miller in their still-undecided race), there have been only two elections since 1950 in which Republicans have gained more Senate seats than the six they gained in 2010. One of those elections was in 1980, when voters swept Ronald Reagan into the White House. The second was in 1994, in response to the Democrats' ill-advised attempts to pass Hillarycare. So while the Republicans' gains in the House — surpassing those of 1994 and likely doubling those of 1980 — are more historic and important, the GOP's Senate pickups in 2010 aren't too shabby either.

Yes, the Tea Party wave did sweep Christine O'Donnell through the Republican primaries in Delaware and Republicans away from ultimate victory, there, but such outcomes are periodically inevitable when a movement raises principle at least to parity with political calculation. As Anderson notes: take away the enthusiasm that elevated O'Donnell, and you take away the enthusiasm that won the House and brought near-historic gains the Senate.

Now the task is for the Republican Party to follow suit and lead rather than calculate.


November 8, 2010


Clarity

Donald B. Hawthorne

Glenn Reynolds writes:

With the election over, Republicans are arguing about whether they should address Democrats via compromise, or confrontation. Both have their places, but I have a different suggestion.

Clarity.

With the deficit and the debt ballooning, with the economy remaining in the tank, and with tough choices on the horizon, what Americans need more than anything is clarity about what those choices involve, about who is making them, and about who is avoiding them.

Sometimes clarity will mean confrontation...

...Often when Washington insiders talk "compromise," they really mean engineering a situation where nobody really has to take a position, or responsibility. In those circumstances, clarity is better served by forcing positions into the open, even if doing so involves confrontation.

Sometimes, of course, compromises can bring clarity -- when it's clear what's being given up, and what's gained in exchange. Generally speaking, though, the Washington approach is to pretend that there's a free lunch, rather than to acknowledge the trade-offs.

This must change. Voters deserve to know the truth, and a compromise that won't work if voters know the truth isn't really a compromise at all, but a con.

A move for clarity will meet much resistance...

One way to [ensure transparency and make sure the facts come out] is to stay on message, of course. Another is to follow House Minority Leader (and, soon, Speaker) John Boehner's advice, and "listen." During the Obamacare debacle, Democratic representatives and senators ran away from constituent meetings and town halls. The last thing they wanted to do was listen to their constituents.

By way of contrast, Republicans should engage constituents early and often, and -- publicly -- encourage Democrats to do the same...

By listening to voters at town hall meetings, Republicans can not only show that they care, they can accomplish something else. They can actually learn something.

By not listening to voters, and not being straight with them, Democrats committed political suicide. Republicans should take a lesson, and promote clarity. In these times, voters will reward that.

More here and here.


November 7, 2010


Reflections on the nature of free markets, different ways of being pro-business, liberty and the attributes of a healthy democracy

Donald B. Hawthorne

2+ minutes of pithy comments by Milton Friedman on greed, enlightened self-interest, and how societies and free markets work.

A succinct summary on the two meanings of being pro-business from Don Boudreaux, who writes for the Café Hayek blog and is a professor of economics at George Mason University:

There are two ways for a government to be ‘pro-business.’ The first way is to avoid interfering in capitalist acts among consenting adults – that is, to keep taxes low, regulations few, and subsidies non-existent. This ‘pro-business’ stance promotes widespread prosperity because in reality it isn’t so much pro-business as it is pro-consumer. When this way is pursued, businesses are rewarded for pleasing consumers, and only for pleasing consumers.

The second, and very different, way for government to be pro-business is to bestow favors and privileges on politically connected firms. These favors and privileges, such as tariffs and export subsidies, invariably oblige consumers to pay more – either directly in the form of higher prices, or indirectly in the form of higher taxes – for goods and services. This way of being pro-business reduces the nation’s prosperity by relieving businesses of the need to satisfy consumers. When this second way is pursued, businesses are rewarded for pleasing politicians. Competition for consumers’ dollars is replaced by competition for political favors.

There is much talk today about the polarization in America and how different factions should compromise by acting in a bipartisan fashion. But such talk is absurd because it ignores several critical and unavoidable issues:

First, policy differences are often based on competing world views. Those differences cannot be wished away by superficial talk about bipartisanship. For example, if you believe in the first definition of being pro-business, i.e., that only the private sector can actually create jobs and the government’s proper role is to promote economic liberty by incenting the private sector to do so, then no size of any stimulus bill will be acceptable. Nor is there any middle ground if you believe that Obamacare represents the socialization of medicine and you don’t believe in socialism. These positions are not about being the "party of no." Instead, they are a clarion call for an alternative public debate about statism, about whether we aspire to become like a European welfare state. Then, instead of ramming down a statist solution to the healthcare issue onto America, we could agree that the status quo for the delivery of medical care isn’t good enough and use that as an alternative starting point from which to conduct a legitimate public debate about different solutions. Polarization will only genuinely dissipate after there is sufficiently open and reasoned public debate about such principles and the desired endpoints of policies that derive from them so that a consensus can begin to form across America.

Second, both political parties have inhibited such a debate. Public choice theory teaches us that we should not be surprised that the parties are focused primarily on promoting their own self-preservation, by sustaining power for the sake of power instead of promoting reasoned debates about how a belief in the ordered liberty of our American Founding should impact our public policies. Such is the added price we pay for having given up on limited government. But, if we believe in liberty, then the people in America have to stand up and insist on the debates. Which is why the Tea Party is perceived to be such a threat to both parties' establishment figures. That debate will take time and will appear messy along the way. But only an arrogant, self-absorbed narcissist will underestimate (more here and here) the American people's ability to instinctively figure things out. Just like the American people rejected the Republicans in 2006 and 2008, the 2010 election was a repudiation of the arrogance of a Democratic party that refused to listen to the American people in recent times. Political gridlock is nothing more than the American people telling the government to stop in its tracks until the the debates can be held.

If the debates are inhibited by the political class, then there will be more repudiations in the coming elections:

...This isn't a wave, it's a tidal shift—and we've seen it coming for a long time. Remarkably, there have been plenty of warning signs over the past two years, but Democratic leaders ignored them. At least the captain of the Titanic tried to miss the iceberg. Congressional Democrats aimed right for it...

But none of this means that Republicans are winning. The reality is that voters in 2010 are doing the same thing they did in 2006 and 2008: They are voting against the party in power.

This is the continuation of a trend that began nearly 20 years ago. In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president and his party had control of Congress. Before he left office, his party lost control. Then, in 2000, George W. Bush came to power, and his party controlled Congress. But like Mr. Clinton before him, Mr. Bush saw his party lose control.

That's never happened before in back-to-back administrations. The Obama administration appears poised to make it three in a row. This reflects a fundamental rejection of both political parties.

More precisely, it is a rejection of a bipartisan political elite that's lost touch with the people they are supposed to serve. Based on our polling, 51% now see Democrats as the party of big government and nearly as many see Republicans as the party of big business. That leaves no party left to represent the American people.

Voters today want hope and change every bit as much as in 2008. But most have come to recognize that if we have to rely on politicians for the change, there is no hope. At the same time, Americans instinctively understand that if we can unleash the collective wisdom and entrepreneurial spirit of the American people, there are no limits to what we can accomplish...

Elected politicians also should leave their ideological baggage behind because voters don't want to be governed from the left, the right, or even the center. They want someone in Washington who understands that the American people want to govern themselves.

William Voegli offered this sage advice several years ago: “A healthy democracy does not require blurring political differences. But it must find a way to express those differences forcefully without anathematizing people who hold different views.”

The sections titled Issues #1, 2 and 4 in this lengthy May 2010 blog post highlight some of the underlying core beliefs that animate a world view which believes in free markets and liberty. These are the meaty topics worthy of public discussion.

A more intense level of public debate has begun across America in recent months. Here's to it continuing in a vigorous manner until a meaningful new consensus can form in the country.

Continue reading "Reflections on the nature of free markets, different ways of being pro-business, liberty and the attributes of a healthy democracy"

November 4, 2010


What Will the President Do?

Justin Katz

The biggest political question on the table is how President Obama will react to the Republican's gains, this election. Victor Davis Hanson notes that Obama's post-election speech didn't indicate that he understands the message that the American people are trying to send to him. But here's the interesting paragraph from Hanson's post:

Had not some zealots talked of possible 90-to-100-seat gains, the Democrats would be in greater shock today at the near-historic 60+ House pick-up, along with a stunning near sweep of state legislatures and governorships, as well as gains in the Senate — and all a mere 21 months after the beginning of hope and change. The idea that we are going to copy EU socialism is dead. So is Keynesian massive borrowing. So is the promised second wave of Obamism, such as cap-and-trade and blanket amnesty. Obama's supporters can brag that erstwhile absolutely safe senior Democratic senators like Boxer and Reid managed to get reelected, but they must understand that Obama's vision and his method of enacting it simply turned off the vast majority of the country.

I agree that the short-term prospects of American socialism are bleak, although it's possible that the virus has already been injected into our system of government to reemerge after a period of welfare-state gestation. But in trying to predict the actions of Democrats, I can't help but hear echoes, in Hanson's reassurances, of the declarations that ObamaCare was dead after Republican Scott Brown won in Massachusetts. What Obama and the Democrats proved, then, was that they were not operating according to political expectations. This election was largely a consequence of that fact, but it's not certain that they'll change their script, when the tea leaves were already plain to see last year.


November 2, 2010


11:30 p.m. U.S. Senate and House Tugs of War

Justin Katz

Taking Fox News's online balance a step farther, I've thrown together these simple graphics:

U.S. Senate

U.S. House



10:15 p.m. U.S. Senate and House Tugs of War

Justin Katz

Taking Fox News's online balance a step farther, I've thrown together these simple graphics:

U.S. Senate

U.S. House



9:09 p.m. House and Senate Tug of Wars

Justin Katz

Taking Fox News's online balance a step farther, I've thrown together these simple graphics:

U.S. Senate

U.S. House



Blumenthal Wins Connecticut, Manchin Wins West Virginia

Carroll Andrew Morse

The WPRO news dept. (630 AM) is reporting that Democrat Richard Blumenthal is projected to defeat Republican Linda MacMahon in the Connecticut Senate race, and Democrat Joe Manchin has won the West Virigina Senate race. This begins to take the "Republican Takeover of the Senate" scenario out of play.



8:15 p.m.: Senate and House Tug of War

Justin Katz

Taking Fox News's online balance a step farther, I've thrown together these simple graphics:

U.S. Senate

U.S. House



A Vague Election Night Mood

Justin Katz

For some reason, I've been glum, today. Stresses at work have much to do with it, to be sure, but some of my mood has to do with concern about what voters will do, tonight. What portion of voters have even a generally accurate sense of the people and policies for which they're voting tonight? That cuts both ways, of course, although it's a particularly dangerous question and answer in Rhode Island.

But then a couple of findings in my evening reading brought a paradoxical improvement in my mood. First was something that Ted Nesi gleaned for his election night liveblog:

Another fascinating data point from the national exit polls — "about 4 in 10 voters said that they supported the Tea Party movement," according to The New York Times.

That's not exactly where us Tea Party types would want that number to be. But then I came across this AP story, to which the Providence Journal gave the following headline and lead:

Vote outcome could add to uncertainty, Analysts doubt expected GOP gains will spark business growth

Here's a taste of reporter Paul Wiseman's piece:

A standoff between the Obama administration and emboldened Republicans will probably block any new help for an economy squeezed by slow growth and high unemployment. Congress might also create paralyzing uncertainty for investors and businesses by fighting over taxes, deficits, health care and financial regulation.

My first instinct, of course, was to argue: That just means that the Republicans must have enough of a majority to overpower the President; at least he'll do less harm for the last two years of his term; there will be no uncertainty if the Republicans just full-out undo what the Democrats have done to our country; and so on. But then it occurred to me that Wiseman and the AP are just trying to stoke any lingering doubts among independents and Democrats who might be considering some Republican candidates, today. The same is true of the New York Times (although, not, I'm pretty sure, Ted Nesi).

In short: The mainstream media is on the Democrats' side. Just look at the Providence Journal's endorsements. That being the case, it's foolish to take anything less concrete than actual election results as accurate... especially if it appears in a mainstream publication. Me, I'll be getting the important, RI-based news of the evening from the Board of Elections.



Projections are Live...

Carroll Andrew Morse

Networks are starting to make their projections. Here's CNN's first two of the night...

Early returns showed Republican running strongly, with Rand Paul projected by CNN to win his Senate race in Kentucky and another conservative, Dan Coats, projected to win the Senate race in Indiana...

Coats will take over the seat held by retiring Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, giving Republicans their first pick-up of the night.



More from Drudge

Carroll Andrew Morse

Exit polls only, no real numbers yet...

IL 49-43 Kirk [R]...
KY 55-44 Paul [R]...
NV TIED...



Here We Go...

Carroll Andrew Morse

Drudge has his first set of exit polls up...

EXIT POLLS:
Arkansas: Boozman (R) defeats Lincoln (D)
Ohio: Portman (R) defeats Fisher (D)
North Dakota: Hoeven (R) defeats Potter (D)
Wisconsin: Johnson (R) defeats Feingold (D)
Guarantees are none.



The Ghost of Election Day Past

Carroll Andrew Morse

According to Elizabeth Crum at National Review Online's election blog, a couple of names familiar to Rhode Island political-watchers are showing up in the Nevada Senate race, those names being "Harrah's" and "Jan Jones"...

Executives at the casino giant Harrah’s pushed company employees to vote early in an all-out effort to help the Harry Reid campaign, according to internal emails obtained by Battle ‘10.

The stepped-up effort began Wednesday when a Reid staffer sent an email pleading for help to Harrah’s top lobbyist, Jan Jones. Soon after, Marybel Batjer, Harrah’s vice president of public policy and communications, distributed that plea via email to executives throughout the company...

On Friday, Western Regional President Tom Jenkin sent out a follow-up email showing a total vote count for Harrah’s properties along with the percentages of employees who had voted at each property. Attached to the email was a spreadsheet showing employee names and at which property they worked. Supervisors were asked to fill in codes explaining why their employees had not yet voted.

The Harrah’s employee who forwarded the emails asked not to be identified due to fear of reprisal. The employee said the pressure from upper management was “disturbing.”

“We were asked to talk to people individually to find out why they had not yet voted and to fill in these spreadsheets explaining why,” the employee said. “I did not feel comfortable doing that.”

Those who voted against casino referendum four years ago can pat themselves on the back for preventing a truly destructive beast from being unleashed on RI politics.


October 29, 2010


Dirtiest Campaign Ever? Thus has it always been claimed....

Marc Comtois

Thanks to the folks at Reason.com for reminding people that political campaigns have been dirty for quite some time (say, a couple hundred years, at least).


October 28, 2010


Welfare queens and their pimps: Why the November 2 election matters

Donald B. Hawthorne

They come in all shapes and sizes.

Don't like any of them. Yes, indeed, not then and not now (and now).

The labels or times may change but not the fundamental issue that any government big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. More on bizarre incentives created by campaign finance reform, where the focus is on the symptoms but not the root cause, and crony capitalism, where the big and powerful feed at the enlarged government trough at the expense of those who lack comparable resources to buy favors.

If we truly treasure liberty in America, then next Tuesday's vote is the first major step toward reclaiming it. Our freedom is never safe, especially when there is a bloated government filled with politicians and bureaucrats who don't recognize and honor the core principles of our Constitution.

ADDENDUM #1:

How about some "old-time" reflections that are actually substantive and suggest a different view of America and public policies?

A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest; be sure to follow the links

American Exceptionalism

"Who You Gonna Call?" The Little Platoons

Lawrence Reed on Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy

Challenging the increasing momentum toward a nanny state

Summing it up -

Roger Pilon from a 2002 Cato Institute publication, as quoted in the American Exceptionalism link:

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government - indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish...to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights...provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract...its principles rooted in "right reason"...the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society…

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

Marco Rubio.

ADDENDUM #2:

The bottom line from 2006:

I hope the Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives in tomorrow's election.

...My disgust with the Republican Congress is intense...

...it is a time to focus on the big picture:

The current Republican party needs some time in the wilderness in order to rediscover its currently lost connections to beliefs in limited government, to the defense of freedom and ordered liberty. Hopefully, they can find some new leaders with principles in time for the crucial 2008 elections.

And what could be better for the American people than to see the House be led for two years by a bunch of left-wing lunatics, to experience a sampling for 2 years before 2008 of what little the Democrats can offer during a time when our country is engaged in a world war with Islamic fascists dedicated to destroying America.

The overriding problem here is we have two political parties who stand for nothing but either the retention or gaining of political power for the sake of power itself...

Well, the Democrats under Obama have indeed stood for something, an overbearing statism largely disconnected from principles of liberty and the rule of law. So we have belatedly tried the left-wing lunatic model for the last 2 years. Let's now send those statists packing on November 2 and hope the Republicans learned something during their time in the wilderness.

The bottom line in 2010 is that until enough people get serious about dismantling much of the engorged government and returning rights to the people, none of this will amount to more than rearranging chairs on the USS Titanic.

But that doesn't have to be our future, if we have the will and courage as a nation to chart a new course.

ADDENDUM #3:

Scott Rasmussen:

...This isn't a wave, it's a tidal shift—and we've seen it coming for a long time. Remarkably, there have been plenty of warning signs over the past two years, but Democratic leaders ignored them. At least the captain of the Titanic tried to miss the iceberg. Congressional Democrats aimed right for it...

But none of this means that Republicans are winning. The reality is that voters in 2010 are doing the same thing they did in 2006 and 2008: They are voting against the party in power.

This is the continuation of a trend that began nearly 20 years ago. In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president and his party had control of Congress. Before he left office, his party lost control. Then, in 2000, George W. Bush came to power, and his party controlled Congress. But like Mr. Clinton before him, Mr. Bush saw his party lose control.

That's never happened before in back-to-back administrations. The Obama administration appears poised to make it three in a row. This reflects a fundamental rejection of both political parties.

More precisely, it is a rejection of a bipartisan political elite that's lost touch with the people they are supposed to serve. Based on our polling, 51% now see Democrats as the party of big government and nearly as many see Republicans as the party of big business. That leaves no party left to represent the American people.

Voters today want hope and change every bit as much as in 2008. But most have come to recognize that if we have to rely on politicians for the change, there is no hope. At the same time, Americans instinctively understand that if we can unleash the collective wisdom and entrepreneurial spirit of the American people, there are no limits to what we can accomplish...

Elected politicians also should leave their ideological baggage behind because voters don't want to be governed from the left, the right, or even the center. They want someone in Washington who understands that the American people want to govern themselves.

Angelo Codevilla on America's ruling class - and the perils of revolution.

From two liberal Democrats comes these critical words about Obama:

... In a Univision interview on Monday, the president, who campaigned in 2008 by referring not to a "Red America" or a "Blue America" but a United States of America, urged Hispanic listeners to vote in this spirit: "We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us."

Recently, Obama suggested that if Republicans gain control of the House and/or Senate as forecast, he expects not reconciliation and unity but "hand-to-hand combat" on Capitol Hill.

What a change two years can bring.

We can think of only one other recent president who would display such indifference to the majesty of his office: Richard Nixon.

We write in sadness as traditional liberal Democrats who believe in inclusion...

Indeed, Obama is conducting himself in a way alarmingly reminiscent of Nixon's role in the disastrous 1970 midterm campaign. No president has been so persistently personal in his attacks as Obama throughout the fall. He has regularly attacked his predecessor, the House minority leader and - directly from the stump - candidates running for offices below his own. He has criticized the American people suggesting that they are "reacting just to fear" and faulted his own base for "sitting on their hands complaining."...

We are also disturbed that the office of the president is mounting attacks on private individuals, such as the founders of the group Americans for Prosperity. Having been forged politically during Watergate - one of us was the youngest member of Nixon's enemies list - we are chilled by the prospect of any U.S. president willing to marshal the power of his office against a private citizen.

The president is the leader of our society. That office is supposed to be a unifying force. When a president opts for polarization, it is not only bad politics, but it also diminishes the prestige of his office and damages our social consensus...

Or, as Charles Krauthammer wrote:

...In a radio interview that aired Monday on Univision, President Obama chided Latinos who "sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.' " Quite a uniter, urging Hispanics to go to the polls to exact political revenge on their enemies - presumably, for example, the near-60 percent of Americans who support the new Arizona immigration law.

This from a president who won't even use "enemies" to describe an Iranian regime that is helping kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. This from a man who rose to prominence thunderously declaring that we were not blue states or red states, not black America or white America or Latino America - but the United States of America.

This is how the great post-partisan, post-racial, New Politics presidency ends - not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a desperate election-eve plea for ethnic retribution...

David Harsanyi points out how Obama has a lack of faith to trust the American people and is implementing processes that only magnify the power of the nanny state.

Arthur Brooks and Paul Ryan offer an alternative view:

As we move into this election season, Americans are being asked to choose between candidates and political parties. But the true decision we will be making—now and in the years to come—is this: Do we still want our traditional American free enterprise system, or do we prefer a European-style social democracy? This is a choice between free markets and managed capitalism; between limited government and an ever-expanding state; between rewarding entrepreneurs and equalizing economic rewards.

We must decide. Or must we?

In response to what each of us has written in the preceding months, we have heard again and again that the choice we pose is too stark. New York Times columnist David Brooks (no relation) finds our approach too Manichaean, and the Schumpeter columnist in The Economist objected that, "You can have a big state with a well-functioning free market."

Data support the proposition that Americans like generous government programs and don't want to lose them. So while 70% of Americans told pollsters at the Pew Research Center in 2009 they agreed that "people are better off in a free market economy, even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time," large majorities favor keeping our social insurance programs intact. This leads conventional thinkers to claim that a welfare state is what we truly want, regardless of whether or not we mouth platitudes about "freedom" and "entrepreneurship."

But these claims miss the point. What we must choose is our aspiration, not whether we want to zero out the state. Nobody wants to privatize the Army or take away Grandma's Social Security check. Even Friedrich Hayek in his famous book, "The Road to Serfdom," reminded us that the state has legitimate—and critical—functions, from rectifying market failures to securing some minimum standard of living.

However, finding the right level of government for Americans is simply impossible unless we decide which ideal we prefer: a free enterprise society with a solid but limited safety net, or a cradle-to-grave, redistributive welfare state...

More and more Americans are catching on to the scam. Every day, more see that the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America's enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.

As this reality dawns, and the implications become clear to millions of Americans, we believe we can see the brightest future in decades. But we must choose it.



Just say no to Barney

Donald B. Hawthorne

One of the unanticipated benefits of leaving Rhode Island is that I moved into Barney Frank's congressional district.

Which means I get to vote for his opponent, Sean Bielat.

Just in case you needed some reminders about Mr. Frank's legacies:

Jeff Jacoby
Russ Roberts
Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
Larry Kudlow
Larry Kudlow
Washington Times
Sheldon Richman
Duncan Currie
Wall Street Journal
National Review
Stephen Spruiell
Russ Roberts
Russ Roberts

More by Russ Roberts on the financial crisis.

We can only hope.

ADDENDUM #1:

Wow, indeed. And check out the RGA video.

ADDENDUM #2:

Go to the videos here and here.



Rift in the Democratic Party

Marc Comtois

This post--"An Open Letter to Rush Limbaugh"--from "Hillbuzz", a pro-Hillary Clinton blog, is starting to get some play. The writer, Kevin DuJan, explains that, while a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters hold a grudge over the 2008 Democratic Party nomination process, that isn't the only reason that they are intent on getting back at Obama and his version of the Democratic Party.

When Obama and the DNC attacked Hillary and her supporters, they permanently alienated tens of millions of us from the party. I know for a fact I am not the only guy...who is working every day to bring down the Obama White House and Democrat Party. Not for Hillary, though I love the woman, but for America...because I love this country even more.
He provides some details of the nasty tactics he witnessed--including voter fraud and intimidation tactics--and asks other Democrats to take a breath and re-think some things:
[E]ven if you called yourself a Democrat for 32 years, the way I did, because everyone you grew up with and everyone in your family was a Democrat, that in 2010 it’s time to ask yourselves what that really means.

Do you want to be in a party that calls people racists for stepping out of line and voicing opposition to the socialist lurch of the current administration?

Do you condone voter fraud and the shameless, undemocratic tactics employed by Democrats?

Do you wish to associate with the likes of ACORN, the SEIU, the Black Panthers, and all the other thugs, goons, and degenerates the Obama campaign and White House employ as the DNC’s muscle on the ground?

It is crystal clear that being a patriotic American who loves this country is intellectually incompatible with being a Democrat. If you love America and want it to prosper, the Democrat Party is at absolute odds with everything we need for a thriving, successful economy.

I wonder how many Rhode Island Democrats feel the same way.


October 20, 2010


Still Making Stuff

Justin Katz

Kevin Williamson thinks that President Obama's proposed infrastructure bank is essentially the White House's play to get in on the corrupt Congressional practice of earmarking (subscription required). The article's worth a read, but this tangential paragraph is what caught my eye:

Even though the extraordinarily productive service sectors of the U.S. economy create a lot of output that can be delivered by e-mail rather than by truck or train, manufacturing remains the second-largest single sector, trailing only wholesale trade. In fact, the idea that the United States has entered a "post-industrial" phase is largely a myth. Measured by output, the U.S. economy is much more industrial-looking than Washington's scary bedtime stories about McJobs and outsourcing would suggest: After wholesaling and manufacturing, the biggest sectors are indeed those service-oriented industries — retailing, finance, and health care — but these are followed by a massive construction industry that is nearly as large as the health-care sector. In terms of economic output, the warehousing and transportation of goods bigger than the software industry or the accommodations and food-services industry — to take the two poles of the services economy — and several times the size of the education sector. U.S. factories, as Cato Institute scholar Daniel Ikenson has reported, produce 21.4 percent of the world's manufacturing value added, 60 percent more than China's (without a billion semi-indentured workers earning Third World wages or a for-profit police state — take that, Tom Friedman!). We're making a lot of stuff and moving it around.

Take that as a reminder that the United States still has a foundation on which to build... and much still to lose.


October 17, 2010


President Killjoy: Obama Signals Against a Jump to Hillary for 2012

Monique Chartier

Of course, the entertainment value of the semi-controlled motor mouth of the current VP [top ten Biden gaffes available here] is not to be underestimated. This is undoubtedly why, on more than one occasion during the last couple of years, either voluntarily or at someone's quiet request, he appears to have gone missing.

But to speak frankly from the perspective of the opposition, it would have been preferable to have had the soap opera that is Hillary Clinton, with all of her machinations and baggage, standing next to President Obama in the upcoming presidential campaign spotlight.

Unfortunately, the odds of that development dropped considerably last week.

"The single best decision that I have made was selecting Joe Biden as my running mate," Obama said. "The single best decision I have made. I mean that. It's true."

Obama was in Delaware with Biden campaigning for Democratic Senate nominee Chris Coons, but in his speech seemed to address the rumors that circulated after Bob Woodward said making Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Obama's vice president in 2012 was "on the table."


September 28, 2010


Plenty of Anti-GOP News, Still No DOJ News

Justin Katz

As of Monday's edition, the Providence Journal had still not deigned to mention Congressional testimony about racial bias in Obama's Department of Justice. Indeed, yesterday's paper revisited the apparently more-important testimony of comedian Stephen Colbert that migrant farm workers do work that a Hollywood celebrity might find arduous.

Curiously, as well, Sunday's paper featured an entire above-the-fold page (B7) of arguable advocacy for national Democrats. Top left was an "analysis" declaring the GOP's "Pledge to America" to be a heavily poll-tested document, with all of the insinuations that come with such a quality:

Billed as a Pledge to America, the House Republican campaign manifesto is as much political straddle as conservative call to action, long on poll-tested goals, short on controversial specifics and designed to reassure independent voters who abandoned the party in the last two elections.

In case that tint wasn't adequate, the piece immediately below gave President Obama almost as much space to do his hyper-partisan schtick about the "disastrous decade" that he managed to make worse. Filling the rest of the page was an article about potential third-party election spoilers, with a heavy emphasis on moderate (read: "liberal") Republicans edged out in primaries by dissatisfied conservatives:

Nine-term Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware is the third prominent Republican to consider a third-party bid this year after a suffering a stinging setback at the hands of tea-party-backed conservatives.

If Castle decides to make an independent run for Senate, he will join Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski in refusing to let GOP primary voters force them into retirement.

Some folks presume that media bias is a subconscious slip into what editors and journalists believe just to be objective truth, but it simply isn't possible that a quasicompetent editor wouldn't see how this collection of stories would come across.


September 20, 2010


Mix-N-Match a GOP Presidential Ticket

Monique Chartier

Are you pleased at the sight of Sarah Palin edging towards the ring, hat in hand? No? Then who would you prefer?

Choose from the fairly comprehensive list of candidates offered at the Values Voter Summit straw poll this weekend

Michele Bachmann | Jan Brewer | Chris Christie | Mitch Daniels | Jim DeMint | Newt Gingrich | Mike Huckabee | Bobby Jindal | Bob McDonnell | Sarah Palin | Ron Paul | Tim Pawlenty | Mike Pence | Marco Rubio | Mitt Romney | Paul Ryan | Rick Santorum

or toss in a wild card.

I'm still mulling over the best person for the top of the ticket. The exceedingly frank and unabashed style of Governor Chris Christie, however, strikes me as an excellent fit for VP.


September 14, 2010


A Primary Night Reminder

Justin Katz

Not to bring Charles Krauthammer back into the negative spotlight, but there's a key consideration that he's left out of his assessment of the GOP's primary races:

Now, we are in a cycle where we have seen that this is not a normal Democratic administration. It's highly ideological. It's instituted changes over the last 18 months that are structural — and some of them irreversible, like Obamacare — and it will try to do the same in the next two years or six.

If you're a Republican and you're a conservative, you want a majority in the Senate that will stop that agenda and you have to elect the most electable. Delaware is not Alaska. In Alaska you can endorse a Joe Miller, who's going to win anyway, even though he's more conservative. In Delaware, O'Donnell is going to lose, and that — that could be the difference between Republican and Democratic control, and make a difference about the Obama agenda in the future.

What's missing is the degree to which the Tea Party movement is not just a reaction to the Obamanation, but to trends that even Republicans have helped to advance. In other words, voters do not trust the GOP to "stop that agenda." Republicans will slow it down — rather, advance it more slowly — but that is no longer a satisfactory objective. The edge of the cliff is too near.


September 7, 2010


The Presidents on the President

Justin Katz

Here's an interesting video about a new work of art by Jon McNaughton (via Michelle Malkin):

McNaughton's Web site has an online version of the painting that shows closeups and offers clickable summaries for each president (and other components of the painting).



The Silent Majority Isn't Static

Justin Katz

David S left a comment to a recent post by Marc that indicates a lack of subtleties in his view of the political order:

- the silent majority-? Marc, where were the silent ones during the last election? The election that was this country's last real political referendum. Were the silent majority unable to rouse themselves for an election about the course forward concerning two full scale wars that had ground on for years? Were they equally uninterested in a tanking economy? Did they just decide they had better things to do on election day? Silent majority? I know its a Nixon term, but it probably can be applied to the present administration and not a noisy minority.

Considering the facts that we are in the midst of war and recession and fear and superstition- when the going gets tough, the cowardly go to tea parties.

The obvious rejoinder is that "the silent majority" did, in fact, rouse itself in the last election. The anger now evident on the political scene is attributable to its sense that it was duped. The American people thought that they were getting, with Obama and the Democrats, a centrist, reasonable party. The assumption, generally, is that the two major parties are mere shades of the same thing, and the United States wanted the other shade, after the Bush presidency. Instead, the Democrats' mantra, when they'd been handed power, became "elections have consequences," and they've set about proving that those consequences were not to Republican partisans so much as to the American people — the silent majority.

Consider:

"Now, a lot of those voters appear to be bolting to the GOP," Holland said. "Republicans now have a whopping 38-point advantage on the generic ballot among voters who dislike both parties."

Republicans also have a large and growing advantage among independents. Sixty-two percent of independents questioned say they would vote for the generic Republican in their district, with three in 10 saying they'd cast a ballot for the generic Democrat. That 32-point margin for the Republicans among independents is up from an 8-point advantage last month.

The hope, now, is that the Republicans will at least conclude that the real consequence of elections is to the elected — that they must actually govern as if they are representatives. As the emergence of the Tea Party shows, this may be the last chance for the "shades of the same thing" bipartisan structure to function to the satisfaction of voters. The Republicans are benefiting from the lack of other options, and if they do, indeed, win hugely in November, they've only got this one chance to prove that a third option is not needed.


September 3, 2010


Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

Marc Comtois

A lot has been said about the August 28th rally on the Mall last weekend. As a non-Beck guy (not anti- just agnostic) and having a lot to do last weekend, I frankly didn't pay too much attention to the event and the aftermath. Now that I've caught up a bit, I think Rich Lowry is pretty close in what it's all about:

This was the revolt of the bourgeois, of the responsible, of the orderly, of people profoundly at peace with the traditional mores of American society.
In other words, it's not a revolt so much as a retrenchment. While I think Lowry conflates the 8/28 and Tea Party movements a bit--it seems there may be some differences of emphasis (morals/tradition/religion or fiscal concerns, respectively)--they are pretty much the same bunch of people--average, middle-class Americans who our coastal/beltway elites like to call the bourgeois. Lowry continues:
For more than a hundred years, the bourgeois have been accused of being insipid, greedy, and unenlightened. To the long catalogue of their offenses can now be added another: unenthralled by Barack Obama, the Romantic hero seeking to transform the nation.

The tea party represents a revolt against his revolution, and thus a restoration. If a tea-party-infused Republican party were to take Congress and manage to cut federal expenditures by a sharp one-fifth, that figure would only be back to its typical level of recent decades of roughly 20 percent of GDP. If the party were to succeed in making the federal government more mindful of its constitutional limits, it would only be a step toward the dispensation that obtained during most of the country’s history.

Quite a revolt! Something about standing athwart History comes to mind....But Republicans shouldn't get too full of themselves, no matter what the current over/under on November looks like:
The last time Republicans benefited from a wave election, they had their own Beckian figure at the top in the person of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. They wallowed in their revolution and let Gingrich’s ideological grandeur define them — to their regret in the end. If the wave comes this time, Republicans should endeavor to be a sober and responsible party for sober and responsible people, resolutely cleaning up after the failed Obama revolution.
As the last two "wave" elections--one each won by the GOP and the Democrats--have shown, the quickest way for a political party to undercut such a win is to display vast quantities of hubris in the wake of a supposed mandate. In each case, the party that won went too far, reneged on promises or decided that ideals were worth sacrificing for the mirage of long term power. Americans want change, but not that kind or that much.

Now we see average folks clamoring for something else, anything else, to stop what they believe is a disaster in the making. They don't like the direction the country is taking politically so they've started Tea Parties. They don't like the long cultural decline so they find themselves inspired to hold a rally on the Mall. In short, average folks--the silent majority--are speaking up like never before. They've got nothing left to lose.


September 2, 2010


Gridlock is Good

Marc Comtois

Via this piece against the implementation of a Value-Added Tax (ie; "A VAT is a terrible idea if it triggers bigger government, and a VAT is a bad idea if it merely finances bigger government."), I came across the below from a decade-old interview with Milton Friedman. It was 2000 and we had a budget surplus. Why?

Milton Friedman: The...reason you have a surplus today, in my opinion, the credit for that has to be given overwhelmingly to gridlock.

Peter Robinson: To gridlock?

Milton Friedman: If you had had a Democratic House and Senate, as well as a Democratic president, you would not have a surplus today in my opinion. They would have spent it. Similarly if you had had a Republican president as well as a Republican House and Senate, I doubt that there would have been a surplus today. Because they would either have spent it or had tax reductions.

Peter Robinson: So when President Clinton steps forward to take his bows, you don't applaud at all?

Milton Friedman: Well, I applaud. He provided gridlock.

Peter Robinson: Okay, you applaud but for a different reason than the one he supposes.

Milton Friedman: The winning thing that really contributed to our successful economy over recent years is that the government has stayed out pretty much, with the White House and the Congress and the Senate haven't done much.

Seems like the last ten years have pretty much proven him right.


August 23, 2010


National Budget Deficit Trends

Marc Comtois

Randell Hoven (h/t) uses CBO figures and a simple chart to put the lie to the now familiar claims that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and Bush tax cuts caused a $3 Trillion budget deficit.

The CBO breaks that cost down over the eight calendar years of 2003-2010. Below is a picture of federal deficits over those years with and without Iraq War spending.

As Hoven points out, the deficits actually were shrinking until 2007, then started back up in 2008. What happened in between? Democrats took over Congress. Hoven adds some context (we all love context!):
The sum of all the deficits from 2003 through 2010 is $4.73 trillion. Subtract the entire Iraq War cost and you still have a sum of $4.02 trillion.

No one will say that $709 billion is not a lot of money. But first, that was spread over eight years. Secondly, let's put that in some perspective. Below are some figures for those eight years, 2003 through 2010.

* Total federal outlays: $22,296 billion.
* Cumulative deficit: $4,731 billion.
* Medicare spending: $2,932 billion.
* Iraq War spending: $709 billion.
* The Obama stimulus: $572 billion.

There is an important note to go along with that Obama stimulus number: the stimulus did not even start until 2009. By 2019, the CBO estimates the stimulus will have cost $814 billion.

If we look only at the Iraq War years in which Bush was President (2003-2008), spending on the war was $554B. Federal spending on education over that same time period was $574B....

So spending $572B in two years stimulates an economy, but spending $554B over six years ruins one?

Depends on who did what, right?


August 19, 2010


Go Get 'Em, Nancy!

Monique Chartier

For some reason, it never occurred to the Speaker that the negative reaction of many millions of people to the construction of a mosque within the crash zone of Ground Zero was spontaneous and not in response to a pre-arranged, pre-paid campaign.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is raising questions about who is funding criticism of the so-called "Ground Zero mosque."

Pelosi told KCBS is San Francisco yesterday that she joins "those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded." She added: "How is this being ginned up?"

Thanks, Speaker Pelosi, I'll pass on the gin. But you leave no stone unturned or astroturf farm uninvestigated as you track down the funding of this ... er, conspiracy. The longer you're in pursuit of untamed waterfowl, the less time you'll be able to devote to inflicting awful legislation on us.


August 15, 2010


Take Two on the Proposed NY Mosque: Feeling Compelled to Comment, President Obama Succeeds Only in Stating the Broadly Obvious

Monique Chartier

Breaking weeks of silence on the subject, President Obama remarked on Friday,

Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.

That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.

When this was hailed as an endorsement of the mosque, President Obama hastened to clarify yesterday.

I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding.

... my intention was simply to let people know what I thought. Which was that in this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion.

Now there's a perfectly bland, blanket statement; something appropriate to observe of our Constitution to an auditorium of school children or on Independence Day or perhaps the next time you're abroad. Can you say something a little more specific to the situation, please? A mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. No one is saying that proponents don't have the right to place it there; some are saying it isn't right to do so. What is your opinion, sir?


August 10, 2010


The ObamaCare Scam

Justin Katz

The healthcare legislation should never have become law, and as time goes on, we continue to discover what a shoddy bit of law-making it was:

Talk about a paperwork nightmare: Tucked into the massive new health care law is a demand that nearly 40 million U.S. businesses file tax forms for every vendor that sells them more than $600 in goods. ...

The goal of the provision was to prevent vendors from underreporting their income to the Internal Revenue Service. The government must think those vendors are omitting a lot because the filing requirement is estimated to bring in $19 billion over the next decade. ...

Republicans want to repeal the filing requirement and pay for it by changing other parts of the new health care law, a strategy that Democratic leaders won't support. Democrats want to repeal the filing requirement and pay for it by raising taxes on international corporations and limiting taxpayers' ability to use special trusts to avoid gifts taxes. Republicans won't support that.

Because of the method of the legislation's enactment, nobody caught this problem before it passed, and those who were aware of it were either too ignorant to foresee (or object to) the consequences or thought it would offer a nifty trick for repealing the problem and increasing taxes after the legislation had squeaked through to passage. Frankly, the whole bill is a scam and an atrocity and should be repealed in full.

Barring that, the Republicans are exactly right: repairs to the law should be made within the law.


August 8, 2010


Swap Out Hillary C. for Joe B. in 2012??

Monique Chartier

That's the idea that "Tingles" Matthews has been exploring. From NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard.

The panel of the syndicated "Chris Matthews Show" this weekend campaigned for Hillary Clinton to replace Joe Biden as Vice President in order to assist Barack Obama's re-election in 2012 and set her up for a successful presidential bid in 2016.

As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, Chris Matthews on that evening's "Hardball" had former Virginia governor Doug Wilder and New York magazine's John Heilemann on to discuss the merits of this strategy.

The "Hardball" host must have found this quite compelling, for he decided to do an entire segment on his weekend program with guests Erin Burnett of CNBC, Kelly O'Donnell of NBC, Howard Fineman of Newsweek, and Heilemann.

Substitute Hillary's baggage and personality for Biden's gaffes? "Obama/Clinton 2012"? Wouldn't that be a dream ticket ... for the Republicans?



The Trouble with Obama (and Don't Forget His Legislative Enabler)

Monique Chartier

Joe Bernstein articulates it under Justin's post.

My objection to him is simple-he's a left wing ideologue who's made bad appointments and seems to not be competent and experienced enough for the job.

I would not argue, only amplify: President Obama is leading the charge on some really bad policies. Government take-over of our healthcare system; a willful disregard for our sovereignty via amnesty for undocumenteds and a refusal to control our borders; a pointless war on fossil fuels (and, therefore, a war on basic items like heat, AC, lights and most vehicles, not to mention, in the process, our wallets); spending beyond the wildest dreams of an inebriated sailor [edit: who, as Warrington correctly points out, at least spends his or her own money]; higher taxes.

Heavily complicit in all of this is Congress with, we should make careful note, Rhode Island's delegation whole-heartedly backing all of these bad rotten government initiatives. In fact, none would ever see the light of day were it not for Congress, which solely possesses the power to reject or implement them.

The trend of the president's approval rating indicates that Joe and I are not the only ones who object to the actualization of Barack Obama's presidency. It is mete also that his accomplice faces a reckoning at the polls on November 2. Indeed, though he goes on to make the case that the failure stemmed from an unwillingness to tack sufficiently leftwards, Robert Reich interestingly points out that it is the president's legislative agenda which now threatens the continued viability of both his own reelection and a Democrat-controlled Congress.

The President may have a fight on his hands even to hold on to what he’s already achieved because his legislative successes have been large enough to fuel strong opposition but not big enough to strengthen his support. The result could be disastrous for him and congressional Democrats. ...

A stimulus too small to significantly reduce unemployment, a TARP that didn’t trickle down to Main Street, financial reform that doesn’t fundamentally restructure Wall Street, and health-care reforms that don’t promise to bring down health-care costs have all created an enthusiasm gap. They’ve fired up the right, demoralized the left, and generated unease among the general population.


August 5, 2010


Topics Local and International

Justin Katz

Last night Monique and Tony Cornetta talked, on the Matt Allen Show, about Iran, teachers' unions, and partisan ethics. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


August 3, 2010


On Ethics: Maxine Now, Maxine Then

Monique Chartier

When, last October, the House Ethics Committee placed Congressman Charles Rangel in exactly the same spot that Speaker Gingrich found himself fourteen years earlier, Congresswoman Maxine Waters observed

"What happens is, unfortunately with the requirements for disclosure that we all have, mistakes are made," she said. "And you do get a chance to correct them. And so it looks as if he is correcting those mistakes."

Regarding Gingrich's situation, however, the congresswoman had not adopted quite the same understanding tone. Courtesy Charlie Spiering at the Washington Examiner; h/t Fred Thompson.

"The house ethics committee found the Speaker guilty guilty guilty!" raged Rep. Maxine Waters on the House floor on December 7 1995. ". . it's about time, believe me the American people do not appreciated double standard, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, no one should be so big, so important, so powerful, that they can violate the rules of this house and the laws of this country and not suffer the consequences. . ."

July 30, 2010


Issues Big and Small

Justin Katz

I've been preoccupied, today, with the sorts of thoughts that are hugely important to the individual, but quotidian details on a larger scale... and there's been so much on that larger scale that might otherwise have merited consideration. The economy, obviously:

The recovery lost momentum in the spring as growth slowed to a 2.4 percent pace, its most sluggish showing in nearly a year and too weak to drive down unemployment. ...

... the recovery has been losing power for two straight quarters. That raises concerns about whether it will fizzle out. Or worse, tip back into a "double-dip" recession. ...

In the revisions issued Friday, the government estimated that the economy shrank 2.6 percent last year -- the steepest drop since 1946. That's worse than the 2.4 percent decline originally estimated. The economy's plunge underscores why the unemployment rate surged to 10.1 percent in October, a 26-year high.

Businesses appear to have the resources to expand, but it's all about the uncertainty, and uncertainty has been the theme of the current Congress and administration. Thousands of pages of invasive law creating new bureaucracies to impose unwritten regulations. Those with resources, in other words, have reason to hold their breath.

The Gulf spill is another big item, today:

The generally accepted view of the Deepwater Horizon disaster has focused on the blowout preventer and the non-standard procedures BP conducted just before the explosion and fire. However, most of the damage and the main source of the spill came from the collapse and sinking of the DH platform rather than the initial explosion. A new report by the Center for Public Integrity, based on testimony from people on scene and Coast Guard logs, contains evidence that the platform sunk because of a botched response from the Coast Guard, which failed to coordinate firefighting efforts and to get the proper resources to fight the fire.

And the controversy will continue. Of course, now that BP has promised its billions in aid and the investigations into the incident pick up steam, we hear this:

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we've heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region's fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana's disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year.

Sometimes, it's difficult to know what to believe, when the issue isn't right there in front of you. Another argument, I'd suggest, for small, decentralized government.

Now back to my personal preoccupations...


July 20, 2010


Obama in Two Acts... or Not

Justin Katz

Anchor Rising readers who share my reading habits have surely come across Charles Krauthammer's warning to opponents of President Obama not to underestimate him:

The net effect of 18 months of Obamaism will be to undo much of Reaganism. Both presidencies were highly ideological, grandly ambitious, and often underappreciated by their own side. In his early years as president, Reagan was bitterly attacked from his right. (Typical Washington Post headline: "For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over" — and that was six months into his presidency!) Obama is attacked from his left for insufficient zeal on gay rights, immigration reform, closing Guantanamo — the list is long. The critics don't understand the big picture. Obama's transformational agenda is a play in two acts. ...

The next burst of ideological energy — massive regulation of the energy economy, federalizing higher education, and "comprehensive" immigration reform (i.e., amnesty) — will require a second mandate, meaning reelection in 2012.

Readers may also have encountered Jonah Goldberg's simultaneous exposition of a seemingly contrary view:

In 2008, American liberalism seemed poised for its comeback. The pendulum of Arthur Schlesinger's "cycle of history" was swinging back toward a new progressive era. Obama would be the liberal Reagan.

Now that all looks preposterous. Of course, considerable blame can be laid at a White House that seems confused about how to relate to the American people when the American people don't share the White House's ideological agenda. Indeed, the White House seems particularly gifted at generating issues that put it crosswise with the majority of voters — from the Arizona immigration lawsuit to the cotton-mouthed explanations about whether or not it considers NASA's primary mission to be boosting the self-esteem of Muslim youth.

Goldberg's central objective, with that piece, is to convey his vague sense that something in the rules has changed. Difficult economic times are not making Big Government more popular, but less; an environmental tragedy has not caused the American people to throw caution to the wind in a burst of zeal for alternative energy.

The cultural dimension will be important to explore, but on the political point, Goldberg subsequently took up the juxtaposition of his piece with Krauthammer's:

Obama's ambition creates opportunities that wouldn't have existed if he opted for a more cautious approach. The risk reward is high for him — and for the opposition. In football, war, or poker, or plenty of other imperfectly analogous situations, when one side goes for broke it creates vulnerabilities the other side can exploit. If Obama had stuck with short passes and a running game, he might not have run up the score so high but he would be in better shape politically.

Goldberg is not convinced that there's a grand political plan — or at least one that Barack Obama is competent to execute. Even during his campaign, he was too apt to slip into rhetoric about rubes with their religion and guns and about economic redistribution, forcing him to rely even more heavily on his showmanship. On the other hand, he proved a master showman.

I'd suggest that, while underestimating the man is inadvisable, focusing on him is even more so. Obama was elected, ultimately, as a centrist healer, and he managed his "historic" achievements only because he had the bare majority of both houses of Congress, with compliantly leftist co-partisans, to ram them through. And the president owes those majorities to the concerted and cynical trashing of his predecessor by the Democrats and by the forces of media, both news and entertainment.

What all of those forces — the president and his allies — have accomplished in the past two years is to remind the American people that they have no good options in the voting booth. The principle of the lesser of two evils has returned with a vengeance, and it may just be that the partisans have revved up public emotions to the degree that a majority of voters will not accept mere incremental loss of their autonomy from government as the "lesser" evil.

So the question isn't whether the president will attempt to rework his presentation in response to a new political reality, after November. He'll surely try, although a period of lame-duck gift-giving by exiting Congressional Democrats will make his efforts more difficult, even if he plays off them as a moderate only reluctantly complicit in the scheme. The question is whether he can play the Republicans and the American people so well that they return to him his one-party government.

But even that goes too far in crediting Obama as the sole actor on the stage. The one question is actually two:

  1. Can Republicans control themselves sufficiently to move with the mandate of popular disaffection, rather than attempt to swim against it for immediate political and personal gain?
  2. Will the American people be fooled again by The One?

On neither count am I confident in the preferable outcome, but while we oughtn't underestimate Obama, neither should we forget that history doesn't really divide into a series of strong personalities. The story isn't the main characters, but the tides that they ride.


July 19, 2010


The Nation's Boom Town

Marc Comtois

In his post earlier today, Justin wondered if there was a link between the Washington, D.C. suburbs' educational success and talk of a ruling class that I brought up yesterday. Heh, well...

America is struggling with a sputtering economy and high unemployment — but times are booming for Washington’s governing class.

The massive expansion of government under President Barack Obama has basically guaranteed a robust job market for policy professionals, regulators and contractors for years to come. The housing market, boosted by the large number of high-income earners in the area, many working in politics and government, is easily outpacing the markets in most of the country. And there are few signs of economic distress in hotels, restaurants or stores in the D.C. metro area.

As a result, there is a yawning gap between the American people and D.C.’s powerful when it comes to their economic reality — and their economic perceptions.

This disconnect has been going on for quite some time, but it looks even worse now. You can be sure that politicians and bureaucrats manage to find a way to get money into their own communities--including the public schools where their kids attend.
Uncle Sam employs about 10 percent of the area’s 3 million-person work force — or by federal procurement dollars, more than $20 billion of which landed in nearby Fairfax County, Va., alone last year.

“This is our auto industry, or financial services, or entertainment,” said Stephen Fuller, director of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, alluding, respectively, to the economic foundations of the Detroit, New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. “The federal government is our business. And on top of that, we have an administration that’s clearly expanding the role of the federal government in the context of the national economy — as a manager and as a provider of funds. That hasn’t been the case in the past, except in the case of wars.”

Then again, according to the Obama Administration, we're in a war against pretty much everything, which requires government mobilization!
And more money is on the way, in the form of well-paid agency jobs associated with reforms of the nation’s health insurance sector and financial markets: Both bills call for substantial new federal oversight by agencies such as the Health and Human Services Department and the Internal Revenue Service. And the professionals who take those jobs will need homes, buy furniture and pay taxes, said David Robertson, executive director of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, “and that’s going to have a multiplier effect in our region.”

The Center for Regional Analysis projects the federal government will add 6,500 new jobs in the area each year through 2012.

It's a boom town, for sure.


July 18, 2010


Taking on the Ruling Class

Marc Comtois

Glenn Reynolds and his readers are commenting on Angelo Codevilla's piece about the "Ruling Class". Who are they?

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
They are the leaders of both parties and government--especially the federal--bureaucracy; and though it's not a "party thing", the ruling class finds a more comfortable home amongst Democrats with a few wannabe Republicans tagging along. That's been particularly the case in Rhode Island. Their motive is power. They seek to wield power for its own sake, or because--following the Progressive tenets that supported the emergence of this new ruling class--they know better than the average person how to run things and what is best. They play rhetorical games to get this power and make deals--with unions, big business--to keep it. Yet, they are still the minority. Indeed, as Codevilla states, there are more people in America not in the "ruling class" who he calls the "country class"--those not oriented towards government for a solution to all problems (there are even some within government in this "class").
In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you.
How old-fashioned: believing that it is what you know (and do) over who you know. Codevilla continues:
It includes those who take the side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever.
That is why ordinary folks are organizing on the local level to try to take back some power. But it will be tough slogging: this new generation of reformers will be faced with a more legalistic and bureaucratized government than previous generations.

Continue reading "Taking on the Ruling Class"

July 17, 2010


Silence About the All-Important Felon Vote

Justin Katz

If you get your news from a mainstream media source, you might not have heard — as Dan Gifford notes — about the apparent likelihood that Senator Al Franken (D., MN) was elected based on the illegal votes of felons:

  • A conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority has gone through voting records reportedly finding that at least 341 convicted felons voted illegally in just two of Minnesota's 87 counties during the 2008 general election. Undoubtedly other felons voted illegally in other counties.
  • After culling through 500 initial allegations of felons illegally voting, the Ramsey County Attorney's Office told The Minneapolis Star Tribune Monday that they are seriously investigating about 180 cases. Another 28 felons have already been charged. Hennepin county, which includes Minneapolis, winnowed 451 initial cases down to 216 that they are still looking at. Some other felons have already been charged. Both the Ramsey and Hennepin county attorneys are Democrats.

Franken won by 312 votes. Liberals will note that the news above comes via Fox News, which in their minds instantly invalidates it; that which is not reported by an alphabet channel does not actually happen. Of course, that's why non-liberals correctly understand Fox News to be the most balanced of the television news options.

Gifford suggests that even liberal Democrats like most journalists ought to find interest in the Franken voter fraud case, inasmuch as Franken cannot be ousted from office, at this point, and they could cast the story toward advocacy of allowing felons to vote legally. Unfortunately, shedding light on the matter might make voters elsewhere suspicious, conservative watchdog groups across the country might begin researching the results in their own states, and bloggers and alternative information sources might rack up more scoops.


July 16, 2010


A Juxtaposition of Eras

Justin Katz

You probably won't get through a bag of popcorn during this Friday night film — indeed, you could almost watch the whole thing while your popcorn pops — but Andrew Klavan's humorous and cutting comparison of the dark days of the Bush Era with Obama's Recovery Summer is worth a watch:



The Question Is Whether It's Curable

Justin Katz

You may have come across the commentary that the co-chairmen of a debt and deficit commission initiated by the president offered to the National Governor's Association:

The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans -- the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries," [Republican Senator from Wyoming Alan] Simpson said.

"We can't grow our way out of this," [former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine] Bowles said. "We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can't tax our way out. . . . The reality is we've got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We've got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that."

Bowles called the national debt "a cancer." Glenn Reynolds thinks "the whole point of the commission is to give political cover to tax increases," which may be the case. The question that follows immediately, however, is: Cover from whom? Cornell Law Professor and Barrington resident William Jacobson might suggest that the people of the United States have already tired of the game:

Barack Obama was not elected because of a progressive political shift in the nation. The nation remains a country which believes, according to polling by James Carville and Stan Greenberg, that:
"The best way to improve our economy and create jobs is to cut government spending and cut taxes so businesses can prosper and the private sector can start creating jobs."

Yet everything the Democrats do goes in the opposite direction. ...

Democrats took advantage of a crisis, and then doubled-down by massively increasing our national debt to advantage preferred political constituencies.

The elections will tell, ultimately, but my expectation is that the American electorate won't look at the bill of particulars and see taxation as the reasonable response. Of course, the two questions that follow that assessment are:

  • Have the national Democrats managed to lock themselves in, as their state members have in Rhode Island?
  • Have the Republicans learned their lesson sufficiently to avoid returning to the disappointing practices of their dominant years during the Bush administration?

If the answers are "yes" and "no," respectively, then our nation is in for grave times, indeed. On the second question, though, there's hope (I hope) that an infusion of tea-party Republicans will be enough to inoculate a Republican Congress against recidivism.


July 13, 2010


So the New-and-Now-Defunct Non-Space Goals for NASA Were Just a Trial Balloon?

Monique Chartier

Well, at least that would be sort of related to space, unlike the goals themselves, which have apparently been ... withdrawn.

[NASA Administrator Charles] Bolden caused a global stir last week when he said President Obama had asked him to reach out to Muslim leaders on science issues. He made the comments during an interview with Al Jazeera while visiting Egypt.

But White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday, "That was not his task, and that's not the task of NASA."

Gibbs said White House officials have spoken to Bolden and NASA about the comments.

At first, I thought perhaps KLo at the Corner had exaggerated when she described this as the White House throwing Bolden under the bus. Just last week, however, the White House had reaffirmed the goals, though embellished with a nice little I-meant-we-would-all-do-this-together, internationalism florish, nor had they corrected Bolden when he first outlined the goals publicly in February. Possibly it wasn't Bolden that White House officials needed to speak about this matter but his boss who, almost two years after winning a presidential election, is obviously still in community-organizing mode, albeit on a much larger scale.


July 10, 2010


Planning Their Moves for After the People Speak

Justin Katz

Don't miss John Fund's widely cited premonition that President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are planning implementation of a last-minute wish list after the election:

It's been almost 30 years since anything remotely contentious was handled in a lame-duck session, but that doesn't faze Democrats who have jammed through ObamaCare and are determined to bring the financial system under greater federal control. ...

Many Democrats insist there will be no dramatic lame-duck agenda. But a few months ago they also insisted the extraordinary maneuvers used to pass health care wouldn't be used. Desperate times may be seen as calling for desperate measures, and this November the election results may well make Democrats desperate.

The message to bring to this summer's "meet your representatives" events will be that consequences can follow a politician and a party even when out of office and out of power... after, of course, all of the horrible legislation is reversed and then some. As disheartening as it may be to acknowledge that ideals of representative government are waning (and may always have been naive), that's the world in which we live. It's unlikely to affect the likes of Sheldon Whitehouse to have constituents call and express their hopes that he won't participate in efforts to explicitly subvert the will of American voters. Perhaps it will have a marginally greater effect if he worries that his actions in the fall will define public perception of his character for the rest of his life.


July 2, 2010


Steele's Afghanistan Hackery

Marc Comtois

Look, I know that for the first time in eons, a GOP chair visited the state and threw the RI GOP some red meat and there was much rejoicing. But it looks like he's engaging in some purely disingenuous political hackery here:

Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This was not something that the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in...if he is such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?
Apparently he forgot the part that it was President Bush--with the broad support of the American people--who correctly got us into Afghanistan because the government in power--the Taliban--aided and comforted a terrorist organization that killed 3,000 Americans. In what has become a regular routine since Steele took over, some are calling for his resignation. We'll see, but one thing is for sure: this sort of hackery is what turns people off to politics (and specifically the GOP). Unbelievable.


July 1, 2010


UPDATED: The Bill Will Come Due

Justin Katz

Kevin Williamson has totaled America's public debt, and his essay makes for scary reading:

So that's $14 trillion in federal debt and $2.5 trillion in state-and-local debt: $16.5 trillion. But I've got some bad news for you, Sunshine: We haven't even hit all the big-ticket items. ...

... "Half the states' pension funds could run out of money by 2025," [Northwester University Prof. Joshua Rauh] says, "and that's assuming decent investment returns. The federal government should be worried about its exposure. Are these states too big to fail? If something isn't done, we're facing another trillion-dollar bailout." ...

So how much would the states have to book to fully fund those liabilities? Drop in another $3 trillion. Properly accounting for these obligations, that takes us up to a total of $19.5 trillion in governmental liabilities. ...

The debt numbers start to get really hairy when you add in liabilities under Social Security and Medicare — in other words, when you account for the present value of those future payments in the same way that businesses have to account for the obligations they incur. Start with the entitlements and those numbers get run-for-the-hills ugly in a hurry: a combined $106 trillion in liabilities for Social Security and Medicare, or more than five times the total federal, state, and local debt we've totaled up so far. In real terms, what that means is that we’d need $106 trillion in real, investable capital, earning 6 percent a year, on hand, today, to meet the obligations we have under those entitlement programs. For perspective, that's about twice the total private net worth of the United States. (A little more, in fact.)

Little wonder the Democrats in power think nothing of layering on the billions: Billions hardly register in the face of that mountain of debt. The cover of the penultimate National Review, in which Williamson's piece appears, shows a distressed boy looking at a chalkboard that reads "130 Trillion: What We Owe." The image got me pondering how one could illustrate the size of a trillion dollars, and I'm still pondering. One idea is to start in the upper left corner of the chalk board with a single dot, labeled "trillion." The next row would be labeled "billions" and would require 1,000 small dots. The next row, "millions," would easily exceed the capacity of the average classroom chalkboard.

My personal circumstances are such that the lessons of debt are hourly on my mind. To oversimplify, a slightly less luxurious lifestyle a decade ago (with dinners out and the like) would have meant that I wouldn't be quitting coffee because a large $8 can of grinds every two weeks or so is something I can live without.

It brings the mind back to that episode of Seinfeld that made famous the phrase, "serenity now." More fitting would be the modification,"austerity now."

ADDENDUM:

Kevin Williamson checked in to send along a graphic illustration of $1 trillion. The upshot:

In case you can't see it, that's a standard-sized man in the bottom left-hand corner. (Check the link for an explanation.)


June 19, 2010


It's the Authority, not the Science

Justin Katz

Jonah Goldberg spotted in the news an instance in which the Obama Interior Department appears to have misrepresented the opinion of some scientists whom it consulted regarding a possible ban of offshore drilling:

The draft these experts saw was substantively different from the document that bore their names. The draft called for a moratorium on issuing new permits, not stopping existing drilling (a move many experts believe would be unsafe).

One of the experts, Benton Baugh, president of Radoil, told the Wall Street Journal that if the draft had said to halt drilling, "we'd have said 'that's craziness.'"

As Goldberg writes, "there is something ugly and hypocritical about glorifying the absolute authority of scientists and sanctimoniously preening about your bravery in 'restoring' that authority" — only to ignore what they say when it's "politically expedient." Actually, I'm sure Goldberg would agree that progressives' periodic lauding of science is primarily, if not entirely, all about political expedience.

When candidate Obama said he would "restore science to its rightful place," he meant that he would treat it as an unassailable, procaimedly "objective," conversation-ending weapon in philosophical debates. The prerequisite, of course, is that science must agree with his own views on a particular issue.

The very necessity of politics arises because there is no objective measure when it comes to policy decisions that must balance competing interests and complement subjective considerations like religion and ethics with practical needs and objectives. Tyranny lurks behind the elevation of any particular input as if it alone settles the question, especially when determination is handed to a limited group with information beyond the comprehension of everybody else.


June 16, 2010


Is it any wonder why, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" is so appealing?

Marc Comtois

To paraphrase, "Government acres is the place to be, government jobs are the life you see...":

Under the Obama administration, the government is doing such a good job that it's decided to reward itself. Last year, Uncle Sam paid out $408 million in bonuses to 1.3 million federal workers...That $408 million figure only counts bonuses that were handed out to about 65 percent of the federal work force. The FOI request didn't cover awards handed out by the Defense and Treasury departments, security agencies, the White House, Congress and various other federal agencies and commissions. In 2008, the last year information was available, the Department of Defense alone handed out $92 million in bonuses to its 687,000 employees.

Federal bonuses are being doled out liberally, even as federal salaries are exploding. From December 2007 through June 2009, the number of federal workers earning six figures increased from 14 to 19 percent. In 2008, average federal compensation, including pay and benefits, was $119,982 -- considerably more than the $59,909 average in the private sector, according to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the midst of a brutal economic downturn that saw millions of jobs lost and unemployment soar above 10 percent, the Office of Personnel Management data shows the federal workforce actually added nearly 100,000 jobs from December 2008 to December 2009.

Bonuses for good performance are nice in theory, and in they work in private sector, when they are paired with consequences (you know, getting fired) if you don't perform. As the article points out, though, in government, it's "all carrot and no stick."


May 28, 2010


Failure to Stop the Gulf Oil Gusher is Not Obama's Katrina

Monique Chartier

... of course, Katrina was not Bush's Katrina. The only "serious" criticism that could be leveled is that he failed for several days to read the minds of a Governor and a Mayor who couldn't stop sitting on their hands long enough to pick up the telephone and ask for help.

But I'm risking an unnecessary discussion of events long behind us. So let's set that aside for the moment and see if we can agree on the definition of a "Katrina". How about this?

It is a situation in which a POTUS 1.) is aware of a disaster 2.) is cognizant that governmental resources exist that could help to abate that disaster and 3.) fails to send those resources knowing full well that they are needed and have been called for.

Clearly, then, the Gulf oil disaster fails item #2 of this test. Contrary to the observations this week of some critics (a list that includes even lefties Carville and Matthews), no branch of the United States government possesses the skills or equipment to deal with an uncapped, gushing oil well one mile under water. This is very much a specialized area of expertise.

Now, could President Obama have attempted to identify another company, possibly another oil company, and elbowed aside BP so as to give this other company a shot at stopping the gusher? Yes, maybe. It would have been a maneuver not without risk, though. If the other company had failed, for instance, could BP have claimed that they would have succeeded? What about the matter of liability? Would the president have reduced BP's liability and placed some liability onto the US government in doing so? Certainly some high powered attorney would have so argued in court.

Another thing. Was it the height of brainless bureaucratic numb-scullery for the US Army Corps of Engineers to call for an environmental impact study before they would consider authorizing the installation of sand berms to protect marshes and other areas along the coast? No question. Several people in that agency need to be fired immediately after they complete the voluntary lobotomies that they had clearly started to undergo just prior to reviewing the application for these sand berms.

(Feel free to take a snack break here as I try to explain.)

These berms were requested, ladies and gentlemen of the Army Corps of Engineers, to try to stop some of the MILLIONS OF GALLONS OF CRUDE OIL WHICH HAS SPILLED INTO THE GULF OF MEXICO, a situation which YOU HAVE OBVIOUSLY NOT HEARD ABOUT even though for the last month, it has been COVERED 24/7 WITH BLARING HEADLINES AND FLASHY GRAPHICS BY EVERY MEDIA OUTLET KNOWN TO MAN.

(Where were we? Oh, yes.) Again, though, the berm denseness of the Army Corps cannot be pinned on the president, at least not until the Louisiana Congressional delegation started jumping up and down in unison, which is something that they did fairly late in the game.

Is the president being too cute by half about the exact circumstances of the termination of employment of Elizabeth Birnbaum, the newly former head of the US Minerals Management Service? Sure he is. And it's not making him look good. But it, too, is a secondary matter - even if he had handled it perfectly, it wouldn't have stopped the oil spill.

There is a very, very, very long list of fiscal, economic, sovereignty, national security and foreign policy proposals and decisions for which the president can be criticized in depth. The steadfast refusal of the mainstream media over the last year and a half to see or discuss 95% of that list makes it very tempting to jump on the president when such a glaringly visible disaster presents itself. We need to resist that, though, both in the interest of our own integrity and so as to retain credibility when we bring up the items on that extremely long list. Failure to cap an underwater oil well is not on that list.


May 27, 2010


Les Phillip, Alabama congressional candidate

Donald B. Hawthorne

The video quality may be poor but the words from Alabama congressional candidate Les Phillip are some of the best I have heard in a long time.

Rainy Day Patriots Speech Highlights.

Here, again, is his ad posted earlier.

His campaign website is here.



From December 5, 2008: Anyone want to bet on what direction Obama wants to take America?

Donald B. Hawthorne

Reposting a December 5, 2008 post entitled Even Lenin would be impressed:

Melanie Phillips:

Trevor Loudon has got hold of a fascinating analysis of Prez-elect Obama's administrative appointments by Mark Rudd and Jeff Jones, two former Weather Underground terrorists (chums of Obama's old ally [chance acquaintance], the unrepentant former WU terrorist William Ayers). The two of them are now on the board of Movement for a Democratic society, in turn the parent body of Progressives for Obama, the leading leftist lobby group behind Obama's presidential campaign. And waddya know - just like me they believe Obama is practising stealth politics with a degree of sophistication and success with which 'even Lenin would be impressed.' As they say, Obama knows that he must be subtle and reassure even the most conservative of his opponents if he is to achieve his radical goals...

Read Phillips for key excerpts from the articles by MDS members. Here is the link to Trevor Loudon's writeup with more complete information.

Phillips continues:

The key is the stupidity of so many of Obama's opponents, amplified by the credulousness and prejudices of the media and the ignorance of the public. The shallow Republicans and their supporters in the media and blogosphere have in large measure fallen for Obama's stealth politics hook, line and sinker. As a result of his 'centris' appointments which have got them absurdly cooing over people like Clinton and Holder, Gates and Jones, their guard is now totally lowered. They still don't know the true nature of what has hit them -- and at this rate will never know until they wake up one morning to a transformed America and a free world that has lost the war being fought against it.

And the more the left shrieks 'betrayal', the more American conservatives will wrap themselves in denial. But characters like Rudd and Jones are the horse's mouth. They know from the inside the manipulative and stealthy game that is being played here. Lenin would be impressed indeed.

As further background, here are a series of Obama posts from the general election:

Clarifying the deeper problems with Barack Obama
Summarizing the philosophical problems with Barack Obama's view of the world
More troubling thoughts about the One
Crisply defining the core problem with Obama's economic and tax policies
On Obama's economic and tax policies
Multiple choice options regarding Obama's "spread the wealth" comment
Any bids for $75,000?
Socialism
Yep, that'd be my reaction
Obama and ACORN's overt and criminal voter fraud acts
McCarthy: Stifling political debate with threats of prosecution is not the "rule of law" - it's tyranny
Obama on his desire for a civilian national security force
Does Obama believe in liberty?
Obama vs. McGovern on eliminating secret union elections
Obama's fundraising: Insufficient transparency and yet more unanswered questions
A rare Zen moment of simplicity
Senator Obama's naive, ahistorical, and unrealistic foreign policy viewpoints: His Achilles Heel for the November election
On Obama's disarmament priorities
On Obama's healthcare policies
On Obama's extreme abortion beliefs
Obama's views on coal industry
Oh my, it just never stops: In the tank for Obama
Creepy, indeed
Creepy, again
An argument for divided government

Anyone want to bet on what direction Obama wants to take America?


May 26, 2010


Go Bama

Donald B. Hawthorne

Some things speak for themselves:

Rick Barber, Congressional candidate.

Les Phillip, Congressional candidate.

Dale Peterson, Ag Commissioner candidate.


May 25, 2010


ObamaCare Less and Less Popular

Justin Katz

Imagine how unpopular it will be when its costs really start to kick in:

Support for repeal of the new national health care plan has jumped to its highest level ever. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of U.S. voters now favor repeal of the plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in March.

Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.

And by "costs," I don't mean just the direct cost to the federal government, which (for those who've forgotten) is not the sum total of the United States. For one example, Americans are pretty good at intuiting this sort of outcome:

A study by the National Center for Policy Analysis shows that tax credits in the new healthcare law could negatively impact small-business hiring decisions.

The new law provides a 50 percent tax credit to companies offering health coverage that have fewer than 10 workers who, on average, earn $25,000 a year. The tax credit is reduced as more employees are added to the payroll.

The NCPA study finds the reduction in tax relief to be a cost concern for companies looking to hire additional workers, but operate on slim profit margin yet still provide employee health coverage.

Incumbents — making government less efficient and American life more difficult, year after year.


May 24, 2010


Blumenthal to the New London Day: Get my (Lack of) Middle Initial Right

Monique Chartier

When it was pointed out to Connecticut AG Richard (this space deliberately left blank) Blumenthal that newspaper articles had picked up and repeated his lies, thereby unwittingly contributing to his stolen valor, Mr. Blumenthal indignantly replied that he could not keep track of all news reports about himself.

Not so fast. An editorial in Wednesday's New London Day dryly reports

And why did Mr. Blumenthal not act quickly to correct inaccurate reports in state newspapers that described him as a Vietnam veteran? The candidate explains he can't track all news reports about him. Yet this newspaper knows from experience that Mr. Blumenthal is quick to correct unflattering statements published about him or to refute opinions with which he disagrees. One reporter got a call from the attorney general for inserting a middle initial in his name. He has none.

May 19, 2010


An ad and a spoof of another ad

Donald B. Hawthorne

Dale Peterson for Alabama Ag Commissioner. (More on the ad here.)

Another interpretation of GM CEO's recent ad. (Full story here.)



The Obligation of Participation

Justin Katz

Jay Nordlinger's profile of Florida congressional candidate Allen West is interesting reading, overall, but this passage should haunt the days of all productive Rhode Islanders (emphasis added):

After the Army, West taught high school for a while — history. He is especially pleased that some of his students went on to service academies. Then he went to Afghanistan as a civilian adviser, training Afghan officers. He says he felt "a yearning in my heart" to do this. And then, politics called. West quotes Plato: "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

The story of our state — and its characteristic apathy — in a sentence.


May 15, 2010


Challenging the increasing momentum toward a nanny state

Donald B. Hawthorne

It seems increasingly relevant so here is a re-run of a February 7, 2009 post, with some updates:

As Obama, Pelosi and Reid accelerate the implementation of statist practices in America - building on what Bush started - it is helpful and necessary to reacquaint ourselves with fundamental economic principles and some specific significant issues animating today's public debate.

FUNDAMENTAL ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES

The 17-blog post series below was originally put together in 2006 and contains excerpts from the writings of Thomas Sowell, Reason magazine, Bruce Caldwell, Friederich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Arthur Seldon, Gordon Tullock, Jane Shaw, Lawrence Reed, The Freeman magazine, Leonard Read, Donald Boudreaux, John Gray, Bertrand de Jouvenel, and Michael Novak, with links to others like Walter Williams, David Boaz, and David Schmidtz:

No matter how emphatically these politicians rant and rave in their effort to re-write history, they cannot re-write the basic laws of economics. As a Reverend once said, those chickens will come home to roost at some point. The only question is when and how big a price we will pay when it happens.

PRIMERS ON ECONOMICS

As some of the above posts note and as further ammunition for the public debate, these books are excellent primers on important economic topics:

An excellent site for articles, blogging, and podcasts on a broad range of economic issues is Library of Economics and Liberty.

Furthermore, the budding public debate in America touches on these significant issues, highlighted below and drawing on the 17 blog posts:

Continue reading "Challenging the increasing momentum toward a nanny state"

May 14, 2010


A refreshing change

Donald B. Hawthorne

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie destroys reporter for calling him confrontational.

No painting with bland pastels. Courageous. A good thing in times of uncertainty.


May 7, 2010


Taking Stock

Marc Comtois

In his latest, Victor Davis Hanson admits that he's beating a dead horse when it comes to "media polarities" that "are getting to the point of absurdity." Perhaps so, but its worth taking stock every now and again and doing the ol' compare and contrast:

Bush, the lazy golfer while we were at war; Obama the engaged commander-in-chief playing golf for needed relaxation more in one year than in Bush’s eight. Katrina, the emblem of federal inaction and culpable incompetence; the BP slick, either a result of private greed overwhelming noble federal auditors or proof of the Obamian competent response. Bush’s illegal war clearly alienating Muslims and thus creating terrorists daily; laughable excuses from a terrorist that Obama’s stepped-up targeted Predator assassinations “created” would-be killers such as himself. Right wingers in bed with Wall Street oligarchs greedily crafting federal policy for the exploiting class; Obama for some odd reason, no doubt in the end a noble reason, taking more money from the likes of Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum than any politician in history. The Bush-Cheney nexus shredding the Constitution with the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, Predators, and renditions; Obama the civil libertarian reluctantly forced to maintain or expand such protocols, albeit at last under a watchful liberal eye. Bush’s “lost” war in Iraq miraculously soon to be Obama’s “greatest achievement.”

What is the theory behind all this other than partisanship or cynicism? I think it involves the power of faith and the irrational, in some cases not confined to the left. (e.g., I once got a prominent conservative angry at me when I suggested Reagan embraced large deficits, signed an amnesty bill, wanted nuclear disarmament, and raised payroll taxes). Politics is a religion, never more so than in the case of Obama. And true believers always prefer the saintly explanation rather than the most logical.

That we're all guilty of having the ideological blinders on at one time or another is true enough. But I also think that it's a basic human characteristic that we don't like to admit we were wrong or were mistaken in our judgment (like in who we support politically) and this is made worse by a tendency to go "all in" with someone and being unable to tolerate acute criticism when warranted.


May 2, 2010


Big government, crony capitalism and the latest from Government Motors

Donald B. Hawthorne

Big government, whom some foolishly think is the pathway to so-called social justice for the little guy, actually has the opposite effect. It incentivizes big corporations, big unions and other powerful organizations to feed at the enlarged government trough to buy favors at the expense of those unable to pay for a place at the trough. This leads to what used to be called "corporate (or union) welfare" and some now call "crony capitalism."

Whatever the label, the result is the same: Transparent competition in the marketplace that benefits consumers is trumped by the non-transparent buying of legal or regulatory favors that benefit the few at the expense of the many. In other words, big government enables the powerful to prey on others, as predicted by public choice economic theory. How ironic it is then that when the structural incentives created by big government cause the forecasted negative outcomes, the advocates for big government call for yet more of the same.

Why do these negative outcomes surprise any of us? Take ObamaCare, where the Congress passed and the President signed a 2,200-page bill that no one had read. Forget for a moment how passing such a large bill that no one read should startle all of us into loud protests. The bill now goes to unelected, unaccountable, nameless, faceless bureaucrats for the development of endless pages of regulations, the existence of which will only further ensure their job stability. Does anyone really think those uniform regulations drafted in the vacuum of government office buildings in the nation's capital will provide easier access to better healthcare services by being responsive to the differing needs of a cross-section of citizens in, say, Peoria, Illinois, Chandler, Arizona, Tucker, Georgia, and Yakima, Washington? But you can be assured that large insurers and medical service companies will have their lobbyists walking the hallways to influence the regulations in ways that are responsive to their own economic needs. Again, the irony: These companies do it not because they are evil but because they are responding rationally to their adjusted self-interest as determined by the new economic incentives created by the ObamaCare legislation.

So when government seeks to play God and takes over activities best done by the free market, there are adverse consequences. (Just like so-called "campaign finance reform" in an era of big government has created its own set of perverse incentives that result in more money flowing into politics in different and often less visible ways.)

Government Motors, aka General Motors, is merely one recent example. Taxpayers' money was used to bail them out, allowing them to avoid the hard choices of restructuring the company to profitability - either on their own or in a traditional bankruptcy process. Now GM touts in a very public ad how they have paid back their government loan ahead of schedule and with interest. And GM went even further with their CEO writing a WSJ editorial entitled The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full - The investment of U.S. and Canadian tax dollars worked. Except (with H/T to Instapundit) they misled everyone by not disclosing that the loan was only a small part of the total bailout and they repaid it with other federal government-provided funds that were sitting in a separate escrow account available for their working capital needs. (More on the government dollars that flowed to GM.) It gets worse: Apparently this ad is part of a campaign to lay the groundwork for GM to get billions more of DOE government aid at a lower interest rate, again funded by the taxpayers at a time of record budget deficits.

Contemplate the perverse incentives created by these unfolding developments. How would a corporation ordinarily fund new projects? Usually out of positive operating cash flow generated from profits of the business, a scenario that would only happen after the project successfully competed against other internal capital project alternatives advocated by other executives through showing more compelling projected financial returns. (Of course, this funding approach would require GM to be profitable and generating positive cash flow, but I digress.) Alternatively, GM could get the money from new equity investors or lenders. Which means they would have to convince those investors or lenders to bet on their plan, in part based on the merits of the plan and in part based on management's past track record. In parallel, these investors and lenders are getting measured quarterly by their own funding sources based on the quality of their performance in comparison to other current investment alternatives available to the funding sources. If equity investors or lenders enter into bad deals, their funding sources will pull back, adversely impacting their business. So the equity investors and lenders have an incentive to deeply scrutinize a GM deal and evaluate its merits in competition with all the alternative deals they could do at the time. But that is not how crony capitalism works: GM only has to privately curry favor in Washington, D.C. among bureaucrats who become more influential when they respond favorably to such behavior, who become even more influential when they have larger projects like the new DOE loans, who have no effective mechanisms for oversight and accountability, and who suffer no adverse consequences if they enter into bad deals.

By the way, to add insult to injury for taxpayers, the political pressure to rush through bankruptcy without the requisite time for an adequate restructuring of their cost structure no doubt contributed to GM (and the other ward of the state, Chrysler) losing billions of dollars last quarter in their first quarter after exiting bankruptcy. For all we know, the rationale for the DOE loan could be to fund changes that ordinarily would have been accomplished in a proper bankruptcy restructuring. Meanwhile Ford, which faced market realities the free market way, turned a profit.

The loss of liberty and cost to taxpayers are profound when you look at the particulars of crony capitalism created by big government.

Why do we tolerate this erosion of our freedom?

ADDENDUM #1:

With another H/T to Instapundit, Megan McArdle on Department of . . . Huh?:

It was bad enough that we had to bail out the banks, but at least you could make a reasonable argument that we had to--we know what happens when you allow widespread bank runs, and its generally pretty disastrous for the citizenry. But you know what happens when a large auto manufacturer fails? Its employees and customers have to do business somewhere else...

It was sheer political theater, and incredibly corrosive to public trust in our government institutions, as well as a gross misallocation of economic resources. The role of the state is to prevent human suffering, not prop up failing enterprises that happen to have politically well-connected employees. I am genuinely struggling to come up with what principled argument Andrew might be making in his head for what has always struck me as a pretty blatant handout to a powerful Democratic interest group.

ADDDENDUM #2:

With an updated H/T to Instapundit, Hot Air writes NY Times: GM, Treasury lied about bailout repayment:

This article by Gretchen Morrison in the New York Times is significant for two reasons. First, the Times has decided to give this significant coverage, which means the story of GM's misleading claim of paying back the taxpayer-funded bailout will continue to have some legs. More importantly, it also points the finger at Treasury and the Obama administration for its complicity in allowing CEO Ed Whitacre to make those claims without challenge...
[quoting from the Times' article]: G.M. also crowed about its loan repayment in a national television ad and the United States Treasury also marked the moment with a press release: "We are encouraged that G.M. has repaid its debt well ahead of schedule and confident that the company is on a strong path to viability," said Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary.

Taxpayers are naturally eager for news about bailout repayments. But what neither G.M. nor the Treasury disclosed was that the company simply used other funds held by the Treasury to pay off its original loan.

Hot Air also references a Power Line post where Scott Johnson wrote:

Whitacre and GM omitted two facts that render their public relations blitz highly misleading. They are the kind of omissions that constitute securities fraud when made by a company in connection with the purchase or sale of a security or when a company reports its financial results...

GM's fraudulent public relations blitz took place with the support of the Obama administration, up to and including Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner. Geithner's participation makes his tax cheating and related testimony pale in comparison.

In retrospect, it is obvious that GM undertook the blitz at the behest of the Obama administration. It is symptomatic of the era of national socialism in which we find ourselves, and for which GM is a leading indicator.

Apparently crony capitalism makes reality optional and accountability non-existent. And liberty is reduced.

ADDENDUM #3:

Mark Tapscott's Did Obama administration tell GM to lie about its TARP repayment? provides links to written Congressional requests for more information about what happened, including these words from Senator Grassley to Treasury Secretary Geithner:

In reality, it looks like GM merely used one source of TARP funds to repay another. The taxpayers are still on the hook, and whether TARP funds are ultimately recovered depends entirely on the government's ability to sell GM stock in the future. Treasury has merely exchanged a legal right to repayment for an uncertain hope of sharing in the future growth of GM. A debt-for-equity swap is not a repayment.

I am also troubled by the timing of this latest maneuver. According to Mr. Barofsky, Treasury had supervisory authority over GM's use of these TARP escrow funds. Since GM's exit from bankruptcy court, Treasury had approved the use of the escrow funds for costs such as GM's obligations to its parts supplier Delphi.

Tapscott concludes with this observation:

...Accusations and worries of improper government interference with business are inevitable results of government picking winners and losers in the private economy, as was done with the trillions of tax dollars used by the Bush and Obama administrations to bail out Wall Street investment firms, GM and Chrysler, insurance giant AIG, and multiple banks.

There is a name for the kind of regime that allows private ownership of businesses but effectively tells them what to produce and sell. It's called Fascism. America is far from there, but becoming a bailout nation is a significant step in the wrong direction.

ADDENDUM #4:

Competitive Enterprise Institute: General Motors Deceptive Advertising Challenged by Watchdog Group in FTC Filing.


April 29, 2010


Who gets to play God?

Donald B. Hawthorne

Obama:

Now, what we're doing, I want to be clear, we're not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that's fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you've made enough money.

What does "success fairly earned" or "enough money" mean?

Who defines "success fairly earned" or "enough money"?

What if different people define "success fairly earned" or "enough money" differently?

Who defines the consequences of having more than "enough money"?

Who enforces such consequences?

If anyone thinks the definition or consequences of "enough money" is unjust, to whom do they turn for relief?

In other words, who gets to play God?

Any way you cut it, implementing policies consistent with Obama's words will require coercive actions that diminish liberty. There seems to be a certain amnesia about the coercive nature of government. Of course, it might be reasonable to say there is no amnesia for people who never recognize coercion because they have always sought power more than they have loved liberty.

On a more practical level, Nobel Laureate Hayek wrote about the impossibility of efforts to centrally plan such "solutions" in the first place in his seminal 1945 paper entitled The Use of Knowledge in Society. Glenn Reynolds referenced the paper in a recent editorial:

...The United States Code - containing federal statutory law - is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117 pages long and composes 226 volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can't be aware of all the real-world complications it's producing, it can't even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it's doing.

There's good news and bad news in that. The bad news is obvious: We're governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can't help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or "better" rules will do any good: Incompetence is built into the system.

The good news is less obvious, but just as important: While we rightly fear a too-powerful government, this regulatory knowledge problem will ensure plenty of public stumbles and embarrassments, helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don't know what they're doing.

If that doesn't encourage skepticism toward big government, it's hard to imagine what will.

ADDENDUM #1:

Michelle Malkin: Barack Obama, America's Selective Salary Policeman - "At some point, you have made enough money" is not a maxim that Obama's team of rich CEO's and well-paid bureaucrats has ever observed.

J.P. Freire: Obama made $5m in 2009 and tells us we've made enough?

ADDENDUM #2:

Kyle Wingfield: Exactly who 'makes enough money' in Obama's eyes?

..."I want to be clear, we're not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that's fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you've made enough money. But part of the American way is you can just keep on making it if you're providing a good product or you're providing a good service. We don't want people to stop fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow the economy."

The second sentence is the one that defines "fairly earned" for Obama. The man who as a candidate spoke of "spreading the wealth around" has found a matter he considers within his pay grade: other people's pay.

ADDENDUM #3:

Neo-Neocon: Obama and Sowell on who can tell when people have made enough money?


April 16, 2010


Paranoia, it's the American Way

Marc Comtois

As Rich Lowry explains in his latest column, we Americans are perpetually paranoid about our government, whether it's the liberal paranoia throughout the Bush years (Patriot Act, world hegemony) or the right wing paranoia amongst conservatives in the Clinton years (Waco, domestic anti-terrorist laws post-Oklahoma City). Lowry explains that our paranoid view of government has been in our "DNA" since the Founding (and before).

As Bernard Bailyn demonstrates in his classic, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, our forebears prized the thought of the 18th-century “country” opposition in England, which considered the government a clear and present danger to liberty — corrupt, conspiratorial, and insatiable.

America’s leaders viewed Revolutionary events through this prism. “They saw about them,” Bailyn writes, “not merely mistaken, or even evil, policies violating the principles upon which freedom rested, but what appeared to be evidence of nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty, both in England and in America.”

This is the taproot of American paranoia. It’s not in status anxiety, or economic dispossession, or racism: It’s in flat-out distrust of governmental authority. As the Patriot Act shows, in America even the statists can summon a robust fear of government. And would we have it any other way? Would we prefer the natural deference to authority of a Japan, or a political culture as favorable to central government as Russia’s?

Lowry's analysis of Bailyn's thesis is spot on and also helps explain why we Americans sometimes tend to buy into conspiracy theories, too.

Continue reading "Paranoia, it's the American Way"

April 9, 2010


Flipping Political Coins with Amendments

Justin Katz

On Wednesday's Matt Allen Show, Andrew brought up the interesting juxtaposition that, while some states' attorney generals are suing the federal government over healthcare with reference to the 10th Amendment, Massachusetts's Martha Coakley is making a 10th Amendment argument against national marriage law. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


April 5, 2010


BREAKING: Rhode Islander Ken McKay Resigns RNC

Justin Katz

RNC Chief of Staff and former staffer for Governor Carcieri, Ken McKay has resigned over controversy:

Republican National Committee chief of staff Ken McKay has resigned in the wake of a controversy over an expenditure at a risque California nightclub, RNC communications director Doug Heye said Monday.

McKay's resignation comes one week after the Daily Caller Web site reported that the RNC's January expenditure report included nearly $2,000 spent at Voyeur in West Hollywood, a topless nightclub.

RNC officials worked to distance Chairman Michael Steele from the controversy -- insisting that not only was he not in attendance but that he had no knowledge of the reimbursement -- and promised changes in the way that people were reimbursed by the committee.


April 3, 2010


A Newly Aware America Confronting Old Tricks

Justin Katz

Andrew Breitbart pulls together some of the threads related to the post-healthcare-vote anti-Tea Party redirection, concluding:

Who is calling the shots here? Is it the White House, by way of Chicago? Or is it Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? The press refused to tell you the truth about this president. It refused to tell you of his proud adherence to the teachings of the original Chicago "community organizer" Saul Alinsky. We have now entered the first full-fledged Alinsky presidency. The only way to beat Alinsky is with Alinsky. The Democrats and President Obama will not give up this tack. Do you think the GOP will win the day in November and in 2012 if its strategy is to apologize for every manufactured "right wing fringe" outrage?

I disagree about "the only way to beat Alinsky." I think it's honesty. That's why it's significant that he's becoming an increasingly understood figure. Fighting Alinsky with Alinsky would mean deception and manipulation, which many whom I've observed on the political right are not well suited to do effectively. Bright lights and proper conduct are the appropriate and most effective responses. Two notes on this front, one national and one local.

First, consider this small story, slipped into the inner pages of the Saturday paper:

David Brian Stone [leader of the recently FBI-stung militia group] never got too far in his plans. His influence didn't appear to extend much beyond a close circle of family and friends, and associates say other militias refused to come to his defense during raids late last month. ...

Members of a group in Hutaree's own backyard — the Lenawee Volunteer Michigan Militia — not only refused to assist one of Stone's sons who fled the FBI after a raid on Saturday night, but they actually turned to authorities to help track down Joshua Stone.

I lack the time and interest to dig into the details and merits of the FBI investigation and raid, but the timing and the huge national splash certainly gives the impression that somebody is constructing a narrative stretching from the Tea Party movement, through the Republican Party, to the most fringe characters of the right.

Which brings us to a local item on which I've been meaning to comment:

Some people wore tri-cornered hats and waved yellow flags that proclaimed "Don't Tread On Me." Others brandished signs with more current messages aimed at Rhode Island's congressional delegation, such as "Abort the D.C. Thugs," with photos of Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse and Representatives Patrick Kennedy and James Langevin, and "LANGEVIN'S VOTE CRIPPLE$ AMERICA."

The "Abort the D.C. Thugs" sign lies at about the edge of what one expects at these rallies, but the one about Langevin, specifically, crosses the line. Indeed, it's so beyond the appropriate that one wonders why reporter Mike Stanton, or his on-scene surrogate, didn't attempt to procure the sign-wielder's name and extract further comment. Perhaps the journalists' caught a whiff of the reek of setup around the sign.

Anybody have a picture of that sign — especially of the person holding it?


April 2, 2010


The Obama-Era Binge

Justin Katz

One gets the sense, watching state and national politicians in action, that paying for things is by far a secondary or tertiary consideration. As Ed Achorn puts it:

The government will borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends this year. Under the most optimistic scenarios, borrowing will continue at historically high levels, putting a severe strain on the dollar and either dampening or devastating the economy. The federal debt will rise to a chilling 90 percent of the nation's economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

Most politicians and most of the media do not pause to consider such things. They prefer happy talk about growing government through clever (often corrupt) maneuvers and passing out public dollars as if they were candy. If pols dwell at all on how to pay for it, they cite budget figures that are based on transparent gimmicks or they advocate taxing that man behind the tree. But nobody seems to be very seriously engaged in the unnerving development that we are aboard a runaway train and we’re rapidly running out of track.

Big-government spending is self-feeding, inasmuch as the recipients of the dough are sure to vote for the people handing it over to them. Our only hope, it seems, is for folks with less direct incentive to get involved and push governance back toward status as an adult activity.


March 30, 2010


Big Business v. Big Government on Healthcare

Marc Comtois

Big Business learns that Big Government giveth and taketh away:

On Capitol Hill and in the White House on Monday, Democrats were fuming over a series of announcements that started Friday from Fortune 500 firms saying their bottom lines will take huge negative hits because of changes in tax law mandated by Obamacare. That hit in turn means lower profit projections. Caterpillar estimates, for example, that Obamacare will cost it $100 million; John Deere faces expenses of $150 million; 3M, $90 million; AK Steel, $31 million; Valero, $20 million. And then there's AT&T, which is marking its balance sheet down by a whopping $1 billion. All in all, the Wall Street Journal estimated a $14 billion haircut for these corporations.

Under post-Enron accounting rules, the corporations were required to revise their projections to account for the effect of Obamacare on their bottom lines. The effect is negative because Democrats, in their zeal to raise revenues and improve Obamacare's claimed effect on the federal deficit outlook, took away a tax break these companies needed in order to supply prescription drugs to their retirees. The tax subsidy, itself a government accounting ruse crafted in 2003 by the Republican Bush administration to dissuade corporations from dumping their retiree drug benefit programs on the then-new Medicare Part D, becomes taxable under Obamacare. Corporations are now being reminded of the harsh truth: What Big Government giveth, Big Government taketh away, too.


March 27, 2010


Protest Envy

Marc Comtois

Poor Jim Spencer and Curtis Ellis: they've been waiting for a poll to confirm their preconceived notions and CNN provided it, so now they can write the column they've been yearning to write:

Now (finally!), a poll conducted by CNN gives us some hard data on the Tea Party Nation.

Neither “average Americans,” as they like to portray themselves, nor trailer-park “Deliverance” throwbacks, as their lefty detractors would have us believe, tea partyers are more highly educated and wealthier than the rest of America. Nearly 75 percent are college-educated, and two-thirds earn more than $50,000.

More likely to be white and male than the general population, Tea Partyers also skew toward middle age or older. That’s the tell.

The tell? Oh, that the Tea Party is composed of Baby Boomer white guys reliving their '60's protest heyday. Unfortunately for them, the more recent Quinnipiac poll undercuts their basic premise about a bunch of angry white guys leading the charge. Turns out, it's a bunch of angry white women, as, according to the poll, 55% of Tea Party members are females and women have taken a leading role in many of the local organizations.
“For years, it has been the liberal women who have organized and been staunch grass-roots and policy advocates,” Rebecca Wales, a spokeswoman for Smart Girl Politics, a new group formed to train and mobilize women in the tea party movement. “No longer is it only the liberals. Conservative women have found their voices and are using them, actively and loudly.”

Melanie Gustafson, an associate professor of history at the University of Vermont who has studied and written about the role of women in politics, said the tea party has provided a more direct way for conservative women to have influence than the Republican Party, where she says “women have always struggled for inclusion.”

Sorry guys.


March 26, 2010


Snapshot

Marc Comtois

The bond market continues to struggle as it tries to deal with the new health care paradigm:

Interest rates climbed in the bond market Thursday after a government debt auction drew tepid demand. Auctions Tuesday and Wednesday also saw lower demand....The auction of $32 billion in seven-year notes saw demand fall from the past two months. That means the government could have to start offering higher interest rates to attract buyers.
Michael Barone explains:
[Former CBO Director Douglas] Holtz-Eakin [explained] the bill will not lower deficits but will raise them by $562 billion over 10 years. Treasury will have to borrow that money -- and probably pay much higher interest than it's paying now.

Moreover, once the bill is fully in effect, the Cato Institute's Alan Reynolds points out, its expenses are likely to grow at least 7 percent a year -- significantly faster than revenues. At that rate, spending doubles every 10 years.

Barone also mentions the pension problem states are having. But back to the national budget. Health care is only part of the blooming deficit under President Obama:
President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation's economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.
That's including the budgetary tricks the administration used to hide the deficits in their health care program. And we've recently learned that the CBO is also predicting that Social Security will pay out more in benefits than it receives in tax revenue. Meanwhile, companies are adjusting to the new health care realities:
In the first two days after the law was signed, three major companies — Deere & Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Valero Energy — said they expect to take a total hit of $265 million to account for smaller tax deductions in the future....Nationwide, companies would take a $14 billion hit on their financial statements if all of the roughly 3,500 companies receiving the subsidies continued to do so, according to a study by Towers Watson, a human resources consulting firm.
These costs will surely affect employee compensation, which is already down in most of the country:
Personal income in 42 states fell in 2009, the Commerce Department said Thursday....Nationally, personal income from wages, dividends, rent, retirement plans and government benefits declined 1.7% last year, unadjusted for inflation.
Oh, but not everywhere:
Incomes...rose in six [states] and the District of Columbia. West Virginia had the best showing with a 2.1% increase. In Maine, Kentucky and Hawaii, increased government benefits, such as unemployment insurance and Social Security, offset drops in earnings and property values.
Then there are the rising gas prices:
Gas prices have risen $1 since just after President Obama took office in January 2009 and are now closing in on the $3 mark, prompting an evaluation of the administration's energy record and calls for the White House to open more U.S. land for oil exploration.
Anyway, back again to the federal budget. Charles Krauthammer thinks that the Obama Administration is prepping the ground for proposing a VAT (Value Added Tax) to help pay for things and "fix" these deficits.
That’s where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude — if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion)....As a substitute for the income tax, the VAT would be a splendid idea. Taxing consumption makes infinitely more sense than taxing work. But to feed the liberal social-democratic project, the VAT must be added on top of the income tax.
Change, in all of its multiple meanings, indeed.



Majority Extremism Against Change You Can Believe In

Justin Katz

By accident of commercial breaks, I caught a few moments of the Rachel Maddow show, last night, and that's all that was necessary to observe that left-wingers very much wish to convince themselves that the Republican Party is locked in an extremist echo chamber, with its far-right base requiring uniformity of opinion out of step with the rest of the country. Every statement that any Republican has made that conflicts with the right on any issue, according to Maddow, is evidence that the facade is beginning to break.

On one level, we could choose, instead, to see intraparty dissent as evidence that there is no such disciplined higher command from the base. On another level, we could argue that this process whereby the essentials of the base's priorities acquire the assent of the middle — like spring spreading north after winter — is precisely how our political system is supposed to work.

And that's what I think is happening. Consider this short speech, on the floor of Congress, by Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R, MI), whose Q&A session in Newport, this summer, so impressed me:

After citing the displeasure of the American people with their government, with reference to poll numbers, McCotter delivers a stinging rebuke of the direction in which President Obama and the Democrats are leading the country. It would be quite a different matter were McCotter's rhetoric purely that, but every time one opens the newspaper or clicks through news Web sites, there's a new story about Obama's use of government authority in expanded ways. By contrast, there's been no indication of an ingenuous intention, on the part of the administration, to loosen the leash on the private sector a bit so that it may chase some much-needed growth.

We who are politically interest should never discount the possibility that we're wrong on both substance and popular sentiment. It seems to me, though, that those of us who saw through Obama's airy baloney about his own centrism, during the campaign, have been joined by an increasingly broad population who sees through the Democrats' faux stimulus and policies that always err on the side of transferring wealth and power to government operatives.

In other words, we're not selling talking points to capture the public whim of the moment. We're offering an argument about government, and the Democrats' behavior and policies continue to support that argument. They appear to hope that they can buy enough votes to counterbalance the dawn of understanding about their intentions, but I don't think the United States is quite so far gone, down that path, as Rhode Island.


March 24, 2010


The Fraudulent Assumptions of the Dems' CBO Report

Monique Chartier

One of the selling points of healthcare reform, repeated yesterday by President Obama when he signed the bill into law, is that it will reduce the federal deficit. To bolster this statement, which is absurd on its face, they point to the conclusion of a CBO report promulgated at the request of and with the, shall we say, heavy input of Dem Congressional leaders.

Under Justin's post, Tim describes the dubious methodology by which the CBO is compelled to generate a report.

All the CBO does is crunch numbers that are presented to them. If Congress wants an analysis from the CBO on how much it will cost to provide every American citizen (300 million) with one apple and they tell the CBO that the cost of each apple is $1 then the CBO will tell Congress their plan will cost $300,000.000.

What the CBO does not consider, because it's not their function, is how the REAL cost of a single apple is $2 and therefore the REAL cost of the program is actually $600,000,000.
CBO answers are only as legitimate as the numbers they're given to work with.

Garbage In = Garbage Out!

In a New York Times OpEd, Douglas Holtz-Eakin confirms Tim's description of the flawed methodoology that the CBO is compelled to employ.

The answer, unfortunately, is that the budget office is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed. So fantasy in, fantasy out.

In reality, if you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.

Holtz-Eakin goes on to detail the "fantasy" assumptions supplied by Dem Congressional leaders so that they could obtain a report that concludes, incredibly, that the largest entitlement program contemplated by the US government will REDUCE the deficit.

Gimmick No. 1 is the way the bill front-loads revenues and backloads spending. That is, the taxes and fees it calls for are set to begin immediately, but its new subsidies would be deferred so that the first 10 years of revenue would be used to pay for only 6 years of spending.

Even worse, some costs are left out entirely. To operate the new programs over the first 10 years, future Congresses would need to vote for $114 billion in additional annual spending. But this so-called discretionary spending is excluded from the Congressional Budget Office’s tabulation. ...

Finally, in perhaps the most amazing bit of unrealistic accounting, the legislation proposes to trim $463 billion from Medicare spending and use it to finance insurance subsidies. But Medicare is already bleeding red ink, and the health care bill has no reforms that would enable the program to operate more cheaply in the future. Instead, Congress is likely to continue to regularly override scheduled cuts in payments to Medicare doctors and other providers.

Removing the unrealistic annual Medicare savings ($463 billion) and the stolen annual revenues from Social Security and long-term care insurance ($123 billion), and adding in the annual spending that so far is not accounted for ($114 billion) quickly generates additional deficits of $562 billion in the first 10 years. And the nation would be on the hook for two more entitlement programs rapidly expanding as far as the eye can see.

In short, if this CBO report were a stock offering, it would now be the subject of a criminal investigation.


March 21, 2010


Presidential Popularity, or Fun with Juxtaposition

Justin Katz

Charles Blow informed New York Times readers, Friday, that President Obama may be "unbreakable":

First, let's take his job approval rating. Yes, it slid during the summer, but it stabilized around 50 percent in November and has hovered there ever since.

The empty-headed chattering class began another round of speculation and inane analysis this week when his approval rating dropped to 46 percent, its lowest yet. Silly pundits.

Then again, Jim Lindgren offers a comparison:

When George Bush left office he was deeply unpopular: in Bush's last month, according to Rasmussen 43% strongly disapproved of the job Bush was doing, while only 13% strongly approved, for a staggering negative rating of -30%. Rasmussen's Thursday release shows that after 14 months in office President Barack Obama has achieved Bush's 43% of the people strongly disapproving of his performance, but Obama is still 10% ahead of Bush in those who strongly approve (23% v. 13% for Bush).

As Lindgren suggests, 10% "strong approval" seems more than adequately covered by adjustments for identity politics (i.e., "the black vote") and the daily and nightly beating that President Bush took in the media for most of his time in office. From what I've seen (admittedly, as one who doesn't pay much attention to such things), the common wisdom about Obama in the entertainment range of the media is that his biggest shortcoming is being too darn smart and cool for the American people.

The President may turn his popularity around, somehow, but it's also possible that us ignahrant folks are increasingly wondering why the One we're seeing doesn't match the One we're hearing about.


March 19, 2010


Congressman Langevin Will Support Healthcare Reform

Monique Chartier

Congressman James Langevin (D-RI), who had been on the fence, issued the following statement this afternoon. It appears that he has been persuaded in part by the revised CBO report.

In a few minutes I will be making an announcement about the upcoming vote on health care legislation. Because I value your continued support, I wanted you to hear it first from me directly.

This Sunday, after a year of deliberation, the House of Representatives will take a historic vote on health reform. After much deliberation of my own, I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that I will support H.R. 4872, the Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010.

Since I was first elected to Congress in 2000, thanks in large part to your support, I have advocated for many of the health reforms that I will be proudly voting for this weekend. I truly believe this legislation will not only provide over 140,000 uninsured Rhode Islanders with access to quality, affordable care, but it will also improve the health care system for those who already have insurance and put us on a path to fiscal stability on both the state and federal levels.

Among many beneficial and historic provisions, this bill will reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over the first 10 years, end the unfair exclusion of those with pre-existing conditions and ban lifetime coverage caps, which are a leading cause of personal bankruptcy. Click here (PDF) to learn more about the provisions in the legislation.

In the coming months, I look forward to talking with you about this landmark piece of legislation and the positive changes it will bring for Rhode Island's families and businesses.



Cold Feet on the Hot-Off-The-Press Deficit Reduction Story? Dems Already Backing Away from the CBO Report that They Commissioned

Monique Chartier

The fiction, manufactured by the CBO in a report revised and reissued at the instruction of the Dem leadership desperate to round up votes, that the pending healthcare reform bill will lower the deficit is quickly being exposed.

Over at The New Atlantis, James Capretta enumerates some items.

For starters, as I mentioned yesterday, the plan doesn’t count $371 billion in spending for physician fees under the Medicare program. The president and congressional Democrats want to spend this money, for sure. They just don’t want it counted against the health bill. That’s because they want to reserve all of the Medicare cuts in the bill as offsets for another entitlement instead of using them to pay for the problem that everyone knows needs fixing. ...

Then there’s the “Cadillac” tax on high-cost insurance plans. Because of union pressure, the president pushed the tax back to 2018, well past the point when he will have left office. But once in place, the threshold used to determine “high-cost” will rise only with the Consumer Price Index, beginning in 2020. That means a very large segment of the middle class would get hit with the tax as the years passed. The president has shown that he is unwilling to actually collect this tax on his own watch. But he wants us to believe that we can count on a huge revenue jump over the long run because his successors will have more stomach for it than he does. ...

The other gimmicks remain in the plan as well: The double-counting of premiums for long-term care insurance programs as an offset for the health entitlement spending. The assumption that Congress will allow Medicare reimbursement rates to fall so low that one in five hospitals and nursing homes might be forced to stop taking Medicare patients. ...

Scott Gottlieb highlights one of the scarier items (no lack of those).

The hardest hit won't be those earning more than $250,000 a year--the group that he says needs to "pay their fair share." Rather, it's families whose combined annual income is around $100,000 who could be crushed under this plan.

These folks will be too "rich" to qualify for ObamaCare's subsidies, but probably too poor to easily afford the pricey insurance that the president's plan forces them to buy.

Many of these $100K families will be obliged to buy a policy costing an average of $14,700 for the mid-level, "silver" health plan, according to the Congressional Budget Office's estimates. After income taxes, they'll be spending almost a quarter of their net income for health insurance.

And for those tempted to believe the conclusion of the CBO report ghost written by the Dem leadership, Jay Severin pointed out yesterday that

No government program has ever come in remotely close to budget.

Now, Politico has posted a leaked memo [PDF] apparently issued today by the Congressional Democrat leadership. [H/T The Corner's Daniel Foster.]

We have increasingly noticed how right-wing fringe trying to pick apart the CEO score. We cannot emphasize enough: do not allow yourself (or your boss) to get into a discussion of the details of the CBO scores and textual narrative. Instead, focus only on the deficit reduction and number of Americans covered. There are two CBO letters Republican operatives have already begun distorting in their pursuit of killing our reform efforts: 1) CBO's March 11, 2010 letter to Leader Reid analyzing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as passed by.the Senate, and 2} CBO's letter to Leader Reid (November 18, 2009) with the initial score of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. I list these letters only to warn you of coming attscks from right-wing operatives and Republican sympathizers in the media. Those anti-reform extremists are making a last-ditch effort to derail reform. Do not give them ground by debating details. (For example, the March 11 letter has estimates of discretionary costs not accounted in the total). Again, instead focus only on the deficit reduction and number of Americans covered. In the critical remaining hours of debate we must drive the narrative of "health reform is deficit reduction." ...

In other words, the assumptions and conclusions of the new CBO report are indefensible. So stick to generalized talking points until we can buy or muscle enough votes to ram this baby through on Sunday.


March 18, 2010


Talking About the Demon Pass

Justin Katz

Monique and Matt talked about the foolishness that is "deem and pass" on last night's Matt Allen Show. The biggest question seems to be: Whom do the legislators think the maneuver is going to fool, especially now that it's become a catch phrase? Stream by clicking here, or download it.


March 17, 2010


Deemed to be Passed Gutless

Monique Chartier

An explanation by Byron Tau of "deem-and-pass", currently being contemplated by House Democrats as a means of getting health care reform on the books.

Okay, so here’s how the “deem-and-pass” procedure would actually work. The House Rules committee is often called the “traffic cop” of the House – controlling what bills come to the floor and how much debate is allowed on each one. On each bill, they pass what is called a “rule” – a resolution determining what kind of debate is allowed on each bill. The whole House must first pass the rule, then the underlying legislation. In the case of “deem-and-pass,” the vote on the rule would also have the effect of passing the Senate bill.

Via the Washington Post's Ezra Klein who, more importantly, elaborates on the purpose of this mechanism.

... the problem with explaining deem and pass is that it's virtually impossible to explain why it's being used. Reconciliation is simple enough: Republicans insist on filibustering and Democrats want the health-care reform fixes to have an up-or-down vote. If Republicans wouldn't filibuster, Democrats wouldn't use reconciliation. It's as simple as that.

But deem and pass? House Democrats don't want to vote for the Senate bill because it includes the excise tax and the Nebraska deal.

That's right. Whether of the health care reform itself or of the fetid, district-specific vote clinchers, what House members want, and leadership is perfectly happy to provide, is deniability. "Oh, no, Constituent Smith/Reporter Jones, I didn't vote for that bill."

The pending health care reform is a really bad idea and nothing like it should become law. But minimally, members of Congress should demonstrate the courage of their convictions by actually voting "Yea" or "Nay" on the bill, not hiding behind a legislative dodge.



Making the United States Exceptional Again

Justin Katz

Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru had an excellent cover piece in the National Review before last on the domestic battle over American exceptionalism, which divides pretty conveniently along the current line of left and right. President Obama is obviously a key figure in the dispute.

Not surprisingly, what strikes me is the gargantuan task facing those of us who'd like to defend and reassert the principles on which our nation was founded:

Corporations, meanwhile, are also becoming more dependent on government handouts. Rivalry between business and political elites has helped to safeguard American liberty. What we are seeing now is the possible emergence of a new political economy in which Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government all have cozy relations of mutual dependence. The effect would be to suppress both political choice and economic dynamism.

The retreat from American exceptionalism has a legal dimension as well. Obama's judicial nominees are likely to attempt to bring our Constitution into line with European norms. Here, again, he is building on the work of prior liberals who used the federal courts as a weapon against aspects of American exceptionalism such as self-government and decentralization. In­creasingly, judicial liberals look to putatively enlightened foreign, and particularly European, opinion as a source of law capable of displacing the law made under our Constitution.

Liberal regulators threaten both our dynamism and our self-government. They are increasingly empowered to make far-reaching policy decisions on their own — for instance, the EPA has the power to decide, even in the absence of cap-and-trade legislation passed by Congress, how to regulate carbon emissions. The agency thus has extraordinary sway over the economy, without any meaningful accountability to the electorate. The Troubled Asset Relief Program has turned into a honeypot for the executive branch, which can dip into it for any purpose that suits it. Government is increasingly escaping the control of the people from whom it is supposed to derive its powers.

I'd suggest that the Republicans of the Bush years proved that the temptations for corruption and intermedling are too great at the national level. Even the best intentioned of people will find it difficult to resist the urge to reach in and fix every problem in sight — which is to say that they'll convince themselves not to relinquish the power of their offices. The only possibility, that I can see, is a resurgence of attention to local and state government, forcing freedom and federalism back up the tiers of government and pulling authority back toward the people.


March 11, 2010


I Wonder Why these Virginia 'Burbs are the Richest Counties in U.S. ?

Marc Comtois

Yesterday I mentioned the report that federal employees make more than private employees in most occupations. Now we learn that 6 out of the 10 wealthiest counties ( and 11 of the top 25!) are suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Rank County Population Median household income
1 Loudoun County 277,433 $110,643
2 Fairfax County 1,005,980 $106,785
3 Howard County 272,412 $101,710
4 Hunterdon County, N.J. 129,000 $100,947
5 Somerset County, N.J. 321,589 $100,207
6 Fairfax City 23,281 $98,133
7 Morris County, N.J. 486,459 $97,565
8 Douglas County, Colo. 270,286 $97,480
9 Arlington County 204,889 $96,390
10 Montgomery County 942,747 $93,999

There hasn't been a recession in D.C. John Derbyshire has been saying for a few years now that the only way to guarantee not only all-around security but also a pretty nice, upper-middle class living for your family is to get a government job. Looks like he's right.


March 4, 2010


Where the Comparison Goes Wrong

Justin Katz

Chatter about the comparison of circumstances between President Obama and President Reagan has been everywhere, and it all falls apart on one basic question. Here's an example from Henry Olsen (subscription required):

Where does this leave us? Republicans should first remember that politics is like tennis, and the Democrats are serving. It's very hard to break service against a competent player, and there is still time for Obama and his party to regain their game. Obama's slide in the polls has been steep, but his year-end standing was eerily similar to Ronald Reagan's in December 1981. Back then, Reagan had 49 percent approval; Obama had 50 percent in the late-December 2009 polling average on RealClearPolitics. Reagan's numbers slid throughout 1982 as the economy worsened, reaching their nadir at 35 percent in January 1983.

But Reagan recovered nicely, relying on issues that unified his coalition, like hard-line positions against the Soviets. The fast-recovering economy also helped, and as his numbers recovered — and with Democrats unable to overcome their own intra-party divisions during their presidential primaries — Reagan swept to an epic reelection win that placed the GOP on the path toward the continued power it would wield for another 20 years.

Olsen's argument relates to the possibility that a third party will emerge and take the place of the GOP, but one significant consideration is missing from the analysis. Reagan's policies helped bring about the recovery that ultimately boosted his image. Amazingly, Obama has continued to chase down the very policies (in effect and proposed) that have been suppressing economic activity. If that continues, the Republicans have plenty of room to maneuver in order to obviate the need for an additional right-leaning candidate.


March 3, 2010


Who Are the Tea Partiers?

Justin Katz

National Review conducted a poll (subscription required) to find out what we all know about the tea party movement. First of all, Americans think well of the movement. McLaughlin and Associates asked respondents whether the tea parties represented an angry fringe or consisted of "citizens concerned about the country's economic future." 57% chose the latter, and only 19% chose the former — that 19% covering, one supposes, Democrat operatives and the mainstream media.

Another interesting factor that should surprise no-one is that tea partiers are not the anti-government extremists that some suggest, but run-of-the-mill right-of-center citizens frustrated enough to finally become active in politics:

Most tea-party sympathizers, [in contrast to Ross Perot independents], are pro-life. They are more pro-life than the electorate as a whole, although less so than Republicans. Their religious practices are roughly in line with those of the electorate. Tea-party participants, meanwhile, are both more pro-life and more frequent churchgoers than the electorate. Social issues may not be what binds the tea partiers together or what matters most to them, but social issues are not going to drive a wedge between them and Republicans.

Tea-party supporters are concerned about the deficit, but not to the exclusion of other issues. They don't want to cut the defense budget. A small, 52 percent majority of them believes we "should cut taxes to stimulate growth" while only 37 percent say that the deficit makes tax cuts unaffordable (and a tiny 7 percent want tax increases to reduce the deficit).

The tea partiers are often said to be populists hostile to Wall Street and big business. But while they clearly oppose bailouts of financial firms, their antipathy may not go much farther than that. McLaughlin asked likely voters whether they think that "we should impose a new tax on banks because they have benefited so much from bailouts and need to be reined in," or that "bank customers would end up paying the tax and the economy would suffer." The anti-taxers were a majority in the poll (52-38 percent), and both tea-party participants and tea-party sympathizers were even more strongly on the anti-tax side. In McLaughlin's poll, a majority of likely voters want to cut taxes on corporations. Tea partiers were especially likely to agree.

One caution that the poll highlights is that third-party, tea-party candidates will tend to split the electorate and help the Democrats. As NR's Ramesh Ponnuru and Kate O'Beirne suggest, this means that Republicans should consider tea partiers to be ideologically determined and move in their direction, rather than hoping that they'll choose the least worst option. Electoral evidence has already been mounting that they won't; the GOP must do the courting, which is to say, return to its own integrity.


March 1, 2010


When They're Playing a Different Game

Justin Katz

When people behave irrationally, there are fundamentally two possibilities: incompetence or calculation. I fear that Andy McCarthy may be right that we're looking at the latter, in Washington:

I hear Republicans getting giddy over the fact that "reconciliation," if it comes to that, is a huge political loser. That's the wrong way to look at it. The Democratic leadership has already internalized the inevitablility of taking its political lumps. That makes reconciliation truly scary. Since the Dems know they will have to ram this monstrosity through, they figure it might as well be as monstrous as they can get wavering Democrats to go along with. Clipping the leadership's statist ambitions in order to peel off a few Republicans is not going to work. I'm glad Republicans have held firm, but let's not be under any illusions about what that means. In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you've calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.

Actually, we're looking at both calculation and incompetence. The Democrats are operating by ideological calculation, while the Republicans lack the competence to recognize the inevitable. They'll take their victories, in November, and then attempt to moderate in order to pick up Democrat constituencies for the welfare/healthcare state. In the long term, it won't work, and the statist Dems will have a huge head start as tea-party types find they have to build a political party from scratch in order to combat them.

Perhaps there's still time to have hope that Republicans will start campaigning on repeal as soon as healthcare is rammed into the law... and then actually follow through when they're elected.


February 28, 2010


Two-Faced Weasel Alert: Her Speakerness Finds She Shares Some of the Views of Tea Partiers

Monique Chartier

... after accusing them of carrying swastikas, implying that they incite violence and calling them astroturf.

[Thanks to NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard for sitting through the interview so as to bring this to light.]

[House Speaker Nancy] PELOSI ... But, you know, we share some of the views of the Tea Partiers in terms of the role of special interest in Washington, D.C., as -- it just has to stop. And that's why I've fought the special interest, whether it's on energy, whether it's on health insurance, whether it's on pharmaceuticals and the rest.

[ABC's Elizabeth] VARGAS: So, common ground with many people in the Tea Party movement.

PELOSI: Well, no, there are some. There are some because they, again, some of it is orchestrated from the Republican headquarters. Some of it is hijacking the good intentions of lots of people who share some of our concerns that we have about the role of special interests and many Tea Partiers, not that I speak for them, share the view, whether it's -- and Democrats, Republicans and Independents share the view that the recent Supreme Court decision, which greatly empowers the special interests, is something that they oppose.

That last item is sheer projection. How does she know what most Tea Party members think of that recent Supreme Court decision about campaign financing?

She fails to retract her comments about swastikas and violence, she continues to insult the Tea Party by claiming that it is orchestrated by the GOP (as as a Republican and on behalf of the RNC, I can say with confidence: we wish) yet simultaneously tries to glom on to this movement, presumably because of its popularity and the political advantages that she herself perceives would accrue to her reelection campaign.

I need a shower.


February 27, 2010


H.R. Clinton: The Massive Debt is Bush's Greenspan's Fault (But is She Also Sandbagging Obama?)

Monique Chartier

Reuters.

"It breaks my heart that 10 years ago we had a balanced budget, that we were on the way of paying down the debt of the United States of America," [Secretary of State Hillary Rodham] Clinton said.

"I served on the budget committee in the Senate, and I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday when we had a hearing in which Alan Greenspan came and justified increasing spending and cutting taxes, saying that we didn't really need to pay down the debt -- outrageous in my view," she said.

Setting aside the considerable irony of the context in which she made these remarks

Clinton, appearing before a congressional panel to defend the State Department's $52.8 billion budget request for the 2011 fiscal year

what's your first reaction to this blame-casting? In addition to questioning its accuracy (for example, did Greenspan really say we don't need to pay down the debt?), mine was, what about the trillions in new spending by the Obama administration and Congress?! As a friend said today, did Alan Greenspan roll into Congress with an army and MAKE them undertake all of that spending?

She couldn't really think that everyone has developed amnesia about all of the check writing that's gone on in DC for the last two years, could she? So isn't she kind of making President Obama, who not only signed into law but requested most of those large expenditures, look bad?

Alternately, with regard to the massive overdrawing of the national checking account, could she, on behalf of Congress and the administration in which she plays a key role, be adopting Geraldine's philosophy?

In any case, only two short years ago - and long after Alan Greenspan supposedly sang his siren song about the beauty of massive deficit spending - then Senator Clinton had quite a different opinion of Alan Greenspan, proposing that he guide Washington's response to the upcoming avalanche of foreclosures.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and other economic experts should determine whether the U.S. government needs to buy up homes to stem the country's housing crisis, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will propose on Monday.

Clinton threw her weight behind legislation proposed by Democrats Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut that would "expand the government's capacity to stand behind mortgages that are reworked on affordable terms."

But she said a bipartisan group should determine whether that approach was sufficient or whether the U.S. government should step in as a temporary purchaser.

The working group could be led by bipartisan economic heavyweights such as Republican Greenspan, Democratic former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton.

Ah, but what's needed now is not expertise but a blame pinata.


February 22, 2010


Treasury @ Haute Couture: Geithner to Have a Layout Be Profiled in Vogue

Monique Chartier

One question. Why?? [H/T the Fred Thompson Show.]

If last year's bailout of the financial industry caused you to start muttering words like investment banker and robber baron in the same sentence, it may cheer you to know that Timothy Geithner, the man responsible for crafting much of that bailout, agrees with you. "I am," he says, seated in his Washington, D.C., office, an intimidatingly ornate room worthy of a Hogwarts headmaster, "incredibly angry at what happened to our country."

* * *

What little free time he has, he prefers to spend with his children, building a ramp in the driveway for skateboarding, surfing off the coast of Cape Cod, building a guitar by hand with his teenage son, or reading—a recent title on his Kindle is The Places in Between, Rory Stewart's account of walking the length of Afghanistan. ...


January 28, 2010


Blah, Blah, Spin, Blah, Blah, Big Government

Justin Katz

I caught about 25 minutes or so of President Obama's State of the Union address on 630AM/99.7FM WPRO on my way home last night, which served to make me even more relieved to pull into the driveway. Put aside all the cortex-numbing spin, the take away message from what I heard, and what I've read since, is that Obama still doesn't get the message that the people of the United States are sending him.

Americans don't want to hear "our country" and think first of all of its government. We don't want to hear what government is going to do for us; we want to hear what the government is going to stop preventing us from doing. In other words, the subtext of the President's message is that he'll lead the government in coming up with a plan to assist we little folk who are wandering clueless in a complicated reality. And surely I'm not the only person in the global audience who noticed that every time he spoke of "hard-working Americans," he went through a list of union — especially public-sector union — roles before grudgingly mentioning such afterthoughts as "people who start businesses."

On top of it all, the brilliant orator's style long ago began to grate. Listening on the radio, I could picture him doing his teleprompter-left, teleprompter-right head oscillation. "Word word [pause] word word word word [pause] word."


January 25, 2010


Identifying the Stealth

Justin Katz

The Providence Journal ran this story on the front page, Saturday, with the headline "Stealth GOP effort helped Brown win." The first paragraphs surely give comfort to those who continue to prefer that the upset not be proof of real grassroots unrest and voter discontent with the Democrats' policies:

The stunning Republican come-from-behind victory in Massachusetts' special U.S. Senate election wasn't entirely a shock to Sen. John Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

The Texas senator had led a stealth Republican operation in the Bay State since December that quietly funneled top staffers, $1 million in cash and campaign knowhow to backstop Republican candidate Scott Brown.

But what constitutes stealth ought to be a question. Here, the Republicans just didn't advertise their financial support of a candidate in a critical (if long-odds) race. Further along in the article, reporter Maria Recio looks to give the other side's interpretation:

State Democrats dispute that they were in the dark about the national Republicans being in the state.

And what Democrat does Recio present as comparable to a Republican in elected office who sits on a committee to elect more Republicans?

"We were very much aware that this was a national election," said Tim Sullivan, the legislative and communications director for the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. "Contrary to popular belief, our side was running a campaign. When it came down to the race being a race, everyone got mobilized."

Perhaps the acronym needs an addition: D-AFL-CIO. Indeed, on the very same interior page as the above quotation is Randal Edgar's application to Rhode Island of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance legislation. The lead reads:

Campaign finance ruling could lead to more spending on ads by corporations and unions.

But three-quarters of the way through the story, one comes upon this:

"It allows too much special interests and lobbying," said Edward Eberle, a professor at the Roger Williams University School of Law. "And I think it makes whoever is up for reelection beholden to the special-interest groups."

Also critical were William Lynch, chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, and George Nee, president of the AFL-CIO of Rhode Island.

I'm not sure how much more beholden Democrats could be to their major interest group when journalists treat party activists and interest group activists as interchangeable. One suspects that the unionists oppose loosened campaign finance rules because they're already so thoroughly interwoven with a political movement — and political party — that the slight leveling of the playing field that comes with allowing corporations to spend more money independently is far more of a threat than being able to spend their own money more overtly is a benefit.


January 24, 2010


Protestations to ProJo Pronouncements

Marc Comtois

1) The ProJo editors on global warming:

Still, that a few scientists are accused of manipulating a bit of data from some climate research does not do away with the preponderance of evidence. The latest controversy revolves around the validity of the collection and use of data behind a U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers will shrink dramatically, or even disappear, in a few decades. However, the scientific consensus that Himalayan glaciers will dramatically recede is unlikely to be overturned anytime soon.
"[A] bit of data", huh? That interpretation explains why the ProJo has ignored Climategate. The attempt to hide data, manipulate data, leave out non-conforming readings from Siberia, etc.? Aw, no big deal. I suppose they're right about that "scientifice consensus" concerning Himalayan glaciers....
The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

Oh.

2) Froma Harrop is ticked about Massachusetts electing a senator to stop national health care reform, especially since Masachusetts has already enacted state health care reform. (Echoes of the temper tantrum the ProJo editors published a few days ago--guess we know who penned that one!). Harrop thinks the national plan superior to the Mass. one, particularly in that it does a better job containing costs. But Massachusetts is going to fix it, which gets us to Harrop's favorite rejoinder to critics of national health care: "Politically, the Massachusetts program could serve as a national model. Pass universal coverage now, fix it later." Here's an idea: let's revert to the the "laboratory of the states" idea. The reason for the reputed success of national health care programs in other countries rests largely on their relatively smaller populations and cultural homogeneity. Neither of these are comparable in the U.S. So let states handle it, if they choose, like Massachusetts did.

3) Some minor quibbles with Ed Fitzpatrick's piece on what went wrong with Coakley, mostly with his parrotting of two memes that don't have much substance, but apparently make Democrats and liberals feel a little better. First:

Republicans might convince themselves that Brown’s victory heralds a new level of affection for the GOP. But voters aren’t expressing love. They’re expressing anger.
No kidding. I really haven't seen many Republicans convinced that they're suddenly the darlings of the polity. Hardly. File under, "I know you are, but what am I...." Second:
But after a year of economic turmoil and seemingly endless debate, many people remain unconvinced that a complex health-care overhaul should top government’s priority list. (If I had to guess, the top three priorities are simple: jobs, jobs, jobs). And now Brown, who as a Boston College law student posed nude for a Cosmopolitan magazine centerfold, has stripped Democrats of any easy way to move forward with the existing bill.
It's become an obvious tactic, let's call it Scott Brown Commentary Rule #1: reference his nude modeling "career" no matter what. The attempt is clearly to imply an unseriousness about Brown. Well, sorry, too late. Oh, and one more thing: like all proper thinking columnists, Fitzpatrick is worried that we're headed towards "partisan gridlock.' And that's a bad thing?


January 23, 2010


Rhode Island's Poor National Representation

Justin Katz

Could there be anything more indicative of poor representation than Rep. Patrick Kennedy's dogged insistence that he's going to shoot for the healthcare stars, no matter what the people say?

Kennedy flatly endorsed a strategy for passage of the pending health-care overhaul that many fellow Democrats are wary of pursuing: a swift vote in the House to accept the Senate version of the bill verbatim.

"We can come back and fix those problems," Kennedy argued, perhaps by using arcane budget-writing rules that might let Democrats win controversial votes by a simple majority in the 100-member Senate. As it stands, Brown represents the 41st Republican vote that could permit them to block the health-care initiative. Kennedy said the alternative to immediate action may be the loss of a "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity to advance national health-care legislation.

Kennedy's post-mortem on the Massachusetts result appeared to jibe with Democratic sentiment expressed Tuesday by White House senior advisor David Axelrod for a preemptive populist campaign that would brand Republicans as handmaidens of a special-interest status quo represented by Wall Street and the insurance industry.

The clear message of the right-of-center populist trends, of the past year, from the Tea Parties to Scott Brown's proclamation of "the independent majority, is that Americans understand that both parties are indebted to special interests (although there's increasing appreciation of the fact that the interests don't line up perfectly with the parties as if they were opposing teams). In the current policy disputes, we just prefer the policies associated with interests, such as Wall Street, that Kennedy despises. That could change, of course, were Republicans to pursue real healthcare reform to that limited the importance of large insurance carriers; in such a case, the independent majority would likely part ways from the insurance lobby.

One can only hope that the upcoming elections prove that Rhode Islanders are tiring of the simplistic analysis that our current delegation insists on serving up. Many of us are also fed up with dead-end promises such as this, from Langevin:

Langevin also said that it's essential that Democrats indicate their solidarity with angry voters by heeding their message from Massachusetts. He said he wants to signal to his Rhode Island constituents "that I'm listening and I hear them."

All I can picture is Rep. Langevin's town hall meeting in Warwick, this summer. Among his peers, his performance was certainly the least scripted, and for that, he gets courage points, but little evidence emerged, subsequently, that Mr. Langevin's listening and hearing had any effect on his doing.



On Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court Decision: Reflections from April 30, 2005 on Correcting the Bizarre Incentives Created by Campaign Finance Reform Laws

Donald B. Hawthorne

A nearly five year old blog post, reposted here in response to this week's Supreme Court decision about free speech:

Andrew has a terrific, focused posting entitled First They Came for the Radio Talk Show Hosts... that gets to the heart of the latest fallout from campaign finance reform here in Rhode Island. Once again, we have an example of how legislation has unintended consequences that, in this case, affect our freedom of speech.

Dating back to the post-Watergate reforms in the 1970's, I continue to be amazed at how people think it is possible to construct ways to limit the flow of money into politics. And so we have concepts such as hard money, soft money, donation limits by individuals, donation limits by corporate entities, political action committees, 527's, etc.

Like water flowing downhill, money simply finds new ways to flow into politics after each such "reform." Does any rational person really think all these limitations have reduced the influence of money on politics? Surely not. Have all these limitations changed behavioral incentives for people or organizations with money? Quite clearly, as the 527's showed in the 2004 elections. But all we have done is made the flow of money more convoluted and frequently more difficult to trace. Are we better off for all the changes? Hardly. And, the adverse and unintended consequences will only continue into the future.

What can we do differently? Here is an alternative, and arguably more straightforward, view of the world:

1. Government has become a huge business, which means there is a lot of money for various interest groups - of all political persuasions - to grab, some for legitimate reasons and much in the form of pork. Money flows into politics to buy influence because so much is at stake financially. While no one wants to talk about it openly, the flow of large sums of money into politics is yet another unfortunate price we pay for allowing government to become such a pervasive part of our lives. If we truly had limited government, the pressure to buy influence would be much reduced. It is nothing but foolish ignorance to seek limits on the flow of money without first reducing the structural incentives that currently give people an economic reason to buy influence.

2. Since money is going to flow into politics, one way or another, then we should stop setting up barriers to free speech like Morse notes have come out of the latest campaign finance reform law. Rather, why not take all limits off political contributions in America in exchange for requiring ALL details about such contributions be posted in a standardized report format on the Internet within 24 hours of receipt by either an individual politician or by a political party? Total transparency and accountability, unlike today. If a George Soros or a Richard Scaiffe contributes vast monies, anyone paying attention will see it and the public scrutiny will be immediate. No more PAC's, no more 527's, no more hard versus soft money distinctions, etc. Eliminate the incentives to play fundraising games like the alleged misdeeds by Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign.

Such reform even has the potential to weaken the power of incumbents in both parties and create real competition in our political races. Think about Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and Ronald Reagan's various campaigns where each challenged the status quo and all of which were the result of having committed financial sponsors. Today many candidates have to be wealthy so they can spend their own money. Limiting the pool of candidates does not result in a better pool of candidates.

Total transparency and accountability in politics, with the potential for greater competition. Should not those be the policy objectives underlying our campaign finance laws? And, if successfully implemented, wouldn't that be a novel concept?

Of course, it is sadly ironic that achieving such transparency, accountability and competition will only happen if our incumbent politicians vote for new laws. Yet, given their own self-interest, our politicians have no incentive to support such changes and that lessens our freedom as American citizens. Yet another price we pay for big government.

Numerous links to commentaries about the Supreme Court decision can be found in the Extended Entry. If you do nothing else, listen to the Cato Institute video.

Continue reading "On Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court Decision: Reflections from April 30, 2005 on Correcting the Bizarre Incentives Created by Campaign Finance Reform Laws"


Winning in Race by Making Policies Primary

Justin Katz

Watching the tears of joy streaming down the faces of black attendees at the Rhode Island Democrats' election-night gathering in Providence, in 2008, knowing candidate Obama's centrist rhetoric to be completely contrary to his life history and political record, and believing that his likely policies would be an unmitigated disaster, I worried what effect it might have on race relations were the Obama administration to be as catastrophically inept as I'd have predicted. To be sure, my view is that racial strife has been effectively over for decades, kept alive mainly by those who profit from the grievance industry. That doesn't mean racism does not exist, though, and the hype surrounding candidate Obama made the crashing of expectations a frightening position.

Thomas Sowell suggests that Republicans should begin the long, slow process of pulling the black community away from the self-identity link that they have with the Democrat Party by creating bonds through actual policies:

There is no point today in Republicans' continuing to try to win over the average black voter by acting like imitation Democrats. Those who like what the Democrats are doing are going to vote for real Democrats.

But not all black voters are the same, any more than all white voters are the same. Those black voters that Republicans have any realistic chance of winning over are people who share similar values and concerns. ...

Blacks have been lied to so much that straight talk can gain their respect, even if they don't agree with everything you say. Republicans need all the credibility they can get. When they try to be imitation Democrats, all they do is forfeit credibility.

Sowell covers specific policies too broadly to allow brief quotes, so read the whole thing.


January 21, 2010


A Note on Availablegate

Justin Katz

By now you've caught wind of Senator-elect Scott Brown's joking around about his daughters' availability on the dating scene:

I appreciate that it's an interesting topic about which to talk, but the conversations really tell you more about the people having them than about Brown. Even taking the joke as a significant gaffe (which I don't), there are too many off-stage factors that would mitigate the import.

I'm picturing a conversation, as the campaign really began to demand the family's time and effort, in which Brown's daughters joked with their father about his having to do something to make up for the effect on their social lives. That's pure conjecture, but it's an example of the sort of inside jokes and running gags that families can develop.

The line would have been better made at a more-private post-game celebration, but sheesh, the guy just came from out of nowhere to win a seat in revolutionary fashion the U.S. Senate.



ProJo Editors Throw Tantrum, Call Names Over Brown Victory

Marc Comtois

With their preferred candidate going down to Scott Brown, the ProJo editors can't help but throw a little tantrum excoriating the easily fooled and selfish voters of Massachusetts (remember, it's all about healthcare for 'em):

Part of this was the well-financed campaign pumping up fears of higher taxes for the middle and upper classes to pay for national health-care reform, and anger at the Wall Street bailout. As always in such races, misinformation machines worked overtime.

Although about 95 percent of Bay Staters have health care in a program similar in many ways to congressional plans — and most seem to like it — the 52 percent who backed Scott Brown seem unwilling to extend such comfort to the rest of America. (Mr. Brown voted for the Massachusetts plan!) There’s a growing disinclination among many Americans to help their fellow citizens with health coverage, or with anything else, as the country’s political tone becomes ever harsher. “I’ve got mine! Fend for yourself!”

Again, no distinction is made between the mythical, ideal "universal healthcare" (though they cried again about their preferred "like Medicare" option, which doesn't account for the non-Medicare subsidization!) and the actual plan being bandied about in Washington. And no mention is made of Coakley's misinformation campaign against Scott Brown, largely composed of disingenuous negative ads, which the ProJo regularly opposes (except when it fits their agenda, I suppose????). Oh, and they blamed Bush (really).

They also engage in a little class-warfare:

...as often happens in special or mid-term elections, turnout among lower-income people, who tend to vote Democratic, was fairly low, while it was very high among affluent suburbanites who fear higher taxes and/or reduced benefits in any national health-care reform.
One of the commenters (FACTSONLY) to the ProJo's whine pointed out that the Coakley won both the urban areas and the affluent "elite" in the cities and suburbs. This reflects the Democratic Party's current core constituencies since Obama took office.

Finally, there's this:

And now the insurance industry has another vote in the form of Scott Brown.
Who was meeting with the insurance lobbyists to raise money about a week ago? Is there any clearer example of why the MSM--particularly newspapers--are in trouble? Maybe there once was a time when such slanted editorials could be produced without fear of being called on the supposed "facts" that support it. No more.



A Brown Radio Call

Justin Katz

A certain northern Senator elect was the topic of conversation when Monique called in to the Matt Allen Show. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


January 20, 2010


Senate President: Paperwork Required for This One, Not for Those 12 Million

Monique Chartier

While Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia) has called for all further votes on health care reform to be suspended until Scott Brown is seated, Mark Steyn points to Senate President Reid's new-found enchantment with documentation.

Harry Reid's reluctance to seat Senator Brown (R., Mass.) — boy, I enjoyed typing that — until "the proper paperwork has been received" seems awfully finicky for a man who famously declared he wanted to bring "12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows."

A duly elected freshman Republican? Check his paperwork!

Twelve million potential supporters of me and my party? Waive them right in!

A compromise, Mr. Senate President? Let's check everyone's documentation, including that of the new Senator from Massachusetts.



Brown Victory: A First Hand Report; a Widespread Sentiment

Monique Chartier

Michael Graham via The Corner.

My radio station in Boston has been non-stop on the Brown/Coakley race for weeks. Three of our hosts are pro-Brown, two pro-Coakley. We were broadcasting from our own victory rally tonight in Braintree, Mass., at the very moment Scott Brown got the concession call from Coakley. He joined us on the air almost immediately to share the good news.

The crowd of several hundred, packed into a room designed for half their number, exploded. Having not been in Boston when they broke the Curse, I can only speculate, but it must have been a similar moment. The crowd wouldn't let Senator Brown speak. The cheering, clapping and crying wouldn't stop. All Senator Brown could say was "I really can't hear anything, but I'll speak to all of you soon."

For at least five minutes, we stood looking at each other in disbelief. Some people kept looking at the TV looking for confirmation from AP. Could it be true?

Finally it sank in. The cheering began to subside, and then came the cry: "Who's next?"

Another roar, and then came the names: Kerry, Frank, and loudest of all Gov. Deval Patrick.

These people have had their first taste of political success in a long time. They feel hope again, for the first time in years. And they're spoilin' for another brawl in the Bay State.

Not just in the Bay State are people spoilin' for a brawl, Michael.


January 19, 2010


Local Results

Justin Katz

UPDATE:

Drudge is reporting that Coakley has conceded by telephone. Here's the story in the Globe, but high traffic appears to have crashed the site.


Local election returns in Massachusetts, tonight, make for an interesting map that will bear further analysis as time progresses. Note, for instance, the huge margins for Coakley in Fall River and New Bedford.

The live results map from the New York Times, however, shows that this isn't a regional result, inasmuch as the two precincts between the cities are red. Urban blight seems to suit the Democrats just fine, it would seem. Perhaps the blighted should think on that.



Democrats "Gingrich-Bush" Shield No Longer A Factor In Northeast

Marc Comtois

Ross Douthat comments on Steve Kornacki's contention that:

… the rise of southern/religious-based conservatism in 1994 — when Newt Gingrich and the GOP won control of Congress — triggered an immediate and enduring cultural backlash among swing voters in places like Massachusetts. Before ‘94, they still saw the GOP (generally) as a big tent party with room for moderate/social libertarian-types. But ‘94 disabused them of that notion and they stopped even listening to Republican candidates.
As Douthat explains, Kornacki dubs this the Gingrich-Bush shield, which, contra what you may initially think, protected Democrats in the northeast. Douthat observes:
Now, of course, both Bush and Gingrich are gone, taking the shield with them, and suddenly northeastern swing voters are willing to consider “voting for a Republican candidate as a way of expressing frustration with the ruling Democrats.” Thus Chris Christie in New Jersey; thus Scott Brown in Massachusetts; thus Pat Toomey’s small lead in the Pennsylvania polls.

Whether this Northeastern G.O.P. surge can be sustained will depend on a host of factors — but Kornacki’s right, I think, to imply that it will depend on whether the Republican Party can find leaders, for 2012 and beyond, who don’t make the party seem too Southern. On this front, though, I think that style and symbolism probably matter more than substance....What turns off Northeasterners, as Caldwell suggested a decade ago, is less a specific issue like abortion than “the broader cultural claims of those who put it forward” — the sense, that is, that a vote for the G.O.P. is a vote for the habits and mores of Alabama or Mississippi (or a caricature thereof), complete with guns in the cupboard and creationism in the schools....

But if you’re trying to be a national political party, you want your leadership to fall relatively close to the American mean culturally, even (or especially) if you’re going to govern from the right or left politically. That means that...if I were a Republican politician from New England, New Jersey or New York, I’d be hoping that the G.O.P. nominates a Mitch Daniels or a Tim Pawlenty in 2012 — so that Yankee voters can pull the “Republican” lever without worrying that they’re casting a vote for the Old Confederacy along the way.

Based on conversations I've had over the last decade with conservative-leaning independents who used to be Republicans, it always seems to boil down to this. It seems silly, but there it is. And, for most of 'em, the same attitude extends to Sarah Palin.



ProJo's Last Shot at Brown - Scare Tactics

Marc Comtois

On election day in Massachusetts, the desperate ProJo editors have resorted to listing a bunch of "what ifs?" should Scott Brown be elected and Obamacare not pass. Notwithstanding that a counter-argument can be made that passing this particular monstrosity called health care "reform" would make all of the items they identify even worse, the panicked essay reveals that the fatal flaw in their reasoning still exists. They clung so stubbornly to a mythical, ideal single-payer system--like Medicare for all!--that they've been blind to other (yes, free market) reforms that would accomplish many of their desired goals, if differently. So they're left to exclaim that we need to pass something, anything ("the warts can be removed later") before it's too late.


January 18, 2010


Go Ahead, Democrats

Justin Katz

Seal your doom:

The White House and Democratic Congressional leaders, scrambling for a backup plan to rescue their health care legislation if Republicans win the special election in Massachusetts on Tuesday, are preparing to ask House Democrats to approve the Senate version of the bill, which would send the measure directly to President Obama for his signature.

The moment the Democrat leaders' request becomes official is the moment we find out just how little other elected Democrats understand what's happening around them. I'm not prone to confident predictions of the future, but it strikes me as entirely possible that passing the healthcare legislation now, in this way, out of fear of an undeniable declaration of public opposition to doing just that will result in many Democrats' losing their seats and then the next Congress (and perhaps next president) undoing the legislation anyway.



Early Peaking in Massachusetts

Justin Katz

Much discussion about the Massachusetts special election over in the Corner, including a thread about whether Republican Scott Brown "peaked early." Naturally the thread began with an email from a self-confessed Massachusetts liberal; then followed a statement of jitters from a New Hampshire conservative:

Over the weekend, while reading the "Globe" online and watching political ads on TV, I had this odd sense that Brown had peaked at the wrong time. It feels like the Dems finally "get it;" they finally understand that Brown had a real shot at this thing. I feel like if the election had been Saturday Brown would have won, but now I fear that the fear of defeat has driven the Dems to frantic GOTV effort that will topple the Brown insurgency.

We certainly shouldn't lose sight of the fact that a Brown win would be dramatic and unexpected, and I guess we'll find out tomorrow whether two days of lag time between peak and election is enough to turn the tide back to Coakley. However, if we consider what voters are doing, in these slightly down days, it seems to me that anything but a major loss on Brown's part will only be more profound for the "early peak."

This ties into the Northeastern Republican discussion that we had a few days ago, in which I suggested that there was no doubt that the huge red surge in the region was motivated precisely by the conservative and tea party enthusiasm that David Frum fears. Now comes the second part of my proffered equation, during which time Massachusetts voters are actually looking at Scott Brown beyond the headlines. These are the days that they'll discover that he's hardly Sarah Palin with less estrogen. That he is, in a neutral sense, moderate. That they can palatably give him a shot in office.

And from my seat next door, here in Rhode Island, it looks to me as if the Democrats are continuing to misunderstand how unbought Americans think and operate. As Massachusetts voters investigate the man behind the unexpected hype, Senator John Kerry (D, MA), he of the slanderous anti-military testimony, added unconfirmed claims about intimidation of his preferred candidate to the list of negative attacks on the political unknown who might derail the Obamamotive.

As Shannen Coffin points out, Massachusetts voters are right now looking at a candidate, on the Republican side, and desperate political machine, on the Democrat. If they choose the candidate, then the machine — and all those who thought they'd purchased a slate of nation-toppling policies by building it — will begin to collapse on itself.


January 17, 2010


Patrick Stumps for Senate Candidate What's-Her-Name

Justin Katz

It's so Patrick Kennedy to enlist in a partisan battle and offer passionate support for a candidate whose name he doesn't know:

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), speaking with a gaggle of reporters after the event, said that while state Sen. Scott Brown (R) offers voters a quick fix, in reality, the problems created by "George Bush and his cronies" are not so easily solved.

"If you think there's magic out there and things can be turned around overnight, then you would vote for someone who could promise you that, like Scott Brown," Kennedy said. "If you don't, if you know that it takes eight years for George Bush and his cronies to put our country into this hole ... then you know we have a lot of digging to do, but some work needs to be done and this president's in the process of doing it and we need to get Marcia Coakley to help him to do that."

And it's so Rhode Island U.S. legislator to have nothing constructive to say and concentrate, instead, on declaring superiority to a former president.

What makes it funny (apart from the natural humor of all things Patches) is that the Democrats' very behavior belies his claims. Clearly, everybody from President Obama to Congressman Barney Frank (D, MA) to candidate Martha Coakley, herself, believes in the magic of a Scott Brown victory to turn national politics around overnight.

Tuesday night, to be precise.



And Let's Not Move Too Quickly Past the (Previously) Absurd Proposition that the Race for Ted Kennedy's Seat Should Even be Competitive

Monique Chartier

Mark Steyn didn't make that mistake in his column yesterday.

... If you were at the Hopeychange inaugural ball on Jan. 20, 2009, when Barney Frank dived into the mosh pit, and you chanced to be underneath when he landed, and you’ve spent the last year in a coma until suddenly coming to in time for the poll showing some unexotically monikered nobody called Scott Brown — whose only glossy magazine appearance was a Cosmopolitan pictorial 30 years ago (true) — four points ahead in Kennedy country, you must surely wonder if you’ve woken up in an alternative universe. The last thing you remember before Barney came flying down is Harry Reid waltzing you round the floor while murmuring sweet nothings about America being ready for a light-skinned brown man with no trace of a Negro dialect. And now you’re in some dystopian nightmare where Massachusetts is ready for a nude-skinned Brown man with no trace of a Kennedy dialect. How can this be happening?


Another Learning Lesson from Brown - This One for Democrats -

Monique Chartier

may be developing out of the Mass senatorial race. [Marc's "lesson" pertained to Republicans.]

If Coakley defies certain polls and pulls out a win this Tuesday, the margin will almost certainly not be the thirty point gap she started with two months ago. At that point, a proportionality exercise will, inexorably, flash into the minds of every incumbent Democrat around the country and their campaign consultants:

This is a Massachusetts - worse, Ted Kennedy's - senatorial seat. Therefore, she should have won by thirty points. She only won by X. I won my last campaign by Y, a lot less than thirty points. What does that mean for my margin this November??

January 16, 2010


Political Spin on a Used Car Salesman Scale

Justin Katz

Anybody who watches politics must be prepared for spin to the border of falsehood, but in Brian Riedl's telling, it's difficult not to conclude that the Obama administration has stepped well into the range of what would more accurately be called scams and con jobs:

Last spring, President Obama proposed $11.3 billion worth of discretionary spending cuts. Today's Washington Times notes that Congress accepted $6.9 billion worth of these cuts, a 61 percent success rate.

In a $3.6 trillion federal budget, that comes to just 0.2 percent of the federal budget.

But there is a larger issue:100 percent of the savings from these "cuts" were automatically shifted into new spending. Total federal spending was not reduced by one dollar.

Moreover, the cuts were mainly in defense spending, so spending on things that most of us associate with "big government" actually increased as a result of these "cuts." Unbelievable.


January 15, 2010


Learning Lessons from Brown

Marc Comtois

Win or Lose, the Scott Brown candidacy in Massachusetts has shown that there is a motivated bunch of people looking to upset establishment apple carts, mostly those being pushed around by the in-power Democrats. Brown has struck a chord with these folks based on his common-sense, man-of-the-people approach. Yet, as both Erick Erickson and David Frum note, Brown is certainly a big tent Republican. Erickson thinks the media is blinded by their own preferred narrative:

Right now the media is missing a really big story. It does not fit their narrative.

The narrative, of course, is that conservatives want a totalitarian pure party with a purity test for the GOP. You want gay marriage? No way. Pro-choice? No support. For government assisted health care options? We don’t recognize you. At least that is what the media claims.

So the media has and is ignoring the alliance between left and right among the GOP in Massachusetts.

Scott Brown is not a conservative. He makes no pretension of being a conservative. He defends Romneycare, which most conservative have rejected. He is pro-choice. But he is for less government interference in the free market and less spending. Like Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, he is the perfect sort of Republican candidate for New England.

Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund is encouraging its members to support and donate to Scott Brown.. Marco Rubio is supporting Scott Brown. RedState is supporting Scott Brown. We, well . . . I, suspect he’ll give conservatives heart burn as New England Republicans do. But all of us know he is a good, pragmatic fit for Massachusetts. He’ll vote against Obamacare and he’d vote against a second stimulus. Conservatives do know, despite media and liberal Republican (called “moderate” by the media) claims to the contrary, that the GOP needs 51 seats in the Senate to have a majority.

Conservative and liberal Republicans are united behind Scott Brown. You’d think a mainstream media that has generated millions of words on television, radio, and print about conservatives demanding a pure party would take notice.

But that would shatter their whole narrative. And the last thing anyone wants to do at the next party at the Met or Sally Quinn’s house is mention the latest liberal friend in rehab or that maybe their group think on conservatives is shallow, self-serving, and vain.

Frum makes much the same observation, but, as usual, is attacking his fellow, more conservative Republicans, if preemptively this time.
A Brown victory will rejoice Republicans nationwide. We will revel in it, triumph in it, deploy it, argue from it. Question: will we learn from it?

The Scott Brown who may rescue the country from Obamacare is not a talk radio conservative.

Strong on defense and school choice, opposed to the Obama administration’s signature initiatives, Brown voted in favor of Mitt Romney’s health plan in Massachusetts. He describes himself as pro-choice (subject to reasonable limitations), accepts gay marriage in Massachusetts as a settled fact, and told the Boston Herald editorial board he would have voted to confirm Sonia Sotomayor. He calls himself “fiscally conservative and socially conscious.” He’s got an environmental record too: In the state senate he voted in favor of a regional initiative to curb greenhouse gas initiatives.

Most important: Unlike his arrogant, brittle opponent, Brown has shown himself an open and accessible candidate, optimistic and without rancor. In short – he’s running exactly the kind of campaign that we alleged RINOs have been urging on the GOP for months now.

It would be a travesty if Brown’s victory is seized upon as a victory for anger, paranoia, and ideological extremism.

They both make good points that, from a strictly political viewpoint, are worth considering here in Rhode Island. To me, Erickson's tone is preferrable. Frum has embarked on a new career based largely on hyperbolizing the right side of the GOP because, well, they don't agree with him, apparently. Nonetheless, there are a lot of left-leaning Republicans and Moderates in the Ocean State who probably are in line with Frum and think that the "right wing" seizing the RI GOP (via a closed primary) would be the antithesis of the Brown candidacy.

Perhaps, but I think that the moderate GOPers have, in the past, made the mistake of too-closely defining such a pragmatic Republican with the current independent candidate for governor Lincoln Chafee. Chafee is more liberal on social issues than many Rhode Island Democrats (not to mention Brown) and, as for economic issues, his recent gubernatorial kick-off displayed his unfortunate predisposition to have a plan for tax increases before having anything concrete on budget cuts (and is but the latest example of his zero-sum, baseline budgeting version of fiscal conservatism). In short, the term "moderate" came to mean "like Chafee," which is a disservice to other moderates who may not be quite so....quirky. I think conservatives would be able to support a moderate candidate who displayed the same traits and competency as Scott Brown if one were to arise out of the RI GOP and run for national office. At least I would.


January 14, 2010


But for a Government Gone Too Far

Justin Katz

Kevin Williamson notes an unfamiliar state of affairs:

It's a world gone mad: The Euro-welfarized 'Nucks are hard at work, their wages up 2.3 percent year over year, while the Aussies, who have a 45 percent top rate for personal income taxes plus a 5 percent payroll tax, are booming. But the rugged individualists toiling in the fields of freewheeling American capitalism are suffering Gallic levels of unemployment. How can that be?

Granted, some of the key causes of this recession were unique to the United States, but Williamson suggests that there's something more at play:

There will be no new firms without new investment, and that's the fundamental problem. Investors are terrified. The big guns are worried about the tax hikes that will be necessary should Obamacare pass, about new regulatory burdens like cap-and-trade, and, most of all, about the apparently boundless jurisdiction of Washington meddlers who have arrogated unto themselves the authority to micromanage every nut and bolt of the economy, from the design of cars to the size of Wall Street traders' paychecks. Individual investors are feeling the continued pinch of the recession and, rather than pouring money into their 401(k)s, are paying down consumer debts and thinking about rainy days. ...

One surprising finding: It's not the size and expense of government alone that has sent the United States downward in the economic-freedom rankings--it's corruption. "We're not talking here about outright bribery or petty corruption," Miller says. "It's the perception that the United States has a political system that is about rent-seeking and dispensing favors. Canada and Australia have different electoral processes, and very disciplined party structures, so they have less of that. It may not be illegal, but this kind of political bribery, with people buying access and Washington picking winners and losers, creates a perception about the U.S. that shows up in these corruption scores."

The supposed experts keep predicting that things will return to normal in X number of months, but a great number of us laypeople fear that President Obama really did accomplish change... just not a change that voters would have wished on themselves. In the context of the War on Terror, Mark Steyn recently called the election of Barack Obama "a fundamentally unserious act by the U.S. electorate." The description applies in the area of the economy, as well.

Big government is a burden on investment and economic growth, but if its rules are predictable and the burden calculable, it's just an accepted moderation of profits absent a better opportunity. For decades, centuries, the United States has offered that better opportunity, but we've been busy, recently, illustrating to the world that our form of democracy can be taken over by redistributionists and thieves. That's an image that will take more than a couple of elections to shed. If we shed it.


January 13, 2010


Massachusetts Senatorial Race: The Taliban May or May not Still Be in Afghanistan

Monique Chartier

... according to the Democrat candidate, but they clearly have a presence on her campaign.

On a slightly more serious note, is the mood in Coakley's campaign so pessimistic that they feel they must resort to stonewalling very reasonable questions and physical intimidation?



Electing Somebody Other than Ted Kennedy

Justin Katz

Jeff Jacoby takes the unique tack of emphasizing policy differences between the candidates in Massachusetts's special election:

Coakley supports ObamaCare, opposes the war in Afghanistan, and favors higher taxes on the wealthy. Brown is against the health care legislation, backs the president's surge in Afghanistan, and wants across-the-board tax cuts a la JFK. Coakley is an EMILY's List prochoice hard-liner; Brown condemns partial-birth abortion and is backed by Massachusetts Citizens for Life. Coakley has no problem with civilian trials for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Brown thinks it reckless to treat enemy combatants like ordinary defendants.

Most commentary has been related to Republican Scott Brown's affirmation that, you know, the senate seat is allocated to the people of the state, not to a political dynasty. Me, I find it interesting that Rhode Island Democrat Party Chairman Bill Lynch apparently can't think of a reason to support Martha Coakley more enthusiastically than one would support a brainless blob with a "D" after its name:

The eyes of the nation are on Massachusetts.

In one week, Bay Staters will go to the polls to elect a new United States Senator to replace Ted Kennedy.

I knew Sen. Kennedy well, and was proud to call him a friend. Over the years I watched him fight to improve the lives of countless Americans and do everything he could to make Massachusetts a better place to live, work and raise a family.

By now you've probably heard that the race between Attorney General Martha Coakley and and her Tea Party-backed GOP opponent has tightened, as special interest groups are flooding the air with gutless attack ads. They're trying to stop the change that you and I fought for last year, and they're getting pretty desperate.

Sen. Kennedy was a true friend to Rhode Island, which is why I'm asking you to help elect a candidate who will honor his legacy and pick up the fight where he left off. I'm asking you to get involved today and help Martha Coakley.

We're looking for energized volunteers from Rhode Island and southeastern New England to make phone calls, knock on doors and get every Democrat to the polls on Election Day.

There's too much at stake next Tuesday to sit this one out, so please, do whatever you can and help send Martha to the Senate!

Message to Democrat voters from Democrat operatives: Keep your betters in office; we'll select the heirs.


January 7, 2010


Intellectuals

Donald B. Hawthorne

Thomas Sowell:

...It may seem strange that so many people of great intellect have said and done so many things whose consequences ranged from counterproductive to catastrophic. Yet it is not so surprising when we consider whether anybody has ever had the range of knowledge required to make the sweeping kinds of decisions that so many intellectuals are prone to make, especially when they pay no price for being wrong.

Intellectuals and their followers have often been overly impressed by the fact that intellectuals tend, on average, to have more knowledge than other individuals in their society. What they have overlooked is that intellectuals have far less knowledge than the total knowledge possessed by the millions of other people whom they disdain and whose decisions they seek to override.

We have had to learn the consequences of elite preemption the hard way — and many of us have yet to learn that lesson.


January 6, 2010


Mr. Sweetheart Mortgage Will not Seek Reelection

Monique Chartier

From the Wall Street Journal today.

The departure of [Senator Chris] Dodd, first elected to the Senate in 1980, carried the most symbolic value because of his seniority and his close association with the financial system bailout and other economic policies. He has drawn criticism for backing a measure that allowed the embattled insurance giant AIG to dole out bonuses to its executives.

Mr. Dodd, once closely associated with the insurance and hedge-fund industry, is one of the highest profile Democratic casualties of the financial crisis and its political fallout. Under fire for receiving what some charged was a sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide Financial, and for land deals in Ireland, Mr. Dodd had tried to reinvent himself as a populist, going after big banks and credit-card companies from his perch as chairman of the Senate banking committee.

And suddenly, the Dems are scrambling to fill four open Senate seats.

The uplift of optimism that accompanies this news is tempered slightly by a sense of perplexity. Why announce this decision now, before committing the terrible deed of voting in favor of health care reform? Doesn't that cast doubt on the moral credibility of the Dem's health care reform plan, while at the same time make these senators look like weasels who want it both ways? "Yes, I will vote for this legislation. Note, however, that I will shortly be departing this chamber."

Meanwhile, the meeting, out of sight of C-Span and the American people, between Speaker Pelosi and Senate President Reid to reconcile the Senate and House bills iron out the first steps to the systematic disassembly of the US health care system and to mandate jail for anyone who fails to exercise an inalienable right will take place as scheduled, though presumably with a heightened sense of urgency. There has been no immediate confirmation to the rumor that someone sounding strangely like presidential advisor Rahm Emanuel has already called the offices of Speaker Pelosi and Senate President Reid shrieking, "Pass it! Pass anything! Gone! Our beautiful super-majority will soon be gone!"



Whitehouse Gets Things Backwards

Justin Katz

Of all the letters that have appeared decrying or endorsing Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's recent screed against those who oppose Obamacare, one by Pamela Burdon, of Warwick, was especially poignant:

The Nazis took my parents from their families when they were teenagers. My parents miraculously survived under impossible conditions. They then fled communism, coming here to become American citizens and work their hardest to provide for their children.

They were so proud to be Americans that they would rarely speak the many European languages they knew. ...

As a way of honoring their memory, I feel it is my responsibility to preserve the freedoms that they valued so highly. Can I sit idly by and let their America be destroyed? Could I live with the knowledge that they sacrificed everything to come here, for a better life for their future generations, only to let hastily passed legislation eventually turn this country into a replica of the ones they fled?



A Way to Affect National Politics Quickly

Justin Katz

Turning his Tennessean eyes to our neighbor to the north, Glenn Reynolds offers a useful suggestion:

MASSACHUSETTS SENATE RACE HEATS UP: Rasmussen Shows Brown Within 9 Percent. This is huge given that it's Massachusetts, and a [Scott Brown (R)] win would probably kill healthcare. I don't know how his online fundraising is going, but so far he hasn't gotten much (er, any?) help from the national Republican party. I imagine that will change, if only because people like William Jacobson are asking: "Will the national GOP, which has ignored Brown, get involved now? I'm not sure I care anymore." Whatever else they do, they can't afford to look irrelevant.

Part-time RI resident William Jacobson has updated the first-linked post to note that Brown is within 2% with "definite voters" and leads by a whopping 44% among independents. Republican or otherwise, those who oppose the Democrats' version of "healthcare reform" and the overall direction in which our government is headed should consider the shockwaves that a Brown victory would send through the national political landscape.


January 4, 2010


Really? Health Care is an Inalienable Right?

Monique Chartier

Glenn Beck this morning dissected remarks that Senator Tom Harkin made following upon the passage of a health care reform bill in the Senate. [Emphasis added in both quotes.]

What this bill does is we finally take that step. As our leader said earlier, we take that step from healthcare as a privilege to healthcare as an inalienable right of every single American citizen.

This is a real leap. True inalienable rights, along with true "human rights", another phrase that the Senator has used to characterize health care, are on a much higher plane than health care. To define health care as an inalienable or human right is to dilute true inalienable and human rights.

Further, there is the question of where those rights come from - or, more precisely, from where they do not flow. Beck:

Are created equal and endowed by their creator. With certain inalienable rights. Now, that's important to understand. Because [Senator Harkin] used this language. He used inalienable rights. We have taken it and made it an inalienable right. This is Senator Harkin making, declaring himself and the government God. Our creator. Rights no longer come from the creator. They come from congress. They come from Washington. This is the end of the American Constitution. This is the end or the beginning, I should say the last, the last piece of turn the engine on, of fundamental transformation of the American system. Once they tell you without fear that they can create inalienable rights, the whole system is upside down.

Beck's point that inalienable rights come from God does not altogether ring with me as I am mostly atheist. I do know that they do not flow from Congress. Senator Harkin's attempt to accrue to Congress the power to create and define inalienable rights comes across as an excessively paternalistic, disturbing and completely overreaching power trip.


December 30, 2009


The Man Behind the Tendrils

Justin Katz

Andrew McCarthy's takedown of Attorney General Eric Holder is relevant for a number of topical reasons — the war on terror, generally, the strategy of treating the war like a criminal action, the decision to give terrorist masterminds access to the American civil courts, even as an international police organizations are freed from accountability. On a political level, though, this part ties in with something that I've found to be increasingly applicable across layers of government:

We have been at war with Islamist terrorists for over eight years now--about half as long as they have been at war with us. In that time, they have committed all manner of atrocities. But of the thousands of jihadists who have been killed, captured, or detained since 2001, the 9/11 plotters stand out. To submit them to the civilian justice system makes a mockery of the war, betrays its victims, and turns the American courts into a weapon by which the enemy can gather intelligence and broadcast propaganda. It is inconceivable that civilian trials would have been permitted in any previous American war. In those conflicts, war was understood as the military and diplomatic resolution of a geopolitical dispute, not the judicial disposition of a legal controversy.

But the Obama administration views the war as a legal matter. And its maneuvering to insulate the president from this unpopular ideological decision has been comically transparent: The president was, conveniently, en route to the Far East when Holder announced the civilian-court transfer; the White House maintains that the decision was a call for Holder alone to make (in fact, the attorney general has no authority to order war prisoners out of military custody--that's a presidential call); and Holder purports not to have consulted the commander-in-chief on this momentous matter, instead seeking the counsel of his wife and his brother.

To further the myth of a fully detached Obama, the administration projects a fully engaged Holder, hitting the books, agonizing for long hours over the most difficult decision of his career. But at the hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) exploded the myth by asking the most elementary legal question: What is the precedent? "Can you give me a case in United States history," he asked, "where an enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?" After several seconds of excruciating silence, Holder stammered, "I don't know, I'd have to look at that." What, pray tell, has he been looking at, if not that? Senator Graham, an experienced Air Force lawyer, informed the nation's top law-enforcement official that there has been no such case.

Whether it be national administrative "czars" or state-level boards and commissions, this transfer of authority — at least as far as the public is led to believe — is an insidious thing. I find the elevation of a man like Holder to his current position disconcerting, but not as worrisome as the fact that he's clearly not an administrative rogue.

ADDENDUM:

But while I'm quoting from the piece, here's part that's directly related to the decision about easing domestic restrictions on the International Criminal Police Organization:

Why invite all this when the 9/11 plotters were ready to plead guilty? On the campaign trail, Holder promised the Left a "reckoning." The new administration would hold the Bush administration to account for its purported crimes. Understanding the legal emptiness and political explosiveness of such a promise, however, Holder has been reluctant to do more than "investigate." Thus the restless international Left--which includes Obama's core of support--has exhorted the United Nations and foreign tribunals to invoke "universal jurisdiction" to bring war-crimes charges against Bush officials. In Europe this spring, Holder expressed his willingness to cooperate with such investigations, including one ongoing in Spain.

A civilian trial for KSM & Co. will be an unparalleled coup for these efforts--more so even than the mounds of classified memos Holder has already made public over the strenuous objections of current and former CIA directors. The Left's shock troops at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who worked on our enemies' behalf with many lawyers now staffing Holder's Justice Department, will exploit any new revelations to intensify calls for foreign prosecutions. The Obama administration will get credit for delivering on its promised reckoning but will avoid the political damage that would result if DOJ were to bring the case itself.

As I titled an earlier post: the noose tightens.


December 29, 2009


The Noose Tightens

Justin Katz

It seems so innocuous, like a little book-keeping, this executive order from President Obama:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words "except those provided by Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act" and the semicolon that immediately precedes them.

Until one applies the deletion to the actual text:

By virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and statutes of the United States, including Section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (59 Stat. 669, 22 U.S.C. 288), it is hereby ordered that the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), in which the United States participates pursuant to 22 U.S.C. 263a, is hereby designated as a public international organization entitled to enjoy the privileges, exemptions and immunities conferred by the International Organizations Immunities Act; except those provided by Section 2(c), the portions of Section 2(d) and Section 3 relating to customs duties and federal internal-revenue importation taxes, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act. This designation is not intended to abridge in any respect the privileges, exemptions or immunities which such organization may have acquired or may acquire by international agreement or by Congressional action.

And digs up Section 2(c):

Property and assets of international organizations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, unless such immunity be expressly waived, and from confiscation. The archives of international organizations shall be inviolable.

Bob Owens cites some of the relevant concerns:

Schippert and Middleton note that Obama’s order removes protections placed upon INTERPOL by President Reagan in 1983. Obama’s order gives the group the authority to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests — which means this foreign law enforcement organization can operate free of an important safeguard against governmental abuse. “Property and assets,” including the organization’s records, cannot be searched or seized. Their physical locations and records are now immune from U.S. legal or investigative authorities.

If the president of the United States has an aboveboard reason for making a foreign law enforcement agency exempt from American laws on American soil, it wasn’t shared by the White House.

An international law enforcement agency now operates on American soil with more immunity and less accountability than agencies subject to the rule of the people of the United States. One wonders why candidate Obama didn't campaign on his trust of the international Left over and above the Constitution.

ADDENDUM:

For further indication of this administration's worldview, put this executive order in the light of the upcoming civil trial of men who've already acknowledged — proclaimed — their role in the murderous attack on our nation in 2001:

While the five men wanted to plead guilty in a military commission earlier this year to hasten their executions, sources now say that the detainees favor participating in a full-scale federal trial to air their grievances and expose their treatment while held by the CIA at secret prisons.

December 22, 2009


Are key portions of Obamacare going to be unrepealable?

Donald B. Hawthorne

It is worthwhile to listen to Senator Jim DeMint discuss one critical aspect of the Senate Obamacare bill:

Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) has thumbed through Harry Reid's manager's amendment and discovered some "particularly troubling" rule-change provisions, especially with regards to the proposed Independent Medicare Advisory Board, which he finds could be unrepealable

John McCormack:

According to page 1001 of the Reid bill, the purpose of the Independent Medical Advisory Board is to "reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending." For any fearmongers out there tempted to call an unelected body that recommends Medicare cuts a "Death Panel," let me be clear. According to page 1004, IMAB proposals "shall not include any recommendation to ration health care"—you know, just like the bill says there's no funding for abortion.

William Kristol:

Why did the authors of the legislation want to specially protect the Independent Medicare Advisory Board by making it difficult for future Congresses to legislate in that area? Because the heart of the bill is the attempt to get control of our health care permanently in the hands of federal bureaucrats, who would allegedly know better than doctors and patients what’s good for them, and who would cut access to care and the quality of care...

A GOP Senate staffer writes:

The bill changes some Senate rules to say we can't vote in a future Congress to repeal the IMAB (death panels)....

It also shows that this provision in particular is very important to Dems. They chose this section out of all others to give the highest possible protection against change or repeal showing how insatiable their desire is to allow Washington bureaucrats to control our lives.

And for these sorts of issues, it is critically important to force a vote on Christmas Eve before the word can get out about the true nature of the bill.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are not articulating a compelling strategic alternative to draw American citizens into their realm.

It's too bad we can't send everyone home from Washington, D.C. until the 2010 elections.



Re: Whitehouse

Justin Katz

Granted, Randal Edgar begins his report with equivalence between political parties, but it's still surprising to see Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's offensive remarks achieve front-page, above-the-fold status in the Providence Journal. If anything, however, that attention only makes me more wary of our all-too-natural reaction.

I've absolutely no doubt that Whitehouse derives enjoyment out of writing and delivering soaring partisan rhetoric about his vision of the most evil people of our day (conveniently, his political opposition), but in an environment in which Sen. Al Franken (D, MN) disallows Sen. Joe Lieberman (I, CT) a few moments to wrap up remarks, it seems to me unlikely that Whitehouse would be granted permission for diatribes unless there were political utility. It could be merely that the Democrats know that forcing through the sort of healthcare bill currently on the table is going to come at a political cost across the ideological spectrum, from far left to far right, so they want to toss some crumbs left and deflect some blame right.

Even if that's the only motivation for Whitehouse's division and offense, it's important to consider that he occupies a very safe seat, from the perspective of Washington, D.C.: He's not up for reelection until 2012, and he's from a relatively liberal state, in which stridency might buy him stronger support in some quarters. I suggest that we look at his remarks as an act, not just of his, but of the Democrat Party's. The critical questions, in that light, are:

  • From what are they trying to distract the public?
  • How can we avoid being distracted?

My fear is that the too-obvious answer to the first question — that they're simply throwing up sand in preparation for passing unpopular legislation not only in the dead of night, but in the dead of a silent night — hides something more sinister. Whatever the case, the various videos of outlandish comments from Sheldon are not going anywhere; they'll be on the Internet well into the 2012 election cycle, and they'll no doubt have picked up additions along the way. In the meantime, we should avoid turning our gaze so fixedly on our senator that we fail to be offended at the broader destruction of our way of government (not to mention of our economy) being perpetrated by his party.

By all means, begin planning for 2012, but don't let political stagecraft and the design of our electoral system become a shield against your ire, right now.


December 19, 2009


This Is About Self-Dealing, Not National Economic Health

Justin Katz

The Democrats are clearly in grabbing mode, and this sort of thing is not going to stop until we citizens of the United States make it stop:

President Barack Obama's Democratic allies in the House Wednesday muscled through a year-end plan to create jobs, mixing about $50 billion for public works projects with another almost $50 billion for cash-strapped state and local governments.

The unemployed would get continued benefits. But conspicuously absent from the plan were Obama's recently announced initiatives to give Social Security recipients $250 payments, a tax credit for small businesses that create jobs, and a program awarding tax credits to people who make their homes more energy-efficient.

This is all about the government and public bureaucracies preserving themselves at the expense of national economic health, rewarding special interests, and expanding dependencies.

It's worth noting, too, that although no Republicans voted for this particular legislation, there's little reason to believe that all, or even many, of them will allow small government principles to stand in the way of their own benefit should they return to power. The political class requires wholesale revision.


December 17, 2009


A Consensus of One-Third

Justin Katz

A running interest of mine is the way in which individuals pile conclusions upon impressions upon experiences upon predispositions in such a way as to live as if in totally different worlds. Last week's WRNI Political Roundtable piqued that interest with URI Political Science Professor Maureen Moakley's heavily couched compliments of President Obama. The following was among the topics that she raised to support the suggestion that he's doing pretty well, considering:

There's now an emerging consensus that, to some extent, the stimulus package has worked.

Perhaps she means "emerging" in the way that the high tide is evidence of an "emerging" flood, but from my reading it's difficult to comprehend how such a statement can be made. Even here in the heart of the Obama blues, only a dramatic minority count themselves among Moakley's "consensus":

Three-quarters of Rhode Islanders have a friend or family member who recently lost a job, and only a third believe the $787-billion federal stimulus package is doing much to help the economy, according to a new Brown University poll.

I wonder if other assumptions of Rhode Island's commentariate are similarly questionable, including even the depth of the state's progressivism. WRNI Political Analyst Scott MacKay lays the decline of RIGOP at the feet of social conservatives and later insists that:

If Anchor Rising and these right-wing blogs and these folks want to beat up Frank Caprio, that's only going to help him in the Democrat primary.

He then goes on to highlight the fact that Caprio's competition for the Democrat nod for governor, Patrick Lynch, was the first out of the gate for Obama during the last campaign season. The thread that MacKay misses, in my opinion, is that a majority of voters — including all "independents" and "unaffiliateds" — don't view these races through a lens of us versus them partisanship. Similarly, it is not the objective of Anchor Rising to help or to harm a particular candidate, but to make an argument for a particular way of looking at the world and solving its problems.

According to that view, civic and economic conservatism will not function — meaning that human society will not endure — unless the culture does some of the work that liberals would put in the hands of government. This relates to MacKay's conclusion in one of his radio monologues:

Rhode Island Republicans desperately need leaders to take them out of the tea party echo chamber, discuss the state's deep economic problems, and give the Democrats some sorely needed competition for assembly seats, but if Republicans keep fighting among themselves, that day will never come.

If conservatives back down, Republicans may, indeed, gain a seat or two, although I'd predict the opposite, but the short-term political calculation is irrelevant. Longstanding pragmatic support for "moderates" will lead just as surely to societal decay as full-on liberalism. The pace and the route may vary by degree, but the result is identical, and the community — starting locally, moving through the state, and ending at the federal level — must be persuaded of that fact.


December 14, 2009


When Taxes Aren't an Issue

Justin Katz

Mark Perry observes (with charts) a progressive trend in American taxation:

The Tax Foundation reported last week that more than 143 million individual income tax returns were filed in 2007, and 46.6 million of those returns had a zero or negative tax liability, setting a new record for the number of "non-payers." This group represented almost one out of every three tax returns filed in 2007 (32.6 percent, see chart above), and reflects tax filers whose exemptions, deductions, and credits wiped out any federal income taxes that would have been due. According to the Tax Foundation, every dollar withheld from the paychecks of the "non-payers" during the year was refunded, and in about half of the cases, substantial additional money was refunded to the tax filer. There were an additional 15 million people in 2007 who did not earn enough income to file a tax return, bringing the total number of Americans who paid no federal income taxes to more than 61 million, or 39 percent of the tax-eligible population (158 million including filers plus non-filers).

As Perry notes in the words of American Enterprise Institute Economist Alan Viard, increases in government spending likely mean less to people who don't think they pay for it. This one item is not a complete explanation, but we appear to be witnessing the realization of a risk that has been foreseen with democracy all along: the majority can simply vote itself money from the minority, disregarding or ignorant of the self-destructive nature of that practice.


December 13, 2009


A Government Version of Tithing

Justin Katz

Today's been a bit of catchup, for me, as a means of remaining productive despite an utter lack of motivation. But I just had to break my rainy-day malaise to note this odd phenomenon, during a recession (emphasis added):

In a surprisingly suspenseful vote, the Senate cleared a key parliamentary hurdle yesterday on a huge spending bill for almost half the federal government, a measure that increases funding for the agencies it covers by an average of 10 percent.

If America doesn't manage to begin cutting its government in the near future, we should focus our efforts on changing the country's name. That way we can still speak of things like "the American spirit" and "the American dream" with some degree of intellectual clarity.


December 11, 2009


Bush Was Better

Justin Katz

Now this is interesting:

Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama's declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they'd rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that's somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country's difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited.

There are a number of centrist-types who were rah-rah for Obama during the campaign from whom I haven't heard since the man began attempting to govern. In a sense, Obama's strategy was to hold up a picture of President Bush (not unlike the one that Glenn Reynolds posted in relation to the polling information) and told Americans that he would be the opposite of whatever they didn't like about his predecessor — left, right, whatever.

It was naked deception, but it worked. Too many right-of-center people didn't realize that Obama included "even more" among the qualifiers for "opposite."


November 29, 2009


The Conservative Eagle Has Two Wings

Justin Katz

Periodically, one picks up a hint from the libertarian quarters of the broader tea party movement that they see, in it, an opportunity to assert economic conservatism apart from social conservatism. As I noted while observing the size and diversity of the crowd at the marriage-vow-renewal ceremony hosted by the National Organization for Marriage - Rhode Island, I don't see that as a plausible political strategy. The point emerges, again, with this information from NOM's national head Maggie Gallagher:

Over in New York, the collapse of Dede Scozzafava is another big story. Scozzafava was handpicked to become the first openly pro-gay marriage Republican in a district where the vast majority of Republicans and independents (and even a big chunk of Democrats) oppose gay marriage.

A National Organization of Marriage poll of likely voters in New York's 23rd Congressional District revealed that fully 50 percent of her opponent's supporters said that Scozzafava's vote for gay marriage was a factor in their decision not to support her.

Granted, I watched that race only peripherally, and political horse-race commentary tends to focus on less, well, mushy subjects than social issues (which is to say it tends to be wonkish), but I hadn't seen the marriage issue mentioned as a factor in Doug Hoffman's out-of-nowhere wave. Obviously, Maggie has reason to emphasize her core issue, and the shorthand of "liberal v. conservative" still includes the social issues in most cases.

Still, it's worth reasserting that conservatism will fail if it doesn't apply its principles across the board. In conjunction with liberal morality, conservative economics only feed an aristocracy and modern conservative governance fails, but not before creating a seedy underclass.


November 22, 2009


Sorting out Exactly Who Appointed the (Now Borderline Criminal) Panel Who Made the (Apparently Execrable) Anti-Mammogram Recommendations

Monique Chartier

Gratifyingly, Democrats in Congress and the Obama Administration have reacted to this government panel's recommendation by setting land speed records distancing themselves from it.

But in view of the public outrage that ensued, a scapegoat had to be identified. Who appointed the members of this panel??

Brace yourself. Because, of course ...

It's George Bush's fault!

Yes, that threadbare excuse hilariously rears its hoary head yet again, this time, almost one year into the administration of a new president. [H/T NewsBuster's Mike Bates.]

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Wednesday on CNN's Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer:

This panel was appointed by the prior administration, by former President George Bush, and given the charge to routinely look at a whole host of services ...

And clearly reading from the same script, Senator Majority Whip Dick Durbin piped in. From Politico:

“The recommendation by this medical panel has been rejected by virtually everyone, including the current administration,” Durbin said. “They were appointed by President Bush.”

Yeah, good times.

Slight glitch, people. The New York Times's Gina Kolata, after some good, old-fashioned research, reports that the panel is apolitical and deliberately so. Further, panel members

said they never thought of themselves as being political appointees, much less being Bush appointees.

In fact, NewsBuster's Mike Bates, with more good, old-fashioned research, has determined that the person who had ultimate say in the current composition of the panel, Dr. Carolyn M. Clancy, is a Democrat. [Oh, the horror ...]

But setting aside, as Durbin and Sebelius did, the apolitical nature of this panel, I would still disagree with their conclusion. My own view is that the Office of the Presidency of the United States is responsible to act on and keep track of an incredible number of matters, large (mostly) and small. Accordingly, it is natural, indeed, necessary, for the occupant of that office to delegate some of those responsibilities, including the appointment of government health panels.

If, however, partisans ducking for cover insist on taking the slant that the President of the United States is personally responsible for the composition of this panel and for its odious recommendations, wouldn't it be far more accurate to point out that it has been eleven months since President Obama took office and, therefore, how much can he truly claim to care about women's health issues if he has not taken the time to appoint the right people to such a panel?

Again, this is not how I see it and neither do a lot of people, I would venture to guess. But this "re-slanting" would be a perfect understandable reaction to the fatuous attempt to blame an official who has been out of office for almost a year. [Side note: Dick Durbin is an elected official so presumably cannot be bothered to do minimal fact checking when deflecting political fallout. But isn't it slightly alarming that the head of Health and Human Services doesn't understand the nature and composition mechanism of one of the panels under her purview?]

More to the point, if the Democrat Party cannot determine with any accuracy who is responsible for a particular misstep, especially when it is committed by one of their own, they need to at least come up with a fresher blame target. The credibility shelf life of "It's Bush's fault!" having expired long ago, it is now not so much an excuse as a punch line.

... or, in keeping with the underlying theme, don't.


November 19, 2009


Patrick Unleashed!

Justin Katz

Rep. Patrick Kennedy gives the impression of a politician sprinting to catch a departing train. Take as evidence of the impression the fact that Patrick Crowley loves this clip of Kennedy in action while filling his seat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee:

No constituents to the right of the aforementioned progressive union extremist should take it as given that Representative Kennedy actually represents them in any real sense. He's now in Congress to prove his Liberal Cub bona fides and play rock star to the far left.

He's also proving that he doesn't know what the word "alien" means. His staff should buy him a dictionary... or show him that Sting video.

Details of the above session may be found here.


November 17, 2009


Obama Stimulus Helps RI's Invisible Districts

Marc Comtois

Thanks to President Obama's stimulus package, RI's 86th Congressional District has netted $10.2 million in aid and has had 58 jobs created (or saved)! The district, which encompasses the Williams and Franklin households in Ashaway, was given funds based on a proposal to open a low footprint, "green" factory for the manufacture of 100% eco-friendly air lined containers. This product--invisible and lightweight--has gained the attention of the aspiration and exhalation industries.

86th District Congresswoman Envy Sibal Williams was thankful for the stimulus help to her district. In a written statement, she explained that, "...over the last two years, the snipe-flu has raged through our domestic snipe farming operation. While some farmers have successfully transitioned to snipe hunting, others were having a tough go....These green jobs will more than make up for those lost."

Additionally, the 5th Congressional District saw $1.3 million in stimulus money. The district, sandwiched between the Jones and Smith houses on Conimicut point, will use the money to develop an entertainment complex--including bleachers and a concession stand--for the purpose of viewing the submarine races that are a regular, nightly attraction.

Unfortunately, the 00th Congressional District, located on the 2nd floor of a tri-decker in Central Falls, reported that they have received no stimulus aid while district(s) 4 and 6 through 85 have not responded to our inquiries.

In other news, the population in Rhode Island is booming...



Counting Every Ballot

Justin Katz

The one straw at which Democrats and progressives could grasp after the election was the 23rd Congressional district in New York. And grasp it, they did. "Tea Party Over?" asked a Village Voice blogger. Matt Jerzyk declared it a "HUGE" victory for the Democrats that third-party, last-minute candidate Doug Hoffman had only come within a few percentage points of winning. Even in our own comment section, Rhody called the loss a "slap" against the tea party movement corresponding to one against the president.

Which all makes this development rather interesting:

Conservative Doug Hoffman conceded the race in the 23rd Congressional District last week after receiving two pieces of grim news for his campaign: He was down 5,335 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted on election night, and he had barely won his stronghold in Oswego County.

As it turns out, neither was true. ...

Now a recanvassing in the 11-county district shows that Owens' lead has narrowed to 3,026 votes over Hoffman, 66,698 to 63,672, according to the latest unofficial results from the state Board of Elections.

In Oswego County, where Hoffman was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, inspectors found Hoffman actually won by 1,748 votes — 12,748 to 11,000.

Sure Owens was quickly sworn in and helped to move the healthcare atrocity through the House, but if he turns out to have lost, he'll be removed. At any rate, even if Hoffman doesn't receive the two-thirds of the remaining votes that he'll need to actually win the race, it's ludicrous to describe his near victory as a rebuke to his supporters.


November 14, 2009


So is He Claiming to be Not Disconnected?

Monique Chartier

Justin references a comment by Senator Whitehouse.

To finish up, Whitehouse spoke about the apparent disconnect from reality that is exhibited by the Republican Party, whether it be about health care reform, or the climate bill, or same-sex marriage.

On all of these issues, Senator Whitehouse has indicated that he will vote "yea" if/when the corresponding bill arrives at the Senate.

Yet, less than a majority of Americans support health care reform [Rasmussen], only 35% support the cap and trade bill that passed the US House [Rasmussen] and 39% favor same sex marriage [CNN].

Just because the question is somewhat obvious does not diminish the importance of asking it. Does Senator Whitehouse purport to be "connected" to the American people with his contrary stances on these issues? (Defenders of the senator who may wish to pirouette away from the nub of the question are reminded in advance that the standard in this case has been established by the senator and is, paraphrasing, connectedness to the American people, not principle or a perception of what is best for the country.)


November 4, 2009


Grow up

Donald B. Hawthorne

Real men don't whine and make excuses.

And they don't dither, either.

ADDENDUM #1:

My first comment in the Comments section:

Dithering on Afghanistan while American soldiers die.

Meeting multiple times with Andy Stern of SEIU while not having time to decide on Afghanistan.

Calling Afghanistan the important war in March before it wasn't the important war in October. The man simply can't say the word "victory," let alone "victory" and "America" in the same paragraph.

Talking, talking, talking to Iran without conditions while being silent as Iranian tyrants arrest, torture and kill freedom-loving dissidents. And then continuing to talk when Iran thumbs their nose at us about their nuclear program.

Chairing the UN for a day and failing to disclose the existence of another Iranian nuclear facility, a clear violation of those meaningless/toothless UN resolutions. Forcing French president to drop any reference to it from his UN speech.

Refuses to meet with the Dalai Lama because relationship with Communist Chinese cannot be sacrificed.

Abandoning our allies in Eastern Europe while coddling Russia as they do war games threatening Eastern Europe.

Treating our historic friends, the Brits, with disrespect.

Refusing to participate in celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling.

Completely silent on anything to do with human rights and freedom while coddling tyrants.

Bowing to Saudi kings.

Pressuring Israel but not the Palestineans.

Backslapping and smiling broadly with tyrant Hugo Chavez.

Listening passively to 50-minute anti-American rants by Daniel Ortega.

Bullying Honduras democracy to reinstate Chavez acolyte who was violating constitution.

Contrary to CW, GW Bush had more effective relationships with various countries than Obama has. Obama is unable to convince anybody of anything anywhere, including actions on Iran and Afghanistan.

Going on world-wide apology tour about America while failing to speak up for our national self-interest.

Passing roughly $800 billion stimulus package that blows up deficit without positively impacting economy. Did I mention nobody read the bill before it was passed?

Running budget deficits that make that spendthrift GW Bush look like a tightwad. See here.

Trying to socialize medicine in America, which would blow up deficit even further and take away freedom.

Trying to pass cap-and-trade energy tax that would adversely impact economic growth and family economics.

Taking over industries instead of letting the marketplace sort it out, losing billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. Dictating outcomes for Chrysler bondholders, unilaterally declaring existing legal contracts don't have any standing.

Demonizing news organizations who don't toe the Obama party line, including trying to exclude them from interviews with Administration officials. In other words, arguing against free speech based on ideological differences.

Having endless number of czars who are effectively an unaccountable shadow Cabinet, operating without Congressional oversight or transparency. Telling Congress there will be no testifying by czars in front of Congress.

Having czars dictate pay for private companies.

Filling his administration with self-proclaimed Marxists and admirers of Mao.

Aligning self with ACORN-types, who commit voter fraud, etc.

Hey, that's the Obama track record. Who needs any more time? He is a wimp like Jimmy Carter on international relations but without any moral compass on freedom and human rights. He is a budget-busting spendthrift who is trying to socialize the American economy. His banana republic deficit levels are driving the international community to abandon the dollar as the preferred reserve currency, something that threatens to reduce our standard of living over time. He is allergic to the concepts of freedom, liberty and American exceptionalism, surrounding himself with people akin to long-time friends like Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers. And he doesn't know history.

In summary, running as a (faux) moderate in 2008 and governing from the far left in 2009. He most certainly has a track record already and it is not positive on any dimension. All while golfing more in 9 months than GW Bush did in 2 years and 10 months.

Okay, the man has a great sounding voice and can read off of a Teleprompter.

And, I repeat, does he ever whine and blame others. Real men and women don't do that. Successful leaders surely don't.

My second comment in the Comments section:

How fascinating to read many of the responses.

Few seem to want to talk about the substantive issue: Obama manufacturers excuses for his non-performance. And he is, I believe, the first US President to go overseas and publicly trash his predecessor. Call it what you want. I call it wimpy, lacking in courage, lacking in leadership, lacking in a moral foundation. You can call it whatever you like but, regardless, it is not what strong, principled men or leaders do.

And talk about thin-skinned! Politics is a contact sport so why is everyone aghast when Obama is criticized. Or feeling a need to twist any criticism into a suggestion of racism.

So, here is the other call out - Is criticizing Obama off limits because he is a black man? Sure seems that way. Which is itself a racist concept and worthy of challenge.

In a nutshell, the other substantive point is that Obama is a socialist who doesn't believe in the core principles of America. And he is a foreign policy wimp who dithers without any moral direction. My earlier comment to this post offers the particulars of an indictment.

By way of contrast with the overly sensitive types, some of us dish it hard in all directions, writing before the 2008 election that McCain wasn't presidential timber; that is summarized here. Some of us said the Republicans should lose majority control of the House in 2006 and spend some time in the political wilderness so they could rediscover principles. Some of us sat out the 2006 RI US Senate race because of a belief that neither of the candidates deserved support. Some of us trashed GW Bush and the Republican Congress for their spendthrift domestic policies. Some of us supported and raised money for a black US Senate candidate back in 1992 and have written on this blog site about the moral contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr.

So some of us are pounding Obama because we don't like socialist domestic policies that take away our freedom, spineless/unprincipled foreign policies that do not promote American interests - all from someone whose actions regularly suggest a lack of commitment to liberty.



Looks Like a Turnaround

Justin Katz

We'll hear all sorts of contradictory analyses, in the days to come, among which will be assurances that there are no broad conclusions to be drawn, but key votes up and down the East Coast, yesterday, certainly don't disprove the notion of a turnaround toward our nation's Republican, conservative strain:

  • Republican Chris Christie took the New Jersey governor seat from Democrat Jon Corzine.
  • Republican Bob McDonnell took the Virginia governor seat from Democrat Creigh Deeds.
  • Democrat Bill Owens narrowly won a New York Congressional District race, with 49% of the vote, against Conservative Doug Hoffman's 46% and RINO Dierdre Scozzafava's 6%. Had the Republicans not gone with the "Republican who can win" and attacked the Conservative, it isn't unreasonable to suggest that they would have won that race, too.
  • Voters in Maine nullified the legislature's imposition of same-sex marriage, for the state, making it the 31st of 31 states in which the people have affirmed the traditional definition of marriage, regardless of the imperious maneuverings of judges and votes bought by ultrarich left-wing activists.

Actually, looking at that last bullet point, it mightn't be accurate to characterize the national results as "a turnaround." After all, President Obama supported traditional marriage, as a candidate, and ran overall as a centrist, even a fiscal conservative in some fevered minds. If there's a lesson in this for the president, it's probably that the people of the United States of America have figured out that he lied.


November 2, 2009


Scozzafava's Parting Shot Inadvertently Revealing

Monique Chartier

Whatever happens in New York's District 23 election tomorrow, Dede Scozzafava's endorsement of her Democrat (former) rival will only confirm the reservations

The Republican nominee, State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, on Sunday endorsed the Democrat in the race, Bill Owens, after coaxing from the White House.

of her critics about her Republican/conservative credentials, especially as she made the cross party endorsement at the urging of President Obama.

After this little turn of events, even those of us who would probably not be considered very conservative now wonder what the president could have talked her into had she stayed in the race and won the Congressional seat. Cap and Trade? A second stimulus package? Ever more bailouts and pork-laden budgets? One's wallet cringes at the thought.

Political vocabulary bonus courtesy Mark Steyn: DIABLO - "Democrat In All But Label Only"


October 30, 2009


Noonan Now and Then

Justin Katz

To a post on Peggy Noonan's latest column, Glenn Reynolds appends a reader's observation that Ms. Noonan should take some responsibility for helping her man, Mr. Obama, gain office. Indeed, a contrast of Noonan a year ago and now is instructive. October 30, 2008:

The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:

He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.

October 30, 2009:

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren't they worried about the impact of what they're doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they've never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don't have the habit of worry. They talk about their "concerns"—they're big on that word. But they're not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa's lap.

They don't feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—"strongest nation in the world," "indispensable nation," "unipolar power," "highest standard of living"—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

Or maybe they don't think America should be so strong — so exceptional. They believe that they should be strong and exceptional, of course, in the mold of their icon — the steady he of guts and gifts — and that they should be above responsibility for their corruption and excesses. And maybe Ms. Noonan should pause before calling them "they."

Last year, Noonan reveled in the symbolism of Obama's primary victory in Alabama, as we all should, as an isolated instance of racial progress outside of broader context. But it's not divorced from the context of all of the rest of history — which, pace the liberal arts academics, doesn't revolve around the American black-white divide — and symbolism only goes so far for the bright and serious people for whom Noonan pines.



Who's Keener on Current Events?

Marc Comtois

The pro-Republican results of the Pew Research Poll, "What Does the Public Know?," (h/t) has led to some "rah rah" chatter on the right side of the blogosphere, partly inspired because the MSM isn't covering the results the same as they did previous polls showing opposite results. True enough, self-identified Republicans performed better than Democrats. Here's the snapshot:

What I'd like to point out, though, is that INDEPENDENTS also did better on most questions than DEMOCRATS. I wonder if this is a reflection of the Democrats recent political success. Have a portion of the Democratic voting electorate "checked out" from current events in the belief that "their guys/gals" will handle it? Does this reflect a hangover effect amongst the younger-skewing Democratic co-hort? More:

Overall, Americans ages 50 and older answered an average of 5.8 questions correctly, while those younger than age 30 answered an average of just four questions. College graduates got the highest scores among all of the groups analyzed (7.1 correct answers), while those with some college education averaged 5.3 correct answers and those with a high school education or less got 4.2 right.

Republicans and independents each averaged 5.7 correct answers, compared with five correct among Democrats. Men correctly answered an average of 5.9 of the 12 items; women answered an average of 4.7.

So, reading these results (warning: potential non-PC content!!!) it looks like that, on average, the most knowledgeable person is a 50+ year old Republican or independent man with a college education. The least knowledgeable is an under-30, Democratic woman with a high school education (or less). That is, generally speaking, of course!!!


October 28, 2009


Societies We Can Imagine

Justin Katz

Thomas Sowell pauses for a moment of disbelief at the conversation in America:

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another "czar" would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers-- that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called "experts" deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

There's a parallel in Rhode Island. You know, it's not that difficult to imagine a reality in which we wouldn't be discussing whether or not prostitution will finally be made illegal and binding arbitration for teachers contracts might make a midnight appearance on the State House floor, but rather whether the tax code would be restructured to improve the business environment of the state and legislators would be explicitly barred from selling their votes.

One can dream on a rainy autumn day...


October 19, 2009


The Sweet Irony of Bumper Stickers

Justin Katz

Driving into Providence for a photo shoot in the rain, yesterday, I parked next to the statehouse. Through the streaks in my windshield, when I climbed back into the van, I spotted this antiquated bumper sticker:

PA180305.JPG

The anti-Bush and anti-Republican stickers that also scarred the vehicle confirmed which regime the driver intended, but for a moment, I had to chuckle.


October 16, 2009


Just like a banana republic

Donald B. Hawthorne

Power Line:

Today the Obama administration's "pay czar" demanded that Ken Lewis, Chairman of the Board of Bank of America, work for free. The "czar," Kenneth Feinberg, pressured Lewis not only to forgo all remaining compensation for 2009, but to repay the $1 million he has already received this year. Lewis acquiesced, saying that "he felt it was not in the best interest of Bank of America for him to get involved in a dispute with the paymaster." I'm sure he was right about that.

Response to this outrage has been surprisingly muted. In my view, it is hard to imagine anything more un-American than a "pay czar" empowered to order businessmen to work for free.

The main point here is not sympathy for Mr. Lewis, although I am, in fact, sympathetic to him. He is about to retire and will receive a substantial retirement package--only, perhaps, because the pay czar lacked jurisdiction to negate it. But the idea of empowering the federal government to dictate businessmen's compensation based on political favoritism is absolutely chilling.

This episode illustrates the problem perfectly. Lewis took on the federal government by testifying that Fed chief Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, a Democrat who was then Secretary of the Treasury, bullied him into committing what was, in effect, an egregious violation of the securities laws. Bank of America was due to close on its purchase of Merrill Lynch, and Lewis knew that Merrill's value was plummeting. Lewis testified under oath that Paulson and Bernanke threatened to fire the entire management and board of Bank of America, including Lewis, if Lewis backed out of the Merrill deal or communicated to the bank's shareholders what a bad deal the purchase had become.

So, according to Lewis, the federal government forced him to violate his duty to his shareholders in order to advance the government's objectives. The feds were unhappy with Lewis's blowing the whistle on their actions, which I believe would have been criminal if carried out by private citizens. Bernanke, at least, denied Lewis's version of events.

So Lewis took on the feds, and now he's paying the price. The Obama administration has taken away his entire salary for 2009. Political payback, or just a coincidence? In a banana republic, you never know.

Where is the outrage from those who love liberty? In a banana republic, your "freedom" only lasts as long as you are favored by those in power. Some definition of freedom; it is certainly not the historic definition in America.



Krauthammer on the problem with Obama's foreign policy

Donald B. Hawthorne

Nobody says it like Charles Krauthammer does in Debacle in Moscow: Obama’s foreign policy is amateurishness, wrapped in naïveté, inside credulity:

About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award “premature,” as if the brilliance of Obama’s foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged.

To believe this, you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International) or an indiscriminate imbiber of White House talking points. After all, this was precisely the spin on the president’s various apology tours through Europe and the Middle East: National self-denigration — excuse me, outreach and understanding — is not meant to yield immediate results; it simply plants the seeds of good feeling from which foreign-policy successes shall come.

Chauncey Gardiner could not have said it better...

Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and “reset” buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever, or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naïveté, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

String of foreign policy posts can be found here.

ADDENDUM #1:

Meanwhile, Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director, is on video here saying that Mao, a tyrant who killed tens of millions of people, is one of her heroes.

In other words, we have an administration that not only doesn't believe in American exceptionalism and conducts a foreign policy based on denigrating America's interests but has key staffers who consider a murderous communist thug as their hero.

Said another way:

...Later in Beck’s show (before he started crying…again) he suggested that Dunn may as well have cited Hitler as one of her favorite political philosophers. Usually Beck’s histrionics turn me off, but he’s got a point with that. How can any high-level American political official seriously cite Mao as a favorite political philosopher and not be driven from office immediate with jeers and derision?

Mao was a mass murder. A tyrant and a dictator whose teachings amount to a cruel ideology that murdered tens of millions and oppressed hundreds of millions more.

Obama needs to explain to us why someone like Dunn is serving in his administration.

Does anyone find this troubling?

ADDENDUM #2:

Andy McCarthy has more, responding to Hans von Spakovsky. McCarthy notes the presence of other communists in the Obama administration.

Openly unapologetic communists. And many people yawn out of disinterest.


October 14, 2009


2009 Nobel Prize in Economics

Donald B. Hawthorne

Cafe Hayek on More on the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics. More here.

Hey, these awardees actually did something to earn their Nobels! LOL.

Valuable reading to be found in the links.

ADDENDUM #1:

David Boaz of the Cato Institute on What is Regulation?


October 13, 2009


October 9, 2009


Obama's Agenda and the Nobel Peace Prize

Donald B. Hawthorne

Thoughts on the strategic issues and political agenda driven by Obama's world view:

Power Line: Paul Rahe on Obama's Agenda

Charles Krauthammer on Decline is a choice

Peter Wehner links the two concepts of Obama's agenda and his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize. More thoughts from Jonathan Tobin, Jennifer Rubin and the NR editors.

Bill Whittle reminds us of the American exceptionalism Barack Obama doesn't believe in.

More valuable thoughts from Andy McCarthy and Peter Kirsanow. Human rights groups are skeptical as are certain liberal opinion leaders.

Previous AR foreign policy posts here, here, here, here, and here.

reason.TV ridicules the award while Obama finally says something many people can agree with.

Meanwhile, let your thoughts and prayers be with the people who were nominated for the Peace Prize but lacked the celebrity status of Obama or Gore. It is truly these people who are making valiant efforts to bring peace to the world.

ADDENDUM #1:

As a reminder, more thoughts on the alternative view of American exceptionalism here: Happy Birthday, America! and William Allen: George Washington as America's First Progressive.

More on who awarded the Nobel to Obama.

Victor Davis Hanson adds his thoughts on Lessons from Oslo and Mark Steyn asks Who Really Won? In diminishing American power abroad, Obama and the U.S. choose decline.

ADDENDUM #2:

SNL on Nobel Peace Prize.

ADDENDUM #3:

Just One Minute on Peggy Noonan wants to write Obama's Nobel Speech.

Jennifer Rubin on America’s Not Big Enough for Him.

ADDENDUM #4:

It could have been so different and influenced the future for the better.

ADDENDUM #5:

Neville Chamberlain would, no doubt, approve of Obama's latest with Russia. How does this advance the cause of peace or America's interests?


October 8, 2009


Republican Northeast Conference, Day 2 Afternoon, Video: Jim McLaughlin and Curt Anderson

Justin Katz

Continuing with Saturday afternoon's presentations, pollster and campaign strategist Jim McLaughlin and campaign strategist and media advisor Curt Anderson took the stage. Of particular interest is the exchange about tea party goers between RI candidate for attorney general Erik Wallin (off camera) and Mr. Anderson, which got a little testy (starting around minute seven of clip 10).

Continue reading "Republican Northeast Conference, Day 2 Afternoon, Video: Jim McLaughlin and Curt Anderson"


Republican Northeast Conference, Day 2 Afternoon, Video: Tony Blankley

Justin Katz

Columnist, commentator, and long-time Republican figure Tony Blankley spoke during the lunch hour on Saturday. (Full speech in the extended entry.)

Continue reading "Republican Northeast Conference, Day 2 Afternoon, Video: Tony Blankley"

October 7, 2009


October 6, 2009


More of the Same from Kennedy

Justin Katz

Hiding behind his quaking fear of "violent rhetoric," Congressman Patrick Kennedy staged a comfy tele-town hall meeting:

Most of the participants — each of whom had their questions screened ahead of time by Kennedy staffers — appeared sympathetic toward changes to the nation's health-care system. ...

Tiverton resident Teresa Rudd said she remained on the line for much of the hour to ask Kennedy about how the proposals now in play treat the abortion issue. She didn't get the chance to ask.

"It didn't seem like there was any opposition," Rudd said afterward. "It seemed like one big commercial for health-care reform."

However much outrage Kennedy may express on behalf of the powerless rabble, it's clear by his actions that he doesn't hold his constituents in very high regard.


October 4, 2009


Republican Northeast Conference, Day 2, Video: Thaddeus McCotter

Justin Katz

He surely benefited from contrast with our Congressional delegation, here in Rhode Island, and perhaps his dry mid-country humor and his intellectual phrasing appeals uniquely to me, but the Q&A speech with Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R, MI) was probably the highlight of the conference, from my perspective.

Continue reading "Republican Northeast Conference, Day 2, Video: Thaddeus McCotter"

September 26, 2009


Violence and Fear in Healthcare

Justin Katz

Steve Peoples' article about this morning's event focuses on Kennedy's lamentation that heated protests may produce violence — of which (he stated) his family has seen too much. There's an interesting juxtaposition if we play Peoples backwards, as it were (emphasis added):

"Unfortunately, these town hall meetings have been hijacked by these Tea Party folks and extremists who really take away from the honest dialogue on the facts of the debate and end up seeing this issue devolve into fear mongering and the peddling of misconceptions," [Kennedy] said, referring again to the sign that referenced his father's death.

But earlier:

Tsiongas said that those who depend on the current health-care system are right to be afraid.

"What they should be afraid of is that we do nothing," he said, "because if we do nothing we can no longer be able to afford this health-care delivery system as it stands."

I guess fear mongering is only a bad thing when conservatives and Republicans do it.


September 20, 2009


The Distressing Versus the Frightening

Justin Katz

The rapid transformation of this country into a European-style socialist democracy is certainly distressing. American life is on its way to becoming more difficult and less free, less innovative — in a word, less American. But it is the combination of that atrophy with the existence of nations seeking to duplicate the international accomplishment of the United States (a global sphere of influence, if you will) without adhering to its methods.

More specifically, it is the combination of a strong-handed government at home with a weak-kneed government on the international scene:

The U.S. Defense Secretary is already on record as opposing an Israeli strike. If it happens, every thug state around the globe will understand the subtext — that, aside from a tiny strip of land on the east bank of the Jordan, every other advanced society on earth is content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.

Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-Il wouldn't really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, they wouldn't really do anything with them, would they? Okay, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of "Eastern" seems to stretch ever farther west, but he's not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c'mon . . .


September 19, 2009


Jon Stewart's Take on the Expose of ACORN

Monique Chartier

Courtesy Comedy Central's Daily Show. [H/T NewsBusters.]

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Audacity of Hos
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes
Political HumorHealthcare Protests



Curbing Somebody's Enthusiasm: Some Facts to Reassure Speaker Pelosi

Monique Chartier

Once again, instead of a substantive discussion about policies, the focus is on feelings - this time, fear.

"I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made," Pelosi said Thursday. Some of the people hearing the message "are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume," she said.

Could you be more specific?

Pelosi's office did not immediately respond to a request from the Associated Press for examples of contemporary statements that reminded the speaker of the rhetoric of 1970s San Francisco.

No specifics on the rhetoric front, huh? Well, on the violence front, the Weekly Standard's Mary Katharine Ham has some data that might interest you, Madam Speaker.

That's the full list of documented violence from the August meetings. In more than 400 events: one slap, one shove, three punches, two signs grabbed, one self-inflicted vandalism incident by a liberal, one unsolved vandalism incident, and one serious assault. Despite the left's insistence on the essentially barbaric nature of Obamacare critics, the video, photographic, and police report evidence is fairly clear in showing that 7 of the 10 incidents were perpetrated by Obama supporters and union members on Obama critics.

Now, see how much better it is to deal in facts rather than wallow in emotion? All of that worrying for naught.



Ignoring the Lesson Plan

Justin Katz

One of the topics that came up on last night's Violent Roundtable was the failure of mainstream commentators to leaven their mockery of conservative concern about President Obama's in-school presentation with an acknowledgment of the objectionable suggested lesson plan that stoked the ire in the first place. Host Matt Allen suggested that bias leads such commentators to accept administration assurances that they've taken care of that aspect and then — poof — forget about it altogether. That's certainly plausible, given the likelihood that many MSMers didn't even know about the dispute until alternative-media heat and constituent reaction had brought the story to a head.

Particularly disappointing was the Providence Journal editorial on the matter (no longer online), published well after the event in question. Space is understandably short in such pieces, but by any journalistic standard with even mild pretensions to critical objectivity, the lesson plan should have been included in the summary of the controversy. Consequently, the reader can't help but feel that the editors' parting line is less a conclusion than a purpose:

The flap over the president's speech diminished his critics, while enhancing his own status as a role model.

An editorial, whether right or wrong in its expressed opinion, should represent the collected wisdom of the newspaper in which it appears — or at least of the guardians of its opinion pages. That it couldn't accurately summarize the sides in a national story like this suggests that it is content to enhance the status of a preferred politician at the expense of its own.


September 18, 2009


The Obama MO?

Justin Katz

With the economy at best slowing its wobble (and reason to be wary even about that), the Obama administration has added requirements for "better gas mileage for cars and trucks and the first-ever rules on vehicle greenhouse gas emissions" to its list of desired drags thereon. Note this now-familiar feature:

The proposal will cover vehicle model years 2012 through 2016, allowing auto companies to comply at once with all federal requirements as well as standards pushed by California and about a dozen other states.

Now, I'm sure there are a whole lot of arguments that one could put forward, with respect to time for such things as research and marketing plans, but a growing fist of expensive programs seem slated to swing by during the millennium's teens — after the next presidential election.

I'd also highlight this:

The administration estimated the requirements would cost up to $1,300 per new vehicle by 2016. It would take just three years to pay off that investment, the government estimates, and the standards would save owners more than $3,000 over the life of their vehicle through better gas mileage.

Except for the fact that gas will increase in price as it adjusts for the lower demand...


September 17, 2009


House joins Senate in De-Funding ACORN

Marc Comtois

The U.S. House of Representatives has joined the Senate in overwhelmingly voting to defund ACORN after recent voter fraud allegations and a grassroots undercover investigation revealed a willingness by ACORN operatives in various states to encourage breaking U.S. law. This follows a decision by the Census Bureau to bar ACORN from assisting in the 2010 Census. Yesterday, ACORN decided to shut down operations across the country to conduct an internal review.

Rhode Island Representatives Patrick Kennedy and Jim Langevin voted FOR the de-funding, joining their Senate colleague Jack Reed in voicing their displeasure with the progressive, grass-roots organization. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was the only member of the Rhode Island delegation to vote against de-funding ACORN.


September 14, 2009


Wherefore ACORN?

Monique Chartier

A third ACORN office has been videotaped giving tax evasion and federal mortgage application tips to a couple who purported to be establishing a brothel for underage girls smuggled into the country.

This follows upon the exposure in 2008 of multi-state, multi-year voter registration fraud.

The Brooklyn District Attorney has opened an investigation into the organization.

The Census Bureau has had second thoughts about ACORN's involvement in the 2010 census.

All of this undue attention to the organization has served to highlight a fact that I, at least, was previously unaware of: ACORN has been the recipient of federal tax dollars and could receive a ton more from stimulus funds.

The question is, why?

Let's stipulate in its entirety the case for the defense: all of the above unethical and illegal activities were isolated incidents carried out by rogue affilates and do not in any way reflect the vast majority of ACORN staffers and activities.

As I was writing this post, TomW forwarded me the breaking news that the Senate had just voted 83-7 (with the junior senator from Rhode Island amoung the seven voting "nay") to withhold federal funds from ACORN. But this was done on the basis of bad behavior. ACORN may well "rehabilitate" itself as an organization and once again be deemed fit to receive federal funds.

Under what philosphy of good government should it do so? Is there any private organization to which federal tax dollars should be handed out? If yes, shouldn't the criteria for doing so be quite extensive and exacting, far more than the perfectly nice and perfectly vague goal of "social and economic justice"?


September 12, 2009


Succinctly summarizing today's conflict

Donald B. Hawthorne

Mike Pence says it well:

I am Mike Pence. I am from Indiana, and it is an honor to welcome the largest gathering of conservatives in American history to your nation's capitol.

There are some politicians who think of you people as astroturf. Un-American. I've got to be honest with you, after nine years of fighting runaway spending here on this hill, you people look like the cavalry to me.

We stand together at a historic moment in the life of the conservative movement and in the life of this great country. The coming weeks and months may well set the course for this nation for a generation. How we as conservatives respond to these challenges, could determine whether America retains her place in the world as a beacon of freedom or whether we slip into the abyss that has swallowed much of Europe in an avalanche of socialism.

While some are prepared to write the obituary on capitalism and the conservative movement, I believe we are on the verge of a great American awakening. And it will begin here and begin now and begin with you.

This Administration and this Congress are getting a badly needed history lesson, starting with just what our founders meant by 'consent of the governed.' If silence is consent, it is now revoked.

We the people, do not consent to runaway federal spending. We the people, do not consent to the notion that we can borrow and spend and bail our way back to a growing America. And we the people, do not consent to government-run insurance that will cause millions of Americans to lose the insurance they have, and that will lead us to a government takeover of health care in this nation.

This week, the president came to this hill and he gave one more speech about the same bad plan. Mr. President, America doesn't want another speech, we want another health care plan that is built on freedom.

And we the people, do not consent to Members of Congress passing thousand-page bills without anybody ever reading them. Members of Congress should be required to read ever major bill that Congress adopts. I've got to be honest with you, I think Members of Congress should read major bills, but I'd be just as happy if some of them read this just a little more often - the Constitution of the United States.

You know, there is a lot of good stuff in there and it reminds us that we are a nation led by the people, and not the elites and the bureaucrats and the politicians. It reminds us that the powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states or to the people.

And nowhere in our Constitution can you find the word 'czar.' It is time Washington, D.C. became a No Czar Zone.

The American people are not happy. But it is not just about dollars and cents. It is about who we are as a nation.

As Ronald Reagan said in 1964, it's about whether 'we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.' My money is on the American people. My money is on freedom. My money is on the future.

This great national Capitol is filled with memorials to freedom's heroes. Americans whose faces are carved in bronze, whose names adorn monuments, and just across that river, lie the remains of Americans who paid freedom's price so we could gather here today. In their time, they did freedom's work as citizens and patriots. Now it's our turn.

Let us do as those great Americans we remember in this city have done before: let us stand and fight for freedom. And if we hold the banner of freedom high, I believe with all my heart that the good and great people of this country will rally to our cause, we will take this Congress back in 2010 and we will take this Country back in 2012, so help us God.


September 9, 2009


One simple question and then some reflections

Donald B. Hawthorne

In advance of President Obama's speech tonight about healthcare, I have one simple question -

If a government-run option is such a good idea for all of the rest of us, why do Obama and the Congress refuse to sign up for it themselves?

On a related note, Ponnuru discusses the Left's disregard for truth.

Glenn Reynolds links to Martin Feldstein and adds his own comments:

"The higher taxes, debt payments and interest rates needed to pay for health reform mean lower living standards." But lower living standards for you are a small price to pay in exchange for more power for the political class — whose living standards won’t be going down at all...

All of which is what the American people have instinctively figured out. Just like we have throughout history.

Camille Paglia, an Obama supporter, writes about the divide:

...Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights...

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

How has "liberty" become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals?...I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party — but I must be living in the nostalgic past...

Meanwhile, all of these developments have occurred while the Republican party has been comatose on policy ideas.


September 8, 2009


Quick Clarity on Health Care Debate

Marc Comtois

Congress is back after a 40 day recess. A lot has happened--namely, bi-partisan "comprehensive health care reform" looks dead--but there will be much discussion over the next few weeks. The Washington Post (h/t) oofers a summary and preview, including this helpful bit from Republican Congressman Mike Pence:

House Republicans, who held hundreds of their own town hall meetings that drew more than 100,000 voters, according to preliminary estimates, viewed the break as a galvanizing moment for opposition to the Democratic legislation. "I heard people saying, 'Look, we need health-care reform. We need to do something to lower the cost of health insurance for families and small businesses and lower the cost of health care,' " said Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.), the third-ranking GOP leader. "But I also heard people say that they don't want a government-run plan that is going to lead to a government takeover of health care."
It's an important point. For all the sturm und drang we've seen at the town hall meetings, what was missing was an explanation that those on all sides (not "both", there are more than two options out there) of the issue think something needs to be done.



President's Address to School Kids

Marc Comtois

As promised, the White House has released the prepared text of President Obama's speech to school children today. Here's the theme:

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.
I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

More excerpts after the jump. Content wise, there are a few things here and there that I didn't like (a reference to AIDS--the President needs to remember his audience, here). All in all, it's OK, but it's way too long for kids. After five minutes, the tune-out factor will be setting in. "When's recess?"

Continue reading "President's Address to School Kids"

September 7, 2009


Some Questions about the Nature and Constitutionality of the Position of Czar

Monique Chartier

In explaining why former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones was not vetted for the position, an exercise that might have prevented the brouhaha that arose out of revelations of certain of his extreme political positions and his eventual resignation, the White House downplayed the power and importance of the position of the Green Jobs Czar.

If this is so, why did Van Jones have to go? If the position is, indeed, relatively low level, what difference does it make, for example, that he signed on to the 911 "truth" movement or that he subsumed communist beliefs into the green movement?

Under Justin's somewhat undiplomatically titled post, commenter Steadman questions why there is now an outcry about the position of czar when prior presidents engaged in the practice. First of all, not everyone has been crazy about the existence of the constitutionally questionable position. But the biggest source of the current unease can be traced to the current president's expansion of the unofficial department: when President Obama entered office, there were eight czars. The Executive Office now has thirty two czars. President Obama has presided over a four fold increase in the number of czars, each with their own budgets and special influence over the president and his choice of policies.

Commenter Steadman is correct on one level. Tolerance for the actions of prior presidents, dem and elephant, as they created or continued the practice of employing czars has set the stage for a considerable expansion - it's very tempting to say "abuse" - of power by the current president in the form of a czar explosion.

Now, if the Green Jobs Czar is a relatively low level job in the federal government, as the White House has averred, does that hold true for all czars? If so, why are we expending precious resources by paying them a salary and handing them budgets to spend? [The budget for the Green Jobs czarship was $80 billion.] Why does the position exist at all?

If power and importance do accrue to the job, why does it have a para-constitutional position, exempt from Senate advise-and-consent and Congressional oversight as to expenditure of federal tax dollars? Hasn't it been a way for the Executive Branch to take and exercise power in a manner not comprehended by the Constitution?

In fact, isn't abolishing the position of czar the only real way to bring it in line with the Constitution?


September 3, 2009


Obama Administration Basks in Glow of "Previous Administration's" Work

Marc Comtois

I heard yesterday that the Obama Administration held a celebratory press conference about getting a couple billion dollars out of Pfizer for some thing or other. Except, as Glenn Reynold's pointed out, it was the Bush Administration that actually extracted the dough.

The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer agreed to pay $2.3 billion to settle civil and criminal allegations that it had illegally marketed its painkiller Bextra, which has been withdrawn.

It was the largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine of any kind ever.

Although the investigation began and largely ended during the Bush administration, top Obama administration officials held a news conference on Wednesday to celebrate the settlement, thank each other for resolving it and promise more crackdowns on health fraud. {emphasis added}

And then there's this:
Top Republican officials rarely publicized drug marketing cases or appeared during news conferences about them. Eli Lilly agreed to pay $1.4 billion over its marketing of Zyprexa, an antipsychotic, in January, before President Obama took office. The announcement was made by prosecutors in Philadelphia.

Ms. Sebelius’s decision to make the Pfizer announcement in Washington suggests that the political environment for the pharmaceutical industry has become more treacherous despite the industry’s commitment to save the government $80 billion as part of efforts to change the health care system.

Or it suggests and Administration desperate for a "win." Even if someone else got it for them.


September 2, 2009


Schilling to Run for MA Senate?

Marc Comtois

Waving the Bloody Sock?:

Curt Schilling, best known for his bloody-sock pitching heroics, may step up to the plate and run for U.S. Senate.

The retired Red Sox ace said today in a telephone interview with NECN that even though his “plate is full,” he’s been contacted to consider a run for the open seat held by the late Edward M. Kennedy. A Jan. 19 special election has been set by the governor to fill the post.

Schilling, a Republican who stumped for John McCain in the New Hampshire presidential primary last year, said he’s a reluctant possible candidate.

“You’d have to make a decision pretty quickly. Let’s just leave it with that,” Schilling said to NECN.

“I think it’s going to take the right candidate. ... There needs to be an enormous amount of house cleaning done,” he added, saying that sentiment would probably cost him deeply.

“My first press conference could be my last,” Schilling said, stressing he sees a lot wrong with politics as usual in the Bay State.

The right-hander said his work with his online gaming company, 38 Studios, is taking up a lot of his time, but anything is possible. He also said a decision to run for the U.S. Senate would need to be backed by his wife, Shonda.

Based on his past media appearances, I think the Schill may be a little too candid for most voters. But maybe that's just what we need.


August 28, 2009


Whitehouse and Reed Community Dinner, Take 2

Justin Katz

Complete video of Wednesday's community dinner with Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed is available in the extended entry.

On a behind-the-scenes note, the tripod and new software have definitely helped. In fact, they helped so much that I was able to liveblog the meeting while filming it, which explains why it periodically takes a moment for the camera to adjust for movement of the speakers.

Continue reading "Whitehouse and Reed Community Dinner, Take 2"

August 27, 2009


Reed's Unimpressive Spinnage

Justin Katz

As I catch up with my Projo reading, an article describing a Web chat with Senator Reed reinforces my impression that he's spectacularly unimpressive. I see no intellectual interest in the man, only talking-point recitation:

When readers mentioned two proposals that Republicans tend to embrace, Reed pointed out what he views as their limitations. When a reader expressed support for tort reform to cut down on the practice of "defensive medicine" to avoid costly malpractice lawsuits, Reed replied, "Tort reform is not a primary or sole solution to the problem of accelerating health-care costs."

Health savings accounts — another proposal dear to conservatives — are not effective for people who have lost their jobs, Reed wrote. "In addition, with the demands facing many families today, including saving for college, there is a pressure to set aside funds for health care rather than other needs," he added.

The tort reform retort merely shuffles the deck in an attempt to make the savings disappear under the assertion that they wouldn't solve the problem all on their own. The health savings account answer is simply shallow. First, with substantial resources saved in such an account, a temporarily unemployed American could more easily afford COBRA or other individual healthcare option. Second, the Democrats insist that people will continue to invest in their own healthcare, so they're already setting aside those funds for that purpose.

This is a man who claims to be able to invent a better healthcare system?



The Comedy Duo of Whitehouse and Reed

Justin Katz

When Monique brought up our liveblogging from the healthcare community dinner hosted by Senators Whitehouse and Reed, on the Matt Allen Show, the conversation drifted toward the oddity of the Senators tackling this issue, locally as a team. Matt's thesis is that Reed doesn't care about the issue, while Whitehouse has all the background, yet he still knows that he'll take a political hit by not appearing to care. Frankly, having watched both events, now, I have to say that I think he's going to take a political hit based on the stark contrast in facility between him and his junior senator. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


August 26, 2009


A Trillion Dollars per Year

Justin Katz

President Obama has put the government on track to realize nearly one trillion dollars per year of cumulative deficit for the next decade:

In a chilling forecast, the White House is predicting a 10-year federal deficit of $9 trillion -- more than the sum of all previous deficits since America's founding. And it says by the next decade's end the national debt will equal three-quarters of the entire U.S. economy.

Do you suppose Americans are finally waking up to the hangover resulting from their campaign-year binge of moral vanity and political superficiality? It's becoming difficult to miss the scam-pitch in such nonsense as the assertion by Obama's Budget Director Peter Orszag that rewriting our healthcare system with an emphasis on regulation and government involvement will decrease the deficit. Sorry, Pete, more and more of us simply aren't buying.

But before President Barack Obama can do much about it, he'll have to weather recession aftershocks including unemployment that his advisers said Tuesday is still heading for 10 percent.

I submit that the solution to both problems is one and the same: shrink government. Define the United States as something grander than its government, and the tidal economic rewards of freedom will lift the bureaucrats' boat, as well.


August 25, 2009


They've Heard Us

Justin Katz

An understandably frustrated Karin commented to a recent post:

Does it really matter who yells and screams. They have no intention of changing the way they vote. The yelling is out of pure frustration that we have zero control over these guys.

One needn't read Sunday's Providence Journal article about our delegation's backing off the public option to comfort Karin that the voices of opposition are making a difference. Of course, it helps to read such things:

For that reason, Langevin suggested that it was a blessing in disguise that both houses of Congress failed to meet Mr. Obama's early-August deadline for passing a bill.

"I'm glad we had this break to slow this down a little bit," Langevin said, adding that the prospect of historic changes in health care has provoked his constituents to a rare outpouring of deep and personal feelings. Langevin said a powerful theme of the public response has been, "We have to do this the right way. Don't rush it."

Yes, the community dinner hosted by Senator Whitehouse and Senator Reed was a bit more subdued than Langevin's town hall the night before, and we'll see how things go for Whitehouse and Reed in Johnston, tomorrow night But our elected political insiders and their staffs can see the wind shifting away from the hard left.

That's no excuse, of course, for turning down the volume, if only to discredit such statements as this:

"If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan."

But Langevin quickly acknowledged that it may not be possible to keep such a sweeping promise. "There is no guarantee" against at least some disruptions of health insurance coverage, he said.

For example, Langevin said, "It's true that some employers could opt for a penalty" rather than let their workers keep their current health plans.

"Certainly there are always unaccounted for, unpredictable and unintended consequences," in an enterprise as vast and complex as Mr. Obama's planned health-care overhaul, Langevin said.

Similarly, Reed was unwilling to repeat Mr. Obama's promise to the satisfied customer that "you can keep your health plan."

"That is our goal and that is our purpose," Reed said. "We will try our best."

I'm not referring to the persistent statement about keeping one's healthcare, which is a lie wherever it isn't followed by the phrase, "for up to five years." Rather, I mean to indicate the suggestion that consequences described by opponents of the plan are "unpredictable and unintended." The fact is that hundreds of Rhode Islanders — thousands of Americans across the country — have been showing up at their representatives' events explicitly to make such predictions, to the degree that not seeking to avoid the consequences would be strongly suggestive of intention.



Ajami: Obama Cult of Personality = FAIL

Marc Comtois

Fouad Ajami:

American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the "mandate of heaven" is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.

Those protesters in those town-hall meetings have served notice that Mr. Obama's charismatic moment has passed. Once again, the belief in that American exception that set this nation apart from other lands is re-emerging. Health care is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it is an unease with the way the verdict of the 2008 election was read by those who prevailed. It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation's recovery of its self-confidence.



UPDATED: Langevin Town Hall Video

Justin Katz

UPDATE: The video below is now complete; I've also managed to take some of the echo out of the audio, so it might be a little easier to understand what people are saying.


Given that Andrew and I attended a separate press session before Congressman Jim Langevin's town hall meeting in Warwick, tonight, and that the event itself went well over the scheduled hour, there's a lot of video to process. It doesn't help that YouTube won't accept videos longer than 10 minutes.

My plan is to upload all the raw footage — and some of it proves definitively that I need practice with my new blogging tool — in one swoop and then to go back and upload segments that merit a closer look for one reason or another. The raw footage phase will take place within this post.

Stay tuned.

ADDENDUM:

Congressman Jim Langevin 08/19/09 Town Hall, Warwick, RI, Preliminary Press Q&A (1):


Congressman Jim Langevin 08/19/09 Town Hall, Warwick, RI, Preliminary Press Q&A (2)

Additional videos in the extended entry.

Continue reading "UPDATED: Langevin Town Hall Video"

August 24, 2009


We All Need An Obama Vacation

Marc Comtois

The Prez is off:

Seven months after taking the oath of office, President Obama on Sunday began his first vacation, traveling to this tony hideaway for Hollywood stars, the wealthy and the occasional politician....Past presidents have been queasy about what they called their time away from the White House, fearing the image of a checked-out president. Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs had no such fear last week, saying that "I don't think the American people begrudge a president taking some time with his family that's well earned and well deserved for a few days to see and spend time with them."
Yeah, just like all of the regular folks who vacation on the Vineyard. We'll soon be inundated with pictures of the Obama's cavorting about the island (but I suspect there won't be a Bush-era type juxtaposition of those pics with others of homeless people are parked in front of the White House). Maybe a week off from him is what we all need with the health care debate, bulging deficits, reduced social security benefits, and a double-dip recession looming. "Well earned and well deserved" vacation? For who? Many of us certainly think we deserve it after the drama of hope and change of the last 7 months.


August 22, 2009


The Weekly Steyn

Justin Katz

Sing it, brother:

That's why the "stimulus" flopped. It didn't just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats' political priorities overrode everything else. If you're a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap'n'trade is promising increased regulatory costs and health "reform" wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama's leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he's spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust's settled and you get a better sense of just how broke he's going to make you. For this level of "community organization," there aren't enough of "the rich" to pay for it. That leaves you.

August 21, 2009


UPDATED: Senators Whitehouse and Reed Meet in West Warwick

Justin Katz

UPDATE: The collection of video clips (below) from this event is complete.


Thursday night's community dinner with Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse did indeed have its drama. It also had moments of should-have-been-revelation that we'll be exploring in the days to come.

In the meantime, I'm collecting the raw video in the extended entry section of this post.

Continue reading "UPDATED: Senators Whitehouse and Reed Meet in West Warwick"

August 20, 2009


Blame the Betcha Gal

Justin Katz

When the Pawtucket Times' Jim Baron lobbed Congressman Langevin the "death panel" volley ball to smack down during the pre-town hall presser, it occurred to me that if (and I repeat: if) some monstrosity of a socializing healthcare bill becomes law, at least some of the blame with fall to Sarah Palin.

When she initially waded onto the ice with the notion of the government's making healthcare decisions, she was on reasonably solid footing:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

This is an argument that can be made as a natural progression from the first principles of the reform, and with evidence from other countries to boot. But when the administration responded, the Palin camp saw the opportunity to declare "got 'im" and jumped on provisions concerning end-of-life decisions. Suddenly, the Democrats could dodge questions on the gravity of government healthcare controls by insisting that a "living will" is not a death panel.


August 19, 2009


The White House's Pesky Friends

Justin Katz

Opinions have, predictably, been split about the verbal ping-pong match of Fox News's Major Garrett and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. On the left, that pushy reporter from the conservative propaganda network was forcing baseless accusations into the public discourse. On the right, he was speaking truth to power.

Well, well, well:

The White House said Sunday night that it will change its e-mail sign-up procedures after some recipients of a health-care e-mail complained that they had not asked to receive updates.

"We are implementing measures to make subscribing to e-mails clearer, including preventing advocacy organizations from signing people up to our lists without their permission when they deliver petition signatures and other messages on individual’s behalf," spokesman Nick Shapiro said in a statement Sunday night.

After a few such recipients appeared on Fox News, White House officials determined that advocacy groups on the right or left could have sent in the names without the person knowing it.

It's possible, I suppose, that right-wing groups have been signing folks up for White House talking-point emails, but it's also conceivable that this has been a method of merging mailing lists at arm's length. The latter possibility wouldn't exactly be out of character for this administration.


August 14, 2009


Whitehouse Responds About Reading

Justin Katz

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's office has sent a response to my inquiry as to the senator's knowledge of the complexities of the healthcare bill:

Thank you for your interest in the important work of reforming our health care system. As a temporary member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee over the last several months, I read the Committee's health reform bill closely and participated in the drafting and markup process. Indeed, the Committee's markup of the Affordable Health Choices Act was the longest and most deliberative in the Committee's history. We considered the legislation for 56 hours and 23 separate sessions.

During the markup, Chairman Dodd led an open, bipartisan debate in which we
considered about 300 amendments. 161 amendments offered by our Republican
colleagues were accepted and incorporated into the bill.

I believe this transparent and thorough process produced excellent legislation,
and I look forward to its consideration by the full Senate.

It appears to have been rash of me to make my initial quip, although I will say that, in this particular case, ignorance of the bill's provisions might have been the charitable assumption when it comes to the legislation's advocates.


August 13, 2009


An Old Tale in a New Context

Justin Katz

Bill Sammon recalls a day, back in 2002:

When Bush visited Portland, Ore., for a fundraiser, protesters stalked his motorcade, assailed his limousine and stoned a car containing his advisers. Chanting "Bush is a terrorist!", the demonstrators bullied passers-by, including gay softball players and a wheelchair-bound grandfather with multiple sclerosis.

One protester even brandished a sign that seemed to advocate Bush's assassination. The man held a large photo of Bush that had been doctored to show a gun barrel pressed against his temple.

Oddly, as Sammon points out, the media that is so keen to make readers, viewers, and listeners aware of the anger of those who oppose (if I may reuse the phrase) the Democrats' federal powergrab in a porcine "healthcare reform" costume was uninterested in Bush's riotous reception. This, of course, is merely one example of history repeating itself with a different accent. When President Obama derides "scare tactics," I can't help but recall this:

That, for those who weren't blogging seven years ago, is a screenshot from an online advertisement put out by the Democratic National Committee. Scare tactics were institutional, back in the day.

While routing around in my old archives, I came across this quotation from FBI profiler Gregg McCrary, conveyed to Washington Post readers that same month:

"White males belong to a long-advantaged group that is now having to share power and control. But I think it has less to do with race than social class."

The context was the search for the Washington sniper. You might recall that, of the various possible profiles, the one about which we heard most frequently was of the angry white supremacist Christian militia variation. You might also recall that the snipers turned out to be black, which fact didn't seem to matter to some aspects of the coverage:

The interesting parallel, though, comes in this paragraph from Harold Meyerson, which arrived in my morning paper the other day:

When future historians look back at this passage in our nation's history, I suspect they'll conclude that this Obama-isn't-American nuttiness refracted the insecurities and, in some cases, the hatred that a portion of conservative white America felt about having a black president and about the transformation of what many thought of as their white nation into a genuinely multiracial republic. But whatever the reasons, a mobilized minority is making a very plausible play to thwart a demobilized majority.

Unsurprisingly, Meyerson's reflections spring from the healthcare townhalls. "What's particularly curious about these two protests," he writes, "is that they took place on very liberal turf — Philadelphia and Austin — yet the local liberals and people of color seemed absent." Bused-in angry white mobs, you might say. In contrast to the bused-in friendly multicultural mob with which Obama set the scene for his own townhall appearance thereby disproving the "demobilized majority" thesis.

The lesson, it would seem, is that angry whites are the villains whether they're the majority, the minority, the origin of a particular policy, the opposition, guilty, or innocent. What ought to be as clear blue as whitey's eyes, at this point, is that racial division has long been serving a leftist agenda, and whether there is a new, emerging majority or a left-wing minority has been deftly pulling together the strings of power, the tone has colored opposing voices not merely as wrong, but as hateful and illegitimate participants.

Those who present such a view as part of a political strategy manipulate the insecurities of the public. And although it's a too easy psychological analysis to make, one does wonder whether those whom the manipulators thus persuade are, themselves, uncomfortable with a multicultural society, giving themselves moral credit for resisting the impulse and believing those who disagree on unrelated political matters to be succumbing to it.

(Links compiled from various sources, but conspicuously from Instapundit both then and now.)


August 8, 2009


Sit Down, Community, and Be Organized!

Justin Katz

If anything, Mark Steyn's latest lays on the wordplay a bit too thick, but apart from his usual humor, this one's worth reading if only to sow the last four sentences of this block quote into the conservative repartee:

"The right-wing extremist Republican base is back!" warns the Democratic National Committee. These right-wing extremists have been given their marching orders by their masters: They've been directed to show up at "thousands of events," told to "organize," "knock on doors" ...

No, wait. My mistake. That's the e-mail I got from Mitch Stewart, Director of "Organizing for America" at BarackObama.com. But that's the good kind of "organizing." Obama's a community organizer. We're the community. He organizes us. What part of that don't you get?


August 7, 2009


The First Murmurs of Political Ugliness

Justin Katz

John Loughlin, the presumed Republican candidate for Patrick Kennedy's seat in Congress, has issued a press release stating that "the Congressman has a basic obligation to share his in-depth knowledge" about healthcare legislation at three to five town-hall-style meetings. As a matter of an elected representative's responsibility, Loughlin is absolutely correct, but constituents might have cause to worry that the ordeal of such meetings might send Patrick back into preventive rehab. The "debate" is getting ugly.

After a few instances of citizens' displaying their passion about the Democrats' federal powergrab in a porcine "healthcare reform" costume, party figures have been striving to prove that nobody does divisiveness as well as they do:

Democrats and the White House are claiming that the sometimes rowdy protests that have disrupted Democratic lawmakers' meetings and health care events around the country are largely orchestrated from afar by insurers, lobbyists, Republican Party activists and others.

Jonah Goldberg goes into further detail about the Democrats' attacks on American citizens. Peggy Noonan took up the topic for the must-read piece to which Marc linked earlier. Noonan highlights the looks of shock that have been characteristic of the Democrats who've been experiencing Americans' frustration. "They had no idea how people were feeling," she writes, and she ends on a note of concern that their leaders and allies see more need for forehead-to-forehead response than for the much-invoked empathy:

Absent [President Obama calling for a pause in the debate], and let's assume that won't happen, the health-care protesters have to make sure they don’t get too hot, or get out of hand. They haven’t so far, they’ve been burly and full of debate, with plenty of booing. This is democracy’s great barbaric yawp. But every day the meetings seem just a little angrier, and people who are afraid—who have been made afraid, and left to be afraid—can get swept up. As this column is written, there comes word that John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO has announced he’ll be sending in union members to the meetings to counter health care’s critics.

If, like me, you've come across news of a beating that apparent members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) delivered to a grassroots activist in Missouri, and watched the video of the aftermath, Noonan's final chord is chilling.

To be sure, meeting constituent unrest with union thuggery is probably not what White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina meant when he told Senate Democrats, "If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard," but the imagery is telling. And dangerous. Citizen ire is going to turn into bloodsport politics, in part because ostensible leaders prefer to battle than to listen.



One Thing's For Sure, They Won't Be Using Them to Meet with Constituents at Health Care Town Halls

Monique Chartier

As reports of a less than agreeable reception for members of Congress at health care town halls have circulated, other congressional delegations around the country, not excluding Rhode Island's, have been strangely slow to schedule town halls in their own states. However, the tax-payer funded body which characterized the use of private jets by taxpayer funded auto executives as "arrogant" has found the time to ... er, order eight new jets for their own taxpayer funded use. Looks like Congress has gotten around to Speaker Pelosi's shopping list.

Again from today's Wall Street Journal.

The 737s, known as C-40s by the military, are designed to be an "office in the sky" for government leaders, according to Air Force documents describing the plane. The plane is configured with all first-class leather seats, worktables, two large galleys for cooking and a "distinguished visitor compartment with sleep accommodations."

Quoting Rep. Gary Ackerman (D., N.Y.)

“Couldn’t you have downgraded to first class or something, or jet-pooled or something ...?”

Our thoughts exactly, Congressman.


July 31, 2009


What Do the Duped Think?

Justin Katz

In one of the meaningful transitions that used to make me daydream about the possibilities now manifested in MP3 players that can put an entire music collection on shuffle, the Eagles' "Hotel California" followed directly upon the "We Are the Ones" Obama-adulation song. "You can check out anytime you want," sings Don Henley, "but you can never leave."

For an exercise in empathy, it's interesting to ponder the effect that the Obamanation movement had on the man himself. How would you respond to fawning on such a scale? It's a scary question, and whatever else one is inclined to say about him, Barack Obama has handled himself admirably.

That's not to say, "perfectly." Rich Lowry devotes some imagination to an alternative course that the president could have plotted, over the past six months:

The Obama team is fiddling with his health-care talking points. But the verbiage is beside the point. What Obama needs is a little modesty. It's easy to imagine an alternative history of a more cautious Obama administration that wouldn't have stoked a voter backlash in all of six months.

It would have begun with the recognition that he won office sounding like a tax-cutting moderate devoted to paying for "every dime" of his program, against a terrible candidate in the middle of a recession blamed on the incumbent Republican president. Even Howard Dean might have won in these circumstances. Obama's victory wasn't as transformative as it appeared. He was given an opening — to address people’s economic anxieties, detoxify the Washington debate, and occupy the center.

Although we're seeing it, to some extent, in dropping poll numbers and thinning bumper stickers, we haven't heard much from those folks who were sure — so confident as to disregard evidence that many of us saw as red flags — that candidate Obama would govern in precisely that fashion. What have they learned from being burned?

I'd like to think that the majority have become wiser, and some surely have. Still, the elixir that Obama peddled may have been of the alluring sort that tempts even those who were sickened by it to take another sip when the packaging changes.


July 27, 2009


The Difference Between a Handout and a Share in a Common Resource

Monique Chartier

... is pretty obvious and substantial, actually.

About Sarah Palin's resignation, David Frum has made this observation.

Sarah Palin’s most notable achievement as governor of Alaska was to increase the payout from the state’s energy tax take by $1200 per resident. Isn’t it odd then that she would use her farewell address to warn against the danger of government handouts?

A handout is obtained involuntarily from other residents/taxpayers. The source of the $1,200 sent to all Alaskan residents is Alaskan oil. A judgment must be made as to who will receive a handout. More often than not, the recipient is a political crony or preferred special interest. (The list of these occurrances in recent months has grown quite long.) The government, then, has taken from one resident/taxpayer and given to another, often with dubious effect and motive.

Contrast to the latter, where no resident pays but rather all share, rightly so, in the revenue from a common resource. These are two utterly different actions by government. One is desireable and appropriate; the other is usually neither.

Apples and alligators, David Frum.


July 22, 2009


The Disclaimers Are Always the Thing

Justin Katz

It is definitely not our practice to run political ads for political reasons (or only for political reasons), but this one from the Republican National Committee on the healthcare legislation is funny enough to merit a few minutes of your time.

As one might expect, the "side effects" disclaimer is the key.


July 21, 2009


When Every Faction's a Swing Group

Justin Katz

I'm not sure what to make of this, from David Brooks...

It was interesting to watch the Republican Party lose touch with America. You had a party led by conservative Southerners who neither understood nor sympathized with moderates or representatives from swing districts.

They brought in pollsters to their party conferences to persuade their members that the country was fervently behind them. They were supported by their interest groups and cheered on by their activists and the partisan press. They spent federal money in an effort to buy support but ended up disgusting the country instead.

... in light of this:

For all the attention generated by Barack Obama's candidacy, the share of eligible voters who actually cast ballots in November declined for the first time in a dozen years. The reason: Older whites with little interest in backing either Barack Obama or John McCain stayed home.

Census figures released Monday show about 63.6 percent of all U.S. citizens ages 18 and older, or 131.1 million people, voted last November. Although that represented an increase of 5 million voters — virtually all of them minorities — the turnout relative to the population of eligible voters was a decrease from 63.8 percent in 2004.

That doesn't strike me as a result easily interpreted according to the "disaffected moderates" storyline. A "moderate" could have found justification for voting for either candidate — with McCain, based on knowledge of his record, and with Obama, based on ignorance of his — but staying home? I suppose a disgust factor came into play, and probably some racism, in pockets. Still, I think the landscape is much more chaotic than pundits with such theories as Brooks's allow.

The political landscape is currently like one of those made-for-gym-class sports that throws all of the equipment on the ground and puts a dozen teams on the field. Anybody who can snag the most visible ball is grabbing it and running toward a preferred goal, and even players who helped him or her get it have reason to consider tackling. Back to Brooks:

Nancy Pelosi has lower approval ratings than Dick Cheney and far lower approval ratings than Sarah Palin. And yet Democrats have allowed her policy values to carry the day — this in an era in which independents dominate the electoral landscape.

For whatever reason, players think Pelosi & Co. hold the advantage, but it's an illusion. She'll trip, and somebody else will have a go, and this will continue unless (until?) we manage to reassert the civic structures around which the nation was built. By that, I mean to suggest that this is a consequence of Big Government. In all of the various games that make up a society — each with its own emphases and dominant contenders — this single one has become too controlling.

The reason to spread out the power of a society into distinct arenas of pursuit is that it allows consensus to form on matters in their appropriate spheres and for conflicts between the spheres to work themselves based on broad cultural movements.


July 20, 2009


Economy as Political Card

Justin Katz

Noting a New York Post article on Washington's spending bonanza, Glenn Reynolds writes:

And yet members of Congress would be hard-pressed to tell you where the money's going. This isn't just undisciplined spending. It's looting.

I'd like to know whether the culprits will face a consequence for the travesty beyond their names' being footnotes in an historical tale of iniquity. Not that their focus is on anything beyond the near-term pillaging. Glenn also links to this report that's difficult not to see as pretty much the very same story:

The administration's annual midsummer budget update is sure to show higher deficits and unemployment and slower growth than projected in President Barack Obama's budget in February and update in May, and that could complicate his efforts to get his signature health care and global-warming proposals through Congress.

The release of the update - usually scheduled for mid-July - has been put off until the middle of next month, giving rise to speculation the White House is delaying the bad news at least until Congress leaves town on its August 7 summer recess.

The administration is pressing for votes before then on its $1 trillion health care initiative, which lawmakers are arguing over how to finance.

Can't have the people panicking until after their representatives have already committed them to a devastating expansion of federal power.


July 19, 2009


Preventive Totalitarianism

Justin Katz

Stated in passing — as an inarguable truism — is the most eerie part of President Obama's recent healthcare remarks (video, at about minute two):

We're now at a point where most everyone agrees that we need to invest in preventive and wellness programs that can save us money and help lead healthier lives.

Put aside that some folks — John Stossel among themdo question the "preventive care" shibboleth. One gets the sense that what Obama is saying and what many Americans will hear are two different things. To my ear — and I offer this without intending to express favor for any particular policy — an "investment" in such programs means funding to make them available, with the option of whether to partake left up to the individual. General experience suggests that, when government officials use the term "investment" in this context, they mean at the very least some form of compulsion, as in: "We'll subsidize your healthcare, but you must do X and must not do Y."

Let's be clear about what's going on conceptually. The premises on which the debate is being framed are that private healthcare is en route to pricing itself out of the reach of a broad swath of our society and that the portions of the industry directed by the government are finding costs unsustainable. By "investing" in "wellness programs" as a means of lowering costs, the government would be putting the weight of the nation's entire healthcare system on individual citizens' behavior. What couldn't be declared intolerable with such a consequence as the collapse of everybody's medical care?

The national and state governments have already instituted the practice of disincentive taxes (as on cigarettes), they regulate what plans must cover, and so on. Imagine what political leaders will do when they can dictate health-related behavior directly, especially if it remains a commonplace that preventive care is key to affordability. With the passage of Rep. Patrick Kennedy's healthcare "parity" bill, eliding the distinction between mental and physical ailments, "health-related behavior" would be tautological. We can only imagine what behaviors and life decisions will qualify a person to be locked out of the healthcare system.

President Obama illustrated his perspective on the ownership rights of a government "investor" when he changed the leadership of GM. In like fashion, healthcare "reforms" that entail greater involvement of the government and greater reliance on its "investments" will inevitably prove to be about the very ownership of individual Americans. One already reads stories from other nations of rationing based on habits like smoking, but the principle needn't halt there.

It's certainly objectionable enough that mandatory coverage of abortions appears now to be a component of the Senate bill. What begins as a "medically appropriate" option could easily make the transition to classification as "most appropriate" — say for one of those inspiring mothers who, under the current system, accept the risk of their own lives for their children's births or for those who choose not to kill their unborn offspring despite known disabilities. When a centralized government becomes a "single payer," those risks and those offspring are a burden to the whole system. One can hear the argument that they're free to do so, but that society cannot be expected to pay for "excessive" procedures during birth, let alone a lifetime of specialty care.

We daren't even contemplate the possibility that women with psychological problems (religious views considered to be extreme, for example) may be deemed ineligible to bring children into the world. We further daren't consider that a government empowered to tell its healthcare dependents what risks they are not permitted to take may, given circumstances, quickly decide that it also holds the prerogative to place risks before them — whether of a martial or occupational character. For the time being, it is enough simply to acknowledge that the party that pays is the party that controls and that to control a person's health is to control the person.


July 18, 2009


Wasn't This Guy Supposed to Be Smart, Moderate, and Temperate?

Justin Katz

This bit of cynicism should be beneath the cool-headed genius whom we elected president:

Obama countered yesterday that "if we step back from this challenge at this moment, we are consigning our children to a future of skyrocketing premiums and crushing deficits. If we don't achieve health-care reform, we cannot control the costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and we cannot control our long-term debt and our long-term deficits."

"Our children" (in this cliché) have years before adulthood and will not be consigned to anything by some months of research and debate. There is no milestone pending in the next few weeks or months that will lock in costs. Unless, that is, the federal government does act and institutes a mess of an oppressive power grab like the plans that are on the table.


July 15, 2009


The Depression Is Coming! The Depression Is Coming!

Justin Katz

It really is astonishing. With the economy flailing and the trends in job losses disappointing even the whiz kids of the Obama administration, despite its having whipped out the "stimulus" credit card, with "cap and trade" energy policy seeking to raise the cost of doing business (and of simply living), the Democrats are hitting the accelerator pedal on their hybrid healthcare suicide car:

The liberal-leaning plan lacked figures on total costs, but a House Democratic aide said the total bill would add up to about $1.5 trillion over 10 years. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private calculations. Most of the bill's costs come in the last five years after the 2012 presidential election.

The legislation calls for a 5.4 percent tax increase on individuals making more than $1 million a year, with a gradual tax beginning at $280,000 for individuals. Employers who don't provide coverage would be hit with a penalty equal to 8 percent of workers' wages with an exemption for small businesses. Individuals who decline an offer of affordable coverage would pay 2.5 percent of their incomes as a penalty, up to the average cost of a health insurance plan.

Pay down. Employment down. Prices up.

Note that admission that the legislation's cost structure attempts to move the bill past the next presidential election. Consider also that the bulk of the stimulus money is scheduled for dispersal next year — an election year. One doesn't have to be partisan to wonder whether economic hardship and civic anxiety are being tolerated in the service of a planned political script. A few eggs must be broken, after all, in order for the Left to make the governmental omelet that the country doesn't yet know it needs.


July 14, 2009


An Image and a Corrective on Healthcare and the Economy

Justin Katz

Ben Stein presents an excellent image:

True, by many metrics, the economy has stopped falling drastically, but we are still in a painful recession, large by postwar standards. The bank crises seem to have abated for now and Wall Street is paying itself fantastically well again, thank heavens, after being rescued with taxpayer money. But housing is still extremely weak, profits are miserable and, most important, far too many Americans are unemployed — roughly 9.5 percent, by the latest data.

Just as basic, far too many Americans are living in fear.

What is President Obama doing about it? Perhaps too much. And, possibly, his efforts are too diffuse. When I think about the economy I think about a plump man who has just been hit by a truck while crossing a street and is in severely critical condition with internal bleeding. Instead of just stabilizing his hemorrhaging, the doctor decides that while the patient is unconscious, he might as well also do a face lift, some coronary bypasses and a stomach-stapling to keep him from gaining weight while he is recovering (if he does recover). After all, a crisis is not to be wasted.

The problem is that all these ambitious operations create too much of a burden for the human body to bear.

It's an old truism that one shouldn't go grocery shopping while hungry. Similarly, one shouldn't make dramatic financial decisions while panicked about paying a surprise bill. With the amped up call for extreme healthcare changes to be pushed through Congress with a minimum of deliberation, one can't help but wonder what makes the matter so dire that it must be forced through Congress in the distracted days of summer immediately before a recess. Are masses dying in the street for lack of a "public option"? It isn't unreasonable to suggest that such an outcome is much more likely if unemployment continues to mount — especially if new healthcare requirements increase the cost of employment for employers.

No, in theory, the urgency derives from a series of jumbled abstractions:

"The status quo on health care is no longer an option for the United States of America," the president said. "This is no longer a problem we can wait to fix. This is about who we are as a country. Health care reform is about every family's health, but it's also about the health of the economy."

In actuality, the urgency derives from a political necessity to rope Americans into a framework of dependency on government while we're susceptible to panic, under the thrall of a charismatic political celebrity, and as yet unable to assert regained senses through an electoral correction.


July 12, 2009


The Future That the Speaker Saw

Justin Katz

Put aside that it was pure fundraising pabulum; it's a pity that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi probably doesn't know just how right she was:

"When I return to Washington, D.C.," Pelosi said, "I'll tell them that I've been to Rhode Island and I've seen the future."

What she was talking about hardly matters. It could have been a new ice-cream mixer at the Frosty Freeze. What she wasn't talking about was the thing that ought to keep somebody of her position awake at night: The effects of high taxes, over-regulation, one-party rule, labor union dominance, an overly "compassionate" and organized poverty industry, and insider politics on a polity.

Yes, Rhode Island's sclerotic economy, crumbling infrastructure, high unemployment, and prominence at the wrong end of every list may indeed be the ghost of America's future. If it is, Pelosi shouldn't "return to Washington, D.C., to tell them" (whoever "they" are). She should run to Washington to warn them.

The folks across the street from the last event of her long day of mooching would surely have been able to provide a concise message, if she'd deigned to acknowledge their presence:

Pelosi and company wrapped up their visit with an evening fundraiser at the Jamestown home of Princeton Review CEO Michael Perik and his wife, Elizabeth. For the first time all day, Pelosi and Kennedy received a less-than-enthusiastic welcome.

Shouting "Vote them out" and carrying signs that said, "Welcome, Comrade Pelosi," more than 50 boisterous protestors jammed the sidewalk while sleek SUVs with tinted-windows arrived at the waterfront fundraiser, where some couples paid $30,400 to be in the "Speakers Cabinet."

Every conservative political stripe was represented, from the Rhode Island Tea Party, an anti-big government group, to Rhode Islanders Against Illegal Immigration. A few protesters, though, had it in for Kennedy.

"Patrick is incompetent," said Chris Kairnes, of North Kingstown, who was wielding an anti-Kennedy placard. "You can't perform your duties if you are highly medicated. He should be realistic and resign."

Ultimately, the crowd was disappointed. Pelosi and the local congressional delegation slipped into the party through a back entranceway. They never saw Rhode Island's version of the populist spirit.


July 7, 2009


Because I Know Who'll Chuckle and Who'll Fume

Justin Katz

David Kahane lets us in on a little secret:

I don't know why I'm telling you this, but maybe now you're beginning to understand the high-stakes game we're playing here. This ain't John McCain's logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United States of America. This is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won't be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it.

In other words, stop thinking of the Democratic Party as merely a political party, because it's much more than that. We're not just the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition. Not just the party of Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Richard J. Croker, Bull Connor, Chris Dodd, Richard Daley, Bill Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II. Not just the party of Kendall "Agent 202" Myers, the State Department official recruited as a Cuban spy along with his wife during the Carter administration. Rather, think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.


July 3, 2009


A Bipartisan Thorn

Justin Katz

It's encouraging to see that figures most often noted for their irascibility against right-leaning politicians can find fault with the other side:

Following a testy exchange during today's briefing with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas told CNSNews.com that not even Richard Nixon tried to control the press the way President Obama is trying to control the press.

"Nixon didn't try to do that," Thomas said. "They couldn't control (the media). They didn't try. ...

"I'm not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well—for the town halls, for the press conferences," she said. "It's blatant. They don't give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame."

Two questions to which I won't presume to supply answers: Is this an indication of Thomas's objectivity or President Obama's extremity? If the latter, is it possible that the standard storyline about the partisan nature of oppressive behavior can be made to change?


June 18, 2009


... So Calling a Female General "Ma'am" Would Be Disrespectful?

Monique Chartier

In a hearing room, Tuesday, on Capitol Hill.

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was testifying on the Louisiana coastal restoration process in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He began to answer one of Boxer's questions with "ma'am" when Boxer immediately cut him off.

"You know, do me a favor," an irritated Boxer said. "Could say 'senator' instead of 'ma'am?'"

"Yes, ma'am," Walsh interjected.

"It's just a thing, I worked so hard to get that title, so I'd appreciate it, yes, thank you," she said.

"Yes, senator," he responded.

There were scattered calls this afternoon for Senator Boxer to apologize to Brigadier General Walsh. It didn't particularly strike me as I heard the exchange that an apology was necessary. It wasn't really about the Brigadier General. It was about the Senator from California, in more ways than one, and a startling look into her character. To be truthful, any apology would have to be phrased along the lines of

"I apologize that I dropped a facade and you had to see the petty, insecure and self obsessed side of my nature."

Paraphrasing Les from Pawtucket, a caller to the Matt Allen Show tonight: some people join an organization to accomplish something. Others join to be someone.



House Defeats Nat'l Popular Vote Scheme

Marc Comtois

Via ProJo:

In a sharp reversal from last year, the House has voted down a proposal aimed at changing the way that the president and vice president of the United States are elected.

On Thursday afternoon, lawmakers defeated a measure that would have allowed Rhode Island to join in a compact with other states that would commit to having their delegates to the Electoral College vote for the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of who won each particular state. The vote was 28 for and 45 against.

Here is the legislation that was voted down. Andrew and Justin (and me, a little) have been on top of this issue for a while now.



June 12, 2009


A Prescription for Me Time

Justin Katz

That's being a Congressman, for ya. Patrick Kennedy hopes to get back to work from a mental health retreat "in time for the... debate on a national health-care overhaul later in the summer." Presumably, he needn't expend any hope on whether the checks from his $174,000 salary will keep arriving, whether or not he manages to participate in the healthcare debate.

Look, without any information about what inspired Kennedy's decision, one can still say that it was probably the intelligent one to make. A person's health is paramount. The idea that somebody who holds an ostensibly important job can just "step away" like this raises questions about what they do, and who should be doing it.

Frankly, having stood on the incisors of alcohol abuse and stared into a dark psychological gullet, I see far too much permissiveness in this prescription explained by Kennedy friend Ronald Smith:

Smith said medical research has found increasing evidence that in early recovery, which he defined as two to three years, it is essential for addicts to recognize when they face "stressors" such as fatigue or illness or family problems. "You have to go back, take a couple of days off and renew your sobriety," he said.

As a matter of principle, I don't believe a solution calling for the avoidance of problems fosters the necessary change in outlook. Moreover, to the extent that a person is in the precarious position of having to avoid "stressors," his first step should be away from a high-stakes job like U.S. legislator.


June 10, 2009


What the Unions are For

Justin Katz

The possibility of payback in such forms as the following will be the continuing story:

That news comes courtesy of federal disclosure forms that unions file each year with the Department of Labor. The Bush Administration toughened the enforcement of those disclosure rules, but under pressure from unions the Obama Labor shop is slashing funding for such enforcement. Without such disclosure, workers wouldn't be able to see how their union chiefs are managing their mandatory dues money.

But there's a more fundamental, and more interesting, angle (emphasis added):

An SEIU spokeswoman says the union works on a four-year cycle, in which it goes "all out for the presidential election" and then rebuilds its finances. She adds the union has paid back more than $10 million of the $25 million it borrowed last year. But it's nonetheless true that the SEIU's liabilities have continued to climb each year from 2003 to 2008.

In that regard, there doesn't appear to be much difference between a labor union and a charitable organization that undertakes a remunerative enterprise (selling something or offering services) to raise money for the cause that represents its reason for being. The worker representation by which the unions raise their money is a means of financing political activism. Which side of the organizations represents their core purpose is probably not as easy a question to answer as it ought to be.


June 5, 2009


An Interesting Convergence of Issues

Justin Katz

This story confounds categorization:

Eastern District of Michigan judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff handed down the decision, in a case involving an alleged violation of the constitutional separation of church and state. The issue is whether a government-owned company, AIG, can market sharia-compliant insurance products. (To be sharia-compliant, an investment vehicle must be created and structured in ways that do not violate Islamic law.) In a well-reasoned and cogently argued opinion, Judge Zatkoff refused to dismiss the case prior to factual discovery. ...

The problem with all of this public largesse is that AIG sponsors, pays for, and aggressively markets sharia-compliant insurance products. The practice of sharia finance has created lucrative advisory positions for often radical imams, who get paid to guarantee the religious "purity" of sharia-compliant products. Such vehicles typically follow the Muslim principle of zakat and donate a slice of their profits to charity. Unfortunately, many of the charities receiving these funds have links to terrorism. Mr. Murray objects to his funds' being used to legitimate and promote sharia law, when that is the same law that calls for jihad. For that matter, sharia allows Saudis, Iranians, Sudanese, Somalis, Afghans, Taliban members, and other adherents to justify the following: the execution of apostates who decide to abandon the faith; the criminalizing of "Islamophobic blasphemy"; the punishment of petty crimes with amputations, floggings and stonings; and the repression of “non-believers” from practicing their respective religions freely and openly.

On one hand, a private business should be able to develop, operate, and market whatever products it likes (provided doing so does not directly support our nation's enemies). On the other hand, AIG is not alone, now, in being a not-so-private company, and the government ought not be in the position of financing the adherence to religious law. It's a precarious balance, and the conceit of mere mortals to maintain it is apt to become hamartia.

Herman Melville functions out of context here:

So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! Throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

Starboard side, we carry the notion that the government should not interfere with freedoms of association and religion. Port side, we've now hung the principle that the government can become a controlling investor in industry. Express no surprise when when find the deck taking on water.


June 4, 2009


Attorney General Holder, Chiquita Banana and Death Squads

Monique Chartier

This is the improbable combination suggested by commenter Joe Bernstein under Justin's post.

But sure enough ...

Do not expect these recommendations to be carried forward if Eric Holder decides to forgo his lucrative corporate law practice at Covington & Burling and accept the U.S. Attorney General position for which many believe he is the top contendor. Eric Holder would have a troubling conflict of interest in carrying out this work in light of his current work as defense lawyer for Chiquita Brands international in a case in which Colombian plaintiffs seek damages for the murders carried out by the AUC paramilitaries - a designated terrorist organization. Chiquita has already admitted in a criminal case that it paid the AUC around $1.7 million in a 7-year period and that it further provided the AUC with a cache of machine guns as well.

Indeed, Holder himself, using his influence as former deputy attorney general under the Clinton Administration, helped to negotiate Chiquita's sweeheart deal with the Justice Department in the criminal case against Chiquita. Under this deal, no Chiquita official received any jail time.

Firedoglake has more details.

An Attorney General with such items on his resume reflects poorly on the President who nominated him. Setting aside for a moment the ruinous economic policies that he and Congress have been implementing, President Obama is a genuinely nice guy. I'm surprised, in light of these nasty details, that Eric Holder was his choice for this important position.

Carrying this over to the domestic front, by the way, it appears that guns are fine for South American death squads but possibly not for Americans.


May 20, 2009


Pelosi: Approval Numbers in the Range of the Revolting Newt?

Monique Chartier

Egad.

Nearly half of all Americans — 48 percent — disapprove of how the California Democrat she is handling her job as Speaker of the House in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released Monday, while 39 percent approve of her performance.

* * *

That puts her approval rating at roughly the levels Newt Gingrich had in his first year as Speaker of the House. (Back in 1995, Gingrich's approval rating was 37 percent; by 1997 — at the same point in his speakership that Pelosi is now — that had dropped to just 25 percent.)



May 17, 2009


Washington's Unfortunate Bipartisanship on Human Rights

Monique Chartier

... and not so much a pure, reach-across-the-aisle spirit is the basis for President Obama's selection of our next ambassador to China, The Corner's Jay Nordlinger has concluded.

I have had a line for some years now: Just as China is a one-party state, America is a one-party state, where China policy is concerned. There are no R’s and D’s; virtually the entire political establishment wants the same thing: to make money off China (often a pipedream); to accommodate China; and not to ruffle China at all (e.g., by bringing up what the government does to its citizens).

May 16, 2009


A Major Truther is Missing from Senator Whitehouse's Truth Commission

Monique Chartier

For the record, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's subcommittee hearing on the use of torture and harsh interrogation techniques following the 2001 terror attacks has been chugging along this week. This is necessary to note because one of its potential star witnesses has sucked much of the p.r. oxygen out of the hearing room with her energetic and ineffective attempts to convince the world that she should not, in fact, be considered a star witness in this or any inquiry.

Substantive changes to Speaker Nancy Pelosi's ... recollections have done the most damage to her credibility on this subject, though disorganized press appearances have not helped.

"My statement is clear, and let me read it again. Let me read it again. I'm sorry. I have to find the page," said a flustered Mrs. Pelosi, shuffling through papers, her hands quivering a bit, as she sought to stick to her prepared text.

"When -- when -- when my staff person -- I'm sorry, the page is out of order -- five months later, my staff person told me that there had been a briefing -- informing that there had been a briefing and that a letter had been sent. I was not briefed on what was in that briefing; I was just informed that the briefing had taken place," she said.

Nothing sharpens the mind like testifying in front of a Congressional committee. Notes, not to mention recollections, can be sorted out with some finality. For your own peace of mind, for the sake of the country and, perhaps most importantly, for the sake of the truth, Madam Speaker, you may wish to consider appearing in front of Senator Whitehouse's hearing.


May 14, 2009


Where the Jobs Are

Marc Comtois

Mama's, don't let your kids grow up to be bureaucrats:

Last week the Department of Labor reported that employers shed a net 539,000 jobs in the first three months of 2009, bringing the nation’s unemployment rate to 8.9%. The manufacturing sector lost 149,000 jobs, business services lost 122,000 jobs, and construction lost 110,000 jobs. All told, the private sector lost 611,000 jobs. So how was the total job loss only 539,000? Because one sector of the economy has proven impervious to economic realities: the public sector. Government actually added 72,000 jobs so far this year.

The continued growth of the public sector while all other sectors of the economy contract is no accident. Government employee unions were a driving force in making sure large chunks of President Obama’s stimulus package went to states and cities to preserve jobs. In fact, when you talk about the entire labor movement today, you are really talking about government employees. Less than 8% of the private sector workforce belongs to a union. Contrast that with 37% of all government employees carrying union cards and 42% of all local government employees.

Make no mistake, collecting union dues from public-sector employees (whose salaries are paid by taxpayers) is big business. The Service Employees International Union collects nearly $5 million a month from just 223,000 health care workers. And when the SEIU is not blatantly stealing this money, they are turning it into efforts to elect politicians who promise to endlessly grow the public sector. SEIU president Andy Stern recently told the Las Vegas Sun: “We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama — $60.7 million to be exact — and we’re proud of it.”


May 9, 2009


UPDATED: "A brazen new era of government"

Donald B. Hawthorne

Dave Cribbin, quoted in yesterday's WSJ:

In the Chrysler deal, the [United Auto Workers] were unsecured creditors and the Chrysler bondholders were secured creditors. The bondholders received 28% of the value of their $6.9 billion in bonds in cash; the Union will receive stock worth approximately $4.2 billion, and a note for an additional $4.58 billion, which represents 82% of the value of their claim. Either the government negotiators have dyslexia and have made a terrible mistake in their paperwork, or this is political payoff writ large. Is this not the equivalent of financial waterboarding? And thus we enter a brazen new era of government, when the White House is openly complicit in the theft of, as a matter of fact is directing, the looting of private property from investors. Welcome to the Rule of Man, or as the President calls it, change we can believe in!

Which reminds us what Gerald Ford once said:

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

ADDENDUM

More:

Political risk is becoming a growing concern for investors in the United States as the government plays a larger and more controversial role in private enterprise because of the financial crisis.

State intervention in economic affairs is always closely watched by investors for what it means for their decisions on where to allocate money, although this is usually more of a worry in emerging markets than in developed economies.

Political risk is becoming more of a U.S. issue as some investors howl over what they see as arbitrary intrusion by the government in business affairs...

Investors concerned that politics could hurt them may demand a risk premium before they buy stocks or bonds or do a business deal. That could make the U.S. less competitive and money might flow elsewhere.

"There is a much larger political risk premium on investing in the United States than there has been in years," said Sean West, an analyst at Eurasia Group, a research and consulting firm that studies political risks.

"What we're seeing now in the United States is much more like what we see in emerging markets, where the government either by choice or as a result of circumstance is in a position to decide which companies or banks survive and which ones don't," he said. "These were almost unthinkable risks a year ago."...

In assessing political risks in emerging markets, investors often look at factors such as the stability of the government and the soundness of its economic policies. In developed countries, they assess things such as proposed changes to the tax system and the resulting impact on corporate profits.

Risks in the United States include fears the dollar could dive because of the rapidly growing budget deficit and the potential for inflation because of radical moves by the Federal Reserve to flood the financial system with money.

But a bigger immediate concern, say risk experts, is that established rules governing businesses could be changed depending on the political winds...

The fear that rules can change midstream -- and contracts investors thought were valid are no longer seen as sacred -- can drive up risk premiums, experts say.

"Investors want to know what the rules are so they can determine whether opportunities are profitable or not," said Jaret Seiberg, a financial services policy analyst at brokerage firm Concept Capital.

All this in just over 100 days. Lovely.

ADDENDUM #2

Originally disclosed here, the bullies in the White House have won the day.

Welcome to the new United States where contracts mean what they say...unless the Obama administration decides otherwise.

Isn't this how banana republics are run?


May 8, 2009


Whitehouse's Dog and Pony Show

Marc Comtois

So, Senator Whitehouse is pretty proud that he's finally getting a chance to question Bush Administration lawyers about "torture memos." I wonder if he's interested in questioning members of Congress, particularly House Speaker Pelosi, about what I'm sure Whitehouse would consider a lack of oversight of the program?



For a chuckle

Donald B. Hawthorne

Check out the video.

ADDENDUM

The original Reagan ad.


May 5, 2009


Regulations Are Like Taxes

Justin Katz

Although he isn't speaking solely about our state, Theodore Gatchel's op-ed, Sunday, presents a worthy reminder that taxation is not the only government burden that must decrease in Rhode Island:

The idea held by many politicians and government bureaucrats that simply passing a new law or issuing a new regulation will solve a problem is a common one. Unfortunately, once a new regulation is turned over to the bureaucrats who administer it, the focus becomes the regulation, not the problem it was created to solve, and common sense goes out the window. The resulting mindset also ensures that most regulations can easily be circumvented.

Whether it's in housing, healthcare, or business, a heavy regulatory hand creates a minefield — albeit one navigable by those clever enough to game the system (or wealthy enough to pay somebody else for that service). Thus do we see name changes, the shuffling (rather than mandated servicing) of patients, and a class of government officials with lapses in their tax records.


April 29, 2009


The Specter of a Problem

Justin Katz

Senator Arlen Specter says it all in just a single sentence:

"I am not prepared to have my 29-year record in the United States Senate decided by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate -- not prepared to have that record decided by that jury," he said.

After three decades in the federal government, the folks who've labored to keep you in office become less important than the power. Everything is apt to become less important than the power.

So we should all thank Mr. Specter for the reminder that term limits are worth bringing up at every opportunity. (Of course, with centuries of cumulative years of "service" currently sitting in Congress, there's a whole lot of power likely to be brought to bear against such a movement.)



William Felkner: Card-Checking Arlen Specter

Engaged Citizen

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter has become a Democrat. Many view this as only a change of label, but it could have a significant impact nonetheless.

As you may all be painfully aware, card-check legislation is pending in Washington. If passed, it would eliminate the secret ballot for workers and give unions the ability to knock on potential members' doors and say whatever it takes to get a signature on a small card, which will still be a binding legal document that would force collective bargaining on an employer.

Elimination of the secret ballot also eliminates the assurance that the worker has ample opportunity to hear both sides of the argument.

This legislation has been struggling to be passed. Inside the beltway rumors have it that the swing vote, Senator Specter, hasn’t received enough "support" from the unions yet but was keeping the door open to persuasion.

My birdies that fly south-right for the winter tell me that the Republican National Committee has threatened Specter that if he supported card-check it would throw its support behind his likely primary opponent, Pat Toomey. Well, it looks like we can call him the general election opponent now.

Regardless of where this shakes out, it still bodes ill for workers' rights to secret ballots. The Democrats, who are clearly taking direction from the unions on this issue, are only one or two votes away from the 60 needed to close out the Republicans (depending on how the
Franken/Coleman race goes). Because card-check is such bad legislation, any compromise will be a step in the wrong direction.

Bill Felkner is the president of the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, sponsor of the LRB Watch website and the Transparency Train public information portal.


April 28, 2009


From the Prince Kennedy Hagiography's Cutting Room Floor

Justin Katz

Vincent Bzdek contacted me requesting a comment for a Patrick Kennedy profile related to mental health parity that he was beginning to write for the Washington Post back in early December. Well, it looks like he and the editors decided to go with the "no criticism" angle. To be sure, the following would have stood out as if in dark, bold text amidst all that glowing language:

To be honest, I think such healthcare mandates as the parity bill represent a harmful impulse. They help some small number of people — people who truly do face difficulties and whom society ought to help as a moral matter — but in doing so, they simply transfer, and probably broaden, the struggle. It's the sort of thing that politicians do to justify posturing as if they've solved a problem, when really they've likely increased the net amount of suffering in the world.

Insurance companies aren't simply going to eat the increased costs; there isn't a pool, somewhere, of the money that they've saved by not covering that which Kennedy will now force upon them. So they'll pass on the shortfall to others. Perhaps they'll compensate by decreasing coverage in some category that isn't thus protected.

In Patrick's case, however, it was certainly a shrewd move. The issue served to redirect attention toward a perceivedly positive goal to evolve his narrative away from the string of embarrassing and reckless comments and incidents that left some Rhode Islanders calling for his resignation. He's well liked by a segment of Rhode Island's population, but there's a significant contingent of us who can't react to him otherwise than by shaking our heads in disbelief. The former group now has a direct response to arguments from the latter.

Fortunately for the congressman, however, economic and political realities in the state are driving out thousands of Rhode Islanders, and it's a safe bet that a majority of them are from the side that would sooner see Kennedy as the straightman in a late-night comedy skit than in Congress.

Bzdek would have us believe that Patrick himself had the inspiration, rebuffing his political advisers, to transform his addictions into activism, but the pieces all fall together just a little too neatly for that to be wholly accurate. Kennedy's ailing father muscled the legislation through, making it the legislative vessel for the first "gotta have it" bailout. Now Patrick's declaring it to be his vindication as a Kennedy, linking him with his family's legacy of civil rights stances:

"How could I have ever imagined that this subject, which I think is going to be my undoing, becomes the platform that connects me to my family's legacy? And continues it."

How, indeed. The crown is being handed over, and the media is content to be complicit.



Pollster Rasmussen on State of the GOP

Marc Comtois

Pollster Scott Rasmussen offers this analysis of the current state of the national GOP (h/t):


Many Republicans had expressed concern about the growth of government spending throughout the Bush years. Then there was the immigration issue. On that topic, the Bush team championed a bill that was even less popular than the bailouts. Eventually, despite strong bipartisan support in Congress, the Senate surrendered to public opinion and failed to pass the Bush-backed reform. Beltway Republicans just didn't recognize the large gap between Mainstream American and the Political Class on this issue and assumed that those angry about it are angry at the immigrants. In fact, data shows that the anger is directed primarily at the federal government...

By the end of Bush's second term, the war in Iraq had dragged down the GOP, and Beltway Republicans became identified as the party of big business. That's not a good place to be when 70% of Americans view big business and big government on the same team working against the interests of consumers and investors.

The gap between Beltway Republicans and the Republican base is part of a wider gap between the Mainstream and the Political Class. On many issues, the gap between Mainstream Americans and the Political Class is bigger than the gap between Mainstream Republicans and Mainstream Democrats.

But Political Class Democrats control Congress and the White House while their GOP counterparts have little in the way of power and influence to overcome the disconnect with their base....Look for the Republican Party to sink further into irrelevancy as long as its key players insist on hanging around Congress or K Street for their ideas. The future for the GOP is beyond the Beltway.

Arlen Specter's party switch confirms the impression that many average Republicans have of inside-the-beltway-GOPers. Specter liked being a Republican because he could win as one and wield power. Now, he can't wield the power (in the minority) and he may not even make it out of his own GOP primary. So he's switching purely for self-preservation* because he had fallen out of touch with his party. He wouldn't be the first moderate to tack in a different direction based on some poll soul searching.

UPDATE: Surprise....former Sen. Chafee offers his two cents:

"The party is not changing, they are not learning from all of this. We've seen a huge wipeout in the Senate," Chafee said. "You'd think they'd want to change direction as they slip deeper and deeper into the minority and that's just not happening. They went after Arlen Specter in a blue state primary and look what happened, he just walked across the aisle."
Of course, the convenient mis-remembering here is that the National party didn't "go after" Senator Chafee, the Senate re-election committee stood by him, choosing pragmatism over ideological purity. It still wasn't enough for Chafee to defeat up-and-coming Democratic superstar Sheldon Whitehouse (ahem). The former Senator still has a knack for putting the blame for the short-circuiting of his political birthright on everyone except for the guy in the mirror.

*NOTE: Pennsylvania is a closed primary state, unlike Rhode Island. So when polls of Republicans in Penn. showed Specter way behind, the structure of Penn. primaries simply don't allow for the groundswell of independent (or Democratic) voters that saved Chafee versus Laffey in the 2008 RI GOP Senate primary. If RI was a closed primary state, it's a good bet Sen. Chafee would have found the Democratic party more comfortable, too.


April 26, 2009


Comfort Means Your Eyes Are Down

Justin Katz

A few days ago, Associated Press writer Liz Sidoti issued perhaps the most disturbing bit of "journalism" in recent memory:

It didn't take long for Barack Obama — for all his youth and inexperience — to get acclimated to his new role as the calming leader of a country in crisis.

"I feel surprisingly comfortable in the job," the nation's 44th president said a mere two weeks after taking the helm.

A milder complaint was often made of President Clinton, but frankly, a president who claims comfort amidst the current circumstances — from the economy to continuing battles with Islamic radicalism and the various conniving regimes across the globe — is either lying or dangerously overconfident. This isn't to say that our national head ought to appear panicked, but "comfort" wouldn't be a word in the vocabulary of an appropriately realistic and circumspect leader.

President Obama ought to ponder why it is that a significant portion of his constituency doesn't find the title of Mark Steyn's latest to be all that extreme: "The End of the World as We Know It." Steyn enumerates a number of uncomfortable developments on the world scene, but among the most chilling thought comes as an aside (emphasis added):

On the domestic scene, he's determined on a transformational presidency, one that will remake the American people's relationship to their national government ("federal" doesn't seem the quite the word anymore) in terms of health care, education, eco-totalitarianism, state control of the economy, and much else. With a domestic agenda as bulked up as that, the rest of the world just gets in the way.

One wonders if the president's comfort level has something to do with the likelihood that his response to Steyn's title would be something along the lines of, "Yup. The country, too."

We will soon find out unequivocally, as our country shifts its stance, whether the United States, as it has stood in the world, really has been a force for good or for ill.


April 20, 2009


Can't Blame Bush Forever

Marc Comtois

The Washington Post's Jackson Diehl makes an observation and then wonders...

New American presidents typically begin by behaving as if most of the world's problems are the fault of their predecessors -- and Barack Obama has been no exception. In his first three months he has quickly taken steps to correct the errors in George W. Bush's foreign policy, as seen by Democrats. He has collected easy dividends from his base, U.S. allies in Europe and a global following for not being "unilateralist" or war-mongering or scornful of dialogue with enemies.

Now comes the interesting part: when it starts to become evident that Bush did not create rogue states, terrorist movements, Middle Eastern blood feuds or Russian belligerence -- and that shake-ups in U.S. diplomacy, however enlightened, might not have much impact on them.

Indeed, as Victor Davis Hansen writes:
[D]id the “their old America did it, not my new one” Obama approach win his country anything? Russians helping out to prevent a nuclear Iran, or stopping the killing of dissidents abroad, or promises not to bully the former Soviet republics? More European combat units going to Afghanistan? Mexico vowing to curb illegal immigration? Turkey ceasing its new anti-Western Islamic screeds?

His supporters would rejoin, “Oh, but give him time. He’s sowing the field with good will for a bountiful harvest of future cooperation”. I do think he’s sowing, but a minefield rather than a crop, whose explosions will be as inevitable as they will be numerous. Sarkozy’s crude dismissal and appraisal of Obama (nothing is worse for a liberal administration than to have their idolized French brethren bite their extended limp hands) are the templates of things to come.

And back to Diehl:
Obama is not the first president to discover that facile changes in U.S. policy don't crack long-standing problems. Some of his new strategies may produce results with time. Yet the real test of an administration is what it does once it realizes that the quick fixes aren't working -- that, say, North Korea and Iran have no intention of giving up their nuclear programs, with or without dialogue, while Russia remains determined to restore its dominion over Georgia. In other words, what happens when it's no longer George W. Bush's fault?



Obama, Budget Cutter?

Justin Katz

Following a week of tea party rallies that the president professes to have barely noticed, a couple stories in today's Providence Journal suggest some modest attempts to puncture his big-spending image. Considering that some banks have suggested that they'd like to return bailout money to the feds, it isn't surprising that the administration thinks more money might not be necessary. Of course, there's a twist:

President Obama's top economic advisers have determined that they can shore up the nation's banking system without having to ask Congress for more money any time soon, administration officials said.

In a significant shift, White House and Treasury Department officials now say they can stretch what is left of the $700 billion financial bailout fund simply by converting the government's existing loans to the nation's 19 biggest banks into common stock. That would turn the government aid into available capital for a bank -- and give the government a large equity stake in return.

Lacking time for extensive research, I put this forward as only an impression, but this doesn't strike me as all that much of a shift from where we were a week ago.

Here's the other (little) bone the administration is throwing out there to the angry crowds:

President Obama plans to convene his Cabinet for the first time today, where he will order members to identify a combined $100 million in budget cuts over the next 90 days, according to a senior administration official.

The budget cuts, while they would account to a minuscule portion of federal spending, are intended to signal the president's determination to cut spending and reform government, the official said.

Precisely, that $100 million would represent 0.0028% of the $3.5 trillion 2010 budget — 0.0083% of the $1.2 trillion deficit. So how many protesters do we have to gather across the country to merit, say, a 1% decrease in the budget?


April 18, 2009


Giving Whitehouse an Easy Go

Justin Katz

Although Arlene Violet subsequently whacked him with a great question about using stimulus money to suppress changes to teachers' healthcare benefits, I'm very disappointed that the Newsmakers gang let Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse ramble on with this partisan mumbo-jumbo for three minutes:

I think it's sort of an ironic moment on this subject, and particularly to the extent that the tea party was orchestrated through the Republican Party and its organizations, because here we are in a bleak recession, which is the one time when economists agree that federal spending is really important, even when you have to borrow to spend, because families are contracting their budgets, businesses are contracting their budgets, states and municipalities are contracting their budgets, and so the whole economy contracts and collapses unless the federal government can engage in what they call "countercyclical spending" to moderate the downturn. So, this is the one time when it really makes sense.

When George Bush took office, we were headed for being a debt-free nation now. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office took a look at where the budget was when President Clinton left it, and we were in surplus, and we were headed for debt-free, and in eight years, George Bush changed that, nine trillion now, 8.9 trillion, to be specific, and that was fair-weather times. That was money for everybody. That was Wall Street on a roll, and he spent that 8.9 trillion on things like a war in Iraq and letting Wall Streeters rake in billions of dollars and get their taxes reduced while they were doing that.

So, there's a kind of sad irony in, now that we need it, people becoming so upset about the federal spending when nobody really paid attention to it, and there weren't tea parties going on when George Bush was running up $9 trillion in debt to give tax breaks to Wall Street millionaires.

First of all, the Republican Party did not "orchestrate" the tea parties. Watch, for evidence, big-spending Republicans being booed at them across the country.

On the financial points, what is Whitehouse talking about with that $8.9 trillion? The total national debt now stands at $11.1 trillion (PDF). When President Bush left office, it was $10.6 trillion (PDF). But when Bush took office, it was $5.7 trillion.

It risks a fatal tangent, but it's worth noting that this number includes intragovernmental holdings, most notably the infamous Social Security IOUs. Such internal borrowing is not typically included in annual deficit numbers. In a sense, the government owes this money in promised services, but there aren't lenders with bills for eventual payment. Excluding this total, the debt under Bush grew from $3.4 trillion (9/29/00) to $5.8 trillion (9/29/08).

Whether we count the increase in the debt as $4.9 trillion or $2.4 trillion, it's still too much — anything above zero is too much — but it simply isn't true that the federal government under President Bush ran up "$9 trillion in debt." It's a lie. And it doesn't take into account the fact that about half of the increase — by either measure — occurred during the two of Bush's eight years during which Democrats controlled Congress, which controls the federal purse.

Moving on to Whitehouse's assertion of Wall Street's being on "a roll" during the Bush presidency enables a nice return to the notion of that "countercyclical spending" of which he's so fond. In actuality, the DOW dipped about 2,000 points around the time of 9/11, recovered some, and then spent much of 2H02 and 1H03 even lower. According to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, private domestic investment dipped from 2001 through 2003. During and beyond this period, government revenues plummeted.

Bush and the Republican Congress increased outlays at the outset of this downturn and held them reasonably steady as a percentage of GDP. (The fiscal conservative in me, though, is still inclined to complain that outlays went up steadily in absolute terms no matter the economic situation, PDF.) Then the economy improved. Consequently, the deficits under Bush show a U pattern, maxing out in 2004 and then heading back toward zero, until the recession began to really sink in in 2008.

An inconceivable number of factors come into play, here, but the point is that, if you buy Senator Whitehouse's economic excuse for the Obama-Dem spending spree (which I don't), the Bush years would have to count as a prime example of mitigating recessions through government spending. This intellectual necessity is evidenced most strongly in the fact that the dot-com bust, an unprecedented terrorist attack in the U.S. financial core, and years of war did not prevent those years from being such that Whitehouse speaks so glowingly of the economy, then.

Even so, in the graphic shown at that last link, the jaw-dropping difference between the Bush deficits and those projected for Obama and beyond makes so much mumbling of Whitehouse's chatter. The Congressional Budget Office expects most of the next decade to have annual deficits that more than double Bush's worst year.

It's understandable that the journalists wouldn't have had the information at hand to rebut the Senator's talking-points nonsense on air, but Whitehouse was sufficiently brazen that they should have recognized a need for him to explain his numbers. Maybe an inevitable stumble or two would have at least given viewers a sense that he wasn't rolling through economic gospel truth.


April 16, 2009


Providence, RI, Tax Day Tea Party Speech

Justin Katz

Stream, Download

This is one of those times in history when a society must make a decision. Social commentators of the near future will say one of two things about us: If we fail to be heard, then these tea parties, these expressions of outrage across the nation, are the final lunge of a fading culture, riddled with the errors of an unenlightened past. Or, if we can rein in our government, these demonstrations represent the reawakening of the American spirit, reasserting the principles of the United States.

Our country is defined by its principles. There is no picture of the typical American. We aren't a race. We aren't a religion. We aren't a tribe or a sect or a straight line of lineage. The typical American is a person in motion. With a swagger. Sometimes a smirk. Often a smile. But always, there's a set jaw and a confident stride toward the future — toward growth and improvement and a better life for all who'll but seek it.

Future historians will either tell the tale of a nation that tipped the scales toward the final decline of Western civilization, or they will celebrate the character of a people who saved the world once again. Because it was right, and because it was who they were. Who we are.

We are called, most critically, not to stand against an external enemy — although that exists — but against a corruption of spirit. There is a cancer running through our culture that wants ease instead of opportunity, that takes a life of stability to be a higher goal than a life of achievement. Powerful interests will punish those who strive and excel because they want to be the ones providing everybody else's comfort — defining everybody else's well-being.

We here today do not savor work, but freedom. If we aren't free to err and struggle, we aren't free to succeed. If we aren't free to build organizations and businesses and lives according to our beliefs and our goals, and based on our own experiences, then we just aren't free. There is no stability without risk, and freedom is the only defense against stagnation.

The forces of stagnation have waged a decades-long campaign to advance their cause incrementally. Little by little. While they hold sway in the halls of power they inject their principles of big government and nanny-state dictation into the body politic, and then, when the poison reveals itself in painful consequences, they recede into the shadows and await their next chance.

When a welfare and social policy regime results in a desperate underclass, these forces point to a bogeyman of bigotry. Conveniently, it's always to be found among their political opposition. When quasi-governmental lenders back unsecure investments and build an edifice of financial straw, would-be magicians of the political sphere spread our great-grandchildren's earnings around in order to establish the principle that government knows best how to run all things, large and small. They connive to foster dependency. They know that an antidote never fully overcomes addiction.

They take, and they tax. They regulate, and they assert authority. They preach their own superiority. And every year, they control a little bit more of our lives, telling a distracted citizenry that they are all that stands between our families and utter collapse and that only their guidance can protect us from our prejudices. They push the fallacy that an increasingly complicated society requires centralized oversight and central planning, when the polar opposite is true. Well, I'm sorry, Senators Reed and Whitehouse, Congressmen Langevin and Kennedy, but no matter how eloquent and genuinely intelligent our new president may be, even if he's the brightest bulb in that dim capital, his thinking is fundamentally flawed. It is dangerous. Oppressive.

If we cannot put a stop to the lapse in our national ideals currently seeping into Washington — very similar to the illness that has ravaged Rhode Island — we will cease to be the United States of America. If we cannot say to the president and his followers, "you lied — you sold us a break, a period of cooperation," if we cannot say that and make the schemers in our government stop pasting a radical pastiche where they promised the even lines of a new realism, then they will have no fear. They will march right into our lives. They will know that the nice image of helping our old country to cross the road to a time of undefined hope and dubious change is suitable propaganda to cover their power grab.

I suspect that most of you here today now understand that there was never any intention to compromise. Those who rule our nation — and who would rule the "global community" — have an idea of compromise that is merely to mouth some pleasing words about listening and then to do whatever they want, take whatever they want. And that is why we must be uncompromising in our message. Enough is enough. That is the statement that the people of these United States have to make. That we have to make here today. And that we must continue to make as we turn our country back toward the right direction in the months and years to come.


April 13, 2009


The One's Direction of the Mob

Justin Katz

Peter Schwartz tallies some recent indicators of political mood:

The essence of mob rule is arbitrary and unchecked force, in disregard of all rights. If so, then when the government spends our money with virtually no limits — then trillions of dollars are gleefully disbursed through unrestrained horse-trading and arm-twisting among members of Congress — when trillions more are poured down the rat holes of failing companies at the uncontrolled discretion of bureaucrats — when government "czars" can select a company's CEO and dictate its product line — then what we have is government by mob rule. That is, we have government with arbitrary, unchecked power to do as it wishes — which means: government unconstrained by the principle of individual freedom.

As he goes on to explain, freedom is unjustifiably being made a scapegoat:

Like any mob, Washington desires a scapegoat. It blames capitalism for the mortgage and credit crisis, in order to divert attention from the real culprit, government intervention. Every housing-related measure taken by Washington has made the standards for homeownership looser than they would be in a free market. Government has stepped in to override private companies' aversion to undue risk. Regulators criticized banks for turning down too many mortgage applications. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created to encourage the issuance of mortgages that would not be prudent in a free market. The FDIC anesthetizes depositors against risks taken with their funds. And the entire Federal Reserve exists to pump paper money into the economy, and to keep interest rates artificially low — often below the rate of inflation — so that more lending occurs. Yet when this house of cards collapsed, it is capitalism that was denounced and more government power that was demanded.


Congressman Langevin Should Tell Us What He Means

Justin Katz

Given its title, I had hoped for some blogworthy meat in Rep. James Langevin's Sunday op-ed, "U.S. needs more control over Internet," but having read the thing, I'd be hard pressed to describe what he's proposing. The reader gets this at the beginning:

A NEWLY INTRODUCED Senate bill, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, which would establish cyber security standards for both the government and the private sector, and create a national cyber security officer within the office of the president, is a notable development in our nation’s effort to craft a comprehensive national cyber security strategy.

And this in the middle:

True protection requires cyber resilience. But that can only be achieved through collective action and cooperation on a scale rarely witnessed before: a national effort involving business, government and society — similar to the way "Y2K" was approached, but designed for the long-haul not just one event. No single organization has the capacity to build this resilience. We need to work as a large and inclusive community across government, industry and non-profit organizations — a mega-community of sorts.

But what does this mean? And how can a "mega-community" help but be open to infiltration and attack?

The underlying question is, I suppose, why Mr. Langevin thought his essay worth writing in the first place. A quick review of the Cybersecurity Act text suggests that its main thrust is to create panels, programs, and centers — another bureaucracy — that will assess and address problems related to cybersecurity, not only for national security purposes, but also to protect intellectual property rights. That's all fine, but is this what now constitutes "action afoot" in the federal government?

I'm afraid so. When we the voters are brought into the fold, the information is vague warnings and declarations of a need for collaboration and, of course, spending. Somehow, at the tail-end of the process, we seem always to be spending more of our money to finance somebody else's investigation into methods of curtailing our freedom of motion and of information.

Aren't there already agencies in the federal government tasked with ensuring our security? I'd suggest that we could add cybersecurity to their responsibilities and then require them to provide detailed explanations for why they need to reallocate or acquire additional funds to address specific problems. Instead, we get politicians who wish most to create the image that they are doing something — while pinning themselves to as few specific policies as possible — and an ultimately unaccountable bureaucracy that will never go away, even when the prefix "cyber-" is a quaint relic of the past.


April 11, 2009


A Crucial Matter of Support

Justin Katz

Thanks to reader donations and advertising sponsorship, I'll be able to take Wednesday afternoon off from work in order to attend, blog from, and speak at the RI Tea Party, from three to six on April 15th.

Most people, to be sure, don't keep a little pot of money on the side to enable involvement with such events, but I do want to stress how important it is that there be a strong showing. If even little blue Rhode Island can evince substantial opposition to the turn that our government is taking, we can contribute an outsized poignancy to the message that the broader tea-party movement is sending to Washington.

Whether you can go for a short time before leaving the city on your way home, travel into the city after work (in the opposite direction of rush-hour traffic, I'd note), or make room in your schedule for the whole three hours, this would be a wonderful catalytic event through which to accelerate reform — civic renewal, if you will — not only nationally, but in our state, as well.

I know that Portsmouth Concerned Citizens et al. have arranged for bus transportation from Aquidneck Island. (Contact Marlene Kane for information.) Other local groups — established and newly forming — may have similar opportunities. But however you get there, the important thing is that you participate.


March 29, 2009


Chris Dodd Picks Up an Opponent

Monique Chartier

It's much too early for such polling to be accurate. So let's disregard the one point lead that Rob Simmons already has on Senator Chris "Sweetheart Mortgage" Dodd - plus we may jinx Mr. Simmon's chances - and focus instead on his positions.

From today's Westerly Sun.

If he were in the Senate now, he said he would have voted against the stimulus bill, calling it a throwback to the 1930s. A better plan would be to return to the 1960s or 1980s, he explained, when presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan helped stimulate the economy by cutting business taxes.

* * *

His other suggestion for stabilizing the economy was a three-month tax holiday, which would cost much less than the stimulus bill and give taxpayers more money to shop and spread their money around.

He also disapproved of the bank bailouts, he said, as well as the legislators who gave money away without oversight and then complained afterward about how it was used.

Damn. Does he have a twin in Rhode Island?

By the way, the incumbent did finally "coming clean" on one of his scandals ... um, by playing a game of peek-a-boo with it. From the Wall Street Journal of February 3.

Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd has finally, sort of, kind of, ended 193 days of stonewalling about his sweetheart loans from former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo. At least he did if you were a fast reader and were one of the few reporters he invited to his Hartford office yesterday to review -- but not copy or take -- more than 100 pages of documents related to his 2003 mortgage financings through Countrywide's "Friends of Angelo" program.

These are the files that Mr. Dodd pledged to make public after the news broke last summer that the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee had received preferential treatment from Countrywide. At first, Mr. Dodd denied everything. Later, he conceded that he'd been given special treatment but thought it was "more of a courtesy."

Whew. Glad that's cleared up.


March 24, 2009


President Obama's Press Conference

Engaged Citizen

Listen live on WPRO. Comment here. (In case anyone else has been ranting at a radio or television for the last 27 minutes ...)


March 22, 2009


Geitner and the Administration's Fiscal Philosophy: the Perfect Match

Monique Chartier

President Obama has no intention of dumping Treasury Secretary Geitner.

Embattled Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner's job is safe and the subject of resignation has not come up in his conversations with President Obama despite calls from some in Congress for Geithner to step down, the president said in an interview to be broadcast tonight on CBS's "60 Minutes."

This is good news. Staggering, pointless deficits created by dubious bailout packages, jacked up social spending and expenditures on pork which look diminutive only because they sit in the middle of gargantuan spending bills. Pointlessly exorbitant environmental and energy programs which will serve only to choke off industry and drain wallets. This administration has already signed some irresponsible and seriously misguided - make that dangerous - fiscal policies and, alarmingly, intends to proceed with more.

Who better, then, to lead the money department than someone whose brief tenure seems to be comprised of fumbles, large and small, starting with his first major initiative described by the New York Times as only an "outline" of a bank bailout plan and now accusations that he failed to alert anyone to taxpayer funded bonuses. (After all, how many dollars can one man keep track of? Actually, if they're tax dollars, he needs to keep track of all of them. On another front, while this does not excuse any of Mr. Geitner's missteps, it would be good if someone would hire him some lieutenants. And filling staff level vacancies at Treasury might move along a little quicker if someone would REPAIR THE DAMN WEBSITE. )

Add in the initial, brusque message - our tax laws apply to almost everyone - conveyed by the appointment of a tax evader to this of all positions and Timothy Geitner has, indeed, turned out to be "uniquely qualified for this job", though perhaps not in the way that the President originally envisioned.


March 11, 2009


The Substance in the Style on Stem Cells

Justin Katz

I remember when President Bush made his announcement about the ban on federal financing of embryonic stem-cell research. He held an evening address, at his desk, and took the time to explain some of the science, present the opposing arguments as he saw them, and explain his decision. You can think what you like about the man or his decision, but that's a stark contrast from President Obama's cheering-crowd press conference, yielding photographs of him leaning off the stage to lay hands on the paralyzed Representative Jim Langevin.

The difference extends to substance. Bush offered an actual compromise position (as much as those who opposed him might have disliked it): He increased (I believe) funding of adult-stem-cell research and permitted funding of research on stem cells that had already been removed from embryos. From Obama, we get promises:

Mr. Obama pledged that his administration will write strict guidelines for research on stem cells taken from embryos. "And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction,'" calling the practice "dangerous and profoundly wrong."

Why not have those guidelines ready for presentation at Monday's announcement? Why not actually put into place anti-cloning policy at the same time that he opened the door for federal funds for the destruction of embryos?

The answer, I suppose, depends on how cynical one is.


March 7, 2009


UPDATED: Is Obama clueless or are his actions intentional?

Donald B. Hawthorne

UPDATED: Roger Kimball:

I was having lunch yesterday with a prominent critic of the Spender in Chief, and he raised a possibility that many of us have entertained over the past several weeks: that Obama is simply out of his depth: that he hasn’t a clue about what makes the economy tick and his talk about the "profit-to-earnings ratio" was not a slip of the tongue but a worrisome confirmation of the suspicion that he is an empty suit floundering around in the dark.

We kicked around that possibility for a few minutes: certainly the Obama administration seems like a monument to incompetence. Consider the multiple appointment fiascos. Consider his treatment of Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the country that has been our staunchest ally. Consider, if you can stand it, the economy: That sucking sound–the only palpable trace of the once-mighty U.S. stock market–reminds us what the market makes of Obama’s plans to raise taxes on "the rich," the middle class, business. It reminds us what the market thinks of his efforts to shove the coal industry into a death spiral with absurd cap-and-trade carbon emissions regulations. And that’s all before breakfast, before he sets about wrecking the U.S. health care industry by turning it, too, over to Washington for ruination.

Yes, we agreed, it certainly looks like incompetence and, judged by its results, is effects, its consequences for this great country, it is incompetence on a breathtaking scale.

And yet, is it only incompetence? Remember, shortly before the election, Obama boasted to his mesmerized supporters that "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." Is that not what he has set about doing–with a vengeance? [Here.]

And here’s where we began talking about another possibility: that Team Obama was deliberately targeting the U.S. economy, deliberately impoverishing millions of Americans, deliberately angering our closest allies while coddling dictators like Putin and his puppet Medvedev and funneling millions to terrorist organizations like Hamas...

...Each step strengthens the role of government in people’s lives. That’s exactly what Lenin sought to do...

Lenin, too, wished to "spread the wealth around." And Obama, like Lenin, has been perfectly frank in recommending that we need to go beyond the "merely formal" rights enunciated in the Constitution in order to "bring about redistributive change" in society.

That’s where Obama’s much heralded–and astronomically expensive–"green" initiatives come in. Only they aren’t really (or are only incidentally) "green," i.e., concerned with the environment. At bottom, they are pink, i.e., they are political weapons in a socialist battle against "greedy" business interests.

Who, I wonder, was the political genius who saw the advantages of exploiting people’s sentimental gullibility about the environment for partisan profit? We’ve long known that environmentalism, as the philosopher Harvey Mansfield put it, is "school prayer for liberals." But I wonder whether even Professor Mansfield could have foreseen what a tool pseudo-environmentalism would be for the radical wing of the Democratic party? The inestimable value of a green, that is, a pink, philosophy is that you can never be green enough. And in pursuit of zero-carbon-emissions purity a government can impose crippling sanctions in order to force compliance. And don’t say Obama didn’t warn you: as I and many others pointed out during the campaign, he promised that, if elected, he would do all he could to "bankrupt" the coal industry...

ORIGINAL MARCH 5 POST & ADDENDUMS

Hmmm.

Jennifer Rubin has written a piece entitled 'I'm Maureen Dowd, and I've Been Had' (H/T):

They may need a support group before the month is out. They could gather in New York or Washington where many victims reside. The meetings would start: “I’m Maureen [or David]. I’m a duped Barack voter. And I’m mad.”

The ranks indeed are filling with the disaffected and the disappointed — Chris Buckley, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, David Gergen, and even that gynecological sleuth and blogger Andrew Sullivan. And then there is the very angry Marty Peretz. Their complaints are varied but expressed with equal amounts of remorse and bitterness. They all have been done wrong by Barack...

All in all it is one dismayed and bitter group, filled with recriminations and a bit of self-flagellation. And it’s not hard to recognize that, as in any grieving process, they have passed through denial (when all who criticized their beloved Obama were excoriated and ridiculed) and are in the second step: anger. They were misled or deluded into believing Obama was a moderate or an indefatigable supporter of Israel or a fiscal grown-up or a reformer (take your pick).

They and the rest of the country are figuring out the bitter truth: Obama bears little resemblance to the moderate and soothing figure who tied up John McCain in knots. He bears even less resemblance to the Agent of Change. Rather he’s pretty much the Chicago pol who went to the Senate to be its most liberal member.

And for the wounded Obama supporters, we can offer just one bit of counsel: you have lots of company. There are trading floors filled with sympathetic souls and businesses filled with stunned executives. They didn’t get what they bargained for either...

Kind of like yesterday's post here on AR. Stuart Taylor has more: Obama's Left Turn - Centrists fear that the president's budget reveals his liberal leanings.

Peter Robinson: "A couple of implications here are worth noting. The first is that a deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite...The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right. As our national drama continues to unfold, bear that in mind."

More here and here.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama, with strong majorities in both houses of Congress, will get every legislative initiative he wants. And from a sheer vote counting viewpoint, that would certainly be true.

But could the countervailing force not be the oft-spineless Republicans with their limited votes in Congress?

Could the real counter come from the financial markets themselves, which sense both the magnitude of the economic downturn and how Obama's proposed statist solutions will only compound the problems and adversely impact any recovery?...

So is it a race between a financial market collapse, accelerated by its reaction to Obama's policy proposals, and Obama's aggressive and statist policy implementation effort?

Will the financial markets then be the force which galvanizes a broad reaction from the American people?...

Incentives matter deeply and drive human behavior. It is a lesson statists and socialists never learn...

Ledeen on de Tocqueville from the second link above:

...We will not be bludgeoned into submission; we will be seduced. [Tocqueville] foresees the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state that manages all the details of our lives. His words are precisely the ones that best describe out current crisis:
That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

It is evident that our associations, along with religion one of the two keys to the great success of the American experiment, are prime targets for the appetite of the state. In the seamless web created by the new tyranny, everything from the Boy Scouts to smoking clubs will be strictly regulated. It is no accident that the campaign to drive religion out of American public life began in the 1940s, when the government was consolidating its unprecedented expansion during the Depression and the Second World War, having asserted its control over a wide range of activities that had previously been entrusted to the judgment of private groups and individuals.

When we console ourselves with the thought that the government is, after all, doing it for a good reason and to accomplish a worthy objective, we unwittingly turn up the temperature under our lobster-pot. The road to the Faustian Deal is paved with the finest intentions, but the last stop is the ruin of our soul.

Permitting the central government to assume our proper responsibilities is not merely a transfer of power from us to them; it does grave damage to our spirit. It subverts our national character. In Tocqueville’s elegant construction, it "renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself."...

...The great Israeli historian Jacob Talmon coined the perfect name for this perversion of the Enlightenment dream, which enslaves all in the name of all: totalitarian democracy.

These extreme cases help us understand Tocqueville’s brilliant warning that equality is not a defense against tyranny, but an open invitation to ambitious and cunning leaders who enlist our support in depriving ourselves of freedom. He summarizes it in two sentences that should be memorized by every American who cherishes freedom:

The…sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

Will the next question for these disillusioned pundits be to ask whether Obama is truly clueless on economic issues OR whether he is intentionally acting in a way to bring down the economy so as to justify his socialist beliefs/policies?

One man's thoughts (H/T).

There is a paper trail which stands behind these thoughts regarding Obama's radical beliefs - More here, here, here, here, and here.

Then there is Obama's pre-election paper trail with numerous links to his many statements not covered well by the MSM.

A thoughtful person has to admit that no other U.S. President has ever had political connections or espoused beliefs which are so questionnable and out-of-line with mainstream opinions.

Is the evidence pattern enough to at least make more people stop and think about what are Obama's true intentions? Will they then take the next step and speak up against Obama's wealth-destroying and liberty-limiting policies?

Or are we all going to be looking belatedly for our own support groups where we talk about how we were also duped?

ADDENDUM

Power Line writes:

[Obama doing it intentionally] is, I admit, an intriguing theory, but I don't buy it. Obama can't possibly want to be a one-term failure. That's what happened to Jimmy Carter, and Obama must know that it will happen to him, too, if his policies are perceived as dragging down the economy.

More likely the explanation is that Obama is an economic illiterate, and subscribes to the idea--which I think is rather common among Democrats--that what the government does has little impact on the economy. Obama likely believes that the economy will recover on its own, and in the meantime--in Rahm Emanuel's immortal words--he shouldn't let the crisis go to waste. So he enacts every left-wing measure that he wanted to do anyway, expecting that when the economy eventually recovers he can take credit for it, even though his policies, if anything, retarded and weakened the recovery.

That's a cynical strategy, although not quite as cynical as destroying the economy on purpose; the difference is that it may well work.

During the general election, Obama showed himself to be ignorant about history so it is not unreasonable that he would also be economically illiterate, too.

But he is also showing himself to be quite the leftist ideologue. Since ideologues act based on their faith beliefs, regardless of empirical evidence, I think it is hard to say definitively it is just illiteracy.

ADDENDUM 2

Meltdown (H/T).

Boskin: Obama's Radicalism is Killing the Dow. Rubin's comments:

...Democrats may shrink from the label "socialist," but they can’t deny the scope and direction of the president’s agenda. More important, they’re not embracing a model which has (ever?) succeeded in producing growth and prosperity. So whatever you call it, it is not a recipe for recovery.

The radical implications of Obama's budget proposal. Victor Davis Hanson provides some historical context. Michael Barone:

The Obama tax plan, combined with major state tax plans, puts not a three in front of the high earners' tax rate as the Clinton plan did, it puts a four or a five in front of it. And at that point, I fear, the animal spirits of high earners are going to be directed away from productive investment and toward tax avoidance and tax shelters. Away from creating new enterprises that can provide avenues upward for any and all, and toward gaming the system for the well-connected and shrewd insiders. Away from an economy that grows more than anyone imagined and toward an economy where system-gamers take shares of a static pie away from the rest of us. Is that where we really want to go?

More Rubin:

Fred Barnes is onto the scam: "Given the moderate-to-conservative viewpoint of voters, Obama has a motive in pushing to have his uniformly liberal agenda approved by Congress as rapidly as possible–before voters catch on to the fact it’s not what they voted for."

Or to put it differently, the Wall Street Journal editors conclude that "economies don’t spiral down forever without a reason and without policy encouragement. What’s worrying about the plunge in equities since January 2, and especially in the last week since Mr. Obama released his radical budget, is that it has come amid the unveiling of the President’s policy agenda. Equity prices have reacted to those proposals by signaling that they expect a much deeper and longer recession."...

Charles Krauthammer calls Obama on the bait-and-switch: "Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy — worthy and weighty as they may be — are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime." Actually the proposals not only aren’t the cure, the taxes and regulatory regime which accompany these plans are likely to make things worse.

Healthcare policy: The latest example of Obama's disdain for liberty.

ADDENDUM 3

Rediscovering first principles. (Lots more here if you want to do a deep dive on many first principles.)

A focused, video comparison between two different world views: Obama versus Reagan.


March 4, 2009


Riding the buyers' remorse train on day 44 of Obama's presidency

Donald B. Hawthorne

Christopher Buckley.

David Brooks.

Even David Gergen.

Jim Cramer.

Now Silicon Valley entrepreneurs see their incentives are being altered for the worse:

Like the college students who stayed up late to be inspired by his campaign rallies only to find Obama's first significant action to be a stimulus program that will transfer about a trillion dollars from them to the Baby Boomers, Silicon Valley Obama supporters are likely to find that a government-dominated economic era will not a great one in which to start companies that threaten big incumbent corporations that have juice with the government. I hope they appreciate the irony.

More here on entrepreneurs in general from the ever-thoughtful Jim Manzi. How do statists like Obama think jobs are created?

Whose next on the Obama buyers' remorse train?

Will it matter enough to force changes in Obama's radical agenda?

ADDENDUM

Democratic Senator Evan Bayh writes in the Wall Street Journal:

...Our nation's current fiscal imbalance is unprecedented, unsustainable and, if unaddressed, a major threat to our currency and our economic vitality. The national debt now exceeds $10 trillion. This is almost double what it was just eight years ago, and the debt is growing at a rate of about $1 million a minute.

Washington borrows from foreign creditors to fund its profligacy. The amount of U.S. debt held by countries such as China and Japan is at a historic high, with foreign investors holding half of America's publicly held debt. This dependence raises the specter that other nations will be able to influence our policies in ways antithetical to American interests. The more of our debt that foreign governments control, the more leverage they have on issues like trade, currency and national security. Massive debts owed to foreign creditors weaken our global influence, and threaten high inflation and steep tax increases for our children and grandchildren.

The solution going forward is to stop wasteful spending before it starts. Families and businesses are tightening their belts to make ends meet -- and Washington should too.

The omnibus debate is not merely a battle over last year's unfinished business, but the first indication of how we will shape our fiscal future. Spending should be held in check before taxes are raised, even on the wealthy. Most people are willing to do their duty by paying taxes, but they want to know that their money is going toward important priorities and won't be wasted...

...But what ultimately matters are not meetings or words, but actions. Those who vote for the omnibus this week -- after standing with the president and pledging to slice our deficit in half last week -- jeopardize their credibility.

As Indiana's governor, I balanced eight budgets, never raised taxes, and left the largest surplus in state history. It wasn't always easy. Cuts had to be made and some initiatives deferred. Occasionally I had to say "no."

But the bloated omnibus requires sacrifice from no one, least of all the government. It only exacerbates the problem and hastens the day of reckoning. Voters rightly demanded change in November's election, but this approach to spending represents business as usual in Washington, not the voters' mandate...

More on 14 centrist Democratic Senators from Politico.

Jennifer Rubin comments:

Barack Obama’s lurch to the left is costing him some support among centrist pundits, but now he’s lost a prominent Democratic Senator, Evan Bayh.

...Bayh and Nelson both pushed back against the idea of raising taxes in a recession. Presumably there are more legislators who are not ready for this lurch to the left.

This is potentially a turning point, as Democrats step forward willing to say, "Enough!" Whether they succeed in dragging the president back to a more centrist and sensible agenda remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: the center, at least in the Senate, is closer to the Republicans than to the Obama administration when it comes to fiscal sobriety and taxation.

Want the definition of overreach? When even Maureen Dowd whines about Obama. LOL.


March 2, 2009


Liberty & the proper role of government in a free society

Donald B. Hawthorne

Obama's budget proposal presents plans which run radically counter to the proper role of government if America is to remain a free society:

...The widespread use of the market reduces the strain on the social fabric by rendering conformity unnecessary with respect to any activities it encompasses. The wider the range of activities covered by the market, the fewer are the issues on which explicitly political decisions are required and hence on which it is necessary to achieve agreement. In turn, the fewer the issues on which agreement is necessary, the greater is the likelihood of getting agreement while maintaining a free society.

...a good society requires that its members agree on the general conditions that will govern relations among them, on some means of arbitrating different interpretations of these conditions, and on some device for enforcing compliance with the generally accepted rules...most of the general conditions are the unintended outcome of custom, accepted unthinkingly...no set of rules can prevail unless most participants most of the time conform to them without external sanctions...But we cannot rely on custom or on this consensus alone to interpret and to enforce the rules; we need an umpire. These then are the basic roles of government in a free society: to provide a means whereby we can modify rules, to mediate differences among us on the meaning of the rules, and to enforce compliance with the rules on the part of those few who would otherwise not play in the game.

...the organization of economic activity through voluntary exchange presumes that we have provided, through government, for the maintenance of law and order to prevent coercion of one individual by another, the enforcement of contracts voluntarily entered into, the definition of the meaning of property rights, the interpretation and enforcement of such rights, and the provision of a monetary system.

The role of government just considered is to do something that the market cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate, and enforce the rules of the game...

Earlier posts here and here discuss what combination of economic freedom and limited government enables liberty for us:

...How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat to freedom? Two broad principles embodied in our Constitution give an answer...

First, the scope of government must be limited. Its major function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets...By relying primarily on voluntary co-operation and private enterprise, in both economic and other activities, we can insure that the private sector is a check on the powers of the governmental sector...

The second broad principle is that government power must be dispersed...If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does...I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check...If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations...

...The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm...

The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization...have never come from centralized government...

Government can never duplicate the variety and diversity of individual action...

It is widely believed that politics and economics are separate and largely unconnected; that individual freedom is a political problem and material welfare an economic problem...such a view is a delusion...

Economic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensible means toward the achievement of political freedom...

Viewed as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements are important because of their effect on the concentration or dispersion of power...competitive capitalism also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other...

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions...

History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition...

The relation between political and economic freedom is complex and by no means unilateral...

As [nineteenth-century, not twentieth-century] liberals, we take freedom of the individual, or perhaps the family, as our ultimate goal in judging social arrangements. Freedom as a value in this sense has to do with the interrelationship between people...in a society freedom has nothing to say about what an individual does with his freedom; it is not an all-embracing ethic...a major aim of the liberal is to leave the ethical problem for the individual to wrestle with. The "really" important ethical problems are those that face an individual in a free society - what he should do with his freedom. There are thus two sets of values that a liberal will emphasize - the values that are relevant to relations among people, which is the context in which he assigns first priority to freedom; and the values that are relevant to the individual in the exercise of his freedom, which is the realm of individual ethics and philosophy.

The liberal conceives of men as imperfect human beings. He regards the problem of social organizations to be as much a negative problem of preventing "bad" people from doing harm as of enabling "good" people to do good...

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals - the technique of the market place.

The possibility of co-ordination through voluntary co-operation rests on the elementary - yet frequently denied - proposition that both parties to an economic transaction benefit from it, provided the transaction is bi-laterally voluntary and informed.

Exchange can therefore bring about co-ordination without coercion...

...Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce...The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated - a system of checks and balances. By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement.

Economic power can be widely dispersed...Political power, on the other hand, is more difficult to decentralize...if economic power is joined to political power, concentration seems almost inevitable. On the other hand, if economic power is kept in separate hands from political power, it can serve as a check and a counter to political power...

Obama's budget proposal also runs counter to the philosophical principles underlying the American Founding.


March 1, 2009


The radical implications of Obama's budget proposal

Donald B. Hawthorne

Commentators on the evolving Obama presidency:

Charles Krauthammer: Obama proposes a European U.S.

Not a great speech, but extremely consequential. If Barack Obama succeeds, his joint address to Congress will be seen as historic -- indeed as the foundational document of Obamaism. As it stands, it constitutes the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president...

...The economic crisis is to Obama a technocratic puzzle that needs to be solved because otherwise he loses all popular support.

Unlike most presidents, however, he doesn't covet popular support for its own sake. Some men become president to be someone, others to do something. This is what separates, say, a Ronald Reagan from a Bill Clinton. Obama, who once noted that Reagan altered the trajectory of America as Clinton had not, sees himself a Reagan.

...Obama made clear Tuesday night that he intends to be equally transformative. His three goals: universal health care, universal education, and a new green energy economy highly funded and regulated by government.

(1) Obama wants to be to universal health care what Lyndon Johnson was to Medicare...

...Obama will create the middle step that will lead ultimately and inevitably to single-payer. The way to do it is to establish a reformed system that retains a private health-insurance sector but offers a new government-run plan (based on benefits open to members of Congress) so relatively attractive that people voluntarily move out of the private sector, thereby starving it. The ultimate result is a system of fully socialized medicine. This will likely not happen until long after Obama leaves office. But he will be rightly recognized as its father.

(2) Beyond cradle-to-grave health care, Obama wants cradle-to-cubicle education. He wants far more government grants, tax credits and other financial guarantees for college education -- another way station to another universal federal entitlement...

(3) Obama wants to be to green energy what John Kennedy was to the moon shot, its visionary and creator. It starts with the establishment of a government-guided, government-funded green energy sector into which the administration will pour billions of dollars from the stimulus package and billions more from budgets to come.

But just picking winners and losers is hardly sufficient for a president who sees himself as world-historical. Hence the carbon cap-and-trade system he proposed Tuesday night that will massively restructure American industry and create a highly regulated energy sector.

These revolutions in health care, education and energy are not just abstract hopes. They have already taken life in Obama's massive $787 billion stimulus package, a huge expansion of social spending constituting a down payment on Obama's plan for remaking the American social contract.

Obama sees the current economic crisis as an opportunity. He has said so openly. And now we know what opportunity he wants to seize. Just as the Depression created the political and psychological conditions for Franklin Roosevelt's transformation of America from laissez-faireism to the beginnings of the welfare state, the current crisis gives Obama the political space to move the still (relatively) modest American welfare state toward European-style social democracy...

Conservatives take a dim view of the regulation-bound, economically sclerotic, socially stagnant, nanny state that is the European Union. Nonetheless, Obama is ascendant and has the personal mandate to take the country where he wishes. He has laid out boldly the Brussels-bound path he wants to take.

Let the debate begin.

Power Line on Clarity

We shouldn't be surprised by the radicalism of Obama's domestic agenda. He was, after all, the most liberal member of the Senate. And he found congenial both the preaching of Rev. Wright and the educational agenda of William Ayers...

Obama's unwillingness, as a formal matter, to take Republican views on domestic issues seriously should not be surprising either. There is no room for meaningful discussion between radicals and non-radicals...

But Obama no longer needs Harvard conservatives or Illinois Republicans to vouch for his "reasonableness." Moreover, he is now engaged in an enterprise that requires a greater single-mindedness -- the transformation of the American economic system...

Under the circumstances, conservatives should be grateful for the clarity of the situation. It is better that battle lines be drawn in sharp relief than that Republicans have the opportunity to pull off this or that legislative tweak...Economic radicalism cannot be tweaked into something palatable.

We now know for certain that Obama is an out-and-out statist bent on redistributing income and clamping down on free markets. He desires, as Charles Krauthammer has shown, to convert our free and vibrant economy into a European-style nanny state.

Conservatives must be equally single-minded in the defense of our country's way of life. There is no cooperating with Obama on domestic issues, and to the extent that Republican Senators like Arlen Specter cooperate, conservatives must do whatever we can to end their public careers.

Continue reading "The radical implications of Obama's budget proposal"

February 28, 2009


Frank Just as You'd Expect

Justin Katz

One could have expected that Barney Frank would know that he was playing to his own crowd at last night's Ocean State Follies, and it also wasn't surprising that his humor has a meanish, hyperpartisan tinge: stream, download. The clearest indication of his attitude came toward the end when somebody on the restaurant staff dropped some dishes and Frank's ad lib inclination was to crack about his or her working above "classification."

Socialism's gonna be fun with this gang!


February 25, 2009


Dispelling Myths About Bipartisanship

Justin Katz

Can we now be clear about what it fundamentally means to strive for "bipartisan" action?

Reed said economists "on both sides of the political divide" concluded "this stimulus was necessary, that we had to stop the job losses, we had to get people back into the marketplace, that there was a very real fear of even worse job losses." He said the package represents "a rather rapid response to the most significant problem facing the country, which I think speaks volumes of the president's leadership and his ability to get difficult things done."

But he cautioned that more must be done, such as "additional efforts to increase lending by the banking community."

While campaigning, Obama decried partisanship, and once in office, he tried to gain support for the stimulus package from Republicans in Congress. But the package passed without a single vote from House Republicans, and it received support from just three Republican senators — Maine's Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, whom conservatives deride as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only).

In response to Republican criticism of the stimulus package, Reed questioned the GOP's claim to fiscal conservatism, noting the national debt rose sharply during President Bush’s administration. "I think after presiding over the economic policies that led us to so much of this," he said, "their standing to be critical is really diminished. But I think what they did is they adopted a political posture, not one based on a pragmatic analysis of the markets and what had to be done."

So should Obama keep striving for bipartisanship?

Brown University political science Prof. James Morone had an op/ed piece in The New York Times on Tuesday, saying that while Obama seems eager "to restore a culture of cooperation in Washington," it's not going to be easy because "that golden bipartisan era never existed."

"Great presidents do manage to push past partisanship — not by reaching out to the other party, but by overwhelming it with a new vision," Morone wrote. "Franklin Roosevelt did not offer a hand to the defeated Hooverites." Rather, FDR's success stemmed from "the collective, social-gospel vision he articulated from the start."

"Bipartisan" is a desirable marker of actions that are so clear and popular that even the necessary political tension that should exist in a healthy society does not apply to them (at least fully). If the weighty and complicated matters of our day sail along with the winds of a bipartisan spirit, it means that our government is not functioning properly.


February 22, 2009


Just a Stimulus Bill

Justin Katz

Most Anchor Rising readers are old enough to recall the School House Rocks cartoons that offered young TV viewers a bit of civic education back in the late '70s and early '80s. The one that I remember most clearly was the "I'm Just a Bill" song about how a bill becomes federal law.

Well, Jim Treacher provides an opportunity to reminisce and, separately, updates the song in light of the stimulus bill's precedent:


February 19, 2009


Arizona Asserting Sovereignty

Justin Katz

Of all the notions that spread from state to state, wouldn't this be a breath of fresh air?

Whereas, the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"; and

Whereas, the Tenth Amendment defines the total scope of federal power as being that specifically granted by the Constitution of the United States and no more; and

Whereas, the scope of power defined by the Tenth Amendment means that the federal government was created by the states specifically to be an agent of the states; and

Whereas, today, in 2009, the states are demonstrably treated as agents of the federal government; and

Whereas, many federal laws are directly in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States; and

WHEREAS, the Tenth Amendment assures that we, the people of the United States of America and each sovereign state in the Union of States, now have, and have always had, rights the federal government may not usurp; and

Whereas, Article IV, section 4, United States Constitution, says in part, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government", and the Ninth Amendment states that "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people"; and

Whereas, the United States Supreme Court has ruled in New York v. United States, 112 S. Ct. 2408 (1992), that Congress may not simply commandeer the legislative and regulatory processes of the states; and

Whereas, a number of proposals from previous administrations and some now pending from the present administration and from Congress may further violate the Constitution of the United States.

Therefore

Be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the State of Arizona, the Senate concurring, that:

1. That the State of Arizona hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States.

2. That this Resolution serves as notice and demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers.

3. That all compulsory federal legislation that directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties or sanctions or requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding be prohibited or repealed.

4. That the Secretary of State of the State of Arizona transmit copies of this resolution to the President of the United States, the President of the United States Senate, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate of each state's legislature and each Member of Congress from the State of Arizona.

I know nothing about Arizona politics, so this may or may not have a life beyond its introduction, but it's nice to know that there are folks out there with this sort of goal in mind.


February 17, 2009


Two Explanations for Mark Patinkin

Justin Katz

Mark Patinkin's bullet-list-style column, today, makes two quips that, helpful soul that I am, I'll try to answer:

Someone will have to explain to me why Palestinian militants feel it's productive to keep firing rockets into Israel.

Because, receiving no substantial international backlash against the practice, the terrorists wish to provoke Israel into military action, with invariably causes international backlash. Thus do the random rockets ultimately isolate Israel from the spinless West even as they wear down the confidence and comfort of the Israeli people.

Obama may fail yet, but it's impressive how readily conservative radio hosts who for eight years championed policies that led to a big mess abroad and at home have piled on the new administration for attempting to change course.

Conservatives fall into several categories on this. Some don't believe that the policies that they supported were ultimately the cause of our current predicament. Others believe that the necessary change to prior policies is being made in the wrong direction. Of course, it's unfair to lump conservatives together as Patinkin does (specificity, Mark!), although the world certainly doesn't lack for partisans who will offer support to the convenient cause.


February 13, 2009


Gregg Rejects Obama Census Grab

Marc Comtois

New Hampshire Senator Jud Gregg removed himself from consideration as Commerce secretary. While his disagreement over the "stimulus" package may be the main reason--his stand on principle--the shenanigans that the Obama Administration is engaged in with the 2010 Census may have been the final straw. John Fund recently explained the danger with having the White House control the census and discussed the issue with Bruce Chapman, who directed the Census in the 1980s.

"The real issue is who directs the Census, the pros or the pols," says Mr. Chapman. "You would think an administration that's thumping its chest about respecting science would show a little respect for scientists in the statistical field." He worries that a Census director reporting to a hyperpartisan such as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel increases the chances of a presidential order that would override the consensus of statisticians.

The Obama administration is downplaying how closely the White House will oversee the Census Bureau. But Press Secretary Robert Gibbs insists there is "historical precedent" for the Census director to be "working closely with the White House."

For my Democratic friends, the words of Mississippi Republican Rep. Gregg Harper may provide some perspective:
How would you feel if this was [President Bush's senior political adviser] Karl Rove and the Bush White House that was handling this census? It's the same thing.
Michael Barone thinks the Gregg un-nomination may have shined a brighter spotlight on the Obama Census grab. Let's hope so.

ADDENDUM: On a lighter note, we should keep in mind the rights of Imaginary-Americans.


February 9, 2009


Forbes: America's Two Nations

Marc Comtois

Forbes magazine examines the difference between America's private and public sector (H/T):

In public-sector America things just get better and better. The common presumption is that public servants forgo high wages in exchange for safe jobs and benefits. The reality is they get all three. State and local government workers get paid an average of $25.30 an hour, which is 33% higher than the private sector's $19, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Throw in pensions and other benefits and the gap widens to 42%.

***

Cops and firemen initially were granted early retirement because their work was physically demanding and they tended to die young. These days they live as long as everyone else, but early retirement lives on for an ever expanding pool of public workers. So do liberal disability rules. Nevada law 617.457 decrees that heart disease among uniformed safety workers is job-related. The medical reality, says the American Heart Association, is that a fireman gets heart disease from diet, lack of exercise or genes, not from dashing into burning buildings. Still, veteran Las Vegas firemen hobbled by heart disease can collect an inflation-protected $40,000 a year for life on top of their pension. That applies even if they're healthy enough to work in another occupation.

***

All this would be infuriating enough if public employees were merely retiring with pensions that paid out a reasonable percentage of their working wages. Instead, they have found legions of ways to boost payments well beyond those levels. In New York, Philadelphia and several other cities police officers rack up huge amounts of overtime in their last two or three years on the job to goose the base pay used to calculate lifetime pension benefits.

Continue reading "Forbes: America's Two Nations"

February 8, 2009


At Least Our Goof Isn't Our Goof

Justin Katz

Can we pause for a moment and be thankful for one thing — that this guy is a Democrat?

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said earlier, as the moderates struggled to complete their deal, "I couldn't care less about bipartisanship." Whitehouse said getting an economic pump-priming bill passed quickly was more important than drawing Republican support. The question of whether the bill gets support from few Republicans or many Republicans "is a sideshow," Whitehouse said.

Whitehouse also said he believes the Senate bill is too small to accomplish the amount of economic stimulus needed.

In another indication of the fraying tempers in this week's debate, Whitehouse angrily denounced Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma for his efforts to block certain projects, including one at the Roger Williams Park Zoo.

"He mocked a zoo that belongs to the City of Providence," Whitehouse said of Coburn during a Senate speech. Coburn, who has made a specialty of attacking spending programs he considers wasteful, had earlier won a large bipartisan majority for an amendment that forbade spending on any gambling casino, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center or highway beautification project. ...

"Is the senator who offered this so infallible? Does he know so much about other states that he's never even visited that he can impose his views?" Whitehouse asked about Coburn after the Senate adopted his amendment on a 73-to-24 vote. Reed and the rest of the New England Democrats present joined Whitehouse in opposition to the amendment.

I'd suggest that Republicans pondering a run for national office keep an eye on Sen. Whitehouse's spot. I've a feeling that, when the political caravan begins to turn, Whitehouse is going to run straight into a ditch.


February 7, 2009


Challenging the socialistic onslaught

Donald B. Hawthorne

As Obama, Pelosi and Reid accelerate the implementation of socialistic practices in America - building on what Bush started - it is helpful and necessary to reacquaint ourselves with fundamental economic principles and some specific significant issues animating today's public debate.

FUNDAMENTAL ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES

The 17-blog post series below was originally put together in 2006 and contains excerpts from the writings of Thomas Sowell, Reason magazine, Bruce Caldwell, Friederich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Arthur Seldon, Gordon Tullock, Jane Shaw, Lawrence Reed, The Freeman magazine, Leonard Read, Donald Boudreaux, John Gray, Bertrand de Jouvenel, and Michael Novak, with links to others like Walter Williams, David Boaz, and David Schmidtz:

No matter how emphatically these politicians rant and rave in their effort to re-write history, they cannot re-write the basic laws of economics. As a Reverend once said, those chickens will come home to roost at some point. The only question is when and how big a price we will pay when it happens.

PRIMERS ON ECONOMICS

As some of the above posts note and as further ammunition for the public debate, these books are excellent primers on important economic topics:

An excellent site for articles, blogging, and podcasts on a broad range of economic issues is Library of Economics and Liberty.

Furthermore, the budding public debate in America touches on 5 significant issues, highlighted below and drawing on the 17 blog posts:

ISSUE #1: UNDERSTANDING THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Since numerous politicians and the media are already trying to re-write the history of the Great Depression so as to justify a significantly larger role for the federal government in our society, we need to arm ourselves for that debate. Here are some good starting points:

Not for the casual reader, here is the book which famously explained how monetary policy was a fundamental cause of the Great Depression:

ISSUE #2: GRASPING THE ACTUAL INCENTIVES WHICH DRIVE GOVERNMENTAL ACTIONS

As part of their argument for a more intrusive government, one of the core arguments of the Left is that interventions by government in the marketplace are somehow more high-minded and of purer intent than private sector actions in the same marketplace.

Part VIII in the above blog series describes public choice theory, which explains the fallacy of that world view. While false, it is nonetheless a pervasive view that holds sway in many minds - even if not articulated explicitly - and has to be tackled directly.

Here are some excerpts from Part VIII about government failure:

...Many economics writers and teachers still present economic systems of exchange between private individuals or firms as "imperfect" and requiring "correction" by government. Most teachers of politics, politicians, and political journalists still present government as well-meaning and able to remove such "imperfections."...

In the past many economists have argued that the way to rein in "market failures"...is to introduce government action. But public choice economists point out that there also is such a thing as "government failure."...

...that government is imperfect carries with it two consequences. The first is that imperfections in the market process do not necessarily call for government intervention; the second is a desire to see if we cannot do something about government processes that might conceivably improve their efficiency...

Although public choice economists have focused mostly on analyzing government failure, they also have suggested ways to correct problems. For example, they argue that if government action is required, it should take place at the local level whenever possible. Because there are many local governments, and because people "vote with their feet," there is competition among local governments, as well as some experimentation...

What causes governmental failure?

...One of the chief underpinnings of public choice theory is the lack of incentives for voters to monitor government effectively...the voter is largely ignorant of political issues and that this ignorance is rational. Even though the result of an election may be very important, an individual's vote rarely decides an election.

Public choice economists point out that this incentive to be ignorant is rare in the private sector...he or she pays only for the [purchased item] chosen. If the choice is wise, the buyer will benefit; if it is unwise, the buyer will suffer directly. Voting lacks that kind of direct result...

Public choice economists also examine the actions of legislators. Although legislators are expected to pursue the "public interest," they make decisions on how to use other people's resources, not their own. Furthermore, these resources must be provided by taxpayers and by those hurt by regulations whether they want to provide them or not...Efficient decisions, however, will neither save their own money nor give them any proportion of the wealth they save for citizens. There is no direct reward for fighting powerful interest groups in order to confer benefits on a public that is not even aware of the benefits or of who conferred them. Thus, the incentives for good management in the public interest are weak. In contrast, interest groups are organized by people with very strong gains to be made from governmental action. They provide politicians with campaign funds and campaign workers. In return they receive at least the "ear" of the politician and often gain support for their goals.

In other words, because legislators have the power to tax and to extract resources in other coercive ways, and because voters monitor their behavior poorly, legislators behave in ways that are costly to citizens.

...bureaucrats in government...incentives explain why many regulatory agencies appear to be "captured" by special interests...Capture occurs because bureaucrats do not have a profit goal to guide their behavior. Instead, they usually are in government because they have a goal or mission. They rely on Congress for their budgets, and often the people who will benefit from their mission can influence Congress to provide more funds. Thus interest groups...become important to them. Such interrelationships can lead to bureaucrats being captured by interest groups...

Or, as is stated in Part III about any government action:

...One of the recurring themes in our consideration of various policies and institutions...has been the distinction between the goals of these policies and institutions versus the incentives they create...

What must be asked about any goal is: What specific things are going to be done in the name of that goal? What does the particular legislation or policy reward and what does it punish? What constraints does it impose? Looking to the future, what are the likely consequences of such incentives and constraints? Looking back at the past, what have been the consequences of similar incentives and constraints in other times and places?...

Now, does any sane person believe that the railroading of a nearly $1 trillion spending spree in about two weeks by Obama, Pelosi and Reid passes the smell test here?

Similarly, the financial crisis of the last year has provided numerous examples of governmental actions and inactions which created incentives for tawdry behaviors in the marketplace. Meanwhile, governmental agencies or individual players have not only suffered no adverse consequences but they are now using these recent events as justification for further governmental involvement in economic activities.

ISSUE #3: THE ROLE OF TACIT KNOWLEDGE IN COORDINATING ACTIONS IN A FREE MARKETPLACE

As Bastiat noted in the 1800's, Paris got fed every day without anyone intentionally planning that outcome. Similarly, Part XII above describes how a pencil is made without one person knowing or doing all the work. Why do those outcomes occur?

Appreciating how these outcomes occur via prices which comunicate the knowledge that enables individuals to coordinate their actions and create economic value is a critical issue usually ignored by public sector players. For example, when they aggressively insert disruptive government actions into the marketplace via a TARP bailout and pork-intensive spending legislation. Contrast that blunt hammer approach with potential legislation which seeks to alter incentives in a way which encourages certain constructive economic behaviors to happen naturally.

Parts III and IV above elaborate further on the role of dispersed knowledge:

...In addition to the role of incentives and constraints, one...other central theme has been the role of knowledge...

...the role of prices...[is to coordinate]...social action where knowledge is dispersed...

Hayek...zeroed in on the critical assumption of full or perfect information. He said that in the real world, we have millions of individuals who have little bits of knowledge. No one has full knowledge, and yet we see a great deal of social coordination...How does that happen? Hayek's answer is that a market system ends up coordinating individual activity. Millions of people are out there pursuing their own interests, but the net result is a coordination of economic activities. And prices are the things that contain people's knowledge.

Mainstream economists have picked up on this and talk about prices as containing information. Modern information theory certainly nods to Hayek as a precursor. He argued that pricing contains knowledge of specific time and place and the man on the spot. Prices contain knowledge that is tacit, that can't really be expressed by individuals. Individuals make actions in markets, and that's what causes prices to be what they are. People are acting in markets. They are not always explicitly saying why they are acting, but they are acting on their knowledge of local situation, the past, and more...

...Given the decisive advantages of knowledge and insight in a market economy...we can see why market economies have outperformed other economies that depend on ideas originating within a narrow elite of birth or ideology. While market economies are often thought of as money economies, they are still more so knowledge economies, for money can always be found to back new insights, technologies and organizational methods that work...Capital is always available under capitalism, but knowledge and insight are rare and precious under any system.

Knowledge can be bought and sold in a free market, like anything else...

...In all these cases, it was the knowledge that was built up over the years - the human capital - which ultimately attracted the financial capital to make ideas become reality...

Success is only part of the story of a free market economy. Failure is at least as important a part, though few want to talk about it and none want to experience it...Economics is not about "win-win" options, but about often painful choices in the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Success and failure are not isolated good fortunes and misfortunes, but inseparable parts of the same process.

All economies...are essentially ways of cooperating in the production and distribution of goods and services, whether this is done efficiently or inefficiently, voluntarily or involuntarily...

By portraying cooperative activities as if they were zero-sum contests...those with the power to impose their misconceptions on others through words or laws can create a negative-sum contest, in which all are worse off...

More on prices/knowledge is in Parts X and XI above.

Friedrich Hayek addressed the subject of knowledge in a seminal 1945 article and his 1974 Nobel Prize speech:

ISSUE #4: RELEARNING THE FATAL FLAWS OF SOCIALISM

In a simplistic layman's nutshell, one could say that the failure of socialism rests on its assuming away the real government incentives problem described in Issue #2 while blocking the flow of knowledge required to enable a free marketplace as depicted in Issue #3.

If you want to better understand and counter the world view which drives the socialistic mentality, here are some classics which rigorously address the fatal flaws of various shades of socialism:

Parts XVI and XVII above discuss the ethics of redistributive policies and the meaning of social justice, two themes which run through socialistic thought and require the coercive force of government. Part IX above elaborates further on the coercive nature of government. Part XV above discusses the consequences of price controls.

ISSUE #5: LIBERTY & THE PROPER ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN A FREE SOCIETY

The impact of the confusion regarding Issue #2 has caused the core American principle of liberty to be missing in action in the current public debate.

This lack of focus on liberty can translate into policies which have a repressive definition of equality measured by outcomes instead of the liberating equality of opportunity; see Part XIV above for further thoughts.

More specifically, this lack of focus on liberty has further highlighted the lack of commonly shared beliefs about the proper role of government if America is to remain a free society - a topic discussed in Part VII above, including these excerpts about the role of government:

...The widespread use of the market reduces the strain on the social fabric by rendering conformity unnecessary with respect to any activities it encompasses. The wider the range of activities covered by the market, the fewer are the issues on which explicitly political decisions are required and hence on which it is necessary to achieve agreement. In turn, the fewer the issues on which agreement is necessary, the greater is the likelihood of getting agreement while maintaining a free society.

...a good society requires that its members agree on the general conditions that will govern relations among them, on some means of arbitrating different interpretations of these conditions, and on some device for enforcing compliance with the generally accepted rules...most of the general conditions are the unintended outcome of custom, accepted unthinkingly...no set of rules can prevail unless most participants most of the time conform to them without external sanctions...But we cannot rely on custom or on this consensus alone to interpret and to enforce the rules; we need an umpire. These then are the basic roles of government in a free society: to provide a means whereby we can modify rules, to mediate differences among us on the meaning of the rules, and to enforce compliance with the rules on the part of those few who would otherwise not play in the game.

...the organization of economic activity through voluntary exchange presumes that we have provided, through government, for the maintenance of law and order to prevent coercion of one individual by another, the enforcement of contracts voluntarily entered into, the definition of the meaning of property rights, the interpretation and enforcement of such rights, and the provision of a monetary system.

The role of government just considered is to do something that the market cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate, and enforce the rules of the game...

Parts V and VI discuss what combination of economic freedom and limited government enables liberty for us:

...How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat to freedom? Two broad principles embodied in our Constitution give an answer...

First, the scope of government must be limited. Its major function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets...By relying primarily on voluntary co-operation and private enterprise, in both economic and other activities, we can insure that the private sector is a check on the powers of the governmental sector...

The second broad principle is that government power must be dispersed...If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does...I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check...If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations...

...The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm...

The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization...have never come from centralized government...

Government can never duplicate the variety and diversity of individual action...[see Part XIII above for more on how the individual is the unit of economic action]

It is widely believed that politics and economics are separate and largely unconnected; that individual freedom is a political problem and material welfare an economic problem...such a view is a delusion...

Economic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensible means toward the achievement of political freedom...

Viewed as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements are important because of their effect on the concentration or dispersion of power...competitive capitalism also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other...

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions...

History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition...

The relation between political and economic freedom is complex and by no means unilateral...

As [nineteenth-century, not twentieth-century] liberals, we take freedom of the individual, or perhaps the family, as our ultimate goal in judging social arrangements. Freedom as a value in this sense has to do with the interrelationship between people...in a society freedom has nothing to say about what an individual does with his freedom; it is not an all-embracing ethic...a major aim of the liberal is to leave the ethical problem for the individual to wrestle with. The "really" important ethical problems are those that face an individual in a free society - what he should do with his freedom. There are thus two sets of values that a liberal will emphasize - the values that are relevant to relations among people, which is the context in which he assigns first priority to freedom; and the values that are relevant to the individual in the exercise of his freedom, which is the realm of individual ethics and philosophy.

The liberal conceives of men as imperfect human beings. He regards the problem of social organizations to be as much a negative problem of preventing "bad" people from doing harm as of enabling "good" people to do good...

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals - the technique of the market place.

The possibility of co-ordination through voluntary co-operation rests on the elementary - yet frequently denied - proposition that both parties to an economic transaction benefit from it, provided the transaction is bi-laterally voluntary and informed.

Exchange can therefore bring about co-ordination without coercion...

...Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce...The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated - a system of checks and balances. By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement.

Economic power can be widely dispersed...Political power, on the other hand, is more difficult to decentralize...if economic power is joined to political power, concentration seems almost inevitable. On the other hand, if economic power is kept in separate hands from political power, it can serve as a check and a counter to political power...

CONCLUSION

With the framework provided by the points raised in this post, we can assess and join in the public debate about the policy proposals we will see over the next few years. Along the way as we defend the marketplace, we will have to be careful to distinguish between crony capitalism/corporate welfare and the innovation arising from the more competitive entrepreneurial capitalism as well as ask ourselves if our private sector leaders, public sector leaders and citizens are holding themselves to a high enough set of ethical standards and transparency in their public behaviors. I predict that finding a way to do the latter in a way that promotes liberty and personal accountability without increasing the number of laws and regulations will be critical to neutralizing the self-righteousness and influence of those who promote various forms of coercive socialism today. In that sense, winning the debate will require a modified strategy from what worked in the 20th century.

Finally, as another part of the discussion, we should also not forget to draw strength from the unique principles underlying our American Founding, including equality before God, as we engage in this ideological struggle to retain our liberty.


February 1, 2009


To the Victor Go...

Justin Katz

As he often does, Jonah Goldberg captures something almost intangible, but true, with this:

Ramesh asked yesterday: "I'm not quite sure why so many liberals are spluttering with rage over the Republicans' failure to go along with their stimulus ideas." He then went on to provide perfectly rational explanations for why liberals should still be happy.

But I think there's an answer for liberal rage: They won. They've been yearning for victory for a very, very long time. They've been full of passionate, netrooted, intensity. Like a starving man dreaming of his next big meal, they had all sorts of ideas about how great their repast would be. Moreover, they believed their own hype. They actually believed that the in-the-tank press was accurately describing reality when they described Obama's FDR-like and Lincolnesque abilities — and opportunities. They bought the idea that because Obama wanted a post-partisan era, he would get it. And they won, they won, they won! And like any kid on their birthday, they think everything should go their way.

That's why this stimulus bill isn't a stimulus bill. It's a bill to catch-up on liberalism's yearnings for social democracy and a more generous welfare state. God gave them this financial crisis as the perfect excuse and Barack Obama as the perfect leader to bring it home.

And yet, it didn't happen the way they hoped. Republicans didn't rollover. Conservatives haven't dropped their convictions. In fact, they seem to have found them.

Goldberg may go a bit far, here. Be individual commentaries what they will, the broad mood of the American public is of breath-holding. There's a come-ye-spring longing, and one can hope that even dyed-in-the-wool liberals are a little apprehensive of the broad strokes of the fiscal brush swooping across the canvas.

Conservatives are fighting under a common-knowledge pall of hopelessness, and liberals aren't sure how much to grab — or how much they trust those doing the grabbing. Perhaps what's spurring some to anger isn't so much the petulant demands of the birthday girl, but a nagging feeling that Republicans resolve against the inevitable is evidence of moral — and political — justification.


January 30, 2009


A Very Brief Capsule Analysis of the RNC Chairman's Race

Carroll Andrew Morse

One thought I've heard from multiple Rhode Islanders keeping tabs on the Republican National Committee Chairman's election is that Mike Duncan would be the only bad choice, the reasoning being that Mr. Duncan takes the position that national party should focus only on Federal races and that state parties have to fend for themselves. There's great skepticism that this top-down philosophy (perhaps usual for the party?) can work given current political conditions.

The election is today. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post has his last round of handicapping here.


January 24, 2009


A Little Morning Humor... and Disgust

Justin Katz

I sure hope Sheldon Whitehouse writes his own speeches, because I'd hate to think that somebody (let alone taxpayers) paid for this:

But for the duration of our Republic, even though our Republic is admittedly imperfect, that light has shone more brightly and more steadily here in this Republic than in any place on earth: as we adopted the Constitution, the greatest achievement yet in human freedom; as boys and men bled out of shattered bodies into sodden fields at Antietam and Chicamagua, Shiloh and Gettysburg to expiate the sin of slavery; as we rebuilt shattered enemies, now friends, overseas and came home after winning world wars; and as we threw off bit by bit ancient shackles of race and gender to make this a more perfect union for all of us.

The speech is overflourished throughout and peppered with a laughable naivete about political and governmental realities. Its purpose is to make a vague call for "discovery, disclosure and discussion" of the asserted misdeeds of the Bush administration, in which regard, Whitehouse is like the kid who so enjoyed mocking the disliked teacher that he wants the gang to go slash her tires after class.

A democracy repairs itself. Enough people wanted "change" that the country elected a president and legislature from the other party. The process of shifts in the following will traverse the natural course of our political and governmental system:

In short, when you have pervasive infiltration into all the halls of government - judicial, legislative, and executive - of the most ignoble forms of influence; when you see systematic dismantling of historic processes and traditions of government that are the safeguards of our democracy; and when you have a bodyguard of lies, jargon, and propaganda emitted to fool and beguile the American people.

The Senator is free to join the inevitable mob of hypocrites who treat as essential much greater reconfigurations than those for which they lambasted the previous administration (as with the "politically motivated" lawyer firings). But if Whitehouse wants a more significant purge than existing law has already set into motion with the change of administrations, then he's not just an oaf, but dangerous. In his blue blood ignorance, he'd usher in a North American Banana Republic.

As a constituent, I therefor request that my Senator repeat the last line of his speech over and over, like a mantra, for at least a half-hour per day:

I yield the floor.

(via Ian)


January 22, 2009


Praise Song for That Day

Marc Comtois

Yesterday, Dan Yorke was talking about the inauguration poem, "Praise Song for the Day", by Elizabeth Alexander and asking for impressions. For his part, Dan thought that it was a solid effort that was essentially a snapshots across America (a "literary split screen" as Dan called it). He thought that it could have been improved upon both stylistically and in the way it was presented. His callers ran the gamut--people confessed to being confused, uplifted, or...whatever. Overall, it was a good bit of "lit-crit" on the radio. For my part, I shot off a quick email that Dan read on the air:

Dan, I agree….a “literary split screen” on a day in the life is a good way to put it. But the end [of the poem] is important:

”In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.“

See, it’s not about just any day, Dan, but that PARTICULAR day. The day when the ONE (Obama) has ascended. To me it was yet one more creepy, though predictable, aspect of the whole over-the-top, messianic feel of this inauguration. Another example of people thinking that, somehow, the election of a politician has single-handedly made everything better. Simplistic.

I've tried to explain this before, but historian and commentator Victor Davis Hanson has honed in and hit on what really bothers me:
I distilled from the press coverage and the crowds and the punditry yesterday that for all too many suddenly a vote for Obama redeems America. Now, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, for the first time in their lives they are apparently proud of the United States....So I am surprised that suddenly the election of a single individual means that we are united, patriotic, proud of America? Suddenly Okinawa or Antietam, or all those who died at the Argonne, are ours to claim again?

....But America was always ours, the public, and the nation transcends the proposition of whether Obama gets elected or not—given that the United States, in its worst hour, was better than the alternatives at their best. So I think it would be wise to cool it on the “I am now proud of America” rhetoric. If getting your way means suddenly the dead at Iwo or those who were blown up in B-17s over Germany are at last your own and matter, then we are in deep trouble.

History did not begin on January 20, 2009.



The First Great Punchline of the Administration

Justin Katz

Jason Jones delivers it on Jon Stewart, just after Stewart has illustrated the striking similarities between Bush's rhetoric and Obama's:

It's like, why is cheese delicious on Italian food, but when you melt it on Chinese food, it's disgusting. I don't know. I guess when Obama says this stuff, I don't think he really means it, and that gives me hope.

That pretty well captures Obama's allure: People across the political spectrum believe him when he speaks their language and hear only necessary white lies when the words come out the other side of his mouth.


January 20, 2009


I've Heard Better

Justin Katz

Here is the text of President Obama's speech. His victory speech was much better, not the least because it was much more gracious toward and tolerant of the other side. Among the first statements issued in the president's new, "unified" tone?

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.

He read that as one paragraph, by the way, making it a complaint against his predecessor, not a statement of national growth. "Unity," in this usage, means the other side just gives in.

One other thought that occurred to me while listening to the speech was that we have been proven correct who have been noting that the nation's handling of race had already changed, and that the liberal methods of addressing it were merely prolonging discord. The conditions were amenable to Obama, just awaiting the right individual.

That is not to deny that it is quite an achievement for him to have been that individual, but a testament to the goodness of our country.


January 17, 2009


At Least We're Not Alone

Marc Comtois

Connecticut has a familiar problem (h/t):

While the private sector was shedding millions of jobs in 2008 and government budgets were collapsing under the weight of waste, fraud and carved-in-stone personnel costs, the public sector had another banner year. Governments at all levels hired 164,100 new employees and were largely responsible for the addition of a further 96,600 jobs in education and 371,600 in health care. Now President-elect Obama wants to add 600,000 to the bloated federal payroll. Untold thousands more local, county and state employees will be needed to fill all the new and bigger public facilities built with stimulus cash. As it is, nearly 15 percent of the civilian work force draws government paychecks.

Lip service by public officials about fiscal austerity notwithstanding, governments and their public-employee unions seem to be approaching 2009 as if the recession is none of their concern. For example, recent negotiations produced teachers contracts that gave raises of 4.4 percent in Cheshire, 4 percent in Region 6, 3.75 percent in Region 14, 3 percent in Plymouth and 2.5 percent for Torrington. In Waterbury, the school board bestowed upon its administrators raises of nearly 10 percent over three years for the expressed purpose of beginning to undo everything the state oversight board did to rescue taxpayers from decades of governmental malfeasance and binding-arbitration abuse. Concessions will soften the impact of these raises some, but prevailing economic conditions minimally demand pay freezes and staff reductions.

In good times, employment ballooned beyond what could be sustained. The public sector is retracing its steps in search of equilibrium. Whither the public sector?

Misery loves company, eh?


January 2, 2009


What Should Be Asked During the RNC Chairman's Debate?

Carroll Andrew Morse

On Monday, the Americans for Tax Reform organization will be holding a debate between the candidates for chairman of the Republican National Committee. Confirmed participants are Saul Anuzis, Ken Blackwell, Katon Dawson, Chip Saltsman and Michael Steele. Also inivited, but not confirmed the last time I checked the website, are Mike Duncan, Tina Benkiser and Jim Greer.

At least part of the debate will be devoted to questions submitted and voted on via the RNCDebate.org website set up for this event. Rhode Island's own Jon Scott has submitted the following question for consideration…

The NRSC and NRCC have concentrated solely on incumbents during the last several cycles and have been ineffective. We have had no discernible answer to the DNC's "fifty state strategy". Good candidates are hard to attract and money is the mother's milk of politics. As a two time candidate for US Congress in Rhode Island; the bluest of blue states, I want to know what the contenders' plans are to support federal races and state Party mechanisms in "weaker" states.
If you'd like to see Mr. Scott's question put to the candidates, you can vote for it by clicking here (registration required).


January 1, 2009


Abandon Hope All Ye Who Run for Office

Justin Katz

Is it me, or is the continued media harassment of the Palin clan beginning to seem like a more general warning:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says her future son-in-law is not a high school dropout as the press is reporting. ...

Palin said some media outlets also are erroneously reporting that her 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, is a high school dropout. The governor said her daughter is enrolled in regular high school and has taken correspondence courses.

Beware, you ordinary (right of center) Americans who are not from the political class: Your lives will undergo tabloid treatment, even from ostensibly respectable news wires, should you find success running for office.


December 30, 2008


Just When You Thought Gov Blago Had Lost His Shock Value

Monique Chartier

In part blaming the Illinois legislature for failing to pass a law that would give the people of Illinois the chance to elect Barack Obama's successor, Governor Rod Blagojevich has appointed former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to the United States Senate, saying,

The people of Illinois are entitled to have two United States senators represent them in Washington DC.

As the Illinois Secretary of State has refused to certify Blagojevich's selection and Democrats in the United States Senate, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, have stated that they will not seat the Governor's selection - both well within their right and power to do so - this unexpected appointment has set up a fascinating showdown. Gov Blago has a point, not quite so baldly stated, that he has not been impeached, has not been convicted of any crime and, in fact, is still the Governor of Illinois, in possession of all of the power conferred by that office, including the power to appoint the successor to a vacant Senate seat. Does the fact that his overt, running auction of a US Senate seat for personal gain was caught on tape really change the core, indubitable fact that he is still Governor of Illinois?


December 23, 2008


Another Square-Peg-Round-Hole Task Force

Justin Katz

Obama's "task force to bolster the standard of living of middle-class and working families in America" can't possibly succeed at its stated objectives, because the ideas and priorities that constitute its basis for formation are deeply flawed, even inimical to the goal that it professes. Here's a bit of ready evidence (emphasis added):

The effort, which is called the White House Task Force on Working Families, is intended to focus on improving education and training for working Americans as well as protecting incomes and retirement security of the middle class. The group, officials said, will work with labor and business leaders.

Labor and business leaders can be relied upon to push their own interests as if they are the interests of whatever group is being targeted. Can you imagine, for example, such a group finding that regulations that favor established businesses and hinder the movement and earning power of private-sector entrepreneurs must be curtailed?


December 19, 2008


Keeping the States Interested in the Electoral College

Justin Katz

Everybody's talking about the Electoral College and the national popular vote movement, 'round here. Ian's on it in the Phoenix. Matt Sledge talks it up on RI Future (although he doesn't think it pertinent to mention that he's the executive director of FairVote RI). Most interesting, however, is Edward Fitzpatrick's column, because the recent FairVote event that sparked the discussion apparently changed his mind, based on the arguments of senior editor and staff writer for The New Yorker (and FairVote board member) Hendrik Hertzberg:

If people such as Carcieri "think the Electoral College is such a good idea, why don't they propose it on the state level?" Hertzberg asked. In most elections, the candidate with the most votes wins. "It's pretty simple," he said. "And that’s how your governor was elected."

On his blog, Hertzberg noted the Constitution gives each state the power to pick electors "in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct." And he said the Founding Fathers did not establish "the current system," in which states award all their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote in each state.

Hertzberg said the current system is "unjust" because "it can easily deprive the people of their preferred choice but also, and mainly, because it shuts the citizens of the 30 or more non-'battleground' states out of the game."

In an interview, Carcieri said the Electoral College was meant to prevent smaller states from being "steamrolled" by larger states, and he said the system "has withstood the test of time."

Hertzberg said, "To say that it has withstood the test of time is simply to say that it's old." And he said having a disproportionate share of electoral votes hasn't kept Rhode Island from becoming a "spectator" state — all but ignored by presidential candidates. Of the 13 states with the smallest populations, only New Hampshire has avoided "spectator" status, he said.

The only thing more disheartening than the realization that a senior editor for a major cultural publication would make these arguments is that they have such wide currency. Firstly, it isn't difficult to comprehend the differences between the nation and its political divisions (states), on one hand, and a state and its political divisions (municipalities), on the other: The geographic, economic, and cultural dispersion among municipalities is not nearly as dramatic as among states, and the federal government behaves beyond the scope of states in a different way than states do municipalities. (There isn't really a state-level analog to the nation's interaction with the world community.)

That point is minuscule, however, in the shadow of the notion that Rhode Island would somehow become more important during campaign season under a national popular vote scheme. Under the Electoral College system, Rhode Island accounts for 0.75% of the available votes. In terms of population, the state holds 0.36% of the national total. In other words, our vote value on a per capita basis would be equivalent to having only two Electoral College votes (with the national total remaining the same).

The specific National Popular Vote proposal currently on the table would actually reduce Rhode Island's significance further. Given Constitutional difficulties, the way the proposal actually functions is by having state legislatures give their Electoral College votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote, but only when enough states have signed on to guarantee victory — that is, when the signatory states account for over half of Electoral College votes.

What that means is that politicians would have our four-EC votes of incentive to campaign in cities and states with higher populations and less homogeneous voting patterns. One-hundred and thirty cities have larger populations than Providence's, and 42 states have larger populations than Rhode Island's. And the state-by-state component of campaign strategies would account for a smaller amount of the total effort, because the National Popular Vote would effectively make the voter audience a national one, thereby increasing the importance of advertisements on a national scale.

I haven't had a chance to research extensively why leftists, in particular, are so keen for the popular vote, but I don't believe that it's residual bitterness over the Bush/Gore race. It could have to do with the fact that Democrats dominate in urban areas, so the math would therefore leave them with a greater advantage, particularly in organizing. Their investment in identity groups may also be a factor, given that geography dilutes such cuts of society.

The advantage of that dilution is perhaps the strongest argument for the Electoral College: It preserves our nation as the United States of America, not the United Interests of America. In a similar vein, it stands as a final safeguard against a populist tyranny — giving small states an allowance against large ones, and political minorities protection against a zeitgeist.


December 15, 2008


Purpose Driven Lives?

Marc Comtois

Driving into work and listening to NPR (yup, really) I heard this story about Obama's nationwide "Change is Coming" house party meetup things (there were some in Rhode Island, too). My first thought was: "It's the holiday season, and these people have no better way to spend their Sunday than regurgitating Obama talking points at each other?"I wasn't far from the truth.

For the house parties, the Obama campaign assembled a team of organizers from battleground states to work with local volunteers. Citizens taking leadership roles hosted the house parties. A packet -- which was given to each host to play during the meetings -- included a DVD of Obama's election night speech, a three-minute "We Have a Lot of Work to Do" video showing off the volunteer efforts during the campaign, and a video from Nikki Sutton, an online Obama campaign organizer.

"Now that the campaign is over, you might be wondering what the next steps are," Sutton says, speaking straight to the camera on the clip that was distributed to play at the house parties, "One of the goals of these house meetings is to come together with friends and neighbors and think about how you will help Barack pass legislation though grassroots acts in your community. In the course of this meeting you'll lay the groundwork for what you can do over the coming months and years."

Boy, sounds like a fun time.


December 10, 2008


Re: Anyone Need...

Justin Katz

The Providence Journal's front-page lead for the New York Times version of the story that Monique mentioned this morning is precious:

Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich is accused of trying to profit from his appointment of Barack Obama's successor in a scheme that didn't involve the president-elect.

It's possible I've missed such things in the past, but I can't recall having ever seen a lead that explicitly running interference. Can you imagine:

Investigators say Enron engaged in illegal activities that in no way implicate President Bush.

December 7, 2008


Bill Ayers tries to airbrush his personal history

Donald B. Hawthorne

Bill Ayers tries to rewrite his personal life history in this New York Times editorial.

J. G. Thayer doesn't let him get away with airbrushing history:

...The facts are simple: Ayers — by his own admission; he described himself after his trial as “guilty as hell; free as a bird” — should have been sent to prison. Instead, he is not only free, but an honored professor who specializes in teaching future teachers — working to make certain his toxic ideology and principles are passed on to more and more young people.William Ayers is not a victim. He is not a misunderstood hero. He is not someone who, despite his protestations to the contrary, deeply regrets the folly of his youth. He is not someone who is repentant of his past misdeeds. He is a would-be Timothy McVeigh, but with more degrees and less technical competence.

ADDENDUM

More on Bill Ayers. Yep, just another law-abiding citizen.



Deja Vu

Donald B. Hawthorne

As the master of malaprops, Yogi Berra, once said:

This is like deja vu all over again.

I guess it isn't enough to pull out all the old books which tackled the realities around the Great Depression and FDR's New Deal versus the commonly held myths.

It now looks like the time to also pull out the decades-old books on the fallacies of industrial policy:

A proposed government "car czar" would oversee any bailout of U.S. automakers under terms being negotiated by the White House and Congress for extending billions in emergency loans to the auto giants, Reuters reported.

Sources familiar with the plan for oversight by an official within the executive branch said Saturday conditions were not final as Democratic leaders and the White House tried to cut a deal.

One leadership aide said both sides favored creation of a "car czar" role to ensure proposed conditions were met, Reuters reported. The funds are designed to last until March, giving the incoming Obama administration and the new Congress time to consider the issue anew.

Racing to seal a deal with the White House, Democratic congressional leaders dispatched aides Saturday to draft an emergency $15 billion aid package to pull Detroit's Big Three automakers from the brink of collapse...

Still, with Washington spooked by massive job losses that provided the latest evidence of a deepening recession, the White House said it was in "constructive discussions" with lawmakers in both parties on the assistance. House and Senate Democratic staff aides worked through the weekend to hammer out details, with votes on the plan expected in the week ahead.

The emerging measure would speed short-term help to General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC, while empowering the government to order a wholesale restructuring of the industry and imposing tight restrictions on the Big Three, according to congressional officials and others close to the talks...

Does anybody old enough to know any history appreciate the irony that these politicians are pursuing government-driven industrial policy - like the Japanese advocated decades ago - while Japanese auto companies have moved beyond that and are now profitability producing vehicles here in the USA in a way which cleans Detroit's economic clock?

As Santayana wrote back in 1905:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

More:
Bailing out Detroit
Bankruptcy, please
Irresponsible talk
Told you so...


December 5, 2008


Even Lenin would be impressed

Donald B. Hawthorne

Melanie Phillips:

Trevor Loudon has got hold of a fascinating analysis of Prez-elect Obama's administrative appointments by Mark Rudd and Jeff Jones, two former Weather Underground terrorists (chums of Obama's old ally [chance acquaintance], the unrepentant former WU terrorist William Ayers). The two of them are now on the board of Movement for a Democratic society, in turn the parent body of Progressives for Obama, the leading leftist lobby group behind Obama's presidential campaign. And waddya know - just like me they believe Obama is practising stealth politics with a degree of sophistication and success with which 'even Lenin would be impressed.' As they say, Obama knows that he must be subtle and reassure even the most conservative of his opponents if he is to achieve his radical goals...

Read Phillips for key excerpts from the articles by MDS members. Here is the link to Trevor Loudon's writeup with more complete information.

Phillips continues:

The key is the stupidity of so many of Obama's opponents, amplified by the credulousness and prejudices of the media and the ignorance of the public. The shallow Republicans and their supporters in the media and blogosphere have in large measure fallen for Obama's stealth politics hook, line and sinker. As a result of his 'centris' appointments which have got them absurdly cooing over people like Clinton and Holder, Gates and Jones, their guard is now totally lowered. They still don't know the true nature of what has hit them -- and at this rate will never know until they wake up one morning to a transformed America and a free world that has lost the war being fought against it.

And the more the left shrieks 'betrayal', the more American conservatives will wrap themselves in denial. But characters like Rudd and Jones are the horse's mouth. They know from the inside the manipulative and stealthy game that is being played here. Lenin would be impressed indeed.

As further background, here are a series of Obama posts from the general election:

Clarifying the deeper problems with Barack Obama
Summarizing the philosophical problems with Barack Obama's view of the world
More troubling thoughts about the One
Crisply defining the core problem with Obama's economic and tax policies
On Obama's economic and tax policies
Multiple choice options regarding Obama's "spread the wealth" comment
Any bids for $75,000?
Socialism
Yep, that'd be my reaction
Obama and ACORN's overt and criminal voter fraud acts
McCarthy: Stifling political debate with threats of prosecution is not the "rule of law" - it's tyranny
Obama on his desire for a civilian national security force
Does Obama believe in liberty?
Obama vs. McGovern on eliminating secret union elections
Obama's fundraising: Insufficient transparency and yet more unanswered questions
A rare Zen moment of simplicity
Senator Obama's naive, ahistorical, and unrealistic foreign policy viewpoints: His Achilles Heel for the November election
On Obama's disarmament priorities
On Obama's healthcare policies
On Obama's extreme abortion beliefs
Obama's views on coal industry
Oh my, it just never stops: In the tank for Obama
Creepy, indeed
Creepy, again
An argument for divided government

Anyone want to bet on what direction Obama wants to take America?


November 26, 2008


Does anyone in Washington, D.C. believe in liberty?

Donald B. Hawthorne

Continuing the earlier discussion about the Detroit bailouts, there is a broader debate taking shape:

Obama Chief of Staff Hopes to Exploit the Economic Crisis to Expand the Growth of Government: In earlier posts I have emphasized the risk that the combination of economic crisis and unified Democratic control of Congress and the White House would lead to a vast expansion of government. It looks like key Obama advisers and congressional Democrats are thinking along the same lines. As Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel puts it, the crisis is "an opportunity to do things you could not do before...You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." The WSJ article from which the quote comes makes clear that the "things" Emanuel has in mind are government policies that "pick winners" by subsidizing particular industries on a massive scale - as Congress is already doing with the finance industry, auto industry and others

Given the serious flaws in this kind of central planning, it is highly unlikely that even a well-intentioned federal government could do a better job than the market in choosing which industries to fund. On this point, F.A. Hayek's critique of government planning is still relevant - even more so than I thought when I defended Hayek's continuing relevance earlier this year. In the real world, of course, it is highly unlikely that government planning decisions will be determined by experts whose only concern is the public good. Rather, politically powerful industries will use their influence to lobby for bailouts and other government assistance that will probably be denied to the politically weak - irrespective of the true merits of helping the industries in question.

Interest group pressure has already played a key role in the congressional vote on the finance industry bailout, and it is likely to be equally important in structuring the massive future bailouts to come. Once Obama takes office, we are likely to see some $500 billion to 1 trillion in additional bailout spending - and that may be just for starters. Interest groups will play a major role in allocating this money, and they are already ramping up their lobbying efforts.

The end result will probably be an enormous transfer of resources from taxpayers and wealth-producing industries to interest groups with political leverage. That is likely to serve the interests of those groups and of the political leaders in charge of doling out the government largesse. But it will also impede economic growth by transferring resources away from productive firms to those that are failing.

Go to the article itself and follow the links.

Here are excerpts from one of them:

Jesse Larner has an interesting and much talked-about article on F.A. Hayek in the left-liberal journal Dissent...Larner gives Hayek credit for his pathbreaking critique of socialist central planning. But he argues that Hayek's thought is largely irrelevant today.

To very briefly summarize Hayek's two most important ideas, he argued that socialism can't work as an effective system for producing and distributing goods because it has no way of aggregating the necessary information about people's wants and needs. By contrast, the price system of the market is a very effective method for collecting and using information about people's preferences and the relative value of different goods. Hayek's 1945 article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" is the best short statement of this argument. Hayek also argued that government control of the economy under socialism necessarily leads to the destruction of democracy and personal freedom. The central planners' control of the economy enables them to crush potential opposition and strangle civil society. This, of course, was the main argument of Hayek's most famous book, The Road to Serfdom (1944).

Larner concedes the validity of both of these Hayekian claims. But he suggests that they are largely irrelevant today because the modern left has mostly abandoned central planning and because Hayek failed to recognize that "collectivism" could be a "spontaneous, nongovernmental, egalitarian phenomenon," not just a totalitarian order imposed by the state. He also suggests that "Hayek doesn’t seem to grasp that human beings can exist both as individuals and as members of a society, without necessarily subordinating them to the needs of an imposed social plan (although he acknowledges that the state can legitimately serve social needs, he contradictorily views collective benefits as incompatible with individual freedom)."

Larner makes some defensible points. For example, he is right to imply that Hayek's arguments are more compelling as a critique of full-blown central planning than of more modest forms of government intervention. It is also true that full-blown economic central planning has a lot less support among left-wing intellectuals today than fifty or sixty years ago. Nonetheless, Hayek's ideas are far more relevant to our time than Larner thinks.

I. The Persistence of Central Planning in Left-Wing Thought.

Although the modern mainstream left no longer favors central planning of the entire economy, many left-wingers do favor government control of large parts of the economic system. Most European leftists and a good many American ones favor government control of the health care industry, which constitutes some 10-15% of the economy in advanced industrialized society. Some forms of government planning are favored not only by left-wingers but also by many moderates and conservatives. For example, government owns and operates some 90% of the schools in Western Europe and the United States. However much we take public education for granted, it still represents the socialization of a vast swathe of the economy.

In addition, many mainstream liberals such as Cass Sunstein and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (as well as some conservatives and moderates) favor giving broad regulatory authority to "expert" government bureaucrats. This is not quite the same thing as government ownership of large enterprises. But it has important ideological affinities with it, to the extent that both policies rely on central planning by expert government bureaucrats. Hayek's arguments in "The Use of Knowledge in Society" are certainly relevant as potential critiques of these various forms of planning - both those that involve government ownership of large enterprises in health care and education and those that rely on regulations administered by expert bureaucrats. If Hayek is right, all these planners and experts don't know as much as they think they do, and certainly can't aggregate knowledge as effectively as the free market can.

Finally, it's worth noting that even full-blown socialism isn't as completely dead as Larner assumes. For details, see my September 2007 post on "Why the Debate Over Socialism Isn't Over."

Fundamentally, most liberals and leftists still look to the state to plan large portions of the economy and other aspects of our lives. So too do many conservatives and moderates, as witness the rise of "big government conservatism" under George W. Bush. Today's advocates of government planning are more modest in their ambitions than the mid-twentieth century socialists whom Hayek criticized. But they are not modest enough to make his arguments irrelevant.

II. Hayek and "Voluntary" Collectivism.

Larner also criticizes Hayek for ignoring the possibility that "collectivism" could be voluntary rather than imposed by the state. He suggests that Hayek was wrong to ignore the thought of socialist anarchists such as Proudhon and Kropotkin, who favored communal enterprise without state control.

Much depends on what is meant here by "collectivism." To the extent that it simply means voluntary cooperation between individuals and groups in civil society, Hayek not only didn't ignore it, he was a great advocate of it. Throughout nearly all his major works, Hayek stressed the importance of voluntary social cooperation and repeatedly emphasized that individuals can't progress or even survive for long without civil society institutions and traditions that are the product of cooperation. Hayek's famous theory of "spontaneous order" was of course based on the idea that society progresses through the development of social norms and customs produced by voluntary cooperation in civil society. Hayek favored free markets and strict limits on government power in large part because he thought that they fostered such voluntary cooperation better than government planning does. Far from denying that "human beings can exist both as individuals and as members of a society, without necessarily subordinating them to the needs of an imposed social plan," Hayek wrote that:

[T]rue individualism affirms the value of the family and all the common efforts of the small community and group . . . [and] believes in local autonomy and voluntary associations . . [I]ndeed, its case rest largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary collaboration.

Some relevant earlier writings can be found here:

"Who You Gonna Call?" The Little Platoons
Sometimes What is New is Old: Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation
Thoughts on the Law & Social Order
On the meaning of social justice
Moving Beyond Loyalty to the Rule of Law Mixes Law & Politics
The Radically Different Visions of Tax-Eaters Versus Taxpayers

ADDENDUM

Obama's rewriting of history continues. It is smart politics and the media will comply with repeating the mantra, likely leading to myths becoming viewed as historical facts.


November 21, 2008


Beware Butter

Marc Comtois

Glenn Reynolds:

Though people still speak of a decision to go to war as something done to enhance the political position of incumbent presidents, history doesn't support that. Truman fought in Korea and lost the next election. LBJ had to give up the White House over Vietnam. George H.W. Bush won in Iraq and enjoyed 90% approval ratings but lost the next election anyway. And George W. Bush's political position certainly doesn't seem to have benefited from the invasion of Iraq; even in 2004, it was an electoral drag, and things only got worse.

By contrast, presidents who push big social programs generally get a political boost and--because the costs and disasters of social programs are less obvious than the costs of war--there's seldom any real downside.

So the notion that war is the friend of big government seems questionable to me, based on things that have happened in the past century at least. Rather, it seems that economic crisis, and economic intervention, is the thing to worry about if you want to keep government under control. Which bodes poorly for current times, when the war's won but the bailouts are coming fast and furious. Eternal vigilance--especially now.


November 18, 2008


Prescriptions for the Other Side

Justin Katz

Those all-powerful radio hosts are to blame for the Republicans' misfortunes, according to Steven Stark. If that's the case, perhaps liberals' difficulty succeeding in the medium was a function of strategy. More seriously, I'd point out that Stark has picked two moments in history and asserted a trend, even though Republicans' fortunes have been more of an arc since the late '80s than a downward slide.

But let's allow that some percentage of the electorate has been driven away from the Republican Party out of aversion to heated, audio-only rhetoric. I'd argue that the perception is a generated one. Even the characterization of "the relentless stream of invective from the right side of the dial" is an arguable description, especially in comparison with the viciousness of the Left, in the multiple media that it controls. And it hardly explains why the affable President Bush is so unpopular.

To be sure, Bush's big-government results are far from the conservative ideal. Some might go so far as to accuse the president of trying to be the populist that Stark is gratified to see in Mike Huckabee. At least in the realm of political theory, conservatives are justified in complaining that their philosophy is inaccurately tarred by association with Mr. Bush.

And there's the edge of the paper covering Stark's argument: President Bush was vilified as a conservative, and conservative media stars are portrayed as beyond-the-pale invective slingers, even when their rhetoric is no more heated or divisive than many a successful liberal. If Mike Huckabee had emerged victorious from the Republican primaries, we'd have spent the last six months hearing what a fire-breather he is.

The lesson for conservatives, in short, is not that it needs to present nice, conciliatory policies, or to take mollifying the skittish middle as a priority. To be sure, I'm a fan of calmness and good humor, but I'd suggest that the liberals who are currently deigning to review the faults of the right are not really complaining about style, but about content, and the only way to remedy that is to change our very nature and to turn a blind eye to reality.


November 17, 2008


Father Sirico: The Way Forward

Donald B. Hawthorne

With a H/T to Rossputin, here is Father Sirico of the Acton Institute offering his assessment of the current state of economic thinking:

...That when one divorces freedom from faith both freedom and faith suffer. Freedom becomes rudderless (because truth gives freedom its direction). It is left up for grabs to the most adept political thug with the flashiest new policy or program; freedom without a moral orientation has no guiding star. Likewise, without freedom and the ability to make moral, economic and social choices, people of faith have restricted practical impact. Theocracy is the destruction of human freedom in the name of God. Libertinism is the destruction of moral norms in the name of liberty. I say a plague on both their houses.

All too many in recent years have at times fallen prey to a consumerist mentality, which is not merely the desire to live better, but the confused idea that only in having more can we be more. Rather than the Cartesian formulation, "cogito ergo sum" we have a new one: "consumo ergo sum."

How common it has become to live outside one’s means, whether it’s the huge flat screen TV we think we can’t do without or the newest automobile or the house larger than our income can afford. The old rallying cry, "Live free or die," has given way to "I’ll die if I can’t have it." Consumerism is wrong not because material things are wrong. No, the Creator pronounced his creation ‘good.’ Consumerism is wrong because it worships what is beneath us.

Then there are the imprudent risks assumed in piling up debt on mortgages with a hubris which assumed that values could only continue to rise at 10% or better per year.

To balance the heresy of consumerism, our culture has invented its opposite, environmentalism-as-holy-order. Here the virtue of thrift—a traditional, indeed, conservative virtue—is reconfigured as a ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ political demand. Thrift, that "handmaid of enterprise," was mothered by scarcity, a scarcity that unregulated pricing in a free market has, better than all economic systems in human history, served best to mitigate. What an obscenity, then, that the principle of thrift should be employed in the mouths of those who oppose this system of natural rationing and allocation, preferring instead top down systems of distribution that would bring poverty and misery to any nation that fully embraced them.

And what must be said about the mortgage originator who sold a loan knowing the customer could ill afford it? Who cared only for the bonus that loan would generate, knowing that the loan would be sold off to some other unknowing bank within days?

And then there is Wall Street. How often the greed and avarice of Wall Street has been skewered and denounced by the East Coast cognoscenti literati, creatures who would not recognize a moral principle if it bit them in their Aspen condos. Most often Wall Street, functioning as a surrogate for the free economy, is denounced for all the wrong reasons: for seeking and making a profit, as though running in the red was somehow a moral virtue and every attempt to be productive was greed. No, if we are going to offer a moral critique of Wall Street, let us not do it because free markets allocate and produce capital, without which people’s homes and savings evaporate, or to be more precise, never get created in the first place. Rather, let us offer a moral critique because all these previously private businesses are now waddling up to the governmental trough begging to be nationalized or subsidized and demanding their share of the dole. Isn’t it obvious that once we concede the principle of a bail-out for those "too big to fail," we invite a queue that will wrap around the globe?

But if tonight I appear to be a generous distributor of anathemas, let me now turn my attention to the institution which initiated, enabled, enhanced and will deepen and sustain this economic and moral hazard. I speak of that institution which has been doing this for the last several decades, and that is the Invasive State as opposed to a limited government. Tocqueville taught us long ago the lesson we are about to re-learn, namely that a society where the moral tie is weakened and where no one accepts responsibilities and consequences for their actions will quickly morph into an authoritarian, State-centered society.

The only society worthy of the human person is a society that embraces freedom and responsibility as its two indispensable pillars which is a society that understands that our individual good depends on our common good and vice versa. Let us reflect upon some crucial facts that are too often overlooked.

The institution of government—what many view as the first resort of charity—is the very thing that unleashed and encouraged those vices of greed and avarice and reckless use of money that got us into the current financial imbroglio. It did so by first placing a policy priority on a worthy goal, increased home ownership, but pursued it with a fanaticism that neglected other goods such as prudence, personal responsibility and rational risk assessment.

Moreover, its official banking centers enjoyed subsidies which distorted that most sensitive of price signals—the price of money—to delude both investors and consumers into believing that capital existed to support vast and extravagant consumerism when in fact no such capital and savings existed.

It’s an obvious point but one the mainstream media appears intent on missing: The financial crisis did not occur within a free market, a market permitted to work within its own indigenous mechanism of risk and reward, overseen by a juridical framework marked by clarity, consistency and right judgment. Quite the contrary. The crisis occurred within a market deluged and deluded by interventionism.

Today we find institution after institution "in the tank" for unrestrained government intervention. One is reminded of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s call for the left to begin a long march through the institutions of Western Civilization. The left, it seems, got the memo. How will we respond to this disheartening situation? Now is no time to retreat in disarray. Now is no time to stumble. There remains a remnant … a potent remnant who has not bowed the knee to big government. My call to you tonight is a transparent one: strengthen the soldiers of that remnant. In particular—strengthen that band of brothers gathered with you tonight, the Acton Institute.

Never in Acton’s nearly 20 year history has our message been more essential than right now. As an institution that cherishes the free and virtuous society, we are living through this thing with all of you, and we need your help to continue. Our history of integrity; the quality of our products and programs; the responsible tone with which we approach the questions at hand, all speak to the fact that this work is worthy of your investment. I humbly ask for it with the promise that we will use it well and prudently.

The fact of the matter is that too many of us have become much too comfortable and yielded to a perennial temptation, the temptation to take our liberty for granted. Those of you who have invested in the work of the Acton Institute over the years know—and especially those of you who have had a chance to see our latest media effort "The Birth of Freedom" know—we believe the time has come for a renewal of those principles that form the very foundation of civilization, the same principles that make prosperity possible and accessible to those on the margins.

Liberty is indeed, as Lord Acton said, "the delicate fruit of a mature civilization." As such it is in need of a nutritious soil in which to flourish. In this sense you and I are tillers of the soil, if you will.

Liberty is a delicate fruit. It is also an uncommon one. When one surveys human history it becomes evident how unusual, how precious is authentic liberty, as is the economic progress that is its result. These past few weeks are a vivid and sad testimony to this fact. As a delicate fruit, human liberty as well as economic stability must be tended to, lest it disintegrate. It requires constant attention, new appreciation and understanding, renewal, moral defense and integration into the whole fabric of society.

In a trenchant analysis of the free society, Friedrich Hayek once offered a sobering speculation:

"It may be that as free a society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, and that once freedom is achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued…" and then he goes on to ask, "Does this mean that freedom is valued only when it is lost, that the world must everywhere go through a dark phase of socialist totalitarianism before the forces of freedom can gather strength anew?"

He answers, "It may be so, but I hope it need not be."

Hayek offers what I consider a partial remedy to this threat. He argues that "if we are to avoid such a development, we must be able to offer a new liberal program which appeals to the imagination. We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage." (The Intellectuals and Socialism, F. A. Hayek).

He is right of course, but Hayek left something out: We must make the building of the free society once more a moral adventure – for its construction was morally inspired in the first place. It emerged from a vision of man as a creature with an inherent and transcendent destiny. This vision, this anthropology, inspired the institutions of Western Civilization: Universal human rights; the right to contract and private property; international institutions of charity; the university. All these formed because of the high view of human dignity we inherited from our Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Earlier, I gave you only the dark side of St. Jerome’s story. A brighter side emerged however, when St. Athanasius came on the scene and scattered the errors of Arianism, defeating its arguments and confounding its proponents. The rectitude of Athanasius’ ideas inspired the Christian faithful to rise up and affirm what they knew to be their tradition, their prayer, their birthright and their heritage.

As a priest, part of my calling is to defend that Tradition. As a child of America and the West, I have a second birthright to defend—the free and virtuous society. Please help us in the critical task of demonstrating why it is not merely the technical proficiency of markets that will enable us to surmount the economic crisis we face. Help us to continue our effort to convince people that economic and moral excellence is of a piece.

People will never surrender themselves for an abstract point of utility. But for a moral adventure? For a deed of moral courage on behalf of human liberty? For this, we will be able to summon a vast army.


November 13, 2008


Bailing out Detroit

Donald B. Hawthorne

Larry Kudlow:

...Stocks were off big today — before, during, and after Paulson — closing down over 400. Tough to pin it on the Treasury man, however, since the plunge started in the early-morning well before he spoke.

Some folks think the stock market is stalking Obama, whose defining moment may be a GM bailout. Plus, investors are waiting for a new Treasury appointee who will shed light on Obama’s tax and trade threats for 2009 as well as his UAW rescue mission that is so strongly favored by Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Policies protecting ailing industries would certainly set a France-like tone for the new administration.

Here’s a stat from my friend, blogger Mark Perry: Total compensation per hour for the big-three carmakers is $73.20. That’s a 52 percent differential from Toyota’s (Detroit South) $48 compensation (wages + health and retirement benefits). In fact, the oversized UAW-driven pay package for Detroit is 132 percent higher than that of the entire manufacturing sector of the U.S., which comes in at $31.59.

I don’t care how much money Congress throws at GM. With that kind of oversized comp-package they are not gonna be competitive. It’s throwin’ bad money after a bad cause. What a way to start the new Obama era.

I would still argue that rescuing banks and consumer credit companies removes systemic risk from our lending system. But the only thing systemic about the GM bailout is the hegemony of the UAW. Or maybe I should be more cynical: Republican socialism followed by more Democratic socialism.

ADDENDUM

Megan McArdle:

One of the things you hear over and over again from critics of Detroit, especially ones from the left, is that their current woes are all management's fault because they kept making big cars.

Management has made a lot of mistakes. But making big cars wasn't one of them. That's because they couldn't profitably make small cars in the United States. And the reason they couldn't is that their labor costs were too high. All in, Detroit was paying about $30 more an hour than other companies to make cars. At that kind of differential, you have to concentrate on large cars with big profit margins, not economy cars where consumers fight to save $15 on the headlight bezels.

That has changed, as Freddie rather vigorously points out in the comments. But corporate culture is a powerful thing. One of the fascinating things about mergers is just how resistant corporate culture is to change; you can fire nearly everyone, and as long as there is still a core of old workers, they will fight to the death to keep doing things the old way. 30 years of complacence followed by 30 years of worrying how to meet the UAW's bill left a corporate culture that was not geared towards innovation, nor towards making small, efficient cars.

Moreover, there was no good way to recruit new talent who might have changed things...Working for the Big Three magically combines vast corporate bureaucracy and job insecurity in one completely unattractive package...

Into this mix you have to throw the dealer network, which has as much of a stranglehold on Detroit as the UAW. As I understand it, until gas hit $4 a gallon and the bottom absolutely dropped out of the market, the dealer network continued to pressure GM and the others to concentrate on high margin SUVs with lots of extras. Libertarians who get all huffy about the UAW should be even more revolted by the dealers, which have browbeaten state legislatures into giving them ridiculous powers over the auto makers.

The entire thing is a toxic mess, left over from the days when interlocking oligopolies contentedly conspired to suck every last dollar out of captive consumers to whom Detroit would happily have given Flintstones cars if they could have figured out how to do them in two-tone vinyl. But things that look like lunatic mistakes on the part of management were often quite rational responses to intolerable pressures...

Having driven the companies right up to the verge of bankruptcy, they conceded literally only when it became clear that the union members were about to get their contracts unilaterally rewritten by a judge, lose their health benefits, and possibly get their pensions crammed down by the PBGC, which maxes out somewhere slightly north of $40K per annum. Then the unions ever so generously agreed to cut health care costs by 30% in exchange for job security guarantees. And now that their game of collective bargaining chicken has resulted in the obvious disaster, they want us to pay to save their jobs, at a cost of over $300,000 per.

It seems to me at least as plausible to believe that the unions were behaving like morons in the belief that the government would bail them out, as that the big bankers were. What is the prudential reason for the rest of us to encourage this sally into the land of moral hazard? If GM goes bankrupt, my Mini will not suddenly stop working.

Bailing out the auto industry offers no net gain to society. It is a straight transfer of resources from one sector to another: we tax money, or borrow it from a finite pool of capital available to the nation, and spend it on auto workers. The people who pay the taxes, or the people who would have borrowed that investment capital, now have less to spend. Whatever they would have bought goes unbought; whoever would have made it goes unemployed. To coin a phrase, what is made on the swings is lost on the roundabouts We have the illusion of a gain only because that other group of people is invisible. Even if we don't bail out GM, they will not be visible--we will never know who didn't lose a job or a business because we declined to spend one squillion dollars saving the Chevy Cobalt.

But let's say it was all management's fault. What's the argument for bailing them out then? Does someone have tens of thousands of auto engineers, marketers, and senior management buried under a rock somewhere, waiting to replace the incompetent managers? Because it seems to me that we're just pouring money into the same deep hole that will periodically reward our efforts by coughing up the Pontiac G6.

Douglas Baird, via Jennifer Rubin:

Professor Douglas Baird of the University of Chicago Law School has some sober words of advice for GM. The entire interview is worth listening to, but the bottom line is simple: GM can’t pay its bills, and it is making a product no one wants. So, a bailout just puts off the inevitable. Oh, and there’s no guarantee that bankruptcy will help, either. As Baird puts it, if a restaurant makes bad food, bankruptcy won’t help it recover.

At least with bankruptcy, however, taxpayers dollars aren’t at stake. Moreover, unlike the vision portrayed by allies of the car companies, bankruptcy won’t mean that GM stops operating–only that its shareholders get wiped out, its creditors "get a haircut," and that new management likely will be brought in. (Remember United Airlines?)

There is little doubt that neither management (which doesn’t want to get booted) nor the UAW (which wants to keep its rich benefit and wage structure) likes the bankruptcy option. And both groups have a lot of political muscle. On the other side are the taxpayers, businesses who have just as much claim to public dollars (and a better track record), and people warning against the never-ending parade of petitioners an open-ended bailout policy will invite.

It will be an interesting test for the President-Elect. Can he stand up to Big Labor? Does he see through the emotional cant ("The auto industry is the backbone of our economy!")? Can he perceive the systemic danger of perpetual government rescues? Stay tuned...

ADDENDUM #2

Jim Manzi:

What would it mean to have GM go bankrupt? A change in ownership and a renegotiation of contracts.

The factories, computers, office space, intellectual property and so forth that are now owned by GM would not disappear; they would basically become the property of GM’s creditors. These creditors would sell the assets to the highest bidder. Assuming there is economic value to be created by continuing to operate the company as a business, private equity or strategic investors would buy the assets, shut down some plants, fire some union and exempt workers, and probably use the leverage of bankruptcy court to get a better deal from the unions. The current employees and creditors would be better off if you and I were forced by the federal government to prevent this by paying money to the corporate entity named General Motors, to then be paid to these employees and creditors. Of course, you and I would be worse off in this situation. On balance, if you believe that markets are more efficient allocators of capital than Congress is, the population of the United States would, on the whole, be worse off.

Is this fair to the people who work at GM and will now have a deal changed after the fact? Well, when people sold parts to GM on credit, or employees (individually or via union negotiations) entered into labor contracts with GM, they undertook counterparty risk. That is, they were taking, in part, a bet about whether GM would actually be able to pay them what they are owed. This is also true for pension payments, which are simply deferred compensation, as much as it is for deferred payments on credit terms for parts. To act now as if they should be protected from this risk is to treat them as children.

Is this fair, given that you and I are being forced to cough up an immense amount of money to bailout bankers in New York who are far less sympathetic characters than assembly line workers or Assistant Market Research Managers in Warren, Michigan? We are bailing out bankers, not because we want to avoid employees losing jobs at AIG or shareholders losing money at Merrill Lynch — in fact, as I have argued form the beginning, it is essential that employees and investors not be protected as part of these bailouts — but because the economy as whole is at risk of devastation if we allow systemic collapse of the banking system. We are bailing out parts of the finance industry because it is good for us, not because it is good for the finance industry. This ultimate public backstop is why it is appropriate and prudent to regulate parts of the finance industry to avoid collapses that threaten the whole economy.

Isn’t it important that we maintain an industrial base as a matter of national security? Yes, but that is not the same thing as saying that the current management of GM needs to continue to have operational control of these assets, or that current employment levels are appropriate, or that current union contracts need to be maintained. There is a potential argument to be made on these grounds for some kinds of restrictions on foreign ownership.

A bailout of GM would be a pure exercise of political power to deliver taxpayer funds to one organized group of citizens at the expense of the country as a whole. It should be avoided.


November 12, 2008


Why not?

Donald B. Hawthorne

Shall we all stop paying our mortgages for the next 2 months so we also can qualify for a bailout?


November 10, 2008


Future History is Written

Marc Comtois

It took historians a full term of George W. Bush's presidency before they declared he was "the worst president ever." Now, only days after the election, at least one prominent historian is declaring that the presidency of Barack Obama will be "unforgettable" (h/t).

Like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D.Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F.Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan - the most memorable of the 18 presidents who served in the last century - Obama seems likely to become an unforgettable personality who presided over a transforming administration....

If Obama's campaign that brought him from relative obscurity in Illinois to the White House in so brief a time is any true measure of the man, we can have every hope that he will acquit himself admirably in the days ahead - and claim a place in the pantheon of America's most distinguished presidents.

There's no doubt that the election of Barack Obama is already historic. But the confidence and the stake-claiming already being made by historians regarding his Presidency gives me pause. In the coming years, through the various trials and tribulations that confront every President, I suspect that many of the "Historians for Obama" will be less than willing to admit their man have been wrong over this or that. Instead, we'll have contemporary "history" being written to justify his decisions and--by extension--the wisdom of those historians who so very publicly supported him. The reputation of the profession will be at stake, you see.

Cross-posted at Spinning Clio.


November 9, 2008


She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain?

Justin Katz

George Will, in a post-election review, makes a corrective worth considering:

Some conservatives who are gluttons for punishment are getting a head start on ensuring a 2012 drubbing by prescribing peculiar medication for a misdiagnosed illness. They are monomaniacal about media bias, which is real but rarely decisive, and unhinged by their anger about the loathing of Sarah Palin by similarly deranged liberals. These conservatives, confusing pugnacity with a political philosophy, are hot to anoint Palin, an emblem of rural and small-town sensibilities, as the party's presumptive 2012 nominee.

These conservatives preen as especially respectful of regular -- or as Palin says, "real" -- Americans, whose tribune Palin purports to be. But note the argument that the manipulation of Americans by "the mainstream media" explains the fact that the more Palin campaigned, the less Americans thought of her qualifications. This argument portrays Americans as a bovine herd -- or as inert clay in the hands of wily media, which only Palin's conservative celebrators can decipher and resist.

These conservatives, smitten by a vice presidential choice based on chromosomes, seem eager to compete on the Democrats' terrain of identity politics, entering the "diversity" sweepstakes they have hitherto rightly deplored. We have seen this movie before. Immediately after the 1972 election, some conservatives laid down the law -- the 1976 Republican nominee must be Vice President Spiro Agnew.

We conservatives are standing before an open field, right now, with all sorts of variables hidden in the high, wild grass. How and how well will Obama govern? The Democratic Congress? What will our enemies do? Our allies? What might social and technological innovations wreak? Or not. And perhaps more important, as an internal matter: Who will emerge from among our ranks making compelling arguments that apply our worldview to those unknowables?

Will seems to go too far toward rejecting Palin for 2012, but he is without doubt correct that it is too early to hand her the crown. Before all else, let's see what she does. If she spends whatever free time her job as governor allows reading the arguments of conservative intellectuals past and present, if she is deliberate about learning the ins and outs of the national and international minefields, it may be that she's precisely the right woman at the right time in four years. She could step forward in the waning months of 2011 and challenge the hostile media to shake her, wink intact and an answer for every gotcha.

Or she could decide to remain a regional phenomenon, and that would be fine, too.

Whatever the case, it would most definitely be advisable all around to nurture as much internal competition as possible. If Governor Palin or any other conservative wants the mantle, let her or him work for it — with help from the rest of us, to be sure.


November 8, 2008


What the Overly Credulous Should Have Assumed

Justin Katz

I suppose a lot of people were predisposed to this sort of credulity, but this should have been the first guess all around:

He says there's no way she didn't know Africa was a continent, and whoever is saying she didn't must be distorting "a fumble of words." He talked to her about all manner of issues relating to Africa, from failed states to the Sudan. She was aware from the beginning of the conflict in Darfur, which is followed closely in evangelical churches, and was aware of Clinton's AIDS initiative. That basically makes it impossible that she thought all of Africa was a country.

On not knowing what countries are in NAFTA, Biegun was part of the conversation that led to that accusation and it convinces him "somebody is acting with a high degree of maliciousness." He was briefing Palin before a Univision interview, and talking to her about trade issues. He rolled through NAFTA, CAFTA, and the Colombia FTA. As he talked, people were coming in and out of the room, handing Palin things, etc. She was distracted from what Biegun was saying, and said, roughly, "Ok, who's in NAFTA, what's the deal with CAFTA, what's up the FTA?"—her way, Biegun says, of saying "rack them and stack them," begin again from the start. "Somebody is taking a conversation and twisting it maliciously," he says.

Frankly, I'm amazed at folks' lack of capacity for empathy. Take a person steeped in the minutia of a particular state and try to get her up to speed on the full slate of national and international issues, and it's inevitable that she'll ask a couple of silly questions (even if she'd know the answer in regular conversation) and make a few mistakes.



The Position We're In

Justin Katz

One consideration that brings some of the darker visions for an Obama presidency a few steps closer to the light of plausibility is the astonishing complicity of the media. Victor Davis Hanson states it well:

In the 3rd book of his history, Thucydides has some insightful thoughts about destroying institutions in times of zealotry—and then regretting their absence when there is a need for refuge for them. The mainstream press should have learned that lesson, once they blew up their credibility in the past election by morphing into the Team Obama press agency.

There will come a time in the year ahead when either Obama's unexamined past will come back to haunt him, or his inexperience and tentativeness in foreign affairs will be embarrassingly apparent, or his European-socialist agenda for domestic programs simply won't work. And as public opinion falls, what will MSNBC, the New York Times, the editors of Newsweek, a Chris Matthews or the anchors at the major networks say?

Not much—since they will have one of two non-choices: (1) either they will begin scrambling to offer supposed disinterested criticism, which will be met with the public's, "Why should we begin believing you now?" or "Why didn't you tell this before?", or (2), They can continue as state-sanctioned megaphones of the Obama administration in the manner that they did during the campaign. They will lose either way and remain without credibility.

In short, we live now in the Age of Post-Journalism. All that was before is now over, as this generation of journalists voluntarily destroyed the hallowed notion of objectivity and they will have no idea quite how to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

If the Democrats should move toward a program of idea rationing, perhaps with other measures to restrict ideological opposition, we'll be treading on very dangerous territory.



Progress or return?

Donald B. Hawthorne

It's been a while since the term "Straussian" was thrown around. Rather than project interpretations by third parties onto others, here are some actual thoughts from the philosopher himself on the subject of progress:

When the prophets call their people to account, they do not limit themselves to accusing them of this or that particular crime or sin. They recognize the root of all particular crimes in the fact that the people have forsaken their God. They accuse their people of rebellion. Originally, in the past, they were faithful or loyal; now they are in a state of rebellion. In the future they will return, and God will restore them to their original place. The primary, the original or initial, is loyalty; unfaithfulness, infidelity, is secondary. The very notion of unfaithfulness or infidelity presupposes that fidelity or loyalty is primary. The perfect character of the origin is a condition of sin—of the thought of sin. Man who understands himself in this way longs for the perfection of the origin, or of the classic past. He suffers from the present; he hopes for the future.

Progressive man, on the other hand, looks back to a most imperfect beginning. The beginning is barbarism, stupidity, rudeness, extreme scarcity. Progressive man does not feel that he has lost something of great, not to say infinite, importance; he has lost only his chains. He does not suffer from the recollection of the past. Looking back to the past, he is proud of his achievements; he is certain of the superiority of the present to the past. He is not satisfied with the present; he looks to future progress. But he does not merely hope or pray for a better future; he thinks that he can bring it about by his own effort. Seeking perfection in a future which is in no sense the beginning or the restoration of the beginning, he lives unqualifiedly toward the future. The life which understands itself as a life of loyalty or faithfulness appears to him as backward, as being under the spell of old prejudices. What the others call rebellion, he calls revolution or liberation. To the polarity faithfulness—rebellion, he opposes the polarity prejudice—freedom.

Worthy of reflection, given all the talk about progress and change in today's politics.

I believe these words begin to get at what is the great philosophical divide in this country. If we are going to resusitate an alternative view to the now more dominant left-wing progressive world view, I think we are going to have to connect it back in certain ways to this baseline and then articulate it in a pragmatic way which people can intuitively grasp.

We have a lot of work to do.


November 5, 2008


About that historic turnout....

Marc Comtois

According to Byron York, Obama has 62.4 million votes, while McCain has 55.4 million. In 2004, Bush won 62 million votes, and Kerry 59 million. Yes, votes are still being tallied, but there aren't that many more to go. According to Jonah Goldberg, 17% of 18-29 year-olds voted in 2004, 18% voted this year. All in all, then, voter turnout was about the same between 2004 and 2008.


November 4, 2008


Reminder: We're over at WPRO, too!

Marc Comtois

You're lovable AR gang is also part of WPRO AM 630's live team coverage. We're manning their blog and Andrew and Justin will be reporting from the party HQs. I'll be at home in my pajamas. Check it out!



Schumer Makes Noise About Fairness Doctrine

Marc Comtois

(H/T)



Voter Intimidation in Philly?

Marc Comtois

First, there were reports that Republican poll workers were thrown out of polling places and that some of the voting machines in Philadelphia had Obama votes registered before the polls opened.

Then there's the Black Panthers, who are apparently providing "security":





Here's a report:


UPDATE:The police checked it out.

UPDATE 2:It took a couple hours, but the "r" word was thrown out there regarding this post. Believe me, if there were two Klan guys standing in front of a polling place, I'd post about it. Intimidation is intimidation, no matter where it is or who is doing it. For the record, here's an alternate view:

Jacqueline Dischell, [an] Obama volunteer...confirms that there were in fact two black panthers guarding the polling place, a nursing home on Fairmont Avenue in north Philadelphia, earlier this morning.

But she says one was an officially designated poll watcher (it was not immediately clear which municipal office had designated him in that role), and the second was his friend. The second panther, who left two or three hours ago, was the one with the nightstick, she says.

Dischell says that earlier this morning a few men who identified themselves as being from the McCain campaign came and started taking pictures of the two panthers on their cell phones. She suggested that they seemed to be baiting the panthers, and that the designated watcher may have given one of them the finger in response to the picture taking.

The police came roughly an hour and a half later. She says she talked to the cops and told them there had been no incident. The police drove away without getting out of the car, she adds.

Some time later, a second, larger group of men whose affiliation couldn't be determined came with real cameras and started taking more pictures. Maybe 15 minutes later the cops returned. This time, they spoke to people on both sides, and told the panther not designated to watch the polls to leave, which he did without an argument.

"There was no fight, nothing," she says.

Fox News arrived on the scene at around that time and started interviewing people near the entrance. The building manager asked the Fox reporter to leave, she says, and he moved further from the entrance.

That's where things now stand. "There has been no fighting, no voter intimidation at all," she said.

Judge for yourself.


October 29, 2008


Monique: Radio Star!

Justin Katz

Monique will be calling in for Anchor Rising's regular pre-7:00 spot, tonight, on the Matt Allen Show, and she also took a few minutes to discuss Barney Frank with John DePetro on Monday morning. Stream the latter by clicking here, or download it.


October 27, 2008


Sayonara Stevens

Marc Comtois

I referenced the Ted Stevens conviction earlier, here are more details. There are several counts against him, but count #1 contains the gist of it:

Stevens engaged in a scheme to conceal from his Senate financial disclosure documents home renovations and other gifts he received from Allen and VECO from 2000-2006. Stevens contends he never asked for any freebies and believed he paid for everything he received.
The rest of the counts are related to the cover up (ie;false statements). Meanwhile, the Senate dithers and hopes they won't have to unduly embarrass their colleague by booting him out. Instead, they hope he just goes away and isn't re-elected. That's probably what will happen, though there's no guarantee. Too bad more of them weren't like Sarah Palin, who stood up to Stevens and the rest of the corrupt GOP machine in Alaska. But no one ever accused your average Senator of being a person of action.

UPDATE: Gee, sorry to disappoint the left side of the local blogosphere. In the comments to the aforelinked post, they wager that we AR folks were going to somehow defend Stevens. I presume this is based on what their own knee-jerk partisan reaction would be if the shoe was on the other foot. (This is what's called projection). After all, there are plenty of bad actors on both sides of the aisle, but when's the last time (ever?) they devoted a post to calling out a Democrat for impropriety. And I don't mean buried in the comments or including them as part of an overall list: I mean an explicit calling out. So I'm still waiting for their detailed post discussing the indictment William Jefferson, the real-estate deals of Charles Rangel or the sexcapades of Tim Mahoney. But I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE 2: Matt J. has responded:

Marc -

In response to your request for times that RIFuture.org has "explicitly called out" a "Democrat for impropriety" I offer you the following posts as evidence:

Recall Democratic Mayor of Woonsocket Susan Menard

Democratic Mayor Menard Plagiarizes

Menard as DINO candidate

Menard's Corrupt Attempts

then Democratic NP Mayor Ralph Mollis (we broke the campaign contributions from town employees story)

then Democratic NP Mayor John Sisto

I could go on, but don't really have the time.

Does this sample satisfy your question?

Instead of commenting, I'll answer here: Nope. My point of contention is pretty clearly regarding NATIONAL Democratic politicians. However, I will certainly give RI Future credit for going after the local corrupt Dems (fertile ground, that). I also note none of the Dems Matt mentions are on the "progressive" side of the Democratic Party ledger. Make of that what you will.



The Final Week (Thank God!)

Marc Comtois

It's the final week of this never-ending election and people who can make up their minds await the decision of the 10% (or so) who can't. I can never figure out how you could be undecided at this point, but people are.

In the Senate, despite the conviction of Ted Stevens (AK), it still looks to me like the GOP will hold on to 41 seats, with McConnell and Chambliss stronger than they look and Wicker holding on in Mississipi and Al Franken will win Minnesota. Regardless, we're a whisker away from Democrats having total, unchecked control in Washington, D.C.

But that won't bother Rhode Islanders, except the few who wonder how much further we will tilt towards one-party government. No, most will go to the polls and pull the same old lever, thus enabling more of the same that enabled the NY Times and This Week to use us as the canary in the recessionary coal mine for the rest of the nation.

But our particular political insanity ("doing the same thing over and over...") is exhibited by more than the leaders we elect. We'll probably also approve the highway bond again, just like every year, because we never seem to figure out that the General Assembly could appropriate the money through normal, budgetary means, which would still allow us to obtain the Federal funds "we got comin' to us." On the flip side, though Rhode Islanders will probably fall for that particular shell game again, we might make themselves feel better by denying $3.5 million bond towards open space. We'll buy the car and refuse the performance package (including a rear spoiler and alloy wheels!) and pat ourselves on the back for being sharp bargainers. Oy.

But, who knows, maybe Rhode Islanders will finally get cranky and make some changes. Maybe the transportation bond will fail and a few local, high profile pols will be defeated. Small victories are victories nonetheless.



Shocked, SHOCKED at Such Mortgage Terms

Monique Chartier

Not a.r.m.'s or balloon payments this time. It seems that Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), in addition to millions in campaign contributions from the industry he purports to regulate, also received a couple of sweetheart mortgages totalling $800,000 from Countrywide Financial. Kevin Rennie in Sunday's Hartford Courant:

Sen. Christopher Dodd's bewildering odyssey of entitlement, evasions and deceptions continued last week. He shed more credibility as he staggered through new excuses for concealing from the public documents related to his cut-rate mortgages of nearly $800,000 from subprime giant Countrywide Financial.

On Wednesday, Dodd announced he wants to wait until the Senate Ethics Committee completes its investigation of his mortgage deals. There's no Senate rule requiring Dodd to remain silent during the investigation. There's no legitimate reason for Dodd to withhold from the public the array of documents, e-mails and letters from the mortgage swag bag Countrywide gave him.

The Senator from Connecticut has also been moving money between his campaign accounts - from presidential to senatorial - so that he can legally spend such funds on attorneys' fees. Were supporters aware of such a prospective use of their contributions?

Dodd has put forth the same weasley, non-believable defense as two other members of Congress, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) who is currently on trial for corruption and Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY), who probably ought to be. From Wednesday's Hartford Courant:

Dodd said he was unaware that he was getting special treatment.

"I never sought any special treatment," Dodd said. "I was never offered special treatment. I was never aware of any unique or special treatment. Had I been so, believe me, I would have terminated the relationship with that institution immediately."

On a more serious note, we now have to ask: what other members of Congress are "unwittingly" receiving gifts and preferential treatment as a result of their official power?


October 24, 2008


A beautiful picture and reflections

Donald B. Hawthorne

Edward Cardinal Egan, Archbishop of New York.



Frank: Democrats Will Cut Defense Spending by 25%

Marc Comtois

As Monique mentioned, the ProJo has endorsed Barney Frank. I wonder if they would reconsider, given that Frank now says he will cut defense spending--an important piece of Rhode Island's economy--by 25%.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said Democrats will push for a stimulus package after the November election, and called for a package reducing defense spending by 25 percent while saying Congress will "eventually" raise taxes.

Frank told the editorial board of the SouthCoast Standard-Times that he wanted to reduce defense spending by a quarter, meaning the United States would have to withdraw from Iraq sooner.

"The people of Iraq want us out, and we want to stay over their objection," he said. "It's extraordinary."

Frank also said the post-election stimulus package will focus on spending for building projects, extending unemployment benefits, and further supporting states' healthcare costs. "We'll have to raise taxes ultimately," Frank said. "Not now, but eventually."

See what economic stimulation a Democratic Congress will bring? Higher taxes and lost jobs! Just ask 'em.


October 23, 2008


Endorsing Bad Government

Monique Chartier

You know, for a gang that claims to be enamoured of regulations and regulating, too many Democrats sure dropped the regulation ball when it came to mortgage guidelines and Fannie and Freddie. One of the more egregious offenders as we now know was Congressman Barney Frank. From September 9's Wall Street Journal.

At least the Massachusetts Democrat is consistent. His record is close to perfect as a stalwart opponent of reforming the two companies, going back more than a decade. The first concerted push to rein in Fan and Fred in Congress came as far back as 1992, and Mr. Frank was right there, standing athwart. But things really picked up this decade, and Barney was there at every turn. Let's roll the audiotape:

In 2000, then-Rep. Richard Baker proposed a bill to reform Fannie and Freddie's oversight. Mr. Frank dismissed the idea, saying concerns about the two were "overblown" and that there was "no federal liability there whatsoever."

Two years later, Mr. Frank was at it again. "I do not regard Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as problems," he said in response to another reform push. And then: "I regard them as great assets." Great or not, we'll give Mr. Frank this: Their assets are now Uncle Sam's assets, even if those come along with $5.4 trillion in debt and other liabilities.

Again in June 2003, the favorite of the Beltway press corps assured the public that "there is no federal guarantee" of Fan and Fred obligations.

A month later, Freddie Mac's multibillion-dollar accounting scandal broke into the open. But Mr. Frank was sanguine. "I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis," he said at the time.

Three months later he repeated the claim that Fannie and Freddie posed no "threat to the Treasury." Even suggesting that heresy, he added, could become "a self-fulfilling prophecy."

In April 2004, Fannie announced a multibillion-dollar financial "misstatement" of its own. Mr. Frank was back for the defense. Fannie and Freddie posed no risk to taxpayers, he said, adding that "I think Wall Street will get over it" if the two collapsed. Yes, they're certainly "over it" on the Street now that Uncle Sam is guaranteeing their Fannie paper, and even Fannie's subordinated debt.

In their endorsement (yes, endorsement) today of Congressman Frank, the ProJo breezes past all these pesky details and, remarkably, cites the congressman's

pivotal role in negotiating the financial-rescue package approved by Congress this month.

This amounts to commending Jesse James for restocking with taxpayer gold some of the banks he himself knocked over during a decade of quite lucrative holdups. Yes, indeed, public officials who fail to regulate an industry so badly that seven hundred billion one trillion tax payer dollars are needed to correct its collapse is the moral equivalent of a bank holdup in the private sector.

Me, I say to the voters in Massachusetts' Fourth Congressional District, "Be jolly, vote for Sholley". Send Jesse James packing.


ADDENDUM

Michael Graham of the Boston Herald [via Free Republic] last month articulated the critical role that non-regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played in the fiscal collapse.

That’s when Freddie and Fannie stepped in. As Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute put it: “They fueled Wall Street’s efforts to securitize subprime loans by becoming the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools.”

Lenders asked themselves, why should I care how shaky these borrowers are or risky the loans if a government-backed body is going to buy them up anyway?

The loans were made, the housing market bubbled, contributions from F&F flowed to Democrats like Chris Dodd and Barack Obama, and everyone was happy. Until they weren’t.

Without Freddie and Fannie’s reckless expansion, the housing bubble doesn’t happen. Without the implied promise behind F&F’s money, investment banks don’t dive into the derivatives market.



Money Well Spent?

Marc Comtois

$605 million and $350 million. That's how much Barack Obama and John McCain, respectively, have raised in this year's presidential run. Almost $1 Billion. Of that, Obama has raised slightly more than $543 million from individual donors while McCain has raised a little over $151 million. Almost $700 million sent from individual Americans to two politicians.

Imagine what that money could do in local communities across this country.

Imagine if people would take a breath, let the emotions ebb, and reconsider before writing those checks and living their lives for a politician. Even if they were to just cut that total in half. Instead of sending $40, send $20 and give the rest to a local organization. Spend some time and money by directly helping friends and neighbors. That would have meant an additional $350 million spent locally.

Obviously, politics are an important part of our society. There are big issues that can only be dealt with on a national scale and electing a President who can do the job is crucial. But it is a misbegotten belief that a remote, national government is the best way to solve local problems. But every four years, we turn to politicians and politics as our salvation and continue to get disappointed. When we're promised the moon and the sun, we're disappointed even if we actually get one.

In this silly season, we seem to have forgotten that, if we indeed are the "change we are waiting for," then the most effective implementation of that change is to do it ourselves in our own communities.Instead, we've sent nearly a billion dollars to politicians based on nothing more than promises and hope.


October 9, 2008


Talking Over the Outro

Justin Katz

Given so much negativity floating around, I was happy to offer some long-view optimism last night on the Matt Allen Show on 630AM/99.7FM WPRO. Boring debates, inept candidates, and the end of the world are certainly worthy justification for talking over the outro as the academy seeks to usher one off the stage. Stream by clicking here, or download it.


October 8, 2008


Popping My Head Up

Marc Comtois

For those wondering, yes, I'm still around, but priorities are elsewhere at the moment (nothing wrong, just a temporary shift in priorities). I'm keeping up with the news, if not my commentary (no great loss, that, I hear some saying). FWIW, some scattered thoughts....

I watched the first 15 minutes of last night's debate and switched. Boring stuff. If you haven't made up your mind yet, and are relying on that sort of spectacle to help, well, good luck. Heck, if you haven't made up your mind yet, what kind of mind do you have! (Why do I suspect that a lot of the undecided's simply like the attention? Is that a bit too cynical?). Nevertheless, does it worry anyone--on either side--that every election year we end up counting on the decision-making process of those who can't make up their mind on a matter as important as this---until the last minute?

On the broader election, I'm still where I've been for about a year: we're truly looking for the least worst guy this time around. None of us should be under the illusion that problems will be solved in Washington, either by a grumpy old guy or a charismatic young cipher. Given that, since it looks like the Democrats will surely hold onto the House and Senate, I’m worried about the candy store that will open with a President Obama in office, too. A President McCain with a Democratic Congress probably won’t "help" us much. At this point, I think that’s the best we can hope for.

If the 6 years from 2000 to 2006 taught us anything, it is that having one political party (the GOP, supposedly the party of “small government”) in control of both Congress and the Presidency is not in the best interest of the country. They may have a good year, or two, but eventually they will focus more on keeping power than on legislating. It's human nature, I guess. In the eyes of the average American, less partisan voter, President Clinton and a Democratic Congress overreached in the '90s and President Bush and a Republican Congress eventually did the same. They did so because they convinced themselves that they needed to compromise their principles for the short term so that their long term ideas could be put into effect. Instead, they got locked into that short-term thinking and the American voters turned them out. Should Obama win with a Democratic Congress, it'll probably happen again. So perhaps the most effective way to mitigate the damage is to ensure that one party doesn’t control it all from the outset.

I see ProJo editor Robert Whitcomb has entered the blogosphere with This New England. Interesting given his recent take on the ills of the internet in today's society. Welcome, Bob!

Given our local, and the national, economy, none of us should be surprised that state revenues are down. My only question is if that means State spending will follow, or taxes will go up. How long can the Democratic legislature deny their natural inclination? Be ready.

Camille Paglia has an interesting read on Sarah Palin.

Red Sox in 6.

Finally, thanks to my fellow AR bloggers for carrying me along for the last few weeks.


October 7, 2008


Group Liveblog: McCain v. Obama Debate II

Engaged Citizen

Given the mildly confusing results of our improvised group liveblogging of the vice presidential debate, we thought to try something a bit different this time around: We're going to liveblog in the comments to this post, which has the added benefit of allowing you to participate. Please note, though, that we'll likely be more particular about what comments we allow in such circumstances.

Click here to follow and partake of the discussion.


October 6, 2008


A Timely Question

Justin Katz

With the economic downturn still in the news while a fresh wave of "saying he's inevitable makes it true" passes through the opinion world, one question comes to mind: How does a family prepare for a Great Depression? Keeping in mind that I'm an optimist on religious grounds, that particular trajectory carries fair odds with an Obama presidency.

With no technological revolutions on the horizon, we're surely not in for a rapid economic recovery — do the media what it will to declare that the sun has risen in a giant, shining O. The Democrat executive and Democrat legislature can be relied upon to respond by giving away money to people who'll use it to pay down debt or waste it and to increase government spending as a form of economic stimulus. To pay for this renewed attempt at socialism, they'll borrow money and raise taxes on wealth and productivity. Consequently, the rich will sit on their wallets, and the productive will wallow in a lack of opportunity.

The silver lining is that the ruling regime of the United States of America will be so weak that our enemies will waste no time coalescing and pushing the world toward some brink or another, ultimately spurring the American people to rally the West toward a war-driven economic boom.

But again: How ought a family to prepare for such a future?

ADDENDUM:

On a related note, I wonder whether the Saturday Night Live folks realize how close to a cultural divide they are when they give the following line to Tina Fey/Sarah Palin:

We don't know if this climate change whoseywhatsit is manmade or if it's just a natural part of the end of days.


Partisan Spin, or Something Else?

Justin Katz

Does Froma Harrop even try to understand the other side? A couple of columns ago, she laid the entire economic crisis at the feet of Phil Gramm, and now, she dismisses a contrary explanation by reducing it to one component:

ACCOMPLISHED GOOGLERS can probably find the original talking points off which dozens of conservatives have made essentially the same case: The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 caused the financial crisis. For example, a Wall Street Journal editorial lumped CRA together with far more plausible causes of the meltdown. This liberal-inspired law, it complained, "compels banks to make loans to poor borrowers who often cannot repay them." In fact, the CRA had about zero to do with today's problems.

One need only watch that ubiquitous explanatory video to know that the CRA is only the beginning of a long tale. For her part, Harrop doesn't so much as mention the Clinton administration's modifications to the law.


October 5, 2008


Back with a Bullet

Justin Katz

It seemed as if Mark Steyn took a hiatus from regular punditry, and it's good to have him back:

By contrast, Senator Biden was glib and fluent and in command of the facts — if by "in command of the facts" you mean "talks complete blithering balderdash and hogwash." He flatly declared that Obama never said he would meet Ahmadinejad without preconditions. But, on Debate Night, the official Obama website was still boasting that he would meet Ahmadinejad "without preconditions". He said America spends more in a month in Iraq than it's spent in seven years in Afghanistan. Er, America has spent over $700 billion in Afghanistan since 2001. It's spending about $10 billion a month in Iraq. But no matter. To demonstrate his command of the "facts", Senator Biden sportingly offered up his own instant replays...

When Regular Joe Six-Pack Bluecollar Biden tried to match her on the Main Street cred, it rang slightly wacky. "Look," he said, "All you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie's Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me, where I spend a lot of time." Why? Is he moonlighting as a checkout clerk on the evening shift? Or is he stalking that nice lady in Lighting Fixtures? As for Katie's Restaurant, ah, I'm sure it was grand but apparently it closed in 1990. In the Diner of the Mind, the refills are endless and Senator Joe is sitting shootin' the breeze over a cuppa joe with a couple other regular joes on adjoining stools while Betty-Jo, the sassy waitress who's tough as nails but with a heart of gold, says Ol' Joe, the short-order cook who's doing his Sloppy Joes just the way the Senator likes 'em, really appreciates the way that, despite 78 years in Washington, Joe Biden is still just the same regular Joe Six-Pack he was when he and Norman Rockwell first came in for a sarsaparilla all those years ago. But, alas, while he was jetting off for one-to-one talks with the Deputy Tourism Minister of Waziristan, the old neighborhood changed.


October 4, 2008


Well, take your pick

Donald B. Hawthorne

Gotta love that Harry Reid.

And, if Obama wins, the Dem majorities in the Congress will allow him, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi to do most anything they want in DC. Lovely.

Harry Reid: reckless and ignorant OR an extreme partisan. Take your pick.


September 30, 2008


Good to Be Leader (Bad to Be Beholden)

Justin Katz

Well, now:

Pelosi and her aides have made it clear they were not going to "whip" or twist the arms of members who did not want to vote, but they also made no effort to rally any support for a bill they attempted to hijack over the weekend.

Further, according to House Oversight Committee staff, Emanuel has received assurances from Pelosi that she will not allow what he termed a "witch hunt" to take place during the next Congressional session over the role Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played in the economic crisis.

Emanuel apparently is concerned the roles former Clinton Administration members may have played in the mortgage industry collapse could be politically -- or worse, if the Department of Justice had its way, legally -- treacherous for many.

A President Obama would likely be helpful in that regard, as well.


September 7, 2008


Re: A Study in Contrasting Responses

Donald B. Hawthorne

UPDATED ON SEPTEMBER 8 & 9

Incentives drive human behavior but, especially in government where there are no market forces, rarely does anybody pay attention to the impact of the incentives created by laws, regulations or government actions. Which is why government actions will always create "unintended" consequences and less than efficient solutions.

There is a concept called "moral hazard" in the finance world which one source defines as:

One of two main sorts of MARKET FAILURE often associated with the provision of INSURANCE...Moral hazard means that people with insurance may take greater risks than they would do without it because they know they are protected, so the insurer may get more claims than it bargained for.

What both Palin and especially Obama are missing in the Freddie and Fannie bailouts/takeovers is the larger issue of moral hazard. These bailouts/takeovers are signaling to the marketplace that nobody in the future will suffer meaningful adverse economic consequences as a result of their bad decisions.

As a first step into the moral hazard world, the federal government enabled this situation by not officially giving its full faith and credit guarantee to backstop any future defaults by Freddie and Fannie, as government-sponsored enterprises...but then winking at investors, as if to tell them that the government would step up if they had to.

Now think of how a bailout works, about what incentives and rewards it dishes out:

    Investors have generated greater than T-bill rates of return on Freddie and Fannie debt investments in past years while really only having marginally more risk than T-bills, which are explicitly guaranteed by the federal government. So investors have made out by generating a higher rate of return.
    Who paid for giving investors that higher rate of return? The American taxpayers. By now bailing them out, American taxpayers - who never contributed one iota to the misdeeds of Freddie and Fannie - are forced to pay billions of dollars of their hard-earned monies toward the bailouts. Said another way, taxpayers are being forced to make a payment for a past-due risk premium which is the difference between a T-bill level of risk and the Freddie and Fannie risk actually taken.
    The government says that the bailout proceeds will be repaid, while adding that it will be up to the next administration and Congress to decide the particulars. The players committing publicly today to a payback won't be around to ensure it happens so their words are meaningless. The government players who could be responsible for repaying taxpayers in the future have no obligation to do so and the government world provides them with no incentives to do so. Which, I predict, will yield a not-surprising indifference to paying back American taxpayers.
    Meanwhile, the people in Freddie and Fannie who actually made the bad decisions (including, it sounds like, aggressive accounting practices) that led to the bailout have no incentive to moderate their risk-taking behaviors because they have learned - just like children learn from bad parenting practices - that they will get away with acting out of line. Sure a few top executives lost their jobs but what else has changed? So the bailout/takeover has largely rewarded bad behavior and even those who lost their jobs have not suffered consequences anywhere near the magnitude of the actions they took or allowed under their watch.
Lovely.

The only genuine solution to stop the stupidity of incentivizing bad behavior that costs taxpayers money is to let something fail completely. Yes, it would be painful and that is never pleasant. But if anybody had the courage to do it, the proper alignment of incentives, of risk and reward, would ensure organizations rapidly returned to paying attention to their business fundamentals.

This is yet another example of what happens when government gets too large and when big business can buy favors from government.

ADDENDUM

See, once it starts, it just keeps going.

Don't lose sight of the obvious: It's big government and big companies doing corporate welfare OR it's big government doing other forms of undeserved welfare.

Meanwhile, average working Americans have no such welfare options. Nope, the government just takes more of their hard-earned monies via taxation to fund everyone else's misbehavior.

Call it justice, big-government style.

ADDENDUM #2

With a H/T to Ramesh Ponnuru, the Wall Street Journal weighs in:

...Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson wants to prop up the walking dead so the world keeps buying their mortgage-backed securities. His action may calm jittery credit markets, and it may get the companies through the current mortgage crisis -- albeit at enormous cost to American taxpayers. The tragedy is that he and Congress didn't act 18 months ago -- when the cost would have been far less -- and that he still isn't killing the Fannie and Freddie business model that has done so much damage. These corpses could still return to haunt us again...

At least Mr. Paulson has finally figured out he's been lied to...[previously] saying that the battle over the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) was nothing but a scrap between "ideologues." So he bought the Congressional line that Fan and Fred weren't a problem and would help financial markets through the housing recession...

This weekend's formal rescue puts an end to those illusions...

The new federal "conservatorship" is a form of nationalization that puts regulators firmly in control. The feds fired the company boards and CEOs, though the clean up needs to go further to change the corporate cultures. Both companies remain Beltway satraps that hire for reasons of political connection, not financial expertise.

The taxpayer purchase of preferred stock means that the feds will own about 80% of the companies if all the warrants are ultimately exercised. The feds also stopped dividend payments, saving about $2 billion a year. This amounts to significant dilution for current Fannie and Freddie shareholders, and it offers taxpayers some return on their bailout risk if the companies recover.

We only wish Mr. Paulson had gone further and erased all private equity holders the way the feds do in a typical bank failure. Fan and Fred holders had profited handsomely for decades by exploiting an implicit taxpayer guarantee that their management claimed didn't exist. Now that the taxpayers are in fact stepping in, the current common and preferred holders deserve to lose everything. Mr. Paulson apparently wanted to dodge that political fight...

The Treasury chief also gave a free pass to the holders of some $18 billion in Fan and Fred subordinated debt. He did so even though these securities were understood not to have the same status as mortgage-backed securities or other Fannie debt, and even though this will set a bad precedent for other bailouts. Watch for Citigroup's subordinated debt to jump in price as investors conclude that the feds would do the same thing if Citi needs a rescue.

By far the biggest risk here, however, is that the companies could still emerge with their business model intact. That model is the perverse mix of private profit and public risk, which gave them an incentive to make irresponsible mortgage bets with a taxpayer guarantee.

Mr. Paulson could have ended that model immediately by putting the companies into "receivership." Both companies could have continued to securitize mortgages, even as their riskiest businesses were wound down...And in any case, had Mr. Paulson acted sooner and given markets time to understand that receivership doesn't mean immediate liquidation, the risk of a run might now be far less.

The Treasury plan does at least put some useful limits on Fan and Fred risk-taking, albeit starting only in 2010...

Treasury says all of this will provide a motive for Congress and the new President to change how Fan and Fred do business, and in the meantime the conservator has also ordered a stop to their political lobbying. It's also nice to see that on this point Mr. Paulson has found religion. In his statement Sunday, he blamed the need for a bailout on "the inherent conflict and flawed business model embedded in the GSE structure." Welcome to our merry band of "ideologues," Mr. Secretary.

The Treasury chief has nonetheless decided to leave the hardest political choices to his successor, who will have to face down the usual phalanx of Fannie apologists: Democratic barons Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer, the homebuilders, various Wall Street sages and left-wing journalists...

...who knows how the political mood will have shifted once the housing slump passes. It's easy to imagine the next Treasury Secretary concluding that he also thinks the fight for permanent reform is too difficult. Then we are back to the same old stand.

The Fannie-Freddie bailout is one of the great political scandals of our age, all the more because it was so obviously coming for so long. Officials at the Federal Reserve warned about it for years, only to be ignored by both parties on Capitol Hill. The least we can do now is bury these undead monsters for all time.

ADDENDUM #3

More from Jim Rogers:

Has America created its own variety of communism with the U.S. Treasury Department’s bailout of two beleaguered government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? According to Rogers Holding CEO Jim Rogers, the answer is yes.

"America is more communist than China is right now," Rogers told CNBC Europe’s "Squawk Box Europe" September 8. "You can at least have a free market in housing and a lot of other things in China. And you can see that this is welfare for the rich. This is socialism for the rich. It’s bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters."

Rogers...said the bailout was not benefiting homeowners or helping average citizens improve their standing for a home mortgage.

“It’s not bailing out the homeowners who are in trouble, by the way,” Rogers said. “It’s not bailing out people who want a mortgage – it’s just bailing out financial institutions...I think it’s a mistake.”...

"This is a big huge mess and neither [Obama nor Palin] has a clue as to what to do next year," Rogers said. "Bank stocks around the world are going through the roof, that’s because they’ve all been bailed out. You don’t see the homeowners in Kansas going through the roof because they’re not being bailed out."

Rogers had previously called for Fannie and Freddie to be allowed to go bankrupt...

"Let the patient go bankrupt,” he said. “We have courts in America; they will be reorganized."

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were "wove a mantle of invincibility" through lobbying according to a September 8 Wall Street Journal "Deal Journal" blog post. According to the Journal’s Heidi N. Moore, the mortgage giants had $170 million in lobbying bills in the past decade and spent $3.5 million on lobbying just in this year’s first quarter, spreading their largesse among 42 outside lobbying firms.

Yep, big government works for the powerful who can buy favors. Now if the less powerful only had some more community organizers to help them out...

ADDENDUM #4

McCain and Palin weigh in with a WSJ editorial.

Corruption. Politicians and former politicians scratching each other's backs, getting wealthy at the expense of average Americans while not serving the public. Where is the outrage?


September 6, 2008


Yep, those religious fundamentalists are scary!

Donald B. Hawthorne

OMG. LOL!

H/T to The Anchoress. Read her whole post, too.

Not to sound like a broken record, but:

...It could be that a great many voters have taken a good look at the fundamentalists on the religious right and the fundamentalists on the political left and made up their own minds about which pose the greater threat to their own private and public values.

September 4, 2008


McCain's speech

Donald B. Hawthorne

On the recent Republican party behavior:

I fight to restore the pride and principles of our party. We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us. We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger. We lost their trust when instead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties and Senator Obama passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies. We lost their trust, when we valued our power over our principles.

We're going to change that. We're going to recover the people's trust by standing up again for the values Americans admire. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan is going to get back to basics.

On education:

Education is the civil rights issue of this century. Equal access to public education has been gained. But what is the value of access to a failing school? We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice, remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward good teachers, and help bad teachers find another line of work.


When a public school fails to meet its obligations to students, parents deserve a choice in the education of their children. And I intend to give it to them. Some may choose a better public school. Some may choose a private one. Many will choose a charter school. But they will have that choice and their children will have that opportunity.

Senator Obama wants our schools to answer to unions and entrenched bureaucracies. I want schools to answer to parents and students. And when I'm President, they will.

On energy:

My fellow Americans, when I'm President, we're going to embark on the most ambitious national project in decades. We are going to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don't like us very much. We will attack the problem on every front. We will produce more energy at home. We will drill new wells offshore, and we'll drill them now. We will build more nuclear power plants. We will develop clean coal technology. We will increase the use of wind, tide, solar and natural gas. We will encourage the development and use of flex fuel, hybrid and electric automobiles.

Senator Obama thinks we can achieve energy independence without more drilling and without more nuclear power. But Americans know better than that. We must use all resources and develop all technologies necessary to rescue our economy from the damage caused by rising oil prices and to restore the health of our planet. It's an ambitious plan, but Americans are ambitious by nature, and we have faced greater challenges. It's time for us to show the world again how Americans lead.

This great national cause will create millions of new jobs, many in industries that will be the engine of our future prosperity; jobs that will be there when your children enter the workforce.

On war:

We face many threats in this dangerous world, but I'm not afraid of them. I'm prepared for them. I know how the military works, what it can do, what it can do better, and what it should not do. I know how the world works. I know the good and the evil in it. I know how to work with leaders who share our dreams of a freer, safer and more prosperous world, and how to stand up to those who don't. I know how to secure the peace.

His conclusion:

I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency; for its faith in the wisdom, justice and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again. I wasn't my own man anymore. I was my country's.

I'm not running for president because I think I'm blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need. My country saved me. My country saved me, and I cannot forget it. And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath, so help me God.

If you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you're disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them. Enlist in our Armed Forces. Become a teacher. Enter the ministry. Run for public office. Feed a hungry child. Teach an illiterate adult to read. Comfort the afflicted. Defend the rights of the oppressed. Our country will be the better, and you will be the happier. Because nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.

I'm going to fight for my cause every day as your President. I'm going to fight to make sure every American has every reason to thank God, as I thank Him: that I'm an American, a proud citizen of the greatest country on earth, and with hard work, strong faith and a little courage, great things are always within our reach. Fight with me. Fight with me.

Fight for what's right for our country.

Fight for the ideals and character of a free people.

Fight for our children's future.

Fight for justice and opportunity for all.

Stand up to defend our country from its enemies.

Stand up for each other; for beautiful, blessed, bountiful America.

Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. Nothing is inevitable here. We're Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.

Not a great public speaker, McCain delivered a generally effective speech which conveyed the depth of his life experiences in a self-effacing manner and a willingness to battle for the common man and woman. The contrast with the soaring rhetoric of an empty suit was striking and also done in a completely different and less dynamic way than last night.

However, whether McCain's speech defined a sufficiently clear contrast with Obama for an effective and focused Fall campaign was less clear.



Left-wing feminist masters to Sarah Palin: How dare you try to leave our plantation!

Donald B. Hawthorne

I wish I could find an old political cartoon I recall from the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearing days which showed Ted Kennedy as the plantation master talking about how blacks weren't allowed off the left-wing plantation.

Well, today's plantation masters are left-wing feminists like Gloria Steinem.

Catch the irony here:

Roughly a decade ago, Steinem excused Bill Clinton's bad behavior with women, essentially declaring he was entitled to one free grope of women as long as he stopped after that.

But today Steinem writes an editorial about Sarah Palin entitled Palin: wrong woman, wrong message - Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

What did I already tell you? The leftists are saying a woman can't be an authentic female unless she believes what the Left believes. But, as long as a man believes what the Left believes, then he is entitled to a free pass at abusing women. And that's liberation? This is enough to make your head spin!

Steinem says:

Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president...

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie...

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality...

Yep, gotta love the Left's tolerance for diversity. And what condescension! LOL.

(Another example here from Mark Steyn: What was it the feminists used to say? "You can have it all." Sarah Palin is a mom, and the first female governor of her state. But the enforcers at the National Organization of Women dismiss her as "more a conservative man than she is a woman." Golly. These days, NOW seems to have as narrow and proscriptive a view of what women are permitted to be as any old 1950s sitcom dad.)

Reminds me of the final words of a 1984 WSJ editorial - my favorite of all time - entitled Liberal Fundamentalism: Who are the intolerant extremists?, highlighted in this 2005 post:

...It could be that a great many voters have taken a good look at the fundamentalists on the religious right and the fundamentalists on the political left and made up their own minds about which pose the greater threat to their own private and public values.

Will Palin be effective in articulating a coherent message, at highlighting the incoherence and intolerance of the left-wing fundamentalists between now and November 4? Who knows. But her nomination has drawn them out and caused the public spotlight to turn back onto the left-wing political fundamentalist plantation masters. So, even if Palin slips up, the country at least knows what world view plays a large part in animating the Obama alternative.

Gotta go now, back to clinging bitterly to my guns and religion. That's all for now, folks!


September 3, 2008


Sarah Palin's speech

Donald B. Hawthorne

Along the way, Sarah Palin asked what the difference was between a pit bull and a hockey mom: Lipstick.

Ahem, after listening to her speech, ladies and gentlemen, I'm betting she is plenty tough enough and most surely ready for primetime.

Some excerpts:

On her experience as a public servant:

"I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town. I was just your average hockey mom, and signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids’ public education better. When I ran for city council, I didn’t need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and knew their families, too. Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities."

On why she is going to Washington, D.C.:

"I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I’ve learned quickly, these past few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone. But here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion - I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country."

On energy policies that the McCain-Palin administration will implement:

"Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of America’s energy problems - as if we all didn’t know that already. But the fact that drilling won’t solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all. Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we’re going to lay more pipelines...build more nuclear plants...create jobs with clean coal...and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources. We need American energy resources, brought to you by American ingenuity, and produced by American workers."

On John McCain:

"Here’s how I look at the choice Americans face in this election. In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change."

Other excerpts:

...in small towns, they don't know what to make of a candidate [Obama] who "lavish praise" on them when he's around and then, behind their backs, "talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns." Don't talk about us "one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco."

ADDENDUM

Here is a link to the speech.

In the comments section, Monique provides another excerpt:

"The American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of 'personal discovery.' This world of threats and dangers is not just a community, and it doesn't just need an organizer."

More:

"I've noticed a pattern with our opponent. Maybe you have, too.

We've all heard his dramatic speeches before devoted followers. And there is much to like and admire about our opponent.

But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate.

This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word "victory" except when he's talking about his own campaign.

But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed ... when the roar of the crowd fades away ... when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot - what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet?

The answer is to make government bigger ... take more of your money ... give you more orders from Washington ... and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy ... our opponent is against producing it.

Victory in Iraq is finally in sight ... he wants to forfeit.

Terrorist states are seeking new-clear weapons without delay ... he wants to meet them without preconditions.

Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America ... he's worried that someone won't read them their rights?

Government is too big ... he wants to grow it.

Congress spends too much ... he promises more.

Taxes are too high ... he wants to raise them. His tax increases are the fine print in his economic plan, and let me be specific.

The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes ... raise payroll taxes ... raise investment income taxes ... raise the death tax ... raise business taxes ... and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars."

For goodness sake, why just read word excerpts when you can watch it live on video?

And I reiterate my points here. The quality of her performance tonight only ups the ante.

ADDENDUM #2:

Thanks to CQ Politics for the link.



Chafee's Political (Ahem) Wisdom

Justin Katz

This is just too much, coming from a man who drove me to vote for an opponent who is now the second most liberal Senator in Congress:

As a matter of campaign politics, Chafee challenged the conventional wisdom that Palin's selection will rouse GOP conservatives who had not been enthusiastic about McCain. He said Palin appears to be a gesture to a part of the Republican electorate that does not need shoring up.

"I always thought that the base wouldn't have anywhere to go," Chafee said. Having lost control of the House and Senate, the conservative base should be "sufficiently motivated" by the prospect of losing the White House, he said.

He don't know us very well, do he?



The ferociously totalitarian response of the Left to Sarah Palin: Sexism, intolerance, and fear

Donald B. Hawthorne

Why the ferocious reaction by both the Left and the MSM to the Palin nomination?

The conventional wisdom is that it is sexism, a variation on what Hillary experienced during the Democratic primaries. That is certainly part of the explanation. When have you ever heard male candidates, such as Obama, asked about how they will handle their job given their young children?

But there is more going on here than sexism.

A second factor is how the Left is notoriously intolerant of women and minorities who don't tow their ideological line. Just like they react fiercely to blacks who wander off their plantation, women who hold different views are deemed as lacking authenticity. Can't be a real feminist if you don't think their left-wing way. (What is no less appalling is how overtly the MSM has fully joined the Left's insanity.)

A third factor explaining the intensity of the reaction to Palin is she is a direct threat to the existing culture of death. Whether it is Trig's birth or her daughter's pending child, there has rarely been such a direct challenge to the abortion culture. The culture war is alive and the Left is facing having to deal with a young, dynamic and contrary role model who has walked the life walk.

What is not lost on many of us is how tolerant the evangelical community has been toward Palin's daughter's pregnancy. One of the most striking comments in several articles below is how several people have said that it was a similar development in their family's life which drew them into the pro-life movement. And what a contrast they offer to the rabid anger of the Left.

So the Left has to try to destroy Palin out of the box because she appears to be a strong, capable and "regular" woman who offers, by her life example, an appealing alternative vision for the future. Again, we don't know her well enough yet to know if she can pull it off - especially given how committed the Left is to destroying her.

But, if Palin can pull it off, she could be one of the biggest threats of my lifetime to the cultural and political Left, someone who could potentially alter the political and philosophical landscape in the United States.

Which explains the ferocious response by the Left to her nomination.

More thoughts to come.

Jonathan Adler on Sarah's rough start?
Kathryn Jean Lopez on We’re Not Sisters with Her: Palin exposes the feminist Left
Kathryn Jean Lopez on Heart of the Matter: Sarah Palin and a new feminism
Rich Lowry on Hating Sarah: Partisanship at its worst
Byron York on Why the Palin Baby Story Matters: What it means to evangelical voters
Ed Morrissey on We have walked in the Palins’ shoes
Focus on the Family on Pastor doesn't preach
Richard Adams on A tale of two philosophies
John Pitney, Jr. on Go Ahead and Laugh: How Palin matters
NR Editors on Pregnant Pause: Trying to end the Palin candidacy before it begins
Thomas Lifson on Sarah Palin and the Two Americas
Jeff Jacoby on A stark choice on abortion
Michelle Malkin on The Four Stages of Conservative Female Abuse


August 29, 2008


Sarah Palin's refreshing words

Donald B. Hawthorne

Beginning at 16:36 in this video of her speech today when she accepted John McCain's selection of her as his Vice Presidential partner, Sarah Palin said these words:

...I signed major ethics reforms...And I championed reform to end the abuses of earmarked spending. In fact, I told Congress: Thanks, but no thanks, to that Bridge-to-Nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, I said, we'd build it ourselves.

Well, it's always safer in politics to avoid risk, to just kind of go along with the status quo. But I didn't get into government to do the safe and easy things.

A ship in harbor is safe but that is not why the ship is built.

Politics isn't just a game of competing interests and clashing parties.

The people of America expect us to seek public office and to serve for the right reasons. And the right reason is to challenge the status quo and to serve the common good.

Now, no one expects us to agree on everything, whether in Juneau or in Washington.

But we are expected to govern with integrity and good will and clear convictions and a servant's heart.

Time will tell whether Palin has the ability to play successfully on the national stage. But in terms of an initial impression, Palin made a good one with those refreshing words.

ADDENDUM

Various interviews with Sarah Palin
Listen especially to the first one where she talks about energy issues. I believe Palin has a chance to alter the domestic energy debate during this presidential race. Sounds like she has more experience, judgment, and knowledge on the topic than any of the other 3 presidential/vice-presidential candidates. More on her experience in the following WSJ piece.

Wall Street Journal on Palin Has Long Experience Dealing With Big Oil in Home State.
Dean Barnett on Diminishing Palin: How the left will try.
Bill Stuntz on Palin, Obama, and the Experience Issue.
Bill Kristol on Let Palin Be Palin: Why the left is scared to death of McCain's running mate.
Kenneth Davenport on The Wrong Kind of Woman? NOW's crusade against Sarah Palin.
Fred Barnes on Providential Palin: She may be the one conservatives have been waiting for.
John McCormack on Sarah Palin, Not a Buchananite.
Volokh Conspiracy on Palin and Buchanan, II.
Helen Smith on Why Palin Is a Fantastic Choice: A Vice President Palin would help women in ways that are often ignored.
Jonah Goldberg on Commander of the Alaskan National Guard, Cont'd.
Jonathan Adler on The Alaska National Guard.
Jonah Goldberg on Pivot Palin, Pivot!
Rich Lowry on Fighting for the Middle Class.
NRO editors on The Palin Pick.
Jonathan Adler on Palin and Creationism.
Hot Air on Palin no panic pick: WaPo.
Flopping Aces on Palin's Trooper'Gate: Beating MSM distortions to the truth.
Lisa Schiffren on The Fighter Pilot and the Moose Hunter: McCain’s V.P. pick has electrified the base—for good reason.
John Podhoretz on She's Palin by Comparison.
Dick Morris on Lady is a Champ: McCain takes back the race with an inspired, maverick selection.
Father Raymond J. de Souza on McCain unveils a secret weapon for culture wars.

As to the issue of women in politics, I would say this: We have to get beyond the current politically correct gender silliness. The national debate on the role of women often has the depth of an elementary school playground argument. The horrible quality of that debate seems particularly ironic for some of us conservatives who were huge fans of Margaret Thatcher 25+ years ago and, had she been an American, would have voted for her in a heartbeat. Yet it wasn't her gender which endeared her to us. It was her world view, her ability to articulate that view, and her courage to act on that world view. She was principled, she was tough, and the fact that she was a woman was utterly irrelevant. Irrelevant to her, too, which is something most feminists don't get in today's America. And what will make history record Thatcher as great will not be that she was a woman but that time proved her world view and actions were wise and timely.

In a nutshell, the metrics by which we should measure the quality of any man or woman are their world view, their ability to articulate it, and their courage to act in a principled manner. For the good of our country, we should encourage a never-ending competition between different world views from both men and women. May the best ideas triumph over time.

It is extremely inappropriate at this very early stage to mention Palin in the same breath as Thatcher. But what is appropriate is to point out that there is often an intolerance among many feminists for their sisters who don't tow the politically correct left-wing feminist line. And these women don't see the obvious irony of how intolerant they are of intellectual diversity among even their own gender. I hope Palin stops talking about the glass ceiling because, by doing so, she is playing the game on her opponent's turf. She will do more for advancing the opportunities for other women by being competent and wise, by showing it is possible to play in the political big leagues while holding a different world view. Now that would be true diversity, a diversity which would shake the very foundation of feminist politics! Which is why the Left is so desperately trying to smear her upfront. It is far too early to tell how well Palin will do. She will most certainly be tested in the next 60+ days and let's hope she finds her own distinctive voice like Hillary Clinton found hers in the latter stages of the Democratic primaries.

Finally, I will close with a response I wrote in the comments section:

Hey, this is getting fun!

I write a simple post noting how Palin's initial impression was positive even as she is unproven on the national stage. That would be called a balanced and understated comment.

And that brings out the MoveOn.org wackos who then call people who disagree with them idiots!! Somebody must be getting anxious. Better be careful in your name-calling though. You wouldn't want to be accused of being sexist and treating Palin like Hillary was treated by other Dems. Or of trying to swift-boat Palin. LOL.

Yes, Andrew Sullivan is so persuasive when he writes: "[Obama] is a man who has spent his adult life thinking serious thoughts about serious issues and having serious conversations about them with other serious, well-informed people." Would Sullivan mean Obama's conversations for the last 20 years with his preacher who openly states his hatred of America? Or would he mean Obama's working directly with an unrepentant terrorist who has said he should have done more to hurt America? Or would Sullivan mean all those "present" votes Obama has done as a legislator? Yes, such heavy and principled thinking indeed. Sounds presidential to me!

Some things never change: All of this reminds me of Bill Buckley's long ago comment that he would rather be governed by the first several thousand names out of the Boston phone directory than the Harvard faculty.

LMAO.

Regardless of what unfolds, good or bad, the bottom line is that this presidential race just got a lot more interesting. And that is good for the country.


August 28, 2008


Quick Thoughts on the Five Minutes of Obama's Speech That I Could Actually Endure

Justin Katz

Whatever the party, I can't believe that anybody is interested — much less enjoys — these speeches. Everything promised. Posture. Posing. Some standby lines and historical references. Black-and-white arguments and vague solutions.

One characteristic that I notice again and again with Barack Obama is his method of adding that flavor of bipartisan "change" to the rhetoric. He'll state some policy or such that's entirely in line with the Democrat-left playbook and then, with the air of one about to put his hand on the chest of his overzealous teammates, he'll say, "But we must admit that... yadda yadda yadda."

The yaddas will be some talking point that sounds vaguely conservative (e.g., "personal responsibility"), but they have no force in his policy. The proof is in his specifics and, increasingly, in his actions. Consider his lack of concession to those across the ideological divide in his choice of running mate. His apparent "no more red America, no more blue America" umph coasted him past the second-most-liberal Senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, but he he couldn't quite bring himself to compromise with the socialist Bernie Sanders. Well known moderates such as Leahy, Boxer, Reid, Durbin, and so on were clearly out of the question.

So will be any compromise on policy should he achieve the highest office (especially with a Democrat-run Congress).


August 25, 2008


The Rhode-Islandification of America?

Justin Katz

A comment from Tom W, last week, raises an interesting question (emphasis added):

Of course "Linc" is now being widely (hailed) in the MSM regarding involvement with "Republicans for Obama."

Gotta love the irony, since McCain came here to campaign for Chafee to try to save his RINO bacon.

This is what happens when the GOP embraces "moderates" and the "big tent" theory.

The "moderates" follow their heart and side with the Democrats, while voters, unimpressed with "Republicans" that are largely indistinguishable from Democrats, vote for the real thing rather than the reasonable facsimile. McCain will discover this the hard way when he finds out the the Hispanics vote that he is courting heads toward Obama, who is pandering to them even more (he's not even playing lip service to "border security").

That is why the GOP continues to shrink in the areas where it is "moderate" - the Northeast and now California. Yet the national party leadership (e.g., McCain) are determined to continue down this path ... the RIGOP writ large.

Baffling, and it bodes ill for the future or our country, as both parties are leading us leftward, the only differences being the pace of decline ... but both ultimately heading for the same destination, transforming the U.S. from our founding principles into a European-style socialist democracy.

I don't know that the RIGOP writ large is possible on a national scale. Part of Rhode Island's problem, I've come to believe, is that its size doesn't allow for truly diverse enclaves in which an opposition party could develop a stronghold. The state's environment doesn't differ much from one place to another, making its residents consistently susceptible to the same peddled policies, as well as the same tentacles of corruption.

On a national scale, there would be a correction. GOP "moderates" would reach a degree of frustration at which conservatives, of whatever form, withdraw their support; simultaneously, "moderates" and liberals would begin to decide that they'd be better served by being part of the winning team. At some point, the institutional party would do what secular institutions do: adjust themselves for survival.

The danger — as any good federalist might surmise — is that undemocratic means would be leveraged to decrease the influence of conservative enclaves. Arguably (if ironically), a national popular vote system would contribute. The "Fairness Doctrine" would contribute. Legislation via judiciary is a more insidious example.

This may be part of what bothers me about our overly Senatorial presidential election: All of the participants are from the same range of our society. It's as if we're electing a prime minister, rather than a president. The health — the "contention" — comes when enclaves can raise up their own representatives, most notably governors, who bring a different perspective and a different approach to governance to the mix.


August 16, 2008


Rhode Island Congressional Power Rankings

Marc Comtois

A couple years ago, I posted about the RI delegation's rankings in the Congressional Power Rankings. Welp, I forgot about it last year, but this being an election year, why not see how the boys are doing?

Continue reading "Rhode Island Congressional Power Rankings"

August 13, 2008


Trying and Trying to Put Down the Electoral College

Justin Katz

It probably hasn't surprised readers that a recent op-ed by Lincoln Chafee and Ari Savitzky arguing in favor of a national popular vote system for president strings together muddled thinking. On the one hand, they claim that "the apportionment of Electoral College does not benefit small states." Yet, a few sentences later, "the Electoral College gives Rhode Island a slight mathematical advantage."

One must, of course, appreciate the difficulty of the two authors' task. It is clear, between the lines, that Rhode Island's lack of influence comes entirely from its voters' inability to break their devotion to the Democrat party. And yet that isn't something that Lincoln and Ari wish to undermine, so they toss around rhetoric about everybody having "an equal vote." They bring up irrelevant history about slave states. All the while, their central premise is arguable, at best:

A national popular vote would be vastly superior to the current system, which practically shuts out over 30 "safe states." Not only is this a question of basic fairness, it is also in Rhode Island's interest. Right now, candidates have no reason to campaign here, organize here, or spend money here — getting more or fewer popular votes will almost never change the electoral vote outcome. Under a national popular vote, every vote would count equally, giving candidates an incentive to seek them here in Rhode Island.

Whatever the system, candidates will be operating with the same resources, and they will have to maximize the effectiveness thereof. Rhode Island is such a blue state that Republicans probably wouldn't see much return on their investment, and Democrats probably wouldn't lose much support by failing to set foot, here. Further, given the size of our state, politicians might find it more worth their while to invest in particular counties, or cities, elsewhere, to reach the same number of people; our definition as a state wouldn't mean a thing.

A national popular vote may or may not be the way to go, but it would certainly take away Rhode Island's "mathematical advantage." If securing political importance for our state is the goal, then the solution is to broaden voters' intellectual and ideological habits.


August 10, 2008


Review: Your Government Failed You

Marc Comtois

Richard Clarke, Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters

Your government failed you.
So said Richard Clarke to the American people during the 9/11 Commission hearings a few years back. Clarke's resume of over 30 years in the foreign policy arena speaks for itself and adds weight to his point of view. At times, his tales of frustration infuriate because they show just how much government did fail leading up to 9/11.

But, as reaction to his first book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror made evident, he can also be frustrating to those who are familiar with events he describes. And this familiarity with acute events can lead, ultimately, to a wholesale--albeit unwarranted--distrust of Clarke.

If I know that he's not being completely forthcoming on Event "A" for which I know a lot about, then how can I be sure he's not doing the same for Events "B, C and D" for which I'm not as familiar? And to the degree that his diagnoses and prescriptions rely upon his experience and expertise, as supported by his explanation of various events, then how seriously am I to take his ideas? In other words, are Clarke's ideas well-informed and worthwhile or just part of an exercise in legacy-protection? The answer, unsurprisingly, is all of the above.

When reading and analyzing a first-hand account of events, a reader should always be on the look out for bias; on the part of both the source and the reader. Ultimately, each of us have to rely on our sense of what seems like good, sound reasoning and argumentation. So, despite these reservations, there are still some things that even those most predisposed to distrust him can learn from Clarke.

Throughout Your Government Failed You, Clarke clearly names names and assesses blame. His reasoning seems sound and his grasp of the nuances of foreign affairs and diplomacy is worth noting as is his recognition of the role that contingency can play in outcomes. And while he doesn't let himself off the hook for some of the errors made, his phraseology can be passive/aggressive. For instance, the phrasing of his "apology" that gave title to this book leaves the impression that he's apologizing more for others than himself. In his opening to Chapter 5, Clarke explains that on the morning of 9/11

I knew that I had failed. In the days and years leading up to that awful moment I had failed to persuade two administrations to do enough to prevent the attacks that were now happening around me.
You see, the decision makers in government didn't listen to Clarke, which is why they failed. And he only failed because they didn't listen. That's a fairly obtuse way of taking blame. The question is then: should we listen to him? Based on my reading and analysis of the events that Clarke describes, I certainly am wary of accepting Clarke's version of events prima facia.

For instance, he notes "the refusal of the Bush administration to ratify the [Kyoto] protocol...(p.277)" and makes no mention of the Clinton administrations similar "refusal." Elsewhere, he explains how he thinks partisanship is bad for national security, something for which many would agree. But the examples of partisanship he provides are markedly one-sided.

I think the record is fairly indisputable that national security issues have been used for partisan electoral advantage in recent years: terrorism threats have been overhyped near elections, predictions have been made about terrorist attacks occurring if the other party wins, people's patriotism has been questioned. (p.340-41)
Common charges levied against the Republicans, all. No mention of the political rhetoric flying from the Democratic side--immediate withdrawal, illegal war, the Bush fascist state, etc.--which helped them sweep to Congressional power in 2006. I suppose if you believe one set of arguments, then they aren't partisan?

Much of the first part of the book is devoted to Clarke's restatement of many of the same charges he made in Against All Enemies. He still thinks Iraq is a distraction away from Afghanistan, which is an arguable point, especially with Osama bin Laden still loose. He also puts much blame for Iraq at the feet of the generals charged with preparing our forces for the invasion:

1) "Neither the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [General Richard Myers] nor the regional commander at CENTCOM [General Tommy Franks] dissented from the initial war plan..."
2) The generals didn't implement proper counter-insurgency activities though they were aware of analysis from the CIA and State department that predicted insurgent activity in post-invasion Iraq.
3) Related to #2, once it became clear that the President intended to invade Iraq, the Generals did not advise the President and Congress that they did not have enough troops to deal with an insurgency.
4) "Inadequate training and...equipment" for American troops in Iraq.
5) Generals tacitly condoned torture, such as at Abu Grahib.
6) Generals didn't ensure that wounded troops were treated adequately (Walter Reed).
All of these points are worth debating. But elsewhere, Clarke essentially accuses General David Petraeus, architect of the proving-successful surge implemented in 2007, of moving the goalposts himself when his own counter-insurgency efforts were initially exhibiting slow returns. "It began to seem as if the reason for the surge, in Petraeus's mind, was to prove that his new counterinsurgency strategy could work."

The recent success in Iraq is making Clarke a victim of the time line. For he claims that Petraeus

[b]y defending a policy that in the larger sense was injurious to the United States and the Army, by arguing for staying on when he admitted that his own condition for the U.S. presence (real progress toward Iraqi unity) was not being met...raised new questions about what makes a general political.
When Clarke wrote these words, the effectiveness of the surge was still in doubt. But no matter the expertise that lay on the side of the predictor, reality has a way of ruining predictions.

Clarke has much else to say about a plethora of items related to national security and, not as impressively, global warming. As to the last, he essentially toes the Al Gore line. Nothing earth shattering (or warming?).

Further, it becomes clear that Clarke is a supporter of the Powell doctrine, though redefined for the times, which is entirely defensible. On the other hand, he also channels Thomas Franks (the academic, not the general) by basically asking "what's the matter with the military," because he can't understand why they have become so overwhelmingly Republican (though he notes that Democrats are gaining support).

All in all, this is a "thick" book. There is a lot to digest and a lot to think about. Clarke's writing isn't florid or light. Instead, he hits you time and again with anecdotes and antidotes that spring from the mind of the man who apologized to the American people on behalf of the U.S. Government. In the end, his is a voice that warrants a listen. Perhaps the best way to get a balanced view of some of the events is to read Clarke's book in combination with Douglas Feith's War and Decision. To quote Ronald Reagan, "Trust, but verify."
Cross-posted at Spinning Clio.


August 1, 2008


Pelosi Blocks Domestic Drilling Debate

Marc Comtois

Nancy Pelosi is blocking a vote, heck, a discussion, on lifting a ban on offshore drilling for oil. The talking points justifying her actions are out there. So are the polls indicating that a majority of the American people think we should do more domestic drilling, even while they recognize the benefits won't be immediate. Charles Krauthammer explains how Pelosi is exhibiting some cognitive dissonance on this matter:

Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?

The net environmental effect of Pelosi's no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world -- thereby increasing net planetary damage....They seem blissfully unaware that the argument for their drill-there-not-here policy collapses on its own environmental terms.

Of course, Pelosi et al don't think that the U.S., under Bushitlermonkeyboy would be "more environmentally scrupulous" than Russia or other countries, do they?


July 30, 2008


define: Hubris

Marc Comtois
Main Entry: hu·bris
Pronunciation: \ˈhyü-brəs\
Function: noun
Etymology:Greek hybris
Date: 1884

: exaggerated pride or self-confidence

hu·bris·tic \hyü-ˈbris-tik\ adjective

example - "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions."


July 15, 2008


Cleaning the Attic

Marc Comtois

Time to clean out the "To do" link "attic" I keep handy. So, before they vanish into the ether, here are some that may be interesting to others.

Part I: Politics and Economy

Obama, Shaman by Michael Knox Beran:

Obama-mania is bound in the end to disappoint. Not only does it teach us to despise our political system’s wise recognition of human imperfection and the pursuit of private happiness; it encourages us to seek for perfection where we will not find it, in politics, in the hero worship of a charismatic shaman, in the speciousness of a secular millennium.
But Obama is for school choice...and for union "card-checks," as Mickey Kaus mentions in his refutation of the same:
It seems to me that a) a tight 90s-style labor market and b) direct government provision of benefits (e.g. health care, OSHA) accomplishes what we want traditional unions to accomplish, but on a broader basis and without encouraging a sclerotic, adversarial bureaucracy that gets in the way of the productive organization of work.

A Newsweek report on the economic feasibility of oil shale.


Megan McCardle
on Sweden, cultural homogeneity and the welfare state.

"A behavioral economist explores the interaction of moral sentiments and self-interest." Surprise! The guy who wrote about the "Invisible Hand" and The Theory of Moral Sentiments was on to something.


Part II: History

A piece on America's "special grace" :

If America has been given a special grace, it is because its founders as well as every generation of its people have taken as the basis of America's legitimacy the Judeo-Christian belief that God loves every individual, and most of all the humblest. Rights under law, from the American vantage point, are sacred, not utilitarian, convenient or consensual. America does not of course honor the sanctity of individual rights at all times and in all circumstances, but the belief that rights are sacred rather than customary or constructed never has been abandoned.

"The Paranoid Style Is American Politics" reminds that conspiracy theories have abounded in American politics since, and including, the American Revolution. Mentions one of my favorites, Bernard Bailyn.

How "luck" is an important, if often overlooked, factor in American History (or any History, for that matter). It's not all about conspiracy or inevitability.

A long and interesting piece on Herodotus and why he wrote his history (from the New Yorker--if you're not banning it or anything...).

Book review of Sean Wilentz's Age of Reagan.

A review of a book about the "Black Death."


Part III: Culture

A "conservative" review of Iron Man (I haven't seen it):

The fantasy wish-fulfillment that makes Iron Man so winning is not being a guy who can fly around and shoot fire from his robot suit. It's being the guy with all the money in the world, the guy who can afford to make that suit.

In "Cleavers to Lohans: The Downhill Slide of the American TV Family", Katherine Berry traces the devolution of "quality family TV" to the reduced importance of parental figures. (Isn't the Lohan show reality tv?).

"Violence and the Video Game Paradox," a fairly recent ProJo op-ed by Dr. Gregory K. Fritz:

...the boom in violent video games correlates with the sharpest decline in youth violence in many decades....The answer to this apparent paradox is that correlation does not prove causation.
But, says Dr. Fritz, parents should still pay attention!

Finally, Where'd Generation X go?


July 5, 2008


Beating the "Inevitable"

Justin Katz

No political strategist am I, but Jonah Goldberg's suggestion for the McCain campaign strikes me as wise:

As many have noted, it's ironic that Obama supporters who profess to want bipartisanship are indisputably voting for the wrong guy. There's next to nothing in Obama's record that suggests he's better equipped to reach across the aisle and work with the opposition party, against the wishes of his own party's activist base. Obama is bipartisan on popular issues, not on controversial ones. Meanwhile, that's McCain's whole schtick.

What's more ironic is that bipartisanship wouldn't be an issue for a President Obama. If, as expected, the Democrats win large majorities in the House and Senate, Obama won't need Republicans for anything, and there's no reason to expect he would find common cause with the GOP against the base of his own party. In the Illinois Legislature, Obama was a pliable creature of the corrupt Democratic machine. Why, McCain might ask, should we expect that he will be otherwise at the national level?

Obama may be moving rapidly to the center, embracing faith-based initiatives and backpedaling on Iraq and NAFTA, but he is not "triangulating." He has not picked any serious fights with his base, no doubt in part because he doesn't think he has to.

This is a potential opening for McCain to exploit. Obama's thin record offers little ammo for McCain. But the Democrats who would truly run the country if they controlled both the Congress and the White House do indeed have a long record.

The reason the Obamanation is willing to overlook his move to the center is likely that nobody believes that he'll stay there, especially with his party's control of the legislature. McCain, therefore, must push him to choose: keep his messianic grip on his base, or fulfill the promise (or promise to fulfill the promise) of substantive compromise.

Even for his own sake, McCain must hammer home how plain wrong Obama is on most issues, because the Republican's biggest problem has arguably been his years of testy relationships with his party's base. He has to hammer home the message that voting against him isn't just a protest vote, it's a "let it burn" vote.


July 4, 2008


Happy Birthday, America!

Donald B. Hawthorne

Once again, in celebration of America's birthday, here are excerpted gems from previous postings about our beloved country - brought together in one posting:

President Calvin Coolidge gave a powerful speech in 1926 on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If you want to rediscover some of the majesty of the principles underlying our Founding, read Coolidge's entire speech. Here are some key excerpts:

There is something beyond the establishment of a new nation, great as that event would be, in the Declaration of Independence which has ever since caused it to be regarded as one of the great charters that not only was to liberate America but was everywhere to ennoble humanity.

It was not because it proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history...

...Three very definite propositions were set out in [the Declaration's] preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed...

While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination...

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world...

...when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live...

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignity, the rights of man - these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions...Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people...The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guarantees, which even the government itself is bound not to violate. If there is any one thing among us that is established beyond question, it is self-government -- the right of the people to rule. If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because there is a failure on the part of individuals to observe them. We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction...The ultimate sanction of law rests on the righteous authority of the Almighty...

...We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all of our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it...We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed...

This Power Line posting elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American creed:

Knowledge of American history holds the key to much of the current discussion of political issues, such as the ongoing liberal attack on Christian belief and on arguments premised on belief in God...Absent knowledge of American history, one would never know that the United States is founded on the basis of a creed, rather than on tribal or blood lines, in which God plays a prominent part. Absent knowledge of history generally, one would never know that this fact makes America unique.

What is the American creed?...The American creed is expressed with inspired concision in the words of the Declaration of Independence...

But does the Declaration have any legal status such that these words can be truly deemed to state the American creed? It does, although virtually no one seems to know it. In 1878 Congress enacted a revised version of the United States Code that included a new first section entitled "The Organic Laws of the United States."

The Code is Congress's official compilation of federal law; the organic laws of the United States are America's founding laws. First and foremost of the four organic laws of the United States is the Declaration of Independence...

Professor Jaffa [of the Claremont Institute] teaches us that the Declaration contains four distinct references to God: He is the author of the "laws of...God"; the "Creator" who "endowed" us with our inalienable rights; "the Supreme Judge of the world"; and "Divine Providence." Americans declared their independence, "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions."

The Declaration states the American creed, the creed that recognizes the source (Nature and Nature's God) of our rights.

Anchor Rising's own Mac Owens gave a speech entitled Limited Government to Protect Equal Rights, published on this blog site, which elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American Experiment:

Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest - the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must."...

The United States was founded on different principles - justice and equality...It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality...Thanks to the Founders, the United States was founded on a principle of justice, not the interest of the stronger. And because of Lincoln's uncompromising commitment to equality as America's "central idea," the Union was not only saved, but saved so "as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of saving..."

"Every nation," said Lincoln, "has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate." For Lincoln, this central idea was the Declaration of Independence and its notion of equality as the basis for republican government - the simple idea that no one has the right by nature to rule over another without the latter's consent...

Indeed, it is the idea of equality in the Declaration, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood, constituting what Abraham Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land..."

The United States is a fundamentally decent regime based on the universal principle that all human beings are equal in terms of their natural rights...

...the only purpose of government is to protect the equal natural rights of individual citizens. These rights inhere in individuals, not groups, and are antecedent to the creation of government...

Roger Pilon wrote the following in a 2002 Cato Institute booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution:

Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.

But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision...the method by which we justify our political order...liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

...that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government...indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish...to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights...provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract...its principles rooted in "right reason"...the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Dr. Pilon concluded his essay by writing:

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

The powerful words from and about our Founding appeal to timeless moral principles grounded in both our Declaration of Independence and the great moral traditions that preceded our Founding. It is these principles that make America unique and inspire us to be proud, engaged citizens who are vigilant stewards of freedom and opportunity for all Americans.

Happy Birthday, America!

Continue reading "Happy Birthday, America!"

June 29, 2008


Contra Conventional Third-Party Wisdom

Justin Katz

The typical left-right pronouncements are being made with regard to Bob Barr's intention to run for president under the Libertarian banner:

On the ballots in 30 states so far, Barr has the chance to be a spoiler for McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, in several states, among them Alaska, Colorado and Georgia. Barr's campaign advisers also assert he has similar potential in other mountain states, New Hampshire, Ohio and other swing states.

The Republican Party and the McCain campaign have swatted away the Barr candidacy, but some Republicans are taking it seriously. If the early polls hold up, and Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, pours heavy resources into Georgia, that state could be up for grabs, said Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.

I wonder if the peculiar dynamics of this particular presidential race oughtn't turn such conventional wisdom on its head. A Barr candidacy could actually provide a protest option for disaffected conservatives and right-leaning libertarians that only benefits Obama half as much as he might otherwise manage to achieve. If Obama's heavy investments in generally Republican regions were designed to emphasize the "change" motif, with the intention of gathering votes from the other side's usual base, it's conceivable that Barr would actually neutralize those efforts to some degree.


June 20, 2008


Langevin Takes the Progressive Heat over FISA, will Obama?

Marc Comtois

Apparently Congressman Langevin has voted in favor of FISA. Local progressives are apoplectic, throwing around the DINO label (what kind of Democrat is pro-life!). It also seems that the fact that Congressman Langevin is Chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee (Cybersecurity and Emerging Threats) is not so much indicative of his familiarity with the issue but rather leads to the suspicion that he is some sort of sleeper neocon Bushitlerian. Good times. However, I wonder if they are falling victim to partisan shortsightedness. What would the reaction be if it was a President Obama, not Bush, in office? Would the hysteria be quite as palpable...or would it be OK because, well, it would be Obama?

Then again, do they even know that Obama supports the same FISA compromise bill that Congressman Langevin just voted for?



RI Legislature to RI: We'd Prefer That Someone Else Choose Your Presidential Electors For You

Carroll Andrew Morse

Over at the Providence Daily Dose, State Representative David Segal (D-Providence) is rationalizing that his vote to marginalize the right of Rhode Islanders to choose their own Presidential electors makes government more democratic. Watch out, because any time now, we may start to hear that the political process can be made even more democratic (and maybe more Democratic) if we decide to award legislative seats in every district to the political party receiving the most legislative votes statewide!

Fortunately (at least at the Federal level) there are Constitutional protections against a legislature disenfranchising its own voters for political reasons. But for those interested, for whatever reason, in bringing the apportionment of electoral votes more in-line with the popular vote, there is a clearly Constitutional solution that's been pointed out by Anchor Rising commenter "Rammer"...

The potential to win the Electoral College, but lose the popular vote for President only exists because of the fixed number of seats in the Senate, which is Constitutionally mandated at two per State. Historically this sort of mismatch happens once every century or so, but if that is too often then there is no need for interstate compacts or Constitutional Amendments, by changing one law we could substantially reduce the possibility.

The simple fix is to increase the number of seats in the U.S. House from 435 to twice that number or more. Those seats would be apportioned by population and the weight of the Senate votes in the Electoral College would be reduced proportionally.



June 12, 2008


Attempts at Political Levity

Justin Katz

Perhaps it would not have been as deliberately un-gun-shy, but Jeanne Moos could have avoided the controversy with this skit and made it funnier, because more relevant:

This morning's e-blizzard of insults was prompted by a Moos piece on body language of the various candidates — particularly their strange, compulsive habit of pointing off into the distance while addressing the crowds at campaign rallies.

''Since we usually can't see who the candidates are pointing at,'' Moos intoned during a voiceover, ''we'll just have to use our imagination.'' Footage of Clinton waving her finger in the air was intercut with her husband's former Oval Office playmate Monica Lewinsky; of McCain, with his conservative bete noir, Ann Coulter; and Obama, with the sound-alike with whom he is perpetually entangled in verbal slips by TV anchormen, Osama bin Laden.

Result: The lefty watchdog group Media Matters for America issued a scathing statement saying Moos ''associates'' Obama with Osama, and a chorus of liberal bloggers joined in.

''I thought it would be Hillary and Monica that would get me in trouble,'' sighs Moos. "I was going for nemeses — Hillary and Monica, McCain and Coulter, Obama and you-know-who. I thought it was funny, but everybody now is touchy, touchy.''

Obama's "nemesis" image should have been Hillary waving her finger right back.


June 10, 2008


When Conservatives Want to Talk

Justin Katz

This comment from Greg, in conversation with Old Time Liberal, is surprising in the degree to which he sets aside incisive surety for a conservative's spin on the mushy milieu of liberal emotivism:

I love to engage in raucous political debate with people from the other side of the fence. In person (Blogs I mostly hate for the obvious reasons). In person you can yell and rant and I can yell back and rant and we can both throw party lines at each other until we're blue in the face.

And once the bloviating is over we can get to the meat of the issues. And more often than not we can come to an agreement on MOST things. I want fewer welfare recipients. You want low-cost tuitions. I say we PAY for four years of schooling and that person gives us back two years of CIVILIAN (military if they want) service and sign off that they aren't eligible for welfare ever. You say ten years. I say twenty. We come to an agreement. It means squat but we're talking. And we're finding solutions we're both happy about or are at least both equally unsatisfied with.

Obama wants this conversation to be happening about everything. He wants to get past the rancor and childish stupidity that has taken over politics in the last 20 years. Can it work? I dunno. But I'll give his way a shot. And if he blows it I'll vote him out in four years. God knows he can't F-it up anymore than Captain Cuckoo-Bananas and his idiot cabal are right now.

I want to be part of that 'new' tone. I'm tired of hating liberals. I'm tired of being hated as a conservative. I want to be an American again and for that to MEAN something.

What have I missed that has so persuaded Greg that Obama truly wants to have such conversations? Oh sure, he wants to be pegged as having such desires. He's got the far-left locked, he's been leveraging identity politics and labor promises to secure the Democrat mainstream, and he and his handlers have been sufficiently shrewd to recognize that much of the Republican base that is fed up with Bush also has never really liked McCain. So they've cooked up this "change you can believe in," "yes we can" drivel, and they've conducted the campaign masterfully. But where is the proof that Obama absorbs the arguments of the other side and adjusts his own positions accordingly?

Greg doesn't seem to care that Obama would shake his hand, thank him for the good conversation, and then go back to his office and expand the size and reach of government in every direction, right down to dictating that small businesses give a certain amount of time for employees to skip out for children's activities. (That's a worthy idea as a benefit, but it isn't the federal government's place offer it on behalf of businesses.)

It seems to me that one of the main things that righties such as Greg (and me) detest about W. is his tendency to listen to the other side so much that he winds up taking their positions half the time. The change that Obama would bring is to make a show of listening, but then to charge hard in the wrong direction. And he'll likely have the benefit of two congressional houses' being controlled by his party.



New Tone, Hidden Strategies

Justin Katz

An interesting passage from Steve Peoples's second part to the Projo's series on local unions:

LABOR UNIONS and their allies walk a fine line when it comes to influencing elections. State and federal campaign finance laws have strict limits on what is, and isn't, permissible.

That may be why Ocean State Action is actually made up of three distinct organizations — the Ocean State Action Fund, Ocean State Action and the Progressive Leadership Fund — although their boards have common members and the organizations have the same staff. ...

Federal law does not limit labor's ability to communicate with its own members.

Labor has detailed lists of the names, addresses and contact information for the estimated 75,000 union members in Rhode Island. Union canvassers can visit the households as many times as they want, send unlimited mailing or make unlimited phone calls.

It isn't my purpose, here, to spark a discussion of any of the laws involved in making this dizzying accountant's dream legal. Rather, I'm curious how folks believe this comprehensive lobbying strategy fits in with some related positions in the economic platform put forward by Mr. Barack "New Tone, Stop the Special Interests" Obama, such as fighting to ensure the "freedom to unionize" and working "to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers, so workers can stand up for themselves without worrying about losing their livelihoods." There's also some overlap in his vision of "comprehensive energy independence and climate change plan" and, say, the Green Jobs Alliance.

There's an ecologically sound bridge that Mr. Obama would like to sell (via tax dollars) to those who actually believe that he is a creature of compromise heretofore unseen in Washington.


June 7, 2008


The Knuckle-Bumping Messiah

Justin Katz

Perhaps it's because I'm a populist or an elitist (pick one), but I find images of Barack and Michelle (Bachelle?) fist-bumping nauseating. The statement that I read in it — albeit, between the lines — is "if we do this, people will think we're regular folk, just like them." And why should this well-to-do, upper-crust, non-entertainment-industry couple get away with it? Well, because their skin is dark.

No doubt, plenty of "regular Americans" scarcely noticed when the silver spoons fell from their lips as they swooned at the gesture. (No doubt, some will take my reaction as an excuse to wallow in their moral superiority to a rubic carpenter with a "my use of cool words is bigger than yours" style, as a recent hate-email characterized my vocabulary.) I've yet to find the story in print, but I wouldn't be surprised if the impact of myriad dunces falling for the script registered on the Richter scale.

I'm with Mark Steyn in this sentiment:

Speaking personally, I don't want to remake America. I'm an immigrant and one reason I came here is because most of the rest of the western world remade itself along the lines Sen. Obama has in mind. This is pretty much the end of the line for me. If he remakes America, there's nowhere for me to go — although presumably once he's lowered sea levels around the planet there should be a few new atolls popping up here and there.

June 5, 2008


Memories & Reflections

Donald B. Hawthorne

Today is a day full of sad memories, offering an opportunity to reflect on what once was and what it teaches us today.

It was 40 years ago today that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, the night he won the California Democratic Party primary. I lived in Southern California at that time and recall turning on the radio the next morning to hear who had won the race...only to hear the awful news. It was a dark time in America, occurring only two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ronald Reagan was governor of California on that fateful night in June and Paul Kengor comments on the grace in Reagan's response to that horrible moment...and his calling out of the linkage to the real enemy at that time, communism.

Today is also the 4th anniversary of Reagan's death. His once-estranged daughter, Patti Davis, has written these words about her father:

...the fourth anniversary of my father's death. For anyone who has lost a loved one, those anniversaries are both sad and sweet. The sadness is obvious—you don't stop missing the person who has gone; you don't stop wishing you'd had one more year, one more day. The sweetness sneaks up on you. It comes in the form of memories, some of them long buried. But mostly it comes with the realization that nothing ever dismantled the love between you, even though many things seemed to along the way.

At this time of year in California, the jacaranda trees are blooming. On some streets, there is a canopy of purple above and a blanket of purple blossoms on the pavement below. Jasmine is also blooming; the soft perfume lingers in the air. If I didn't have a calendar, I would still know that this anniversary was upon us. Jacaranda and jasmine will always be the background palette of that time.

As similar as my experience is to anyone else's who has lost a parent, it is also different because my family lived in the public eye. Because the country grieved along with us when my father died...

It seems valuable, I think, in these thorny political times, to remember why so many people mourned so deeply when Ronald Reagan died. It had nothing to do with politics, but rather with the quality of his character. It had to do with his goodness, his dignity—qualities that we as a nation are hungry for. We know we need leadership, but we also know we need compassion. We're sick to death of meanness and sniping, yet we've also grown accustomed to it.

My father would be perplexed by the overabundance of meanness in the political field. And he would be deeply saddened by it. His wish, I think, would be that we as a country turn our backs on the vitriol that has become too commonplace and demand that the "race" for president become a dignified one, as archaic as that may sound these days.

A friend who recently lost her mother said to me, "Death distills everything." It's true. I, like many people, live with regrets that will never lessen—the times I lashed out at my father, refused to appreciate him or consider his feelings, his point of view. I envy those who can say after a parent's death that they don't have remorse—I just don't know too many people like that.

But regrets can lead you to a profound awareness of what's important, what's meaningful. Since I do share my father with America and with the world, how he lived his life—not just as a politician, but as a man—has resonance for all of us.

He believed that words can wound, that even in the harsh, muckraking world of politics, it simply isn't right to insult another person. He believed that this country's greatness came from its collective heart, from its history of being a "melting pot" and that the dark passages of our history came when we lost sight of our own heart. He had no tolerance for racism. He was raised in a home where people were never judged by the color of their skin. He was raised in a home where everyone was considered a child of God, and he carried that belief with him throughout his life.

Politics aside, I think most Americans long for those qualities in a president, particularly in these uncertain times.

When we were in Washington, D.C., for my father's service, I was taken on a tour of the White House. I hadn't been there since he was president, and in those years I couldn't appreciate it--I was too blinded by my own saga of being a very reluctant First Daughter.

But four years ago, in June, I finally understood the reverence my father felt for that building—for its history, its memories, its significance. To walk through the White House and really absorb the environment is to remember that this country was founded on the idea of respect for life, truth and freedom. It was also founded out of rebellion, but that did not diminish the dignity the Founding Fathers brought to the task.

My father's dignity didn't die four years ago, and neither did our longing for it. The anniversary of his death may best be marked by reflecting on how he lived his life.

Julie Ponzi reflects on the philosophical conflict within some of Patti Davis' words:

His daughter, Patti Davis, reflects upon the man who was her father and why, after all the struggle and heartache, she could not help but love him. I think it is always wise to listen to the reflections of a daughter upon the character of her father. For one thing, there are few people in this life who have more of an interest in understanding the character of a man than his daughter. So she's been at the job for a long time, had better access to him and--though she admits to willful misunderstanding in the past--seems to be coming to a deeper, better, and more mature understanding of him now. Of course, there is a temptation on her part to wish to see him rediscovered as the ultimate and true liberal in her understanding of the term. If we're using a small "l," I think I'd give her that. She's right that the man she knew could not possibly be the caricature painted by his political enemies--the racist and the heartless man they said he was. But you can see from this piece that she is still struggling to circle the square--to make his politics fit with the character of the man she loved. They do . . . but she doesn't quite see how, so instead she dismisses them and talks instead of attitudes in politics and graciousness and demeanor and just "being nice." It's a start.

Of course, in America, being a true "liberal" means you're actually a conservative. What is it that we're trying to conserve, after all? We are trying to conserve the ideas of Revolution . . . and it's no accident that people talked of a "Reagan Revolution." Perhaps one day Patti will come to see that as well. And perhaps not. No matter. She gives us a beautiful reflection on the soul of the man and, though (perhaps) she misses the larger picture, she is not wrong about his good nature and his inability to be "mean." We do miss that. We ought, always, to do our best to imitate it and so honor the man who deserves our admiration and respect. Rest in peace, Ronald Reagan.

Four years ago, at the time of his death, Davis also wrote some touching words about her father - presented in the Extended Entry below - which, by comparison, show how her own feelings have evolved and deepened with time.

Davis' poignant reflections remind us how human relationships are like marathons, not sprints, where the underlying goodness in a human being, if practiced with constancy and love, can shine through and win the day over time...no matter how many obstacles exist in the near-term.

RIP, Robert Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Continue reading "Memories & Reflections"

May 28, 2008


Coburn Attempts to Refocus the Nat'l GOP

Marc Comtois

From Senator Tom Coburn (R, OK):

Becoming Republicans again will require us to come to grips with what has ailed our party – namely, the triumph of big-government Republicanism and failed experiments like the K Street Project and "compassionate conservatism." If the goal of the K Street Project was to earmark and fund raise our way to a filibuster-proof "governing" majority, the goal of "compassionate conservatism" was to spend our way to a governing majority.

The fruit of these efforts is not the hoped-for Republican governing majority, but the real prospect of a filibuster-proof Democrat majority in 2009. While the K Street Project decimated our brand as the party of reform and limited government, compassionate conservatism convinced the American people to elect the party that was truly skilled at activist government: the Democrats.

Compassionate conservatism's starting point had merit. The essential argument that Republicans should orient policy around how our ideas will affect the poor, the widow, the orphan, the forgotten and the "other" is indisputable – particularly for those who claim, as I do, to submit to an authority higher than government. Yet conservatives are conservatives because our policies promote deliverance from poverty rather than dependence on government.

Compassionate conservatism's next step – its implicit claim that charity or compassion translates into a particular style of activist government involving massive spending increases and entitlement expansion – was its undoing. Common sense and the Scriptures show that true giving and compassion require sacrifice by the giver. This is why Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell his possessions, not his neighbor's possessions. Spending other people's money is not compassionate.

Regaining our brand as the party of fiscal discipline will require us to rejoin Americans in the real world of budget choices and priorities, and to leave behind the fantasyland of borrowing without limits.


ADDENDUM: Alex Castellanos makes a case for a more "natural" or "organic" government that conservatives can live with.



Seconding Whitcomb: Politicians Ain't the Messiah

Marc Comtois

My dispositional inclination is to agree with the ProJo's Bob Whitcomb:

Sen. Barack Obama visited the Capitol in his glory the other week, with other, lesser politicians crowding around to be photographed — testifying to his charm and to the tendency to suck up to the winner.

It recalls how we pay far too much attention to presidential candidates, as opposed to everything else. Much can be blamed on the sloth of the news media; they find it much easier and more glamorous to cover a presidential race — as daily soap operas, or games — than, say, the complex activities of the government bureaucracy.

And an increasingly infantilized society has attributed to presidents super-parental attributes. We invest absurd hopes and hates in this office, forgetting that America’s condition is far more dependent on changes in technology and other big trends than any president. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, changed our world a lot more than Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

Mr. Obama has high intelligence, dignity, a smooth voice, close ties to some major economic lobbies — see the farm bill — and the ability to use and discard alliances at high opportunistic speed and (eloquently) contradict himself daily. He may or may not become a good president (and I may vote for him). Most of his success and failure, however, would depend on events far out of his control. And he would not create a heaven or hell on earth for most of us. We have to do that for ourselves. (emphasis added~ed.)

I second Whitcomb (except for the voting for Obama part) and would extrapolate his thoughts to include all politicians and political "movements." For sure, politics can engender change. But, for the most part, technology, science and even faith (or a disregard for any of the above) have had larger roles to play in the course of our society than finger-in-the-wind pols or faddish movements.

That doesn't mean we should all check out of the political process. But we certainly shouldn't believe that the entire fate of our nation will forever be determined by one election, held a few months from now. I mean, this country survived freakin' Andrew Johnson, right?


May 18, 2008


President Bush's speech in the Israeli Knesset

Donald B. Hawthorne

Moving beyond the world of over-reactions and political drama, has anyone actually read President Bush's speech to the Israeli Knesset?

...We gather to mark a momentous occasion. Sixty years ago in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel's independence, founded on the "natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate." What followed was more than the establishment of a new country. It was the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David -- a homeland for the chosen people Eretz Yisrael.

Eleven minutes later, on the orders of President Harry Truman, the United States was proud to be the first nation to recognize Israel's independence. And on this landmark anniversary, America is proud to be Israel's closest ally and best friend in the world.

The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty. It is grounded in the shared spirit of our people, the bonds of the Book, the ties of the soul. When William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower in 1620, he quoted the words of Jeremiah: "Come let us declare in Zion the word of God." The founders of my country saw a new promised land and bestowed upon their towns names like Bethlehem and New Canaan. And in time, many Americans became passionate advocates for a Jewish state.

Centuries of suffering and sacrifice would pass before the dream was fulfilled. The Jewish people endured the agony of the pogroms, the tragedy of the Great War, and the horror of the Holocaust -- what Elie Wiesel called "the kingdom of the night." Soulless men took away lives and broke apart families. Yet they could not take away the spirit of the Jewish people, and they could not break the promise of God. When news of Israel's freedom finally arrived, Golda Meir, a fearless woman raised in Wisconsin, could summon only tears. She later said: "For two thousand years we have waited for our deliverance. Now that it is here it is so great and wonderful that it surpasses human words."

The joy of independence was tempered by the outbreak of battle, a struggle that has continued for six decades. Yet in spite of the violence, in defiance of the threats, Israel has built a thriving democracy in the heart of the Holy Land. You have welcomed immigrants from the four corners of the Earth. You have forged a free and modern society based on the love of liberty, a passion for justice, and a respect for human dignity. You have worked tirelessly for peace. You have fought valiantly for freedom.

My country's admiration for Israel does not end there. When Americans look at Israel, we see a pioneer spirit that worked an agricultural miracle and now leads a high-tech revolution. We see world-class universities and a global leader in business and innovation and the arts. We see a resource more valuable than oil or gold: the talent and determination of a free people who refuse to let any obstacle stand in the way of their destiny.

I have been fortunate to see the character of Israel up close. I have touched the Western Wall, seen the sun reflected in the Sea of Galilee, I have prayed at Yad Vashem. And earlier today, I visited Masada, an inspiring monument to courage and sacrifice. At this historic site, Israeli soldiers swear an oath: "Masada shall never fall again." Citizens of Israel: Masada shall never fall again, and America will be at your side.

This anniversary is a time to reflect on the past. It's also an opportunity to look to the future. As we go forward, our alliance will be guided by clear principles -- shared convictions rooted in moral clarity and unswayed by popularity polls or the shifting opinions of international elites.

We believe in the matchless value of every man, woman, and child. So we insist that the people of Israel have the right to a decent, normal, and peaceful life, just like the citizens of every other nation.

We believe that democracy is the only way to ensure human rights. So we consider it a source of shame that the United Nations routinely passes more human rights resolutions against the freest democracy in the Middle East than any other nation in the world.

We believe that religious liberty is fundamental to a civilized society. So we condemn anti-Semitism in all forms -- whether by those who openly question Israel's right to exist, or by others who quietly excuse them.

We believe that free people should strive and sacrifice for peace. So we applaud the courageous choices Israeli's leaders have made. We also believe that nations have a right to defend themselves and that no nation should ever be forced to negotiate with killers pledged to its destruction.

We believe that targeting innocent lives to achieve political objectives is always and everywhere wrong. So we stand together against terror and extremism, and we will never let down our guard or lose our resolve.

The fight against terror and extremism is the defining challenge of our time. It is more than a clash of arms. It is a clash of visions, a great ideological struggle. On the one side are those who defend the ideals of justice and dignity with the power of reason and truth. On the other side are those who pursue a narrow vision of cruelty and control by committing murder, inciting fear, and spreading lies.

This struggle is waged with the technology of the 21st century, but at its core it is an ancient battle between good and evil. The killers claim the mantle of Islam, but they are not religious men. No one who prays to the God of Abraham could strap a suicide vest to an innocent child, or blow up guiltless guests at a Passover Seder, or fly planes into office buildings filled with unsuspecting workers. In truth, the men who carry out these savage acts serve no higher goal than their own desire for power. They accept no God before themselves. And they reserve a special hatred for the most ardent defenders of liberty, including Americans and Israelis.

And that is why the founding charter of Hamas calls for the "elimination" of Israel. And that is why the followers of Hezbollah chant "Death to Israel, Death to America!" That is why Osama bin Laden teaches that "the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties." And that is why the President of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.

There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Some people suggest if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away. This is a tired argument that buys into the propaganda of the enemies of peace, and America utterly rejects it. Israel's population may be just over 7 million. But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because the United States of America stands with you.

America stands with you in breaking up terrorist networks and denying the extremists sanctuary. America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror to possess the world's deadliest weapons would be an unforgivable betrayal for future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

Ultimately, to prevail in this struggle, we must offer an alternative to the ideology of the extremists by extending our vision of justice and tolerance and freedom and hope. These values are the self-evident right of all people, of all religions, in all the world because they are a gift from the Almighty God. Securing these rights is also the surest way to secure peace. Leaders who are accountable to their people will not pursue endless confrontation and bloodshed. Young people with a place in their society and a voice in their future are less likely to search for meaning in radicalism. Societies where citizens can express their conscience and worship their God will not export violence, they will be partners in peace.

The fundamental insight, that freedom yields peace, is the great lesson of the 20th century. Now our task is to apply it to the 21st. Nowhere is this work more urgent than here in the Middle East. We must stand with the reformers working to break the old patterns of tyranny and despair. We must give voice to millions of ordinary people who dream of a better life in a free society. We must confront the moral relativism that views all forms of government as equally acceptable and thereby consigns whole societies to slavery. Above all, we must have faith in our values and ourselves and confidently pursue the expansion of liberty as the path to a peaceful future.

That future will be a dramatic departure from the Middle East of today. So as we mark 60 years from Israel's founding, let us try to envision the region 60 years from now. This vision is not going to arrive easily or overnight; it will encounter violent resistance. But if we and future Presidents and future Knessets maintain our resolve and have faith in our ideals, here is the Middle East that we can see:

Israel will be celebrating the 120th anniversary as one of the world's great democracies, a secure and flourishing homeland for the Jewish people. The Palestinian people will have the homeland they have long dreamed of and deserved -- a democratic state that is governed by law, and respects human rights, and rejects terror. From Cairo to Riyadh to Baghdad and Beirut, people will live in free and independent societies, where a desire for peace is reinforced by ties of diplomacy and tourism and trade. Iran and Syria will be peaceful nations, with today's oppression a distant memory and where people are free to speak their minds and develop their God-given talents. Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and Hamas will be defeated, as Muslims across the region recognize the emptiness of the terrorists' vision and the injustice of their cause.

Overall, the Middle East will be characterized by a new period of tolerance and integration. And this doesn't mean that Israel and its neighbors will be best of friends. But when leaders across the region answer to their people, they will focus their energies on schools and jobs, not on rocket attacks and suicide bombings. With this change, Israel will open a new hopeful chapter in which its people can live a normal life, and the dream of Herzl and the founders of 1948 can be fully and finally realized.

This is a bold vision, and some will say it can never be achieved. But think about what we have witnessed in our own time. When Europe was destroying itself through total war and genocide, it was difficult to envision a continent that six decades later would be free and at peace. When Japanese pilots were flying suicide missions into American battleships, it seemed impossible that six decades later Japan would be a democracy, a lynchpin of security in Asia, and one of America's closest friends. And when waves of refugees arrived here in the desert with nothing, surrounded by hostile armies, it was almost unimaginable that Israel would grow into one of the freest and most successful nations on the earth.

Yet each one of these transformations took place. And a future of transformation is possible in the Middle East, so long as a new generation of leaders has the courage to defeat the enemies of freedom, to make the hard choices necessary for peace, and stand firm on the solid rock of universal values.

Sixty years ago, on the eve of Israel's independence, the last British soldiers departing Jerusalem stopped at a building in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. An officer knocked on the door and met a senior rabbi. The officer presented him with a short iron bar -- the key to the Zion Gate -- and said it was the first time in 18 centuries that a key to the gates of Jerusalem had belonged to a Jew. His hands trembling, the rabbi offered a prayer of thanksgiving to God, "Who had granted us life and permitted us to reach this day." Then he turned to the officer, and uttered the words Jews had awaited for so long: "I accept this key in the name of my people."

Over the past six decades, the Jewish people have established a state that would make that humble rabbi proud. You have raised a modern society in the Promised Land, a light unto the nations that preserves the legacy of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And you have built a mighty democracy that will endure forever and can always count on the United States of America to be at your side. God bless.

Noel Sheppard writes:

...From a speech that lasted over 20 minutes -- interrupted eight times by applause from Israeli Knesset members -- America's media exclusively reported 83 words they felt insulted the candidate for president they have been unashamedly supporting for over a year.

Everything else in the President's stirring and emotional address went completely ignored, so much so that the other 2,400 words were totally irrelevant, as was the signficance of the day and the moment...

Or, as Andy McCarthy said:

Can Somebody Explain to Me...how Obama sat in Wright's church for 20 years and managed never to hear anything, but hears 20 seconds of a Bush speech that doesn't mention him and perceives a shameful personal attack?

ADDENDUM

In response to the first comment from Greg in the Comments section, let me highlight my response:

The point of this post was not to be a Bush apologist but to point out the overall nature of Bush's speech and thereby provide a context for showing how Obama looked thin-skinned and defensive by over-reacting to the appeasement comment. And to point out how the media grabbed 83 words of the speech and focused only on them.

Separately, it is a blunt truth that Bush has greatly damaged, if not destroyed, the Republican "brand" through the reckless domestic spending which fell under his "compassionate conservatism" label (assisted in no small part by the then-Republican-controlled Congress), through his horrible handling of the illegal immigration issue, through poor execution for several years of the Iraq war, and for his general inarticulateness in defining and advancing a coherent policy agenda on a consistent basis.

It is why I have previously said I hoped the Republicans lost control of the House in 2006 and spent some time in the wilderness and why I have criticized McCain directly in the past on this blog site, saying he wasn't presidential timber. (And that doesn't even touch my problems with his policy preferences on illegal immigration.)

As a result, not only is the party direction-less but a generation of young people, unlike the 1980's, has been brought up with absolutely no reason to be part of the party's efforts.

And some of us older conservatives, who never completely bought into the party stuff anyway, are now adrift. McCain is hardly a viable alternative for some of us and it is far from clear at this time whether some of us will sit on the sidelines in November or not.

The real issue I am trying to highlight here in raising Obama's increasingly clear and worrisome foreign policy views is that those views, which only become more troubling with the passage of time, may drive some of us to hold our nose and vote for McCain when we were originally going to not vote for him.

Underlying the November politics of all this are two very different views of human nature, how the world works, and the scope of the battle against Islamofascism. My broader intent is to highlight the differences between those two vastly different world views because that is both worthy of debate and crucial to scrutinize, even as Obama attempts to declare such conversations as off limits.


May 17, 2008


Attitude Over Policies

Justin Katz

Mark Steyn's astute observation is applicable to much more than foreign affairs:

Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies. It's one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most midlevel powers, talks are the end, talks without end. Because that's what civilized nations like doing — chit-chatting, shooting the breeze, having tea and crumpets, talking talking talking. Uncivilized nations like torturing dissidents, killing civilians, bombing villages, doing doing doing. It's easier to get the doers to pass themselves off as talkers then to get the talkers to rouse themselves to do anything. And, as the Iranians understand, talks provide a splendid cover for getting on with anything you want to do. If, say, you want to get on with your nuclear program relatively undisturbed, the easiest way to do it is to enter years of endless talks with the Europeans over said nuclear program. That's why that Hamas honcho endorsed Obama: They know he's their best shot at getting a European foreign minister installed as president of the United States.

One gets the sense that, for too many Westerners, the important thing isn't so much to solve problems or to make good things happen as it is to feel the right feelings and think the right thoughts. And if vanity is the target, then self-expression — talking — is the medium via which to hit it.


May 8, 2008


Differing Perspectives on America

Marc Comtois

Historian Dale Light offers an interesting summary of how the candidates and their supporters view the country.

One benefit of this interminable Democrat nomination process is that fundamental issues do get discussed -- no I'm not talking about health care, or foreign policy, or the war, or any of those other transitory things; I'm talking about things that really matter in the long run, such as how the candidates and their supporters see America.

By now it is clear that "Hillary!" and her supporters see America solely in terms of competing interest groups. This is pretty standard for mainstream Democrats, has been ever since the rise of the "broker state" concept in the Roosevelt years. It's a social science vision of the country and in terms of electoral politics it consists of identifying and pandering to a sufficient number of interest groups to accumulate a majority.

Tonight in his North Carolina victory speech, "O-ba-ma!" went out of his way to disparage that sociological approach to America, emphasizing instead common approaches to common problems. This is at first glance similar to the unifying nationalistic themes on which Republican candidates have run ever since the party's inception in the middle of the nineteenth century. But there is a significant difference. Republicans love the country for what it is and what it has been as much as for what it might be in the future. Obama, with his strong liberal and radical associations, focuses almost exclusively on negative aspects of the American experience, and talks instead about an ideal America that has never been, but which he promises to bring into existence.

I think he's being a little too rosy with his description of Republicans, but his point is that, all in all, Republicans are more apt to view the country as a whole--the history, the institutions, the traditions--as being a net positive. (I include conservatives with this group, but they also view government as being naturally, and detrimentally, expansionistic. As the last few years have shown, not all Republicans believe this, too). I also understand Light's point about the Clintonian factionalism, but we also have a long tradition of that in our politics, despite the express desires of the founders. Finally, Obama truly is a Progressive with a belief that a group of experts--with Obama in charge--can lead our nation to a virtual (or, to some apparently, a very real) Heaven on Earth. We just have to trust him.


April 14, 2008


The More Things Change

Marc Comtois

From Time (h/t):

The Middle American's faith is not merely grounded upon nostalgia and emotion. He believes in a system that did work and in large measure still does; a brilliant, highly adaptable system, heir to the Enlightenment and classic democracy, with innumerable, ingenious, local accretions. But the country has become too complex and the long-hidden inequities too glaring for the system to continue without drastic changes. The Middle American's education does not dwell upon the agonizing moral discrepancies of American history—the story of the Indians or the blacks, or the national tradition of violence. He quite sincerely rejects the charge that he is prejudiced against the blacks or callused about the poor. He cannot believe that the society he has come to accept as the best possible on earth, the order he sees as natural, contains wrongs so deeply built-in that he does not notice them. His sense of indignation is all too easily served by the fact that so many reformers have gone beyond the reform as being too slow, and are using methods ranging from rude to downright totalitarian.
Oh, that was written in 1969.


April 12, 2008


Obama of the Working Class: Their Evil Values Are Just Blankies

Justin Katz

Not unlike other wealthy faux-populists who wish to manipulate poor and working class citizens for their own aggrandizement, Barack Obama apparently thinks that the change that will bring unity will entail an optimistic lunge past some of those wicked security blankets... you know, like religion:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The people need hope; they need handed to them what they could never really achieve on their own (right-wing rhetoric promise what it might). They need to pay their dues and contribute their votes for the benefit of those fortunate few with the brains (and, often, the high salaries) to coordinate their numbers.

ADDENDUM:

By some coincidence, general politics came up as a topic of conversation on the job site today, and somebody (I won't say whom) noted that minorities and others of the Left's harbored special interests (such as inner city residents with children in public school) have not gotten a very good return on their political investments. One might say that they cling to their multiculturalism or socialism or antipathy to people who make something of themselves.

Just sayin'.


April 2, 2008


Charity with Other People's Money

Justin Katz

When things go wrong for people, society ought at least to weight the costs of helping, even when the problems are wrapped up in the esoteric complexities of modern finance, but when I read news like this, I can't help but wonder from where the money's coming:

The legislation is likely to draw on elements of the Democratic plan such as letting states issue $10 billion in tax-exempt bonds to refinance subprime loans and permitting homebuilders and other money-losing businesses to reclaim previously paid taxes.

Democrats also want to provide $4 billion to states to buy up and refurbish foreclosed homes, a plan that the administration opposes as a bailout for lenders and speculators. ...

There is also bipartisan backing for $200 million in new money for debt counselors to help homeowners negotiate with lenders.

I'm sympathetic, of course, to any plan that solves problems by cutting or returning taxes, but if these steps are worth taking, shouldn't there be at least some discussion of what other area of government is going to be sacrificed?


March 16, 2008


An Assassinated Mythology

Justin Katz

The following passage from Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism struck me as relevant to the (thankfully abated) speculation of Barack Obama's assassination:

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. As if on cue, Dallas was christened "the city of hate." A young TV reporter named Dan Rather heard a rumor that some Dallas schoolchildren had cheered when they heard the news of Kennedy's death. The rumor wasn't true, and the local Dallas CBS affiliate refused to run the story. Rather made an end run around the network and reported the story anyway.

Rather wasn't the only one eager to point fingers at the right. Within minutes Kennedy's aides blamed deranged and unnamed right-wingers. One headline proclaimed the assassination had taken place "deep in the hate of Texas." But when it became clear that a deranged Marxist had done the deed, Kennedy's defenders were dismayed. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights," Jackie lamented to Bobby Kennedy when he told her the news. "It's — it had to be some silly little Communist."

Or maybe not, the Kennedy mythmakers calculated. They set about creating the fable that Kennedy died battling "hate" — established code, then and now, for the political right. The story became legend because liberals were desperate to imbue Kennedy's assassination with a more exalted and politically useful meaning. Over and over again, the entire liberal establishment, led by the New York Times — and even the pope! — denounced the "hate" that claimed Kennedy's life. The Supreme Court justice Earl Warren summed up the conventional wisdom — as he could always be counted upon to do — when he theorized that the "climate of hatred" in Dallas — code for heavy right-wing and Republican activity — moved Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president.

The fact that Oswald was a communist quickly changed from an inconvenience to proof of something even more sinister. How, liberals asked, could a card-carrying Marxist murder a liberal titan on the side of social progress? The fact that Kennedy was a raging anti-communist seemed not to register, perhaps because liberals had convinced themselves, in the wake of the McCarthy era, that the real threat to liberty must always come from the right. Oswald's Marxism sent liberals into even deeper denial, their only choice other than to abandon anti-anti-communism. And so, over the course of the 1960s, the conspiracy theories metastasized, and the Marxist gunman became a patsy. "Cui bono?" asked the Oliver Stones then and ever since. Answer: the military-industrial complex, allied with the dark forces of reaction and intolerance, of course. Never mind that Oswald had already tried to murder the former army major general and prominent right-wing spokesman Edwin Walker or that, as the Warren Commission would later report, Oswald "had an extreme dislike of the rightwing."

Amid the fog of denial, remorse, and confusion of the Kennedy assassination, an informal strategic response developed that would serve the purposes of the burgeoning New Left as well as assuage the consciences of liberals generally: transform Kennedy into an all-purpose martyr for causes he didn't take up and for a politics he didn't subscribe to.


March 8, 2008


Lighter than Expected

Justin Katz

Well, the memo's gone out. The You Tube videos are in production. The party line: McCain's got a temper! Watch the video over on RIFuture. Watch as the Senator rips a chair right out of the floor of the bus like Sam Kinison and pins the reporter's note-taking hand in the overhead storage compartment.

Actually, while he's understandably a little impatient with persistent questions that he has repeatedly declined to answer to the reporter's satisfaction, his comportment remains (though I shudder to use the word) statesmanlike. I'm no major fan of McCain's, but really: how clear do the Progressives wish to make it that they haven't any care whatsoever for reality? Reality is what you make it, eh guys? Repeat the line enough. Expect that many people won't actually watch the video all the way through. Make it reality.

Well, if that's the game, allow me to scroll down a post to Pat Crowley's once-more-unto-the-breach speech for the Obamanation, in which he explicitly admits that he votes multiple times in a given election (emphasis added):

I would rather vote for someone I liked and not get them in then vote for someone I didn’t like and help them succeed.

See! Corruption admitted! Pass it on.


February 26, 2008


Who Wants to Kill Barack?

Justin Katz

When speculation becomes front-page news, one gets the impression of legend building. If Barack Obama wins and lives to tell the tale, he'll be the One Who Lived. The great hope whom they managed to protect (unless the reality disappoints terribly):

His wife, Michelle Obama, voiced concerns about his safety before he was elected to the Senate. Three years ago, she said she dreaded the day her husband received Secret Service protection, because it would mean serious threats had been made against him.

The thing is: I've yet to hear of any actual serious threats being made. The fears appear all to be grounded in assassinations from decades ago. The Kennedys and King (somehow the attempt on Reagan's life is never mentioned).

Of course, more than one narrative can be constructed around the idea of a dead candidate, and I, for one, can't think of any more dangerous act — in a culture that produces semi-annual mass murders perpetrated, it seems, mainly for posthumous attention — than to splash across the news media fears of having to write a candidate's murder into the history books. That risky behavior raises an interesting question, though: Who would benefit most from the candidate's death?


February 24, 2008


More Derb on Mrs. O

Justin Katz

John Derbyshire has done what few non-college professors are willing to do: he's actually read Michelle Obama's senior thesis. Overall, he believes (and I agree) that it will and should have minimal effect on the presidential race, but he makes a worthy point:

... the slight negative is negative because the thesis reveals a cast of mind that most voters find deeply unattractive. Plainly Mrs. Obama had that cast of mind in 1985. Recent remarks suggest she still has it. The fact that Barack Obama chose her as a wife and seems to get on well with her, indicates that he shares it. It's that deeply, unrelentingly critical way of thinking about the U.S.A., and about most of our citizens, that characterizes the "victicrat" — the person who has been taught, or who has taught herself, that she is a pitiful figure buffeted by hostile forces, whose only hope for survival is to return the hostility, and to band together with others like herself ("the Black community") for mutual aid, all of them in a hostile posture to the out-group.

Most Americans don't see our country like that, and have a low opinion of people who do. Millions of white — or, as Mrs. Obama writes, "White" — Americans would love to have had the breaks Mrs. Obama had, and resent the fact that they didn't have them because they don't belong to a designated victim group. They resent the ease with which two beneficiaries of those breaks can parlay their victim status into two six-digit salaries and a seven-digit house, without ever doing any kind of work that adds to the nation's wealth or security. And they especially resent that people who have attained those heights of success, with the assistance of those breaks, seem to nurse nothing but hostile emotions towards the country that made it possible for them.

This "slight negative" for the Obama campaign has been a tremendous negative for race relations over the past few decades, and to the extent that an Obama presidency reinforces the victimhood separatism of our recent history, it will prove to be a net loss for interracial harmony.


February 23, 2008


A President You Can't Get Out of Your Head

Justin Katz

In today's Providence Journal, a young Ivy Leaguer with a hyphenated name adds too my still-short list of old-man moments (note the sentence that I've italicized):

But that is all that I have ever known as an adult: a reviled America under George Bush, and a Congress dominated by petty bickering instead of big ideas. The 2004 election offered an opportunity to vote for a Democrat, but few people my age were excited about Kerry. I have come of political age at a time when America is divided, disliked, and fading as the leader of the Free World. There is a thirst among young Americans for a new era of politics at home and abroad and for an America that is creative at home and respected abroad. And there is an overwhelming sense that only one person can usher in that new era: Barack Obama.

I was a bit younger than Mr. Cook-Deegan at the time, but my how that sentiment brings me back to the late-'80s/early-'90s. You want divided and disliked, whippersnapper? Take a look at the video that the British band Genesis aimed at our president in 1986. And as for our "fading leadership," I remember high school debates about Japan's ascendancy. (A curiosity for consideration at another time: Doesn't it seem that those who believe that the United States ought to be chastened by the world are often illogically quick to worry about our diminishing stature?)

Further stoking my incipient fogeyism, young Master C.-D. writes:

Now, at 22, I am a voting adult who comprehends the consequences of that election. I have friends from high school serving in Iraq. Now I understand the grave danger of alienating the Muslim world. I have traveled to over 25 countries. Nearly everyone I meet tells me how his or her respect for America has plummeted during the Bush presidency.

Central among the convictions of which the last decade of life has disabused me is that a twenty-two year old in modern society is necessarily (put aside legality) "an adult." "I was only a sophomore in high school," Patrick writes of the 2000 election, "I did not really understand what was going on." Myself, at 32, I'm daily more appreciative of how little I really understand what's going on.

But I do know enough to question the "nearly everyones" whom a traveling college student is likely to engage in discussion. I'd have to make a tally before I could confidently claim to have visited over 25 cities. One needn't travel far, however, to understand that this world contains all sorts of people, and that the best of them make decisions based on whether they are right or wrong, not on whether they will meet the approval of a foreign moral authority or bring into unadulterated harmony factions with wildly divergent beliefs and interests.

I wonder: Does our Brown history major understand the danger of not alienating the Muslim world? It's telling that he turns to personal conversations, rather than historical studies, to determine what his country ought to do.

Ah, this g-g-g-generation — "free from any huge upheaval like the 1960s" growing up "in a time when young men and women... have [all] had the same opportunities" in a post–Cold War, Internet-besotted era marking "an opportunity in history for the world to come together in a new way." Somehow, I suspect that many boys and girls have, in fact, not had the opportunity to be nation-hopping globalists. Some of them might even think to include 9/11 in a survey of their generation's formative experiences.

These colts of the academic world, chomping at the bit to apply their knowledge in the service of all that they have learned to be Good, would do well to consider the thoughts of elders with whom they disagree. Peggy Noonan, for example, has some edifying things to say about Mr. Obama:

Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone at their Ivy League universities school them in why one should love America? Do they confuse patriotism with nationalism, or nativism? Are they more inspired by abstractions like "international justice" than by old visions of America as the city on a hill, which is how John Winthrop saw it, and Ronald Reagan and JFK spoke of it?

Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised--so raised in the liberal cocoon--that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? And are they, in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?

Why is all this actually not a distraction but a real issue? Because Americans have common sense and are bottom line. They think like this. If the president and his first lady are not loyal first to America and its interests, who will be? The president of France? But it's his job to love France, and protect its interests. If America's leaders don't love America tenderly, who will?

And there is a context. So many Americans right now fear they are losing their country, that the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders, that we don't teach the young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax, federal tax they are paying a lot of money to lose the place they loved.

And if you feel you're losing America, you really don't want a couple in the White House whose rope of affection to the country seems lightly held, casual, provisional. America is backing Barack at the moment, so America is good. When it becomes angry with President Barack, will that mean America is bad?

Patrick Cook-Deegan hears a "catchy new song with the sweet phrase, 'President Barack Obama.'" It's an infectious tune, I imagine, among those who trust (as I once did) that the world beyond the graduation podium is practically humming with the promised life. And the lyric suggests that those old-time Americans ought, if the world is good, to lose. It's progress, my aged friends. We must step aside so that fields of plenty may sprout on land that we only managed to trample in our own time.

We non-matriculating students of history — and of current events — may wonder whether we are merely clearing a path for an assault, an invasion, against which a dahoo-dorray refrain will prove to be little protection.


February 22, 2008


Roland Benjamin: Ask Not What Your Country Can Do (to Make You More Productive)

Engaged Citizen

Elements of Senator Obama's economic plan described in this Washington Times editorial have the makings of a staggering economic impact. If you subscribe to the notion that individuals should earn as much as their skills, talents, and minds will permit, then you will be incredulous at the alternative Senator Obama is presenting to the household earning around the median income level (the middle class, as defined by the IRS).

The National Center for Policy Analysis put out this synopsis of the plan:

... Obama has gone hog wild over "refundable tax credits":
  • He promises a $4,000 refundable tax credit to finance college tuition for students who spend 100 hours performing community service.
  • There will be a refundable 10 percent mortgage-interest tax credit for married couples who take the $10,900 standard deduction because their itemizable deductions (including mortgage interest) fall below that level.
  • Taxpayers will also finance a $500 refundable tax credit to augment a $1,000 savings-account deposit made by families earning up to $75,000.
In addition, Obama also promises to triple the EITC benefit for minimum-wage workers:
  • For a married couple with two children working full-time and earning the minimum wage, their refundable EITC would rise from $3,225 to $9,675.
  • He would increase their refundable child-care tax credit to $3,000 and offer a refundable $1,000 tax credit to partly offset their $1,500 Social Security taxes, which had already been more than offset by their nearly $10,000 refundable EITC.
  • If they put that $1,000 in the bank, they would get another refundable tax credit of $500.

Now consider what this means to a typical family of four assuming the following:

  • The breadwinner is capable of earning $18.25/hr with his or her skills, talents, and mind. The oldest child is about to enter her first year at a community college and can work 6 hours per week at minimum wage to offset tuition costs (or augment household income) or can choose to simply work 100 hours of community service.

  • The other child is sufficiently young to receive existing or new child tax credits.

  • At the $18.25/hr job, the breadwinner can insure the family's health at a co-share cost of $73/week through his or her employer.

  • At higher earnings levels they are able to itemize deductions including $8,144 of mortgage interest.

Under Obama's plan, the breadwinner has a new option for choosing an employer or career.

In other words, if the household decides to work as productively as possible while encouraging the daughter to contribute to the household income, then the family will net $206 per year more than if the breadwinner simply takes a minimum wage position. Tax dollar redistribution will close the rest of the gap to the tune of more than $25,000 via refundable credits, reduced contributions into social security, and public funded health care.

I cannot grasp how providing incentive for nearly half of the population to work at less than 40% of their productive capacity could help our economy.

This plan mutates the "Welfare Trap" into a malignant monstrosity that entices all households earning below median income to work at a significantly reduced productive capacity in order to qualify for the progressive expectations of an "enlightened" society.

In contrast, we can only hope that the American spirit, as described in this piece in the Aspen Times, will prevail:

... [among] common traits are that he isn't looking for anything from anyone — just the promise to be able to make his own way on a level playing field.

Of course, I think the writer underestimated the "Angry" demographic by singling out one segment within this category. With a few exceptions to the broader depiction, we can all list scores of individuals who behave according to the above statement yet do not fall into the writer's narrow demographic.

As the social safety net morphs into the predominant lifestyle, individuals fitting the above description will have a more and more diminished say on election days. In the state most likely to proceed down this path, Rhode Island could be the first to experience its consequences. The saying "Last one out, turn off the lights" comes to mind.


February 20, 2008


Geldof - Press Has Shortchanged Bush's Successful Africa Policy

Marc Comtois

Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof is chastising the US Press corps for under-reporting the positive effect that President Bush's Africa policy has had:

Mr. Geldof praised Mr. Bush for his work in delivering billions to fight disease and poverty in Africa, and blasted the U.S. press for ignoring the achievement.

Mr. Bush, said Mr. Geldof, "has done more than any other president so far."

"This is the triumph of American policy really," he said. "It was probably unexpected of the man. It was expected of the nation, but not of the man, but both rose to the occasion."

"What's in it for [Mr. Bush]? Absolutely nothing," Mr. Geldof said.

Mr. Geldof said that the president has failed "to articulate this to Americans" but said he is also "pissed off" at the press for their failure to report on this good news story.

"You guys didn't pay attention," Geldof said to a group of reporters from all the major newspapers.

Bush administration officials, incidentally, have also been quite displeased with some of the press coverage on this trip that they have viewed as overly negative and ignoring their achievements.

And more...
Mr. Geldof said that he and Bono, U2's lead singer, have "gotten a lot of flak" for saying that Mr. Bush has done more for Africa than any other U.S. president.

Mr. Geldof said that "the main thing now is asking the candidates, 'What are you going to do?'"

Mr. Bush, said Mr. Geldof, has "put in place a whole foundation" in the form of aid for disease prevention, government institution building with accountability measures, and investing capital in African countries to build up their economies.

"The next guy really must take it on," Mr. Geldof said, referring to the next president.

If the press has underplayed the success of such policies that liberals would otherwise find compelling (say, if a Democrat had implemented them), then what else has the media underplayed or spun differently? In some simple minds, the man can do no good.


February 18, 2008


Michelle Obama: "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country"

Donald B. Hawthorne

Michelle Obama just said these words:

...What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something -- for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change...

Instapundit has a round-up of various reactions to Michelle Obama's comments, including John Podhoretz:

...Michelle Obama is 44 years old. She has been an adult since 1982. Can it really be there has not been a moment during that time when she felt proud of her country? Forget matters like the victory in the Cold War; how about only things that have made liberals proud — all the accomplishments of inclusion? How about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991? Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s elevation to the Supreme Court? Or Carol Moseley Braun’s election to the Senate in 1998? How about the merely humanitarian, like this country’s startling generosity to the victims of the tsunami? I’m sure commenters can think of hundreds more landmarks of this sort. Didn’t she even get a twinge from, say, the Olympics?

Mrs. Obama was speaking at a campaign rally, so it is easy to assume she was merely indulging in hyperbole. Even so, it is very revealing.

It suggests, first, that the pseudo-messianic nature of the Obama candidacy is very much a part of the way the Obamas themselves are feeling about it these days...

Second, it suggests the Obama campaign really does have its roots in New Class leftism, according to which patriotism is not only the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the first refuge as well — that America is not fundamentally good but flawed, but rather fundamentally flawed and only occasionally good...

And third, that Michelle Obama — from the middle-class South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, Princeton 85, Harvard Law 88, associate at Sidley and Austin, and eventually a high-ranking official at the University of Chicago — may not be proud of her country, but her life, like her husband’s, gives me every reason to be even prouder of the United States.

Unfortunately, this kind of talk by Michelle Obama is not new. (Nor is the topic of liberal fundamentalism new, as this 1984 WSJ editorial reminds us. Some reflections on the broader issues can be found here, where this linked post offers these clarifying thoughts from Richard John Neuhaus:

Politics and religion are different enterprises...But they are constantly coupling and getting quite mixed up with one another. There is nothing new about this. What is relatively new is the naked public square. The naked public square is the result of political doctrine and practice that would exclude religion and religiously grounded values from the conduct of public business...

When religion in any traditional or recognizable form is excluded from the public square, it does not mean that the public square is in fact naked...

The truly naked public square is at best a transitional phenomenon. It is a vacuum begging to be filled. When the democratically affirmed institutions that generate and transmit values are excluded, the vacuum will be filled by the agent left in control of the public square, the state. In this manner, a perverse notion of the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church...

The conflict in American public life today, then, is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of moralities in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate...

The founding fathers of the American experiment declared certain truths to be self-evident and moved on from that premise. It is a measure of our decline into what may be the new dark ages that today we are compelled to produce evidence for the self-evident.)

In that context, John O'Sullivan explains Obama this way in The Obama Appeal: He's post-racist, but also post-American (available for a fee):

...More important even than that is his recent rhetoric on American unity. Obama has mastered the lost art of delivering patriotic speeches that sound sincere and sensible. Such rhetoric used to be a Republican specialty, but liberal opinion long ago bullied them out of it ("super-patriotism"), and now they have lost the knack. The American people retain a taste for patriotic unity, however, and will likely respond to it with added respect when it comes from a post-racist black American.

But there are two kinds of American unity: the natural unity of citizens with equal rights, and the managed unity of groups with equal rights. These are in direct conflict with each other. Obama's rhetoric is undoubtedly sincere, but it gives the impression that he favors the first sort of unity when he actually wants to ratify and advance the second. A glimpse at his speeches and programs demonstrates that he is committed, like all the Democratic candidates, to such policies as racial preferences, multiculturalism, liberal immigration laws, and the transfer of power from America's constitutional republic to non-accountable global bodies and international law. For Obama is not merely a post-racist; he is a post-nationalist and a post-American too...

Apparently a post-American world view means it is acceptable not to wear a USA flag lapel pin as he runs for the USA Presidency. Or to attend a church where, if whites said the same things in reverse at their churches, they would be labeled racists. [ADDENDUM #1: More on the latter from Kaus, Kaus, Cohen, Hill, Dreher, and Knippenberg.]

This world view suggests We Are Paying Quite a Price for Our Historical Ignorance, a problem Ronald Reagan warned us about in his 1989 Farewell Address:

...Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in presidential farewells, and I've got one that's been on my mind for some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I'm proudest of in the past eight years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won't count for much, and it won't last unless it's grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over thirty-five or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood...Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the midsixties.

But now, we're about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection.

So, we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important...If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

So, as an antidote to this ahistorical, multicultural and relativistic world promoted by the Obama's, we would do well to go back and rediscover the first principles of our American Founding and ponder what it means to educate Americans in our unique heritage:

Calvin Coolidge:

...In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignity, the rights of man - these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions...Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776..that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final...If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people...

In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people...

Mac Owens:

Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest - the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must."... The United States was founded on different principles - justice and equality...It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality...Thanks to the Founders, the United States was founded on a principle of justice, not the interest of the stronger. And because of Lincoln's uncompromising commitment to equality as America's "central idea," the Union was not only saved, but saved so "as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of saving..."

"Every nation," said Lincoln, "has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate." For Lincoln, this central idea was the Declaration of Independence and its notion of equality as the basis for republican government - the simple idea that no one has the right by nature to rule over another without the latter's consent...

Indeed, it is the idea of equality in the Declaration, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood, constituting what Abraham Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land..."

The United States is a fundamentally decent regime based on the universal principle that all human beings are equal in terms of their natural rights...

Roger Pilon:

Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.

But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision...the method by which we justify our political order...liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

...that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government...indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish...to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights...provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract...its principles rooted in "right reason"...the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Contrary to Michelle Obama's viewpoint, the American Founding - however imperfectly practiced over the years - is something to be proud of for a lifetime.

And even a "plagiarizing" Barack Obama assures us that those American Founding principles aren't "just words." As a first step to show their seriousness that they are not "just words," perhaps Barack and Michelle Obama could acquaint themselves with and develop some pride in these core principles of the very country he seeks to lead and which gave each of them the freedom to live the American Dream as they have. As a next baby step, they could even encourage their partisans to hang posters in their campaign offices which celebrate that Founding instead of the late murderous communist thug Che.

If they are unwilling to take those tangible steps, then I agree with Kathryn Jean Lopez, when she writes: "Maybe the Obamas do take after the Clintons. It's all about them too."

More on the left-wing messianic posturing by Obama from Lopez, Steyn, Charen, Krauthammer, Last, and Brooks.

[ADDENDUM #2: More from Lowry, Hanson, Derbyshire, Goldberg, Henninger, Stuttaford, Geraghty, Lopez, Samuelson, Blankley, Levin, Malkin, Hemingway here and here, and Stein, a blogger for that right-wing attack machine, Mother Jones. Bronson writes: "I think pride in the country doesn’t come from what the government or the military or even our heroes do; I think it comes from realizing that every day, in every thing we do, we are making our country into something new. If you don’t believe in where we came from, how can you expect to get to someplace worthwhile?"]

Or, as Malkin writes: "When Republicans talk about broken souls in the context of civil society, the nutroots start screaming about the obliteration of the church-state line. When the Obama campaign uses the same rhetoric to get him elected to the White House, everyone swoons."

[ADDENDUM #3: Goldfarb writes this about Obama's attempts to clarify his wife's comments: "It's still the same creepy message. Apparently the only thing that might redeem this country in the eyes of Michelle Obama is the election of her husband as president of the United States. That's not good enough. This implies that the Obamas aren't running for office in order to serve the country that they love--because this country has, in fact, been so good to them--but in order to save the country from itself."]

Liberal fundamentalism is alive and well, albeit with some fancy new packaging.


February 17, 2008


The Latter Day Kennedy? Not Really.

Justin Katz

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby doesn't think JFK would be amused by the association of Che Guevara with a presidential candidate whom some have crowned as his (JFK's) political heir:

In December 1962, Kennedy offered a blunt summary of the Castro/Che record. "The Cuban people were promised by the revolution political liberty, social justice, intellectual freedom, land for the campesinos, and an end to economic exploitation," he said. "They have received a police state, the elimination of the dignity of land ownership, the destruction of free speech and a free press, and the complete subjugation of individual human welfare." Eleven months later, in a speech intended for delivery on the day he was assassinated, Kennedy regretted that Castro's "Communist foothold" in Latin America had "not yet been eliminated."

Were he alive today, it's hard to imagine JFK feeling anything but contempt for those who extol a dictatorship that has been crushing freedom and human beings for nearly 50 years. And it would surely pain him that so many of the cheerleaders are members of his own party.

The lionizing of Che, a sociopath who relished killing and acclaimed "the pedagogy of the firing squad," is not just "inappropriate." It is vile. No American in his right mind would be caught dead wearing a David Duke T-shirt or displaying a poster of Pol Pot. A celebrity who was spotted with a swastika-festooned cap or an actress who revealed that she had gotten a tattoo depicting Timothy McVeigh would inspire only repugnance. No presidential campaign would need more than 30 seconds to sever its ties to anyone, paid staffer or volunteer, whose office was adorned with a Ku Klux Klan banner. Yet Che's likeness, which ought to be as loathed as any of those, is instead a trendy bestseller and a cult favorite.

Judging from the policies that the fashionable Left promotes, it's not always a simple matter to discern whether it's the symbol of revolution that so captures the movement's imagination or a deep-seated sympathy with the lustful totalitarian impulse.


February 16, 2008


Anticipating History

Justin Katz

Mark Steyn's good today on Obama worship:

... it seems to me that Barack Obama is the triumph of flesh, color, and despair over word — that's to say, he offers an appealing embodiment of identity politics plus a ludicrously despairing vision of contemporary America (sample: "Trade deals like NAFTA ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart") that triumphs over anything so prosaic as a policy platform. Mrs. Clinton, the earthbound wonk, is reduced to fulminating that this race is about "speeches versus solutions." But a lot of Democrats seem to have concluded that Hillary's the problem, and Obama's speech is the solution. ...

On the other hand, if you’re running for president not as an unexceptional first-term senator with a thin resume but as the new Messiah, the new Kennedy, the new Gandhi, the new Martin Luther King, you can’t blame folks for leaping ahead to the next stage in the mythic narrative. Around the world, a second instant sub-genre has sprung up in which commentators speculate how long it will be before some deranged Christian-fundamentalist neo-Nazi gun-nut deprives America of its fleeting wisp of glory. Setting a new standard for fevered slavering Obama-assassination porn, Earl MacRae warned Canadians in the Ottawa Sun this week:

To be black and catapulting towards the presidency on charm, intellect, and popularity is unacceptable to the racist paranoid and scary in America the beautiful... They do not want to hear that he is a better American than they are, these right-wing extremist fascists in the land of America who no doubt believe it's God's will Barack Obama not get to the White House, no method of deterrence out of bounds, in their zealotry to protect and perpetuate Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Mom's apple pie, and the cross of Jesus in every home.

My own feeling, although I believe that anybody who thinks in these terms dramatically misunderstands God's operation, is that a better interpretation would be that Obama's on a divine mission to keep Hillary out of the White House. Either way, the nation is probably charging toward another daydream respite from history, with an even more calamitous cost for inattention.

Perhaps it's a subconscious sense of this truth that leaves so many desperate for fantasies — murderous or otherwise.


February 14, 2008


"We Have Been This Young Before"

Justin Katz

Some interesting reading from Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic:

All this even before we attend to the elimination of poverty. And into this unirenic environment strides Obama, pledging to extract us promptly from Iraq and to negotiate with our enemies. What is the role of a conciliator in an unconciliating world? You might think that in such conditions he is even more of an historical necessity-but why would you think that all that stands between the world and peace is one man? George W. Bush was not single-handedly responsible for getting us into our strategic mess and Barack Obama will not be single-handedly responsible for getting us out of it. There are autonomous countries and cultures out there. The turbulence that I have described is not caused by misunderstandings. It is caused by the interests of powers and the beliefs of peoples. Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, Islamabad, Gaza City, Khartoum, Caracas-does Obama really believe that he has something to propose to these ruthless regimes that they have not already considered? Does he plan to move them, to organize them, to show them change they can believe in? With what trick of empathy, what euphoria, does he hope to join the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds in Iraq? Yes, he made a "muscular" speech in Chicago last spring; but I have been pondering his remarks about foreign policy in the ensuing campaign and I do not detect the hardness I seek, the disabused tone that the present world warrants. My problem is not with "day one": nobody is perfectly prepared for the White House, though the memory of Bill Clinton's "learning curve" is still vivid, which in Bosnia and Rwanda cost more than a million lives. My problem is that Obama's declarations in matters of foreign policy and national security have a certain homeopathic quality. He seems averse to the hurtful, expensive, traditional, unedifying stuff.

February 13, 2008


Breaking Campaign News at the Katz Household

Justin Katz

John McCain just became the first candidate of the season to turn me off with an automated political telemarketing call just as we were succeeding in getting all the children to bed. Couldn't McCain-Feingold at least have done the good deed of preventing that?


February 8, 2008


What Harm Could Four Years Do?

Justin Katz

Cliff May has a point:

This year's election will be unusually consequential. In 2006, Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress. Democrats also now hold a majority of governors' mansions and state legislatures. The left long has been regnant on America's campuses, in the mainstream news media, in the entertainment industry, and in the unions.

A Clinton or Obama victory would put all levers of power into the same hands. What would Democratic -party bosses do with that? How about statehood for Washington, D.C., which would provide two new Democratic votes in the Senate? How about appointing judges who regard the Constitution as clay, and using immigration policy to expand the Left's electoral margins? These and other creative maneuvers could create an anti-conservative majority that would last a generation or more.

Most worrisome of all: Americans today are engaged in a conflict as serious as any we have ever fought. Romney and McCain get that. Perhaps Hillary Clinton does, too, though you wouldn't know it from anything she's said recently. But does Barack Obama? Or does he think it's all a big misunderstanding, one that can be resolved through talk, appeasement, global anti-poverty programs and a sincere effort to make ourselves inoffensive to those sworn to destroy us?

Thinking hard about such questions over the months ahead would be not just alright; it would be commendable — and conservative.


January 30, 2008


Whitehouse's Actions Commensurate with Danger

Justin Katz

RI Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D, Ocean Drive) has personal experience with the dangers of global warming:

Scientists say the world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.

Repeating the mantra of frustrated environmental advocates across the world, Whitehouse told a supportive audience that President Bush should "lead or get out of the way."

Whitehouse said he has seen the evidence of rising temperatures locally.

The senator said he was alarmed to see the cherry tree at his Providence home bloom in January, and expressed concern over the warming of Narragansett Bay, and how even just one degree can throw the delicate ocean ecosystem off balance, often with dire consequences.

The good Senator is so alarumed that he's going to sell all but one of his properties and split his profits between scientists and all of the people who will experience economic harm from stringent policies aimed at reducing the damage.

Sorry; couldn't keep a straight face. The Senator's actual course of action is to make high-profile speeches and work toward the election of "a president that will lead the nation, and complement the Democratic majority in Congress." No word on whether such a leader would pressure the hoities on Martha's Vineyard to accept the terrible inconvenience of windmills in their views and perhaps even in some areas in which they like to pleasure cruise.


January 29, 2008


So, Tu?

Justin Katz

I didn't catch the State of the Union last night, but I've explained, before, that I have a hard time getting riled up for state of the x speeches.

I will say that I continue to be struck by the irrational hatred of George Bush on the Left. Much of the fire, it seems to me, derives from his having twice stood in the way of Democrat rule, of destiny. No doubt Obama owes much to a nearly messianic narrative. He'll unite the country... without compromising the liberal vision. The heavenly gates of Camelot will pour forth their glory. Rolling Stone will lie down with the Nation.

Whoever has the honor of carrying the torch for the Republicans should brace himself, if he wins the general election, for some of the most vile treatment in American political history.


January 24, 2008


Stimulus Package

Marc Comtois

The stimulus package:

- Individuals must earn at least $3,000 to get a $300 rebate
- 117 million people will get rebates, 35 million of whom don't pay taxes
- Higher-income individuals would receive up to $600
- Couples could receive $1,200 plus $300 per child
- Rebates would be limited to individuals earning less than $75,000 and couples earning less than $150,000.

Next year, those paying taxes will be taxed on the "rebate" as regular income. Those who don't make enough income to be taxed will not. Does that still make it a rebate? At least a partial one for taxpayers. But it's simply a handout for non-taxpayers, not a rebate. Incidentally, according to the AP report:

Bush has supported larger rebates of $800-$1,600, but his plan would have left out 30 million working households who earn paychecks but don't make enough to pay income tax, according to calculations by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. An additional 19 million households would receive only partial rebates under Bush's initial proposal.
So money intended for the average American tax-payers was pulled so it could be sent to non-taxpayers. Nice.

Additional components:
- The AMT will also be suspended for 2007
- Businesses will be given incentives to invest in equipment
- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be temporarily allowed to buy mortgages of up to $625,000, exceeding a $417,000 federal limit.

Not included:
- Extension of unemployment benefits
- Provide additional food-stamp aid

Hey, is it an election year or something?


January 21, 2008


Let's Not Spin the Spin, Mr. Donnis

Justin Katz

Over on Not for Nothing, Ian Donnis chortles about Hillary: The Movie, noting:

Among the things we learn from Ann Coulter and a host of other putative experts is that Hillary is "worse than Nixon." OK!

I'm disinclined to rush to the movie's defense as anything other than a political production, but this particular selectivity of information is indicative of the difficulty that folks on the Left and Right have communicating. Ian narrows in on the most easily dismissed commentator (among his own crowd), Ann Coulter, and the most outrageous comment (among his own crowd), which she didn't even say. Names like Michael Barone and Larry Kudlow (let alone Barack Obama) would presumably carry less of the ha-what-trash factor for liberals. Throwing out the Nixon cliché — as the gold standard for political corruption (outside of RI, anyway) — avoids uncomfortable discussion about just how manipulative and deceitful the Clintons actually are.


January 15, 2008


Nothing to Hope for...

Justin Katz

Mark Steyn's Sunday NRO column is a bit uneven, but much can be forgiven of the man who turns such masterful phrases as this:

Terrific. In a Huckabee administration, nothing is certain but hope and taxes. Did he poll-test the line? Was it originally "What I didn't raise was tobacco"? Or did he misread the line? Did he mean to say "hogs"? Is there any correlation between taxes and hope? If you cut taxes by 20 percent, does hope nosedive off the cliff? Not for those of us who were hoping for a tax cut. And is there any evidence that he "raised hope"? Hope of what? Huck's line is a degradation of FDR: We have nothing to hope for but hope itself.

Apart from the politics, that last line certainly sums up my life just about now. Make a good t-shirt.


January 10, 2008


Chris Mathews Thinks New England Democrats are Racists

Marc Comtois

We close-minded, xenophobic, mouth-breathing christianists are used to being called racists. I wonder how our fellow New Englanders of the "progressive" variety feel when the talking heads at MSNBC lump them in with us simply because they voted for Hillary over Obama in New Hampshire? (via Michael Graham)

JOE SCARBOROUGH: What the hell happened in New Hampshire?

CHRIS MATTHEWS:“You remember the Lone Ranger and Tonto? I think paleface speak with forked tongue. You hear me? Forked tongue....

I thought this was over. I thought it ended with “macaca."...

I thought white voters stopped being what they didn’t want to be. You know what it tells me? People aren’t proud of who they are. They aren't proud of who they are. If they want to vote for Hillary Clinton, fine. Why don’t they say so?

SCARBOROUGH: I’m used to people saying that we in the South have problems.

MATTHEWS: Tell me about it,

SCARBOROUGH: But talk about New England.

MATTHEWS: Boston? BOSTON? [with a tone of incredulity]

MATTHEWS: There’s different kind of prejudice in the North than in the South. But it exists. It may not be “I think I’m better than you,” but it might be "I don’t want to live next door to you.”


January 9, 2008


Calling All Armchair QBs - New Hampshire

Marc Comtois

New Hampshire voters just did what they do best--go against the Conventional Wisdom (or the establishment, in the case of McCain). All sorts of theories are out there about how the media misread the Democratic race. One interesting theory is that perhaps McCain pulled independents away from Obama because--to the NH independent voter--it looked like McCain needed them more. Maybe. Another is that people lied to pollsters--the Bradley effect--about voting for Obama.

Or maybe crying helps.

Exit polling showed that Clinton did much better among women of all ages than Obama. And while the youth vote that was supposed to come out for Obama did, there just aren't as many of them as we think. That's nothing new: pandering to the youth vote is sexy but doesn't yield substantive results. As Clinton showed, it's all about the older women (Except you Mom!) and traditional Democrats. Bottom line for the Dems is that the real contest is a generational one.

On the GOP side, McCain won as predicted, if not by as much. Romney came in 2nd (again), which both reflects a belief that he is everyone's second choice and that he may end up being the consensus GOP candidate. Regardless of perception, the fact is that Romney leads the delegate count with two seconds and a first in Nevada {thanks Jon} Wyoming (which has more delegates than NH, by the way--just not the publicity). Huckabee got no real Iowa bounce, but he wasn't paying much attention to NH to begin with. It's all about South Carolina for him. Then there is Giulianni, waiting for February...Meanwhile, the role that independent voters will play in party primaries will lessen significantly.

Ironically, despite the heavy play that domestic issues are getting in this election, maybe the NH results show that both parties voted for the candidate they believe to be the strongest on foreign policy.


January 7, 2008


Emotional Populism

Marc Comtois

Iowa rewards populists. That's how Mike Huckabee and John Edwards and, to a certain extent, Barack Obama did so well last week. According to George Will, Huckabee and Edwards are cut from the same cloth (more on Obama in a bit) and their class-warfare dependent messages are flawed:

[Huckabee] and John Edwards, flaunting their histrionic humility in order to promote their curdled populism, hawked strikingly similar messages in Iowa, encouraging self-pity and economic hypochondria. Edwards and Huckabee lament a shrinking middle class. Well.

Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 -- because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. "So," Rose says, "the entire 'decline' of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder." Even as housing values declined in 2007, the net worth of households increased.

Huckabee told heavily subsidized Iowa -- Washington's ethanol enthusiasm has farm values and incomes soaring -- that Americans striving to rise are "pushed down every time they try by their own government." Edwards, synthetic candidate of theatrical bitterness on behalf of America's crushed, groaning majority, says the rich have an "iron-fisted grip" on democracy and a "stranglehold" on the economy. Strangely, these fists have imposed a tax code that makes the top 1 percent of earners pay 39 percent of all income tax revenues, the top 5 percent pay 60 percent, and the bottom 50 percent pay only 3 percent.

But the class-warfare card is played so often because it works well, at least for a while. And a lot of people really think that their acute economic frailty is due to some "other" taking money away from them--or at the least, taking more than their "fair share." However, both think that government is the solution. Will, again:
Although Huckabee and Edwards profess to loathe and vow to change Washington's culture, each would aggravate its toxicity. Each overflows with and wallows in the pugnacity of the self-righteous who discern contemptible motives behind all disagreements with them, and who therefore think opponents are enemies and differences are unsplittable.

The way to achieve Edwards' and Huckabee's populist goal of reducing the role of "special interests," meaning money, in government is to reduce the role of government in distributing money. But populists want to sharply increase that role by expanding the regulatory state's reach and enlarging its agenda of determining the distribution of wealth. Populists, who are slow learners, cannot comprehend this iron law: Concentrate power in Washington and you increase the power of interests whose representatives are concentrated there.

Yet, Will thinks Obama is different:
He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee -- an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic "fights" against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.
But he is a liberal and there is little doubt in my mind that his "reform" will also see a growth in government. Obama has also flirted with populism here and there--particularly the everyman, we-shop-at-Target variety--and mixes it in with a "unity" theme; all in an attempt to appeal across the political spectrum. It worked in Iowa and probably will in New Hampshire. For sure, Obama is a fine speaker and comes across as pleasant and likable. And while various wonks have been explaining that his rhetoric is "short on details," that hasn't hurt him so far. In fact, it is his ability to speak in heartwarming generalities and pleasant platitudes that has made him so appealing.

That makes him a populist of another sort.

While Huckabee and Edwards appeal to the emotions of fear and distrust and anger--which is generally viewed as the more traditional vein of populism--Obama is also a populist by appealing to the desire for hope and happiness via a non-ideological, "agent for change" image. The common denominator revealed in the rhetoric and records of all three is that none is afraid of turning to government to "help," but a government run by them, not the elite "other." Obama is similar to JFK and Reagan and even Bill Clinton in that he offers a hopeful message. But whereas the first two integrated their core philosophies into their rhetoric--indeed, they were persuasive because they believed in their philosophy (as for Clinton, he believed what he said, at the time)--Obama tends to hide his real governing philosophy--left-liberalism--behind his appealing rhetoric. At some point, Obama will have to begin to explain his ideas....won't he?


January 1, 2008


Speaking of Practices They Dislike

Justin Katz

My previous post cites the environment — global warming, specifically — as a religiously founded cause that allows believers to dismiss complications to their unrelated aversions, especially business. National Review's Rich Lowry argues that John Edwards is seeking to capitalize on that underlying impulse:

It is rare indeed to hear a politician brag about his fistfights as a child as Edwards does to establish his credentials for the "epic fight" ahead. Persuasion and negotiations are anathema to him and he explicitly forswears them: "People say to me, as president of the United States I want you to sit at a table and negotiate with these people. Never." He's willing to talk to Iran, but not to Pfizer. One is only a terrorist-sponsoring enemy of the United States, after all, and the other is a drug company.

For all its populist grievance, Edwards has a certain conservative appeal based on filial piety. He brings up his grandparents and parents constantly, and frames his fight against corporations in terms of all the striving our forebears have done to secure a better future. He complains that the mill where his father worked has now closed. In a change election, Edwards sells a kind of nostalgia, as if fighting the corporations will end the capitalist churning that so discomfits his listeners.

Anybody know the amount of CO2 released by a nuclear explosion? Alackaday. Some there are, perhaps, who believe that Iran is fighting — albeit in a different manner — the "dark corporate forces [that] are responsible for everything [Edwards] doesn't like" in his "down-home Manichaean vision" (magnificent phrase).


December 26, 2007


Frightening Enough to Induce Vomiting

Justin Katz

And I'll share it with you:

[Hillary] might even be shameless enough to put [Bill] on the Supreme Court, where he could ruin the law of the land, as many of his own judicial appointees are already doing in the federal courts.

From an equal-opportunity take-down column by Thomas Sowell.


December 19, 2007


Another Anecdote in Support of Limited Government

Donald B. Hawthorne

Some news stories, like this one below about the just-passed Omnibus bill in Congress, need no further commentary:

[South Carolina Senator] DeMint's office put a finger in Sen. Dick Durbin's (D-Ill.) eye last night:

Durbin: “For 46 hours and 8 minutes—the Senator from South Carolina has had an opportunity to go to the Internet and see this bill in its entirety, with his staff, and to read every page...Please, do not come to the floor and suggest that this is a mystery bill which no one has seen. For 2 days, this has been posted on the Internet . You have had your chance. Every Senator has had a chance.” – Senate Floor, 12/18/07

According to Senator Durbin’s math: Every Senator had 2,768 minutes to read 3,417 pages of legislative text that included next year’s spending for every domestic program of the entire federal government and many new policy changes.

According to Senator Durbin’s math: A Senator that downloaded the bill when it was posted at 12:15 a.m. Monday morning would have had to:

  • Read nearly 1.25 pages of the bill every minute for 46 hours and 8 minutes,
  • Not sleep,
  • Not eat,
  • Take no bathroom breaks.

After Durbin's speech last night, DeMint asked him on the floor if he'd read the bill. He did not answer.

And some people are silly enough to think that a public sector filled with politicians like Senator Durbin and unelected, unaccountable, physically remote, and faceless bureaucrats have only pure motives and are capable of solving our national problems!

It is always worth reminding ourselves that it is the underlying incentives created by policies, not the publicly-stated goals, which drive actual behaviors long after everyone has forgotten about the legislative details. See the first part of this post and pay particular attention to this important post.


December 6, 2007


Romney Speech: The Public Square Cannot Be Naked

Donald B. Hawthorne

The Corner provides excerpts from Mitt Romney's speech today, which suggest it will focus on the broader strategic question of what role religion should play in the American public square instead of the granularity of Mormon theology:

There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation's founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adam's words: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion... Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone…

When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God. If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest. A President must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States…

There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes President he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths…

It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it's usually a sound rule to focus on the latter – on the great moral principles that urge us all on a common course. Whether it was the cause of abolition, or civil rights, or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people.

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust.

We should acknowledge the Creator as did the founders – in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places. Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from 'the God who gave us liberty…

These American values, this great moral heritage, is shared and lived in my religion as it is in yours. I was taught in my home to honor God and love my neighbor. I saw my father march with Martin Luther King. I saw my parents provide compassionate care to others, in personal ways to people nearby, and in just as consequential ways in leading national volunteer movements…

My faith is grounded on these truths. You can witness them in Ann and my marriage and in our family. We are a long way from perfect and we have surely stumbled along the way, but our aspirations, our values, are the self -same as those from the other faiths that stand upon this common foundation. And these convictions will indeed inform my presidency...

The diversity of our cultural expression, and the vibrancy of our religious dialogue, has kept America in the forefront of civilized nations even as others regard religious freedom as something to be destroyed.

In such a world, we can be deeply thankful that we live in a land where reason and religion are friends and allies in the cause of liberty, joined against the evils and dangers of the day. And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion - rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith.

The Mormon tradition has some serious theological differences with Catholic and Protestant traditions. Yet, there are also theological differences which exist between Roman Catholicism and Protestant traditions, Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox traditions, Pentecostal and main line Protestant traditions, Evangelical and main line Protestant traditions, Christianity and Judaism, as well as Orthodox, Conservative and Reformed traditions of Judaism. We can argue about theological particulars but I haven't found that to be interesting since college days when we debated all sorts of topics. And even then, those debates were often inconclusive or unproductive.

But the issue regarding what is the proper role of religion in the American public square - including how it informs the way we live together as a nation, a community, and a family - is a most important debate. That debate requires a certain moral seriousness, which can exist across differing religious traditions. It further requires us to take a serious look again at the principles of our Founding, which affirm that we are born with our rights which come from the Creator and "the laws of nature of and of nature's God," not the government. And, as the Founders stated, morality cannot be sustained without religious influence.

It is a debate which has not been conducted openly and honestly in recent times, as noted in the earlier Anchor Rising posts highlighted in the Extended Entry below.

If Romney's speech reignites a public debate on what should fill our public square, he has then made an important contribution to our civic discourse.

ADDENDUM:

The text of Romney's speech is here. The video is here.

Here are some of the subsequent commentaries -

Kathryn Jean Lopez
Mona Charen
Byron York
Byron York
Kate O'Beirne
Ramesh Ponnuru
Jonah Goldberg
Mark Levin
Captain's Quarter
South Carolina Republican Party leadership
Power Line
Examiner editorial
Lee Harris
Ed Cone
John Podhoretz
Fox News Special Report with Brit Hume
Evangelical leaders on Hannity & Colmes
Wall Street Journal
Boston Globe
Peggy Noonan
John Dickerson
Michael Gerson
Pat Buchanan
David Kuo
Rich Lowry
Charles Krauthammer
David Kusnet
Kathleen Parker
Jay Cost
E.J. Dionne
David Brooks
Dick Morris
Eleanor Clift
Liz Mair
Jonah Goldberg
Jason Lee Steorts
National Review editors
An NRO symposium
Kathryn Jean Lopez
Bill Bennett
David Frum
The Anchoress
Jimmy Akin
International Herald Tribune
Steve Chapman
Robert Robb
Terry Eastland
Richard John Neuhaus

Along with the American Founders, Romney strongly affirms the role of religion at the creation and through the history of this constitutional order...

...Those familiar with the discussion of these questions might say that the entirety of Romney’s address is an exercise in "civil religion." That is closer to the truth of the matter. Civil religion is not another religion but is a mix of convictions about transcendent truths that are held in common and refracted through the particular religious traditions to which Americans adhere...

...His understanding that the naked public square is not neutral toward religion but is a project of the quasi-religion of secularism is entirely on target. His sharp contrast between America and a secularistic Europe, on the one hand, and jihadist fanaticism, on the other, is well stated.

It is too much to say, as he did, that Americans "share a common creed of moral convictions." It is not a creed, just as America is not a church, but there is an undeniably Judeo-Christian moral ambiance within which we engage and dispute how we ought to order our life together. And, however much we may argue over particulars, Mr. Romney is surely right in saying that "no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people."...

...He was making a bid for the support of people who find themselves on one side of a culture war that they did not declare. If you wonder who did declare the war, you need go no further than the facing page of the Times on the same day, with its typically strident editorial attacking Mr. Romney and his argument about religion in American public life...

...I believe Mr. Romney has rendered a significant service in advancing the understanding of religion and public life in the American experiment...

Continue reading "Romney Speech: The Public Square Cannot Be Naked"

November 26, 2007


The 2008 Political Season Looks to Be Fully Underway

Carroll Andrew Morse

Here's the January calendar for the Presidential nomination process, which finally seems to have settled, from CBS News

  • The Iowa caucuses will start the nominating process on January 3.
  • Wyoming GOP county caucuses follow on January 5
  • …followed by New Hampshire on January 8
  • …and Michigan on January 15.
  • South Carolina Republicans and Nevada will vote on January 19
  • South Carolina Democrats likely will be on January 26
  • …and Florida on January 29.

But even with all of the focus on the Presidential race, a few intrepid souls are already preparing their campaigns for the Rhode Island General Assembly. Here's Jim Haldeman (and supporter) over the Thanksgiving weekend letting South Kingstown know that he plans to run another energetic race in House District 35…

thanksgiving%20picture.jpg

And in just a few minutes, Anchor Rising will post its interview with Jonathan Wheeler, the Republican party's candidate in Tuesday's General Assembly special election in Warwick...


October 16, 2007


Former Senator Chafee Questions the Patriotism of those who Display the Flag

Carroll Andrew Morse

From this past weekend's 10 News Conference on WJAR-TV (NBC 10)…

Bill Rappleye: Has patriotism been corrupted? We've had a controversy whether Barack Obama is going to wear a flag-lapel pin.

Former Senator Lincoln Chafee: I think he gave a good answer. If it's in your heart, you don't need to put it on your lapel, as some kind of a gimmick.

Jim Taricani: We've got to take a break…

Chafee: It's almost suspect, those who wear their flag. What, do you have to wear it on your lapel?

Earlier in the interview, when asked who he supported in the Presidential field, Senator Chafee took his traditional stance of I'll wait 'til the race is already over, and I'm even more irrelevant than I already am, before making an endorsement. However, he did suggest that Barack Obama might be his candidate of choice. If he does make that official, the headline on the story should read "Just-another-liberal endorses another just-another-liberal".

N.B.

Ian Donnis has a few more snippets from the Chafee interview available over at Not-for-Nothing.


October 10, 2007


It's the demography stupid! (At least partly...)

Marc Comtois

Mark Steyn pithily sums up a little-discussed truism undergirding many social welfare programs:

This is why I'm opposed to universal social programs - because they were set up on the basis of mid-20th century birth rates.
Defined benefit plans and the pending Social Security crisis seem to prove the point, no? He also links to this story about Europe, the laboratory of socialism:
There are currently more elderly people than children living in the EU, as Europe's young population has decreased by 21 percent - or 23 million — in 25 years, 10 percent of which in the last ten years alone...

Italy has the least young people (14.2%) and one out of every five Italians is more than 65 years old... However, the decrease in numbers has been greatest in Spain, where the young population has diminished by 44% in the 1990 to 2005 period...

The decrease has been most significant in new member state Bulgaria, which has lost almost 8% of its population (7.94%) in the last ten years...

On top of that, the number of births across the EU has been decreasing and in some member states, the birth rate is almost two times lower than in the US (2.09 children per family in 2006).

I think the U.S. is holding its own, but the amount of workers it takes to support those not working (elderly, infirm, etc.)--regardless of the population breakdown--is declining. In the acute case of Social Security, demographic shifts are only partially to blame. We also have to "deal" with longer lifespans, which means longer retirements and more benefits paid out. That's why we're down to 3 workers per 1 SS recipient (versus 11 to 1 in the 1930s). That's why something has to change. Don't hold your breath for Washington to solve this one any time soon, though.


October 3, 2007


Whitehouse Plays Politics with His State

Justin Katz

The Providence Journal editorial board is dead on in its criticism of Sheldon Whitehouse for furthering delays of judicial appointments in Rhode Island:

Two important local federal judgeships on the U.S. District Court in Providence and U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (a seat long held by a Rhode Islander) have gone unfilled for 10 months.

That's already an unfortunate delay. But Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D.-R.I.) argued recently that it's too late for the Bush administration to make these appointments. That means the vacancies would have to wait until well after a new president gets sworn in — in 2009!

"There has been zero meaningful discussion between the White House and the Senate on these appointments," he complained.

Such a stand, unfortunately, puts politics ahead of justice.

Former Appeals Court Judge Bruce Selya, a Reagan appointee who left full-time service 10 months ago to create one of the vacancies, made some good points about this political brinksmanship.

"I'm really very disappointed in the senator's remarks. This is not a political game. The courts and the country and the state need these judges, and the question ought to be not who makes these nominations but the quality of the nominees," he said.


September 30, 2007


Revisited: Rediscovering Civility and Purpose in America's Public Discourse

Donald B. Hawthorne

Sharing this March 2005 blog post with someone today was a pleasant reminder to me of how much I still agreed with what I wrote back then.

Which naturally means I now encourage you to read it again as well!


September 28, 2007


There's Only 1 Party of the Rich?

Marc Comtois

The Anchoress makes a keen observation:

Chelsea Clinton works for Avenue Capital and makes an estimated 6 figure salary. Not bad for a woman in her mid-twenties and I certainly don’t begrudge her; Chelsea seems to be a private and perfectly nice person, and if either of my kids could make that kind of sugar not long after college, I’d say “buy Mama a condo near the water when she is old” and be happy for them.

But one cannot help noting that all we ever hear about President Bush is that he is “rich,” from “old money” and he represents “greedy capitalism” etc, etc…yet, his daughter Jenna is a public elementary school teacher in Washington DC, by no means a glamour gig. The Dems talk about how they’re all about taking on the big greedy capitalists and terrible corporations that hurt the middle class and the environment, yadda, yadda, yet the Clintons friends are all incredibly wealthy - mostly “new” money - they’re all very “Corporate” and their daughter works in the “corporate” world. Seems like there are stereotype templates at work here (GOP evil, greedy, uncaring, rich - Democrats Middle Class, compassionate, unmaterialistic, good) that don’t quite jibe with the reality, no?

Reality: they're all rich. We need someone with a thinner wallet (you know, just an "average" millionaire), so let's hope that the streak doesn't continue.


September 26, 2007


American Solutions Day in Rhode Island

Carroll Andrew Morse

Newt Gingrich's American Solutions for Winning the Future organization will be holding a number of events in Rhode Island this Thursday and Saturday. Here's the welcoming statement from the organization's website…

We recently launched American Solutions for Winning the Future, a unique non-partisan organization designed to rise above traditional gridlocked partisanship, to provide real, significant solutions to the most important issues facing our country.

The breakthrough impact of this organization is driven by its powerful approach:

  • Broad scale engagement of elected officials and candidates of both parties at all levels of government, interested citizens, private sectors leaders, reporters, scholars and students.
  • Development of big, real, breakthrough solutions to the most important issues facing this country - education, energy, more effective homeland and national security, a new model of retirement savings, a renewed sense of American civilization and citizenship, creating efficient, information age government and more.
  • A process to educate, ignite collaboration and implement these solutions across all levels of government with widespread support from citizens.
The events will be nationally-networked, with participants at the local sites linked to a series of speakers discussing topics ranging from "Green Conservatism & Biodiversity" to how "Defending America Requires Fixing our Intelligence System" (presented by a former CIA director) to "Rediscovering God in America". A full list of the topics is available here.

The Thursday event will include a webcast by former Speaker Gingrich and will be hosted locally by former RI Congressional Candidate Jon Scott, who has never failed to give an engaging presentation any time I've seen him appear before an audience…

DATE: September 27, 2007
TIME: 7:00pm to 9:00 pm
PLACE: Brown University,
List Art Building, Room 120

The particulars on the Saturday workshops are...
DATE: September 29, 2007
TIME:1:00pm to 5:00 pm
PLACE: The University of Rhode Island,
Memorial Union Room 360
or
Providence College,
Moore Hall II

The events are free and open to the public, though the organizers request that people planning to attend register in advance via the American Solutions website.



American Solutions Day in Rhode Island

Carroll Andrew Morse

Newt Gingrich's American Solutions for Winning the Future organization will be holding a number of events in Rhode Island this Thursday and Saturday. Here's the welcoming statement from the organization's website…

We recently launched American Solutions for Winning the Future, a unique non-partisan organization designed to rise above traditional gridlocked partisanship, to provide real, significant solutions to the most important issues facing our country.

The breakthrough impact of this organization is driven by its powerful approach:

  • Broad scale engagement of elected officials and candidates of both parties at all levels of government, interested citizens, private sectors leaders, reporters, scholars and students.
  • Development of big, real, breakthrough solutions to the most important issues facing this country - education, energy, more effective homeland and national security, a new model of retirement savings, a renewed sense of American civilization and citizenship, creating efficient, information age government and more.
  • A process to educate, ignite collaboration and implement these solutions across all levels of government with widespread support from citizens.
The events will be nationally-networked, with participants at the local sites linked to a series of speakers discussing topics ranging from "Green Conservatism & Biodiversity" to how "Defending America Requires Fixing our Intelligence System" (presented by a former CIA director) to "Rediscovering God in America". A full list of the topics is available here.

The Thursday event will include a webcast by former Speaker Gingrich and will be hosted locally by former RI Congressional Candidate Jon Scott, who has never failed to give an engaging presentation any time I've seen him appear before an audience…

DATE: September 27, 2007
TIME: 7:00pm to 9:00 pm
PLACE: Brown University,
List Art Building, Room 120

The particulars on the Saturday workshops are...
DATE: September 29, 2007
TIME:1:00pm to 5:00 pm
PLACE: The University of Rhode Island,
Memorial Union Room 360
or
Providence College,
Moore Hall II

The events are free and open to the public, though the organizers request that people planning to attend register in advance via the American Solutions website.


September 21, 2007


Shame on You, Sen. Reed

Mac Owens

Yesterday the Senate passed a resolution condemning the disgraceful "General Betray-Us" ad in the NY Times sponsored by the despicable Moveon.org. The resolution reads:

To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.

The resolution passed 72-25. The "no" votes were all Democrats, including both Reed and Whitehouse. I expected as much from Whitehouse, a lightweight on military and defense affairs if there ever was one. But why in the world would a West Point graduate like Reed who touts his military service take the side of an odious nest of vipers like Moveon.org over his fellow soldiers? Jim Webb may oppose the war but he had the decency to vote in favor of the condemnation of Moveon.org. But Jim Webb is an honorable man. Would that Reed had an ounce of Jim's spine. Reed on the other hand puts me in mind of Churchill's "Boneless Wonder."


The US taxpayers wasted a great deal of money on Reed's West Point education. They ought to demand a refund. Say, I have an idea. Why doesn't Moveon.org reimburse the American taxpayers for that education? After all, if Moveon.org is going to buy a US Senator it should be expected to pay full price.

Am I angry? You bet I am. Reed has dishonored himself and his state. Shame on you, Senator Reed. What a disgrace!


September 19, 2007


An Informed Patriotism Grounded in Thoughtfulness, Knowledge & Discussions Around the Dinner Table

Donald B. Hawthorne

An excerpt from Ronald Reagan's Farewell Address:

...Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in presidential farewells, and I've got one that's been on my mind for some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I'm proudest of in the past eight years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won't count for much, and it won't last unless it's grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-'60s.

But now, we're about to enter the '90s, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom--freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection.

So, we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important: Why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing of her late father, who'd fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, "We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did." Well, let's help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson No. 1 about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

And that's about all I have to say tonight. Except for one thng. The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.

And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that; after 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home...

Let's not just mark time. Let's make a difference and make the city stronger.


September 14, 2007


The Propriety of Responding to the President

Marc Comtois

Feeding into the WPRO ad, "Where do bloggers go....", Dan Yorke brings up an interesting point. Why was there a need for a "Democrat response" to the Presidential speech on the status of the conflict in Iraq? Dan talked to Brown University's Darrell West about it, and they came to the following conclusions:

1) There was never any sort of "opposition party" response to a televised Presidential address until the 1980's (Ronald Reagan). Then, the argument was that the President could offer his side of a story without rebuttal. The networks acquiesced and began allowing a response to State of the Union addresses.

2) Over the years, and despite the removal of the so-called "Fairness Doctrine", the networks continued the practice.

3) Now, it seems they've expanded the practice such that any Presidential address is effectively rebutted by the opposition. Even a speech offering an update on progress made in a war. Anyone ever here about the time Wendell Wilkie aired a rebuttal to one of FDR's fireside chats? Didn't think so.

Yorke's point is that, since the networks are under no obligation to offer the rebuttal, they are being ideological activists by continuing to provide the opportunity. As such, the office of the President--regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican--is diminished. He can't even get 5 minutes of breathing room to offer his case without the other side being able to take partisan political shots. Incidentally, it looked like ABC, CBS and NBC aired the Democratic response, but FOX did not (though FOXNEWS did, I think). That should stoke some fires.

I suppose this is of a piece of the broader trend towards diminishing the office of the President or that how some of us realize there was a time when politics really did stop at the waters edge.

On a side note, the best analysis of Sen. Reed's retort comes from Kimberly Kagan:

Senator Jack Reed gave the Democratic response, and the contrast with Bush’s speech was striking to those who paid careful attention. Bush addressed the situation in Iraq with detail and nuance. He described varying situations on the ground in different, specific regions of the country, spoke of particular movements and individuals, and showed a grasp of the complexity and reality of the struggle. Reed spoke only in generalizations. He did not refer to any specific events, places, or individuals in Iraq. He spoke generally of a “Democratic plan” for withdrawal that sounded remarkably like the Baker-Hamilton plan, originally presented at the end of 2006 in a completely different operational context. The vagueness of his discussion of the situation and of his proposals contrasted starkly with the specificity even of Bush’s speech, to say nothing of the incredible complexity and detail evinced in the testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. That contrast highlights once more what is really the key question of the upcoming political debate over Iraq: Whom do the American people want to run this war, Congress or the people who know something about it?



Finding Common Moral Ground

Marc Comtois

John Miller--in the recent National Review--calls attention to a set of moral initiatives and legislation that the moral and religious of left/right/center have been putting forward:

Halting the international and domestic trafficking and enslavement
of millions of girls, women, and children.

Promoting international religious freedom as a core element of U.S. human-rights policy.

Eliminating domestic prison rape and violence, which is the purpose of the Kennedy-Sessions Prison Rape Elimination Act.

Upgrading the inhumane conditions of Third World prisons.

Adopting a “Helsinki strategy” of advancing human rights as a key element in dealing with the government of North Korea.

Developing and sustaining the AIDS initiative originally proposed to the Bush administration by evangelical leaders.

Reducing the ability of oppressive regimes to monitor and censor Internet communications

Ensuring the peaceful promotion of democracy as a key theme in U.S. foreign policy.

Miller also observes that Evangelicals don't get any credit for getting the ball rolling in the first place:
Though evangelicals were mainly responsible for these campaigns, they have gained little political credit for them. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the rest of the establishment media are happier writing about Christians’ besieging of abortion clinics than about their joining with feminists to halt sex trafficking. Sub specie aeternitatis, this is fine—the evangelicals can layup treasure in Heaven—but it’s a definite handicap when waging future campaigns. Many liberals would be astonished to discover that the Christian Right is campaigning to stop prison rape. Their mental image of evangelicals is one of people who favor the worst possible treatment of criminals. Fair coverage would introduce a valuable note of cognitive dissonance into the average liberal’s prejudice against evangelicals.
How much of this is a pipedream? Don't know. If you add abortion and gay marriage to the 8 items mentioned above, you'll find that liberals and evangelicals (and, by extension, conservatives) agree with each other 80% of the time--but spend 95% of their time arguing over the 2 items over which they disagree. Now, these are fundamental disagreements. But every once in a while it's good for everyone to take a step back and acknowledge that we all can agree on something!

Of course, an important caveat would be that, while we can agree on the goals outlined above, we don't always agree on the method use to attain those goals.....

You all better go sing Kumbya and have a group hug before I change my mind.


September 13, 2007


Yet More News You Can Hsuse

Carroll Andrew Morse

According to the Associated Press, Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has moved from returning campaign contributions received directly from Norman Hsu ($23,000) to returning all contributions raised and/or bundled by Mr. Hsu (about $850,000). According to the Wall Street Journal, many other prominent Democrats have also announced that they will be returning any of their contributions associated with Mr Hsu…

More Democrats announced yesterday that they would dispose of funds that Mr. Hsu gave or raised, including Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York ($25,000), Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts ($35,000), Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu ($11,700), Montana Sen. Jon Tester ($4,750), Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill ($20,700) and Pennsylvania Rep. Joseph Sestak ($2,500). Others have given their money to charity, including Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, whose campaign received $2,000 in March from Mr. Hsu.
Do Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse and Congressman Patrick Kennedy intend to take similar actions with regards to any of their contributions raised with the help of Mr. Hsu?

And does the RI State Democratic party have any plans to announce what it intends to do with the $11,000 it received directly from Mr. Hsu?



Yet More News You Can Hsuse

Carroll Andrew Morse

According to the Associated Press, Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has moved from returning campaign contributions received directly from Norman Hsu ($23,000) to returning all contributions raised and/or bundled by Mr. Hsu (about $850,000). According to the Wall Street Journal, many other prominent Democrats have also announced that they will be returning any of their contributions associated with Mr Hsu…

More Democrats announced yesterday that they would dispose of funds that Mr. Hsu gave or raised, including Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York ($25,000), Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts ($35,000), Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu ($11,700), Montana Sen. Jon Tester ($4,750), Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill ($20,700) and Pennsylvania Rep. Joseph Sestak ($2,500). Others have given their money to charity, including Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, whose campaign received $2,000 in March from Mr. Hsu.
Do Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse and Congressman Patrick Kennedy intend to take similar actions with regards to any of their contributions raised with the help of Mr. Hsu?

And does the RI State Democratic party have any plans to announce what it intends to do with the $11,000 it received directly from Mr. Hsu?


September 6, 2007


More News You Can Hsuse

Carroll Andrew Morse

According to the Associated Press, after Democratic Party fundraiser and convicted con-man Norman Hsu missed his court date yesterday, Congressman Patrick Kennedy reversed his original decision to keep his $6,200 in donations from Mr. Hsu and decided to give the money to charity instead.

However, even after the no-show at court and the issuance of a warrant for Mr. Hsu's arrest, the Rhode Island State Democratic Party still has not yet made any statement I can locate on whether they intend to forgo the $11,000 they have received from Mr. Hsu. Michael McKinney's report in today's Projo on the plans of Congressman Kennedy and Senator Jack Reed to return their suspect donations makes no mention of the direct financial ties between the State Democratic party and Mr Hsu. According to campaign finance records, the State Democrats have received more money from Mr. Hsu than Senator Reed and Congressman Kennedy combined.

Is the Rhode Island Democratic Party really comfortable keeping money received from a fugitive from justice who has apparently listed non-existent addresses on campaign-finance disclosure forms?


September 5, 2007


News You Can Hsuse

Carroll Andrew Morse

Matt Jerzyk of Rhode Island's Future and Tim Raymond of Rhode Island's newest news aggregator StartRI (see comment #3 here) {UPDATE: the earliest source on this appears to be a Projo Political Scene item from last Friday} are reporting that Senator Jack Reed will return the $2,500 in campaign money he received from Norman Hsu, the Democratic fundraiser convicted of running an investment scam in the early 1990's that took over a million dollars from unsuspecting investors.

However, the Associated Press is reporting that Congressman Patrick Kennedy has publicly announced that he intends to keep his contributions from Mr. Hsu…

Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy said Tuesday he's not returning $6,600 in donations he got from Norman Hsu, a prominent Democratic donor whose criminal past was recently revealed.

Several top Democrats, including 2008 presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and Kennedy's father, Sen. Edward Kennedy, have said they will return Hsu's donations or give them to charity.

Rep. Kennedy will keep the money because there is no indication that Hsu's contributions to him were illegal, according to his chief of staff, Adam Brand.

And there has been no official word from the Rhode Island's State Democratic Party on whether they intend to take any action with regard to the $11,000 in donations they've accepted from Mr. Hsu…

Contributions from Norman Hsu

08/10/2006RI Democratic State Committee$1,000
08/10/2006 RI Democratic State Committee $10,000

Will the state Democratic leadership follow the example of Senator Reed's or the example of Congressman Kennedy, saying that they see no problem taking money from scam-artists and fugitives from justice, as long as it serves their political purposes?


September 1, 2007


Sexless Sex Scandals & Liberal Moralizing

Donald B. Hawthorne

Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig has resigned.

With a h/t to Instapundit, I found these comments from Eric Scheie on the Craig story to be most amusing:

I realize that there are things missing in this analysis, and of course the biggest problem is that it does not involve actual sex, but the perception of sex. In that respect, Craig's "sex" is like the nonexistent sex of Mark Foley, whose crime was not sex, but sending suggestive emails. (Or Vitter, whose name was found in an address book.)...

What is it with these guys that they can't even run a proper sex scandal?

Who ever heard of sex scandals without sex?

At least when the Democrats have a sex scandal, it involves real, honest to goodness sex. Yeah, I know, Bill Clinton said the sex wasn't sex. But let's face it, it was. Had Bill tapped Monica's foot, the most he'd have been accused of was playing footsie, and there'd have been little to no outcry, much less an impeachment. And as Matthew Sheffield makes clear, the double standard is appalling; Democrats keep their jobs after drowning women in cars or keeping male brothels, while Republicans are hounded out of office for sex scandals without even the component of sex.

If I were the American people, I'd be totally sick of sexless Republican sex scandals by now.

The GOP needs to shape up.

Jonah Goldberg offers both some light-hearted and more serious reflections on this news and the surrounding debate:

In the wake of the Larry Craig “Bathroomgate” story, some intrepid free-market-oriented bloggers came up with a novel solution to the problem of closeted gay conservatives indulging their carnal desires on the side. Gay-sex offsets.

The same market-based approach is used by environmentally crapulent liberal celebrities all the time. They use private jets, drive around with big entourages and own numerous energy-sucking homes. To make amends, they purchase an indulgence in the form of “carbon offsets” — a contract whereby the equivalent amount of greenhouse gases are soaked up by newly planted trees and the like.

So why not do the same thing with gay sex? Cruise the bus station, cut a check to the heterosexuality-promoting organization of your choice.

Since most on the Left think Craig’s alleged sexual liaisons are perfectly benign, they shouldn’t object. “Who are we to judge?” and all that. Rather, the Left claims it hates Craig’s hypocrisy, not his behavior.

From Rush Limbaugh’s drug use to Bill Bennett’s gambling to the long list of Republican politicians who’ve thrown a few earmarks and riders into their marriage vows, the Left has chosen to denounce the perceived hypocrisy rather than the behavior. The indictment sometimes loses its punch in the details. Bennett never inveighed against gambling, for example.

But that misses the point. The Left claims to hate “moralizers.” So any failure to live like Jesus while telling others to follow his example is an outrage, even the defining challenge of our lives...

One solution to the hypocrisy epidemic, of course, is to have no morals at all. You can’t violate your principles if you don’t have any. Another solution: simply define down your principles until they are conveniently consistent with your preferred lifestyle...

But the Left has another solution. Under its system, you can still be a moralizer. You can still tell people what to do and how to live. And, best of all, you can still fall short of your ideals personally while guiltlessly trying to use government to impose your moral vision on others. All you have to do is become a liberal moralizer.

Once you become a liberal, you can wax eloquent on the glories of the public schools while sending your kids to private school. You can wax prolix about the greedy rich while making a fortune on the side. You can even use the government to impose your values willy-nilly, from racial quotas and confiscatory tax rates to draconian environmental policies and sex-ed for grade-schoolers — all of which will be paid for in part by people who disagree with you.

You don’t even have to give up traditional religion, so long as you now define the teachings of your faith in perfect compliance with the Democratic platform.

Why, just look at John Kerry. In 2004, the Democratic nominee repeatedly insisted that his religious faith is "why I fight against poverty. That’s why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That’s why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith." Great! But when it comes to, say, abortion, consulting one’s faith is a no-no: "What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn’t share that article of faith."

So I guess under a Kerry administration, America’s civil rights and economic and environmental policies would all be voluntary?

The point is simply this: Hypocrisy is bad, sure. But it’s a human failing that should fall upon the individual in question. What the left wants to do is use hypocrisy as a cudgel to declare that conservative ideals are categorically illegitimate because some conservatives fail to live up to them. But we all fail to live up to our ideals sometimes (just ask John Edwards, who wants get rid of everyone’s SUV, save the one in his driveway). That’s sort of why we call them "ideals." Most of us don’t fall as far as Larry Craig seems to have fallen, but that’s not necessarily an indictment of his arguments, it’s an indictment of the man.


August 30, 2007


Clinton's Funny Money Man Gave to Rhode Island Candidates

Carroll Andrew Morse

According to today's New York Times, the Presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton has decided to forgo some large campaign contributions from a dubious source…

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign said yesterday that it would give to charity $23,000 it had received from a prominent Democratic donor, and review thousands of dollars more that he had raised, after learning that the authorities in California had a warrant for his arrest stemming from a 1991 fraud case.

The donor, Norman Hsu, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democratic candidates since 2003, and was slated to be co-host next month for a Clinton gala featuring the entertainer Quincy Jones.

Mr. Hsu, who is in the apparel business in New York, has been considered a fugitive since he failed to show up in a San Mateo County courtroom about 15 years ago to be sentenced for his role in a scheme to defraud investors, according to the California attorney general’s office.

Mr. Hsu had pleaded no contest to one count of grand theft and was facing up to three years in prison.

The travails of Mr. Hsu have proved an embarrassment for the Clinton campaign, which has strived to project an image of rectitude in its fund-raising and to dispel any lingering shadows of past episodes of tainted contributions.

It's not just the Clinton camapaign returning the contributions; a number of other Democrats across the nation feel that Mr. Hsu's background is sufficiently murky to justify their severing of financial ties with him…
Al Franken, a Democratic Senate candidate in Minnesota, said he would divest his campaign of Mr. Hsu’s donations, as did Representatives Michael M. Honda and Doris O. Matsui of California and Representative Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, all Democrats.
But what about the Rhode Islanders who have accepted money from Mr. Hsu this cycle…

Contributions to RI Federal Candidates from Norman Hsu

2/28/2007Reed, Jack$200
2/28/2007Reed, Jack $2,300
3/15/2007Kennedy, Patrick J$1,000
6/28/2007Kennedy, Patrick J$1,000
(Congressman Kennedy also took $4,200 from Mr. Hsu in 2005).

Will Rhode Island's Democrats apply the same standards as their leading national candidate, or do they believe that rules about accepting suspicious donations can be applied a little more loosely when you're from Little Rhody?


August 27, 2007


Pull String for Talking Points

Justin Katz

A short while ago, Congressman Langevin, speaking to Dan Yorke, did me the favor of reminding me why I've ceased to listen to politicians' public performances. I think I could just about hear the sound a ballpoint pen makes against yellow legal-pad paper as he checked off each item on his talking-points list (multiple times). The implicit dishonesty of it all is mind numbing.

For instance, paraphrasing: "The American people are tired of the failure of the administration and this Congress [meaning the pre–'06 election, Republican Congress, of course] to address the issues that it cares about — healthcare, the environment, education, yadda yadda." Among the items that are finally being addressed, now that the Democrats run the Congress, according to Mr. Langevin, is — get this — renewing the No Child Left Behind Act. Yes, the very act that the administration backed to its shame (for many reasons). If I were Yorke, I'd have asked why Congress's approval ratings continue to drop, well below the President's, if Americans are so impressed by the Democrats.

Another for instance: Yorke had Langevin on the show to challenge the congressman's line in a news report stating that his constituents had sent him a clear message of disapproval of AG Gonzalez (but not as clear as their message in support of presidential impeachment, mind you). Mid-interview, a caller informed Yorke that he had attended one of the town meetings from which Langevin was drawing these messages and that the main topic of conversation was their anger at the failure to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. Thereafter, Langevin included immigration on the repeated list of topics that Rhode Islanders "care about."

Presumably, since he's so concerned about the "clear messages" that his constituents send him, our congressman will spearhead legislation to combat sanctuary cities, the hiring of illegals, and the porous nature of our borders.



Gonzales Resigns

Carroll Andrew Morse

From the New York Times...

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.


August 23, 2007


Surprise! President Clinton Lied!

Marc Comtois

According to Newsweek:

In September 2006, during a famous encounter with Fox News anchor Wallace, Clinton erupted in anger and waived his finger when asked about whether his administration had done enough to get bin Laden. “What did I do? What did I do?” Clinton said at one point. “I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.”

Clinton appeared to have been referring to a December 1999 Memorandum of Notification (MON) he signed that authorized the CIA to use lethal force to capture, not kill, bin Laden. But the [CIA] inspector general’s report made it clear that the agency never viewed the order as a license to “kill” bin Laden—one reason it never mounted more effective operations against him. “The restrictions in the authorities given the CIA with respect to bin Laden, while arguably, although ambiguously, relaxed for a period of time in late 1998 and early 1999, limited the range of permissible operations,” the report stated. (Scheuer agreed with the inspector general’s findings on this issue, but said if anything the report was overly diplomatic. “There was never any ambiguity,” he said. “None of those authorities ever allowed us to kill anyone. At least that’s what the CIA lawyers told us.” A spokesman for the former president had no immediate comment.)

Remember, when Bill was President, we were told that having Hillary as First Lady meant we were really getting a Presidential two-fer, right? Keep that in mind...(more here, h/t).


August 13, 2007


Karl Rove Resigns

Carroll Andrew Morse

I suspect this news arriving via the Wall Street Journal might generate some buzz in political circles (h/t Drudge)...

Karl Rove, President Bush's longtime political adviser, is resigning as White House deputy chief of staff effective Aug. 31, and returning to Texas, marking a turning point for the Bush presidency.


July 13, 2007


The Popular Vote Thing

Justin Katz

The spreading of the popular vote notion from presidential politics to senatorial, here on Anchor Rising, has brought out the shadow of a key principle that is in danger of being forgotten in our coastal parochialism.

The U.S. Senate is constructed as it is partly to capitalize on the diversity of a (small-r) republican nation. The states aren't merely political units; they are somewhat independent cultures unto themselves.

In other words, for the Senate and the President both, folks from different regions will have different perspectives, not just different political and economic motives, and that true diversity is crucial to the strength and progress of the United States.


July 12, 2007


If We Switch to a Popular Vote for President, Shouldn’t We Dump this Whole Senate Thing Too?

Carroll Andrew Morse

Question for fans of electing the President by popular vote: What do you think of Professor Larry Sabato’s proposal for “reforming” the Senate (via Joseph Knippenberg of the Ashbrook Center)…

Because each state, regardless of population, elects two of the 100 senators, just 17 percent of the nation’s population elects a majority of the Senate. Sabato would expand the Senate by giving the 10 most populous states two additional senators, the next 15 most populous states one new senator and the District of Columbia its first senator.
After all, if we are going to govern the country on the principle that big states rule and small states obey, shouldn’t we make that change uniform throughout the government?

Second Question for the same fans: If you really believe that popular vote for President is a top priority, why not implement it through the undeniably Constitutional strategy suggested by previous Anchor Rising commenter “Rammer”…

The potential to win the Electoral College, but lose the popular vote for President only exists because of the fixed number of seats in the Senate, which is Constitutionally mandated at two per State. Historically this sort of mismatch happens once every century or so, but if that is too often then there is no need for interstate compacts or Constitutional Amendments, by changing one law we could substantially reduce the possibility.

The simple fix is to increase the number of seats in the U.S. House from 435 to twice that number or more. Those seats would be apportioned by population and the weight of the Senate votes in the Electoral College would be reduced proportionally.



July 11, 2007


Iraq: Taking Stock

Marc Comtois

I'm not a dead-ender on Iraq, but I do think we've got to give the new--albeit too-long in coming--strategy time to work. I suspect readers will just breeze on past this post as many, probably most, already have their minds made up. To them, we are frozen in time: the situation in Iraq will always be as it was in November 2006, just before the election. And that's not a coincidence. The domestic political component of the entire war debate is probably the most troubling to me. Without further (or much) ado--and in addition to Don's related post--here are some reports/opinions that inform my own current views on Iraq.

Continue reading "Iraq: Taking Stock"

July 9, 2007


Popular Vote and the World Series

Marc Comtois

Ian Donnis over at N4N invokes the Supreme Court "giving" the election to George W. Bush in 2000 as a lead-in to the National Popular Vote movement. Both Andrew and I have posted about this before. Here's a baseball analogy just for Ian, via a Bruce Bartlett piece from 2000:

It will be as if we changed the World Series from a system in which a team must win 4 games to one in which the total number of runs in all games played determines victory. As recently as 1997, a popular vote-type system for the World Series would have switched the winner from the Florida Marlins to the Cleveland Indians. Although Florida won 4 games to Cleveland's 3, Cleveland scored 44 total runs in the 7 games played to Florida's 37.
Hey, just having fun. I'm sure someone could liken it to the Superbowl instead.

Oh, one other thing: why does Common Cause (national) like this idea while the RI chapter doesn't support another popular vote driven reform, voter initiative? Aren't they both "popular" democracy in action?


July 6, 2007


Ben Stein on the Libby Pardon

Marc Comtois

Of all the ink spilled (or pixels populated) over the Libby pardon, perhaps Ben Stein's take sums it up best (h/t). Nuff said.


June 27, 2007


That's All I Gots to Say 'Bout That

Justin Katz

Oddly, regarding the President's visit to Newport tomorrow, I find myself scowling not unlike a Democrat (Bushitler-types excluded). I'm relieved that I'll likely be working on the other side of town, but except for that consideration, I'll be just as happy to have him come and go, and I find that I mean from the White House as much as from Newport.


June 13, 2007


Rudy Almighty

Justin Katz

Is it me, or is there something similar in the eyes of the following two pictures (both from the ad-cycling page to which Marc links)?

rudyalmighty.jpg

The picture at right is, of course, from the new neo-Noah film Evan Almighty, and given Rudy's famous social liberalism (as well as my selective cropping), I can't help but chuckle at this possible caption for the picture at left: "Three?"

Some of you will get it; some won't...


May 29, 2007


And Never the Two Shall Meet

Justin Katz

If you missed it last week, Daniel Henninger's Thursday column makes some interesting points:

It has been argued in this column before that the origins of our European-like polarization can be found in the Florida legal contest at the end of the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential campaign. That was a mini civil war. With the popular vote split 50-50, we spent weeks in a tragicomic pitched battle over contested votes in a few Florida counties. The American political system, by historical tradition flexible and accommodative, was unable to turn off the lawyers and forced nine unelected judges to settle it. So they did, splitting 5-4. In retrospect, a more judicious Supreme Court minority would have seen the danger in that vote (as Nixon did in 1960) and made the inevitable result unanimous to avoid recrimination. A pacto. Instead, we got recrimination.

From that day, American politics has been a pitched battle, waged mainly by Democrats against the "illegitimate" Republican presidency. Some Democrats might say the origins of this polarization traces to the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton. After that the goal was payback. To lose as the Democrats did in 2000 was, and remains, unendurable (as likely it would have for Republicans if they'd lost 5 to 4).

Politics of its nature is about polar competition. Opposed ideas should compete for public support. Withdraw all possibility of contact or crossover, however, and "politics" becomes just a word that euphemizes national alienation. That, effectively, is what we have now.


May 18, 2007


Hide Your Wallets, D.C. Dems are Coming....

Marc Comtois

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell writes:

While most of the media were busy covering the latest developments on the Iraq funding bill or the bipartisan immigration proposal, congressional Democrats on Thursday quietly passed a budget creating the framework for the largest tax increases in American history...

Everyone takes a hit. Forty-five million working families with two children will see their taxes increase by nearly $3,000 annually. They’d see the current child tax credit cut in half — from $1,000 to $500. The standard deduction for married couples is also cut in half, from the current $3,400 to $1,700. The overall effect on married couples with children is obvious: Far from shifting the burden onto the wealthy, the Democratic budget drives up taxes on the average American family by more than 130 percent.

Seniors get hit hard too. Democrats like to crow that only the richest one percent of Americans benefit from the stimulative tax cuts Republicans passed in 2001 and 2003. What they rarely mention is how much seniors benefited from those cuts in the form of increased income as a result of lower taxes on dividends and capital gains. More than half of all seniors today claim income from these two sources, and the Democratic budget would lower the income of every one of them by reversing every one of those cuts.

Heritage also has some analysis on the Senate Budget--most of the tax increases are because the Senate is going to simply let the Bush tax cuts expire--and more here:
With federal spending surging above $24,000 per household per year, the incoming Democratic majority of Congress promised to restore fiscal responsibility in Washington. Instead of paring back the growth of government, however, Congress came to agreement in conference on a budget resolution that:

* Raises taxes by $721 billion over five years, and a projected $2.7 trillion over 10 years, or more than $2,000 per household;
* Includes 23 reserve funds that could be used to raise taxes by hundreds of billions more;
* Increases discretionary spending by nearly 9 percent in FY 2008 and does not terminate a single wasteful program;
* Completely ignores the impending explosion of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid costs; and
* Creates rules that bias the budget toward tax increases.
...

Congress’s budget resolution is consistent with the Democratic majority’s budget agenda so far. In just a few months in Washington, the Democratic Congress has tacked $21 billion in unrelated deficit spending onto the Iraq war emergency bill; passed a $7 billion farm bailout—without any offsets—that violates the majority’s own pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) rules by adding new mandatory spending;[1] and waived its own PAYGO rules in order to add new mandatory spending as part of a bill to expand the House of Representatives.[2] Coming on the heels of these initiatives, Congress’s irresponsible budget resolution is hardly a surprise.

President Bush has vowed to veto the Democratic budget.


May 16, 2007


Pelosi Bucks 185 Year Old House Rule, Stifles Debate

Marc Comtois

Yup, they sure are changing things down there in D.C. Drudge reports:

After losing a string of embarrassing votes on the House floor because of procedural maneuvering, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has decided to change the current House Rules to completely shut down the floor to the minority.

The Democratic Leadership is threatening to change the current House Rules regarding the Republican right to the Motion to Recommit or the test of germaneness on the motion to recommit. This would be the first change to the germaneness rule since 1822.

In protest, the House Republicans are going to call procedural motions every half hour.

House Minority Whip John Boehner's reaction:
“This is an astonishing attempt by the majority leadership to duck accountability for tax-and-spend policies the American people do not want,” Boehner said. “The majority leadership is gutting House rules that have been in place for 185 years so they can raise taxes and increase government spending without a vote. House Republicans will use every tool available to fight this abuse of power.”

Last November, House Democratic leaders promised the most open, ethical Congress in history:

“[W]e promised the American people that we would have the most honest and most open government and we will.” (Nancy Pelosi press stakeout, December 6, 2006)

“We intend to have a Rules Committee ... that gives opposition voices and alternative proposals the ability to be heard and considered on the floor of the House.” (Steny Hoyer in CongressDaily PM, December 5, 2006)

The rules House Democrats are seeking to change have not been changed since 1822.
Republicans have already achieved significant legislative successes on the House floor with 11 consecutive “motion-to-recommit” victories that exposed flaws and substantively improved weaknesses in underlying Democrat bills. But rather than living by the same rules which have guided the House of Representatives for 185 years, Democrats are proposing to change the rules in order to game the system and raise taxes and increase spending without a House vote. What are House Democrats afraid of?

Here's more about the Motion to Recommit.


May 15, 2007


New House Budget Means Higher Taxes

Marc Comtois

The Heritage Foundation has done an analysis of the new House Budget crafted by the Democratic majority in Washington and concluded that it means higher taxes across the board. Their reasoning:

The House leadership has proposed to increase spending over the next five years. Given the leader­ship's avowed commitment to paying for spending increases, tax revenues will have to rise. Which taxes will have to rise is unclear, as budget resolutions are notoriously short on details. However, the failure of House leaders to include any language addressing the expiring Bush tax cuts of 2001 through 2004 indicates that they could intend to end these tax cuts.[1] This, in turn, means that the House leadership could be allowing American taxpayers to assume a large and expensive tax increase upon the expiration of these tax cuts.

The House budget resolution has the potential to cost the average American taxpayer an additional $3,026 in taxes. In addition to the increased tax bur­den, Americans could also see their personal income decrease by an average of $502 dollars due to a weaker economy. Moreover, the budget resolution could dam­age employment growth, causing about one million fewer jobs to be created, and has the potential to damage economic output by over $100 billion nationally. The average cost of the House budget resolution to each congressional district amounts to the potential loss of 2,284 jobs that would have oth­erwise been created and a loss in economic output by an average $240 million.

The culprit for these negative impacts is higher taxes. Many economists believe that higher taxes, particularly on capital, cause the level of private investment to fall, thereby slowing productivity improvements and weakening the earning capac­ity of households. Wages and business earnings, which are closely tied to productivity, would fall as well.

Again, the budget resolution does not contain a detailed tax plan. However, the resolution also is silent on the most important tax policy change since 2001: the expiration of the tax law changes from 2001 through 2004 over the next four years. This paper presents estimates of the potential impact that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire would have on Americans.[2]

Here's how--according to their calculations--Rhode Islanders would be affected:

RI-StickerShock.JPG

May 11, 2007


Is the Interstate Voting Compact Unconstitutional?

Carroll Andrew Morse

Not exactly. There are, however, potential Electoral College ramifications for states that choose to participate.

The Interstate Voting Compact is an attempt to bypass the Electoral College and elect the President of the United States through a direct popular vote. A state legislature signing on to the compact agrees to disregard the choice made by its own state’s voters in a Presidential election and allocate the electoral votes under its control to the winner of the national popular vote. For example, had Rhode Island been a party to the compact in 2004, Rhode Island’s four electoral votes would have been given to national popular vote winner George W. Bush even though a majority of Rhode Islanders cast ballots for John Kerry.

This scheme is acceptable under Article II of the U.S. Constitution which gives state legislatures carte-blanche authority to choose their state’s Presidential electors…

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
But does this really mean that the power of state legislatures to choose the President is absolute? Hypothetically, state legislatures might decide to cut voters entirely out of the process. A legislature could mandate, for example (and not entirely inconceivable in Rhode Island), that its electors vote for the nominee of the Democratic party, no matter the result of the vote at any level. Would this too be legal?

Under Article II, the answer is yes. However, any system that bypasses a state's voters brings another section of the Constitution into play. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment also has something to say about electing Federal officials, President included…

Section. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
In extreme cases, this means that if no citizen votes are counted in a Presidential election process, then no citizens are counted towards a state’s total representation either; a state that ignores its citizens when allocating its electors loses representation in the Electoral College -- and possibly in the House of Representatives.

The problem with the Interstate Voting Compact is that it abridges the right of state voters to choose their Presidential electors nearly as egregiously as an ignore-the-voters-completely scheme does. To understand this, consider some other systems acceptable under the letter of Article II. The Rhode Island legislature could decide to allocate Rhode Island’s electoral votes according to the decision of a 10 member blue-ribbon commission of experts chosen in a nationwide search. But then the right of Rhode Islanders to select their Presidential electors would have been completely abridged and the Fourteenth Amendment would mandate that Rhode Island lose representation.

How about a hybrid system for choosing Presidential electors? The people of RI would get to cast ballots for their Presidential preference. A national blue-ribbon commission would also get to make a selection and the choice of the blue-ribbon panel would be awarded a certain number of “bonus” votes in the final tally -- perhaps more bonus votes than there are voters in Rhode Island! But since the wishes of Rhode Islanders would now be only one factor (and perhaps a very minor factor) in choosing Rhode Island’s Presidential electors, the right of Rhode Islanders to choose their Presidential electors would have been abridged, and the Fourteenth Amendment would mandate that Rhode Island lose representation.

The Interstate Voting Compact is no different from the above scheme, except in the size of the commission being used to award the bonus votes. Under the terms of the compact, every Rhode Islander’s voice in choosing Rhode Island’s Presidential electors is diluted by a factor of about 300. According to the Fourteenth Amendment, Rhode Island’s representation must be reduced correspondingly.

The exact nature of the reduction in representation is open to some interpretation. Here are a few possibilities…

  • A state abridging the right of its citizens to choose its Presidential electors by joining the interstate voting compact could lose Electoral College representation in terms of its citizens counted towards the House of Representatives, but since no state can drop below one Rep, no state could be reduced below a minimum of 3 electoral votes.
  • "Representation" in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment could also be interpreted to directly apply representation in the Electoral College, so a state joining the interstate compact could conceivably forfeit all of its electoral votes.
  • "Representation" could be taken to apply to representation in the Electoral College and the House of Representatives, so states joining the compact could have both their electoral votes and their number of Representatives reduced.
Whether opponents of the Electoral College like it or not, the Constitution mandates that Presidential electors are to be chosen by individual states (Article II) by a democratic process involving the people within those states (Amendment XIV). To reduce the voice the voters within any state have in choosing their Presidential electors by including factors from out-of-state is to abridge the Constitutionally specified value of their votes, which the Fourteenth Amendment states cannot be done without penalty.

On Wednesday, the Rhode Island House Judiciary Committee voted to hold a bill that would have Rhode Island join the Interstate Voting Compact for further study.


May 8, 2007


Changing Demography of the US Electorate

Marc Comtois

Michael Barone in the Wall Street Journal:

It has become a commonplace to say that population has been flowing from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt, from an industrially ailing East and Midwest to an economically vibrant West and South. But the actual picture of recent growth, as measured by the 2000 Census and the census estimates for 2006, is more complicated.... What I found is that you can separate [population centers] into four different categories, with different degrees and different sources of population growth or decline. And I found some interesting surprises.
By far, the biggest population losers are the "Coastal Megalopolises"
Americans are now moving out of, not into, coastal California and South Florida, and in very large numbers they're moving out of our largest metro areas. They're fleeing hip Boston and San Francisco, and after eight decades of moving to Washington they're moving out. The domestic outflow from these metro areas is 3.9 million people, 650,000 a year. High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations--these are driving many Americans elsewhere.

The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.

I would have thought that Providence would fall into the "Coastal Megalopolis" category. Not so:
The fourth category is what I call the Static Cities. These are 18 metropolitan areas with immigrant inflow between zero and 4%, with domestic inflow up to 3% and domestic outflow no higher than 1%. They seem to be holding their own economically, but are not surging ahead and some are in danger of falling back. Philadelphia makes the list, and so do Baltimore, Hartford and Providence in the East.

Surprisingly, some Western cities that boomed in the 1990s are in this category too: Seattle (the tech bust again), Denver, Portland. In the Midwest, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Columbus and Indianapolis are doing better than their Rust Belt neighbors and make the list. In the South, Norfolk, Memphis, Louisville, Oklahoma City and Birmingham are lagging enough behind the Interior Boomtowns to do so. Overall the Static Cities had a domestic inflow of just 18,000 people (.048%) and an immigrant inflow of 2%. Politically, they're a mixed bag, a bit more Democratic than the nation as a whole: 52% for Kerry, 47% for Bush.

Not losing, but not gaining. All in all, Barone concludes:
Twenty years ago political analysts grasped the implications of the vast movement from Rust Belt to Sun Belt, a tilting of the table on balance toward Republicans; but with California leaning heavily to Democrats, that paradigm seems obsolete. What's now in store is a shifting of political weight from a small Rust Belt which leans Democratic and from the much larger Coastal Megalopolises, where both secular top earners and immigrant low earners vote heavily Democratic, toward the Interior Megalopolises, where most voters are private-sector religious Republicans but where significant immigrant populations lean to the Democrats. House seats and electoral votes will shift from New York, New Jersey and Illinois to Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada; within California, House seats will shift from the Democratic coast to the Republican Inland Empire and Central Valley.


April 30, 2007


Primary Madness

Carroll Andrew Morse

Jim Baron has an op-ed in today’s Pawtucket Times where he discusses a possible improvement to the Presidential primary system (and once again, Rhode Island Secretary of State Ralph Mollis seems to be at the cutting edge of reform)…

Secretary of State Ralph Mollis, a Democrat, has embraced a plan put forward by the National Association of Secretaries of State - one that might get us past the parochialism and opportunism that is at the root of the states elbowing each other for position on the primary schedule.

Under this scheme, the nation would be broken into four regions: the East, the South, the Midwest and the West. There would be regional primaries in March, April, May and June and the regions would rotate the order in which they hold their primaries every four years.

The first year the East would be in March, the South in April, the Midwest in May and the West in June. Four years later the West would be in March, the East in April, the South in May and the Midwest in June and so forth.

Each region would hold its primary first once every 16 years, and would be last once every 16 years. The exception would be that the New Hampshire primary and the Iowa caucuses would keep their status as first-in-the-nation contests so lesser-known and lesser-funded candidates would still have a chance to campaign in states where person-to-person retail politics is as important as big-money advertising campaigns.

Here’s another, lottery-based system proposed by Bill Whalen in the Weekly Standard
Rule One: No presidential primaries or caucuses until the first Monday in February. Let the public have a peaceful January breaking resolutions and watching football.

Rule Two: Start the selection process with the same first four states as in 2008. Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina all are relatively small states. And they reflect four regions of the country with distinctly different economies and cultures. That makes for a level playing field.

Rule Three: Once those four states vote, the game changes. From here on, primaries are held among seven states, every Tuesday, for the following six weeks. That mix would include one "mega" state with at least 20 electoral votes, three mid-size states with a minimum of 10 electoral votes, three smaller states worth four to nine electoral votes, plus one small state with three electoral votes (on the seventh Tuesday, one "mega" state, two mid-sized states and one small state would vote).

I conducted such a lottery with the aid of four baseball caps and one shredded piece of paper. Based upon the new rules, if this system were implemented a year ago, here's what the 2008 primaries would look like:

  • Feb. 5, Iowa
  • Feb. 10, Nevada
  • Feb. 13, New Hampshire
  • Feb. 20, South Carolina
  • Feb. 27, Ohio, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Oregon, Alaska
  • March 6, Illinois, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Idaho, Rhode Island, North Dakota
  • March 13, California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, South Dakota
  • March 20, Florida, Virginia, Minnesota, Alabama, Colorado, Hawaii, District of Columbia
  • March 27, Texas, New Jersey, Indiana, Nebraska, Utah, Arkansas, Wyoming
  • April 3, New York, Missouri, Tennessee, Connecticut, Mississippi, West Virginia, Vermont
  • April 10, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maryland, Delaware, Montana
The lottery idea is a bit fanciful, but the idea of a two-round system, where a round of individual state primaries is followed by round of regional super-primaries with the order of regions rotating from election to election would be an improvement over what we do now.

The natural question to ask here is is there anyone who likes the system as it is?


April 6, 2007


About that event next November we're not talking about...

Marc Comtois

Andrew spoke for all of us at Anchor Rising when he made a vow to not discuss a certain political event, and those who aim to be deeply involved in said event, until the actual event was much closer. It seems we are not alone. Here's The Anchoress (no relation ;):

I resent like hell that these politicians - all of them, but I seem to recall it was Hillary who started early, forcing everyone else to do so, as well - began their stumping and fund-raising two years before an election. Some of them - like Clinton - barely finished their re-election celebrations before reaching out their hands for ‘08 campaign funds.

They’ve decided to be in our faces for an excessive period of time, and the acquiescent media is allowing it by covering their every belch and hiccup, but that doesn’t mean I have to read it and get sucked into a pre-election vortex that has no business forming just now. Our “public servants,” duly elected to represent their states, are running back and forth across the country giving speeches, eating festival food and raising money, money, money instead of attending to the concerns of their constituents, voting on pending legislation, FUNDING OUR TROOPS and otherwise doing what they were hired to do.

I’m not participating in this, yet. I’m not going to allow myself to be suckered into paying attention to these people - and giving them either my money or my time - before I deem it practical and intelligent to do so, and that will be sometime around November of ‘07.

So far, we've done a pretty good job of staying mum around here (though we've given our readers an opportunity to "weigh" in).

At first I thought it was something about bloggers who have an affinity with "anchor," but other bloggers have put up their own "Protest Manifestos". And there's even a logo.

too_early.jpg

Maybe this could be the next, big blogger movement?


April 5, 2007


The Situational Pragmatism of Congressman Langevin

Marc Comtois

In addition to talking about Iraq with Dan Yorke, Congressman Langevin also talked about Speaker Pelosi's recent botched Syrian excursion and said she was following the precepts of the Iraq Study Group report (PDF). While Langevin condemned the regimes of both Iran and Syria, he also offered that--as per the Iraq Study Group--pragmatic diplomacy was the way to go. He also talked about how the U.S. should encourage democracy movements, particularly in Iran. So, while the regimes are bad and we'd really like to see them taken down, we've still got to talk to them, despite their past intransigence. It's realpolitick all over again and very pragmatic. (Don't get me wrong, we need to talk, but keep in mind who we're dealing with here.)

On the other hand, when Yorke asked him about gas prices, the Congressman lapsed into the standard alternative energy chant and explained that the U.S. needed to decrease our dependence on oil My first thought was: where's the pragmatism here, Congressman? I agree that we should develop new energy sources. But in the meantime, why don't we take steps to become energy independent by actually taking advantage of some of our own domestic oil resources or expanding our nuclear power capability? Wouldn't the pragmatic approach be to take advantage of the technology we we have now and still provide incentives for new energy sources? Why can't we do both?



The National Popular Vote Fallacy

Marc Comtois

Some proponents of having the Electoral College replaced by a National Popular Vote to elect the President write:

In today's climate of partisan polarization, the current system shuts out most of the country from meaningful participation by turning naturally "purple" states into simple "red" and "blue."

The result is a declining number of Americans who matter and a majority who don't. Youth turnout was fully 17 percent higher in presidential battlegrounds than the rest of the nation in 2004—double the disparity just four years before. The presidential campaigns and their allies spent more money on ads in Florida in the final month of the campaign than their combined spending in 46 other states....Candidates for our one national office should have incentives to speak to everyone, and all Americans should have the power to hold their president accountable. We're well on our way toward that goal with the Free State Initiative—escaping the shackles of the current bankrupt Electoral College system.

E.J. Dionne, Jr., who supports the idea, explains that the plan is a justifiable circumvention of the Constitutional Amendment process:
Yes, this is an effort to circumvent the cumbersome process of amending the Constitution. That's the only practical way of moving toward a more democratic system. Because three-quarters of the states have to approve an amendment to the Constitution, only 13 sparsely populated states -- overrepresented in the electoral college -- could block popular election.
By over representation, Dionne means that Rhode Island, which has 4 electoral votes that are worth around 250,000 people each, has more electoral college power than California, whose 55 electors each represent around 665,000 people. So, yes, on the face of it, Rhode Island's people have a disproportionate amount of power over the people of California when it comes to electing the President. A fact that some Rhode Island legislators want to "rectify" by introducing National Popular Vote legislation in both the Senate and House.

But should this national popular vote idea take hold, there will undoubtedly be some consequences for small states that the popular vote proponents fail to acknowledge. Dionne attempts to knock down some anti-popular vote arguments

Opponents of popular election invent scary scenarios to continue subjecting our 21st-century nation to a system invented in the far less democratic 18th century. Most frequently, they warn about having to conduct a nationwide recount in a close election.

But direct election of presidents works just fine in France and in Mexico, which managed to get through a divisive, terribly narrow presidential election last year. Are opponents of the popular vote saying our country is less competent at running elections than France or Mexico?

Well, some would say yes.

Yet, as the point is often made, the U.S. is a Republic and the system was designed to work this way such that there are really 50 separate presidential elections every four years. It's consistent with our Federal system and also in the spirit of the Founders inclination to distrust direct democracy (like it or not). At the heart of that distrust lay an antipathy to "factions." As Madison wrote in support of the current electoral system:

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source.
For instance, besides state-centered factions, there was a very real country vs. city dynamic and a wariness against having a disproportionate amount of electoral power--especially when it came to the presidency--in the hands of one or another of these "factions." The reasoning behind this was that urban and rural people often have very different concerns and priorities. Breaking up the presidential election into separate state elections mitigated against the urban "factions" gaining too much power over the rural--or vice versa--because most states contained both rural and urban "factions." As such, politicians would be forced to address the needs of both groups.

Popular vote proponents make much of the fact that only certain battleground states get the lion's share of attention under the current system and smaller or more uncontested states are ignored. By going to a popular vote, they seem to think that the focus away from a few battleground states. There is also a flaw in the logic that argues that small states have too much proportional power yet don't get enough attention as "battleground states" under the current system. After all, despite all of the apparent electoral power that Rhode Island has over California, the Presidential candidates weren't exactly streaming into the state in 2003/4, were they? But, proponents would argue, that a national popular vote would make "every vote count" no matter where it is. Well, I wouldn't bet on it (some would count more often--badump-bum, tip your waitress, please).

Where can candidates get the most bang for their buck (and they're sure raising the bucks, aren't they)? In the cities. And while Dionne attempts to discount the shibboleth of a national recount, I wouldn't be so quick to do so. 3,000 Palm Beach Counties anyone? However, while I do harbor a fear of widespread vote fraud and corruption in the cities, my biggest concern is that candidates will be encouraged to concentrate on places where they are already popular for the sole purpose of cranking up their vote totals.

So while a Democrat could incessantly campaign in Rhode Island to jack up an overall popular vote tally, they would probably acutely focus on bigger population centers like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston etc.to maximize their turnout and run up their their popular vote tallies. Under a popular vote scheme, they could do that and still get the Rhode Island votes anyway. So where's the Democrat incentive to visit a small state like li'l Rhody for the sake of marginal popular vote gains when the big numbers can be had in the big cities?

Similarly, a Republican could adopt a similar, more rural strategy in a state like Utah or Wyoming, though it would be a whole lot more work because the population is more dispersed. They still might try it though, or they might try to take the Democrats on, city by city. If this were to happen, then the interests of the rural and suburban citizens could very well fall by the wayside--or at best be of secondary concern--as both political parties sought to tailor their message to the voters who live in large population centers.

What the popular vote movement does is replace one "ignored" population for another, all under the cloak of "equality." It's really just an electoral shell-game cloaked in populist rhetoric. There will still be battleground states, they'll just tend to be the ones that have big cities and big populations.

And maybe that's exactly the way the popular vote crowd wants it.


April 2, 2007


Elaborating on MacKay's Immigration History

Marc Comtois

Scott MacKay's immigration piece in the Sunday ProJo was a good piece of historical writing. However, and inevitably, it will be used by some as proof for their arguments in the contemporary illegal immigrant debate. Namely that the U.S. has "historically" allowed all immigrants, whether illegal or not.

My first thought after reading the piece was that, while historically accurate, it doesn't necessarily reflect the situation that confronts us now. To be fair, though, this was only the first in a series (at least according to the ProJo), so I don't want to take MacKay to task when I don't know what else is forthcoming. However, I do suspect that there is an attempt to link the past with the present rather too directly--and some of MacKay's writing has the air of polemic rather than reporting.

Perhaps the issue that stirs the passions the most is that the primary difference between the immigrants of then and now is that the U.S. did not have the current social welfare apparatus in place. As such, the tax dollars of American citizens didn't go to support the immigrants of yesteryear. Instead, the immigrants worked hard for what they got. Were the conditions deplorable? Yes. Did they face racism and xenophobia? Yes. But to conflate then with now is simply not accurate.

MacKay writes about how French-Canadians were resistant to be assimilated into the U.S. culture and society. That is entirely true and I deal extensively with it below. He seems to be emphasizing this for the sake of invoking compassion for today's immigrants--and by doing so he conflates the legal/illegal distinction--but there is another way to look at it. Instead of using it as an excuse for today's immigrants, the difficulties encountered by the French Canadians as they attempted to cling to la survivance can also be used as an object lesson.

I don't think anyone will argue that chances are that the quicker an individual can acclimate to our culture and learn our language, the quicker he can succeed. That does not mean that Americans should denigrate or dismiss the various cultures of the immigrants--and we must keep in mind that there are waves of immigrants, which can obscure any acute progress in cultural education that is being made--but it does mean that we shouldn't let our compassion or forbearance be taken for granted. Today's immigrants should learn the "American way" as soon as possible and be encouraged to do so. That does not mean that they will be or should be somehow forced to forget their own culture.

Another point is that there was no such thing as "illegal immigration" until the U.S. passed laws saying so. MacKay deals with this, and although he certainly ascribes nefarious motives for the passage of the these laws, they were passed in reaction to a specific problem. Americans believed that too many people were coming in, too fast. Regardless of the ofttimes despicable reasoning behind the original passage of these laws, they are still the law and most Americans want to keep it that way.

By limiting immigration, the laws--if properly enforced--would actually reduce the current level of acrimony. They help to throttle back on the "incursion" of "the other" (to use a favorite academic term)--they make the waves smaller--and make it easier for those immigrants who enter the country legally to assimilate into the U.S. If these laws weren't so popular amongst Americans--including legal immigrants--then I don't think that some illegal immigration apologists would so consistently conflate the difference between illegal and legal immigration.

Overall, I find it interesting that much of this recounting of history is deemed pertinent because it apparently supports the argument that goes something like this: we've always had these immigration problems in the U.S. so why is it such a big deal now? What's missing from MacKay's accurate re-telling of history is any sense of learning from the lessons of the past. (Though, as I indicated, perhaps that will be present in the next story). Since when have progressives taken to premising their arguments upon the notion of "that's the way it's always been..." to argue for what it should be now? Usually they take what they know of history and try to identify a better way of dealing with the problems that were encountered. In this case, it seems like they're really just saying that everything is fine, let's move on.

In the extended portion of this post, I've tried to elaborate a bit on some of the unsaid implications in MacKay's piece by calling upon my own research into French-Canadian immigration during the post-Civil War era. To do this, I've excerpted liberally from a 4-part series on the topic that I've posted at Spinning Clio. (For important background--and full sources--see these posts on French-Canadian immigration before the Civil War and French-Canadian involvement in the Civil War, portions of which are included in this post).

Continue reading "Elaborating on MacKay's Immigration History"

March 28, 2007


The New Copperheads

Mac Owens

I recently remarked on the rhetorical similarities between the Civil War-era Copperheads, "the Peace Democrats" who went out of their way to obstruct the Union war effort, and today's Democratic Party.

Of course, rhetoric is one thing. Action to obstruct is another. With their recent vote to hamstring the authority of the president and his ability to prosecute the war in Iraq, the Democratics have assumed full Copperhead status by moving from the former to the latter.

Congress's action in this case is clearly unconstitutional. The principle that once Congress has funded a military force, that body has no further authority to direct or limit its deployment or employment, was established during the administration of John Adams and America's "Quasi-War" with France (1798-1801).

Unfortunately for the health of the Republic, Copperhead behavior has become institutionalized in today's Democratic Party establishment and among a disturbingly high proportion of that party's voters. With the honorable exception of Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and a handful of others, there is no faction within the Democratic Party that can counter the influence of today's Copperheads.

The members of Rhode Island's congressional delegation must be so proud of themselves. No doubt the ghost of Rep. Clement Vallandigham (D-OH), the arch-Copperhead and Confederate sympathizer, is proud of them, too. The Rhode Island delegation may not sympathize with our enemies in Iraq and elsewhere, but by their vote, they have given those enemies as much aid and comfort as Vallandigham and the other Copperheads gave the Confederate cause during the War of the Rebellion.



The New Copperheads

Mac Owens

I recently remarked on the rhetorical similarities between the Civil War-era Copperheads, "the Peace Democrats" who went out of their way to obstruct the Union war effort, and today's Democratic Party.

Of course, rhetoric is one thing. Action to obstruct is another. With their recent vote to hamstring the authority of the president and his ability to prosecute the war in Iraq, the Democratics have assumed full Copperhead status by moving from the former to the latter.

Congress's action in this case is clearly unconstitutional. The principle that once Congress has funded a military force, that body has no further authority to direct or limit its deployment or employment, was established during the administration of John Adams and America's "Quasi-War" with France (1798-1801).

Unfortunately for the health of the Republic, Copperhead behavior has become institutionalized in today's Democratic Party establishment and among a disturbingly high proportion of that party's voters. With the honorable exception of Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and a handful of others, there is no faction within the Democratic Party that can counter the influence of today's Copperheads.

The members of Rhode Island's congressional delegation must be so proud of themselves. No doubt the ghost of Rep. Clement Vallandigham (D-OH), the arch-Copperhead and Confederate sympathizer, is proud of them, too. The Rhode Island delegation may not sympathize with our enemies in Iraq and elsewhere, but by their vote, they have given those enemies as much aid and comfort as Vallandigham and the other Copperheads gave the Confederate cause during the War of the Rebellion.


March 26, 2007


Democrats Hiding Earmarks?

Marc Comtois

The new Democratic Congress really is changing the way things are done in Washington, aren't they? I'll leave it up to the reader to define "change" (h/t) in John Fund's story:

Democrats promised reform and instituted "a moratorium" on all earmarks until the system was cleaned up. Now the appropriations committees are privately accepting pork-barrel requests again. But curiously, the scorekeeper on earmarks, the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service (CRS)--a publicly funded, nonpartisan federal agency--has suddenly announced it will no longer respond to requests from members of Congress on the size, number or background of earmarks. "They claim it'll be transparent, but they're taking away the very data that lets us know what's really happening," says Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn. "I'm convinced the appropriations committees are flexing their muscles with CRS."

Indeed, the shift in CRS policy represents a dramatic break with its 12-year practice of supplying members with earmark data. "CRS will no longer identify earmarks for individual programs, activities, entities, or individuals," stated a private Feb. 22 directive from CRS Director Daniel Mulhollan...The concern now is that free-spending appropriations committees will use the new CRS gag rule to define earmarks downward. "We need CRS to continue its reliable reporting so we can save the taxpayers money," says Sen. [James] DeMint...

...CRS is merely being asked to continue providing objective data. If it can't do that, why do taxpayers shell out $100 million a year to employ its 700 researchers?


March 17, 2007


"Wilson, Plame and all that."

Marc Comtois

Over at the OSB, I've put up a post putting yesterday's testimony by Valerie Plame in context. Included is an informative reminder that, at first--while attempting to protect their own journalists against charges of publishing sensitive national security information--many mainstream media outlets tried to convince the Justice Department that Plame's identity was well known. (Guess it depends who's bacon is being fried, huh?) Also of some help would this timeline (via NRO), which the author contends shows that it was really Wilson who revealed the now infamous details of who and what his wife (Plame) did (with some help from Richard Armitage). This whole thing is a good example of how, once a narrative has been established, new facts often don't change what people think. Though some do.

Mr. Wilson was embraced by many because he was early in publicly charging that the Bush administration had "twisted," if not invented, facts in making the case for war against Iraq. In conversations with journalists or in a July 6, 2003, op-ed, he claimed to have debunked evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger; suggested that he had been dispatched by Mr. Cheney to look into the matter; and alleged that his report had circulated at the highest levels of the administration.

A bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these claims were false -- and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this fact, along with Ms. Plame's name, was disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced yet another sensational charge: that his wife was a covert CIA operative and that senior White House officials had orchestrated the leak of her name to destroy her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson.

Also, the Rome Sentinel (in upstate New York) has a good three part series (via American Thinker) on the whole matter: the web of incompetence, the web of deceit, and 3) the web of politics.



The Attorneys: How a "Scandal" Can Become a Scandal

Marc Comtois

I've already asked, "How is Firing Government Attorneys a 'Scandal'?" Well, it ain't. I agree with Andrew McCarthy:

The politicians on Capitol Hill theatrically castigate the politicians in the administration for making political decisions about political appointees based on political considerations. The politicians in the administration reply, “That would never happen,” before conceding that it precisely happened … without their knowledge, of course. And the political press is aghast.
Thus, was the "scandal" born. But, thanks to the by-now expected political ineptitude of the Bush Administration, the "scandal" has been turned into a scandal. To boil it down:

1) The Administration had every right to fire those attorneys, no matter what. Even if it looked vindictive and partisan, that's politics.
2) The Administration tried to say that they were being high-minded. But instead of simply stating that these attorneys "serve at the pleasure of the President," there was some effort to denigrate the performance of those fired. Stupid. As McCarthy said on Boston's Michael Graham show (to paraphrase), these are highly motivated lawyers, wouldn't you think they'd fight back?
3) Which brings me back to the title of the first post. The only controversy is in the way that the Administration has failed miserably to deal with this.

The Democrats and press alleged scandal over the initial act. In my opinion, there was no scandal. No matter who brought it up--the White House or the AG--or why or whatever. It was politics. It ain't purty, but it's still legal. But now, instead of just playing it straight and/or being surprised that the Democrats and the press would take them to task for just about anything they do, the Bush Administration was caught off guard. Now hearings are in the offing and the made-up "scandal" has become one in actuality. Nice job.

ADDENDUM:: Incidentally, to some of the commenters to the last post: you see how--as a story changes and more information comes out--a position can also change? (Even if it that change may be a bit too nuanced for some.) I'm the first to admit that I have politically and ideologically based biases. But once initially formed, they aren't static and locked in for all time. How about you?


March 16, 2007


How is Firing Government Attorneys a "Scandal"?

Marc Comtois

So the Bush Administration fires 8 lawyers and somehow this "scandal"is the next Watergate? Please. I agree with Mike Gallagher on this one:

[T]o read today’s papers, all the political controversies in our nation’s history combined don’t add up to the earthquake of a scandal that is rocking our world: the Bush Administration was involved in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall of a high school social studies class when a student timidly raises his hand and says to the teacher, “Um, Miss Smith – if President Clinton can fire all 93 U.S. attorneys for obvious political reasons, why can’t President Bush?”

Oh but it is different. Just ask the CBS News blog, who are setting it all straight by, for instance, pointing to this explanation:
Although Bush and President Bill Clinton each dismissed nearly all U.S. attorneys upon taking office, legal experts and former prosecutors say the firing of a large number of prosecutors in the middle of a term appears to be unprecedented and threatens the independence of prosecutors.
And, according to CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen
What is different about this current episode is that a Republican White House sought to replace Republican-appointed federal prosecutors mid-stream who were by all accounts doing precisely what they had been asked to do. We now know, from last week’s testimony, why in some cases this was so and the answers we got make it clear that the reasons were not high-minded or lofty.
I'm glad the unbiased media is on the case. So, to dismiss someone, the Executive Branch must do so for only high-minded or lofty reasons? So much for executive privilege. I'll throw up another Clinton example: remember the Travel Office? OK, it may not rise to the same level. And, as NY Sen. Chuck Schumer points out, "U.S. attorneys have always been above politics, and this administration has blatantly manipulated the U.S. attorney system to serve its political needs." Hmm. What about this?
...the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is Manhattan, which is a big post, was a Chuck Schumer protégé, and he was there for five or six years. If there was somebody else prior to him, then this guy who was Schumer's protégé was second. He was there for a number of years. A Chuck Schumer protégé was the US attorney for the Southern District of New York. They finally got a new guy in there -- I don't know, a year and a half, or two years ago -- a man by the name of Mike Garcia, finally a Bush appointee after four or five years of his administration, and Schumer now has the audacity to say that US attorneys have always been above politics?
Of course not. And that's what this really is about. Politics. It's not illegal, it's not a crime. It's pure political opportunism. That's it.

Continue reading "How is Firing Government Attorneys a "Scandal"?"

March 12, 2007


Open Thread: 2008 Presidential Election

Carroll Andrew Morse

Sensing undeniable interest in the subject, despite any ironclad vows I may have taken, I will offer an open thread for observations and analysis concerning the 2008 Presidential election.


February 28, 2007


Why Flip-Flops are Valid Campaign Issues

Carroll Andrew Morse

Mickey Kaus provides the seeds of the argument that explains why flip-flopping is something not desirable in a political candidate. Kaus points out that you can’t really determine a candidate’s heartfelt position is the flip or the flop. Contrary to the way it is usually portrayed, it is just as likely that a candidate’s current position is his real one and the past position was the one chosen for political expediency than it is the other way around. Kaus uses former New York Mayor Rudolph Guilani as an example…

I'd forgotten a perverse set of facts that suddenly seems relevant: Hillary Clinton was almost certainly in favor of the 1996 welfare reform law while Rudolph Giuliani opposed it. ... That could mean Giuliani is more liberal than people realize…Or it could mean that Giuliani is more opportunistic than people realize and therefore more likely to reposition himself. ... My guess: Both, but definitely the latter. Giuliani was a genuine welfare reformer, after all. His opposition to the key reform bill, in retrospect, looks like a stunt to cultivate stature in the national press.
Here’s the problem opportunistic flip-flopping creates for voters. The incentives for politicians change after an election. Before an election, opportunities lie in getting the attention of undecided voters. Undecideds are undecided because they don't like anything they've seen so far, so one way candidates can appeal to them is by promoting "fresh", "exciting" new ideas. But after an election, new opportunities are going to lie with a different group of people, away from the voters, and in the direction of the existing power structure and the permanent bureaucracy that an elected official must work with on a day-to-day basis (see President George W. Bush and the No-Child-Left Behind Act).

If a candidate is an opportunistic flip-flopper, how is a voter to know which path a candidate will choose after he wins?

This dynamic is, at least, why we don’t have to worry about candidates like Hillary Clinton or John Edwards flip-flopping on domestic issues. During future campaigns, they’ll promise to bring you big bureaucratic government (liberal Dems try to win undecideds not through ideas, but by promising to give them more wealth through benevolently-managed bureaucratic programs). If a lib wins, he or she will be happy to work with those bureaucracies on strengthening their power.

By the way, this is post about flip-flopping in general and not any specific election that may be coming up in the next year or two, so it shouldn’t be interpreted as a statement of support or non-support for any particular candidate.



Why Flip-Flops are Valid Campaign Issues

Carroll Andrew Morse

Mickey Kaus provides the seeds of the argument that explains why flip-flopping is something not desirable in a political candidate. Kaus points out that you can’t really determine a candidate’s heartfelt position is the flip or the flop. Contrary to the way it is usually portrayed, it is just as likely that a candidate’s current position is his real one and the past position was the one chosen for political expediency than it is the other way around. Kaus uses former New York Mayor Rudolph Guilani as an example…

I'd forgotten a perverse set of facts that suddenly seems relevant: Hillary Clinton was almost certainly in favor of the 1996 welfare reform law while Rudolph Giuliani opposed it. ... That could mean Giuliani is more liberal than people realize…Or it could mean that Giuliani is more opportunistic than people realize and therefore more likely to reposition himself. ... My guess: Both, but definitely the latter. Giuliani was a genuine welfare reformer, after all. His opposition to the key reform bill, in retrospect, looks like a stunt to cultivate stature in the national press.
Here’s the problem opportunistic flip-flopping creates for voters. The incentives for politicians change after an election. Before an election, opportunities lie in getting the attention of undecided voters. Undecideds are undecided because they don't like anything they've seen so far, so one way candidates can appeal to them is by promoting "fresh", "exciting" new ideas. But after an election, new opportunities are going to lie with a different group of people, away from the voters, and in the direction of the existing power structure and the permanent bureaucracy that an elected official must work with on a day-to-day basis (see President George W. Bush and the No-Child-Left Behind Act).

If a candidate is an opportunistic flip-flopper, how is a voter to know which path a candidate will choose after he wins?

This dynamic is, at least, why we don’t have to worry about candidates like Hillary Clinton or John Edwards flip-flopping on domestic issues. During future campaigns, they’ll promise to bring you big bureaucratic government (liberal Dems try to win undecideds not through ideas, but by promising to give them more wealth through benevolently-managed bureaucratic programs). If a lib wins, he or she will be happy to work with those bureaucracies on strengthening their power.

By the way, this is post about flip-flopping in general and not any specific election that may be coming up in the next year or two, so it shouldn’t be interpreted as a statement of support or non-support for any particular candidate.


February 14, 2007


Hey Bush Haters: Just So's You Don't Miss It

Justin Katz

Well look what's among the news not fit to print:

Even with spending control slipping a bit (up 6.4% in January 2007 compared to January 2006), the deficit is 57% lower through the first four months of FY07 than it was at the same time in FY06. I believe that merits a “Wow.”

There is a very real possibility that the federal budget will be in a surplus situation when President Bush hands over the keys to the White House in January 2009.

Not that liberals have to change their game plan, or anything. We all know it's fundamentally illusionist, anyway.


January 29, 2007


Mitt Romney on Social Issues

Carroll Andrew Morse

I know. I’m not supposed to be posting anything on the 2008 Presidential campaign before June. However, I’m adding a codicil to my New Year’s resolution: I can make an exception when able to present primary-source material about a Presidential candidate (or someone with a Presidential exploratory committee) that adds to a discussion area already active here at Anchor Rising.

At the National Review Institute’s (direct quote from NRO-Editor-at-Large Jonah Goldberg: "Whatever that is") Conservative Summit held this past weekend in Washington D.C., Presidential Candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney gave a substantive address on his philosophy concerning the major issues in American politics -- limited and fiscally conservative government, healthcare, foreign policy, and social and life issues. Here's what Governor Romney had to say about gay marriage, abortion and stem-cell research...

Governor Mitt Romney: When I ran [for Governor of Massachusetts], there were a couple of social issues that were part of that debate. You probably know what some of them were.

One was gay marriage. I opposed then and do now oppose gay marriage and civil unions.

One was related to abortion. My opponent was in favor of lowering the age where a young woman could get an abortion without parental consent from 18 to 16…I, of course, opposed changing the law in that regard.

Another issue was the death penalty, I was for, [my opponent] was against.

Another was English immersion. For a long time, our state had bilingual education, where the schools or the parents get to choose what language their child is taught in. I said that’s just not right. If kids want to be successful in America, they have to learn the language of America. We fought for that, and by the way, I won that one, my opponent did not.

Now, as you know, after I got elected, Massachusetts became sort of the center stage for a number of very important social issues, one of them being gay marriage. I am proud of the fact that I and my team did everything within our power and within the law to stand up for traditional marriage. This is not, in my view and the view of my team, a matter of adult rights. We respect the rights of gay citizens to live as they wish and to have tolerance and respect and not be discriminated against. I feel that very deeply. At the same time, we believe that marriage is not primarily about adults. In a society, marriage is primarily about the development and nurturing of children. A child’s development, I believe, is enhanced by access to a mom and a dad. I believe in every child’s right to a mom and a dad.

Now, there’s one key social issue where I did not run as a social conservative, at least one. That was with regards to abortion. I said I would protect a woman’s right to choose an abortion. I’ve changed my view on that, as you probably know.

Let me tell you the history about that. Some years ago, when I was at the Olympics, I met a guy named Mark Lewis. He was head of our marketing there. He told me that he was a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship. I don’t know how far he got. His final interview was with a German interviewer and the interviewer said to him “Mr. Lewis, who is one of your political heroes?” and he said Ronald Reagan. The German had the predictable response -- *GASP*. He said how in the world can you square that statement with what Churchill said, which is that “a young person who is not a liberal has no heart?” Mark responded by repeating the last portion of that Churchillian comment, that “an older person who was not a conservative had no brain” and adding “I, Herr Doctor, simply matured early”.

On abortion, I wasn’t always a Ronald Reagan conservative. Neither was Ronald Regan, by the way. But like him, I learned with experience.

In my case, the point where that experience came most to bear was with regards to learning about stem-cell research. Let me tell you, there are so many different ways of getting stem cells. I was delving into that because my legislature was proposing new legislation that re-defined when life began. I think it’s interesting that the legislature thinks it has the capacity to make that determination. Our state had always said that life began at conception, but they were going to re-define when life began, so I spent some time learning (with, by the way, a number of people in this room who helped) about all of the different types and sources of stem-cells, not only adult stem cells and umbilical stem cells and stem cells from existing lines, but also surplus embryos from in-vitro fertilization. I supported all of those.

But for me, there was a bright-line when you started creating new life for the purposes of destruction and experimentation. That was somatic-cell nuclear transfer (or cloning) and also what’s known as embryo farming. At one point, I was sitting down with the head of the stem-cell research department at Harvard and the provost of Harvard University, and they were explaining these techniques to me. I imagined in my mind this embryo farming. Embryo farming is taking donor sperm and donor eggs and putting them together in the laboratory and creating a new embryo. If that’s not creating new life, then I don’t know what is. I imagined row after row after row of racks of these, created either by the cloning process or the farming process. At that point, one of the two gentleman said, “Governor, there’s really not a moral issue at stake here, because we destroy the embryos at 14 days”. I have to tell you, that comment and that perspective hit me very hard. As he left the room with his colleague, I turned to Beth Myers, my chief of staff, and said I want to make it real clear: we have so cheapened the value and sanctity of human life in our society that someone can think there’s not a moral issue because we kill embryos at 14 days.

Shortly thereafter, I announced I was firmly pro-life.

Now, you don’t have to take my word for it, by the way. The nice thing about being able to watch governors is you don’t have to look just at what they say, you can look at what they’ve done. Over my term, I had 4 or 5 different measures that came to my desk [concerning life issues] and on every single one I came down on the side of respecting human life. That didn’t make me real popular in the state. Remember, in Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy is considered a moderate….

In the next few days, I’ll have more from Mitt Romney on other issues, excerpts from Newt Gingrich and Jeb Bush on the meaning and future direction of conservatism and from Tony Snow on the Iraq Surge and the President’s new healthcare proposal, plus a whole lot of insights and opinions that I heard discussed at the conference that will bring you up-to-date on the state of conservatism…


January 25, 2007


Closing an Independent Klaus With a Question Mark

Justin Katz

Even days later, I find Klaus's comments to my recent post dizzying. Sometimes — I'd suggest — the fact that every bit of evidence points to your conclusion, even those bits that are contradictory, is above all evidence that your conclusion is a priori.

In one breath, industrial manufacturing companies have it all over modern high-tech companies because they spread wealth more broadly:

And, did you realize that, at it's peak, GM alone employed almost a million people? And each well-paid GM worker could support another 5-10 others (merchants, bankers, dentists, etc.) And there were how many large industrial employers like that? That's a lot of $$ to spread around an economy.

Microsoft, OTOH, employs 40,000? Which situation creates more wealth for the whole economy?

In another breath, unions are the best thing since a hammer and sickle specifically for the reason that they enable workers' children to exchange their blue collars for white:

Another reason union membership peaked in the 50s, and wages continued to increase is that the economy was transitioning from a manufacturing-base to a service-sector based economy. Those blue-collar kids who grew up on the Mickey Mouse Club didn't go work in the factory like dad; they became white-collar workers.

In one breath, putting money in the hands of the government is a positive good:

Odd, though: there was a period in which the stagnation in wages was arrested and even reversed. During the Clinton presidency. You know, all those high taxes? But ol' George W comes along and cuts them taxes and the median wage starting going right back down again. And, btw, gov't revenues dropped. GWB is the only president who did not collect more in taxes than his predecessor.

In another breath, the unfair distribution of government largesse is mindblowing:

And the people looking for handouts could just as easily be corporations. Ever read the tax code? One hand-out after another. Ever hear of the sugar subsidy? Or the last agriculture bill? A $200B handout. It blows my mind that you quibble over a couple of bucks and swallow the billions given to corporations every year.

What's missing from all of this recitation of factoids is any sense of practicality — of functionality. Give the government $200 billion, and those who run the government will hand it out to the powerful, not the downtrodden. Mandate that it be given to the downtrodden and observe as a new species of elite parasites creates an unnecessary industry of middlemen.

The entire point of my previous post was to address such declarations as this, from Klaus:

A better solution is to raise the wages of the taxpayers. And that means their wages.

How do Klausians propose to do that? (Please reread the previous post before you answer, if need be.) This is the question that they will not answer any differently than would a clueless emperor: "Just make it so."

Klaus makes much of his comparison with the economic regime of the 1890s, but although I would never gainsay the importance of learning from history, such comparisons apply an antiquated lesson. For one thing, technology has vastly improved the ability of the working class to communicate, organize, and attract attention to their plight. For another, the equation of Microsoft with the industrial behemoths of the 19th century leaves me cold. As far as I've seen, nobody has suggested that Microsoft's position has given it leeway to force employees into inhumane circumstances. If we're talking human exploitation, I would have us keep a view of the fundamental differences between building a railroad and building the Internet.

But if we're talking strategies to leverage our representative democracy to distribute wealth more fairly, then I'd have us ponder the forces — much greater than government economic policy — that created the different monopolies. The nineteenth century in the United States was in many ways a giant push for geographic expansion and industrial advancement. To put it in ugly terms, it was in the public interest to consolidate resources and exploit workers who facilitated those ends.

As I've said, the Microsoft-style monopoly isn't remotely as oppressive, but the existence of underlying drivers beyond government policy still holds. Consider your own experience: why did you buy a Windows operating system (or Apple's version for elites)? The dominant reasons can be summed up as standardization and reliability. The functionality and compatibility of a Microsoft operating system is the same on the home PC as on the office workstation, and both have been through decades of public development.

To translate this observation into the socio-economic discussion at hand, the most beneficial area of focus for folks who'd like to leverage our shared government to blow the IT windfall more expansively should be on the causes of the market forces that have led to the current situation — standardization and reliability — not on demands that we pour more resources, directly and indirectly, into the public finance shell game.

P.S., Klaus, if you're measuring "full time" as 40 hours per week when you ask whether I'm "OK with the idea that someone can work full-time and not make enough to live on," then I'd reply that I have no choice but to be OK with it. My standard week is, by that measure, full-time and a half, but the weeks that I can earn what I need — with a mixture of white and blue collar work — are those during which I work double time. That is the reality of heading a five-person (plus dog) household in a state in which the rich who dominate the power structure exorcise their guilt by legislating handouts rather than handing out from their own stockpiles.

Let's boil it down, shall we? Isn't the liberal/progressive prescription for inequities pretty explicitly universal dependency?


January 23, 2007


State of the Union Open Thread

Carroll Andrew Morse

I was going to write a high-snark-factor post about how nothing memorable has ever occurred in a State of the Union Address. However, I came across this Whitehouse webpage (the building, not the Senator; this is going to be really annoying for the next six years) which lists some impressive State of the Union moments…

  • 1823: James Monroe’s “Monroe Doctrine” speech.
  • 1862: Abraham Lincoln’s connects the Civil War to the emancipation of slaves.
  • 1941: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s "Four Freedoms" speech.
In more recent memory, both Lyndon’s Johnson the Great Society (1965) and Bill Clinton’s declaration that the “era of big government is over” (1996) were announced in States of the Union. And, of course, in 2003, George W. Bush used the State of the Union to make his case for invading Iraq.

Still, I don’t think the country would lose too much if the State of the Union, especially in its modern laundry-list form, was delivered like it was between the years 1801 and 1912…

The third President, Thomas Jefferson, objected to appearing in person - saying it was too much like an imperial or king's speech, and for the next 100 years presidents sent a written message to Congress that was then read out for them.
It worked for Presidents Monroe and Lincoln, right?

Consider this post to be an open-thread on tonight's State of the Union. Insightful comments, witty comments, and even comments that spin like a vinyl 78-rpm recording of “Happy Days are Here Again” are all welcome, but crude or personally insulting posts will be deleted as soon as I see them.

The comments are open now!

UPDATE:

Here's an incisive preview from Byron York of National Review...

...the official said the speech is about as long as previous SOTU's, as measured in words, but it should go more quickly because nobody expects there will be as much applause as in past years.


January 20, 2007


Cheap Pop or a Marriage of Concepts?

Justin Katz

Supporters of minimum wage increases (used here as an example issue) don't appear willing to discuss whether their policies would work, would achieve an increase in living standard for working families. Instead, they offer insults about heartlessness and declarations about what the working poor deserve. Their presumption, I guess, is that anybody so cold as to argue against giving disadvantaged families a little bit more must be offering specious arguments with the objective of funneling more money to The Rich and that, therefore, need not be acknowledged.

As it happens, I don't disagree with the principle that our society is morally obligated to work toward a state of affairs in which anybody who's willing to make an honest effort ought to be able to support a family. Indeed, to turn the tables, my observation is that those who would have the government dictate pay rates privilege sounding as if they want to help over actually doing some good. Consider a couple of comments to Marc's recent post on the issue. Scott Bill Hirst:

We need as Republicans to address nutrition and housing needs.We just can't oppose the Democrats agenda.A pro family GOP agenda must show that Republicans are indeed not the party of the rich.That the GOP has solutions for these human problems will enhance our party.

Rhody:

If the GOP is ever to overcome its stigma as party of the rich (which I don't necessarily believe anymore), it has to show its support for working families with some concrete proposals and action, instead of just throwing in the phrase "working families" for cheap pop when it fights abortion or gay marriage.

The cynicism of that closing jab illustrates the point. Maybe those aren't cheap pop issues; maybe they are, in fact, part of a concrete solution to the social ills that seem inevitably to repercuss among the poor and otherwise vulnerable. Commenter Ralph gets it right when he notes that Republicans' "plan for real assistance to working families" takes "the form of more reasonable spending and lower taxes." But it is, or ought to be, deeper than that.

The conservative solution also entails, as I've said, emphasis on more opportunity for education (in forms and environments that citizens feel best suit them, not that government feels best suit it) and policies that encourage and facilitate entrepreneurship. More broadly, it entails encouragement toward life choices that we know to be healthier and more conducive to a society in which everybody has a chance to thrive. And to reach those who've fallen beyond the reach of simple freedom and soft encouragement, conservatives suggest that government get out of the way of, and (when possible) assist, those who would conduct charitable enterprises, regardless of their degree of religious emphasis.

It's easy to sound big-hearted. It's also easy to score political points with people who think the world owes them something by giving them handouts instead of structure. But anybody who wants to do good in the world should have the minimal resolve and fortitude to discuss whether their plans will actually work, and whether we all need to make sacrifices — some manifesting as limits to our libertine freedoms — more fundamental than higher payroll bills for businesses.


January 12, 2007


House Dems Like Earmark Reform. Senate Dems? Not so much...

Marc Comtois

Ah yes, see how much has changed! Looks like the House Democrats earmark reform bill is being supported by most Senate Republicans and a few Democrats....but the heartiest opposition is being put up by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (via Glenn Reynolds). TPM Muckraker has one report and Andy Roth at the Club For Growth kept a running commentary on the goings on. Roth also posted a follow-up, which included this bit:

Senator Jim DeMint offered strong reform to the most egregious spending abuses in Congress-a proposal that was sponsored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and that passed the House just last week. After trying, and failing, to kill the DeMint proposal, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senator Ted Kennedy and other Democrats used stall tactics to delay a final vote. Ultimately, the Senate was forced to postpone it.
I had heard that some local "new media" outlets sympathetic to the Democrats were starting up some countdown or something to track all of the "change" that was going to happen. (Funny, I checked them out and haven't seen anything about this yet. Maybe they'll get around to it. That is, of course, once they work out how to frame it as a positive for "their side.")

Which gives me an opportunity to offer a little advice for those new to the porkbusting/earmark reform movement in particular. You're either "all in" by going after anyone of either party who is a roadblock to said reform or you're not "in" at all. That means that you really, truly have to hold people accountable, even if, you know, you really, really like them, and all. So, yes, you actually have to put the pom-poms down every once in a while and throw a "boo" and "hiss" their way. Or you can just keep being a Party cheerleader.

Then, of course, maybe some Democrats supported earmark reform only because it was the GOP running Congress, right? Nah.....couldn't be that.

UPDATE: Looks like Senator Reid has acquiesced (via CFG quoting a Congressional Quarterly $$ article):

After losing a critical floor vote Thursday and scrambling in vain to reverse the decision, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., found the spirit of bipartisan compromise more to his liking Friday morning.

Reid offered an olive branch to Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., agreeing to embrace his amendment to a pending ethics and lobbying overhaul (S 1) with some modifications. DeMint’s amendment, which Democratic leaders tried but failed to kill on Thursday, would expand the definition of member earmarks that would be subject to new disclosure rules.

[...] Reid admitted Friday that he was caught off guard when nine Democrats and independent Joseph I. Lieberman voted against his motion to table, or kill, the DeMint amendment. His effort failed, 46-51.

[...] Friday morning, a chastened Reid said, “Yesterday was a rather difficult day, as some days are. We tend to get in a hurry around here sometimes when we shouldn’t be. Personally, for the majority, we probably could have done a little better job.”

DeMint, who was flabbergasted Thursday by Reid’s maneuvering to change the outcome of the vote, was happy to accept the compromise Friday.

“DeMint has been happy to work to come to a bipartisan compromise that solidifies the reforms done by [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi [D-Calif.] and House Democrats,” said DeMint spokesman Wesley Denton.

Congrats to those on the left, right and center who held Reid's feet to the fire. Maybe next time, when such hypocrisy becomes readily apparent, even more folks from across the political spectrum will chime in!


January 10, 2007


Democrats 9/11 Commission Bill: Both Less and More Than Advertised

Marc Comtois

So, the 100 Hours continue and Speaker Pelosi has gotten her 9/11 Commission legislation through. And though some may think that every one of the 9/11 Commission prescriptions were included (the necessity or wisdom of implementing them all is another discussion), apparently, that's really not the case (via The Corner).

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, who held a hearing Tuesday as the Senate prepared for its version of this bill, noted that one major recommendation — not in the House measure — was strengthening Congressional oversight of intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. “We found it a lot easier to reform the rest of the government than we did to reform ourselves post-9/11,” Mr. Lieberman said. “That’s unfinished work.”
The relevant portion of the 9/11 Report to which Lieberman refers begins here (and I've excerpted it in full in the extended entry, below.

Finally, Speaker Pelosi's 9/11 Commission Legislation contains language making it possible for the federal employees of the TSA to unionize.

The 9/11 commission did not address union rights or personnel rules but urged improvements in airport screening operations. AFGE [American Federation of Government Employees] maintains that collective bargaining rights help smooth agency operations because labor-management contracts provide a structure for addressing employee issues, including job performance.

Peter Winch, an organizer with AFGE, said the union had asked Democrats to put bargaining rights for TSA screeners "on the agenda for the first 100 hours." He continued, "It does not make sense to keep these employees from collective bargaining rights when other Department of Homeland Security employees have those rights."

The TSA has said that collective bargaining is not appropriate for airport passenger and baggage screeners because of their national security mission and because the agency requires the ability to make personnel staffing changes rapidly in response to threats. In the law creating the TSA, Congress left it to the Bush administration to determine such issues as union rights for screeners.

The Bush Administration also provided an example:
As an example, officials pointed to the foiled United Kingdom airline bombing plot in August, when new procedures for screeners were put into place immediately.

"This flexibility is a key component of how the Department of Homeland Security, through TSA, protects Americans while they travel," the statement said.

Then there is this point made by Senator Joseph Lieberman's office:
"Other security personnel like customs agents and the Border Patrol have the right to collective bargaining, and that has not impaired their ability to protect American security."
OK, fine. But isn't this really just an "earmark" by another name? The original legislation that allowed this potential TSA unionization had previously stalled in committee (granted, GOP controlled congress) and NONE of this 100 hour legislation is being debated in--or passed through--committee. Heck, to the victor go the spoils and all that, but for the Democrat led Congress to reward one of their key constituencies--a federal employee union--under the cover of national security smells like business as usual to me.

Continue reading "Democrats 9/11 Commission Bill: Both Less and More Than Advertised"

January 5, 2007


Foreshadow of Serious Earmark Reform?

Carroll Andrew Morse

I may have to give the new Congressional Democrats some credit. During the past election, I commented several times on this June 2006 statement by Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia…

”When I become chairman [of a House appropriations subcommittee], I'm going to earmark the sh** out of it,” Moran buoyantly told a crowd of 450 attending the event.
Well, according to Andy Roth of the Club for Growth, Congressman Moran's Democratic peers have denied him his anticipated chairmanship (h/t Instapundit). According to the new House Appropriations Committee website, Congressman Moran was 10th in Appropriations seniority, while 12 subcommittee chairmanships were available, indicating that the Democratic leadership actively decided to skip him over. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio (5th in seniority) and Ed Pastor of Arizona (12th in seniority) were also passed over, and Robert Kramer of Alabama (15th in seniority) would have been next-in-line for a subcommittee chairmanship, had not one been given to the very junior Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida (36th in seniority).

For those Rhode Islanders who are curious, Congressman Patrick Kennedy ranks 16th in Appropriations seniority.


January 4, 2007


A Tale of Two Speakers

Marc Comtois

On January 5, 1995, Newt Gingrich was elected Speaker of the House, the first Republican to do so in 40 years.

Newt Gingrich took the Capital by storm today like many of the generals he has studied -- before dawn, with a plan and with an eye on history.

As he achieved his longtime dream of becoming Speaker of the House, his method was also characteristically Newtonian -- expansive, buoyant, heavy on the symbolism and a bit disjointed.

His plan included, typically, a symbolic act of defiance. In the weighty moments just before he was elected the first Republican Speaker of the House in 40 years, Mr. Gingrich slipped away from the throngs like an outsider and spoke as a guest on a radio call-in show.

During the program, Mr. Gingrich sat with his helmet of gray hair cuffed by a big headset beneath a wartime poster of Winston Churchill that declared "Deserve Victory!" and took shots at the mainstream media and the Democrats. Then he strode onto the House floor and delivered a generously bipartisan acceptance speech to thunderous applause from his fellow House members and visitors from the other side of the Capitol, including Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the new majority leader, and the other side of the aisle, like Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts...

Mr. Gingrich's big day began at a little after 6 in the morning when he arrived at the Capitol. It was to extend until at least midnight tonight because he wanted to be sitting in the Speaker's chair to gavel to a close the longest opening day in House history.

In between, the House, now his House, with 230 Republicans at his command, passed a flurry of bills to revamp internal House rules. The point was to signify the end of the imperial era, when Congress held itself above the laws of the land, and the beginning of a new era of openness. Not only were many of the day's activities open to television cameras, but the House voted to abide by the laws that it imposes on everybody else.

After grabbing a cup of black coffee and a banana at a take-out store, Mr. Gingrich arrived at the Capitol for interviews with all the morning network news programs as well as a morning drive-time broadcast interview with The Associated Press. He then attended a prayer service at St. Peter's Church...

Mr. Gingrich said that when he stepped out on the balcony [of his new office] today for the first time, on what was a crystal-clear morning, he was filled with "the sense of being part of history and part of the romantic myth of this country." {NY Times, January 5, 1995, p.A23}

Ah yes, remember the "coup" of 1994, led by Generalissimo Gingrich and his cohort of nast, mean conservative Republicans? But never fear, the true heir has been crowned! The Queen has arrived!!!
"We have waited over 200 years for this time to come," Mrs. Pelosi said on the eve of her selection as speaker, a position that makes her second in line to the presidency after Vice President Dick Cheney.

"We will not just break through a glass ceiling, we will break through a marble ceiling," she said. "In more than 200 years of history, there was an established pecking order -- and I cut in line."

After calling herself "the most powerful woman in America," Mrs. Pelosi flexed her right muscle like a weight lifter to much applause at an event yesterday titled a "women's tea."

"All right, let's hear it for the power," she screamed as the jubilant applause continued.

When Mrs. Pelosi tried leaving the podium, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Connecticut Democrat, asked her to stay.

"There is so much love and warmth that's in this room today and that's because of the new speaker," Mrs. DeLauro said. "And that tells you about what the future is all about in the House of Representatives."

Yesterday's event was part of three days of festivities to mark the historic moment. Later, Mrs. Pelosi and special guests dined at the Italian Embassy.

Today will be the official vote by her colleagues installing her as speaker, followed by a "swearing-in celebration concert" in the Great Hall of the National Building Museum.

Tomorrow will feature an "open house for the People's House," a nod to Democrats' professed commitment to the common man. For the rest of the day, Mrs. Pelosi will celebrate her roots with a visit to a statue of her late father, former Baltimore Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro, and later the dedication of a Baltimore street to Mrs. Pelosi.

But wary of accusations of arrogance, Democrats have included other, less celebratory events. Those include a Mass yesterday at Trinity University in remembrance of "the children of Darfur and Katrina and a prayer service this morning at St. Peter's Catholic Church to honor the troops." {emphasis added}

Note the difference in tone as expressed by the actual Speakers-to-be. Gingrich "was filled with 'the sense of being part of history and part of the romantic myth of this country.'" Pelosi referred to herself as "the most powerful woman in America" and exhorted "All right, let's hear it for the power" to her followers. Methinks, despite the protestations to the contrary, that the "imperial era" has returned.


December 29, 2006


A 2007 New Year’s Resolution About 2008

Carroll Andrew Morse

One of my New Year’s resolutions is not to talk about the 2008 Presidential election until at least next June. But since the New Year hasn’t quite arrived, allow me a few observations…

1. If Barack Obama wants to run, it has to be now. If he waits, he will marginalize himself when he tries to position himself as a “moderate” or a centrist four-to-eight years from now, in spite of the heavily-liberal voting record that he will almost certainly have accrued.

Bear in mind that the last sitting Senator to win the Presidency (John F. Kennedy) was considered “inexperienced”, in Senate terms, when he decided to run. And consider the inverse formulation -- do you really believe that four/eight more years of the experience that has made Joe Biden the man he is today will somehow make Senator Obama a more attractive candidate?

2. During the initial stages of the campaign, it will be fascinating to watch most of the Democrats claim that they are really moderates (John Edwards has already started), while most of the Republicans will be stressing how they are either acceptable to conservatives, or are the “true” conservatives.

Republicans, at the national level, need to examine why they aren’t able to make more political hay in an environment like this. Is it poor organization? Or is the problem that (perhaps because of the liberal worldview that places politics before all else?) liberals can be counted on to energetically strongly support Democrats, no matter what positions they espouse (creating, by the way, the structural advantage that Democrats have in places that allow straight-ticket voting), while conservative-leaning voters are not energized unless they hear coherent ideas from the candidates they support?

3. John McCain has an uphill battle in front of him. 1) McCain-Feingold makes him unpopular with the new media. 2) His sudden enthusiasm for amnesty for illegal aliens is going to hurt him with the populist elements of the electorate. And make no mistake about it, populists are an important Republican constituency. Ross Perot’s peeling away of populists from the Republican party, for example, was what opened the way for Bill Clinton. 3) If McCain does assume frontrunner status for an extended period of time, his free ride with the MSM will be over. The relationship between Republican underdogs, which McCain traditionally has been, and the MSM is like the relationship between backup quarterbacks and sports fans. The #2 guy can be the most popular guy in town, until he has to start a few games…

4. Like many Republicans, I’m waiting to see what substance Rudolph Guiliani brings to the table. However, Guiliani’s “moderateness” is not necessarily a deal-breaker, if it turns out he really is a moderate (ala Gerald Ford) and not a liberal (ala Lincoln Chafee). In recent years, liberal Republicans have re-defined moderate bi-partisanship to mean “doing what the most liberal of Democrats want on every important issue”. This has opened a vacuum in the middle that could create a dynamic that someone like Guiliani (or McCain, if not for his other problems) could take advantage of. I’m not saying this is necessarily a good thing, just that it is.



Press Distorts President Ford's Iraq Opinion

Marc Comtois

President Ford was interviewed by the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, but embargoed the interview until after his death. The portion of the interview that is getting the most play is where President Ford differed with the Bush Administration on the Iraq War. Specifically, portions of the interview are being excerpted and rehashed as news articles reporting that Ford had "had deep doubts about Iraq," and he "doubted justifications for the Iraq war." It is the various permutations of the latter characterization that reveals a disconnect between what the former president said and what the headline writers want to believe he said.

What the president really said about the Bush Administration's justifications for the Iraq War was:

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."
What Ford disagreed with was in Bush trying to justify invading Iraq based on WMD. From this can be inferred that Ford believed there were other justifications. And he said as much in an interview with Thomas DeFrank of the NY Daily News in May (also embargoed):
Ford was a few weeks shy of his 93rd birthday as we chatted for about 45 minutes. He'd been visited by President Bush three weeks earlier and said he'd told Bush he supported the war in Iraq but that the 43rd President had erred by staking the invasion on weapons of mass destruction.

"Saddam Hussein was an evil person and there was justification to get rid of him," he observed, "but we shouldn't have put the basis on weapons of mass destruction. That was a bad mistake. Where does [Bush] get his advice?"

So while President "Ford said he wouldn't have invaded Iraq..." in 2004, he had come to support it in 2006. And to characterize his belief as being that the "Reasons for Iraq War 'A Big Mistake'" is patently false. President Ford disagreed with the method of justification. That is different than saying the war itself wasn't justified. The press has taken a report that Ford opposed the initial invasion, conflated it with his disagreement in how the war was justified and come up with a story implying that he disgreed totally with the entire war, from stem to stern, Instead, President Ford was much more nuanced in his analysis. I thought the mainstream press liked nuance?


December 27, 2006


The Quiet Conservatism of President Ford

Marc Comtois

With the passing of President Ford, most people have, by now, been disabused of the notion that he was a perpetual klutz and have learned that, in fact, he was a two-time All-American football player at Michigan. Nonetheless, the role that history has cast him is as the man who pardoned Nixon. Yet, believe it or not, while conventional wisdom seems to be that President Ford was a centrist, he was a relatively conservative politician: not Reagan conservative, to be sure, but a sort of natural conservative. To today's conservatives, that may border on heresay, but there is some evidence to support this.

Most contemporary conservatives, no doubt, would agree with Robert Novak:

The failure of the Ford presidency was the reason Reagan became the first challenger since Roosevelt to threaten seriously the renomination of an incumbent Republican. His pardon of Richard Nixon is usually cited as the reason for Ford's unpopularity, but it went much deeper. He seemed to have no public purpose, and his presidency revealed no philosophy. A Republican president whose hero was Harry Truman has perception problems from the beginning. A career politician from Grand Rapids, Michigan, he appeared to share Henry Kissinger's belief that the declining West could not successfully compete with the Soviet bloc and an accommodation had to be found.

Reagan's grassroots popularity grew as the public perceived he would take a harder position against the Kremlin than the Republican president who declined to see Russian dissenter Alexander Solzhenitsyn because it might offend Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and undermine detente. But Reagan's clever and manipulative campaign manager John Sears pulled him away from such divisive issues in the interest of seeing him nominated by a united party. In the meantime, the Ford campaign pounded mercilessly against Reagan as unfit for the presidency. Ford disdained Reagan, and his attitude was spread throughout the president's campaign. The contempt for Reagan was palpable.

But perhaps the error is in characterizing the personal animosity between the Reaganites and the Ford supporters (including the Bushes, I might add) as reflective of wide gulf between governing philosophies. Instead, it seems more apt to view the political dispute as that between a nascent, revolutionary vision of conservatism (Reagan) and a more pragmatic, traditional conservate Republicanism (Ford). To be sure, today, Reagan's brand of conservatism has essentially triumphed, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Ford wasn't conservative at all. While Ford's foreign policy is what we would call "realist" (ie; George H.W. Bush/Jame Baker)--his belief in detente with the U.S.S.R. is usually given as an example--he did have some conservative moments (the Mayaguez incident) and his economic policy was essentially conservative (though he was no supply-sider).

George Will (via NRO) wrote a column 30 years ago (PDF) that helps to illustrate this latter point. According to the piece, Ford stymied the Democrat-led Congress:

Congress was going to rescue the nation's economy from Mr. Ford's "inhumane" concern with inflation. It was going to treat unemployment as the priority problem. To that end it ginned up a $6-billion bill to put 900,000 people on public payrolls. Mr. Ford vetoed it, and Congress failed to override.

Congress was going to codify in laws the trendy environmentalism which appeals to an intense minority of its constituents. To that end it passed a tough law restricting strip mining. Again, Mr. Ford vetoed. Congress failed to override.

The third and most intense humiliation for Congress came when the House gutted the energy bill prepared by Representative Al Ullman (D., Ore.)...[which] arrived on the floor with a steep gasoline tax and left with that and all other teeth pulled.

Perhaps most telling is Will's excerpting of a Business Week article on Ford:
Now [Ford's} Administration is preparing a domestic package that seeks to bolster his '76 candidacy with such diffuse issues as a strong defense posture, a tough anticrime program, a drive to aid business through tax reforms that assist in capital formation, and rnoves that would curtail government regulation of industry.

That means that, despite his serious split with conservatives. Ford at this point is running on little more than his basic conservatism. To complicate matters further, many of Ford's deeply felt convictions center on unabashedly probusiness stances that may be deflected by his political opponents into potent anti-consumer positions.

Now, this is not to say that Ford fits the definition of a contemporary conservative, but it is too simple to say he was a "moderate." Nor was he a tax-and-spender. He didn't have "the vision thing" and wasn't a revolutionary conservative in the mold of Ronald Reagan. Instead, he was an honorable and gracious man who--much like the silent majority of the time--was a natural, traditional conservative. May he rest in peace.


December 12, 2006


No More Earmarks...For Now

Marc Comtois

Apparently, the newly-elected Democrat controlled Congress is putting a kibosh on earmarks (via The Insider). So sayeth Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), soon-to-be-chairmen of the Senate and House appropriations committees:

There will be no Congressional earmarks in the joint funding resolution that we will pass. We will place a moratorium on all earmarks until a reformed process is put in place. Earmarks included in this year's House and Senate bills will be eligible for consideration in the 2008 process, subject to new standards for transparency and accountability. We will work to restore an accountable, above-board, transparent process for funding decisions and put an end to the abuses that have harmed the credibility of Congress.
Though I must confess to being a bit skeptical that Robert "King-o-Pork" Byrd is behind this proclamation, it is a good sign, nonetheless. We'll have to see whether or not this moratorium on "invisible" pork will dampen the overall pork spending or if the pork will still be there, just out in the open. Regardless, no earmarks is a good start.

UPDATE: Jordan J. Ballor at Acton confirms my "pessimistic hopefulness" (to coin a non-sensical phrase) that it isn't all about earmarks. According to Citizens Against Government Waste:

“There are three parties in Washington: Democrats; Republicans; and appropriators,” CAGW President Tom Schatz said. “Democrats should expect any serious reform efforts to meet stiff opposition from appropriators who have no qualms about breaking party lines, or the bank, to keep their pork.”

Based largely on CAGW’s annual Congressional Pig Book, the pork profiles chronicle members’ exploits with pork totals, examples, quotes, and voting record.

“It remains to be seen whether Democrats will be better behaved than the Republicans, who presided over an explosion of earmarks and spending. One fact is certain: A suspension or reduction of pork-barrel spending would constitute a remarkable break from tradition for either party,” Schatz concluded.

The aforementioned "Pork Profiles" include these numbers on Byrd (whom CAGW calls "The King of Pork") and Obey. Like I said, ending earmarks is good. But it doesn't look like these fellas are too concerned about porking it out in the open.


December 11, 2006


Baron Dazzled by MoveOn

Marc Comtois

Jim Baron writes:

...when I heard there was a [MoveOn.org] meeting scheduled at a home in Barrington last week, I thought I would sit in and see what it was all about.

The meeting, replicated in living rooms all over the country on the same night -- the national MoveOn organization claims 7,000 people at meetings in 350 cities, which divides into about 20 people each, which was about the number of folks at Sam and Pat Smith’s house on Tuesday -- was billed as a "Mandate for Change."

The idea, Sam Smith explained, was to "remind Congress members why they were elected." MoveOn likes to take at least a little credit for nationwide Democratic sweep in November and, Sam noted, "the progressives we sent to D.C. need support to carry out the agenda."

Ideology and issues aside -- I was there to observe these folks clinically, as a lab technician observes subjects of an experiment, and the content of their discussions were not as important to me as the fact that the discussions were happening -- I was pretty impressed and heartened that meetings like this could be taking place in living rooms across America in 2006. If there were another group, nationwide or local, similar to this one espousing conservative values and issues, that would be equally exciting.

Um...Mr. Baron....over here! (Now, to continue...)
This was a working meeting of individuals -- not a pre-existing group with an agenda, like a labor union, a parent-teacher organization or a religious group -- people who came together with the express purpose of participating in the political process. It was not a cocktail or dinner party where a political discussion happened to break out.
Yikes...that's being a bit naive. "[N]ot a pre-existing group with an agenda"? Before a bunch of people get together to make a labor union, are they a pre-existing group? Howsabout a group of parents in a nascent PTO? In fact, Baron's last comparison, a religious group, may come the closest to describing what they are. These folks worship at the altar of liberal progressivism (and some at a sub-altar of anti-Bushism). In reality, they are nothing more than a grassroots PAC for the Democrat Party. That is their agenda: first, elect Democrats, second make sure that said Democrats act appropriately liberal and progressive. They are as ideological--and thus have an agenda--as any labor union or PTO or religion.

But Baron was apparently emotionally MovedOn:

Covering state government in general, and the General Assembly in particular, you can get a little bit jaded about the way politics works. Watching these sincere people gather in a living room in Barrington to try to convince their public officials to pay attention to people rather than lobbyists or contributors can restore your sense of the possible in politics.

My first thought: We need these people, or some like them, to keep an eye on the Statehouse.

I'd venture to bet that most of those "sincere people" uniformly voted Democrat last election, putting back in power all of those in the RI Statehouse whom Baron seems to think need their feet held to a fire. In actuality, the watchdogs for whom Mr. Baron yearns are to be found hereabouts and in places like Common Cause and Operation Clean Government. Those are also groups of like-minded citizens.

The folks who make up MoveOn are to be congratulated for their participation. But they neither represent anything new nor anything particularly unique in the history of this country. Abolition, the temperance movement, labor organization: all came about because individuals sought change via a grassroots movement. These small, localized efforts morphed into larger efforts driven by larger groups. Eventually, someone was bright enough to bring these disparately led groups together. That's what the founder's of MoveOn did.

Baron's MoveOn meetup group is just an example of a local chapter of a larger national organization getting together. Like a Cub Scout pack meeting--nothing more, nothing less. Let's not deify them just yet, OK?


November 30, 2006


Bleeding the (Blue)blood out of the New England GOP

Marc Comtois

First, the New York Times focuses the soft-filter lense on the now dwindling ranks of GOP moderates in New England and :

It was a species as endemic to New England as craggy seascapes and creamy clam chowder: the moderate Yankee Republican.

Dignified in demeanor, independent in ideology and frequently blue in blood, they were politicians in the mold of Roosevelt and Rockefeller: socially tolerant, environmentally enthusiastic, people who liked government to keep its wallet close to its vest and its hands out of social issues like abortion and, in recent years, same-sex marriage...

Then they let the moderates explain that they're the real conservatives:
Walter Peterson, a former New Hampshire governor and lifelong Republican, this year became the co-chairman of Republicans for John Lynch, the incumbent Democratic governor.

“What the people want is basically to feel like the candidates of a political party are working for the people, not just following some niche issues,” Mr. Peterson said. “The old traditional Republican Party was conservative on small government, efficient government; believed in supporting people to give them a chance at life but not having people on the dole; wanted a balanced budget; and on social issues they were moderate, tolerant, live and let live. They didn’t dislike somebody from other religious viewpoints.”

He continued, “That was the old-fashioned conservative, but the word conservative today has been bastardized.”

I'm afraid that Mr. Peterson is the one "bastardizing" the meaning of the word. His apparent complaint that today's conservatives "dislike [people] from other religious viewpoints” stands out as the primary difference in his functional description of "what it means to be a Republican" and that of most contemporary conservatives. Together with the linkage of "live and let live" with "moderate" and "tolerant"--such a neat little trick--the comment reveals that the real axe he and other moderates have to grind is that they look down their blue-veined noses at people who actually have a religious viewpoint. In short, live and let live unless you're a right wing, religious nut. Very tolerant of them.

As a practical, pragmatic and political matter, the various New England GOPs need to have a much bigger tent than their counterparts in, say, the south. Yet, they also have to recognize that the conservatives who are (seemingly) at the lower, rank-and-file level of the party are tired of being ignored. We're smart enough to realize that compromises have to be made. Maybe it's time that the bluebloods realize that, too.

Finally, the Times offers Senator Chafee as Exhibit "A":

I’m caught between the state party, which I’m very comfortable in, and the national party, which I’m not,” said Mr. Chafee, adding that he was considering the merits of “sticking it out and hoping the pendulum swings back.”
Sheesh, Senator. "Sticking it out"? Could he be any more complacent? If he really wants to hold elective office again, he has to be proactive, seize the bull by the horns and start working now. A good place to start would be to put his time and money where his rhetoric is and help build the RI GOP. Don't start waiting. Start doing. (And remember to be tolerant and open-minded, K?)


November 28, 2006


Achorn: GOP Lost to Dems Get Out The (Straight-Party) Vote Effort

Marc Comtois

Edward Achorn backs up what many have already concluded: the Democrat margins of victory were attributable to straight-party (mostly Harrah's "inspired") voters:

On Nov. 7, the straight-party system worked its wonders for Rhode Island Democrats. Some 61,357 voters cast a straight-party ballot for the Democrats -- a whopping increase of more than 23,000, or about two-thirds, over the last midterm election. Only 18,424 cast straight ballots for Republicans.

That obviously gave Mr. Whitehouse a dramatic boost, and quite possibly the winning edge. Subtract the straight-party ballots, and Mr. Chafee beat Mr. Whitehouse handily. It appears that Mr. Chafee was the preference of voters who actually took the time to mark their ballots for either candidate....

The people who really suffered, though, were down the ballot -- the reformers trying to bring more balance to the General Assembly. They got swept away in the flood. Many of the casual voters who went straight-ticket -- and thus returned the local incumbent to power -- probably never heard of either candidate in those races.


November 24, 2006


I, So-Called Conservative

Justin Katz

Over on Autonomist, my friend Rocco DiPippo — to whom I am tremendously indebted for non-blog-related reasons — writes:

...politically speaking it was idiotic for Republicans to showboat over the Foley matter. And incredibly, after the Foley revelations, Republican pundits lined up to publish a self-flagellating stream of articles saying how it might be "good" to lose the Congress, since that would teach Republicans how to be Republicans again.

Well that might be a reasonable strategy in peacetime, but it is madness during war, especially when you are willing to risk having people with a demonstrable, 40-year- long track record of appeasement coupled with an aversion to things military, attain power. So, in essence, though the Republicans rightly stressed that America's first order of business is successfully waging war against a particularly virulent, widespread enemy, some of those same Republicans were willing to jeopardize this country's safety by handing power over to a group of people who, in their adolescent haze, do not think we are actually involved in a war. These so-called conservatives and so-called Republicans are plain stupid, or utterly hypocritical. ...

Now, there's a good chance that the War on Islamist Terror will be lost, a million Iraqis will die and endless investigations aimed at impeaching Bush and Cheney will soon commence. Aren't you glad you stayed home instead of voting?

Although my motivation had nothing whatsoever to do with the Foley matter — to which I paid almost no attention — I am not timid in the least to admit that, not only did I not stay home, I voted for Sheldon Whitehouse. If that makes me a "so called" whatever, so be it.

Here's my bottom line: As soon as the national GOP began acting under the rationale of "what are they going to do, vote for Democrats?" — which they've been doing for longer than most of us would like to admit — the party became a detriment to the war on terror and, perhaps even more importantly, to everything that makes this country worth defending against terrorists. They became a detriment even to those social causes that they sought to leverage (e.g., same-sex marriage and abortion), and they became a detriment to the economic causes that are supposed to be the sine qua non of Republicanism.

If conservatives intended to assert themselves on this broad, self-defining slate of issues, it had to be with this election. These are, all of them, long-term issues, and the rapid slip among the "right" party required equally rapid correction: proving the possibility of defeat to the Republicans and the reality of responsibility to the Democrats. Doing so was neither stupid nor hypocritical, but considered and consistent. As to whether it will prove correct and effective, we can only pray.


November 20, 2006


Conservatives Back Ideology with Cash

Marc Comtois

{N.B. Cross-posted at Spinning Clio--MAC}

Historian Ralph Luker points to a new book by Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks called Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. According to this story:

When it comes to helping the needy, Brooks writes: "For too long, liberals have been claiming they are the most virtuous members of American society. Although they usually give less to charity, they have nevertheless lambasted conservatives for their callousness in the face of social injustice."

...The book's basic findings are that conservatives who practice religion, live in traditional nuclear families and reject the notion that the government should engage in income redistribution are the most generous Americans, by any measure.

Conversely, secular liberals who believe fervently in government entitlement programs give far less to charity. They want everyone's tax dollars to support charitable causes and are reluctant to write checks to those causes, even when governments don't provide them with enough money...

"These are not the sort of conclusions I ever thought I would reach when I started looking at charitable giving in graduate school, 10 years ago," he writes in the introduction. "I have to admit I probably would have hated what I have to say in this book."

Still, he says it forcefully, pointing out that liberals give less than conservatives in every way imaginable, including volunteer hours and donated blood.

...Harvey Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University and 2004 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, does not know Brooks personally but has read the book.

"His main finding is quite startling, that the people who talk the most about caring actually fork over the least," he said. "But beyond this finding I thought his analysis was extremely good, especially for an economist. He thinks very well about the reason for this and reflects about politics and morals in a way most economists do their best to avoid."

Brooks seems very reluctant to embrace his findings. I would bet it's because he isn't too keen on the idea of the political hammer it could become for social (religious) conservatives. I also think he'll get his wish of having other academics putting his findings through rigorous analysis! Finally, Ralph poses a good question: "do people on the left actually say: 'I gave at the IRS.'?"


November 15, 2006


About that Vote for Change....

Marc Comtois

So, according to a new poll:

While voters in Election Day surveys said corruption and scandal in Congress were among the most important factors in their vote, the postelection poll indicated 37 percent of all adults said the war in Iraq should be at the top of the congressional agenda during the next two years. Nevertheless, 57 percent of all adults in the AP-Ipsos poll said Democrats do not have a plan for Iraq; 29 percent said they do.

That finding strikes at the heart of a Democratic dilemma. The party has been of one voice in criticizing President Bush's strategy for the war but has been more equivocal on how to move in a different direction.

Democrats such as Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania want a fixed deadline to pull all troops out of the country. Other Democrats, including some party leaders, have voiced support for a staggered withdrawal that demands greater responsibility from the Iraqis.

I like that..."equivocal." Sheesh. Anyway, let me see if I've got this straight. For a couple years now the President has been criticized by many Democrats for either not having a plan or having the wrong plan. Now, the average American voter is telling us that Iraq is the most important task facing a Congress led by the Democrat party, but also admits that they don't think that the new leaders in Congress have a plan.

And how is that tactic of voting out the GOP because of "corruption and scandal" working out? Well, apparently, the new House Majority leader isn't exactly squeeky clean. Writes the Wall Street Journal's John Fund:

House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi's endorsement of Rep. John Murtha for majority leader, the No. 2 position in the Democratic leaderhsip, has roiled her caucus. "She will ensure that they [Mr. Murtha and his allies] win. This is hardball politics," Rep. Jim Moran, a top Murtha ally, told the Hill, a congressional newspaper. "We are entering an era where when the speaker instructs you what to do, you do it."

But several members are privately aghast that Mr. Murtha, a pork-barreling opponent of most House ethics reforms, could become the second most visible symbol of the new Democratic rule. "We are supposed to change business as usual, not put the fox in charge of the henhouse," one Democratic member told me. "It's not just the Abscam scandal of the 1980s that he barely dodged, he's a disaster waiting to happen because of his current behavior," another told me.

By no means is this the only such story. Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post also wrote about Murtha (read 'em both). But it's not just Murtha...apparently Speaker-Elect Pelosi also thinks having an impeached judge running the House Intelligence committee is a good idea. Marcus wrote about this one, too:
...Nancy Pelosi's first test as speaker will arrive long before the 110th Congress convenes. Her choice to head the House intelligence committee -- unlike other House committees, this one is left entirely up to the party leadership -- will speak volumes about whether a Speaker Pelosi will be able to resist a return to paint-by-numbers Democratic Party interest-group politics as usual.

Pelosi is in a box of her own devising. The panel's ranking Democrat is her fellow Californian Jane Harman -- smart and hardworking but also abrasive, ambitious and, in Pelosi's estimation, insufficiently partisan on the committee. So Pelosi, once the intelligence panel's ranking Democrat herself, has made clear that she doesn't intend to name Harman to the chairmanship.

The wrong decision, in my view, but one that's magnified by the unfortunate fact that next in line is Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings. In 1989, after being acquitted in a criminal trial, Hastings was stripped of his position as a federal judge -- impeached by the House in which he now serves and convicted by the Senate -- for conspiring to extort a $150,000 bribe in a case before him, repeatedly lying about it under oath and manufacturing evidence at his trial.

How's that vote for "change" looking now?

UPDATE: (Via Instapundit) Meanwhile, the GOP has apparently learned a lesson and decided that Trent Lott should help lead them into the future. Brilliant. And Allahpundit points to this John Miller piece that explains why the GOP dumped Lott in the first place. Dean Barnett is right: "Is it just me, or is it becoming increasingly apparent that the Republicans and Democrats are determined to engage in a two year dumb-off?"


November 9, 2006


Jon Scott on the Republican Future

Carroll Andrew Morse

First District Congressional Candidate Jon Scott weighs in on how he thinks Republicans can best move forward from where they are. He begins as graciously as always

Jon Scott: First, let me take the opportunity to say thank you to those that cast votes for me on Tuesday and to those who supported my candidacy in other ways, as well.

Where we go from here certainly affects me in the future and I am unhappy with the support (or lack thereof) that came from the Party on both a national and statewide level although I do understand why there was none.

The question that needs to be answered and placed into the record is one of how we define conservatism. What makes a conservative a conservative? I am a Republican because:

  1. I believe in low taxes
  2. I believe in small government
  3. I believe in a strong national defense (to include secure borders).

Instead of flames, [I will support the statement] that we need to put aside our differences and come to some sort of agreement on flashpoint issues that divide the Party and pull us away from forward progress. That was one of the central tenets of my campaign.

In his comments, Hayden wrote: The party needs to recruit some moderate, smart, energetic young people to make them relevant and I couldnt agree more as long as those recruits agree that taxes should be low, government should be small, and the US should have a strong national defense.

Some on this board will bristle at that sentiment because their definition of conservative is somewhat different. The problem is that those three principles are our core beliefs as a Party and we have abandoned them for social conservatism. It is fine to be socially conservative but we cannot be so at the expense of our core beliefs and that is what has happened in Washington.

There is a bit of a struggle forming in the House right now that I wish I was a part of. As Speaker Hastert announced that he would not seek the Minority Leadership, those still standing after Tuesday night began to line-up in an attempt to secure their chance at the helm. The first was Mike Pence, a social conservative from Indiana. The heir-apparent, of course, is John Boehner of Ohio who is sometimes at odds with the Christian wing of the Party. The third name mentioned has been Joe Barton of Texas who is an oil industry insider.

Who would I have supported had I unseated Kennedy? I am not a social conservative in any true sense of the definition but there is no question that I would have gotten behind Pence. Why? Because in a statement that he sent out yesterday, the Congressman, who leads the conservative caucus called the Republican Study Committee, stated that we have not only lost our majority but we have lost our way.

In abandoning their commitment to limited government, the Party has lost their foundation. It is OK to argue the flashpoints but we have to get our central ideals back first. Those central tenets need to be the rally point for a re-building and re-energizing process in RI, as well. Without those ideals at our center we will continue to be lost.


November 8, 2006


The Purge of 2006?

Justin Katz

Perhaps it's needless to say that I disagree with commenter Anthony's assessment, offered in a comment to a recent post by Marc:

I think this election will force incumbent Republicans to move left, just as the Democrats were forced to put up more conservative candidates after years of unsuccessful attempts to elect left-wingers.

The central flaw of this view, as I see it, is that it sees politics mainly in terms of degree of extremity — as if neither party aligns better with the American people's beliefs on general principle. It leaves no room for the possibility that Americans prefer conservative policies to liberal ones. It's not as if voters rebuffed a slate of rabid right-wing Republicans; they rebuffed Republicans, period, including moderates. Anthony continues in a subsequent comment:

In this election, I think the conservatives blew it. The 'conservative' GOP Congressional leadership took on the same attributes as the Democrats--overspending and a bureaucratic approach to governing. At the same time, conservatives attacked GOP moderates instead of Democrats submarining them in vulnerable districts.

While GOP moderates were attacked from within, the Democrats were recruiting moderate Democrats to run and win districts that had been drawn by Republicans during redistricting to lean Repbulican.

Conservatives should have been focusing in on bringing "conservative" leaders back into line, not helping to elect Democrats.

The narrative simply makes no sense: Republicans did not govern according to conservative principles, so Democrats moved right, and conservatives targeted moderates, so Republicans will... move left? Belief in that strange scenario of inverse consequences is not, at least, the sense I'm getting from what I've read about Republican officials' reactions to their party's loss.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see, but if Republicans do move to shore up their base, then I'd suggest that, pace Anthony, conservatives will have been successful at "bringing 'conservative' leaders back into line" by means of this election.



Time to Hunker Down for a Perennial Winter

Justin Katz

How oppressive it will be depends on whether the Senate falls, as well. Regardless, and speaking with some restraint, the next two years (at least) promise to be difficult and perhaps dangerous.

Who can doubt, for instance, that the regime in Iran and terrorists across the globe feel as if they, themselves, have won a victory in their war against the United States? A nuclear Iran may or may not be a fait accompli, but it is certainly less likely that the country will now increase its openness to negotiations or that the United States will take the decisive steps necessary to stop it nonetheless. Similarly, expect a resurgence of violence in Iraq and perhaps, if the terrorists continue their characteristic fatally over-anxious strategizing, in the United States.

Meanwhile, Larry Kudlow makes me relieved that I currently work in two very different segments of the economy. The strength of the economy that we've enjoyed despite a major terrorist attack on our financial center, a war in progress, and environmental calamity may be about to wane.

On social and moral issues, from marriage to stem cells, I expect those on my side will have a lot of persuading and arguing to do. In a silver lining way, that will help us to focus our understanding of the world and to hone our vision for the future, hopefully laying the foundation for a return to prior trends in our direction. In a dark cloud way, I'm relieved that recent improvements of the Supreme Court cannot be undone and can only hope that the president is prepared to begin using his veto power.

I don't think the media is correct that this election's results are entirely attributable to, in soon-to-be-ex Senator Chafee's words, "rage toward our president." The Democrats, the media, and liberals generally have striven, out of their own black feelings, to make hatred out of broad disappointment. Republican partisans must heed Representative John Boehner's analysis that the "American people strongly supported our ideas and agenda in 1994, and they still do." Americans wanted change, yes, but the tragedy of our political system's current makeup is that the only change available was in the wrong direction. Republicans tried to capitalize on that fact for their own gain, and that left them vulnerable.

But none of this is an expression of buyer's remorse from a rebellious conservative. A trip around the dark side of the moon is what we need — a sort of (to mix metaphors) aggressive radiation therapy. I will pray strenuously, though, that my aforementioned restraint in prognostication is proven wise, and not unduly, well, conservative.


November 7, 2006


Quick Election Thoughts (Warning: Information Value Nearly Nil)

Carroll Andrew Morse

Ive looked around the internet and must report that there is absolutely no election information of any value out there at the moment.

Personally, I blame Jimmy Carter for this. Liberals (who always have a hard time dealing with the rejection of their ideas) convinced themselves that the Republican landslide in 1980 was the result of their voters becoming discouraged because the networks had used exit-poll data to declare that Reagan Wins in the early afternoon while voting was still going on. People of my age or older will back me up on this. This traumatic experience led liberal newsrooms to institutionally internalize the idea that early release of exit poll data was bad.

Why not count absentee ballots before election day, as they come in? Then, wed get (pre-recount and pre-litigation) final results of close races a lot more quickly.

Im not a return all-the-way to paper ballots guy, but I like the optical scan technology we use here in RI that leaves a physical audit trail. I dont think going to a purely electronic touch-screen system will ever be a good idea.

Stay tuned. Rhode Island polls close at 9:00.


November 6, 2006


Some Reflections on Issues of our Time

Donald B. Hawthorne

To provoke thought, even if you disagree with their content, here are four interesting articles I have read in recent days about issues we face as a country:

Austin Bay on Military service, John Kerry, and honor

The Only Issue This Election Day

John Derbyshire on To Vote Or Not To Vote: A tough call for conservatives

Rick Santorum on The Gathering Storm



Wanting What We Don't Have: America Needs Two Vibrant Political Parties Competing With Each Other

Donald B. Hawthorne

I hope the Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives in tomorrow's election.

I am a conservative who happens to be a registered Republican. My disgust with the Republican Congress is intense. As I have said to many friends in recent months, they have done in 12 years what the Democrats took 40 years to do.

A more detailed reflection on the policy reasons for my disgust have been previously articulated on this site in many previous posts.

Now is not the time to regurgitate the specifics. Rather, it is a time to focus on the big picture:

The current Republican party needs some time in the wilderness in order to rediscover its currently lost connections to beliefs in limited government, to the defense of freedom and ordered liberty. Hopefully, they can find some new leaders with principles in time for the crucial 2008 elections.

And what could be better for the American people than to see the House be led for two years by a bunch of left-wing lunatics, to experience a sampling for 2 years before 2008 of what little the Democrats can offer during a time when our country is engaged in a world war with Islamic fascists dedicated to destroying America.

The overriding problem here is we have two political parties who stand for nothing but either the retention or gaining of political power for the sake of power itself.

For the long-term good of America, we need two vibrant political parties competing with each other. This isn't a Democrat or Republican thing. Both political parties have become devoid of a vision for the future of America. The Democrats have been devoid of vision for several decades. The Republicans have become devoid of vision, because they have faced little real competition and they are devoid of leaders with any coherent views of the world.

Think about the effect of this vision-less world view: Political races this year have become focused on the efficiency of voter turnout operations rather than articulating a vision for America that creates a natural passion within individual citizens to stand up and be counted in the voting booth.

And America is worse off for it.


November 4, 2006


Eminent Domain Reform on the Ballot in Eleven States

Carroll Andrew Morse

Todays OpinionJournal notes that next Tuesdays elections are likely to be a big step forward in the national movement to reform eminent domain laws

No fewer than 11 states (see nearby table) have ballot measures designed to limit government's ability to pilfer private property for someone else's private economic development. Eight initiatives would enshrine those restrictions in state constitutions, and polls show that most are headed for victories.

Alabama was the first to move after Kelo, passing a statute in 2005 that still gave government the leeway to pursue private property that could be defined as urban "blight." This turned out to be a major loophole, which city planners have routinely applied to any home or business they wanted to condemn and then transfer to private developers. Alabama's legislature closed that loophole this year, and "blight" is now defined in the better reforms as a property posing a danger to health or public safety.

This issue, where citizens are using voter initiative to pass reforms that lobbyists have often blocked in state legislatures, is an excellent example of how ridiculous it is to assert that the lack of voter initiative is somehow in the average citizen's best interests
Arizona's legislature also passed a strong anti-Kelo bill, only to watch Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano veto it in June. Arizona voters responded by pursuing their own initiative that is even wider in scope. The best model may be Florida, where the legislature passed a Constitutional amendment that goes before the voters next week.

All of this has occurred despite furious lobbying by local municipalities and developers to water down legislation. The lobbying has sometimes worked with state legislatures, but voters in Idaho, North Dakota and California have responded with ballot language for constitutional amendments that go further than their own state statutes. This ballot language tends to be legally clearer, and such constitutional provisions are harder for politicians to evade or weaken later when voters aren't looking.

Finally, the op-ed notes that one region of the country seems to be lagging the others in terms of eminent domain reform
As is so often the case when it comes to economic freedom, the states absent from this debate are those with liberal legislatures on the East Coast. Politicians in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut (home of Kelo) are so addicted to the tax revenue they get by forcible property transfers to rich developers that they refuse to act on behalf of property rights. This is one more reason for their citizens to keep fleeing these states for more hospitable climes, much as Third World countries that fail to protect property rights watch their human capital flee.
Sadly, Rhode Island is no exception to this trend.


October 12, 2006


Theocrats, Moral Relativism & The Myth of Religious Tolerance, Part VI: The Alleged Theocracy Threat - Valid or a Tool to Limit the Public Debate?

Donald B. Hawthorne

The previous posting in this series ended with these words:

A discussion about the meaning of "reason" becomes important as reason offers a tool to enable a pluralistic society to have substantive discourse about what belongs in our public square.

A previous posting entitled Respectful Competition: A Basic Requirement for a Healthy Democracy clarified the meaning of a vibrant discourse in our society:

A healthy democracy does not require blurring political differences. But it must find a way to express those differences forcefully without anathematizing people who hold different views.

As a first step toward discussing the meaning and significance of reason, this posting asks whether the current propensity for some to use the theocracy label in our public debate amounts to anathematizing religious people in an attempt to stifle one side of the debate in our public square.

Jonah Goldberg made these comments this week in Liberal Paranoia:

...Ross Douthat surveys the scare literature demonizing "Christianists," "theocons" and "Christocrats" - people who were under the impression that they were actually law-abiding, tax-paying, patriotic American citizens who happen to subscribe to the Christian faith. Little did they know they're actually all about rounding up infidels and torching the Constitution...

Ross Douhat is the associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly and he has written a book review entitled Theocracy, Theocracy, Theocracy which includes these arguments:

This is a paranoid moment in American politics...

Perhaps the strangest of these strange stories, though, is the notion that twenty-first-century America is slouching toward theocracy. This is an old paranoia...

To understand what, precisely, the anti-theocrats think has gone so wrong, its necessary to understand what they mean by the term theocracy. This is no easy task...the clout of institutional religion is at low ebb in American politics...

...as National Reviews Ramesh Ponnuru put it, in an essay written amid the "values voter" hysteria of 2004:

It may be instructive to think about the wish list of Christian-conservative organizations involved in politics...Nearly every one of these policiesand all of the most conservative oneswould merely turn the clock back to the late 1950s. That may be a very bad idea, but the America of the 1950s was not a theocracy.

...But if youre committed to the notion that religious conservatives represent an existential threat to democratic government, you need a broader definition of theocracy to convey your sense of impending doom...

All you need are politicians who invoke religion and apply Christian principles to public policy.

If thats all it takes to make a theocracy, then these writers are correct: Contemporary America is run by theocrats. Of course, by that measure, so was the America of every previous era. The United States has always been at once a secular republic and a religious nation, reflexively libertarian and fiercely pious, and this tension has been working itself out in our politics for more than two hundred years...But theres no way to give an account of American history without grappling with this tension...

Yet this is a history that the anti-theocrats seem determined to reject...

...this strict-separationist interpretation of world history frees the anti-theocrats from the messy business of actually arguing with their opponents...

A Christian is...allowed to mix religion and politics in support of sweeping social reforms but only if those reforms are safely identified with the political Left, and with the interests of the Democratic party...

Sometimes its argued that what sets the contemporary Christian Right apart from previous iterations of politically active religion isn't its Christianity per se but its unwillingness to couch argument in terms that nonbelievers can acceptto use "public reason," in the Rawlsian phrase, to make a political case that doesnt rely on Bible-thumping. As a prudential matter, the case for public reason makes a great deal of sense. But one searches American history in vainfrom abolitionist polemics down to Martin Luther Kings Scripture-saturated speechesfor any evidence of this supposedly ironclad rule being rigorously applied, or applied at all.

And besides, religious conservatives do, frequently and loudly, make arguments for their positions on non-theological grounds...

What all these observers point out, and what the anti-theocrats ignore, is that the religious polarization of American politics runs in both directions. The Republican party has become more religious because the Democrats became self-consciously secular...

So the rise of the Religious Right, and the growing "religion gap"...arent new things in American history but a reaction to a new thing: to an old political party newly dependent on a bloc of voters who reject the role that religion has traditionally played in American political life. The hysteria over theocracy, in turn, represents an attempt to rewrite the history of the United States to suit these voters' prejudices, by setting a year zero somewhere around 1970 and casting everything thats happened since as a battle between progress and atavism, reason and fundamentalism, the Enlightenment and the medieval dark.

The tragedy is that so many religious people have gone along with this revisionism...

There is no single Christian politics, and no movement can claim to have arrived at the perfect marriage of religious faith and political action. Christianity is too otherworldly for that, and the world too fallen. But this doesn't free believers from the obligation to strive in political affairs, as they strive in all things, to do what God would have them do. And the moments when Gods will is inscrutable, or glimpsed only through a glass, darkly, are the moments when good-faith arguments between believers ought to bear the greatest fruit...

In today's America, these arguments are constantly taking place...But they are increasingly drowned out by cries of "theocracy, theocracy, theocracy" and by a zeal, among ostensibly religious intellectuals, to read their fellow believers out of public life and sell their birthright for the blessing of the New York Times.

More excerpts from the article are contained in the Extended Entry below.

In another posting, Rediscovering Civility and Purpose in America's Public Discourse, a quote from T.S. Eliot defines the connection to and importance of religion in our public discussions:

As political philosophy derives its sanctions from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term "democracy"...does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike - it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God, you will pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin.

Reason, therefore, offers us - as members of a pluralistic society - the opportunity to discuss the connections between political philosophy, ethics and religion as we seek to better understand our American and Western Civilization heritages and apply their teachings to our habits as citizens of this great country.

Earlier postings in this series can be found here:

Part I: The Difference Between Religious Freedom and Religious Tolerance
Part II: Are We Hostile Toward or Encouraging Religious Belief?
Part III: Consequences of Excluding Religion from the Public Square
Part IV: Moral Recovery via Rediscovering the Meaning of Words
Part V: Recovering the Meaning and Implications of Religious Freedom

Continue reading "Theocrats, Moral Relativism & The Myth of Religious Tolerance, Part VI: The Alleged Theocracy Threat - Valid or a Tool to Limit the Public Debate?"

October 4, 2006


Theocrats, Moral Relativism & the Myth of Religious Tolerance, Part V: Recovering the Meaning and Implications of Religious Freedom

Donald B. Hawthorne

The previous posting in this series noted how moral relativism leads to words losing their meaning, thereby impoverishing the public discourse and making genuine consensus on important issues difficult, if not impossible. It also suggested that moral recovery was possible by calling for it with direct language.

As a first step toward eliminating that lack of meaning, the same posting identified four crucial questions and addressed the first question about whether moral truths exist and belong in the public square.

The second question noted that there is a lack of agreement on the meaning of religious freedom and reason.

It is impossible to have a reasoned public discourse over the proper role of religion in the public square if we do not share a common understanding about the meaning of religious freedom. The impact of no common ground means the public discourse often descends into an ahistorical mumbo-jumbo from secular left fundamentalists warning about the alleged threat from theocrats. The left's actions have the effect of stripping the public square of religious practices or habits as attempts are made to block religious or religion-inspired people and practices from playing any role whatsoever in the public square. These behaviors have created a backlash and new assertiveness from the religious right in recent times.

The purpose of this posting is to offer a broad definition of religious freedom, which can be found in the Extended Entry below, and reflect on some of its implications for all of us.

After reading the thoughts below on the meaning of religious freedom, several striking thoughts arise from the document:

First, it provides greater insight into the higher purpose that is at the heart of why religious freedom is so important: With the personal responsibility and free will that arise from the dignity of man is the moral obligation and sense of duty to pursue truth and abide by it as it becomes known. That provides a challenge to each of us: Do we accept as our personal duty, the obligation to pursue truth and abide by it as we achieve new understandings? (Note: Commitment to that course of action does not require a particular religious belief. It does require a dedication to being men and women of virtue.)

Second, there are profound implications that follow once that pursuit is engaged: Frequently our public discourse is an unpleasant mixture of some people questioning whether there is any truth at all while others are presenting beliefs as if they have already reached truth in its final form. It is these people - called fundamentalists of the left and right, respectively - who often dominate the public debate to our society's detriment. In contrast, the alternative view expressed below suggests the practice of religious freedom is a process with milestones achieved along the way - but not an end. That concept is completely ignored by secular left fundamentalists who prefer to rely on the use of scare tactics that equate any religious belief with religious fanaticism in order to achieve a near ban on religious expression in the public square. Yet an ongoing process also implies a lack of final closure in understanding truth, which should result in a greater spirit of humility accompanying the ongoing pursuit by religious people.

These conclusions lead us back to another point from the previous posting: The dominant struggle in our society today is over the meaning of freedom, in this case understanding the implications of religious freedom in our society. Once we have this freedom, how do we pursue truth and talk constructively to each other about it given that we live in a pluralistic society made up of people with differing religious beliefs?

Let's assume most people share a common goal of living together successfully and with meaning in a civil society. For that to happen, we have to be able to talk to each other, to have a substantive discourse. But it cannot be based upon the requirements that the existence of moral truths be denied, that religious beliefs be excluded from the public square, or that everyone be required to hold similar religious beliefs.

George Weigel put this issue in perspective when he wrote about Pope John Paul II:

Building the free society certainly involves getting the institutions right; beyond that, however, freedom's future depends on men and women of virtue, capable of knowing, and choosing, the genuinely good.

That is why John Paul relentlessly preached genuine tolerance: not the tolerance of indifference, as if differences over the good didn't matter, but the real tolerance of differences engaged, explored, and debated within the bond of a profound respect for the humanity of the other...

John Paul II was teaching a crucial lesson about the future of freedom: Universal empathy comes through, not around, particular convictions...

It is in this context that a discussion about the meaning of "reason" becomes important as reason offers a tool to enable a pluralistic society to have substantive discourse about what belongs in our public square. That discussion of reason shall be the topic of the next posting in this series.

Earlier postings in this series can be found here:

Part I: The Difference Between Religious Freedom and Religious Tolerance
Part II: Are We Hostile Toward or Encouraging Religious Belief?
Part III: Consequences of Excluding Religion from the Public Square
Part IV: Moral Recovery via Rediscovering the Meaning of Words

Continue reading "Theocrats, Moral Relativism & the Myth of Religious Tolerance, Part V: Recovering the Meaning and Implications of Religious Freedom"

October 3, 2006


Foley: The Political Sitcom's Season Premier

Justin Katz

For more than a year, now, I've been directing conversations with my politically-interested friends toward an issue that has concerned me as one who has found (very) modest success as a socio-political writer: my growing disinterest in the political debate du jour.

A prominent experiential example: I used to check the Corner two to five times per hour. Now, although I don't believe that the quality of the writers or the written has gone down, I find myself increasingly surprised at the topics that the punditentia is discussing. At this moment, two-and-a-half hours and roughly 3,000 words worth of Corner posts are about Mark Foley.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan, another must-read during the days of the Bronze Age of blogging, who once lanced from his chariot the idea that the Catholic Church's pedophilia scandals had anything whatsoever to do with homosexuality (what's the difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia, again?) is casting about such rhetoric as this:

But closeted gay men are particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing. Your psyche is so split by decades of lies and deceptions and euphemisms that integrity and mental health suffer. No one should excuse Foley's creepy interactions; they are inexcusable, as is the alleged cover-up (although we shouldn't jump to conclusions yet about who knew what when). But there's a reason gay men in homophobic institutions behave in self-destructive ways.

Or think of it another way: what do the Vatican and the RNC have in common? Here's one potential list: entrenched homophobia, psychologically damaged closet cases, inappropriate behavior toward teens and minors ... and cover-ups designed entirely to retain power.

Here's the thing about politics — at least for me: when it begins to feel like a game, it also begins to feel like callous and even malicious manipulation. Maybe I'm just suffering from scandal fatigue... do we really need two or three per primetime season?


September 24, 2006


Theocrats, Moral Relativism & the Myth of Religious Tolerance, Part IV: Moral Recovery via Rediscovering the Meaning of Words

Donald B. Hawthorne

The comments sections of

Part I: The Difference Between Religious Freedom and Religious Tolerance
Part II: Are We Hostile Toward or Encouraging Religious Belief?
Part III: Consequences of Excluding Religion from the Public Square

of this Theocrats, Moral Relativism & the Myth of Religious Tolerance series, plus Justin's Favoring the Non-Participatory posting, offer up many statements which present a largely incoherent vision for how our society will develop, share, and sustain a set of core values necessary for it to exist in a cohesive manner.

Distilled to their essence, the comments highlighted four major issues:

1. Do moral truths (discovered via either faith or reason) exist and belong in the public square - and how should they affect our public life?

2. How do we define reason and religious freedom?

3. What does religious freedom - as defined in the 1st Amendment - mean and how has jurisprudence and societal practices changed our interpretation of religious freedom over the years?

4. What role and importance did the Founding Fathers assign to religion in our society and why?

This posting focuses on the first part of question #1 and subsequent postings in this series will address the remaining issues.

To provide a context before tackling question #1, here are some of the statements from the comments sections:

At no time do I want to interfere with your right or anyone else's right to practice [religion] as you choose...It is impossible for the state to speak on religion without giving the impression that one has been preferred. As you increase "liberty" for one, you decrease it for others. The Founders wanted balance for all...The Government does not have the right to allow one advocacy over another even if we can't figure out what the other is...We can never figure out what "all" advocacy is...Since the "all" universe cannot be determined, the only way to keep balance is the "no" universe...The Government cannot allow the advocacy of religion on public grounds because it limits the freedoms of others to express their religious views when they are not advocated. The non-advocated position has been de-established by the Government�How do you know with certainty that every religion has been asked to participate? You assume so because as a mainstream sect, you were. However, the guy who worships Kelly Clarkson as a demi-goddess was not...he was left out, his religion is valid, and therefore demeaned...Since everyone will not choose to participate...you cannot allow some belief system to obtain an advantage because they choose to participate. Therefore, no one gets to participate.

There are two striking features to these comments: First, they avoid any discussion of substantive issues such as freedom, justice, rights, and moral common sense. Instead, they devolve into ideas emphasizing how our government should restrict the freedom of citizens to express their beliefs in any public forum.

And when we equate the suggested religion of Kelly-Clarkson-as-a-demi-goddess with either the Jewish or Christian tradition, have not we just endorsed an unserious moral relativism which denies there are any moral truths discoverable by faith or reason? If there are no moral truths, have not then words like freedom and justice lost all meaning?

Reflections on Pope John Paul II's role in the demise of Communism - as highlighted in an article in the extended entry below - offers some guidance about where to begin:

Language, then, and the restoration of its relationship with reality were critical to the Communist collapse. This was no small feat since, for many in the West, words had lost their meaning. A recovery of meaning was essential before a real challenge could be presented...You cannot use "evil" as an adjective until you know it as a noun...the new struggle [today] is over the meaning of freedom...In Veritatis Splendor, the pope warned of "the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which would remove any sure moral reference point from political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgment of truth impossible." If truth is impossible, so are the "self-evident truths" upon which free government depends. Then, one can understand everything in terms of power and its manipulation...[John Paul II] raised the hope that moral recovery is possible by calling for it.

That loss of meaning means we - at least implicitly - deny the existence of moral truths and, by default, fail to address the societal consequences of the moral relativism now dominating the public square, as described by these words from Pope Benedict XVI:

No great, inspiring culture of the future can be built upon the moral principle of relativism. For at its bottom such a culture holds that nothing is better than anything else, and that all things are in themselves equally meaningless...

The culture of relativism invites its own destruction...by its own internal incoherence...

Yet, acknowledging the existence of moral truths is part of both our American and Western Civilization heritages. As Lee Harris writes, our heritage is a rich one:

Christian Europe, after all, was a fusion of diverse elements: the Hebrew tradition, the experience of the early Christian community, the Roman genius for law, order, and hierarchy, the Germanic barbarians' love of freedom, among many others. In this cultural amalgam, Greek philosophy certain played a role. St. Clement argued that Greek philosophy had been given by God to mankind as a second source of truth, comparable to the Hebrew revelation. Benedict argues that the "inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history."

Our heritage not only acknowledges the existence of moral truths but argues that these truths can be discovered by either faith or reason - thereby confirming what has been true for centuries: This public conversation about the role of moral truths in the public square does not require everyone to hold identical religious beliefs. It does require us to be morally serious and to firmly place moral relativism in the dustbin of history.

Moral truths belong in the public square to avoid the societal consequences of moral relativism. Only with a belief in moral truths can words become meaningful again and enable us to begin a public conversation about principles such as freedom and - from there - to discuss proper ways to introduce their meaning back into the public square.

As a first step toward the recovery of meaning, let's next ask ourselves whether we truly understand the meaning of freedom - including religious freedom - and reason as we explore how best to live our American experiment in ordered liberty.

Continue reading "Theocrats, Moral Relativism & the Myth of Religious Tolerance, Part IV: Moral Recovery via Rediscovering the Meaning of Words"

September 19, 2006


What the Heck...Even More Poll Numbers!

Marc Comtois

(Heads Up--or Nota Bene for the cultured sort--Andrew and I were obviously working the same story and posted them within 1 minute of each other. This proves we Anchor Rising Contributors don't collude!!!! I kept my post up because of the wonderfully witty and pithy observations....but I did truncate most of it to the "extended" section.)

As noted in the comments to my earlier "poll post" {and Andrew's new post--MAC} a new Brown poll (Darrell West) is out, with some encouraging numbers for both Governor Carcieri and Senator Chafee.

Continue reading "What the Heck...Even More Poll Numbers!"

September 17, 2006


Winning or Losing in Context

Justin Katz

Long before September 11, even before the 2000 elections, it seemed to me that our culture, and therefore society and government, was moving toward the right. This is not to say that I expected, or desired, a loss of the broad principles of fairness, mutual respect, and mutual responsibility that drove the leftward lurch. However, liberal policy assumptions are increasingly exposed as fantasies, liberal prescriptions as poison, and liberal demands as tyranny.

These specifics aren't critical to my intentions with this post, but it might be helpful for me to offer some respective examples:

  • An America that disarms itself through military erosion will not "lead by example" and thereby defuse the human tendency toward aggression.
  • Throwing money at those in need will not boost them toward autonomy; rather, it will mire them in a pernicious dependency.
  • Constricting our language and tipping scales on behalf of minority groups will not, despite the sheen provided by euphemism, lead to a utopian equality of outcomes and good will.

Again, we can (and do) debate these matters at length, but what I'm suggesting is that, from my perspective, the trend was toward Americans' learning from the excesses of the last century and reapplying discarded principles from our heritage (cleansed of the detritus, such as legitimized racism and institutional misogyny, that had lingered from less enlightened days). Indeed, I expected — and still expect — the next socio-cultural war to be between libertarians and social conservatives.

Both of those terms I treat broadly, the essential distinction between them being that libertarians (including "moderates" as a less intellectually rigorous subgroup) acknowledge liberal error when it comes to economics, national security, and a handful of other, mainly process-based, matters, but they do not believe, or will not believe, that a similar bill will come due from the liberal approach to social issues. They hope to correct matters of money and military, but they wish not to lose sexual license (which, by extension, requires that abortion remain an option and that marriage be defined essentially as a sexual coupling) and other forms of liberty that come more easily when unencumbered by traditional morality (such as the quest for immortality via embryonic stem cells and freedom from the decrepit, as with euthanasia).

Forgive my wide drift, here, but the point to which I've been heading is one inherently tied up with broad worldview, and it is this: The trends that were leading toward conservatism have not abated. Arguably, the Bush Administration delayed them. Arguably, September 11, with the intensity of focus that it created, distracted from them. Certainly, members of the GOP sought prematurely to capitalize on (and distort) them. But the trends remain; the bills are still coming due; and we should be careful not to mistake that which arguably delays and distracts — and to clutch it — as if it were that which we're increasingly finding ourselves to want.



George Will on Upholding the Idea of Liberty

Donald B. Hawthorne

George Will recently gave the keynote speech at the dinner for the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, which was given to former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar. A hard-copy version of the speech was published in the Summer 2006 edition of Cato's Letter; it is available online only via the Cato Institute's Audio Program. Here are some excerpts:

...in the words of M. Stanton Evans, a modern liberal is someone who doesn't care what you do as long as it's compulsory...O'Sullivan's Law -- named after John O'Sullivan, former editor of National Review -- which is that any institution that is not libertarian and classically liberal will, over time, become collectivist and statist, unless it is anchored in the kind of ideology that the Cato Institute vivifies in Washington.

The backsliding that we are witnessing today on the part of the party we formerly associated with the defense of liberty is astonishing and disheartening...

What's wrong with this picture is that the liberal and conservative arguments have become radically blurred. Modern conservatism was defined in reaction against the New Deal and renewed in reaction against the Great Society. Conservatives spoke the language of Jefferson. They believed that limited government, government not in the grip of hubris and what Hayek called the fatal conceit of the ability to anticipate and control the future, governs best.

But by the year 2000, we had forgotten that argument. The two candidates that year agreed that the task of the next President would be to strengthen and expand the emblematic achievements of the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare. Something had gone radically wrong, and I think I know what it is.

We, as a country, are now in the grip of five kinds of politics that I want very briefly to discuss, if only to alarm you and depress you. I call them the politics of assuming a ladder, the politics of rent seeking, otherwise known as the war against Wal-Mart; the politics of learned dependency; the politics of speech rationing, and politics of orchid building. [NB: Will's thoughts on these five kinds of politics can be found in the Extended Entry below.]

Here is the good news, and it is profoundly good. First of all, as Mart Laar, our honoree tonight, can tell you, all of us in this room live in a world fundamentally unlike the world in which our parents lived. We live in a world where the American model is the only serious model for running a modern society. Fascism is gone. Communism is gone. Socialism is gone. Al-Qaeda has no rival model of modernity. Al-Qaeda is a howl of rage against modernity.

We had an uncommonly clear social experiment after the Second World War. We divided the city of Berlin, the country of Germany, the continent of Europe, indeed, the whole world, and had a test. On the one side, the collectivist model, a society run by command, by elites with a monopoly on information. On the other side, what deserves to be called the American model. It has the maximum dispersal of decisionmaking based on the maximum dispersal of information, with markets allocating wealth and opportunity. The results are in. They're decisive. We're here. They're gone. The Soviet Union tried to plant Marxism in Europe with bayonets for 70 years. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe...

...Social learning is slow, but it does occur, and it is driven by institutions like Cato.

Furthermore, the American people remain astonishingly sound in their fundamental values. They are not egalitarians beyond their strong belief in equality of opportunity, not result...

Well, so far, so good. We have endured. And we have endured because institutions like Cato and people like Milton Friedman, astonishing force multipliers, take in the basic ideas of the American founding, the basic principles of limited government, and demonstrate their continuing relevance and applicability to the modern world...

The moral of the story is that liberty is an acquired taste. We have acquired it. We can lose it. But we won't lose it as long as we continue to honor people the way we are honoring one tonight and the way the Cato Institute honors our Founders by keeping their ideas vivid.

More on the American Founding here and here. Will's description of the five kinds of politics follows below.

Continue reading "George Will on Upholding the Idea of Liberty"

September 10, 2006


Theocrats, Moral Relativism & the Myth of Religious Tolerance, Part II: Are We Hostile Toward or Encouraging Religious Belief?

Donald B. Hawthorne

In a comment to the Part I posting, Joe Mahn writes:

...From my simple perspective and I think in the context of the actual events of the time religious freedom meant that no State in the Union under the Constitution could force, by law, any citizen to participate in, confess, or otherwise practice any particular State sanctioned or preferred religion. It would also forbid the creation of a State religion with attendant threats of incarceration or imposition of any punishment upon said citizens.

The objective of these freedoms was to allow citizens to believe what they wanted with no interference from the State as well as guarantee that States not mandate one religion, or sect within a religion, over another.

From that point going forward governments across the land, from municipal to federal, acknowledged God, His laws, and many other events and rituals of the Christian faith with little or no dissent. That all changed in the late 1940's when the US Supreme Court violated the Constitution by interfering in the rights of the sovereign states and prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

It's been all downhill from there....

Let's give a specific example of how much things have changed in our understanding of the relationship between the State and religion over the last 50 years: Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was know as a very liberal justice of the court. Yet, in Zorach v. Clauson, a 1952 case, he wrote for the Court with these words:

New York City has a program which permits its public schools to release students during the school day so that they may leave the school buildings and school grounds and go to religious centers for religious instruction or devotional exercises. A student is released on written request of his parents. Those not released stay in the classrooms. The churches make weekly reports to the schools, sending a list of children who have been released from public school but who have not reported for religious instruction...

It takes obtuse reasoning to inject any issue of the "free exercise" of religion into the present case. No one is forced to go to the religious classroom, and no religious exercise or instruction is brought to the classrooms of the public schools. A student need not take religious instruction. He is left to his own desires as to the manner or time of his religious devotions, if any...

Moreover...we do not see how New York by this type of "released time" program has made a law respecting an establishment of religion within the meaning of the First Amendment...

And so far as interference with the "free exercise" of religion and an "establishment" of religion are concerned, the separation must be complete and unequivocal. The First Amendment within the scope of its coverage permits no exception; the prohibition is absolute. The First Amendment, however, does not say that, in every and all respects there shall be a separation of Church and State. Rather, it studiously defines the manner, the specific ways, in which there shall be no concert or union or dependency one on the other. That is the common sense of the matter. Otherwise the state and religion would be aliens to each other -- hostile, suspicious, and even unfriendly. Churches could not be required to pay even property taxes. Municipalities would not be permitted to render police or fire protection to religious groups. Policemen who helped parishioners into their places of worship would violate the Constitution. Prayers in our legislative halls; the appeals to the Almighty in the messages of the Chief Executive; the proclamations making Thanksgiving Day a holiday; "so help me God" in our courtroom oaths -- these and all other references to the Almighty that run through our laws, our public rituals, our ceremonies would be flouting the First Amendment. A fastidious atheist or agnostic could even object to the supplication with which the Court opens each session: "God save the United States and this Honorable Court."

We would have to press the concept of separation of Church and State to these extremes to condemn the present law on constitutional grounds. The nullification of this law would have wide and profound effects. A Catholic student applies to his teacher for permission to leave the school during hours on a Holy Day of Obligation to attend a mass. A Jewish student asks his teacher for permission to be excused for Yom Kippur. A Protestant wants the afternoon off for a family baptismal ceremony. In each case, the teacher requires parental consent in writing. In each case, the teacher, in order to make sure the student is not a truant, goes further and requires a report from the priest, the rabbi, or the minister. The teacher, in other words, cooperates in a religious program to the extent of making it possible for her students to participate in it. Whether she does it occasionally for a few students, regularly for one, or pursuant to a systematized program designed to further the religious needs of all the students does not alter the character of the act.

We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. We guarantee the freedom to worship as one chooses. We make room for as wide a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem necessary. We sponsor an attitude on the part of government that shows no partiality to any one group and that lets each flourish according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma. When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe. Government may not finance religious groups nor undertake religious instruction nor blend secular and sectarian education nor use secular institutions to force one or some religion on any person. But we find no constitutional requirement which makes it necessary for government to be hostile to religion and to throw its weight against efforts to widen the effective scope of religious influence...

But we cannot expand it to cover the present released time program unless separation of Church and State means that public institutions can make no adjustments of their schedules to accommodate the religious needs of the people. We cannot read into the Bill of Rights such a philosophy of hostility to religion.

How things change. Today, we hear examples of how a Christian student club cannot even meet after school on school property - while a gay & lesbian student club can. The issue for many of us is not the latter club's ability to meet. Rather, it is the exclusion of the former club's ability to meet.

Unfortunately, in yet another tribute to our lack of knowledge of American history, enough time has passed with these current practices being the norm so that most American's think it was never otherwise.


September 9, 2006


Theocrats, Moral Relativism & the Myth of Religious Tolerance, Part I: The Difference Between Religious Freedom & Religious Tolerance

Donald B. Hawthorne

Do we believe in reason and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong? Do we believe in and teach the uniqueness of our Western Civilization tradition? Or, has the relativism of multiculturalism dumbed it all down to where there are no standards of excellence or truth discoverable by some combination of reason or faith?

In Having it Both Ways on "Values", William Voegli writes:

...The more practical problem with the fact-value distinction is that no one, including those who espouse it, actually believes it. No one is really "value-neutral" with respect to his own values, or regards them as values, arbitrary preferences that one just happens to be saddled with...

The problem with relativism is its insistence that all moral impulses are created equal - that there are no reasons to choose the standards of the wise and good over those of the deranged and cruel. A world organized according to that principle would be anarchic, uninhabitable. As Leo Strauss wrote, the attempt to "regard nihilism as a minor inconvenience" is untenable.

The problem with relativists is that they always dismiss other people's beliefs, but spare their own moral preferences from their doctrine's scoffing...

Justice, rights, moral common sense - either these are things we can have intelligent discussions about or they aren't...

In The Myth of Relgious Tolerance, Thomas Williams writes:

The vehement, sometimes acrimonious debates that accompanied the drafting of the Vatican II declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, yielded an exceptionally precise and carefully worded document. Noteworthy in the 5,700-word declaration is the absence of even a single reference to religious "tolerance" or "toleration."

The choice of religious "freedom" or "liberty" as the proper category for discussion and the exclusion of "tolerance" flies in the face of the societal trend to deal with church-state issues in terms of religious tolerance...

Why Tolerance Isn't Enough

Religion is a good to be embraced and defended - not an evil to be put up with. No one speaks of tolerating chocolate pudding or a spring walk in the park. By speaking of religious "tolerance," we make religion an unfortunate fact to be borne - like noisy neighbors and crowded buses - not a blessing to be celebrated.

Our modern ideas of religious tolerance sprang from the European Enlightenment. A central tenet of this movement was the notion of progress, understood as the overcoming of the ignorance of superstition and religion to usher in the age of reason and science...

Since religion was the primary cause of conflict and war, the argument went, peace could only be achieved through a lessening of people's passion for religion and commitment to specific doctrines...

The language of tolerance was first proposed to describe the attitude that confessional states, such as Anglican England and Catholic France, should adopt toward Christians of other persuasions (though no mention was made of tolerance for non-Christian faiths). The assumption was that the state had recognized a certain confession as "true" and put up with other practices and beliefs as a concession to those in error. This led, however, to the employment of tolerance language toward religion. The philosophes would downplay or even ridicule religion in the firm belief that it would soon disappear altogether. Thus, separation of church and state becomes separation of public life and religious belief. Religion was excluded from public conversation and relegated strictly to the intimacy of home and chapel. Religious tolerance is a myth, but a myth imposed by an anti-religious intellectual elite.

Continue reading "Theocrats, Moral Relativism & the Myth of Religious Tolerance, Part I: The Difference Between Religious Freedom & Religious Tolerance"

September 4, 2006


"Who You Gonna Call?" The Little Platoons

The convenient cliche propagated by many people is that those who truly care about the needy will be supportive of new or expanded government programs. Those who oppose this approach of throwing endlessly increasing sums of money at social programs are commonly labeled as heartless and lacking in compassion. That is not only a false label but it shows a lack of knowledge about American history as well as a lack of understanding about how the incentives created by many large government programs are fundamentally flawed.

There are two sets of answers to the challenge about how best to care for the less fortunate in our society. The first is the empirical data that shows many/most large social programs, like those generated by the Great Society, just don't work. The recent public debate about welfare reform, as it celebrated its 10-year anniversary, has driven this point home in spades. The second is to study our past and apply lessons from its successes to meeting social needs in today's world.

Let's review both answers, beginning with the second answer.

When we study the past, Alexis de Tocqueville's words in Democracy in America are a good place to start:

Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types - religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fetes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

Or at least we used to think more that way...

In his November 2004 letter in Acton Notes, Rev. Robert Sirico contrasted the two alternative world views:

When people say "call the authorities," they generally mean governmental officials - usually, the police. It is just a colloquialism, but do we understand the implication? The suggestion is that government and its many agents trump all other authority in our lives - or, even, that they have supremacy in society. That is far from true.

Day to day, public officials do not have the greatest impact on our lives. At home, parents set ground rules. In school, teachers raise expectations. At work, we may be managed by virtue of a labor contract. In our neighborhood, we agree to observe the rules of the housing covenant.

Our civic associations and choices of faith also imply the desire to conform behavior to the wishes of the group at large...

Robert Nisbet warned decades ago that as civil authority gains power, private and voluntary authority will be less influential in our lives. This process results in tension between citizens and the state, and we know who will win that struggle. We need intermediating institutions of authority to enforce order and give coherence to our disparate wishes.

The free society is not properly characterized as one of individuals. It is, instead, made up of free men and women who choose to involve themselves in a wide range of structures of influence. If we care about freedom, the government should be the authority of last resort...

Senator Santorum and British MP Iain Duncan Smith have outlined an alternative vision to the large government program approach in Let's Deploy the 'Little Platoons': A conservative vision of social justice:

For all the differences between the United States and Europe, we share a common challenge: how to improve the social well-being of our citizens without a massive growth in the size and intrusiveness of government. We're convinced that conservatism--properly understood--offers the surest road to social justice.

In many conservative circles, "social justice" is synonymous with socialism or radical individualism. No wonder: For decades, the political left has used it as a Trojan horse for its big-state agenda. Yet the wreckage of their policies is obvious...

Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond are charting a new vision of social justice. It recognizes that the problems caused or aggravated by the growth in government cannot be corrected by a crude reduction in its size. Policy must also deliberately foster the growth of what Edmund Burke called "the little platoons" of civil society: families, neighborhood associations, private enterprises, charities and churches. These are the real source of economic growth and social vitality.

The social justice agenda we endorse is grounded in social conservatism. That means helping the poor discover the dignity of work, rather than making them wards of the state. It means locking up violent criminals, but offering nonviolent offenders lots of help to become responsible citizens. It endorses a policy of "zero tolerance" toward drug use and sexual trafficking, yet insists that those struggling with all manner of addictions can start their lives afresh.

In America, this vision emerged a decade ago with bold conservative initiatives aimed at empowering individuals and grassroots groups helping the nation's neediest, such as the Community Renewal Act and other antipoverty initiatives. Today's CARE Act is part of the same tradition...

...These efforts seek to empower individuals and families, not bureaucracies, and unleash the creativity and generosity of neighbor helping neighbor...

Addressing these social problems that have worsened over many decades will take years. "The most important of all revolutions," Burke wrote, is "a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions." Yet we believe that social-justice conservatism can produce societies that are more humane than anything liberalism could accomplish. As we build a conservative alternative--a vision informed both by idealism and realism--we have evidence, experience and common sense on our side.

Further thoughts on this subject can be found in What is Social Justice? and Rediscovering Civil Society, Part I: Mediating Structures and the Dilemmas of the Welfare State. In the first posting link, Michael Novak writes on why volunatry associations are so important:

We must rule out any use of "social justice" that does not attach to the habits (that is, virtues) of individuals. Social justice is a virtue, an attribute of individuals, or it is a fraud. And if Tocqueville is right that "the principle of association is the first law of democracy," then social justice is the first virtue of democracy, for it is the habit of putting the principle of association into daily practice. Neglect of it, Hayek wrote, has moral consequences:
It is one of the greatest weaknesses of our time that we lack the patience and faith to build up voluntary organizations for purposes which we value highly, and immediately ask the government to bring about by coercion (or with means raised by coercion) anything that appears as desirable to large numbers. Yet nothing can have a more deadening effect on real participation by the citizens than if government, instead of merely providing the essential framework of spontaneous growth, becomes monolithic and takes charge of the provision for all needs, which can be provided for only by the common effort of many.

Returning to the first issue highlighted at the beginning of this posting, we must ask why the large government programs typically fail. It can be explained by comparing the differences between the incentives created by coerced charity versus voluntary charity:

Coerced "charity" via government taxation has several corrosive effects:
First, it incentivizes citizens to relinquish all personal responsibility to care for or get involved in supporting the needy in their community. After all, "the government" is responsible for doing that.

Second, it assumes that a distant bureaucrat can better judge how to structure the policy designed to meet the true needs of our neighbor whom he has never met. This is the knowledge/information problem raised over the years by both Hayek and Sowell.

Third, the problem in the second example also leads to higher economic costs due to more ineffective programs, continued propagation of such poor policies, and the ability for the programs to be affected by remote sources of power whose self-interest can often be anything but truly helping the needy neighbor.

Fourth, it also harms the recipient of the charity, because appreciation will soon be replaced with a feeling of entitlement.

On the other hand, voluntary charity draws people in through the formation of associations who are willingly bound by the same altruistic purpose. Such voluntary associations end up developing a refined sense of moral responsibility at the individual and group levels. And by teaching people to care and receive the joy and satisfaction that only comes from giving personally, people are touched in emotionally and spiritually powerful ways - and will be more likely to continue to reach out to others.



"Who You Gonna Call?" The Little Platoons

Donald B. Hawthorne

The convenient cliche propagated by many people is that those who truly care about the needy will be supportive of new or expanded government programs. Those who oppose this approach of throwing endlessly increasing sums of money at social programs are commonly labeled as heartless and lacking in compassion. That is not only a false label but it shows a lack of knowledge about American history as well as a lack of understanding about how the incentives created by many large government programs are fundamentally flawed.

There are two sets of answers to the challenge about how best to care for the less fortunate in our society. The first is the empirical data that shows many/most large social programs, like those generated by the Great Society, just don't work. The recent public debate about welfare reform, as it celebrated its 10-year anniversary, has driven this point home in spades. The second is to study our past and apply lessons from its successes to meeting social needs in today's world.

Let's review both answers, beginning with the second answer.

When we study the past, Alexis de Tocqueville's words in Democracy in America are a good place to start:

Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types - religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fetes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

Or at least we used to think more that way...

In his November 2004 letter in Acton Notes, Rev. Robert Sirico contrasted the two alternative world views:

When people say "call the authorities," they generally mean governmental officials - usually, the police. It is just a colloquialism, but do we understand the implication? The suggestion is that government and its many agents trump all other authority in our lives - or, even, that they have supremacy in society. That is far from true.

Day to day, public officials do not have the greatest impact on our lives. At home, parents set ground rules. In school, teachers raise expectations. At work, we may be managed by virtue of a labor contract. In our neighborhood, we agree to observe the rules of the housing covenant.

Our civic associations and choices of faith also imply the desire to conform behavior to the wishes of the group at large...

Robert Nisbet warned decades ago that as civil authority gains power, private and voluntary authority will be less influential in our lives. This process results in tension between citizens and the state, and we know who will win that struggle. We need intermediating institutions of authority to enforce order and give coherence to our disparate wishes.

The free society is not properly characterized as one of individuals. It is, instead, made up of free men and women who choose to involve themselves in a wide range of structures of influence. If we care about freedom, the government should be the authority of last resort...

Senator Santorum and British MP Iain Duncan Smith have outlined an alternative vision to the large government program approach in Let's Deploy the 'Little Platoons': A conservative vision of social justice:

For all the differences between the United States and Europe, we share a common challenge: how to improve the social well-being of our citizens without a massive growth in the size and intrusiveness of government. We're convinced that conservatism--properly understood--offers the surest road to social justice.

In many conservative circles, "social justice" is synonymous with socialism or radical individualism. No wonder: For decades, the political left has used it as a Trojan horse for its big-state agenda. Yet the wreckage of their policies is obvious...

Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond are charting a new vision of social justice. It recognizes that the problems caused or aggravated by the growth in government cannot be corrected by a crude reduction in its size. Policy must also deliberately foster the growth of what Edmund Burke called "the little platoons" of civil society: families, neighborhood associations, private enterprises, charities and churches. These are the real source of economic growth and social vitality.

The social justice agenda we endorse is grounded in social conservatism. That means helping the poor discover the dignity of work, rather than making them wards of the state. It means locking up violent criminals, but offering nonviolent offenders lots of help to become responsible citizens. It endorses a policy of "zero tolerance" toward drug use and sexual trafficking, yet insists that those struggling with all manner of addictions can start their lives afresh.

In America, this vision emerged a decade ago with bold conservative initiatives aimed at empowering individuals and grassroots groups helping the nation's neediest, such as the Community Renewal Act and other antipoverty initiatives. Today's CARE Act is part of the same tradition...

...These efforts seek to empower individuals and families, not bureaucracies, and unleash the creativity and generosity of neighbor helping neighbor...

Addressing these social problems that have worsened over many decades will take years. "The most important of all revolutions," Burke wrote, is "a revolution in sentiments, manners and moral opinions." Yet we believe that social-justice conservatism can produce societies that are more humane than anything liberalism could accomplish. As we build a conservative alternative--a vision informed both by idealism and realism--we have evidence, experience and common sense on our side.

Further thoughts on this subject can be found in What is Social Justice? and Rediscovering Civil Society, Part I: Mediating Structures and the Dilemmas of the Welfare State. In the first posting link, Michael Novak writes on why volunatry associations are so important:

We must rule out any use of "social justice" that does not attach to the habits (that is, virtues) of individuals. Social justice is a virtue, an attribute of individuals, or it is a fraud. And if Tocqueville is right that "the principle of association is the first law of democracy," then social justice is the first virtue of democracy, for it is the habit of putting the principle of association into daily practice. Neglect of it, Hayek wrote, has moral consequences:
It is one of the greatest weaknesses of our time that we lack the patience and faith to build up voluntary organizations for purposes which we value highly, and immediately ask the government to bring about by coercion (or with means raised by coercion) anything that appears as desirable to large numbers. Yet nothing can have a more deadening effect on real participation by the citizens than if government, instead of merely providing the essential framework of spontaneous growth, becomes monolithic and takes charge of the provision for all needs, which can be provided for only by the common effort of many.

Returning to the first issue highlighted at the beginning of this posting, we must ask why the large government programs typically fail. It can be explained by comparing the differences between the incentives created by coerced charity versus voluntary charity:

Coerced "charity" via government taxation has several corrosive effects:
First, it incentivizes citizens to relinquish all personal responsibility to care for or get involved in supporting the needy in their community. After all, "the government" is responsible for doing that.

Second, it assumes that a distant bureaucrat can better judge how to structure the policy designed to meet the true needs of our neighbor whom he has never met. This is the knowledge/information problem raised over the years by both Hayek and Sowell.

Third, the problem in the second example also leads to higher economic costs due to more ineffective programs, continued propagation of such poor policies, and the ability for the programs to be affected by remote sources of power whose self-interest can often be anything but truly helping the needy neighbor.

Fourth, it also harms the recipient of the charity, because appreciation will soon be replaced with a feeling of entitlement.

On the other hand, voluntary charity draws people in through the formation of associations who are willingly bound by the same altruistic purpose. Such voluntary associations end up developing a refined sense of moral responsibility at the individual and group levels. And by teaching people to care and receive the joy and satisfaction that only comes from giving personally, people are touched in emotionally and spiritually powerful ways - and will be more likely to continue to reach out to others.


September 2, 2006


The International & Domestic Impact of Reaganomics 25 Years Later

An August 12 Wall Street Journal editorial entitled Reaganomics at 25 (available for a fee) highlights the enduring positive international effect of President Reagan's supply-side economic policies:

Twenty-five years ago this weekend, Ronald Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act. The bill cut personal income tax rates by 25% across the board, indexed tax brackets for inflation and reduced the corporate income tax rate. The anniversary is worth commemorating as a seminal moment that continues to influence policy for the better in the U.S., and around the globe.

The achievement of Reaganomics can only be fully understood by recalling the miserable state of affairs a quarter-century ago. Newsweek summarized the national mood when it wrote in 1981 that Reagan "inherits the most dangerous economic crisis since Franklin Roosevelt took office 48 years ago."

That was no exaggeration. The economy was enduring a cycle of rising inflation with growing levels of unemployment. Remember 20% mortgage interest rates? Terms like "stagflation" and "misery index" entered the popular vocabulary, and declinists of various kinds were in the saddle. The perception of American economic weakness encouraged the Soviet empire to ever bolder adventures...

The reigning Keynesian policy consensus had no answer for this predicament, and so a new group of economic ideas came to the fore. Actually, they were old, classical economic ideas that were rediscovered via the likes of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, Arthur Laffer, Robert Mundell, and such policy activists in Washington as Norman Ture and Jack Kemp...

For every policy goal, you need a policy lever...Monetary restraint was needed to break inflation, while cuts in marginal tax rates would restore the incentives to save and invest. With Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve and Reagan at the White House, those two levers became the essence of the "supply-side" policy mix.

The results have been better than even some of its supporters hoped. The Dow Jones Industrial Average first broke 1,000 in 1972, but a decade later it was barely above 800 -- one of the worst and most enduring bear markets in history. In the 25 years since Reaganomics, however, the Dow has climbed to about 11,000, accounting for an increase in national wealth on the order of $25 trillion...American living standards have risen steadily, and U.S. businesses have created entire industries that didn't exist a generation ago.

Obviously, the economic policy path from 1981 to the present day has not been a straight line. The biggest detour occurred from 1990 through 1994, when George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton forgot the Gipper's lesson and raised marginal income-tax rates; they suffered for it in the elections of 1992 and 1994. The arrival of the Gingrich Republicans in Congress stopped this slow-motion repeal of Reaganomics, however, and even helped to extend it at the margin with a cut in the capital-gains tax rate to 20% in 1997.

Adherents of Rubinomics -- after Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin -- are still not converts, arguing that tax increases are virtuous if they reduce the deficit...But even the Rubinites haven't dared to repeal indexing for inflation (which pushed taxpayers via "bracket creep" into ever-higher tax rates), and even the most ardent liberals don't propose to return to the top pre-Reagan income tax rate of 70%. They also now understand that, at some point along the Laffer Curve, high rates begin to yield less tax revenue. The bipartisan consensus in favor of sound money has also held.

Thus today, the top marginal personal and corporate tax rates are 35%, compared with 70% and 48% in 1981. In the late 1970s the tax on dividends was 70% and the capital gains rate was 50%; now they're both 15%. These reductions have increased the rate of return on capital, and hence some $3 trillion more was invested by foreigners in the U.S. between 1981 and 2005 than was invested by Americans abroad. One result: 40 million new jobs, more than the rest of the industrialized world combined.

The rest of the world, meanwhile, has followed the Gipper down the tax-cut curve. Daniel Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation finds that the average personal income tax rate in the industrialized world is now 43%, versus 67% in 1980. The average top corporate tax rate has fallen to 29% from 48%. This decline in global tax rates has been the economic counterpart to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most of Eastern Europe has adopted flat tax rates of 25% or lower, and the Russians now have a flat income tax of 13%. In Old Europe, Ireland's corporate and personal income tax rate cuts have helped generate the swiftest economic growth in the EU.

...In his 1989 farewell address, Reagan said that "People say that I was a great communicator. It would be more accurate to say that I communicated great ideas." He was right, and a remarkable global prosperity has followed in his wake. The challenge for current and future political leaders is not to forget it.

What about the enduring effect of these supply-side economic policies on domestic policies? That question is answered by Christopher DeMuth, President of the American Enterprise Institute, in Reaganomics: Hows It Going?: Two wins, a draw, and two losses (also available for a fee) published in the September 11 issue of National Review:

When Ronald Reagan came to Washington, he brought with him a conservative school of economics. This school emphasized, much more thoroughly and systematically than those associated with previous presidents of either party, the advantages of private markets, the disadvantages of government spending and regulation, and the role of private economic incentives in advancing or undermining government policies. As we pass the 25th anniversary of the August 1981 tax cuts, it is appropriate to assess Reagans economic record. My scorecard shows two wins, one draw, and two losses.
Continue reading "The International & Domestic Impact of Reaganomics 25 Years Later"

August 30, 2006


GOP Closing the Gap Because of Security and ....Pork?

Marc Comtois

A recent USA Today/Gallup Poll showed that the gap between support for a generic Democrat and generic Republicans had narrowed to 2% (47%-45%, respectively). As the related USA Today story pithily explained:

The arrest of terror suspects in London has helped buoy President Bush to his highest approval rating in six months and dampen Democratic congressional prospects to their lowest in a year.
In short, as security issues came back to the forefront, the general public re-assessed their priorities and--as has historically been the case--tend to look more favorably upon the GOP with regards to the future of Iraq and the War on Terror. Don Lambro agrees with "security" angle, but also adds this:
Another factor behind the Republicans' end-of-summer rise in the polls: They have spent the past month reminding voters, particularly their party's base, what they have done for their states and districts. Despite all the justified criticism about wasteful pork-barrel spending, the fact remains that most voters like their tax dollars coming back to them in bridge, road and other public-works projects and members aren't shy about reminding them about the bacon they've brought home.
We've certainly seen this born out as one of the central pillars of Senator Chafee's reelection strategy. It's a tried and true strategy and is effective in garnering support from most average voters (like RI Independents), as Lambro's analysis of the poll seems to bear out . It also is in stark contrast to Mayor Laffey's "no pork" approach, which is appealing to the more conservative GOP base (the Porkbusters crowd). Two different messages that appeal to two different sections of the GOP primary electorate. Which message will ultimately take hold? As with all else in this crazy race, it all depends on turnout.


August 28, 2006


The Source of the Valerie Plame Leak

Carroll Andrew Morse

If anyone is still interested (probably not, because it looks like it wont hurt Dick Cheney or Karl Rove), the world apparently now knows the source of the Valerie Plame leak. National Reviews Byron York reports

According to Hubris, the new book by the Nations David Corn and Newsweeks Michael Isikoff, [Secretary of State Colin Powell] had been told by his top deputy and close friend Richard Armitage that he, Armitage, leaked the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak. Armitage had, in other words, set off the CIA-leak affair.
Apparently, the Justice Department has been aware that Armitage was the original leaker since October of 2003, but went ahead with a full investigation, including special prosecutor, anyway.

Heres a bare bones timeline of Armitage's involvement compiled from Yorks article

  1. On at least two separate occasions in 2003, Armitage discusses CIA employee Valerie Plame's role in helping her husband obtain an assignment investigating Iraqi uranium purches in Africa, once with the Chicago Sun-Times' Robert Novak and once with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward. Novak uses this fact in a July 2003 column.
  2. In October 2003, during the very early stages of the investigation to determine who revealed Plame's connection to the CIA, Armitage admits to being Novak's source, but does not disclose the separate Woodward leak.
  3. Armitage eventually discloses the Woodward leak in November 2005.
York speculates that Lewis Libby, the only person indicted in this matter, was targeted by the prosecution because his story was inconsistent with the stories being told by the people who had received their information via the Novak leak while the prosecution was unaware of the existence of the Woodward leak. (The implication, I think, is that Libby learned of the Plame-Wilson connection from someone in the Woodward channel, if not Woodward himself).

But, as York points out, why Armitages initial incomplete testimony was treated as an oversight while problems with Libbys story have been treated as criminal activity is unknown to anyone but the special prosecutor.


August 22, 2006


A Republican Strategist Discusses the Northeast

Carroll Andrew Morse

Last week, the Wall Street Journals Kimberly Strassel hinted at the national Republican Party's willingness to totally give up on the Northeast

Laffey supporters are betting that if he wins the primary, the GOP establishment will offer its support....It's still a long shot, although at least some Republican strategists are nonplussed. They've long argued the party should write off the Northeast, and focus on consolidating its gains in the South and Midwest.
Now, I dont know that Rod Martin lists Republican Strategist on his resume, but he is the Executive Vice-President of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies and the founder of the TheVanguard.org, a national-level online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us. Mr. Martin has thought long-term about both the policy ends the conservative movement should be focusing its energies on and about the best political strategy for achieving them.

I asked Mr. Martin to comment on Ms. Strassel's article, asking specifically if he believed that Republican strategists were ready to write off the Northeast and, if so, was it a smart thing for them to be doing. Here is his reply on the challenge of and the hope for Northeastern conservatism

Rod Martin: The problem is complicated. Conservatives outside the Northeast see the Northeast as the biggest single problem within the Party: liberal, establishment, looking down on and working to thwart conservatives (and particularly Christians). Rightly or wrongly, the faces of Northeast Republicanism they see are Christie Whitman, Arlen Specter, and Lincoln Chafee.

And that's not the worst of it. Conservative officeholders in Washington feel compelled to back leftists like Chafee (and Arlen Specter) to keep the numerical majority. In so doing, they choke off the growth of Northeastern conservatism, infuriate their national base, and make themselves hostage to their enemies.

But the bottom line in the Northeast is the same as it is everywhere else: eventually, ideology always matters, and eventually, if the voters want a Democrat, they're going to vote for a real one. Thwarting true conservatives like Steve Laffey is self-defeating on every possible level, not least the level of real voters in Rhode Island. The conservative message is universal, and universally needed. Is the Kelo decision any less onerous to Northeasterners than to Texans? Is the war on terror really harder to grasp in the shadow of the Twin Towers than it is in Idaho? Is sound economic policy any harder to explain in Connecticut than in Alabama(or Poland, or Hong Kong)?

Are we really supposed to believe that universal truths, increasingly accepted around the world, cannot be sold in the birthplace of American liberty?

Quite the contrary. I think we need to do all we can for our Northeastern brothers, to help them make the case at home and to demonstrate the power of that case elsewhere. And I think it's high time we helped them root out their home-grown leftists -- who are losing the old lefty Republican base to the Democrats anyway -- and finance guys like Steve Laffey who deserve the chance to show the way.


August 14, 2006


Michael Barone on the Incumbent Rule

Carroll Andrew Morse

A few weeks ago, I postulated that there may exist a significant number of independent voters in the New England electorate who tell pollsters that they're "undecided", even if they're 90% sure who they're going to vote for. I called this the theory of the surly New England independent. Last week, U.S News and World Reports Michael Barone offered a similar theory (but without the regional angle) involving "stubborn" moderate and conservative voters to explain why incumbent Joe Lieberman did much better than any pre-election poll indicated.

Of course, because a brilliant political mind like Mr. Barone reaches a conclusion similar to the one I've reached doesnt prove anything. Then again, he is analyzing a result that occurred in New England...

It may be time to revise one of the cardinal rules of poll interpretation--that an incumbent is not going to get a higher percentage in an election than he got in the polls. Lieberman was clocked at 41 and 45 percent in recent Quinnipiac polls; he got 48 percent in the primary election. The assumption has been that voters know an incumbent, and any voter who is not for him will vote against him. But the numbers suggest that Lieberman's campaigning over the last weekend may have boosted his numbers-or that the good feelings many Democratic voters have had for him over the years may have overcome their opposition to his stands on Iraq and foreign policy.

Another possibility: The left is noisy, assertive, in your face, quick to declare its passionate support. Voters on the right and in the center may be quieter but then stubbornly resist the instruction of the mainstream media and show up on Election Day and vote Republican, as they did in 2004, or for Lieberman, as some apparently did this week.

Encouraging news for Governor Carcieri and Senator Chafee, perhaps?


July 31, 2006


The Risen Doctrine: If a Government Department is Not Working, Where do you Look to Find the Problem?

Carroll Andrew Morse

Last week, Insight on the News (a conservative weekly affiliated with the Washington Times) ran an item alleging a serious rift between Newt Gingrich and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice

Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has reversed the administrations national security and foreign policy agenda.

The conservatives, who include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle and leading current and former members of the Pentagon and National Security Council

The reference to Gingrich was based on a quote from Gingrichs July 16 appearance on Meet the Press
Mr. Gingrich agrees and said Miss Rice's inexperience and lack of resolve were demonstrated in the aftermath of the North Korean launch of seven short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missiles in July. He suggested that Miss Rice was a key factor in the lack of a firm U.S. response.

"North Korea firing missiles," Mr. Gingrich said. "You say there will be consequences. There are none. We are in the early stages of World War III. Our bureaucracies are not responding fast enough. We don't have the right attitude."

Robert Bluey of the Human Events Right Angle Blog was skpetical of Insight's interpretation of Gingrich's meaning. The jump from the direct quote -- where Secretary Rice is not mentioned -- to the anti-Rice meaning implied by Insight was a large one, so Mr. Bluey contacted Gingrichs staff in order to clarify. They confirmed that Gingrich's criticism of the bureaucracy was not intended as criticism of Secretary Rice
Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler disputed a story from conservative magazine Insight on the News .Newt is supporting Rice, he told HUMAN EVENTS. So far she is saying and doing the right things.
A response to Mr. Bluey from Insight editor Jeff Kuhner explaining his magazine's interpretation of Gingrich's remarks included this fascinating (at least to me) statement
Condi Rice is the head of the State Department. If [Gingrich is] not happy with the policies of the State Department, then I don't see how he could be happy with Condi.
In Mr. Kuhner's response, we see another case of a journalistic assumption we can call the Risen Doctrine: what happens within government bureaucracy, below the level of the leadership, is either beyond reproach or maybe just not worth reporting on; failures within a government departments should always be assumed to be failures of leadership to set proper policies, and never to be poor execution of the policies set by the leadership.

Its not breaking news to say that no respectable journalist accepts the reverse of the Risen Doctrine -- assume first that problems within a government department originate from the bureaucracys inability to properly execute, and not from the leaderships bad choice of direction. Journalists would argue (quite rightly) that leaders not continually called upon to explain and correct their errors in public inevitably become sloppy and inefficient and probably worse.

But the same sloppines and worse will happen to permanent bureaucrats never held accountable. Problems in the bureaucratic execution of policy will not be corrected if the public never learns about them. And the public will not learn about the problems bureaucracies have turning policies into effective actions for as long as the mainstream press remains thoroughly uncurious about them.



Karl Rove Offers Hope...or not?

Marc Comtois

At first, being of a cynical mind this morning, I wondered if Karl Rove (via Dale Light) had ever been to Rhode Island when I read his recent statements at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management. But upon further consideration, I think he truly hit on one truism, which I've highlighted:

"There are some in politics who hold that voters are dumb, ill informed and easily misled, that voters can be manipulated by a clever ad or a smart line," said Rove, who is credited with President Bush's victories in the 2000 and 2004 elections. "I've seen this cynicism over the years from political professionals and journalists. American people are not policy wonks, but they have great instincts and try to do the right thing."

Rove said it is "wrong to underestimate the intelligence of the American voter, but easy to overestimate their interest. Much tugs at their attention."

I'd offer that here in RI that interest in local politics is also proportional to how much the average RI thinks they can make a real difference. In other words: Not Much.

At this point, RI citizens have--for the most part--simply gotten used to putting their "attention" elsewhere than politics. Wrong or not, they seem to think that, for the most part, their everyday lives aren't affected that much by the actions of the General Assembly or local school committees and town councils. The irony, of course, is that this attitude of "They're all the same" is just about as self-perpetuating as it gets.

I guess the task for those of us who want to change the political climate in this state is to get the attention of the average Rhode Islander. Calling them ignorant certainly won't endear them to our cause, after all, and it also happens to be a cop-out. It takes hard work to change minds. The obvious fly in this ointment is that maybe, just maybe, the status quo here in Rhode Island is exactly what the average Rhode Islander wants....and if that's the case, maybe we're all just Ocean State versions of Don Quixote. But perhaps people are only satisfied with the status quo because that's all they know.


July 11, 2006


Robert Novak on Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald

Robert Novak writes:

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has informed my attorneys that, after two and one-half years, his investigation of the CIA leak case concerning matters directly relating to me has been concluded. That frees me to reveal my role in the federal inquiry that, at the request of Fitzgerald, I have kept secret.

I have cooperated in the investigation while trying to protect journalistic privileges under the First Amendment and shield sources who have not revealed themselves. I have been subpoenaed by and testified to a federal grand jury. Published reports that I took the Fifth Amendment, made a plea bargain with the prosecutors or was a prosecutorial target were all untrue.

For nearly the entire time of his investigation, Fitzgerald knew -- independent of me -- the identity of the sources I used in my column of July 14, 2003. A federal investigation was triggered when I reported that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was employed by the CIA and helped initiate his 2002 mission to Niger. That Fitzgerald did not indict any of these sources may indicate his conclusion that none of them violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

...I have promised to discuss my role in the investigation when permitted by the prosecution, and I do so now.

The news broke Sept. 26, 2003, that the Justice Department was investigating the CIA leak case...

The FBI soon asked to interview me, prompting my first major decision. My attorneys advised me that I had no certain constitutional basis to refuse cooperation if subpoenaed by a grand jury...

I was interrogated at the Swidler Berlin offices Oct. 7, 2003, by an FBI inspector and two agents. I had not identified my sources to my attorneys, and I told them I would not reveal them to the FBI. I did disclose how Valerie Wilson's role was reported to me, but the FBI did not press me to disclose my sources.

On Dec. 30, 2003, the Justice Department named Fitzgerald as special prosecutor. An appointment was made for Fitzgerald to interview me at Swidler Berlin on Jan. 14, 2004. The problem facing me was that the special prosecutor had obtained signed waivers from every official who might have given me information about Wilson's wife.

That created a dilemma. I did not believe blanket waivers in any way relieved me of my journalistic responsibility to protect a source...

However, on Jan. 12, two days before my meeting with Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor informed Hamilton that he would be bringing to the Swidler Berlin offices only two waivers. One was by my principal source in the Valerie Wilson column, a source whose name has not yet been revealed. The other was by presidential adviser Karl Rove, whom I interpret as confirming my primary source's information. In other words, the special prosecutor knew the names of my sources.

When Fitzgerald arrived, he had a third waiver in hand -- from Bill Harlow, the CIA public information officer who was my CIA source for the column confirming Mrs. Wilson's identity. I answered questions using the names of Rove, Harlow and my primary source.

I had a second session with Fitzgerald at Swidler Berlin on Feb. 5, 2004, after which I was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury. I testified there at the U.S. courthouse in Washington on Feb. 25.

In these four appearances with federal authorities, I declined to answer when the questioning touched on matters beyond the CIA leak case...

I have revealed Rove's name because his attorney has divulged the substance of our conversation, though in a form different from my recollection. I have revealed Harlow's name because he has publicly disclosed his version of our conversation, which also differs from my recollection. My primary source has not come forward to identify himself...

In my sworn testimony, I said what I have contended in my columns and on television: Joe Wilson's wife's role in instituting her husband's mission was revealed to me in the middle of a long interview with an official who I have previously said was not a political gunslinger. After the federal investigation was announced, he told me through a third party that the disclosure was inadvertent on his part.

Following my interview with the primary source, I sought out the second administration official and the CIA spokesman for confirmation. I learned Valerie Plame's name from Joe Wilson's entry in "Who's Who in America."

I considered his wife's role in initiating Wilson's mission, later confirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, to be a previously undisclosed part of an important news story. I reported it on that basis.


July 4, 2006


Happy Birthday, America!

Donald B. Hawthorne

In celebration of America's birthday, here are excerpted gems from previous postings about our beloved country - brought together in one posting:

President Calvin Coolidge gave a powerful speech in 1926 on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If you want to rediscover some of the majesty of the principles underlying our Founding, read Coolidge's entire speech. Here are some key excerpts:

There is something beyond the establishment of a new nation, great as that event would be, in the Declaration of Independence which has ever since caused it to be regarded as one of the great charters that not only was to liberate America but was everywhere to ennoble humanity.

It was not because it proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history...

...Three very definite propositions were set out in [the Declaration's] preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed...

While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination...

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world...

...when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live...

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignity, the rights of man - these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions...Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776..that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final...If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people...

In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people...The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guarantees, which even the government itself is bound not to violate. If there is any one thing among us that is established beyond question, it is self-government -- the right of the people to rule. If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because there is a failure on the part of individuals to observe them. We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction...The ultimate sanction of law rests on the righteous authority of the Almighty...

...We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all of our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it...We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed...

This Power Line posting elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American creed:

Knowledge of American history holds the key to much of the current discussion of political issues, such as the ongoing liberal attack on Christian belief and on arguments premised on belief in God...Absent knowledge of American history, one would never know that the United States is founded on the basis of a creed, rather than on tribal or blood lines, in which God plays a prominent part. Absent knowledge of history generally, one would never know that this fact makes America unique.

What is the American creed?...The American creed is expressed with inspired concision in the words of the Declaration of Independence...

But does the Declaration have any legal status such that these words can be truly deemed to state the American creed? It does, although virtually no one seems to know it. In 1878 Congress enacted a revised version of the United States Code that included a new first section entitled "The Organic Laws of the United States."

The Code is Congress's official compilation of federal law; the organic laws of the United States are America's founding laws. First and foremost of the four organic laws of the United States is the Declaration of Independence...

Professor Jaffa [of the Claremont Institute] teaches us that the Declaration contains four distinct references to God: He is the author of the "laws of...God"; the "Creator" who "endowed" us with our inalienable rights; "the Supreme Judge of the world"; and "Divine Providence." Americans declared their independence, "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions."

The Declaration states the American creed, the creed that recognizes the source (Nature and Nature's God) of our rights.

Anchor Rising's own Mac Owens gave a speech entitled Limited Government to Protect Equal Rights, published on this blog site, which elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American Experiment:

Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest - the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must."...

The United States was founded on different principles - justice and equality...It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality...Thanks to the Founders, the United States was founded on a principle of justice, not the interest of the stronger. And because of Lincoln's uncompromising commitment to equality as America's "central idea," the Union was not only saved, but saved so "as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of saving..."

"Every nation," said Lincoln, "has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate." For Lincoln, this central idea was the Declaration of Independence and its notion of equality as the basis for republican government - the simple idea that no one has the right by nature to rule over another without the latter's consent...

Indeed, it is the idea of equality in the Declaration, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood, constituting what Abraham Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land..."

The United States is a fundamentally decent regime based on the universal principle that all human beings are equal in terms of their natural rights...

...the only purpose of government is to protect the equal natural rights of individual citizens. These rights inhere in individuals, not groups, and are antecedent to the creation of government...

Roger Pilon wrote the following in a 2002 Cato Institute booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution:

Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.

But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision...the method by which we justify our political order...liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

...that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government...indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish...to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights...provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract...its principles rooted in "right reason"...the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Dr. Pilon concluded his essay by writing:

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

The powerful words from and about our Founding appeal to timeless moral principles grounded in both our Declaration of Independence and the great moral traditions that preceded our Founding. It is these principles that make America unique and inspire us to be proud, engaged citizens who are vigilant stewards of freedom and opportunity for all Americans.

Happy Birthday, America!



Happy Birthday, America!

In celebration of America's birthday, here are excerpted gems from previous postings about our beloved country - brought together in one posting again on this July 4:

Ronald Reagan noted:

The day of our nation's birth in that little hall in Philadelphia, [was] a day on which debate had raged for hours. The men gathered there were honorable men hard-pressed by a king who had flouted the very laws they were willing to obey. Even so, to sign the Declaration of Independence was such an irretrievable act that the walls resounded with the words 'treason, the gallows, the headsman's axe,' and the issue remained in doubt. [On that day] 56 men, a little band so unique we have never seen their like since, had pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Some gave their lives in the war that followed, most gave their fortunes, and all preserved their sacred honor...

In recent years, however, I've come to think of that day as more than just the birthday of a nation. It also commemorates the only true philosophical revolution in all history. Oh, there have been revolutions before and since ours. But those revolutions simply exchanged one set of rules for another. Ours was a revolution that changed the very concept of government. Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people. We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should.

President Calvin Coolidge gave a powerful speech in 1926 on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If you want to rediscover some of the majesty of the principles underlying our Founding, read Coolidge's entire speech. Here are some key excerpts:

There is something beyond the establishment of a new nation, great as that event would be, in the Declaration of Independence which has ever since caused it to be regarded as one of the great charters that not only was to liberate America but was everywhere to ennoble humanity.

It was not because it proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history...

...Three very definite propositions were set out in [the Declaration's] preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed...

While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination...

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world...

...when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live...

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignity, the rights of man - these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions...Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776..that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final...If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people...

In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people...The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guarantees, which even the government itself is bound not to violate. If there is any one thing among us that is established beyond question, it is self-government -- the right of the people to rule. If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because there is a failure on the part of individuals to observe them. We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction...The ultimate sanction of law rests on the righteous authority of the Almighty...

...We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all of our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it...We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed...

This Power Line posting elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American creed:

Knowledge of American history holds the key to much of the current discussion of political issues, such as the ongoing liberal attack on Christian belief and on arguments premised on belief in God...Absent knowledge of American history, one would never know that the United States is founded on the basis of a creed, rather than on tribal or blood lines, in which God plays a prominent part. Absent knowledge of history generally, one would never know that this fact makes America unique.

What is the American creed?...The American creed is expressed with inspired concision in the words of the Declaration of Independence...

But does the Declaration have any legal status such that these words can be truly deemed to state the American creed? It does, although virtually no one seems to know it. In 1878 Congress enacted a revised version of the United States Code that included a new first section entitled "The Organic Laws of the United States."

The Code is Congress's official compilation of federal law; the organic laws of the United States are America's founding laws. First and foremost of the four organic laws of the United States is the Declaration of Independence...

Professor Jaffa [of the Claremont Institute] teaches us that the Declaration contains four distinct references to God: He is the author of the "laws of...God"; the "Creator" who "endowed" us with our inalienable rights; "the Supreme Judge of the world"; and "Divine Providence." Americans declared their independence, "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions."

The Declaration states the American creed, the creed that recognizes the source (Nature and Nature's God) of our rights.

Anchor Rising's own Mac Owens gave a speech entitled Limited Government to Protect Equal Rights, published on this blog site, which elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American Experiment:

Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest - the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must."...

The United States was founded on different principles - justice and equality...It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality...Thanks to the Founders, the United States was founded on a principle of justice, not the interest of the stronger. And because of Lincoln's uncompromising commitment to equality as America's "central idea," the Union was not only saved, but saved so "as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of saving..."

"Every nation," said Lincoln, "has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate." For Lincoln, this central idea was the Declaration of Independence and its notion of equality as the basis for republican government - the simple idea that no one has the right by nature to rule over another without the latter's consent...

Indeed, it is the idea of equality in the Declaration, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood, constituting what Abraham Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land..."

The United States is a fundamentally decent regime based on the universal principle that all human beings are equal in terms of their natural rights...

...the only purpose of government is to protect the equal natural rights of individual citizens. These rights inhere in individuals, not groups, and are antecedent to the creation of government...

Roger Pilon wrote the following in a 2002 Cato Institute booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution:

Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.

But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision the method by which we justify our political order liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract its principles rooted in "right reason" the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Dr. Pilon concluded his essay by writing:

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

The powerful words from and about our Founding appeal to timeless moral principles grounded in both our Declaration of Independence and the great moral traditions that preceded our Founding. It is these principles that make America unique and inspire us to be proud, engaged citizens who are vigilant stewards of freedom and opportunity for all Americans.

Happy Birthday, America!


June 28, 2006


Rhode Island Senators Vote Against Flag Burning Ban

Marc Comtois

Both Senator Reed and Senator Chafee voted against the Flag Burning Amendment (story), which failed by one vote. Senator Chafee, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Robert Bennett of Utah were the only Republicans who voted against the Amendment.

UPDATE: Andrew emailed me to say it was worth noting that Langevin voted for the House version and Kennedy against.


June 17, 2006


Rediscovering Civil Society, Part I: Mediating Structures and the Dilemmas of the Welfare State

To Empower People: From State to Civil Society was a book published in 1996 and edited by Michael Novak. It is a group of essays which take a retrospective look at the policy recommendations contained in a 1977 book by Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus entitled To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy .

The first chapter of the original 1977 book defines some structural challenges we face in today's society and offers a policy framework for solving some of those problems:

Two seemingly contradictory tendencies are evident in current thinking about public policy in America. First, there is a continuing desire for the services provided by the welfare state...The second tendency is one of strong animus against government, bureaucracy, and bigness as such...

...we suggest that the modern welfare state is here to stay...but that alternative mechanisms are possible to provide welfare-state services.

The current anti-government, anti-bigness mood is not irrational. Complaints about impersonality, unresponsiveness, and excessive interference, as well as the perception of rising costs and deteriorating services - these are based upon empirical and widespread experience...At the same time there is widespread public support for publicly addressing major problems of our society in relieving poverty, in education, health care, and housing, and in a host of other human needs...

...The alternatives proposed here...can solve some problems...become the basis of far-reaching innovations in public policy, perhaps of a new paradigm...

The basic concept is that of what we are calling mediating structures...defined as those institutions standing between the individual in his private life and the large institutions of public life.

Modernization brings about a historically unprecedented dichotomy between public and private life. The most important large institution in the ordering of modern society is the modern state...In addition, there are the large economic conglomerates of capitalistic enterprise, big labor, and the growing bureaucracies that administer wide sectors of the society, such as in education...All these institutions we call the megastructures.

Then there is that modern phenomenon called private life...

For the individual in modern society, life is an ongoing migration between these two spheres, public and private. The megastructures are typically alienating, that is, they are not helpful in providing meaning and identity for individual existence. Meaning, fulfillment, and personal identity are to be realized in the private sphere. While the two spheres interact in many ways, in private life the individual is left very much to his own devices, and thus is uncertain and anxious...

The dichotomy poses a double crisis. It is a crisis for the individual who must carry on a balancing act between the demands of the two spheres. It is a political crisis because the megastructures (notably the state) come to be devoid of personal meaning and are therefore viewed as unreal or even malignant...Many who handle it more successfully than most have access to institutions that mediate between the two spheres. Such institutions have a private face, giving private life a measure of stability, and they have a public face, transferring meaning and value to the megastructure. Thus, mediating structures alleviate each facet of the double crisis of modern society...

Our focus is on four such mediating structures - neighborhood, family, church, and voluntary association. This is by no means an exhaustive list...

Without institutionally reliable processes of mediation, the political order becomes detached from the values and realities of individual life. Deprived of its moral foundation, the political order is "delegitimized." When that happens, the political order must be secured by coercion rather than by consent. And when that happens, democracy disappears.

The attractiveness of totalitarianism...is that it overcomes the dichotomy of private and public existence by imposing on life one comprehensive order of meaning...

Democracy is "handicapped" by being more vulnerable to the erosion of meaning in its institutions...That is why mediation is so crucial to democracy. Such mediation cannot be sporadic and occasional; it must be institutionalized in structures. The structures we have chosen to study have demonstrated a great capacity for adapting and innovating under changing conditions. Most important, they exist where people are, and that is where sound public policy should always begin...

Continue reading "Rediscovering Civil Society, Part I: Mediating Structures and the Dilemmas of the Welfare State"

June 12, 2006


Previewing a Democratic House Majority: Hold on to your Wallet

Carroll Andrew Morse

The very first thing Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy talks about in the biographical section of his official Congressional website is his work on the House Appropriations Committee...

Patrick J. Kennedy is serving his sixth term in Congress as the representative from the First District of Rhode Island.

Kennedy was appointed to the House Appropriations Committee in December 1998, but requested a leave of absence in order to fulfill a two-year term as the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. With the term completed, Kennedy now sits on the powerful panel which has authority over all of the federal government's discretionary spending. As part of his Appropriations duties, Kennedy sits on the Subcommittees on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and on Commerce, Justice, State, and Judiciary.

I hope that Congressman Kennedy considers the national interest in his work on the Appropriations Committee, something that his Appropriations Committee colleague Jim Moran of Virginia apparently believes to be largely unnecessary. This is how Congressman Moran, in the Arlington Sun-Gazette, talks about his plans for the future if the Democrats retake a majority in the House...
Moran, D-8th, told those attending the Arlington County Democratic Committee's annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner on June 9 that while he in theory might oppose the fiscal irresponsibility of "earmarks" - funneling money to projects in a member of Congress's district - he understands the value they have to constituents.

"When I become chairman [of a House appropriations subcommittee], I'm going to earmark the sh** out of it," Moran buoyantly told a crowd of 450 attending the event.

Is Congressman Moran speaking only for himself here, or expressing the philosophy shared by all Congressional Democrats? I've contacted Congressman Kennedy's office to try to find out.

Remember Congressman Moran when Democrats make their arguments for why taxes must be rasied. It's not that more money is needed to address real needs; it's that Congressional chairmen want to take control of more of your money in order to bolster their power.


June 5, 2006


Remembering President Reagan

President Ronald Reagan died two years ago today.

As a reminder of his leadership, here is an excerpt from his January 1989 Farewell Address as he left the Presidency:

...And in all of that time I won a nickname, "The Great Communicator." But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: it was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation--from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries. They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I'll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.

Common sense told us that when you put a big tax on something, the people will produce less of it. So, we cut the people's tax rates, and the people produced more than ever before. The economy bloomed like a plant that had been cut back and could now grow quicker and stronger. Our economic program brought about the longest peacetime expansion in our history: real family income up, the poverty rate down, entrepreneurship booming, and an explosion in research and new technology. We're exporting more than ever because American industry became more competitive, and at the same time, we summoned the national will to knock down protectionist walls abroad instead of erecting them at home.

Common sense also told us that to preserve the peace, we'd have to become strong again after years of weakness and confusion. So, we rebuilt our defenses, and this New Year we toasted the new peacefulness around the globe. Not only have the superpowers actually begun to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons--and hope for even more progress is bright--but the regional conflicts that rack the globe are also beginning to cease...

The lesson of all this was, of course, that because we're a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours. And something else we learned: Once you begin a great movement, there's no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.

Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech and turning away from the ideologies of the past. For them, the great rediscovery of the 1980's has been that, lo and behold, the moral way of government is the practical way of government: Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive...

Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: "We the People." "We the People" tell the government what to do; it doesn't tell us. "We the People" are the driver; the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which "We the People" tell the government what it is allowed to do. "We the People" are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past 8 years.

Continue reading "Remembering President Reagan"

May 25, 2006


Economic Thoughts, Part VII: The Role of Government in a Free Society

This posting is Part VII in a series of postings about economic thoughts.

This posting contains excerpts from Chapter 2 of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman's 1962 classic book, Capitalism & Freedom in which he discusses the role of government in a free society:

...To the [nineteenth-century] liberal, the appropriate means are free discussion and voluntary co-operation, which implies that any form of coercion is inappropriate. The ideal is unanimity among responsible individuals achieved on the basis of free and full discussion. This is another way of expressing the goal of freedom...

From this standpoint, the role of the market...is that it permits unanimity without conformity; that it is a system of effectively proportional representation. On the other hand, the characteristic feature of action through explicitly political channels is that it tends to require or to enforce substantial conformity...the fact that the final outcome generally must be a law applicable to all groups, rather than separate legislative enactments for each "party" represented, means that proportional representation in its political version, far from permitting unanimity without conformity, tends toward ineffectiveness and fragmentation. It thereby operates to destroy any consensus on which unanimity with conformity can rest.

There are clearly some matters with respect to which effective proportional representation is impossible...With respect to such indivisible matters we can discuss, and argue, and vote. But having decided, we must conform. It is precisely the existence of such indivisible matters - protection of the individual and the nation from coercion are clearly the most basic - that prevents exclusive reliance on individual action through the market...

The use of political channels, while inevitable, tends to strain the social cohesion essential for a stable society. The strain is least if agreement for joint action need be reached only on a limited range of issues on which people in any event have common views. Every extension of the range of issues for which explicit agreement is sought strains further the delicate threads that hold society together...Fundamental differences in basic values can seldom if ever be resolved at the ballot box; ultimately they can only be decided, though not resolved, by conflict...

The widespread use of the market reduces the strain on the social fabric by rendering conformity unnecessary with respect to any activities it encompasses. The wider the range of activities covered by the market, the fewer are the issues on which explicitly political decisions are required and hence on which it is necessary to achieve agreement. In turn, the fewer the issues on which agreement is necessary, the greater is the likelihood of getting agreement while maintaining a free society.

Unanimity is, of course, an ideal. In practice, we can afford neither the time nor the effort that would be required to achieve complete unanimity on every issue...We are thus led to accept majority rule in one form or another as an expedient. That majority rule is an expedient rather than itself a basic principle is clearly shown by the fact that our willingness to resort to majority rule, and the size of the majority we require, themselves depend on the seriousness of the issue involved. If the matter is of little moment and the minority has no strong feelings about being overruled, a bare plurality will suffice. On the other hand, if the minority feels strongly about the issue involved, even a bare majority will not do...

...a good society requires that its members agree on the general conditions that will govern relations among them, on some means of arbitrating different interpretations of these conditions, and on some device for enforcing compliance with the generally accepted rules...most of the general conditions are the unintended outcome of custom, accepted unthinkingly...no set of rules can prevail unless most participants most of the time conform to them without external sanctions...But we cannot rely on custom or on this consensus alone to interpret and to enforce the rules; we need an umpire. These then are the basic roles of government in a free society: to provide a means whereby we can modify rules, to mediate differences among us on the meaning of the rules, and to enforce compliance with the rules on the part of those few who would otherwise not play in the game.

The need for government in these respects arises because absolute freedom is impossible. However attractive anarchy may be as a philosophy, it is not feasible in a world of imperfect men...

The major problem in deciding the appropriate activities of government is how to resolve such conflicts among the freedom of different individuals...

...the organization of economic activity through voluntary exchange presumes that we have provided, through government, for the maintenance of law and order to prevent coercion of one individual by another, the enforcement of contracts voluntarily entered into, the definition of the meaning of property rights, the interpretation and enforcement of such rights, and the provision of a monetary system.

The role of government just considered is to do something that the market cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate, and enforce the rules of the game...These all reduce to cases in which strictly voluntary exchange is either exceedingly costly or practically impossible. There are two general classes of such cases: monopoly and similar market imperfections, and neighborhood effects.

Exchange is truly voluntary only when nearly equivalent alternatives exist. Monopoly implies the absence of alternatives and thereby inhibits effective freedom of exchange...

When technical conditions make a monopoly the natural outcome of competitive market forces, there are only three alternatives that seem available: private monopoly, public monopoly, or public regulation. All three are bad so we must choose among evils...

In a rapidly changing society, however, the conditions making for technical monopoly frequently change and I suspect that both public regulation and public monopoly are likely to be less responsive to such changes in conditions, to be less readily capable of elimination, than private monopoly...

The choice between the evils of private monopoly, public monopoly, and public regulation cannot, however, be made once and for all, independently of the factual circumstances. If the technical monopoly is of a service or commodity that is regarded as essential and if its monopoly power is sizable, even the short-run effects of private unregulated monopoly may not be tolerable, and either public regulation or ownership may be a lesser evil...

Technical monopoly may on occasion justify a de facto public monopoly. It cannot by itself justify a public monopoly achieved by making it illegal for anyone else to compete...

A second general class of cases in which strictly voluntary exchange is impossible arises when actions of individuals have effects on other individuals for which it is not feasible to charge or recompense them. This is the problem of "neighborhood effects." An obvious example is the pollution of a stream...

A less obvious example is the provision of highways...

Neighborhood effects impede voluntary exchange because it is difficult to identify the effects on third parties and to measure their magnitude; but this difficulty is present in governmental activity as well...when government engages in activities to overcome neighborhood effects, it will in part introduce an additional set of neighborhood effects by failing to charge or compensate individuals properly...Every act of government intervention limits the area of individual freedom directly and threatens the preservation of freedom indirectly...

Freedom is a tenable objective only for responsible individuals. We do not believe in freedom for madmen or children. The necessity of drawing a line between responsible individuals and others is inescapable, yet it means that there is an essential ambiguity in our ultimate objective of freedom. Paternalism is inescapable for those whom we designate as not responsible...

The paternalistic ground for governmental activity is in many ways the most troublesome to a [nineteenth-century] liberal; for it involves the acceptance of a principle - that some shall decide for others - which he finds objectionable in most applications and which he rightly regards as a hallmark of his chief intellectual opponents, the proponents of collectivism...Yet there is no use pretending that problems are simpler than in fact they are. There is no avoiding the need for some measure of paternalism...There is no formula that can tell us where to stop. We must rely on our fallible judgment...We must put our faith, here as elsewhere, in a consensus reached by imperfect and biased men through free discussion and trial and error.

A government which maintained law and order, defined property rights, served as a means whereby we could modify property rights and other rules of the economic game, adjudicated disputes about the interpretation of the rules, enforced contracts, promoted competition, provided a monetary framework, engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify governmental intervention, and which supplemented private charity and the private family in protecting the irresponsible, whether madman or child - such a government would clearly have important functions to perform...

Yet it is also true that such a government would have clearly limited functions and would refrain from a host of activities that are now undertaken by federal and state governments in the United States and their counterparts in other Western countries...

Part VIII to follow...

For previous postings on Economic Thoughts, refer to:

Part I: What is Economics?
Part II: Myths About Markets
Part III: Why Policy Goals are Trumped by Incentives They Create & the Role of Knowledge in Economics
Part IV: The Abuse of Reason, Fallacies & Dangers of Centralized Planning, Prices & Knowledge, and Understanding Limitations
Part V: The Relationship Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom
Part VI: More on the Relationship Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom


May 24, 2006


Pork Dependence

Carroll Andrew Morse

From a Joseph Fitzgerald article in the Woonsocket Call

U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee Monday said the communitys hard work to restore the vintage Stadium Theatre Performing Arts Centre should not suffer any loss of momentum by the need to install an expensive new fire suppression system as mandated by the state.

While acknowledging the need to comply with state mandates resulting from increased fire safety code regulations, Chafee is hoping the cost for the Stadium Theatre to meet those requirements will be addressed with the help of a $250,000 appropriations request he submitted last month to help pay for the new system.

Senator Chafee has promised to put funding for the Stadium Theatre on a fast-track
Chafee submitted the funding request to Sen. Christopher Bond, chairman of the Senate Transportation-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee. Funding would come from HUDs Economic Development Initiative grant program

"Ive put a high priority on this request," said Chafee, who was appointed by former governor Lincoln Almond in November 1999 to fill the unexpired Senate term of his late father, Sen. John H. Chafee. "So many people and volunteers worked hard to make this restoration project a reality."
Yes, it is good that the Stadium Theatre will receive the resources it needs to meet the fire code. But wouldnt it be good if facilities without the right political connections could have the resources to bring their buildings up to code too?

When people are forced to send a large portion of their income to the Federal government, some of it does make it back to them in forms like a $250,000 grant to Woonsocket or a $200,000 grant to the Westerly animal shelter. But a lot more of it is lost to items like a $750,000,000 grant to move a perfectly functional railroad to where casino owners want it, or a $500,000,000 grant to pay for corporate losses already covered by insurance, or a $3,000,000,000 grant to pay for digital-to-analog TV converters.

As long as spending is controlled by a remote Federal government, the allocation of resources will be determined too much by the needs and whims of the remote politicians who control the money, and not enough by the needs of the citizens and communities who have sent their money away. The only way to prevent this is to let local communities keep control of more of their resources by reducing the Federal tax burden.



Barney Frank: Defender of Free Markets

Marc Comtois

On the heels of George McGovern's defense of big business, we have Barney Frank extolling the virtues of a free market in the face of GOP reluctance to cut agricultural subsidies. (Via Instapundit -> Club for Growth).

Mr. Chairman, I am here to confess my reading incomprehension. I have listened to many of my conservative friends talk about the wonders of the free market, of the importance of letting the consumers make their best choices, of keeping government out of economic activity, of the virtues of free trade, but then I look at various agricultural programs like this one. Now, it violates every principle of free market economics known to man and two or three not yet discovered.

So I have been forced to conclude that in all of those great free market texts by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and all the others that there is a footnote that says, by the way, none of this applies to agriculture. Now, it may be written in high German, and that may be why I have not been able to discern it, but there is no greater contrast in America today than between the free enterprise rhetoric of so many conservatives and the statist, subsidized, inflationary, protectionist, anti-consumer agricultural policies, and this is one of them.

In particular, I have listened to people, and some of us have said let us protect workers and the environment in trade; let us not have unrestricted free trade; but let us have trade that respects worker rights and environmental rights. And we have been excoriated for our lack of concern for poor countries.

There is no greater obstacle, as it is now clear in the Doha round, to the completion of a comprehensive trade policy than the American agricultural policy, with one exception, European agricultural policy, which is much worse and just as phony.

Sugar is an example. This program is an interference with the legitimate efforts at economic self-help in many foreign nations.

Wow, is this Bizzaro World? Or has another blind squirrel found a nut?



George McGovern Advises Unions: Stop Asking for "More"

Marc Comtois

This can be filed under "Don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg." Paragon of the Left, George McGovern has just such a warning:

I have always been a supporter of the labor movement. Unions have a proud legacy of improving the lives of millions of workers over the last century.

But lately I have seen developments that have me worried. And I have been reminded of legendary union leader John L. Lewis, who was once asked what his miners were after. His answer? "More."

It was a funny answer, and perhaps it was honest too. But these days, it's not a very effective strategy, and we are seeing some unfortunate and unintended consequences of Lewis' "more" philosophy.

McGovern lists the problems with Delphi Corp. as well as U.S. auto makers and the airlines. McGovern also explains (As Don has previously explained on our own pages) that the financial problems for older companies is:
...driven in large part by the compensation packages and work rules that unions have won for their members, which are too expensive compared to [newer companies].... "More" has, unfortunately, become "too much" in a global and far more competitive economy.

Many of my friends will consider this view heretical. But it is based on stark reality. Some progressive union leaders, facing this economic reality, have come to the same conclusion. Others are holding fast. Their behavior is partially a function of internal politics and sheer habit. Not unlike members of Congress, union leaders are in the business of asking for more. That's what their mentors and predecessors and heroes did. It's very difficult to turn around and say that "more" is not always possible.

He even (gasp) defends Wal-Mart:
It can be galling to hear companies argue that they have to cut wages and benefits for hourly workers even as they reward top executives with millions of dollars in stock options. The chief executive of Wal-Mart earns $27 million a year, while the company's average worker takes home only about $10 an hour. But let's assume that the chief executive got 27 cents instead of $27 million, and that Wal-Mart distributed the savings to its hourly workers. They would each receive a bonus of less than $20. It's not executive pay that has created this new world. [Emphasis added.]
He adds that--despite its size--Wal Mart only makes less than 4 cents on the dollar with it's thin profit-margin (low prices, high volume), which is the norm for many businesses, both large and small. As McGovern explains, low prices only work with low labor costs and so far consumers (and job applicants to Wal Mart) don't seem to mind. McGovern--who also believes that universal health coverage is better than the current employer-centric model--wraps up the piece with this advice:
Liberals must never abandon their core principles of justice and equality. But union leaders who still see American businesses as the enemy must update that vision.
I wonder if any other progressives will listen? [NB: Michael Barone has some thoughts, too.]


May 15, 2006


Thomas Sowell on Useful Idiots

Back in 2000, Thomas Sowell wrote an editorial, Useful Idiots (H/T Power Line), in which he stated:

Lenin is supposed to have referred to blind defenders and apologists for the Soviet Union in the Western democracies as "useful idiots." Yet even Lenin might have been surprised at how far these useful idiots would carry their partisanship in later years -- including our own times.

Stalin's man-made famine in the Soviet Union during the 1930s killed more millions of people than Hitler killed in the Holocaust -- and Mao's man-made famine in China killed more millions than died in the USSR. Yet we not only hear little or nothing about either of these staggering catastrophes in the Communist world today, very little was said about them in the Western democracies while they were going on. Indeed, many useful idiots denied that there were famines in the Soviet Union or in Communist China.

The most famous of these was the New York Times' Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer prize for telling people what they wanted to hear, rather than what was actually happening. Duranty assured his readers that "there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be." Moreover, he blamed reports to the contrary on "rumor factories" with anti-Soviet bias.

It was decades later before the first serious scholarly study of that famine was written, by Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution, always identified in politically correct circles as "right-wing." Yet when the Soviets' own statistics on the deaths during the famine were finally released, under Mikhail Gorbachev, they showed that the actual deaths exceeded even the millions estimated by Dr. Conquest.

Official statistics on the famine deaths in China under Mao have never been released, but knowledgeable estimates run upwards of 20 million people. Yet, even here, there were the same bland denials by sympathizers and fellow travellers in the West as during the earlier Soviet famine...

Today, even after the evidence of massive man-made famines in the Communist world, after Solzhenitsyn's revelations about the gulags and after the horrors of the killing fields of Cambodia, the useful idiots continue to deny or downplay staggering human tragedies under Communist dictatorships. Or else they engage in moral equivalence, as Newsweek editor and TV pundit Eleanor Clift did during the Elian Gonzalez controversy, when she said: "To be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be better than being a poor child in Miami and I'm not going to condemn their lifestyle so gratuitously."

Apparently totalitarian dictatorship is just a lifestyle, like wearing sandals and beads and using herbal medicine. It apparently has not occurred to Eleanor Clift to ask why poor people in Miami do not put themselves and their children on flimsy boats, in a desperate effort to reach Cuba.

Elian Gonzalez and his mother were only the latest of millions of people to flee Communist dictatorships at the risk of their lives...

Yet none of this has really registered on a very large segment of the intelligentsia in the West. Nor are Western capitalists immune to the same blindness. The owner of the Baltimore Orioles announced that he would not hire baseball players who defect from Cuba, because this would be an "insult" to Castro. TV magnate Ted Turner has sponsored a TV mini-series on the Cold War that has often taken the moral equivalence line.

Turner's instructions to the historian who put this series together was that he wanted no "triumphalism," meaning apparently no depiction of the triumph of democracy over Communism. Various scholars who have specialized in the study of Communist countries have criticized the distortions in this mini-series in a recently published book titled CNN's Cold War Documentary: Issues and Controversy, edited by Arnold Beichman.

Meanwhile, that moral-equivalence mini-series is being spread through American schools from coast to coast, as if to turn our children into the useful idiots of the future.

The issues of education, multiculturalism, and relativism have been highlighted in an earlier posting, Becoming Americans.



The Hypocritical Straight Talk Express Man: The Ongoing Problem With John McCain

Donald B. Hawthorne

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) prides himself on his "straight talk." However, recent times have shown that his appreciation for his own free speech does not frequently apply to others' right to free speech.

First, he led the effort to curtail free speech via the euphemism called campaign finance reform.

Second, George Will recently captured some McCain comments which showed a genuine lack of respect for free speech:

Presidents swear to "protect and defend the Constitution." The Constitution says: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." On April 28, on Don Imus' radio program, discussing the charge that the McCain-Feingold law abridges freedom of speech by regulating the quantity, content and timing of political speech, John McCain did not really reject the charge:
"I work in Washington and I know that money corrupts. And I and a lot of other people were trying to stop that corruption. Obviously, from what we've been seeing lately, we didn't complete the job. But I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I'd rather have the clean government."

Question: Were McCain to take the Presidential oath, what would he mean?

In his words to Imus, note the obvious disparagement he communicates by putting verbal quotation marks around "First Amendment rights." Those nuisances.

Then ponder his implicit promise to "complete the job" of cleansing Washington of corruption, as McCain understands that. Unfortunately, although McCain is loquacious about corruption, he is too busy deploring it to define it. Mister Straight Talk is rarely reticent about anything, but is remarkably so about specifics...

Anyway, he vows to "complete the job" of extirpating corruption, regardless of the cost to freedom of speech. Regardless, that is, of how much more the government must supervise political advocacy.

President McCain would, it is reasonable to assume, favor increasingly stringent limits on what can be contributed to, or spent by, campaigns. Furthermore, McCain seems to regard unregulated political speech as an inherent invitation to corruption. And he seems to believe that anything done in the name of "leveling the playing field" for political competition is immune from First Amendment challenges.

The logic of his doctrine would cause him to put the power of the Presidency behind efforts to clamp government controls on Internet advocacy...It is extending to regulation in the name of "fairness." Bob Bauer, a Democratic lawyer, says this about the metastasizing government regulation of campaigns:

"More and more, it is meant to regulate any money with the potential of influencing elections; and so any unregulated but influential money, in whichever way its influence is felt or achieved, is unfair." This explains the hand-wringing horror with which the reform community approached the Internet's fast-growing use and limitless potential.

This is why the banner of "campaign reform" is no longer waved only by insurgents from outside the political establishment. Washington's most powerful people carry the banner: Led by Speaker Dennis Hastert, and with the President's approval, the Republican-controlled House recently voted to cripple the ability of citizens' groups called 527s (named after the provision of the tax code under which they are organized) to conduct independent advocacy that Washington's ruling class considers "unfair."...

Proof that incumbent politicians are highly susceptible to corruption is the fact that the government they control is shot through with it. Yet that government should be regarded as a disinterested arbiter, untainted by politics and therefore qualified to regulate the content, quantity and timing of speech in campaigns that determine who controls the government. In the language of McCain's Imus appearance, the government is very much not "clean," but is so clean it can be trusted to regulate speech about itself...

McCain told Imus that he would, if necessary, sacrifice "quote First Amendment rights" to achieve "clean" government. If on Jan. 20, 2009, he were to swear to defend the Constitution, would he be thinking that the oath refers only to "the quote Constitution"? And what would that mean?

Third, McCain's words were dripping with condescension when he slammed the free speech exercised by bloggers in his recent speech at Liberty University:

When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights. I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me. With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It's a pity that there wasn't a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.

Unfortunately, none of this surprises people anymore because it is now clear that the only right to free speech Senator McCain believes in is his own. And that means he fails the "presidential timber" test.



The Hypocritical Straight Talk Express Man: The Ongoing Problem With John McCain

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) prides himself on his "straight talk." However, recent times have shown that his appreciation for his own free speech does not frequently apply to others' right to free speech.

First, he led the effort to curtail free speech via the euphemism called campaign finance reform.

Second, George Will recently captured some McCain comments which showed a genuine lack of respect for free speech:

Presidents swear to "protect and defend the Constitution." The Constitution says: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." On April 28, on Don Imus' radio program, discussing the charge that the McCain-Feingold law abridges freedom of speech by regulating the quantity, content and timing of political speech, John McCain did not really reject the charge:
"I work in Washington and I know that money corrupts. And I and a lot of other people were trying to stop that corruption. Obviously, from what we've been seeing lately, we didn't complete the job. But I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I'd rather have the clean government."

Question: Were McCain to take the Presidential oath, what would he mean?

In his words to Imus, note the obvious disparagement he communicates by putting verbal quotation marks around "First Amendment rights." Those nuisances.

Then ponder his implicit promise to "complete the job" of cleansing Washington of corruption, as McCain understands that. Unfortunately, although McCain is loquacious about corruption, he is too busy deploring it to define it. Mister Straight Talk is rarely reticent about anything, but is remarkably so about specifics...

Anyway, he vows to "complete the job" of extirpating corruption, regardless of the cost to freedom of speech. Regardless, that is, of how much more the government must supervise political advocacy.

President McCain would, it is reasonable to assume, favor increasingly stringent limits on what can be contributed to, or spent by, campaigns. Furthermore, McCain seems to regard unregulated political speech as an inherent invitation to corruption. And he seems to believe that anything done in the name of "leveling the playing field" for political competition is immune from First Amendment challenges.

The logic of his doctrine would cause him to put the power of the Presidency behind efforts to clamp government controls on Internet advocacy...It is extending to regulation in the name of "fairness." Bob Bauer, a Democratic lawyer, says this about the metastasizing government regulation of campaigns:

"More and more, it is meant to regulate any money with the potential of influencing elections; and so any unregulated but influential money, in whichever way its influence is felt or achieved, is unfair." This explains the hand-wringing horror with which the reform community approached the Internet's fast-growing use and limitless potential.

This is why the banner of "campaign reform" is no longer waved only by insurgents from outside the political establishment. Washington's most powerful people carry the banner: Led by Speaker Dennis Hastert, and with the President's approval, the Republican-controlled House recently voted to cripple the ability of citizens' groups called 527s (named after the provision of the tax code under which they are organized) to conduct independent advocacy that Washington's ruling class considers "unfair."...

Proof that incumbent politicians are highly susceptible to corruption is the fact that the government they control is shot through with it. Yet that government should be regarded as a disinterested arbiter, untainted by politics and therefore qualified to regulate the content, quantity and timing of speech in campaigns that determine who controls the government. In the language of McCain's Imus appearance, the government is very much not "clean," but is so clean it can be trusted to regulate speech about itself...

McCain told Imus that he would, if necessary, sacrifice "quote First Amendment rights" to achieve "clean" government. If on Jan. 20, 2009, he were to swear to defend the Constitution, would he be thinking that the oath refers only to "the quote Constitution"? And what would that mean?

Third, McCain's words were dripping with condescension when he slammed the free speech exercised by bloggers in his recent speech at Liberty University:

When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights. I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me. With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. Its a pity that there wasnt a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.

Unfortunately, none of this surprises people anymore because it is now clear that the only right to free speech Senator McCain believes in is his own. And that means he fails the "presidential timber" test.


May 11, 2006


Creeping Socialism: ACORN & the Living Wage

I have never understood the logic of the "living wage" argument, where certain organizations - like ACORN - seek to have government agencies mandate new and higher wage rates. Such people believe that higher wages must be realized and that they can only be achieved by government fiat, not by the ability of the market to efficiently incorporate wage information into the best possible outcomes over time.

More specifically, if they really believe it is possible for government to unilaterally set higher wages without any adverse economic consequences to private sector businesses or public sector operations, they sure do not think very expansively. Instead of mandating wages of $10-12/hour, why not simply legislate that everyone will earn $100,000/year? Or $150,000/year? Yet nobody does that. Could it be that they really do know there are adverse economic consequences to higher wages?

If only the living wage debate was so straightforward. But, more on that shortly.

ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now and they are a key player in the tax-eater world. In their words, "the mission of ACORN is clear, the vision remains: power through organization and direct action." A close reading of their website will quickly clarify their socialistic politics and alignment with the more politically radical labor unions.

Steven Malanga, in his book The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today (reviewed here), has this to say about the living wage movement:

...The living wage poses a big threat to [cities] economic health because the costs and restrictions it imposes on the private sector will destroy jobs - especially low-wage jobs - and send businesses fleeing to other locales. Worse still, the living-wage movement's agenda doesn't end with forcing private employers to increase wages. It includes opposing privatization schemes, strong-arming companies into unionizing...

The living-wage movement got its start in mid-1990's Baltimore...

As it spread beyond Baltimore, the living-wage movement at first purposely kept its aims narrow...

Soon, though, living-wage supporters began to win ever broader laws, covering ever more workers and businesses. Detroit's 1998 living wage applied to any business or non-profit with a city contract or to any firm that had received $50,000 or more in economic development assistance - ranging from the Salvation Army to small manufacturers located in the city's economic development zones. San Francisco's law went beyond city contractors to cover workers at the city airport, on the grounds that businesses there leased land from the city; airlines, newsstands, fast-food restaurants - none was exempt...Today forty-three states have at least one municipality with living-wage legislation on the books, or proposed laws.

The movement owes much of its success to the model campaign - exportable anywhere, anytime, fast - that its proponents, above all ACORN's national living-wage center, have created...The prospective living-wage activist can find everything he needs to know in a step-by-step manual, concocted by ACORN director of living-wage campaigns Jed Kern and Wayne State University labor economist David Reynolds.

The manual echoes the organizational theories of legendary radical Saul Alinsky. Coalition building is key. Alinsky's modus operandi was to get diverse constituencies to support his various causes by emphasizing their shared interests...

To pull off such coalition building in practice, you need more than a manual, of course; you need money - and the movement has lots of it, thanks to the backing of leftist foundations. The Tides Foundation has given hundreds of thousands of dollars...The Ford Foundation has been another big contributor.

The coalitions the movement has assembled have included hundreds of religious groups, allowing organizers to present their economic agenda as deeply moral...Labor groups have signed on too...

Living-wage campaigns have repeatedly outflanked the business community by practicing what ACORN calls "legislative outmaneuver." Local groups work behind the scenes for months before going public. They draft partisan economics to release timely studies on the prospective benefits of the living wage before opponents can come up with any countering data, and they try to keep any actual legislation off the table until the very last minute, so that there's no fixed target for opponents to get a bead on...

Providing the intellectual muscle (such as it is) for the living-wage movement is a small group of Marxoid economists led by University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor Robert Pollin, a longtime board member of the Union of Radical Political Economists, founded in the 1960's to bring Marxist economics to American universities...in 1998 he co-authored...the book that has become the movement's bible, The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy.

In The Living Wage, the class war rages on - and on. Businesses, assert Pollin and Luce, have grown increasingly hostile toward workers in recent years. Their sole evidence for this claim - that the unionization rate has plummeted over the last three decades - ignores the conventional explanations for union decline in the United States: more intense global competition, the shift to a service-oriented, knowledge-based economy, and more generous benefits at nonunionized companies. But never mind: to keep ravenous capitalists under control, they argue, government clearly needs to impose a national living wage on the private sector. And that's just the beginning. Caps on profits, mandated benefits, rules to make unionization easier, massive taxation - government will manage the economy from top to bottom in The Living Wage's warmed-over socialism...

The complete rejection of a free-market economy by these living-wage gurus...is too much even for many liberal economists. One of the most telling critiques of The Living Wage came from self-professed liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. In an article archived on the "cranks" section of his website, Krugman observes that "what the living wage is really about is not living standards, or even economics, but morality. Its advocates are basically opposed to the idea that wages are a market price - determined by supply and demand."

Continue reading "Creeping Socialism: ACORN & the Living Wage"

May 10, 2006


The Wrong Way to Avoid a Spending Veto

Carroll Andrew Morse

According to Andrew Grossman of the Heritage Foundation Policy Blog, Congress may avert a Presidential veto of the War on Terror/Hurricane Relief Supplemental Spending Bill by agreeing to a 13% across-the-board cut in all programs enhanced by the bill (h/t Mark Tapscott via Instapundit).

Is an across-the-board cut a reasonable way to rein in spending in a bill of this kind? Somebody should put that question to General Barry McCaffrey. General McCaffrey recently had this to say about the American effort to rebuild Iraq

CENTCOM and the U.S. Mission are running out of the most significant leverage we have in Iraq - economic reconstruction dollars. Having spent $18 billion - we now have $1.6 billion of new funding left in the pipeline.
Despite the fact that reconstruction funding for Iraq appears to running low, the (supposed) War on Terror supplemental spending bill cuts back programs under the heading of the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund by a total of $213,000,000. The line-items being cut back have titles like water resources and sanitation, the electric sector, and health care (complete list). A further 13% reduction would lead to a total cut in reconstruction spending of more than $230,000,000.

This funding cut is being enacted in the same bill that appropriates $1,200,000,000 to move a railroad-to-nowhere to benefit casino interests in Mississippi and to compensate a company for Hurricane damage that was covered by private insurance. Wouldnt it make more sense to completely cut the luxury spending out of the bill rather than cut back on necessary things like Iraqi reconstruction?

Continue reading "The Wrong Way to Avoid a Spending Veto"


May 8, 2006


Kurtz: National Media Gave Kennedy a Pass

Marc Comtois

Washington Post political scene reporter Howie Kurtz observes that the national media has been uncharacteristically silent concerning Patrick Kennedy's previous "adventures," especially since he is, well, a Kennedy:

It's hard to imagine that Patrick Kennedy would have gotten elected to Congress a dozen years ago without his last name.

It's equally hard to imagine that the media would be going wild about his late-night car crash and prescription drug addiction if he weren't a Kennedy.

The only lingering mystery is why national news organizations didn't pounce earlier on the Rhode Island Democrat's long history of alcohol and drug abuse, depression and a series of downright embarrassing incidents.

The answer in large measure is that Kennedy hasn't been a very important House member. But given the journalistic obsession with the Kennedy family and its tragicomic soap opera, he does seem to have gotten an easy ride -- except in the New England press, which has chronicled his every misstep.

While Kennedy, the 38-year-old son of Ted Kennedy, was widely reported to have held a news conference Friday, it was nothing of the sort. He read a statement designed to elicit sympathy, saying he was going into rehab, and took no questions. This amounted to an age-old damage-control technique: changing the subject...

When national news organizations last week began throwing together their congressman-in-trouble profiles -- along with the inevitable Ambien sidebars -- there was a long list of local clips to pore over.

In 1991, while a state representative, Kennedy acknowledged -- following a National Enquirer story -- having used cocaine as a teenager, but said he had kicked the habit years earlier by checking into a treatment center.

In 2000 alone, Kennedy got into a scuffle with an airport security guard, who said he shoved her during an argument about oversize luggage; admitted taking antidepressants; was accused by a charter company of causing $28,000 in damage to a rented sailboat; and, after a few drinks and an argument, had a distraught date call the Coast Guard to be rescued from his chartered yacht.

Just last month, Kennedy hit another car in a Rhode Island parking lot.

Relatively little of this drew significant national coverage...

However, Kurtz does note that Kennedy gets more negative coverage here at home.


May 7, 2006


Human Equality and Democracy in the Middle East - and in America

Harry Jaffa discusses human equality and democracy in the Middle East and connects the issues there to our own confusion in America about The Central Idea:

According to Abraham Lincoln, public opinion always has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate. The central idea of the American Foundingand indeed of constitutional government and the rule of lawwas the equality of mankind. This thought is central to all of Lincoln's speeches and writings, from 1854 until his election as president in 1860. It is immortalized in the Gettysburg Address.

The equality of mankind is best understood in light of a two-fold inequality. The first is the inequality of mankind and of the subhuman classes of living beings that comprise the order of nature. Dogs and horses, for example, are naturally subservient to human beings. But no human being is natural subservient to another human being. No human being has a right to rule another without the other's consent. The second is the inequality of man and God. As God's creatures, we owe unconditional obedience to His will. By that very fact however we do not owe such obedience to anyone else. Legitimate political authoritythe right of one human being to require obedience of another human beingarises only from consent...The rights that governments exist to secure are not the gift of government. They originate in God.

The great difficulty in forming legitimate governments is in persuading those forming the governments that those who are to be their fellow citizens are equal to them in the rights, which their common government is to protect...

The United States is engaged today in a great mission to spread democracy to the Middle East...Under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the minority of Sunnis persecuted the majority Shias. It is understandable that the minority Sunnis are today resisting majority rule, while the majority Shia favor it. The Sunnis clearly believe that majority rule by Shia will be used as a means of retribution and revenge...It is inconceivable to the Sunnis that the rule of the Shia majority will be anything other than tyranny. Indeed, it is inconceivable to them that any political power, whether of a minority or a majority, would be non-tyrannical. The idea of non-tyrannical government is alien to their history and their experience...they see no other form of rule other than that of force. Our government assumes that the people of the Middle East, like people elsewhere, seek freedom for others no less than for themselves. But that is an assumption that has not yet been confirmed by experience.

Our difficulty in pursuing a rational foreign policy in the Middle Eastor anywhere elseis compounded by the fact that we ourselves, as a nation, seem to be as confused as the Iraqis concerning the possibility of non-tyrannical majority rule. We continue to enjoy the practical benefits of political institutions founded upon the convictions of our Founding Fathers and Lincoln, but there is little belief in God-given natural rights, which are antecedent to government, and which define and limit the purpose of government...We, in short, engaged in telling others to accept the forms of our own political institutions, without any reference to the principles or convictions that give rise to those institutions.

According to many of our political and intellectual elites, both liberal and conservative, the minority in a democracy enjoys only such rights as the majority chooses to bestow upon them. The Bill of Rights in the American Constitutionand similar bills in state Constitutionsare regarded as gifts from the majority to the minority. But the American Constitution, and the state constitutions subordinate to it have, at one time or another, sanctioned both slavery and Jim Crow, by which the bills of rights applied to white Americans were denied to black Americans. But according to the elites, it is not undemocratic for the minority to lose. From this perspective, both slavery and Jim Crow were exercises of democratic majority rule. This is precisely the view of democracy by the Sunnis in Iraq, and is the reason they are fighting the United States.

Unless we as a political community can by reasoned discourse re-establish in our own minds the authority of the constitutionalism of the Founding Fathers and of Lincoln, of government devoted to securing the God-given equal rights of every individual human being, we will remain ill equipped to bring the fruits of freedom to others.


May 5, 2006


Spending Veto Possibility Update

Carroll Andrew Morse

The Senate has passed a War on Terror/Hurricane Relief Supplemental Spending Bill that appropriates a total of a total of $109,000,000,000 and includes a number of questionable pork-spending items. President Bush threatened to veto this bill if the total amount appropriated exceeded $94,500,000,000.

35 Republican Senators have signed a letter pledging to uphold the Presidents veto, but 14 of those Senators (George Allen, Robert Bennett, Kit Bond, Sam Brownback, Jim Bunning, Lincoln Chafee, John Cornyn, Elizabeth Dole, Charles Grassley, John Kyl, Mel Martinez, Rick Santorum, John Thune and John Warner) voted to approve the $109,000,000,000 version of the bill. Senator Orrin Hatch, who also signed the veto pledge, did not vote on the final passage of the bill.

Before the bill reaches the Presidents desk, it must be reconciled with the House version, which costs only $91,900,000,000. Negotiations between the House and Senate may still avert a veto. If they don't, the 14 Senators listed above will be in the position of having to vote against a bill they voted for in order to uphold their pledge. I don't get the tactics of this.


May 3, 2006


The Declaration Of Independence & What It Means To Be An American Citizen

To lessen the lack of clarity in the immigration debate about what it means to be an American citizen, let's go back to the first principles of the American Founding. The Claremont Institute has developed a web-based overview of the Declaration of Independence which includes these sub-sections:

A Guide to the Declaration of Independence

Issues at the time of the Founding

Hot topics

The Declaration of Independence

Founder's library


May 2, 2006


Identifying Four Core Issues Underlying the Immigration Debate

The clarity of many public policy debates gets derailed when the sloppy and imprecise use of words reduces such debates to cliches instead of a substantive discussion of issues. Recent developments in the immigration debate are merely the latest example. The result has been a focus on the wrong issues. More importantly, by having no connection to the principles underlying the American Founding, the public discourse on immigration has not led to a deeper understanding of what it truly means to be an American citizen.

As an example, our friends on the Left at Rhode Island's Future show an interesting, albeit flawed, understanding of both the real issues underlying the immigration debate and its connection to our American heritage in their posting entitled America Doesn't Work without Immigrants:

Today, the police estimated that 15,000-20,000 Rhode Islanders marched to the RI State House for the human rights of the 12-15 million undocumented immigrants who live and work in the shadows and only seek a legal pathway to citizenship. Just as millions of Americans marched for the civil rights of African-Americans while others in America expressed their disgust at giving civil rights to 'inferior' African-Americans, the struggle for dignity and justice continues to ensure the great promise of freedom enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

CORE ISSUE #1: WHO IS BEHIND MANY RALLIES & DOES THEIR POLITICAL AGENDA ADVANCE THE CAUSE OF FREEDOM?

Is the immigration debate really about "only seeking a legal pathway to citizenship" by people who love America and, thus, long to be officially a part of her? Information in previous postings by Andrew (here, here) and Marc would certainly suggest not.

Extensive coverage of the May 1 illegal immigration marches by Michelle Malkin only raises further questions about who is behind many of the rallies:

A Day to Hate the Yanquis
The Pictures You Won't See
Borders? What Borders?
The Day to Hate Republicans
L.A.'s Reconquista Reporter
[UPDATE: Here are some more links:
Where's the Compassion?
Reconquista 101
Calling White People "Wetbacks?"
Aztlan brown beret picture, showing a map of the Southwest USA becoming part of Mexico
Following all the links in these postings will be an eye-opener]

So do postings at Malkin's The Immigration Blog. The April 10 posting reminds us that the freedom to assemble does not exist in other countries who receive less criticism at these rallies than America. What does that say about the protestors' political agenda?

Lovers of the late communist guerilla Che and socialist groups like A.N.S.W.E.R. are the antithesis of freedom-loving Americans and they appear to be commandeering the illegal alien protest movement in many parts of the country. These are not people who love America and the timeless principles of her Founding.

Others who promote the same immigration political agenda need to be careful about aligning themselves with (or being manipulated by) such non-democrats.

Byron York reminds us that labor unions are intimately involved because it aligns with their own economic self-interest of growing union membership - even if the immigration policies they end up supporting run counter to both the rule of law and America's Founding principles:

UNITE HERE, which represents about 460,000 workers in the U.S. and Canada but hopes to unionize millions of newly arrived, low-paid, unskilled immigrant workers, played a major role in organizing the Washington rally, as well as other pro-illegal-immigration events across the country...

The chief organizer and spokesman of the Washington rally was a man named Jaime Contreras, who heads the local SEIU chapter...

SEIU and UNITE HERE, along with a few others like the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, are key sources of money, talent, and organization in the nationwide campaign to legalize illegal immigrants.

The Chamber of Commerce deserves some criticism, too, for its implicit support of illegal aliens as "cheap labor" in the workforce, although their involvement has been more passive than the unions.

Determining who is behind many of the rallies and identifying their political agenda is a real issue that needs more public scrutiny.

CORE ISSUE #2: THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION CAUSE IS NOT MORALLY EQUIVALENT TO MARTIN LUTHER KING JR'S NOBLE CRUSADE

It is an insult to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. to suggest that this week's protests have any moral basis comparable to King's efforts on behalf of black Americans.

Mark Krikorian elaborates on why:

The question now is whether the government of the United States will give in to the mob...

...the use of direct action to intimidate lawmakers is largely alien to American experience. The civil-rights marches, which the illegal-alien movement frequently points to as its inspiration, were explicitly patriotic and constitutional affairs. The 1963 march on Washington didn't feature foreign flags and racist, anti-American signs; on the contrary, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech pointed to the promise of "the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence," written by "the architects of our Republic," and his peroration was based on the lyrics of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."

The illegal-alien marches, starting almost two months ago in Chicago, have more in common with the anti-war marches of the 1960s in their hostility to the American constitutional order...

It is equally absurd to use meaningless cliches and label every political cause a "civil rights issue" - a behavior that can only result from a superficial understanding of the principles underlying the American Founding as well as King's just crusade.

CORE ISSUE #3: ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION ADVOCATES SHOW DISDAIN FOR THE RULE OF LAW & SUCH DISDAIN PUTS OUR FREEDOM AT RISK

I would strongly suggest that Heather Mac Donald's mid-April viewpoint expressed in Postmodern "Rights" en Los Estados Unidos: "I am here," so deal with it more accurately describes what many of us consider to be a major - but unaddressed - issue in this immigration debate: Does the rule of law, a core principle of the American Founding, still matter in America?

With last month's mass demonstrations of illegal aliens, the United States has entered the era of postmodern rights. The protesters looked like conventional rights demonstrators, with their raised fists, chants, and banners. But unlike political protesters of the past, the illegal-alien marchers invoked no legal basis for their claims. Their argument boils down to: "We are here, therefore we have a right to the immigration status we desire." Like the postmodern signifier, this legal claim refers to nothing outside of itself; it is, in the jargon of deconstruction, a presence based on an absence.

The consequences of this novel argument are not insignificant: the demise of nation-states and of the rule of law. Remember: The only basis for the illegals' demands is: "I am here." The "I am here" argument could be made by anyone anywhere - a Moroccan sneaking into Sweden could make the same demand for legal status. In one stroke, the border-breaking lobby has nullified the entire edifice of American immigration law and with it, sovereignty itself. None of the distinctions in that law matter, the advocates say. The conditions for legal entry? Null and void. The democratically chosen priorities for who may enter the country and who not? Give me a break! In other words, the United States has no right to decide who may come across its borders and what legal status an alien may obtain upon arrival. Those decisions remain solely the prerogative of the alien himself. The border no longer exists.

The American legal tradition has until now assumed that it takes a congressional enactment or a judicial ruling to overturn a duly enacted law. With the ubiquitous chant, "No person is illegal," first popularized by Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahoney, that tradition is over. Pace Cardinal Mahoney, under existing immigration law, a person may in fact be "illegal," if he has broken into the country without permission or has overstayed his visa. Mahoney and the hordes who have taken up the "No person is illegal" slogan beg to differ. No law has the power to confer illegal status on an alien law-breaker, they say. Therefore, the existing laws are void, simply because the illegal aliens and their supporters do not like them, not because Congress has decided to withdraw them. This alleged power to overturn laws based on sheer presence is a remarkable new constitutional development.

Efforts to analogize the illegal-alien protests to the civil-rights movement are ludicrous. Blacks were demanding that state governments end the unlawful deprivation of rights that they already possessed under the Constitution, and for which the nation had fought a traumatic civil war. The illegals are claiming rights to which by law they have no right and for which they can make no legal argument whatsoever. If their movement succeeds, it will not be possible to deny any future rights claims in any sphere of life or activity...

[UPDATE: Rick Moran makes similar points here:

...a difference that the Open Borders crew refuses to acknowledge and, in fact, obfuscates in order to tag their opponents as heartless gorgons. It is the difference between those who endure the bureaucratic rigmarole and long waiting periods to legally enter this country and those who take the sometimes perilous but nevertheless easier way by sneaking across the border in defiance of the law.

In truth, this is the club used by the pro-illegal lobby to beat enforcement advocates over the head. By successfully blurring the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, they can portray those who support a rational immigration policy as ideological soul mates of the "Know Nothing" anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic party of the early 1850's...

Almost 1 million people enter this country as legal immigrants every year...There are very, very few enforcement advocates who begrudge these potential citizens their rights under the law...most pro-enforcement advocates actually support increased legal immigration.

But you would never know this if the only information you received was from the pro-illegal groups. They have successfully portrayed the anti-illegal lobby as anti-immigration - both legal and illegal - as well as proponents of a draconian "round-up" of illegals that would tear families apart and turn the United States into a police state...

On the other hand, how often do you read about International ANSWER and how they have expropriated the reform movement for their own nefarious ends? Those May Day protests were largely organized by the communists in ANSWER while being opposed by more mainstream immigration groups. In fact, few pro-reform websites bothered to inform their readers of this very salient point.

We will not have meaningful immigration reform until we all agree that the United States is a sovereign country with recognizable borders that must be defended. That defense includes shutting the door on people who would break the law to come here. It is such a basic concept that it is mystifying why the pro-illegal lobby deliberately ignores it. At times, they seem almost embarrassed by the fact that the United States has a right to determine who comes here and who doesn't as well as determining its own requirements for citizenship.

In the end, this is what "sovereignty" is all about; the belief that being born an American is a privilege beyond words and that becoming an American should also be a privilege, earned by a legal immigrant's hard work, obedience of the law, and desire to be a part of this grand experiment in self-government.

Anything less and you cheapen the idea of citizenship for everyone.

Michelle Malkin has more in Reconquista is real.]

CORE ISSUE #4: A TEACHING OPPORTUNITY ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN AMERICAN CITIZEN EXISTS BECAUSE THERE IS ANOTHER WAY TO LOOK AT THE IMMIGRATION ISSUE

There is another way to look at the immigration issues that is consistent with a love of liberty and a belief in self-government - both core American principles. Peter Schramm of the Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs writes about this alternative view in describing his family's immigration to the United States from Communist Hungary following the failed 1956 revolution in Born American, but in the Wrong Place:

...Now, with the revolution failing, came the final straw for my Dad...He came home and announced to my mother that that was it. He said he was going to leave the country...

"But where are we going?" [Peter Schramm] asked [his father].

"We are going to America," my father said.

"Why America?" I prodded.

"Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place," he replied.

My father said that as naturally as if I had asked him what was the color of the sky. It was so obvious to him why we should head for America. There was really no other option in his mind. What was obvious to him, unfortunately, took me nearly 20 years to learn. But then, I had to "un-learn" a lot of things along the way. How is it that this simple man who had none of the benefits or luxuries of freedom and so-called "education" understood this truth so deeply and so purely and expressed it so beautifully? It has something to do with the self-evidence, as Jefferson put it, of America's principles. Of course, he hadn't studied Jefferson or America's Declaration of Independence, but he had come to know deep in his heart the meaning of tyranny. And he hungered for its opposite. The embodiment of those self-evident truths and of justice in America was an undeniable fact to souls suffering under oppression. And while a professor at Harvard might have scoffed at the idea of American justice in 1956 (or today, for that matter), my Dad would have scoffed at him. Such a person, Dad would say, had never suffered in a regime of true injustice. America represented to my Dad, as Lincoln put it, "the last, best hope of earth."

I would like to be able to say that this made Dad a remarkable man for his time and his circumstance. For, in many ways, Dad truly is a wonder. But this is not one of them. He was not remarkable in this understanding. Everybody in Hungary, at least everybody who wasn't a true believer in the Communists. thought that way...

Continue reading "Identifying Four Core Issues Underlying the Immigration Debate"


The Senate Preserves its Pork

Carroll Andrew Morse

Two more attempts to remove pork spending from the War on Terror/Hurricane Relief Supplemental Spending bill have been defeated in the United States Senate.

An amendment introduced by Senator John McCain to remove from the spending bill a $6,000,000 subsidy to be given to sugar cane growers in Hawaii was defeated this morning by a vote of 40-59. Hawaii is approximately 4000 miles away from the site of 2005s major hurricane strikes.

Also, the fourth of the Coburn amendments was defeated this afternoon by a vote of 48-51. According to the Porkbusters website, the defated amendment would have eliminated a $500,000,000 subsidy that will now be given to Northrop-Grumman to compensate them for disruption expenses cause by Hurricane Katrina. This item is considered pork because Northrop-Grumman is already covered by insurance for its losses.

Senator Lincoln Chafee voted to cut both pork items, improving his record on supplemental spending pork votes to 4-0. Senator Jack Reed voted to approve both pork items, lowering his record to 1-3 voted against the Northrop-Grumman subsidy, but in favor of the sugar subsidy, bringing his record to 2-2.

UPDATE:

Alas, Senator Coburn has withdrawn porkbusting amendments 5 through 18 from the US Senate. Amendment 19 ("acceleration of construction of the Sacramento Riverbank Protection Project in California") will still be voted upon.

There was progress. Last year, fewer than 20 Senators supported porkbusting cuts like eliminating the "bridge to nowhere". This time around, 40 or more Senators regularly voted in favor of eliminating pork projects. Still, to seal the deal, the Porkbusters movement has to make Senators who want to keep your taxes high so they can engage in unrestrained pork spending fear for their jobs.


April 30, 2006


George Weigel on Europe's Two Culture Wars: Is This the Future for America?

As America awaits the big May 1 protest parades, with their likely demands for an unconditional amnesty for illegal immigrants, it is worth noting that many protestors so far reject any requirement for assimilation to historical American principles. This is a non-trivial issue for which the trends in Europe offer a perspective on what the long-term price could be for the failure to educate Americans.

This concern was reinforced this week when my children's school - a fine school that has been a wonderful place for them - sent out a survey asking parents to judge the quality of their efforts at multiculturalism and diversity. There was a section for comments and I wrote these words:

I find the entire subject of multiculturalism to be fraught with definitional problems.

I do not know anyone that would suggest learning about world history is anything but an invaluable experience for our children.

But multiculturalism frequently sets a relativistic tone that values feelings and self-esteem over a rigorous differentiation between truly unique cultural traditions. Look at the definition of it in this survey: "bringing together and celebrating of many distinctive cultures..." Are those who promote multiculturalism willing to teach the superiority of some traditions over others and be able to offer reasoned arguments why? My experience is usually not.

As one writer said: "The foremost idea of multiculturism is the equal value of all cultures, or cultural relativism...Inherent in the idea of cultural relativism is the idea that culture, race, ancestry or gender determines our ideas."

Do we believe in reason and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong? Do we believe in and teach the uniqueness of the American tradition?

As [Mac Owens, a contributor to this blog site] said: "Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest - the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will."...It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality...it is the idea of equality in the Declaration of Independence, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood."

Are we teaching those principles to our kids? Are we teaching them what Roger Pilon said: "Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law...It is not our political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system. But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision, liberty is its aim...We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government..."

While we must be willing to acknowledge our failures to live up to the Founding standards, no other country in the history of the world was founded on such bold truths.

Are we teaching our children to be citizens capable of the self-government in the American tradition? Are we teaching them the uniqueness of the American tradition? Or, in the spirit of multiculturalism, do we treat our Founding as equivalent to others which can make no such claims? Are we teaching them about the killing fields in Cambodia, the gulags in the Soviet Union, the mass murders in the millions done by Mao, the gas chambers of Nazi Germany - all situations where a Nietzsche-like focus on power trumping all makes the only relevant issue be: who has the power to control?

And that does not even touch the frequently used but undefined phrase called "social justice." Michael Novak paraphrased Nobel Laureate Friederich Hayek in these words: "...whole books have been written about social justice without ever offering a definition of it..The vagueness seems indispensable. The minute one begins to define social justice, one runs into embarrassing intellectual difficulties. It becomes, most often, a term of art whose operational meaning is, "We need a law against that." In other words, it becomes an instrument of ideological intimidation, for the purpose of gaining the power of legal coercion."

So let us teach our children to be colorblind in the way Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke, where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. But let's not let multiculturalism dumb it all down where there are no standards of excellence or truth discoverable by some combination of reason or faith.

What is the significance of these issues? What does it suggest could be our future? In the May 2006 edition of Commentary Magazine, George Weigel offers a view as he writes about Europe's Two Culture Wars.

...Earlier this year, five days short of the second anniversary of the Madrid bombings, the Zapatero government, which had already legalized marriage between and adoption by same-sex partners, and sought to restrict religious education in Spanish schools, announced that the words "father" and "mother" would no longer appear on Spanish birth certificates. Rather, according to the government's official bulletin, "the expression 'father' will be replaced by 'Progenitor A' and 'mother' will be replaced by 'Progenitor B.'"...

...For the events of the past two years in Spain are a microcosm of the two interrelated culture wars that beset Western Europe today.

The first of these wars...call[ed]..."Culture War A" - is a sharper form of the red state/blue state divide in America: a war between the post-modern forces of moral relativism and the defenders of traditional moral conviction. The second - "Culture War B" - is the struggle to define the nature of civil society, the meaning of tolerance and pluralism, and the limits of multiculturalism in an aging Europe whose below-replacement-level fertility rates have opened the door to rapidly growing and assertive Muslim populations.

The aggressors in Culture War A are radical secularists, motivated by what the legal scholar Joseph Weiler has dubbed "Christophobia." They aim to eliminate vestiges of Europe's Judeo-Christian culture from a post-Christian European Union by demanding same-sex marriage in the name of equality, by restricting free speech in the name of civility, and by abrogating core aspects of religious freedom in the name of tolerance. The aggressors in Culture War B are radical and jihadist Muslims who detest the West, who are determined to impose Islamic taboos on Western societies by violent protest and other forms of coercion if necessary, and who see such operations as the first stage toward the Islamification of Europe...

The question Europe must face, but which much of Europe seems reluctant to face, is whether the aggressors in Culture War A have not made it exceptionally difficult for the forces of true tolerance and authentic civil society to prevail in Culture War B.

Western Europe's descent into the languors of "depoliticization," as some analysts have called it, once seemed a matter of welfare-state politics, socialist economics, and protectionist trade policy, flavored by irritating EU regulations...indeed there has been no let-up in Europe's seeming determination to bind itself ever more tightly in the cords of bureaucratic regulation...

What does all this have to do with Culture War A? The plain fact is that even as Europe's regulatory passions continue to bear deleterious economic consequences, they have also been sharpened to a harder ideological edge, not least where religion is concerned...

...Culture War A represents a determined effort on the part of secularists, using both national and EU regulatory machinery, to marginalize the public presence and impact of Europe's dwindling numbers of practicing Christians...

Culture War A finds expression as well in efforts to coerce and impose behaviors deemed progressive, compassionate, non-judgmental, or politically correct in extreme feminist or multiculturalist terms. In recent years, this has typically taken the form of EU member-states legally regulating, and thus restricting, free speech...

...the most dramatic fact about the continent in the early 21st century: Europe is committing demographic suicide, and has been doing so for some time...

...Not a single EU member has a replacement-level fertility rate, i.e., the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population. Moreover, eleven EU countries - including Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and all three Baltic states - display "negative natural increase" (i.e., more annual deaths than births), a clear step down into a demographic death-spiral...

Over the next quarter-century, the number of workers in Europe will decline by 7 percent while the number of over-sixty-fives will increase by 50 percent, trends that will create intolerable fiscal difficulties for the welfare state across the continent. The resulting inter-generational strains will place great pressures on national politics...Demography is destiny, and Europe's demographics of decline - which are unparalleled in human history absent wars, plagues, and natural catastrophes - are creating enormous and unavoidable problems.

Even more ominously, Europe's demographic free-fall is the link between Culture War A and Culture War B.

History abhors vacuums, and the demographic vacuum created by Europe's self-destructive fertility rates has, for several generations now, been filled by a large-scale immigration from throughout the Islamic world...

Far more has changed than the physical appearance of European metropolitan areas, though. There are dozens of "ungovernable" areas in France: Muslim-dominated suburbs, mainly, where the writ of French law does not run and into which French police do not go. Similar extraterritorial enclaves, in which sharia law is enforced by local Muslim clerics, can be found in other European countries. Moreover, as Bruce Bawer details in a new book, While Europe Slept, European authorities pay little or no attention to practices among their Muslim populations that range from the physically cruel (female circumcision) through the morally cruel (arranged and forced marriages) to the socially disruptive (remanding Muslim children back to radical madrasses in the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan for their primary and secondary education) and the illegal ("honor" killings in cases of adultery and rape - the rape victim being the one killed)...

Sixty years after the end of World War II, the European instinct for appeasement is alive and well. French public swimming pools have been segregated by sex because of Muslim protests. "Piglet" mugs have disappeared from certain British retailers after Muslim complaints that the A. A. Milne character was offensive to Islamic sensibilities. So have Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirls, which reminded some Muslims of Arabic script from the Koran. Bawer reports that the British Red Cross banished Christmas trees and nativity scenes from its charity stores for fear of offending Muslims. For similar reasons, the Dutch police in the wake of the van Gogh murder destroyed a piece of Amsterdam street art that proclaimed "Thou shalt not kill"; schoolchildren were forbidden to display Dutch flags on their backpacks because immigrants might think them "provocative."...

These patterns of sedition and appeasement finally came to global attention earlier this year in the Danish-cartoon jihad...

The response from Europe, in the main, was to intensify appeasement...the EU's justice minister, Franco Frattini, announced that the EU would establish a "media code" to encourage "prudence" - "prudence" being a synonym for "surrender"...

For all the blindness of the politicians who in the 1930's attempted to appease totalitarian aggression, they at least thought that they were thereby preserving their way of life. Bruce Bawer...suggests that 21-st century Europe's appeasement of Islamists amounts to a self-inflicted dhimmitude: in an attempt to slow the advance of a rising Islamist tide, many of Europe's national and transnational political leaders are surrendering core aspects of sovereignty and turning Europe's native populations into second- and third-class citizens in their own countries.

Bawer blames Europe's appeasement mentality and its consequences on multiculturalist political correctness run amok, and there is surely something to that. For, in a nice piece of intellectual irony, European multiculturalism, based on postmodern theories of the alleged incoherence of knowledge (and thus the relativity of all truth claims), has itself become utterly incoherent, not to say self-contradictory...

[You have to read some of the examples cited throughout the article to fully appreciate how extreme things have become.]

Yet to blame "multi-culti" p.c. for Europe's paralysis is to remain on the surface of things. Culture War A - the attempt to impose multiculturalism and "lifestyle" libertinism in Europe by limiting free speech, defining religious and moral conviction as bigotry, and using state power to enforce "inclusivity" and "sensitivity" - is a war over the very meaning of tolerance itself. What Bruce Bawer rightly deplores as out-of-control political correctness in Europe is rooted in a deeper malady: a rejection of the belief that human beings, however inadequately or incompletely, can grasp the truth of things - a belief that has, for almost two millennia, underwritten the European civilization that grew out of the interaction of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome.

Postmodern European high culture repudiates that belief. And because it can only conceive of "your truth" and "my truth" while determinedly rejecting any idea of "the truth," it can only conceive of tolerance as indifference to differences - an indifference to be enforced by coercive state power, if necessary. The idea of tolerance as engaging differences within the bond of civility...is itself regarded as, well, intolerant. Those who would defend the true tolerance of orderly public argument about contending truth claims (which include religious and moral convictions) risk being driven, and in many cases are driven, from the European public square by being branded as "bigots."

But the problem is deeper still. For one thing, however loudly European postmodernists may proclaim their devotion to the relativity of all truths, in practice this translates into something very different - namely, the deprecation of traditional Western truths, combined with a studied deference to non- or anti-Western ones. In the relativist mindset, it thus turns out, not all religious and moral conviction is bigotry that must be suppressed; only the Judeo-Christian variety is. In short, the moral relativism of Europe is often mere window-dressing for Western self-hatred...

Continue reading "George Weigel on Europe's Two Culture Wars: Is This the Future for America?"

April 28, 2006


Supplemental Pork

Carroll Andrew Morse

Senator Tom Coburn has identified 19 items (see the table below) that he believes to be wasteful pork spending in the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Hurricane Recovery bill currently being debated in the United States Senate . The Senator has introduced amendments that would rescind the 19 items.

Determining if a spending earmark is truly pork generally requires a more complete project description than is provided in the text of legislation. For instance, the first of Senator Coburn's proposed rescissions would have cut funds earmarked for the relocation of a rail line in Mississippi. Superficially, this sounds as if it could be a reasonable Katrina cleanup project. However, according to the Washington Post, the $700,000,000 is being appropriated to relocate a railway that has already been rebuilt with Federal dollars within the past year...

Mississippi's two U.S. senators included $700 million in an emergency war spending bill to relocate a Gulf Coast rail line that has already been rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina at a cost of at least $250 million.

Republican Sens. Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who have the backing of their state's economic development agencies and tourism industry, say the CSX freight line must be moved to save it from the next hurricane and to protect Mississippi's growing coastal population from rail accidents. But critics of the measure call it a gift to coastal developers and the casino industry that would be paid for with money carved out of tight Katrina relief funds and piggybacked onto funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Senate has already voted to "table" the amendment that would have eliminated this project, i.e. the $700,000,000 appropriation remains in the bill. A vote to table the second Coburn amendment, rescinding $15,000,000 allocated for "seafood promotion strategies", did not pass. The Senate could still vote to eliminate this earmark.

Senator Lincoln Chafee voted with the porkbusting side in both cases, voting against tabling either amendment. Senator Jack Reed voted to allow a vote on rescinding the railway spending, but to preserve the seafood promotion spending.

The toughest vote for the New England delegation will be the vote on $20,000,000 earmarked for assisting New England coastal communities that were impacted by a red tide outbreak (item 13).

I Rail Line Relocation Capital Grant program (Federal Railroad Administration) $700,000,000
II Implement seafood promotion strategies (National Marine Fisheries Service) $15,000,000
Continue reading "Supplemental Pork"

April 23, 2006


Reflections on the Meaning of Inequality

Donald B. Hawthorne

Among the weighty phrases thrown around in our public discourse, few are as provocative or poorly understood as "social justice" and "inequality." A perspective on social justice was previously offered here.

With a H/T to Cafe Hayek, David Schmidtz's article When Inequality Matters offers a philosophical perspective on the issue of inequality. (Note: His definition of "liberal" is the classical definition going back to prior centuries, not today's definition.) This is not a casual read, but is one worth re-reading several times.

Everyone cares about inequality. Caring about inequality, though, is not enough to make inequality matter. Unless we have the right sorts of reasons to care, equality does not matter, at least not in the way justice matters. So, why care about inequality?

If the question has no simple answer, part of the reason is that equality is multi-dimensional...

Of the many dimensions along which people can be unequal, presumably some do not matter. Moreover, not all dimensions can call for amelioration, given that to ameliorate along one dimension is to exacerbate along another. The dimensions that do matter, though, may turn out to matter for the same reason, so even given that inequality is multi-dimensional, the reason to care about it may yet be relatively simple. Here are two possibilities.

1. The dimensions of equality that matter are dimensions where moving in one direction (letting wives have bank accounts, say) is liberating while moving in the other direction is oppressive.

2. The dimensions of equality that matter are dimensions where moving in one direction (toward equality of income, say) fosters prosperity while moving in the other fosters destitution.

My assumption here is that for an inequality to matter, it must make a difference...Simply calling a given inequality 'unjust' (some people paying more than others pay in taxes, say, or having more left after paying) is not a reason...we make good on the promise when we offer reasons why that particular inequality matters enough to warrant being called unjust.

Inequality That Matters: Toward Liberation

...The point of the liberal ideal of political equality is not to stop us from becoming more worthy along dimensions where our worth can be affected by our choices, but to facilitate our becoming more worthy.

Liberal political equality is not premised on the absurd hope that, under ideal conditions, we all turn out to be equally worthy. It presupposes only a traditionally liberal optimism regarding what kind of society results from giving people (all people, so far as we can) a chance to choose worthy ways of life. We do not see people's various contributions as equally valuable, but that was never the point of equal opportunity, and never could be. Why not? Because we do not see even our own contributions as equally worthy, let alone everyone's...In everyday life, genuine respect (to some extent) tracks how we distinguish ourselves as we develop our unique potentials in unique ways.

Traditional liberals wanted people - all people - to be as free as possible to pursue their dreams. Accordingly, the equal opportunity of liberal tradition put the emphasis on unleashing human potential, not equalizing it...

...Anderson suggests that when redistribution's purpose is to make up for bad luck, including the misfortune of being less capable than others, the result in practice is disrespect...

Political equality has no such consequence...

Liberal egalitarianism has a history of being, first and foremost, a concern about status, not stuff. Iris Marion Young calls it a mistake to try to reduce justice to a more specific idea of distributive justice...Young sees two problems with the "distributive paradigm." First, it leads us to focus on allocating material goods. Second, while the paradigm can be "metaphorically extended to nonmaterial social goods" such as power, opportunity, and self-respect, the paradigm represents such goods as though they were static quantities to be allocated rather than evolving properties of ongoing relationships.

...The proper function of our network of evolving relationships is not to keep us in our static place but to empower us to aspire to a better life. Even more fundamentally, the point is to empower us to become as worthy as we can be along dimensions where our worth is affected by the choices we make about what sort of life is worth living...

In a race, equal opportunity matters. In a race, people need to start on an equal footing. Why? Because a race's purpose is to measure relative performance. Measuring relative performance, though, is not a society's purpose. We form societies with the Joneses so that we may do well, period, not so that we may do well relative to the Joneses. To do well, period, people need a good footing, not an equal footing. No one needs to win, so no one needs a fair chance to win. No one needs to keep up with the Joneses, so no one needs a fair chance to keep up with the Joneses. No one needs to put the Joneses in their place or to stop them from pulling ahead. The Joneses are neighbors, not competitors.

Inequality That Matters: Toward Prosperity

Here is a truism about the wealth of nations: Zero-sum games do not increase it. Historically, the welfare of the poor always - always - depends on putting people in a position where their best shot at prosperity is to find a way of making other people better off. The key to long-run welfare never has been and never will be a matter of making sure the game's best players lose. When we insist on creating enough power to beat the best players in zero-sum games, it is just a matter of time before the best players capture the very power we created in the hope of using it against them. We are never so unequal, or so oppressed, as when we give a dictator the power to equalize us. By contrast, the kinds of equality we have reason to care about will be kinds that in some way facilitate society as a positive sum game...

One of the great sources of inequality (more precisely, inequalities of wealth and income) is the division of labor. If we truly were on our own, producing something as mundane as a slice of pizza would be out of the question. Even getting started...acquiring iron ore (with our bare hands) and turning it into an oven in which to bake the dough...would be out of the question. Without division of labor, the Joneses would go nowhere, so keeping up with them would be unavoidable. At the same time, the division of labor makes us many thousands of times more productive than we otherwise would have been. Compared to that, the income inequality that division of labor fosters is inconsequential. In summary, the kind of equality that is liberating is also the kind that historically has been a key to human prosperity...namely, acknowledging people's right to use their own judgment about how to employ their talents under prevailing circumstances, as free as possible from encumbrances of a race-, sex-, or caste-defined socioeconomic roles.

From the Goodness of Equality to the Rightness of Equalizing

David Miller notices a difference between saying equality is good and saying equality is required by justice...Not everything that matters is a matter of justice.

...In the real world, to take from one person and give to another does not only alter a distribution. It also alters the degree to which products are controlled by their producers. To redistribute under real-world conditions, we must alienate producers from their products. The alienation of producers from their products was identified as a problem by Karl Marx, and rightly so; it should be seen as a problem from any perspective.

...The liberal ideal is free association, not atomic isolation. Further, the actual history of free association is that we do not become hermits but instead freely organize ourselves into "thick" communities. Hutterites, Mennonites, and other groups moved to North America not because liberal society is where they can't form thick communities but because liberal society is where they can.

...We do not start from scratch. We weave our contribution into an existing tapestry of contributions, and within limits, are seen as owning our contributions, however humble they may be. That is why people contribute, and that in turn is why we have a system of production.

...When we do reflect on the history of any given ongoing enterprise, we feel grateful to Thomas Edison and all those who actually helped to make the enterprise possible. We could of course resist the urge to feel grateful, insisting that a person's character depends on "fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit" and therefore, at least theoretically, there is a form of respect we can have for people even while giving them no credit for the effort and talent they bring to the table. One problem: this sort of respect is not the kind that brings producers to the table. It is not the kind that makes communities work...

...What about inequalities?...Unless an inequality (of talent, say) is ours to arrange, theories about what would be fair are moot. A truly foundational theory about how inequalities ought to be arranged would not start by imagining us coming to a bargaining table with a right to distribute what other people have produced. A truly foundational theory would start by acknowledging that there is a prior moral question about which inequalities are ours to arrange.



Reflections on the Meaning of Inequality

Among the weighty phrases thrown around in our public discourse, few are as provocative or poorly understood as "social justice" and "inequality." A perspective on social justice was previously offered here.

With a H/T to Cafe Hayek, David Schmidtz's article When Inequality Matters offers a philosophical perspective on the issue of inequality. (Note: His definition of "liberal" is the classical definition going back to prior centuries, not today's definition.) This is not a casual read, but is one worth re-reading several times.

Everyone cares about inequality. Caring about inequality, though, is not enough to make inequality matter. Unless we have the right sorts of reasons to care, equality does not matter, at least not in the way justice matters. So, why care about inequality?

If the question has no simple answer, part of the reason is that equality is multi-dimensional...

Of the many dimensions along which people can be unequal, presumably some do not matter. Moreover, not all dimensions can call for amelioration, given that to ameliorate along one dimension is to exacerbate along another. The dimensions that do matter, though, may turn out to matter for the same reason, so even given that inequality is multi-dimensional, the reason to care about it may yet be relatively simple. Here are two possibilities.

1. The dimensions of equality that matter are dimensions where moving in one direction (letting wives have bank accounts, say) is liberating while moving in the other direction is oppressive.

2. The dimensions of equality that matter are dimensions where moving in one direction (toward equality of income, say) fosters prosperity while moving in the other fosters destitution.

My assumption here is that for an inequality to matter, it must make a difference...Simply calling a given inequality 'unjust' (some people paying more than others pay in taxes, say, or having more left after paying) is not a reason...we make good on the promise when we offer reasons why that particular inequality matters enough to warrant being called unjust.

Inequality That Matters: Toward Liberation

...The point of the liberal ideal of political equality is not to stop us from becoming more worthy along dimensions where our worth can be affected by our choices, but to facilitate our becoming more worthy.

Liberal political equality is not premised on the absurd hope that, under ideal conditions, we all turn out to be equally worthy. It presupposes only a traditionally liberal optimism regarding what kind of society results from giving people (all people, so far as we can) a chance to choose worthy ways of life. We do not see peoples various contributions as equally valuable, but that was never the point of equal opportunity, and never could be. Why not? Because we do not see even our own contributions as equally worthy, let alone everyones...In everyday life, genuine respect (to some extent) tracks how we distinguish ourselves as we develop our unique potentials in unique ways.

Traditional liberals wanted peopleall peopleto be as free as possible to pursue their dreams. Accordingly, the equal opportunity of liberal tradition put the emphasis on unleashing human potential, not equalizing it...

...Anderson suggests that when redistributions purpose is to make up for bad luck, including the misfortune of being less capable than others, the result in practice is disrespect...

Political equality has no such consequence...

Liberal egalitarianism has a history of being, first and foremost, a concern about status, not stuff. Iris Marion Young calls it a mistake to try to reduce justice to a more specific idea of distributive justice...Young sees two problems with the "distributive paradigm." First, it leads us to focus on allocating material goods. Second, while the paradigm can be "metaphorically extended to nonmaterial social goods" such as power, opportunity, and self-respect, the paradigm represents such goods as though they were static quantities to be allocated rather than evolving properties of ongoing relationships.

...The proper function of our network of evolving relationships is not to keep us in our static place but to empower us to aspire to a better life. Even more fundamentally, the point is to empower us to become as worthy as we can be along dimensions where our worth is affected by the choices we make about what sort of life is worth living...

In a race, equal opportunity matters. In a race, people need to start on an equal footing. Why? Because a races purpose is to measure relative performance. Measuring relative performance, though, is not a societys purpose. We form societies with the Joneses so that we may do well, period, not so that we may do well relative to the Joneses. To do well, period, people need a good footing, not an equal footing. No one needs to win, so no one needs a fair chance to win. No one needs to keep up with the Joneses, so no one needs a fair chance to keep up with the Joneses. No one needs to put the Joneses in their place or to stop them from pulling ahead. The Joneses are neighbors, not competitors.

Inequality That Matters: Toward Prosperity

Here is a truism about the wealth of nations: Zero-sum games do not increase it. Historically, the welfare of the poor alwaysalwaysdepends on putting people in a position where their best shot at prosperity is to find a way of making other people better off. The key to long-run welfare never has been and never will be a matter of making sure the games best players lose. When we insist on creating enough power to beat the best players in zero-sum games, it is just a matter of time before the best players capture the very power we created in the hope of using it against them. We are never so unequal, or so oppressed, as when we give a dictator the power to equalize us. By contrast, the kinds of equality we have reason to care about will be kinds that in some way facilitate society as a positive sum game...

One of the great sources of inequality (more precisely, inequalities of wealth and income) is the division of labor. If we truly were on our own, producing something as mundane as a slice of pizza would be out of the question. Even getting startedacquiring iron ore (with our bare hands) and turning it into an oven in which to bake the doughwould be out of the question. Without division of labor, the Joneses would go nowhere, so keeping up with them would be unavoidable. At the same time, the division of labor makes us many thousands of times more productive than we otherwise would have been. Compared to that, the income inequality that division of labor fosters is inconsequential. In summary, the kind of equality that is liberating is also the kind that historically has been a key to human prosperitynamely, acknowledging peoples right to use their own judgment about how to employ their talents under prevailing circumstances, as free as possible from encumbrances of a race-, sex-, or caste-defined socioeconomic roles.

From the Goodness of Equality to the Rightness of Equalizing

David Miller notices a difference between saying equality is good and saying equality is required by justice...Not everything that matters is a matter of justice.

...In the real world, to take from one person and give to another does not only alter a distribution. It also alters the degree to which products are controlled by their producers. To redistribute under real-world conditions, we must alienate producers from their products. The alienation of producers from their products was identified as a problem by Karl Marx, and rightly so; it should be seen as a problem from any perspective.

...The liberal ideal is free association, not atomic isolation. Further, the actual history of free association is that we do not become hermits but instead freely organize ourselves into "thick" communities. Hutterites, Mennonites, and other groups moved to North America not because liberal society is where they cant form thick communities but because liberal society is where they can.

...We do not start from scratch. We weave our contribution into an existing tapestry of contributions, and within limits, are seen as owning our contributions, however humble they may be. That is why people contribute, and that in turn is why we have a system of production.

...When we do reflect on the history of any given ongoing enterprise, we feel grateful to Thomas Edison and all those who actually helped to make the enterprise possible. We could of course resist the urge to feel grateful, insisting that a persons character depends on "fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit" and therefore, at least theoretically, there is a form of respect we can have for people even while giving them no credit for the effort and talent they bring to the table. One problem: this sort of respect is not the kind that brings producers to the table. It is not the kind that makes communities work...

...What about inequalities?...Unless an inequality (of talent, say) is ours to arrange, theories about what would be fair are moot. A truly foundational theory about how inequalities ought to be arranged would not start by imagining us coming to a bargaining table with a right to distribute what other people have produced. A truly foundational theory would start by acknowledging that there is a prior moral question about which inequalities are ours to arrange.


April 21, 2006


Becoming Americans

As an alumnus of one of The Claremont Colleges, it is with pride that I highlight the mission of the Claremont Institute:

The mission of the Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.

The Claremont Institute finds the answers to America's problems in the principles on which our nation was founded. These principles are expressed most eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that "all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...."

To recover the Founding principles in our political life means recovering a limited and accountable government that respects private property, promotes stable family life and maintains a strong defense...

The Claremont Institute believes that informed citizens can and will make the right choices for America's future...the Institute engages Americans in an informed discussion of the principles and policies necessary to rebuild our civic institutions...

America's Founders endowed our Republic with sound principles and a framework for governing that is unmatched in the history of mankind. The prosperity and freedom of America can only be made secure if they are guided by a return to these basic principles as our country enters the 21st Century.

Toward that end, the Institute is reprinting three classic essays by Claremont scholars on "Becoming Americans" as the nation debates immigration, American culture and principles, and the nature of citizenship. A version of the first essay - Educating Citizens - addresses multiculturalism and originally appeared in Moral Ideas for America, edited by Larry P. Arnn and Douglas A. Jeffrey and published in 1993. Here are some excerpts:

Democracy requires more of its citizens than any other form of government. It depends on the capacity of the citizens to govern themselves. But the habits and dispositions of self government are difficult to acquire and to sustain. They are rooted in moral and political principles in which each new generation must be educated. It is no accident that history provides so few examples of successful and enduring democracies. In the American democracy today, we have largely lost sight of those moral and political principles which provide the common ground of American political community and inform the civic character required of American citizens. There is widespread recognition of the necessity to restore that private morality which is the source of the public good and to strengthen the common bonds of civility among the diverse citizens of America. Educating citizens in the principles, rights, duties, and capacities of citizenship is the primary purpose of public education in America, and our institutions of higher learning play a critical part in making our public schools capable or incapable of fulfilling their purpose. That America is failing miserably in accomplishing this purpose is apparent to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear...

...To the extent that a single cause may be identified as the primary source of our failure at the task of educating citizens, it can be summed up simply: bad ideas.

Education in America today, at every level, is dominated by doctrines that openly repudiate the principles on which America is founded; indeed, they deny the very capacity of men to distinguish freedom from tyranny, justice from injustice, right from wrong. These doctrines have wholly discredited the perspective of the democratic citizen: they have made self government itself unintelligible as a political phenomenon...The consequence has been a corruption of the political language through which the nation conducts its public deliberations, a citizenry increasingly confused or uncertain about the ground and substance of its rights and duties, and political and educational leaders capable for the most part only of deepening the crisis. These bad ideas are rooted in a profound assault upon human reason and human nature as grounds of human morality, an assault waged over the past two centuries culminating in explicit and assertive nihilism. The popular expressions of these ideas in our time take a wide variety of forms. But as they are professed and practiced in the world of American education today, they converge most faddishly under the banners of "Multiculturalism" and "Diversity."

The multicultural movement and the diversity movement are distinct political and intellectual movements which frequently overlap and reinforce one another. Their stronghold is in the academies of higher learning, whence they have sallied forth into practically every nook and cranny of American life...

The foremost idea of multiculturalism is the equal value of all cultures, or cultural relativism...

This is not just the view of zealots or extremists but of the mainstream, supposedly responsible public officials making policy at the highest levels...

This reigning dogma among professional educators who shape the curriculum of American public schools requires a non-chauvinistic, non-ethnocentric, balanced treatment of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Jefferson or Lincoln. Moral relativism prohibits preferring freedom to despotism or believing that there can be a rational ground for preferring one over the other. With Lincolnian firmness, our civics instruction is dedicated to the proposition that "the concept of freedom can mean different things to different people in different circumstances."...

Inherent in the idea of cultural relativism is the idea that culture, race, or ancestry (feminist multiculturalists throw in gender) determines our ideas. Our minds, that is, are locked inside our skins, and the gulf between races or cultures is unbridgeable. There is no such thing as human reason capable of grasping any part of objective moral truth (which also doesn't exist) which is worthy of imparting to a student...Education itself is thus understood to be merely the imposition of one's own ethnically or culturally determined prejudices on others. The relation between teacher and student can be understood only in terms of power.

Multiculturalists loudly denounce the emphasis in American schools on American history and culture and western civilization. Everyone has read about this. Perpetuating the American heritage in American public schools falls under the heading of "Eurocentrism," one of the worst forms of cultural or ethnic chauvinism. It discriminates against other cultures by denying them an equal "voice" in the classroom or the textbooks. One might think that it would be a rational and non-controversial approach to teach American students about the American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. This is naive. And, again, it is not just the "fringe elements" who protest...American taxpayers are thus required to support the inculcation among American citizens of non-American cultural heritages however antipathetic these cultures may be to democracy or to American institutions...

Bilingualism springs from this fount of multiculturalism...In fact, the animating idea of the bilingual movement today is to preserve the sanctity of the students' "native" language and culture against the imperialistic efforts to force the "foreign" tongue of English upon them...

...The more ardent multiculturalists not only denounce the emphasis on Western civilization as bad but denounce Western civilization and its American variety as uniquely evil in themselves. The very ideas of "humanity" and "reason" are seen in this view as Eurocentric (and for the feminists, patriarchal) prejudices contrived to exploit "oppressed" cultures. This is the real driving force of the multicultural movement.

Multiculturalism has no patience for objective academic standards of excellence. These are merely other means by which the "dominant culture" oppresses "minority cultures." Therefore demonstrably objective tests are denounced as racist...

The multiculturalist replaces education with therapy, insisting that supporting the students' "self-esteem" is the governing object of education. Self-esteem is achieved by teaching the students of "oppressed cultures" to be proud of their particular race or ancestry. Some argue that this should be done by revealing the true greatness of these oppressed cultures which has been systematically repressed by a dominant white, male, European culture. But the more candid or incautious multiculturalists admit or even insist that the self worth of the oppressed must be cultivated by myths where facts will not do the trick...

...But truth must not get in the way of therapy...

The teachers who teach our public school children are graduates of American colleges where such doctrines of multiculturalism are rampant...

Social critic Rita Kramer recently spent a year visiting and studying representative schools of education across the country. Her conclusion: "At present, our teacher-training institutions, the schools, colleges, and departments of education on campuses across the country, are producing for the classrooms of America experts in methods of teaching with nothing to apply those methods to. Their technique is abundant, their knowledge practically nonexistent. A mastery of instructional strategies, an emphasis on educational psychology, a familiarity with pedagogical philosophies have gradually taken the place of a knowledge of history, literature, science, and mathematics."...What matters is not to teach any particular subject or skill, not to preserve past accomplishments or stimulate future achievements, but to give to all that stamp of approval that will make them 'feel good about themselves.' Self-esteem has replaced understanding as the goal of education."...

Continue reading "Becoming Americans"

April 19, 2006


Spending Caps Won't Solve the Unfunded Public Sector Liability Problems Caused by the Tax-Eaters

Ed Achorn's latest editorial A cap won't solve R.I.'s tax troubles states:

It is encouraging that Rhode Island politicians -- in an election year, anyway -- are awakening to the public's agonized cries over sky-high property taxes.

Senate President Joseph Montalbano (D.-North Providence), Majority Leader Teresa Paiva-Weed (D.-Newport), and Minority Leader Dennis Algiere (R.-Westerly) last week rolled out their proposal to lower the current ceiling on city and town spending increases to 4 percent, from 5.5 percent, of the tax levy, starting in fiscal 2008. Exceeding the new cap would require the majority of voters in a special election, instead of an act of the General Assembly...

That would be nice! But if a 5.5-percent cap served as the backdrop for today's rampaging property taxes, it's fair to wonder how much good a 4-percent cap would do...

...simply capping spending and calling that a break for taxpayers is not responsible government or courageous leadership. The question is how the money is being spent...

Leaders who were serious about restraining property taxes would act quickly to:

Limit inordinately generous pensions, early retirements and health-care benefits for public employees, which threaten to bankrupt local communities...

Restore management rights to local communities, so that they may spend money more carefully and demand accountability from employees.

Encourage the creation of a more robust economy, by drawing in wealthy taxpayers who could help pay for government, give to charity and create the jobs that generate tax revenues...

House Speaker William Murphy and his leadership team have done the risky work of addressing part of the problem, by proposing to bring Rhode Island's income taxes in line with those in Massachusetts. That is the only real hope of drawing in well-to-do enterpreneurs to boost the economy.

But the Senate's leaders, sadly, lack such courage.

None of this is theoretical anymore...

...Residents of other communities face enormous tax hikes to cover pension and health benefits, many of them going to retirees who have moved away to enjoy them in lower-tax locales.

As long as Rhode Island's political leaders ignore these well-documented trends -- and the voters let them do so -- the taxpayers will get pounded.

If towns and cities were simply forced to live with a lower cap, what would be squeezed? Road repairs, no doubt. Textbooks and school sports. Parks, libraries and other services that make communities pleasant. Communities would, essentially, be further hollowed out. Meanwhile, obligations to public employees, postponed year after year, would build up toward their inevitable explosion.

Unfortunately, there is no politically painless way out of this mess, which is why Ocean State property taxes continue to soar, despite politicians' bi-annual expressions of sympathy and concern. Making serious changes in Rhode Island would pit lawmakers against some very powerful and well-vested interests.

If they truly wanted to serve the public, politicians would have to say no to their "friends."...

It's certainly much easier to set a spending cap...

Achorn's view about the exploding public sector costs resulting from years of contractual giveaways is reinforced by a Standard & Poor's public pension study released in February, as discussed in a Wall Street Journal article (available for a fee) entitled S&P Study Notes Shortfall and Warns That Stresses Threaten Creditworthiness:

Underfunded public-employee pension plans are straining state budgets just as states face other rising expenses and steep debt levels, according to a Standard & Poor's Corp. analysis to be released today.

The report said state pension plans fell short by about $284 billion nationwide in 2004, the latest year for which data are available, leaving the plans in need of hefty contributions. The budgetary stress could ultimately hurt states' creditworthiness, leading to higher borrowing costs for some governments, which sell debt to finance all types of projects, such as roads and schools...

While state revenue growth is stronger than it has been in the past five years, states face a "double-whammy" of declining pension fund assets and rising liabilities, which means they must contribute more money, according to the report.

As of June 30, 2004, the value of public pension fund assets fell to 84% of projected liabilities from 100% or more in the late 1990s, according to the report. The drop stems from several factors, including the bursting of the stock-market bubble, the promise of enhanced benefits and weak financial contributions by state and local governments...

When the stock-market bubble burst early this decade, pension funds saw their funding levels sink, and state and local governments were on the hook to make up the difference. As a result, states have had to boost their contribution rates.

But many still have large holes to fill before their pension plans are fully funded. Among the most underfunded plans in fiscal 2004 were West Virginia, Oklahoma and Rhode Island.

NA-AH889B_PENSI_20060222200041.gif

The need to contribute more money comes as states face other budgetary pressures, including skyrocketing costs for Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for the poor. Costs are rising at about 7% a year. State and local governments will also have to start setting aside money to pay for retiree health benefits as the result of a pending accounting change; for the first time, governments will be required to disclose these obligations. States are also carrying an enormous debt load of $288 billion, which they must finance in both the long and short term.

Because of the rising budget pressures, ratings firms such as S&P want to see pension asset-to-liability ratios reach 90% or more so that contribution rates can level off...

Continue reading "Spending Caps Won't Solve the Unfunded Public Sector Liability Problems Caused by the Tax-Eaters"

April 14, 2006


The Unprincipled and Politically Tone Deaf Congressional Republicans

A Wall Street Journal article entitled The Minority Maker: The clever GOP strategy for defeat in November provides yet another example of how the Congressional Republicans are hopelessly out-of-touch with economic and political realities:

If Republicans lose control of Congress in November, they might want to look back at last Thursday as the day it was lost. That's when the big spenders among House Republicans blew up a deal between the leadership and rank-in-file to impose some modest spending discipline.

Unlike the collapse of the immigration bill, this fiasco can't be blamed on Senate Democrats. This one is all about Republicans and their refusal to give up their power to spend money at will and pass out "earmarks" like a bartender offering drinks on the house. The chief culprits are the House Appropriators, led by Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis of California and his 13 subcommittee chairmen known as "cardinals." If Republicans lose the House--and they are well on their way--Mr. Lewis deserves the moniker of the minority maker.

For weeks, the Republican Study Committee, a group of fiscally conservative Members, had been negotiating a spending outline with the House leadership. But when they finally struck a deal last week, Mr. Lewis refused to go along and threatened to defeat the budget on the House floor if Speaker Denny Hastert brought it up. With Democrats opposing the budget as a matter of party unity, GOP leaders gave up and left town for Easter recess without a vote on their budget blueprint for 2007.

Political hardball isn't new to Congress, but what's especially notable here is the utter cluelessness by Mr. Lewis and his friends about how much trouble they're in and how to get out of it. The rank-and-file Members who haven't yet gone native in Washington realize that their biggest problem is the disappointment of Republican voters at Congress's free-spending ways. If those voters stay home in November, Mr. Lewis will soon be known as Mr. Ranking Member

he's hunkered down as one of the GOP's spenders-in-chief, presiding over multiplying earmarks and chopping to bits the party's reputation as fiscal conservatives. When President Bush recently asked Congress to pass a modified line-item veto, among the first to complain was Mr. Lewis. The spending baron told the Rules Committee last month that the line-item veto "could be a very serious error" that threatens the separation of powers. "We are the legislative branch of government."

Translation: Mr. Lewis is opposed to any budget reform that would give the President more leverage to limit his ability to spend tax dollars like there's no tomorrow. On the item veto, this puts him to the fiscal left of John Kerry, Al Gore

The reforms that Mr. Lewis objected to can only be called modest in any case. In return for supporting President Bush's $873 billion discretionary spending limit for Fiscal 2007, the conservatives had sought a few budget "process" reforms. Kevin Brady of Texas wanted a floor vote to establish a commission to sunset federal agencies that have outlived their usefulness. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin asked for a floor vote on the line-item veto--just a vote. Mr. Lewis and his band of spenders would still have the chance to try and defeat it on the House floor.

Jeff Flake of Arizona wanted each spending "earmark" to be identified along with the Member who requested it, so perhaps lawmakers might be shamed into using tax dollars more responsibly. He assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that a legislative body that has allowed these pork projects to quadruple in the past five years is still capable of being embarrassed.

Another important reform would have addressed the "supplemental" spending shell game on Capitol Hill, whereby initial spending requests that fall within the limits of a budget blueprint are inevitably augmented by so-called "emergency" spending. And since this "emergency" spending falls outside the budget framework, the sky's the limit. The proposed reform would have set criteria for what constitutes an emergency, established a rainy day fund for when one occurs, and required a House Budget Committee vote to increase spending beyond the amount in the reserve.

All of this is a far cry from a wholesale and much-needed rewrite of the Democratic budget act of 1974, which Republicans once promised to redo if they ever won the House

A category five political storm is building in GOP precincts around the country, and it is going to blow Republicans right out of the majority in November if they don't soon give their supporters some reason to re-elect them. So far this year they've passed limits on free speech that liberals love, but they haven't been able to extend the wildly successful 2003 tax cuts by even a mere two years. And now they won't even allow a vote on budget reforms that their own President and a majority of their own Members support

An alternative approach to Congressman Lewis' view is articulated in the Contract With America: Renewed, proposed by the Republican Study Committee and highlighted in a recent posting by Andrew.

What Congressman Lewis and his ilk don't seem to grasp are the potentially profound consequences that their despicable actions here could have across a wide range of other foreign and domestic policy issues should the Left recapture the leadership of the Congress. Issues like the global war against Islamic terrorists, tax cuts that empower economic growth, and the return to a more modest judiciary.

All of this is not a new story. However, the despair for fiscal conservatives only grows deeper as the Congressional Republicans, with the implicit endorsement by President Bush, show a stunning level of fiscal irresponsibility. As I told one Democratic political operative last weekend: The Republicans have, after only 12 years in the leadership, done what it took the Democrats 40 years to do in Congress. Some previous and relevant postings include:

Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation
Pigs at the Public Trough
Big Government Corrupts, Regardless of Party
More on the Misguided Incentives in the Public Sector
Pigs at the Public Trough, Revisited
Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die
Favors for Everyone Except the Taxpaying Masses
Tapscott: Has the GOP Lost Its Soul?
Rancid Pork Leaves a Bad Taste in Your Mouth, which links to numerous other postings on the highway bill, energy bill, etc.
Has the GOP Lost Its Soul? Part II
Drinking the Kool Aid
Senator Chafee: Is This How You Define Fiscal Conservatism?
Cutting the Fat: The New Porkbuster Site


April 11, 2006


Revisiting Why Current Lobbyist Reforms Will Fail

Donald B. Hawthorne

David Boaz, the Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, recently wrote these words about why lobbyist reform initiatives will fail:

When you spread food out on a picnic table, you can expect ants. When you put $3 trillion on the table, you can expect special interests, lobbyists and pork-barrel politicians.

That's the real lesson of the Abramoff scandal.

Jack Abramoff may have been the sleaziest of the Washington lobbyists but he's not unique. As the federal government accumulates more money and more power, it draws more lobbyists like honey draws flies.

People invest money to make money. In a free economy they invest in building homes and factories, inventing new products, finding oil, and other economic activities. That kind of investment benefits us all -- it's a positive-sum game, as economists say. People get rich by producing what other people want.

But you can also invest in Washington. You can organize an interest group, or hire a lobbyist, and try to get some taxpayers' money routed to you. That's what the farm lobbies, AARP, industry associations, and teachers unions do. And that kind of investment is zero-sum -- money is taken from some people and given to others, but no new wealth is created...

The number of companies with registered lobbyists is up 58 percent in six years. The amount of money lobbyists report spending has risen from $1.5 billion to $2.1 billion in that time...

And why not? After all, federal spending is up 39 percent in the same period. That means another $640 billion a year for interest groups to get their hands on.

With federal spending approaching $3 trillion a year -- and even more money moved around by regulations and the details of tax law -- getting a piece of that money can be worth a great deal of effort and expense...

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek explained the process 60 years ago in his prophetic book The Road to Serfdom: "As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power."

The United States is not Russia or Nigeria, states where government power really is the only thing worth having. But when the government has more money and power, then more of society's resources will tend to be directed toward influencing government...

Abramoff specialized in manipulating regulations, especially the licensing of casinos. If gambling wasn't so tightly licensed and regulated, then it wouldn't produce extraordinary profits and lavish lobbying...But his efforts were small potatoes compared with the hugely expensive and complex programs of the federal government and the lobbying generated by all that spending and regulation.

During the 1970s, when Congress created massive new government regulations, businesses had to invest more heavily in lobbying. Some of it was defensive -- to try to minimize the cost and burden of regulation.

But of course some of the lobbying was more cynical, to ensure that costs fell more heavily on competitors. One study in 1980 showed that 65 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies came to Washington at least every two weeks. That was up sharply from 1971, when only 15 percent of CEOs visited Washington even once a month...

Meanwhile, the taxpayers have little voice in the halls of Congress. The National Taxpayers Union spent less than $175,000 on lobbying in 2004. And the NTU is one of the very few organizations whose lobbying is aimed at decreasing the size and overall reach of government.

As long as the federal government has so much money and power to hand out, we'll never get rid of the Abramoffs. Restrictions on lobbying deal with symptoms, not causes.

Boaz' thoughts build on the thoughts of Walter Williams and Frederich Hayek, as highlighted in this posting. Follow the link in that posting to another posting with multiple examples of how both political parties are guilty of increasing the size of government at the expense of working families and retirees all across America.

The issue is the engorged size of government, which only benefits the powerful - be they corporations, unions or any other significant special interest.

Why do we tolerate this?



Revisiting Why Current Lobbyist Reforms Will Fail

David Boaz, the Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, recently wrote these words about why lobbyist reform initiatives will fail:

When you spread food out on a picnic table, you can expect ants. When you put $3 trillion on the table, you can expect special interests, lobbyists and pork-barrel politicians.

That's the real lesson of the Abramoff scandal.

Jack Abramoff may have been the sleaziest of the Washington lobbyists but he's not unique. As the federal government accumulates more money and more power, it draws more lobbyists like honey draws flies.

People invest money to make money. In a free economy they invest in building homes and factories, inventing new products, finding oil, and other economic activities. That kind of investment benefits us all -- it's a positive-sum game, as economists say. People get rich by producing what other people want.

But you can also invest in Washington. You can organize an interest group, or hire a lobbyist, and try to get some taxpayers' money routed to you. That's what the farm lobbies, AARP, industry associations, and teachers unions do. And that kind of investment is zero-sum -- money is taken from some people and given to others, but no new wealth is created

The number of companies with registered lobbyists is up 58 percent in six years. The amount of money lobbyists report spending has risen from $1.5 billion to $2.1 billion in that time

And why not? After all, federal spending is up 39 percent in the same period. That means another $640 billion a year for interest groups to get their hands on.

With federal spending approaching $3 trillion a year -- and even more money moved around by regulations and the details of tax law -- getting a piece of that money can be worth a great deal of effort and expense

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek explained the process 60 years ago in his prophetic book The Road to Serfdom: "As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power."

The United States is not Russia or Nigeria, states where government power really is the only thing worth having. But when the government has more money and power, then more of society's resources will tend to be directed toward influencing government

Abramoff specialized in manipulating regulations, especially the licensing of casinos. If gambling wasn't so tightly licensed and regulated, then it wouldn't produce extraordinary profits and lavish lobbyingBut his efforts were small potatoes compared with the hugely expensive and complex programs of the federal government and the lobbying generated by all that spending and regulation.

During the 1970s, when Congress created massive new government regulations, businesses had to invest more heavily in lobbying. Some of it was defensive -- to try to minimize the cost and burden of regulation.

But of course some of the lobbying was more cynical, to ensure that costs fell more heavily on competitors. One study in 1980 showed that 65 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies came to Washington at least every two weeks. That was up sharply from 1971, when only 15 percent of CEOs visited Washington even once a month

Meanwhile, the taxpayers have little voice in the halls of Congress. The National Taxpayers Union spent less than $175,000 on lobbying in 2004. And the NTU is one of the very few organizations whose lobbying is aimed at decreasing the size and overall reach of government.

As long as the federal government has so much money and power to hand out, we'll never get rid of the Abramoffs. Restrictions on lobbying deal with symptoms, not causes.

Boaz' thoughts build on the thoughts of Walter Williams and Frederich Hayek, as highlighted in this posting. Follow the link in that posting to another posting with multiple examples of how both political parties are guilty of increasing the size of government at the expense of working families and retirees all across America.

The issue is the engorged size of government, which only benefits the powerful - be they corporations, unions or any other significant special interest.

Why do we tolerate this?


April 9, 2006


The Radically Different Visions of Tax-Eaters Versus Taxpayers

Donald B. Hawthorne

In an earlier posting, I introduced a book entitled The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today by Steven Malanga and a review of the book in the Claremont Review of Books. The core theme of the book was described by one reviewer as "American politics is not about [political] parties, it is about special interest group against special interest group."

Expanding on that comment, here are some excerpts from the Introduction: Tax Eaters versus Taxpayers, where the author writes:

...A new political dynamic has slowly been emerging over the past forty years, a face-off between those who benefit from an expanding government and those who must pay for it - the tax-eaters versus the taxpayers...coalitions of public employees, staffers at publicy funded social-services programs, and the recipients of government aid have emerged as effective new political forces...

This increasingly powerful public-sector movement results from the joining together of two originally distinct forces. First are the government-employee unions...

For years, government employees had no right to organize, on the grounds that there was no competition in the delivery of government services and that therefore public unions could hold cities and states hostage by going on strike and denying essential services to the public...that began to change in the mid-1950's...

...In 1960 the American Federation of Teachers mapped out a controversial strategy to win collective bargaining rights for teachers around the country, using...labor-friendly New York City as a test case...

...most of the warnings voiced about public-employee unions in those tumultuous years have proven accurate. Political leaders and labor experts predicted that government-employee unions would use their power over public services to win contracts with work rules far more generous and undemanding than in the private sector; and that without the restraints on salaries and benefits that the free marketplace imposes on private firms, unions would win increasingly meaty compensation packages that would be impossible to restrain or to roll back...

But what critics did not anticipate was how far public-employee unions would move beyond collective bargaining to inject themselves into the electoral and legislative processes...

Reinforcing the public-employee unions in the powerful new coalition of tax-eaters are the social-services groups created by the War on Poverty. Nominally private, they are sustained by and organized around public funding...This flood of money transformed many formerly private welfare organizations into government contractors, and their employees into quasi-public workers. It also spurred the creation of vast new networks of such organizations...

This social-services funding vastly expanded the publicly supported workforce almost overnight...

Almost from the War on Poverty's inception, these social-services employees and their clients began to show themselves as a powerful political force...

The gradual government takeover...has transformed...institutions, executives, and workers into unremitting lobbyists for ever greater public monies and expanding programs, and tireless foes of efforts to restrain costs...

The electoral activism of this New New Left coalition of tax eaters - public-employee unions, hospitals and healthcare -worker unions, and social-services agencies - has reshaped the politics of many cities. As the country's national political scene has edged rightward, thwarting their ambitions in Washington, these groups have turned their attention to urban America, where they still have the power to influence public policy...

Increasingly in cities around the country, the road to electoral success passes through the public-employee/health/social-services sector...

One reason why these politicians have succeeded electorally is that those who work in the tax-eater sector clearly have different voting priorities from private-sector workers or business owners...

....public-sector workers, who realize they are going to the polls to elect their bosses, make sure to remember to vote...

With so much of their economic future at stake in elections, the tax eaters have emerged as the new infantry of political campaigns, replacing the ward captains and district leaders of old-time political clubs...

Although it started out as a romantic but wrongheaded idea, the War on Poverty was the child of idealists who really believed that a benevolent, paternalistic government could offer solutions that America's private economy couldn't provide for the poor. But the most cherished ideals and programs of the movement have turned out to demonstrably wrong...

By the mid-1990's, Americans were eager for reform, and they got it...

In the face of such results, the new urban left has emerged as an increasingly cynical coalition, ever more focused on goals that benefit its members and their allies, even thought it retains the jargon of "social justice."...

Regardless of how transparent its aims now seem, this new coalition will remain formidable because the tax-eater sector is now so large in many cities and states that it can easily thwart reforms aimed at undermining its programs. With much of the legislative agenda merely concerned with expanding programs and enacting laws that add to its own numbers, the New New Left may be in the ascendancy for a long time to come.

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled GM, France and Albany: What the declines of all three have in common (available for a fee) states:

At first glance, they seem to have little in common. But the riots in France over labor reform, the slow-motion suicide of General Motors, and the continuing decline of the New York economy all share one defining trait: entrenched and unchangeable union power.

These columns have always favored the right to collectively bargain...we should [not] fail to appreciate the consequences when unions become entrenched inside any organization...unions do not provide individual job or income security. On the contrary, they undermine security by contributing to broader business and economic decline.

At the national level, the French example is clear enough. While the French private sector is less unionized than America's, it must cope with mandated work rules that make it all but impossible to fire someone; so naturally companies are also reluctant to hire. The jobless rate is double America's, while youth unemployment is 23%. More significant is that the political clout of public-sector unions has blocked all but minor changes in these rules. Public-sector workers account for more than a quarter of the entire French work force (6.4 million of out 24.6 million), and their salaries and pensions made up 45% of the entire state budget as recently as 2003.

The current French protests are in response to a modest change that would allow employers to fire people under age 26 more easily. So entrenched has the politics of union entitlement become in France that even at the onset of their careers these young protesters are demanding security over opportunity. In the global economy, this means they will end up with less of both.

France remains a wealthy country, and its economic decline can be masked for a time as it lives off accumulated capital. But already the promises that its unions have extracted from the government seem unlikely to be kept. A growth rate of between 1% and 2% a year won't be enough to finance the pensions and health care of an aging nation. And facing up to those facts will require an increasingly painful political reckoning.

Here in the U.S., the same burden is slowly crippling New York...Power in the state capital of Albany is shared by Republicans and Democrats. But both parties bow before the public-sector unions, especially the teachers, and the health-care workers...

...New York's Medicaid costs are higher than those of Texas and Florida combined; a health-care insurance premium for a young family of four is roughly six times what it is across the border in Connecticut; and high-deductible health-savings accounts that can help the self-employed afford insurance can't even be offered in the state...

Another union-driven business cost is workers' compensation, and in New York the average cost per claim is second highest in the nation (after Louisiana) and 72% higher than the national average...

...upstate [New York] is a different story, with jobs and young people fleeing to better business climes. New York manufacturing employment fell by 41% between 1990 and 2005, or double the national rate.

Even Eliot Spitzer recently referred to upstate New York as "Appalachia." Alas, the Attorney General shows no sign of understanding that the heart of the problem lies in Albany...

As for GM, its management mistakes are legion and its weak product line well-known. But the root of its problem is that it long ago became a corporate version of the welfare state, with the same entrenched union interests...the size of its market dominance going back to its heyday 40 years ago allowed its managers to avoid confronting its uncompetitive wages, benefits and work rules even as they saw Toyota and Honda gaining in the rearview mirror.

In retrospect, GM management should have provoked a union showdown. Yet only a very brave CEO would have been willing to risk a potentially catastrophic strike on his watch for the sake of making the company more competitive after he retired. In any case, would the United Auto Workers really have budged? In 1998, young executive and future CEO Rick Wagoner endured a 54-day UAW wildcat strike at two plants in Flint, Michigan, after GM had tried to change some production rules. The strike shut down most GM production in North America and cost the company some $2 billion. In the end GM caved and the UAW escaped, having made virtually no concessions.

Even now at auto-parts maker Delphi--which is already in Chapter 11--the UAW is declaring it will take a strike that could destroy both Delphi and GM rather than agree to Delphi's proposed job cuts and work changes. As in France and New York, these union leaders would rather sink the company than make concessions that would reduce their own power.

This pattern has repeated itself again and again--in the steel and textile industries attacked by foreign competition, or the unionized grocery chains routed by Wal-Mart. The union answer has rarely been to work with a company to allow more job flexibility to become more competitive. The answer has typically been to seek a ruinous strike or lobby for political intervention that might stave off disaster for at best a few more years.

We recount all this because, even amid GM's decline and France's economic turmoil, most of America's liberal elites refuse to draw the right lesson. They cling to the belief that if only the Democrats can retake Congress, or the union movement can once again organize more of the American labor force, the old economy of union-backed job security and egalite will return. Or, worse, they propose seceding from global competition via protectionism. It is all a delusion. Down that road lies France--a nice place to vacation, but you wouldn't want to work there.

This is the central problem the liberal wing of the Democratic Party faces as it plots what to do if it does regain power this year, or in 2008...to govern for the long haul they need better ideas than trade barriers, a tax hike to increase the size of government, or the defense of the entitlement status quo.

They need to champion reforms to help individual workers better secure their own futures in a competitive global economy, rather than relying on the false hope of restoring the age of Walter Reuther. They need to promote portable pensions, cheaper health insurance and education choice. So far all we see is Jacques Chirac in American drag.



The Radically Different Visions of Tax-Eaters Versus Taxpayers

In an earlier posting, I introduced a book entitled The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today by Steven Malanga and a review of the book in the Claremont Review of Books. The core theme of the book was described by one reviewer as "American politics is not about [political] parties, it is about special interest group against special interest group."

Expanding on that comment, here are some excerpts from the Introduction: Tax Eaters versus Taxpayers, where the author writes:

...A new political dynamic has slowly been emerging over the past forty years, a face-off between those who benefit from an expanding government and those who must pay for it - the tax-eaters versus the taxpayers...coalitions of public employees, staffers at publicy funded social-services programs, and the recipients of government aid have emerged as effective new political forces...

This increasingly powerful public-sector movement results from the joining together of two originally distinct forces. First are the government-employee unions...

For years, government employees had no right to organize, on the grounds that there was no competition in the delivery of government services and that therefore public unions could hold cities and states hostage by going on strike and denying essential services to the public...that began to change in the mid-1950's...

...In 1960 the American Federation of Teachers mapped out a controversial strategy to win collective bargaining rights for teachers around the country, using...labor-friendly New York City as a test case...

...most of the warnings voiced about public-employee unions in those tumultuous years have proven accurate. Political leaders and labor experts predicted that government-employee unions would use their power over public services to win contracts with work rules far more generous and undemanding than in the private sector; and that without the restraints on salaries and benefits that the free marketplace imposes on private firms, unions would win increasingly meaty compensation packages that would be impossible to restrain or to roll back...

But what critics did not anticipate was how far public-employee unions would move beyond collective bargaining to inject themselves into the electoral and legislative processes...

Reinforcing the public-employee unions in the powerful new coalition of tax-eaters are the social-services groups created by the War on Poverty. Nominally private, they are sustained by and organized around public funding...This flood of money transformed many formerly private welfare organizations into government contractors, and their employees into quasi-public workers. It also spurred the creation of vast new networks of such organizations...

This social-services funding vastly expanded the publicly supported workforce almost overnight...

Almost from the War on Poverty's inception, these social-services employees and their clients began to show themselves as a powerful political force...

The gradual government takeover...has transformed...institutions, executives, and workers into unremitting lobbyists for ever greater public monies and expanding programs, and tireless foes of efforts to restrain costs...

The electoral activism of this New New Left coalition of tax eaters - public-employee unions, hospitals and healthcare -worker unions, and social-services agencies - has reshaped the politics of many cities. As the country's national political scene has edged rightward, thwarting their ambitions in Washington, these groups have turned their attention to urban America, where they still have the power to influence public policy...

Increasingly in cities around the country, the road to electoral success passes through the public-employee/health/social-services sector...

One reason why these politicians have succeeded electorally is that those who work in the tax-eater sector clearly have different voting priorities from private-sector workers or business owners...

....public-sector workers, who realize they are going to the polls to elect their bosses, make sure to remember to vote...

With so much of their economic future at stake in elections, the tax eaters have emerged as the new infantry of political campaigns, replacing the ward captains and district leaders of old-time political clubs...

Although it started out as a romantic but wrongheaded idea, the War on Poverty was the child of idealists who really believed that a benevolent, paternalistic government could offer solutions that America's private economy couldn't provide for the poor. But the most cherished ideals and programs of the movement have turned out to demonstrably wrong...

By the mid-1990's, Americans were eager for reform, and they got it...

In the face of such results, the new urban left has emerged as an increasingly cynical coalition, ever more focused on goals that benefit its members and their allies, even thought it retains the jargon of "social justice."...

Regardless of how transparent its aims now seem, this new coalition will remain formidable because the tax-eater sector is now so large in many cities and states that it can easily thwart reforms aimed at undermining its programs. With much of the legislative agenda merely concerned with expanding programs and enacting laws that add to its own numbers, the New New Left may be in the ascendancy for a long time to come.

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled GM, France and Albany: What the declines of all three have in common (available for a fee) states:

At first glance, they seem to have little in common. But the riots in France over labor reform, the slow-motion suicide of General Motors, and the continuing decline of the New York economy all share one defining trait: entrenched and unchangeable union power.

These columns have always favored the right to collectively bargainwe should [not] fail to appreciate the consequences when unions become entrenched inside any organizationunions do not provide individual job or income security. On the contrary, they undermine security by contributing to broader business and economic decline.

At the national level, the French example is clear enough. While the French private sector is less unionized than America's, it must cope with mandated work rules that make it all but impossible to fire someone; so naturally companies are also reluctant to hire. The jobless rate is double America's, while youth unemployment is 23%. More significant is that the political clout of public-sector unions has blocked all but minor changes in these rules. Public-sector workers account for more than a quarter of the entire French work force (6.4 million of out 24.6 million), and their salaries and pensions made up 45% of the entire state budget as recently as 2003.

The current French protests are in response to a modest change that would allow employers to fire people under age 26 more easily. So entrenched has the politics of union entitlement become in France that even at the onset of their careers these young protesters are demanding security over opportunity. In the global economy, this means they will end up with less of both.

France remains a wealthy country, and its economic decline can be masked for a time as it lives off accumulated capital. But already the promises that its unions have extracted from the government seem unlikely to be kept. A growth rate of between 1% and 2% a year won't be enough to finance the pensions and health care of an aging nation. And facing up to those facts will require an increasingly painful political reckoning.

Here in the U.S., the same burden is slowly crippling New YorkPower in the state capital of Albany is shared by Republicans and Democrats. But both parties bow before the public-sector unions, especially the teachers, and the health-care workers

New York's Medicaid costs are higher than those of Texas and Florida combined; a health-care insurance premium for a young family of four is roughly six times what it is across the border in Connecticut; and high-deductible health-savings accounts that can help the self-employed afford insurance can't even be offered in the state

Another union-driven business cost is workers' compensation, and in New York the average cost per claim is second highest in the nation (after Louisiana) and 72% higher than the national average

upstate [New York] is a different story, with jobs and young people fleeing to better business climes. New York manufacturing employment fell by 41% between 1990 and 2005, or double the national rate.

Even Eliot Spitzer recently referred to upstate New York as "Appalachia." Alas, the Attorney General shows no sign of understanding that the heart of the problem lies in Albany

As for GM, its management mistakes are legion and its weak product line well-known. But the root of its problem is that it long ago became a corporate version of the welfare state, with the same entrenched union intereststhe size of its market dominance going back to its heyday 40 years ago allowed its managers to avoid confronting its uncompetitive wages, benefits and work rules even as they saw Toyota and Honda gaining in the rearview mirror.

In retrospect, GM management should have provoked a union showdown. Yet only a very brave CEO would have been willing to risk a potentially catastrophic strike on his watch for the sake of making the company more competitive after he retired. In any case, would the United Auto Workers really have budged? In 1998, young executive and future CEO Rick Wagoner endured a 54-day UAW wildcat strike at two plants in Flint, Michigan, after GM had tried to change some production rules. The strike shut down most GM production in North America and cost the company some $2 billion. In the end GM caved and the UAW escaped, having made virtually no concessions.

Even now at auto-parts maker Delphi--which is already in Chapter 11--the UAW is declaring it will take a strike that could destroy both Delphi and GM rather than agree to Delphi's proposed job cuts and work changes. As in France and New York, these union leaders would rather sink the company than make concessions that would reduce their own power.

This pattern has repeated itself again and again--in the steel and textile industries attacked by foreign competition, or the unionized grocery chains routed by Wal-Mart. The union answer has rarely been to work with a company to allow more job flexibility to become more competitive. The answer has typically been to seek a ruinous strike or lobby for political intervention that might stave off disaster for at best a few more years.

We recount all this because, even amid GM's decline and France's economic turmoil, most of America's liberal elites refuse to draw the right lesson. They cling to the belief that if only the Democrats can retake Congress, or the union movement can once again organize more of the American labor force, the old economy of union-backed job security and egalit will return. Or, worse, they propose seceding from global competition via protectionism. It is all a delusion. Down that road lies France--a nice place to vacation, but you wouldn't want to work there.

This is the central problem the liberal wing of the Democratic Party faces as it plots what to do if it does regain power this year, or in 2008to govern for the long haul they need better ideas than trade barriers, a tax hike to increase the size of government, or the defense of the entitlement status quo.

They need to champion reforms to help individual workers better secure their own futures in a competitive global economy, rather than relying on the false hope of restoring the age of Walter Reuther. They need to promote portable pensions, cheaper health insurance and education choice. So far all we see is Jacques Chirac in American drag.


March 23, 2006


Re-Examining the Dubai Port (non)Deal

Marc Comtois

Now that the hyperbolic rhetoric surrounding the Dubai Port deal has reduced a bit, it's time to look at the consequences of this little exercise in political gamesmanship. In a recent issue of Newsweek, Robert Samuelson recently explained the nature and effect of the politicization of the port deal:

The idea of letting an Arab-owned company, Dubai Ports World, run container terminals at five U.S. ports struck many Americans as an absurdity. Why not just turn control directly over to Al Qaeda?. . . The company's withdrawal last week can be seen as a triumph of public opinion. Or it can be acknowledged for what it is: a major defeat for the United States, driven by self-indulgent politicians of both parties who enthusiastically fanned public fears.

Continue reading "Re-Examining the Dubai Port (non)Deal"

March 15, 2006


More Federal Budget Fun

Carroll Andrew Morse

1. As best as I can tell, the new, improved line-item veto (Senator Lincoln Chafee is a co-sponsor) is actually a decent proposal. It is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick thats being used to close a loophole.

Presently, individual spending earmarks in appropriations bills dont have to be approved by both houses of Congress. So long as both houses agree upon the total amount of earmarked money being spent, only one house has to specify how an earmark will be used. The line-item veto allows the President to ask Congress to reconsider individual budget items, earmarks included. If both houses dont vote to re-approve an individual item returned to Congress by the President, then the item is removed from the bill it was originally attached to.

Its not really a veto, line-item or otherwise, because if Congress re-approves an item, then the President cant stop it without vetoing the entire bill its attached to.

Incidentally, a similar proposal was introduced in the House of Representatives in 2004. Congressman James Langevin voted for the line-item veto, Congressman Patrick Kennedy voted against it.

2. Yesterday, Congress again rejected PAYGO by a 50-50 margin (Senators Jack Reed and Lincoln Chafee both voted to restore PAYGO). This years version looks the same as last years version, meaning it had no provisions for capping automatic entitlement growth, meaning it was a plan to address growing the national entitlement liability with mandatory tax increases.

3. The House of Representatives' Republican Study Committee has put forth a serious budget-balancing plan called the Contract With America: Renewed. The goal of the RSC plan is a balanced budget by 2011. Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation provides a summary

The RSC proposal would keep tax rates at the current levels that have helped the economy expand. Instead of forcing Americans to send more money to Washington to fund wasteful and outdated programs, the RSC would:
  • Eliminate over 150 programs, such as the Advanced Technology Program, a notorious bit of corporate welfare;
  • Turn back the gas tax and federal highway program to the states; (Currently, states send their gas tax revenues to Washington, which subtracts a hefty administrative fee and then sends the funds back to the states, with many strings attached.)
  • Eliminate all pork projects from the recent highway bill;
  • Pare back a fraction of the 137 percent increase in education spending since 2001 in return for providing states with more freedom to spend federal education dollars how they wish;
  • Convert Medicaid and S-Chip into block grants and provide states with freedom and flexibility to tailor these programs to the needs of their low-income citizens;
  • Pare back Medicare growth by requiring that upper-income recipients pay slightly more for their benefits and by reforming Medicare based on the successful Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) and providing seniors with an annual health insurance contribution that they could use to purchase the health care plan of their choice; and
  • Fully budget for the anticipated costs of maintaining troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Contract With America: Renewed is a serious spending reduction plan that recognizes no sacred cows, calling for big spending reductions in programs like the Space Program, USAID, and agricultural and energy subsidies.


March 5, 2006


The Role of Government In Our Society, Revisited

Cafe Hayek has a very good posting entitled Government Ain't Us, which says:

The idea is prevalent that little or nothing beneficial happens for people generally unless it is done by government. Things people do individually -- for their own purposes, using their own gumption, own wits, and own resources, neither incited by nor directed by government -- too often are not counted as things that "we" do. The assumption seems to be that unless certain things are done by government, they aren't done -- even if they are done!

...I first encountered this comment in this Business Week Online article by Michael Mandel:

I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that one problem with Mandel's argument is that we're not investing in human capital. Government spending on universities has been slashed, leading to huge increases in tuition and much greater burdens on individuals and families. --Rebecca Allen, commenting on delong.typepad.com

"We're not investing in human capital" laments Ms. Allen -- who then immediately says that tuition is rising and that "individuals and families" apparently are paying this higher tuition despite the fact that doing so is a great burden. So, individuals and families are investing in human capital. But in Ms. Allen's view, we're not investing.

Why not?

Why reserve the "we" for actions taken by government? As a shorthand, it's perfectly appropriate to say about ourselves as Americans that, for example, "we drive a lot" or "we like NFL football." Not everyone drives, and some Americans can't tell a football from a foosball. Nevertheless, these statements make sense, we (!) know what they mean, and I dare say that they're correct.

No one would reply "Oh no Boudreaux, you're mistaken!" and then explain that, because most driving is done privately and because football fans buy their tickets to NFL games with their own resources, we don't drive a lot or like NFL football.

So why say say that "we're not investing in human capital" simply because (assuming that it's true) "government spending on universities has been slashed"?

It's just not true that government'r'us -- or that us'r'government.

Should government be the driver of these so-called investment ideas? If it were the driver, would the investments be successful?

An earlier posting on this site, entitled A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest, brings clarity to the core issue about the proper role of our government, given the frequently misguided incentives that exist within the public sector which are rarely discussed publicly:

...the question arises regarding whether American citizens should continue to assume the actions of government are well-meaning and focused primarily on the public interest. The answer is no.

Why this claim? Just think about it. Most American citizens have personal stories about how various public sector players (politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and other parties with an economic stake in government actions like corporations and unions) act in their own self interest and not in the public interest. In fact, the bottom of this posting contains numerous previous postings which provide examples of such behavior.

The balance of this posting will elaborate on public choice theory, which explains why we cannot assume government is either well-meaning or focused primarily on the public interest. The posting then concludes with specific recommendations in a Call to Action.

Read the entire posting for further information.


February 21, 2006


John Fund on United States of Big Labor

From the February 17 edition of the Wall Street Journal's Political Diary (available for a fee):

Remember that three-day mass transit strike that paralyzed New York City over the Christmas holidays? Apparently the drama isn't over. Since then, transit workers have narrowly rejected the contract their leadership accepted to end the strike. The union is now hoping to start new talks in a desperate effort to avoid binding arbitration that would probably result in a less generous contract being imposed on them.

But an even more important fight for the union leadership now concerns the threatened loss of its ability to automatically collect dues from members. Unions that violate New York state law barring public-employee unions from striking face losing the right to require these automatic paycheck deductions. "Dues checkoff is absolutely indispensable," labor law professor David Gregory told the New York Times. "If dues are suspended, frozen or sequestered, that's a radical move. It would fundamentally cripple the union." He noted that dues account for 87% of the union's $23 million in annual revenue.

A very similar issue explains why California public-employee unions spent over $120 million last year to defeat Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's set of voter initiatives to reform California politics. A centerpiece of the governor's effort was a proposal to require the unions to seek written permission from their members before spending a portion of their dues on politics. "At the heart of the union's ability to extract concessions from government employers is their unlimited ability to spend union dues money on political retribution against elected officials," notes former teacher union official Myron Lieberman. "That issue is at the heart of most failures to improve the performance of government."

New York's transit union was once before denied the right to automatically collect dues money from its members after a bitter 1980 transit strike. But the courts restored its privileges after it presented evidence that it would be bankrupt without the cash infusions that automatic payroll deductions brought in. Given the chaos and costs last December's strike caused New York, here's hoping the courts view any such appeal for sympathy this time with a more jaundiced eye.


February 13, 2006


When a Republican is Really a Democrat

Mac Owens

It's been a while since I posted. This piece ran on NRO today. The topic is the decision by my good friend, Jim Webb, to seek the Democratic nomination for the US Senate from Virginia. I think this is a blow to the Republicans. Then it occurred to me. Maybe I can convince Jim to move to RI and run as a Dem against Chafee.


http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens200602130816.asp

National Review Online

Mackubin Thomas Owens

NRO Contributing Editor


February 13, 2006, 8:16 a.m.

Webb Loss

A potential challenge to George Allen is a challenge to the Republican party.

In the 1980s, many Democrats, put off by the perceived left-wing shift of their party, voted Republican for the first time in their lives. These were the "Reagan Democrats," and they contributed to the most significant political realignment in the United States since FDR and the New Deal. The Democratic "solid South" cracked, and political pundits began to argue that projected demographic shifts would give the Republican party an "electoral lock" in presidential elections. It took longer on the legislative side, but in 1994, the Republicans gained control of both Houses of Congress for the first time (with one short exception) since the 1930s.

Meanwhile, the Democratic party went into decline. Since FDR, the central idea of the Democrats has been that the government's job is to adjudicate the distribution of resources among competing claimants. Over the past couple of decades, the Democratic party has taken this to its logical conclusion, treating the United States not as a community of individuals, but as an array of groups whose demands must be met.

As the Alito hearings demonstrated, Democrats have eschewed rhetoric as a means of persuading the electorate, preferring instead to grandstand in an effort to appease the left-wing interest-groups that constitute the base of the Democratic party. The party's only hope for returning to power is to throw off the shackles imposed by Moveon.org, the Daily Kos, People for the American Way, NARAL, and the like.

We may soon see if this is possible. My friend Jim Webb announced last week that he will seek the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate from Virginia. If he wins the Democratic primary, he will challenge the incumbent, Republican George Allen.

Republicans should worry. Webb is an impressive man. He is a 1968 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. As a Marine officer in Vietnam, he led an infantry platoon and company, was wounded twice, and was awarded the Navy Cross (second only to the Medal of Honor as a recognition of valor) and the Silver Star. After he was medically retired from the Marine Corps, he attended Georgetown Law School and later served as counsel to the House Veterans Committee. He is the author of six novels, including Fields of Fire, the best novel there is about Vietnam. During the Reagan administration, he served as an assistant secretary of Defense and secretary of the Navy. Combine his virtues with the fact that Virginia is one of the few states where a conservative Democrat might win, and, if Webb prevails in the Democratic primary, Senator Allen is likely to be in for the fight of his life.

What most endeared Webb to me and many others who served in Vietnam was his unflinching defense of Vietnam veterans against the slanderous charges that have been leveled against them: dopehead, baby-killer, war criminal...you remember. Webb is the man who time and again stood on the front lines of the culture war that still rages between those who served during the Vietnam era and those who didn't, a culture war that played a major role in the recent election. He could always be counted on to stand up to the elites who peddled falsehoods about Vietnam veterans. Ironically, these slanders were most at home in the Democratic party, whose nomination Jim now seeks.

What happened? Why does a man who served in the Reagan administration now embrace the very party that, since Vietnam, has denigrated the martial virtues he epitomizes? Part of it is his opposition to the war in Iraq. Webb is no knee-jerk Bush hater, and his opposition to the Iraq war is based on strategic considerations he is concerned that by committing such a large force there for an extended period of time we have weakened ourselves in the long run against a rising China.

More to the point, though, is his growing anger at the Bush administration for what he sees as a McNamara-like disregard for military advice, and even worse, a tendency on the part of too many Republicans and conservatives who did not serve in the military to attack the service of veterans like Jack Murtha who oppose the war. Webb's New York Times op-ed of January 18, "Purple Heartbreakers," was a clear harbinger of his break with the Republican party. There he wrote:

[I]n recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and now Mr. Murtha.

The political tactic of playing up the soldiers on the battlefield while tearing down the reputations of veterans who oppose them could eventually cost the Republicans dearly. It may be one reason that a preponderance of the Iraq war veterans who have thus far decided to run for office are doing so as Democrats.

Both Jim and I have taken Kerry to task for what he said after the war (readers of National Review and NRO may have noticed that I wrote some 14 articles on Kerry's antics after the war), but both of us were troubled by the attack on his service. I cringed during the Republican convention in 2004 when some genius came up with the idea of mocking John Kerry by circulating band-aids in the shape of Purple Hearts. This seemed to me to be a real case of tonedeafness.

Jim will be a formidable candidate. I already know a number of Virginia Republicans who are inclined to vote for him because of what they (rightly) perceive as his sterling character. It will be interesting to see what happens if he wins (assuredly not a foregone conclusion, given Allen's real strengths). Somehow I can't see him hanging out with Teddy Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, or John Kerry, whose hand Jim once refused to shake. And the idea of Harry Reid bending Jim to conform to his will makes me laugh. When Webb abruptly resigned as secretary of the Navy in 1988 after clashes with Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, he remarked to reporters, "It's no secret that I'm not a person who wears a bridle well."

Let us hope that Webb's move from the Republican party to the Democrats does not adumbrate a major cultural shift that would deal a major blow to the former: the loss of the "Scots-Irish," a group that Webb described in his 2005 book, Born Fighting (which I had the good fortune to review for National Review). In Born Fighting, Webb wrote:

[The Scots-Irish shape our culture] more in the abstract power of emotion than through the argumentative force of law. In their insistent individualism they are not likely to put an ethnic label on themselves when they debate societal issues. Some of them don't even know their ethnic label, and some who do know don't particularly care. They don't go for group-identity politics any more than they like to join a union. Two hundred years ago the mountains built a fierce and uncomplaining self-reliance into an already hardened people. To them, joining a group and putting themselves at the mercy of someone else's collectivist judgment makes about as much sense as letting the government take their guns. And nobody is going to get their guns.

In my review I remarked that these are the "red state" voters. They are family-oriented, take morality seriously, go to church, join the military, and listen to country music. They strongly believe that no man is obligated to obey the edicts of a government that violates his moral conscience. They once formed the bedrock of the Democratic party from Andrew Jackson until Vietnam but have been moving to the GOP ever since. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Webb called the Scots-Irish in America the "the secret GOP weapon."

But the Republicans cannot take this group for granted. Commenting on a statement that Howard Dean made during the Democratic primaries, Charles Krauthammer opined that Dean was campaigning for the "white trash vote" by pandering to the "rebel-yelling racist redneck." In the Wall Street Journal, Webb called this "the most vicious ethnic slur of the presidential campaign," noting dryly that Krauthammer "has never complained about this ethnic group when it has marched off to fight the wars he wishes upon us." Jim and I disagree on a number of topics the Iraq war being an obvious instance but the Republicans can't afford to lose such people.

Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is writing a history of U.S. civil-military relations.


February 7, 2006


More on the Religion of Liberal Fundamentalism

Jonah Goldberg, in The New-Time Religion: Liberalism and its problems (available for a fee) offers this commentary:

Liberalism today has two maladies...The first...American liberalism is intellectually exhausted, or bookless, as New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz recently called it. The second...Modern liberalism has taken on the trappings of a religion.

This second diagnosis runs counter to the reigning clichs about the GOPs becoming the party of theocracy. While its true that the Republican party and the conservative movement are invested in the agenda of religious groups, conservatism maintains a far clearer separation of religious and political impulses than liberalism, which often conflates the two into a single ideology. Like many spiritual movements, liberalism emphasizes deeds and ideals over ideas. As a result, when liberals gather theres a revivalist spirit in the air, with plenty of talk about fighting the forces of evil and testifying about good deeds done...

It was the philosopher Eric Voegelin who...decried the liberal impulse as an attempt to...create a heaven on earth. The often spiritual nature of the environmental movement; the quasi-messianic treatment of Martin Luther King Jr.; Bill Clintons invocation of "covenants" with the American people; Hillary Clintons hibernating "politics of meaning,"...all of these are examples of what Voegelin would describe as the neo-Gnostic effort to make the hereafter simply here.

This is all the inevitable consequence of a political movement that deliberately turned its back on philosophy and its own intellectual history. A movement without ideas must be driven by something, and if ideas and principles arent it, whats left is a stew of emotional and quasi-religious notions about "doing good."...

Liberals tend to deride conservatism for its faith in dogma. But the reality is that liberal dogma is settled while conservative dogma remains a work in progress. Indeed, the great debate of modern conservatism crudely described as libertarianism versus conservatism, or freedom versus virtue remains as unsettled today as it was when Frank Meyer coined the term "fusionism."...

Liberals had their own fusionist debate during the first three decades of the 20th century. American reformers envied Europes statist solutions to the "social problem."...

Liberals succeeded in jettisoning the historical baggage of liberalism by wielding the razor of Pragmatism, a "philosophy and a psychology perfectly tailored to progressive needs," writes Eric Goldman in his classic Rendezvous with Destiny. William James described his philosophy as an attitude of "looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts."...

Some liberals understood the dangers of this approach early on. "The real trouble with us reformers," lamented J. Allen Smith, a leading progressive intellectual, "is that we made reform a crusade against standards. Well, we smashed them all and now neither we nor anybody else have anything left." But the anti-dogmatism of the Pragmatists won out and became unquestioned dogma for generations of liberals...

Of course, an ideology of anti-dogmatism isnt less ideological than other worldviews; its merely harder to defend consistently, which is why many liberals choose not to try. Ever since Michael Dukakis insisted that voters should value his "competence" over Republican "ideology," Democratic politicians have been saying they dont believe in "labels" never mind extolling anything like a coherent political philosophy. But, as Bertrand Russell warned, the Pragmatic approach leaves its adherents no easily articulated principles for action other than power, preferences, and irrational "feelings."...

...it is an article of faith for liberals that they are right, they just need to update the evangelization effort by speaking in the vernacular a bit more...

And this is where the Janus faces of liberalism meet. William James invented Pragmatism to accommodate the belief that Darwin killed God; with it, religious truth became whatever believers willed. Liberalism therefore puts government in Gods throne to the extent that it believes that, as a matter of principle, no challenge is beyond the reach of Leviathan. From Woodrow Wilson on, central to the new liberals project was to create, in Arnolds words, a "religion of government," where the old dogma of a limited state with defined powers would be rendered obsolete in favor of an "organic" state and an oracular "living constitution."...

Here are three related postings:

"It Is Liberalism That Is Now Bookless And Dying"
Liberal Fundamentalism, Revisited
Rediscovering Civility and Purpose in America's Public Discourse



Finding New Sources of Energy: Contrasting How Free Markets Allocate Economic Resources Without the Perverse Outcomes Generated by Government Meddling in the Marketplace

An earlier posting, Government Makes Us Pay Higher Gasoline Prices, offered another example of the perverse economic incentives that arise when the government meddles in the marketplace, violating our Founders' guidance about the importance of limited government.

Another posting, Government Meddling Creates Marketplace Distortions, Increasing Long-Term Costs, makes it clear that a meddlesome government can wreck havoc in other important areas of our lives like health care.

Returning to the issue of energy, do you recall how Congress worked itself up in the Fall of 2005 over allegations of "excessive profits" by the oil companies? How they brought oil company executives in for a public grilling?

As the current tensions with Iran are expected to continue, the price of oil is unlikely to decrease and that means the issue of oil industry profits will be with us for a while.

Once again, the public story about "high" oil industry profits masks another perversion created by government meddling in the energy marketplace. Scott Hodges and Jonathan Williams wrote about this in Who Profits at the Pump? Our government, for one:

Over the past quarter century, oil companies directly sent more than $2.2 trillion in taxes, adjusted for inflation, to state and federal governments three times what they collectively earned in profits over the same time period. Yet some politicians say this is not enough and are proposing a new windfall profits tax to raise billions more for federal coffers.

Of course, as most economists agree, corporations dont pay taxes, people do. Folks like us will really pay those new taxes, either through higher prices at the gas pump or through lower returns in our 401(k)s. Smaller profits for companies means smaller returns for our retirement funds.

...At a minimum, both politicians and the media are guilty of biting the hand that feeds them and, perhaps, a bit of hypocrisy: Oil companies hand over more than $35 million per year to newspapers for advertising, while the government profits far more from each gallon of gas sold than do the oil companies.

Today, Americans pay an average of 45.9 cents in taxes per gallon of gas. The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon while the average state and local tax is 27.5 cents. These taxes pumped more than $54 billion into federal and state coffers last year alone. Diesel taxes totaled $9 billion more.

Almost all gas taxes are levied at a flat rate per gallon, regardless of whether a gallon of gas costs $1.49, $2.49, or $3.49. So while industry profits go through booms and busts, government profits grow steadily larger.

While politicians decry large corporate profits, those profits generate large corporate income-tax payments. We estimate that over the past 25 years, the major domestic oil companies paid about $518 billion in corporate income taxes to Uncle Sam and state governments. Oil companies pay billions more to governments in off-shore royalties, severance taxes, property taxes, and payroll taxes and the list goes on.

The last time this country experimented with a windfall profits tax was in the 1980s. Back then, the tax depressed the domestic oil industry, increased our reliance on foreign oil, and failed to raise a fraction of the revenue forecasted...

Because it receives so much tax revenue from this one industry, the government is subject to the same risk as any parasitic organism: If it eats too much it will kill the host...

Check out the graph in the referenced article for a visual on taxes paid by the oil companies.

Continue reading "Finding New Sources of Energy: Contrasting How Free Markets Allocate Economic Resources Without the Perverse Outcomes Generated by Government Meddling in the Marketplace"

February 6, 2006


The Coercive Role of Government

D. W. MacKenzie wrote in the October 2002 issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, the monthly publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, about the coercive role of government:

I am government...

Coercion is both my vocation and my avocation; it is in my very nature to compel others to do that which they otherwise would not do. My nature should then be of great concern to you as I impinge on your liberty. My nature affects your life profoundly. Indeed, there is little in your life that escapes my grasp. I am also a mystery to many. Some see me as benevolent, though I murdered 119 million people in the twentieth century. Some see me as omniscient, though I face an insurmountable knowledge problem in trying to comprehend the society I seek to control. Some see me as an absolute necessity, though people have lived in societies without me. But those whom I use seldom recognize any of this. These naive convictions grant me an unwarranted place in society. These misconceptions have imposed great hardships on ordinary people, though they have served an elite of rulers well...

I benefit few at the expense of the many. Small groups organize easily, and large ones do not. Hence if I serve any interests other than those of actual rulers, I serve narrow interests. I grant monopoly privileges to influential industrialists and trade associations. I do this with tariffs and import restrictions that hobble foreign competitors. I do this with regulations that place burdens on new businesses. I do this with licensing laws that restrict access to professions. Of course, these interests pay me to get what they want. Sometimes they pay me simply to leave them alone.

My form is difficult to comprehend as well. I am vast and complex. No one can fathom me in all my complexity. I comprise a gargantuan array of agencies, statutes and regulations, and discretionary policies. No one would have the time or the intellectual capacity to know me fully even if he were to try. There is little point in trying anyway. One person can do nothing to me. No significant election has ever turned on a single vote, so voters have no obvious incentive to learn about me...

I am responsible for all the worst unnatural tragedies and unnecessary burdens that mankind has endured. Yet it seems that no one knows how to stop me. How can this be? My true nature is not easy to discern. When tragedy strikes, I am called into action. If I raise taxes to fund the effort to deal with crises, all can see my costs clearly. If I instead expand my authority to conscript resources, I hide my true costs, thus causing many to overestimate the net benefit of my actions. This instills unduly favorable beliefs about me in many minds.

...There have been successful efforts to restrain me for extended periods of time...In such places, people have prospered. But I have often succeeded in making strong comebacks. Some seek to limit my power with constitutional rules. However, there are strong reasons to doubt the efficacy of these rules. Persons who have power to enforce constitutional rules also have the power to flout them.

Why then do I ever fail?...There must be an answer, because I do sometimes falter...my failures are relatively uncommon. As difficult as the issues here are, they are vitally important to you because the continued success of free societies hinges on them. What is more important to you than that?

And here is why America's Founding was different, even though we have lost our way in recent decades.


February 1, 2006


Move Over Senator

Marc Comtois

Thinking aloud over at The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru asks, "What do conservatives gain if Chafee wins?" But first he makes a case for conservative retribution against Sen. Chafee:

The more I think about it, the more important it seems to me that Steve Laffey beat him in the Rhode Island Senate primary.

None of the Republicans who voted against Bork in 1987, and none of the Democrats who voted against Thomas in 1991, paid any price. (It was the pro-Thomas senators who suffered: Democrat Alan Dixon lost a primary to Carol Moseley-Braun, and Arlen Specter had a tough general election.) If Chafee loses, it will make it harder for Snowe and Collins to vote against a qualified conservative in the next Supreme Court fight.

What do conservatives gain if Chafee wins? The hope that he would vote to keep Senate Republicans in the majority if it came down to him. We don't know that he would vote that way; and it's not clear that nominal control of the Senate matters all that much. Even if Laffey went on to lose the general election, taking out Chafee looks like a good move to me.

As some of you may have realized, I've basically come to that conclusion myself, though not from any desire for retributive action against Senator Chafee.

In a response to a critique of my post regarding where Sen. Chafee has differed from conservatives, I explained why I have decided that it's time to send Sen. Chafee on his way. I think it's proper for me to summarize my reasoning in a "regular" post so readers (and my fellow Anchor Rising contributors) can see where I stand on the Laffey/Chafee race.

Anchor Rising is a conservative blog, not a Republican blog. I am a registered Republican, but I'm a conservative first. I am more concerned with growing the conservative movement within the state than I am with keeping a liberal Republican in national office merely for the false promise of "goodies" for my state.

It is a political reality that the home for conservatives is the GOP. Unfortunately, Sen. Chafee--the face of the RIGOP at the national level--has shown time and again that he is most comfortable being a liberal Republican. In fact, it's as if he revels in the attention he accrues for being a Republican wildcard. His position as the only Republican in our congressional delegation has given both he and his supporters considerable power--both direct and indirect--within the State GOP, especially at the top of the state GOP hierarchy.

Additionally, though there are many leaders within the RIGOP who are more conservative than Sen. Chafee (such as Governor Carcieri), these leaders have chosen to be "pragmatists" and "grin and bear it" as Sen. Chafee routinely votes against the interests of his President and the interests of the majority of the Party he calls "home." They are understandably reluctant to break Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment ("Never speak ill of another Republican"; the same cannot be said for the NRSC), especially in a state with such a small GOP contingent. But the willingness of the RIGOP to accept whatever Senator Chafee does for the sake of having a seat at the national GOP's table is starving their own conservative base.

The Alito confirmation vote is the most recent and stark example of how much Sen. Chafee differs from even his fellow liberal/moderate Republicans like Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. He was the only Republican to vote against confirmation of Justice Alito, a nominee of a President of his own party. Yes, the GOP is a "big tent" party--but Sen. Chafee usually isn't in the tent when the Main Event is in the center ring!

Eventually, the RI GOP--whether from the "bottom up" or the "top down"--has to make a decision: Continue being satisfied with the status quo and the shenanigans of our "independent" Senator, or send the sort of message that is long overdue. Currently, Mayor Steven Laffey is the vehicle through which conservative members of the RIGOP can best make such a statement. Mayor Laffey isn't a "perfect" conservative (if such a thing exists), but he is undeniably more conservative than Sen. Chafee. At the least, he will support President Bush on the big issues like the War in Iraq. I am not condoning some sort of ideological purity within the RIGOP, nor am I naive enough to believe such a thing is achievable. All I desire is that the RIGOP begin to reflect the predominant ideals of the majority of its members, from the top on down.

Regardless of whether or not Sen. Chafee has a better chance than Mayor Laffey of winning the general election is not as important as how the nomination of each effects the structure of the RIGOP. If--as Tip O'Neill said, "All politics is local"--then it's time for RIGOP to concern ourselves with our own backyard. Party building requires its members to be inspired, something that has been sorely lacking within the GOP. Inspiration requires leadership, but it also requires that the members "buy-in" to a message in which the truly believe. Even if Mayor Laffey should win the primary, but lose the general election, few can doubt that his views are more in line with the majority of the RIGOP.

Many say that RI is a "liberal" state, and that having a liberal Republican is the best that we can do. That is both pessimistic and defeatist. Conservatives have to realize that there is no law stating hat RI will always be "liberal." We are not consigned to some permanent fate. We have the ability to change Rhode Island, but only through optimism and hard work will we be successful.

After 1964, Barry Goldwater was considered a fringe candidate who had led the nascent national conservative movement to a fiery death. In 1980, Ronald Reagan proved them wrong. In between 1964 and 1980, Reagan and others led a grassroots movement that spread the conservative message throughout the nation. Unfortunately, with the exception of a brief period during the 1980s, that message has been forgotten in Rhode Island. It is past time that Rhode Island conservatives rectify that situation. The first step is to change the attitude and direction of the RIGOP. So long as we continue to derive inspiration from our conservative ideals and values--and don't accept vague promises of maintaining our little slice of the political pie--we can be confident in our attempt to fundamentally change the Rhode Island Republican Party. Change has to start somewhere and sometime: Why not here, why not now?


January 31, 2006


Where Senator Chafee has Gone "Off the Reservation"

Marc Comtois

In addition to being the only Republican Senator to vote against the confirmation of now-Justice Alito, Senator Chafee has opposed President Bush and--more often--conservative ideals on the following substantive matters. (All links are to data provided by ProjectVoteSmart. An index of Sen. Chafee's complete voting record is here).

Presidential Appointments:

Voted against nomination of Judge Priscilla Owen.
Voted against nomination of Judge William Pryor.

Domestic Issues:

Voted against cloture on debate on the Federal Marriage Amendment Bill in 2004, thus upholding a filibuster.
Voted against the provision that allowed for opening up ANWR to oil exploration and drilling.
Voted against the Firearms Manufacturers Protection bill that limited civil liabilities against gun makers--twice.
Voted against the Unborn Victims of Violence Act 2004 that would have made it a criminal offense if a "fetus" is injured or killed while carrying out a violent crime on a pregnant woman.
Voted for the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit (thus supporting the President).

Foreign Policy:

Voted against the use of military force against Iraq.
Voted for an attempt to make members of the US Military subject to the International Criminal Court.
Voted against an amendment that prohibits any employee of the Federal government from holding a security clearance for access to classified information if they disclose such information to unauthorized persons (say, to the NY Times).

Finally, of course, he voted against the President in the 2004 election.

To be fair, there are many important issues in which Sen. Chafee has been in line with many conservatives or the President. For instance, there can be little doubt that he's a free-trader. However, as can be seen, on substantive issues he is just as likely to bolt the President as he is to join him.



Fun Reading at the NRSC

Marc Comtois

Back in December, the National Republican Senatorial Committee--in support of Sen. Chafee--decided to try to undermine Steve Laffey's conservativism by claiming he was really a tax-and-spender. Well, by reading the comments (select "View all comments" at the aforementioned page), you'll find that a few people have tried to set them straight. Interestingly, the thread is still growing given the recent Alito vote--possibly because the NSRC has decided to put Sen. Chafee "In the Spotlight" this week. Oops--good timing guys. If nothing else, reading the comments calling for the NRSC to "wake up" can be a cathartic experience.

Meanwhile, the NRSC is making much of the fact that Michigan Democrat Senator Debbie Stabenow is supported by the radical, left-wing Emily's List and are claiming that she voted for the attempted filibuster of Alito because she is beholden to this pro-abortion organization. Apparently, NARAL isn't considered as left-wing by the NSRC. Maybe because they're the second-highest single contributor to Sen. Chafee's re-election campaign? (Here's another way to look at this data--look for yellow).


January 27, 2006


Laffey Endorses Shadegg in House Leadership Race

Carroll Andrew Morse

OK, I was wrong. Rhode Island Republicans do have a voice in the upcoming Republican leadership election in the House of Representatives. In today's National Review Online, Republican Senatorial Candidate Steve Laffey has endorsed Congressman John Shadegg of Arizona in the race for House Majority Leader ...

All three contestants have issued numerous promises to fight the special interests, but promises are not enough. John Shadegg has the clearest record of standing up to the corrupt practices and the outrageous pork spending that has become so prevalent in recent years. For example, Representative Shadegg cosponsored a bill to reform the earmark process last spring, long before it became the "in" thing to do, and he was one of only eight Representatives to vote against the pork-heavy Transportation bill.
Laffey then plugs his own campaign, and offers some criticism of his challenger...
John Shadegg and I have something in common: We are both appalled by the spending gluttony in Washington, and we have dedicated our careers to saving taxpayers money. That is why I am running for the United States Senate in Rhode Island. The incumbent Republican senator, Lincoln Chafee, has not demonstrated the desire or the ability to stand up to the Washington political bosses and fight for the Republican values of fiscal responsibility and restraint. His career has been marked by timidity and an affinity for the status quo, and that is not good enough.


January 21, 2006


Peggy Noonan: The decline of the liberal media monopoly and the future of the GOP

Peggy Noonans latest editorial Not a Bad Time to Take Stock: Thoughts on the decline of the liberal media monopoly and the future of the GOP notes:

I don't think Democrats understand that the Alito hearings were, for them, not a defeat but an actual disaster. The snarly tone the senators took with a man most Americans could look at and think, "He's like me," and the charges they made--You oppose women and minorities, you only like corporations and not the little guy--went nowhere. Once those charges would have taken flight, would have launched, found their target and knocked down any incoming Republican. Not any more. It's over.

Eleven years ago the Democrats lost control of Congress. Then they lost the presidency. But just as important, maybe more enduringly important, they lost their monopoly on the means of information in America. They lost control of the pipeline. Or rather there are now many pipelines, and many ways to use the information they carry...

Could Democratic senators today torture Clarence Thomas with tales of Coke cans and porn films? Not likely. Could Ted Kennedy have gotten away with his "Robert Bork's America" speech unanswered? No.

And the end of the monopoly of course isn't only in the news, it's in all media"You don't like it, change the channel," network executives used to say. But that, as they knew, meant nothing: There were only three channels. Now there are 500. And more coming.

You know who else experienced, up close and personal, the end of the information monopoly this week? Walter Cronkite. Once, he said America should leave Vietnam and the president of the United States said if we've lost him we've lost middle America. Now, Walter calls for withdrawal from Iraq and it occasions only one thing: stories about how once such a thing mattered

We are in a time when the very diminution of the importance of network news leaves some old news hands to drop their guard and announce what they are: liberal Democrats. Nothing wrong with that, but they might have told us when they were in power. The very existence of conservative media--of Rush Limbaugh, of Fox, of the Internet sites--has become an excuse by previously "I call 'em as I see 'em/I try to be impartial" journalists to advance their biases. Actually, it's more Fox than anything. The existence of a respected cable network that is nonliberal and non-Democratic (or that is conservative, or Republican, or neoconservative -- people on the right have polite disagreements about this) is more and more freeing news outlets, encouraging them actually, as a potential business model, to be more and more what they are. Is this good? Well, it's clearer

But where does this leave us? With our mass media busy with reluctant reformation...with the old network monopoly over and done...with something new, we know not what, about to take its place...with the Democratic Party adjusting to the loss of its megaphone...Where does that leave us? I think it leaves us knowing that, more than ever, the Republican Party--the party ultimately helped by the end of the old monopoly and the reformation of news media--must be a good party, a decent one, and help our country.

That it regain a sense of its historic mission. That it stop seeming the friend of the wired and return to being the great friend of Main Street, for Main Street still, in its own way, exists. That it return to basic principles on spending, regulation and state authority. That it question a foreign policy that often seems at once dreamy and aggressive, and question, too, an overreaching on immigration policy that seems composed in equal parts of naivet and cynicism. That its representatives admit that lunching with lobbyists is not the problem; failing to oppose the growth of government--so huge that no one, really no one, knows what is in its budget--is. That they reduce the size and power of government. That they help our country

Republicans in Washington struggle with scandal and speak of reform, and reformation. They would better think of words like regain, refresh, rebuild. If they don't, if Republicans don't choose to lead well, and seriously, and with principle, they should ask themselves: Who will? Seriously: Who will?

This is why the outcome of the House Majority Leader race is so important (see here, here, here, and here).

More on that race, and why Congressman John Shadegg is the best candidate, can be found here, here, here, here and here.



Celebrating Reaganomics, 25 years later

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal carried an editorial entitled Still Morning in America: Reaganomics, 25 years later:

Twenty-five years ago today, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States promising less intrusive government, lower tax rates and victory over communismIf the story of history is one long and arduous march toward freedom, this was a momentous day well worth commemorating.

All the more so because over this 25-year period prosperity has been the rule, not the exception, for America--in stark contrast to the stagflationary 1970s. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the success of Reaganomics is that, over the course of the past 276 months, the U.S. economy has been in recession for only 15. That is to say, 94% of the time the U.S. economy has been creating jobs (43 million in all) and wealth ($30 trillion). More wealth has been created in the U.S. in the last quarter-century than in the previous 200 years. The policy lessons of this supply-side prosperity need to be constantly relearned, lest we return to the errors that produced the 1970s.

The heart and soul of Reagan's economic agenda were sound money (making the dollar "as good as gold," as Reagan used to put it) and lower tax rates. On monetary policy, Reagan has won a resounding victory. Today, nearly all economists agree with Reagan's then-controversial belief that the sole purpose of monetary policy should be to keep prices stable

On tax policy, Reaganomics has also carried the day, if somewhat less completely. Tax rates in the U.S. are on average half as high now as they were in the 1970s, and almost every nation has followed the Reagan model of lower tax rates

Nonetheless, tax cuts still stand in disrepute among most of the media, academics and Democrats in Congress, albeit for shifting reasons. When Reagan proposed his 30% across-the-board tax-rate cut, his critics howled that this would cause demand to rise and lead to hyper-inflation. In fact, supply rose faster than demand, and inflation fell to 4% from 13% and has fallen even lower sincethe moment the final leg of the tax cut took effect, in January of 1983, the economy roared to life with an expansion that lasted more than seven years.

When the budget deficit rose in the mid-1980s, the liberals warned that if Reagan would not raise taxes interest rates would skyrocket. He didn't and rates didn't

The Gipper's critics have written an economic history of the 1990s that they portray as a repudiation of Reaganomics. In this telling--known as Rubinomics--the Clinton tax hikes of 1993 ended the budget deficit, which caused interest rates to fall, which produced the boom of the mid- to late-1990s. In fact, the budget deficit hardly fell at all in the immediate aftermath of the tax hike, and while long-term interest rates fell in 1993, they shot back up again in 1994 almost precisely through Election Day

On that day, votersgave Republicans control of Capitol Hill to govern on the Reaganite agenda of lowering taxes and shrinking runaway government. Both the stock and bond markets turned upward precisely on Election Day in 1994, beginning a whirlwind six-year rally. By 1998, growth and fiscal restraint delivered a budget surplus for the first time in nearly 30 years. In 1997 President Clinton signed a further reduction in the capital gains tax, which propelled investment and the stock market to even greater heights.

The latest chapter of this story is the 2003 income and investment tax cuts enacted by the current President Bushin the two and a half years since those tax cuts passed, the economy and tax revenues have both surged.

Where Republicans have most strayed from the Reagan vision has been on controlling federal spendingThey should all recall the Gipper's words in his inauguration speech 25 years ago: "It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government."

For more economic/taxation history, check out the posting entitled Economics 101: Never Underestimate the Incentive Power of Marginal Tax Cuts.


January 19, 2006


Things That Make You Go Hmmmm...

Carroll Andrew Morse

From Jim Lindgren of the Volokh Conspiracy...

In response to a question from an audience of Northwestern law students and faculty, [Senator Richard] Durbin disclosed that the Senate leaders were counting votes, not only on Alito's nomination, but on the possibility of a filibuster: "At this point, I wouldnt want to project whether we will have a filibuster.

On the nomination more generally, Durbin said that one Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, had publicly indicated that he would vote for Alito, and one undisclosed Republican Senator had privately indicated that he or she would probably vote against Alito.




Walter Williams: Attacking Lobbyists is Wrong Battle

Walter Williams, once again, cuts through all the political posturing about the rationale for lobbying reforms in his latest editorial:

...Whatever actions Congress might take in the matter of lobbying are going to be just as disappointing in ending influence-peddling as their Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known as the McCain-Feingold bill. Before we allow ourselves to be bamboozled by our political leaders, we might do our own analysis to determine whether the problem is money in politics or something more fundamental.

Let's start this analysis with a question. Why do corporations, unions and other interest groups fork over millions of dollars to the campaign coffers of politicians? Is it because these groups are extraordinarily civic-minded Americans who have a deep interest in congressmen doing their jobs of upholding and defending the U.S. Constitution?...Anyone answering in the affirmative...probably also believes that storks deliver babies and there really is an Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

A much better explanation for the millions going to the campaign coffers of Washington politicians lies in the awesome growth of government control over business, property, employment and other areas of our lives. Having such power, Washington politicians are in the position to grant favors. The greater their power to grant favors, the greater the value of being able to influence Congress, and there's no better influence than money.

The generic favor sought is to get Congress, under one ruse or another, to grant a privilege or right to one group of Americans that will be denied another group of Americans. A variant of this privilege is to get Congress to do something that would be criminal if done privately.

Here's just one among possibly thousands of examples. If Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) used goons and violence to stop people from buying sugar from Caribbean producers so that sugar prices would rise, making it easier for ADM to sell more of its corn syrup sweetener, they'd wind up in jail. If they line the coffers of congressmen, they can buy the same result without risking imprisonment. Congress simply does the dirty work for them by enacting sugar import quotas and tariffs...

...A tweak here and a tweak there in the tax code can mean millions of dollars.

...Campaign finance and lobby reform will only change the method of influence-peddling. If Congress did only what's specifically enumerated in our Constitution, influence-peddling would be a non-issue simply because the Constitution contains no authority for Congress to grant favors and special privileges. Nearly two decades ago, during dinner with the late Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, I asked him if he had the power to write one law that would get government out of our lives, what would that law be? Professor Hayek replied he'd write a law that read: Whatever Congress does for one American it must do for all Americans. He elaborated: If Congress makes payments to one American for not raising pigs, every American not raising pigs should also receive payments. Obviously, were there to be such a law, there would be reduced capacity for privilege-granting by Congress and less influence-peddling.

Whatever Congress does for one American it must do for all Americans: A simple, but powerful, policy spoken by one of the greatest economists. Now ponder how that would change Washington's game of pork.


January 18, 2006


The Race for Republican Majority Leader

Carroll Andrew Morse

There is an important, upcoming political decision where Rhode Islanders will have no voice. It is the election of a new Majority Leader in the House of Representatives. The outcome of the this election will significantly impact Republican prospects for maintaining their national governing majority. If the new leader cannot convince the public that Republicans are serious about bringing spending under control, Republicans may lose control of Congress to the Democrats within the next two or three election cycles.

Two of the three leading contenders for the Majority Leader position published op-eds on the OpininonJournal.com website this week. Both sounded at least one common theme the Republican party must reduce pork spending if it is to stay true to its principles and maintain the credibility it needs to govern effectively. (By the way, is anyone still arguing that reducing pork-spending is not a viable political issue?)

Congressman John Boehner of Ohio, considered one of the two frontrunners for Majority Leader, devoted an extensive part of his op-ed to discussing specific pork-spending reforms

To rebuild trust in the [House of Representatives] and our commitment to governing, we need to recognize that most of the current ethical problems arise from one basic fact: Government is too big and controls too much money. If you want to dismantle the culture that produced an Abramoff or a Scanlon, you need to reform how Congress exerts power.

We must start by addressing the growing practice of unauthorized earmarks--language in spending bills that directs federal dollars to private entities for projects that are not tied to an existing federal program or purpose. The public knows the practice better by a different name--pork-barreling. Unauthorized earmarks squander taxpayer dollars and lack transparency. They feed public cynicism. They've been a driving force in the ongoing growth of our already gargantuan federal government, and a major factor in government's increasing detachment from the priorities of individual Americans.

Many pork-barrel provisions are inserted into legislation at the last minute to ensure passage, and relatively few members get a chance to see them before actually voting. My Republican colleague, Jeff Flake of Arizona, has bold ideas to solve this problem. He proposes that the earmarking process be transparent: All earmarks should be included in the actual text of legislation, so members can see them before they vote.

We need to establish some clear standards by which worthy projects can be distinguished from worthless pork, so that pork projects can be halted in their tracks as soon as they are identified. For example, earmarks should meet the specific purpose of the authorizing statute. They should not give a private entity a competitive edge unless it is in the immediate national security interest of the country. They should not be a substitute for state and local fiscal responsibility. They should be used sparingly, and ideally, they should be a one-time appropriation for a specific national need.

Congressman John Shadegg of Arizona, considered a dark-horse candidate, approves of Boehners proposals. As proof of his committment, he points out that he has already sponsored legislation that would have implemented them

Yesterday John Boehner wrote on this page about a proposal to reform the earmark process offered by Rep. Jeff Flake. While Mr. Boehner is suddenly talking about this idea, I was one of the first co-sponsors when it was introduced last spring.

We need sunshine in the earmark process, and an end to secret, backroom deals. According to Citizens Against Government Waste, the total number of earmarks in 2005 was nearly 14,000--compared with only 1,439 in 1995. Earmarked money is often spent without the oversight and consideration in the regular appropriations process, so waste, abuse or even fraud is more likely. Congress should base decisions on what is good for America, not what is good for the lobbyist friends of a few.

Every year Congress adopts a budget, and every year we exceed it. Cheats and dodges--supplemental spending without offsets, "off budget" spending--hide this expenditure, but it is added to our national debt, a legacy of irresponsibility to burden future generations. We are still using a budget process that dates from 1974, when Democrats ruled the House and the government was a fraction of its current size. We need reforms in our budget rules to force Congress to stay within the budget it adopts.

The third candidate, Congressman Roy Blunt of Missouri, has not, as far as I know, taken a definitive stand on pork-reform.

Alas, as Rhode Island has no Republican Representatives in Congress, Rhode Island will have no vote in this matter. However, the mood for reform does provide a more-interesting-than-usual opening for Republican candidates interested in running in Rhode Islands 2006 Congressional elections. There is an opportunity for an up-and-coming Republican politician to discuss his-or-her partys principled stand on a popular and relevant issue and attach him-or-herself to the national party in a positive way. Anybody in the party interested in keeping our incumbent Representatives honest and building some statewide name recognition, all while doing the right thing?

UPDATE: (January 19, 2006)

As Marc points out in the comments, Congressman Roy Blunt of Missouri, the current Majority Whip and the other frontrunner in the election, makes his case for becomming Majority Leader at OpinionJournal.com today. It includes a section on pork-reform...

We must also reform the earmark and federal grant-making processes. Specifically, earmarks should be identified with the member who is requesting them, and accompanied by a justification for how the expenditure serves a public purpose. Grants made by federal agencies should be open to more scrutiny with the creation of a public database of all those receiving grants, along with a justification for how the grant serves the public interest.



A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away

Donald B. Hawthorne

George Will has written an editorial entitled For the House GOP, A Belated Evolution in which he makes the following comments:

...And now among House Republicans there are Darwinian stirrings, prompted by concerns about survival.

In Washington, such concerns often are confused with and substitute for moral epiphanies...

The national pastime is no longer baseball, it is rent-seeking -- bending public power for private advantage. There are two reasons why rent-seeking has become so lurid, but those reasons for today's dystopian politics are reasons why most suggested cures seem utopian.

The first reason is big government -- the regulatory state. This year Washington will disperse $2.6 trillion, which is a small portion of Washington's economic consequences, considering the costs and benefits distributed by incessant fiddling with the tax code, and by government's regulatory fidgets.

Second, House Republicans, after 40 years in the minority, have, since 1994, wallowed in the pleasures of power. They have practiced DeLayism, or "K Street conservatism." This involves exuberantly serving rent-seekers, who hire K Street lobbyists as helpers. For House Republicans the aim of the game is to build political support. But Republicans shed their conservatism in the process of securing their seats in the service, they say, of conservatism.

Liberals practice "K Street liberalism" with an easy conscience because they believe government should do as much as possible for as many interests as possible. But "K Street conservatism" compounds unseemliness with hypocrisy. Until the Bush administration, with its incontinent spending, unleashed an especially conscienceless Republican control of both political branches, conservatives pretended to believe in limited government. The past five years, during which the number of registered lobbyists more than doubled, have proved that, for some Republicans, conservative virtue was merely the absence of opportunity for vice.

The way to reduce rent-seeking is to reduce the government's role in the allocation of wealth and opportunity. People serious about reducing the role of money in politics should be serious about reducing the role of politics in distributing money. But those most eager to do the former -- liberals, generally -- are the least eager to do the latter.

A surgical reform would be congressional term limits, which would end careerism, thereby changing the incentives for entering politics and for becoming, when in office, an enabler of rent-seekers in exchange for their help in retaining office forever. The movement for limits -- a Madisonian reform to alter the dynamic of interestedness that inevitably animates politics -- was surging until four months after Republicans took control of the House. In May 1995 the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that congressional terms could not be limited by states' statutes. Hence a constitutional amendment is necessary. Hence Congress must initiate limits on itself. That will never happen.

...a few institutional reforms milder than term limits might be useful. But none will be more than marginally important, absent the philosophical renewal of conservatism...

Roy Blunt of Missouri, the man who was selected, not elected, to replace DeLay, is a champion of earmarks as a form of constituent service...A salient fact: In 15 years in the House, Boehner has never put an earmark in an appropriations or transportation bill.

Since Will wrote his editorial, Congressman John Shadegg of Arizona has announced his candidacy for the Majority Leader role in the House. Here are some excerpts from his Wall Street Journal editorial entitled The Spirit of 1994: Republicans need to look again to the examples of Goldwater and Reagan:

Ten years ago, the American people put Republicans in control of the House of Representatives for the first time in more than 40 years. It was a historic achievement, made possible because we stood for the principles the American people believed in: smaller government, returning power to the states, lower taxes, greater individual freedom and--above all--reform.

Some Republican leaders in the House seem to have lost sight of those principles, though the American people still believe in them...

Republicans promised the American people two things in 1994. First, we promised to rein in the size and scope of the federal government. Second, we promised to clean up Washington. In recent years, we have fallen short on both counts. Total federal spending has grown by 33% since 1995, in inflation-adjusted dollars. Worse, we have permitted some of the same backroom practices that flourished in the old Democrat-controlled House...The recent scandals involving Duke Cunningham and Jack Abramoff have highlighted the problem, but this is not just a case of a few bad apples. The system itself needs structural reforms.

This has been clear for some time. I did not discover reform as an issue--like Saul on the road to Damascus--when I entered the majority leader race. It has been an integral part of my record, not at one time a decade ago, but constantly, year in and year out since 1994. Yesterday John Boehner wrote on this page about a proposal to reform the earmark process offered by Rep. Jeff Flake. While Mr. Boehner is suddenly talking about this idea, I was one of the first co-sponsors when it was introduced last spring.

We need sunshine in the earmark process, and an end to secret, backroom deals. According to Citizens Against Government Waste, the total number of earmarks in 2005 was nearly 14,000--compared with only 1,439 in 1995. Earmarked money is often spent without the oversight and consideration in the regular appropriations process, so waste, abuse or even fraud is more likely...

Every year Congress adopts a budget, and every year we exceed it. Cheats and dodges--supplemental spending without offsets, "off budget" spending--hide this expenditure, but it is added to our national debt, a legacy of irresponsibility to burden future generations. We are still using a budget process that dates from 1974, when Democrats ruled the House and the government was a fraction of its current size. We need reforms in our budget rules to force Congress to stay within the budget it adopts...

I grew up watching the example of Barry Goldwater, who worked closely with my father. He taught me that "a government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away." That philosophy guided me when I ran for Congress in 1994. I was thrilled to be part of the Revolutionary Class of '94, and the sense of hope and mission of the early days after the American people elected a Republican majority in the House is still with me...

...The party of Ronald Reagan exists not to expand government, but to protect the American people from government's excesses. President Reagan once said, "If you're afraid of the future, then get out of the way, stand aside. The people of this country are ready to move again."...

While a well-intentioned man of principle and the best person for the Majority Leader job, Congressman Shadegg's reform ideas don't deal vigorously enough with the core structural problem raised by George Will. The structural problem is influenced by how money flows into politics in the first place (see here) and why there are no incentives for politicians and bureaucrats to make any changes to that status quo (see here).

Why does all of this matter? Because, as is noted in a posting highlighted below:

...Big government means there are plenty of spoils to divide among the many powerful pigs at the public trough.

The next time your Senator or Congressman tries to impress you with the spoils he or she is bringing home to your district, take a step back and remember that the true price you are paying for any suggested benefit must also include the pro-rata cost of feeding every other pig across America who eats from the public trough.

Most importantly, what is often forgotten is that the spoils they are so eager to divide up represent a meaningful portion of the incomes of American working families and retirees - who are usually unrepresented at the table when these spoils are given away.

We must never forget that all families pay quite a price for these giveaways: It means less of their own hard-earned incomes is available to be spent on their own tangible needs, on things such as food, clothing, medical care, education, etc.

And that is why big government means less freedom for American working families and retirees.

Continue reading "A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away"


Goldwater: A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away

George Will has written an editorial entitled For the House GOP, A Belated Evolution in which he makes the following comments:

And now among House Republicans there are Darwinian stirrings, prompted by concerns about survival.

In Washington, such concerns often are confused with and substitute for moral epiphanies

The national pastime is no longer baseball, it is rent-seeking -- bending public power for private advantage. There are two reasons why rent-seeking has become so lurid, but those reasons for today's dystopian politics are reasons why most suggested cures seem utopian.

The first reason is big government -- the regulatory state. This year Washington will disperse $2.6 trillion, which is a small portion of Washington's economic consequences, considering the costs and benefits distributed by incessant fiddling with the tax code, and by government's regulatory fidgets.

Second, House Republicans, after 40 years in the minority, have, since 1994, wallowed in the pleasures of power. They have practiced DeLayism, or "K Street conservatism." This involves exuberantly serving rent-seekers, who hire K Street lobbyists as helpers. For House Republicans the aim of the game is to build political support. But Republicans shed their conservatism in the process of securing their seats in the service, they say, of conservatism.

Liberals practice "K Street liberalism" with an easy conscience because they believe government should do as much as possible for as many interests as possible. But "K Street conservatism" compounds unseemliness with hypocrisy. Until the Bush administration, with its incontinent spending, unleashed an especially conscienceless Republican control of both political branches, conservatives pretended to believe in limited government. The past five years, during which the number of registered lobbyists more than doubled, have proved that, for some Republicans, conservative virtue was merely the absence of opportunity for vice.

The way to reduce rent-seeking is to reduce the government's role in the allocation of wealth and opportunity. People serious about reducing the role of money in politics should be serious about reducing the role of politics in distributing money. But those most eager to do the former -- liberals, generally -- are the least eager to do the latter.

A surgical reform would be congressional term limits, which would end careerism, thereby changing the incentives for entering politics and for becoming, when in office, an enabler of rent-seekers in exchange for their help in retaining office forever. The movement for limits -- a Madisonian reform to alter the dynamic of interestedness that inevitably animates politics -- was surging until four months after Republicans took control of the House. In May 1995 the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that congressional terms could not be limited by states' statutes. Hence a constitutional amendment is necessary. Hence Congress must initiate limits on itself. That will never happen.

a few institutional reforms milder than term limits might be useful. But none will be more than marginally important, absent the philosophical renewal of conservatism

Roy Blunt of Missouri, the man who was selected, not elected, to replace DeLay, is a champion of earmarks as a form of constituent serviceA salient fact: In 15 years in the House, Boehner has never put an earmark in an appropriations or transportation bill.

Since Will wrote his editorial, Congressman John Shadegg of Arizona has announced his candidacy for the Majority Leader role in the House. Here are some excerpts from his Wall Street Journal editorial entitled The Spirit of 1994: Republicans need to look again to the examples of Goldwater and Reagan:

Ten years ago, the American people put Republicans in control of the House of Representatives for the first time in more than 40 years. It was a historic achievement, made possible because we stood for the principles the American people believed in: smaller government, returning power to the states, lower taxes, greater individual freedom and--above all--reform.

Some Republican leaders in the House seem to have lost sight of those principles, though the American people still believe in them...

Republicans promised the American people two things in 1994. First, we promised to rein in the size and scope of the federal government. Second, we promised to clean up Washington. In recent years, we have fallen short on both counts. Total federal spending has grown by 33% since 1995, in inflation-adjusted dollars. Worse, we have permitted some of the same backroom practices that flourished in the old Democrat-controlled House...The recent scandals involving Duke Cunningham and Jack Abramoff have highlighted the problem, but this is not just a case of a few bad apples. The system itself needs structural reforms.

This has been clear for some time. I did not discover reform as an issue--like Saul on the road to Damascus--when I entered the majority leader race. It has been an integral part of my record, not at one time a decade ago, but constantly, year in and year out since 1994. Yesterday John Boehner wrote on this page about a proposal to reform the earmark process offered by Rep. Jeff Flake. While Mr. Boehner is suddenly talking about this idea, I was one of the first co-sponsors when it was introduced last spring.

We need sunshine in the earmark process, and an end to secret, backroom deals. According to Citizens Against Government Waste, the total number of earmarks in 2005 was nearly 14,000--compared with only 1,439 in 1995. Earmarked money is often spent without the oversight and consideration in the regular appropriations process, so waste, abuse or even fraud is more likely...

Every year Congress adopts a budget, and every year we exceed it. Cheats and dodges--supplemental spending without offsets, "off budget" spending--hide this expenditure, but it is added to our national debt, a legacy of irresponsibility to burden future generations. We are still using a budget process that dates from 1974, when Democrats ruled the House and the government was a fraction of its current size. We need reforms in our budget rules to force Congress to stay within the budget it adopts...

I grew up watching the example of Barry Goldwater, who worked closely with my father. He taught me that "a government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away." That philosophy guided me when I ran for Congress in 1994. I was thrilled to be part of the Revolutionary Class of '94, and the sense of hope and mission of the early days after the American people elected a Republican majority in the House is still with me...

...The party of Ronald Reagan exists not to expand government, but to protect the American people from government's excesses. President Reagan once said, "If you're afraid of the future, then get out of the way, stand aside. The people of this country are ready to move again."...

While a well-intentioned man of principle and the best person for the Majority Leader job, Congressman Shadegg's reform ideas don't deal vigorously enough with the core structural problem raised by George Will. The structural problem is influenced by how money flows into politics in the first place (see here) and why there are no incentives for politicians and bureaucrats to make any changes to that status quo (see here).

Why does all of this matter? Because, as is noted in a posting highlighted below:

...Big government means there are plenty of spoils to divide among the many powerful pigs at the public trough.

The next time your Senator or Congressman tries to impress you with the spoils he or she is bringing home to your district, take a step back and remember that the true price you are paying for any suggested benefit must also include the pro-rata cost of feeding every other pig across America who eats from the public trough.

Most importantly, what is often forgotten is that the spoils they are so eager to divide up represent a meaningful portion of the incomes of American working families and retirees - who are usually unrepresented at the table when these spoils are given away.

We must never forget that all families pay quite a price for these giveaways: It means less of their own hard-earned incomes is available to be spent on their own tangible needs, on things such as food, clothing, medical care, education, etc.

And that is why big government means less freedom for American working families and retirees.

Continue reading "Goldwater: A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away"

January 17, 2006


If USA Today Says Public Pension Programs are a Financial Time Bomb...

When USA Today, the McPaper of newspaper journalism, carries a lead article on page 1 entitled Public workers' pensions swelling, you know the looming financial implosion of public sector pensions is slowly - but firmly - seeping into public consciousness:

Public employee pensions have become increasingly generous since 2000, promising a more comfortable retirement for civil servants but a serious financial challenge for future taxpayers...

Many corporations have replaced traditional pension plans, which pay monthly benefits for life, with plans that cost employers less and pay workers a lump sum when they retire...

Governments have been moving in the opposite direction: increasing monthly benefits, making it easier to retire at 55 and spending more on retiree health benefits. State and local governments, which cover 21 million workers and retirees, have been adding benefits the fastest:

A December study of 85 big public pensions in all 50 states covering three-fourths of public employees nationwide found that governments continued to enhance benefit formulas, ease early retirement and improve other benefits from 2000 through 2004 despite states' financial problems. The increases were enacted on top of even larger benefit changes approved from 1996 to 2000. The study, conducted by the Wisconsin Legislature, is one of the most comprehensive on the issue...

Average annual benefits for retired state and local workers grew 37% to $19,875 from 2000 to 2004, the most recent data available, according to the Census Bureau. The rising payments reflect the early retirement of baby boomers, who started to qualify for full benefits in 2001, at age 55, under most government pensions.

"These pensions are unaffordable," says Alaska state Rep. Bert Stedman, a Republican. "If we don't act now, we're going to have social conflict in the future between the haves and the have-nots those with government pensions and those without."

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, which represents teachers, says legislators shouldn't respond to pension problems in the private sector by attacking government pensions. "Pensions are a national problem, but it's not in the interest of workers to diminish either type," he says.

The portion of the private workforce enrolled in plans that pay monthly benefits for life has fallen from 39% in 1980 to 18% in 2004, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. By comparison, more than 90% of government workers are covered by such plans, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says...

Federal, state and local governments have promised pension and retiree medical benefits that would require more than $5 trillion to be invested today to cover costs over the next 75 years, according to the financial statements of the retirement plans.

In another USA Today story entitled Pension funds fall short of guarantees:

...The public servants have been guaranteed retirement benefits that are far richer than private pensions, yet elected officials have failed to set aside enough money to cover the promised benefits...

The belief that government offers good benefits to make up for lower wages appears to be a myth. Government workers earn higher average wages and get better benefits than people in the private sector, according to bureau statistics. Even white-collar workers managers and professionals earn more on average than their counterparts in private industry.

Keith Brainard, research director of the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, says those numbers don't recognize the special nature of government jobs. "Two-thirds of government employees work in education, public safety, corrections or are judges," he says. "You don't want high turnover in those professions, so you need benefits that encourage long-term retention."

The Bureau of Labor Statistics details how superior government benefits are to those in the private sector. Private companies contributed an average of 90 cents to a worker's pension plans for every hour worked in 2005. By comparison, state and local governments contributed $2.48 for every hour an employee worked.

Those numbers don't include retiree health benefits, which make it possible for civil servants to retire before federal Medicare health coverage begins at age 65.

Starting this year, governments must report the cost of promised retiree medical benefits...

...The national total is likely to be hundreds of billions of dollars.

Most public pensions also have automatic cost-of-living increases. Private pensions usually do not. That means the difference between public and private pensions grows every year, even after retirement.

...Government employees don't have to worry about losing benefits. State constitutions and court precedents forbid cutting pension benefits to civil servants...

"These unfunded liabilities are not a big problem," says Frederick Nesbitt, executive director of the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, which lobbies for public employee pension rights. "We have 40 or 50 years to recoup the money through investments..."

Once again, reread the irresponsible comments by union officials in both of these articles. Spineless politicians and bureaucrats, outrageous demands by union officials, and no market mechanisms to correct a growing problem. It is a formula for disaster.

None of this is news at Anchor Rising, which has previously covered this issue in great depth.



Still Looking for New Conservative Leadership

In a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled Right and Ron: Republicans long for a new Reagan, Brendan Miniter offers this commentary on Republican Party leadership in the Congress and in the Oval Office:

...It's telling that now, five years into the second Bush presidency, conservatives are still looking for the next Ronald Reagan to champion their ideas in Washington...Reaganism is the party's philosophy, with its belief in small government, low taxes, forceful conservatism, a strong military and the view that this country is a shining example for all the world...

Both Messrs. Boehner and Shadegg are promising to bring Reagan back because over the past five years the party appears to have been seduced by the very forces it came to Washington to overturn--rampant spending with expansive new federal entitlements.

Of course, limited government wasn't original to Reagan, and many of his ideas are inherent in President Bush's governing philosophy, such as combating the nation's enemies by spreading freedom around the world. But it was Reagan who branded these ideas into the nation's consciousness by using them to remake one of the two dominant political parties. And it was Reagan who proved to be the change agent in Washington.

In part this was thanks to Reagan's personality. He won political debates, won over allies and won popular support through sheer appeal, even if his policies were not always popular...Yet very few people today have a "Bush story" outside of the policy realm...

But it's not all personality. One reason the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 did not prove to be the second wave of the Reagan revolution is that the dominant power in American government is the chief executive. And conservatives are still waiting for that second wave today because President Bush hasn't effectively and consistently used one of the most powerful tools of the modern presidency: the bully pulpit.

Reagan did it in his first inaugural address by proclaiming an end to the brand of liberalism that had largely reigned uninterrupted since the Depression: "In this present crisis government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Today government largely remains the problem. Even Osama bin Laden and his followers would be much less of a threat if this country could bring its own bureaucracies to heel...But competence has long been the exception at the [CIA], which failed to assess Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities accurately, failed to stop A.Q. Kahn (father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb) from spreading nuclear technology to rogue regimes in North Korea and Libya and failed to uncover the Sept. 11 plot before it was too late. The FBI isn't much better.

These days it's hard to find a well-functioning government bureaucracy, or the political will to solve the nation's problems. Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security all imperil the government's financial well-being. Yet reforming them is proving to be impossible. Likewise, education reform is proving to be too tough a nut for our elected officials to crack.

Will Mr. Boehner, Mr. Shadegg or anyone else for that matter in the House be able to lead a governing revolution that tackles these problems?... but to really change the political culture, pressure has to come from outside Washington, with a little help from inside the Oval Office.


January 6, 2006


Direct Perspectives on Samuel Alito III

Carroll Andrew Morse

Anchor Rising continues its interview with Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's law school classmate Mark Dwyer and former law clerk Thomas Gentile. Mr. Dwyer and Mr. Gentile can be viewed on 10 News Conference, on WJAR-TV (Channel 10) this Sunday at 6:30 AM. To read Anchor Rising's earlier interview with former Alito law clerk Susan Sullivan, click here.

Anchor Rising: Give us legal laypeople a hint of what to look for in the confirmation hearings that will tell us about what kind of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito would be.

Mark Dwyer: Youll see him be calm, collected and precise. I dont know what the strategy is for when you say I cant answer that question because it may come before me someday and when you say look at my past opinions and heres what Ive said about that in the past. I dont know just where hes going to draw that line. I guess Judge Roberts drew it in a pretty good place; hes probably going to try to do about the same thing. But you will see him when he talks be precise in his answers. He will get clarification when the Senators, as they will, ask questions that dont make much sense. Hes appeared in front of the Supreme Court and done a great job there. For him to appear in front of this group of Senators -- who are not as well versed in the subjects theyll be asking about as are Supreme Court Justices when they talk to you -- is not going to be a big shock to his system. He is going to be fine. He going to perform, I predict, extremely well, show his intelligence and show what a nice guy he is.

Thomas Gentile: During the confirmation hearings, all of America will see Judge Alitos facility for legal issues that have come before him in his 15 years on the court of appeals and are coming before the Supreme Court now. Judge Alito knows this stuff and he knows it cold. When I was a law clerk, there were times that Judge Alito would dictate opinions to his clerks off the top of his head -- complete with case cites and page cites. America will be impressed by the scope of his knowledge. America will also be impressed when it sees Judge Alitos dedication to faithfully applying the law and to never having his personal opinions interfere with his legal decision making process.

AR: If you could tell people something you think will be lost in the fog of partisanship and the focus on judicial outcomes that we will certainly see in the next few weeks, what would it be?

MD: Youre going to hear a lot of Senators and certainly a lot of lobbyists involved in the process look at one opinion that Sam wrote and not pay attention to the reasoning about how he got to the ending. Theyll find one opinion in a particular area, be it abortion, the environment, or employee rights, one opinion they disagree with, and conclude from that one opinion that Sam is a danger to the country because he is anti-abortion, or anti-whatever. They will not be looking at the whole group of opinions he has written over 15 years. They wont be looking at the group of opinions he has written in a particular area. They will look at the one they dont like and try to make hay out of that by making this all a political process instead of an assessment of whether somebody is a restrained and fair judge. So watch for that. Youll see people distort his record by focusing on the one case they dont agree with and not explaining how the law made him get there.

TG: America has a choice here. Its a choice about the role of the federal judiciary in our Constitutional democracy. If America wants the kind of Judge who decides cases, regardless of ideology, based on the law and the precedents and the facts of each case, then Sam Alito is the kind of judge they want sitting on the Supreme Court. If America wants judges who reach into their own policy preferences and create the outcome in cases they want to see happen, regardless of what the law requires, then Sam Alito is not the judge for them. I think when America watches the confirmation hearings, America will see that judge Alito respects the limited role of the judiciary in Americas constitutional democracy.



Direct Perspectives on Samuel Alito II

Carroll Andrew Morse

In modern politics, the loudest chatter heard about a Supreme Court nominee -- Samuel Alito included -- usually comes from those who know the nominee as little more than the sum of a paper trail. Anchor Rising was given one more opportunity (click here to read our earlier interview with former Alito law clerk Susan Sullivan) to supplement the paper trail by talking to people who know Judge Alito personally.

Mark Dwyer was Samuel Alitos roommate at Yale law school. Mr. Dwyer is currently Chief of the New York County District Attorneys Appeals Bureau. Thomas Gentile was a law clerk for Judge Alito in 1996-1997 on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. He is currently a partner with the law firm of Lampf, Lipkind, Prupis, and Petigrow. Heres what Mr. Dwyer and Mr. Gentile think about the man who will stand before the Senate Judiciary Committee starting next week

Anchor Rising: Were you surprised when you heard that Samuel Alito had been nominated to the Supreme Court?

Mark Dwyer: Only in the sense that even the best person is a huge longshot to get that lone nomination that comes along. Ive never known anybody who was better suited and who seemed pointed in that direction any more than Sam. Hes been fascinated by the court and by the appellate process and appellate law ever since college. And he obviously went through the steps that would make him a natural nominee. In that sense, its a perfect fruition of what hes been doing his whole career. At the same time, you dont expect lightning to strike the guy you know, because it's just against the odds.

Thomas Gentile: I agree completely. There is no question that Judge Alito is eminently qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. As soon as President Bush was elected back in 2000, you began to hear discussions of Judge Alito as possibly being a nominee to the Supreme Court when an opening came up. So in that sense, I wasnt surprised. But on the same note, there was something very surreal about turning on my TV on the morning of October 31 and seeing my old boss standing up there with President Bush.

AR: To me, the toughest part of finding someone who will be a good Supreme Court Justice seems to be finding someone whos got the ambition to want to sit on the highest court of the greatest nation on earth but also has the humility to respect legal precedent and decisions made by legislatures. Can you give us any insight into how youve seen Judge Alito combine these disparate impulses?

MD: Youre certainly right. Its a hard thing to find. Sam plainly has them both, and its just a remarkable combination. In terms of his drive and ambition, ever since I knew him in college, and certainly when I was rooming with him in law school, he was the guy who was burning the midnight oil. He was studying, studying, studying. It wasnt really labor to him because he loved the stuff. He loved learning what he was learning; it was so natural for him to enjoy all of that. He was really good at it. And all through his career, he put in that same kind of intense work/play in fooling around with the legal concepts in learning appellate law and being a great appellate judge. So hes got that drive. Does he want to be on the Supreme Court, does he have that ambition? Sure. But even without that goal in mind, he was going to be doing that same stuff anyway, because its just so natural for him.

The humility part is so natural for him also. He is a shy, nice, pleasant guy. I know that from living with him for a couple of years, three years actually, its just inherent in his personality to be that kind of guy, to be respectful of everybody hes dealing with including all the people he has to work with who arent as smart as he is and people who are as smart as he is. Everybody, whether a judge or in the clerks office gets the same nice treatment from Sam Alito.

TG: Ive worked in two of the biggest law firms in America for ten years and Judge Alito is, by far, the most brilliant legal mind I have ever encountered -- including all of my law professors at Harvard. But he couples that intellectual capacity with a judicial temperament and a humility in his approach to the law that uniquely qualifies him for the Supreme Court. He draws praise from the Judges that he sits with whether they were appointed by Republican Presidents or Democratic Presidents. The other judges on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals are pretty much unanimous in saying wonderful things about their colleague Sam Alito who has been nominated to the Supreme Court. When the judges write back and forth in opinions, including dissents, theyre never bitter, never angry, never caustic when Judge Alito is involved. They are very respectful. You will see opinion after opinion where other judges say I respect tremendously what Judge Alito has written and I disagree on these grounds. He fosters that atmosphere of judicial collegiality that I think sometimes is missing from the Supreme Court right now. Thats another reason why hell be an outstanding Associate Justice.

To be continued...


December 27, 2005


The Upcoming Public Sector Financial Implosion

Ed Achorn of the ProJo discusses the looming transparency of public sector financial obligations to be required under the new accounting rules:

Taxpayers in Rhode Island -- and nationwide -- will soon be learning some very unpleasant facts of life about debts the politicians have been running up in their name for many years, in courting favor with public-employee unions. And some union leaders are understandably getting twitchy about the day when the spotlight gets switched on.

The federal Government Accounting Standards Board has ordered states and communities to start reporting, in less than two years, how much they owe government retirees for (often free or low-priced) health coverage.

The true costs -- which have been kept hidden from the public until now, since governments have conveniently failed to keep track of the mounting pricetag -- are staggering, experts say. Nationwide, the unfunded liability could be $1 trillion.

"This is a huge liability," Jan Lazar, an independent benefits consultant in Lansing, Mich., told The New York Times ("The next retirement time bomb," Dec. 11). "If anybody understands it, they'll freak out."...

Public disclosure of such costs will have repercussions, some of them alarming. Cities and towns may have such huge liabilities that their bond ratings will plummet, making it extraordinarily expensive or impossible to borrow money. Some may be forced into bankruptcy.

Local taxes -- in Rhode Island, already among the nation's highest -- may have to be raised sharply, and services slashed. Citizens are sure to be angry that even more of their money will have to go for even worse government because of deals cut long ago, and never fully explained. Union officials fear the public will pressure politicians to slash benefits...

Of course, those of us in the private sector, struggling to survive in a competitive world, are paying most of the bills for those in the public sector. While we focus on our jobs, paying taxes, and keeping our children clothed, sheltered, educated and healthy, special interests are at work day and night to influence the political system.

In many states, public-employee unions and their operatives have learned to contribute heavily to campaigns, get out the vote, elect friendly politicians, and handsomely pay experienced, full-time advocates to represent their interests at the state house and at city hall.

...Unfortunately, the common good and the public interest sometimes get short shrift, even in the best system, and even when agreements are made "in good faith."

It's human nature. Politicians often don't worry about cutting deals whose costs will be inflicted on later generations of taxpayers, such as offering free health care to government retirees. They won't be around to suffer the wrath of the voters who foot the steep and rising bills. And politicians can get away with selling out to special interests because the public is too busy and apathetic to notice -- or because voters are denied essential information that could help them better understand what is at stake...

Achorn's editorial expands on some of the points made in Andrew's previous posting, which highlighted a recent ProJo article:

As a result of a new public-sector accounting rule, Rhode Island -- along with every other state, city, and town, water, sewer and school district in the nation -- will soon have to disclose to its taxpayers and bondholders the total value of its retiree health-care promises....

While no other specific action is required, the [American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees] told its members, the new Government Accounting Standards Board rule "will require employers to calculate and publish the cost of these benefits, which will show up as a liability on the employer's financial statements."

"If assets have not been set aside to offset the liability, an 'unfunded liability' will be displayed.

I predict that, when the full effect of this previously hidden information becomes public knowledge, it will make any number of corporate scandals of past years look like a walk in the park.

Outlandish and unfunded public sector pension obligations as well as extraordinary healthcare insurance benefits are all a result of outrageous demands by public sector unions rewarded in a competition-free environment by spineless politicians and bureaucrats.

Why does this happen? Because of the misguided structural incentives that drive public sector actions that nobody wants to confront directly. These issues have been discussed previously on Anchor Rising:

Public Sector Issues
Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation
Bankrupt Public Pensions: A Time Bomb That Will Explode
Why Truly Free Markets & Timely, Transparent Information Are Needed to Protect the Freedom of American Citizens
RI Public Pension Problems
The Cocoon in which Entitled State Employees Live
The Union's Solution for the Future: Get More People in Unions
Bankrupt Public Pensions, Part II
How Public Pensions Make People Well-Off at Taxpayers' Expense
Public and Private Unions
Rhode Island Unions Again Resist True Pension Reform
"Shut Up & Teach"

Union Political Activity
Learning More About How Dues Paid To Big Labor Are Spent
Pension Fund Politics: How the AFL-CIO Violates Its Fiduciary Responsibilities
Now Here is a Good Idea
Paycheck Protection: Allowing You to Keep Your Own Hard-Earned Monies

The big picture of why all this happens is explained in this posting: A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest.



A Direct Perspective on Samuel Alito

Carroll Andrew Morse

Most efforts at evaluating the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court have focused on parsing the Judge's record (too often looking solely towards the outcomes of cases while ignoring the legal reasoning used). Anchor Rising was provided with an opportunity to approach the question of what kind of Justice Samuel Alito would be from another direction; we had the opportunity to put a few questions to a person who has worked with Judge Alito. Below is a short interview with Susan Sullivan, a former law clerk for Judge Alito (1990-1991), now a solo legal practitioner in San Francisco, CA.

Anchor Rising: We are interested in asking you a few questions about Judge Alito because, as a member of Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, you have a resume that's different from many of Judge Alito's supporters. Do you believe that, as a Supreme Court justice, Samuel Alito would gave a fair hearing to the cases and arguments brought by organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU?
Susan Sullivan: As a self described social progressive, (a registered Democrat, a pro-choice feminist who supports gay marriage, opposes the death penalty and supports gun control), I am not afraid to have Sam Alito as a Justice on the Supreme Court. Having worked closely with him, I never saw his personal or political views dictate an outcome in a case and I do not believe him to be intent on advancing a conservative political agenda. If he were a conservative zealot there would not be the decisions he has made with so called "liberal" outcomes. There are cases with "pro-choice" outcomes; there are cases favoring plaintiffs bringing discrimination suits, cases that ruled in favor of criminal defendants, or expanded a woman's rights to seek political asylum on the basis of gender. These are just not the results you would expect to see if he were a conservative ideologue.

AR: What would you say to your fellow liberals who oppose Judge Alito's nomination because they don't like the outcome of some of his decisions, regardless of the legal reasoning used?
SS: If George Bush had picked anyone other than Judge Alito, I would probably have the same response of suspicion, fear and distrust as many liberals have had to Judge Alito simply because he was selected by Bush. But because I worked closely with the Judge I do not believe he will reach results based on his own personal views. While, it does not sound very complimentary to say that we could do a lot worse, the reality is that with George Bush in charge, we really could do so much worse and end up with a real conservative ideologue and I find that to be really scary! That is in part why I have said that by opposing Judge Alito, we may be shooting ourselves in our own left foot. I cannot predict the future and there are no guarantees but I'm confident that Judge Alito will be fair and impartial, and that is more important me than having a political ideologue of any stripe on the Supreme Court.

Second, we ask juries and judges every day to not judge someone until after they have heard all the arguments and seen the evidence. Some groups have already declared their opposition to him. I think the better approach is to wait until after the hearings to reach a more informed judgment. So I would suggest we take a careful look over his entire fifteen year record. He heard over 2,000 cases and was involved in over 200 opinions.

AR: What kind of boss was Judge Alito?
SS: He is a really likable, modest guy who treats everyone with respect and courtesy. It was great to work with him. He's really smart and he's always open to argument. He's a quiet and a private person. When a judge down the hall from Judge Alito redecorated her office and placed two rather elaborate stone lion sculptures outside her door, Judge Alito (though he won't confess to it), placed two pink, plastic flamingoes outside his own door! A coffee shop down the road named a coffee after him "Bold Justice." Perhaps if he makes it onto the Supreme Court, they'll rename it "Bolder Justice."

Hope that's helpful. All I would ask is that people temper what they are hearing in the mainstream press. Keep in mind that if it is not ugly and sensational, frankly, the mainstream press does not seem interested in reporting it and there is so much at stake, we should give the Judge a fair hearing before reaching any judgment.


December 22, 2005


New York Transit Strike: Example of New "Class Warfare"

Marc Comtois

The New York Transit Worker Union strike has been going on for three days--and though a deal may be looming--both the lessons offered and the people most affected are those I'm quite sure the strikers hadn't intended. New York Post columnist Ryan Sager [subscription] writes of the key lesson we can all take from this episode:

As transit workers walked off the job Tuesday and stayed off the job Wednesday, the rhetoric has heated up on all sides.

Nowhere did the rhetoric get hotter than on a Web site that the TWU set up for the strike. There, as the sun came up on Tuesday, hundreds of anonymous New Yorkers logged on and sounded off about the TWU's decision to shut down the subways and buses.

The surprise (at least to the TWU): Opinions on the site ran roughly 4-to-1 against the union which pulled the comments off the Web by Tuesday afternoon.

But the real surprise was who was against the union. . .

"I appreciate many of your concerns regarding the contract negotiations, but striking, though [it] may prove a point, hurts more people than it helps," wrote one New Yorker. "My annual salary is less than half than the lowest paid transit worker in the system, and now I am going to lose at least one if not more days of pay due to the strike . . . Thanks for that and happy holidays."

. . . Not the reaction the TWU was hoping for.

And also not the war of rich against poor that the unions would like New Yorkers to believe is underway.

One socialist Web site on Tuesday labeled the strike "the biggest class confrontation in the U.S. in a generation" and wrote that "The attitude taken by the city's ruling elite is akin to the reaction of a master to a slave revolt."

Not quite.

As the comments excerpted above show, there is a class confrontation of a kind going on but it's not between rich and poor. It's between the working class and what might be called the government-worker class. {emphasis mine}

Sager offers a couple more comments and delves into the gaps between private and public benefits, the last of which regular readers of Anchor Rising should be familiar. Sager sums it up this way:
The private sector has been groaning under rising health and pension costs for years. Retired coal miners have lost company-paid health insurance in bankruptcy proceedings. Companies like General Motors have had to lay off tens of thousands of workers because of crushing pension costs.

Yet the benefits for public-sector workers keep getting fatter and fatter.

The reason is fairly simple. While only 8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized these days, some 40 percent of public-sector workers are unionized. And while the rigors of the free market forced private companies to become more efficient, the government faces no such constraints.

Instead, pliant politicians simply give the unions whatever they want, driving up health and pension costs and sticking taxpayers (the ones trudging over the Brooklyn Bridge this week) with the bill.

Sound familiar? Of course, here in Rhode Island--a STATE with only 1 million people (versus the 8 million in the CITY of New York) where "everybody knows somebody" employed by some level of government--I suspect the sympathy for such a strike would be higher.



More thoughts on the ANWR Vote

Carroll Andrew Morse

The Defense Department appropriations bill has passed, with the ANWR drilling provision removed. If I read this right, the move to remove the ANWR provision passed the Senate 48-45, with 7 Senators not voting. Senator Lincoln Chafee was one of the 7 not voting.

Since Senator Chafee is also listed as Not Voting for the final Defense appropriation bill which passed by a vote of 93-0 a little later in the evening, I am guessing that this was a case of Senator Chafee not being physically present for the vote, not some sort of protest or procedural move. Still, I wonder if, just to be sure, Senator Chafee calls up the Democratic whip and asks do you need me on this one? before leaving for the evening.

The ANWR vote also begs a question for all those who argue that it is impossible for Congress to cut pork spending. ANWR drilling was put into the Defense Appropriation by Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska. I seem to recall reading arguments that individual Senators could not hope to defy the will of a powerful Senator like Ted Stevens on a pure-pork project like the Bridge to Nowhere and still be effective in the Senate. Yet on this issue, many Senators including Lincoln Chafee did make a stand against Senator Stevens. So if a bipartisan group of Senators can make a stand on this issue, why cant a bipartisan group of fiscally responsible Senators also make a stand on runaway pork spending?


December 21, 2005


Senators Chafee and Reed Filibuster Defense Appropriations

Carroll Andrew Morse

Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review Online is reporting that Senator Lincoln Chafee has joined with the Democrats (including Senator Jack Reed) to filibuster this year's Defense Department appropriation until a provision allowing oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is removed.

By the way, to read a more sensible approach to energy policy, click here.

UPDATE:

The Associated Press confirms ANWR oil-drilling as the reason for the filibuster. (h/t Kathryn Jean Lopez).


November 30, 2005


President Bush's Iraq Plan Speech

Marc Comtois

Anchor Rising contributor Mac Owens alludes to Federalist 71 as he gives his positive impression of the President's Iraq strategy speech:

I dont know if President Bush has ever read The Federalist Papers, but the steps he is to taking to explain the policy and strategy of the United States in Iraq means that he has at long last recognized [Alexander] Hamiltons principle. His speech today at the Naval Academy is as fine an example of republican rhetoric as I have heard since the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

We often forget that opinion polls have no constitutional standing. Nonetheless, when properly done, they can tell us a great deal about what the citizenry are thinking. And it is clear that in the absence of any attempt by the president to defend his policies, the vacuum has been filled by by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess [the peoples] confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it. Under such circumstances, it should not be surprising that public support for the war has gone down.

Another name for such operators is demagogue. Our demagogues have pandered to the fears and weaknesses of the American rather than to their virtues and strengths. In his Naval Academy speech, President Bush did just the opposite, exercising his duty [as one whom the people have] appointed to be the guardians of [their] interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.

Todays speech is the opening salvo in a campaign of public diplomacy to reinvigorate the war effort and restore public support for our enterprise in Iraq. . . . The fact is that the United States has always had a strategy for Iraq, but any strategy worthy of the name must be adaptable.

What critics mean when they say there is no strategy is that they dont like what the president is doing, although none have offered any alternative but withdrawal. By publishing the outline of his strategy, the president makes it impossible for his critics to take the easy way out. Now they will have to put up or shut upif only.

Instapundit also notes that the plan has been there all along:
Some people are asking what's new about this strategy. The answer. . . is nothing, really. . .

What's new is that the White House is forcing people to pay attention to the plan, and to the fact that there is, and has been, a plan even though the press has ignored it. That many media outfits, as Henke notes, seem to think this is all new is merely evidence that they've been providing lousy war coverage all along.

But the White House, if a bit late in the day, is doing something it needs to do. You can't rely on bloggers to do it all.

Indeed.

Continue reading "President Bush's Iraq Plan Speech"

November 21, 2005


Is the CIA Impeding the President's Ability to Act on Foreign Policy Matters?

With H/T to Power Line, Dafydd ab Hugh writes:

Paul over at Power Line poses a fascinating question -- in subtext -- in a recent post:
How does the CIA protect its turf so well? Its skill in the art of the leak must play a major role. For one thing, this skill helps explain how the agency exerts so much control over those in the mainstream media who cover it.

The subtextual question is, of course, what to do about this?

My suggestion is that the Bush administration must realize that this is a terribly dangerous situation: at a time of national danger, when we are at war, the CIA has become a rogue agency, uncontrolled by any branch of the federal government. It conducts its own foreign policy; it dictates military policy (through control of the intelligence the Department of Defense needs); it has seized control of a significant portion of the powers of the elected Executive.

It's time to fight back... and best and quickest way to do so would be for President Bush to direct Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to immediately begin Justice Department investigations of this rash of recent leaks from the CIA, including the decision to allow Joe Wilson to go public with his lying claims in the New York Times about "what [he] didn't find" in Niger; the leak about the previously secret prison facilities for terrorists; and so forth.

Reporters should be subpoenaed; if they refuse to testify, put them in jail for contempt until they do. Use the full powers of the Patriot Act to seize records and find out who is doing the leaking. And then drop the hammer on them: prosecute them for misuse of classified information or even worse criminal violations. At the very least, get enough evidence to strip them of their security clearances... make it plain that leaking to the press to damage the administration is a career-terminating offense and might even lead to prison time.

Also, be sure to widely publicize the names of leakers as soon as you dredge them up. These people rely upon anonymity; if word gets around that whatever you tell Harry ends up in a Walter Pinkus column tomorrow, the leakers will be shunned by many of the folks who have unwittingly been helping them funnel damaging information to the mainstream leftist media.

Bush can do all of this without Congress lifting a finger. He can do it over the Thanksgiving Day weekend, and he doesn't need any votes from the Democrats. The press will scream; but if Bush were to demand time to give a short speech for broadcast and explain his reasons to the American people, I think they would not only back him, they would applaud lustily: "My fellow Americans, this constant stream of political leaks from the CIA has just got to stop... for God's sake, we're in a war! It's time for the Central Intelligence Agency to get out of politics and back to their actual job: gathering intelligence on our enemies, not leaking stories to the press."

JunkYardBlog has more.



The Historiography of Debunking Thanksgiving

Marc Comtois

One of the lesser-known sub-disciplines within the field of History is Historiography: the study of how history has been practiced through the years. A fine and timely example is provided by Dr. Jeremy Bangs in "The Truth About Thanksgiving Is that the Debunkers Are Wrong." Dr. Bangs is the former Chief Curator of Plimoth Plantation and is quite familiar with the arguments set forth by those who, for some reason, want to make less of Thanksgiving than tradition holds.

Surveying more than two hundred websites that correct our assumptions about Thanksgiving, its possible to sort them into groups and themes, especially since Internet sites often parrot each other. Very few present anything like the myths that most claim to combat. Almost all the corrections are themselves incorrect or banal. With heavy self-importance and pathetic political posturing, they demonstrate quite unsurprisingly that what was once taught in grade school lacked scope, subtlety, and minority insight.
There is much more, but below I highlight Bangs' response to the particular charge made by some that Thanksgiving "was not about religion."

Continue reading "The Historiography of Debunking Thanksgiving"

November 14, 2005


The Online Freedom of Speech Act & The Blog Boomlet in Coventry

Carroll Andrew Morse

There are about a dozen blogs written by residents of the town of Coventry (see the blogroll in the extended entry below). Their content includes a healthy amount of coverage of the civically unhealthy dispute between Coventrys town council president Frank Hyde and acting town administrator Richard Sullivan. Hyde is accused of trying to force some hirings and firings that are supposed to be under the control of the town manager (including maybe trying to force Sullivan to resign from his acting position). There is an emergency town council meeting scheduled for tonight with election of officers and hiring a new town manager on the agenda. The bloggers, of course, have their own opinions on all of these matters.

The blog boomlet in Coventry is a perfect example the kind of activity that the first amendments freedom of the press was designed to protect -- criticism of the conduct of government officials. Yet our current Congress may attempt to restrict this kind of online political speech. The pro-regulation crowd in Congress continues to argue that only established, corporate media is covered by freedom of the press and that all other political speech is subject to regulation.

Coventry may provide the clearest example of how this is the wrong attitude. If Mighty Isis or the Duck or E-Town wants to say that we need to get Mr. Hyde out of office and believe that Henry Jekyll would be the best replacement then they should be free to spread that opinion as far and as wide as possible, without fear of the government defining their speech as a coordinated in-kind campaign contribution and claiming the right to regulate it.

A couple of weeks ago, Congress attempted exempting the Internet from campaign finance regulation through the Online Freedom of Speech Act, but the measure failed. According to the Daily Kos, an alternative proposed by notoriously pro-regulation-of-speech Congressmen Marty Meehan and Christopher Shays is ambguous at best, refusing to expressly extend media protection to blogs.

James Langevin, the Congressman representing the bloggers of Coventry, voted against the Online Freedom of Speech Act, leaving the threat of regulation in the air.

One final only in Rhode Island thought on this. In pursuing a campaign-finance complaint against the Republican party, Board of Elections chairman Roger Begin attempted to clear a proposed settlement with members of the states Democratic leadership. The politcos he talked to were not affiliated with the BOE in any way. Given the behavior of the State Board of Elections, is it unreasonable to believe that bringing political speech in the blogosphere under government regulation will ultimately give William Murphy or William Lynch or Joeseph Montalbano the power to stifle new-media criticism of their actions?

Continue reading "The Online Freedom of Speech Act & The Blog Boomlet in Coventry"

November 11, 2005


Chafee as Weather Vane for the Conservative Rebellion

Justin Katz

Something in a Corner post by Larry Kudlow might help to tie local Rhode Island concerns to the broader political landscape:

Why Republicans don't say more about the tax-cut related economic expansion is beyond me. And whether Tuesday's disappointing election results provide a wake up call for the GOP remains to be seen. But they need a wake up call. Young Turks in the House like Mike Pence, Jeff Flake, and Marsha Blackburn should be represented in the House leadership. Ideas matter. Dick Armey was a great idea man. Speaker Dennis Hastert doesn't seem to be a great idea man. The Tom DeLay period is probably over. New blood in the leadership is essential.

To offer flesh and fire to the sentence that I've italicized, consider an open note that the Anchoress has blogged to the GOP leadership:

The world is tilting, and you useless, ineffectual, dithering moneysuckers seem increasingly to be empty suits, given shape and movement not by ideas and a willingness to serve the electorate, but by wispy tufts of ambitious smoke. You seem directed toward nothing more than keeping your almighty Senate or House seat in your name. You give away your power, you give away your advantages in committee, you leave in place utterly feckless people like Arlen Specter and then, when you finally seem like you are on the cusp of doing something productive and right, like investigating the CIA or okaying drilling in a bare, muddly, uninhabitable tundra, you fall into a faint and go slinking back to your states and districts to gladhand and pump for money and then gladhand some more. ...

I will spend the next election, and the one following it, doing everything I can to replace you disappointing, entrenched frauds and fakers with real people who have real stakes in what is going on in the nation and want to effect real change for the better.

Now, I'm not saying that Rhode Island's own upstart Republican, Steve Laffey, fits the Anchoress's "leaders wanted" ad, but his campaign opposition, Sen. Lincoln Chafee, is (and will continue to be) living evidence of the GOP's response. The RNC's handling of the Chafee v. Laffey contest provides indication of whether it has heard the wake up call that Kudlow notes and the Anchoress amplifies. Similarly, it represents an effective starting point for those who are fed up with the status quo.

The Republican establishment wouldn't have to promote Laffey over Chafee, but the suits should keep in mind that replacing "disappointing, entrenched frauds and fakers with real people who have real stakes in what is going on in the nation and want to effect real change for the better" doesn't inherently require those real people to come from the same party. And to the extent that it does, the process can involve some creative destruction and unfold over several election cycles.


November 4, 2005


Congress Begins Eminent Domain Reform

Carroll Andrew Morse

If West Warwick, or the local governments with jurisdiction over Rhode Islands other two Municipal Economic Development Zones in Woonsocket and Central Falls, or any city or town in Rhode Island plan to use eminent domain to increase their tax base, they may soon have a new factor to consider.

Yesterday, the United States House of Representatives passed the Private Property Rights Protection Act of 2005 by an overwhelming 376-38 margin. The act outright forbids Federal use of eminent domain for economic development. It then goes on to limit Federal funding to states, cities, or towns that use eminent domain for economic development...

(a) In General- No State or political subdivision of a State shall exercise its power of eminent domain, or allow the exercise of such power by any person or entity to which such power has been delegated, over property to be used for economic development or over property that is subsequently used for economic development, if that State or political subdivision receives Federal economic development funds during any fiscal year in which it does so.

For the purposes of the law, economic development is defined as

(1) ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT- The term `economic development' means taking private property, without the consent of the owner, and conveying or leasing such property from one private person or entity to another private person or entity for commercial enterprise carried on for profit, or to increase tax revenue, tax base, employment, or general economic health
Warning: the act then goes on to list a bunch of exceptions to the above.

Congressman James Langevin and Congressman Patrick Kennedy both voted in favor of prohibiting the use of eminent domain for economic development. The bill still needs to be passed by the Senate (where Senator John Cornyn has introduced similar legislation) and signed by the President to become law.

However, rather than relying on the threat of Federal defunding for private property protection, the people of Rhode Island should demand that their state government also pass state-level eminent domain reform. All the legislature needs to do is pass a bill similar to House bill 5242 (which was killed in last years session). Or perhaps the people of Rhode Island need to pass eminent domain reform themselves through voter initiative.

Finally, each of Rhode Island's cities and towns should pass local versions of eminent domain reform. The strong version of eminent domain protection proposed by Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey can serve as a model. West Warwick might be the ideal place to start the ball rolling.


November 3, 2005


Congress Defeats the Online Freedom of Speech Act

Carroll Andrew Morse

Yesterday, the United States House of Representatives failed to pass the Online Freedom of Speech Act. The act would have exempted the Internet from campaign finance regulations. The bill received majority support, but failed because it required a 2/3 majority for procedural reasons. Instapundit has a round-up here.

The bill's sponsor, Congressman Jeb Hensarling, plans to bring the bill up again under circumstances where it will require only a simple majority to pass. To become law, the bill will also need Senate approval.

Until an Internet exemption to campaign finance reform is passed, it is only a matter of time until an over-reaching judge or a partisan bureaucrat decides that some or all political speech on the Internet can constitute an in-kind contribution that needs to be reported, regulated and limited.

Congressman Patrick Kennedy voted to exempt the Internet from campaign finance regulations.
Congressman James Langevin voted against exempting the Internet from campaign finance regulations. Given that Congressmans Langevins previous job was facilitating democracy as Rhode Islands Secretary of State, his decision not to support online freedom of speech is particularly disappointing.

Curiously (or entirely predictably, depending on your political perspective), as a party, Republicans voted in favor of the act, 179-46; while Democrats voted against, 38-143. Socialist Bernie Sanders from Vermont, staying true to the socialist principle that government should control all aspects of life, voted with the Democratic majority.


October 30, 2005


Free the Form Letters!

Carroll Andrew Morse

Senators and Congressmen frequently respond to inquiries about issues by sending out a form letter. Here are a few form-letter stories compiled from Instapundit's Porkbusters reporting. They show that sometimes form letters address the questions being asked, sometimes they dont.

Stories like those relayed by Instapundit, combined with my own experiences investigating positions on issues, got me thinking: why shouldnt legislators take advantage of technology and make their form letters more widely and easily accessible by posting their libraries of form letters on their official websites?

Form letters can often be a legislators most detailed public statement on a particular policy. Making them electronically accessible would help constituents stay informed, and help constituents ask relevant questions to their elected representatives. Interaction around the form letters, where everyone is working off the same text, would help take the deliberative part of deliberative democracy to a new level.

With these ideas in mind. I put the following questions concretely to Rhode Islands Congressional delegation, and hypothetically to their 2006 challengers: Will you make your library of issue form letters directly available to the public via the interent. If not, why not?


October 29, 2005


Iraq, the War on Terror, & American Politics

A Wall Street Journal editorial today says this:

Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation took nearly two years, sent a reporter to jail, cost millions of dollars, and preoccupied some of the White House's senior officials. The fruit it has now borne is the five-count indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the Vice President's Chief of Staff--not for leaking the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak, which started this entire "scandal," but for contradictions between his testimony and the testimony of two or three reporters about what he told them, when he told them, and what words he used...

...[Fitgerald] noted that a criminal investigation into a "national security matter" of this sort hinged on "very fine distinctions," and that any attempt to obscure exactly who told what to whom and when was a serious matter.

Let us stipulate that impeding a criminal investigation is indeed a serious matter; no one should feel he can lie to a grand jury or to federal investigators. But there is a question to be asked about the end to which the accused allegedly lied. The indictment itself contains no motive. And Mr. Libby is not alleged to have been the source for Robert Novak's July 14, 2003 column, in which Valerie Plame's employment with the CIA was revealed...

If this is a conspiracy to silence Administration critics, it was more daft than deft. The indictment itself contains no evidence of a conspiracy, and Mr. Libby has not been accused of trying to cover up some high crime or misdemeanor by the Bush Administration. The indictment amounts to an allegation that one official lied about what he knew about an underlying "crime" that wasn't committed...

On this much we can agree with Mr. Fitzgerald: These are "very fine distinctions" indeed, especially as they pertain to discussions that occurred two years ago, and whose importance only became clear well after the fact, when investigators came knocking. In a statement yesterday, Mr. Libby's counsel zeroed in on this point when he said, "We are quite distressed the Special Counsel has now sought to pursue alleged inconsistencies in Mr. Libby's recollection and those of others' and to charge such inconsistencies as false statements."...

On the answers to these questions hang a possible 30-year jail term and $1.25 million in fines for a Bush Administration official who was merely attempting to expose the truth about Mr. Wilson, a critic of the Administration who was lying to the press about the nature of his involvement in the Niger mission and about the nature of the intelligence that it produced. In other words, Mr. Libby was defending Administration policy against political attack, not committing a crime.

Mr. Fitzgerald has been dogged in pursuing his investigation, and he gave every appearance of being a reasonable and tough prosecutor in laying out the charges yesterday. But he has thrust himself into what was, at bottom, a policy dispute between an elected Administration and critics of the President's approach to the war on terror, who included parts of the permanent bureaucracy of the State Department and CIA. Unless Mr. Fitzgerald can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Libby was lying, and doing so for some nefarious purpose, this indictment looks like a case of criminalizing politics.

For a review of the chain of events in this whole episode, read The White House, the CIA, and the Wilsons: The chain of events that gave rise to a grand jury investigation. For more on Joe Wilson, read The Incredibles: The only debate about Joseph Wilson's credibility is the one taking place at the Washington Post and the New York Times.

This is part of a bigger and more important issue. Power Line has this to say: "The administration long ago gave up making the factual case to support the centrality of Iraq in the war on terroristm" and refers us to another Hayes article entitled A Spooked White House: The damage that has already been done by the CIA leak investigation, which notes:

There are other documents from Iraq that would help the American public understand the nature of the former Iraqi regime and why a serious war on terror required its removal. Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents currently stored in a warehouse in Doha, Qatar, as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency's document exploitation project are a case in point. Many of these documents, listed in a database known as HARMONY, have rather provocative titles:
Money Transfers from Iraq to Afghanistan

Secret Meeting with Taliban Group Member and Iraqi Government (Nov. 2000)

Iraqi Effort to Cooperate with Saudi Opposition Groups and Individuals

Order from Saddam to present $25,000 to Palestinian Suicide Bombers' Families

IIS Reports from Embassy in Paris: Plan to Influence French Stance in UN Security Council

IIS Report on How French Campaigns are Financed

Improvised Explosive Devices Plan

Ricin research and improvement

There are thousands of similar documents. Many have already been authenticated and most are unclassified. That's worth repeating: Most are unclassified.

Of course, nothing is more important than winning on the ground in Iraq. Demonstrating that we are killing terrorists and making steady progress on the political front will do much to blunt the criticism of the war. But if the White House refuses to challenge its critics, and refuses to explain in detail why Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, and refuses to discuss the flawed intelligence on Iraqi WMD, and refuses to use its tremendous power to remind Americans that Saddam Hussein was, in fact, a threat, then it risks losing the support of those Americans who continue to believe that the Iraq war, despite all of its many costs in blood and money, was worth it.


October 28, 2005


AIDS Drugs or a Japanese Garden: Which would You Choose?

Carroll Andrew Morse

Senator Lincoln Chafee took an anti-pork stand on a Senate floor vote on Thursday. According to Mark Tapscott of the Heritage Foundation,

President Bush had previously asked Congress to appropriate $30 million for construction upgrades at the Center for Disease Control facilities in Atlanta, including the Japanese gardens. There was already $240 million in previously authorized but not yet spent funds for the construction program.

The House approved the $30 million sought by Bush but when the bill came to the Senate, Coburn noted that it had increased the appropriation to $225 million, which meant there would be half a billion dollars available if the Senate version of the bill became law.

Coburn, who is a physician, offered the amendment to move $60 million from the CDC construction program to the AIDS effort. Doing so would mean "we will have enough funding to make sure everybody with HIV in this country has the medicine they need to stay alive," Coburn told the Senate, according to the Congressional Record for Oct. 26, 2005.

Coburn also told the Senate that the transfer was needed because "while people are dying from HIV, they cannot get medicines under the ADAP program because we cannot fund it significantly. We have multiple states with people on waiting lists. We have multiple states that cap the available benefits. It is a death sentence to those people with HIV today."

The amendment to transfer funds from building a garden at upgrading CDC headquarters to providing AIDS drugs was defeated, 85 14.

Senator Chafee was one of the 14 Senators who voted to provide AIDS drugs. Senator Jack Reed was one of the 85 Senators who voted to build the Japanese garden upgrade CDC headquarters instead. I would like to hear Sheldon Whitehouse's and Matt Browns position on this vote. So far, their Senate campaigns have been marked by unwavering adherence to national Democratic party positions. Would it be party discipline over doing the right and sensible thing on this issue too?

Finally, last week I posed the question of whether Senators and Congressmen are aware of what they are voting for when they pass these giant, pork-ladern approrpriations bills. Tapscotts account of the Japanese garden amendment provides evidence that the answer is a thundering No

Coburn then noted that "the CDC has just completed a $62 million visitors center. I am asking for $60 million for people who have HIV, who are never going to get to the visitors center. I do not how we spent $62 million on a visitors center for the CDC but I believe that priority is wrong when people are dying from HIV and do not have the available medicines."

Sen. Specter then responded to Coburn by first claiming there was not Japanese garden spending at the CDC facility in Atlanta, but then upon being corrected by a staffer, acknowledging that "maybe there could be a less expensive exotic garden than a Japanese garden."

UPDATE:

In an update to his original post, Tapscott wishes to clarify any confusion about the amounts involved...

Please note that the Japanese garden is part of a $60 million package of construction upgrades. The garden is NOT a $60 million garden. My apologies for the awkward wording when this post initially appeared earlier today. Being an editor, I should have caught that earlier.


October 27, 2005


The Answer Is...

Carroll Andrew Morse

In the American Prospect, Ezra Klein rhetorically asks

After all, who hasn't called for Democrats to adopt "a coherent foreign policy" [or] "tolerance and common sense" on social issues
The answer is Democratic Party national chairman Howard Dean.


October 26, 2005


Owens: Keep Posse Comitatus As Is

Marc Comtois

Mac Owens (a contributor to this site) has a column up over at National Review explaining both the history of the Posse Comitatus Act, which defines the line between the militia (or National Guard) and U.S. military, and why it shouldn't be changed despite the recent events surrounding Hurricane Katrina.


October 5, 2005


Raising the Bar: Expecting Greatness From Our Political Leaders

In a comment to a previous posting, Will writes:

...what's important here is the need to address the substance of the problems mentioned herein, and not just attack the messenger. Ignoring problems doesn't make them go away. All it usually does is lead to greater problems down the road.

That comment directly relates to the points raised in previous postings about a lame, stupid, and condescending ad on behalf of Senator Chafee and some ridiculous comments by Mayor Laffey.

We need to raise the bar and expect more from our political leaders. And that leads to three quotes about political greatness and statesmanship from Steven Hayward's new book entitled Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders.

Hayward quotes James Bryce from his book entitled The American Commonwealth about why raising the bar is important:

A democracy, not less than any other form of government, needs great men to lead and inspire the people.

A 1897 quote from Winston Churchill speaks to what really matters in a leader:

In politics a man, I take it, gets on not so much by what he does, as by what he is. It is not so much a question of brains as of character and originality.

Finally, Hayward himself makes this point:

What is greatness, especially political greatness? In three thousand years we have not surpassed the understanding of Aristotle, who summed up political greatness as the ability to translate wisdom into action on behalf of the public good. To be able to do this, Aristotle argued, requires a combination of moral virtue, practical wisdom, and public-spiritedness...One must know not only what is good for oneself but also what is good for others. It is not enough merely to be wise or intelligent in the ordinary IQ-score sense; in fact, Aristotle goes to great lengths to show that practical wisdom "is at the opposite pole from intelligence." One must have moral virtue, judgment, and public spirit in a fine balance, and these traits must be equally matched to the particular circumstances of time and place.

In the upcoming 2006 U.S. Senate race, all of us in Rhode Island should raise the bar and demand more from all candidates.

Let's demand that they run races focused on debating policy issues and convincing us how their policy preferences benefit the public good.

And then let's vote for the candidate who best shows signs of political greatness by the strength of their practical wisdom, character and originality.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Here are some further excerpts from Hayward's book:

Greatness, especially political greatness, carries a whiff of political incorrectness...

In place of greatness, today we have mere celebrity, best exemplified by...People magazine...

Greatness is ultimately a question of character. Good character does not change with the times: it has eternal qualities. Aristotle connects the honor that accrues to the magnanimous person with the virtues of friendship. This suggests that it is always within our grasp to cultivate the virtue of greatness as individuals, even if circumstances - crises - do not call forth the need for political greatness on the highest level...

The tides of history and the scale of modern life have not made obsolete or incommensurate the kind of large-souled greatness we associate with Churchill or Lincoln or George Washington...yet the cases of Churchill and Reagan offer powerful refutation to the historicist premise that humans and human society are mostly corks bobbing on the waves of history...Why were Churchill and Reagan virtually alone among their contemporaries in their particular insights and resolves? The answer must be that they transcended their environments and transformed their circumstances as only great men can do, and thereby bent history to their will..

Can there be another Churchill, or another Reagan? The answer is plainly yes, though we must note that the greatness of statesmen is seldom recognized in their own time. Typically we only recognize greatness in hindsight...

Leo Strauss took the death of Churchill in 1965 as the occasion to remind his students that "we have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, of human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness."

Contemplating on the example of Churchill and his influence on Reagan gives us confidence that even though the mountaintops may be often shrouded in fog, we can still tell the difference between peaks and valleys.

Comparing these inspiring words about political greatness with either the stupid NRSC ad attacking Laffey or Laffey's ridiculous comments about the pharmaceutical industry drives home the point that the bar in this U.S. Senate race is far too low.

Shall we "train ourselves and others to see things as they are..." and aspire to greatness?

If so, then we must develop zero tolerance for the mediocrity that currently pervades this Senate race.


September 30, 2005


The Republican "Economy Bloc" in the Senate

Marc Comtois

Robert Novak wrote of a successful rebuttal of a bi-partisan attempt in the U.S. Senate to spend more of our tax dollars under the auspices of "Katrina Aid."

The Senate was up to its old tricks Monday evening. It prepared to pass, without debate and under a procedure requiring unanimous consent, a federal infusion of $9 billion into state Medicaid programs under the pretext of Katrina relief. The bill, drafted in secret under bipartisan auspices, was stopped cold when Republican Sen. John Ensign voiced his objection.

The bill's Democratic sponsors railed in outrage against Ensign, a 47-year-old first-termer from Las Vegas, Nev., who usually keeps a low profile. But he was not acting alone. Ensign belongs to, and, indeed, originated, a small group of Republicans who intend to stand guard on the Senate floor against such raids on the Treasury as Monday night's failure. The group includes Sen. John McCain, who long has tried to wean Republicans from ever greater federal spending but attracted little support from GOP colleagues until recently.

Fear has enveloped Republicans who see themselves handing the banner of fiscal integrity to the Democrats. The GOP is losing the rhetoric war, even though Democrats mostly push for higher domestic spending, because Republicans, while standing firm against tax hikes, have also declined to cut spending. Fearing the worst in the 2006 and 2008 elections, Republican senators who would not be expected to do so are looking to McCain to lead the party back to fiscal responsibility.

The "emergency" Medicaid bill is a classic case of how government grows and spending soars. Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln, concerned by health problems of evacuees in her state of Arkansas, introduced a bill increasing Medicaid funds to the states. The Senate Finance Committee's Republican chairman, Chuck Grassley, and its ranking Democrat, Max Baucus, drafted the scaled-down, $9 billion substitute and marked it for quick passage. No hearings, no debate, no trouble.

Follow the link for the rest of the story, but you get the picture. Thankfully, there is still a small core of Senators willing to stop this sort of largess. Perhaps more Senators will join them in the future as they wake up to the fact that their political future depends upon it.


September 18, 2005


Cutting the Fat: The New Porkbuster Site

Andrew has started the debate here in Rhode Island, asking why we are spending highway bill pork in RI at a time of national need in New Orleans.

In what is likely to be another example of how the blogosphere is changing politics, take a look at this posting from Instapundit about various bloggers looking for pork awarded their state in the recent highway bill, including Andrew's posting.

Instapundit extends the pork debate with this important additional posting, linking to this interesting porkbuster site from Truth Laid Bear that is the result of an idea developed by TLB and Instapundit. Congratulations to them for such a good idea.

So how do you think our Senators Chafee and Reed as well as our Congressmen Langevin and Kennedy will respond to this responsible idea of porkbusting?

Maybe we should ask each of them...



Same Old Story: Clinton is a Deceitful & Dishonest Man Who Has No Principles

This story shows the latest example of just how unprincipled a man Bill Clinton is.

Power Line has a strongly-worded response.

For a man who (i) had shady dealings with a range of Communist Chinese or their agents; (ii) passed up an opportunity to capture bin Laden when he was offered to the USA before 9/11; (iii) treated terrorism as a police action matter against which to lob a few cruise missiles; (iv) ran $300 billion budget deficits until the Republicans took over Congress in 1994 and reduced spending enough to yield surpluses; (v) took personal credit for the Cold War peace dividend achieved by President Reagan; (vi) decimated the US military after the Cold War; (vii) brought dishonor to the White House by his personal behavior; (viii) created the legacy of perpetual campaigning; and, (ix) took the techniques of personal destruction against political opponents to a unprecedented level, Bill Clinton certainly has chutzpah.

And he has no grace. That is why history will show him for what he is: a petty small-state governor whose personal charisma allowed him to reach heights where his lack of values then made him a spineless man who had to triangulate because he didn't have the backbone to lead like a real man.

Small and inconsequential to the long-term history of America. That will be his legacy as President - unless we let him succeed in his unilateral effort to rewrite history.

Not in our lifetime, Slick Willie.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

JunkYardBlog has more.

Oblogatory Anecdotes also has more.


September 12, 2005


John Roberts Confirmation Hearings

Marc Comtois

The hearings for Chief Justice-in-waiting John Roberts begin today and can be seen and heard via C-SPAN beginning at 11:30 AM. As C-SPAN "warns," however:

On Monday, the multi-day Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge John Roberts begin. They are expected to last all week. First, will be a series of opening statements by the eighteen members of the Senate Judiciary Cmte. These should take up most of the afternoon.
So get your hip-waders ready. For his part, Senate Judiciary member John Cornyn has outlined three things he's going to be looking for throughout the hearings.
Will my colleagues misuse the term "judicial activism"?

Will my colleagues ask Judge Roberts questions they know he cannot answer?

Will my colleagues accuse Judge Roberts of being an extremist?

Cornyn elaborates on all three, so it's worth reading the piece.

UPDATE:

Here is the text of Judge Roberts opening statement. Here is a substantive selection from his statement:
Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them.

The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules.

But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.

Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath.

And judges have to have the modesty to be open in the decisional process to the considered views of their colleagues on the bench.

Mr. Chairman, when I worked in the Department of Justice, in the office of the solicitor general, it was my job to argue cases for the United States before the Supreme court.

I always found it very moving to stand before the justices and say, "I speak for my country."

But it was after I left the department and began arguing cases against the United States that I fully appreciated the importance of the Supreme Court and our constitutional system.

Here was the United States, the most powerful entity in the world, aligned against my client. And yet, all I had to do was convince the court that I was right on the law and the government was wrong and all that power and might would recede in deference to the rule of law.

That is a remarkable thing.

It is what we mean when we say that we are a government of laws and not of men. It is that rule of law that protects the rights and liberties of all Americans. It is the envy of the world. Because without the rule of law, any rights are meaningless.

President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights. We do, because of the wisdom of our founders and the sacrifices of our heroes over the generations to make their vision a reality.

Mr. Chairman, I come before the committee with no agenda. I have no platform. Judges are not politicians who can promise to do certain things in exchange for votes.

I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind. I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that are presented. I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues on the bench. And I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.


September 11, 2005


Rancid Pork Leaves a Bad Taste in Your Mouth

The domestic spending habits of the Republican Congress were criticized in an earlier posting about the Chafee-Laffey race.

Previous postings (here and here) discussed the outrageous spending contained in the recently passed highway bill.

Another posting discussed how actions by the small, but powerful, sugar lobby go against the interest of average Americans.

The energy bill was another pork-laden feast that recklessly spent even more of our hard-earned monies.

There has also been no lack of criticism on this blogsite of the outrageous demands by public sector unions where pension benefit demands alone (see here and here) have numerous states and towns across America facing financial ruin.

And now the ProJo highlights a pork-laden water bill.

All of these deals - that benefit a few to the detriment of the many - are examples of an ever increasing diet of rancid pork that makes the body politic sick.


September 10, 2005


Lessons From Hurricane Katrina: Regaining a Sense of Historical Perspective on What Works in America

As the political fallout from hurricane Katrina unfolds, there is plenty of griping about the performance of the federal government as well as the performance of the Louisiana state and New Orleans local governments.

For a moment, forget about all that endless bickering and focus on the many relief efforts now underway and the good that they will end up doing. Efforts like those of the Salvation Army or the Red Cross.

Those efforts lead us back to these famous words by a long-ago observer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society...

Whenever at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

As you see the many heroic efforts by individuals and groups (see here for just the financial contributions) in response to the devastation caused by Katrina, remember that such efforts have been a strong trait of Americans since the early years of our country. Also, do not forget that these wonderful efforts were initiated voluntarily and organized successfully without any centralized planning effort by government agencies. The efforts, including their spontaneous creation, are at the core of what has made America great.

Now contrast those efforts - which have garnered only praise and appreciation - with the numerous examples of incompetent behavior by governmental agencies. Andrew has highlighted such examples in two recent postings (here and here).

Yet, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, many Americans hold on to the erroneous belief that complex situations can only be addressed by governmental agencies.

This profoundly misguided worldview ignores the appalling incompetence of government, which occurs because of the underlying incentives that drive government action.

Some of the longer-term consequences of relying extensively on government are highlighted in this bluntly worded article by Robert Tracinski of The Intellectual Activist, which a friend sent me last Thursday:

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicles, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state....

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the SuperDome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

...the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency...

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Some of Tracinski's points are reinforced and expanded on by Noemie Emery in this article:

...The reason New Orleans slid so quickly from civilization into Third World conditions was that it was pretty much a Third World city already, and didn't have too far to go. In its violence, in its corruption, in its reliance on ambience and tourism as its critical industry, in its one-party rule, in its model of graftocracy built on a depressed and crime-ridden underclass that was largely kept out of the sight and the mind of vacationing revelers, it was much more like a Caribbean resort than a normal American city. Its crime and murder rates were way above national averages, its corruption level astounding. The latter was written off as being picturesque and perversely adorable, until it suddenly wasn't, as it paid off in hundreds of buses--that could have borne thousands of stranded people to safety--sitting submerged in water, and police either looting or AWOL.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville defined a long set of traits that made Americans "different," and that remain today just as valid: Americans are restless, inventive, pragmatic, entrepreneurial, socially mobile, and so future-oriented they are ready and eager sometimes to let go of the past. None of these things defined what once was New Orleans; in fact, that poor destroyed city played them in reverse: It was socially static, fairly caste-ridden, non-entrepreneurial (read hostile to business), and wholly immersed in its past, to the point where its main industry is marketing ambience and nostalgia. "New Orleans's dominant industry lies not in creating its future but selling its past," wrote Joel Kotkin in the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com. "Tourism defines contemporary New Orleans's economy more than its still-large port, or its remaining industry, or its energy production. Although there is nothing wrong, per se, in being a tourist town, it is not an industry that attracts high-wage jobs; and tends to create a highly bifurcated social structure. This can be seen in New Orleans's perennially high rates of underemployment, crime and poverty." New Orleans, in short, was the place you went to take a vacation, not to prosper in life and start a family, much less start a business. This lack of opportunity, or the upward ladder of social mobility, is perhaps one reason so many evacuees felt they were breathing fresh air when they landed in Houston, and are deciding to make it their home.

Let us look now at Houston, for it is the second city in this cosmic drama, and one in which Tocqueville would feel right at home. Like so many cities in the Sunbelt, it is expanding, entrepreneurial, based on the future, and the place where the "much celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people" comes roaring to life. "In 1920, New Orleans's population was nearly three times that of Houston," says Kotkin. "During the '90s, the Miami and Houston areas grew almost six times as fast as greater New Orleans, and flourished as major destinations for immigrants...These newcomers have helped transform Miami and Houston into primary centers for trade, investment and services, from finance and accounting to medical care for the entire Caribbean basin. They have started businesses, staffed factories, and become players in civic life."

It is now no surprise that Houston is the place where in days they built a new city in and around the Astrodome, that has taken in 25,000 refugees from New Orleans, and is planning to feed, house, employ, and relocate most of them. Houston is the place where the heads of all the religious groups in the city--Baptists and Catholics, Muslims and Jews--came together to raise $4.4 million to feed the evacuees for 30 days, and to supply 720 volunteers a day to prepare and serve meals. If New Orleans was where the Third World broke through, Houston was where the First World began beating it back, and asserting its primacy...

Therefore, what are some of the lessons that can be learned from Hurricane Katrina?

Continue reading "Lessons From Hurricane Katrina: Regaining a Sense of Historical Perspective on What Works in America"


FEMA Wasting the Bravery and Dedication of Providence Firefighters II

Carroll Andrew Morse

Further evidence, this time from a group of Indiana firefighters, that firefighters sent by the city of Providence to assist in Katrina relief will not be put to good use

"Our job was to advertise a phone number for FEMA," said Portage Assistant Fire Chief Bill Lundy. "We were going to be given shirts and hats with a phone number on it and flyers, and sent to shelters, and we were going to pass out flyers."

"There was almost a fight," said Portage Assistant Fire Chief Joe Calhoun. "There was probably 700 firefighters sitting in the room getting this training, and it dawned on them what we were going to be doing. And then it got bad from there."

Lundy and Calhoun's first task was an eight-hour course on sexual harassment and equal opportunity employment procedures, Rogers reported. Neither firefighter would be involved in technical rescues of trapped people or any of their other specialties.

Apparently, the Federal government is not satisfied with having turned its own response to emergencies over to a bunch of paper pushing bureaucrats. Now they want to reach down to the local level, take individuals ready and willing rescue others away from their calling, and make them push paper too. FEMA must be abolished.


September 8, 2005


Is FEMA Wasting the Bravery and Dedication of Providence Firefighters?

Carroll Andrew Morse

Six Providence firefighters are traveling to Atlanta to aid in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, in response to a call put out by the Department of Homeland Security

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent an urgent message this weekend looking for 1,000 two-person teams of firefighters to volunteer in the storm-ravaged states.
The specific phrasing of two person teams suggests that Providences firefighters wont be involved in front line search and rescue efforts, which is no doubt where they want to be. Instead, FEMA wants to use firefighters for community relations. This is from FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak
"The initial call to action very specifically says we're looking for two-person fire teams to do community relations,"
And what do community relations involve? The Salt Lake Tribune, from which the above quote was taken, doesnt paint a very complimentary picture
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

Why use firefighters, some of the bravest, most highly trained and motivated individuals a city can send, for community relations? The answer is, of course, is bureaucratic. FEMA wants to use firefighters because theyve already had background checks.
But Louis H. Botta, a coordinating officer for FEMA, said sending out firefighters on community relations makes sense. They already have had background checks and meet the qualifications to be sworn as a federal employee.
If this story of this abuse of resources by the Federal government is true, then it is not enough to fire Michael Brown. FEMA quite clearly serves very little purpose, cannot be saved, and should be disbanded.


September 7, 2005


No Refugees in America

Carroll Andrew Morse

I explain why in my current TechCentralStation column.


September 5, 2005


Fire Michael Brown

Carroll Andrew Morse

Over the coming months and years, America must deal with three separate though interrelated failures that combined to create the New Orleans disaster.

1. The failure to properly evacuate New Orleans before the storm.

2. The failure to immediately evacuate the shelters of last resort, e.g. the Superdome and the convention center, after it was known that the levee had broken.

3. The failure to provide basic relief to the shelters of last resort while their evacuation was being organized.

The first two failures were basically local and/or state government failures. But the third was clearly the responsibility of FEMA. FEMA failed to carry out its most basic mission; get to an emergency first, and get people what they need so they will be alive to take advantage of more permanent fixes being organized by the rest of society. FEMA had the resources to collect and deliver supplies to the evacuees awaiting rescue. Their inability to do so greatly contributed to the rapid deterioration of the situation in New Orleans.

It wont help prevent future repeats of the first two failures, but firing Michael Brown as head of FEMA would be a reasonable step towards preventing future instances of the third.


September 3, 2005


Blame before relief? I don't think so.

President Bush made his way to Louisiana and surrounding states to view the devastation firsthand, but many are questioning why it didn't happen earlier. Why did the President fly by on Wednesday, but not actually tour the leveled cities?

That is a sound question, and whether we're Republicans, Democrats, or anything else, we expect our President to bring strength and hope in horrific situations. Liberals chomped at the bit after Katrina, waiting with bated breath as they looked to expose the President as uncaring, aloof, and on vacation. Many Web sites published photos of the President playing a guitar the day after the hurricane — not noting the context, but who cares about minor details like that when the desire is to spin, manipulate, and self-propagate?

The fact remains, however, that the relief effort just wasn't getting the job done. People were hungry, dying, getting shot at, and in many cases being raped. Can you imagine being a young woman who had just lost her husband, trying to keep your children as more than memories from the past? And then you walk into a putrid bathroom only to have some thugs try to play spin the bottle with your exhausted body. Unfortunately, there were such women, and authorities just didn't have the manpower to do anything about it. Begin the blame game...

Democrats blamed the President, the mayor of New Orleans blamed everybody and succinctly stated that all who could help should "get your a** over here," and even Republicans took shots at FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. So whose fault is it?

At this point it doesn't matter, in my opinion. When people are able to get a meal, a shower, and some rest, then we can talk about where to cast blame. To be clear, someone must be held accountable for this mess. If 9/11 showed us what can go right with emergency services, Katrina is showing us what can go terribly wrong. But before we start throwing stones, let's make sure we don't forget the tens of thousands of lives forever altered by Hurricane Katrina.


August 22, 2005


Tapscott: Has the GOP Lost Its Soul?

Mark Tapscott has written a powerful editorial asking Has the GOP Lost Its Soul?

...Their differences [between President Reagan and Alaskan GOP Rep. Young] are nowhere more evident than on limiting government and reducing federal spending. Reagan said in his first inaugural speech that "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Today, Young crows about the $286.4 billion transportation bill to The New York Times, saying he "stuffed it like a turkey."

These differences didnt start with Young, though. Republicans took over Congress in 1994 promising in the "Contract with America" to cut taxes, reduce federal spending and eliminate unneeded bureaucracy. Theyve used the same message to retain majorities in both chambers for all but a couple of the succeeding years.

Despite the GOP majority and its promises, federal spending including wasteful pork barrel projects has skyrocketed to record levels, especially as President Bush won the White House in 2000, the GOP kept the House and regained the Senate in 2002 and Bush gained re-election in 2004.

Federal outlays are going up so fast that in 2004 for the first time since World War II Washington spent more than $21,000 per household but collected only about $18,000 in revenue, causing budget deficits to explode. The rate of increase in spending was faster only during the "guns and butter" era of the Vietnam War and LBJs Great Society programs, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.

Simply put, the GOP majority has been spending federal tax dollars like drunken sailors since 2001, increasing outlays by an average of 7.25 percent annually. Inflation increased by a mere 2.0 percent average in those same years.

Bush has basically stepped aside, not once exercising his veto, compared to 78 vetoes by Reagan, who had to deal with powerful Democrat majorities in the House throughout his White House years.

Having a president who won't veto unleashes the big spenders. That transportation bill that Bush accepted and Young stuffed contained more than 6,500 "earmarks" i.e. pork barrel projects. Reagan vetoed a 1987 transportation bill with a mere 152 projects.

The same stuffing pattern is seen in other legislation like the recently enacted energy bill that is "chock-full of corporate subsidies, targeted tax breaks, and other special interest handouts," according to Citizens Against Government Waste. Since 2003, the overall earmarks total has zoomed from 8,341 to nearly 14,000, the group recently told The Washington Post.

As for limiting government, the federal establishment is as complicated, duplicative and inefficient as ever, despite more than a decade of GOP majorities in Congress and several years of GOP control of both the White House and Congress....

Most worrisome about this GOP addiction to pork is that it undermines the partys credibility as the entitlements crisis caused by the retirement of the Baby Boomers draws ever closer.

Medicare has nearly $30 trillion in unfounded mandates. Social Security faces annual deficits in excess of $100 billion beginning sometime around 2018. Add government employee pension obligations and those assumed from Fortune 500 corporations by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Commission and there will be no alternative to steeply higher taxes and major benefit cuts. Social, economic and financial chaos will follow, just as Reagan predicted in 1981.

Reagan expressed the GOPs soul when he said "it is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people." Progress was slow and sometimes reversed, but Reagan kept up the pressure.

Reagans GOP heirs are wasting his legacy.

This behavior by President Bush and the entire GOP Congress is scandalous. It is irresponsible and has adverse long-term consequences. It represents a complete breakdown in leadership.

These problems are not new to Anchor Rising. Here are some past postings on the general topic:

Favors for Everyone Except the Taxpaying Masses
Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die
The Highway Bill: "Egregious and Remarkable"
The Highway Bill: Another Example of Unacceptable Government Spending
Pigs at the Public Trough
More on the Misguided Incentives in the Public Sector
Pigs at the Public Trough, Revisited

A brief look at why these problems develop in the first place can be found in a posting entitled Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation.

A more comprehensive look at why these problems develop in the first place can be found in a posting entitled A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest.



Tapscott: Has GOP Lost Its Soul?

Donald B. Hawthorne

Mark Tapscott has written a powerful editorial asking Has the GOP Lost Its Soul?

...Their differences [between President Reagan and Alaskan GOP Rep. Young] are nowhere more evident than on limiting government and reducing federal spending. Reagan said in his first inaugural speech that "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Today, Young crows about the $286.4 billion transportation bill to The New York Times, saying he "stuffed it like a turkey."

These differences didn't start with Young, though. Republicans took over Congress in 1994 promising in the "Contract with America" to cut taxes, reduce federal spending and eliminate unneeded bureaucracy. They've used the same message to retain majorities in both chambers for all but a couple of the succeeding years.

Despite the GOP majority and its promises, federal spending - including wasteful pork barrel projects - has skyrocketed to record levels, especially as President Bush won the White House in 2000, the GOP kept the House and regained the Senate in 2002 and Bush gained re-election in 2004.

Federal outlays are going up so fast that in 2004 for the first time since World War II Washington spent more than $21,000 per household but collected only about $18,000 in revenue, causing budget deficits to explode. The rate of increase in spending was faster only during the "guns and butter" era of the Vietnam War and LBJ's Great Society programs, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.

Simply put, the GOP majority has been spending federal tax dollars like drunken sailors since 2001, increasing outlays by an average of 7.25 percent annually. Inflation increased by a mere 2.0 percent average in those same years.

Bush has basically stepped aside, not once exercising his veto, compared to 78 vetoes by Reagan, who had to deal with powerful Democrat majorities in the House throughout his White House years.

Having a president who won't veto unleashes the big spenders. That transportation bill that Bush accepted and Young stuffed contained more than 6,500 "earmarks" - i.e. pork barrel projects. Reagan vetoed a 1987 transportation bill with a mere 152 projects.

The same stuffing pattern is seen in other legislation like the recently enacted energy bill that is "chock-full of corporate subsidies, targeted tax breaks, and other special interest handouts," according to Citizens Against Government Waste. Since 2003, the overall earmarks total has zoomed from 8,341 to nearly 14,000, the group recently told The Washington Post.

As for limiting government, the federal establishment is as complicated, duplicative and inefficient as ever, despite more than a decade of GOP majorities in Congress and several years of GOP control of both the White House and Congress....

Most worrisome about this GOP addiction to pork is that it undermines the party's credibility as the entitlements crisis caused by the retirement of the Baby Boomers draws ever closer.

Medicare has nearly $30 trillion in unfounded mandates. Social Security faces annual deficits in excess of $100 billion beginning sometime around 2018. Add government employee pension obligations and those assumed from Fortune 500 corporations by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Commission and there will be no alternative to steeply higher taxes and major benefit cuts. Social, economic and financial chaos will follow, just as Reagan predicted in 1981.

Reagan expressed the GOP's soul when he said "it is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people." Progress was slow and sometimes reversed, but Reagan kept up the pressure.

Reagan's GOP heirs are wasting his legacy.

This behavior by President Bush and the entire GOP Congress is scandalous. It is irresponsible and has adverse long-term consequences. It represents a complete breakdown in leadership.

These problems are not new to Anchor Rising. Here are some past postings on the general topic:

Favors for Everyone Except the Taxpaying Masses
Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die
The Highway Bill: "Egregious and Remarkable"
The Highway Bill: Another Example of Unacceptable Government Spending
Pigs at the Public Trough
More on the Misguided Incentives in the Public Sector
Pigs at the Public Trough, Revisited

A brief look at why these problems develop in the first place can be found in a posting entitled Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation.

A more comprehensive look at why these problems develop in the first place can be found in a posting entitled A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest.



August 17, 2005


The Real Lesson of the Ohio Election?

Carroll Andrew Morse

Dean Barnett (another conservative New Englander) has an excellent analysis in the Weekly Standard of the Democratic side of the recent Ohio special Congressional election, where a veteran Republican edged out a Democratic newcomer in a solidly Republican district. However, I think the real lesson for Republicans is contained in this paragraph from Barnett...

The Republicans nominated a veteran state senator, Jean Schmidt, who according to both friend and foe was a lackluster politician who subsequently ran a lackluster campaign. What's more, Schmidt was saddled with the baggage of being a staunch supporter of Ohio's wildly unpopular governor, Robert Taft, whose sole unique political talent seems to be an ability to alienate his state's voters...
Is Jean Schmidt the exception, or the rule? Maybe I'm over-generalizing from a few cases, but this seems to be part of a larger Republican problem. In Rhode Island's last gubernatorial election, had the candidate of the party establishment won the primary, he would have almost certainly lost in the general election. Fortunately, he was so bad (as a candidate), he lost a primary challenge to Don Carcieri, who went on to beat the Democratic challenger.

Combine enough of these cases, and you start to develop a picture of a party that looks at nominations as a way to reward service, not as a way to win elections. It points to a top-down party, interested in building a disciplined machine for winning at the national level, but less concerned with winning locally. Eventually, this organizational philosophy drains the party of the grass-roots support need edfor long-term success.


August 13, 2005


Bob Kerr, Lies, and Indirection

Carroll Andrew Morse

If Bob Kerr wants to call President Bush a liar, he shouldnt hide behind a grieving mother to do so. Does Kerr himself think that President Bush is a liar? He doesnt quite make it that far, he only gets to a point where he can tell us

It's as if the truth has laid siege to the vacation White House.
He lets someone else make the charge of lying for him
He could have used his standard bromides -- "noble cause," "the right of Iraqis to live in freedom." And [Cindy] Sheehan could have disagreed with him, told him she considers the reasons for the war to be lies.
Does Kerr believe that it is a lie that Iraqis have a right to live in freedom. Or does Cindy Sheehan believe that it is a lie that Iraqis have a right to live in freedom? Or do Kerr and/or Sheehan believe it is a lie that President Bush believes that Iraqis have a right to live in freedom? Its hard to tell, given the indirection that Kerr expresses himself with. Whatever the case, if Bob Kerr believes that the United States best protects itself by ignoring governments that crush the freedom and the lives of their people, which seems to be the center of the lie he is talking about, he should come out and say so in his own name.


August 12, 2005


What Cindy Sheehan's New Pals Really Think About Her Army Son

Mac Owens

As anyone who watches TV knows, Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, has camped out in Crawford, Texas, demanding that the president meet with her. Of course, as we also know, the president did meet with her and her first account of the meeting indicated she was very favorably impressed with the demeanor of the president. For whatever, reason, she has changed her tune.

A coalition of anti-war groups has latched on to Mrs. Sheehan, calling her the Rosa parks of the anti-war movement. She is, of course, the public face the anti-war types need. But she might be interested in what her new pals really think about her son.

In response to my NRO piece yesterday calling into question the utility of much of the criticism of the war, I received a very illuminating e-mail, which I posted on The Corner.

Dear Mr. Owens;

You write, "It is hard to conduct military operations when a chorus of
eunuchs is describing every action we take as a violation of everything that
America stands for, a quagmire in which we are doomed to failure, and a
waste of American lives."

But Mr. Owens, I believe that those three beliefs are true. On what
grounds can I be barred from speaking them in public? Because speaking them
will undermine American goals in Iraq? Bless you, sir, that's what I want
to do in the first place. I am confident that U.S. forces will be driven
from Iraq, and for that reason I am rather enjoying the war.

But doesn't hoping that American forces are driven from Iraq necessarily
mean hoping that Americans soldiers will be killed there? Yes it does.
Your soldiers are just a bunch of poor, dumb suckers that have been swindled
out of their right to choose between good and evil. Quite a few of them are
or will be swindled out of their eyes, legs, arms and lives. I didn't
swindle them. President Bush did. If you're going to blame me for cheering
their misery, what must you do to President Bush, whose policies are the
cause of that misery?

Yours sincerely,
(Name withheld)

If Mrs. Sheehan wants to be used to advance the interests of the antiwar left, that is her prerogative. But she might want to peruse the blogs that constitute the fever swamps of the left. There she will find that this is not an isolated case, but that her new pals feel nothing but contempt for her sonthat indeed they do believe he was a poor, dumb sucker.




They're not Anti-War, They're just on the Other Side

Carroll Andrew Morse

Mac has recently published a couple of columns in the New York Post and National Review on media coverage and criticism of the war in Iraq. At The Corner, he has also posted a response from someone who is, in the words of Glenn Reynolds, not anti-war, but just on the other side.


August 3, 2005


To Stop Religious Terrorism, Permit Religious Politics

Justin Katz

For my column — which will now be appearing every other Wednesday — I pondered the formation of London's homegrown Muslim terrorists: "Exploding Across Arm's-Length Tolerance." The bottom line is that the common thread that runs through the astute explanations — the root cause, if you will — is disengagement. And pushing religion, and the religious, away from politics and government will only exacerbate the problem.



Favors for Everyone Except the Taxpaying Masses

An editorial entitled Meet the New Special-Interest U.S. Congress by George Melloan continues an ongoing discussion about the perverse incentives that drive public sector behaviors:

...Taxpayers can rest easier now that the denizens of Capitol Hill have gone home for their August holiday. But those worthies have left behind a trail littered with the favors they've done for their special friends at the expense of the taxpaying masses...

The McCain-Feingold act, the current embodiment of years of campaign finance "reforms," was peddled as a law that would "take money out of politics." Oh, sure. Campaign spending set a record last fall, much of it provided indirectly from shadowy sources rather than up front and in public. Americans in some distant past had a largely unrestricted right to support candidates with their contributions, but a Congress uncomfortable with free choice chose to limit that power.

A case can be made that we are seeing the result of this limitation in the performance of the current Congress, which seems to have less regard than its predecessors for the broad public interest...

This near fiasco [the Cafta vote] for U.S. trade policy raises a question: How did lobbyists for a few business interests with little overall economic importance [See Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die] almost overwhelm the broad interests of the U.S. and its trading partners? One possible answer is that narrow interests can wield such power because...campaign-finance restrictions have so narrowed the financial support base for lawmakers that they have become more beholden to lobbies with the cash and know-how to defeat anyone who doesn't toe the line...

Before recess, the House also rushed to approve two big spending bills covering who knows what. In both the highway [see previous posting here] and energy bills the main concern was not the price tag or whether the money would be spent efficiently. It was to ensure that every member got a fair share for his state or district...

Apologists for all this profligacy argue that at least it "creates jobs." But none of those jobs comes with any cost-benefit test of the type that a private venture would have to pass to get funding. Thus there is no measure of whether the money spent adds or subtracts from human well-being.

There is very little concern for anything other than dividing up the tax-and-borrowing revenues so that every member, along with his coterie of supporters, gets a share...

Congress knows it has a spending problem, just as alcoholics are aware that they have a drinking problem. The late Democratic Senator Pat Moynihan once said to Journal editors, "It doesn't do any good for you to yell at us -- we just can't help it."

He may have been right. Congress has made various stabs at setting up a "congressional budget process" that would reconcile the various spending bills and keep them within some agreed-upon total. But somehow the machinery just never seems to work. It keeps getting overwhelmed by the pressures of political logrolling...

A broader argument is that money holds the republic together. By sharing it out, the federal government buys the loyalty of a broad variety of constituencies, thereby insuring national unity. In politics, "fairness" is a very big word, even if it is only applied to those who receive federal largesse and seldom to those taxpayers who cough it up.

If "fairness" is the guiding principle, perhaps it should apply to the equal treatment under the law of everyone who wants to express his constitutional right to free expression by supporting, financially, the candidate of his choice. The result might be that members of Congress would become less beholden to special interests and more concerned with the common good...

It is worth repeating a paragraph from an earlier posting:

A more complete discussion of the perverse incentives that exist within the public sector are discussed in the posting entitled A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest, where numerous links provide the opportunity to dive more deeply into both the root causes and the symptoms of an irresponsible, out-of-control public sector.



Creating a False Distinction Between Human Rights & Property Rights

Walter Williams latest editorial entitled Human rights vs. property rights offers an insightful look into the twisted views of some Leftists:

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent 5-4 ruling in Kelo v. New London, statements have been made about property rights that are demonstrative of the paucity of understanding among some within the legal profession. Carolyn Lochhead's July 1st San Francisco Chronicle article, "Foes Unite in Defense of Property," reports on the coalition building in Congress to deny federal funds to cities that use laws of eminent domain to take private property for the benefit of another private party.

But it's the article's report on a statement made by a representative of People for the American Way...that I'd like to address. According to Ms. Lochhead's article, "Elliot Mincberg, the group's legal director, said the case [Kelo v. New London] had been brought by the Institute for Justice as part of an effort by conservatives to elevate property rights to the same level of civil rights such as freedom of speech and religion, in effect taking the nation back to the pre-New Deal days when the courts ruled child labor laws unconstitutional." To posit a distinction between civil or human rights on the one hand and property rights on the other reflects little understanding...

My computer is my property. Does it have any rights -- like the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Are there any constitutional guarantees held by my computer?...to think of property as possessing rights is unadulterated nonsense.

...Property rights are human rights to use economic goods and services. Private property rights contain your right to use, transfer, trade and exclude others from use of property deemed yours. The supposition that there's a conflict or difference between human rights to use property and civil rights is bogus and misguided...

That it's bogus to make a distinction between human, civil and property rights can be seen in another way. In a free society, each person is his own private property; I own myself and you own yourself. That's why it's immoral to rape or murder. It violates a person's property rights. The fact of self-ownership also helps explain why theft is immoral. In order for self-ownership to be meaningful, a person must have ownership rights to what he produces or earns...if someone steals my computer, he's violated my ownership rights to my computer, which I earned through my labor, and therefore my human or civil rights to keep what I produce.

Creating false distinctions between human rights and property rights plays into the hands of Democrat and Republican party socialists who seek to control our lives. If we buy into the notion that somehow property rights are less important, or are in conflict with, human or civil rights, we give the socialists a freer hand to attack our property.

As President John Adams (1797-1801) put it, "Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty." Adding, "The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence."

An indepth look at the Kelo decision can be found in a posting entitled The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished.



The Highway Bill: "Egregious and Remarkable"

An article entitled Highway Bill Full of Special Projects tells another government spending horror story:

When President Eisenhower proposed the first national highway bill, there were two projects singled out for funding. The latest version has, by one estimate, 6,371 of these special projects, a record that some say politicians should be ashamed of.

The projects in the six-year, $286.4 billion highway and mass transit bill passed by Congress last week range from $200,000 for a deer avoidance system in Weedsport, N.Y., to $330 million for a highway in Bakersfield, Calif.

For the beneficiaries -- almost every member of Congress -- they bring jobs and better quality lives to their communities and states. To critics, they are pork barrel spending at its worst.

"Egregious and remarkable," exclaimed Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., about the estimated $24 billion in the bill set aside for highways, bus stops, parking lots and bike trails requested by lawmakers.

McCain, one of only four senators to oppose the bill, listed several dozen "interesting" projects, including $480,000 to rehabilitate a historic warehouse on the Erie Canal and $3 million for dust control mitigation on Arkansas rural roads.

His favorite, he said, was $2.3 million for landscaping on the Ronald Reagan Freeway in California. "I wonder what Ronald Reagan would say."

Reagan, in fact, vetoed a highway bill over what he said were spending excesses, only to be overridden by Congress. Meanwhile, according to a Cato Institute analysis, special projects or "earmarks" numbered 10 in 1982, 152 in 1987, 538 in 1991 and 1,850 in 1998. The 1998 highway act set aside some $9 billion for earmarks, well under half the newest plan.

"This bill will be known as the most earmarked transportation bill in the history of our nation," said Keith Ashdown, vice president of policy for Taxpayers for Common Sense, which tracks such projects in congressional legislation...

...few lawmakers are willing to turn down a new road or bridge in their district...

Lawmakers were sending out press releases bragging of their accomplishments even before the bill was passed, said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste. "It's a symbol of why everything else is out of control, not just highways."

The biggest beneficiaries tend to be the lawmakers with the biggest clout...

The highway bill is one area where the minority Democrats aren't forgotten...

Not every lawmaker came seeking gifts. Two conservative Republicans from Arizona, Jeff Flake and John Shadegg, wrote Young asking that the $14 million the committee was allotting to each House member for earmarks be sent instead to the state transportation department.

Flake's office said that in the end he didn't take any projects, and Flake and Shadegg were two of only eight House members to vote against the bill.

An earlier posting first highlighted the ridiculous actions contained in the highway bill.

It is all part of a game where politicians of both parties spend a portion of our hard-earned monies as if those funds were nothing but Monopoly play money.

Why does this happen? Because Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation.

A more complete discussion of the perverse incentives that exist within the public sector are discussed in the posting entitled A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest, where numerous links provide the opportunity to dive more deeply into both the root causes and the symptoms of an irresponsible, out-of-control public sector.


July 26, 2005


Upheaval at the AFL-CIO: Nobody has a Vision for Competing in a Global Economy

An editorial entitled Very Old Labor: Unions need a vision for the new global economy discusses the underlying reason for the breakup of the AFL-CIO:

The AFL-CIO, the giant union consortium formed in 1955 by George Meany and Walter Reuther, is breaking apart this week in a dispute over how to revive labor's lagging fortunes. The tragedy is that neither faction is offering an agenda that will make workers more prosperous in our increasingly competitive global economy.

Instead, we are witnessing a fight over who gets to preside over a declining labor movement...

...Mr. Sweeney promised to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into electoral politics to stop the Gingrich revolution. He staffed AFL-CIO headquarters with activists from the political left...and made the union consortium a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

A decade later we can see how that turned out. Democrats remain in the House and Senate minority, and union membership continues to decline across the American economy. The unionized share of the total U.S. work force has been sliding steadily for years, and was down again last year to 12.5%...In the more dynamic private sector, only 7.9% of employees now carry the union label.

Service workers President Andy Stern wants to arrest this decline by diverting more labor resources into union organizing, especially at such large employers as Wal-Mart. One of his rebel allies, Terence O'Sullivan of the Laborers International Union, wants to more aggressively use union pension funds and financial assets to influence corporate decisions and gain seats on corporate boards. Mr. Sweeney doesn't oppose either idea, but he also wants to pour cash into Congressional lobbying and Democratic coffers. Mr. Stern replies that this money will largely be wasted until unions increase their member ranks, and for our non-union money he's probably right.

What's missing on both sides, however, is a vision of economic opportunity that might actually make workers want to join a union in the first place. Tactics aside, both factions continue to believe in the idea of unions that arose in the Industrial Age: Greedy management versus the exploited working man, seniority over flexibility, fixed benefits and strike threats over working with management to keep a U.S.-based company profitable and innovative in a world of growing competition. On the political front, both factions favor trade protection, higher taxes and government help to enforce restrictive work rules. This is the agenda of Old Europe, where jobless rates are above 10%, and it merely offers more economic insecurity in the U.S. as well.

What the labor movement really needs is a new generation of leaders who understand the emerging competition to U.S. workers from the likes of India and China. Rather than oppose imports to protect textile jobs that can't be saved, such leaders would work to reform education so future Americans can compete in the knowledge industries that will grow the fastest. They'd also work to make pensions and health insurance transportable from company to company, so a worker wouldn't be trapped by benefits in a job or industry he didn't like. They'd be partners with management, not antagonists.

Without such a new vision, Big Labor will only continue its slide. All the more so given new Labor Department rules, recently upheld in court after an AFL-CIO challenge, requiring that unions disclose more details about how they spend hard-earned member dues. Some of the nation's largest unions will now have to disclose their spending by specific categories, such as political donations, grievance proceedings, or organizing. This sunshine will expose just how much labor money is being wasted on political activities that have little to do with improving workers' lives...

...their real obstacle is the reality of the modern global economy. Until they offer workers something more than class warfare, circa 1955, they will continue to decline.

Other stories on the breakup can be read here and here.

Continue reading "Upheaval at the AFL-CIO: Nobody has a Vision for Competing in a Global Economy"

July 22, 2005


Politically Correct Suicide

Paul Sperry has written an article entitled Politically Correct Suicide: Still No Subway Profiling, in which he says:

After a new series of subway bomb attacks in London, the mayor of New York announced yesterday that police will search backpacks and other bags carried by people boarding city subways.

But the passengers they single out will be picked at random without regard for their race or religion. There will be absolutely no profiling, Mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed.

Talk about politically correct exercises in futility.

Young Muslim men bombed the London tube, and young Muslim men attacked Bloomberg's own city with planes nearly four years earlier. Statistically, they fit the profile of the terrorist targeting the American transportation system.

And yet, still no profiling.

Authorities instead will single out people for special security screening as they do at the nation's airports. That means stopping Girl Scouts and grannies in a procedure that has more to do with demonstrating tolerance for young Muslim men than protecting citizens from them.

At the same time, the NYPD is advising subway riders to be alert for "people" with bulky clothes or fiddling nervously with bags. Could they be more general in describing the traits of an Islamic suicide bomber? They're too PC to narrow it to a level where it can actually be useful to Americans trying to protect themselves and their loved ones...

Don't expect the feds to be any more serious about screening Muslim suicide bombers on Amtrak, which pulls into two of the biggest commuter train depots in the country: Penn Station and Union Station.

Asked after the London bombings if the fed-run trains were safe, White House terror czar Fran Townsend claimed: "They're safer than they were after 9/11, they're safer after the Madrid bombings ... It's a lot safer."

What a crock. Not only is there no passenger profiling on Amtrak, there's no bag screening -- even after Madrid. The only restrictions on bags are a 50-pound weight limit, and that's no comfort at all. The London bombers used plastic explosives weighing less than 50 pounds.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and his Muslim-sensitive civil-rights team act as a bulwark against profiling at airports and train stations. One of Mineta's top aides is the son of a Wahhabi mosque leader who raised money for Osama bin Laden's No. 2 in Santa Clara, Calif.

So don't hold your breath for any policy changes there -- even if, as experts predict, as many as 20,000 casualties result from London-type bombs detonated in the New York MTA.

And that's not the only al-Qaida threat to mass transit that authorities are worried about. According to a closely held DHS security advisory I obtained, the "terrorists have designed a crude chemical dispersal device fabricated from commonly available materials, which is designed to asphyxiate its victims."

"The device produces cyanogens chloride (CLCN) gas and/or hydrogen cyanide (HCN) gas," continues the five-page document, first issued Nov. 21, 2003. "These gases are most effective when released in confined spaces such as subways."

And they are extremely deadly, experts say.

By not allowing police to profile the most suspicious train passengers, Bloomberg, Mineta and other leaders are not only unnecessarily inconveniencing millions of commuters, but unwittingly giving Muslim terrorists political cover to carry out their plans. Call it politically correct suicide.

Power Line writes:

Apparently lots of London Muslims think it's odd that people are looking at them funny:
[A spokesman for the Council] said in the current atmosphere Muslims were very afraid and other people were looking at them in a very suspicious manner.

Gosh, why would that be? Maybe I'm being unfair here, but it seems to me that a great many Muslims are refusing to face reality. For their sake as well as everyone else's, they need to get serious about helping the authorities root out terrorism, in England and elsewhere.


July 17, 2005


Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die

Donald B. Hawthorne

Nothing is more unjust to the working families and retirees of America than to over-pay for under-performance. In other words, not to get fair value for our hard-earned monies.

It is in that context where this blogsite has been appropriately critical of both public sector unions and private sector unions. Follow all the links at the bottom of postings here and here for concrete examples. In some of the latter postings, the imbecilic actions of certain management teams have also been criticized.

No less of a problem in our society are the corporate welfare queens who exist like parasites living off their manipulation of a bloated federal government, thereby reducing many Americans' standard of living through hidden and completely unnecessary taxes.

The article entitled Sugar Daddies: How sugar interests rip off America and harm the national interest provides a classic example of a corporate welfare queen:

In a hall of fame for corporate-welfare queens, the sugar industry would occupy a place of special honor. For decades, powerful sugar growers have gotten politicians to enrich them with a protectionist scheme that inflates domestic sugar prices to the detriment of American consumers, American manufacturers, American farmers, and the American economy as a whole...

The program allows sugar processors to take out loans from the USDA by pledging sugar as collateral. The loan rates - 18 cents per pound for cane sugar, 22.9 cents per pound for beet sugar - are significantly higher than average world sugar prices. These loans must be repaid within nine months, but processors also have the option of forfeiting their sugar to the government in lieu of repaying their debt.

This arrangement effectively guarantees that the processors receive a price for their sugar that is no lower than the loan value: If prices fell below that level, they would simply forfeit their sugar and keep the government's money. In order to avoid that scenario, the USDA must prop up the domestic price of sugar. It does this by controlling supply through two mechanisms. First, it sets quotas on how much foreign sugar can be imported without facing prohibitive tariffs; second, it regulates the amount of sugar that domestic processors can sell.

The consequence is that sugar in the U.S. has, over the past decade, cost two to three times the average world price. The sugar industry likes to point out that the program requires no government outlays, since processors repay their loans each year (assuming the government keeps sugar prices sufficiently high). This argument is sound if one regards the sugar program as a question of federal bookkeeping, but that is only because, in this case, the government does an uncharacteristically efficient job of plundering taxpayers to pay off a special interest: It simply cuts itself out as middleman. Each time you buy sugar or a product made with sugar, the difference between the price you pay and the lower price you would pay absent the sugar program's dirigisme can be thought of as a sugar tax. Unlike most taxes, this tax never finds its way to government accounts. Instead, it passes directly from your pocket to the sugar industry's profit statements.

A GAO study found that, between 1989 and 1991, the sugar tax cost American consumers an average of $1.4 billion per year. By 1998, that number had risen to $1.9 billion. Other costs are borne by manufacturers who use sugar as an input. Faced with high domestic prices, some confectioners have moved to countries without sugar price supports, such as Canada. Others have simply shut down...Without the program, resources currently devoted to sugar production would shift to more efficient sectors of the economy and create new jobs.

The sugar program is a case study in how small, concentrated interests can trump larger but more diffuse ones. By any measure, the U.S. sugar industry is minuscule. It employs only 62,000 people and comprises less than 0.5 percent of U.S. farms. But because it profits so richly from the current protectionist scheme, it has a powerful incentive to keep that scheme in place.

It does so by donating extravagantly to political candidates. One lobbyist who works with trade issues says, "[The sugar industry] is collecting monopoly rents. Any industry in a position of collecting monopoly rents will spend back a significant portion of those rents to maintain those monopolies." Although sugar accounts for just 1 percent of U.S. farm receipts, 17 percent of all campaign contributions from the agricultural sector between 1990 and 2004 came from the sugar lobby.

Perhaps no political investment has brought a higher return. The GAO report found that sugar producers gain around $1 billion a year from the artificially high prices that the sugar program guarantees. Some growers have gotten exceedingly rich...

Nowhere does the sugar lobby pursue its interests more ferociously than in debates on free trade. Having successfully lobbied the Bush administration to exclude sugar from the recently ratified free-trade agreement with Australia, sugar producers are now determined to kill the Central American Free Trade Agreement, on which Congress will vote sometime this summer.

CAFTA, which would eliminate most trade barriers between the U.S. and Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, is, if anything, embarrassingly deferential toward the sugar lobby. After its full implementation over a 15-year period, it would allow participating states to increase their sugar exports to the U.S. by only 1.7 percent of current U.S. sugar production. The sugar industry is nevertheless intransigently opposed to the pact, and has rejected every suggested compromise.

If the sugar lobby derails CAFTA, its success will, once again, represent the triumph of the few at the expense of the many. CAFTA would bring modest but not insignificant economic gains to both the U.S. and Central America. Perhaps more important, it would advance efforts to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas, and would strengthen the Central American middle class while making the economic and legal systems of participating states more open and transparent...

It is deeply exasperating that a tiny sector on which CAFTA's effect would be almost negligible is within striking distance of scuttling the agreement. The obstinacy of sugar producers looks especially unreasonable when one considers that protectionism has increased their share of the domestic market from 55 percent in the late 1970s to 89 percent in 2002, and when one notes that population growth over the next decade is likely to increase demand for sugar, thereby offsetting any lost income to the industry...

...The United States has no reason to grow sugar, and every reason not to. It is a simple question of comparative advantage, as Dennis Avery, a former agriculture analyst for the Department of State, explains: "Yields of sugar in the tropics are twice as high and the costs half as high as growing sugar in temperate regions." The U.S. sugar program thus defies both nature and economics; in guaranteeing an artificially high price for sugar, it encourages American farmers to plant sugar instead of crops they could grow more efficiently. Ending the domestic sugar program would require them to switch to the crops they should have been growing all along.

While liberalizing world farm trade would probably put a stop to domestic sugar production, it would also, according to Avery, mean that U.S. farmers who now grow sugar beets...could sell wheat to China and India, and make far more money than they do from this sugar...Cane growers in Florida and Louisiana would have a somewhat harder time of it, since little else could grow on their lands...Smaller farmers could be compensated for their loss, and their transition eased by a gradual phase-out of the sugar program.

The benefits of ending domestic sugar production would not be merely economic; Avery sees liberalized farm trade as...both the leading environmental issue and the leading trade issue in the world...Given long-term population trends, countries will have to specialize in crops for which they have a comparative advantage...or else undertake policies with disastrous environmental consequences...

...domestic producers will not acquiesce in the removal of their government-mandated profit margins...

The real test will come in 2007, when the next farm bill is negotiated. Reformers should seek nothing less than the total dismantling of the sugar program...

These sweetheart deals - that benefit a few to the detriment of the many - are economically wrong and morally wrong. They must end.

To conclude, ask yourself why such sweetheart deals like the one described above exist in the first place. The answer is part of a much broader issue, which was addressed in an indepth posting entitled A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest. I would encourage you to read that posting carefully.



Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die

Nothing is more unjust to the working families and retirees of America than to over-pay for under-performance. In other words, not to get fair value for our hard-earned monies.

It is in that context where this blogsite has been appropriately critical of both public sector unions and private sector unions. Follow all the links at the bottom of postings here and here for concrete examples. In some of the latter postings, the imbecilic actions of certain management teams have also been criticized.

No less of a problem in our society are the corporate welfare queens who exist like parasites living off their manipulation of a bloated federal government, thereby reducing many Americans' standard of living through hidden and completely unnecessary taxes.

The article entitled Sugar Daddies: How sugar interests rip off America and harm the national interest provides a classic example of a corporate welfare queen:

In a hall of fame for corporate-welfare queens, the sugar industry would occupy a place of special honor. For decades, powerful sugar growers have gotten politicians to enrich them with a protectionist scheme that inflates domestic sugar prices to the detriment of American consumers, American manufacturers, American farmers, and the American economy as a whole

The program allows sugar processors to take out loans from the USDA by pledging sugar as collateral. The loan rates 18 cents per pound for cane sugar, 22.9 cents per pound for beet sugar are significantly higher than average world sugar prices. These loans must be repaid within nine months, but processors also have the option of forfeiting their sugar to the government in lieu of repaying their debt.

This arrangement effectively guarantees that the processors receive a price for their sugar that is no lower than the loan value: If prices fell below that level, they would simply forfeit their sugar and keep the governments money. In order to avoid that scenario, the USDA must prop up the domestic price of sugar. It does this by controlling supply through two mechanisms. First, it sets quotas on how much foreign sugar can be imported without facing prohibitive tariffs; second, it regulates the amount of sugar that domestic processors can sell.

The consequence is that sugar in the U.S. has, over the past decade, cost two to three times the average world price. The sugar industry likes to point out that the program requires no government outlays, since processors repay their loans each year (assuming the government keeps sugar prices sufficiently high). This argument is sound if one regards the sugar program as a question of federal bookkeeping, but that is only because, in this case, the government does an uncharacteristically efficient job of plundering taxpayers to pay off a special interest: It simply cuts itself out as middleman. Each time you buy sugar or a product made with sugar, the difference between the price you pay and the lower price you would pay absent the sugar programs dirigisme can be thought of as a sugar tax. Unlike most taxes, this tax never finds its way to government accounts. Instead, it passes directly from your pocket to the sugar industrys profit statements.

A GAO study found that, between 1989 and 1991, the sugar tax cost American consumers an average of $1.4 billion per year. By 1998, that number had risen to $1.9 billion. Other costs are borne by manufacturers who use sugar as an input. Faced with high domestic prices, some confectioners have moved to countries without sugar price supports, such as Canada. Others have simply shut downWithout the program, resources currently devoted to sugar production would shift to more efficient sectors of the economy and create new jobs.

The sugar program is a case study in how small, concentrated interests can trump larger but more diffuse ones. By any measure, the U.S. sugar industry is minuscule. It employs only 62,000 people and comprises less than 0.5 percent of U.S. farms. But because it profits so richly from the current protectionist scheme, it has a powerful incentive to keep that scheme in place.

It does so by donating extravagantly to political candidates. One lobbyist who works with trade issues says, [The sugar industry] is collecting monopoly rents. Any industry in a position of collecting monopoly rents will spend back a significant portion of those rents to maintain those monopolies. Although sugar accounts for just 1 percent of U.S. farm receipts, 17 percent of all campaign contributions from the agricultural sector between 1990 and 2004 came from the sugar lobby.

Perhaps no political investment has brought a higher return. The GAO report found that sugar producers gain around $1 billion a year from the artificially high prices that the sugar program guarantees. Some growers have gotten exceedingly rich

Nowhere does the sugar lobby pursue its interests more ferociously than in debates on free trade. Having successfully lobbied the Bush administration to exclude sugar from the recently ratified free-trade agreement with Australia, sugar producers are now determined to kill the Central American Free Trade Agreement, on which Congress will vote sometime this summer.

CAFTA, which would eliminate most trade barriers between the U.S. and Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, is, if anything, embarrassingly deferential toward the sugar lobby. After its full implementation over a 15-year period, it would allow participating states to increase their sugar exports to the U.S. by only 1.7 percent of current U.S. sugar production. The sugar industry is nevertheless intransigently opposed to the pact, and has rejected every suggested compromise.

If the sugar lobby derails CAFTA, its success will, once again, represent the triumph of the few at the expense of the many. CAFTA would bring modest but not insignificant economic gains to both the U.S. and Central America. Perhaps more important, it would advance efforts to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas, and would strengthen the Central American middle class while making the economic and legal systems of participating states more open and transparent

It is deeply exasperating that a tiny sector on which CAFTAs effect would be almost negligible is within striking distance of scuttling the agreement. The obstinacy of sugar producers looks especially unreasonable when one considers that protectionism has increased their share of the domestic market from 55 percent in the late 1970s to 89 percent in 2002, and when one notes that population growth over the next decade is likely to increase demand for sugar, thereby offsetting any lost income to the industry

The United States has no reason to grow sugar, and every reason not to. It is a simple question of comparative advantage, as Dennis Avery, a former agriculture analyst for the Department of State, explains: Yields of sugar in the tropics are twice as high and the costs half as high as growing sugar in temperate regions. The U.S. sugar program thus defies both nature and economics; in guaranteeing an artificially high price for sugar, it encourages American farmers to plant sugar instead of crops they could grow more efficiently. Ending the domestic sugar program would require them to switch to the crops they should have been growing all along.

While liberalizing world farm trade would probably put a stop to domestic sugar production, it would also, according to Avery, mean that U.S. farmers who now grow sugar beets could sell wheat to China and India, and make far more money than they do from this sugar. Cane growers in Florida and Louisiana would have a somewhat harder time of it, since little else could grow on their landsSmaller farmers could be compensated for their loss, and their transition eased by a gradual phase-out of the sugar program.

The benefits of ending domestic sugar production would not be merely economic; Avery sees liberalized farm trade as both the leading environmental issue and the leading trade issue in the world. Given long-term population trends, countries will have to specialize in crops for which they have a comparative advantage or else undertake policies with disastrous environmental consequences

domestic producers will not acquiesce in the removal of their government-mandated profit margins

The real test will come in 2007, when the next farm bill is negotiated. Reformers should seek nothing less than the total dismantling of the sugar program

These sweetheart deals - that benefit a few to the detriment of the many - are economically wrong and morally wrong. They must end.

To conclude, ask yourself why such sweetheart deals like the one described above exist in the first place. The answer is part of a much broader issue, which was addressed in an indepth posting entitled A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest. I would encourage you to read that posting carefully.



It Won't Work

I am the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers. Dad was active and outspoken in the civil rights movement in the 1960's, a truly noble cause that rightfully sought to extend the principles of America to all citizens.

In contrast, an article entitled Labor and Religion Reunite: The AFL-CIO is sending forth seminary students to shore up the waning clout of unions by reviving the connection with a traditional ally highlights a pale imitation of that historical effort in what is nothing more than a phony attempt to pretty up the self-interest of labor unions and masquerade it as a noble cause:

The office manager pressed forward, glowering, his muscles straining the seams of his pinstriped suit. "I'm asking you to step outside," he said.

The nine men and women who had taken over the lobby of AlliedBarton Security Services did not budge.

Rabbinical student clasped hands with Islamic scholar and Methodist seminarian. Heads bowed, eyes closed, they sang "Amazing Grace." And prayed that the security guards employed here would join the Service Employees International Union.

Struggling to regain power and prestige for the sagging labor movement, the AFL-CIO has hired more than three dozen aspiring ministers, imams, priests and rabbis to spread the gospel of union organizing across the nation this summer.

The program seeks to recreate the historic partnership between faith and labor, an alliance that for nearly a century gave union leaders an aura of moral authority and their cause the stamp of divine righteousness.

As it prepares for a national convention next week in Chicago, the AFL-CIO faces stark challenges: Less than 8% of private-sector workers belong to unions, compared with more than 35% in the 1950s...

Labor leaders are responding with programs to overhaul their image. They want unions to be seen as a dynamic force for social justice, not as a stodgy special interest.

That's where the seminary students come in.

For $300 a week, they're organizing security guards in metropolitan Washington, carpenters in Boston, hotel maids in Chicago, meatpackers in Los Angeles. Some spend their days with the workers, trying to give them courage to mobilize. Others visit local congregations to urge solidarity with the union cause...

Most of the interns can readily quote the religious text that moved them to apply for the labor internship, which is cosponsored by Interfaith Worker Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group...

Historically, religious leaders have been among labor's most steadfast partners...

...the AFL-CIO hopes will spring from the internships, which have been in place for six summers. If quoting the Bible can persuade a fearful maid to join the union, great. But the real goal is to inspire a generation of pastors to put economic justice and, in particular, union-building at the center of their ministry...

The last paragraph defines the key underlying assumption in this effort: It could only work if there was a tangible link between economic justice and union-building.

But, while there will always be some examples of inappropriate management behavior in a sinful world, most people realize this is no longer the 1930's when labor unions served a valuable role in our society.

Now, the labor unions are just another big business albeit with one important difference: They add no economic value and only serve to raise costs, putting certain companies at risk of becoming uncompetitive in an increasingly competitive global economy. That is a strategy for job losses and the reduction in many people's standard of living over time.

Happy talk aside, it won't work. And it won't because either you deal with economic reality or it will deal with you - on its own terms.

Continue reading "It Won't Work"

July 10, 2005


Paycheck Protection: Allowing You to Keep Your Own Hard-Earned Monies

What would you say if someone forcibly took a portion of your hard-earned monies and spent it on political actions that violated your personal beliefs? You would say you belonged to an American labor union.

Building on this previous posting entitled Now Here is a Good Idea, a new editorial entitled Big Labor Taking a Beating notes:

...They call it a perfect storma confluence of events creating a crisis of major proportionsand organized labor may have one on its hands...

There is good reason for labors concern: union membership is in a 50-year tailspin. In 1952, 36 percent of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today, that figure is less than 8 percent. Unions are failing to organize those entering the workforce, which is perhaps the most important age group for its future survival. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 4.7 percent of workers between the ages of 16 and 24 belonged to a union in 2004, down from 5.2 percent in 2002.

Unions are so desperate for members they are attempting to organize unique sectors of the workforce such as babysitters and Ivy League student teaching assistants. As a sign of labors shrinking power, the AFL-CIO is tightening its belt, laying off over 160 employees (about 40 percent of its staff) in May.

And then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called for a special election in California this November...

Lew Uhler of the Coalition for Employee Rights may become the common enemy against which labor leaders can rally. He is sponsoring an initiative on Californias ballot that would require public employee unions to get permission from individual members before using dues for politicsa measure known as "paycheck protection."

Labor organizations annually dump tens of millions of dollars into state and national politics. Unfortunately, workers often have no say in how the money is to be used. While paycheck protection does not take away a unions right to spend dues on politics, it does something almost as bad in the eyes of union officials: it requires the union to get a members written permission before using his or her dues for political activity.

The first paycheck protection law was adopted by Washington state in 1992. Since then, five other states have enacted various forms of the law. The measure is based on the common sense idea that no one should be forced to support political causes against his or her will.

By qualifying for the California ballot, this measureonce known only to policy wonks and a few union memberswill be given a national platform and a compelling spokesman, should Schwarzenegger decide to endorse the initiative.

This worries union officials because they know that workers, when given a choice, overwhelmingly refuse to support union political activity.

After Washington state passed paycheck protection, contributions to the Washington Education Association political committee dropped from over 80 percent of teachers down to 6 percent. Utah adopted paycheck protection in 2001 and now nearly 95 percent of Utah Education Association members refuse to contribute to the unions political fund.

Workers refuse to support their unions politicking because the spending is usually at odds with individual member preferences. For example, although at least 30 percent of California Teachers Association members are Republican, the CTA just approved a $60 per-member dues increase in order to raise $50 million to fight paycheck protection and a Republican governors education proposals.

This spending discrepancy is consistent with a national trend. The AFL-CIO and affiliate SEIU spent a combined $100 million to mobilize union household voters against President Bush in 2004, but surveys indicate that at least one-third of union voters cast their vote for Bush in the last election.

Forcing a politically diverse workforce to fund organized labors single-party devotion is fundamentally unfair. Paycheck protection is a common sense measure that requires unions to raise political capital one individual at a timejust like any other political playerbut union officials can be expected to fight the encroachment on their monopoly over California public employees for all theyre worth.

A storm is brewing, given the unrest within organized labors leadership and the dissatisfaction among rank-and-file members.

It may be time for Big Labor to invest in umbrellas.

Indeed it is. It is only fair and just that unions not be able to unilaterally take people's hard-earned monies against their will.

Here are two more related postings entitled Learning More About How Dues Paid To Big Labor Are Spent and Pension Fund Politics: How the AFL-CIO Violates Its Fiduciary Responsibilities.

In summary, think about it: You earned the money. It's your money. You deserve to spend it the way you want to spend it. What could be more American than that?

And that is exactly the point of Paycheck Protection.


July 4, 2005


Economics 101: Never Underestimate the Incentive Power of Marginal Tax Cuts

In the June 13 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore wrote an editorial entitled Real Tax Cuts Have Curves (available for a fee):

...The Laffer Curve helped launch the Reaganomics Revolution here at home and a frenzy of tax rate cutting around the globe that continues to this day.

The theory is really one of the simplest concepts in economics. Yet its logic continues to elude the class-warfare lobby whose disbelief is unburdened by the multiple real-life examples which validate its conclusions. The idea is that lowering the tax rate on production, work, investment, and risk-taking will spur more of these activities and thereby will often lead to more tax revenue collections for the government rather than less.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan chopped the highest personal income tax rate from the confiscatory 70% rate that he inherited when he entered office to 28% when he left office and the resulting economic burst caused federal tax receipts to almost precisely double: from $517 billion to $1,032 billion. [Remember these numbers the next time someone tries to tell you the deficits under Reaganomics were a revenue problem and not a spending a problem!]

Now we have overpowering confirming evidence from the Bush tax cuts of May 2003. The jewel of the Bush economic plan was the reduction in tax rates on dividends from 39.6% to 15% and on capital gains from 20% to 15%. These sharp cuts in the double tax on capital investment were intended to reverse the 2000-01 stock market crash, which had liquidated some $6 trillion in American household wealth, and to inspire a revival in business capital investment, which had also collapsed during the recession. The tax cuts were narrowly enacted despite the usual indignant primal screams from the greed and envy lobby about "tax cuts for the super rich."

Last week the Congressional Budget Office released its latest report on tax revenue collections. The numbers are an eye-popping vindication of the Laffer Curve and the Bush tax cut's real economic value. Federal tax revenues have surged in the first eight months of this fiscal year by $187 billion. This represents a 15.4% rise in federal tax receipts over 2004. Individual and corporate income tax receipts have exploded like a cap let off a geyser, up 30% in the two years since the tax cut. Once again, tax rate cuts have created a virtuous chain reaction of higher economic growth, more jobs, higher corporate profits, and finally more tax receipts.

This Laffer Curve effect has also created a revenue windfall for states and cities. As the economic expansion has plowed forward, and in some regions of the country accelerated, state tax receipts have climbed 7.5% this year already...Many of President Bush's critics foolishly predicted that states and localities would be victims of the Bush tax cut gamble.

Alas, all of the fiscal news is not celebratory. The CBO also reports that federal expenditures are up $110 billion, or 7.2%, so far this year as the congressional Republican spending spree rolls on. Nonetheless, it now appears that the budget deficit will be at least $60 billion lower than last year and states and cities, led by California, which a few years ago were awash in debt themselves, will enjoy net surpluses of at least $50 billion. This means that total government borrowing will come in at below 2.5% of national output, which is hardly a crisis level of debt...

On the private-sector side of the ledger, what we are now witnessing is a broad-based investment boom. The lower capital gains and dividends taxes have been capitalized into higher stock values, and that in part explains why the Dow is up 24% since May of 2003 while the Nasdaq has risen 39%. Dan Clifton of the American Shareholder Association estimates that this rise in stock values has translated into roughly $3 trillion in added wealth holdings of American households. The severe slump in business capital spending in 2001 and 2002 has now taken the shape of a U-turn, with spending on capital purchases up an enormous 22% since 2003. Because higher wages and new job creation are highly dependent on business capital investment, the mislabeled "Bush tax cut for the rich" has in reality enormously benefited middle-income workers.

...Thanks to inane budget rules in Congress the capital gains and dividend tax cuts are currently set to expire in 2008. (When was the last time a spending program in Washington expired?) One thing would seem certain: Raising the tax rates on capital gains and dividends would be a formula for choking off the expansion and reversing the stock market climb. Until now, the Democrats in Congress have in unison sanctimoniously charged that the government can't afford the price tag of making the tax cut permanent. But, of course, all this new fiscal evidence points to precisely the opposite conclusion: that we can't afford not to make the tax cuts permanent.

Whether Mr. Bush's critics' ideological blinders make them capable of being persuaded by facts and evidence is an altogether different issue.

If you want even more empirical data, read this excellent article by Arthur Laffer, in which he presents historical data on the effects of marginal tax cuts from the Harding-Coolidge (1920's), Kennedy (1960's) and Reagan (1980's) eras - which also turn out to be the three times of greatest economic growth in the last 100 years. In the article, Laffer explains the drivers which provide the underlying logic for the Curve:

The Laffer Curve illustrates the basic idea that changes in tax rates have two effects on tax revenues: the arithmetic effect and the economic effect. The arithmetic effect is simply that if tax rates are lowered, tax revenues (per dollar of tax base) will be lowered by the amount of the decrease in the rate. The reverse is true for an increase in tax rates. The economic effect, however, recognizes the positive impact that lower tax rates have on work, output, and employment--and thereby the tax base--by providing incentives to increase these activities. Raising tax rates has the opposite economic effect by penalizing participation in the taxed activities. The arithmetic effect always works in the opposite direction from the economic effect. Therefore, when the economic and the arithmetic effects of tax-rate changes are combined, the consequences of the change in tax rates on total tax revenues are no longer quite so obvious.

It is important to note that, in evaluating the effects of tax cuts, many opponents of such cuts (including the "pay as you go" budget deficit hawks as well as the methodology used by the Congressional Budget Office) only present a calculation of the arithmetic effect - called a "static analysis" - thereby assigning a zero value to the economic effect. Yet the empirical data from the three eras of tax cuts clearly show the error of that approach. That is why it is crucial that a "dynamic scoring" methodology be used, incorporating both arithmetic and economic effects. It is no less important to note that cash refunds from government, which do not change marginal tax rates, will have no lasting economic effect because they create no incentive to change human behavior and create new economic value.

Never underestimate the incentive power of marginal tax cuts. It's Economics 101, after all.



Happy Birthday, America!

In celebration of America's birthday, here are excerpted gems from previous postings about our beloved country - brought together in one posting:

President Calvin Coolidge gave a powerful speech in 1926 on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If you want to rediscover some of the majesty of the principles underlying our Founding, read Coolidge's entire speech. Here are some key excerpts:

There is something beyond the establishment of a new nation, great as that event would be, in the Declaration of Independence which has ever since caused it to be regarded as one of the great charters that not only was to liberate America but was everywhere to ennoble humanity.

It was not because it proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history...

...Three very definite propositions were set out in [the Declaration's] preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed...

While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination...

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world...

...when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live...

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignity, the rights of man - these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions...Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776..that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final...If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people...

In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people...The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guarantees, which even the government itself is bound not to violate. If there is any one thing among us that is established beyond question, it is self-government -- the right of the people to rule. If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because there is a failure on the part of individuals to observe them. We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction...The ultimate sanction of law rests on the righteous authority of the Almighty...

...We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all of our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it...We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed...

This Power Line posting elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American creed:

Knowledge of American history holds the key to much of the current discussion of political issues, such as the ongoing liberal attack on Christian belief and on arguments premised on belief in God...Absent knowledge of American history, one would never know that the United States is founded on the basis of a creed, rather than on tribal or blood lines, in which God plays a prominent part. Absent knowledge of history generally, one would never know that this fact makes America unique.

What is the American creed?...The American creed is expressed with inspired concision in the words of the Declaration of Independence...

But does the Declaration have any legal status such that these words can be truly deemed to state the American creed? It does, although virtually no one seems to know it. In 1878 Congress enacted a revised version of the United States Code that included a new first section entitled "The Organic Laws of the United States."

The Code is Congress's official compilation of federal law; the organic laws of the United States are America's founding laws. First and foremost of the four organic laws of the United States is the Declaration of Independence...

Professor Jaffa [of the Claremont Institute] teaches us that the Declaration contains four distinct references to God: He is the author of the "laws of...God"; the "Creator" who "endowed" us with our inalienable rights; "the Supreme Judge of the world"; and "Divine Providence." Americans declared their independence, "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions."

The Declaration states the American creed, the creed that recognizes the source (Nature and Nature's God) of our rights.

Anchor Rising's own Mac Owens gave a speech entitled Limited Government to Protect Equal Rights, published on this blog site, which elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American Experiment:

Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest - the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must."...

The United States was founded on different principles - justice and equality...It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality...Thanks to the Founders, the United States was founded on a principle of justice, not the interest of the stronger. And because of Lincoln's uncompromising commitment to equality as America's "central idea," the Union was not only saved, but saved so "as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of saving..."

"Every nation," said Lincoln, "has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate." For Lincoln, this central idea was the Declaration of Independence and its notion of equality as the basis for republican government - the simple idea that no one has the right by nature to rule over another without the latter's consent...

Indeed, it is the idea of equality in the Declaration, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood, constituting what Abraham Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land..."

The United States is a fundamentally decent regime based on the universal principle that all human beings are equal in terms of their natural rights...

...the only purpose of government is to protect the equal natural rights of individual citizens. These rights inhere in individuals, not groups, and are antecedent to the creation of government...

Roger Pilon wrote the following in a 2002 Cato Institute booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution:

Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.

But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision the method by which we justify our political order liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract its principles rooted in "right reason" the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Dr. Pilon concluded his essay by writing:

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

The powerful words from and about our Founding appeal to timeless moral principles grounded in both our Declaration of Independence and the great moral traditions that preceded our Founding. It is these principles that make America unique and inspire us to be proud, engaged citizens who are vigilant stewards of freedom and opportunity for all Americans.

Happy Birthday, America!



Happy Birthday, America!

Donald B. Hawthorne

In celebration of America's birthday, here are excerpted gems from previous postings about our beloved country - brought together in one posting:

President Calvin Coolidge gave a powerful speech in 1926 on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If you want to rediscover some of the majesty of the principles underlying our Founding, read Coolidge's entire speech. Here are some key excerpts:

There is something beyond the establishment of a new nation, great as that event would be, in the Declaration of Independence which has ever since caused it to be regarded as one of the great charters that not only was to liberate America but was everywhere to ennoble humanity.

It was not because it proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history...

...Three very definite propositions were set out in [the Declaration's] preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed...

While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination...

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world...

...when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live...

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignity, the rights of man - these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions...Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776..that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final...If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people...

In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people...The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guarantees, which even the government itself is bound not to violate. If there is any one thing among us that is established beyond question, it is self-government -- the right of the people to rule. If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because there is a failure on the part of individuals to observe them. We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction...The ultimate sanction of law rests on the righteous authority of the Almighty...

...We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all of our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it...We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed...

This Power Line posting elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American creed:

Knowledge of American history holds the key to much of the current discussion of political issues, such as the ongoing liberal attack on Christian belief and on arguments premised on belief in God...Absent knowledge of American history, one would never know that the United States is founded on the basis of a creed, rather than on tribal or blood lines, in which God plays a prominent part. Absent knowledge of history generally, one would never know that this fact makes America unique.

What is the American creed?...The American creed is expressed with inspired concision in the words of the Declaration of Independence...

But does the Declaration have any legal status such that these words can be truly deemed to state the American creed? It does, although virtually no one seems to know it. In 1878 Congress enacted a revised version of the United States Code that included a new first section entitled "The Organic Laws of the United States."

The Code is Congress's official compilation of federal law; the organic laws of the United States are America's founding laws. First and foremost of the four organic laws of the United States is the Declaration of Independence...

Professor Jaffa [of the Claremont Institute] teaches us that the Declaration contains four distinct references to God: He is the author of the "laws of...God"; the "Creator" who "endowed" us with our inalienable rights; "the Supreme Judge of the world"; and "Divine Providence." Americans declared their independence, "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions."

The Declaration states the American creed, the creed that recognizes the source (Nature and Nature's God) of our rights.

Anchor Rising's own Mac Owens gave a speech entitled Limited Government to Protect Equal Rights, published on this blog site, which elaborates further on the uniqueness of the American Experiment:

Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest - the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must."...

The United States was founded on different principles - justice and equality...It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality...Thanks to the Founders, the United States was founded on a principle of justice, not the interest of the stronger. And because of Lincoln's uncompromising commitment to equality as America's "central idea," the Union was not only saved, but saved so "as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of saving..."

"Every nation," said Lincoln, "has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate." For Lincoln, this central idea was the Declaration of Independence and its notion of equality as the basis for republican government - the simple idea that no one has the right by nature to rule over another without the latter's consent...

Indeed, it is the idea of equality in the Declaration, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood, constituting what Abraham Lincoln called "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land..."

The United States is a fundamentally decent regime based on the universal principle that all human beings are equal in terms of their natural rights...

...the only purpose of government is to protect the equal natural rights of individual citizens. These rights inhere in individuals, not groups, and are antecedent to the creation of government...

Roger Pilon wrote the following in a 2002 Cato Institute booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution:

Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.

But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision...the method by which we justify our political order...liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

...that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government - indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish...to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights...provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract...its principles rooted in "right reason"...the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Dr. Pilon concluded his essay by writing:

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

The powerful words from and about our Founding appeal to timeless moral principles grounded in both our Declaration of Independence and the great moral traditions that preceded our Founding. It is these principles that make America unique and inspire us to be proud, engaged citizens who are vigilant stewards of freedom and opportunity for all Americans.

Happy Birthday, America!


July 2, 2005


A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest

Donald B. Hawthorne

In the book entitled Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice, Arthur Seldon writes:

Many economics writers and teachers still present economic systems of exchange between private individuals or firms as "imperfect" and requiring "correction" by government. Most teachers of politics, politicians, and political journalists still present government as well-meaning and able to remove such "imperfections."

In spite of this view of government, Seldon notes:

Economic systems based on exchange between individuals and on selling and buying between firms usually correct themselves in time if they are free to adapt themselves to changing conditions of supply and demand. Government "cures" usually do more harm than good in the long run because of three stubborn and too-long neglected excesses of government: their "cures" are begun too soon, they do too much, and they are continued for too long.

So, the question arises regarding whether American citizens should continue to assume the actions of government are well-meaning and focused primarily on the public interest. The answer is no.

Why this claim? Just think about it. Most American citizens have personal stories about how various public sector players (politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and other parties with an economic stake in government actions like corporations and unions) act in their own self interest and not in the public interest. In fact, the bottom of this posting contains numerous previous postings which provide examples of such behavior.

The balance of this posting will elaborate on public choice theory, which explains why we cannot assume government is either well-meaning or focused primarily on the public interest. The posting then concludes with specific recommendations in a Call to Action.

Gordon Tullock, writing in the same book, explains the evolution of public choice theory:

Public choice is a scientific analysis of government behavior and, in particular, the behavior of individuals with respect to government. Strictly speaking, it has no policy implications...

Until the days of Adam Smith, most social discussion was essentially moral...

David Hume was the first to make significant cracks in this monolithic approach. He took the rather obvious view that most people pursued their own interest in their behavior rather than a broadly based public interest...Adam Smith developed modern economics by assuming that individuals were very largely self-interested and by working out the consequences of that assumption in the realm of economics...

From the time of Plato...[t]here was no formal theory of how government works outside such moral and ethical foundations.

Throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century, economists assumed that individuals were primarily concerned with their own interest and worked out the consequences of that assumption. In contrast, during this same period political science largely assumed that political actors are mainly concerned with the public interest. Thus individuals who enter a supermarket and purchase items of their choice are assumed, when they enter the voting booth, to vote not for the politicians and laws that will benefit themselves, but for politicians and laws that will benefit the nation as a whole. People in the supermarket mainly buy the food and other goods that are, granted the price, found to benefit themselves and their families. However, when individuals become politicians, a transformation is assumed to occur so that a broader perspective guides them to make morally correct decisions rather than follow the course of behavior that pleases the interest groups that supported them or the policies that may lead to reelection.

Economists changed this bifurcated view of human behavior by developing the theory of public choice...

This bifurcation of the individual psyche is particularly impressive when it is remembered that the economic system based upon self-interest assumptions can be demonstrated to produce a result not totally out of accord with the classical ideas of the public interest...

We must accept that in government, as in any form of commerce, people will pursue their private interests, and they will achieve goals reasonably closely related to those of company stockholders or of citizens only if it is in their private interest to do so. The primacy of private interest is not inconsistent with the observation that most people, in addition to pursuing their private interests, have some charitable instincts, some tendency to help others and to engage in various morally correct activities.

However, the evidence seems fairly strong that motives other than the pursuit of private interests are not ones on which we can depend for the achievement of long-continued efficient performance...

Continue reading "A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest"


A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest

In the book entitled Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice, Arthur Seldon writes:

Many economics writers and teachers still present economic systems of exchange between private individuals or firms as "imperfect" and requiring "correction" by government. Most teachers of politics, politicians, and political journalists still present government as well-meaning and able to remove such "imperfections."

In spite of this view of government, Seldon notes:

Economic systems based on exchange between individuals and on selling and buying between firms usually correct themselves in time if they are free to adapt themselves to changing conditions of supply and demand. Government "cures" usually do more harm than good in the long run because of three stubborn and too-long neglected excesses of government: their "cures" are begun too soon, they do too much, and they are continued for too long.

So, the question arises regarding whether American citizens should continue to assume the actions of government are well-meaning and focused primarily on the public interest. The answer is no.

Why this claim? Just think about it. Most American citizens have personal stories about how various public sector players (politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and other parties with an economic stake in government actions like corporations and unions) act in their own self interest and not in the public interest. In fact, the bottom of this posting contains numerous previous postings which provide examples of such behavior.

The balance of this posting will elaborate on public choice theory, which explains why we cannot assume government is either well-meaning or focused primarily on the public interest. The posting then concludes with specific recommendations in a Call to Action.

Gordon Tullock, writing in the same book, explains the evolution of public choice theory:

Public choice is a scientific analysis of government behavior and, in particular, the behavior of individuals with respect to government. Strictly speaking, it has no policy implications...

Until the days of Adam Smith, most social discussion was essentially moral...

David Hume was the first to make significant cracks in this monolithic approach. He took the rather obvious view that most people pursued their own interest in their behavior rather than a broadly based public interest...Adam Smith developed modern economics by assuming that individuals were very largely self-interested and by working out the consequences of that assumption in the realm of economics...

From the time of Plato...[t]here was no formal theory of how government works outside such moral and ethical foundations.

Throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century, economists assumed that individuals were primarily concerned with their own interest and worked out the consequences of that assumption. In contrast, during this same period political science largely assumed that political actors are mainly concerned with the public interest. Thus individuals who enter a supermarket and purchase items of their choice are assumed, when they enter the voting booth, to vote not for the politicians and laws that will benefit themselves, but for politicians and laws that will benefit the nation as a whole. People in the supermarket mainly buy the food and other goods that are, granted the price, found to benefit themselves and their families. However, when individuals become politicians, a transformation is assumed to occur so that a broader perspective guides them to make morally correct decisions rather than follow the course of behavior that pleases the interest groups that supported them or the policies that may lead to reelection.

Economists changed this bifurcated view of human behavior by developing the theory of public choice...

This bifurcation of the individual psyche is particularly impressive when it is remembered that the economic system based upon self-interest assumptions can be demonstrated to produce a result not totally out of accord with the classical ideas of the public interest...

We must accept that in government, as in any form of commerce, people will pursue their private interests, and they will achieve goals reasonably closely related to those of company stockholders or of citizens only if it is in their private interest to do so. The primacy of private interest is not inconsistent with the observation that most people, in addition to pursuing their private interests, have some charitable instincts, some tendency to help others and to engage in various morally correct activities.

However, the evidence seems fairly strong that motives other than the pursuit of private interests are not ones on which we can depend for the achievement of long-continued efficient performance...

Continue reading "A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest"


How Government Makes Us Pay Higher Gasoline Prices

Kimberley Strassel wrote an editorial last week in the Wall Street Journal entitled Another Reason to Love Wal-Mart (available for a fee). In that editorial, she provides another example of how misguided government behavior is forcing many working families and retirees across America to pay unnecessarily higher gasoline prices:

The Senate passed its energy bill yesterday, and is already peddling the fiction that this uninspired bit of legislation may somehow help with soaring gas prices. Yet if drivers really care about getting some immediate relief at the pump, they'd be better off putting some heat on their own state legislatures to back away from a class of anticompetitive laws that are jacking up gas prices around the country.

Known as "sales-below-cost" laws, these restrictions take different forms but all have the same purpose: to protect smaller gas stations from larger competitors who are willing to sell fuel at cut-rate prices. Some of these laws forbid retailers from selling gas below cost, while others actually force companies to mark up their prices. Many were passed back in the 1930s, relics of a bygone era when governments fretted that gas behemoths would use predatory pricing to gain a monopoly and drive out competitors. That threat, we now know, was never very likely, and in the meantime the laws have accomplished the exact opposite -- blocking new entrants to the market and preventing pro-competitive price-cutting.

The only big bad gas giants these days are the Wal-Marts and Costcos of the world, who see gasoline sales as a natural extension to their one-stop shopping philosophy. These giant retailers, while still less than 10% of the gasoline market, are ramping up gas sales in a huge way, and often can sell their fuel at up to 15 cents a gallon cheaper than many competitors. That's because they can often buy their product in bulk at a better price, or can make up for cheaper gasoline sales with profits from other products inside their stores.

But their growth has also inspired a backlash from mom-and-pop retailers and convenience stores, all of which have turned to below-cost laws as their preferred political tool for kneecapping this new competition. Some 13 states currently have below-cost laws, from Massachusetts to Alabama to Utah, and in recent years, with gas prices and drivers' tempers rising, sensible legislators had contemplated repealing the antiques. In response, the independent gas retailer lobby has geared up and made the retention and vigorous enforcement of the laws their No. 1 priority...

....A favorite argument of these smaller businesses is that the law is still necessary in order to ward off nefarious antitrust behavior...

This argument gets to the heart of the flawed logic that motivated the original passage of below-cost laws. Antitrust law, as any good economist will tell you, exists to protect consumers. As such, below-cost pricing isn't on its own an antitrust threat. It is only considered a problem if there is a reasonable likelihood that the company engaged in lower pricing is likely to become a monopoly, which would then allow that firm to later raise prices to supracompetitive levels that would harm consumers.

Over the years, economic research, legal studies and court cases have all found that below-cost pricing hardly ever leads to a monopoly, and that it is especially unlikely in the competitive market for motor fuels...

What antitrust is not about is protecting competitors from more efficient, or more aggressive companies. Yet that is clearly what laws like Wisconsin's are being used for, and nobody denies it. That's one reason why the Federal Trade Commission has felt compelled to wade into this debate, encouraging those states with below-cost laws on the books to get rid of them...

...As gas prices go up, this blatant protectionism will be all the more inexcusable.


July 1, 2005


Replacing O'Connor: Opening Arguments

Marc Comtois

With Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement, the summer and fall of 2005 promises to be one of partisan contention centered around who President Bush selects to be her replacement. Though, this does not necessarily mean that a filibuster will be called.

Majority leader Bill Frist is scheduled to hold a senators-only conference call this afternoon to discuss the Supreme Court vacancy. One of the issues to be covered will be when to hold hearings on the nominee, assuming that President Bush chooses someone shortly after his return from the G-8 Summit. The Senate, which is now leaving for its July 4 recess, is scheduled to go on its August recess by the first week of August, and will not to return until September 6. "If we get a nominee delivered to us on July 11, when we get back [from the current break]," asks one Republican, "do we hold hearings in August? Do we gain anything by not waiting for two more weeks?"

So far, there is no consensus on the answer to that question. Right now, top Republicans in the Senate do not believe Democrats will filibuster a Supreme Court nominee -- "They won't filibuster," one well-placed source said flatly yesterday -- but the GOP leadership does believe Democrats will do everything in their power to drag out the confirmation process. Holding hearings in August would simply get the process going sooner rather than later. In any event, Republicans believe that the aftermath of the nuclear/constitutional/Byrd option fight has left the GOP, in the words of the well-placed source, "maximally positioned" to conduct a Supreme Court fight.

We'll see soon, but I have my doubts that the Democrats will be able to refrain from taking a political stand if pressured from their base to do so. Speaking of which, lefty-mag Slate has put up its list of potential successors and conservatives are abuzz (or afear) about the possibilities.
Bush could wind up naming Gonzales to replace O'Connor relatively quickly. Then Rehnquist resigns. Then the president names a McConnell/Luttig/Roberts/etc. The second nominee softens the blow of the Gonzales nomination on the Right. The Left will be more ready to accept the conservative because the president ticked off conservatives with Gonzales.

Some problems with that scenario: It assumes a lot about the Left. First, the Senate Dems refer to Gonzales as The Torture Memo Guy. Who says he's going to be an easy confirmation ride? And, despite the joy they'll get from the president dissing his peeps (which I, naive K-Lo, think my Stud W would never do anyway), who really thinks that will translate into the Left cooperating on not just one but two nominees? You do realize how much mo and money Ralph Neas and co. have riding on this, right?

And I could be wrong but I just don't think the people who are really making these decisions in the White House don't see the recusal problem with Gonzales as a conversation stopper. He's just not a practical prospect as a judge a "half justice" as we've talked about here.

Others are giving early warnings as to the method that will be used to torpedo any of the President's nominees (including this commercial), while Republican Sen. John Cornyn offers his own advice as to what kind of nominee he'd find acceptable. The next few months will be very interesting.


June 30, 2005


Politicians: The Things They Say & How They Say Them

Here is a troubling story:

...Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia...has over the past two years repeatedly accused the Bush administration of deliberately deceiving the American public to take the nation to war. It's hard to imagine a more serious charge. And Rockefeller makes it perhaps more credibly than most Iraq War critics--as the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

It's no surprise then that reporters sought out Rockefeller for his reaction to George W. Bush's address to the nation Tuesday night. The junior senator from West Virginia minced no words. Iraq, he said, "had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, it had nothing to do with al-Qaida, it had nothing to do with September 11, which he managed to mention three or four times and infer three or four more times."

This, Rockefeller seems to find outrageous. "It's sort of amazing that a president could stand up before hundreds of millions of Americans and say that and come back to 9/11--somehow figuring that it clicks a button, that everybody grows more patriotic and more patient. Well, maybe that's good p.r. work, which it isn't, but it's not the way that a commander in chief executes a war. And that's his responsibility in this case."

It is an attack on President Bush that echoes those we've heard from Democrats--both those on the fringe left and those at the top of the party--for the past 27 months. And it is nonsense...

Odd then that Senator Rockefeller would have spoken of a "substantial connection between Saddam and al Qaeda" just one month before the Iraq War began. In some interviews Rockefeller did say that he hadn't seen evidence of close ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. But asked about an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship by CNN's Wolf Blitzer on February 5, 2003, Rockefeller agreed with Republican Senator Pat Roberts that Abu Musab al Zarqawi's presence in Iraq before the war and his links to a poison camp in northern Iraq were troubling. Rockefeller continued: "The fact that Zarqawi certainly is related to the death of the U.S. aid officer and that he is very close to bin Laden puts at rest, in fairly dramatic terms, that there is at least a substantial connection between Saddam and al Qaeda."...

...other aspects of Rockefeller's 2002 speech. It's worth noting, however, that the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told his colleagues that "there is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years." And: "Saddam's existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose a very real threat to America, now." And: "We cannot know for certain that Saddam will use the weapons of mass destruction he currently possesses, or that he will use them against us. But we do know Saddam has the capability."

Unmistakable evidence. Existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities. We do know Saddam has the capability. Remember these things the next time you hear Rockefeller and his colleagues accuse the Bush Administration of exaggerating or fabricating the threat from Iraq.

Rockefeller ended his 2002 floor speech with yet another direct reference to September 11--his fifth.

"September 11 has forever changed the world. We may not like it, but that is the world in which we live. When there is a grave threat to Americans' lives, we have a responsibility to take action to prevent it."

Do you find it troubling when politicians radically change their tune - and the only reason for it seems to be politics? Do you find it troubling when those changes relate directly to the national security of America - at a time when we are at war?

And then, on top of it, they are so full of themselves:

...can you imagine George Washington referring in public, or in private for that matter, to his many virtues? In normal America if you have a high character you don't wrestle people to the ground until they acknowledge it. You certainly don't announce it. If you are compassionate, you are compassionate; if others see it, fine. If you hold to principle it will become clear. You don't proclaim these things. You can't, for the same reason that to brag about your modesty is to undercut the truth of the claim...

How exactly does it work? How does legitimate self-confidence become wildly inflated self-regard? How does self respect become unblinking conceit? How exactly does one's character become destabilized in Washington?...

What is wrong with them? This is not a rhetorical question. I think it is unspoken question No. 1 as Americans look at so many of the individuals in our government. What is wrong with them?

Normal people just don't act this way.

Yet more arguments for term limits. Yet another argument for limited government.

And another reason why a diligent citizenry is so essential to ensuring our freedoms are protected.

Sadly, it is an uphill battle, isn't it?


June 28, 2005


Pigs at the Public Trough, Revisited

Time Magazine has an unflattering story about lobbyist Jack Abramoff which builds on some of the points highlighted in this earlier posting:

...The spreading scandal is a particular concern to Republicans in light of next year's midterm elections. Abramoff's name has become associated in Washington with more than just typical lobbying excess. He is an intimate of the self-described revolutionaries who took power on the Hill in 1994 on promises of cleaning house after decades of Democratic control and, as such, is seen as the personification of the Republican revolution gone awry. It doesn't help that the Indian tribal money that made Abramoff so influential around town came mostly from profits from gambling, which many conservatives view as immoral. Some Republicans are even arguing that the party should distance itself from those tied too closely to Abramoff. "If someone within your family is doing something that's certainly wrong, if not illegal, you have a duty to say, That's not us," says David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. "That's what people are saying."

Last week's e-mail dump was the first detailed look the public has got into how Abramoff combined his top-tier connections with vast sums of money from his tribal clients to advance his interests. It shows how easy it is for seasoned operators to violate the spirit of the law--possibly while staying within the letter of it--as they peddle influence...Most of all, it shines a bright light into the dark places of Washington where money, politics and lobbyists meet.

Norquist, Abramoff and Reed first worked together in 1981 as members of the college Republicans organizing protests against communism in Poland. From there, the three rose steadily to the tops of their fields. Reed, as leader of the Christian Coalition, built a national grass-roots following of religious activists. Abramoff tapped into massive casino profits by representing newly rich tribes. And Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), established himself as the high priest of tax cuts...

Abramoff's spokesman released a statement last week saying that with an investigation ongoing, "Mr. Abramoff is put into the impossible position of not being able to defend himself in the public arena until the proper authorities have had a chance to review all accusations." Norquist says he believes the direction of the Indian Affairs Committee's probe is being driven by an old rivalry between him and the committee chairman, Republican Senator John McCain. "This is completely political," Norquist says. McCain said last week's hearings sought to uncover fraud against the Choctaws, not investigate Norquist or Reed...

What of the friendship among the three men? In 2002 Abramoff came to see Reed as competition and cut him off the Choctaw gravy train. "He is a bad version of us! No more money for him," Abramoff wrote Scanlon. Norquist was still standing by Abramoff last week, in a way. "I've known Jack for a long time," he said. "He's never approached me for anything improper. But we have led very different lives over the last 20 years."

The WSJ also published a story on the issue, available here for a fee.

When politicians of both parties compete for power and money in the political arena, they cause all sorts of unfortunate outcomes, none of which benefits working families and retirees across our land. Consider these examples:

First, here is a related story about Ralph Reed.

Second, here is an example of government waste within the pork-laden highway bill.

Third, here is a story about the FEC blogging regulation debate which shows that, even within the Republican Party, John McCain's proclivity for political machinations could end up reducing freedom of speech for average Americans.

Fourth, here is a story about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and his political opponents which shows how the drive for political power affects the behaviors of both DeLay and his political opponents.

Fifth, here is a story about how the Supreme Court now says government can take our homes away when there is money to be made.

So what is the average American supposed to deduce from all this? Here are some thoughts that I wrote in this posting:

I remember well that election night in November 1994 when it seemed real change might occur. Unfortunately, we have - yet again - relearned the lesson from the words of Lord Acton who taught us how power corrupts, regardless of party affiliation.

Big government means there are plenty of spoils to divide among the many powerful pigs at the public trough.

The next time your Senator or Congressman tries to impress you with the spoils he or she is bringing home to your district, take a step back and remember that the true price you are paying for any suggested benefit must also include the pro-rata cost of feeding every other pig across America who eats from the public trough.

Most importantly, what is often forgotten is that the spoils they are so eager to divide up represent a meaningful portion of the incomes of American working families and retirees - who are usually unrepresented at the table when these spoils are given away.

We must never forget that all families pay quite a price for these giveaways: It means less of their own hard-earned incomes is available to be spent on their own tangible needs, on things such as food, clothing, medical care, education, etc.

And that is why big government means less freedom for American working families and retirees.

In summary and to expand on the initial comments, here are some other conclusions taken from the DeLay posting:

Two takeaway thoughts that can help us regain perspective:

First, the intensity of the partisan fighting is directly correlated to what is at stake and big government means there is more to fight over. One of the reasons the Founding Fathers encouraged limited government was their deep understanding of human nature.

Second, since politicians and bureaucrats have no incentive to behave well, a diligent citizenry is crucially important to the ongoing success of our American experiment in ordered liberty.

Read this posting for more on the misguided incentives that drive public sector taxation.

Others have said it more eloquently. Here is a public policy viewpoint offered by Lawrence Reed in a speech entitled "Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy," which includes these words:

The "Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy" that I want to share with you today are pillars of a free economy. We can differ on exactly how any one of them may apply to a given issue of the day, but the principles themselves, I believe, are settled truths...They are not the only pillars of a free economy or the only settled truths, but they do comprise a pretty powerful package. In my belief, if every cornerstone of every state and federal building were emblazoned with these principles-and more importantly, if every legislator understood and attempted to be faithful to them-we'd be a much stronger, much freer, more prosperous, and far better governed people...

Public policy that dismisses liberty or doesn't preserve or strengthen it should be immediately suspect in the minds of a vigilant people...Ben Franklin went so far as to advise us that "He who gives up essential liberty for a little temporary security deserves neither liberty nor security."

Too often today, policy makers give no thought whatsoever to the general state of liberty when they craft new policies. It if feels good or sounds good or gets them elected, they just do it...

I would encourage you to read the entire Reed speech to get a more detailed view of the seven principles.

And here is a political philosphy viewpoint:

Roger Pilon wrote the following in a 2002 Cato Institute booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution:
Appealing to all mankind, the Declarations seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.

But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision the method by which we justify our political order liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract its principles rooted in "right reason" the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Dr. Pilon concluded his essay by writing:

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

...may all of us live up to that vision authored by our Founders as we strive to be engaged citizens who are vigilant stewards of freedom and opportunity for all Americans.



The Kelo Decision Revisited: An Ironic Twist

The Kelo decision by the Supreme Court has stirred a lot of controversy, as noted in an earlier posting.

The following twist comes from Justice Souter's home state of New Hampshire:

Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter? A new ruling by the Supreme Court...might allow it. A private developer is seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter's land...

Justice Souter's vote in the "Kelo vs. City of New London" decision allows city governments to take land from one private owner and give it to another if the government will generate greater tax revenue or other economic benefits when the land is developed by the new owner.

On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter's home.

Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.

The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Caf" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged."...

"This is not a prank" said Clements, "The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development."...

The Just Desserts Cafe in the Lost Liberty Hotel, proposed to be built on what would have been called - one week ago - Justice Souter's private property, free from theft by the government.

How ironic.

But, then again, maybe all of us are approaching this with the wrong thought process. Since government itself neither creates economic value nor generates tax revenue, why don't we we interpret the Kelo decision in a more creative way:

Any time a government agency decides to take away our families' private property, let's make that agency's physical location the replacement target to convert from a government building to a private sector entity that generates lots of tax revenue.

This approach would have several benefits: First, it would save our homes. Second, it would shrink the size of government. Third, it would accelerate the further reduction of our taxes.

Sounds about as logical as the Kelo decision, no? And in doing so, we would simply be abiding by the laws of our land. Any takers?


June 26, 2005


More on Potential FEC Restrictions on Blogging Community

A previous posting provided a substantive introduction to ongoing FEC regulation risks facing the blogging community.

Win Myers at the Democracy Project continues his good work on this subject with these two recent postings here and here.

It is in the blogging community's self-interest as lovers of freedom to stay informed about FEC developments and all the surrounding politics - and ensure the debate is visible to the American people. Read closely and stay alert.

After all, if the government can take away our private property with ease, why should we assume they wouldn't take away our free speech with similar ease?

Why is it even necessary to have these concerns in America? Sad and worrisome, isn't it?



Countering the Intolerance of Left-Wing Secular Fundamentalists

Hugh Hewitt has written an important article entitled Real Religious Intolerance. In the article, he provides a speech by American Roman Catholic Archbishop Chaput that is worthy of reading in full:

The Los Angeles Weekly's "The New Blacklist" is author Douglas Ireland's attempt to equate consumer boycotts of gay-themed entertainment sponsors with McCarthyism.

That's a stretch to begin with...

Ireland's piece is full of over-the-top rhetoric, including repeated use of the term "Christers," which many view as nakedly bigoted.

But Ireland is a proud radical atheist, as blogger-theologian Mark D. Roberts discovered as he began a lengthy assessment of Ireland's piece...the harshest language in his article didn't come from him, but from the associate dean of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication, Martin Kaplan. Kaplan, a long-time Democratic activist turned professor, called the trend among Christians refusing to buy products advertised on shows such as Will & Grace, ""theocratic oligopoly." Dean Kaplan continued: "The drumbeat of religious fascism has never been as troubling as it is now in this country."

Kaplan's absurdity would have lacked the context to make it other than the silly excess of a tenured Trojan had the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe not just held a conference in Cordoba Spain on the rise of anti-Semitism and other forms of religious intolerance in Europe...an American delegation attended...Among the delegation was Denver's Archbishop Charles Chaput. Archbishop Chaput's remarks deserve widespread distribution...

Because Dean Kaplan's bigotry and historical amnesia is not unique, we reprint the entire text of Bishop Chaput's remarks here:

For a few weeks two months ago, the City of Rome doubled in size. People from around Europe and the world came to the funeral of Pope John Paul II. Some 600,000 people viewed his coffin on the first day. More than 1.4 million paid their respects before his burial. That should remind us of two things.

First, Europe remains obviously religious--not simply in its nominal and active believers, but also in its culture and assumptions about the dignity of the human person.

What we know as "Europe" was shaped, in vital ways, by the Christian faith. Judaism and Islam also clearly made important contributions to the European experience. But the founders of the European unity movement were all professed Christians. Their commitment to the great project of Europe's future came from their moral convictions, which in turn grew out of their religious identity and Christian heritage.

Second, John Paul II's appeal to people of every faith--and no faith--did not come simply from his personality but from his actions. His devotion to human freedom and his role in liberating Eastern Europe were rooted completely in his Catholic faith. In one sense, he embodied the greatness of Europe. And he did it by being a son of Europe's Christian imagination and history.

We know from the totalitarian regimes in Europe's recent past that a determined minority can persecute other minorities, and oppress even a majority of a nation's citizens. Discrimination and intolerance toward Christians and minority religious groups are rising in several areas of the world today. Europe, despite its heritage, is not immune. And unfortunately, other parts of the OSCE region show similar troubling signs.

Discrimination and intolerance take two forms: direct and indirect. Direct discrimination has the shape of legal restrictions, and often police harassment and legal barriers, designed to stamp out unauthorized or unpopular religious communities or to limit the legitimate exercise of their religious freedom. The intolerant behavior of some OSCE states continues to violate the basic human rights of belief and worship.

In several OSCE states, regimes discriminate against religious communities by creating structures of prejudicial treatment. High membership requirements prevent small congregations from obtaining legal status which, in contrast, is granted to other "traditional" religious communities. Lack of historical presence can block newer religious groups from qualifying for basic rights and privileges. Denial of legal standing has the very real consequence of either violating individual rights or stigmatizing entire groups. This is state-sponsored discrimination, and it violates OSCE commitments to promote religious freedom for all.

An equally dangerous trend now dominates other OSCE states, where public expressions of religious faith often seem to be ridiculed as fundamentalism. In the name of respecting all religions, a new form of secular intolerance is sometimes imposed. Out of fear of religious fundamentalism, a new kind of secular fundamentalism may be coerced on public institutions and political discourse.

At the same time, various media in the OSCE area now often allow symbols of Christian identity, Christian believers and their faith to be publicly abused. Programs like "How to cook a crucifix" and sacramental confessions recorded without the confessor's knowledge are deeply contemptuous of Catholic believers. This is unworthy of Europe's moral dignity and religious heritage. Furthermore, it stands in stark contrast to OSCE commitments to promote religious freedom.

Europe has given the whole world the seeds of democracy. Today's growing anti-religious and often anti-Christian spirit undermines that witness.

As with anti-Semitism, the OSCE must employ its practical commitments on combating discrimination to also fight discrimination and intolerance against Christians and members of other religious communities. Moreover, the OSCE must carefully monitor their implementation.

OSCE participating states must strive to protect Christian communities and other religious groups from discrimination and intolerance. The media should be encouraged to offer truly balanced coverage of religious faith. Educational systems should teach the value of faith in people's lives. The specific contribution given to public life by Christian communities and other religious groups should be remembered.

Democracy depends on people of conviction taking an active, visible part in public life; peacefully and respectfully, but vigorously. That includes Christians, Jews, Muslims and all religious believers, as well as non-believers. Public debate without a free and welcoming role for religious faith does not produce diversity or pluralism. It can easily do the opposite. It can create politics without morality, and public institutions without enduring ideals.

My hope is that OSCE participating states will do everything in their power to discourage all forms of religious intolerance - including any disrespect for Europe's own Christian roots."

Continue reading "Countering the Intolerance of Left-Wing Secular Fundamentalists"

June 25, 2005


Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning

The public debate about proper judicial reasoning is often so ill-informed because the focus is only on short-term partisan agendas, a bad habit which damages the fabric of our society and respect for the rule of law.

Into that morass and using the recent Supreme Court decision on medical marijuana use in California, Charles Krauthammer elaborates on the meaning of "original intent" and shows how far away the courts have moved away from a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Here is the link to his very helpful and educational editorial on judicial reasoning:

...In our current, corrupted debates about the judges, you hear only about results. Priscilla Owen, we were told (by the [ultra-liberal] Alliance for Justice), "routinely backs corporations against worker and consumer protections." Well, in what circumstances? In adjudicating what claims? Under what constitutional doctrine?

The real question is never what judges decide but how they decide it. The Scalia-Thomas argument...was about what the Constitution's commerce clause permits and, even more abstractly, who decides what the commerce clause permits. To simplify only slightly, Antonin Scalia says: Supreme Court precedent. Clarence Thomas says: the Founders, as best we can interpret their original intent.

The Scalia opinion (concurring with the majority opinion) appeals to dozens of precedents over the past 70 years under which the commerce clause was vastly expanded to allow the federal government to regulate what had, by the time of the New Deal, become a highly industrialized country with a highly nationalized economy.

Thomas's dissent refuses to bow to such 20th-century innovations. While Scalia's opinion is studded with precedents, Thomas pulls out founding-era dictionaries (plus Madison's notes from the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers and the ratification debates) to understand what the word commerce meant then. And it meant only "trade or exchange" (as distinct from manufacture) and not, as we use the term today, economic activity in general. By this understanding, the federal government had no business whatsoever regulating privately and medicinally grown marijuana.

This is constitutional "originalism" in pure form. Its attractiveness is that it imposes discipline on the courts. It gives them a clear and empirically verifiable understanding of constitutional text -- a finite boundary beyond which even judges with airs must not go.

And if conditions change and parts of the originalist Constitution become obsolete, amend it. Democratically. We have added 17 amendments since the Bill of Rights. Amending is not a job for judges.

The position represented by Scalia's argument in this case is less "conservative." It recognizes that decades of precedent (which might have, at first, taken constitutional liberties) become so ingrained in the life of the country, and so accepted as part of the understanding of the modern Constitution, that it is simply too revolutionary, too legally and societally disruptive, to return to an original understanding long abandoned.

And there is yet another view. With Thomas's originalism at one end of the spectrum and Scalia's originalism tempered by precedent -- rolling originalism, as it were -- in the middle, there is a third notion, championed most explicitly by Justice Stephen Breyer, that the Constitution is a living document and that the role of the court is to interpret and reinterpret it continually in the light of new ideas and new norms.

This is what our debate about judges should be about. Instead, it constantly degenerates into arguments about results.

Two years ago, Thomas (and Scalia and William Rehnquist) dissented from the court's decision to invalidate a Texas law that criminalized sodomy. Thomas explicitly wrote, "If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it." However, since he is a judge and not a legislator, he could find no principled way to use a Constitution that is silent on this issue to strike down the law...

As we approach a time of new Supreme Court nominations, it would be a service to the country if the Senate and the major interest groups across the political spectrum could conduct a reasoned public debate on these important principles.

Since we know that they have lost the ability to conduct that kind of debate over the last 20 years, recovering such a debate will only occur if the requisite public pressure from citizens across America demands it. I hope we are up to the challenge.

Continue reading "Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning"

June 23, 2005


The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished

Private property rights have always been central to our free society. That right is now gravely weakened after the Supreme Court issued a ruling that expands the ways in which the government can seize our homes:

The Supreme Court today effectively expanded the right of local governments to seize private property under eminent domain, ruling that people's homes and businesses -- even those not considered blighted -- can be taken against their will for private development if the seizure serves a broadly defined "public use."

In a 5-4 decision, the court upheld the ability of New London, Conn., to seize people's homes to make way for an office, residential and retail complex supporting a new $300 million research facility of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. The city had argued that the project served a public use within the meaning of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution because it would increase tax revenues, create jobs and improve the local economy.

A group of homeowners in New London's Fort Trumbull area had fought the city's attempt to impose eminent domain, arguing that their property could be seized only to serve a clear public use such as building roads or schools or to eliminate blight. The homeowners, some of whom had lived in their house for decades, also argued that the public would benefit from the proposed project only if it turned out to be successful, making the "public use" requirement subject to the eventual performance of the private business venture.

The Fifth Amendment also requires "just compensation" for the owners, but that was not an issue in the case decided today because the homeowners did not want to give up their property at any price...

The majority endorsed the view that local governments are better placed than federal courts to decide whether development projects serve a public purpose and will benefit the community, justifying the acquisition of land through eminent domain...

New London officials "were not confronted with the need to remove blight in the Fort Trumbull area, but their determination that the area was sufficiently distressed to justify a program of economic rejuvenation is entitled to our deference," Stevens wrote. "The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including--but by no means limited to--new jobs and increased tax revenue."

Stevens added that "because that plan unquestionably serves a public purpose, the takings challenged here satisfy the public use requirement of the Fifth Amendment."...

Dissenting were justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, as well as Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

In a strongly worded dissenting opinion, O'Connor wrote that the majority's decision overturns a long-held principle that eminent domain cannot be used simply to transfer property from one private owner to another.

"Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power," she wrote. "Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded -- i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public -- in the process."

The effect of the decision, O'Connor said, "is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property -- and thereby effectively to delete the words "for public use" from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment."...

This article contains excerpts from oral arguments on the case. Here are the formal opinions from the case.

There are a lot of strong reactions to this ruling and Michelle Malkin provides links here and here to many of them. Professor Bainbridge offers his thoughts. John Eastman offers some historical perspective as does Ken Masugi, whose comments include:

...From the original intent to eliminate slums, the use of eminent domain has degenerated into corruption masquerading as statesmanship and delusion sold as sound public policy...

The Wall Street Journal, in its editorial (available for a fee) entitled Kennedy's Vast Domain, writes:

The Supreme Court's "liberal" wing has a reputation in some circles as a guardian of the little guy and a protector of civil liberties. That deserves reconsideration in light of yesterday's decision in Kelo v. City of New London. The Court's four liberals (Justices Stevens, Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg) combined with the protean Anthony Kennedy to rule that local governments have more or less unlimited authority to seize homes and businesses

the plain reading of th[e 5th] Amendment's "takings clause" also appears to require that eminent domain be invoked only when land is required for genuine "public use" such as roads

The founding fathers added this clause to the Fifth Amendment -- which also guarantees "due process" and protects against double jeopardy and self-incrimination -- because they understood that there could be no meaningful liberty in a country where the fruits of one's labor are subject to arbitrary government seizure.

That protection was immensely diminished by yesterday's 5-4 decision, which effectively erased the requirement that eminent domain be invoked for "public use."

Justice Kennedy wrote in concurrence that this could be considered public use because the development plan was "comprehensive" and "meant to address a serious city-wide depression." In other words, local governments can do what they want as long as they can plausibly argue that any kind of public interest will be served.

In his clarifying dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas exposes this logic for the government land grab that it is. He accuses the majority of replacing the Fifth Amendment's "Public Use Clause" with a very different "public purpose" test: "This deferential shift in phraseology enables the Court to hold, against all common sense, that a costly urban-renewal project whose stated purpose is a vague promise of new jobs and increased tax revenue, but which is also suspiciously agreeable to the Pfizer Corporation, is for a 'public use.'"

the unsual coalition supporting the property owners in the case, ranging from the libertarian Institute for Justice (the lead lawyers) to the NAACP, AARP and the late Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The latter three groups signed an amicus brief arguing that eminent domain has often been used against politically weak communities with high concentrations of minorities and elderly. Justice Thomas's opinion cites a wealth of data to that effect.

And it's not just the "public use" requirement of the Fifth Amendment that's undermined by Kelo. So too is the guarantee of "just compensation." Why? Because there is no need to invoke eminent domain if developers are willing to pay what owners themselves consider just compensation.

Just compensation may differ substantially from so-called "fair market value" given the sentimental and other values many of us attach to our homes and other property. Even eager sellers will be hurt by Kelo, since developers will have every incentive to lowball their bids now that they can freely threaten to invoke eminent domain

These kinds of judicial encroachments on liberty are precisely why Supreme Court nominations have become such high-stakes battles

Justice Clarence Thomas' dissenting opinion included this comment:

Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's interpretation of the Constitution.

Sheldon Richman writes about the decision and further discusses Justice Thomas' dissenting opinion:

O'Connor's words are to be savored, although she largely accepts the precedents, striving only to distinguish them from the current case. But it is to Justice Clarence Thomas we must turn for a model of proper constitutional interpretation and reasoning. His dissenting opinion goes further than OConnors by calling the precedents into question. It is refreshing indeed.

Thomas writes: "Today's decision is simply the latest in a string of our cases construing the Public Use Clause to be a virtual nullity, without the slightest nod to its original meaning. In my view, the Public Use Clause, originally understood, is a meaningful limit on the government's eminent domain power. Our cases have strayed from the Clause's original meaning, and I would reconsider them."

Thomas proceeds to show, first, that it is sound constitutional principle to regard every word in the Constitution as meaningful and purposeful; second, that use at the time of the framing meant the "act of employing"; third, that to construe use more broadly would make the takings clause duplicative of powers already expressly delegated; and fourth, that the common law and great legal authorities such as Blackstone support this narrow reading of the word.

Thus, "The Constitution's text, in short, suggests that the Takings Clause authorizes the taking of property only if the public has a right to employ it, not if the public realizes any conceivable benefit from the taking. The Takings Clause is a prohibition, not a grant of power. The Clause is thus most naturally read to concern whether the property is used by the public or the government, not whether the purpose of the taking is legitimately public."

Since that is the case, the issue of deference to the legislature is put into perspective: "[I]t is most implausible that the Framers intended to defer to legislatures as to what satisfies the Public Use Clause, uniquely among all the express provisions of the Bill of Rights."

He concludes: "When faced with a clash of constitutional principle and a line of unreasoned cases wholly divorced from the text, history, and structure of our founding document, we should not hesitate to resolve the tension in favor of the Constitution's original meaning."

Richard Epstein, in a WSJ editorial (available for a fee) entitled Supreme Folly observes:

for in [Justice Stevens] view New London had made its case when it asserted, without evidence, that the new projects would both increase tax revenues and create new jobs. It hardly mattered that its projections had been pulled out of thin air and were already hopelessly out of date when the case reached the Supreme Court. All that need be shown to Justice Stevens was procedural regularity and some claim that the proposed project served some "public benefit."

Astute readers will quickly note that the phrase "public benefit" is far broader than the constitutional words "public use." That last phrase clearly covers only two situations. The first arises when land is taken to build government facilities, such as forts, or to construct infrastructure, such as highways, open to all. The second covers those cases where property is taken by, or conveyed to, private parties who are duty bound to keep it open to all users. Private railroads and private grist mills, both of which are subject to the common carrier obligation of universal service, are two obvious examples. Note too that once a given use is properly identified as public, it does not matter for constitutional purposes whether the project is wise or is as foolish as New London's redevelopment program. The constitutional inquiry is over once it is proved that the project falls into these categories. Factually, the standard of review hardly matters, for it takes little genius to prove that a given structure is a fort or a highway.

There are, however, good reasons why the public use language has long been extended to cover some cases of takings for private purposes with indirect public benefits. One recurrent problem of social coordination arises when one party is in a position to blockade the productive ventures of another

The great intellectual blunder of the public use law over the past 50 or so years is that it has wrenched the public benefit language out of this narrow holdout context. In the mid-1950s, the Supreme Court held that takings were for public use when they were intended to relieve various forms of urban "blight" -- a slippery term with no clear constitutional pedigree. Thirty years later, the Court went a step further by allowing Hawaii to force landlords to sell their interests to sitting tenants, as a means to counteracting ostensible "oligopolistic" market conditions. Now any "conceivable" indirect social benefit would do, without regard to the attendant costs.

Given this past legacy, Justice Stevens found it easy to take New London at its word. Any comprehensive public project will produce some benefit for someonehis test always allows the legislature to gin up some rationale for taking public property for just compensation

The Court could only arrive at its shameful Kelo ruling by refusing to look closely at past precedent and constitutional logic. Courts that refuse to see no evil and hear no evil are blind to the endemic risk of factional politics at all levels of government. And being blind, this bare Supreme Court majority has sustained a scandalous and cruel act for no public purpose at all.

This decision is a complete and total outrage. Tom Bethell, in his book entitled The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Throughout the Ages, offers an explanation on why it is such an outrage:

...There are four great blessings that cannot easily be realized in a society that lacks the secure, decentralized, private ownership of goods. These are: liberty, justice, peace and prosperity...private property is a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for these highly desirable social outcomes.

Of these, the relationship between liberty and property is by now fairly well understood...Milton Friedman has said that "you cannot have a free society without private property."...

Rights are held against the state, and property is an important bulwark against state power...like all genuine rights, property rights protect the weak against the strong...

The institution of private property also plays a key role in establishing justice in a society. This is one of the most important arguments in its favor, yet the connection between private property and social justice has rarely been made, mainly because social justice has been equated with the distribution of already existing goods. Inequality is equated with injustice. Nonetheless, a private property regime makes people responsible for their own actions in the realm of material goods. Such a system therefore ensures that people experience the consequences of their own acts...Both the prudent and the profligate will tend to experience their deserts...As Professor James Q. Wilson has said, property is a "powerful antidote to unfettered selfishness."

Property is also the most peaceable of institutions. In a society of private property, goods must be either voluntarily exchanged or laboriously created. As long as such ownership is protected by the state, goods cannot easily be taken by force. Furthermore, a society with legal institutions that encourage the creation of wealth poses a diminished threat to the wealth of neighbors...Private property also allows a country to become rich enough to defend itself against aggressive neighbors, thereby reducing the likelihood of conflict.

Private property both disperses power and shields us from the coercion of others...It leaves us free to act without interference, within our own autonomous spheres..

Prosperity and property are intimately connected. Exchange is the basic market activity, and when goods are not individually owned, they cannot easily be exchanged. Free-market economies, therefore can only be built on a private property base...

This Supreme Court decision highlights another reason why the nomination of any new justice to the Court is so important to our freedom. And why the appointment of Janice Rogers Brown to the D.C. District Court of Appeals was so important.

Power Line offers further valuable insights that re-connect us with the Founding principles of America:

...The right to property was central to our founding; it occupied a vital place in the system of free government the founders built. The right to property was an instrument to defend common people from the power of the establishment...

For the past hundred years the attack on private property has been central to the Progressive assault on the Constitution, beginning with J. Allen Smith's The Spirit of American Government (1907) and continuing most importantly with Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913). Smith and Beard portrayed the constitutional protection of private property by the founders as the weapon of an elite interested in preserving its privilege...

The American Revolution is of course the appropriate place to begin to understand the role of property rights in the American legal order. The American Revolution was in part a rebellion against the feudal order...In the feudal order all property belonged to the King; the King retained ownership but conditionally granted the use of property to his subjects.

By contrast, the idea that men possessed the right to acquire and enjoy property separate and apart from the prerogative of sovereign government was one of the "unalienable rights" grounded in "the laws of Nature and Nature's God" at the heart of the American Revolution. In the founders' view, property rights did not emanate from government. Rather, they emanated from the nature of man, and it was the function of government to protect the rights conferred on man by nature. Indeed, Jefferson characterized property rights as "the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone [of] the free exercise of industry and the fruits acquired by it." As Jefferson's comment suggests, the right to acquire property was the critical right for the founders; it made property rights the friend of the poor by allowing them to earn and safeguard wealth ("the fruits acquired by" work).

Accordingly, when the founders crafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, they provided numerous protections of property rights...

Further, putting property on a par with life and liberty, the Constitution prohibited the government from taking property in any criminal case without due process. And in the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, the government was prohibited from taking private property for public use without just compensation; the government was not even afforded the power to take private property for anything but public use.

The founders extended these and other specific protections to the property of Americans in the fundamental law of the United States for the sake of freedom. The freedom to exercise and profit from one's abilities without regard to caste or class was in the view of the founders the essence of freedom.

As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, "the first object of government" is the "protection of the diversity in the faculties [abilities] of men, from which the rights of property originate." In the eyes of the founders, the protection of property rights was a bulwark for the poor in assuring them that the wealth earned with the sweat of their brow could not arbitrarily be expropriated by the heavy hand of government.

It was precisely on this ground that Lincoln sought to persuade Americans of the injustice of slavery...He often spoke of the heart of slavery as a denial of property rights: "It is the same tyrannical principle that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.'"...

The founders' study of history taught them that majority rule was susceptible to tyranny and that the protection of property rights was an indispensable condition for the preservation of freedom and for the growth of national wealth. The founders observed that tyrannical rule and material scarcity had by and large been the fate of man through the ages. They saw the confiscation of property by government in the name of the sovereign power of the state as an old and sorry story. Through the protection of property rights they aimed to forge a new order of the ages. It lies to us to regain their understanding and act on it.

The Kelo decision goes against the Founding principles of America. Slowly but surely, our freedom is being diminished. And don't forget that the people most at risk of losing their freedom are those least able to fight against the tyrannical power of government. Professor Bainbridge reinforces this point with a quote from Justice O'Connor's dissenting opinion:

Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.

June 22, 2005


Now Here is a Good Idea

This article, entitled California Union Blues: The Golden State's unions fight to keep their members from controlling their own money, informs us about an issue that often gets limited public scrutiny:

The leadership of California's largest public labor unions declared a crisis last week--and it had nothing to do with outsourcing, Enron, WorldCom, the minimum wage, healthcare, or any of the other causes that usually whip union bosses into frenzy. Instead, the controversy surrounds an initiative called "paycheck protection" which is now headed to Golden State voters in a special election this fall. The measure would require public sector unions to receive written permission from rank-and-file members before spending their dues on political activities.

While the issue doesn't sound earth-shattering, the consequences for organized labor could be devastating...if the measure passes, union leaders will only have themselves to blame for supporting political candidates and positions that don't square with a sizeable chunk of their membership.

In almost every election cycle, labor's leadership takes millions of dollars in dues from rank and file members and ships it off to Democratic headquarters without asking...The system is highway robbery for union members who are forced to fund politics with which they don't agree.

Exit polls and campaign finance data make the divide clear. For example, nationally, 38 percent of union members voted for George W. Bush in 2004. But according to the Center for Responsive Politics, 87 percent of all labor donations either went to John Kerry or other Democratic candidates. Republican presidential candidates aren't alone...

The initiative which will go before the voters this fall only applies to public sector unions. Under current law, public sector union members have very few mechanisms to influence how their dues are used. While some unions technically allow members to get a refund of the portion of their dues that is spent on politics, doing so is complicated, cumbersome, and unadvertised...

Paycheck protection acts as an opt-in clause, forcing the leadership to get the written consent of union members before any of their money is spent on politics...

Of course the unions will not go quietly into the night. They defeated a similar measure in 1998 and are optimistic about their abilities to win political battles with the Governator, having sunk a Schwarzenegger plan earlier this year which would have moved state workers into 401(k)-style retirement plans...

The campaign's biggest irony is that labor leaders are fighting the initiative by raising rank and file union dues. The California Teacher's Association did exactly that recently, telling their membership that the dues increase will go to fight the paycheck protection provision. Their message: We want to take more of your money to make sure you won't be able to control any of your money.

It's a strange situation for union leaders to find themselves afraid of their own members.

It is indeed a strange situation. And yet another example of how unions raise cash to pursue their own political agenda, regardless of whether that agenda matches up with the beliefs of the people supplying the cash to the union's coffers.

Here is another, relevant posting on the union dues issue entitled Learning More About How Dues Paid To Big Labor Are Spent. Here is another tangentially related posting on Union Pension Fund Politics.


June 20, 2005


Hillary Rodham Clinton II

Marc Comtois

To further enable investigation, here is the rundown on Sen. Clinton provided by Project Vote Smart. Concerning "Issue Positions," one will be confronted by this disclaimer:

In 2000, this candidate was contacted repeatedly over several weeks by Project Vote Smart staff members and by prominent political leaders, and asked to do the right and honorable thing by providing citizens with the critical information that the 2000 National Political Awareness Test supplies. On each occasion this candidate failed to provide voters with this information.
However, a catalogue of "Interest Group Ratings" is available. Here are some of her ratings according to a variety of conservative groups (whose mention doesn't mean endorsement, by the way).

Continue reading "Hillary Rodham Clinton II"


Hillary Rodham Clinton

National Review Online has an interview with Edward Klein, author of the new book on Hillary Rodham Clinton entitled The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President.

The interview attempts to get beyond/behind the recent controversy about an excerpt from the book.

Those of us who disagree with her politics, such as her previous attempt to socialize medicine in 1993, must deal with her in a more effective way than many people dealt with Bill Clinton. Let's focus on the substance of her policy beliefs and not let her whitewash her own history.

To put things in perspective, consider these words about Bill Clinton from this posting:

We cannot forget that the real price America is likely to pay for the Clinton-Gore years will not be from inappropriate sexual dalliances, but from that administration's peculiar dealings with China, which Bill Gertz outlines in his 2001 book entitled Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security. Character does matter in the end.

Gertz has also elaborated previously on the growing threat from China in his 2000 book entitled The China Threat: How the People's Republic Targets America.

In other words, Bill Clinton's legacy will be about how how he did not deal with bin Laden and how he permitted untoward things to happen with China. Let's bring a cool-headed, laser-like focus to Hillary Rodham Clinton and not let her get the upper hand in any public debate about important policy matters.

Dick Morris comments on Hillary with an editorial entitled Personal attacks on Hillary will only embolden her. Here is more commentary on Klein's book. Michelle Malkin directs us to a number of other reviewers of the book.


June 16, 2005


Liberalism's Dilemma

Marc Comtois

Andrew writes about Liberalism's Dilemma at Tech Central Station.


June 14, 2005


Electromagnetic Pulse: A Real Threat to the Security of the United States

Frank Gaffney delivered a speech on May 24, 2005, in Dallas, Texas, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "Americas War Against Islamic Terrorism."

An adapted version of that speech can be found in the latest edition of Hillsdale College's Imprimis publication and is entitled "EMP: Americas Achilles Heel".

...[What if the] destruction [of America] could be accomplished with a single attack involving just one relatively small-yield nuclear weaponand if the nature of the attack would mean that its perpetrator might not be immediately or easily identified.

Unfortunately, such a scenario is not far-fetched. According to a report issued last summer by a blue-ribbon, Congressionally-mandated commission, a single specialized nuclear weapon delivered to an altitude of a few hundred miles over the United States by a ballistic missile would be "capable of causing catastrophe for the nation." The source of such a cataclysm might be considered the ultimate "weapon of mass destruction" (WMD)yet it is hardly ever mentioned in the litany of dangerous WMDs we face today. It is known as electromagnetic pulse (EMP)...

Estimates of the combined direct and indirect effects of an EMP attack prompted the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack to state the following in its report to Congress:

The electromagnetic fields produced by weapons designed and deployed with the intent to produce EMP have a high likelihood of damaging electrical power systems, electronics, and information systems upon which American society depends. Their effects on dependent systems and infrastructures could be sufficient to qualify as catastrophic to the nation.

...The EMP Threat Commission estimates that, all other things being equal, it may take months to years to bring such systems fully back online. Here is how it depicts the horrifying ripple effect of the sustained loss of electricity on contemporary American society:

Depending on the specific characteristics of the attacks, unprecedented cascading failures of our major infrastructures could result. In that event, a regional or national recovery would be long and difficult and would seriously degrade the safety and overall viability of our nation. The primary avenues for catastrophic damage to the nation are through our electric power infrastructure and thence into our telecommunications, energy, and other infrastructures. These, in turn, can seriously impact other important aspects of our nations life, including the financial system; means of getting food, water, and medical care to the citizenry; trade; and production of goods and services...

Unfortunately, todays strategic environment has changed dramatically from that of the Cold War, when only the Soviet Union and Communist China could realistically threaten an EMP attack on the United States. In particular, as the EMP Threat Commission put it:

The emerging threat environment, characterized by a wide spectrum of actors that include near-peers, established nuclear powers, rogue nations, sub-national groups, and terrorist organizations that either now have access to nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles or may have such access over the next 15 years, have combined to raise the risk of EMP attack and adverse consequences on the U.S. to a level that is not acceptable.

Worse yet, the Commission observed that "some potential sources of EMP threats are difficult to deter." This is particularly true of "terrorist groups that have no state identity, have only one or a few weapons, and are motivated to attack the U.S. without regard for their own safety." The same might be said of rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran. They "may also be developing the capability to pose an EMP threat to the United States, and may also be unpredictable and difficult to deter." Indeed, professionals associated with the former Soviet nuclear weapons complex are said to have told the Commission that some of their ex-colleagues who worked on advanced nuclear weaponry programs for the USSR are now working in North Korea.

Even more troubling, the Iranian military has reportedly tested its Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile in a manner consistent with an EMP attack scenario. The launches are said to have taken place from aboard a shipan approach that would enable even short-range missiles to be employed in a strike against "the Great Satan." Ship-launched ballistic missiles have another advantage: The "return address" of the attacker may not be confidently fixed, especially if the missile is a generic Scud-type weapon available in many arsenals around the world. As just one example, in December 2002, North Korea got away with delivering twelve such missiles to Osama bin Ladens native Yemen. And Al Qaeda is estimated to have a score or more of sea-going vessels, any of which could readily be fitted with a Scud launcher and could try to steam undetected within range of our shores.

The EMP Threat Commission found that even nations with whom the United States is supposed to have friendly relations, China and Russia, are said to have considered limited nuclear attack options that, unlike their Cold War plans, employ EMP as the primary or sole means of attack...

What makes the growing EMP attack capabilities of hostile (and potentially hostile) nations a particular problem for America is that, in the words of the EMP Threat Commission, "the U.S. has developed more than most other nations as a modern society heavily dependent on electronics, telecommunications, energy, information networks, and a rich set of financial and transportation systems that leverage modern technology." Given our acute national dependence on such technologies, it is astonishingand alarmingto realize that:

Very little redundancy has been built into Americas critical infrastructure. There is, for example, no parallel national security power grid built to enjoy greater resiliency than the civilian grid.

Americas critical infrastructure has scarcely any capacity to spare in the event of disruptioneven in one part of the country (recall the electrical blackout that crippled the northeastern U.S. for just a few days in 2003), let alone nationwide.

America is generally ill-prepared to reconstitute damaged or destroyed electrical and electricity-dependent systems upon which we rely so heavily.

These conditions are not entirely surprising. America in peacetime has not traditionally given thought to military preparedness, given our highly efficient economy and its ability to respond quickly when a threat or attack arises. But EMP threatens to strip our economy of that ability, by rendering the infrastructure on which it relies impotent.

In short, the attributes that make us a military and economic superpower without peer are also our potential Achilles' heel. In todays world, wracked by terrorists and their state sponsors, it must be asked: Might not the opportunity to exploit the essence of Americas strengththe managed flow of electrons and all they make possiblein order to undo that strength prove irresistible to our foes? This line of thinking seems especially likely among our Islamofascist enemies, who disdain such man-made sources of power and the sorts of democratic, humane and secular societies which they help make possible. These enemies believe it to be their God-given responsibility to wage jihad against Western societies in general and the United States in particular...

We have been warned. The members of the EMP Threat Commissionwho are among the nations most eminent experts with respect to nuclear weapons designs and effectshave rendered a real and timely public service. In the aftermath of their report and in the face of the dire warnings they have issued, there is no excuse for our continued inaction. Yet this report and these warnings continue to receive inadequate attention from the executive branch, Congress and the media. If Americans remain ignorant of the EMP danger and the need for urgent and sustained effort to address it, the United States will continue to remain woefully unprepared for one of the most serious dangers we have ever faced. And by remaining unprepared for such an attack, we will invite it.

The good news is that steps can be taken to mitigate this dangerand perhaps to prevent an EMP attack altogether. The bad news is that there will be significant costs associated with those steps, in terms of controversial policy changes and considerable expenditures. We have no choice but to bear such costs, however. The price of continued inaction could be a disaster of infinitely greater cost and unimaginable hardship for our generation and generations of Americans to come.

You will learn much more by reading the entire article.

In addition, this link leads to a release from the Center for Security Policy, which Gaffney leads, and the executive summary of the classified EMP Commission report.


June 13, 2005


Why the Big Three Auto Companies Could Easily Fail

An earlier posting entitled Outrageous Employee Compensation Liabilities Continue to Haunt General Motors; Will American Taxpayers End Up Paying the Bill? highlighted pension and healthcare cost issues that have made American auto makers like General Motors cost the high cost producer in a competitive global marketplace.

These points and the structural problems that sustain them are highlighted in a Wall Street Journal article entitled UAW Is Facing Biggest Battle In Two Decades:

...UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and other UAW leaders face the union's worst crisis since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when oil price shocks and a surge of Japanese cars forced thousands of layoffs at Detroit's Big Three, and drove Chrysler Corp. to seek a government bailout. How Mr. Gettelfinger handles the challenge could be critical in whether General Motors Corp. and several major U.S. auto parts makers pull out of their recent financial crises.

...the UAW is again facing management demands to give back some of what it has won, particularly in health benefits, or risk even more job losses...

"I do get a little bit irritated when I constantly hear and read that the problems are UAW," Mr. Gettelfinger told a popular Detroit morning radio host, Paul W. Smith, Wednesday morning on ABC-affiliate WJR. The question, he says, should be why the U.S. can't create a single-payer, universal health-care system. And he says the U.S. needs a tougher trade policy. "You say we can't rely on Washington," Mr. Gettelfinger told Mr. Smith and his Detroit audience. "Well, why can't we? These people are elected by us, and I think our expectation is way too low."

You know the economic debate about uneconomically high American car manufacturing costs is getting off to a good start when the ideas of socialized medicine and some sort of tariff/import restrictions - both of which would raise costs - are the initial counter proposals to the challenges arising from global competition. Are these UAW people really that economically illiterate? E.g., see Canadian Supreme Court: "Access to a Waiting List is NOT Access to Health Care" for more information on the failures of socialized medicine.

The article continues:

...Rick Wagoner, GM's chairman and chief executive, used Tuesday's annual shareholder meeting to deliver his strongest public warning yet that the No. 1 auto maker is prepared to take action to cut its $5.6 billion U.S. health-care bill -- with or without the UAW's agreement...an agreement with the union to cut health costs is "our very strongly preferred approach"; then he added, "Either way, it is crystal clear that we need to achieve a significant reduction in our health-care cost disadvantage and to do so promptly. We are committed to do that."...

Yesterday, UAW leaders representing union locals from GM and Delphi plants throughout the country gathered in Detroit for the first of two meetings to review the two companies' situations. Officials who were there say the focus of the first session was on GM and health care. Richard Shoemaker, the UAW official charged with negotiating with GM and Delphi, spelled out GM's dire situation. A Power Point presentation highlighted its declining market share, rising health-care costs and legacy burden of retiree benefits. The message was grim: Each percentage-point drop in market share means 170,000 fewer vehicles built by UAW members.

Mr. Shoemaker's thrust: What can the UAW do within the confines of the contract to help GM? But he also said the UAW wouldn't reopen the contract, which isn't set to expire until 2007, the officials said...

A crisis is at hand - and has been for years now - and the UAW's response is to say "see you in 2 years."

The article continues:

Mr. Coven said several officials stood up and said that while they would bend on health-care issues for current workers, they wouldn't be willing to bend on retiree issues...

Retirees form an increasingly large share of all UAW members. Since 1980, active membership in the UAW has fallen by more than half to just over 622,000, according to the UAW. The union says it currently has more than 500,000 retirees.

Two-tier contracts are already becoming more common at auto suppliers...

Think about how much the current employee contracts are going to have to change if nearly one-half of the costs (for retirees) are defined as off-limits. It begs the question of whether they can change enough to even make a competitive difference to General Motors.

Here are further excerpts from the article:

Workers in China earn an average of $1.96 an hour, compared with $36.55 for the average American auto worker, says automotive consultant John Hoffecker of AlixPartners, Southfield, Mich. Chinese car makers are gearing up for a major export push, he says, as their car-making capacity outstrips that nation's demand.

But even more threatening for auto workers is the grim scenario playing out now in the airline industry: Unionized carriers, such as UAL Corp.'s United Airlines, have sought bankruptcy-court protection, then shed their union pension plans and forced through big wage cuts.

While none of the Big Three auto makers has suggested bankruptcy protection as a way to shed health-care or pension obligations, several big auto suppliers have made Chapter 11 filings in bankruptcy court in recent months...

The health-care coverage GM currently offers hourly retirees is more generous than the coverage it offers white-collar retirees and the coverage many comparable large companies offer their retirees. GM's UAW retirees pay no premiums, compared with monthly premiums of $75 paid by GM's white-collar retirees and an average of about $166 paid by retirees at comparable large firms, according to Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Brian Johnson.

Note the key words: UAW retirees receive rich healthcare benefits - and pay no premiums for that coverage. And the UAW says changing that is off limits - when they finally get around in 2007 to negotiating a new contract.

What could the impact of such changes be?

Raising the monthly premiums for hourly retirees to $50 would improve GM's annual earnings by about $1.44 per share and its cash situation by about 73 cents per share, Mr. Johnson said. If the monthly premiums were raised to $100, GM's earnings per share would be boosted by $2.93 a share and its cash would be improved by $1.45 a share, Mr. Johnson wrote in a report published recently. GM has more than 565 million shares outstanding.

According to Mr. Shaiken, the labor expert, only two times in the UAW's history has its agreed to reopen a master contract. Once was in the 1950s; the second time was in 1982. He described the 1982 re-opening as "politically explosive" and "a very painful process."

In 1982, the UAW agreed to concessions with GM. But after the agreement was officially ratified, GM disclosed a new, more-generous bonus plan for the company's top executives. "You can imagine how that played," Mr. Shaiken said. "So, when the UAW says, 'Let's figure out what else we can do,' that doesn't come out of thin air. There's a history behind that."

What sort of buffoons in management would introduce a new, self-serving bonus plan at the same time they are taking away compensation from hourly workers? It is hard not to reach the conclusion that these management and union personnel deserve each other.

Economics 101 is the ultimate reality show. If you won't deal with economic reality, then it will deal with you - on its own terms.

Continue reading "Why the Big Three Auto Companies Could Easily Fail"


For a Chuckle...

ScrappleFace does it like no one else.

Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, we forget to do what ScrappleFace does - poke fun at political actors. Here are two great recent examples:

GOP Senators Shocked: Judge Brown is Black:

Republican Senators, who yesterday confirmed President Bush's appointment of Judge Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, today expressed shock at learning that the California Supreme Court justice is black.

The revelation comes in same week that Democrat party Chairman Dr. Howard Dean released his research showing that Republicans, and especially their leaders, "all look the same" because they're "white Christians."

"I'm concerned about how this is going to play with the white base," said an unnamed Republican Senator upon learning of Judge Brown's non-mainstream race. "I feel betrayed by President Bush, who has now managed to sneak a number of non-whites, not to mention women, into high-ranking government positions. The White House tricked us into focusing on the accomplishments of nominees, distracting us from the key genetic and theological markers that Dr. Dean has identified as determining factors of Republicanism."...

Rumsfeld: Move U.N. to Guantanamo:

On the day that a bipartisan U.S. commission reported that the United Nations is stuck in a quagmire of mismanagement, corruption and 'dismal' staff morale, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested moving the headquarters of the global organization to the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay...

The panel probing the U.N. found that the organization has failed to stop genocide, mass killing and major human rights violations.

"Even if you believe Amnesty International's outrageous claims," said Mr. Rumsfeld, "It would be, ethically speaking, a big step up for Kofi Annan to associate himself with the name Gitmo."

The defense secretary said that if Mr. Annan accepts his proposal, the U.S. would throw in several thousand free copies of the Koran as a "signing bonus."



Will FEC Draft Regulations Lead to Greater Regulatory Control Over Blogging Community?

This interview with FEC Commissioner Brad Smith again reminds us of the potential ongoing threat to our freedom of speech as bloggers via FEC draft regulations on Internet communications. The editor's note at the beginning of the interview defines the issues:

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is currently under court order to consider extending regulation and restriction of political speech outlined by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA, also known as McCain-Feingold). The court order was the result of a lawsuit filed by advocates of regulated speech, including the architects of BCRA, Sens. John McCain and Russ Feingold. Users of the Internet, such as online publications and blogs, so far have enjoyed a broad exemption from the speech restrictions favored by reformers. But the court-ordered rule-making by the FEC could change that.

Brad Smith then makes these comments in the interview:

...one of the problems I think with campaign finance law and regulation is that it adds complexity and makes it more difficult for citizens to participate in politics -- it puts legal hurdles in their way.

So it's not necessary that the FEC would be setting this rule-making determined to shut down blogs before bloggers have to get concerned or before people should be concerned about their rights to participate in politics; or before people should be concerned about what effect the regulation might have on what has been a very democratizing medium.

And what this rule making does is it sets the stage. We will have changed the presumption from the idea that the Internet is not regulated to one that it is regulated. And once we have made the presumption that it's going to be regulated, it's only a matter of time before people will find things that they think therefore ought to be regulated.

Politics is a dirty business...People who lose in political battles don't like to admit that they lost because maybe their ideas weren't good enough or they weren't persuasive enough, or people just don't agree with them. They would like to say, well, those guys must have an unfair advantage that must be regulated. That's the way that the political system works here and we have now set up the presumption that when things come up that people are unhappy about, government should regulate them.

I go back to a First Amendment perspective, that the First Amendment was there for us to keep government out of this. Now we are past the stage in which we can say that the courts will strike down all campaign finance regulation. But we really need to ask ourselves: is there not one area of American political life that can be unregulated? Is it absolutely required to regulate every area? And if there is one area that could be unregulated, one would think it might be the Internet, given that it's one area where the little guy -- the average citizen -- really can get in there and compete with the big, well-financed interests...

We have been forced into a position that there will be some regulation; and that alone will mark a substantial change in the whole disposition towards the Internet. I think that the commission can and should adopt a broad exemption for personal activity on the Internet and also for paid ads to be on the Internet.

We need to make clear that bloggers are press, these are periodicals and people update them regularly; that the first amendment does not only apply to people who are members of the National Press Club, that it is not limited to people who have a little press card in their hat band like some 1930s movie.

The press is everybody; every citizen has a right to publish his views and to promote his views and if the Internet is blurring a distinction between traditional media and just average citizens, I am not sure that's a bad thing. That's a good thing, a democratizing thing, it is exactly the type of thing that the reformers claimed for years to want. They ought to rejoice in it. That they don't is interesting in itself...

...oddly, with the type of regulation in which the more money you have the more free you will be to participate. A wealthy guy like George Soros, who can spend his millions, or Rupert Murdoch who can own a network, will have heightened influence. Your average small business doesn't have that possibility. They can, however, go onto the Internet. But now we are going to say, "No, you can't take it on the Internet either." Systematically we are working again exactly backwards.

Continue reading "Will FEC Draft Regulations Lead to Greater Regulatory Control Over Blogging Community?"

June 9, 2005


Milton Friedman on School Choice

Milton Friedman has written a new editorial entitled "Free to Choose: After 50 years, education vouchers are beginning to catch on"

Little did I know when I published an article in 1955 on "The Role of Government in Education" that it would lead to my becoming an activist for a major reform in the organization of schooling...The original article was not a reaction to a perceived deficiency in schooling. The quality of schooling in the United States then was far better than it is now, and both my wife and I were satisfied with the public schools we had attended. My interest was in the philosophy of a free society. Education was the area that I happened to write on early. I then went on to consider other areas as well. The end result was "Capitalism and Freedom," published seven years later with the education article as one chapter.

With respect to education, I pointed out that government was playing three major roles: (1) legislating compulsory schooling, (2) financing schooling, (3) administering schools. I concluded that there was some justification for compulsory schooling and the financing of schooling, but "the actual administration of educational institutions by the government, the 'nationalization,' as it were, of the bulk of the 'education industry' is much more difficult to justify on [free market] or, so far as I can see, on any other grounds." Yet finance and administration "could readily be separated. Governments could require a minimum of schooling financed by giving the parents vouchers redeemable for a given sum per child per year to be spent on purely educational services. . . . Denationalizing schooling," I went on, "would widen the range of choice available to parents. . . . If present public expenditure were made available to parents regardless of where they send their children, a wide variety of schools would spring up to meet the demand. . . . Here, as in other fields, competitive enterprise is likely to be far more efficient in meeting consumer demand than either nationalized enterprises or enterprises run to serve other purposes."...

What really led to increased interest in vouchers was the deterioration of schooling, dating in particular from 1965 when the National Education Association converted itself from a professional association to a trade union. Concern about the quality of education led to the establishment of the National Commission of Excellence in Education, whose final report, "A Nation at Risk," was published in 1983. It used the following quote from Paul Copperman to dramatize its own conclusion:

"Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents."

"A Nation at Risk" stimulated much soul-searching and a whole series of major attempts to reform the government educational system. These reforms, however extensive or bold, have, it is widely agreed, had negligible effect on the quality of the public school system. Though spending per pupil has more than doubled since 1970 after allowing for inflation, students continue to rank low in international comparisons; dropout rates are high; scores on SATs and the like have fallen and remain flat. Simple literacy, let alone functional literacy, in the United States is almost surely lower at the beginning of the 21st century than it was a century earlier. And all this is despite a major increase in real spending per student since "A Nation at Risk" was published.

One result has been experimentation with such alternatives as vouchers, tax credits, and charter schools. Government voucher programs are in effect in a few places (Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, the District of Columbia); private voucher programs are widespread; tax credits for educational expenses have been adopted in at least three states and tax credit vouchers (tax credits for gifts to scholarship-granting organizations) in three states. In addition, a major legal obstacle to the adoption of vouchers was removed when the Supreme Court affirmed the legality of the Cleveland voucher in 2002. However, all of these programs are limited; taken together they cover only a small fraction of all children in the country.

Throughout this long period, we have been repeatedly frustrated by the gulf between the clear and present need, the burning desire of parents to have more control over the schooling of their children, on the one hand, and the adamant and effective opposition of trade union leaders and educational administrators to any change that would in any way reduce their control of the educational system...

...In each case [of voter initiatives on school choice], about six months before the election, the voucher opponents launched a well-financed and thoroughly unscrupulous campaign against the initiative. Television ads blared that vouchers would break the budget, whereas in fact they would reduce spending since the proposed voucher was to be only a fraction of what government was spending per student. Teachers were induced to send home with their students misleading propaganda against the initiative. Dirty tricks of every variety were financed from a very deep purse. The result was to convert the initial majority into a landslide defeat...Opposition like this explains why progress has been so slow in such a good cause.

The good news is that, despite these setbacks, public interest in and support for vouchers and tax credits continues to grow. Legislative proposals to channel government funds directly to students rather than to schools are under consideration in something like 20 states. Sooner or later there will be a breakthrough; we shall get a universal voucher plan in one or more states. When we do, a competitive private educational market serving parents who are free to choose the school they believe best for each child will demonstrate how it can revolutionize schooling.

Why all the attention to public education issues here in Rhode Island? Why all the attention to union contract negotiations? There is one simple reason and it was articulated above by Paul Copperman in 1983: "For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents." That is a damning indictment of the status quo and those who support it.

Therefore, this debate is about ensuring all children have a fair shot at realizing the American Dream. They will only get that fair shot if we provide them with access to a quality education - where the definition of quality means they are able to compete successfully on a global basis.

The evidence is in and the status quo has failed our children with long-term adverse consequences for the competitive strength of our entire country. Serious change must occur beginning immediately. We have a moral obligation to engage in the battle for change; nothing less will suffice.

Continue reading "Milton Friedman on School Choice"

June 8, 2005


Outrageous Employee Compensation Liabilities Continue to Haunt General Motors; Will American Taxpayers End Up Paying the Bill?

Greg Wallace at What Attitude Problem? highlights this week's news on General Motors, building on the news previously highlighted here on this blogsite.

First, a Washington Post article states:

General Motors Corp., the world's biggest automaker, has offered buyout and early retirement packages to some of its nonunion, salaried workforce in North America as the company grapples with cutting costs.

The offers were sent in the first quarter in hopes of speeding the normal amount of attrition the company usually has...

GM is under pressure from investors to close plants and renegotiate union contracts. Its bonds fell last week to the lowest levels against government debt since at least 2001 after the company forecast its biggest quarterly loss in 13 years. The Detroit company is the third-biggest issuer of corporate debt...

With U.S. sales this year headed for the lowest market share in 80 years, GM is finding it tougher to cover rising health care costs for its 1.1 million employees, retirees and dependents and pay for increased costs for steel and other materials...

Then Ankle Biting Pundits weighs in with some strong observations:

...A substantial part of G.M.'s problem - but hardly the only issue - is that it is supporting about two and a half retirees for every worker. With health care costs more than $5 billion a year - and about $1,400 on a vehicle produced in the United States - many G.M. workers are expecting that long-cherished benefits could be pared back...

A posting on the blogsite notes that non-union General Motors' retirees are paying an increasingly large portion of their medical costs but union contracts do not yet require union retirees to make similar contributions. The author of the posting also notes that GM's problem is quite similar to the looming problem with Social Security - fewer people working to support more and more retirees.

In a different posting, Ankle Biting Pundits makes these additional comments:

...I hope the United Auto Workers union are happy. Thanks to their insane demands for lifetime health care for retirees, not wanting to contribute to rising health care costs, and an outdated, underfunded pension system, 25,000 of their members are going to heading to the unemployment line...

We take no joy in seeing anyone lose their job, that's not the reason we're mentioning this. Rather, we point out that what ails GM is a microcosm for what troubles America. The GM pension system is going bankrupt because an ever smaller number of workers are supporting a ever larger number of non-producers. Sound familiar (think Social Security)? The union could have cared less that health care and other costs were skyrocketing - they wanted to continue the free ride and refused to see how this stance could only lead to disaster for everyone...

It is not hard to imagine that the next step at some point in the near future is GM declaring bankruptcy and dumping its underfunded pension plan on the PBGC. It's really the only thing they can do to survive. The shame is that all those people who are going to have their pensions cut and their health care costs skyrocket can thank their labor unions for their plight (Granted, GM management was pretty stupid to go along with their ridiculous demands). And guess who's going to have to pay for that? Yup, us the taxpayers. Way to go UAW. Both your union members and we the taxpayers thank you.

For further examples of egregious union contract terms, read some of the comments posted to this most recent link.

A story in The Wall Street Journal states:

GM's North American operations, which posted a loss of $1.3 billion for the first quarter, already have been eliminating about 8,000 jobs a year through a combination of attrition and early-retirement programs since 2002...Those cost cuts haven't been enough to offset GM's sliding U.S. market share and declining revenue per vehicle.

...Mr. Wagoner said the newly announced cuts would be "an acceleration" of normal attrition...

GM's total North American work force was 181,000 as of Dec. 31. Of those, 111,000 are hourly workers in the U.S.

GM is the last of Detroit's Big Three...to announce a restructuring program within the past five years, a period during which market share for the three big, unionized U.S. auto makers has plunged from 68% in 2000 to just over 57% as of the end of May.

Reaction from the United Auto Workers, the large union that represents most GM manufacturing workers in North America, came late yesterday in a statement from its vice president and top GM negotiator, Richard Shoemaker. He said the union "is not convinced that GM can simply shrink its way out of its current problems. What's needed is an intense focus on rebuilding GM's U.S. market share, and the way to get there is by offering the right product mix of vehicles with world-class design and quality.

"It's one thing to present in a speech specific targets for job reductions and closing plants by the end of 2008," Mr. Shoemaker said, but in reality "various factors" will determine the actual outcome, including talks on a new labor agreement scheduled to take effect in 2007...

Morgan Stanley analyst Stephen Girsky said in a comment that Mr. Wagoner's plans represent "a small step in the right direction" but added, "The targeted employment reduction appears to be roughly in line with recent attrition and does not appear to be acceleration."...

Since then, he has sketched out a four-legged strategy for restoring profitability, that starts with boosting capital spending this year and next to speed the launches of several new models, including replacements for GM's aging lineup of large SUVs. Part two of the plan is a sweeping overhaul of U.S. marketing strategy. On legs three and four -- cost-cutting and reducing GM's burdensome health-care bill -- Mr. Wagoner has offered few details and appears to be avoiding drastic, short-term cuts. Much of his success will depend on the acquiescence of the UAW and suppliers that already are straining to meet GM's cost-cutting demands...

...cuts would save GM about $2.5 billion a year. That works out to savings of about $530 on average for every U.S. vehicle, using GM's 2004 sales. That is about only a third of the $1,500 higher cost per vehicle that GM suffers against foreign rivals because of its high worker costs, including health care for retirees.

A GM spokeswoman said yesterday that job cuts are only one part of GM's cost-reduction plan. The company also expects to save money in areas such as purchasing, productivity improvements and health care, she said.

On the key issue of GM's high health-care costs for workers and pensioners, Mr. Wagoner said GM management hasn't reached an agreement in talks with the UAW about ways to reduce GM's $5.6-billion-a-year U.S. health-care bill. "To be honest, I'm not 100% certain that we will," he said...

On the production front, Mr. Wagoner said GM needs "to get to 100% capacity utilization, or better" in North America, compared with about 85% in 2004. By the end of this year, based on plant closings already announced, GM will reduce its North American assembly capacity to five million vehicles from six million in 2002, Mr. Wagoner said.

"We expect to close additional assembly and component plants over the next few years, and to reduce our manufacturing employment levels in the U.S. by 25,000 or more in the 2005-2008 period," Mr. Wagoner said. He didn't identify specific plants that could be closed.

Mr. Wagoner faces a major challenge in GM's contract with the UAW. The current agreement, which expires in 2007, technically prohibits plant shutdowns, and guarantees UAW workers full pay and benefits if their plants are shuttered for a lengthy period...

...could refuse to renew those income and job protections in 2007, but the UAW has fought successfully to maintain them in each contract cycle since GM agreed to the provisions in 1990...

In his speech to shareholders, Mr. Wagoner said GM ultimately plans to "look at capacity utilization on a global basis." In other words, GM hopes to follow Japanese rivals such as Honda Motor Co. that can move production of various models rapidly from plant to plant based on sales patterns, or tool one plant to ship vehicles to any market, based on demand...

From a distance, the GM changes sound incremental and not of a size to reinvent the company's micro-economic business model. That does not bode well for the company. After all these years of struggling, you would think that management and the UAW would get the point that re-arranging the chairs on the GM Titanic will not fix the fundamental, structural problems. These people need to get real - and do it quickly.

As I have said in a previous posting: If you don't deal with economic reality, then it will deal with you - on its own terms. That does not bode well for the well-being and competitive strength of the American economy. Unless we significantly tackle the weaknesses embedded in the status quo, we are going to pay a hefty price. To be more precise, we are setting up the American economy for a fall which could deprive our children and grandchildren of the opportunity to live the American Dream. That is morally reprehensible.

When will people wake up and really pay attention?

Continue reading "Outrageous Employee Compensation Liabilities Continue to Haunt General Motors; Will American Taxpayers End Up Paying the Bill?"


Revisiting the Case for Janice Rogers Brown

The US Senate today approved the appointment of Janice Rogers Brown to the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals. That news is cause for celebration and revisiting the case for her appointment.

Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute offers these powerful thoughts on Janice Rogers Brown:

How much longer can we go on playing constitutional pretend pretending that there's a serious connection between the Constitution and so much of what passes today for "constitutional law"?

Rarely faced head-on, the question arises on the few fortunate times when we're presented with a judicial nominee who's been so bold as to publicly doubt the connection. At the moment that's Janice Rogers Brown.

The pretend game is especially well-played by "moderates" wary of "extremists" like Brown. And no one plays it better...than the wonderfully moderate Stuart Taylor Jr., because no one tries harder than he to find common ground between the warring camps brought forth by such a nominee. Blessed are the peacemakers.

But war is sometimes inevitable, as when great principles are at stake...No moderate she, her thinking is indeed "radical," going to the root of the matter. It's the kind of thinking that awakens Washington from its dogmatic slumbers. That's why the battle today is so vicious...because the stakes are so high.

What's the Principle?

Like many a moderate, Taylor sees "grave danger" in the Republican effort to bring an end to the unprecedented judicial filibusters that, for two years, have blocked 10 of President George W. Bush's appellate court nominees. But his criticism is evenhanded, not surprisingly: "Both sides," he writes, "are hypocritical to pretend they're driven by principle, not partisanship."

True, on both sides there's enough hypocrisy to go around, and both sides are driven by partisanship no surprise there. But that doesn't mean that principle is not also at issue. The question is, What's the principle?

For Republicans, it seems to be "that the Senate's Article I power to 'determine the rules of its proceedings' applies . . . less to confirmation proceedings than to legislative proceedings," Taylor tells us, calling the argument "embarrassingly weak." No, it rests on the history of the extraconstitutional filibuster, which until 2003 had never been used to block judicial nominees with clear majority support. By specifying the few things requiring a supermajority vote, the Constitution fairly implies majority rule for the rest, with "rules of its proceedings" meant mainly for housekeeping. Put it this way: Would constitutional alarms sound were the confirmation rule four-fifths or nine-tenths? Then why not when it's three-fifths?

For Democrats, the principle seems to be to temper majority rule when a nominee is "outside the mainstream" that is, to filibuster nominees who fail to reflect "the core values held by most of our country's citizens," as Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) put it in a 2001 New York Times op-ed, just as he was launching Senate hearings to push for ideological litmus tests for nominees.

Never mind that judges are supposed to apply the law whether or not it's consistent with their own or the citizenry's "core values" (now that is a principle), Schumer's point is captured by Taylor when he concludes his filibuster commentary by invoking the sword of Damocles. The value of the judicial filibuster, Taylor writes, "is not that it should be used, but that it should hang over the process, and serve as a moderating influence on the president."

"Moderating" influence? Moderating toward what? What sense, if any, do terms like "moderate" and "extreme" make in this context? We hear them all the time, yet they serve mostly to end or to cloud rather than to aid debate about what a judge should do or what we, and the Constitution, stand for about matters of principle. In the end, to say that a judge is "outside the mainstream" is simply to make a political appeal, to trade on the pejorative "extremist."

Unwilling to Pretend

We come, then, to that issue of principle, and to Taylor's brief against Janice Rogers Brown, currently a justice on the California Supreme Court. Her chief sin, it seems, is that she stands for something, for principle, not unlike albeit far from in substance "the remaining exponents of radical redistributionist and Marxist theories" that Taylor plants opposite her. What is worse, perhaps, is that she is willing to speak truth to constitutional hypocrisy and plainly, at that. She is unwilling, that is, to play constitutional pretend.

Consider, for example, Taylor's charge that Brown is "a passionate advocate of a radical, anti-regulatory vision of judicially enforced property rights far more absolute than can be squared with the Supreme Court precedents." Quite so, save for the anti-regulatory part (she's actually anti-takings, which is not the same as anti-regulation). But is the problem with her vision or with the Court's precedents with the "labyrinthine and compartmentalized" case law in this area, as Brown has put it?...

What would Taylor have? Less passion from Brown? A less "radical" approach one that avoids going to the root of the matter? The virtue of someone like Brown is that she's willing and able to go to first principles to straighten out the mess the Court has here, as in so many other areas of our law. In a word, she has a vision. It's a vision of the Constitution, and of the yawning gap between it and much of our modern constitutional law.

A Vision Lost

Therein lies the problem, of course, because the "mainstream" has largely lost sight of that vision. Indeed, Taylor himself recognizes that when he frames his critique with a question that speaks volumes about modern constitutional confusions. Drawing on charges that Brown, were she on the Supreme Court, would be active in holding Congress to its enumerated powers, he asks: Where is the conservative outrage over the president's having nominated someone who believes the Court has authority to find so many of the administration's programs to be without constitutional authority?

Conservatives like Robert Bork and Scalia, after all, have made careers railing against "judicial activists." Yet here comes Brown, who believes the Court should "actively" hold the federal government to its enumerated powers while securing our rights, both enumerated and unenumerated, against every government federal, state, and local.

Modern liberals recoil against the first of those "the Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decisions that constrain Congressional power," as Schumer put it in that New York Times piece. Yet what else could James Madison have meant except limited government when he wrote in Federalist 45 that the powers of Congress would be "few and defined"? Modern conservatives recoil against judicial enforcement of unenumerated rights, fearing "judicial activism." Yet what is the Ninth Amendment about if not unenumerated rights? Or the 14th Amendment's privileges or immunities clause? Or the very structure of the Constitution itself? If we're going to be originalists, let's do it right.

To answer Taylor's question, then, it would seem that there are enough thoughtful people in the Bush administration to have appreciated the constitutional dilemma before the nation the crisis of legitimacy and the need to bring it out in the open. In a word, we have a Constitution authorizing limited government, yet Leviathan surrounds us and Justice Brown is perceptive and secure enough to say so, as Taylor amply notes. For that she should be commended, not criticized...

To be sure, that was one year before the constitutional revolution that is primarily responsible for the constitutional dilemma we have today. Following fast upon President Franklin Roosevelt's notorious Court-packing scheme, the Court caved to political pressure in 1937 and opened the floodgates for the modern welfare state. That's when politics trumped law on a grand scale, and it's never been the same since.

Boston University's Gary Lawson put the upshot well in the 1994 Harvard Law Review: "The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution." But take it from someone who was there, Rexford Tugwell, one of the principal architects of the New Deal: "To the extent that these [New Deal policies] developed, they were tortured interpretations of a document intended to prevent them."

The New Dealers knew exactly what they were doing to the Constitution. Janice Rogers Brown understands that, too. We're fortunate to have so radical a nominee before us.

Continue reading "Revisiting the Case for Janice Rogers Brown"


Islamic Jihadists Here in America, Preparing to Kill

Read this posting for a very detailed and informative writeup on the Islamic jihadists arrested in Lodi, California. Lots of links to follow in the posting.

The posting begins:

As put by Rusty at Jawa Report, "Four men have been arrested in Lodi California, two on suspicion of aiding al Qaeda and two on immigration violation charges. One of the most worrisome aspects of this story is that the two arrested on immigration charges were in the process of starting a religious school. Guess which religion?"

So while we sleep, sleeper cells aren't yawning. From hospital-based terror plots to school lunches, an office building, an airport, or a shopping center, it's all fodder for jihadis. And for a flavor of Islamists agenda for America, you need go no further than the Islamist's favorite group, CAIR, whose board member, Imam Siraj Wahaj calls for replacing the American government with a caliphate, and warns that America will crumble unless it "accepts the Islamic agenda." Are you listening yet? You may be but our politicians and the liberal MSM aren't...

The posting also includes a link to this key conclusion written at the end of this Captain's Quarters posting:

This also shows the fallacy of the "they hate us because they don't know us" crowd. The Hayats and the other fanatics in Lodi had the freedom to practice their religion and earn a decent living in California -- certainly they made a higher standard of living there than they could have expected in Pakistan or Afghanistan, especially before the Taliban were ejected by American military action. They don't hate us because they misunderstand us. They hate us because all they know is hate, and outreach and kind words don't make a damned bit of difference to fanatics.

It's time we understood the difference between moderates and fanatics, and the difference between youthful indiscretions and outright treason. A free society can handle moderates and survive youthful indiscretions, but it cannot abide fanatics who commit treason. We need to make that abundantly clear in the manner which we handle the latter.

Now go read all the various links to get better informed.

Then read this LA Times report and see how these arrests may only be the tip of the iceberg.



Howard Dean: Damaging the Political Discourse in America

Howard Dean has, once again, damaged the quality of political discourse in America:

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, unapologetic in the face of recent criticism that he has been too tough on his political opposition, said in San Francisco this week that Republicans are "a pretty monolithic party. They all behave the same. They all look the same. It's pretty much a white Christian party."

"The Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people," Dean said Monday, responding to a question about diversity during a forum with minority leaders and journalists. "We're more welcoming to different folks, because that's the type of people we are. But that's not enough. We do have to deliver on things: jobs and housing and business opportunities."

The comments are another example of why the former Vermont governor, who remains popular with the party's grassroots, has been a lightning rod for criticism since being elected to head the Democratic National Committee last February. His comments last week that Republicans "never made an honest living in their lives," which he later clarified to say Republican "leaders," were disavowed by leading Democrats including Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson...

But Dean's style and rhetoric have sparked increasing criticism from inside the Democratic Party in recent weeks -- and gleeful Republicans say they couldn't be happier.

"Where do I sign up on a committee to keep Howard Dean?" crowed GOP operative Jon Fleischmann, publisher of the FlashReport, a daily roundup of California political news and commentary. "He's the best thing to happen to the GOP in ages."

"I'm thrilled he's the DNC chair," says Tom Del Becarro, chairman of the Contra Costa County Republican Party. "Howard Dean is scaring away the middle. People don't like angry people. They like hopeful people.''

But Simi Valley Councilman Glenn Becerra, a staffer with former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and a Bush appointee to the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars, said Tuesday he was far from amused by Dean's suggestion that Republicans constitute "a white Christian party," and called the Democratic Party chairman "an embarrassment."

"I'm living proof that the (GOP) isn't what Howard Dean is trying to describe,'' Becerra said during a telephone interview. "It's a sad day when Democrats don't have any ideas to put forward, and they have to resort to race politics. President Bush didn't get 40 percent of the Hispanic vote (in 2004) because we're a monolithic, white Christian party."

Dean, speaking in a roundtable discussion Monday, downplayed the controversy over his rhetoric.

"This is one of those flaps that comes up once in awhile when I get tough," Dean said. "We have to be rough on the Republicans. Republicans don't represent ordinary Americans and they don't have any understanding of what it is to go out and try and make ends meet."...

"What I said was the Republican leadership didn't seem to care much about working people," he said. "That's essentially the gist of the quote."

Still, the words brought sharp rebukes from fellow Democrats such as Biden, who Sunday said Dean "doesn't speak for me ... and I don't think he speaks for the majority of Democrats."

Other Democrats, including Richardson, said such comments hurt Dean's effort to increase Democratic registration, contributions and votes in red states dominated by Republicans...

But Dean's performance -- and his problems -- have become a concern to deep pocketed donors in California, particularly Silicon Valley, which is the No. 3 ATM for political fund-raising in the country, behind New York and Los Angeles, said Wade Randlett, a key party fund-raiser in the high tech center.

"He's got himself in trouble with social commentary, and that's not what the DNC chair does," Randlett said.

"For small donors, hearing 'George Bush is bad' is enough," Randlett said. "What I'm hearing very clearly from big donors is: tell me how we'll win."

Randlett said Dean has been criticized for not quickly improving the pace of fund-raising for the party with a recent Business Week story suggesting that he has been far outpaced by Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman.

According to the story, the DNC has raised less than half of the $42.6 million raised by the RNC in the first four months of the year...

But Republicans note Mehlman wrapped up this third trip as chairman to California last week, and trumpeted an aggressive schedule in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Jose and Sacramento that included hitting Hispanic small business events in Santa Ana, addressing African American voters and women's groups.

"(Ken's) an operative, a tactician," said Fleischman, of FlashReport. "Dean is a politician."...

Garry South, a leading Democratic strategist, said of Dean, "the only thing we can hope is that he understands the difference from being a shadow president to being the head of the party when we're out of office."

His job is to "get the Democratic Party ready for the next election," South said. But "if he views himself as the public face of the Democratic Party, then we have a problem."...

Some things never change. This story offers additional information on other Dean comments as well as a perspective on this demagogue.

Think about what he has said about his political opponents:

They all behave the same.

They all look the same.

It's pretty much a white Christian party.

The Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people.

Republicans never made an honest living in their lives.

Republicans don't represent ordinary Americans and they don't have any understanding of what it is to go out and try and make ends meet.

Republican leadership didn't seem to care much about working people.

Republicans [are] "evil," "corrupt" and "brain-dead" "liars."

Republicans "are not nice people."

[Speaking to the Congressional Black Caucus,] The Republican Party "couldn't get this many people of color in a single room" unless "they had the hotel staff in here."

If you belong to the GOP...then you "are all about suppressing votes: two voting machines if you live in a black district, ten voting machines if you live in a white district."

If you are a Republican...you offer a "dark, difficult and dishonest visionfor America."

Forget the gleeful comments that Howard Dean is good news for the Republicans, because he is scaring away voters in the middle. We must be focused on matters greater than short-term political gain.

As an American, I find Howard Dean's words offensive and the epitomy of intolerance. It is one thing to have a hard-hitting political debate; it is another thing to engage in extreme name-calling, devoid of substance.

Howard Dean is degrading the quality of the civil discourse in our country. Shame on him and those that excuse his unprincipled behavior.

Once again, Peggy Noonan says it so well:

...The comportment of Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean is actually not worthy of America. Their statements suggest they are in no way equal to the country they seek to lead. And something tells me that sooner or later America is going to tell them. But in a generous, mature and fair-minded way.

In the meantime, while some Democratic leaders are distancing themselves from Dean's comments, others blame the "right wing"

The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate yesterday blamed "the right wing" and elements of the press "in service to it" for repeating Howard Dean's remarks about Republicans and inflating them out of proportion. "I think we all understand what's happening with you all," said Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, in remarks echoing Hillary Rodham Clinton's blaming a "vast right-wing conspiracy" for her husband's legal-ethical woes.

"The right wing has got the agenda moving. Fox [News Channel] and everybody's got the agenda. It's all about Howard Dean. You've bought into it," Mr. Durbin said.

"You can't let up on it. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves."

Now, think about what kind of world view is held by people who blame others rather than accept any form of personal responsibility for the repeated actions of their party's national chairman. Then, given that world view, think about what kind of legislation they are likely to propose in the Congress.


June 6, 2005


Bankrupt Public Pensions, Part II

A June 5 posting on RI Policy Analysis links to a new Business Week article on the financially insolvent public pensions.

...the cost of retirement has continued its steady climb. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, major public pension plans paid out $78.5 billion in the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 2000. By the comparable period in 2004, that had grown to $117.8 billion, a 50% climb in five years. Beyond hiking taxes and cutting costs, governments have few ways to meet this bill...

...there's little relief in sight. Excluding federal workers, more than 14 million public servants and 6 million retirees are owed $2.37 trillion by more than 2,000 different states, cities, and agencies, according to recent studies. In 2003 alone, states and municipalities poured some $46.2 billion into these plans, according to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, a 19% jump from the year before. Excluding federally funded programs, pensions went from 2.15% of all state and local spending in 2002 to approximately 2.44% in 2003. But the largest state and city funds were still short $278 billion in 2003 -- approximately 20% of state and municipal revenue excluding federal funds...

As much as states are throwing into pensions, they may owe even more. Despite a 2004 stock market rise that should narrow some of the gap, pension experts at Barclays Global Investors (BCS ) say that if public plans calculated their obligations using the more conservative math that private funds do, they would not be $278 billion under, but more than $700 billion in the red. "It's just ruining the financial picture for states and municipalities," says Matthew H. Scanlan, managing director of Barclays, one of the largest managers of pension-fund investments. "You're looking at a taxpayer bailout of this pension crisis at some point."

There's more bad news. One major category of cost isn't disclosed at all: how much retiree health care has been promised to public retirees. No one can estimate how much these promises will add up to, but they're sure to be in the tens of billions, and only some states seem to have put aside reserves for them, according to bond analysts. That's chilling, given how quickly medical costs are rising. After a pitched battle, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), the independent accounting standards-setter for state and local governments, has finally begun to require states to disclose these liabilities. Numerous unions and state government representatives objected to the change, says GASB member Cynthia B. Green, "not because [unions and states] didn't think these were important, but because they thought once the governments did their studies and found what the price tag was, they would be concerned or, if not concerned, staggered." The requirement will be phased in beginning in late 2006.

If these costs aren't brought under control, rising taxes could prove unavoidable -- and a competitive problem for the states in the worst shape as well as for the country...companies -- and even citizens -- could end up moving to states in better fiscal shape. "You could see it turning into an economic desert in certain states," he warns. Combined with the national retirement issues surrounding Social Security, these plans contribute to a depressing outlook for U.S. competitiveness overall...

One reason for the drop [in pension funding levels] was unavoidable: The impact of the bear market of 2000-2002 on the value of these fund investments was severe. The other reason was just foolishness: a lathering on of billions of dollars worth of new promises to workers in flush days. It was a familiar mistake: Public-pension provisions are determined by elected officials, and civil servants vote. Legislators have a long history of making such expensive upgrades to already generous plans.

Some of these giveaways are truly spectacular. In 1998 the city of Houston instituted a deferred-retirement option plan, or DROP, that would allow workers to in effect take their retirement when they became eligible for it but continue to work at their salary. The retirement income was put in a side account where it earned an attractive rate of return, and the employee could later have his pension adjusted upward to a higher level. The DROP, along with other pension improvements, drove the city's pension plan down from 91%-funded in 2000 to just 60% two years later. Houston had gone from contributing 9.5% of payroll toward pensions to more than 32%. Joseph Esuchanko, a Michigan actuary brought in to study the problem, discovered that things would only get worse. According to his calculations, it was possible for employees to become millionaires thanks to the system...

...even bare-bones guaranteed retirements are increasingly rare in the rest of the economy. According to the Census Bureau, 90% of state and local workers have a defined-benefit pension with a guaranteed payout. But only 24% of people employed in the private sector have such plans. (Most public-sector employees contribute along with employers to their pensions, unlike private-sector workers.) And more of the companies that once offered these benefits -- places like Motorola, IBM, and Delta Air Lines -- are dropping them for new workers in favor of 401(k)s. Health-care coverage for retirees, a costly perk that companies have been shedding at lightning speed, also remains common in the public realm.

It has long been accepted as truth that government workers get good benefits and job security in lieu of high salaries, but over the years the gap between public and private employee paychecks seems to have narrowed. It's hard to come by perfect comparisons, since government numbers for the private sector include lower-wage industries like retailing, which pull down the averages, but overall, public-sector workers look to be getting a pretty good deal. In 2004 average salary for a public worker was $49,275 compared with $34,461 for everyone else, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI).

Even white-collar workers are better off in the public sphere. According to the U.S. Labor Dept., state and local government managers and professional staff earned $42.87 an hour last year, while their private-sector counterparts earned $41.52. One big reason: government workers get $2.62 an hour in retirement benefits; everyone else gets $1.63.

States pay more for public retirees too. According to the EBRI, the average public-plan retiree got $16,188 a year in 2003, far more than the $7,200 their private company counterparts could expect. One reason for that big split is that some public retirees do not get Social Security. But that too is changing. Since 1983 most public workers have been part of that system too, so in the future the disparity could well widen. All in all, EBRI concludes, state and local government wage and salary costs are 40% higher than the private sector's; its employee benefit costs are 60% higher...

This tendency to dole out goodies in fat times is the core moral hazard of public-pension plans. Politicians like to reward voters when they can, and public workers vote..."That was the mirage of cost-free benefits," says S&P's Young. "Nobody pays, nobody gets hurt."...

But states have also voluntarily heightened their own exposure to this risk. Rosalind M. Hewsenian, managing director of Wilshire Associates, says the biggest cause of the sharp drop in funding levels at public plans over the past few years was a drop in employer funding and a reliance instead on investment gains to make up the difference...

Elected officials are hesitant to ask the rest of their voters to pay for these promises through higher taxes. One primary reason: Outside of government workers, very few employees have these kinds of deals anymore. "Our people at 55 years of age can get 75% to 80% of their salary [as pension], and it's a pretty nice salary," says Illinois State Representative Robert S. Molaro, a member of a commission convened by the governor to make recommendations for fixing the pension system. "It will be hard for us to go to the taxpayers and ask them to pay for our pensions with benefits you in the private sector couldn't even dream of."

Given this divide, it's reasonable to wonder why there hasn't been more debate about these plans already. They've been protected from scrutiny for a number of reasons. The public-pension systems lack the regulatory system governing corporate pension plans. Corporations have to disclose timely, detailed information about their pensions to investors and the SEC. Rating agencies focus on them, too. In combination, these groups can pressure companies to be more conservative in their fund management. Devereaux A. Clifford, managing director of pension consultants Greenwich Associates, says it was pressure from these watchdogs that forced corporations to lower unrealistic investment return assumptions, from 8.9% in 2002 to 8.3% in 2004.

The public world has far less scrutiny. Nor do these plans have an equivalent to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the government-sponsored insurer of corporate plans. They have to conform to the funding requirements or accounting demands of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the federal law passed in 1974 to monitor private pensions. And public fund reporting lags corporate reporting by at least six months. Important factors like the performance and cost of bonds issued to cover pension obligations are even harder to suss out.

That's bad news. Understanding the depth of these retiree problems seems especially important for state and local governments because of their limited financial options. Unlike the federal government, which can always print money, and private companies, which might sell more widgets and make more profits to fund their pensions, and whose pensions are guaranteed by a government-backed insurer, local government basically has only one way of meeting those promises: your taxes. Public-pension experts note that these obligations must be paid. Public-sector retirement benefits are generally guaranteed by state constitution...

The more likely answer is the most painful: Taxes will keep going up and benefits will be cut for future public employees. Both are unpopular. The debate is just starting to be heard.

Continue reading "Bankrupt Public Pensions, Part II"


Remembering President Ronald Reagan

June 5 marks the one-year anniversary of President Ronald Reagan's death.

This posting provides links to many special moments in the President's life and brings back many fond memories of a great man. Follow all the links, they are a treat.

Here is an article from the Washington Times.


June 4, 2005


Bringing Added Clarity to the Judicial Filibuster Debate

Power Line offers a valuable posting on the judicial filibuster debate.

The posting adds to other informative postings about the judicial filibuster debate on this site, including:

The Filibuster...Continued

The Injustice of Smearing A Fellow American For Political Gain

The Senate Judicial Filibuster: Power Politics & Religious Bigotry

Mac Owen's open letter to Senator Chaffee

Senator Mitch McConnell on the Judicial Filibuster

The Foolish Fourteen: An editorial by the former Dean of BU's Law School

It is important to get the real story out because our opponents are actively trying to rewrite history and, thereby, distort the reality of today's debate.


June 2, 2005


The Foolish Fourteen

Mac Owens

here is a good piece from the LA Times on why the compromise on judicial filibusters was a bad idea, and essentially unconstitutional to boot. The author was at one time the dean of BU's law school



Political Junkies Only

Marc Comtois

Patrick Ruffini, Republican pollster/blogger, has unveiled his 2008 Presidential Election Tracker.

Here's how it works. Throughout the day, the Wire goes out and scours blog and MSM feeds for news about 22 potential Presidential candidates, both Democrat and Republican. The result is a tool where you can not only read all the news about a particular candidate, but where these stories are compiled, analyzed, and tested against underlying trends. Who's the most discussed political leader on blogs right now? Who's the favorite of MSM journalists? Whose coverage is up 671% from yesterday?

The 2008 Presidential Wire enables us to know, in real time. . .

You might ask, "Why so early?" Good question. Actually, it's because a tool like this is most useful early in the process, when so little is known about many of the contenders, and we can get a glimpse into the Statehouse or the Senate office without being inundated by 24/7 cable news coverage and hundreds of versions of the same wire copy.

Junkies may proceed!


May 29, 2005


Leading a Dishonest Debate

JunkYardBlog writes this:

A rightwing Republican Congressman has introduced a bill in the House demanding respectful treatment of the Bible. Get yer torches and pitchforks, people, and make sure to ring up the press.

But...

Before you do all of that, I need to clarify a couple of details.

The Congressman isn't a rightwing Republican. He's a leftwing Democrat. And it's not the Bible's respectful treatment he is trying to be made law of the land. It's the Koran.

Where did all the pitchforks go? And where's the ACLU to decry this encroachment on the separation of church and state? Hmmm?

From the blog of Rep. John Conyers (D-MI):

Resolved, That the House of Representatives
(1) condemns bigotry, acts of violence, and intolerance against any religious group, including our friends, neighbors, and citizens of the Islamic faith;

(2) declares that the civil rights and civil liberties of all individuals, including those of the Islamic faith, should be protected;

(3) recognizes that the Quran, the holy book of Islam, as any other holy book of any religion, should be treated with dignity and respect; and

(4) calls upon local, State, and Federal authorities to work to prevent bias-motivated crimes and acts against all individuals, including those of the Islamic faith.

This is idiocy on stilts. It goes against the letter and spirit of the First Amendment and is a true step in the direction of establishing a state religion. And it's pandering based on a fake and retracted Newsweek story that probably started when some terrorist made up a story to inflame the press and irritate the Muslim world!...

...the silence with which [Conyers] is being greeted by the MSM is more than telling.

RELATED:...If passed Conyers' proposed law might open the way for similar prosecutions right here in the US. You, blogger and blog reader, could find yourself prosecuted for mishandling or in any way disparaging the Koran or Islam. Islam would become more equal than other religions here--the bill's language refers to religious tolerance but singles out Islam and the Koran for special protection.

And that amounts to bringing in sharia, Islamic law, in baby steps. Right here in the US...

The fourth element of his bill, noted above, marries mistreatment of the Koran to hate-crimes legislation already on the books. That puts some teeth into it, and it's truly chilling.

Rocco at The Autonomist also comments:

It seems strange that Conyers, whose party goes absolutely ballistic when Republicans intimate that Judeo-Christian beliefs under-pin the U.S., suggest that Freedom of Speech be toyed with in order to accommodate religion. Perhaps not so strange, once one realizes that Conyers has been a close ally of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) since 9/11.

How much of this relationship is due to Conyer's representing Michigan, a state with a large Muslim-Arab population, and how much of it has to do with CAIR's contributions to Conyer's political efforts, is anyone's guess.

A quick refresher on CAIR: Ghassan Elashi, founder of CAIR's Texas Chapter, was indicted for financial dealings with Musa abu Marzook, a Hamas leader. In 1995, US attorney Mary Jo White named CAIR advisory board member Siraj Wahhaj as a possible co-conspirator in plans to destroy the World Trade Center and other NY City landmarks. In May of 2005 another CAIR leader, Ismail Randall Royer, was found guilty of funding terrorism and was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison for training in Virginia for holy war against the United States. CAIR's associations with Islamic terror groups and individual terrorists go on and on and on....

If you go to Rocco's posting, you can follow the many links to learn more.

Rocco continues:

A natural question arises in response to Conyer's resolution: Does America's Muslim leadership actively foster a sense of respect towards religions other than Islam?

The words of CAIR chairman Omar Ahmad provide a possible answer. Said Ahmad, in a 1998 Muslim rally in California:

"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Quran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth."

U.S. Representative Conyers, are you listening?

Are these people dense or naive or just plain stupid?



What Are We Doing To Our Children?

Michelle Malkin writes here and here about a new teenage book called "Rainbow Party."

Here's a rich irony: I'm writing today about a new children's book, but I can't describe the plot in a family newspaper without warning you first that it is entirely inappropriate for children.

The book is "Rainbow Party" by juvenile fiction author Paul Ruditis. The publisher is Simon Pulse, a kiddie lit division of the esteemed Simon & Schuster. The cover of the book features the title spelled out in fun, Crayola-bright font. Beneath the title is an illustrated array of lipsticks in bold colors.

The main characters in the book are high school sophomores supposedly typical 14- and 15-year-olds with names such as "Gin" and "Sandy." The book opens with these two girls shopping for lipstick at the mall in advance of a special party. The girls banter as they hunt for lipsticks in every color of the rainbow...

What kind of party do you imagine they might be organizing? Perhaps a makeover party? With moms and daughters sharing their best beauty secrets and bonding in the process?

Alas, no. No parents are invited to this get-together. A "rainbow party," you see, is a gathering of boys and girls for the purpose of engaging in group oral sex. Each girl wears a different colored lipstick and leaves a mark on each boy. At night's end, the boys proudly sport their own cosmetically-sealed rainbow you-know-where bringing a whole new meaning to the concept of "party favors."...

...according to Publisher's Weekly, the bound galleys sent to booksellers carried the provocative tagline, "don't you want to know what really goes down?"

The author and publisher of the book seem to have persuaded themselves that they are doing families a favor...Bethany Buck, Ruditis' editor, told USA Today the intention was to "scare" young readers (uh-huh) and Ruditis told Publisher's Weekly:

"Part of me doesn't understand why people don't want to talk about [oral sex]," he said. "Kids are having sex and they are actively engaged in oral sex and think it's not really sex. I raised questions in my book and I hope that parents and children or teachers and students can open a topic of conversation through it. Rainbow parties are such an interesting topic. It's such a childlike way to look at such an adult subject with rainbow colors."

Teenage group orgies are "an interesting topic?" Is Ruditis out of his mind?...

In a small sign that decency and common sense still survive in the marketplace, a number of children's book sellers are refusing to stock "Rainbow Party." But as Ruditis's comments indicate, it's just a matter of time before the book ends up on public school library shelves in the name of "educating" children and helping them "deal with reality."...

Malkin continues:

...Those who raise even the least objection are cast as out-of-touch theocrats who need to "deal with reality."...

If "proper socialization" means teaching 14-year-olds about group oral sex, we can only pray that more parents choose to raise social misfits.

Why do we tolerate this? What are we doing to our children?

ADDENDUM I:

Reader Jeff Miller, in the Comments section to this posting, directs us to Mere Comments for additional and troubling information:

...I picked up a copy of Simon and Schusters new book for the teenage girl market, Rainbow Party by Paul Ruditis...

The book is even more insidious than I first imagined. The heroine of the book is not the party-planner, but a saintly high school sex education teacher. Ms. Barrett is described as more of a friend than a teacher. She is the only one to whom all the students can talk about their sexuality. Unfortunately, the heroic Ms. Barrett is silenced after the head of the high school Chastity Club rats on her to the school board, which instructs Ms. Barrett to teach abstinence only in the classroom.

Ms. Barrett is vindicated when a gonnhorea epidemic hits the high school, an epidemic that could have been stopped if only Ms. Barrett had been allowed to give the right information about protection to the students. In the end, Ms. Barrett valiantly resigns rather than leave her students unprotected. Here she stands. She can do no other.

The antagonists in this book are the parents. Now, this is nothing new...But there is something different here. It is not simply that the parents are outdated in their morality, or out of touch with teen culture. In this book, the parents lack of understanding actually leads to the sickness and potential death of their teenage children.

And who will stand up for them? Why the public school sex education teacher, of course.

This misguided line of thought is getting really old.


May 26, 2005


Enough Already!

This report is simply over-the-top and contributes to the ongoing destruction of civil society in America:

Hollywood once again jumps into bitter DC politics when an episode of NBC's Law & Order: Criminal Intent suggests a judge killer would wear a 'Tom DeLay' T-Shirt!

The House Majority Leader plans a letter of protest later this afternoon...

TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE 'FALSE-HEARTED JUDGES'

In the season finale, Detectives Goren and Eames suspect an imprisoned white supremacist is behind the shootings of a judge's family, but their investigation widens when an appellate judge is later murdered...

ADA RON CARVER (COURTNEY B. VANCE) : An african-american judge, an appellate court judge, no less.

MAN: Chief of DS is setting up a task force. People are talking about multiple assassination teams.

DET. ALEX EAMES (KATHRYN ERBE): Looks like the same shooters. CSU found the slug in a post, matched it to the one that killed Judge Barton. Maybe we should put out an APB for somebody in a Tom DeLay T-Shirt.

This is simply and utterly unacceptable, polarizing behavior. Another example of Hollywood's total disconnection from reality and the Left's willingness to stoop to any low level to trash those who don't agree with its secular fundamentalist political agenda.

As a conservative who has publicly criticized Tom DeLay here and here, my loud exclaim is: Enough already! Our country is too great to deserve this kind of demeaning behavior.


May 24, 2005


Senator Mitch McConnell on the Judicial Filibuster - Before the Capitulation

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell gave this speech on the Senate floor prior to the capitulation by the 7 Republican senators. It offers a history lesson and is complementary to this posting by Mac Owens.



You Can Always Count on that Great Deliberative Body, the U.S. Senate...

Marc Comtois

...to come up with a politically expedient and intellectually dishonest solution to a problem. That is what the "filibuster deal" is. The moderates, including our own Sen. Chafee, prized comity over Constitutional consistency. Senator John Cornyn explains it well.

Conservatives have good reason to be unhappy with the agreement announced last night concerning the Senates judicial-confirmation process. The agreement does not guarantee up-or-down votes on all of President Bushs judicial nominees, nor does it restore the Senates unswerving 214-year tradition of majority vote for all judicial nominees. In addition, the agreement attempts to rewrite Article II of the Constitution, by giving the Senate an advise-and-consent role in the nomination, as well as the appointment, of judges. Those objectives are still within reach, however. As one of the signatories to the agreement made clear last night, the agreement does not foreclose the use of the Byrd option in the event that the filibuster continues to be abused. Moreover, conservatives should be proud of the principled manner in which they have conducted this debate.

The other sides position, by contrast, is an intellectual shambles. The agreement guarantees up-or-down votes to Justice Priscilla Owen, Justice Janice Rogers Brown, and Judge William Pryor three well-qualified nominees who were once deplored as extreme and dangerous (as late as yesterday afternoon). The agreement is thus an effective admission of guilt an admission that these fine nominees should never have been filibustered in the first place. Moreover, by forbidding future filibusters of judicial nominations except under extraordinary circumstances, the agreement establishes a new benchmark for future conduct in the United States Senate namely, that other qualified judges who are firmly committed to the law, like Owen, Brown, and Pryor, deserve an up-or-down vote, too.

Likewise, for months it was claimed that the filibuster is sacrosanct to the Founders, and that using the Byrd option to restore Senate tradition would be illegal. Yet Senator Robert Byrd reminded the world just last week that our Founders did not tolerate filibusters that the rules adopted by the United States Senate in April 1789 included a motion for the previous question, which allowed the Senate to terminate debate by majority vote. And just yesterday, he conceded that the so-called nuclear option has been around for a long time. It doesnt take a genius to figure that out.

Now, it must be said that some on the left aren't all that happy either, thus ideologues on both left and right are disappointed. To this, Pejman Yousefzadeh makes the point
I understand the desire of Republicans to get rid of the filibuster entirely when it comes to judicial nominees. I share in that desire. But remember that politics is a game of inches. Tip O'Neill once admiringly said of Ronald Reagan that the latter may not get 100% of what he wanted, but that Reagan would always get about 80%. When Reagan heard the compliment, he responded by saying "Yeah. And then next time, I go after the other 20%."

The other 20% is out there for Republicans to get. And if this deal falls apart thanks to bad faith on the other side, we can go out and get it.

Some of us may wonder if the Republican moderates will follow through, though. For those of us in Rhode Island, we have to ask if the 1/4 loaf of Lincoln Chafee is really worth it. Should we move to get rid of the false promise that Chafee most-often offers, knowing full well that a liberal Democrat could, and probably would, replace him? Perhaps. Because then we would be sure where that potential Chafee successor stood. Is it better to "know-thy-enemy" then to wonder what the heck the incumbent is going to do? Actually, as I look back at the previous couple sentences, I realize that we do know what Chafee will do. If there is a "compromise" offered, he will sign on. Sen. Chafee is most firm in his un-conservative ideals (abortion, "traditional" environmentalism, to name a couple) and it is only when he is asked to adhere to even tacitly conservative ideals that he compromises. It is no secret that Sen. Chafee isn't a conservative. He is most definitely the very definition of a RINO (Republican-in-name-only). We have to ask ourselves, is a RINO better than a liberal Democrat? Is there a difference?

NOTE: For good coverage and analysis, check out NRO's Bench Memos blog.


May 23, 2005


An Open Letter to Sen. Lincoln Chafee

Mac Owens

I sent this off to Sen. Chafee's office this morning

Dear Sen. Chafee:

With President Bushs nomination of Pricilla Owen to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit now before the Senate, the long-expected showdown over the issue of permanent minority judicial filibusters seems imminent. You have indicated that you will not support a move to end judicial filibusters. That, of course, is your right. But perhaps you can take the time to explain to your constituents why you have chosen to join the Democrats in defending a practice that is at best obstructionist, and at worst, unconstitutional.

Opponents of changing the Senate rules regarding permanent minority judicial filibusters have launched what can only be called a campaign of misinformation, if not disinformation. You, of course, know that most of what the Democrats are saying on this issue is simply false. You know this because you have access to one of the finest research organizations in the world, the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

Here are some of the things you know to be true, but perhaps your constituents dont. First, the Constitution is very clear in delineating when a supermajority is required. Two-thirds of both houses of Congress are required to amend the Constitution, which amendment must then be approved by the legislatures of thee-fourths of the states. Two-thirds of both houses are necessary to override a presidential veto. Two-thirds of the members of each house must vote to expel a member. A two-thirds vote of the Senate is necessary to convict an individual impeached by the House. And two-thirds of the Senate are required for consent to ratification of a treaty. No such supermajority is required to approve presidential nominees.

Indeed, Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution provides an illuminating juxtaposition of the Senate roles in both treaty-making and appointments:

"[The president] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law"

The clear sense of the language of this clause indicates that appointments require only a majority of Senators to provide the necessary advice and consent in the case of nominees, as opposed to approving treaties.

Second, you know that the Democrats claim that the proposed rule change undoes 200 years of precedent is nonsense. They get away with this by conflating the use of the filibuster to block legislation and its use to block judicial nominees. As you must know, the 200 years of precedent refers to the former, not the latter.

From 1789 to 1806, a simple majority could end debate on a motion before the Senate. The rule change in 1806 permitted unlimited debate in the Senate that could be ended only by unanimous consent but the use of the legislative filibuster was rare until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1917, the Senate adopted the first cloture rule, Rule XXII, which provided for ending a debate by a vote of two-thirds of the senators present and voting. In 1975, the rule was amended to allow cloture by a vote of three-fifths of the Senatewhich is why the current threshold for ending a filibuster is 60.

But again, this applied to legislation, not appointments. As former Minnesota Senator Rudy Boschwitz recently observed:

"For more than 200 years, just one judicial nominee was defeated by filibuster -- Abe Fortas in 1968 in extraordinary circumstances that are not comparable to the current situation. For more than 200 years, no minority leader ever organized a judicial filibuster. For more than 200 years, the Senate operated on the understanding that a majority of senators was entitled to carry out its constitutional obligation to advise and consent on federal judges. But now the Democratic leadership has cast aside Senate tradition to usurp the president's appointment power against nominees not meeting the minority's ideological benchmarks or litmus tests."

In other words, it is the Democrats use of the filibuster to block President Bushs judicial nominees that is unprecedented.

You must also know that the claim by Democrats that 60 Clinton judicial nominees were filibustered by blue slips, holds, or other procedural devices, and that numerous other nominees in the 19th and 20th centuries were filibustered, is false. Heres what Stuart Taylor, a Senior Non-Resident Fellow of the Brookings Institute and columnist for Newsweek had to say in the May 7 issue of The National Journal:

"It is misleading for Democrats and liberal groups to claim that there are ample precedents for this filibuster-forever tactic. Their trick is to count as "filibusters" even genuine debates and short-term stalls that ended in cloture votes and confirmation.

"The fact is that only one judicial nominee in our history (Abe Fortas) has even arguably been blocked by the filibuster-forever tactic that Senate Democrats have used since 2003 to block 10 majority-supported Bush judicial nominees. (Three of the 10 have withdrawn.)

"And even the 1968 filibuster of then-Justice Fortas's nomination to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a pretty weak precedent. That was a real floor debate, over ethical missteps as well as judicial philosophy. It lasted only a little more than a week. Then, President Johnson, having lost a cloture vote, withdrew the nomination at Fortas's request. This decision came amid damaging disclosures that might have led to defeat in an up-or-down vote."

No matter what the Democrats may claim, you certainly know that successful cloture votes, generic delays or blockages, or blue slips and holds are not the same as permanent minority judicial filibusters.

Opponents of ending judicial filibusters point to the clause in Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution stating that Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings. This is true, but there are two constitutional issues here. The first is the degree to which one Senate can bind future Senates with its rules. The second is the impact of Senate rules on the powers of the other branches.

While senators are understandably reluctant to disturb precedent, it is ludicrous to believe that a procedural rule, once instituted, should stand forever. Rule XXII, after all, disturbed the precedent that had stood since 1806 (Rule XXII was passed, by the way, not by a supermajority but by a simple majority). Sen. Robert Byrd, now an opponent of ending judicial filibusters, made this point on Jan. 15, 1979:

"This Congress is not obliged to be bound by the dead hand of the past The first Senate, which met in 1789, approved 19 rules by a majority vote. Those rules have been changed from time to time So the Members of the Senate who met in 1789 and approved that first body of rules did not for one moment think, or believe, or pretend, that all succeeding Senates would be bound by that Senate It would be just as reasonable to say that one Congress can pass a law providing that all future laws have to be passed by two-thirds vote. Any Member of this body knows that the next Congress would not heed that law and would proceed to change it and would vote repeal of it by majority vote."

Would that Sen. Byrd still accepted the unassailable logic of this statement today.

While the Constitution permits each house to determine its own rules, logic dictates that a Senate rule governing its internal proceedings that limits the constitutional power of another branch is unconstitutional. Senator Chafee, do you believe that the Senate can reduce the number of votes necessary for consent to ratification of a treaty? If not, how can you believe that Senate Democrats can de facto change the number of votes necessary to confirm a presidential nominee, as they have by use of the judicial filibuster? To do so would seem to indicate that you believe the Senate has an amending power that constitutional scholars have not yet discovered!

Your Democratic allies claim that judicial filibusters are necessary because Republicans control both the White House and the Senate. But one or another party has often controlled both, yet filibustering judicial nominees was unheard of until used against President Bushs nominees in his first term. As Sen. Boschwitz asks, Has every Senate in American history been wrong constitutionally and traditionally? As Abraham Lincoln, the man whose namesake you are, well understood, if a party does not like the makeup of the judiciary, it changes it by winning elections.

The Democrats claim that they are holding the line against the extremists that President Bush wishes to nominate to the federal bench. You cannot possibly believe that Pricilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown are extremists. If you do, then the word no longer has any meaning.

But lets look at the kind of judge that the Democrats believe acceptable. On May 5, 1994, President Clinton nominated district judge H. Lee Sarokin to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) called him a judge of proven competence, temperament, and fairness and an excellent choice. Consider a sterling example of this competent, temperate, and fair judges jurisprudence: Kreimer vs. Bureau of Police for the Town of Morristown. In this case, Sarokin ruled that the New Jersey towns public library couldnt enforce its written policies to expel a homeless man who regularly engaged in offensive and disruptive behavior and whose odor was so offensive that it prevented the library patrons from using certain areas of the library and prohibited library employees from performing their jobs.

According to a memo posted in the Congressional Record of 12 September, 1994 by Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Third Circuit, which reversed Kreimer, also criticized Sarokin for judicial usurpation of power, for ignoring fundamental concepts of due process, for destroying the appearance of judicial impartiality, and for superimpos[ing his] own view of what the law should be in the face of the Supreme Courts contrary precedent.

Sen. Hatch also observed that the New Jersey Law Journal had reported that Sarokin may be the most reversed federal judge in New Jersey when it comes to major cases and that a broad range of police and victims groups announced their opposition to his nomination. But while Republicans voted against him, they did not filibuster his nomination and a mere five months after he was nominated, the Senate confirmed him.

The press routinely describes you and other liberal Republicans as courageous when you oppose the policies of your party. But since Rhode Island is the most Democratic state in the Union, it does not take much courage for you to vote with the Democrats, as you often have done. Again, this is your right, but real courage in this case would be to stand with constitutional principleindeed, with the Constitution itselfand vote to end permanent minority judicial filibusters. You could justify your decision to Rhode Islanders by invoking the wisdom of two prominent Democrats: Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), who said in 1998 that We owe it to Americans across the country to give these nominees a vote. If our Republican colleagues dont like them, vote against them. But give them a vote; and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) who said in 1997 that It is not the role of the Senate to obstruct the process and prevent numbers of highly qualified nominees from even being given the opportunity for a vote on the Senate floor.


I myself prefer the wisdom of the country music philosopher, Aaron Tippin: youve got to stand for something, or youll fall for anything. Sen. Chaffee, please stand for something in this casestand for constitutional principle.
Mac Owens*
Newport

*Mac Owens is a contributing editor to National Review Online and Anchor Rising. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Congress and the Presidency at Catholic University in Washington DC and URI. He served on a Senate staff for nearly four years.


May 21, 2005


Why Truly Free Markets & Timely, Transparent Information Are Needed to Protect the Freedom of American Citizens

Crises often happen when individuals and organizations refuse to face reality. It is a common human problem.

These behavioral tendencies not to face reality are only magnified by the misguided incentives that pervade the public sector (here, here, here, here, here) and the portion of the private sector which uses power and influence to shelter itself from truly competitive market forces.

The underfunding of pension obligations (here, here, here) and healthcare benefit obligations committed to by both the public and private sector, including Social Security, represent prime examples of such foolish behavior.

Stanley Kurtz observes that we have a series of looming problems with pension liabilities that will put taxpayers all across America at serious financial risk:

Four years before the massive wave of boomer retirements begins, were beginning to see cracks in our pension system. The retirement of the boomers is a crisis in waiting. And the problem goes way beyond Social Security...

...our private pension system in danger of collapse, Social Security is even more important. But thats all the more reason to put Social Security on safe fiscal footing. The private pension crisis Stone describes is quite like the one that confronts Social Security. Corporate pension funds are failing because, when times were good, companies raided their retirement trust funds and diverted the money to other expenses. Sound familiar? Thats exactly what we do with the Social Security trust fund...

Once bad economic times hit the airline industry, companies burdened with huge pension debts went bust. Thats what could happen to the United States itself if we pass through an economic rough patch while also being burdened with huge entitlement debt. Should that happen, there wont be anyone to bail America out...

...pressure from boomer retirements-and from crises like the private pension fund meltdown were seeing now-could spook investors and send the economy south. The way to stop the ripple effect is to send out a signal that were putting our economic house in order. Thats why weve got to reform Social Security now...

So how do we get to the point of having what Kurtz calls "a crisis in waiting?"

One way was by creating mythical structures, like trust funds in government which have no connection to economic reality. For example, read this article on the underfunded highway trust fund. Then recall Al Gore's emphatic discussion of the Social Security trust fund - another mythical structure with only federal government IOU's but no cash - because all of that "money" has also been spent elsewhere.

Another way was by tolerating dishonest or misleading public debates which are enabled by a lack of timely, transparent information.

Continue reading "Why Truly Free Markets & Timely, Transparent Information Are Needed to Protect the Freedom of American Citizens"

May 19, 2005


The Highway Bill: Another Example of Unacceptable Government Spending

If you want another example of how misguided incentives in the public sector lead to bad outcomes, here is another pathetic example (available from the WSJ for a fee):

...What's meaningful about the [highway] bill the Senate passed yesterday...is just how quickly and utterly some Republicans have abandoned all spending principle.

The 89-11 Senate vote for a $295 billion highway bill exceeds the $284 billion limit that President Bush has said is acceptable. But more than that, it also defies the budget resolution that Congress adopted only last month...The resolution isn't binding (which is the way Democrats designed it in 1974), but it is intended to provide some parameters for a Republican Congress that's supposedly serious about changing its free-spending ways. Or so they keep telling us.

It's bad enough that only nine Members voted against the House version of the highway bill in March, which makes us wonder if there's any political constituency for spending restraint....But at least the House measure, at $284 billion, stayed within the overly generous spending limits set by the White House.

President Bush has threatened to veto any highway bill in excess of that amount, but apparently Senate Republicans don't take his threat seriously. Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley is claiming the extra $11 billion is "paid for" and won't add to the deficit. But Senator Judd Gregg told reporters last week that the higher figure is "quite simply, unequivocally, unquestionably, a budget buster." He was being kind...

The highway trust fund, supported by federal gas taxes, is the main source of money for highway projects. To claim deficit "neutrality," the Senate bill mainly diverts general revenue funds into the highway trust, or shifts highway trust fund liabilities into some other fund. But either way, it constitutes deficit spending...

It's also worth noting that the $284 billion ceiling set by the President is a record high level of funding and $73 billion, or 35%, more than the last six-year bill enacted in 1998. Which is to say that the White House strictures are far from unreasonable. It's too bad that only nine GOP Senators -- Sam Brownback, John Cornyn, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham, Jon Kyl, John McCain, Judd Gregg and John Sununu -- saw fit to vote against the bill. They were joined by the two Wisconsin Democrats, Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold, who opposed the measure because they said it shortchanged their state.

The transit bill is already 20 months late, and since there's little in there to promote the types of infrastructure reforms -- toll roads, public-private partnerships -- the country could really use...

...a veto is in order. Make that imperative. Mr. Bush has been preaching spending restraint since his re-election, and to let Congress get away with busting the first big spending bill of his second term is to guarantee that he won't be taken seriously again. Senators are daring Mr. Bush on this bill because they simply don't believe he'll use his veto...

Plain and simple, this is nothing but revolting behavior by the Congress.

For more on the broader problem that afflicts public sector incentives, go here, here, here, and here. Then go read Lawrence Reed's speech entitled Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy.



Perspective: What is Lost Right Now in the Partisan Debate Swirling Around Tom DeLay

In the heat of intense political warfare, perspective is often the first thing to disappear. Let's apply that observation to the debate about Tom DeLay, Republican Majority Leader in the US House of Representatives, and see if we can regain some perspective.

I have been critical of Tom DeLay even before Howard Dean got into the act. I was critical because, like many Americans, I actually believed in the principles outlined in the 1994 Contract With America, which was instrumental in the Republicans gaining majority control of the House. It is my opinion that they have largely squandered that legacy and, as a House leader, that means DeLay deserves criticism because he has become an inside-the-Beltway power broker in a way that is not all that different from the Democrats I have criticized previously.

What do we know about DeLay? We know he is quite effective at power politics. He did not get the nickname "The Hammer" for nothing. By definition, that is going to create some enemies. We also know he has done some wonderful things in his personal life that get little or no publicity and show he is a more complex personality than his nickname suggests:

The DeLays share a deep interest in the circumstances facing abused and neglected children. They got involved with children's issues after Christine DeLay, a teacher, began volunteering as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for children in foster care. Eventually, the DeLays became foster parents themselves. Today, they are outspoken advocates in favor of reforming the present foster care system by making the child's best interest the paramount concern.

We should also recognize that DeLay's religious beliefs put him at odds with the secular left fundamentalists, who show no tolerance toward their philosophical opponents.

Then along comes Howard Dean, who has declared DeLay guilty of crimes for which DeLay has not even been charged. Never mind the American principle of being innocent until proven guilty.

Like all Americans, except for Howard Dean and his ilk, I have no ability to judge whether DeLay might be charged with or found guilty of crimes in the future. All I have the ability to judge today is that there is an intense political storm swirling around DeLay.

Which is why today's story is so interesting:

Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, who denies partisan motives for his investigation of a political group founded by Republican leader Tom DeLay, was the featured speaker last week at a Democratic fund-raiser where he spoke directly about the congressman.

A newly formed Democratic political action committee, Texas Values in Action Coalition, hosted the May 12 event in Dallas to raise campaign money to take control of the state Legislature from the GOP, organizers said.

Earle, an elected Democrat, helped generate $102,000 for the organization...

Earle and his staff of prosecutors have obtained indictments of three DeLay associates on charges that their political committee, the DeLay-led Texans for a Republican Majority, broke state campaign finance laws with the use of corporate donations on its way to helping establish Republican control in the state House.

Earle said Wednesday he knew the group that met in Dallas was raising money for Democrats, but that it was not his reason for speaking...

Political analysts said Earle's appearance left him open to questions about his motives.

"It may help Tom DeLay establish his case that Ronnie Earle's investigation is a partisan witch hunt," said Richard Murray, a political scientist with the University of Houston.

"It clearly fuels the perception that his investigation is politically motivated. It was probably not a wise move," said Larry Noble, a former Federal Election Commission lawyer who heads the watchdog group Center for Responsive Politics...

Former House Speaker Jim Wright, a Fort Worth Democrat who was forced to resign from Congress in 1989 after the House Ethics Committee began investigating whether he improperly profited from a book publishing deal, was among those who attended the event. He is scheduled to speak at the committee's next fund-raiser in June...

Dallas lawyer Ed Ishmael, another co-founder of the Democratic committee to which Earle spoke, is described on the group's Web site as "a leader in the Howard Dean presidential campaign" of 2004.

[Here, on June 20, is some additional information on the behavior of Ronnie Earle.]

So, from afar, I believe the only credible statement that can be made right now is that DeLay is a partisan and he is being attacked by people with a competing partisan agenda. Welcome to politics, a contact sport.

As American citizens, we can only hope that the truth will prevail even as we simultaneously worry that partisan agendas - regardless of party - will focus on achieving victory at all costs, even if that means sacrificing the search for facts and an honest interpretation of those facts.

Two takeaway thoughts that can help us regain perspective:

First, the intensity of the partisan fighting is directly correlated to what is at stake and big government means there is more to fight over. One of the reasons the Founding Fathers encouraged limited government was their deep understanding of human nature.

Second, since politicians and bureaucrats have no incentive to behave well, a diligent citizenry is crucially important to the ongoing success of our American experiment in ordered liberty.


May 18, 2005


Why Democratic Leaders Lack Credibility With American Voters

Howard Dean, national chairman of the Democratic party, thinks Tom DeLay is guilty until proven innocent:

"I think he's guilty . . . of taking trips paid for by lobbyists, and of campaign-finance violations during his manipulation of the Texas election process," Dean said.

But Howard Dean thinks Osama bin Laden is innocent until proven guilty:

"I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found," Dean said during the 2004 Democratic primary campaign. "I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials."

Okay, I get it. Do you?

Here's the source article.


May 17, 2005


Discussing the Incivility in Today's Public Discourse

Edwin J. Feulner, the President of The Heritage Foundation, gave a commencement speech at Hillsdale College on May 8, 2004 entitled "Lay Your Hammer Down." In this era where hostile attacks are often more typical than reasoned exchanges, these excerpts from the speech seem particularly relevant:

In 1969 a Stanford University psychologist named Philip Zimbardo set up an experiment. He arranged for two cars to be abandoned one on the mean streets of the Bronx, New York; the other in an affluent neighborhood near Stanford in Palo Alto, California. The license plates had been removed, and the hoods were left open. Zimbardo wanted to see what would happen to the cars.

In the Bronx, he soon found out. Ten minutes after the car was abandoned, people began stealing parts from it. Within three days the car was stripped. When there was nothing useful left to take, people smashed windows and ripped out upholstery, until the car was trashed.

In Palo Alto, something quite different happened: nothing. For more than a week the car sat there unmolested. Zimbardo was puzzled, but he had a hunch about human nature. To test it, he went out and, in full view of everyone, took a sledgehammer and smashed part of the car.

Soon, passersby were taking turns with the hammer, delivering blow after satisfying blow. Within a few hours, the vehicle was resting on its roof, demolished

why does the broken window invite further vandalism? Wilson and Kelling say its because the broken window sends a signal that no one is in charge here, that breaking more windows costs nothing, that it has no undesirable consequences.

The broken window is their metaphor for a whole host of ways that behavioral norms can break down in a community

In short, once people begin disregarding the norms that keep order in a community, both order and community unravel, sometimes with astonishing speed.

Police in big cities have dramatically cut crime rates by applying this theory. Rather than concentrate on felonies such as robbery and assault, they aggressively enforce laws against relatively minor offenses graffiti, public drinking, panhandling, littering.

When order is visibly restored at that level, the environment signals: This is a community where behavior does have consequences

Now all this is a preface. My topic is not crime on city streets, rather I want to speak about incivility in the marketplace of ideas. The broken windows theory is what links the two

What were seeing in the marketplace of ideas today is a disturbing growth of incivility that follows and confirms the broken windows theory. Alas, this breakdown of civil norms is not a failing of either the political left or the right exclusively. It spreads across the political spectrum from one end to the other

Continue reading "Discussing the Incivility in Today's Public Discourse"


Beyond the Red and the Blue

Marc Comtois

Pew has come out with a new poll in which it developed some new and interesting political typologies. If you want to find out what kind of "political animal" you are, then go here and take the survey. A few of the dual statements with which you are supposed to agree or disagree seemed to have overly-negative implications. For instance, one set offered a choice between

"Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return."

or

"Poor people have hard lives because government benefits don't go far enough to help them live decently."

There were probably better ways to ask that. Anyway, it's still worth taking the test. I tried it a couple times, changing the shading on a few answers, but still got the same results. I am what Pew calls an "Enterpriser." To put it another way, I'm a Limbaugh Republican.



The Newsweek Koran Flush Lie: Liberal Hypocrisy and Journalistic Presumptions

Marc Comtois

Newsweek finally fully retracted its story, and the libertarian uber-linker Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) offered this own opinion regarding liberal hypocrisy and their manufactured outrage over this now-false abridgement of religious rights (and the more general Guantanamo "torture" charges)

I want to add that I don't think there's anything immoral about flushing a Koran (or a Bible) down the toilet, assuming you've got a toilet that's up to that rather daunting task, and I think it's amusing to hear people who usually worry about excessive concern for religious beliefs suddenly taking a different position. Nor do I think that doing so counts as torture, and I think that it debases the meaning of "torture" to claim otherwise. If this had happened, it might have been -- indeed, would have been -- impolitic or unwise. But not evil.

And anyone who thinks otherwise needs to be willing to apply the same kind of criticism to things like Piss Christ, or to explain why offending the sensibilities of one kind of religious believer is "art" while doing the same in another context is "torture." If, that is, they want to be taken at all seriously.

I'm sure many don't hold Reynolds' view regarding flushing the Bible and probably, to be intellectually honest at some level, extend that respect to other holy books. Nonetheless, Reynolds' calling out of the left on their religious hypocrisy is noteworthy.

Continue reading "The Newsweek Koran Flush Lie: Liberal Hypocrisy and Journalistic Presumptions"

May 16, 2005


Bankrupt Public Pensions: A Time Bomb That Will Explode

Two previous postings here and here discussed the perverse incentives that drive public sector behaviors. A more recent posting addressed further pension woes in the private sector. Marc has brought even more information forward about pension woes in his recent posting.

Misguided public sector incentives are particularly obvious when reviewing the status of public sector pensions across America, where public sector unions make outrageous demands and spineless politicians and bureaucrats cave into those demands leaving working family and retiree taxpayers holding the bag.

On May 31, 2004, Fortune Magazine published an article entitled "The $366 Billion Outrage: All across America, state and city workers are retiring early with unthinkably rich pay packages. Guess who's paying for them? You are". Arguably one of the best writeups I have seen on this issue, here are some of its major points:

...the public pension morass is bigger, more wide ranging, and ultimately more costly than anything you've seen in the corporate world...

...public pensions are constitutionally guaranteed or protected in [41]...states...

...the result is a hole...that can only be filled...with either steep cuts in city services or [large] property tax increases or both

The third option is to cut those lavish benefits. But that's easier said than done

Whats happening...is just the beginning of a cascading problem. Pension plans covering the nations 16 million state and local government employees about 12% of the entire workforce are gobbling up increasingly large shares of budgets, setting the stage for bitterly fought battles among politicians, unions, and taxpayers. Collectively, the plans owe an incredible more in pension benefits to current and future retirees than the money stashed away to pay for them

How on earth did it get to this point? You may have heard about the "perfect storm" a lethal combination of a crashing stock market and record-low interest rates that has hammered the pension plans (and share prices) of many of Americas largest corporations. Those same factors also wrecked havoc on the finances of state and local pension plans.

But when it comes to the government plans, you can add a few more poisonous elements to the mix: elected officials who were more than happy to dole out lush benefits to their heavily unionized employees during and even after the stock market bubble; a system that lets politicians push the costs for those increased benefits off on future generations of taxpayers; and a general public that simply wasnt looking. "The public employee, no matter who you compare him to, has become the dominant sector of the labor force that is well pensioned and well benefited," says Dallas Salisbury, president of the Employee Benefit Research Institute. "And the real question is, At what point, vis--vis tax burden, does the nonpensioned public start to pay attention to that as voters?"...

Making the cash crunch even more severe is that in most cities and states, public pension costs are growing more rapidly than the tax base...

[Under defined-benefit pension plans,] the employer puts up all or most of the money...Unlike defined contribution plans, such as 401(k)'s, the nest eggs accumulated under a defined-benefit plan can't be demolished by a cratering stock market...

There's another crucial difference between the public and private sector plans: A corporation, under federal law, typically must start pumping money into its pension plan once the value of the plan's assets sinks below 80% of its liabilities. But there is no such law governing state and local plans - the decision to pump additional money into a pension plan lies with the individual discretion of state and local governments.

Thanks to this discretionary funding system, shortsighted politicians can simultaneously dole out rich pensions to their heavily unionized workforces (thereby presumably currying favor with a powerful group of voters and avoiding nasty strikes) and keep the rest of their constituents at bay by shoving the liability for those increased benefits onto future taxpayers...

There is another big trend at play here: the ever-widening divergence between the proportion of public and private sector workers who participate in a traditional pension plan. For private sector workers, the number has progressively slipped, from almost 40% at the beginning of 1980 to about 17% now...

The story is very different in the public sector, where traditional pension plans continued to flourish. Ninety percent of all state and local workers are currently covered by a defined-benefit plan, unchanged from a decade ago...

Only 9% of all private sector workers are now represented by a union, less than half the percentage of two decades ago. Meanwhile, the proportion of state and local workers with union representation has held steady over the same time, at about 43%...

...government pensions are generally much richer than those offered by corporations. The average public sector employee now collects an annual pension benefit of 60% after 30 years on the job or 75% if he is one of the one-fifth or so of workers who are not eligible to collect Social Security benefits. Of the corporate employers that still offer traditional pensions, the average benefit is equal to 45% of salary after 30 years...

Just as important, about 80% of government retirees receive pensions that are increased each year to keep pace with the cost of living, a feature which protects pensions against the effects of inflation and that can increase the value of a typical pension by hundreds of thousands of dollars over a person's retirement. But such inflation protection is nonexistent in corporate plans...

...then there are plans, like those in Houston and San Diego, that allow workers to draw both their salaries and pensions simultaneously...

Union officials say those greater benefits are part of a long-honored compact between governments and their workers. "Historically people deferred wages and traded them for retirement benefits," says Ferlauto [a union official]. "That's been the public service quid pro quo." But whether they are actually trading off wages anymore is anything but certain...

The stock market did, of course collapse, leaving public sector employee pension plans without nearly enough money to pay for promised benefit increases. Even more troubling is that many governments continued to sweeten pension plans long after the stock market bubble burst in 2000...

Thanks to the widespread constitutional and legal guarantees, politicans even attempting to reduce benefits can almost surely expect protracted court challenges...

So what's the answer to the pension morass? While changing benefits for existing employees is difficult, if not legally impossible, a handful of politicians have been attempting to at least reduce the amount of cash the plans siphon out of government budgets in the future...Governments will probably continue to offset rising pension costs by slashing services and, in the process, laying off workers...

Another alternative is for employees to contribute more to their pension plans. About 80% of all state and local plans require employees to make at least some contribution to their defined-benefit plan; the average payroll deduction is 5% of salary...But increasing that amount is a tough sell...Don't count on a booming stock market to come to the rescue...

its looking as if the main responsibility for the public pension mess is going to rest squarely with taxpayers for the foreseeable future. [One union official] acknowledges that the situation might be creating some anger among workers in the private sector. "As more people are concentrated in positions that have no pension system at all, they look at some of these things with resentment," he says. "Hopefully some day theyll all join unions, and they can negotiate better benefits for themselves."

Oh, that's a really intelligent comment there at the end of the article. Such a stunning grasp of basic economics.

And you wonder why it has never crossed the minds of public sector union officials to ask one simple question working families and retirees answer every day: Where is the money going to come from to pay for all of these outrageous contractual demands by public sector unions?



The Senate Judicial Filibuster: Power Politics & Religious Bigotry

A Wall Street Journal editorial entitled "How We Got Here: Why Republicans can't let the judicial filibuster succeed" states:

On the eve of this brawl, it's worth recalling how we got here. Our own choice for what started the modern bitterness would be 1987 and the Robert Bork fightthe trashing of such a widely respected jurist marked that date as the one when nominations became political campaigns. During the Clinton years some GOP Senators returned the favor by delaying or blocking individual nominees. But even when Republicans had a Senate majority, there was nothing comparable to the demolitions of Mr. Bork or Clarence Thomas.

The judicial filibuster of the last two years marks another political escalation

The audacity of the Democrats' radicalism is illustrated by the breadth of their claims against the nominees. It isn't just one nominee they object to; it's 10, and counting. It isn't just abortion they're worried about but the entire range of constitutional law.

Priscilla Owen is said to be a judicial "activist" for a decision interpreting Texas's law regarding parental notification of teens seeking abortions. Janice Rogers Brown is "against" affirmative action and speaks bluntly in public. Brett Kavanaugh is portrayed as a radical for defending executive privilege. William Pryor is hit on the First Amendment. Richard Griffin is "anti-union" and "anti-worker." William Myers is "hostile" to the environment. Every one is labeled an "extremist" and unacceptable no matter their experience or their "well qualified" ABA rating.

This also marks a political escalation in reaching below the Supreme Court to the circuit courts of appeal

They are going to such bitter lengths, we suspect, precisely because they view the courts as their last hold on federal power. As liberals lost their majority status over the past 30 years, they have turned increasingly to the courts to implement their political program. If Democrats succeed in blocking these nominees, they will feel vindicated in their view that judicial activism pays. They will also conclude that Senate obstructionism works, and so will dig in for more of it

Democrats who point to other judicial filibusters are deliberately confusing the distinction between a filibuster and a vote for "cloture," or to end debate

This is at its core a political fight, and elections ought to mean something. Republicans have gained Senate seats in two consecutive elections in which judicial nominations were among the most important issues

Robert Novak's latest editorial entitled "Judges' financial info sought" shows how the raw exercise of power politics behind the filibuster is escalating even further now:

On May 5, the U.S. Judicial Conference in Washington received a request from a Mike Rice of Oakland, Calif., for the financial disclosure records of U.S. Appeals Court Judge Edith Jones (5th Circuit) of Houston. A 20-year veteran on the bench, Jones is a perennial possibility for the U.S. Supreme Court. The demand for her personal records is part of a major intelligence raid preceding momentous confirmation fights in the Senate.

Jones was not alone as a target, and Rice is not just a nosy citizen. He and Craig Varoga, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, are partners in a California political consulting firm. Their May 5 petition requested financial information on 30 appellate judges in all but one of the country's judicial circuits, including nine widely mentioned Supreme Court possibilities. Varoga & Rice's client: NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Nobody can recall any previous mass request for such disclosures by federal judges. This intelligence raid is financed by the abortion lobby, but it looks to Republicans like a front for Reid and other senators who will consider President Bush's appointments for Supreme Court nominations...

While Rice bills himself as an "expert" on "state public-records laws," his special field has been negative research probing the background of political foes...

...But compiling financial profiles of judicial nominees plows new ground...

The abortion advocacy group surely was not asking the judges' views on abortion. Nancy Keenan, who has been NARAL's president some five months, told this column her organization is concerned about "out of touch theological activists" becoming judges. Why seek financial information from them? She said the disclosure information might help identify the "character" of judicial nominees...

To which this Power Line posting entitled "Anything goes if you're planning to attack believing Christians" notes:

...The statement of Nancy Keenan, NARAL's president, is also revealing. She told Novak that her organization is concerned about "out of touch theological activists" becoming judges. What does financial information have to do with this? Keenan says the disclosure information might help identify the "character" of judicial nominees. That's an interesting twist -- when caught with her pants down, Keenan reverts to a facially absurd "we're protecting the country from the God-fearing" defense. The left has journeyed very far, fairly fast...

Remember how the Democrats blasted Senator Frist for suggesting that their opposition to President Bush's nominees had anything to do with religion? "Out of touch theological activists" are, I think, the same people as those who have "deeply held religious beliefs."

In addition, Stanley Kurtz has these comments in a posting entitled "It's What You Believe:"

When asked why her organization was going after these nominees, NARAL president Nancy Keenan said that her organization was concerned about "out of touch theological activists" becoming judges. Now thats interesting. I thought opponents of the presidents nominees were only concerned about judicial philosophy, not religious belief. Do you suppose [the mainstream media] will now come down on Keenan for injecting religion into politics? Will [the mainstream media] now acknowledge that the presidents nominees are indeed being targeted because of their faith? Will pigs fly?

In a posting entitled "Hating Their Religion," Liberty Files offers these thoughts:

...Essentially, they are looking for the indicia of the serious practice of faith in order to use that as ammunition to slime them as an intolerant religious hack, their premise being that people of sincere faith cannot be effective judges because they will reflexively legislate the Bible.

But NARAL is not concerned about fitness of judges anymore than it is concerned about the health of the mother after an abortion takes place. This plan is rooted in radical left's increasingly conspicuous anti-religious bigotry, and is an effort to portray people of faith as out of the mainstream nuts because they hold a set of unchanging beliefs and vocally object to the moral lawlessness of the left. Listen to their rhetoric and then replace the term "Christian" with "Jew", and the historical parallel will become clearer. NARAL's hope is that real faith, rather than being an admirable personal attribute, will become a skeleton in the closet, so that they can count on moral relativist activist judges and politicians who will maintain the abortion status quo and effectuate the social agenda of the left.

They accuse Christians of being hatemongers, but watch the behavior of these radicals carefully--they commit the very evils of which they accuse their opponents. They are discriminating based on religion. They behave as madmen. They don't argue facts, but only innuendo, prejudice and emotion, hoping that they can scare people into their viewpoint...

A JunkYardBlog posting entitled "An Admission" has this to say:

"Out of touch theological activists." That is a phrase that Andrew Sullivan is sure to love and support, but to the rest of us it can be explained in two words: religious bigotry. NARAL has admitted now that it is applying a religious test to the president's nominees, and NARAL is one of a handful of groups controlling the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Therefore the Democrats are engaged in religious bigotry, and are conducting an unconstitutional religious test upon judicial nominees.

Game, set, match. Now let's blow that non-filibuster filibuster out of the water.

Now, again, ask yourself who are really the theocrats threatening liberty in this equation?

For more on the judicial filibusters by Democratic Senators, go here and here.

For more on the fundamentalism of the secular left, go here, here, here, here, here, and here.



This is not a recording...or is it?

Marc Comtois

From the OpinionJournal.com, offered without comment:

Liberal Fundamentalism
Who are the intolerant extremists?

Monday, May 16, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

We have been following the extensive theological commentary in the press on the subject of politics and religion in the current presidential campaign. It might not otherwise have occurred to us that so many editorialists and columnists harbored so many deep, pent-up opinions on religious worship, voluntary school prayer or Christian fundamentalism.

What we have been looking for but have so far missed in this great awakening of religious writing is a short sermon on the subject of liberal fundamentalism. And so in the spirit of Samuel Johnson, who once wrote homilies for his church pastor so as not to fall asleep during Sunday services, we would like to offer a few thoughts on what has been far and away the most messianic religion in America the past two decades--liberal politics.

American liberalism has traditionally derived much of its energy from a volatile mixture of emotion and moral superiority. The liberal belief that one's policies would on balance accomplish something indisputably good generally made opposing arguments about shortcomings, costs or unintended consequences unpersuasive. Nonetheless, politics during the presidencies of Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower was waged mainly as politics and not as a kind of religious political crusade. Somehow that changed during the Kennedy presidency.

Mr. Kennedy used the force of his personality to infuse his supporters with a sense of transcendent mission--the New Frontier. The emotions this movement inspired coincided with the one deeply moral political phenomenon that postwar America has experienced--Martin Luther King's civil-rights movement. The Rev. King's multiracial civil-rights marches and their role in overturning de jure and de facto segregation in the U.S. were a political and moral achievement.

In retrospect, it's clear that the moral clarity of the early civil-rights movement was a political epiphany for many white liberals. Some have since returned to traditional, private lives; others have become neoconservatives. But many active liberals carried along their newly found moral certitude and quasi-religious fervor into nearly every major public-policy issue that has come along in the past 15 years. The result has been liberal fundamentalism.

The Vietnam anti-war movement, the environmental movement, the disarmament and nuclear-freeze movements, the anti-nuclear-power movement, consumerism, the Third World movement, the limits-to-growth movement. These have been the really active faiths in contemporary America. Their adherents attended the anti-war march on Washington in 1970, locking arms and once again singing "We Shall Overcome." They characterized the leader of their own country at the time as demonic. More recently, they have held vigils outside nuclear power plants, singing and holding lighted candles, while their lawyers filed injunctions in friendly courtrooms. The Sierra Club and other environmental groups transformed "the wilderness" into a vast, pantheistic shrine, which they and fellow believers must defend against the depredations of conservative developers. America's Roman Catholic bishops denounced nuclear war and became revered figures in the nuclear-freeze movement (but when they denounce abortion, they are reviled).

Not surprisingly, this evangelical liberalism produced a response. Conservative groups--both secular and religious--were created, and they quite obviously make the political success of their adversaries more difficult. Liberals don't like that. So now, suddenly, we find all these politicians and columnists who are afraid someone might want to impose a particular point of view on them. "There is a long and unhappy history of intolerance which still flourishes at the extremist fringe of American politics," says Ted Kennedy, a fundamentalist liberal preacher from eastern Massachusetts. Indeed there is. It greeted U.S. soldiers returning to California from Vietnam with spit. It has characterized people who work in the auto, drug and nuclear-power businesses as criminally amoral. It turned the investigations of Anne Gorsuch, Les Lenkowsky and Ed Meese into inquisitions.

If some liberals are now afraid that certain Christian fundamentalists will reintroduce new forms of intolerance and excessive religious zeal into American political life, perhaps we should concede the possibility that they know what they're talking about. But they might also meditate on the current election and why there has been an apparent rightward shift in political sentiment in the U.S. It could be that a great many voters have taken a good look at the fundamentalists on the religious right and the fundamentalists on the political left and made up their own minds about which pose the greater threat to their own private and public values.

Sounds familiar? Yup, I posted a similar thing the other day. But I forgot this part, from OpinionJournal:

(Editor's note: The editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 13, 1984.)

The more things change...



Underfunding Pensions, Public and Private, can Hurt Taxpayers

Marc Comtois

Don has posted on the perils to the taxpayer derived from excessive penision and other benefits to government employees and has also posted on the perils to private business if they over-promise benefits to their retirees. Ironically, the poor decisions of both can hurt the U.S. taxpayer. If public sector employees get too much, well, it's fairly obvious who foots the bill. However, in addition, the private sector may soon come calling to the American taxpayer, too.

Continue reading "Underfunding Pensions, Public and Private, can Hurt Taxpayers"

May 14, 2005


The Injustice of Smearing A Fellow American For Political Gain

There is an excellent posting on Captain's Quarters about Janice Rogers Brown, one of the court nominees being filibustered by Senate Democrats, that references this Sacramento Bee editorial written by a liberal who, among other things, said:

I know Janice Rogers Brown, and she knows me, but we're not friends. The associate justice of the California Supreme Court has never been to my house, and I've never been to hers. Ours is a wary relationship, one that befits a journalist of generally liberal leanings and a public official with a hard-right reputation fiercely targeted by the left...

Even though being in general disagreement with Brown's political philosophy, she notes Brown's dissent in the case of The People v. Conrad Richard McKay and comments further:

I find myself rooting for Brown. I hope she survives the storm and eventually becomes the first black woman on the nation's highest court.

I want her there because I believe she worries about the things that most worry me about our justice system: bigotry, unequal treatment and laws and police practices that discriminate against people who are black and brown and weak and poor.

Consider these words from the conclusion to Brown's dissent in the referenced case:

In the spring of 1963, civil rights protests in Birmingham united this country in a new way. Seeing peaceful protesters jabbed with cattle prods, held at bay by snarling police dogs, and flattened by powerful streams of water from fire hoses galvanized the nation. Without being constitutional scholars, we understood violence, coercion, and oppression. We understood what constitutional limits are designed to restrain. We reclaimed our constitutional aspirations. What is happening now is more subtle, more diffuse, and less visible, but it is only a difference in degree. If harm is still being done to people because they are black, or brown, or poor, the oppression is not lessened by the absence of television cameras.

I do not know Mr. McKay's ethnic background. One thing I would bet on: he was not riding his bike a few doors down from his home in Bel Air, or Brentwood, or Rancho Palos Verdes - places where no resident would be arrested for riding the "wrong way" on a bicycle whether he had his driver's license or not. Well...it would not get anyone arrested unless he looked like he did not belong in the neighborhood. That is the problem. And it matters...

It is clear the Legislature could not authorize the kind of standardless discretion the court confers in this case. Why should the court permit officers to do indirectly what the Constitution directly prohibits? How can such an action be deemed constitutionally reasonable? And if we insist it is, can we make any credible claim to a commitment to equal justice and equal treatment under law?

Well...No. Not exactly.

Do those words sound like some scary extremist? Of course not.

And yet, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid recently said this about Brown:

...She is a woman who wants to take us back to the Civil War days...

Which leads The Captain's posting to end with these words:

This is the real Janice Rogers Brown, not some bogeyman dreamed up by People for the American Way and Ted Kennedy. Even her presumed political opponents in the California state capitol know better. It's high time for the GOP to put an end to the smear campaigns of the Left and get Brown the up-or-down vote she deserves.

Nobody has put forth evidence that Janice Rogers Brown has let her personal beliefs cause her not to follow the Constitution in her judicial opinions. Rather, all they can offer are certain public comments which confirm that she holds some conservative viewpoints. The last time I checked, expressing such opinions was still an allowed freedom in America. This point is reinforced by Thomas Sowell.

Unsurprisingly, Reid's comments have not stopped with just Brown. Here is what he recently said about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas:

I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I don't--I just don't think that he's done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.

Discussing a Supreme Court case, Reid also said this about a dissent by Thomas:

...it's like looking at an 8th grade dissertation compared to somebody who just graduated from Harvard...

Also in the most recent link, James Taranto of the OpinionJournal.com responds with these thoughts:

When Trent Lott crossed the line two years ago, Republicans, after some hesitation, did the right thing and ousted him as their leader. If the Democrats retain Reid, it will tell us something about the party's commitment to racial equality.

Here is the link to a 2003 Wall Street Journal editorial that explains the underlying motives for the words and actions of Senate Democrats:

The truth is that Judge Brown is all too qualified, and what scares the left is her chances for promotion. More U.S. Supreme Court Justices--including Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas--have come from the D.C. Circuit than from any other federal court...

The lesson liberals learned from Clarence Thomas's success is to start attacking early when fewer people are paying attention. Senators who had approved Judge Thomas's appointment to the D.C. Circuit found it politically difficult later to oppose his promotion to the Supreme Court...

So she's getting the by-now-ritual Borking...

...attacks ultimately descended into something close to parody...Democrats accused her of being insensitive to victims of rape, housing discrimination, age discrimination and even racial discrimination.

Judge Brown was born into a family of Alabama sharecroppers in 1949. She has personal experience with racial segregation and every other precept of Jim Crow America. The idea that she needs a lecture on discrimination from...anyone...in the all-white and mostly male Senate is absurd on its face. But for Democrats the goal is to make her look somehow like an inauthentic black.

As Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Justice Thomas and others can attest, liberals reserve their harshest and most personal attacks for minorities with the audacity to wander off the ideological plantation...Hardly an "extremist," Judge Brown...wrote the majority opinion for the court more times that any other Justice in the 2001-02 term...

This is about political power, and overturning the results of the 2000 and 2002 elections...

Senate liberals are in the process of filibustering a rainbow coalition of conservative judges that deserves to become a major Republican campaign issue: One black, one Hispanic, three women, two Southern whites and perhaps soon an Arab-American. Let's have a 2004 election debate over which party is really the enemy of diversity, intellectual and otherwise.

The Left just doesn't want any blacks wandering off their plantation. No conservative blacks allowed. No school choice for poor inner-city black kids. The list could go on. Now ask yourself who really believes America should be the land of freedom and opportunity for ALL Americans.

See here for more on the Senate judicial filibusters.

ADDENDUM I:

Peter Kirsanow adds these thoughts about Janice Rogers Brown. Nat Hentoff comments here.



Sexual License

Jayd Henricks offers this commentary on the issue of sexual license and why the homosexual-rights and abortion-rights groups are politically united:

The Human Rights Campaign recently named Joe Solmonese as their new president. Solmonese moves from his position as CEO of Emilys List a political-action committee aimed at electing women abortion advocates to public office to HRC, the largest homosexual-rights interest group. Meanwhile, homosexual Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson has announced his support for Planned Parenthood, the leading abortion provider in the U.S. Both of these are emblematic of an interesting phenomenon in the cultural battle defining American politics today: Homosexual interest groups often form a significant part of the coalition supporting abortion rights. Why is a population that by definition does not procreate heavily involved in the right to end a pregnancy?

One might argue that this is simply what defines a liberal. A liberal defends the power of an individual to do as he or she pleases. While this is selectively true (where is the liberal movement to defend the rights of an individual to pray in the public square, or for parents to send their children to the school of their choice?), its not quite specific enough. At any large event in support of abortion rights, rainbow flags and other symbols of the homosexual culture are prominent. Homosexual groups frequently advertise pro-abortion events on their websites and publications, and abortion groups often support activities promoting homosexual causes. The two groups clearly overlap. Why is this?

On the surface it is an unlikely coalition, but upon closer examination there is common ground. While the two groups are very different in their particular circumstances, the common denominator between the two agendas is sexual license. Homosexuals are often strong advocates of abortion not because they need access to it but because homosexual activists are driven by the same philosophy that drives abortion rights: sex without restrictions or consequences. The two groups share the same foundation and it is in an effort to fortify this foundation that the two are committed to each other.

Continue reading "Sexual License"


Pat Buchanan: Nazi Apologist

Stephen Green of Vodkapundit offers a striking counter-argument to Pat Buchanan's editorial entitled "Was World War II worth it?":

It took 40 years, but today Pat Buchanan hit bottom on the slippery slope from Young Turk conservative columnist to Nazi Apologist troglodyte...

Shame on Buchanan. We must never let the evil of World War II be whitewashed. I would encourage you to read the entire posting.



Ahistorical America: Are We Doomed to Repeat the Past?

It is common knowledge that many of our children are ignorant about their American history.

We then have the secular left fundamentalists actively trying to rewrite history, especially our understanding of the American Founding.

As a result, this article by David Gelernter, a senior fellow in Jewish Thought at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, should come as no surprise to anyone:

A report just issued by the Bible Literacy Project suggests that young Americans know very little about the Bible. The report is important, but first things first: A fair number of Americans don't see why teenagers should know anything at all about the Bible.

Scripture begins with God creating the world, but there is something these verses don't tell you: The Bible has itself created worlds. Wherever you stand on the spectrum from devout to atheist, you must acknowledge that the Bible has been a creative force without parallel in history.

Continue reading "Ahistorical America: Are We Doomed to Repeat the Past?"

May 13, 2005


Strange Bedfellows, Indeed

Marc Comtois

Welp, what are we all to make of this?

Mr. Gingrich and Mrs. Clinton have a lot more in common now that they have left behind the politics of the 1990's, when she was a symbol of the liberal excesses of the Clinton White House and he was a fiery spokesman for a resurgent conservative movement in Washington.

Beyond the issue of health care, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gingrich have forged a relatively close relationship working on a panel the Pentagon created to come up with ways to improve the nation's military readiness, according to people close to them.

Mr. Gingrich says he has been struck by how pro-defense Mrs. Clinton has turned out to be at a time when other Democrats have criticized President Bush's decision to go to war against Iraq. He chalked that up to her experience in the White House, where her husband, as commander in chief, had to deal with grave national security matters.

"Unlike most members of the legislature, she has been in the White House," he said. "She's been consistently solid on the need to do the right thing on national defense."

It was, in fact, during one of the defense panel's meetings in Norfolk that Mr. Gingrich suggested to her that they join efforts to push legislation on an area of mutual concern: the need to spur greater online exchanges of medical information among patients, doctors, health insurers and other medical experts. That, in turn, led to the press conference that both attended this week.

Political opportunism on both parts? Or could there be something to the idea that a personal relationship can overcome too-often hyperbolic partisan rhetoric? I actually think its encouraging. Though I must confess that there is no way I could trust Mrs. Clinton as President. Nonethless, when she's right (as she has been on military affairs), she's right.


May 12, 2005


Pension Fund Politics: How the AFL-CIO Violates Its Fiduciary Responsibilities

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial entitled "Pension Fund Politics" in which it made these comments about labor union practices:

One of the more dangerous political trends these days is the misuse of public pension assets for partisan ends. So it was encouraging this week to see the Labor Department give a refresher course on fiduciary duty to the AFL-CIO.

The instruction came in the form of a legal warning that spending pension fund assets on partisan crusades is a violation of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or Erisa. "A fiduciary may never increase a plan's expenses, sacrifice the security of promised benefits, or reduce the return on plan assets, in order to promote its views on Social Security or any other broad policy issue," wrote Alan Lebowitz, a deputy assistant secretary and career Labor official, in a letter to the union group.

This legal brushback pitch is a response to the AFL-CIO's attempts to enlist pension managers as partisan allies. The union umbrella has threatened to pull its $400 billion pension business from any financial services company that supports personal Social Security accounts. This is political intimidation that no corporate pension fund would dare to attempt, lest it be sued. But it is part of a new union strategy that runs from California's Calpers fund siding with striking unions against Safeway last year, to New York State's Democratic Comptroller, Alan Hevesi, threatening Sinclair Broadcasting out of running a documentary critical of John Kerry.

The AFL-CIO claims to be unworried by the Labor warning, but this is probably both a legal and political mistake. Union leaders are already under scrutiny for wasting member dues on politics, with no apparent results or accountability. If workers discover that unions are also dipping into their pension assets, or are picking investment advisers based on politics more than return on assets, their desire to join unions will only decrease.

Labor's resort to pension-fund politics reflects its overall shrinking fortunes in the workplace. Union membership has fallen precipitously for years, and last weekend came news that the AFL-CIO was forced to dismiss more than a third of its 424 employees. During John Sweeney's 10-year presidency, the AFL-CIO's reserve fund has dropped to $31 million from $61 million. Pension fund assets are the last stash of cash out there to exploit.

As the Labor Department has now made clear, that's illegal. Resisting that advice will invite a lawsuit, as well as Congressional oversight to underscore that the fiduciary obligation of public pension managers is to workers, not to the political causes of union leaders.



John Adams on the Importance of Morality & Religion

John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of America, wrote:

We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

He also said:

You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the universe.

Another Adams quote contains these words:

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

Finally, John Adams said:

Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, they may change their rulers and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty.

These quotes are consistent with other previously noted quotes by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson contained in this posting as well as these words from Calvin Coolidge.

These words from three leading Founding Fathers and four American Presidents can only lead to the unanswered question: Why are today's secular left fundamentalists so committed to rewriting the history of our country's Founding by claiming the Founding was a completely secular occurrence.


May 11, 2005


A Revolution of Discipline

Justin Katz

In email conversation with URI women's studies professor Donna Hughes — who has published on NRO and FrontPage — about an online course that she'll be teaching in the fall, "Human Rights and Foreign Policy," I suggested that conservatives have quite a bit of work to do to reclaim inclusion with issues that are often considered "liberal" by definition. It shouldn't be reasonable for students registering for a women's studies course to assume that they know for whom their professor voted in the past five presidential elections or what her view on stem-cell research is. The following part of Prof. Hughes's response struck me as worth publishing, here, and I've done so with her permission.


Even if you disagree with certain points of view, you have to read and understand them to know how to counter them. Otherwise, you're arguing in ignorance. Where I find that bias hurts students is when they've been taught opinion as fact. No one tells them that what they are learning is just one side of a debate or a particular political perspective.

For example, I'm opposed to the legalization of prostitution from what I consider a feminist point of view — it's not good for women! Yet that puts me in opposition to most liberals who support legalization or decriminalization of prostitution, and I find allies among social conservatives and faith-based groups who agree with me, but often for different reasons.

I just finished teaching a course on "Sex Trafficking." I have my students read both points of view on the debates on trafficking and prostitution. They read some of the things I've written, so I don't hide my point of view, but when they write essays they have to clearly indicate that they understand the debate and the arguments. In the class discussion, they frequently state their opinions. I don't discourage that.

In the area of human rights and foreign policy, a very interesting coalition has come together in Washington to successfully pass a number of bills. As a feminist working to advance the well being and status of women around the world, I meet every week and frequently speak every day to members of our coalition made up of conservative Christians, Jews, Bahai's, social conservatives, and liberals. I've learned that conservatives have different philosophies about foreign policy — and they can be more effective than the liberal approaches sometimes. As a result of working together, we have built a strong political alliance, learned to respect each other — and become friends. As a feminist and women's studies professor, I was invited by the Midland Ministerial Alliance to come to Midland, Texas, and talk about trafficking of women. I spoke to a room full of Bush supporters. We got along great because we were united behind the Bush administration policies on trafficking and prostitution.

I will be drawing from my experience in this new class. That's why I think conservative students might be interested in taking it. It will not be hostile to their views. The world is rapidly changing, and frankly, I think the liberals are out of ideas on what to do about it. From the perspective of a feminist who wants to promote the well being and status of women, we need more democracy and freedom in the world. It is only under those conditions that women can organize and lobby for more rights. Also, one of the greatest threats to women in the world today is Islamic fascism and it seems to be the neoconservatives that have figured out what a threat it is to the world.


May 5, 2005


The Public Interest Ends: The Fight for Morality in Government Continues

Marc Comtois

The journal The Public Interest is ending a 40 year run with this issue. In a "look back" article, editor Nathan Glazer recounts how the PI was "Neoconservative from the Start." Some of his pull-quotes from past issues illustrate that many of the same problems we are facing today are nothing new and were, in fact, predicted by the writers and editors of the journal.

Continue reading "The Public Interest Ends: The Fight for Morality in Government Continues"

May 4, 2005


Social Security Reform Debate: Hypocrisy, Misinformation & Why Change is Necessary

As you continue to listen to leading politicians debate the merits of Social Security reform, consider the points raised in this editorial.

The Left strongly opposes Americans controlling their own retirement funds through personal accounts...

Three million federal employees, including members of Congress, invest pre-tax dollars into personal retirement accounts, which they control. Instead of Social Security, federal employees use the [Thrift Savings Plan] TSP, which allows them to allocate their retirement investments among five options, any of which beats Social Security's meager two to three-percent return. TSP 10-year average returns range from 5.45 percent for the international stock index fund to 11.99 percent for the domestic stock-index fund.

Individually owned, privately invested accounts yield greater retirement security: TSP proves it. So why does Senator Kennedy want to deny workers the same ownership rights and higher returns that he enjoys? Because he knows such ownership will change people's policy preferences. If the value of retirement nest eggs were tightly linked to individual earnings and long-term stock-market performance, people would demand a freer economy to pump up economic growth and stock performance. Freer markets deflate Big Government, which threatens the Left but freer markets pay off handsomely for the individual...

Ownership motivates people to think long term and to maximize the value of their assets. People act differently with borrowed goods than with owned goods; nobody washes a rental car, for instance. But the Left wants to keep working Americans in the Social Security rental car precisely because they know people tolerate more government when ownership rights are restricted. The Left views private retirement accounts as the biggest threat to Big Government since Ronald Reagan. And they are right.

That's the real reason Senator Kennedy is fighting to stop ordinary Americans from having the same ownership rights over retirement funds that he has.

Here are some websites of organizations supporting social security reform:

National Center for Policy Analysis
Cato Institute Project on Social Security Reform
Heritage Foundation
Institute for Policy Innovation
Social Security Choice, a project of The Club for Growth
Freedom Works/Citizens for a Sound Economy

Continue reading "Social Security Reform Debate: Hypocrisy, Misinformation & Why Change is Necessary"


Looking Back to Terri Schiavo's Death

World Magazine has an interview with David Gibbs, attorney for Terri Schiavo's parents.

...last week I sat down with David Gibbs...to ask him what had gone so wrong. "What single thing," I inquired, "do you wish might have been done differently?"

"I wish," Mr. Gibbs said simply, "that we'd been able to show the American public how very alive Terri was."

Acknowledging the severity of the brain damage Mrs. Schiavo had suffered and the limits that imposed, Mr. Gibbs still insisted that he had come to know his clients' daughter as a person. "There was a dynamic to her. She jabbered. She complained when she was in pain. She fussed at the staff. She laughed when her mother came in, and she cried when her mother left. She teased. Her father, Bob Schindler, would come in with his mustache and beard, and she wouldin her own wayplay with him about how they tickled her."

All those human details were critical to demonstrate to the public, Mr. Gibbs insists, because of the determination of Michael Schiavo, Terri's husband, to portray her not just as brain damaged, but as brain dead...

But Americaby careful designnever saw that warm and human exchange. More critical even than the various courts' final rulings that her feeding tube be withdrawn was their previous determination that any personal exposure to Terri would be limited to a tiny group of professional experts. No jury of peers got to hear or see Terri face to face. News reporters were officially excluded. The judges themselves never met or saw herin spite of Mr. Gibbs's pleading that they do so. "She was altogether capable of coming to their courtrooms in a wheelchair," he insists now. "They turned down all my efforts to make that happen."

Continue reading "Looking Back to Terri Schiavo's Death"


An Evangelical Reporter Speaks Up

Marc Comtois

Don has already called for an end to the political namecalling. John McCandlish Phillips, a former religion writer for the New York Times, has confronted the particular and recentyl popular application of the term "jihad" in relation to religious people by the predominantly left-wing op-ed writers in the Times and Washington Post (which published this column).

I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, fellow evangelicals along with traditional Catholics, in a ghastly arcade mirror lately -- courtesy of this newspaper and the New York Times. Readers have been assured, among other dreadful things, that we are living in "a theocracy" and that this theocratic federal state has reached the dire level of -- hold your breath -- a "jihad."

In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days.

Phillips recounted most of the major, left-wing columnists who have picked up on the "jihad" meme and then, after he reassured them that religious people aren't going to hurt them, accused them of improperly revising history:

Continue reading "An Evangelical Reporter Speaks Up"

May 3, 2005


Wilfred M. McClay: The Evangelical Conservatism of George W. Bush

Wilfred McClay offers his thoughts on the nature of the George W. Bush administration:

What I want to look at is, specifically, how the administration of George W. Bush seems to have marked a sea change in the evolution of Republican politics, in conservatism, in the present and future alignment of our political parties and ideologies, and the role of religion in our public discourse and public action. In addition, however, I want to talk about the ways that, taking a longer-range historical view, what looks like a sea change may in fact merely be the process of this administration and the political party it leads rejoining itself, consciously or not, to certain longer traditions of American political and social reform. And I will also want to ask, in the end, whether these changes or reorientations are entirely a good thing, or whether there are aspects of them that should give pause to Americans in general, and to conservative Americans and evangelical Americans in particular.

I would encourage you to read the entire article as well as William F. Buckley, Jr.'s commentary on it.



The Religion of Secularism

Marc Comtois

I highly recommend reading Don's latest post for some important context to the following (hopefully) succinct post.

As Don argues, radical secularism can be viewed as its own sort of religion whereby the "state" replaces the religious function and, despite claims otherwise, also assumes the role of the "higher power" [God]. It can be safely assumed that most secularists are on the political left and have a tendency toward moral relativism, which is the belief that we all live by our own moral code and "whose to say one is better than the other." However, in truth, secularists do belief in a set of moral truths: those that they determine.

Without getting too far into the weeds, even secularists realize there must be some kind of basic moral ruleset by which society must be governed. However, they have no room for religiously informed morality within government and purposefully have read the "separation of church and state" to mean the "separation of religion and state." To them, because religion is a private matter, it is improper for a state to derive its morality from religion (especially Judeo-Christian, I might add). However, secularists, some might say arrogantly, believe that men, usually highly educated intellectual such as themselves, are perfectly able to arrive at moral truths through rational reasoning. Once "discovered," these moral truths are best enforced by being codified into the rule of law. Thus, if its legal, it is moral.

On the face of it, it seems to hold that morality and legality are equivalent, but this is not necessarily true. For instance, most would agree that murder is both illegal and immoral. However, persuasive arguments have been made that both abortion and the death penalty are legalized murder: they may be legal, but they are immoral. So, while it is obvious that there are some gray areas, it gets even worse when reinterpreting seemingly obvious laws (or even terms, like "marriage") is deemed appropriate and necessary to reflect society's "proper" morality.

Ideally, lawmaking would be done through majoritarian political machinations. If most people agreed with a proposed law, it would be passed and would become the law of the land. However, to a secularist, if that is not possible, then relativistic reinterpretations of past laws are perfectly legitimate (so long as the reinterpretations mirror their "reasoned" morality). Therefore, it is important that people with a proper ideological view get placed within the ranks of those who can dictate and reinterpret law: the judiciary. Thus, a secularist's religion is government (especially the judiciary), his dogma is the rule of law ("properly" interpreted), and his high priests are judges.



A Reasoned Alternative to the Ongoing Name-Calling in America's Public Discourse: Additional Commentary

A previous posting offered A Reasoned Alternative to the Ongoing Name-Calling in America's Public Discourse, including a list of 33 postings addressing important issues in America today.

C P Fuhrmann offered a response on that posting, which this new posting responds to as follows:

I thank C P Fuhrmann for the comments.

Nonetheless, I must disagree with the suggestion that "calling a spade a spade" justifies using terms such as "jihadist." To paraphrase William Voegeli, there are ways to make a point without resorting to language that only serves to polarize, not to convince. Cynthia Tuckers language was inappropriate and degraded the public discourse.

I share C P Fuhrmanns belief that Congressman DeLays comments about Justice Kennedy were inappropriate. In a posting that predated DeLay's comments, I have also noted questions about certain actions by the Congressman. Furthermore, I relayed other writers criticisms of his Justice Kennedy comments in this more recent posting.

I have been no less shy in criticizing Christians - with whom I share many similar views - who make public comments that I believe are inconsistent with the values of their religious beliefs.

However, enabling a constructive two-way public discourse requires people such as C P Fuhrmann to be equally willing to criticize Ms. Tuckers language even if in agreement with the core of her arguments. You cannot have it both ways - criticizing DeLay's language while excusing Tucker's language any more than it would be appropriate for me to criticize Tucker but excuse DeLay or certain Christians. Civility practiced only by one side of the debate amounts to a form of unilateral surrender that only a fool would continue into the future.

But even that disagreement misses the bigger point: Focusing on stupid comments by the Congressman and Cynthia Tucker conveniently misses the three important issues that are not being debated across America:

Continue reading "A Reasoned Alternative to the Ongoing Name-Calling in America's Public Discourse: Additional Commentary"

May 2, 2005


More on the Misguided Incentives in the Public Sector

Previous postings have addressed the Misguided Incentives that are structurally present in the public sector and how this leads naturally to Pigs at the Public Trough. These observations make Lawrence Reed's Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy an insightful read.

Why does this all matter? Here is another story that illustrates why:

Robert Novak has written an editorial about new U. S. Senator Tom Coburn and what happens to people who challenge the status quo:

Continue reading "More on the Misguided Incentives in the Public Sector"


Morning Roundup 5/2/2005

Marc Comtois

Nota Bene: This post is an experiment. I thought I'd try providing a bunch of different links to different web posts, articles, stories etc. that I found interesting. The goal is to point to some articles that may be of general interest to conservative readers with enough of a summary to indicate whether or not it would be interesting. I'd appreciate any feedback as to whether this is a worthwhile endeavor.

Continue reading "Morning Roundup 5/2/2005"

May 1, 2005


Learning More About How Dues Paid To Big Labor Are Spent

One of the more interesting informational black holes has always been the forced payment of dues by union members and exactly what those funds were then spent on by the union.

Thanks to some new reporting requirements that kick in this summer, we are about to get the first real glimpse into what is going on with the millions and millions of dollars paid in union dues.

Continue reading "Learning More About How Dues Paid To Big Labor Are Spent"


If You Won't Deal With Economic Reality, Then It Will Deal With You

The overall economic cost structure of the American airline industry is pathetically unsustainable. This is not news; the elephant has been sitting in the room for years now but most everyone has refused to acknowledge its presence.

Continue reading "If You Won't Deal With Economic Reality, Then It Will Deal With You"


Are We Capable of Self-Government?

David Gelernter writes:

Who could possibly be against cutting voter fraud on election day? You'd have to be some sort of fruitcake. But when Georgia's Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue recently signed a bill to reduce voter fraud, under which voters must show a photo ID before casting their ballots, many of Georgia's black legislators stormed out in protest. They even threatened to sue. The new process is simple, easy and fairly effective, but Democrats alleged that it would reduce voting by minorities, the elderly and the poor. So black legislators had to oppose it.

For legislators to announce that getting a photo ID is too tricky for their constituents is downright amazing. Wouldn't you expect those constituents to say, "Drop dead! Stop treating us like morons!"?...

As Michelle Malkin points out on her blog, those outraged Democrats are treating their constituents like children. But actually the episode points to a bigger, deeper, uglier truth: Democrats habitually treat Americans like children

Continue reading "Are We Capable of Self-Government?"

April 30, 2005


Correcting the Bizarre Incentives Created by Campaign Finance Reform Laws

Donald B. Hawthorne

Carroll Andrew Morse has a terrific, focused posting entitled First They Came for the Radio Talk Show Hosts... that gets to the heart of the latest fallout from campaign finance reform here in Rhode Island. Once again, we have an example of how legislation has unintended consequences that, in this case, affect our freedom of speech.

Dating back to the post-Watergate reforms in the 1970's, I continue to be amazed at how people think it is possible to construct ways to limit the flow of money into politics. And so we have concepts such as hard money, soft money, donation limits by individuals, donation limits by corporate entities, political action committees, 527's, etc.

Like water flowing downhill, money simply finds new ways to flow into politics after each such "reform." Does any rational person really think all these limitations have reduced the influence of money on politics? Surely not. Have all these limitations changed behavioral incentives for people or organizations with money? Quite clearly, as the 527's showed in the 2004 elections. But all we have done is made the flow of money more convoluted and frequently more difficult to trace. Are we better off for all the changes? Hardly. And, the adverse and unintended consequences will only continue into the future.

Continue reading "Correcting the Bizarre Incentives Created by Campaign Finance Reform Laws"


Correcting the Bizarre Incentives Created by Campaign Finance Reform Laws

Carroll Andrew Morse has a terrific, focused posting entitled First They Came for the Radio Talk Show Hosts... that gets to the heart of the latest fallout from campaign finance reform here in Rhode Island. Once again, we have an example of how legislation has unintended consequences that, in this case, affect our freedom of speech.

Dating back to the post-Watergate reforms in the 1970's, I continue to be amazed at how people think it is possible to construct ways to limit the flow of money into politics. And so we have concepts such as hard money, soft money, donation limits by individuals, donation limits by corporate entities, political action committees, 527's, etc.

Like water flowing downhill, money simply finds new ways to flow into politics after each such "reform." Does any rational person really think all these limitations have reduced the influence of money on politics? Surely not. Have all these limitations changed behavioral incentives for people or organizations with money? Quite clearly, as the 527's showed in the 2004 elections. But all we have done is made the flow of money more convoluted and frequently more difficult to trace. Are we better off for all the changes? Hardly. And, the adverse and unintended consequences will only continue into the future.

Continue reading "Correcting the Bizarre Incentives Created by Campaign Finance Reform Laws"

April 28, 2005


Frist Proposes a Senate Compromise on Judges

Marc Comtois

(via NRO's Corner) Senator Bill Frist has made a proposal to the Democrats in hopes of ending the "filibuster" battle. While the rhetoric he used to frame his case is good, I'll refrain from posting it and just go right to the 4 points of his offer:

First, never in the history of the Senate had a judicial nominee with majority support been denied an up-or-down vote until two years ago. However, it was not unprecedented either for Republicans or Democrats to block judicial nominees in committee.

Whether on the floor or in committee, judicial obstruction is judicial obstruction. Its time for judicial obstruction to end no matter which party controls the White House or the Senate.

The judiciary committee will continue to play its essential oversight and investigative roles in the confirmation process. But the committee -- whether controlled by Republicans or Democrats -- will no longer be used to obstruct judicial nominees.

Second, fair and open debate is a hallmark of the Senate. Democrats have expressed their desire for more time to debate judicial nominees. I respect that request and honor it.

When a judicial nominee comes to the floor, we will set aside up to 100 hours to debate that nomination. Then the Senate as a whole will speak with an up-or-down vote.

The Senate operated this way before we began to broadcast debates on television in 1986. This would provide more than enough time for every Senator to speak on a nominee while guaranteeing that nominee the courtesy of a vote.

Third, these proposals will apply only to appeals court and Supreme Court nominees. Judges who serve on these courts have the awesome responsibility of interpreting the Constitution.

So far, only up-or-down votes on appeals court nominees have been denied. I sincerely hope the Senate minority does not intend to escalate its judicial obstruction to potential Supreme Court nominees.

That would be a terrible blow to constitutional principles and to political civility in America. I hope my offer will make it unnecessary for the minority to further escalate its judicial obstruction.

Fourth, the minority of senators who have denied votes on judicial nominees are concerned that their ability to block bills will be curbed. As Majority Leader, I guarantee that power will be protected.

The filibuster -- as it existed before its unprecedented use on judicial nominees in the last Congress -- will remain unchanged.

He correctly admits that both sides have been engaged in overstepping the bounds of the traditional definition of the "advise and consent" role of the senate. I wonder if it'll work.


April 27, 2005


A Reasoned Alternative to the Ongoing Name-Calling in America's Public Discourse

Cynthia Tucker, editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has written a nasty editorial entitled "Right-Wing Jihadists Chip Away at Americans' Liberty."

It is yet another example of the intolerant behavior toward people of faith that has become the norm among secular left fundamentalists as they seek to intimidate and silence American citizens who disagree with their worldview:

Continue reading "A Reasoned Alternative to the Ongoing Name-Calling in America's Public Discourse"


President for '08: Getting an Early Line

Marc Comtois

Patrick Ruffini is asking Republicans to make an honest assessment of some potential Republican primary two-man races to determine the "conventional wisdom." It seems prompted by recent reports that Rudy Giuliani, who would presumably fare well in the general election, has been losing ground among the generally more conservative Republican primary voters. As such, he has pitted Rudy against three other candidates: the more conservative George Allen and Bill Frist and the "maverick" John McCain (current results are here). After voting, read some of the comments, where a consensus seems to be that Ruffini has selected some pretty weak candidates to oppose Giuliani. I would have to concur.


April 25, 2005


The Filibuster...Continued

Marc has a posting on a most important subject: The ongoing Senate filibuster by Democrats over President Bush's judicial nominations.

Here are additional information sources that elaborate further on the multitude of issues behind this unprecedented action.

Continue reading "The Filibuster...Continued"


The Filibuster

Marc Comtois

For a (mostly) fair recounting of the history and debate of the efficacy of using the filibuster to stop judicial nominees, I'd recommend reading NPR's story on the subject. The essential portion:

Continue reading "The Filibuster"

April 23, 2005


Discussing Justice, Rights & Moral Common Sense

Our country deserves a rigorous public debate about some serious and highly important issues raised in several recent postings entitled Pope Benedict XVI: Offering Faith as an Antidote to Relativism and Rediscovering Civility and Purpose in America's Public Discourse. This posting offers some additional perspectives on these issues.

Andrew Busch adds his thoughts:

There has been a great deal of discussion over the past three weeks about the implications for the Catholic Church of the death of Pope John Paul II and the selection of a new Pope, as Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI...

First, for all of their public obsession with "diversity," "multiculturalism," and "tolerance," the liberals who populate (and indeed dominate) the mainstream media have little use for tolerance or diversity when it comes to cultural values...

The message was clear: Diversity is fine, as long as it does not interfere with imposing a moral (or perhaps amoral) conformity on the human race by badgering into submission any remaining resistance to the nihilism that now passes for sophistication in elite circles...

Second, the whole episode exposed the great moral dilemma of modern liberalism, the reason it seems unable to produce heroic figures. Liberals love heroic men, but they dislike it intensely when those men confidently possess a strong moral compass. That is to say, they want most of all to have men of conviction who nevertheless have no convictions...

Diversity without disagreement, heroism without convictions. This is the jumble that remains of post-modernist liberalism in America, and for three weeks in April, it was on full public display.

Continue reading "Discussing Justice, Rights & Moral Common Sense"

April 18, 2005


Parents or Government/Unions: Who Should Control Our Children's Educational Decisions?

What greater gift can we give our children than a fair shot at living the American Dream? The important contribution of a quality education to having that fair shot led me to write:

While hard work alone can make the difference, sometimes it is not enough to make the American Dream come alive for every American citizen. That leads to the final enabling component to the American Dream: access to a quality education. Such access is the great equalizer, ensuring that all Americans have a decent starting position as they enter adulthood.

But, in spite of well-documented performance problems in American public education, the educational establishment continues to actively resist change - even if that means blocking citizens from living the American Dream and putting our country at a long-term competitive disadvantage in a knowledge-based global economy.

In that context, the March 2005 edition of "The School Choice Advocate," published by the Militon and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, has a very relevant article. Not yet accessible on-line, here is an excerpt from an article entitled "Celebrating 50 Years" by Robert Enlow:

In 1955, Milton Friedman wrote an essay that articulated an old idea of liberty in a fresh and innovative way.

The idea went something like this. Elementary and secondary education in America is in serious trouble because government has combined the appropriate role of financing the general education of children with the inappropriate role of owning and operating schools. It would be much better and more equitable, he argued, if the government would "give each child, through his parents, a specified sum [voucher] to be used solely in paying for his general education...The result would be a sizable reduction in the direct activities of government, yet a great widening in the educational opportunities open to our children."

Continue reading "Parents or Government/Unions: Who Should Control Our Children's Educational Decisions?"

April 8, 2005


After the First Time, It Always Becomes Easier

In the second of my seven postings (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII) on the Terri Schindler-Schiavo case, I wrote:

And that leads us back to the more fundamental question about what value we will place on human life, including that of a disabled woman. If we begin to say it is okay to kill off "weak" human beings, think where that will take us over time. It will take us to a place where certain people will seek to play "God" so they can set the criteria for who lives and who dies. Why not then an elderly parent or a young child, should either become a financial or emotional burden? The freedom to do such great evil will only invite more profound evil over time.

Holocausts do not begin with operational concentration camps; they start on a smaller scale and steadily break down our resistance while many people plead that they are "too busy" to pay attention and get involved.

Now another blogger, Sounding the Trumpet, is back with news of another case similar to Terri's - but with an ominous twist.

Continue reading "After the First Time, It Always Becomes Easier"

April 3, 2005


Sandy Berger & Clintonian Ethics

Do you remember how the nation was lectured during the 1990's on how there was no connection between private ethics and public life? How Bill Clinton could do what whatever he wanted in his private life but, rest assured, it had no connection to his behavior as President?

Continue reading "Sandy Berger & Clintonian Ethics"

March 31, 2005


Rediscovering Civility and Purpose in America's Public Discourse

Donald B. Hawthorne

Hugh Hewitt writes:

The Terri Schiavo tragedy has been seized on by long-time critics of the "religious right" to launch attack after attack on the legitimacy of political action on the basis of religious belief. This attack has ignored the inconvenient participation in the debate--on the side of resuming water and nutrition for Terri Schiavo--of the spectacularly not-the-religious-rightness of Tom Harkin, Nat Hentoff, Jesse Jackson, and a coalition of disability advocacy groups.

The attack has also been hysterical...

All of these charges--from the most incoherent to the most measured--arrive without definition as to what "the religious right" is, and without argument as to why the agenda of this ill-defined group is less legitimate than the pro-gay marriage, pro-cloning, pro-partial-birth abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda of other political actors...Every political conflict is a choice between competing moral codes...

...But a strain of thought is developing that the political objectives of people of faith have second-class status when compared to those of, say, religiously secular elites. Of course, not only would such a position have surprised all of the Founding Fathers, it would have shocked Lincoln and Reagan, too.

The speed with which issues that excite the passions of people of faith have arrived at the center of American politics is not surprising given the forced march that the courts have put those issues on. It was not the "religious right" that pushed gay marriage...ordered Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removed... forced the United States Supreme Court to repeatedly issue rulings on areas of law that would have been better left to legislatures.

These and other developments have indeed mobilized new activists across the country, many of who see a vast disparity between what they believe ought to be public policy and what is becoming that policy by judicial fiat. They have every right to participate in politics, and they can be expected to refuse to support elected officials who ignore their concerns.

Attempts to silence them, marginalize them, or to encourage others to do so are not arguments against their positions, but admissions that those positions represent majorities that cannot be refused a place at the law-making table.

Five important issues arise out of Hewitt's editorial and are the focus of this posting: (i) the under-discussed but domineering presence of liberal fundamentalism, a competing moral code in American society; (ii) how judicial activism destroys the fabric of our politics; (iii) the connection between religious values and the American Founding; (iv) the long-term consequences for America of a radically secular religion; and, (v) how we discover civility and purpose in America's public discourse.

Continue reading "Rediscovering Civility and Purpose in America's Public Discourse"


Rediscovering Civility and Purpose in America's Public Discourse

Donald B. Hawthorne

Hugh Hewitt writes:

The Terri Schiavo tragedy has been seized on by long-time critics of the "religious right" to launch attack after attack on the legitimacy of political action on the basis of religious belief. This attack has ignored the inconvenient participation in the debate--on the side of resuming water and nutrition for Terri Schiavo--of the spectacularly not-the-religious-rightness of Tom Harkin, Nat Hentoff, Jesse Jackson, and a coalition of disability advocacy groups.

The attack has also been hysterical...

All of these charges--from the most incoherent to the most measured--arrive without definition as to what "the religious right" is, and without argument as to why the agenda of this ill-defined group is less legitimate than the pro-gay marriage, pro-cloning, pro-partial-birth abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda of other political actors...Every political conflict is a choice between competing moral codes...

...But a strain of thought is developing that the political objectives of people of faith have second-class status when compared to those of, say, religiously secular elites. Of course, not only would such a position have surprised all of the Founding Fathers, it would have shocked Lincoln and Reagan, too.

The speed with which issues that excite the passions of people of faith have arrived at the center of American politics is not surprising given the forced march that the courts have put those issues on. It was not the "religious right" that pushed gay marriage...ordered Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removed... forced the United States Supreme Court to repeatedly issue rulings on areas of law that would have been better left to legislatures.

These and other developments have indeed mobilized new activists across the country, many of who see a vast disparity between what they believe ought to be public policy and what is becoming that policy by judicial fiat. They have every right to participate in politics, and they can be expected to refuse to support elected officials who ignore their concerns.

Attempts to silence them, marginalize them, or to encourage others to do so are not arguments against their positions, but admissions that those positions represent majorities that cannot be refused a place at the law-making table.

Five important issues arise out of Hewitt's editorial and are the focus of this posting: (i) the under-discussed but domineering presence of liberal fundamentalism, a competing moral code in American society; (ii) how judicial activism destroys the fabric of our politics; (iii) the connection between religious values and the American Founding; (iv) the long-term consequences for America of a radically secular religion; and, (v) how we discover civility and purpose in America's public discourse.

Continue reading "Rediscovering Civility and Purpose in America's Public Discourse"


RIP, Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo

Terri Schindler-Schiavo is dead, killed by a judicial fiat done at her husband's request.

The posting notes:

After 14 days without food or water, Terri Schiavo died around 9:05 Thursday morning - shortly after her parents issued an emotional plea to be at her hospice bedside in her final moments of life.

Terri's husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, denied the Schindler family's final request to be with Terri as she took her last breath.

Apparently, Michael let his lawyer-of-death, George Felos, be present at her death - but not Terri's parents and siblings. That is heartbreaking, just as so many aspects of this case have been.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Schindler family. May they find some peace and purpose after this traumatic ordeal. I would encourage you to read the entirety of their family's gracious and thoughtful public statement.

Continue reading "RIP, Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo"


Limited Government to Protect Equal Rights

Justin Katz

When Mac Owens first signed on as a contributor to Anchor Rising, he sent me a speech that he had given on February 23, 2002, at the North Kingston Town Committee's Annual Lincoln Dinner. The current collection of issues, both nationally and in Rhode Island, makes it particularly appropriate for posting now. (I'm told, by the way, that Lincoln Chafee, in attendance, blushed when Owens suggested that Republicans should aspire to be more than merely pale imitations of the Democrats.)

Tonight, your main speaker will talk to you about the upcoming elections of 2002. These off year elections are certainly important and worthy of discussion. But at the same time, it is occasionally useful to return to our origins, "to recur to first principles." That is what I wish to do with the time allotted me. What are the principles of the Republican Party? What do Republicans believe in? What differentiates Republicans from Democrats?

Although some here tonight may disagree, let me offer a suggestion as to what these differences are. The modern Democratic Party was founded by FDR. Its central idea is that government's job is to adjudicate the distribution of resources among competing claimants. Democrats increasingly view the United States, not as a community of individuals, but as an array of groups whose demands must be met. But since government produces nothing on its own, certain favored groups prosper at the expense of others. The modern Democratic Party invokes the language of rights, but what Democrats really mean by the term are privileges or claims to resources that are granted by government. They certainly don't mean by rights what the Founders meant when they used the term.

On the other hand, the Republican Party was founded on the basis of principles invoked by Abraham Lincoln. He himself recurred to the principles of the American Founding, specifically the Declaration of Independence, so we can say that the principles of the Republican Party are the principles of the nation. In essence these principles hold that the only purpose of government is to protect the equal natural rights of individual citizens. These rights inhere in individuals, not groups, and are antecedent to the creation of government. They are the rights invoked by the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — not happiness, but the pursuit of happiness.

Continue reading "Limited Government to Protect Equal Rights"

March 30, 2005


(d)emocratization and (D)emocrats

Carroll Andrew Morse

Noam Scheiber has upgraded his New Republic blog entry on the subject of President Bushs focus on democratization eventually helping the Democratic party to a full-blown New York Times op-ed.

I still disagree with his argument, for two reasons.
1. The Democrats are not as nearly committed to democracy as Scheiber assumes. Full explanation here.
2. You need to make the democracy-security argument to win the security-minded political center. Even if the Dems were as committed to democracy as Scheiber assumes, they do not believe in the democracy-security connection. Full explanation here.

Here is the policy question I would put to Mr. Scheiber. There are, at the very least, three countries in the world, Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea, where an aggressive strategy of democratization could overlap with Americas security interests. Will the national Democrats take a leading stand in favor of supporting democratization in these countries, or does the very fact that they have governments hostile to the US lead the Dems to believe we should be silent about the internal workings of these dictatorships?


March 29, 2005


More Important Issues Regarding Terri Schiavo Case

This posting builds on five previous postings on Terri Schiavo (I, II, III, IV, V).

I would encourage you to read Nat Henoff's editorial in the Village Voice on Terri Schiavo:

For all the world to see, a 41-year-old woman, who has committed no crime, will die of dehydration and starvation in the longest public execution in American history...

While lawyers and judges have engaged in a minuet of death, the American Civil Liberties Union, which would be passionately criticizing state court decisions and demanding due process if Terri were a convict on death row, has shamefully served as co-counsel for her husband, Michael Schiavo, in his insistent desire to have her die...

In death penalty cases, defense counsel for retarded and otherwise mentally disabled clients submit extensive medical tests. Ignoring the absence of complete neurological exams, supporters of the deadly decisions by Judge Greer and the trail of appellate jurists keep reminding us how extensive the litigation in this case has been19 judges in six courts is the mantra...

As David Gibbs, the lawyer for Terri's parents, has pointed out, there has been a manifest need for a new federal, Fourteenth Amendment review of the case because Terri's death sentence has been based on seven years of "fatally flawed" state court findingsall based on the invincible neglect of elementary due process by Judge George Greer.

I will be returning to the legacy of Terri Schiavo in the weeks ahead because there will certainly be long-term reverberations from this case and its fracturing of the rule of law in the Florida courts and then the federal courtsas well as the disgracefully ignorant coverage of the case by the great majority of the media, including such pillars of the trade as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, and the Los Angeles Times as they copied each other's misinformation...

Do you know that nearly every major disability rights organization in the country has filed a legal brief in support of Terri's right to live?...

During the March 21 hearing before Federal Judge James D. Whittemore, who was soon to be another accomplice in the dehydration of Terri, the relentless Mr. Felos, anticipating the end of the deathwatch, said to the judge:

"Yes, life is sacred, but so is liberty, your honor, especially in this country."

It would be useless, but nonetheless, I would like to inform George Felos that, as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said: "The history of liberty is the history of due process"fundamental fairness.

Contrary to what you've read and seen in most of the media, due process has been lethally absent in Terri Schiavo's long merciless journey through the American court system.

"As to legal concerns," writes William Andersona senior psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard University"a guardian may refuse any medical treatment, but drinking water is not such a procedure. It is not within the power of a guardian to withhold, and not in the power of a rational court to prohibit."

Ralph Nader agrees. In a statement on March 24, he and Wesley Smith (author of, among other books, Culture of Death: The Assault of Medical Ethics in America) said: "The court is imposing process over justice. After the first trial [before Judge Greer], much evidence has been produced that should allow for a new trialwhich was the point of the hasty federal legislation.

"If this were a death penalty case, this evidence would demand reconsideration. Yet, an innocent, disabled woman is receiving less justice. . . . This case is rife with doubt. Justice demands that Terri be permitted to live."...

Many readers of this column are pro-choice, pro-abortion rights. But what choice did Terri Schiavo have under our vaunted rule of lawwhich the president is eagerly trying to export to the rest of the world? She had not left a living will or a durable power of attorney, and so could not speak for herself. But the American system of justice would not slake her thirst as she, on television, was dying in front of us all.

What kind of a nation are we becoming? The CIA outsources torturein violation of American and international lawin the name of the freedoms we are fighting to protect against terrorism. And we have watched as this woman, whose only crime is that she is disabled, is tortured to death by judges, all the way to the Supreme Court.

And keep in mind from the Ralph Nader-Wesley Smith report: "The courts . . . have [also] ordered that no attempts be made to provide her water or food by mouth. Terri swallows her own saliva. Spoon feeding is not medical treatment. This outrageous order proves that the courts are not merely permitting medical treatment to be withheld, they have ordered her to be made dead."

In this country, even condemned serial killers are not executed in this way.

Can this be America, the land of the free and the brave?

Continue reading "More Important Issues Regarding Terri Schiavo Case"

March 28, 2005


Let's Not Delude Ourselves About the Consequences of Killing Terri Schiavo

This posting builds on four previous postings on Terri Schiavo (I, II, III, IV).

Thanks to Power Line for highlighting this article, entitled "Bigotry and the Murder of Terri Schiavo," by a Harvard alumnus who suffers from severe cerebral palsy:

The case of Terri Schiavo has been framed by the media as the battle between the right to die and pro-life groups, with the latter often referred to as "right-wing Christians." Little attention has been paid to the more than twenty major disability rights organizations firmly supporting Schiavos right to nutrition and hydration. Terri Schindler-Schiavo, a severely disabled woman, is being starved and dehydrated to death in the name of supposed "dignity"...

...A close examination of the Schiavo case reveals not a case of difficult decisions but a basic test of this country's decency...

Our country has learned that we cannot judge people on the basis of minority status, but for some reason we have not erased our prejudice against disability...

Essentially, then, we have arrived at the point where we starve people to death because he or she cannot communicate their experiences to us. What is this but sheer egotism? Regardless of ones religious beliefs, this is obviously an attempt to play God.

Not Dead Yet, an organization of persons with disabilities who oppose assisted suicide and euthanasia, maintains that the starvation and dehydration of Terri Schiavo will put the lives of thousands of severely disabled children and adults at risk...Not Dead Yet exposes important biases in the "right to die" movement, including the fact that as early as 1988, Jack Kevorkian advertised his intention of performing medical experimentation ("hitherto conducted on rats") on living children with spina bifida, at the same time harvesting their organs for reuse.

Besides being disabled, Schiavo and I have something important in common, that is, someone attempted to terminate my life by removing my endotracheal tube during resuscitation in my first hour of life. This was a quality-of-life decision: I was simply taking too long to breathe on my own, and the person who pulled the tube believed I would be severely disabled if I lived, since lack of oxygen causes cerebral palsy. (I was saved by my family doctor inserting another tube as quickly as possible.) The point of this is not that I ended up at Harvard and Schiavo did not, as some people would undoubtedly conclude. The point is that society already believes to some degree that it is acceptable to murder disabled people.

As Schiavo starves to death, we are entering a world last encountered in Nazi Europe. Prior to the genocide of Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, the Nazis engaged in the mass murder of disabled children and adults, many of whom were taken from their families under the guise of receiving treatment for their disabling conditions. The Nazis believed that killing was the highest form of treatment for disability.

...This sick twisting of medical ethics led to a sense of fulfillment of duty experienced by Nazi doctors, leading them to a conviction that they were relieving suffering. Not Dead Yet has uncovered the same perverse sense of duty in members of the Hemlock Society, now called End-of-Life Choices. (In 1997, the executive director of the Hemlock Society suggested that judicial review be used regularly "when it is necessary to hasten the death of an individual whether it be a demented parent, a suffering, severely disabled spouse or a child." This illustrates that the "right to die" movement favors the imposition of death sentences on disabled people by means of the judicial branch.)

For an overview of what "end-of-life choices" mean for Schiavo, I refer you to the Exit Protocol prepared for her in 2003 by her health care providers (available online). In the midst of her starvation, Terri will most likely be treated for "pain or discomfort" and nausea which may arise as the result of the supposedly humane process of bringing about her death. (Remember that Schiavo is not terminally ill.) She may be given morphine for respiratory distress and may experience seizures. This protocol confirms what we have learned from famines and death camps: death by starvation is a horrible death.

This apparently is what it means to have "rights" as a disabled person in America today.

Continue reading "Let's Not Delude Ourselves About the Consequences of Killing Terri Schiavo"


Big Government Corrupts, Regardless of Party

I wrote a piece last December entitled "Pigs at the Public Trough" which talked about how the ideals of the 1994 Congressional revolution had dissipated into nothing more than power politics as usual.

Today's Wall Street Journal contains an editorial entitled "Smells Like Beltway: The real reason Tom DeLay is in political trouble" that only reinforces why big government corrupts, regardless of party. Here are a few excerpts:

By now you have surely read about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's ethics troubles. Probably, too, you aren't entirely clear as to what those troubles are--something to do with questionable junkets, Indian casino money, funny business on the House Ethics Committee, stuff down in Texas. In Beltway-speak, what this means is that Mr. DeLay has an "odor": nothing too incriminating, nothing actually criminal, just an unsavory whiff that could have GOP loyalists reaching for the political Glade if it gets any worse.

The Beltway wisdom is right. Mr. DeLay does have odor issues. Increasingly, he smells just like the Beltway itself...

Taken separately, and on present evidence, none of the latest charges directly touch Mr. DeLay; at worst, they paint a picture of a man who makes enemies by playing political hardball and loses admirers by resorting to politics-as-usual.

The problem, rather, is that Mr. DeLay, who rode to power in 1994 on a wave of revulsion at the everyday ways of big government, has become the living exemplar of some of its worst habits...

...Rather than buck this system as he promised to do while in the minority, Mr. DeLay has become its undisputed and unapologetic master as Majority Leader.

Whether Mr. DeLay violated the small print of House Ethics or campaign-finance rules is thus largely beside the point. His real fault lies in betraying the broader set of principles that brought him into office, and which, if he continues as before, sooner or later will sweep him out.

There were very legitimate reasons why the Founders believed in limited government. Our country would be better off if we quickly relearned the lessons they taught us a long time ago.

ADDENDUM I:

In contrast to the Wall Street Journal editorial, here are three counter-points:

First is a transcript from an interview with Tom DeLay that the Washington Times carried in its April 14 edition.

Second, Jeffrey Bell has written this article in the Weekly Standard.

Third, David Limbaugh has written this editorial.



Tyranny by Assertion

Justin Katz

I understand that Jerry Landay, "a former CBS News correspondent," is part of the mainstream media club, and I continue to think the Providence Journal's editorial page admirably broad in what it publishes. Still, I'm a bit surprised that the page would publish this rant from Landay:

Few of the "hath littles" are aware of what's being done to them. The middle and blue-collar classes are victims of declining wages, ever-higher health-care costs, and other price hikes -- led by energy costs, the highest in history, and climbing. Behind the smokescreen of a glorious "patriotic war," fear of terrorism, and pumped-up religious fervor lies a home-front war against the middle and blue-collar classes: a conservative counter-revolution, which aims at a colossal redistribution of wealth upward, to the New Aristocracy -- supported by a self-serving rewriting of the law based not on legal principle but on "free-market" theory.

The intended result is the creation of a "peasant" class, driven to the bottom by the need to compete against cheap labor pools, such as India's and China's, working for the bargain-basement wages that are all the big-business scrooges will dole out.

The intended result? And the former news correspondent knows this how? Unless somebody in the administration has said as much, Landay's assertion reeks of vicious libel. One gets the sense that the Projo allowed Landay to get away with such a thing because his arguments aren't meant to be taken as such, but rather as a noise pleasant to liberal ears — fare for the sort who would have had to invent Nazi rhetoric (perhaps through reams of phony memos) if it did not already exist.

It may be an amusing twist that Landay retools the "political ferment" in Ukraine and Lebanon (to which "citizens here look enviously") to support his own anger at the administration that has facilitated the global environment in which it has occurred. But his piece is pretty much boilerplate, right down to its citation of a famous psychological experiment showing that humanity can't be trusted to stand up to evil authority.

Asks Landay: "Why did 59 million voters, most of them victims of Bush's economic tyranny, vote for George W. Bush and his party against their own best interests?" Well, for one thing, because Landay's pined-for rebellion has yet to install the government for which we gullible citizens can't comprehend our need. Something, it would seem, a bit more for the people (at least in its talking points) than by the people.


March 25, 2005


Re-3: A Republican Crack-up?

Justin Katz

I guess I've always lumped the country-club folks with the managerialists. Whatever the case, I'd be inclined to include libertarians in your breakdown of the factions.

And regarding those libertarians, let's just say I'm not quite as optimistic that the abstract principle that you've noted will serve as sufficient glue. My general sense is that the great bulk of libertarians take their position on government not primarily on the basis of a theory that compartmentalizes the sources of power in a society, but because they believe that removing morality from government will mean that they will never have to pay attention to others' declarations about morality.

More broadly applicable than my impression, however, is that libertarians don't see the secular philosophy as "you must honor a contract because the state says so." The state is not the source of the coercive power. Rather, they see, as you admit, that one "of the few proper roles for government that most libertarians agree upon is enforcement of contractual arrangements freely entered," and they would say that a person must honor those contracts because the state will enforce an explicit penalty (e.g., fines or jail time). No external morality is necessary for such a system except the narrow morality of immediate self-interest.



Re: Re: A Republican Crack-up?

Carroll Andrew Morse

On Managerialism: Managerialists do not possess the fundamental skpeticism about government power that libertarians do. Managerialists are perfectly happy to increase the size and influence of government, so long as it serves their economic interests at a given moment.

Do you remember when James Baker, as Secretary of State, said that the first Iraq War was about jobs, jobs, jobs? I am not sure what he meant, but whatever it was reflected a managerialist point-of-view.

I would guess that the bankruptcy legislation that passed congress this week is a triumph of the managerialists over everyone else, but I dont know enough details to be sure.

On Libertarians vs. Theocons: Optimist that I am, I think there is room for agreement between theocons and libertarians. Here is the basis. One of the few proper roles for government that most libertarians agree upon is enforcement of contractual arrangements freely entered. For this concept to work, there must be a shared sense of morality within a society. A system of voluntary arrangements in a society where people do not honor their commitments will either fall apart or degenerate into a police-enforced order.

There are two philosophies that create people willing to honor their agreements, the philosophy that morality is defined by obedience to the laws of the state, or the philosophy that says humans have duties towards others that transcend their laws. I am skeptical that libertarians will ever be comfortable with a philosophy that says you must honor a contract because the state says so.



Re: A Republican Crack-up?

Justin Katz

I've thought much the same thing for a while, Andrew, although I emphasize the tentative Republicans' libertarianism, rather than what you call "managerialism." It's unfortunate that Terri Schiavo has become the excuse of the week for libertarians to stomp their feet about the "theocrats" with whom they have to share a coalition.

As I see it, there are two possibilities when it comes to the libertarian faction of Republicans shifting over to the Democrats:

  1. The Democrats could learn how to compromise with them on small-government issues.
  2. The Democrats could run their party into the ground so dramatically that the libertarians essentially take it over.

Number 1 would be the most expedient route — with number 2 taking decades, I would think — but it doesn't look likely. Whenever Democrats want to appeal to a broader base, they move toward social conservatives, not governmental conservatives. (Witness Hillary.)

The Schiavo case, especially considering that the legislative and executive branches dealt with it by handing it back to the judiciary for another chance to bail them out of a tough political spot (sort of like the legislature's initial reaction to Goodridge in Massachusetts), makes me wonder whether those who trumpet the possibility of a "Republican crack-up" don't have it backwards. The common line is that social conservatives are busily enacting their moral policies, but what's actually happening is that they're being thwarted in doing so by the representatives to whom they look for influence. Moreover, since their involvement in government and politics is driven by something other than government and political theory, they may be more inclined to disengage from the coalition (whether that means disengagement from the entire process or just from the party).

I wonder: would libertarians have been more incensed by decisive legislative/executive action in the Schiavo case than the social conservatives will be by the ineffective show put on last weekend? I don't think so. I do think, however, that politicians and libertarian Republicans both should be wary of assuming there to exist an immovable "base." One too many monuments torn down, one too many lives not saved, one too many social policies rewritten in the courts, and social conservatives may decide that their time is better spent in the socio-cultural arena. That's what libertarians claim to want, but they may not like the political consequences.



A Republican Crackup?

Carroll Andrew Morse

Instapundit initiated a discussion about a potentially looming Conservative crackup. Initally, conservatives are not impressed (scroll-up to follow the discussion). The discussion is suffering from a bit of mis-labeling. The Instapundit post begins by asking Is the Republican coalition about to splinter?. If you talk are talking about Republicans, you have to consider more than just conservatives.

Roughly speaking, the Republican coalition is made up of 3 groups,
1. Conservatives, in many different shapes and sizes.
2. The old-money country club set, who arent really sure why they are Republicans, but just are. (A certain junior senator from Rhode Island fits into this category).
3. Risk-averse business manager types. Think of Bush 41s Secretary of State James A Baker as the archetype.

The old-money is fading in importance. In the past, they had two things on their side, money and organization. However, the conservatives are taking over the organization, it is likely that new political funding mechanisms will make their money less important, they cant turn out voters, and other than by having more kids, they cannot produce more of themselves.

This third group is the key. At his MSN blog, Glenn Reynolds mentions Jack Kemp acting on behalf Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. That takes the discussion beyond the scope of conservatism-only. When Kemp lobbies on behalf of a dictator, he is acting as a managerialist, not a conservative.

As Jonah Goldberg pointed out in a corner post a while back, corporate managerialism may have done more to advance a collectivist agenda than direct government action has. This may be the most striking contradiction in the Republican coalition; I dont think I am overstating things if I say that American conservatism considers resisting the idea of collectivism to be its original, and still very relevant, motivation.

If two (admittedly big) ifs are satisfied:
1. If the Dems become less willing to be by led adolescent petulance on a number of issues, like national security and the environment (managerialists will be not satisfied in a coalition that places too many limits on what they can use for political horse trading)
2. and if labor unions and managerialists figure out a way to work together (perhaps the bigger of the two ifs)
it is not impossible that the risk-averse business class could switch to the Democrats in a substantial political realignment.


March 23, 2005


Chipping at the Edges

Justin Katz

Mark Steyn writes the following in a piece that touches on the Terri Schiavo case:

You can read similar stories in almost any corner of the developed world, except perhaps the Netherlands, where discretionary euthanasia is so advanced it's news if the kid makes it out of the maternity ward. As the New York Times reported the other day: "Babies born into what is certain to be a brief life of grievous suffering should have their lives ended by physicians under strict guidelines, according to two doctors in the Netherlands."

Perhaps I can be forgiven for allowing paranoia to mix with principle for a moment as I ponder the procedure for writing and amending the "strict guidelines" that define "grievous suffering." Although the rhetoric sometimes drifts into a debate about whether or not Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state, floating around this issue (National Review Online's Corner offers a self-contained example starting here) is the underlying question of whether her life is "worth living" or not. Putting aside the law, how does a culture define such a thing?

I ask because Projo blogger Sheila Lennon links to a personal anecdote from Barbara Brotman that steps a bit away from realm of being a vegetable:

My husband and I entered the murky waters on behalf of both his parents. They both headed into their 90s with dementia that left them unaware of their surroundings. Their bodies were gradually failing. They were adored by family members who agreed that if they began to die, we should not stand in their way.

One night, the phone call came. The nursing home called to say that my mother-in-law had pneumonia. The doctor wanted to send her to the hospital to be treated and was calling for the family's permission.

Again, I have to wonder: where are the boundaries of "dementia," and who will set the guidelines around it?

I'm wading deeply into speculative waters, but there seems to me clear reason to worry about a society that begins trimming its notions of rights and worthiness around the edges. Anybody who's ever thought a Monday morning head cold would never fade knows that suffering is a fluid concept; when current, it feels eternal and unbearable. And anybody who's ever been through or witnessed a teenage romantic breakup knows that whether a life is worth living is a matter of mushy perspective.

We all rightly despise suffering, and it is right to wish that our world did not include it. It's also right to desire to relieve it in some way. We'd best be wary of looking to death for that relief, however, lest it become the prescription for midlife discomfort.


March 21, 2005


RI Delegation on Terry Schiavo

Carroll Andrew Morse

Congressman James Langevin voted in favor of allowing the federal court system to decide if Terri Schiavo should be allowed to continue receiving "food, fluids, or medical treatment necessary to sustain her life."

Congressman Patrick Kennedy voted against against the measure, in effect voting to deny Ms. Schiavo "food, fluids, or medical treatment necessary to sustain her life."

Text of the bill available here. Full roll call vote available here.


March 18, 2005


Saving Terri Is Your First Amendment Right

Justin Katz

Over on Dust in the Light I've explained that Terri Schiavo's life has become a legitimate matter of interest for millions of Americans, and that it is our First Amendment right to demand that Congress do everything in its power to answer our grievance. Every court case does not get an appeal to Congress, but every court case that millions of Americans believe involves a matter of importance to them can and should.


March 16, 2005


Coerced Charity vs. Voluntary Charity

Donald B. Hawthorne

Warren Beatty has suggested that Governor Schwarzenegger raise taxes on the rich:

Schwarzenegger should raise taxes on the California rich and "terminate" his fund-raising and dinners with "the brokers of Wall Street" and the "lobbyists of K Street," Beatty said...

Beatty said Schwarzenegger should lead the rich toward helping California.

"It's called the haves giving a little more to the have nots," he said. "Nobody likes taxes, but everybody likes a peaceful, compassionate, law-abiding, productive, protective society."

Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Vince Sollitto replied Saturday: "Tax and spend rhetoric aside, California needs budget reform because it's not a revenue problem, but a spending problem."

Beatty's comments prompted the posting of these two quotes:

Walter Williams -

Reaching into one's own pocket to assist his fellow man is noble and worthy of praise. Reaching into another person's pocket to assist one's fellow man is despicable and worthy of condemnation.

P.J. O'Rourke -

There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money -- if a gun is held to his head.

The referenced website itself contains this quote -

Thomas Sowell -

If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.

Coerced "charity" via government taxation has several corrosive effects:

First, it incentivizes citizens to relinquish all personal responsibility to care for or get involved in supporting the needy in their community. After all, "the government" is responsible for doing that.

Second, it assumes that a distant bureaucrat can better judge how to structure the policy designed to meet the true needs of our neighbor whom he has never met. This is the knowledge/information problem raised over the years by both Hayek and Sowell.

Third, the problem in the second example also leads to higher economic costs due to more ineffective programs, continued propagation of such poor policies, and the ability for the programs to be affected by remote sources of power whose self-interest can often be anything but truly helping the needy neighbor.

Fourth, it also harms the recipient of the charity because appreciation is soon replaced with a feeling of entitlement and that person has less incentive to pull himself up by his own bootstraps.

On the other hand, voluntary charity draws people in through the formation of associations who are willingly bound by the same altruistic purpose. Such voluntary associations end up developing a refined sense of moral responsibility at the individual and group levels. And by teaching people to care and receive the joy and satisfaction that only comes from giving personally, people are touched in emotionally and spiritually powerful ways - and will be more likely to continue to reach out to others.

(E.g., Think back to when your young child first gained an appreciation for the satisfaction that comes from giving to others while expecting nothing in return.)

At a practical level, workers at a local charity will likely either know that neighbor or know people who knew the neighbor personally - allowing them to have valuable information which could determine what would be the most effective course of policy-related action.

To paraphrase Michael Novak, we need to take the time to build up these voluntary associations. Our society will be stronger and more free as a result. And more good things will happen over time.


March 15, 2005


Why the Rush to Kill Terri Schindler-Schiavo?

An American citizen, Terri Schindler-Schiavo, is scheduled to be starved to death starting this Friday, March 18, by the order of an American judge.

I am deeply saddened that this could happen in America. This is not just an ugly family quarrel, as some suggest. Nor is this just a matter where Terri's family needs to "learn to let go."

No, this is a precedent-setting legal case that will likely have long-standing implications for many Americans in the coming years. As one group noted:

It will open the floodgates to euthanasia in the United States, at all ages, without even a legislative decision.

Three previous postings (here, here, here) have shared the history, fact patterns and ethical issues of this case. There is no need to repeat them here.

In the coming days, I would encourage you to keep track of the latest news at the blogsforterri.com website and the terrisfight.org website. And contact key public officials, encouraging them to intervene on behalf of Terri.

As I reflect on this case, there are 7 categories of major, still unanswered questions that are troubling and warrant answers - especially before an innocent, disabled woman is killed:

Under Florida law, incapacitated persons are entitled to certain rights. Florida law also protects disabled adults from abuse, neglect and exploitation. Why did Michael frequently not meet numerous required guardianship standards under the law? Why did the judge apparently permit these many violations of the law and still allow Michael to remain as guardian?

Why did Michael have an attorney ready to meet with Terri's parents within 48 hours of the original injury to ask them to sign over medical care decision making to him? Why did he seal Terri's medical records shortly after the injury? Why, at times, did he instruct the medical staff not to brief Terri's family on her condition? Why did he not act to ensure Terri received proper follow-on care when the results of the 1991 bone scan which showed broken bones throughout her entire body? Why is he so eager to have her cremated immediately after her death?

Why did Michael say in a 1992 malpractice award court hearing that he was dedicated to ensuring Terri received rehabilitation therapy but then has allowed zero therapy since then - after winning settlements totaling $1.7 million? Why did the judge tolerate such contradictory behavior? Why did Michael petition the court for permission to place Terri on Medicaid in 2002 when malpractice settlement funds still existed? Why did the judge grant the request? Could there be any Medicaid fraud in these actions?

Isnt it odd that Michael only began raising Terris alleged wish to die in 1998, 8 years after the injury and in the first year after hiring George Felos, the right-to-die enthusiast, as his new attorney? That George Felos then filed his first petition to have Terris feeding tube removed in May 1998? That Florida House Bill 2131, which was introduced in April 1999 and became law in October 1999, changed the legal definition of life prolonging medical procedures to include "artificially provided sustenance and hydration" - i.e., to the care which is provided to Terri? That one of the bills co-sponsors and one of the panelists each served on the Suncoast Hospice Board of Directors with George Felos? That Judge Greer presided over the case determining whether Michael could starve/dehydrate Terri only three months later in January 2000? Are these just coincidences?

Why is the judge so disinterested in hearing other depositions which challenge Michaels hearsay-only claim that Terri would want to die?

Similarly, why was Terri moved to a hospice facility in April 2000 by Michael without the required prior approval by the judge? Was it unusual that this unapproved move took Terri to a place where George Felos served as Chairman of the hospice Board of Directors? When you listen to this radio interview with Carla Iyer, a nurse who took care of Terri in an earlier care setting, doesnt it create some sense of doubt whether the real story has been told publicly and being at the Felos-influenced hospice will now not allow that story to come out?

Why has the judge denied Floridas Department of Children and Families request for a 60-day extension to the March 18 feeding tube removal date in order to complete their investigation into allegations of abuse and neglect by Michael?

Ken Connor, Chairman of the Center for a Just Society, has said:

Perhaps even more ironic is the fact that if the most heinous of mass murderers were to receive a sentence of death by starvation or dehydration, the courts would overturn that sentence as a violation of the Constitutions prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Beyond the significant ethical and legal issues lurks one simple question: Why is there such a rush to kill Terri Schindler-Schiavo now?


March 14, 2005


What Does "Social Justice" Mean?

An article in today's ProJo on Carol Bennett-Speight, Dean of Rhode Island College's (RIC's) School of Social Work since January, triggered some provocative thoughts.

First of all, Dean Bennett-Speight deserves kudos for her personal and professional successes, which are wonderful accomplishments:

Her parents, Holden and Dorothy Bennett, did not have the chance to go to college. But her father, who was only able to finish fourth grade, pushed his three girls to study hard. Bennett-Speight, who received her bachelor's degree from Penn State, was the first person in her immediate family to attend college.

"I remember him always saying 'I wish I had the opportunity to go to school,' and that always stuck with me," Bennett-Speight said. She went on to receive a master's degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey. She received a doctorate in social work from the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for several years while maintaining a private practice. Before taking the job at RIC, Bennett-Speight was chairwoman of the social work department at Cabrini College, a Catholic college in Pennsylvania, and under her leadership, the program was accredited.

Yet all is not rosy at RIC. Ed Achorn of the ProJo has previously commented on the "chill wind of intolerance" at RIC. Anchor Rising has also noted the unfortunate academic harassment problems within the School of Social Work in a previous posting here. That is why I was so struck by these words in the newspaper article:

She and her classmates fought to change the name of their all-girls public high school from William Penn High School, named after the colonial governor who founded Pennsylvania, to Angela Davis High School, honoring the controversial civil rights activist. Despite organized protests in front of the Liberty Bell, the students lost their battle. But Bennett-Speight found her passion for fighting for "issues of social justice."

But Angela Davis is not just any "controversial civil rights activist." She had very close personal ties to the leaders of the Black Panther Party. Davis also has been an active member of the Communist Party, serving as the Vice Presidential candidate on the Communist Party presidential ticket in the 1980's.

More information on the Black Panther Party can be found here, including this excerpt:

The Party's ideals and activities were so radical, it was at one time assailed by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States."...It was named, originally, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The black panther was used as the symbol because it was a powerful image...The term "self defense" was employed to distinguish the Party's philosophy from the dominant nonviolent theme of the civil rights movement.

Here is how the Communist Party of the United States describes itself:

The Communist Party USA is an organization of revolutionaries working to bring about social change in a conscious, progressive direction...building a movement large enough and united enough to create revolutionary change and socialism in the future...We base ourselves on Marxism-Leninism, on the accumulated experience of our Party since our founding in 1919. Our view of the needs of our working class as a whole, and on our vision of Socialism USA is based on those experiences.

Now many of us did interesting things in our youth. For example, I thought (and still think) Nixon was a crook and listened to every day of the House and Senate hearings. As a 16-year-old, I walked the streets for McGovern in 1972, an action that I now cheerfully write off to the blissful ignorance of youth.

On a more serious level, my Presbyterian minister father stood in a pulpit in February 1964 - before even the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had become the law - and boldly told his parishioners that it was the duty of all Christians to support open, non-discriminatory housing. That courageous stand resulted in the departure of one-third of the church's members and numerous indignities to our family.

Yet all of these actions - even if they were minority opinions at the time - were still generally consistent with the core principles of the American Founding.

But the values of the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party have no such connection to the core principles of the American Founding as they have sought only to destroy America. I find it quite unsettling that an adult educator would - at this stage in her life - still refer to honoring an outspoken communist who has supported violence as a positive and defining event in her life. And that then leads naturally to a very interesting and broader question: What does "social justice" mean?

Michael Novak offers a compelling explanation worthy of sharing in detail:

The trouble with "social justice" begins with the very meaning of the term. [Nobel Laureate Friedrich] Hayek points out that whole books and treatises have been written about social justice without ever offering a definition of it...The vagueness seems indispensable. The minute one begins to define social justice, one runs into embarrassing intellectual difficulties. It becomes, most often, a term of art whose operational meaning is, "We need a law against that." In other words, it becomes an instrument of ideological intimidation, for the purpose of gaining the power of legal coercion.

Hayek points out another defect of twentiethcentury theories of social justice. Most authors assert that they use it to designate a virtue (a moral virtue, by their account). But most of the descriptions they attach to it appertain to impersonal states of affairs"high unemployment" or "inequality of incomes" or "lack of a living wage" are cited as instances of "social injustice." Hayek goes to the heart of the matter: social justice is either a virtue or it is not. If it is, it can properly be ascribed only to the reflective and deliberate acts of individual persons. Most who use the term, however, ascribe it not to individuals but to social systems. They use "social justice" to denote a regulative principle of order; again, their focus is not virtue but power...

Curiously, however, the demand for the term "social justice" did not arise until modern times, in which more complex societies operate by impersonal rules applied with equal force to all under "the rule of law."

The birth of the concept of social justice coincided with two other shifts in human consciousness: the "death of God" and the rise of the ideal of the command economy. When God "died," people began to trust a conceit of reason and its inflated ambition to do what even God had not deigned to do: construct a just social order. The divinization of reason found its extension in the command economy; reason (that is, science) would command and humankind would collectively follow. The death of God, the rise of science, and the command economy yielded "scientific socialism." Where reason would rule, the intellectuals would rule. (Or so some thought. Actually, the lovers of power would rule.)

From this line of reasoning it follows that "social justice" would have its natural end in a command economy in which individuals are told what to do, so that it would always be possible to identify those in charge and to hold them responsible. This notion presupposes that people are guided by specific external directions rather than internalized, personal rules of just conduct. It further implies that no individual should be held responsible for his relative position. To assert that he is responsible would be "blaming the victim." It is the function of "social justice" to blame somebody else, to blame the system, to blame those who (mythically) "control" it. As Leszek Kolakowski wrote in his magisterial history of communism, the fundamental paradigm of Communist ideology is guaranteed to have wide appeal: you suffer; your suffering is caused by powerful others; these oppressors must be destroyed...

We are not wrong, Hayek concedes, in perceiving that the effects of the individual choices and open processes of a free society are not distributed according to a recognizable principle of justice. The meritorious are sometimes tragically unlucky; the evil prosper; good ideas dont pan out, and sometimes those who backed them, however noble their vision, lose their shirts. But a system that values both trialanderror and free choice is in no position to guarantee outcomes in advance. Furthermore, no one individual (and certainly no politburo or congressional committee or political party) can design rules that would treat each person according to his merit or even his need. No one has sufficient knowledge of all relevant personal details, and as Kant writes, no general rule has a grip fine enough to grasp them.

Hayek made a sharp distinction, however, between those failures of justice that involve breaking agreedupon rules of fairness and those that consist in results that no one designed, foresaw, or commanded. The first sort of failure earned his severe moral condemnation. No one should break the rules; freedom imposes high moral responsibilities. The second, insofar as it springs from no willful or deliberate act, seemed to him not a moral matter but an inescapable feature of all societies and of nature itself. When labeling unfortunate results as "social injustices" leads to an attack upon the free society, with the aim of moving it toward a command society, Hayek strenuously opposes the term. The historical records of the command economies of Nazism and communism justify his revulsion at that way of thinking...

Careless thinkers forget that justice is by definition social. Such carelessness becomes positively destructive when the term "social" no longer describes the product of the virtuous actions of many individuals, but rather the utopian goal toward which all institutions and all individuals are "made in the utmost degree to converge" by coercion. In that case, the "social" in "social justice" refers to something that emerges not organically and spontaneously from the ruleabiding behavior of free individuals, but rather from an abstract ideal imposed from above...

Intolerance and intellectual harassment of dissenting viewpoints; use of methods of intimidation and coercion; eventually even justifying violence and the spectre of communism. No reasonable person would connect these actions with the virtue of justice. Yet these often are the implicit and/or explicit behaviors of many people pursuing "social justice."

There has to be a better way, a deeper and more proper way to think about social justice that is consistent with the great principles of the American Founding. Michael Novak goes on to develop such a definition of social justice:

Social justice rightly understood is a specific habit of justice that is "social" in two senses. First, the skills it requires are those of inspiring, working with, and organizing others to accomplish together a work of justice. These are the elementary skills of civil society, through which free citizens exercise selfgovernment by doing for themselves (that is, without turning to government) what needs to be done. Citizens who take part commonly explain their efforts as attempts to "give back" for all that they have received from the free society, or to meet the obligations of free citizens to think and act for themselves. The fact that this activity is carried out with others is one reason for designating it as a specific type of justice; it requires a broader range of social skills than do acts of individual justice.

The second characteristic of "social justice rightly understood" is that it aims at the good of the city, not at the good of one agent only. Citizens may band together, as in pioneer days, to put up a school or build a bridge. They may get together in the modern city to hold a bake sale for some charitable cause, to repair a playground, to clean up the environment, or for a million other purposes that their social imaginations might lead them to. Hence the second sense in which this habit of justice is "social": its object, as well as its form, primarily involves the good of others.

One happy characteristic of this definition of the virtue of social justice is that it is ideologically neutral. It is as open to people on the left as on the right or in the center. Its field of activity may be literary, scientific, religious, political, economic, cultural, athletic, and so on, across the whole spectrum of human social activities. The virtue of social justice allows for people of good will to reach differenteven opposingpractical judgments about the material content of the common good (ends) and how to get there (means). Such differences are the stuff of politics.

We must rule out any use of "social justice" that does not attach to the habits (that is, virtues) of individuals. Social justice is a virtue, an attribute of individuals, or it is a fraud. And if Tocqueville is right that "the principle of association is the first law of democracy," then social justice is the first virtue of democracy, for it is the habit of putting the principle of association into daily practice. Neglect of it, Hayek wrote, has moral consequences:

It is one of the greatest weaknesses of our time that we lack the patience and faith to build up voluntary organizations for purposes which we value highly, and immediately ask the government to bring about by coercion (or with means raised by coercion) anything that appears as desirable to large numbers. Yet nothing can have a more deadening effect on real participation by the citizens than if government, instead of merely providing the essential framework of spontaneous growth, becomes monolithic and takes charge of the provision for all needs, which can be provided for only by the common effort of many.

The quality of the civic debate in America would be greatly improved if we paid more attention to the meaning and consequences of our words and actions. Hayek and Novak have offered us some profound insights. May their wisdom guide us as we seek to make the American Dream come true for all Americans.

ADDENDUM I:

Justin has an excellent posting about comments from a RIC School of Social Work student's letter to the ProJo. I am connecting it to this posting because it is important for people to realize that most proponents of "social justice" are left-wing zealots with a dangerous political agenda. But, after reading Novak's comments above, that should come as no surprise to any thoughtful lover of freedom.



The Deep Performance Problems With American Public Education

This posting continues a debate begun in two earlier postings here and here.

How bad is the public education performance problem in America? Consider this information from Robert J. Herbold of the Presidents Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and formerly the Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft:

There are some very worrisome trends in the United States with respect to our global share of science, technology, engineering and mathematics expertise. Our share of this expertise is decreasing significantly, both at the bachelors and at the Ph.D. levels...

...among 24-year-olds in the year 2001 who had a B.S. or B.A. degree, only five percent in the U.S. were engineers, compared to 39 percent in China and 19 percent or more in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. If you look at the actual number of engineers...China is producing three times more than the United States...

Another disturbing trend is in the numbers of individuals receiving a Ph.D. in physical science and engineering. In 1987, 4,700 U.S. citizens received these degrees, compared to 5,600 Asians. In 2001, the U.S. figure had dropped slightly to 4,400 and the number of Asians had risen to 24,900...

Why are these figures important? Traditionally, it has been our technical human talent that has driven our industrial success. Basic science, technology, engineering and mathematics knowledge is vitally important in the business world...physical science and engineering capabilities at the Ph.D. level typically drive the kind of highly prized innovations that lead to the emergence of new industries. With expertise in these fields declining in the U.S. while rising in other parts of the world, we risk seeing our industrial leadership weaken...

One of the main reasons why U.S. production of science and engineering talent in universities is low in comparison to other countries is that U.S. K-12 math and science skill levels are quite weak. Note the data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) from the year 2000...scores of U.S. students across the 4th, 8th, and 12th grade levels are abysmal. For example, in science, only two percent of our 12th graders are rated advanced and only sixteen percent are rated proficient...Thirty-four percent of our 12th graders are only partially proficient in science, and almost half are below partial proficiency...

...the results of the International Math and Science Study. It rates the U.S. versus other countries and provides the percentile our students achieved. For example, in mathematics, our 12th graders rated at the 10th percentile. In other words, 90 percent of the countries did better than the U.S., and only 10 percent performed worse. While we do well in grade 4, we do mediocre in grade 8 and very poorly in grade 12...

Weak K-12 results in the U.S. are not a new problem. Twenty years ago, a famous report entitled "A Nation at Risk" was published and highlighted similar findings. Recently, the Koret Task Force of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University considered the failure of that report to bring about reform. The following is a key paragraph from their report summary:

"A Nation at Risk" underestimated the resistance to change from the organized interest of the K-12 public education system, at the center of which were two big teachers unions as well as school administrators, colleges of education, state bureaucracies, school boards, and many others. These groups see any changes beyond the most marginal as threats to their own jealously guarded power.

In light of this, we need the K-12 teaching community (the union leaders, the administrators and the teachers themselves) to take responsibility for the poor results they are achieving. We need them to get serious about accountability and teacher qualifications...We need them to implement the recommendation of the National Commission on Excellence, requiring three years of math and two years of science at the high school level. We need them to support new routes for teacher certification in order to increase the number of teachers qualified to teach math and science. We need them to ease their opposition to vouchers and charter schools, which will bring about the kind of competition that generates broad improvement. And we need them to stop promoting unprepared students to the next grade level.

Probably most important, the K-12 teaching community needs to implement good management practices, such as performance appraisal systems that identify superior teachers. It should then reward these top teachers with salary increases of 10 percent or more per year, leading to annual wages of over $100,000. Equally as important, it needs to isolate the bottom 5-7 percent of teachers, put them on probation, and if no progress is made within a reasonable period terminate them...

We need for the K-12 teaching community to take responsibility and implement these reforms in an urgent manner. If they do not, all of us in our individual communities need to hold that community to account. Failure to address our immense shortcomings in science and math education is unacceptable and will inevitably lead to the weakening of our nation.

A November 24, 2003 Wall Street Journal editorial entitled "Witness Protection for Teachers" (available here for a fee) shows how deep the problem is within American public education:

[New York City Councilwoman Eva] Moskowitz, a Democrat who heads the Council's education committee, recently held four days of hearings on the union rules and mandates that beleaguer New York's 1,200 schools and 1.1 million students. What she says she found is that "many of the rules are indefensible."...

Union officials...launched a media campaign to intimidate Ms. Moskowitz into canceling her unprecedented hearings...Many [teachers and principals] were willing to criticize the contracts privately, but most requests to testify were met with, "I'm not that brave," "I might be blacklisted," "Are you kidding?" and the like...Keep in mind these are teachers, not members of the mob.

The unions have operated for decades without public scrutiny or accountability, which has enabled them to impose work rules that any average person would recognize as...well, insane...

But the rules that most damage learning are those that give primacy to seniority for teachers. Seniority-based transfers...result in the most inexperienced teachers serving the most challenging schools. A seniority-based, lock-step compensation structure bans merit pay for the large majority of teachers who meet or exceed performance expectations. So teachers with high-demand skills...are pushed into the private sector, where they can be paid what they're worth...

The City Council lacks the power to change union work rules, but never underestimate the uses of public embarrassment.

Or, consider these excerpts from a February 25, 2004 Wall Street Journal editorial entitled "Paige's Point" (also available here for a fee):

A fact of political life today is that if you favor meaningful educational reform, you can automatically count yourself a political enemy of two groups: the teachers' unions that prefer the status quo and too many politicians who depend on them for financial support...

Teachers unions are among the most powerful lobbies in American public life. In political influence they rank alongside the Teamsters, the AARP and the NRA. And they use the exact same hardball tactics to try to get what they want, which in their case is to preserve their monopoly on public education.

The NEA has 2.7 million members from whom it collects hundreds of millions of dollars in involuntary dues and spends tens of millions on political activities, some 95% of which goes to Democrats. Its 1,800 designated political directors use an integrated command structure...to coordinate national, state and local activities for Democratic candidates...

It's easy to forget that all but 8% of education spending occurs at the state and local level, and that's where the teachers unions wield most of their power by pressuring legislatures, defeating state ballot initiatives, supporting campaigns and even getting their own members elected and appointed to education committees...

Back in Washington, NEA President Reg Weaver stands ready to describe any criticism of the union as an attack on public school teachers. "We are the teachers; there is no distinction"...the typical teacher, who earns a fraction of the $334,000 Mr. Weaver reportedly took home last year, may beg to differ...

"There are two big interesting education reform ideas in America today," says Chester Finn, a former Education Department official. "One involves standards and tests and accountability; the other involves competition and choice. The NEA is against both, and they will unflaggingly work to defeat both kinds of reform."

Terry Moe has written an extensive piece on how the teachers' unions operate:

Their influence takes two forms. First, they shape the schools from the bottom up, through collective bargaining activities that are so broad in scope that virtually every aspect of the schools is somehow affected. Second, they shape the schools from the top down, through political activities that give them unrivaled influence over the laws and regulations imposed on public education by government...teachers unions are...absolutely central to an understanding of America's public school. Despite their importance, the teachers unions have been poorly studied by education scholars...

A December 15, 2004 Wall Street Journal editorial entitled "America's C-" (available here for a fee) reinforces the mediocrity of America's public education system:

The report, conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, tested the math, science, problem-solving and reading skills of 15-year-olds in 41 countries. Only a generation ago, U.S. high school students ranked No. 1. Today, their performance has fallen below the OECD average - except in reading, where Americans manage to eke out an "average."...Less publicized has been why U.S. scores are so low. The OECD researchers identified several key characteristics that most successful school systems share - namely, decentralization, competition and flexibility...schools are given a large degree of autonomy over curriculum and budget decisions...teachers...have a large degree of autonomy and responsibility, which leads in turn to a high degree of professionalism. It is not simply a matter of renumeration. Teachers in Finland get paid relatively little, but...there is a strong professional ethos and teachers routinely exchange experience to improve their skills...

With an ever-higher percentage of the work force expected to be employed in knowledge-based industries, school reform is a question of U.S. economic survival...

If we want to maintain our standard of living, we'd better change...

Can genuine reform be achieved? Consider the following success story in an article from The American Enterprise:

While New York City public schools face an epic shortage of good teachers, many private schools in the Big Apple have no trouble attracting candidates. The School of Columbia, for instance, received 1,700 applications for 39 teaching positions in its first year of operation...

Unlike public schools, the School of Columbia does not offer tenure; there is no union; there is no guaranteed salary increase each year; how much teachers make depends on their performance, not their seniority; teachers are expected to come in early, stay late, and show up on weekends to do their job well; and there are no guaranteed breaks during the day.

Those do-what-it-takes-to-succeed expectations are standard in most of white-collar America today...

Offering merit pay means you also have to give teachers enough flexibility to distinguish themselves. The curriculum at Columbia includes a set of skills and "key facts" that students at each grade level must master, but teachers are allowed to use their own individual methods to get students to that point. If their method doesn't work, all the seniority in the world won't get them a promotion. And the fact that half the kids come from a depressed inner-city neighborhood is not accepted as an excuse for failure.

Teacher assessments are done every year or two. Every instructor must put together a portfolio demonstrating student progress, including test results, videos of students reading aloud, student performances, etc. A peer evaluation team sits in on several classes and submits recommendations. School administrators consider all this information and then make a final decision.

The world of public education could be so different - and better. We are paying a huge price for such mediocrity - by limiting people's access to the American Dream and by putting our nation's leadership position in the world at risk.

Why do we continue to tolerate such nonsense?


March 13, 2005


Freedom, Hard Work & Quality Education: Making The American Dream Possible For ALL Americans

My family had the privilege of visiting The Statute of Liberty in August 2004 on only the 23rd day after it had re-opened for the first time since September 11, 2001. It was there that we saw first-hand the poem penned by Emma Lazarus and etched on the pedestal of the statute, which includes these famous words:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Immigrants came to America from places where their lives were defined forever for them before they were even born. Here is how some of them described the unique allure of America:

For them Europe meant poverty and persecution, and America meant democracy and opportunity. "Other lands," wrote the Polish emigré Henry Sienkiewicz, "grant only asylum; this land recognizes the immigrant as a son and grants him rights." When they were "sickened at last of poverty, bigotry and kings," wrote another immigrant, "there was always America!"

The land of freedom and opportunity, the land where immigrants were granted rights without any consideration of family history. That was the magnificent allure of America.

Many Americans have their own personal stories about how the American Dream became a reality for their families. There is nothing more American than having the opportunity to achieve more than your parents and then enabling your children to do even better than you.

What makes the Dream possible? At the core, it is the principle of liberty - the freedom not only to have lofty aspirations but to have the opportunity to achieve them. That unique level of freedom has its origins in our own Declaration of Independence, about which President Calvin Coolidge said:

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignity, the rights of man - these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions...Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful...If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final...If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people...

In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people...The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guarantees, which even the government itself is bound not to violate.

It is truly unfortunate how so many of America's public leaders have forgotten the spiritual basis which empowers the freedom that is central to our lives. It is equally as unfortunate, as Andrew has written, that certain political activitists have forgotten the importance of freedom, democracy, and individual rights.

That freedom, however, only translates into realized opportunity through hard work, the second core principle that enables people to realize the American Dream.

While hard work alone can make the difference, sometimes it is not enough to make the American Dream come alive for every American citizen. That leads to the final enabling component to the American Dream: access to a quality education. Such access is the great equalizer, ensuring that all Americans have a decent starting position as they enter adulthood.

But there are problems with education in America, as I have written previously:

Education is the gateway to the American Dream for all citizens. Yet, we are failing to provide a quality gateway for our children. The performance of public education in America is absymal as we have one of the weakest performing educational systems in the industrial world. It is not for lack of spending money: We have tripled our per-pupil spending in real terms over the last 40 years...More money won't fix the structural problems...Only competition from true educational choice will solve the problems...

Nowhere is access to a quality public education more challenged than in Washington, D.C. and other disadvantaged inner city locations. That same posting continues:

I find it particularly ironic that certain liberal U.S. senators (who often have sent their own children to the most elite private schools) consistently do the bidding of the unions to block the inner city black children of Washington, D.C. - who are stuck in the worst public education system in our country - from receiving the educational vouchers which would give them educational freedom and a fair shot at living the American Dream. The unions and their cronies are willing to risk creating a permanent underclass so they can maintain their chokehold on public education in America. That is morally offensive.

It was, therefore, with great interest - thanks to a posting by KelliPundit - that I read a news report about black Americans, party politics, and the principles of freedom, opportunity, faith, and educational choice:

[Donna Brazile,] the Democrats' most-respected minority outreach tactician warned her party at the beginning of the 2004 election cycle not to "take African-American voters for granted." Polls showed an increase in younger black voters registering as independents, not as Democrats. Many were drawn to President Bush's campaign message of an "ownership society" and his faith-based initiatives to help the needy.

Ken Mehlman, who managed Mr. Bush's re-election campaign and is now the Republican national chairman, is leading a stepped-up drive to reach out to black voters, often with the help of influential black religious leaders attracted by the GOP's emphasis on religious values usually missing in the Democrats' message.

Addressing the National Black Chamber of Commerce in Trenton, N.J., last month, Mr. Mehlman told several hundred business owners that "the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass is not complete without more African-American support and participation."

...Black voters remain the Democrats' most loyal voting bloc, but they find a number of Republican issues appealing, and Mr. Mehlman believes if the GOP reaches out to them with a menu of choices, it can win a much larger share of their votes.

Polls show 60 percent of African-Americans support school choice vouchers to get their kids out of failing public schools. Mr. Bush's emphasis on small-business ownership also resonates very strongly among upwardly mobile blacks, as does the chance to build a bigger retirement nest egg in Social Security personal investment accounts.

Mr. Mehlman's offensive has the potential to make significant inroads into the Democrats' once largely monolithic black vote, Miss Brazile says. "The GOP is preaching a new gospel to black voters yearning for answers" to age-old problems that still afflict their community. "Once they start listening to Republicans, some may even like what they hear."

That warning from one of the party's most respected political figures sent shock waves last week through the Democratic National Committee's high command, who know that if their party loses 15 percent or so of the black vote, it will be in the minority for years to come.

At a personal level, I care little about party politics. What excites me, though, is that there is increased competition in American politics to see who has the best ideas on how to make the American Dream come true for ALL Americans. Let the debate begin in earnest. Everyone will be better off as a result. What could be more American than that!


March 8, 2005


Victor Davis Hanson on Today's America

The March 14, 2005 edition of the Weekly Standard includes an article entitled "The Sage of Fresno: Victor Davis Hanson, down on the farm."

Here is an excerpt:

Hanson places much of the blame for this decay on America's elites, who he says have fostered a cult of post-modernism, identity politics, and affirmative action - or, as he puts it, "diversity without standards." As a classicist, he sees this as nothing less than a renunciation of the intellectual tradition bequeathed by the Greeks.

"Multiculturism, in preference to a multiracial embrace of Western culture, has become what pulp was in the 1950's," he tells me..."Plato told us this was inevitable: The more you embrace a state-mandated egalitarianism for its own sake and radical democracy,...the more you will be driven to the common denominator of a therapeutic, happy-go-lucky culture, simple stories, low-brow entertainment, minimal expectations - rather than the hard work of using education to uplift the majority."


March 3, 2005


A Moment of Dead Silence

Justin Katz

As a subjective guide to Don's previous post, laying out facts and considerations in the case of Terri Schiavo, I offer the following anecdote from Fr. Rob Johansen, which I found via Lane Core:

In the course of our conversation, [a well-respected neurologist] made reference to the standard use of MRI and PET scans to diagnose the extent of brain injuries. He seemed to assume that these had been done for Terri. I stopped him and told him that these tests have never been done for her; that Michael had refused these tests.

There was a moment of dead silence.

"How can he continue as guardian?", the neurologist said in a tone of utter incredulity. "He refused a non-invasive test? How can they be debating a life and death decision without these tests?" ...

He said, "I can't believe intelligent people are debating this woman's life without these tests."


March 2, 2005


Can Terri Schindler-Schiavo Be Murdered By Judicial Fiat...In America?

This posting builds on two previous postings here and here.

On February 25, Judge Greer issued what can only be described as an order of execution:

Ordered and Adjudged that absent a stay from the appellate courts, the guardian, Michael Schiavo, shall cause the removal of nutrition and hydration from the ward, Theresa Schiavo, at 1:00 p.m. on March 18, 2005.

Is this America, the land of the free, if judges can order the murder of citizens by fiat?

Others are asking the same question:

"This is not simply a court order removing a judicial stay and allowing the guardian to proceed as he sees fit," said Diane Coleman, President of Not Dead Yet, which was joined by sixteen other national disability rights groups in three amicus briefs filed in support of Terri Schiavo's right to food and water.

Unfortunately, the judges action is only the latest in a series of ethically challenged actions, the litany of which are outlined here in an impeachment initiative. Consider these examples:

1. Judge Greer has allowed Michael Schiavo to remain as Terris guardian even though he should be removed as Terris guardian pursuant to Florida Statute 744.474(2) for failure to discharge his duties as guardian. The statute requires that the guardian protect the rights of the ward, provide for her health and safety, properly manage her financial resources and help her regain her abilities to the maximum extent possible.

2. Judge Greer has allowed Michael Schiavo to remain as Terris guardian even though he should be removed as Terris guardian pursuant to Florida Statute 744.474(3) for abuse of his powers as evidenced by his denying her any significant sensory stimulation and his efforts to have her life ended

5. Judge Greer has allowed Michael Schiavo to remain as Terris guardian even though he should be removed as Terris guardian pursuant to Florida Statute 744.474(13) for failure to comply with the guardianship report

7. Judge Greer has allowed Michael Schiavo to remain as Terris guardian even though he should be removed as Terris guardian pursuant to Florida Statute 744.474(16) for improperly managing the wards assets by using Terris money which was awarded by a court to be used for her rehabilitation but at the authorization of Judge Greer is being used to pay legal fees in an effort to end Terris life

9. Judge Greer has allowed Michael Schiavo to remain as Terris guardian even though he should be removed as Terris guardian pursuant to Florida Statute 744.474(18) because Michaels adulterous relationship (which is a misdemeanor under Florida law) with another woman ought to disqualify Michael as a suitable guardian for Terri as the interest which Michael said (in malpractice trial court proceedings) he had toward Terri is directed to another woman who is not his wife and has two children by said other woman of whom he is the father

12. Judge Greer has deprived Terri of her constitutional religious rights by allowing Michael Schiavo to prevent Monsignor Malonowski from visiting Terri, by allowing Michael to prevent Monsignor Malinowski from administering last rites when her feeding tube was removed in October 2003, and by allowing Michael to prevent Terris blood relatives from placing pictures of religious figures in her room

17. Judge Greer has denied Terri the right under 744.3215(d) (d) to be treated humanely, with dignity and respect, and to be protected against abuse, neglect, and exploitation.

18. Judge Greer has denied Terri the right under 744.3215(e) to have a qualified guardian.

19. Judge Greer has denied Terri the right under 744.3215(f) to remain as independent as possible, including having her preference as to place and standard of living honored, either as she expressed or demonstrated her preference prior to the determination of his or her incapacity or as she currently expresses her preference, insofar as such request is reasonable.

20. Judge Greer has denied Terri the right under 744.3215 (g) to be properly educated. She is not receiving any rehabilitative therapy

23. Judge Greer has denied Terri the right under 744.3215 (k) to have access to the courts. Judge Greer has relied upon the testimony of others related to Michael Schiavo as to Terris condition yet ignored the testimony of her blood relatives which was contradictory to information provided by Michael and his family.

24. Judge Greer has denied Terri the right under 744.3215(l) to counsel.

25. Judge Greer has denied Terri the right under 744.3215(m) to receive visitors and communicate with others.

26. Judge Greer has allowed violation of 744.3215(a) by allowing Terri to be moved to different facilities without prior approval of the court.

27. Judge Greer has allowed violation of 744.3215(b) not requiring Michael to have follow up examinations of electrodes, which were implanted in Terris brain. These implants should have been removed years ago, as they are a source for both infection and hydrocephalus. Hydrocephalus may cause pressure that could suppress cognitive function and be responsible for much of Terris condition. If so, there could be a vast improvement in her condition if a shunt were placed. Hydrocephalus could also cause pressure that would flatten the brain and show fluid filled areas on a brain scan.

28. Judge Greer has allowed Michael to violate a court order stating that he is to keep Terris family advised of her medical condition.

29. Judge Greer has ignored Terris right under 765.102(5)(a) to palliative care which addresses physical, psychological, social, spiritual, and existential needs of patients.

30. Judge Greer has not required Michael Schiavo to implement a plan which would provide for Terris needs under 765.102(5)(a)

32. Judge Greer relied on Dr. Ronald Cranfords definition of PVS (Persistent Vegetative State) instead of the legal definition contained in the Florida Statutes. There were several doctors who gave reports that Terri is not PVS but Greer decided not to use the Florida Statutes definition.

33. Judge Greer has failed to be impartial and has ignored testimony and evidence presented by Counsel for Terris natural family and has consistently ruled in agreement with Counsel for Michael Schiavo.

34. Judge Greer has allowed Michael to continue denying visitation to Terris family

35. Judge Greer authorized the euthanization of Terri Schiavo by authorizing the removal of her feeding tube when she does not fit the definition of PVS under Florida statutes. Euthanasia is illegal in Florida.

36. Judge Greer has violated the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. Sections 12101 provides that necessary and appropriate rehabilitation services and physical/motor skill therapy may not be denied a substantially disabled patient in the United States of America.

37. Judge Greer has violated the ADA Cf 28 CFR, Ch 1, Subpart B, Sect 35.130 States "Nothing in the Act or this part authorizes the representative or guardian of an individual with a disability to decline food, water, medical treatment, or medical services for that individual."

38. Judge Greer has violated FS 38.10 four times by not disqualifying himself from the case when it was requested. The statute states whenever a party to any action or proceeding makes and files an affidavit stating fear that he or she will not receive a fair trial in the court where the suit is pending on account of the prejudice of the judge of that court against the applicant or in favor of the adverse party, the judge shall proceed no further, but another judge shall be designated

The same article continues:

Judge Greer serves on the Committee for Guardianship Monitoring but is, in fact, violating the intentions and guidelines established by the Committee:

1. Judge Greer has neglected the mission of guardianship monitoring in Terris case. The mission of guardianship monitoring is to collect, provide, and evaluate information about the well-being and property of all persons adjudicated of having a legal incapacity so that the court can fulfill its legal obligation to protect and preserve the interests of the ward, and thereby promote confidence in the judicial process.

2. Page 5 of the document contains "Thus, the court must be proactive to discover and respond to disputes and issues." Judge Greer has intentionally ignored disputed issues in Terris case and not made any ruling to correct them.

3. On page 6 of the document is this statement "An ideal guardianship monitoring program encompasses four major service areas: (1) initial and on-going screening and reviewing of guardians; (2) reporting on the well-being of the ward; (3) reporting on the protection of the wards assets; and (4) case administration." Judge Greers flagrant oversight of Michael Schiavos violations of the statutes pertaining to guardians is certainly no example for any monitoring program.

4. It is unclear whether Judge Greer has required Michael Schiavo to meet all the requirements of a guardian (listed on page 6 of the document). "A family member guardian is required to hire an attorney, provide detailed personal information, undergo a credit check, post a fiduciarys bond, attend an 8-hour training course, and file detailed initial and annual personal and financial reports."

5. Pinellas County employees a full time monitoring staff, which reviews cases to make sure guardianship plans are being filed and followed. It would not have been possible for them to give approval of the plan for Terri since the guardianship plans have not been an important issue with Judge Greer evidenced by his granting Michael extensions to file the plan. Judge Greer is deliberately undermining the guardianship monitoring program which was established to make sure that all wards receive the protection they are entitled to by the law.

6. Judge Greer did not adhere to the monitoring guidelines which state that in cases where it appears there is substantial likelihood for serious irreparable harm (similar to the injunctive relief standard), immediate action steps by the court should include but not be limited to: Filing an abuse, neglect, or exploitation complaint with the Department of Children and Families, as required by statute, referral to local law enforcement agencies or the state attorney and, conducting immediate hearings among several other possible actions. Terri is at risk of irreparable harm as long as Michael is her guardian. He didnt want to treat her for an infection, has not had preventive health care examinations for her and stated on national television that he would do whatever it takes to have her feeding tube removed. Michael also stated during the same interview that Terri's teeth were fine but recently she is missing several teeth.

I have intentionally listed many of the claims against Judge Greer to convey the magnitude and gravity of his ethically challenged behavior. When his behavior is combined with Michael Schiavo's behavior highlighted here, can any reasonable person believe Terri - as a disabled woman - had even the slightest chance of being treated justly?

Is this the America we love when a beast of a husband and an unprincipled judge can gang up to kill a defenseless disabled woman?

Alas, suggested misdeeds and ethical conflicts are not limited only to Judge Greer's courtroom behavior. This article highlights some questionnable behaviors of his related to local Florida politics.

With 16 days left before the killing begins, what is next? Many of the motions filed by the Schindler family were denied outright on February 28 without any hearing by Judge Greer's court:

Judge George Greer...has denied, without access to hearing, motions filed by Terri Schiavo's immediate family for:

* Updated neurological evaluations based on new MRI testing protocols;

* A motion to compel the deposition of Michael Schiavo;

* A petition for extraordinary authority to provide Terri Schiavo with updated rehabilitative protocols;

* A petition for divorce, citing open adultery on the part of Terri Schiavo's husband and guardian;

* An objection to the guardian's annual guardianship plan;

* A motion to remove Michael Schiavo as guardian, citing his failure to comply with Florida Law mandated guardianship requirements. This motion dates back to November of 2002, but the court has never ruled on it.

[PDF versions of the denied motions can be found in the just-highlighted article.]

Judge Greer has stated that he will only consider motions from Terri's family as they relate to the death process, which include but are not limited to a motion to allow Terri Schiavo to die at home instead of a Hospice facility, a motion for a Florida burial, and a motion allowing her immediate family uninterrupted access to her throughout the death process.

Pamela Hennessey, spokesperson for the Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation says the foundation finds the actions of Judge Greer reprehensible and a clear denial of the due process rights afforded to Terri Schiavo under Federal and Florida law.

The hearing for the remaining motions has been set for March 4.

There are several important actions we can all take immediately:

Contact Floridas Governor, Jeb Bush at jeb.bush@myflorida.com, and demand that he invoke Florida Statute 415.1051 to provide protective custody until investigations into abuse and neglect can be carried out.

Contact Florida's Senate and ask them to institute an immediate moratorium on withholding assisted nutrition and hydration until Florida can adopt a new standard of testing protocols for brain-injured patients.

Contact Floridas House of Representatives and ask them to pass legislation that would forbid the removal of food and water without the informed consent of the patient.

Visit the Schindler family's website and see for yourself the woman who has been called a house plant by her husbands attorney and why.

Get a Protective Medical Decisions Directive from the International Anti-Euthanasia task force and make your medical treatment desires known to your family and friends. You dont have to be starved or dehydrated to death simply because your life is effected by disability.

The Founding Principles of America as articulated in the Declaration of Independence were deeply profound and set a new example for the world. At this time of peril, we have a great need to rediscover those principles and let them guide our actions.

If we ignore those principles, then this T. S. Eliot quote (offered by Bruce Frohnen) will likely become our future:

As political philosophy derives its sanctions from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term "democracy," as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike - it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God, you will pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin.

As citizens of this great land, the unethical actions of Judge Greer and Michael Schiavo now force each of us to make fundamental choices which we can no longer brush off: Will our culture defend the helpless? Will we allow Terri Schindler-Schiavo to live?

In other words, will we stay true to the Founding Principles of America and the values which informed that Founding? Each of us must take a stand. What is your personal answer?


February 28, 2005


Prejudicial Views on Social Security

Justin Katz

Seeing that I'm among the younger set that supports President Bush's Social Security plan, I take umbrage at Froma Harrop's condescention:

The folks are going to stop the kids from doing something stupid. Many have known world war and a great depression. They saw the pitiful old people that Social Security lifted from the gutter. And they've spent a lot of time thinking about retirement.

So what if the young people are receptive to letting go of guaranteed benefits? They're also more receptive to hang-gliding and riding motorcycles in the rain.

Besides, the children are too busy to focus on the debate over privatizing Social Security. They are working long hours and raising families. To them, retirement seems unimaginably far off.

Let's stop there. Harrop doesn't define "kids," but since they're "working long hours and raising families," I imagine it would be safe to extend the category out to, say, thirty-five. That seems a little too old for dismissal as a bunch of uninformed hang-gliders — especially if we back up to a previous paragraph with a curious echo to the one just quoted:

The people don't want [the President's plan]. They want a benefit that, however modest, is guaranteed. And they see no need to "save" a program that's fine until 2042 -- and may not need much fixing even then.

Myself as a hard-working, family-raising kid, I'll be sixty-seven that year. If it makes sense to plan for retirement at all, it makes sense to consider the state of Social Security around the time that I may (or may not) manage to retire. And actually looking at the poll that Harrop leverages for a quip suggests that I'm not alone in my concern. When she scoffs at the "mere 17 percent" who believe that a "crisis" looms, she conveniently ignores that another 55% believe that the system "has major problems." Although she attributes skepticism about the amount of required fixing in 2042 to a vague "they," 64% of the poll's respondents "think the Social Security system will... be bankrupt" that year.

Other results from the poll offer another lens through which to view Harrop's statement that the "President's plan to privatize Social Security is clearly headed for political oblivion." Just a couple of months into a major education campaign on the issue, there's obviously a great deal of thinking that can still be forced. It's true that 55% think allowing "people who retire in future decades to invest some of their Social Security taxes in the stock market and bonds" would be a "bad idea." However, that percentage is less than the "bad idea" scores for:

  • "Further reducing the total amount of benefits a person would receive if they retired early" (57% bad idea)
  • "Increasing Social Security taxes for all workers" (60%)
  • "Increasing the age at which people are eligible to receive full benefits" (63%)
  • "Reducing retirement benefits for people who are currently under age 55" (67%)

Take particular note of that last one. Given a better understanding of the options that are actually available, perhaps the 30% who believe that "most Americans would receive higher Social Security benefits than the government would provide" were they allowed to invest now would match or surpass the 40% who think their benefits would have been higher if they had invested a portion of their lifetime Social Security taxes already. If there's that much skepticism about the future of this nation's economy, it oughtn't be difficult to make citizens question how the government will find the money that is supposedly "guaranteed."

Froma Harrop may wish to convince her readers that "the quest to privatize Social Security is truly a lost cause," but I suspect that we kids will have the stubbornness of geezers if admitting a "lost cause" makes one of our retirement. Perhaps Harrop and the rest of our elders should ask themselves whether the young'ns are truly uninformed or are just less able to see 2042 as a year that might never come.


February 24, 2005


What If This Was Our Daughter or Sister or Wife? What If It Was "Only" A Stranger's Life? Part II

This posting builds on a previous posting about Terri Schindler-Schiavo.

Digging further into the case only raises additional deeply unsettling questions, questions that deserve thoughtful responses and not the casual ending of a human life.

The first major question has to do with Terris physical and mental condition. As you read the following, remember that she has been denied any rehabilitation therapy since at least 1993:

Nurses who tended to Terri Schiavohave stated in affidavits provided by her family that the 41-year-old has exhibited clear-cut behavior indicating she is conscious and aware of her surroundings.

In stunning testimony, one nurse, Heidi Law, a certified nursing assistant who took care of Terri when she was at Palm Gardens Nursing Home in Largo, Florida, in 1997, said that the severely disabled woman formed words such as "mommy, "momma," and most hauntingly, "help me."

"While it is true that those patients will flinch or make sounds occasionally, they don't do it as a reaction to someone on a constant basis who is taking care of them, the way I saw Terri do," claimed Law in a formal deposition

The testimonycontradicts widespread perceptions that Terri is a nearly brain-dead or comatose woman living in a vegetative state

That the disabled woman acknowledges the presence of her parents, responds to music, and follows the movement of objects such as a balloon has long been known and documented by videos

attested by a second caretaker, Carla Sauer Iyer, a registered nurse who was at Palm Garden from 1995 to 1997:

"Terri's medical condition was systematically distorted and misrepresented," stated Iyer in her own affidavit..."When I worked with her, she was alert and oriented. Terri spoke on a regular basis while in my presence, saying such things as 'mommy' and 'help me.' 'Help me' was, in fact, one of her most frequent utterances. I heard her say it hundreds of times. Terri would try to say the word 'pain' when she was in discomfort, but it came out more like 'pay.' When I came into her room and said 'Hi, Terri,' she would always recognize my voice and her name, and would turn her head all the way toward me, saying, 'Haaaiiiii,' sort of, as she did. I recognized this as a 'hi,' which is very close to what it sounded like, the whole sound being only a second or two long. When I told her stories about my life, or something I read in the paper, Terri would sometimes chuckle, sometimes more a giggle or laugh.

Numerous affidavits on Terri's condition, including some referenced in this posting, can be found here and here. An overview of medical observations on Terri over the last 15 years can be found here. All of this information paints an entirely different picture of Terri from what Terri's husband and his attorney have been stating publicly for years now.

There have been frequent media reports that Terri suffered from eating disorders. However, this posting notes:

there was never a determination by any court nor the Florida Department of Health that Terri Schiavo ever suffered from any eating disorder, bulimia, anorexia or compulsive behavior that would lead to a heart failure at the age of 26.

Indeed, Floridas Department of Health had completely and absolutely cleared Terris general practitioner of any negligence or wrong-doing in her case. This was after the physician had been accused by Terris husband of ignoring evidence of an eating disorder.

Additionally, at the time of her mysterious medical episode, Terri Schiavo stood 53 and weighed somewhere between 115 and 118 pounds a slim, but normal stature and weight. [Her husband is said to be 6'6" tall and weigh about 250 pounds.]

This posting notes:

Dr. William Hammesfahr, a world renowned neurologist wrote a complete reportin September, 2002, revealing that medical tests conducted after her collapse did not show evidence of a heart attack. In the emergency room, a possible diagnosis of heart attack was briefly entertained but then dismissed after blood chemistries and serial EKGs did not show evidence of a heart attack.

I would strongly encourage you to read the entirety of Dr. Hammesfahr's report. Among other things, it will allow you to contrast the depth of his examination analysis with the shallow analyses of a doctor who has twice "examined" Terri and then declared her to be in a persistent vegetative state. Here are some impressions and observational excerpts from Dr. Hammesfahr's examination of Terri:

Impressions: The patient is not in coma. She is alert and responsive to her environment. She responds to specific people best. She tries to please others by doing activities for which she gets verbal praise. She responds negatively to poor tone of voice. She responds to music. She differentiates sounds from voices. She differentiates specific people's voices from others. She differentiates music from stray sound. She attempts to verbalize. She has voluntary control over multiple extremities. She can swallow. She can feel pain...

Communication: She can communicate. She needs a Speech Therapist, Speech Pathologist, and a communications expert to evaluate how to best communicate with her and to allow her to communicate and for others to communicate with her

ENT[Ear, Nose, Throat]: The patient can clearly swallow, and is able to swallow approximately 2 liters of water per day (the daily amount of saliva generated). Water is one of the most difficult things for people to swallow. It is unlikely that she currently needs the feeding tube

Spinal Exam: The patient's exam from a spinal perspective is abnormal. The degree of limitation of range of motion, and of spasms in her neck, is consistent with a neck injury.

All of these observations explain why her parents are seeking further medical tests of Terri before any action to starve her to death is taken. Terris husband and the judge have been blocking these testing requests.

The second big question is whether her husbands past behaviors and current intentions are ethical. As her husband, he is Terris legal guardian. Ask yourself whether he is acting in her best interest and deserves to remain her guardian where he has the power over life/death decisions.

There is significant uncertainty about what happened on February 25, 1990, the day Terri sustained her injuries:

The main evidence comes from a bone scan taken on March 5, 1991This scan indicated numerous broken bones in various stages of healing, including compression fractures, a broken back, pelvis, ankle, bone bruises and ossifications.

Board certified radiologist Dr. Walker read the scan in 1991 and interpreted the results as abnormal, which he attributed to either an accident or earlier traumaa) the injuries indicated by the scan occurred on or around the time that Terri Schiavo collapsed; b) the abnormalities on the bone scan were not typical of someone suffering cardiac arrest and collapsing to the floor; and, c) the fracturesare not typical of patients bedridden only thirteen months

On October 24, 2003, renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden [former chief medical examiner for New York City]disclosed that with low potassium and no elevated enzymes, it would be extremely rare for a young woman to collapse as Terri did from a heart attack. When asked what the bone injuries suggest to him, Dr. Baden replied, Some kind of trauma. The trauma can be from a fall, or the trauma can be from some kind of beatingIts something that should have been investigated in 1991 when these findings were found.

The same posting contains the thoughts of psychiatrist and expert witness Dr. Carole E. Lieberman, including a profile of Michael Schiavo. The posting also states:

Prior to Terris collapse, there were serious financial problems in her marriage and her husband tried to control her behavior. He was fired from six jobs in two years, some of which he held only two weeks. They often lived on her income, which Michael often spent on himself. He monitored her odometer and isolated her from her family and friends. On the day of her collapse, Michael and Terri had a bad fight after he accused her of spending too much money at the hairdresser

So, what really happened on February 25, 1990? We know that Terri fell in her home and sustained serious injuries. We know that Michael Schiavo, who was trained in CPR, oddly did not administer CPR to his wife.

A previously mentioned posting add the following observations:

Why isnt [Judge] George Greer and the court interested in how Terri Schiavo sustained the injuries in 1990?

after the Schindlers became aware of the bone scan report in November, 2002, they tried to file a report with the police of a possible battery on Terri but that the police refused to get involved

Prior to 2002, Terris medical records had been kept sealed under court order at the request of Michael Shiavo. The bone scan surfaced when the Schindlers former attorney, Patricia Anderson, obtained some of the medical records through discovery

The hospital admittance records from 1990 show evidence of trauma to Terri Schiavos neck

There is reportedly an order on file issued by Michael Schiavo that upon her death, Terri Schiavo will immediately be cremated, no autopsy.

Dr. Hammesfahr's report includes these words:

Interestingly, I have seen this pattern of mixed brain (cerebral) and spinal cord findings in a patient once before, a patient who was asphyxiated.

Another posting discusses how Terri did not receive adequate care and offers further insight into their marital problems at the time Terri sustained her injuries:

...medical records show that Terri has never been evaluated or treated by an orthopedic surgeon for the multiple injuries revealed in the bone scan, which may have a profound bearing on her current medical condition...

In testimony given during the 2000 trial, Terri's girlfriend and co-worker said [see item #6 on left side listing] Terri discussed getting a divorce and moving in with her. She also testified that the couple had a violent argument on the day of Terri's collapse, which prompted her to urge Terri to not stay at home that night a suggestion Terri disregarded.

"There are only two people who know what happened that night that she collapsed. And one of them is trying to kill the other who is too disabled to speak," Anderson told WND at the commencement of the trial last month.

What has her husband Michael been doing over the years since 1990? Denying her any rehabilitation services, for starters, as this excerpt notes:

Michael Schiavo, although being awarded nearly $1.7 million from medical malpractice claims on the representation that he would provide rehabilitation services for his wife, refused to do so shortly after receiving the money and instead has used the money earmarked for Terris rehab to be used for legal fees to obtain a court order to end her life.

But it hasn't been just a failure to provide rehab over the years. I would strongly encourage you to read closely the information at this site, which highlights the numerous times since her injuries that her husband has ensured Terri did not receive either quality care or humane treatment. Equally powerful reading is selected information on Michael's character and actions from this site. In aggregate, the documents paint a damning picture of the man.

Here is some additional information on questionable behavior by her husband and Terris responses to him during these intervening years:

"I made numerous entries into the nursing notes in her chart, stating verbatim what she said and her various behaviors, but by my next on-duty shift, the notes would be deleted from her chart," claimed Iyer in potentially devastating detail. "Every time I made a positive entry about any responsiveness of Terri's, someone would remove it after my shift ended. Michael always demanded to see her chart as soon as he arrived, and would take it in her room with him."

Iyer claims that she "became fearful for my personal safety" and was terminated after she called police about comments and activities at the nursing home relative to the Schiavo woman. "When Michael visited Terri, he always came alone and always had the door closed and locked while he was with Terri," the affidavit alleges. "He would typically be there about twenty minutes or so. When he left Terri would be trembling, crying hysterically, and would be very pale and have cold sweats. It looked to me like Terri was having a hypoglycemic reaction, so I'd check her blood sugar." The glucometer reading would be so low it was below the range where it would register an actual number reading. I would put dextrose in Terri's mouth to counteract it. This happened about five times on my shift as I recall. Normally Terri's blood-sugar levels were very stable due to the uniformity of her diet through tube feeding." [These events led Iyer to speculate the unproven/unprovable idea that Michael Schiavo could have been injecting Terri with insulin.]

Added Law, the nursing assistant, "When she was upset, which was usually the case after Michael was there, she would withdraw for hours... Several times when Michael visited during my shift, he went into her room alone and closed the door. When he left, Terri was very agitated, was extremely tense with tightened fists, and sometimes had a cold sweat. She was much less responsive than usual and would just stare out the window, her eyes kind of glassy."

A previously referenced posting shares the following:

Nurses have reported hearing Michael Schiavo make such comments as "When is that bitch going to die?" [Iyer] says that she recalls him making statements such as "Cant anything be done to accelerate her death, wont she ever die?" "Michael would be visibly excited, thrilled even, hoping that she would die", Iyer recalled. "He would blurt out, 'I'm going to be rich' and would talk about all the things he would buy when Terri died which included a new car, a new boat and going to Europe."

This posting has further information on George Felos, Michael Schiavo's attorney, and the information does not reflect well on Felos' personal values.

Another posting notes that:

On September 3, 2004 Father Rob Johansen wrote in his blog ["Thrown Back"] about what Cheryl Ford, a nurse from Tampa who has been very active in the efforts to save Terri's life, found in her review of Terri's medical records.

... Cheryl had recently undertaken, on behalf of the Schindlers, a review of medical records from when Terri was first admitted to Woodside Hospice. Woodside Hospice is run by Hospice of the Florida Suncoast.

It is of interest to note that Michael Schiavo's attorney, George Felos, was a member of the Board of Directors of Hospice of the Florida Suncoast until the Terri Schiavo case began to attract widespread public attention a few years ago.

In her research, Ms. Ford found a document titled "Exit Protocol" in Terri's file. The document is on Hospice of the Florida Suncoast "Patient Care Notes" stationery, and is dated April 19, 2001. This document lays out, in clinical detail, the procedures to be followed in bringing about Terri's death by starvation and dehydration.

That protocol is part of a broader set of questions regarding the role the hospice is playing in this case:

The original hospice mission is to care for, support and manage the symptoms of the terminally ill until a death occurs in its own natural timing. Every hospice nurse and physician knows that hospice is supposed to neither hasten death nor seek to cure the terminal illness. Hastening the death of a patient goes against everything hospice stands for.

Although Terri Schiavo's case will be decided in a Pinellas County courthouse, any hospice that accepts a chronically ill patient has violated not only the spirit of hospice and the mission of hospice, but the federal regulations governing hospice.

In addition, there have been a series of very questionnable decisions by the judge plus some seriously overlapping conflicts of interest between the judge, his colleagues, the hospice, and George Felos. I find the number and nature of these conflicts to be most troubling, raising further ethical concerns.

Many of the ethical issues in this case are discussed in this article:

[George] Felos's well-known ties to the euthanasia movement...has been a member of the infamous Hemlock Society...

Michael Schiavo's principal witness, Dr. Ronald Cranford,...perhaps the leading medical proponent of the pro-death movement...

[One peer reviewed medical journal article] revealed that 43% of patients sent to that hospital with a diagnosis of PVS [persistent vegetative state] were not in a vegetative state at all...

The growing awareness of the difficulty in diagnosing PVS, and the widespread errors in making the diagnosis, have led many leading hospitals...to routinely reassess patients referred to them as PVS...

...[Terri's parents'] were informed [in 1993] that Michael had cut off their access to Terri's medical information...Michael had the legal authority to issue the order, which remains in place to this day...

[Later in 1993,] Terri had a serious urinary tract infection and that Michael had ordered the nursing home not to give her treatment, which would have consisted of a simple course of antibiotics...the nursing home eventually gave Terri the antibiotics anyway. [Could this be an example of why she was then moved from the nursing home to the hospice?]...Michael admitted [in a court hearing] that he had ordered the nursing home to deny Terri treatment for the infection and that he knew the infection, left untreated, would have caused Terri's death...

In 1998, Michael petitioned the court to remove Terri's feeding tube...was the first time that Michael had ever claimed such a wish on Terri's part [not to be kept alive in her condition]...

The judge then appointed a guardian ad litem, Richard Pearse, to investigate Michael's fitness as guardian and to make a recommendation about Terri's feeding tube. Pearse interviewed the various parties, including doctors, and issued his report in December 1998 recommending against Michael's fitness as guardian and against removing Terri's feeding tube...In February 1999, George Felos filed a "suggestion of bias" against Pearse and demanded he be removed as guardian ad litem...In April 1999, Pearse filed a request that he either be given further instructions or discharged...[noting] that there would be due process difficulties if the case proceeded to trial without Terri having an independent guardian ad litem...[the judge] discharged Pearse without appointing a successor...

All of which is why the following comment makes so much sense:

You have to ask yourself, why a Judge would continue to allow this [ceasing to provide a feeding tube] without ordering that Terri Schiavo have, at the very least, six months of therapy just to make sure that he's not killing someone that has every right to continue fighting for her life

As observers from afar, we cannot independently confirm the veracity of all of the information described above. But reasonable people must admit that the information pattern raises enough material questions about the behavior of Terris husband and the judge to have grave concerns.

And that leads us back to the more fundamental question about what value we will place on human life, including that of a disabled woman. If we begin to say it is okay to kill off "weak" human beings, think where that will take us over time. It will take us to a place where certain people will seek to play "God" so they can set the criteria for who lives and who dies. Why not then an elderly parent or a young child, should either become a financial or emotional burden? The freedom to do such great evil will only invite more profound evil over time.

Holocausts do not begin with operational concentration camps; they start on a smaller scale and steadily break down our resistance while many people plead that they are "too busy" to pay attention and get involved.

The stakes are enormous here and there is no neutral ground. Not to decide is to decide. The fight for Terris life is another battle to determine whether we are to live in a culture of life or a culture of death.


February 23, 2005


An Alternate Reality for Social Security

Justin Katz

Perhaps its cause is an irrepressible idealism on my part, but I still find myself stunned and disheartened by the stooped-to depths of political dishonesty. In this one sentence, Rep. Patrick Kennedy appeals to a completely alternate reality to score political points among people whom he assumes to be uninformed and/or stupid:

Since the president took office and began squandering the Clinton surpluses, the federal government has treated Social Security like a credit card -- borrowing from the Social Security surplus to pay its other bills.

First of all, "the Clinton surpluses" never amounted to money in hand. Rather, they were projections into the future based on a booming economy. (Although, I suppose that if any body can squander something it doesn't have, it's the federal government.) Second of all, the money that Social Security raises each year began being filtered to the federal government's general funds via bonds long before President Bush ever stepped into the White House.

From there, deconstructing Kennedy's "facts" is a tedious matter that I leave to interested readers. (For example, the suggestion that "Social Security would be unable to pay full benefits in 2021, instead of 2042 or 2052," ignores the obvious reality that Bush's private account program is meant to supplement benefits that Social Security will eventually be unable to finance.) I offer a summary piece by Donald Luskin as a helpful antidote.

Overall, in building his phony version of political reality, Kennedy is either a dupe of his own rhetoric or a con man. The story is that Bush has been "squandering the Clinton surpluses," in part because he tapped the Social Security trust fund, money that he "borrowed for big tax breaks." Yet — yet! — Kennedy's counter-proposal is "the ASPIRE Act, which would give every child an investment account at birth [for which the government would] put in a seed contribution, and match parental contributions for lower-income children."

In other words, a Congressman who has declared that he's "never worked a f***ing day in [his] life" prefers giving government-funded, redistributionist hand-outs to eighteen year olds to allowing working citizens to keep more of the money that they earn. A man wealthy by default wishes to ensure the importance of the government teat to the common citizen by taking money from the hands of parents, filtering it through the grubby ones of government, and then handing it back to adolescents just as they exit their parents' legal guardianship.

Somehow, I don't think Kennedy's concept of "an ownership society" matches that of believers in a free market and individual independence. The difference is who does the owning, and the alternate reality that he's striving to bring about is not one in which Americans should invest hope... or votes.


February 22, 2005


What If This Was Our Daughter or Sister or Wife? What If It Was "Only" A Stranger's Life?

My wife heard last night the sad and horrible news of the death of one of her dearest friend's daughter. We grieve for that wonderful family, whose kindness to others - including my wife - has never known any limits. Having been fortunate enough to be present at the birth of our three children, I cannot imagine anything more painful than having to bury one's child.

And that leads to a related story about Terri Schindler-Schiavo, which has been in and out of the news for a while now. Last week, however, a posting by Greg Wallace got my attention. Here is an excerpt:

She is not dying. She has no terminal illness. She is not in a coma. She is not on life-support equipment. She is not alone, but rather has loving parents and siblings ready to care for her for the rest of her life. She has not requested death.

Yet a battle rages regarding whether Terri Schindler-Schiavo should be starved. She has sustained brain injuries and cannot speak or eat normally. Nevertheless, the only tube attached to her is a small, simple, painless feeding tube that provides her nourishment directly to her digestive system.

Her legal guardian is her husband, who already has another woman -- by whom he also has children. He wants Terri's feeding tube removed. Of course, he could simply allow her to be cared for by her parents and siblings, and get on with his life, but he refuses...

Some say that Terri's family should "let her go." But this is not a matter of "letting her go," because she isn't "going" anywhere. If, however, she is deprived of nourishment, then she would slowly die in the same way that any of us would slowly die if we were deprived of nourishment. It is called starvation.

What makes this an even more poignant human love story is the content of a written settlement offer made by Terri's family to her husband, Michael, on October 26, 2004. You can find the letter here. In that letter, her immediate family offers to:

Take Terri home and care for her at their own expense.

Never to seek money from her husband, Michael, including from past malpractice awards. He would also be able to keep all assets from their married life.

Sign any legal documents allowing her husband to divorce her, should he desire that, while still allowing him to retain all rights to her estate upon her natural death in the future as if he was still married to her.

Allow Michael to retain visitation rights, if he so wished.

Forgo any and all future financial claims against Michael.

Michael has rejected their offer; the only acceptable outcome for him is to see Terri dead.

The love of this family for their daughter and sister is reinforced in postings here and here by fellow Rhode Islander, Chuck Nevola.

I would also encourage you to return to the family website for more on this case.

Going back to Greg's original posting and taking the issue to a more philosophical level:

If the courts permit that to happen, then why should that permission apply only in Terri's case? There would be no way to limit it to her case alone. Countless others would follow, and their deaths would be described as "letting them die" instead of "killing them." Where, indeed, does the state get the authority to starve people? Court decisions permitting this lack all authority, as Pope John Paul II teaches in "The Gospel of Life" (section 72). These decisions cannot be obeyed, because they are not binding on the conscience and are in fact acts of violence.

A horrible day is upon us: Michael Schiavo will have the legal right to begin starving Terri to death today.

This ghastly outcome should be neither the values nor the law of America. But it is now on the verge of becoming just that.

What would be our response if this was our daughter, our sister or our wife? Could our response be muted just because Terri Schindler-Schiavo is a "stranger" to all of us? Why should there be any difference?

Or, consider this: What if, by some awful twist of fate, one day you personally were in Terri's place and your family was stopped from saving your life, caring for you, and showing tender love for you? And what if everyone else was "too busy" to care?

I hope our society will find a greater respect for the preciousness of all human life - regardless of whether they are family, friends or someone we have never met. Let's begin by saving Terri Schindler-Schiavo's life.


February 3, 2005


Media Bias - or Just Incompetence?

During his State of the Union speech, President Bush introduced an Iraqi citizen with these words:

One of Iraq's leading democracy and human rights advocates is Safia Taleb al-Suhail. She says of her country, "we were occupied for 35 years by Saddam Hussein. That was the real occupation. Thank you to the American people who paid the cost but most of all to the soldiers." Eleven years ago, Safia's father was assassinated by Saddam's intelligence service. Three days ago in Baghdad, Safia was finally able to vote for the leaders of her country - and we are honored that she is with us tonight.

Subsequently, in praise of an American soldier who had given his life for freedom, the President said:

One name we honor is Marine Corps Sergeant Byron Norwood of Pflugerville, Texas, who was killed during the assault on Fallujah. His mom, Janet, sent me a letter and told me how much Byron loved being a Marine, and how proud he was to be on the front line against terror. She wrote, "When Byron was home the last time, I said that I wanted to protect him like I had since he was born. He just hugged me and said: 'You've done your job, mom. Now it's my turn to protect you.'" Ladies and gentlemen, with grateful hearts, we honor freedom's defenders, and our military families, represented here this evening by Sergeant Norwood's mom and dad, Janet and Bill Norwood.

The National Ledger captures a very poignant moment that followed when Safia Taleb al-Suhail turned and hugged Janet Norwood:

The symbolism was striking. A mother had lost her patriot son so that this woman--a person she had never met before--would have the opportunity to be free. Janet Norwood had her son's dog-tags wrapped around her hand while Safia Taleb al-Souhail's index finger was still slightly stained with ink from her first vote.

It was a moment to make every patriot proud.

By contrast, The Washington Post described the hug with the following words:

The emotional highpoint of last night's event came near the end when Bush introduced the parents of a U.S. Marine from Texas, Sgt. Byron Norwood, who was killed in the assault on Fallujah, Iraq. As Norwood's mother tearfully hugged another woman in the gallery, the assembled senators and representatives responded with a sustained ovation, and Bush's face appeared creased with emotion.

Just "another woman?" And the mainstream media insists it carries no bias. Well, it is either bias or incompetent reporting - their choice.

ADDENDUM:

Power Line offers this update:

A reader says that the Post has now updated its story so that the offending paragraph now reads:
The emotional highpoint of last night's event came near the end when Bush introduced the parents of a U.S. Marine from Texas, Sgt. Byron Norwood, who was killed in the assault on Fallujah, Iraq. As Norwood's mother tearfully hugged Safia Taleb Suhail, leader of the Iraqi Women's Political Council, the assembled senators and representatives responded with a sustained ovation, and Bush's face appeared creased with emotion. Suhail also was a guest of the White House sitting with the first lady in the gallery who had been introduced by Bush earlier in the speech as "one of Iraq's leading democracy and human rights advocates.

No credit to Power Line, however, for pointing out the Post's blunder.


February 1, 2005


When Lives Votes Are on the Line

Justin Katz

I've been pondering Lane Core's suggestion that Sen. Kennedy's fire-breathing speech last week was an attempt to set himself up for further histrionics after a calamitous election day in Iraq (emphasis in original):

But it occurred to me today — I wish it had done so last week — that Kennedy's speech was not occasioned merely by the election in Iraq. No, it was occasioned by his expectation of a debacle in the election.

And what should I come across but an article about Rhode Island's federal representatives:

All four members of the delegation explicitly rejected the call -- from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and other war critics -- to start pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq immediately and to set a timetable for total withdrawal. But all four were cautious in their assessment of post-election Iraq, stressing that this week's advances do not guarantee a successful democracy.

Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy said he doesn't "differ with the sentiment" behind calls for bringing the troops home, "but we don't want to give up on the success that we've created."

"We've moved the ball toward the goal line here. It doesn't make sense to pull out now," said Kennedy, a son of the Democratic senator from Massachusetts and the only member of the local delegation who backed Mr. Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

It's easy to be reasonable in retrospect. Let's see how quickly that "goal line" moves — and how quickly Papa Ted manages to recast any scripts that he'd already prepared.


January 28, 2005


Finding the Balance in President Bush's Inaugural Address

Marc Comtois

At the risk of trying the patience, or interest, of some, I offer one last (I promise) analysis on President Bush's Inaugural Address. Today, the Providence Journal's Philip Terzian succinctly encapsulated what Bush's speech was all about. :

George W. Bush declared that "the great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations." To some, he seemed to be conjuring up the Kennedy ghosts in a quest to liberate a fractious world. To others, he was parroting the boilerplate rhetoric of American idealism.

Which was it? It was both. It can hardly be news to say that the American republic regards itself as a beacon, a "shining city on a hill," to inspire daughters and sons of liberty around the world. That has been our civic religion, with minor variations, from the time of John Winthrop to Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt and onward. Kennedy, after all, said that the "long twilight struggle" would "not be finished in the first hundred days . . . nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."

The difference between 1961 and 2005, however, is experience. Bush's objective in Afghanistan was to show that when tyranny takes the form of terrorism, it must be punished. In Iraq his intention, as I take it, is to demonstrate that freedom is naturally intrinsic, that tyranny can be attacked, and will be assaulted if it stands in the way of a larger objective -- in this instance, a just settlement of the Arab-Israeli struggle.

In that sense, Bush is an advocate, not an evangelist, of freedom. He recognizes that the "long twilight struggle" against terrorism demands the toleration of imperfect regimes -- Pakistan, Russia, China -- and that exhorting the world to embrace freedom involves risk (Taiwan), as well as reward (Ukraine). The point is not that the United States can make impossible things happen, or will lead the charge in a dozen different places, but that American power means certain principles, as well as prosperity and military strength.


January 27, 2005


(Reluctantly) Deconstructing Peggy Noonan

Marc Comtois
Peggy Noonan has responded to those critical of her Inaugural critique. In short, she stands by her original thoughts and essentially believes that we Americans have enough on our plate now and don't need to worry about larger goals at this time. This seems to contradict some of her earlier writings, though.
We cannot leave Iraq and should not leave Iraq. . . We have to stay, and we have to win. I define winning as the yielding up of, at the least, a relatively stable society unafflicted by governmental sadism and dictatorship, and, at the most, a stable society in a fledgling democracy that demonstrates, with time, that the forces of Arab moderation, tolerance and peacefulness can triumph. Such an outcome would give so much good to the world. What a brilliant beacon this Iraq could be, and what a setback to terrorists, who thrive in darkness.

I do not feel America is right to attempt to help spread democracy in the world because it is our way and therefore the right way. Nor do I think America should attempt to encourage it because we are Western and feel everyone should be Western. Not everyone should be Western, and not everything we do as a culture, a people or an international force is right.

Rather, we have a national-security obligation to foster democracy in the world because democracy tends to be the most peaceful form of government. Democracies tend to be slower than dictatorships to take up arms, to cross borders and attempt to subdue neighbors, to fight wars. They are on balance less likely to wreak violence upon the world because democracies are composed of voters many of whom are parents, especially mothers, who do not wish to see their sons go to war. Democracy is not only idealistic, it is practical.[emphasis mine]
In another piece, a eulogy to President Reagan, Ms. Noonan wrote of the ideals that guided the President as he guided America.
In his presidency he did this: He out-argued communism and refused to accept its claim of moral superiority; he rallied the West, rallied America and continued to make big gambles, including a defense-spending increase in a recession. He promised he'd place Pershings in Europe if the Soviets would not agree to arms reductions, and told Soviet leaders that they'd never be able to beat us in defense, that we'd spend them into the ground. They were suddenly reasonable.

Ronald Reagan told the truth to a world made weary by lies. He believed truth was the only platform on which a better future could be built. He shocked the world when he called the Soviet Union "evil," because it was, and an "empire," because it was that, too. He never stopped bringing his message to the people of the world, to Europe and China and in the end the Soviet Union. And when it was over, the Berlin Wall had been turned into a million concrete souvenirs, and Soviet communism had fallen. But of course it didn't fall. It was pushed. By Mr. Know Nothing Cowboy Gunslinger Dimwit. All presidents should be so stupid.
Given her criticism of President Bush, one wonders if Ms. Noonan has forgotten the many "experts" who said that President Reagan was being unrealistic. In her aforementioned rebuttal, she attempted to reconcile her present view with the "overreaching" that was done by President Reagan. Her reasoning falls short as it seems to me to be an excercise in contradiction.
For a half century our country faced a terrible foe. Some feared conflagration. Many of us who did not were convinced it would not happen because the United States was not evil, and the Soviet Union was not crazy. The Soviets didn't want war to achieve their ends, they wanted to achieve those ends without the expense and gamble of war. We rolled them back, bankrupted them, forced their collapse. And we did it in part through a change of policy in which Ronald Reagan declared: From here on in we tell the truth. He called the Soviet Union an evil empire because it was a) evil and b) an empire, and c) he judged a new and stark candor the way to begin progress. We'd already kissed Brezhnev; it didn't work. And it wasn't Reagan's way in any case.

Today is quite different. The context is different. Now we are up against not an organized state monolith but dozens, hundreds and thousands of state and nonstate actors--nuts with nukes, freelance bioterrorists, Islamofascists, independent but allied terror groups. The temperature of our world is very high. We face trouble that is already here. We don't have to summon more.

Healthy alliances are a coolant in this world. What this era demands is steely resolve, and actions that remove those who want things at a full boil. In this world we must speak, yes, but softly, and carry many sticks, using them, when we must, terribly and swiftly. We must gather around us as many friends, allies and well-wishers as possible. And we must do nothing that provides our foes with ammunition with which they can accuse us of conceit, immaturity or impetuousness.
In short, while she praised Reagan for telling the truth, she believes that now, given the changed "context," we can only tell the truth so long as it doesn't make anyone "accuse us of conceit, immaturity or impetuousness"? Given the persistently negative reaction to the President seen in Europe, I think this wish is one doomed to be unfulfilled. Ms. Noonan must accept that some countries continue to cling to the belief that the world is politically multi-polar. With this mindset, they view the U.S. as the biggest pole that needs to be balanced and will take steps, such as in the UN Security Council, to limit our actions in the hope of balancing our power. Platitudes would only quell the criticism temporarily.

As Ms. Noonan's own writings, and history, have shown, the ideals expressed so effectively, and frequently, by President Reagan were key to ending communism. She is afraid that President Bush's speech calling for the extension of freedom could call more trouble down upon us. Could it call any more than Reagan did? This comes close to blaming us for the (predicted) actions of others. Additionally, she clearly exhibits an old-school, "realist" school of foreign policy stance.
Here is an unhappy fact: Certain authoritarians and tyrants whose leadership is illegitimate and unjust have functioned in history as--ugly imagery coming--garbage-can lids on their societies. They keep freedom from entering, it is true. But when they are removed, the garbage--the freelance terrorists, the grievance merchants, the ethnic nationalists--pops out all over. Yes, freedom is good and to be strived for. But cleaning up the garbage is not pretty. And it sometimes leaves the neighborhood in an even bigger mess than it had been.
Yes, just as President Reagan's actions did in Nicaragua, Grenada and El Salvador and his words inspired in the old Eastern Bloc. Regardless, Noonan forgets that the President spoke of how it would take generations of Americans to spread the freedom of which he spoke.

The comparisons between President Bush and President Reagan have been made before. One can't help but think that Ms. Noonan recognized the similarities when she wrote of our current "gunslinger":
George W. Bush has given our soldiers something to be proud of, something they can understand and respect. He is, now, after all he's been through the past two years, Mr. Backbone. He has demonstrated to a seething and skeptical world that America can and will stand and fight for a cause, see it through, help the tormented and emerge victorious.

It is important who he is. George W. Bush is an American of the big and real America. He believes in it all--in the vision of the founders, in the meaning of freedom, in the founding and enduring ideas of our country. He believes in America's historic insistence on humanity and not inhumanity in war, and he appears to have internalized the old saying that "one man with courage is a majority."

I used to wonder if George W. Bush's biography didn't suggest a kind of reverse Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was born in low circumstances and rose with superior gifts. Mr. Bush was born in superior circumstances and rose with average gifts. And yet when you look at Mr. Bush now I think you have to admit--I think even clever people who talk loudly in restaurants have to admit--that he has shown himself not to be a man of average gifts. Backbone is not an average gift. Guts are not an average gift. The willingness to take pain and give pain to make progress in human life is not an average gift.

All in all these are amazing qualities in a political figure, and in a president. There's a headline for you: America appears to have a president worthy of its people.
Cobble these excerpts together and I think we can see that, in the past, Ms. Noonan appreciated it when ideals were voiced. I don't think that she has stopped believing in them, which is why I don't understand why she was so critical of the President. Is is a case of "wrong place, wrong time"? Could she believe that the Inaugural Address was the wrong forum for the President to speak of higher ideals? Should Reagan have called to tear down the wall in Berlin when he did? Wasn't that a case of asking for much more than was possible while risking the anger of both foes and allies as we took on more than the U.S. could "handle" at the time?

One thing about these excerpts does strike me, though: they were all contained within pieces written by Ms. Noonan prior to her taking a leave of absence to be a political consultant on the President's campaign. Could it be that Ms. Noonan's time in the belly of the political beast, where so much focus is put on practical and pragmatic political solutions, has inured her against the purpose of voicing the ideals of a nation? I don't know. I do know that I appreciate Ms. Noonan's political acumen and writing. I will continue to read her with pleasure, even though I think she has gotten carried away with literary deconstructionism. Remember, Ms. Noonan, most Americans aren't literary critics. Instead, they want to believe that their country is a force for good in the world. The President reminded us that it is by using soaring rhetoric that spoke to the higher ideals of a nation. To paraphrase something that I previously wrote: The President made this speech to present the case for a cause, extending freedom, that is greater than the protection of our own nation's self-interest. At the same time, he showed that our nation's self-interest depended on pursuing that higher cause.


Technology: Vehicle of Liberty

Marc Comtois
Austin Bay has offered perhaps the most pragmatic reason for heeding the President's call to spread freedom. Bay writes :
Idealism, however, isn't the sole spine of "the democracy strategy." The strategy seeks to address a very concrete issue: technological compression. Technological compression is a fact of 21st century existence -- and it is the superglue now bonding American foreign policy idealism (promoting democracy) and foreign policy pragmatism (survival via realpolitik).

An article of mine in The Weekly Standard's Jan. 3, 2005, issue frames it this way: "Technology has compressed the planet, with positive effects in communication, trade and transportation; with horrifyingly negative effects in weaponry. Decades ago, radio, phone cables on the seabed, long-range aircraft and then nuclear weapons shrunk the oceans. Sept. 11 demonstrated that religious killers could turn domestic jumbo jets into strategic bombers -- and the oceans were no obstacles. 'Technological compression' is a fact; it cannot be reversed. To deny it or ignore it has deadly consequences."

Translation: There is no "over there." Everybody lives next door. All local gossip can become international rumor in an instant. With weapons of mass destruction in the mix -- particularly if biological or nuclear weapons are employed -- a tribal war in Saudi Arabia or a border firefight in Asia can rapidly escalate to global disaster. . .

Sept. 11 demonstrated that we cannot tolerate the wicked linkage of terrorists, rogue states and weapons of mass destruction. Terrorists plus rogue states plus weapons of mass destruction: That's the formula for hell in the 21st century. Rogue states are inevitably undemocratic, authoritarian states -- typically secular or religious tyrannies.

Given modern technology and the role tyrannical states play in facilitating or exporting terror, a democratic offensive against tyranny is realpolitik. The explicit American goal is to advance free states where the consent of the governed creates legitimacy and where terrorists are prosecuted, not promoted. (via Instapundit)

January 24, 2005


Commentary as Job Interview

Justin Katz

Related to Marc's posts (here and here) on Peggy Noonan's reaction to President Bush's inaugural speech, Patrick Sweeney of Extreme Catholic delves into some of the relevant theological considerations. He also makes this story-behind-the-story suggestion:

Perhaps Peggy Noonan thinks she's in the running for William Safire's job.

This is ankle-biting envy. This is offering a "Good, but I could have done better" criticism.

Too much cynicism paints the world in nasty tones, but positioning is inevitably a part of decisions, particularly among writers and particularly among opinion writers. Noonan's credibility is such that readers should doubt neither her sincerity nor perspicacity in picking up on something significant in the President's speech. Still, it must be difficult, at her level of success, to close one's mind to the benefits of dissent from the conservative Republican line.


January 23, 2005


Conservatives Against Bush's Speech II

Marc Comtois
Well, after expending so much time defending the ideals put forth in President Bush's speech, I find it a bit disheartening, though predictable, to see that some are trying to portray that the Administration may be engaged in damage control. For my part, I don't think that the President was "shifting" his policy with this speech. Rather, it seems clear that he has essentially been proclaiming an "empire for liberty" for quite some time, even if unknowingly.
Bush advisers said the speech was the rhetorical institutionalization of the Bush doctrine and reflected the president's deepest convictions about the purposes behind his foreign policies. But they said it was carefully written not to tie him to an inflexible or unrealistic application of his goal of ending tyranny.

"It has its own policy implications, but it is not to say we're not doing this already," said White House counselor Daniel J. Bartlett. "It is important to crystallize the debate to say this is what it is all about, to say what are our ideals, what are the values we cherish."

"It is not a discontinuity. It is not a right turn," said a senior administration official, who spoke with reporters from newspapers but demanded anonymity because he wanted the focus to remain on the president's words and not his. "I think it is a bit of an acceleration, a raising of the priority, making explicit in a very public way to give impetus to this effort." He added that it was a "message we have been sending" for some time.
I agree with the "senior administration official," though I do think that some nervous folks in the Administration couldn't handle criticism from the right and are trying to placate those, such as Peggy Noonan and William Buckley, who raised an eyebrow at the speech. I think it was the criticism by these pundits, rather than any from abroad, that shocked the Administration and precipitated this ill-advised spin control, if that is actually what is going on.

It is also interesting to discover that some of those whom I earlier cited as supporters of the President's vision actually may have had a hand in helping craft the speech.
The planning of Bush's second inaugural address began a few days after the Nov. 2 election with the president telling advisers he wanted a speech about "freedom" and "liberty." That led to the broadly ambitious speech that has ignited a vigorous debate. The process included consultation with a number of outside experts, Kristol among them.

One meeting, arranged by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, included military historian Victor Davis Hanson, columnist Charles Krauthammer and Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, according to one Republican close to the White House. White House senior adviser Karl Rove attended, according to one source, but mostly listened to what became a lively exchange over U.S. policy and the fight for liberty.

Gaddis caught the attention of White House officials with an article in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs magazine that seems to belie the popular perception that this White House does not consult its critics.

Gaddis's article is, at times, strongly critical of Bush's first-term foreign policy calculations, especially what he calls the twin failures to anticipate international resistance to Bush's ideas and Iraqi resistance to peace after the fall of Baghdad. But the article also raises the possibility that Bush's grand vision of spreading democracy could prove successful, and perhaps historic, if the right choices are made in the years ahead.

The former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky also helped shape the speech with his book about the hopes of democratic dissidents jailed by despots around the world. Bush recommended the book, "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror," to several aides and invited Sharansky, now an Israeli politician, to the White House in mid-November to discuss it, according to one official.
I guess that explains why people such as Hanson and Kristol voiced their support. It doesn't change my thinking on it, though. Yes, I have an idealistic streak, but it is informed by my sense of history and a belief that, by taking the long view, we can accomplish that outlined in the speech. Some have pointed out that similar ideals were explained by President Reagan. It doesn't have to be done via military action, and it doesn't have to be accomplished in 10 years. Rather, it is a policy worth following because in the age of terrorism, it is best for the United States to "clear the swamps." The byproduct will be freedom in much of the rest of the world. This freedom will be generated by the internal pressure applied by the oppressed and suppressed who will take their cue from the example set by the U.S. In some instances the U.S. will take more direct action, in others less. In all cases, it is our example that will lead the way. Never mind what the intellectuals or politicians say, pay attention to what the people say. They don't carry the cynicism of so many of the "elite." They aren't afraid to hope.

January 21, 2005


Conservatives Against Bush's Speech

Marc Comtois
PROEM: Before proceeding, you really should read President Bush's Inaugural Address. I originally posted the first part of this post (in slightly different form) here, but, well, there's more traffic here at Anchor Rising!

Peggy Noonan thought the President's Inaugural Address did not have the right tone.
The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush's second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars.
There were two particular points on which she seemed to fault the President's speech. First, she didn't fully agree with the theory of history he outlined.
[T]he administration sees history as dynamic and changeable, not static and impervious to redirection or improvement. That is the Bush administration way, and it happens to be realistic: History is dynamic and changeable. On the other hand, some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government.
I believe she allowed her more realist-conservative side to govern her analysis, as evidenced by her above comment that "some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government." Yes, that is so. But that shouldn't stop us from attempting to change or help where we can. To the President, the spread of freedom is the best method to do just that, whether it sounds too idealistic or not. This leads to the second problem Ms. Noonan seemed to have.

I think what was was particularly troubling to her stemmed from her own belief, as expressed repeatedly in the column, that the President was proposing to make Earth like Heaven.
This world is not heaven. . .

The president's speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. . .

It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission. . .

. . . Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it's earth.
I think she was being oversensitive to the religious imagery that the President wove throughout the speech as he attempted to explain his ideology of freedom. While she has the (correct) notion that Earth is not and cannot be Heaven, I think she is misreading the President's intentions. I don't think he wants liberty to spread so that we can make Heaven on Earth. I will grant Ms. Noonan that there is something of the missionary in the President's speech. As such, perhaps his larger goal is to extend liberty and freedom to all men so that they can worry less about their worldly problems and begin thinking more about what comes After. When men don't have to worry about food, shelter, or being killed, they can turn their minds from the physical to the metaphysical, in whatever form it may take.

Ms. Noonan also commented that, "The speech did not deal with specifics--9/11, terrorism, particular alliances, Iraq. It was, instead, assertively abstract." To me, such things are best left to the upcoming State of the Union speech. The world doesn't watch State of the Union speeches. (Heck, few Americans watch them!), so the President chose to express his ideals in a forum in which he knew the world would be watching. Thus, I'd venture he's saving more specific proposals for the State of the Union Address.

Finally, Ms. Noonan thinks that the speech, especially the ending --"Renewed in our strength--tested, but not weary--we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom."--, was "over the top." She chalks this up to a White House suffering from "mission inebriation." Further, she "wonders if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded" and offers that "[t]he most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not." Again, I disagree with Ms. Noonan's premise that the President proposed that, through universal liberty, we can make Heaven on Earth.

Overall, she seemed a bit deaf to what the average person heard in the President's speech. Why? Perhaps she has heard, and written, too many speeches herself and can't help but apply a professional's critical ear and eye to them. Perhaps she has been too long in the New York/Washington corridor among the other wonks and has become too surrounded by the clarion call of "NUANCE!!" to resist applying the standard herself. Whatever the reason, I just think she got this one wrong. Doesn't mean I'll stop reading her though.

We must remember that one of the special qualities of men is that we aspire to tasks that many believe are impossible. Yet, we all need a reason to take on these tasks and usually our motivation is tied to self-interest. It takes inspiration to motivate us to look beyond our own desires to attempt something for a higher cause. Yesterday, President Bush attempted to provide that inspiration. He reminded that there are few more noble causes than extending our hands to other men, half a world away, so that they can experience freedom of both body and soul.

UPDATE: It seems William F. Buckley has also cast a slightly disapproving eye at the President's speech, mostly based on its linguistic style. Well, at the risk of quibbling with another brilliant mind, I'd have to say that few regular folk can approach Mr. Buckley's ability to analyze the linguistic and epistemological inconsistencies of a speech. Few would even think to try. Here's a taste of Mr. Buckley's weighty analysis:
Mr. Bush said that whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny. You can simmer in resentment, but not in tyranny. He said that every man and woman on this earth has matchless value. What does that mean? His most solemn duty as President, he said, was to protect America from emerging threats. Did he mean, guard against emerging threats? He told the world that there can be no human rights without human liberty. But that isnt true. The acknowledgment of human rights leads to the realization of human liberty. The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them. What is a habit of control?
Yikes. Great stuff for us pointy-head types, but again, I don't think the Average Joe would even attempt to subject the President's speech to a microscope with the resolution of Mr. Buckley's. To employ an analogy: Mr. Buckley is at MIT, most of us are in Jr. High Science class.

I guess I can take some comfort from the fact that Ken Masugi at Claremont seems to approve of the speech. Masugi notes that the tones were more Lincolnian than Wilsonian and calls on Harry Jaffa to bolster his case.

Finally, James Taranto takes exception with those who think the President' s speech was too idealistic (see above).
[T]hose who fault Bush for an excess of idealism, or an insufficiency of realism, are not grappling with the conceptual breakthrough of his speech, which is to declare the idealism-realism dichotomy a false choice. A key passage:
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
The lesson Bush drew from Sept. 11 is that "realism" is unrealistic--that the "stability" that results from an accommodation with tyranny is illusory. To Bush, there is no fundamental conflict between American ideals and American interests; by promoting the former, we secure the latter. Maybe he'll turn out to be wrong, but for now the burden ought to be on those who, in the wake of Sept. 11, hold to a pre-9/11 view of what is "realistic."

Noonan is right that "ending tyranny in the world" is a fantastically ambitious aspiration, one that isn't going to be realized anytime soon. But Bush didn't promise to do it in the next four years or even in our lifetimes. He said it was "the ultimate goal" and "the concentrated work of generations."
The President made this speech to present the case for a cause greater than protection our own self-interest. At the same time, he showed that our self-interest depended on pursuing that higher cause.

UPDATE II: I forgot to mention that Victor Hanson also approved of the President's tone. I would also hazard that, given his most recent article, that Norman Podhoretz does too, but that is only speculation. Finally, it also looks like some of the folks at the Weekly Standard, particularly William Kristol and Joseph Bottum, also believe the President's speech was historic. (Granted, David Gelernter gives in to the "darkness" of linguistic analysis, but he quibbles over the words while he agrees with the meaning behind them).

This will be it for updating this post. If necessary, I will compile a new post to sum up any further arguments over the speech as they come to light. I expect such will be the case.


Thoughts on the President's "Big Idea"

Marc Comtois
For anyone interested, I've posted some thoughts on the President's Innaugural Address at The Ocean State Blogger.

January 19, 2005


Respectful Competition: A Basic Requirement for a Healthy Democracy

Donald B. Hawthorne

A previous posting highlighted how the coarsening of our public debate in America has resulted from the use of extreme language that only seeks to intimidate, not to persuade.

Subsequently, there was the usual talk after the election about how the conservative winners should "moderate" their views, a code word suggesting that capitulating on key principles to liberals who lost the election was the only proper course of action. What a bunch of silly nonsense!

Politics, like business, is a competitive, contact sport. No one in their right mind believes that businesses become successful by not seeking a competitive advantage. Nor does anyone in their right mind believe that businesses become successful by appealing only to the most narrow customer base. Finally, no sensible person believes that corporate monopolies have any incentive to maintain the highest level of excellence that is a natural result of living in a competitive world.

Why should the competition for the best political principles and public policy initiatives be any different?

The losers in the 2004 election did not articulate a viable, competitive alternative vision for where America should go in the future. The best thing that could happen to our country right now would be for them to stop calling people names and start thinking outside the box. After doing that, they should come back into the public debate with innovative thinking that offers a truly competitive alternative to the winners of 2004.

Two current examples drive home what happens when there is a lack of competition in the political arena: Rhode Island politics and the spending habits of the U.S. Congress. The Rhode Island legislature is 85% Democrat, which means the minority party cannot, by itself, stop legislation. That means the majority party has no need to build a majority coalition outside its own ranks and no need to build a broader consensus. The citizens of Rhode Island are worse off because the lopsided majority means there is no competition for the best policy ideas and no way to stop officials from acting against the best interests of the citizens whom they were elected to serve. There would be the same problem if the state legislature was 85% controlled by Republicans; the pork-laden excessive spending by the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress reinforces that conclusion.

To sum it all up, I offer you a quote from William Voegeli, who wrote:

The inevitable post-election blather about unity fails to make the crucial distinction. A healthy democracy does not require blurring political differences. But it must find a way to express those differences forcefully without anathematizing people who hold different views.

ADDENDUM:

Michael Barone wrote an interesting commentary on March 14, 2005 in which he suggests that the Democrats are out of gas. If true, there is a vacuum waiting to be filled by some new, creative leaders.


January 18, 2005


Labels as a First Step Toward Finding Deeper Meaning

I received the December 2004 issue of The Proposition, a publication of the Claremont Institute. As a graduate of Harvey Mudd College, one of the Claremont Colleges, who also satisfied the requirements for a political science major at Claremont McKenna College, I found one of the quotes in the issue to be an interesting perspective on a world that simply adores putting labels on most everything:

The idea that government should be limited in its powers and that we should be a moral, self-governing people was commonsense wisdom for America's Founders, and it remains so for Americans who love freedom and constitutional government. The problem today is that many people simply don't understand these principles. From liberal intellectual elites, to most of the media, to those government "experts" who exert increasing control over our lives, the most influential people and institutions are trying to turn America into something other than the free country it has always been.

In conservative politics these days there is much talk of "Neo-Conservatives" and "Paleo-Conservatives" and "Libertarians." Because of our 25 years of hard work...there is talk now of what it means to be a "Claremont Conservative." When asked what this means, we explain that a Claremont Conservative is someone who believes in the principles of the Declaration of Independence - that all men are created equal, and that government exists to defend our natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A Claremont Conservative agrees with Alexander Hamilton that citizens are capable of governing themselves through "reflection and choice," and that we do not need bureaucratic experts telling us how to raise our children or run our businesses. A Claremont Conservative thinks the opinions of American citizens are as important, if not more, than the opinions of bureaucrats.

You can see the various projects of the Claremont Institute at their website and discover several of my personal favorites: "A User's Guide to the Declaration of Independence" website, the "Rediscovering George Washington" website, and the "Vindicating the Founders" website.

America would benefit greatly if all citizens developed a deeper understanding of the principles on which the founding of our great nation was built. Happy reading!

ADDENDUM:

There is a wonderful posting at Power Line about the Claremont Institute and the Claremont Review of Books. I also heartily endorse Marc's comments about the latter publication; it is a must read for anyone serious about politics.


January 6, 2005


Re: Chafee and McKay Oppose Electoral College

Justin Katz

The Linc Chafee quotation in Marc's post illustrates why Chafee's so infuriating. Not only does he stand apart from his party, but he does so for reasons that are either deceptive or, if principled, just plain foolish. (Personally, I think it's the latter.)

By population, Rhode Island is 0.37% of the national total. By electoral college votes, Rhode Island is 0.74% of the national total. In a surface-level analysis, therefore, abolishing the college would halve Rhode Island's electoral importance. But it's worse than that.

Flattening the complexities of voter turnout, in an extremely close two-party race, the candidate who won a bare majority of the Rhode Island vote would claim about 0.37% of the minimum necessary to win the national popular vote. With the current system, on the other hand, that candidate gains 1.48% of the national minimum. In this scenario, Chafee's suggestion would quarter Rhode Island's importance.

The reason presidential candidates don't "make an investment in Rhode Island" is their confidence that the state's citizens will either vote for them (Democrats) or not (Republicans), by wide margins. Chafee, rather than hammering that point, is lamenting the fact that each state gets only one vote in the House in the event of an electoral college tie. In that case, Rhode Island would count for 2% of the total and about 4% of the minimum to win.

The conspiratorially minded among us might have reason to wonder whether Chafee isn't in truth an extreme Republican partisan working beguilingly to limit the influence of New England liberals.



Chafee and McKay Oppose Electoral College

Marc Comtois
Senator Lincoln Chafee has decided to join California Sen. Diane Feinstein in calling for the abolishment of the Electoral College.
"Under the current system, the only states that get any candidate visits are the battleground states," said Chafee. "As a Rhode Islander . . . I'd like to see the presidential candidates make an investment in Rhode Island. The last election came down to just Ohio and Florida."

What is more, Chafee said, is that a tie in the Electoral College in a presidential election would push the decision into the House of Representatives, where each state would get one vote. That, Chafee said, would not be a representative system.
Apparently, the journalist who penned the piece also opposes the Electoral College. I assume this from the immediately detectable amount of editorialization in Scott McKay's "news" story. In describing how the Electoral College was formulated, McKay wrote
It is an irony of the 21st century that presidential elections in an era of the Internet and international jet travel are decided by the Electoral College, a system established by men -- no women were allowed to vote -- who communicated by quill pen and horseback mail and traveled by clipper ship.

The system was erected by the men who founded the United States in 1789 because they did not trust average citizens. Voting was restricted to white males who owned property. And they only allowed those voters to select one segment of the U.S. government -- the federal House of Representatives.

U.S. senators were chosen by legislatures until 1913, when popular election of senators was established. The founders established the Electoral College -- which in those days was made up of community and political leaders -- to pick the president.
As one familiar with the debate, and perhaps I'll post substantively on that in the future, it is easy for me to detect the anti-Electoral College "talking points" within McKay's prose. The allusion to modern items like the internet and jetplanes provided to accentuate the implied archaic nature of the Electoral College; the true but gratuitous line that "the Electoral College, a system established by men -- no women were allowed to vote"; that it was "erected" because the Founders didn't "trust" the average citizen, which is true but leaves a lot of the context out; and the tiresome recitation of how only white male property owners voted and how this small and exclusive group chose the President.

Now, perhaps McKay intended to convey that it was Chafee and Feinstein's argument that he was presenting. If so, he did a poor job of making that point clear. However, that he started a paragraph with the declarative "It is an irony that..." indicates to me that Mr. McKay has taken it upon himself to editorialize against the Electoral College within a news story. As such, I would urge him to confine his personal sentiments to the editorial pages where they belong.

December 26, 2004


The Meaning of "Tolerance"

Each of two recent articles on the troubles in the Netherlands contained interesting quotes on the long-term impact of multiculturism. There is a warning for America in these words as they highlight the ongoing confusion over the meaning of "tolerance."

A quote in the first article said:

...tolerance became a pretext for not addressing problems...

A quote in the second article said:

We have been so tolerant of others' culture and religion, we are losing our own...Europe is losing itself...One day we will wake up, and it will be too late...

I looked up the definition of the word "tolerance" and it said:

sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own...the allowable deviation from a standard...

The definition of tolerance clearly states there are pre-existing standards, without which the very concept of tolerance has no significance. But multiculturism has led us into a world of relativism where there are no standards. And that means there is no way to define allowable deviations.

In a free and democratic society, we owe it to ourselves to openly debate what will be the appropriate standards and the allowable deviations from them that we will tolerate in our American society.

I hope we can conduct that debate in a context that keeps sight of the standards given to us through our Founding in the Declaration of Independence, the lessons learned over the entire history of America, and the natural law principles that have guided Western Civilization for centuries.

We owe it to our children and the future of America not to let the relativism of multiculturism result in any further dumbing down of our society based on the misguided thinking and ahistorical practices of the last forty years or so.

ADDENDUM:

Power Line has highlighted Mark Steyn's new comments on the "tolerance" debate with some updated stories, one of which is a tall tale. However, one of them is quite true and involves a now well-publicized story from our own state of Rhode Island, which Justin has written on here.



Our Declaration of Independence

This posting relates to a previous posting on the American Founding and also relates to Liberal Fundamentalism and The Naked Public Square Revisited, Parts I, II, and III.

Thanks to Power Line for referring to a 1926 speech by Calvin Coolidge on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If you ever have any doubt that certain apostles of liberal fundamentalism are actively attempting to rewrite our country's history, read the entire speech. In the meantime, here are some powerful excerpts:

There is something beyond the establishment of a new nation, great as that event would be, in the Declaration of Independence which has ever since caused it to be regarded as one of the great charters that not only was to liberate America but was everywhere to ennoble humanity.

It was not because it proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history...

...Three very definite propositions were set out in [the Declaration's] preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed...

While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination...

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world...

...when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live...

In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignity, the rights of man - these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in religious convictions...Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish...

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776..that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final...If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people...

In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people...The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guarantees, which even the government itself is bound not to violate. If there is any one thing among us that is established beyond question, it is self-government -- the right of the people to rule. If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because there is a failure on the part of individuals to observe them. We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction...The ultimate sanction of law rests on the righteous authority of the Almighty...

...We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all of our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it...We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed...

The speech connects to an excerpt from another Power Line posting:

Knowledge of American history holds the key to much of the current discussion of political issues, such as the ongoing liberal attack on Christian belief and on arguments premised on belief in God...Absent knowledge of American history, one would never know that the United States is founded on the basis of a creed, rather than on tribal or blood lines, in which God plays a prominent part. Absent knowledge of history generally, one would never know that this fact makes America unique.

What is the American creed?...The American creed is expressed with inspired concision in the words of the Declaration of Independence...

But does the Declaration have any legal status such that these words can be truly deemed to state the American creed? It does, although virtually no one seems to know it. In 1878 Congress enacted a revised version of the United States Code that included a new first section entitled "The Organic Laws of the United States."

The Code is Congress's official compilation of federal law; the organic laws of the United States are America's founding laws. First and foremost of the four organic laws of the United States is the Declaration of Independence...

Professor Jaffa [of the Claremont Institute] teaches us that the Declaration contains four distinct references to God: He is the author of the "laws of...God"; the "Creator" who "endowed" us with our inalienable rights; "the Supreme Judge of the world"; and "Divine Providence." Americans declared their independence, "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions."

The Declaration states the American creed, the creed that recognizes the source (Nature and Nature's God) of our rights.


December 21, 2004


Pigs at the Public Trough

Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard takes a fascinating look at the previously behind-the-scenes activities of a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. in an article entitled "A Lobbyist's Progress: Jack Abramoff and the end of the Republican Revolution."

Here is how the story begins:

In honor of the tenth anniversary of the fabled Republican Revolution--for precisely a decade has flown by since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives...let us pause...to ponder the story of Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon...

Abramoff was until recently a registered lobbyist, and Scanlon offers himself as a public affairs specialist, but more precisely they are what Republicans in Washington used to call "Beltway Bandits," profiteers who manipulate the power of big government on behalf of well-heeled people who pay them tons of money to do so. Sometime around 1995, Republicans in Washington stopped using the term "Beltway Bandits"...

After describing how tens of millions of dollars flowed to various entities affiliated with both men, will there be any real consequences?

A funny thing happens when you talk to lobbyists, especially those with Indian casino clients, about the Senate investigation of Abramoff and Scanlon. None of them will talk for the record, of course, but they are surprisingly unanimous that all this unpleasantness will soon blow over.

Ferguson then addresses the deeper and more troubling issue underlying the status quo:

Stripped of its peculiar grossness, Abramoff's Indian story really is just another story of business as usual in the world of Washington lobbying...That closed, parasitic culture of convenience --with its revolving doors, front groups, pay-offs, expense-account comfort, and ideological cover stories -- is as essential to the way Republican Washington works, then years after the Revolution, as ever it was to Democratic Washington...

I came across another quote...from a profile of Abramoff in the National Journal in 1995, soon after Abramoff had announced he would become a lobbyist, back when the Revolution was still young.

"What the Republicans need is 50 Jack Abramoff's," Norquist said. "Then this becomes a different town."

It was a bold statement, typical for the time, but even then it raised a question we now know the answer to: Would Republicans change Washington, or would it be the other way around?

I remember well that election night in November 1994 when it seemed real change might occur. Unfortunately, we have - yet again - relearned the lesson from the words of Lord Acton who taught us how power corrupts, regardless of party affiliation.

Big government means there are plenty of spoils to divide among the many powerful pigs at the public trough.

The next time your Senator or Congressman tries to impress you with the spoils he or she is bringing home to your district, take a step back and remember that the true price you are paying for any suggested benefit must also include the pro-rata cost of feeding every other pig across America who eats from the public trough.

Most importantly, what is often forgotten is that the spoils they are so eager to divide up represent a meaningful portion of the incomes of American working families and retirees - who are usually unrepresented at the table when these spoils are given away.

We must never forget that all families pay quite a price for these giveaways: It means less of their own hard-earned incomes is available to be spent on their own tangible needs, on things such as food, clothing, medical care, education, etc.

And that is why big government means less freedom for American working families and retirees.



The Naked Public Square Revisited, Part III

Donald B. Hawthorne

After pulling together the two previous postings of The Naked Public Square Revisited, Parts I & II, I returned home this weekend to find the December 27 issue of National Review with its cover article entitled "Secularism & Its Discontents." In the article, Ramesh Ponnuru offers some further insights into the debate about the public square.

Ponnuru reiterates how inappropriate name-calling has become the norm:

...most liberals, including religious ones, do find Christian conservatism dangerous in a way that makes it similar in principle, if not in virulence, to the Taliban...The idea that Christian conservatives and Islamofascists can be reasonably or fairly compared in this fashion is such a common-place that people who propound it often do not seem to think that they are saying anything provocative...

Putting things into perspective, Ponnuru notes:

My point...is to note that introducing nearly every one of these policies [of the religious Right] would merely turn the clock back to the late 1950's. That may be a very bad idea, but the America of the 1950's was not a theocracy.

America at the time of its Founding was, by contemporary standards, including contemporary conservative standards, shockingly illiberal...

At the same time, Ponnuru offers the following appropriate suggestion to religious conservatives:

To the extent that religious conservatives are jumping from policy disagreements to accusations of bigotry against some persons - and this does happen - they ought to stop. And while there is no constitutional requirement that people make political arguments in terms that can be understood by fellow citizens with different religious views, it is a reasonable request.

He then turns his attention to how liberals often twist the relationship between faith and reason in this debate:

The way liberals typically deploy the distinction between faith and reason in public-policy argument could also stand some interrogation. There are good reasons to think that it involves real unfairness to religious conservatives, or at least to their views.

Liberals tend to assume, without reflection, that the rational view of an issue is the one that most non-religious people take. The idea that a religious tradition could strengthen people's reason - could help them reach rationally sound conclusions they might not otherwise reach - rarely occurs to them...liberalism's general tendency is to identify reason with irreligion.

When you have read the likes of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, it is hard not to find this reaction just plain annoying - not to mention just plain ignorant.

Ponnuru states the core problem in a way complementary to how Neuhaus did in the previous posting:

Liberalism's hymns to reason always end up truncating reason. They are pleas for open debate designed to rule things out of debate...Let us imagine a conservative who says that abortion should be illegal because it kills human beings. His liberal friend responds that this sort of theological talk is inadmissable in a democracy because it violates the rules of open debate. We can see that this liberal has misrepresented his friend's views and shut down the discussion - all in the name of reasoned argument. Yet that conversation happens all the time in our politics, and somehow we don't see it.

If I'm right about liberalism's instinctive reflexes, then contemporary liberalism has forfeited the creed's ancient claim to promote civil peace...But if liberal secularism amounts to the unwitting imposition of the views of an irreligious minority on a religious majority, then it hardly seems likely to foster social harmony. Nor has it.

Finally, Ponnuru offers a sobering thought on what this all means during a time when Americans face a dedicated and evil external foe:

Liberalism's confusions about church and state matter more now that we are in a war with actual theocrats, murderous ones. It is one thing to fight a war for religious freedom, pluralism, and modernity. It is another to fight a war for those things as liberals understand them...

December 20, 2004


RE:Understand the UN!

Marc Comtois
I heartily recommend reading Andrew's aforementioned excellent and insightful piece, The UN: The World's Greatest Trade Association, that he wrote for Tech Central Station. Acccording to Andrew
The United Nations is the trade association for the world's executive branches -- the place where executive branches come together to promote their individual interests to one another, and to promote the expansion of executive authority in general....The trade association extends professional courtesy to its members -- its cardinal rule is not to step on the toes of another executive. Saddam Hussein violated this rule by invading Kuwait and displacing another executive. Hussein paid for this mistake; the UN stepped in to enforce discipline amongst its members.
Conversely, so long as an executive maintains power within a country the UN will stay out of the internal politics of that country. Call it a sort of professional courtesy among fellow rulers. I would add that the misunderstood concept of sovereignty lay behind the UN's non-interventionist political theory. This misconception, purposeful or not, has enabled the UN and other political entities to provide excuses for their lack of action in places like Venezuala and Zimbabwe. In the eyes of the UN, any who hold power in a region is a legitimate executive, thus sovereign, and thus a legitimate "state," subject to all the rights and priveleges of the International Community. This conflation of the concepts of executive power, whether legitimate or not, and legitimate sovereignty, has allowed the UN to call for diplomatic process, including sanctions, over substantive action.

Carlin Romano at the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an illuminating article on the concept, and misconceptions, of sovereignty. In it, he mentioned the work of Alan Cranston (1914-2000), a four-term Democratic senator from California, who wrote an essay, The Sovereignty Revolution, that began
"It is worshiped like a god, and as little understood. It is the cause of untold strife and bloodshed. Genocide is perpetrated in its sacred name. It is at once a source of power and of power's abuse, of order and of anarchy. It can be noble and it can be shameful. It is sovereignty."
In the essay, Cranston laid out various definitions of sovereignty. The best definition, the one held by most in the United States, was that sovereignty was "the right of people to determine their own destinies."

The other definition is both more cynical and less humanitarian. In short, it is the belief that sovereignty is the "absolute power of a government over its own territory and citizens." As such, sovereignty acts as "a shield against the intervention of other governments, nongovernmental organizations, and outside powers...a defense against outside intervention to stop extraordinarily unacceptable behavior by a government against its people..." Romano also cited the work of Dan Philpott, a Notre Dame political scientist who wrote that many believe "that simple presence within a geographical area presumptively places someone under a particular sovereignty." This seems to be the definition to which the United Nation ascribes.

To combine the two explantions (Andrew's and Romano's), the UN has conflated strong executive power with the idea of sovereignty. As such, according to the UN, any strong executive automatically holds sovereign power, which implies that said ruler wields such power legitimately. As such, so long as Saddam Hussein or Robert Mugabe commit murder within their sovereign borders, the UN is unable, conveniently, to do anything for fear of violating the sovereignty of a nation. As a result, the UN imposes toothless sanctions that it eventually subverts, to the monetary benefit of its member states. Of this, the UN Oil-for-Food program is the best example.


Independently Moderate

Marc Comtois
In a story by Howard Fineman, Mitch McConnell casts the current political "divisiveness" in its proper historical context:
"It's naive to assume there would be one collection of views widely held by everyone," he said. "I'm amazed at all this hand-wringing over the level of discourse and partisanship. It leads me to believe nobody has read any history. The level of divisiveness now is really quite mild when it's compared with numerous periods in our history."
Indeed, our history is replete with political brawls that would appear unseemly to those with more milder political sensibilities. The accusation Thomas Jefferson had a liaison with a slave was first brought up during his presidential campaign. Andrew Jackson was accused of bigamy because his wife had never technically divorced from her first husband before marrying Ol' Hickory. Of course, the greatest period of political divisiveness was the period leading up to the Civil War. How soon we forget. However, according to Democrat Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson, "It may not actually be worse but TV can make it feel worse." He has a point.

In this instantaneous mass media age, most any story can be picked up by television, radio or the internet and spread worldwide within a matter of minutes. As such, upon first hearing an initial report of some event, it is human nature to take a position on that event, usually based upon an ideological worldview. It is also human nature that, once we have formed an opinion, we change our minds only when the evidence arrayed against our original position is well nigh overwhelming. We Americans like to stick to our guns. As such, our unprecedented near-instantaneous access to mountains of information has increased and amplified the ideological polarization in our country. However, despite the heated rhetoric generated by those on the poles, there is a mass of people, the majority in fact, who are in the political "cool middle" and are not caught up in the ideology wars. They are the self-described "moderates," voters who ostensibly desire nothing more than "bipartisanship." They are the same people who claim to be political "independents" often stating, not disingenuously, that they "like to look at both sides and make up their own mind." If this is indeed so, it is incumbent upon the ideologues, positively defined, to plea their cases to this mass of undecideds every election cycle.

In the 2004 Presidential election, Rhode Island voters who described themselves as political "independents" accounted for 26% of the vote, and split 48/49 for Bush/Kerry. (source). (Registered Republicans and Democrats were evenly divided at 37% and split 93/6 and 11/89, respectively for Bush/Kerry). This would seem to indicate that neither Republican nor Democrats were able to persuade a statistically significant majority of Independents. However, more useful statistics are found in the ideological breakdown of the Rhode Island electorate (source). In Democrat-dominated Rhode Island, only 21% of voters identify themselves as Liberal, while 34% identify themselves as Conservative. (It is safe to assume that mose Liberals are Democrats and most Conservatives are Republicans, though I'm sure there is some party/ideology cross-pollinization). Putting these two polar groups aside, leaves the largest voting group in Rhode Island, those who call themselves "Moderate." In Rhode Island, they comprise 45% of the electorate and broke 54/45 for Kerry.

Generally speaking, it is accepted that a moderate is liberal on social issues, conservative on fiscal, and all over the map on international issues, though they usually are enamored with the hazy concept of "diplomacy" (witness our own Senator Lincoln Chafee). It is also a safe assumption that most moderates are also those who most often call for bipartisanship. According to Senator McConnell, now that Republicans dominate Washington, the definition of bipartisanship is about to change:
For decades... "bipartisan" meant only a "center-left" coalition of Democrats and a smattering of Republicans. "The key now...will be whether there are a group of Democrats willing to join with most Republicans in a coalition of the center-right."
In Rhode Island, we have Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee, who is properly viewed by his Republican counterparts as essentially a moderate Democrat. In this, I suspect Senator Chafee reflects the ideological make-up of his own constituency: Moderates who can be described as "center-left." For most, Senator Chafee and his late father John Chafee are probably the only Republicans for whom they've ever voted. As such, I don't foresee such a change as predicted by McConnell in Rhode Island. Indeed, the field of Rhode Island moderates may not be the most fertile for planting conservative ideas. I do believe that there are moderates who are really conservatives, they just don't think of themselves as such. It is much more pleasant to view oneself as a "moderate" person, after all.

In reality, many, if not most, Rhode Island Democrats and Independents are traditional FDR/JFK Democrats who simply can't bring themselves to vote Republican. Unfortunately, this means they vote in a way disconnected from their own beliefs, as they assign their traditional Democrat ideals onto today's Democrats who are far more liberal than they. We few conservatives in Rhode Island are trying to convince the average Rhode Islander that their traditional beliefs are, for the most part, not reflective of those held by the 21st century Democrat party. It is a difficult task, especially when they still believe the notion that Republicans, and conservatives by extension, are intolerant, beholden to the wealthy, and don't care about "the little guy." Despite this pre-existing condition, however, there is evidence that conservative arguments may be taking hold.

According to the same exit polls cited above, as a percent of the electorate, those describing themselves as Conservatives rose 3% from the Presidential election of 2000, and those describing themselves as Moderate rose 1%. Self-described Liberals remained unchanged. My guess is that the 1% rise in Moderates is directly attributable to Liberals re-defining themselves as Moderates. As for the 3% rise in Conservatives, perhaps minds are being changed. It could be that the Independent Man atop our State House, to whom so many Rhode Islanders point a representative of their own views, may be glancing to his right. Perhaps, just perhaps, he sees the Anchor beginning to Rise on the Rhode Island ship of state. Perhaps there is "Hope" after all.

December 18, 2004


The Naked Public Square Revisited, Part II

This posting is the second part of a discussion that began with an earlier posting and is related to two previous postings about liberal fundamentalism and the American Founding.

Richard John Neuhaus wrote a book entitled The Naked Public Square: Religion & Democracy in America. First published in 1984, it addressed societal trends and the philosophical issues underlying the religion/democracy debate in America. Here are some excerpts where he describes the problem:

Politics and religion are different enterprises...But they are constantly coupling and getting quite mixed up with one another. There is nothing new about this. What is relatively new is the naked public square. The naked public square is the result of political doctrine and practice that would exclude religion and religiously grounded values from the conduct of public business...

When religion in any traditional or recognizable form is excluded from the public square, it does not mean that the public square is in fact naked...

The truly naked public square is at best a transitional phenomenon. It is a vacuum begging to be filled. When the democratically affirmed institutions that generate and transmit values are excluded, the vacuum will be filled by the agent left in control of the public square, the state. In this manner, a perverse notion of the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church...

Our problems, then, stem in large part from the philosophical and legal effort to isolate and exclude the religious dimension of culture...only the state can..."lay claim to compulsive authority."...of all the institutions in societies, only religion can invoke against the state a transcendent authority and have its invocation seconded by "the people" to whom a democratic state is presumably accountable. For the state to be secured from such challenge, religion must be redefined as a private, emphatically not public, phenomenon. In addition, because truly value-less existence is impossible for persons or societies, the state must displace religion as the generator and bearer of values...

[T]he notion of the secular state can become the prelude to totalitarianism. That is, once religion is reduced to nothing more than privatized conscience, the public square has only two actors in it - the state and the individual. Religion as a mediating structure...is no longer available as a countervailing force to the ambitions of the state...

If law and polity are divorced from moral judgment...all things are permitted and...all things will be done...When in our public life no legal prohibition can be articulated with the force of transcendent authority, then there are no rules rooted in ultimacies that can protect the poor, the powerless and the marginal...

Politics is an inescapably moral enterprise. Those who participate in it are...moral actors. The word "moral" here...means only that the questions engaged [in politics] are questions that have to do with what is right or wrong, good or evil. Whatever moral dignity politics may possess depends upon its being a process of contention and compromise among moral actors, not simply a process of accomodation among individuals in pursuit of their interests. The conflict in American public life today, then, is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of moralities in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate...

The founding fathers of the American experiment declared certain truths to be self-evident and moved on from that premise. It is a measure of our decline into what may be the new dark ages that today we are compelled to produce evidence for the self-evident.

It is sobering to consider how rapid the decline in America has been, happening during our lifetime. For example, contrast today's status quo with this 1952 opinion by William O. Douglas who, as a not particularly religious man, wrote the following in a U.S. Supreme Court case entitled Zorach v. Clauson:

We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. We guarantee the freedom to worship as one chooses. We make room for a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem necessary. We sponsor an attitude on the part of government that shows no partiality to any one group and lets each flourish according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma. When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows in the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accomodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.

Finally, here are some additional thoughts from Neuhaus where he offers some guidance on how to understand and fix the problem:

One enters the public square, then, not as an anonymous citizen but as a person shaped by "other sources" that are neither defined by nor subservient to the public square. The public square is not a secular and morally sterilized space but a space for conversation, contention, and compromise among moral actors...compromise is an exercise of moral responsibility by persons who accept responsibility for sustaining the exercise that is called democracy...

One enters the democratic arena, then, as a moral actor. This must be insisted upon against those who view compromise as the antithesis of moral behavior. It must also be insisted upon against those who claim that moral judgment must be set aside before entering the public square...In this [latter] view, the assertion that a moral claim is an intrusion...an "imposition" upon a presumably value-free process. Morally serious people, however, cannot divide themselves so neatly...We do not have here an instance of moral judgment versus value-free secular reason. We have rather an instance of moralities in conflict. The notion of moralities in conflict is utterly essential to remedying the problems posed by the naked public square. Those who want to bring religiously based value to bear in public discourse have an obligation to "translate" those values into terms that are as accessible as possible to those who do not share the same religious grounding. They also have the obligation, however, to expose the myth of value-neutrality...

Neuhaus is now a Roman Catholic priest, a man known for publicly stating his deeply held religious beliefs. Yet, it is instructive to note how, through the use of reason that reaches out to all Americans, he carefully describes the issues we face here. In that way, he is being true to the principles of our Founding.

Americans who believe in liberty and self-government need to take responsibility for changing the course of our country's debate on this important issue. We need to approach this issue with greater clarity.

As we prepare for another new year, it is a worthy endeavor to contemplate how each of us can make our own individual contribution in 2005 to helping the land we love.


December 17, 2004


The Naked Public Square Revisited, Part I

This Christmas holiday season has reignited the public debate about the proper roles for church and state.

Why are so many Americans upset about what is going on? Consider the following:

Christmas has been sanitized in schools and public squares, in malls and parades...

"Those who think that the censoring of Christmas is a blue-state phenomenon need to consider what happened today in the Wichita [Kansas] Eagle," said William Donahue of the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

The Kansas newspaper ran a correction, he said, for mistakenly referring to a "Christmas Tree" rather than a "Community Tree" at the Wichita Winterfest celebration.

"It's time practicing Christians demanded to know from these speech-code fascists precisely who it is they think they are protecting [by] dropping the dreaded 'C-word'," Mr. Donahue said yesterday...

"People are tired of efforts to sanitize religious expression. This policy against even instrumental Christmas music in schools violates common sense and is neither necessary nor constitutional," Mr. Scott [of the Alliance Defense Fund] added...

Denver, for example, refused to allow a Christian church float in the city's holiday parade, because "direct religious themes" were not allowed. Homosexual American Indians, Chinese lion dancers and German folk dancers, however, were welcome...

School districts in Florida and New Jersey have banned Christmas carols altogether, and an "all-inclusive" holiday song program at a Chicago-area elementary school included Jewish and Jamaican songs, but no Christmas carols.

Meanwhile, a Kirkland, Wash., high-school principal nixed a production of "A Christmas Carol" because of Tiny Tim's prayer, "God bless us everyone," while neighboring libraries banned Christmas trees...

"Our Founding Fathers didn't intend to take religion out of the state. They took state out of religion," [said] Jim Finnegan.

We have seen similar issues arise in Cranston.

Unfortunately, however, the problem is much deeper and not limited to the Christmas season. As an article entitled "Declaration of Independence Banned" noted:

In the city of Cupertino, California, a fifth grade public school teacher at Stevens Creek School, Stephen Williams, has been prohibited by the principal from distributing the Declaration of Independence among other documents from the American Founding. Why? Because they mention God.

Things have truly gotten out of hand when American children are forbidden from reading our own Declaration of Independence. And, it shows how far certain people will go to enforce the new religion of secular intolerance. (See the Liberal Fundamentalism, Revisited posting for additional perspective on this intolerance.)

The same author continued:

Carried to its logical conclusion, the position staked out by modern courts would prevent not only any mention of God in the classroom, but would render teaching the natural rights principles of constitutional government unconstitutional...

...there is a concerted effort to drive God out of our schools and out of our public square...to remove constitutional limitations on government power, and, at the same time, replace moral, free, self-sufficient citizens with needy, subservient citizens dependent on government. Removing God from the American mind advances both goals.

Understanding that sound government and a free, moral society rest upon a belief in the "laws of nature and of nature's God," California passed a law in 1997 requiring public schools to teach the Declaration of Independence and other documents from the Founding period...

As my friend, John Eastman, said in the same article:

"Unfortunately, our courts have abandoned the original meaning of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, and what we are witnessing today is the logical consequence of a half-century of misguided jurisprudence."

This view of the world has serious implications for the American principle of self-government. Here are some further thoughts from an article entitled "Belief in God Underlies Self Government":

America's founders devised the world's most excellent constitution, but they never imagined that their handiwork would survive without the proper understanding of its foundations and purposes

The ultimate cause of our political order, and the reason for its existence, is set forth with surpassing eloquence in the Declaration's Preamble:

"We hold these truths to be self evident-that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

This is the most revolutionary political doctrine in the history of the world...

But the radical nature of the Declaration consists not only in its revolutionary character but in its reliance on the authority of a divine Creator. The Declaration teaches that the authority of the people is prior to government, but that the rights of the people are the gift of God. Neither man nor government is the author of liberty. That honor belongs only to God...

It is true that America's founders were scrupulously neutral between the numerous religious sects that existed in their time. But it is not true that they were hostile to the God worshipped by all of them...

What is especially sinister about the relentless campaign to remove all public references to God is that it calls the nation's foundations needlessly into question. If there is no God, then there is no human freedom and there is no government by consent of the governed...

Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia,

"[C]an the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?"

I will post shortly some excerpts from a powerful book which directly tackles this important issue of religion and democracy in America.


December 14, 2004


Liberal Fundamentalism, Revisited

Consider these quotes about the recently concluded election:

"Election results reflect a decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry...Ignorance and blood lust have a long tradition...especially in red states...They know no boundaries or rules. [Bush and Cheney] are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant." Jane Smiley

"I am saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country - the heartland." Article

"Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity?" Garry Wills

"...used that religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad..." Thomas Friedman

"W's presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We're entering another dark ages...a scary, paranoid, regressive reality." Maureen Dowd

These are just some examples of the heated and frequently over-the-top rhetoric by the left.

That ugliness and resulting polarization led me to dig out one of the most powerful editorials I have read in my adult life and it speaks directly to the so-called Red versus Blue state phenomenon. Here are some excerpts:

We have been following the extensive theological commentary in the press on the subject of politics and religion in the current presidential campaign. It might not otherwise have occurred to us that so many editorialists and columnists harbored so many deep, pent-up opinions on religious worship, voluntary school prayer or Christian fundamentalism.

What we have been looking for but have so far missed in this great awakening of religious writing is a short sermon on the subject of liberal fundamentalism...we would like to offer a few thoughts on what has been far and away the most messianic religion in America the past two decades - liberal politics.

American liberalism has traditionally derived much of its energy from a volatile mixture of emotion and moral superiority. The liberal belief that one's policies would on balance accomplish something indisputably good generally made opposing arguments about shortcomings, costs or unintended consequences unpersuasive...

In retrospect, it's clear that the moral clarity of the early civil-rights movement was a political epiphany for many white liberals...many active liberals carried along their newly found moral certitude and quasi-religious fervor into nearly every major public policy issue that has come along in the past 15 years. The result has been liberal fundamentalism.

...Not surprisingly, this evangelical liberalism produced a response. Conservative groups - both secular and religious - were created, and they quite obviously made the political success of their adversaries more difficult. Liberals don't like that. So now, suddenly, we find all these politicians and columnists who are afraid someone might want to impose a particular point of view on them...

If some liberals are now afraid that certain Christian fundamentalists will reintroduce new forms of intolerance and excessive religious zeal into American political life, perhaps we should concede the possibility that they know what they're talking about. But they might also meditate on the current election and why there has been an apparent rightward shift in political sentiment in the U.S. It could be that a great many voters have taken a good look at the fundamentalists on the religious right and the fundamentalists on the political left and made up their minds about which poses the greater threat to their own private and public values.

Interesting perspective, isnt it? Doesnt it strike you as if the editorial was written on November 3, 2004, the day after the election? But, no, it wasnt written last month or even this year. Rather, the Wall Street Journal published that editorial entitled "Liberal Fundamentalism" on September 13, 1984.

Unfortunately, liberal fundamentalism continues to actively strip naked the traditional public square and replace it with a secular absolutism. Another editorial discussed recent actions against the Boy Scouts and Catholic Charities by noting:

What's going on here is an effort by liberal activists and their judiciary enablers to turn one set of personal mores into a public orthodoxy from which there can be no dissent, even if that means trampling the First Amendment. Any voluntary association that doesn't comply - the same little platoons once considered the bedrock of American freedom - will be driven from the public square. Meet the new face of intolerance.

This ideological intolerance is not the historical face of America. It does not reflect the principles of the Declaration of Independence. And it is not the practices of most Americans today, including many principled liberals and conservatives.

But still the question remains: Where will we go from here as a country? No one should doubt that this is a battle for the future of our country and it requires active engagement by all of us. History from recent decades shows that the apostles of liberal fundamentalism are unrelenting in their self-righteousness and intolerance of any opposing world view. We are fighting what Thomas Sowell has labeled the "vision of the [self-] anointed."

As we do battle with this determined foe, I would offer you three quotes for reflection and encouragement.

The first quote reminds us of the natural law principles articulated by our Founders and why that leads to a crucial belief in limited government:

...natural law jurisprudence represents the greatest threat to the liberal desire to replace limited, constitutional government with a regulatory-welfare state of unlimited powers.

...the principle that our rights come not from government but from a "Creator" and "the laws of nature and of nature's God," as our Declaration of Independence says, and that the purpose and power of government should therefore be limited to protecting our natural, God-given rights.

The left understands that if it is to succeed, these principles of constitutional government must be jettisoned, or at least redefined...the founders' natural-law defense of constitutional government is fatal to liberalism's goal...

...Woodrow Wilson, for example, insisted that unlike the physical universe, the political universe contains no immutable principles or laws. 'Government...is a living thing...'

From a liberal view, liberty cannot be a natural right, protected by a government of limited powers, because there are no natural rights...Instead, 'the state...is the creator of liberty.'

...The liberal critique of the Constitution has been repeated so long and with such intensity that it has become orthodoxy in our law schools, courtrooms and legislative halls...

The size, scope and purposes of our government are no longer anchored in and limited by our Constitution...The American people need to be reminded of the source of their rights and persuaded that limited government is good; that the principles of the Constitution - which are the natural-law principles of the Declaration of Independence - are timeless, not time-bound; that without those principles, the noble ends set forth in the Constitution's preamble can never be achieved.

The second quote comes from Thomas Jefferson, as mentioned in Chapter 6 of Richard John Neuhaus' book, The Naked Public Square:

...Jefferson, however, had no illusions that democracy had resolved the religious question by establishing "the separation of church and state." Consider, for example, his well-known reflection on the immorality of slavery:
And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?...

In short, Jefferson understood that that no constitution or written law is strong enough to defend rights under attack. Their "only firm basis" is in their being perceived as transcendent gift.

The final quote comes from George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address as his Presidency was ending. It speaks to the importance of religion and morality:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness - these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them...Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

The very nature of public debate on a controversial issue in a democracy is "messy" and that messiness makes the debate appear inefficient or even ineffective. But that is because it takes time to build a consensus among citizens across our great country. For the survival of our country, we must find that consensus over time by helping people rediscover the importance of limited government and how both morality and religion are crucial building blocks.

I believe we will achieve such an outcome by appealing to Americans across the political spectrum who hold a deep-seated belief in the right of individual Americans to live a life of principled freedom among their family, friends, church and community without interference from fundamentalists of any persuasion.


December 10, 2004


Rummy's Good Lessons for All Reactions

Justin Katz

I first heard about the Rumsfeld and the Tough Question episode when I tuned in to local morning talk radio host Steve Kass. The audio clip that he played for the audience (and on which he may have based his reaction) consisted only of the soldier's question and the offending sentence of Donald Rumsfeld's response, without any sort of auditory ellipsis. Even so, I thought Kass's vehemence that Rumsfled ought to resign a little extreme, and most of the callers whom I heard seemed to be speaking with more general complaints.

When I returned home, I discovered that Fox News was giving a couple of the preceding sentences in its clip, but nowhere near the full response:

I talked to the General coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles are being armored. They have been brought from all over the world, wherever they're not needed, to a place here where they are needed. I'm told that they are being — the Army is — I think it's something like 400 a month are being done. And it's essentially a matter of physics. It isn't a matter of money. It isn't a matter on the part of the Army of desire. It's a matter of production and capability of doing it.

As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe — it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment.

I can assure you that General Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army and certainly General Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that they're working at it at a good clip. It's interesting, I've talked a great deal about this with a team of people who've been working on it hard at the Pentagon. And if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored humvee and it can be blown up. And you can go down and, the vehicle, the goal we have is to have as many of those vehicles as is humanly possible with the appropriate level of armor available for the troops. And that is what the Army has been working on.

One can argue that his choice of words for that one short sentence was poor — especially given the media wailing that it enabled. But Rumsfeld was clearly following a public speaking template:

  1. Acknowledge being aware of the problem.
  2. Summarize the specific difficulties.
  3. Allude to the larger principle guiding the variety of actions.
  4. Put the problem in as soft a light as possible.
  5. But reassert that it is a problem, and one that is being addressed.

There are two lessons from this perspective that are more broadly applicable to the ways in which we react to this sort of controversy. The first is that we often know less about the context than we believe we do. In this case, that includes not only the full paragraph of the response that Kass's station cut from its clip, but also the information that a reporter was behind the scenes orchestrating the incident (and probably had much to do with the way the question was phrased).

The second consideration highlighted in this controversy is a realistic assessment of what even the top guy can accomplish and how he ought to explain the circumstances. To demand Rumsfeld's resignation, it seems to me, one must believe that this one sentences proves that his handling of the armor situation places it unreasonably low in the tangle of issues with which he must deal. In other words, one must believe that the financial and geopolitical considerations that affect his decisions are laughably inadequate to justify his judgment that the current rate of Humvee armor upgrades is acceptable. That's a tough argument to make in a war with relatively low casualties and the lowest fatality rate ever.

The consideration consequently becomes how Rumsfeld expressed the difficulties, and I'd suggest that there are a great many ways for a Secretary of Defense to answer — or avoid truly answering — such questions that would be less desirable. For instance, he could have simply slipped past the question with evasive assurances and moved on. Or he could have just avoided putting himself in that situation altogether. (Further discussion along these lines here.)

As for Rummy's relationship with the troops, I note that by the time he moved on to the next question, he appears to have re-won them over:

The other day, after there was a big threat alert in Washington, D.C. in connection with the elections, as I recall, I looked outside the Pentagon and there were six or eight up-armored humvees. Theyre not there anymore. [Cheers] [Applause] Theyre en route out here, I can assure you.

December 6, 2004


Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation

Talking about a pro-tax ballot initiative defeated in Oregon during 2002, a Wall Street Journal editorial stated:

When the budget issue is framed in terms of higher taxes, voters don't understand why government should be exempt from the same spending discipline the rest of us live by. "I am a normal person and when I don't have enough money I have to change my habits," 26-year-old Heather Bryan told the AP, explaining her vote against the measure. "Government should be the same way."

But it isn't and that begs the question of why?

Terry Moe offers this opinion of why government behavior is problematic (PDF):

Public agencies usually have no competition and are not threatened by the loss of business if their costs go up, while workers and unions know they are not putting their agencies or jobs at risk by pressuring for all they can get. Governmental decisions are not driven by efficiency concerns, as they are in the private sector, but by political considerations, and thus by [political] power.

In comparison, when faced with competition in the private sector, irresponsible management action eventually results in loss of market share, lower profits, and loss of jobs. In other words there are direct and dire consequences to bad behavior.

Or, as Wendell Cox wrote last year in a National Review Online article:

How different government is to the real world of the private sector. When [corporations get] into financial trouble, they cut costs and get concessions from their unions, while doing everything they [can] to maintain service levels. When government gets into trouble, it threatens deep service cuts, all too often cuts aimed at the programs that cause the greatest public consternation, in a calculated strategy to obtain the additional funding necessary to maintain the status quo.

The bottom line consequences for working families and retirees are clear: When taxes increase, your standard of living declines.

Practically speaking, the decline in your family's standard of living results in some combination of the three following outcomes: (i) you incur new debt; (ii) you use some of your savings; and/or (iii) you reduce your current spending for items such as food, clothes, heating oil, medical care, car repairs as well as savings for college and retirement. All three outcomes are direct and tangible costs incurred by every family - you have less of your hard-earned income to spend on your family's needs.

It is worth noting that politicians, bureaucrats, and public sector unions suffer no similar consequences when they act irresponsibly. This creates a curious lack of incentive for them to change their behavior.

It was what led Calvin Coolidge to say:

Nothing is easier than spending the public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody.

Or, as Lawrence Reed said in his October 2001 speech to the Economic Club of Detroit:

When you spend other people's money to buy something for someone else, the connection between the earner, the spender and the recipient is most remote - and the potential for mischief is the greatest.

That mischief is obvious when you read about the ridiculous spending approved by lawmakers from both parties. See Citizens Against Government Waste's Pig Book.

The mischief is clear when you see powerful interest groups (including both corporations and unions) manipulate the system for their advantage, all to the detriment of individual families who lose more of their freedom through ever-increasing tax burdens.

So, what can we do about this problem? Any solution requires a vigilant citizenry that makes the mischief transparent to the voting public. And then it comes down to engaged citizens gathering enough political power to bring about change.



UN & NAACP: Usefulness Outlived

Marc Comtois
According to conservative columnist Armstrong Williams, Kweisi Mfume, who supposedly resigned as CEO of the NAACP, was actually forced out by the organization's Chairman, Julian Bond. Why the rift? According to Williams
The two began feuding after Mfume nominated National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice for his 2003 NAACP Image Award. Furious that Mfume was reaching out to the Bush administration, Bond responded by nominating "Boondocks" cartoonist Aaron McGruder...[who] had ridiculed Rice in his comic strip and later caller her murderer for her role in the war in Iraq....

The final tear came after the election. Mfume suggested sending a letter to President Bush, mapping out ways that they could work together to help the community. Bond rejected the idea. Mfume sent the letter anyway. To Bond, this was an unforgivable. A few weeks later, Bond had Mfume voted out. The message was clear: There is no room within the NAACP for intellectual diversity. Just loyal servitude to the Democratic Party.
As originally conceived, the NAACP played a large and important role in the Civil Rights movement. It's original mission accomplished, it has survived as a watchdog organization, albeit one that, as presently constituted, serves as little more than a wing of the Democrat Party. As such, the current NAACP offers no independent vision for the future that can be reasonably disconnected from the mundane political desires of the Democrat Party. While Mfume's outreach to Republicans could be taken as nothing more than political calculation, the resulting political conversation would have fostered an intellectually diverse dialogue that is currently non-existent within the NAACP. Such intellectual diversity would seem to be desirable to an organization based on broadening the spectrum of the American body politic. A political foot in the door with the party in power would also seem to benefit the communities ostensibly served by the NAACP. However, Bond's actions indicate that the organization's current adherence to simplistic demonization and knee-jerk reactions to anything Republican or conservative will continue. Unfortunately, this lack of interest in intellectual diversity is predictable given that the old mantras and polemics have served the current leadership so well. They have maintained their own power at the expense of the best interests of their constituency. Until the average members of the NAACP, or the greater minority community in general, realize that they are being ill-served, they will continue to be led by those who deem power more important than progress.

Similarly, the UN Oil-for-Food program scandal can leave one with no other conclusion than that the United Nations, as presently constituted, has survived beyond its own usefulness. Once seen as an example of democracy writ large, it now serves as a vehicle of power and prestige for men and women who "represent" mostly undemocratic nations. Politically immune from prosecution in both the country of their birth and the country in which they work, they live in a different reality than the rest of the world. They suffer few or no consequences for their actions: they are accountable to none but their own government, whose interests they represent. In such an environment, these self-interests, both personal and political, often win out over any "greater good." The UN has become slave to unending processes in which nothing is ever really solved, though much is discussed. Instead, its members flit about, condemn the U.S. "Empire" and remain comfortably insulated in a cocoon of privilege, forever confirmed of the rightness of their reality by the chattering classes of the Boston-New York-Washington corridor, the Enlightened on the Continent, and their own oppressive governments abroad.

Both organizations, the UN and the NAACP, are operating anachronisms. While the context in which they were founded has changed, the institutions themselves have not altered to meet new challenges. The original missions of each were praiseworthy, albeit (in the case of the UN) a bit idealistic. With proper leadership, these organizations could update their missions. They could refocus, modify or redefine their goals to better address the needs of the people for whom they claim to represent. Unfortunately, such reform requires strong leadership and intellectual flexibility. The NAACP's adherence to a simplistic "oppressed black" vs. "white oppressor" dichotomy or the U.N.'s upside-down geopolitical worldview where America is an opressive Empire and Saddam Hussein a victim of aggression are evidence of "truths" in need of reexamination. Unfortunately, Julian Bond and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan are too inept, corrupt and power-hungry to steer a new course toward redefined goals. Most importantly, it is not in their best interest to do any such thing. Until they are removed, change is impossible and both organizations will continue to sink and wallow in the mud of irrelevancy.


Ethics Rules and the Missing Factoid

Justin Katz

Glen Peck of Barrington thinks that:

House Republicans have done something truly appalling. They've knocked down a Republican House ethics rule that banned House members from holding leadership positions if they've been indicted on felony charges. They did it on behalf of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R.-Texas). ...

This is no mere act of hypocrisy, though. Nor is it just a Beltway issue, relevant only in Washington. This is a national moral lapse that cuts to the heart of our government.

Curiously, Mr. Peck doesn't seem interested in the question of whether the other major party at "the heart of our government" has a similar rule. (Of course, in Rhode Island, the Democrats are the head, hands, and pockets of government, too.) In trying to answer that question for myself, I didn't come across any "appalled" liberals demanding that the Democrats institute one. The closest was a parenthetical note from the apparently liberal Bert Caradine at WatchBlog — offered without evidence or opinion — that "House Democrats are now considering one."

News readers might suppose that Washington Post writer Charles Babington would think it a relevant factoid for his piece on the matter. But the information remains absent, even as he quotes House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as saying that the rule change would "confirm yet again that [Republicans] simply do not care if their leaders are ethical." (Pelosi, herself, didn't seem to notice that her standard for the Republicans implies a lack of ethics as the norm.)

Bill Bowman, writing from Bruce Springsteen's old stomping grounds in New Jersey in the Asbury Park Press, outdoes the WaPo coverage in this respect, if only because a New Jersey Republican spokesman thought to say the unspeakable:

The Republicans' new rule is "considered tougher than the Democrats', who have no rules whatsoever. A Democrat leader could be indicted and found guilty and still hold their post," Sagnip said.

And the folks at Power Line join me (or at least their emailers do) in finding it curious that Democrats would fling the word "hypocrisy" on this count.

I'm not interested enough in this matter to engage in adequate research to form a definitive opinion. Still, indictment seems a rather strict measure in an innocent-'til-proven-guilty society. A rule such as the following, described in the WaPo article, seems most reasonable to me, given political circumstances:

Republicans last night were tweaking the language of several proposals for changing the rule. The one drawing the most comment, by Rep. Henry Bonilla (Tex.), would allow leaders indicted by a state grand jury to stay on. However, a leader indicted by a federal court would have to step down at least temporarily.

December 3, 2004


Honoring the Land We Love

Donald B. Hawthorne

With the election over, we once again turn our attention to the future. That includes preparing for a new group of government officials to take office.

Therefore it seems timely to reflect on the principles of the American Founding, as we hope these principles will guide both our lawmakers and us.

It is a common practice for some people to focus on America's past or current failings. Some even go so far as to claim The American Project is a failure or illegitimate because of these imperfections.

Contrast that world view with the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of one of the great moral endeavors of our lifetime. We all agree that slavery was a failing in the early years of the Republic. We further agree that unequal treatment under the law in a post-slavery world was another failing. Yet, when faced with the latter challenge, Dr. King successfully led a change effort by appealing to higher principles.

Consider this excerpt from his 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech:

I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

We are touched because those powerful words appeal to timeless moral principles that are grounded in both our Declaration of Independence and the great moral traditions that precede our Founding.

Roger Pilon wrote the following in a 2002 Cato Institute booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution:

Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.

But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision - the method by which we justify our political order - liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

...that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government - indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish - to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights - provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract - its principles rooted in "right reason" - the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Dr. Pilon concluded his essay by writing:

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

A love for life and liberty with the freedom to pursue happiness, while seeking a deeper understanding of the moral underpinnings of natural law. In this time of great challenges and conflict, may all of us live up to that vision authored by our Founders as we strive to be engaged citizens who are vigilant stewards of freedom and opportunity for all Americans.



Honoring The Land We Love

With the election over, we once again turn our attention to the future. That includes preparing for a new group of government officials to take office.

Therefore it seems timely to reflect on the principles of the American Founding, as we hope these principles will guide both our lawmakers and us.

It is a common practice for some people to focus on Americas past or current failings. Some even go so far as to claim The American Project is a failure or illegitimate because of these imperfections.

Contrast that world view with the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of one of the great moral endeavors of our lifetime. We all agree that slavery was a failing in the early years of the Republic. We further agree that unequal treatment under the law in a post-slavery world was another failing. Yet, when faced with the latter challenge, Dr. King successfully led a change effort by appealing to higher principles.

Consider this excerpt from his 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech:

I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

We are touched because those powerful words appeal to timeless moral principles that are grounded in both our Declaration of Independence and the great moral traditions that precede our Founding.

Roger Pilon wrote the following in a 2002 Cato Institute booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution:

Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law and against which to criticize that law at any time. It is not political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system.

But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision the method by which we justify our political order liberty is its aim. Thus, cardinal moral truths are these:

that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract its principles rooted in "right reason" the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society.

Dr. Pilon concluded his essay by writing:

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

A love for life and liberty with the freedom to pursue happiness, while seeking a deeper understanding of the moral underpinnings of natural law. In this time of great challenges and conflict, may all of us live up to that vision authored by our Founders as we strive to be engaged citizens who are vigilant stewards of freedom and opportunity for all Americans.


November 24, 2004


Thanksgiving and Separation of Church and State

Marc Comtois
Since Thanksgiving is upon us, I thought I'd provide an excerpt from Paul Johnson's A History of the American People that puts the Separation of Church and State, and Thanksgiving, in their proper historical context.
'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' This guarantee has been widely, almost willfully, misunderstood in recent years, and interpreted as meaning that the federal government is forbidden by the Constitution to countenance or subsidize even indirectly the practice of religion. That would have astonished and angered the Founding Fathers. What the guarantee means is that Congress may not set up a state religion on the lines of the Church of England, as by law established. It was an anti-establishment clause. The second half of the guarantee means that Congress may not interfere with the practice of any religion, and it could be argued that recent interpretations of the First Amendment run directly contrary to the plain and obvious meaning of this guarantee, and that for a court to forbid people to hold prayers in public schools is a flagrant breach of the Constitution. In effect, the First Amendment forbade Congress to favor one church, or religious sect, over another. It certainly did not inhibit Congress from identifying itself with the religious impulse as such or from authorizing religious practices where all could agree on their desirability. The House of Representatives passed the First Amendment on September 24, 1789. The next day it passed, by a two-to-one majority, a resolution calling for a day of national prayer and thanksgiving [emphasis mine].

It is worth pausing a second to look at the details of this gesture, which may be regarded as the Houses opinion of how the First Amendment should be understood. The resolution reads: We acknowledge with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peacefully to establish a constitutional government for their safety and happiness. President Washington was then asked to designate the day of prayer and thanksgiving, thus inaugurating a public holiday, Thanksgiving, which Americans still universally enjoy. He replied: It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of 144 Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His mercy, to implore His protection and favor ... That great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that ever will be, that we may then unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people.

There were, to be sure, powerful non- or even anti-religious forces at work among Americans at this time, as a result of the teachings of Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, and, above all, Tom Paine. Paine did not see himself as anti-religious, needless to say. He professed his faith in One god and no more. This was the religion of humanity. The doctrine he formulated in The Age of Reason (1794-5) was My country is the world and my religion is to do good. This work was widely read at the time, in many of the colleges, alongside Jeffersons translation of Volneys skeptical Ruines ou Meditations sur les revolutions des empires (1791), and similar works by Elihu Palmer, John Fitch, John Fellows, and Ethan Allen. The Age of Reason was even read by some farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers, as well as students. As one Massachusetts lawyer observed, it was highly thought of by many who knew neither what the age they lived in, nor reason, was. With characteristic hyperbole and venom, John Adams wrote of Paine: I do not know whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satire on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then The Age of Paine.

As it happened, by the time Adams wrote this (1805), Paines day was done. His age had been the 1780s and the early 1790s. Then the reaction set in. When Paine returned to America in 1802 after his disastrous experiences in Revolutionary France, he noticed the difference. The religious tide was returning fast. People found him an irritating, repetitive figure from the past, a bore. Even Jefferson, once his friend, now president, gave him the brush-off. And Jefferson, as president, gave his final gloss on the First Amendment to a Presbyterian clergyman, who asked him why, unlike Washington and Adams (and later Madison), he did not issue a Thanksgiving proclamation. Religion, said Jefferson, was a matter for the states: I consider the government of the United States as interdicted from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, disciplines, or exercises. This results from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment of religion, or the free exercise thereof, but also from that which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the United States. Certainly no power over religious discipline has been delegated to the general government. It must thus rest with the states as far as it can be in any human authority. The wall of separation between church and state, then, if it existed at all, was not between government and the public, but between the federal government and the states. And the states, after the First Amendment, continued to make religious provision when they thought fit, as they always had done. [Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, p. 144-45]
To be sure, many of the founders were not what we today would consider conventional Christians (rather, they were deists), but most recognized the importance of organized religion in society. (For more on the deism of the Founders, refer to p.141-44 of Johnson's History).

With that, I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving. (I may be around some time this weekend, but I have a tour of southern New England scheduled, so free time, much less blogging time, will be at a premium).

ADDENDUM: I'd also recommend Ken Masugi's piece, which touches on the same theme and points to the Thanksgiving Proclamations of Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

November 18, 2004


Another Take on Cox

Carroll Andrew Morse

I also was intrigued by Cox's article on urban-versus-rural-versus-Democrat-versus-Republican. For Marc's thoughts, click here. For Justin's thoughts, click here. Here's my plausible-but-not-proven stab at explaining the trend: Urban areas are the most dependent on other areas to survive.

Imagine the following: One Sunday night, impenetrable force-fields appear along the borders of every town in Rhode Island. Places like Foster and Hopkington would be able to set up some sort of subsistence-level society pretty quickly. Providence, on the other hand, would be in big trouble once the supplies at the grocery stores ran out.

I think, at some level, though maybe not a conscious one, urban dwellers are aware of this vulnerablity. That's why they are more likely to vote for the party whose central message is "don't worry, we'll keep taking stuff from other people and giving it to you" than they are a party with a more principled message.


November 17, 2004


The Red in the Blue

Justin Katz

Having been struggling for an interesting way to frame this, I was much relieved to read Marc's recent post about demographics and Republican states' receiving more government aid while (ostensibly) voting against Big Government. Blogger Sensible Mom has explored the data in a bit more depth (the bracketed comment is hers):

But let's focus on the election map by county. Those states with large cities, Illinois, New York and California, benefit from the corporate taxes payed by the businesses in those cities. In addition, in many of the blue states, there are large areas of red. Take a look at Illinois and California. One of the collar counties of Chicago, DuPage County, is wealthy. I would like to see the average tax bill per household in DuPage compared to the average in the city of Chicago [I'm going to try to find this data]. I bet it is higher in DuPage. ...

Next I looked at Illinois by county. I picked one blue county, Cook (includes Chicago), and three red counties, Lake, DuPage and Will. The US Census Bureau publishes the Consolidated Federal Funds Report by county. When that information is divided by the population in each county it shows that the blue counties receive considerably more federal funds on average than the red counties.

Of course, Illinois might be different than, say, Massachusetts, but some of the considerations are significant. First, we can't forget the disproportion of corporate taxes when assessing how much the Blue States "give." Second, it is apparently (and logically) the case that some Blue States concentrate the money that the feds give back to them in a limited number of Democrat-controlled areas.

So here's the (intentionally biased) question: Do the Republican poor vote principle while the Democrat poor vote self-interest? I don't have the time, right now, to dig into this as deeply as the turf appears to allow, but at initial glance, it would seem that living amid the Coastal Elite has a deleterious effect on one's character.

(Via Lane Core)



Voter Motivation and Another Stab at a Big Idea

Marc Comtois
I'd encourage anyone interested in the question as to "why we vote the way we do" to read this article by Patrick Cox about the seeming correlation between political ideology and demography. In it, he also tackles the apparent conundrum of those who most benefit from government spending (so-called Red States) voting against those who would seem to favor an increase in said spending (the Democrats). This is something that the pundit Lawrence O'Donnell (one of the proponents of Blue State Secession, btw) had been pontificating about recently. (O'Donnell said "Ninety percent of the red states are welfare-client states of the federal government.") According to this meme, it was rural voters, who receive more federal dollars than do urban voters, who are responsible for putting President Bush back in the White House. (I guess we are all supposed to revel in the irony of it all.)

Cox offers some insight into why this ungratefulness, as O'Donnell seems to imply, on the part of the Red States is not really hard to figure out. First, because the cost of living is higher in urban areas, they have a higher concentration of higher wage earners and generate higher revenue than do rural areas with lower cost of living requirements and commensurate wages. As such, more of the urban dollars get redistributed. To this I would add that the gulf between the very wealthy and the very poor is wider in the cities. As such, one group votes its interests (the poor) and the other (the rich) votes either out of guilt or because it can afford to pay for social welfare programs (or, with good tax people, can avoid taxed altogether anyway!). Cox's second point is that, with less concentrated populations, rural states spend more money delivering services (like the mail) to fewer people over larger areas. Finally, Cox believes that it is more likely that the voters in rural states are continually being "bought off" by "redistributionists" so that they will approve of other government programs.

While looking deeper for a link between demography and ideology, Cox closes the piece with the following:
The statistician's perennial caveat is that "correlation is not causation." but there is little doubt that there is connection, largely unexplained, between ideology and demography. Depressingly deterministic as it is, this correlation, if it continues, may mean that future elections will be decided by immigration patterns, reproductive rates and technologies that allow more businesses and workers to locate in suburban and rural locations.
In one sense, Cox has simply noticed a characteristic that has existed in this country almost since its founding. The Town/Country, Rural/Urban divide has been much debated. While Cox links demography to ideology, it is important to note that "demographies" can change in their ideological preferences, or, at the least, in their political preferences. (The change in the south from solid Democrat to solid Republican is an example of the latter. However, it can be argued that the ideology of the South has not necessarily changed as much as the vehicle that best expresses that ideology of the polity, a given political party, has indeed changed.)

Demography is a term that covers a wide array of other terms. These include words like geography, race or religion, and all carry certain characteristics or connotations that may be much more indicative, or even determinative, of ideology. Importantly, rare is the case where only one of these factors is determinative and usually it is a combination of these characteristics that goes into forming an ideology. As such, the ability of "demography" to serve as a conceptual catch-all makes it attractive, especially to one such as Cox who appears determined to find that one Big Idea as to why we vote the way we do.

The work of historians such as Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby has shown that, while certain ideologies have been predominant at certain periods in our history, they inevitably give way to other, more persuasive concepts. Though traces of the ideologies of the 17th Century Radical Whigs, or the Civic Humanists or the Jeffersonian Liberals can still be found, no single ideology has dominated for an extended period of time among the general population.

Cox seems to have consigned himself to having concluded that his view is hopelessly deterministic, which harkens back to yet another Big Idea. History is full of many attempts by those who have been tempted to find a single word or concept to describe both the process of history and the future of the world. The funny thing is, just when we think we have it all figured out, the rules change. Just ask Karl Marx or Francis Fukuyama.


The 9 Most Catholic States Picked Kerry

Marc Comtois
Just to add to the observations that have been touched on here and there at Anchor Rising, the 2005 Catholic Almanac has revealed that 9 of the 10 most Catholic states sent their Electoral Votes to John Kerry, with only Lousianna (#10 overall) in the Bush column. Rhode Island, at 63.5% of its population, is the nation's most Catholic state.

November 16, 2004


Outsider Looks In

Marc Comtois
Patrick Ruffini, former "blogmaster" at the official Bush Blog is back doing his own blog and has offered some further insight into Republican gains in New England. (Something we've been speculating upon ourselves). Surprisingly, Rhode Island was second only to Hawaii (nationwide) in the increase in percentage of support for President Bush from 2000 to 2004. Overall, President Bush made gains throughout New England from 2000, but there was a dividing line. According to Ruffini:
The line runs through Massachusetts and New Hampshire. On one side there are the blue-collar Catholic urban and suburban areas, in which President Bush staged a strong recovery. On the other is the small-town Yankee-Protestant interior, which turned to Kerry. If Kerry was in fact the hometown favorite, it manifested itself far from Louisburg Square, in rural Vermont and New Hampshire. Closer to home, the booing when Kerry bounced the ball at Fenway was apparently the real deal.
Ruffini provides a chart of the increase among Catholic voters for the President and posits his own theory as to why they swung toward Bush and away from Kerry:
Several explanations are available to us. The first is that churchgoing Catholics do hold Catholic political leaders to a higher standard and the Senator found no sympathy among lapsed Catholics. The second is that he alienated both sides by seeming to straddle. The third is simply that blue collar Reagan Democrats, many of them Catholic, liked the grit they saw in George W. Bush at Ground Zero and ever since. All three have some validity, but Catholics being the least politicized of all the major faiths, especially in the Northeast, I tend towards the third.
If this is the case, it will take more leaders with demonstrable grit to continue to make Republican gains in the northeast. Rudy Giulianni and Arnold Schwarzenegger, no conservatives mind you, would be extremely attractive here in the northeast. Perhaps America's appetite for a "John Wayne Presidency" is stronger than ever.

November 15, 2004


Leading by the Force of Example

Justin Katz

On the radio, Dan Yorke is talking about the possibility of Condoleezza Rice's ascension to the post of Secretary of State. Yorke speaks often and forcefully in support of women's rights and respectful treatment of them, so I'm sure it pains him to say it, but he's concerned that Condoleezza's gender will represent a problem for the United States' dealings with regimes such as those in the Middle East.

Perhaps the first typically American response — certainly mine — is to say, "tough luck." She's our representative, and if a backwards dictatorship or oligarchy doesn't like it, well, then that country's going to have a hard time drawing out the benefits that come with being a friend to the world's only superpower. However, as John Kerry tried so hard to symbolize, sometimes we have to compromise our principles in the short term to make more profound gains in the future.

Such questions are right along the line of disagreement between fortitude and nuance that characterizes so much of the American political debate, right now. Both sides make legitimate points. In this specific instance, though, I don't know that the gut response is as unnuanced as it seems.

Our foreign policy currently has as its focus the relatively rapid remaking of entire regions so as to preclude catastrophic terrorism. Consequently, we must force and lure regimes toward radical change. Perhaps it shows how serious we are if we take the risk of choosing a diplomat with whom those regimes will be reticent to work — forcing them, in that one respect, either to be the sorts of governments that we believe they must become or to emphasize the ways in which they are more sympathetic to our enemies than to us.

ADDENDUM:
In the comments, Marc asks whether Madeleine Albright's name came up. I didn't hear the entire segment of Yorke's show, so I can't say. It's interesting that the circumstances between the Clinton '90s and now are so dramatic that the comparison mightn't come immediately to mind. (It didn't to mine.)

Although we're still too close to those years to judge accurately, it seems likely that some text-book producer of the future won't be able to come up with a more accurate section title for the 1990s than "A Break from History."



Our "Un-Serious" Senator

Marc Comtois
In Sunday's ProJo, M. Charles Bakst, erstwhile stakeholder of the political commentariat of Rhode Island, took Sen. Lincoln Chafee to task for his waffling on both supporting fellow Republican President Bush and staying a Republican at all.
His flirtation with bolting the party -- and, more especially, his decision not to vote for George W. Bush and instead write in the name of the president's father -- has been an excruciating episode that has done the senator no good in Rhode Island or in Washington.

He has been in these matters the picture of indecision, and his dithering has been a distraction that has needlessly punctuated political conversation.
Indeed, all Senator Chafee has managed to do is to further call into question his own suitability as a responsible member of the Senate.
A spectacular low point came on the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention. (He would make only a brief appearance on the New York scene.) Chafee said he supported Mr. Bush's reelection but wouldn't commit to voting for him. He looked ridiculous, and Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey, more conservative, more combative, and a possible challenger in a 2006 Senate primary, could barely contain himself, asking in an interview:
"What does that mean? Usually, the people you support you vote for. Would you vote for one you wouldn't support? Or is he saying he supports two people?
Then Chafee, distancing himself further from the president but also wanting to stay away from Democrat John Kerry, hit upon the solution of writing in the name of the president's father, an old family friend whose policies he like better.

But, in declining to choose between candidate Bush and candidate Kerry, Chafee didn't make a decision, he avoided a decision. Citizens look to leaders to lead. Chafee is often accused of wanting to have things both ways. This time he outdid himself.
He certainly did. In trying to be all things to all people, he seems to take few principled stances except for the few instances (environmental, War in Iraq, Tax Custs) that find him at odds with his own (ostensibly) party. This is exacerbated by the perception that he lacks critical thinking abilities and is not the best at offering well-reasoned arguments for some of his postions.
He is who he is, not the most polished operator, but a bright guy, an honest guy, moving as best he can through the political jungle. He has plenty of interests in life, and he and his wife, the former Stephanie Danforth, have a ton of money, and he is very competitive, but he doesn't need this job, and when he's through, or when voters decide he's through, he'll find something else to do.
I suspect that in 2006 Lincoln Chafee will be the former Senator from Rhode Island.

November 12, 2004


Truce Watch

Carroll Andrew Morse

Arianna Huffington has an article on her blog nominally analyzing how Kerry's reluctance to talk about foreign policy contributed to his defeat, yet in her detailed tactical description how foreign policy came to be muted, she doesn't tell us what she thinks that the Kerry campaign should have been saying. She attributes the avoidance of foreign affairs to "the old obsession with pleasing undecided voters". The question is: if she didn't want Kerry to court undecideds, whom did she want him to go after?

The possibilities are 1) turn out the base with a more stridently anti-war position. But all the anti-war voters were already vehemently against Bush. Were there that many more votes to be found on the hard left?

By default, the other possibilty is to 2) convince Bush voters to switch sides. This option breaks down into two sub-options...
a) Push the "competence" angle, i.e. I'll fight the war better than Bush. Do this, however, and the pro-war talk drives voters on the left away, probably in greater numbers than the gains in the middle.
b) Talk about the war as unwinnable, and say the best you can hope for is an open-ended truce. Convince the public that a detente with Islamist terror is the only "reasonable" option.

I fear that this position is going to gain strength as the Democrats redefine themselves in the coming election cycle. Remember where you heard it first.



Overstating Morality's Election Day Impact

Marc Comtois

Those on the left and right have written and said much since the election regarding the role of moral issues in President Bush's reelection. For those on the right, reaffirmation and confirmation of deeply held beliefs has been expressed. For those on the left, demonization of overly-religious rural southern voters has prevailed over any sort of internal introspection. In a column today, Charles Krauthammer(free register req.) offers some insight into the very basis for this premise and, to my mind, succeeds in showing how the role of morality has been somewhat overstated. (He was preceded by others in coming to this conclusion, for example by Paul Freedman at Slate).

Krauthammer first notes how the Democrats have seemingly converted the Angry White Males of 1994 (who voted Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress into power) into the "Bigoted Christian Redneck" of 2004. He then deconstructs the exit polling that has provided the basis for the apparent importance of moral issues in the 2004 Presidential Election.
Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical voter rest?

Its origins lie in a single question in the Election Day exit poll. The urban myth grew around the fact that "moral values" ranked highest in the answer to Question J: "Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?"

It is a thin reed upon which to base a General Theory of the '04 Election. In fact, it is no reed at all. The way the question was set up, moral values were sure to be ranked disproportionately high. Why? Because it was a multiple-choice question, and moral values cover a group of issues, while all the other choices were individual issues. Chop up the alternatives finely enough, and moral values are sure to get a bare plurality over the others.

Look at the choices:

Education, 4 percent.
Taxes, 5 percent.
Health Care, 8 percent.
Iraq, 15 percent.
Terrorism, 19 percent.
Economy and Jobs, 20 percent.
Moral Values, 22 percent.

"Moral values" encompass abortion, gay marriage, Hollywood's influence, the general coarsening of the culture and, for some, the morality of preemptive war. The way to logically pit this class of issues against the others would be to pit it against other classes: "war issues" or "foreign policy issues" (Iraq plus terrorism) and "economic issues" (jobs, taxes, health care, etc).
Krauthammer then uses his broader categories, does the simple math and shows that War/Terror and Economic issues still held the preeminent place in the voters' minds on election day, much as they did in all of the polls leading up to the election. In essence, the election hinged on the voters prioritization of War/Terror and the Economy. As Freedman had earlier pointed out, there wasn't a "morality gap" so much as a "terrorism gap." Krauthammer's argument is convincing and well-reasoned, though he doesn't mention the role of the 4 million evangelicals who sat out the 2000 election and undoubtedly helped push President Bush to the popular vote lead this election. He does address the specific issue of gay marriage:
Ah, yes. But the fallback is then to attribute Bush's victory to the gay marriage referendums that pushed Bush over the top, particularly in Ohio.

This is more nonsense. George Bush increased his vote in 2004 over 2000 by an average of 3.1 percent nationwide. In Ohio the increase was 1 percent -- less than a third of the national average. In the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the 39 states that did not have the referendum. The great anti-gay surge was pure fiction.
I would argue that, even if the numbers were to support a "great anti-gay surge" that, in fact, it wasn't anti-gay so much as anti-judicial activism (See: Massachusetts Supreme Court). Nonetheless, the demonization of their opponents is an oft-used salve for the liberal ego. As Krauthammer writes, "They need their moral superiority like oxygen, and they cannot have it cut off by mere facts. Once again they angrily claim the moral high ground, while standing in the ruins of yet another humiliating electoral defeat." Except, of course, in Rhode Island, where the simple of appendage of "(D)" to one's name seems to be enough to guarantee political victory.


November 11, 2004


Anti-Specter Details Needed

Carroll Andrew Morse

I'd like to offer a suggestion to the conservatives mounting a challenge to Arlen Specter's chairmanship of the Senate judiciary committee. They need to do a better job explaining what exactly the powers of a committee chair are, and exactly how a committee chair can frustrate the appointment process in a way that any other indivdual Senator cannot.

I'm not sure that the general public understands that committee chairmen are more than just the time-keepers during hearings. Some detail about how legislative committee chairmen can use scheduling and other powers to dominate the legislative process would help explain the urgency of their campaign.



The Dems and National Security

Carroll Andrew Morse

My latest article for TechCentralStation, on the subject of the Democratic party and national security issues, ran today. As luck would have it (or maybe it's my vast network of spies in the vast right-wing conspiracy), the article serves as something of a response to blog entries from Kevin Drum and Matt Ygelsias (scroll up) that ran yesterday.


November 10, 2004


Can you Secede From the Bizarro World?

Carroll Andrew Morse

And having opened talking about the local roots of this blog, I now move immediately to a national-level post...

The (mostly tongue-in-cheek, I think) talk about some sort of red-state blue-state secession has me feeling like I'm living in the Bizarro World. I have a track record on the issue of secession. I've written a couple of Tech Central Station columns advocating secession and/or partition as a potential solution to problems in Iraq and Sudan. Based on the reaction to these columns, it would not surprise me if many of the people pondering an American secession think that idea of partitioning Sudan to protect the people of Darfur from the Sudanese central government is too radical to be considered.

I would never advocate secession for a democracy for a simple reason. Ultimately, assuming that the democracy is working, partitioning it limits the choices of an individual. Right now, a resident of Rhode Island can drop everything and move to Southern California without asking anyone's permission. If the US broke into smaller states, however, the departing Rhode Islander would have to get some form of governmental permission to settle in California.

p.s. Is there one "r" or two in "Bizarro"?



Optimism for Republican Gains in Rhode Island

Marc Comtois
As detailed in this morning's ProJo, Karl Rove went into a deep statistical analysis of where the Republicans gained in the electorate during the recent elections. One of his examples, surprisingly, was the increase the President enjoyed in garnering the vote of Rhode Islanders.
Kerry carried Rhode Island with 59.4 percent of the vote. Mr. Bush's 38.7-percent share was 6.8 percentage points higher than in 2000. Nationwwide, Mr. Bush's 51-percent majority last week was 3.1 percentage points higher than his total in 2000.
For my part, I guess this small, but significant, gain was obscured by the relative margin of Kerry's victory. Perhaps progress is being made.

Interestingly, Rove also made a point of warning against assuming that the much-talked about "moral values" issues were those that carried the day for the President.
"Be careful," Rove said more than once, of stereotyping Mr. Bush's victory as the work of evangelical Christians who flooded the polls in the heartland because they oppose gay marriage. Rove affirmed the importance of such voters and issues, but he said the true portrait of the 2004 electorate is much "broader and more subtle."
Indeed, Christopher Hitchens for one has pointed out that Bush improved in the secular/atheist vote over his performance in 2000. However, the one religious group in which the President made a substantial gain was Roman Catholics, where he experienced a 5% increase.

Finally, Rove confirmed something that I have suspected: there is a real effort at party building going on by the RNC.
Rove also said that Mr. Bush intends to help the Republican Party "grow our numbers" in New England and other areas that Sen. John F. Kerry carried. In a related matter, Rove hinted that Republican Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee may get a fence-mending White House invitation from a president determined, in Rove's words, to "serve all the people."

Rove hinted that "gestures have been made" from the White House to Chafee and other Republican moderates. Chafee later confirmed that, saying he has had more than one conciliatory phone call from the White House -- though not, so far, from Mr. Bush.

Rove also said that Mr. Bush was not irritated by Chafee's symbolic protest of writing in the name of the president's father on his ballot. "Look, he's a wonderfully independent guy and he's entitled to his opinion," Rove said.
"And he also runs in a very tough state."
Yes, he does, and it appears that political idealism is taking a back seat to political practicallity. This is not a bad thing, but as the Arlen Specter debate has revealed, it is a difficult spot for a conservative.

November 9, 2004


Well, Hem, You Know, Haw

Justin Katz

U.S. Senator Lincoln Chafee (RINO, RI) has promised to remain a Republican, offering the supremely confidence-inspiring declaration: "Yes, at this stage, that is my intention." In a sad echo of President Bush's overused phrase in the first debate, Chafee says it is also his intention to "work hard to regain the support" of Republicans. Personally, I think the state GOP chairwoman's defense of Chafee tells Republican voters all they need to know:

"The media forced him to make statements that were contrary to how he actually views his role," Morgan said, speaking of Chafee's months of inconclusive public musings about whether he would support Mr. Bush and remain a member of the Republican Party.

"You guys backed him into a corner," Morgan said, "and he wasn't adept enough at dealing with the media to sidestep the issue."

Perhaps it's best that he not "rehabilitate that," as Morgan put it.



One-Party States

Carroll Andrew Morse

John Fund documented in yesterday's Opinionjournal, that more and more states are tending towards one-party rule at the state level.

This is an intersting trend. If you believe what people say about voting for "the best candidate" instead of party affiliation, you would expect, at the local level, less dominance by any single party, because at the local level, voters have more of a chance to actually get to know their candidates.


November 8, 2004


Our Little Blue Corner of the Nation

Marc Comtois

Now for my first self-promotional plug. My most recent post at my personal blog, The Ocean State Blogger, deals with Blue New England's place in a Red Nation and in it I allude to the Republican party being the real "big tent" party in the nation. Additionally, I recently posted on some of the Rhode Island exit polling results that seem to indicate that many Rhode Islanders are more personally conservative than they vote. Read them both for why I made these two conclusions. I promise in the future to limit my cross-posting, but I believe these two posts are particularly relevant to the (as yet unknown) readership of this site.