P.J. O'Rourke on Atlas Shrugged.

I had begun to consider ol' P.J. a bit of a relic, semi-retired like Lord Kitchner before WWI. But of late he's been doing yeoman's service, first deftly cutting Amy Chua off at the knees:

You might think that Amy Chua is a fascist pig. She wrote a previous book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, so she is.

And now, he updates Ayn Rand more successfully in a few sentences than, one suspects, the filmmakers will two movies:

An update is needed, and not just because train buffs, New Deal economics and the miracle of the Bessemer converter are inexplicable to people under 50, not to mention boring. The anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they’ve shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative. Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation—as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed. Partners at Goldman Sachs go forth with their billions. Steve Jobs walks on water. Jay-Z and Beyoncé are rich enough to buy God. Progressive Robin Hoods have turned their attention to robbing ordinary individuals. It’s the plain folks, not a Taggart/Rearden elite, whose prospects and opportunities are stolen by corrupt school systems, health-care rationing, public employee union extortions, carbon-emissions payola and deficit-debt burden graft. Today’s collectivists are going after malefactors of moderate means.

The Inner Party always has privileges. This is a point that we wingnuts need to make louder over the coming year: that progressivism primarily benefits those who can afford to pay for it.

There's life in the old boy yet.

Koran-Burning in Iran.

From what I'm given to understand, these are two Persian boys who consider the Koran a document foisted on their people by Arab invaders. I'm guessing this makes them Zoroastrians, some other religious minority. But non-Muslims make up just 5% of the population, according to the CIA World Factbook, so maybe they're just  Muslim apostates.

They don't get it lit until about the 4:50 mark, but when they do, it burns quickly. Notice that they throw their prepared speech into the flames as well: a necessary precaution in a religiously-minded state.



I'm of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, there's something indescribably sad about a book burning; the poetry of the Koran does not deserve to be treated this way.

On the other hand, it's worth noting that antipathy to radical Islam is as broad as the wide world, even in what an American considers the dark heart of enemy territory. So there it is: watch it if you've the stomach.

Preach, Brother.

Over at Ace of Spades, they've been preaching Jeremiads on the DOOMED Debt cycle for some time. It has of late crossed into the mainstream. In the WaPo, Robert Samuelson tells it like it is:

We in America have created suicidal government; the threatened federal shutdown and stubborn budget deficits are but symptoms. By suicidal, I mean that government has promised more than it can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government can’t easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Government’s very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest.

When the end comes, we will lose things that we like. We will lose benefits we have come to depend on, tax breaks that we treat as our due. The fact that we were fools for ever trusting Caeser in the first place will not make it hurt the less.

Read the whole thing.

Budget Popcorn: Butter or No Butter?

If the GOP was going to follow-up the Budget deal with some real cuts, they'd get right to it, wouldn't they?

Behold:

“This is about making the right decisions now,” Cantor said. He touted Rep. Paul Ryan’s, R-Wis., budget proposal — a plan released last week that contains about $6 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years — and suggested Republicans would fight for at least a chunk of that plan as a condition of their support on the debt limit vote.

Cantor said a portion, and I think a portion is all he and Boehner expect to get. Which is what any sane person would expect when the Democrats control the Senate and the White House. Shutting down Pelosi (notice how absent she's been from these debates?), and hemming in Obama and Reid are about what Boehner can do. And I can tell that it's working, because:

“It’s totally unbalanced,” Van Hollen said. “He ends the Medicare guarantee for seniors. … They’ll have to eat all of the rising costs of health care, while they provide big tax breaks for millionaires and the corporate special interest."

This is what those triumphant donkeys of 2007-2010 are reduced to; muling and fussing about grampa's pills. Their backs are up against the wall, and they've got nothing to do but point to a weak-tea, half-assed version of the Ryan plan that the White House is going to offer.

So don't fret, wingnuts. Boehner and company are fighting the good fight.


UPDATE: The WSJ chimes in:

[T]he Obama-Pelosi Leviathan wasn't built in a day, and it won't be cut down to size in one budget. Especially not in a fiscal year that only has six months left and with Democrats running the Senate and White House. Friday's deal cuts more spending in any single year than we can remember, $78 billion more than President Obama first proposed. Domestic discretionary spending grew by 6% in 2008, 11% in 2009 and 14% in 2010, but this year will fall by 4%. That's no small reversal.

The budget does this while holding the line against defense cuts that Democrats wanted and restoring the school voucher program for Washington, D.C. for thousands of poor children. Tom DeLay—the talk radio hero when he ran the House—never passed a budget close to this good.

Indeed.

Bill Maher Gets Something Right.

It was bound to happen.

“What it comes down to is there is one religion in the world that kills you when you disagree with them and they say, ‘Look, we are a religion of peace and if you disagree, we’ll fucking cut your head off,’ and nobody calls them on it. There are very few people that will call them on it. You know, it’s like if dad is a violent drunk and beats his kids,” Maher said. “You don’t blame the kid because he set dad off. You blame Dad because he’s a violent drunk.”

He even quotes Bush approvingly:

“Bush used to talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations,” he said. “That’s what this is. When you say, ‘Well this is what the Muslims are going to do, you burn a Quran, they’re going to fucking kill the people – that’s bigotry.”

I do, George. I do.

Relax: the Budget Battle is Just Beginning.

I'm not going to comment on the "Shutdown"-avoiding budget deal that Boehner and Reid cobbled together on Friday night. If you consider $38.5 billion in budget cuts too little, you're right. If you think Boehner showed spunk in dealing with the Senate and White House, you may be right. If you think the GOP has sold us all down the river for not getting $eleventy-trillion, you might need to take a breath:

The accomplishment set the stage for even tougher confrontations. Republicans intend to pass a 2012 budget through the House next week that calls for sweeping changes in Medicare and Medicaid and would cut domestic programs deeply in an attempt to gain control over soaring deficits.
And the Treasury has told Congress it must vote to raise the debt limit by summer — a request that Republicans hope to use to force Obama to accept long-term deficit-reduction measures.

Now we have a complete year's worth of budget to make the kind of gigantoid cuts that the Tea Party wants to see. And yeah, a good bit of that won't make it through the Senate, and it's anyone's guess as to whether Obama will sign it if it does. But Boehner has demonstrated that he can get Reid to cut more than he wants to, and that Obama will be largely irrelevant to the procedure.

So keep the popcorn warm and the powder dry. The real show is about to begin.

83 Cents on the Social Security Dollar? Where Do I Sign Up?

Alex Pollock has crafted a plan to un-screw Social Security so simple, straightforward, and obviously beneficial that there's a virtual guaruntee that Congress will never consider the measure. It begins with a sound statement of reality:

If a debt cannot be paid, it will not be paid—at least not paid in full.

Everyone who has ever declared bankruptcy or dealt with a credit counseling firm knows this to be true. There is a point where liabilities stretch beyond future earnings. We have either hit this point already or sailing in full-steam, damn-the-torpedoes mode towards it.

Here's the plan:

You could stay in Social Security as it is. Or you could elect to settle for 83 cents, paid in U.S. Treasury inflation-indexed bonds, which you would own outright. These bonds, with all future interest payments on them, would constitute true retirement savings, protected from inflation.⁶ In exchange, you would forego formula benefits equal to the value of the bonds you received divided by 0.83. You would have made up your own mind about the chances of such promised Social Security benefits actually being paid.

I'd take it in a New York minute. So would most people, and every time that happens, Uncle Sugar finds his liability decreased. The essence of trade: both sides benefit.

So what's to stop it from happening? The greed of politicians for control over the lives of its citizens; the hunger to be seen as the cornucopia from which all good things flow. Why, if people have their own assets, we don't need to save them from themselves! Then what the hell are we going to do?

The Ryan Plan Sucks. We Still Need To Do It.

Nothing a politician does, however intelligent or well-meaning, will be without unpleasant or unintended consequences. This is so true as to be axiomatic. Thus, whatever benefits we will get from the Ryan Plan, people will be unhappy with it. People will have problems in their lives as a result of it. It doesn't go far enough for the libertarians, and it will cause the Left to howl like it's face is being ripped off with a sandpaper-bedecked spoon.

Whatever. This is the last chance our government will have to put its fiscal house in order. After this, we face 1 of 2 options:

1. Euro-style stagnation, complete with monstrously high taxes, permanent double-digit unemployment, and gradually collapsing demographics.
2. Civil War II: Bloodshed Bugaloo.

We don't want either, and I suspect the first will lead to the second rather quickly.

Let's Be Honest: The Man is a Fool.

For it must be noted, that men must either be caressed or annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones; the injury that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance.  -Machiavelli

Obama has gone to war with Libya without Congressional authorization, without a plan for achieving his goals, and he is likely to fail. Like many a man who festoons himself with the title of Man of Peace, he has refused to study war, and so has allowed himself to be hoodwinked. He believed the rebels in Libya, who believed, like the rest of the world, that Gaddafi was Mubarak in silly clothes. He did not consider that Gaddafi was a soldier by training, that he fought in Chad for seven years to control that poor country, or that he went to war with Egypt in 1977 more or less on a whim.

Such a man does not flee like Ferdinand Marcos or Baby Doc from popular discontent. He does not fear his palaces being blown up by cruise missiles. He will not surrender to maintain his wealth. He will give up his control over the country at the same moment that his body gives up his spirit.

Obama should have known this, or at the very least, inquired as to the nature of the man whom he had decided "must go." But we should not be surprised that he didn't. Conflict and the resources needed to win it have always been above his pay grade.

When All Is Said and Done....

... I gotta hand it to Brietbart. The guy's made himself an empire, whilst being completely unafraid and unapologetic. So if the title of his new book sounds a little precious, so be it.

For the Love of God, Obama...

Why are you stupid?

The Russians specifically are seeking a defense technology cooperation deal with the Pentagon that will permit them to gain access to U.S. hit-to-kill missile defense know-how, the key technology for the most current strategic long-range and tactical short-range defenses that were developed at a cost of billions of taxpayer dollars over the past two decades.The reason, the officials said, is that Moscow knows it can offer very little in the way of cooperative missile defense with the U.S. The current strategic anti-missile interceptors around Moscow are armed with nuclear warheads — tactical weapons that Moscow is not expected to use against an Iranian missile attack.

That's because the Russians don't expect to be receiving any Iranian missile attacks. Hell, they'll probably sell the tech to Tehran the first chance they get.

And yes, Ace, the appeal of not voting for Romney (or even Palin) diminishes when confronted with this basic fecklessness in the one area the President has total control.

"Kinetic Military Action"

The Examiner:

Now, White House officials are referring to the war in Libya not as a war but as a "kinetic military action." As common as "kinetic" might be among those in government, it still seems likely to strike members of the public as a euphemism that allows the Obama administration to describe a war as something other than a war.

Polysyllabics are like passive voice: they obscure. Passive voice obscures who's acting; pollysyllabics obscure the action itself.

Is it Really Aggression if You're Fighting a Rebellion?

Look, I'm sure that Muammar Kahadaffy (or however his name is spelled) deserves every salty ounce of the rage that the Libyan rebels have for him. But Mickey Kaus has a point:

It’s one thing for a supra-national authority–the U.N.–to authorize a war against someone who has committed cross-border aggression, or who has repeatedly violated earlier U.N. resolutions left over from a previous war. That was the case with Saddam in 2002–in theory.*It’s another to let the U.N. authorize a war on what Obama calls ”humanitarian grounds”–whether it’s to stop actual killings or some less severe variety of  “human rights violation.”  These are concepts that are easily watered down to justify intervention–indeed, as Massimo Calabresi makes clear, they seem to have been watered down in this very case, where Gaddafi’s pending atrocities are hardly Rwanda-sized...

And yes, that's a mighty flimsy defense. But legal authorization carries with it the threat of precedent. Are all rebels to demand UN-guarunteed Marquess of Queensbury rules?

Getting rid of Gaddafi is an easy call on national-interest grounds: he's a slime. He has the blood of Americans on his hands. His people, carried up in the winds of the Arab Spring, want him gone, and it behooves us to make nice with them. Done and done. But jumping in with a vague constructions about atrocities that may not have happened, in an internal revolt that touches no other nation, this may lead we know not where.

It's Not Just Me...

Word Around the Net:

Months before the actual invasion of Iraq began, President Bush brought his argument to the American people, using speeches, interviews, and his administration writing editorials for various news sources. President Bush tried to convince the American people of the necessity of his plan and why.
By contrast, President Obama went to the UN and started taking action. He did not seek to convince anyone in the public of what he was doing, nor gain public support.

Obama seems not to remember what country he Presides over. After all, there's oceans to stop...

Fukushima Demonstrates That Nuclear Power Works

George "Moonbat" Monbiot (h/t Insty):

[T]he average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.
If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Read the whole thing, in which he points out that renewable energy carries it's own costs. Basically, Fukushima got hit with a perfect storm of disasters, and to date, no one is going to die.

Being President is Hard.

It's been fun the last day or two, watching proggies of various stripes get themselves all worked up over the Bombing of Libya. Glenn Reynolds is having a grand time granting Andrew Sullivan the title he has so eminently deserved. But the outraged proggies may have a point.

Does anyone have any notion of what it is we're DOING in Libya? Are we merely levelliing the playing field? Or are we ousting Khadaffi? To what end? By what means?

Say what you will about Bush, but he made it plenty clear in the build-up to Afghanistan and Iraq what we were doing and why. He made it clear to Congress, and he made it clear to the American people. For that matter, when Reagan bombed Libya back in '86, he went on television and told us why.

Obama has done none of that. So I don't blame the proggies for being bent out of shape, even if I do wonder why they expected a one-term junior senator with no executive experience to handle the Presidency better.

It's the Hypocrisy, Stupid.

Listen up, proggies.

Death threats are bad. Everyone knows this, and everyone is supposed to say so.

Civility is good. Everyone knows this, and everyone is supposed to speak up for the civil against the uncivil.

You aren't supposed to excuse the uncivil when they happen to sit on your side of the aisle. You're supposed to keep them under control, or at the very least, not encourage or defend them.

So when unsubtle threats and extortion demands get sent to those who dissent from the Proggie sense of entitlement vision, everyone is supposed to call those people what they are: vain, ridiculous petty tyrants with the manners of Vandals and the morals of pimps.

You're supposed to call it out, in the interests of a better, more civil society for all of us, not just the people who agree with you.

And if you can't or won't do that, then don't be surprised when your caterwauling about how awful and scary the people who disagree with you are falls on deaf ears and rolled eyes.

Ball's in your court.

There's Another Solution....

A crusading Clerk of the Circuit Court (Frank Conaway, who's running for mayor) stands up for a man who's been fighting for 12 years to keep his house from a variety of lawyers who have purchased the tax lien on his house, charged him rent, and filed duplicitous records.

In other words, the property owners rack up hefty interest charges on the debt, while the lawyer who bought it can then bill them for essentially selling the obligation back to them, with some legal fees tacked on. In the end the owner ends up paying thousands of dollars in legal fees and interest for what amounts to a dollar-value several times the original debt.

However wretched this kind of tax-farming is, whatever court case and whatever new ordnance Conaway has in mind, there are a couple of ways this could be prevented:

1. Create a settlement system that allows the city to collect tax liens in a timely manner, as by monthly payments.
2. Charge less in property taxes.

Is the government so incompetent that it can't even collect its own taxes?

Lileks Sticks it to the Man

That is, the Woman, in the person of 1945 Poet Laureate Louise Brogan:

There was no glory in the smart circles to finding the poetry in the lives of Nice People. No, the souls that had been damaged by banging their heads against the stone walls of this prison culture, and had naturally sought refuge in brain-scrambling chemicals until they soiled themselves and stood in the park yelling for EZRA POUND TO COME OUT FROM BEHIND THAT TREE I SEE YOU AND YOU’RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE – these were the vanguard, the mystics, the seers, and everyone else seemed a whiskered Victorian by comparison, harumphing behind opera glasses as they beheld the truth of Life, man, life.

 Poor fellows going under the novocaine today. Read the whole thing.

Preach, Brother

Pezman Yousefzadeh:

I long for the day when arguments in favor of farm subsidies will be viewed with the same disdain as are arguments that the sun revolves around the earth.

Geocentrism, as Ptolemy designed it, was far more sophisticated. No special pleading required.

The Generation Pay Gap

Over at Ace, Gabriel Malor speaks truth to power:

[T]he Baby Boomers and their predecessors wanted it this way and, as a result of the way they wanted it, the whole scheme is crashing down. That's on them.
It's not like the Social Security funding crisis just materialized yesterday. This has been on the radar for decades. This structural flaw -- and it is a structural flaw, integral to the whole scheme -- has been evident for a very long time. It didn't just happen, as if it were an uncontrollable, unpredictable, and unfathomable Act of God. You did this; you were there and have been in the best position to do something about it for decades. But the only question was how far you thought you could kick that can down the road. And the Usual Answer was: who the fuck cares, as long as it's until after I'm dead.

Social Security has turned the aged into the nations most powerfull lobby. No one denies this. But if in the New Broke Normal, we're prepared to tell public sector unions that they need to sacrifice along with the rest of us, then it's time to consider telling rich old farts that they too are fellow citizens with obligations and responsibilities to the rest of us. That they may have to delay their long-promised suckling at the federal teat.

I'm utterly bereft of sympathy on this point. They've been telling me for a decace plus that they might not be able to fully fund my retirement pay back the money they've been grifting from my paycheck. Maybe I'll get 75% back. And if they're saying that now, what are they going to start saying when I'm actually ready to retire?

Por espanol, marque el "Dos"...

Hey, My Scrotum's Right Where I Left It!

Holy shneikes, even Adam Corolla's chiming in.

You don’t want us to fight. You don’t want us to pay the bills. You don’t want us to open the car door and pull out the chairs. So guess what? We’re going to play Nintendo and watch our YouPorn. We can hop on the computer and stay busy for the next several years.

Millions of versions of this have hit teh intertubes since Kay Hymowitz put out the first male-bashing book that tenatively suggested that women might do that too much. And it's not as though I disagree with it. But sitting on our fat asses collecting pizza weight and spyware actually is a problem. And complaining that women are just too damn mean and scary actually isn't the solution.

If we think that our society needs some manliness, we need to sack up and pay the cost of being men. Of earning it. Of looking at our lives and ourselves with the flinty eye that our grandfathers employed as a matter of course. And of telling our girlfriends and wives that what we are and what we do matter, and we'll take our share of respect for it, thank you very much.

Otherwise, why shouldn't the ovarians win?

If You Can Find the King, You Can See Him...

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert just spent eight months trying to get the Depatment of Health and Human Services to let him take the State's Medicaid paperwork online. He finally had to appeal to President Obama.

"We tried for eight months to get the waiver," says Herbert. HHS delayed and delayed and delayed -- and then finally said no. "The denial we got back from the secretary of HHS was by e-mail, of all things," Herbert says, pausing a second for the listener to take it in. "The irony is rich."

To his credit, Obama immediately saw the worth of the idea and got the desk jockeys to okay it. But the whole episode displays everything the Right hates about Big Government: the delays, the inadequate responses, the self-serving hypocrisy. What the Left fails to understand is that these things are natural, and unavoidable parts of any bureaucratic process.

Bureaucracies exist to enforce, not to innovate. Office-holders are not empowered to make decisions, but rewarded for complying with them. HHS could not - literally could not - make the change Herbert asked for, because no one of sufficient authority told them that they could. It doesn't matter if they're officially allowed to make such decisions; in practice they will make the decisions that will create the minimum of ripples.

It reminds one of a French peasant hiking his way to Versailles and getting permission from the guards to enter, finding the King, and asking his permission to build a bridge over his stream, because the local Count wouldn't let him and the Bishop was indifferent.

America isn't supposed to work this way. We aren't supposed to be bowing in tender supplication to the arbitrary whims of our emperor and his eunuchs. We're supposed to be a free people. But freedom is messy; and our aspiring eunuch class likes things neat and tidy.

Oil Prices Start Dropping again.

Daily Caller:

Oil and gasoline prices soared last week as the rebellion in Libya halted oil shipments from the country. On Monday, oil dropped on reports that a tanker bound for China was loading oil in the Libyan port of Tobruk and Saudi Arabia was boosting exports.

I Guess It's Finally Over, Over There...

The Last Doughboy has rejoined the rest of his comrades. Frank Buckles was an ambulance driver in the Great War, and all of 16 years old in 1917. His fondest wish: to restore the DC War Memorial, get a monument for the AEF, and to be buried by General Pershing.

"It has long been my father's wish to be buried in Arlington, in the same cemetery that holds his beloved General Pershing," Flanagan wrote as she began to prepare for the inevitable in a letter she sent to home-state U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia.

Here's hoping the Defense Department can make that happen. He ended up involved the the second war as well.

Buckles, after World War I ended, took up a career as a ship's officer on merchant vessels. He was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II and held prisoner of war for more than three years before he was freed by U.S. troops.

That sounds like more than one's fair share of bloodshed and toil. RIP.

UPDATE: As of now, the only living veterans of WWI are subjects of Queen Elizabeth: a British Woman and an Australian Man.

Well then, Cui Bono?

John Carney at CNBC takes us to school on "regulatory capture":

Pennell asked whether MERS was worried about an investigation by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The general counsel’s reply was a stunning admission—basically MERS isn’t worried because it is convinced that the government regards it as too important to be sanctioned for misconduct.

As Leona Helmsley might have put it, regulations are for the little people. They exist not to rein in the powerful, but to protect them from competition.

Iran is the Lodestone.

Pejman Yousefzadah links Amir Tahiri on the protests in Iran, which are becoming triumphant merely for surviving.

Many Iranians believe that the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings that toppled two Arab despots were inspired by Iran’s pro-democracy demonstrations of 2009. This week’s protests revealed three things: Iran’s opposition movement is wounded but alive; it is united in its rejection of Mr. Ahmadinejad; and, slowly but surely, it is discarding the option of change within the regime and seeking to change the regime.

For some reason, the Sunni Middle East seems to take its cue from Shi'ite Iran. Thus far that cue has been for jihad and Jew-blaming. Democracy and dictator-shaming is a welcome change.

Justin Bieber's Litmus Test

I cannot bring myself to write about Justin Bieber at Genre Confusion, so I'm doing it here. It's more about politics, anyway.

So the golden boy of the pop world got asked a bunch of questions that have nothing to do with music, and he may not have answered them like he was supposed to:

"I really don't believe in abortion," the teen idol said. "It's like killing a baby?" When asked if he was still adamantly pro-life in cases of rape, his stance didn't really change. "Um. Well, I think that's really sad, but everything happens for a reason," he said. "I don't know how that would be a reason. I guess I haven't been in that position, so I wouldn't be able to judge that."

So far, so 16-year-old. It's probably not something he's ever really thought about, and he mumbled through it as best he could. Whatever. I neither know nor care what he really thinks enough to criticize him on how artfully he articulates it.

Another point of contention from the interview is the Canadian crooner's admission that he never plans to become an American citizen. "You guys are evil," he joked. "Canada's the best country in the world." The young man even took a dig at the U.S. healthcare system. "We go to the doctor and we don't need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you're broke because of medical bills."

Let's give the kid a little credit here. Sure, he's traveled the world and is in a higher tax bracket than most of us can even fathom, but how many 16-year-olds are even remotely aware of how insanely expensive healthcare can be? The fact that he's cultured and tuned in to the everyday struggles of those surrounding him (he mentions his bodyguard's premature baby and the costly complications stemming from that) is a refreshing glimpse of a Hollywood star that hasn't completely lost touch with reality and everyday people.

This, on the other hand, is just bursting with stupid. Not Bieber's polite and thoughtful opining on the intricacies of health care, that's just the opinion every Canadian is issued at birth. What's stupid is this particluar Popeater claiming that mere chauvinism coupled with declarations of evil reflects maturity and insight.

Justin Bieber doesn't know anything about health care or how much it costs. He doesn't have to: he's Canadian. Debates about health care costs occur above his pay-grade. Somber, credentialed professionals in brightly lit rooms have these debates for him, so that, as he boasts, not a golden hair of his pretty head ever need be disturbed by them.

Justin and his opinions on premarital sex are understandable -- the kid is, after all, a sex symbol to millions of tween girls -- but were the questions about abortion, rape and even politics appropriate given his age and the fact that these topics have seemingly nothing to do with his music, movie or any of the products he sells?

"I think that anyone who has as much sway in popular culture as Justin should be asked all questions," Grigoriadis said. "I agree that he does not bring up these issues in his work at the moment, but it's possible that he will in the future, as he decides that he wants the public to know more about him."

How does one say "bullshit" in Canadian?

Rolling Stone asked these questions for one reason and one reason only: to determine if Frankie Avalon Leif Garret Justin Bieber was one of the Right People with the Right Opinions. If he is, then RS can insert the Teen Idol as More Sophisticated Observer of Human Affairs Than We Would Have Thought angle. If not, so much the better: the Pop Sensation With Troubling, Controversial Opinions angle always sells better (you don't think these thumb-suckers actually like interviewing 50 Cent and Eminem, do you?).

So based on this, I'm guessing he got a C+. Expect continuing coverage for the next several millenia.

I Love the Smell of Disco in the Evening. It Smells Like Victory.

One of the standing lines from the Right since Obama's rise has been that he is Carter in blackface. Instapundit, and myself, have long been of the opinion that Carter II is about the best we could expect from Obama. But he might mean something different from what I mean.

Carter's great virtue from a conservative point of view was his complete impotence, an almost adorable inability to come to terms with the challenges of his time. This had nothing whatever to do with his intellect. James Earl Carter, Jr. graduated from Annapolis and studied nuclear physics; such men are not without grey matter. Rather, he persistently misconcieved what the country the times needed and wanted.

And why was this good? Because by 1978 it was arguable, and by 1980, obvious. A sea change could and did occur in the American political landscape because the country had percieved that the New Class had failed to provide what it had promised. Conservative success in 2012 depends in no small part on a similar perception.

As P.J. O'Rourke once put it, after we get Carter, we get Reagan.

Good Morning, Mr. Taliban. You are Dead.

 

The XM25 allows Soldiers to engage defilade targets -- those behind a barrier, protected from oncoming weapons fire. The XM25 measures the distance to the enemy's protective barrier, and can then program the round to detonate a user-adjustable distance past that -- allowing Soldiers to put an air-bursting round directly above the enemy's head, inside their protected area. 

 We're just beta-testing the things now.

Baltimore Sheds Another 30,000 People

Investigative Voice is in full cry-havoc-and-let-slip-the-dogs mode:

And that’s why, ultimately, this city is losing. Not because of crime, or ineffective schools that managed to muster just a three-percent advanced-placement pass rate for students in a state that averaged 25 percent.

Not just because the city can’t raise enough revenue to keep the same bloated payrolls that allowed multiple Department of Public Works employees to not do their jobs for weeks at a time — and at least one to be kept on the public payroll while serving time in jail for molesting a teenage girl — with not a single superior taking notice.

The reason the city failed to keep and attract residents is that the policies that have informed the past are constructed for the benefit of people who don’t live here. For tourists, cops, and small handfuls of politicians and business insiders who trade tax breaks for political donations.

When this process is over, the population of Baltimore will consist of the powerless poor and the grasping government. Read the Whole Thing, as they say.

For the Children

Hat tip: Ace



Tax Reform now, indeed...

Walter Russel Mead on Sun Tzu

Since I mentioned it, here's an example of the kind of argument that only military historians make, and only conservative military historians at that:

The Art of War, a book which has inspired Chinese emperors, Japanese shoguns, Napoleon, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, does not just subvert conventional morality. It is even more profoundly opposed to the bureaucratic mind: the approach to the world that believes that everything can be reduced to technique and procedures.

Much of America today is as addicted to bureaucratic, rule based thinking as ancient China. The uncertainties of life in a thermonuclear world haunt us. There must, we feel, be infallible techniques for making the economy grow, keeping inflation at bay, understanding international events and managing American foreign policy. When there is a problem — a financial crash, a revolution in a friendly country, an attack by hostile forces — somebody must have made an obvious mistake. They must have misapplied or failed to apply an obvious technique. We would rather believe that our leaders are foolish and incompetent (which they often are) than face the truth that we live in a radically unpredictable world in which no methods and no rules can guarantee safety.

We believe in reason, and reason is predictable. We claim that the world was made by forces which we can a) understand, and b) harness. This is a matter of gospel in the modern world. A conservatives, faced with an intractable problem which flies in the face of the creed, shrugs his shoulders and says, "it is what it is." A progressive cannot, for that is giving up on those who deserve his aid, and that is the sin by which the world is corrupted.

Bias Amongst the Bias-Hunters

In Other News, Duh.

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

Many on the Right have commented on this. I am of two minds about it. On the one hand, it's good to see epistemic cloture being breached, and anything that would let moonbats and wingnuts see each other as differently-thinking rather than non-thinking would be welcome.

On the other, I dislike the idea of being made part of a Designated Victim Group. One of the reasons conservatives don't study psychology and anthropology has to be that conservatives tend to be drawn to study other things. How many progressive military historians are there?

Still, if this is what it takes, well, such is the Age of Revolution.

Trains are For Nerds.

When I was a young fellow, I had a weekly commute from Philadelphia to Monmouth  by way of a particularly painful combination of AmTrak and NJ Transit. I did this because I didn't have a car, and I didn't have a car because I was still figuring out costs and other such things. It's all part of being 21 and out in the wide world for the first time.

On one particular Sunday rehearsal, I wasn't able to get off the NJ Transit train at my stop, because I sat too far back in the train, and the doors weren't opening. So I had to get off at the last stop, and try to figure out how to get to my corporate hotel room from there. This was 1998, before cell phones were attached to everyone's hip, so I had to use a phone card to get in touch with my hotel. I had to wait an hour before the hotel could manage to get a car and driver out to where I was.

Within a few weeks, I'd purchased a crappy old 1986 Lincoln Mark VII. I totalled it within a matter of months and had to buy another car, but whatever. I was never going to endure that agony again.

And that's why I roll my eyes whenever proggies get themselves all worked up over public trains. Trains work only when nothing else is faster or more convenient than they are. Such instances are as follows:

" the Woodrow Wilson Institute for Liberals Who Want To Seem Smart About Foreign Stuff"

That there's funny, I don't care who you are.

Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles....

First comes inflation qualitative easing.

Then comes food riots.

What comes next?

This is Not Racism

But the Tea Party? Totally racist. Totally.

GE Enjoys its Benefices

Serve the realm, and the king will reward you.

Of course, once again, as a GE stockholder, a bit of these plums will eventually trickle down to the likes of me. Beggin' yer pardon, milord...

Richard Dawkins Struggles With the Whole Logic Thing

Via Carthago Delenda Est, this:

Because a university science department would be justified in turning down holders of these beliefs, Dawkins wishes us to think, it follows that UK was justified in rejecting Gaskell. Dawkins's illustrations are three cases of Biblical literalist YEC belief and three fantasy beliefs the likes of which no one you'll ever meet actually holds, certainly no one who could rise to a level of scientific achievement where hiring him to teach at a university would come up for practical discussion.

I don't necessarily buy ID, but I have noticed a similarity between ID-opponents and AGW-proponents: the willingness to malign and conflate their opponents.

If an Inquisition existed today, Dawkins would run it with glee

2012: We've Seen this Movie.

The trouble with the presumptive 2012 GOP candidates is that every single one of them is a re-tread from 2008. Someone who lost to John McCain just doesn't seem like a strong candidate off the bat, and his Veep candidate has her own problems.

Which is why I like Daniels, among other reasons. He's untainted by 2008 failure.

Ace has his suspicions about Daniels. I filet the front-runners here.

The Aristocracy of Pull

Ayn Rand has her issues, but she did come up with a few deft phrases, and one of them is the beginning of Francisco d'Anconia's rant in Atlas Shrugged: that in the new progressive age, the aristocracy of wealth would be replaced by "the aristocracy of pull," or political connection.

If there's another way to interpret the fact that eternal corporate pariah Wal-Mart pays %33.6 percent of its profit in taxes, while the Obama Adminstration's bankroll, GE, pays 3.6%, I'd like to hear it.

It's not that I have a problem with GE paying so little. I'm a GE stockholder, and I likes my dividends. But the idea that one corporation should pay more taxes than another by an order of magnitude --whether due to political favor or tax farming -- ought to be offensive to conservatives and progressives alike.

Or perhaps someone would like to explain how a single 10% corporate tax rate with no loopholes or deductions would not be more just?

And There Goes One of My Guys...

I liked Mike Pence, and liked the idea of a dark horse congressional candidate overturning Romney, Huckabee, and Palin for the nomination. So I'm a little disappointed that he's putting the kibosh on it now. That said, he's playing the smart route, and getting out of Mitch Daniels' way.

So now my Dark Horse is John Bolton.  He would rule

It's all about Meghan McCain. Especially when it isn't.

This gentleman came to Meghan McCain's GWU speech, heard her, and posted a YouTube video in response.



Most of it is a polite pointing out of Meggie's self-contradictions, but the most damning indictment comes at the four-minute mark, when he points out that the crowd of protestors she assumed were demonstrating against her were in fact protesting something else and didn't even know she was there.

Who Knew Towing Could Be So Dramatic?

Investigative Voice:

The FBI may be investigating Baltimore's towing business in light of the recent move by the city to privatize its impound lot and do away with the city’s medallion towing business, the fellow councilperson told Kraft, according to the sources.

Are you telling me there's a federal statute on how urban centers can operate towing firms? WHY?

But at least the mayor has the right idea:

“From what I understand the mayor believes there are things we should do and other things we should not,” Nelson told I.V. at the time.

Indeed. Until:

At the meeting she told minority-owned towing firms that a privatization plan would provide them a greater share of the city’s lucrative contract-towing business.

“We’re trying to increase the availability… of minority and women-owned businesses,” she said then. “We certify you as a minority or a woman so you can be named as a subcontractor.”

*sigh* I know this is boilerplate, but dammit, Baltimore is a minority-majority city. Anyone who can get a tow-license should be able to start a tow business. Why do they have to make everything so difficult?

Get Out of the Way, Here Comes Domino...

Egypt revolts, and this time, the Obama administration is determined to be on time for the party:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that Washington supports the "fundamental right of expression and assembly," but she urged Egyptians to refrain from violence.

That's about as close to approval as we can get, inasmuch as we rely upon Mubarak to be no friend of al-Qaeda.

If It Bleeds, It Bores

Unlike E.J. Dionne, I don't have any particular animus against Eric Goldstein. But his column of today is bizarre to me, strangley formulaic and and bereft of real argument. So I'm going to fisk it, if for no other reason than to keep my claws sharp.

A Tunisian revolution that's more bloody than jasmine

What a powerful headline! So challenging in its assertions, so evocative in its construction, so tasty the bourbon at the hotel bar!

What's the Difference Between a Developer and an Environmentalist?

A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods.

An environmentalist is someone who already owns a house in the woods.

Via Ace, Patrick Moore's Confessions of a Greenpeace Founder. Moore has been out and proud from Greenpeace for some time, but here he spells out where things went wrong:

Some activists simply couldn't make the transition from confrontation to consensus; it was as if they needed a common enemy. When a majority of people decide they agree with all your reasonable ideas the only way you can remain confrontational and antiestablishment is to adopt ever more extreme positions, eventually abandoning science and logic altogether in favour of zero-tolerance policies.

And this is precisely what people don't like about environmentalists: their zealotry and puritanical will to damn the Industrial Revolution. They're angry Romantics with a furry fetish.

The idea that we cannot pollute our land has taken hold. But some pollution will continue as long as humans will need a source of energy. And I am deeply suspicious of any alternative fuel that requires massive government support. If it truly works, it will work on its own.

The Industiral Revolution has created problems for the planet, but it is also the only way to address those problems. If the Environmentalists really cared about the earth, they'd stop standing in the way of its saviors.

Micheal Moore, Health Care: The Fisking (A Zombie Post from March 2010)

[Editors Note: I've been cleaning out the old blog today, adding tags, deleting drafts that would never see the light of day, when I stumbled upon this. God only knows why I got this far and never finished it. I was faced with either deleting it or getting rid of it. And for some reason I cannot choose to un-fisk Michael Moore. I just can't quit the big fat bastard]

Because.

To My Fellow Citizens, the Republicans:

Say, what you will about the man, he loves him some schtick. And he loves no schtick like the "Phoney Politeness" schtick.

Baby Doc Duvalier Splits Atoms...With His Mind

I mentioned earlier that Baby Doc returned to Haiti and was promptly arrested and prevented from leaving the country. Now we have some indication as to what prompted him to show his face:

Duvalier, 59, made the trip just before a Swiss law that could entitle him to at least $4.6 million takes effect on Feb. 1. To collect the funds, he would have to show Haitian authorities aren't interested in prosecuting him.

So he tried to collect money by proving that Haiti wasn't going to prosecute him, which he did by showing up in Haiti, where they are now prosecuting him.

Palinoia is Bush Derangement Syndrome in a Skirt

Losing your mind over Sarah Palin has it's own cute name: Palinoia.  I won't take Taranto's argument and run with it, the way Robert McCain does, because I'm not that devoted to the vigorous thwacking of contraception. Rather, I found the key quote in Taranto's column early on:

They resent her because, in their view, she has risen above her station.

Sarah Palin is a state-college grad, and state-college grads aren't supposed to eke out Ivy-Leaguers for the top spot on the greasy pole of politics. She's the American equivalent of what Roman patricians called a homo novus, a New Man, one whos family had never had a consul before. Thus a good deal of the "she's a moron," is more or less the same as calling Gaius Marius an Italian hayseed with no Greek.

I do not mean to say that Sarah Palin is as accomplished as Gaius Marius. As I've said before, I have my doubts about her aptitude for the presidency. But snobbery is snobbery, and we've seen this before:

There are many among our political and media elite, and among those on the coasts who are in their zone of influence, who simply cannot believe that a born-again Christian from Texas can ever be right about anything, ever. Decades (centuries?) of internalized bigotry of urbanites against provincials, of secular humanists against unsophisticated believers, does not vanish overnight, not even in the face of an act of war, not when the same group has drank deep of the waters of Wilsonian collective security and refuses to believe that their enemy is their enemy because he wants to be so.

In short, George W. Bush has been despised since long before the Iraq War, because he is the living embodiment of Those People, and the habit of the American media and political establishment has for some time been to mock Those People as cruel, stupid, and dangerous.

The oldest kind of elitism in the world is the only kind that our ruling class celebrates.

UPDATE: In light of this post at Classical Values, I should point out where exactly my doubts on Palin spring from.

To start with, they aren't properly "doubts." That implies a bias toward thinking Palin is not competent to be President. Really, my problem with her is that there's been so much dust kicked up about her, that it's hard to discern the true person underneath. At the moment she was tapped to be Vice President, I liked everything I heard about her. Her speech at the convention was good (not great, but better than McCain's). After that, she entered the Media Circus and to date, hasn't come out. Almost everything about her is now part of the ongoing drama of her against her assailants. All of which I find a distraction to determining whether she really can handle the presidency.

If she steps up in the campaign, and takes the heat, and demonstrates her acumen, then I'll give her a vote. If not, there are others.

Old and Busted: Sarah Palin Made Loughner Shoot People

New Hotness: Zeitgeist, which is anti-semetic and right-wing, made Loughner Shoot People

You have to ignore a LOT to make Zeitgeist a Republican film. You also have to ignore a lot to make it a Democratic one. Mainstream American politics -- of which, like her or not, Sarah Palin is a member -- has as little to do with this sort of vision-dreaming. These people aren't on the political fringe. They aren't even cranks. They're nothing, detritus, the equivalent of the tinfoil they doubtless wrap around their heads to avoid the CIA mind control.

Kooks. Jared Loughner was a kook. And kooks do kooky things.

The Left likes to portray Tea Partiers as kooks, for the same reason that Federalists called Thomas Jefferson the Anti-Christ: for rhetorical purposes, an entirely cynical exercise in fear-mongering. And if I wanted to stretch it, I could make a comparison between that and the fear-mongering of Zeitgeist. But I'm not going to do that, because there's a world of difference between "You guys are lunatics!" and "the Federal Reserve is poisoning the wells, the Bilderbergers are unwittingly causing us to bow down to the Beast, Jesus is the Devil!!!eleventy!!!" Cynicism does many things, but it does not willfully deny reality.

Dictator Rule #1

If you get gone, stay gone:

Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was charged with corruption and the theft of his country's meagre funds last night after the former Haitian dictator was hauled before a judge in Port-au-Prince

Two days after his return to the country he left following a brutal 15-year rule, a noisy crowd of his supporters protested outside the state prosecutor's office while he was questioned over accusations that he stole public funds and committed human rights abuses after taking over as president from his father in 1971.

I honestly did not see this coming. I assumed that if Baby Doc was coming home, that he would have, you know, some kind of a plan for surviving, something to avoid this kind of nonsense. Of course, maybe he does. Papa Doc surely would have. But this is Baby, so...

Liquor Board Inspector Works for a Club

Investigative Voice has been on this story from the beginning:

Pigtown residents who gathered to hear plans for a new 5,000-square-foot bar on the 700 block of Washington Boulevard at a community meeting last week said they were a bit confused when the three prospective owners were joined by a liquor board inspector who said he would be working as security consultant to the project.

 And now, Chanel 11 has found it worthy of their time:

A Baltimore liquor inspector has been reassigned amid allegations that he violated the firewall that's supposed to separate the inspectors from the businesses they regulate.

Now, I-V mentioned Fitzgerald's re-assignment, too, but at the end, giving the impression that it was the normal process of investigations, and not the lede of the story. I-V also managed to interview the co-owner of the prospective club, Tiffany Felder, who brought Fitzgerald in as a security consultant. Channel 11 makes do with a "businessman" named Paul Ely who's clearly hostile to the proposed club.

So basically, Stephen Janis scoops the Baltimore Media again, and gives us an actual damn story. Compare the two, and see which one gives you more actual information.

One Tyrant Out, Another Returns

The official silence surrounding the Tunisian Revolution invites gales of laughter. This sort of things isn't supposed to happen in the Arab world, where the people have two choices:

1. Bloodthirsty screaming Islamists who will behead your brother for reading Oscar Wilde, and stone your sister for reading anything; or
2. Meretricious gasbags who will funnel the wealth of your country into Swiss Bank accounts, and cause your cousin to vanish in the dead of night when he snarks too loudly about it.

But here the people, having already voted out the Islamists 24 years ago, have sent the gasbag, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, into exile. No doubt he can buy an estate in San Marino and commiserate with Roman Polanski about the world's injustices.

Obviously, this too will pass. Though the sight of furious young men in beards and galabiyeh, invoking the Prophet's wrath, has been blessedly absent from Tunisia's popular uprising, they may soon return. Algeria, which has experienced a civil war between Islamists and anti-Islamists for nearly 20 years, is just over the border. And there's no guaruntee that a secular government will govern any better than Ben Ali did.

But for the moment, let's enjoy watching the Saudis, Syrians, Egyptians and Iranians glance warily over their shoulders. Let's quietly savor the obvious discomfort of the French, who are again hung upon the hypocrisy of their crypto-colonialism. 'Tis time to kiss, when tyrants seem to fear.

On the other hand, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, the dictatorial heir who was flung from Haiti like a wormy apple the year before Ben Ali came to power, has returned. The feckless son of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, the humanitarian medical man who murdered 30,000 Hatiians during his 14-year reign, Baby Doc has shown up out of the blue during Haiti's elections, for no stated reason. Perhaps Ben Ali can rent his chateau.

On the New Civility

Jim Treacher calls out Richard Cohen for being the hypocrital swine he is:

Go ahead and insult anybody you want. But please excuse me if I don’t take you seriously when you turn right around and call on the rest of us to be nicer to each other.

And then, of course, there's Don Surber's Rant Heard Round the Right-osphere:

The left suddenly wants civil discourse.

Bite me.

The left wants to play games of semantics.

Bite me.

The left wants us to be civil — after being so uncivil for a decade.

Bite me.

The problem with all this is we don't even have an agreement about what civility consists of. What is it about the Tea Parties that the Left finds uncivil? The entirely peaceful protests, which usually leave the site cleaner than it was found? The dissent from the Keynsian Consensus of 2008? The accusations of socialism/fascism/communism levelled at Barack Obama? What?

If we could agree upon what was out of bounds, and we could trust the other side not to violate those bounds, perhaps we could establish this new civility.

As it stands though, I'm off to buy a bigger soapbox.

NY Schools Chancellor Jokes About Birth Control to Fix Over-Crowding; Hilarity Ensues

When demand outstrips supply, and service cannot be refused, what happens?

People make grim, bitter jokes:

The public-service novice, who has spent her entire career in media and publishing, also dropped jaws at the meeting by likening her task of satisfying space-crunch concerns in every neighborhood to making "many Sophie's Choices" -- a reference to the book in which a mother in the Auschwitz death camp is forced to decide which of her two children will live.

I know what she meant: she has to make impossible decisions, and she feels bad about it. The woman has to meet unlimited and ever-growing needs, with limited and and difficult-to-grow resources. Why anyone expects different is a mystery to me.

But faith in the endless power of public institutions marches on.

We're All Perverts Now.

From the WSJ's "Eek! A Male!" (h/t: Althouse)

What's really ironic about all this emphasis on perverts is that it's making us think like them. Remember the story that broke right before Christmas? The FBI warned law-enforcement agencies that the new Video Barbie could be used to make kiddie porn. The warning was not intended for the public but it leaked out. TV news celebrated the joy of the season by telling parents that any man nice enough to play dolls with their daughters could really be videotaping "under their little skirts!" as one Fox News reporter said.

The more we think about children as victims of pedophilia, the more pedophilia is on our minds. It's a self-perpetuating obsession, the Last Taboo.

And that's not the worst. In England in 2006, BBC News reported the story of a bricklayer who spotted a toddler at the side of the road. As he later testified at a hearing, he didn't stop to help for fear he'd be accused of trying to abduct her. You know: A man driving around with a little girl in his car? She ended up at a pond and drowned.
We think we're protecting our kids by treating all men as potential predators. But that's not a society that's safe. Just sick.

When you catch a predator, the predator also catches you.

Nifty.

Pope John Paul II to be Beatified May 1.

For those non-Cat'licks, Beatification is the half-way point to being declared a saint. Afterwards it will be customary to refer to him as Blessed John Paul II.

You may return to your pedophilia jokes now.

Obama's Tucson Speech

Hopefully this will be the last I write on this subject.

My initial reaction to Obama's speech, which I read last night, was that he was sounding the right notes, and appearing presidential for the first time in his presidency. By explicitly calling attention to the Loughner's victims, he made the subject what it should have been all along. It was the right re-focusing of the national attention and mood.

Now, many on the Right are not going to be satisfied with this. For them, nothing short of defending Sarah Palin and telling the unhinged of his own camp specifically to silence themselves, will be acceptable. As with his Iraq Speech, I'm not so picky. I don't expect a Democratic President to specificaly call out members of his own party for rebuke. There's simply no benefit for him to do that. No Republican President would do it either.

No, last night, however briefly, Obama was the President of the whole country, not just the people who agree with him. That is more than I usually expect from him, so I will grant it respect.

Progressive Logic

Not taking more money from people who make 250,000 a year? Plutocracy.

Giving export assistance to one of America's largest corporations? Common-sense, reality-based government work.

Sarah Palin is Absolutely Right

I don't care about Sarah Palin. I saw very little of her in the 2008 campaign that really impressed me. By the same token, it doesn't take much subtelty to see that the response to her from the Left is preposterously out of proportion to her actual deeds. Like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, she seems to evoke a particular deranged fury from those who consider themselves our credentialed elite.

For both of these reasons, I hope she doesn't win the 2012 GOP nomination, and don't plan on voting for her to get it. To my mind, better candidates can be found, and if she does win, then the election will become a referendum on her media image, rather than anything about the issues or her ability to grapple with them.

That said, her response to the Gifford hysteria is absolutely dead on:

There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols? In an ideal world all discourse would be civil and all disagreements cordial. But our Founding Fathers knew they weren’t designing a system for perfect men and women. If men and women were angels, there would be no need for government. Our Founders’ genius was to design a system that helped settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So, we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure.

One of the mushy middle's more tedious fallacies constantly refrains that our politics are so loud and obnoxious now, and getting worse. The demonstrable falseness of this belief doesn't stop them from holding it. So-called "moderates" and "centrists" believe it because they don't know anything about politics or history, and they don't know anything about politics or history because they find it distasteful.

Politics has never been nice. History has never been nice. Lament this if you will, take pains to curtail it if you must. But don't pretend that we're seeing anything new. Humanity makes innovations on this front but rarely.

Feminism for Me, But Not for Thee

Classical Values, noting the absence of the rather obvious sexism narrative:

When I said this:

If we suppose that Loughner's victim had been black or hispanic, I think there would be a pretty loud chorus on the left that the racist motivation for the shooting was obvious. Similarly, had Barney Frank been shot, there would have been immediate cries of homophobia. 

I should have noted that it would not be true if the black, hispanic or gay victim happened to be on the right side of the political spectrum. Thus, if, say, Clarence Thomas or Alberto Gonzales were assassinated (especially by leftist gunmen), they would not be seen as victims of racism. Similarly, when Pim Fortuyn was assassinated by an anarcho-primitivist nut, this was not condemned as homophobic by the PC classes.

It is a basic law of identity politics that such identities are conditioned upon being on the left. Which is another reason that no indignity heaped on Sarah Palin can ever be condemned as sexist.

Read the whole thing.

Taxing Less and More

I don't suppose I'd object to simplifying the tax code along the lines of this article in the Fiscal Times.

The beauty of tax reform is that it starts with a belief everyone shares: The current system is horrible. Monstrously complex, unfair and inefficient, the code has fewer friends in Washington than Mahmoud Ahmadinejab, and in principle, throwing it over for something simpler is a sure bipartisan crowd pleaser.

For starters, lowering the top bracket and corporate tax rates is long overdue, if only to bring us in line with other developed nations. And I don't have a problem with closing loopholes, which I see as essentially government manipulation of private behavior via the tax code. Anything to reduce the Byzantine nature of the tax code is a benefit to me.

But I suspect they won't go far enough; won't lower the rates enough, won't remove enough loopholes. Instead of a 60,000 - page tax code, we'll get a 30,000- page one. How long would it take for interest-group pressure and regulatory creep to return us to the same place we are now?

But I salute the effort.

Right-Wing Rhetoric is So Violent, and Man Do I Wanna Slap Sarah Palin!

Via Carthago Delenda Est, another example of great lengths to which the left is willing to go to improve the tone of our national discourse, to calm the raging waters of our rhetorical madness.

The blogger (who is not the cartoonist) responds to objections thusly:

Now look at the first few comments there. It's people complaining that the cartoon is in bad taste! Good grief, have you people ever actually listened to Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage or looked at Sarah Palin's campaign strategy? I say again, madness.

See? All you have to do is look at them, and you know that they are scum who deserve nothing. And are way too angry all the time. It's so frightening!

Self-Esteem vs. "Chinese" Parenting

This article in the WSJ about the superiority of "Chinese mothers" has been making the rounds of late. The debate has been had by people who know far more about raising children than I do. But the reason the debate exists, I think, is right here:

By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.

Without question, this is the blinkered, self-emasculating guilt that the modern Western parent has willingly embraced. For some reason, we have decided that to have a child is a dastardly act, and that a parent must labor for decades, giving up all trace of adult life or personality, in order to atone for it. It's gotten so bad that a complete 180-degree turnaround -- becoming a totalitarian shame-dispenser -- can now be seen as an outre position worthy of a new look.

For myself, Here is what I wrote on the subject in September of 2005:

Our modern child-rearing techniques seem focused on the emotional lives of children. I think this is wrong, because in the grand scheme of things, the emotions of children are transitory and relatively unimportant. Child-rearing should be about not the blooming of the child's life but the coaxing into existence of the adult the child must become. None of the research-approved, peaceable parenting skills that the elite would foist on us are half so valuable as inducing a child to think beyond his immediate wants and desires. And I am unconvinced that this can be done without the use of fear.

Yes, I said fear. It is written that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. To this, I add that the fear of parents is the beginning of familial peace. the State of childhood is a state of constant physical and emotional flux. They are long on impulse and short on experience. Catering to that mind-set gives that mind-set power that it neither deserves nor can use justly. To make up for that experience, it is necessary for parents to set boundaries and defend them to the utmost. As the best defense is a good offense, a properly built fear of parental anger keeps boundaries defended, sometimes without the parent even knowing it.

It is not that I love children the less, but that I love adults more.

Jeff Danziger is an Self-Important Asshat, and Other Thoughful Musings

Apparently if you're not within the actual confines of a court of law, you have no obligation to back your statements up with any kind of connection to fact.

Jeff Danziger, who doodles blurry editorial cartoons for the WaPo and presumably, other places, made his contribution to setting a new tone of calm introspection so needed after the Giffords shooting:

Really?

Ed Frank of Frank Strategies asks him to explain himself. Danziger replies with the usual boilerplate, that the Tea Parties anti-government rhetoric created a mind-controlling memefog that drove Loughner like the talking dog commanded Berkowitz. He does so while demonstrating command of no facts other than his Vietnam war record, which is as impressive as it is irrelevant.

Frank asks for a single piece of solitary evidence to back up his assertion. Danziger replies with the following atom-splitting chunk of Pure Genius:

Ed. We are not in court. I have been watching the development of this combination of loons and opportunists since it started. The Tea Party, the very name is ridiculous. Crazed fat people tortured by their lack of success in life, following the absolute worst of our politicians. Palin, Angel, Quayle’s rotten kid. These people are your choice for anything? The whole thing is based on unreality. Don’t you understand? And Mcveigh was reading that crazy shit from the enbd times or whagtever it is called.

If I was going to make up a stereotypical cornered-nitwit misdirecting non-response, I would not have penned one this utterly bereft of reason. It is adolescent in its mind-set: a set of assumptions based on hearsay and prejudice, into which knowledge of any kind cannot enter. The half-assed typing just seals the deal; I am dissapointed not to find ALLCAPS or a string of exclamation points melting into a string of 1's.

But wait, there's more:

In the end the government has GOT to work. We are in competition with the world. Car companies don’t compete. nation now compete. And these asses want to go back to the 1700′s. I’ve written enough. The whole thing is probably unstoppable except with another dumb war. That’s what usually happens. You can have it.

"Big Brother has to protect us, and if you disagree you're a Luddite, and Good Day, Sir! I'm going to slink off and Profoundly Despair For My Country. [music swells]"

This man believes himself wiser than the rest of us. He really really does. It makes me sad inside.

The Essayist #22: Politics and the Oedipus Effect

The Greeks believed in destiny. Unlike Old Testament prophets, Greek oracles weren't interested in changing behavior. If the gods let you know that something was going to happen, then that thing was going to happen. That thing was not going to change, no matter what you did. The message was not "Check yourself," but "Brace yourself."

Oedipus proves this perfectly. His parents, and then he, were told that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother. Everything that Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus did to prevent this guarunteed that it would happen. By abandoning baby Oedipus on a hillside, Laius and Jocasta guaruntee that Oedipus grows up not knowing who his real parents are. By getting away from the people he thinks are his parents, Oedipus puts himself into his true parents' path. As Camille Paglia put it in Sexual Personae: "Oedipus, fleeing from his mother, runs right into her arms."

Owen Honors Pooped in the Punch Bowl. End of Story.

A good few wingnuts are up in arms over the fall of Owen Honors, the Captain of the USS Enterprise, who was a bit too Kirk for his own good. Here's Other McCain:

Just to be clear about the rules of the New Navy in the post-DADT era: An admiral can dress in drag and march in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, but any sailor who makes a wisecrack about such behavior will be drummed out of the service.

And Ace of Spades:

Honors is being hung out to dry for something that was either fine with his then superiors or which he was duly critiqued for and allowed to move on in his career. Either way, this is ex post facto outrage and the senior leadership of the Navy has simply thrown a dedicated and decorated officer to the wolves.

I respect their point of view, but I'm not sure I share it. There is no line of work in which you can make raunchy videos with your co-workers and subordinates and not get fired for it if it should come to light and embarass the higher-ups. Everybody blows off steam. Bosses are inclined to overlook blowing off steam, up to the point when it causes the public to question the judgement of the organization.

If you poop in the punch bowl at the company Christmas party, you might get away with it, depending on how funny everyone thinks it is. If you poop in the punch bowl at the company Christmas party and the pictures end up on Facebook, you're going to get fired, no matter how hard the boss laughed at the time.