Monday, December 28, 2009

Forget the Horses; Save Those Barns!

Powerful forces gather off America, looking to unleash terror and destruction onto unprotected civilian populations. How should we respond?

One way to respond is to coordinate Federal and State authorities and resources to ameliorate the destruction after it has occurred, tend to the survivors, and clean up the mess. The other response is to meet those forces where they gather before they hit our shores and prevent the ensuing carnage altogether.

In the case of a Hurricane Katrina off the American coastline, the amelioration response is the only option we have. In the case of radical Jihadist attacks, to wait until the damage is done before responding is madness. And yet, this is just what the Obama Administration is doing.

How else to interpret Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano's confident assertions this weekend that the security system of the United States "worked" in the case of the attempted Christmas day bombing attempt on the Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit?

Continue ....


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Wednesday, December 23, 2009

We're INTERPOL and We're Here to Help

Breaking news, Readers. Read this. Then read this.

Got it? Under cover of the loud kerfuffle of a major Healthcare debate, your President quietly signed an Executive Order granting INTERPOL, the International Criminal Police Organization, full diplomatic immunity in the United States. This means INTERPOL is now a sort of Super Cop on American shores. With full immunity, they can go anywhere, do anything, collect and store whatever information they desire, and are not subject to anyone's oversight, authority, freedom of information requests, prosecution, or judicial restraint of any sort at any time.

In short, the Constitutional search and seizure protections of all American citizens are not applicable against INTERPOL agents within the United States.

What possible reason would our President have for granting such extraordinary status to a foreign police force in America? For starters, read this. That's a Wall Street Journal article informing us that the International Criminal Court's Chief Prosecutor opened up a file in November, 2009 on possible U.S. War Crimes in Afghanistan. And this tells us that INTERPOL assists the "Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court" in its fight against War Crimes, including the sharing of any and all information it may have. It appears, then, that our President desires to help the local INTERPOL office as it collects information on American citizens for possible prosecution for War Crimes. That is, it appears this is so, but we can't know for sure because President Obama has immunized INTERPOL from being forced to divulge just what it is up to.

Continue .....


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Harry Reid Can't Hide from Sarah Palin

Harry Reid tried to hide behind 2,000 some pages of dense, deadly dull legislation, but Sarah Palin spotted him skulking around the Senate and bagged herself a bunch of Democrats up to no good.

It seems the Senator slipped into the National Healthcare legislation on page 1,000 or so an unelected regulatory commission that would have near omniscient control over the quality and extent of everyone's healthcare. In other words, a "Death Panel." But he also inserted an outrageous provision prohibiting any Congressional oversight or control of any kind over this Death Panel. That's right, the Death Panel would be like, I don't know, a separate country or something and not subject to Congress' jurisdiction. Here is an exact quote from the bill:

it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.
You can't make this stuff up.

It's all a procedural trick of course, as explained here. Especially so as, under the Constitution, future Senate bodies can change by a simple majority vote most things a previous Senate passes, including this provision. So, this trick is rather lame as these things go.

But, Harry Reid, et al., deserve to be slapped down for even trying such a thing, and they don't slap 'em down much better than our Sarah. Here is one salient point she makes:
Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call “death panels” the “lie of the year,” this type of rationing – what the CBO calls “reduc[ed] access to care” and “diminish[ed] quality of care” – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.
Read it all here.


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Saturday, December 19, 2009

Buy This Christmas Card
and Make Ours a Merry Christmas!

And finally, a card for the ladies!





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Buy This Christmas Card
and Make Ours a Merry Christmas!




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Buy This Christmas Card
and Make Ours a Merry Christmas!



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Friday, December 18, 2009

Buy This Christmas Card
and Make Ours a Merry Christmas!



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Buy This Christmas Card
and Make Ours a Merry Christmas!



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Thursday, December 17, 2009

Son of a Burns

Larry Kudlow all but calls today for Ben Bernanke to resign as Fed Chairman. He states that " ... Bernanke (as Fed chairman) has provided unbelievable, ultra-easy, free-money, zero interest rates for too long ... Bernanke knows how to ease but not how to tighten. The emergency is long past, but he is still operating an emergency policy of ultra-easy, excess-dollar creation."

These are good points. However, the real reason Bernanke should resign (or the Senate should refuse to re-confirm him) is that he is completely politicized. Ever since the near hyper-inflation of the 70's, begun by Richard Nixon's obsequious Fed Chairman, Arthur Burns, our heads of the Federal Reserve have studiously maintained the independence of Federal Reserve policy from political machinations of the White House. The result has been almost 20 some years of little to no inflation and unremitting economic expansion.

Bernanke has broken with that tradition, and as a result, our Republic is heading for economic disaster. And the truth is, he did it simply because he is not a strong man. Can anyone believe that Alan Greenspan in his prime would have rolled over to the demands of the doyens of the financial markets and the White House as Bernanke has done? The dollar collapses like a pair of cheap socks and yet Mr. Bernanke is cowering in his office, afraid of raising interest rates even a point above absolute zero.

What is he afraid of? A strong dollar, which is the only thing he really can control (as opposed to employment and macro-economic activity), would serve to stabilize the financial markets and reassure a world eager to buy into the safety of American assets. Shouldn't those achievements be enough for an unelected head of a quasi-government bureaucracy?

Apparently not. Instead, he channels the fears of the White House that this recession won't end before the 2010 elections, and vainly keeps pumping printing press money into the economy, hoping for an economic "bubble" that will protect the incumbents in Washington.

Well, bubbles burst, as they did in 2000 and 2006, and this one will, too, almost as soon as it appears. We need to be shut of this weak-sister of a Fed Chairman well before the bursting, so that the hard and necessary monetary policies can then be instituted.


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Re: Iranian Containment

Easy, as to your speculations that the Administration is somewhat less than zealous about preventing Iran from acquiring the bomb, see this post by Jamie Fly.

Instead of welcoming Congressional "hotlining" of a sanctions bill, the Obami held up passage while negotiating provisions to water it down. Mr. Fly concludes that this "raises questions about how serious they and their "partners" are about stopping Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon."

Questions, indeed, along with some pretty clear answers.


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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Iranian Containment without a Container

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton forthrightly admitted yesterday that the Administration's Iranian policy of the last year is a failure. She stated, "I don't think anyone can doubt that our outreach has produced very little in terms of any kind of a positive response from the Iranians."

Commentary's Jennifer Rubin points out that this means "the entire process has been delayed for yet another year as the Iranians inch forward to the day when they will declare themselves a nuclear power," and speculates that soon "we will hear that "containment" is really the only option left." She then concludes, "One wonders if that wasn't the end game all along."

I don't think she needs to wonder too hard about that. This Administration had a well-developed containment strategy for a nuclear armed Iran at least as long ago as July of this year, as Ms. Secretary Clinton let slip here.  Apparently, from half a world away, the U.S. nuclear umbrella will prevent Iran from intimidating or dominating the region. 

Ms. Clinton's remarkable strategic theory depends, of course, on the Mad Mullahs of Iran behaving like the risk-averse Commissars of Russia in the face of our nuclear deterrence. More to the point, it depends on those same Mullahs being convinced that this Administration has the cojones to actually visit nuclear annihilation on Iran.

Given the Administration's well-nigh sycophantic pleading and hollow threats of sanctions over the last year, I don't think the Mullahs will be shaking in their qabaas when their nuclear missiles go online.


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Monday, December 14, 2009

Chicago is as Chicago Does

Here is the situation. You are the President, and you have seen in your first year the failure or near failure of three signature reforms, National Healthcare, Cap and Trade, and Stimulus. Your poll numbers among Independents are plummeting, and your base is deserting you like rats on a sinking ship.

You decide you can salvage something of your first year by passing what would seem to be a popular reform: a brand new, of-the-people and for-the-people bureaucracy, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Critical to your success, of course, is getting the financial services industry on your side in the coming political debate.

What do you do? How about a pre-emptive strike against bank executives, by going on 60 minutes last night and calling them "fat cats?" Then, in case they don't quite get the message, why don't you up the ante with a broadside accusing them of being ungrateful for the help America gave them last year? And finally, be sure and accuse them, erroneously, of flooding Washington with lobbyists to block regulatory reform.

This is not how to win friends and influence people. This is what political science wonks call "demagoguery." It is apparently the only way the Obami know how to govern, which explains a great deal about this worst of years for a newly installed President.

As I said here, these people are just not very smart about national politics, primarily because, as Whit said here, they are so parochial. The Obami think "the customs of a political backwater like Chicago are universal truths."


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Saturday, December 12, 2009

Re: Greens Go Nuclear

Hmmmm.  "The Mercurial Pundit: News Before it's News"

Not bad, Easy. But, how about this?

     THE MERCURIAL PUNDIT:
 All the News Before it's Fit to Print

I know, I know, too glib. Since it's the 21st Century, maybe we could try: 

                        THE MERCURIAL PUNDIT:
                    You're Wormhole to News of the Future

Too much? Then perhaps we could surprise them with the truth:

                Information overload? Then you should read
    THE MERCURIAL PUNDIT:
Some of the News, Some of the Time

Let me know what you think. We'll get the tech boys on it right after they finish their breakfast pizza.


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Palin and Shatner, Together at Last

Conan O'Brien of Tonight Show fame took it to Sarah Palin in July of this year, when he had William Shatner, the "Master Thespian," do a mock poetic reading of her speech resigning as Governor of Alaska.

Last night Conan showed there was nothing personal about it. Leading the audience to believe he was repeating the smack down, he brought William Shatner out again to gravely read excerpts from her autobiography, Going Rogue. When Mr. Shatner finished, however, who should appear on stage but Sarah Palin herself, who then delivered choice excerpts from Bill Shatner's own autobiography.

She pulled it off with just the right touch of charm, mischief, and good humor. The audience roared as she and Bill Shatner walked off, stage right, arm in arm.

The lady is a professional at everything she does. Watch the video.


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Friday, December 11, 2009

Greens Go Nuclear

It's almost an Internet truism that if you want to be ahead of the curve in politics and culture, read The Mercurial Pundit. Here's one example.

The Washington Post gave us surprising news the end of last month:

Nuclear power -- long considered environmentally hazardous -- is emerging as perhaps the world's most unlikely weapon against climate change, with the backing of even some green activists who once campaigned against it.
Nice reporting of an important story, which I am sure came through the Post editors' clenched teeth.

Now let's get into the way-back machine, and go to April of 2007, when we opined:
An interesting possible consequence of the Global Warming movement/fiasco: massive numbers of political activists who might switch their long-standing opposition to nuclear power.
The numbers may not be massive just yet, but give it time, give it time. Truth is hard to ignore, even for the most dedicated radical.

In the meantime, read The Mercurial Pundit, where you get the News before it's News.


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Thursday, December 10, 2009

Greed is Not So Good

Matthew Continetti steers us to a fascinating treatise on Capitalism by the eminent Jeffrey Friedman, which argues, in part, that the popular interpretation of Capitalism's dependence on self-interest and greed is wrong. Mr. Continetti quotes Dr. Friedman:

UCLA economist Armen Alchian showed in 1950 that capitalism would succeed even if capitalists weren't motivated by self-interest—and many capitalists, such as the founders of Google and Whole Foods, were not motivated by self-interest ... Smith's parable of the baker, to whose benevolence we do not appeal when we buy our bread, is actually a lesson in unintended consequences, not in the wonders of greed ... The baker intends to make money, but he can do so only by providing his customers with bread ... that doesn't mean that greed is always good, or benevolence bad. Nor does it mean that greed accounts for the success of capitalism.
I have a few quibbles with Dr. Friedman. For instance, benefiting buyers is not an unintended consequence of the baker's actions; it is a necessary condition to selling bread, without which no baker would stay in business long.

But, by and large, I think Dr. Friedman is correct. In the first place, Capitalism does not have some corner on greed. Socialists can be greedy, as can Popes, Saints, and social workers. Greed is a common human emotion, and Capitalists, as human beings, can sometimes be greedy. But Capitalists also run the gamut of other human motivations as well: sense of excellence, envy, charity, benevolence, anger, pride, sloth, kindness, and love.

Which is to say that greed is a very poor explanation of why Capitalists do what they do. But it is also a very poor explanation of what Capitalists do. "Making money" is a mere slogan, and tells us as much about Capitalism as it does about Art and the artists that produce such works. Certainly, artists work and expect payment, but that is an aspect of their work, not the substance.

In its simplest sense, Capitalism is freedom, the freedom of letting people do what they deem important. As such, what a Capitalist does is as many and varied as there are objects or goals in the world. But, in all this variety, Capitalists have one common characteristic: a singular commitment to an individual ethic of self-responsibility.

Continue .....
Whatever he has and is trying to accomplish, a Capitalist takes personal responsibility for the process, looks to himself to make sure that his part gets done properly. Self-responsibility is not self-interest; it is more akin to Christian Stewardship than anything else.

It is true that economics and accounting play a large role in what a Capitalist does, but that is a function of the Enlightenment revelation that the economy and businesses follow certain very defined laws of behavior.  Profit and Loss is not an ideology or a way of living, it is a scientific fact, and anybody that tries to get along in the world without some modicum of knowledge of the subject will fail miserably. This includes Christians, Marxists, Communists, butchers, bakers, and welfare recipients. Capitalists, as self-responsible players, are simply being appropriately hard-headed about the reality of the world.

The benefits of Capitalism derives from this principle of self-responsibility, and points us to why other systems just do not work as well. As the famous parable about making a pencil tells us, the simplest economic transactions involve hugely complex decisions made by hundreds of thousands of disparate people all across the world.  Few of the people involved in the making of a pencil knows much of anything about any of the others, nor do they seek such knowledge. In the making of a pencil, each person is concerned with his own job, with what he puts into the process. Lumberjacks cut trees; truck drivers transport the wood; miners on the other side of the world dig graphite; manufacturers invest millions in machinery to cut the wood; and etc. One person, or even a committee of people, simply cannot have the huge range of knowledge, expertise, and physical ability to do all of the work that needs to be done to make a pencil.

Capitalism is what makes this process work, as each little part of the process is given the attention and expertise needed by individuals and groups taking responsibility for what it is that they need to do.

Despite appearances, the most hierarchical organizations invented by Man, whether a Catholic Church, a Communist dictatorship, a multi-billion dollar corporation, or an Army, depend for their success on subordinates taking responsibility for their work and providing what no executive class can: knowledge about what is actually occurring on the ground, and the creative response to that information that will enable the group's goals to be achieved.

Capitalism incorporates this wisdom explicitly and transparently into what it does. Non-capitalist organizations tend to bury this wisdom in ideology or ignorance, and as a result, achieve their goals and purposes inconsistently, if at all. And when they do achieve anything, it is more often accompanied by inefficiencies and a sickening waste of its best resources: its people.


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Wednesday, December 9, 2009

We're Dealing!

Pick a deal, any deal, seems to be Harry Reid's panicked strategy to get 60 votes in the Senate for National Healthcare.

Is this any way to legislate 1/6th of the American economy?  Makes one long for the days when Congress was denigrated as a "sausage factory." These bozos can't even make half decent sausage anymore.


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Monday, December 7, 2009

Climate Cools as Flackery Heats Up

The PR flacks are out in force today, drumming up business for the Copenhagen World Climate Conference.  Unfortunately, this piece of puffery and used-car salesman type hype was published by the Asssociated Press, ostensibly a news source. 

The errors and misrepresentations are too numerous to go through, but here are a couple of highlights.

Arctic polar ice caps melting?  A good point, if there was only one polar ice cap.  What's going on down south? Antarctic ice is growing.

The 2000's were 1.1 degree hotter than average global temperatures from 1951-1980? Well, according to the IPCC 2007 Climate Report, 1950 was significantly cooler than the previous year, reducing significantly the average of the series from 1951 onward. This is classic cherry-picking. If you use the average of thirty year temperatures from 1940-1970, our decade shows an increase of only .18 degrees; 1960-1990, the temperature increase is only .1 degree; and  from 1970-2000 ... oops! a .088 degree decrease in temperature.

This approach by the AP is now famously called "hiding the decline." Temperatures have been decreasing the last decade, in violation of every climate change computer model, to the great consternation of the vast grant-receiving bureacracy of "scientists" around the globe.

AP needs to start charging for its PR flackery. It certainly does not have much of a future as a news organization.


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Saturday, December 5, 2009

The Roundup

At the risk of introducing noise into Archie's Internet Test, here is the Roundup for today:

The estimable Mark Steyn's regular Saturday contribution is up. Read and enjoy as Mr. Steyn slices and dices the President's unrealistic realism.

Jennifer Rubin gives us Sen. Joe Lieberman as the indispensable Senator. Her case is air-tight, and brooks no argument from this corner.

Charles Krauthammer weighs in on the Administration's claim of executive privilege in refusing to allow the White House Social Secretary, Desiree Rogers, to testify to Congress regarding the recent gate-crashing of the Obami's Thanksgiving Party. The Doctor states:

What is comical about this is it’s being invoked for a social secretary in a circumstance where, in the original Supreme Court rulings, it was intended for high officials with important state secrets. What was the state secret here — the nature of the flower arrangements at the head table?
Of course, as everyone knows, the "state secret" is that Desiree Rogers was promoting the primary agenda of this Administration, which is to maximize White House prestige in service of political back-scratching (hint, hint: follow the money). Someone might want to check on the Lincoln Bedroom; it looks like Hotel White House might be open for business again soon.

Matthew Vadum raises alarm bells with his report on the formation and agenda of the George Soros backed Secretary of State Project. This is actually old news. In the wake of Al Gore's loss of the 2000 Florida Presidential recount, the Left convinced itself that Republican Secretaries of State were rigging elections nationwide. Not to be outdone, numerous Lefty PAC's and coalitions began in the early 2000's to focus on seizing control for themselves of State election machinery. Their most notable success was the 2006 election of Mark Ritchie as Secretary of State in Minnesota, who enabled Al Franken to win a very questionable (to put it mildly) recount in the 2008 Senatorial contest. Old news or not, that the Left is redoubling its efforts to elect Secretaries of State ought to be seriously troubling to anyone who cares about free and fair elections in this country. Read Matthew Vadum.

(G. Whitman contributed to this blog. Chas. Ransom, the other old guy, was taking a nap and did not contribute).


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An Internet Test

Do not be alarmed.  This is only a test.

BARE BREASTED WOMEN!!

PICTURES TO FOLLOW!!

This has been a test of this blog's Internet profile. If this announcement had been real, you would now be looking at pictures of bare breasted women instead of this cool, calm, and collected prose.

In the following days, the Web Geeks in the basement will be perusing our Google Analytics report to determine what impact, if any, this test has had on blog hits. For those of you that may be interested in the technical details, the Geeks will be using the last 48 hours of posts as a baseline, wherein three old guys battled it out tooth and gum over Obama's War. 

The prevailing hypothesis is that Internet America really likes three old guys with, collectively, four teeth, and some inexpensive (read: cheap) bridgework, and that there will be little difference in hits due to this test. I on the other hand differ, and am willing to back it up with hard cash at 10-1 odds.

This should be interesting. Or, if not, it should be something. And if not something, its at least another day.

So stay tuned!


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Friday, December 4, 2009

Re: At the Summit of Jobs

Sounds like a cousin, Ellie, possibly one of Siegfried Metternich's boys. You and the cows have nothing to worry about for about three years; we Yeats are late bloomers.


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Re: At the Summit of Jobs

Don't mind Archie, Ezra, it's the medications. They don't kick in until 9:00 AM or so.

As for the fascinating story about the Yeats' impressive contributions to American culture, do you have any family in these parts? I ask because lately there has been a brownish hued little 12 year old boy hanging around the pasture eying the bovines.

Should we be afraid?


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Re: Obama's War

Correctamundo, Ezra!  Cheers!


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Re: At the Summit of Jobs

Archie, have you gone crazy? "... human personification and instantiation ... random agglomeration of protein molecules?" Not to mention " ... like greased really fast things!" What are you talking about? How am I supposed to edit stuff like this?

A personal note: I will let Whit and Chase speak for themselves, but I do not take testosterone injections. The Yeats clan has no need for such things. The United States is almost the sole 1st world country whose population is growing, and most agree that the primary causes are Yeats males, with enthusiastic support, of course, from wives and close personal friends, as well as various and sundry one-night stands.


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Re: Obama's War

Well, Chaz, Churchill was in Chamberlain's own party. It would have been difficult to refuse the appointment to the Admiralty under the circumstances.

I don't think you, Whit, and I are in that much disagreement. It's a matter of emphasis. I will certainly support President Obama's troop surge, on both strategic and patriotic grounds. But support should not mean glossing over any detrimental features of the President's execution of the war-plan, like his tendency to put a political spin on his strategy which in fact undermines American and World support for the war.

In retrospect, I think we all fell too much into defending George Bush in Iraq over the last eight years, and did not critique him enough when he deserved it. That he was under savage, ill-considered political attacks from the Left is no excuse. If we had been more forthright in criticizing Bush, I think he might have gotten the right Iraq strategy years before he did.

I take you to be saying that we should not let our critiques of Obama overwhelm our support and devolve into partisan political sniping. On that we can all agree; such things are inappropriate in war-time.

Click here for all posts in this thread.


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At the Summit of Jobs

For those of us who are not interested in following a knock-down, drag-out, sucker-punching, cage-style debate on Obama's War between three  old guys pumped up on caffeine, testosterone injections, and nostalgia, the White House Jobs Summit that began yesterday is what's really happening.

Summits on the nation's employment, or lack thereof, have not been very productive in the past. But that is because Jobs themselves have never been willing to put down their work and participate. Instead, human beings attend on Jobs' behalf, and these meetings inevitably bog down due to the inherent slowness of organic chemical processes and the essential irrationality of anything that takes its  marching orders from a random agglomeration of protein molecules.

The notion that Jobs alone, bereft of human personification or instantiation, might actually be willing to get together to discuss things, is the kind of outside-the-box thinking this Administration has always talked about, but no one believed possible. But Obama declared, "Yes, We Can!" and Jobs of all types and stripes streamed along the highways and byways of America to the Summit, lighting up Washington yesterday like a three-ring circus on steroids.

As economists have pointed out in both the peer reviewed literature and the literature read mainly on piers, Jobs react almost instantaneously to changes in the economy.  Your distribution network at capacity? Zip! Truck driver Jobs jump up as if goosed by a cold handed proctologist.  Professional hockey suddenly more popular than adult circumcision?  Zap! Zamboni servicing Jobs to the rescue faster than the Flash on upppers.  Obama's poll numbers blasting past 90% approval? Zowey! Rev. Wright collection plate Jobs race forward like greased ... Uhrm .... uh ... like greased really fast things.

Continue .....
In the real world, the only thing holding back Jobs on doing what they do best is the interminable wait while carbon based life-forms finish their Fantasy League season.

As near as I can tell, the Jobs Summit has started off without incident, which is encouraging given that not all Jobs get along with each other. There is an historic tension between Management and Labor Jobs, of course, but little noted has been the animosity between Nurse and Doctor-Spouse Jobs. There is also a certain professional envy between Dentist and Gitmo Torturer Jobs, and a vast cultural divide separating the religiously fundamental Amway Sales Jobs from all other Jobs, humans, animal, vegetable, and mineral in existence.

The last Summit of this magnitude involving Jobs did not begin well. In 1999, the negotiations of a labor dispute with the miners of Trion ore on Dregocia was seriously imperiled when a shuttle carrying Dregocian Diplomats exploded amidst suspicions of sabotage. That crisis was resolved within an hour (for better or worse, I will let the historians decide). But the lesson we learned then is equally applicable now: "Only with the realization that what we share with our enemy is greater than what divides us, can peace ever be won."

President Obama couldn't have said it better. Well, he might have, or maybe he did, but in any event I never heard it.  And that's the important thing.


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Re: Obama's War

Well, Whit, you bring up a nice point.  Let's review the situation in Britain in 1939. When Parliament declared war on Germany, Chamberlain asked both opposition parties, Liberal and Labor, to join his government. They refused.  But what did his biggest critic Winston Churchill do? He accepted appointment to the Prime Ministers Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty.

In other words, Winston Churchill supported and encouraged Chamberlain, in an effort, no doubt, to stiffen the spine of the Government at a time when Britain was in such peril.

We should do no less. After all, history tells us there may not be many opportunities to reward Democrats for right behavior in foreign policy matters.


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Re: Obama's War

Chase, since Easy invoked Winston Churchill in a comparison with President Obama, it might also be instructive to look at the Prime Minister preceding Churchill, Neville Chamberlain. Known as the Great Appeaser, Chamberlain nevertheless far surpassed President Obama in forthright military action. After all, he led England to declare war on Germany and sent hundreds of thousands of British troops to the Continent to defend France -- just in time, of course, for Dunkirk.

So, everyone should have "supported and encouraged" Chamberlain because he was more of a hawk than the rest of the appeasers? I don't think so. War-time leadership is or ought to be evaluated on an objective standard.

And objectively, President Obama has gone to war in Afghanistan without conviction, other than the sordid political conviction he will lose public support if Afghanistan - and Pakistan - fall into the bloody hands of Islamic terrorist.


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Thursday, December 3, 2009

Re: Obama's War

I don't mean to pick on you Ezra, but I and many commentators on the right have a different take on the President's speech.

I think you must begin from the standpoint that the President is a man of the left, heir to the extremist anti-war McGovern wing of the Democrat Party. As such, his decision to ramp up the American commitment to Afghanistan is a bold step away from the defeatist war-politics of the Democrat Party over the last 40 years. As some have noted, this is the first Democrat Administration to send American troops into combat for the explicit purpose of defending America and furthering global foreign policy interests since Lyndon Johnson.*

No one would describe President Obama as a neo-conservative, but this is most certainly a welcome change in the long-term downward spiral of Democrat leadership as a responsible voice in foreign affairs. As such, President Obama needs to be supported and encouraged in this endeavor. In particular, we ought to cut him some slack for playing to his leftist base with timetables for withdrawal and the like. As Defense Secretary Gates and others in the Administration have made clear since the speech, those were rhetorical flourishes, not substantive Afghan policy deadlines.

*Please do not cite me Bill Clinton's humanitarian troop deployments and ineffectual, bellicose missile strikes. These were particularly unserious attempts at war, done more for triangulation political purposes than for any grown-up foreign policy rationale.


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Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Obama's War: A Surge to the Exits

In a major foreign policy speech last night, President Obama explained his Administration's decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan with 30,000 more American troops. Remarkably, he was able to do so without once using the word "victory." Although I am not given to quoting Vice-President Biden on any subject outside of hair-replacements and baseball, he aptly summed up the President's speech this morning as outlining a "Surge and Exit" strategy.

With emphasis, I might add, on the "Exit." After three months of intense study and debate within his Administration, the best the President could come up with to describe his Afghanistan policy was as follows:

... as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.
For contrast, let's see what another newly installed leader said, in the face of a much darker moment in his nation's history. In May of 1940, with French and British forces teetering under the Nazi Blitzkrieg in France, Winston Churchill, appointed Prime Minister just days before, appears before the House of Commons and is asked what his Government's war policy will be. He says,
You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be ...
Churchill's is the language of war-time leadership; Obama's the language of pre-meditated defeat. Faced with the clear and present threat of Taliban terror, it's hard to imagine why the Afghan peoples will choose to side with us, when the American Commander-in-Chief manifests such diffident ambivalence about this war.

This is now Obama's war, to lead where he will. And he is leading, it seems, a surge to the exits.


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Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Back to the Future

In perusing some of the latest poll results, it strikes me that the decline and fall of the Republicans is easily explained. Republicans lost their most basic rationale: promoting fiscally prudent government and a sound economy.

For most of my adult life, the most common theme in politics was the Republican attack against Democrats as "Tax and Spend Liberals." The charge stuck, for the simple reason that Democrats were, in fact, Liberal tax and spenders. It stuck so well that Democrats have all but dropped the Liberal label in favor of "Progressive."

Over the years, however, the Tax and Spend charge lost its effectiveness. There were many different reasons. One important factor was the masterful triangulation of Bill Clinton's Presidency, which muddied the political waters. But more significant was the Republican take-over of Congress in 1994, ending 40 years of continuous Democrat dominance. Since then, an entire generation of voters has grown up without any experience of real, unrestrained Democrat governance, while older generations lost interest in the subject. As a result, the Tax and Spend charge became all but anachronistic, a shop-worn political cliche from an older politics that seemed no longer relevant.

The Bush Presidency exacerbated these trends of muddiness and forgetfulness. Bush's signature "Compassionate Conservatism" meme served over time to identify Republicans in the public mind with bigger Washington government and deficit spending. At the same time, the Democrats pounded away on the rhetorical front, beating the drums for fiscal prudence and responsibility in order to rectify a failed economy. The fact that they obstinately opposed any measures to rescue Social Security and Medicare from bankruptcy meant very little; as the party out of power, their disingenuous opportunism was little noted.

The net result, then, by the end of the Bush Presidency was a reversal of the parties' historic positions in the public's mind: Republicans were now inside the beltway plutocrats, pockets bulging with earmarks and disdainful of the economic consequences of their profligacy, while Democrats became lone voices in the wilderness pleading for fiscal responsibility.

Ten months into the Obama Presidency and this decades long re-labeling of the parties has suddenly reversed course.

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A recent Democracy Corps survey finds that Republicans have climbed back into parity with Democrats as the party better able to run the economy, recovering a whopping 16 point deficit on the issue since May. Democrats may take some comfort in the fact that they are still viewed positively on the issue by 50% of the voters, but I think they are mistaken. The Republican's 16 point jump is only a freeze-frame of a rising trend, wherein the voters are being reminded and awakened to old political truths: that the Democrats are Tax and Spend Liberals whose policies are devastating for an economy.

It's really quite marvelous to watch, actually. Cultural memory is real; it can be hidden or suppressed for a while, but long term trends in the body politic will erupt upon any crack in the surface. And the Democrats, with their trillion dollar deficits, proposals to construct massive clanking government machinery like National Healthcare and Cap and Trade, and their utter cluelessness about the connection between these and a faltering economy, have set off a bomb at the very fault lines of American politics. The resulting earthquake, estimated to occur in November of 2010, looks to be a doozy.

Republicans should dust off their old yard signs. "Tax and Spend Liberals" is a political slogan that is back in vogue.

With a vengeance.


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Monday, November 30, 2009

Honduras Leads the Way

Let's see:

Pre-election primaries held on time and without fraud, check.

National elections held on time and without fraud, check.

Score: Honduras 1, Chavez 0.

Looks like a soccer score, but the meaning is clear: Chavez, and his sycophantic Organization of American States are the big losers in their bid to oust democracy in Honduras. Fortunately, the Obama Administration came to its senses just in time to get on the band wagon of freedom in Honduras.

Now it's time to get serious about the increasing adventurism of the strongman-style governments around the world. It is no accident that every one of the trouble makers in the world today depend heavily on oil revenues to maintain their power and influence. Russia, Iran, and Venezuela all strut and preen on the world stage as if they have done something other than milk their oil revenues for world prominence.

This is easily remedied. Drill, Baby, Drill is not just a catch-phrase for the resurgence of the American economy. It is also the Achilles heel of all these faux powers. If we and the portion of the world that is still sane will flood the world with oil rather than printed money, the price of oil will plummet, leaving these paper tigers limp and gasping.

Of course, this is all a bit too simple for the best and brightest in the Obama Administration. But as Honduras has shown, free and fair elections have consequences, and our own chance at democracy-in-action is coming the fall of next year.

Click the title above to see all posts in this series.


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Sunday, November 29, 2009

Re: Evolution: Is this Progress?

Apropos my previous post on Climate Science, let me expand a bit more on a thread I started the first of this year.  If you will recall, I was arguing that secular scientists, especially those studying evolution, refuse to permit any argument into their discipline grounded in what I called extra-causal explanations, such as teleology, artistic concepts of beauty and mystery, or theological concepts like Divine Intervention. At the same time, their own discipline permits quasi-causal concepts like "randomness" and "probability."

There is a good reason for this, but it is not the reason the secularists think. In the same way a Christian believes in a loving, active God, secularists believe that physical phenomena behave in ways that can be measured and analyzed. Their science is the development of formal rules and methodologies to investigate the physical world in conformance with this belief. As a result, the phenomena they study does, in fact, behave in ways that can be measured and analyzed, but largely due to reasons expressed in the cliche that for someone with a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. Where they find phenomena that do not conform with their expectations, by and large they simply eliminate it from their studies. 

For instance, in the old days, artistic categories of form and perfection were understood and utilized by philosophers, theologians, and scientists in describing and understanding the world around them. But at some point, scientists fell prey to the notion that Beauty was only in the eye of the beholder, and so they reduced physical objects to more objective criteria like shape, color, density, motion, and the like. All else was outside science's parameters, not because artistic categories were invalid or wrong, but because it just wasn't what the scientists wanted to do with the physical world.

I know this sounds like a criticism of science, but I actually think it points us to the merit in excluding certain concepts from all types of science. The world is such an immensely complex thing that without rigorous conscription of a science's objects and methods, it would be simply impossible to make any progress.  It is therefore the mark of a good sphere of scientific research that it demand a set of very strictly defined phenomena, together with a methodology appropriate to the phenomena as defined. 

Contemporary attempts to make progress in such mushy areas as "Cultural Studies" make this point rather well.  But on the positive side, evolutionary science is also a good example.

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The phenomena evolution seeks to study are the observed multiplicity of species. Where did all these species come from? What happened to species that have become extinct? What will happen to various species in the future? Evolutionary science investigates this and other questions with a toolbag of concepts like "survival," "fitness," "ecosystems," "randomness," and "probability," and in so doing, constrains itself to physical phenomena, per se.  As such, theological concepts like Divine Intervention are inappropriate, not because they are wrong, but because such concepts are more suited to a wider field than mere physical phenomena, a field as big and as complex as the Universe itself.

To put it another way, the will of God is largely inexplicable. As a result, derivative concepts like Divine Intervention or Creationism just cannot help us to understand the concrete details of processes like evolution.  Such concepts will not yield any kind of a quantifiable answer at all, much less one that fits within anything calling itself science.

It is with God and theological concepts, however, that the secular evolutionist usually goes wrong when he insists, in the name of his science, in passing judgment on such things. In so doing he oversteps the bounds of the very scientific discipline he has created. If the objects of evolutionary science are pre-defined so as to exclude God from consideration, then the evolutionary scientist can say nothing about God or Creationism or Divine Intervention without exiting his discipline. Such theological concepts are simply defined out of the scientist's vocabulary, ab initio, and he ought to stand mute on such questions - at least insofar as he tries to speak as a scientist. 

Immanual Kant called such attempts as this amphibolies of reason, which result from extrapolating from one category of thought into another irrelevant sphere.  He might just as well have pointed out what the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes: "[God] has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end."  Evolutionary science is not about ultimate beginnings or ends, but about physical processes in the here and now. If the scientist wants to talk about ends or beginnings, he must use other more theological language, for his discipline is not geared towards that sort of thing.

But if the evolutionist may not delve into theological matters, the same is not true in reverse. The processes of evolution that our scientists discover can help us appreciate the Divine better, just as the deeper understandings of cosmological physics and quantum theory can bring us to a greater sense of awe: of God, because of what He has wrought.


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Saturday, November 28, 2009

Garbage In. Garbage Out

The Net is roiling with the news that mainstream climate research scientists have been corrupting the science of global warming for upwards of a decade. That's the science that has the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change in a terrible frenzy over the coming apocalypse, along with sundry Hollywood types and our great leaders in Congress. The evidence of this corruption is straightforward and damning: someone dumped a mountain of internal emails off of Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) server, catching the big-wigs of world climate research (people like Phil Jones, Michael Mann, and Thomas Wigley) discussing how to alter the data to conform with climate models, plotting to marginalize climate skeptics by freezing them out of the peer-review process, and conspiring to destroy information requested under Britain's Freedom of Information Act.

Don't look for this story in the Mainstream Media. It's too busy worrying about gate-crashers at Washington parties.

As shocking as the emails are, the fact is we already knew the science community - and the peer-review process, which is its raison d'etre - was corrupt. Here's why.

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The climate debate is actually rather simple. We are sure about two things: (1) if you introduce greater concentrations of CO2 into, say, a green house, the temperature will rise; and (2) the earth's temperature has been rising for about the last 100 years or so. This establishes a plausible hypothesis that the world's temperature increase has been caused by increases in atmospheric CO2 stemming from the Industrial Revolution of the last couple of centuries.

But only a plausible hypothesis. Coincidence does not equal causation; something else is needed to eliminate other possible causes of global warming. If, for instance, it can be established that 20th Century global warming is anomalous, that is, much higher than years past, then the case for global warming as a man-caused problem becomes much stronger. This is precisely the tact of climate scientists over the past 15 years, and this is precisely where the debate is most fierce.

Which brings us to the last 1,000 years and the so-called Medieval Warm Period. 1,000 years ago the world apparently was quite warm, as evidenced by historical curiosities like a current-day icebound northern island that is called 'Greenland.'  Climate science, however, needs more than anecdotal evidence; it needs hard temperature data with which to compare current data. Modern temperature information is pretty good, especially since the advent of satellite technology, but there is nothing remotely comparable from medieval times.

So, climate scientists have come up with the notion of "proxies" for temperature. During warm periods, it is reasoned, things will grow and flourish, leaving a record behind. For instance, sedimentation layers and tree rings should be larger during warm periods. As a result, the science and methodology of deriving temperature data from the study of sedimentation and tree-rings (and a growing number of other things) has exploded over the last few decades.

Central to our story are the tree-rings in the Yamal Peninsula of Russia. It is these trees which provided the basis in the 1990's for deducing that the temperature during the Medieval Warm Period was actually much cooler than supposed, and that the subsequent temperature variations, even during the so-called 'Little Ice Age' of the 1700's, was milder than previous assumptions. The result was a graph of temperatures over the last 1,000 years that looked like a hockey stick, with 20th Century temperatures exploding upward. 

This Hockey Stick graph was a political bomb-shell, kicking off a nearly world-wide angst over the coming world apocalypse. 20th Century temperature was not only anomalous to previous centuries, it seemed to be in a class by itself. A man-made class, in fact.

Again, if the 20th Century temperature rise is indeed statistically anomalous with the preceding 800+ years, this presents powerful evidence that man's industrial activity is at least a very significant cause of global warming. Not conclusive evidence (something else might still be causing it), but certainly strong evidence.

But well before the CRU email dump, we already knew that the science behind the Hockey Stick was flawed. That is because the research was conducted, published, and peer-reviewed in gross violation of the scientific method. Normally, when a scientist publishes his research, it is accompanied with the actual data and conditions underlying his conclusions, in such detail that other scientists can duplicate his research to see if they get the same results. In the case of the Hockey Stick graph, and subsequent studies seemingly confirming the Hockey Stick, fundamental data was withheld. Specifically, the information on the precise trees used in compiling the temperature series prior to the 20th Century was not published, nor were the various computer algorithms that were used to interpret the tree-ring data made available.

The climate scientists essentially published their conclusions and as for the rest, they said, "Trust us."  In fact, they refused to divulge the deep data behind their global warming conclusions right up until they were forced to by a Congressional investigation in 2005. Since then, other scientists have discovered, among other things, that the tree-ring data was cherry-picked to produce the now infamous Hockey Stick graph.

So, the recent CRU email dump only confirms what we already knew.  The behavior of the mainstream climate scientists in withholding their data from scrutiny should have made them and their theories laughable, ab initio. Instead, they have been lauded and feted, received millions of dollars in research grants, and have driven the world to the brink of madness in the name of a Global Catastrophe, wherein grown-up educated people contemplate spending trillions of dollars and regulating freedom to near death.

And all of it, all of it, based on a monstrous scientific hoax. Man-made global warming might still be true (as any theory might be true before it is researched), but we will never know it from scientists such as these. For they are not scientists, but mere partisan ideological hacks feeding away at the public trough. These people need to get other jobs, and let the real scientists get back to work.


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Thursday, November 19, 2009

Re: Where's the GOP

Tut, tut, Ezra. It is not dishonest and deceitful per se to step back and let another political party shoot itself in the head. Each political season is different, and quietly permitting the political suicide of the opposition is one possible approach among many. The only relevant question is whether these are times that dictate such a strategy.

I am saying that this is not one of those times. The extreme over-reaching by the current Democrat Administration and Congress this past year has stirred up political winds that will, undoubtedly, push many Democrats out of office, even if the Republicans stand pat. But such winds as I see in America today can do more than blow against the Democrats; it can also accelerate a Republican positive agenda item: the reform of our current Healthcare system into a more competitive, lower-cost, freedom enhancing part of our economy.

All it will take are Captains of the Republican ships who are willing to unfurl the sails and catch this timely wind.

Which brings up the question: are our Captains Courageous or Queegs? We will soon know.


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Senator Graham Puts on Airs

A little bit ago, Lindsey Graham co-wrote a Wall Street Journal Op/Ed with the esteemed Senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry, advocating for Cap and Trade legislation. We wrote about that Op/Ed here.

Yesterday, Senator Graham defended himself in an interview on the Sean Hannity radio program. In essence, he said the EPA was already empowered to regulate CO2 emissions, and it was important therefore to pass legislation insuring that such regulation would not burden small businesses and consumers with costs that would stifle economic activity and growth. He then concluded his defense, saying that he did not know to what extent Global Warming was a true man-made cataclysm, but that CO2 emissions by cars and other polluters was certainly not good and we needed to move as fast as possible to energy sources other than fossil fuels.

He talks as if the EPA is some natural, unstoppable force in the world, instead of a bureaucracy which owes its continuing existence to Congress. Why not legislate it out of existence, or if he is not willing to do that, curtail its jurisdiction over CO2? Because Senator Graham's real rationale for joining with Democrats on Cap and Trade is what he concluded with: CO2 is a pollutant, and pollutants are bad.

But, Mr. Graham, CO2 is not a pollutant. Another word for CO2 is "air." Air is not bad; unless it is hot air, in which case it can be very damaging to the political health of this Country.

Let the record show that I am in favor of eliminating all sources of hot air, including, perhaps especially including, Senators Graham and Kerry.


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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Re: Where's the GOP?

Chaz, in a nutshell, here are the Republican reasons for why they are doing what they are doing:

Why on earth should Republicans go on record with actual Healthcare bills? Wouldn't that leave them open to criticism on the merits? Wouldn't the Democrats and the Media literally revel in the real or imagined facts of harm and misery inflicted on the citizens of those States that had passed the Republican Healthcare measures?

As it is now, all the voters know is the evils of the Democrats' plans. Why give the Democrats an ability to tell a story about a corresponding evil of a Republican plan?

Best to stay low, and quiet, and let the enormity of the Democrats' plans for America be the only thought in the minds of the electorate.

Then, in 2010, we can pounce, and run the scoundrels from office.
For myself, I think that if this is the tack the GOP takes, then it will result only in the replacement of existing scoundrels with other scoundrels. Politicians should stand for something and be elected or not on account of that something. To try to slide into office by the back door - by simply not being an "unacceptable" Democrat - is a demeaning and deceptive strategy. Not to mention that such politicians are inherently unable to resist the lure of joining a $1+ trillion dollar spend-a-thon each year.


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KSM Takes Manhattan

Bill Kristol makes a striking point about Attorney General Eric Holder's description of the upcoming trial in New York City of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of 9/11, as the "Trial of the Century."

That phrase, in colloquial usage, refers to a media fire-storm type trial that rivets the nation, often for the same reasons a train wreck commands attention. The usual result of such an incendiary spectacle is something less than a trial and more like a circus. Think "O. J. Simpson" here, and you'll get the idea.

This nicely exposes the mind-set of the Administration regarding the erstwhile war between America and its enemies. This trial is not about justice or the defense of America against an implacable foe. If it were, then the military commissions - approved by the Supreme Court and enacted into legislation by Congress, with the support of then Senator Obama - would have sufficed. This is about a public spectacle, because to this Administration, success is gaged in terms of the amount of media coverage it commands and the number of news cycles it saturates with the President's picture and rhetoric.

This is foreign policy as conducted by a Hollywood PR expert. Military commissions in Cuba? "Puhleeeze! How am I going to get this covered by anyone? Which major media outlet will send cameras to that dreary place? New York, Baby! The Big Apple is the place! We'll get 'em to preempt Oprah with this one!"


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Where's the GOP?

In politics, when opportunity knocks, it is important to open the door. If that cliche doesn't thrill you, then how about this one: if you want to instruct a mule, you must first get its attention. The old joke finds a 2 x 4 to be the best method. However, if it is the mule who is knocking, then you already have its attention and can toss away the lumber. Just open the door and start instructing.

Voters are a particularly mulish lot. Most of the time, they are not paying attention. The only exceptions are the hard-line followers of both parties who are always thinking about politics. I estimate this group to be about 15% of the electorate and fairly evenly distributed between Democrats and Republicans. This means that the primary ongoing struggle for either political party is somehow to get the other 85% to pay attention long enough for it to make the sale on its policies and programs.

By their nature, Presidential elections gain a significant amount of attention from the 85%, but those times come around only once every four years. Off-year elections can have the same effect, but markedly less so, especially when there is no galvanizing political theme. This is why the party in power usually loses Congressional seats in off-years. Of the 85%, it is mostly the dissatisfied who will rouse themselves grumpily off their bark-a-loungers to vote; the satisfied are apt to stay home.

And then there are the important legislative battles in between elections. During these times, most of the 85% are comfortably hibernating from politics and could care less. George Bush's 2005 attempt to reform Social Security is a case in point. Social Security reform was one of his major policy planks, and the 2004 electoral victory had given him a sizable mandate for his second term, together with legislative majorities in Congress. However, after sweating out a particularly rancorous Presidential contest, the 85% retreated to their homes and political somnambulism. Try as he might, President Bush could not get any significant public support for his efforts, and Social Security reform fizzled, along with a good portion of the President's mandate. His Presidency never recovered.

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However, the 85% will wake up to politics sometimes, in unpredictable ways and at unpredictable times, even in the no-man's land of non-election cycle politics. As rare as these time are, it is critically important that a political party be alert to their occurrence, and act decisively.

In my opinion, we are in such a time right now. The national electorate, including a sizable portion of the 85%, is awake and listening intently to the Healthcare debate. Exactly why the 85% is paying attention is not important. The fact is that they are, and I wonder: where is the GOP? Why are Republicans not seizing this opportunity to push their agenda when a substantial portion of the electorate is listening?

I am not talking about Congressional action. Republicans have come under heavy criticism from Democrats and the national media for obstinately opposing the Democrats on Healthcare without offering any constructive alternatives. However, the GOP has put forward significant alternatives, such as Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's Healthcare legislation, only to see them vanish amidst Washington's political whirl-winds. In fact, as a distant minority in Congress, the only strategy the GOP can and should pursue in that august body is high-profile opposition to all that the Democrats represent. Nothing else will break through Democrat control of both the legislative process and the media.

But the GOP does command strong majorities in many State governments, and until the Democrats succeed in passing their National Healthcare program, the regulation of Healthcare and health insurance is largely a State responsibility. Why isn't the GOP pursuing a national campaign to reform State laws to allow interstate purchase of health insurance, reduce State insurance mandates, and otherwise increase choice and competition for consumers? A national State based campaign such as this would gain traction in the national media, especially so if it was coordinated with real legislative action in GOP dominated State legislatures. Imagine the impact on the Washington debates if the Republicans not only proposed market based solutions for Healthcare, but enacted the same!

All the polls show that the American people do not like the Democrats' reactionary New Dealism, where bigger, bloated government seems to be the answer for everything. As a result, the GOP is perfectly positioned to take control of this issue at the State level, giving the voters real-time programs and policies that will actually solve the Healthcare problem rather than make it worse.

The public is knocking at the door, looking for leadership on the Healthcare issue that will not take them down the Democrats' road. Where is the GOP? Why won't they open the door?

Probably for the same reasons that made them the minority party in the first place.


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Sunday, November 15, 2009

Our President, Lower than a Highness

Socialist, Marxist, Ideologue. These are the usual epithets hurled our President's way.

Is it possible, however, that he is none of the above, but instead ... a Royalist?

He has a curious habit of bowing to Emperors and Kings, something American's (much less American President's) are not prone to do. The LA Times has helpfully included a file photo of then Vice President Cheney bow-lessly greeting the Japan Emperor.

As the Times asks, how low is this President willing to go?


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Straining a Gnat

Let's count the expenses: a $787 billion Stimulus, with more contemplated; more than $1 trillion approved by the House for National Healthcare; and proposed legislation for Cap and Trade that will add trillions of dollars in expenses to the national economy.

Recently, however, our Leaders " ... expressed reservations about the potential long-term costs of expanding the war in Afghanistan." The costs? $26 billion. That's $26 billion BEFORE factoring in the savings from the wind-down of the Iraq war. Net cost after troop levels are reduced in Iraq? $0.00; that's zero, zip, nada.

Our Dear Leaders strain a gnat and swallow a camel.

Ignorance? Stupidity? No; just politics as usual, Washington style.


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Thursday, November 12, 2009

A Brief History of Faith

President Obama said yesterday at Fort Hood, "No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts. No just and loving God looks upon them with favor." Taken as a universal moral prescription, he is correct. But as a description of the history of religions, he could not be more wrong.

The norm in human history is to kill or be killed in the name of religion. Taking only the last 2,000 years and a very narrow slice of peoples, Romans killed Christians because of their faith, and thereafter, Christian sects killed other Christian sects. Meanwhile, Muslim sects killed other Muslim sects. Then, Christians killed Muslims and Muslims killed Christians, while Christian and Muslim sects continued to kill each other. All of this occurred with a regularity bordering on a scientific necessity.

In fact, the only major religion that has not killed others in the normal course over the last millennia is Judaism, mainly because it was altogether too busy fending off the recurrent bloody mobs seeking its extinction.

The idea that religious difference does not, and should not, justify killing others is an epiphany of the last few hundred years. This notion gained some credence in Western culture during the Enlightenment, and finally emerged in the American revolution as an obdurate challenge to the religious history of mankind.  The Continent followed suit shortly thereafter, due in large part to the translation and publication in Germany towards the end of the 19th Century of the works of the incomparable Kierkegaard.

As of today, this Western ethic of religious tolerance is accepted almost universally, by the Left, the Right, and everyone in between ...... except, of course, by a large slice of about a billion Muslims.

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I am not being critical of Muslims, I'm really not. My brief history of religious tolerance is intended to show that this is a very recent invention. It should not be a surprise that people as passionate as Muslims will be a good bit behind the curve, as it were. And this is not least because their own culture was marginal and marginalized during the period of the ascendancy of religious tolerance.

However, for almost 40 years now, Islam has been ascendant, due to the conjunction between a growing, prospering world starving for energy and the huge reserves of black gold under the sands of the Middle East. Muslims, rightly, insist on taking their place on the world stage. If they do so, however, there is no more important lesson for them to learn than that bloody war in the name of their religion is something the world will no longer accept.

And it is up to the rest of the world, and the United States in particular, to teach them this lesson, through persuasion if possible, but through steely nerve and force of arms, if that is what they prefer. The world lost too many people in the countless millennia of religious warfare to let itself fall back into those dark ages.

At bottom, this is the problem with the Obama Administration's prevarication and obfuscation about Islamic Terrorism. The Obami are treating the issue as if it is some parochial American political battle with the Right. Instead, it is a transcendent worldwide cultural war. This brazen idea, that people of different religions can live in peace, is at a cross-roads: will it become a universal law between people of all nations, or shall it be just another 19th Century Western curiosity, like bustles and spats?

If we can secure this principle of religious tolerance against the forces of Islamic Jihad, then the world will be a better place. Perhaps we can then move on to educating the world about political liberty, and make it a two-fer for 19th Century Western culture.


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Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Witness Unprotection Program:
Bubble Boy v. UPI

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(h/t Ez. Yeats)


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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Is it a Terrorist Yet?

There is not a little bit of buzz as to whether the alleged Ft. Hood killer, Major Hasan, is a terrorist or not. The Obami, including the Major Media, are emphasizing the fact that the Major did not coordinate his actions with al Quaeda or any other outside organization. He was a lone mad killer, perhaps a victim of pre-post traumatic stress disorder or harassment for his Muslim religion. Or both. In any event, he is no terrorist.

The conservative net, however, seems to be moving back and forth between proliferating definitions of terrorist, war criminal, and traitor.

Let's keep a little focus here, people. This is not a definitional problem. This was murder and an act of Jihadist terror, pure and simple. Whether the Major coordinated with al Quaeda or was a lone gunmen, whether he had personal mental problems or not, the fact remains that he clearly indicated an intention to further by his actions the worldwide Islamic Jihad against America and Americans. And he did so using the classic terrorist method of mass slaughter of unarmed, defenseless people in an unpredictable manner and place. This was an act of radical Islamic terror, in the same category as 9/11, QED.

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And therein lies the Obami problem, and the reason for Administration obfuscation. You may praise or bury President Bush, but one thing is irrefutable: his policies kept America safe from Islamic terrorism on American soil for eight years after 9/11. Now, just nine months into the Obama Administration, Islamic terrorism has claimed more American victims.

It is being speculated that one of our problems is a multi- culti- diversity pablum infecting the command structure of our Armed Forces which prevented anyone from properly investigating the Major's suspicious activities. If true, and it appears it is, we should not let this sort of thing distract us. The ultimate problem rests with the Commander in Chief. President Obama has made it plain from the start that he does not like the War on Terror, nor the Bush Administration practice of calling a Muslim terrorist a Muslim terrorist. This attitude at the very top of our government has reduced the readiness of our Armed Forces, Homeland Security, the FBI, and all others who are charged with protecting America in this War that we did not start.

To coin a phrase, this past week the President's chickens ..... came home to roost.

To the lasting sorrow of thirteen American families and the Nation at large.


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Monday, November 9, 2009

NY-23

Bill Owens, newby Representative from New York's District 23, broke 4 campaign promises in his first 24 hours.

A new record. As politicians go, this guy is a real over-achiever.

Bleh.


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Bubble Boy

20 years ago today, the signal event of the 20th Century occurred. More significant than VE Day in Europe or VJ Day in the Pacific, for those just marked the ends of two great battles in the larger 70 Years War since Communism raised its ugly head in Russia in 1917.

The final volley in the 70 Years War was fired by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 when he uttered those immortal words in front of the Brandenburg Gate, "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Almost all of the best and brightest advised Reagan not to give such a speech. But he knew his times better than most, and his destiny and the destiny of his Country: to oppose those that would imprison human beings behind walls, barbed wire, and sick ideologies. And so, as near universal consensus acknowledges, President Reagan defeated Soviet Communism, won the 70 Years War, and ended the omnipresent nuclear crisis known as the Cold War, without firing a shot, with words, only words. But what words!

Which brings us to our current President, Barack Hussein Obama, II. He was invited by German Chancellor Merkel to attend the ceremonies marking this great occasion; unfortunately, he was otherwise engaged. That Presidential calendar sure can fill up quick!

But with what? In addition to ministerial functions like a British Prime Minister, the President performs the functions of a Monarch; that is, a President personifies the Nation, and participates in ceremonial occasions on behalf of all Americans, especially those that are central to the identity of this Country. There is hardly anything more central to what the United States is about than the fall of the Berlin Wall, and therefore hardly anything more important for our President to be doing today. Why did he not attend these ceremonies?

Helmut Kohl, then Chancellor of West Germany, said 20 years ago to President George H. W. Bush: “Without the U.S., this day would not have been possible. Tell your people that.” Tell them he did. But when he did, some Americans were not listening.

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As I have related here and here, President Obama is gripped in an ideology he learned as a young man. For he and his brethren of the 1980's, the fall of the Berlin Wall was not the living metaphor of a joyous celebration of freedom, but the distasteful triumphalism of a predatory capitalism foisted on the world by America. Those free people, dismantling brick by brick the "gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers," as President Reagan described it, were but dupes of the system. They were the soon-to-be petty bourgeoisie whose ignorant sloth would serve the interests of the real oppressors.

Nothing of the history of the last 20 years can penetrate ideology such as this. Rip Van Winkle eventually woke up, and began processing the changes of the new world around him. President Obama does not need to wake up, for he has never been asleep. Only encased in his bubble, safe and secure from any truth that might nudge him to engage the reality of the world as it is, not as he would wish it to be. Our President, the Bubble Boy.

That said, if our President will not represent the United States on this most momentous occasion, leave us not forget to offer our own little congratulations, to the German peoples, who endured post-World War II a horror disproportionate to any punishment they might have deserved, and now live in the freedom which is the birthright of all peoples, everywhere.

(h/t for the quotes herein, Bill Bennett)
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Sunday, November 8, 2009

Witness Unprotection Program:
Meet the Press


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