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Friday, August 18, 2006
Playing With Pictures
Posted by on 8.18.06 @ 7:25PM
Union Leader Editorial Page Editor Andrew Cline paddles the Kos crowd in a great bit here, seeing their one supposedly incriminating picture of Rep. Charlie Bass at a big, bad corporate party and raising them some pictures of Kos allies (and others) at the same party. Fun stuff, take a look.
Fun With Ben and Jerry’s
Posted by on 8.18.06 @ 5:48PM
I set one of the toggles to 100%, left one alone, and set all of the others to zero. You guess which I set to 100% and which I left alone.
Hat tip: Best of the Web
Deficit Going Down
Posted by on 8.18.06 @ 1:57PM
I’d like to hope that the editors at the New Republic are feeling a bit less smug today with the Congressional Budget Office’s announcement that the fiscal year 2006 deficit will be $260 billion, down from $318 billion last year. But I won’t, since smugness seems to be the editorial disposition at TNR these days. They’ll just cling to the CBO’s claim that the deficit will rise next year.
That’s not a wise strategy though. Using data from various CBO reports, I constructed this table on projected and actual deficits and income taxes (it is the growth in income taxes that has accounted for a large part of the decline in the deficit).
| CBO Projections Vs. Actual Numbers |
I Disagree, Reluctantly
Posted by on 8.18.06 @ 1:55PM
With the lovely Ms. Coulter, but in her recent column she decries the terrorists’ victory in compelling us to bar deodorant from airliners. Sorry, Ann, but you’re wrong. It’s not the terrorists who will celebrate this win. It is to the French that the spoils (and the odor of them) will belong.
Talks the Talk
Posted by on 8.18.06 @ 1:03PM
Al Sharpton recently spoke out against people who act “as if gangsterism and blackness are synonymous.” It would seem, though, that the dear Reverend doesn’t always practice what he preaches. There he was at the Radio One Awards in D.C. last night, schmoozing with the hucksters and glitterati of the pop-gangster culture, including the likes of Janet Jackson, gangster rappers Sean “P Diddy” Combs, Jay-Z and Jermaine Dupree, as well as the rap producer Russell Simmons.
Rudy Still Leads
Posted by on 8.18.06 @ 12:15PM
The latest 2008 presidential preference poll for August, based on a Pew Research survey of registered voters, finds Giuliani in the lead among Republicans, with 24 percent support. Rice is at 21 percent and McCain is at 20 percent. Everybody else is in the single digits. Hillary Clinton is still polling way ahead of everbody else in the Democratic field, with 40 percent support among registered Democrats. Gore far behind at 18 percent.
Suicidal Purge
Posted by on 8.18.06 @ 12:03PM
The Democrats have a great plan to deal with a Joe Lieberman victory: A shunning.
A group of Senate Democrats is growing increasingly angry about Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (D-Conn.) campaign tactics since he lost the Democratic primary last week. If he continues to alienate his colleagues, Lieberman could be stripped of his seniority within the Democratic caucus should he defeat Democrat Ned Lamont in the general election this November, according to some senior Democratic aides.But if that happens, as Mickey Kaus and James Taranto have pointed out, Lieberman’s vote determines which party controls the Senate. What a brilliant moment to stick it to Joe![…]
The issue of Lieberman’s seniority would arise most dramatically if Lieberman wins re-election and Democrats recapture control of the chamber. That would slot Lieberman to take over as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the panel primarily responsible for investigating the executive branch.
Democrats think their chances of taking back the Senate are growing more and more likely. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) last week said he was more confident that Democrats would pick up at least five Senate seats.
Security Moms
Posted by on 8.18.06 @ 10:09AM
In a July 1, 2004 Opinion Journal column, Peggy Noonan pointed out a phenomenon that she was worried would hurt President Bush’s re-election prospects:
History has been too dramatic the past 3 1/2 years. It has been too exciting. Economic recession, 9/11, war, Afghanistan, Iraq, fighting with Europe, fighting with the U.N., boys going off to fight, Pat Tillman, beheadings. It has been so exciting. And my general sense of Americans is that we like things to be boring. Or rather we like history to be boring; we like our lives to be exciting.
Perhaps Noonan was two years early. I thought back to her article when reading today’s Washington Post cover story on how the so-called “security mom” vote was starting to shift toward Democrats. In particular, the following quote from Jo Ann Smith, a divorced Ohio mother , stood out:
“I am just totally disgusted with this war,” Smith said. “I understand terrorism and the threat, but I am sick of hearing about it.”
If this phenomenon holds true in November, I will be very scared for our country. If even people who know that there is a threat would rather try to tune it out as if it were an annoying construction noise, we’re in trouble.
Jolt Culture
Posted by on 8.18.06 @ 9:59AM
…is the name given by J. Peder Zane writing in the News & Observer to our fetish for pointless information in heaping servings. Trivial Pursuit was once the game of middle-class snobs, seemingly invented for intellectuals stuck in yuppie careers to impress at dinner parties. It’s still a good game — so long as you avoid, at all costs, the “90’s Edition,” which is an updated abomination on par with a blonde James Bond. All of the questions, you suspect after fifteen minutes or so, require the player to draw from an encyclopedic “knowledge” of popular detritus, a memory bank bracketed by Pop Up Video and I Love The 80s.
A culture is always in danger of going overboard. Philip Rieff — whose signature book ISI will rerelease this fall (mark your calendars) — remarked somewhere that the French Encyclopedists showed this tendency even in a refined culture when their passion for accumulating knowledge inspired finally a cult of ornamentalism. We have that today as well, only without the gilt edges. Now all that glitters is gold, and nothing glitters like, well, pop trivia. This is defined such that trivia, served in pop style, becomes pop, and this is the subject of Zane’s piece. The link, with commentary via Postmodern Conservative, is here.
Department of Scurrilousness
Posted by on 8.18.06 @ 12:06AM
Who is Ricardo Alarcón Quesada? He is the “President of Cuba’s National Assembly” in “Havana, Cuba” who’s been given the lead position in the select letters section of the New Yorker in its August 21 issue. He wrote to defend the so-called “Five Heroes” mentioned in a July 31 piece who are in jail in the U.S. for having, in his words, “penetrated—without force or harm to any individuals—South Florida’s terrorist groups, in order to monitor their activities.” He claims “the U.S. did not contest that the Cubans’ ‘crime’ was to operate against violent groups tolerated by the Administration.” Indeed, “the Bush administration succeeded in protecting its own terrorists” three months after 9/11, “in the heat of the ‘war on terror,’” when it had these five men convicted.
Now it’s not common practice in Mike Wallace’s “so-called free world” to give space to a Goebbels-like stooge without including some sort of editorial response, particularly since Quesada’s letter is a slander against all south Florida Cuban-Americans (not to mention the Administration itself and all post-9/11 American sensitivies).
Now normally, if no reply from the editor or from the author of the piece in question is forthcoming, a publication might run a second letter that takes a sharply opposing view from such a scurrilous first letter. But not at the New Yorker. It declined any of these three options. Indeed, as if to second Quesada’s concerns, it has instead run a companion letter from an Ada Bello of Philadelphia, who condemns “the Bush Administration’s Committee for the Assistance to a Free Cuba.” The very existence of such “an entity” Bello finds “ominous,” given that the “U.S. ought to realize that Cubans are prepared to manage the post-Castro transition, and that any change imposed from the outside will never be seen as legitimate.” The dinero quote: “Without the pressures and intrusions of U.S. policy, Cuba, while preserving the social gains of the revolution, could evolve into a tolerant society, with a mixed economy and a good standard of living…” You know the rest: no more “U.S. imperialist adventures.”
It must hearten the likes of Raul Castro, Ricardo Quesada, and Hugo Chavez to know that in the United States there are many who will continue to make common cause with them once Fidel is sleeping with the worms.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Club for Growth Ousts Chafee
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 10:28PM
So says the AP:
The club has flexed its political muscles in recent GOP primaries. It figured in the ouster of moderate Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island last week, and in Michigan it helped challenger Tim Walberg unseat an incumbent, first-term Rep. Joe Schwarz.
I’ll have to send Andy Roth a congratulatory email.
Baylor Ex-Pres Robert Sloan Gives Exit Interview
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 9:34PM
Robert Sloan paid attention to the big buzz about integrating faith and learning throughout the 90’s. He certainly didn’t invent the concept, not even at Baylor where Provost Donald Schmeltekopf had already tilled the field waiting for seeds, water, and determination to back up his early evangelism of the concept. What Robert Sloan did, though, was to put money and his reputation behind the project to transform Baylor into a great Christian university that was simultaneously a research university. Whether or not U.S. News and World Report acknowledges it, a lot has happened at Baylor. Student board scores are up, graduate programs are churning out Ph.D.’s and Baylor is winning some serious research grants.
A strange thing happened along the way, though. Sloan himself was forced to resign only to see the vision continue to bloom. He stayed on as Chancellor for a year or so, basically occupying a fund-raising and figure-head role. He is now headed off to Houston to take over as president of Houston Baptist University, a school that characterizes itself as having no problem with the direction Sloan tried to take Baylor.
What may have been the most important part was that he was a symbol, or perhaps less euphemistically, a security blanket for those who wanted to see the university stay true to the 2012 vision Sloan pushed so hard. When David Jeffrey was fired as provost and Francis Beckwith’s tenure was denied, there were rumblings. First Things spectacularly jumped ship and Christianity Today clammed up after having given extensive coverage earlier.
Sloan’s departure will take the focus off him by both critics and supporters. Baylor will now be judged not by Sloan’s presence, but by its faithfulness to the vision it continues to embrace rhetorically. Final word on Beckwith’s tenure appeal should come down in late August. That will be one powerful indicator of Baylor’s heart and soul. After all, Beckwith (formerly my boss) is a prototypical faith and learning guy.
For his part, Sloan is still presidential. He has refused to publicly criticize anything done by his interim successor Bill Underwood (now at Mercer) or his permanent successor John Lilley. After 27 years at Baylor as student, athlete, teacher, preacher, distinguished prof., dean, and then president, he bleeds green and gold. But he has taken on a new opportunity and Baylor will stand or fall without him.
He starts at Houston Baptist immediately and has already done a public exit interview with the Waco Tribune-Herald. There’s some interesting stuff here personally, spiritually, organizationally, etc. It’s a good read.
The conclusion is my favorite part:
Q: What are your departing words to the Baylor family?
A: God bless Baylor. We love Baylor and we love Waco. Our greatest passion for Waco is that it be willing to take some risks and to grow and develop. For Baylor, there should be no question, historically or in terms of our obligation, as to what Baylor’s identity is. Certain features of it really are not even debatable. Legally and historically, Baylor was founded as a Christian institution in the Baptist tradition and being faithful to that should not be up for grabs. Having a faculty and staff that have those commitments should always be of primary concern because it’s the people that really are the institution and what the faculty and staff are determines the experience of the students. Baylor should always seek people that don’t merely accept her identity, but embrace it.
Of course, there’s another question beyond what Baylor will do without Sloan. What will Sloan do with Houston Baptist? That should be the fun part. Chairman Mao wanted to let a thousand flowers of revolution bloom. I’d settle for a dozen or so more in Christian higher education.
Vampires!
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 6:29PM
I’ve been personally very impressed with Mitt Romney on more than one occassion, but I have expressed concerns about his health care plan that seem unfortunately to be coming to pass. It could get much worse post-November as I pointed out in April:
Even if this plays out perfectly, it is not difficult to imagine this spiraling out of control should Democrats take over the Governor’s office in 2006 after Romney retires. Combine that with the likely retention of the Democratic Party’s 85 percent stranglehold on the legislature and it will be time to get the peoples’ checkbook out and start re-buying those votes they may have lost. Will Democrats let themselves be outdone by a former Republican governor bragging on the presidential campaign trail about delivering universal health care? Such a scenario seems exceedingly unlikely.
Read the rest here.
N. Korea Nuclear Testing
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 6:22PM
ABC News reports that there is evidence suggesting North Korea is preparing a nuclear test. One analyst put the chances of a test by the end of the year at 50-50. If Kim Jong Il does pull off a provocative test, would the Bush Administration ensure that he faces consequences, or will it speak loudly and carry a small twig like it did after the July 4th missle tests?
Mass Care Not Working Out—Part II
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 3:27PM
Lesson number two that Romney ignored: Unintended consequences. From that same Globe article:
Walrath’s comments came as the divide between business leaders and healthcare advocates over what constitutes a company’s “fair and reasonable” contribution to health insurance deepened yesterday. During a Division of Health Care Finance and Policy public hearing at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, healthcare advocates said the division’s proposal would further erode employer health plans, leading to a “race to the bottom.”So, some companies are now purchasing less-costly insurance that makes it easier to comply with the regulation mandating that the company pay 33% of the premium.“The proposed regulations make an already inadequate assessment even more inadequate,” said Phil Edmundson, head of a private insurance company and chairman of Affordable Care Today’s Massachusetts coalition.
Edmundson said the proposed contribution requirement doesn’t set any standards for company health plans. He cited the case of Friendly Ice Cream Corp. of Wilbraham, which recently changed its health plan for many restaurant employees to a “mini-med” plan, with limited benefits, which leaves beneficiaries liable for costs if they become seriously ill. In a statement, Friendly said yesterday that it has recently improved its insurance for restaurant employees, increasing hospitalization benefits to $10,000, with no deductible.
“With no quality requirement, these regulations could spread the use of mini-med plans,” Edmundson said.
That, in turn, leads to calls for “minimum quality requirements”—i.e., mandates on what benefits a health insurance plan must include.
And, of course, the insurance industry, in the form of Mr. Edmundson, advocates for more regulation requiring companies to purchase more expensive insurance—thereby fattening the insurance industry’s bottom line.
It is at least a bit ironic that Romney intended this reform to make insurance more affordable.
Mass Care Not Working Out—Part I
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 3:16PM
I’m betting that Mitt Romney will eventually come to regret the health care reform he championed. From the Boston Globe:
Representative Patricia A. Walrath, Democrat of Stow, said the regulations proposed in June by the Romney administration do not require businesses to pay enough for healthcare reform. In addition, she said a company’s contribution should take part-time employees into account. The rules drafted by the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy exclude part-time workers.Under the proposed rules, a company is considered a `”contributing employer” if at least 25 percent of its workers participate in the employer-sponsored health plan.” Companies that don’t meet that threshold can also be considered contributing employers if they pay at least 33 percent of the premium for individual coverage. Businesses with fewer than 11 employees are exempt.
Both tests are too lax, Walrath wrote in a letter to Amy Lischko , commissioner of the healthcare division. She wants companies to pay at least 50 percent of healthcare premiums or have at least 35 percent of their employees signed up for coverage.
Yep, the social-activist-do-gooders now want those evil corporations to pay more. That’s lesson number one that Romney ignored: No matter how much you give to the left, they always come back and demand more.
There They Go Again
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 1:23PM
Ok, radio’s over for a little while so tv begins again. See ya on Kudlow & Co. on CNBC tonight about 5 pm EDT, talking about terrorist profiling at airports and other such. Lots of SGO, none of it good.
RE: For What Office Is Wal-Mart Running?
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 1:21PM
Oh, but Dave, it can be such a profitable strategy in the short run. That’s why Wal-Mart’s CEO has urged an increase in the minimum wage. In the long-run, of course, you give the left more power to determine what you can and cannot pay employees. But in the short-run, such a policy makes labor costs higher for Wal-Mart’s competitors—you know, all those Mom-N-Pops the left always accuses Wal-Mart of driving out of business? They go out of business, and Wal-Mart expands its market share.
Of course, getting the left to understand that about the minimum wage makes one feel like the proverbial one-legged man at the a** kicking contest.
For What Office Is Wal-Mart Running?
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 12:47PM
The Democrats seem to have confused a corporation that provides jobs (and, by the way, is now toeing their line on emergency contraceptives, the environment, and health care) for a political opponent. At least Mayor Daley gets it ($): if you keep legally harassing Wal-Mart about wages, they’ll just up and leave.
It is worth noting, as Mr. Hogberg often does, that corporations often don’t understand that appeasing the left is not a fruitful strategy. Wal-Mart has given many inches, and will end up having to give miles.
Compromise Allows Arsonist To Keep Flamethrower
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 12:20PM
I didn’t need to read any further than the sub-headline on this article in the Washington Post.
Lebanon Sending Troops Into SouthCompromise Will Allow Hezbollah to Keep Arms
Dealing with Hamas
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 11:44AM
Writing in today’s NY Times (subscription required), Scott Atran, a research scientist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, says that Israel and the U.S. should deal with Hamas.
Although Hamas is sworn to the destruction of Israel, Atran writes:
Hamas’s top elected official, Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, now accepts that to stop his people’s suffering, his government must forsake its all-or-nothing call for Israel’s destruction. “We have no problem with a sovereign Palestinian state over all our lands within the 1967 borders, living in calm,” Mr. Haniya told me in his Gaza City office in late June, shortly before an Israeli missile destroyed it. “But we need the West as a partner to help us through.”
First, a return to the 1967 borders would include Israel giving up Jerusalem, which is a complete non-starter and Haniya knows it. Second, Haniya has already said publically that he would accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, but only as a staging area for the eventual destruction of Israel. Leading up to the January Palestinian elections, Haniya was quoted by the AFP:
“Hamas supports the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital in the territories occupied [by Israel] in 1967 - as an interim solution. However, Hamas will continue to maintain its views regarding the boundaries of historical Palestine, and [in terms of] refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the occupation.”
Clearly, Haniya hasn’t changed his tune, just his tactics. But another Hamas official was a little more honest:
“Israel freeing some of our prisoners will help us to stop others from attacking it,” said the Hamas government spokesman, Ghazi Hamad. “But Israel must apologize for our tragedy in 1948 [i.e. the establishment of Israel] before we can talk about negotiating over our right of return to historic Palestine [i.e. all of Israel].”
Always count on the NY Times to legitimize evil.
Many Have Said
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 11:28AM
After two days of prominently placed page 1 stories on Sen. George Allen, the Washington Post has relegated its coverage of his re-election campaign to its previous spot, the Metro section, practically burying today’s story in a tiny corner at the bottom of page B1. Evidently it’s not big news that Sen. John McCain stumped for Allen yesterday in Norfolk, or that Allen’s opponent James Webb drew all of 40 people to his appearance in safe, ultra-liberal Arlington (I think I drew more than that when I once spoke to the Arlington Kiwanis, the group Webb addressed yesterday), or that Webb supporter Wesley Clark included war hero McCain among the Republicans he says have let military veterans down.
Of course, the “macaca” story was replayed early in the report, in the weasely way that has come to exemplify liberal media bias, as editorializing fills in where empirical reporting won’t or can’t go. This, from paragraph 3, about McCain’s appearance for Allen:
But the event was partly overshadowed by continuing criticism over comments Allen made last week to a Webb volunteer of Indian descent that many have said were demeaning and insensitive.
“Partly overshadowed”? Only in the eyes of the reporter, evidently, since no effort is made to confirm that point, not even via a single quote from anyone in attendance. And who might the “many have said” be? (As if you had to ask.) Finally, “Webb volunteer”? Reverse the Post’s political affiliation and it would have read, “Allen stalker.”
Ned Falling
Posted by on 8.17.06 @ 10:17AM
This is what people power is all about:
BOSTON (Reuters) - U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (news, bio, voting record), a three-term Democrat now running as an independent candidate, leads the man who beat him in last week’s primary vote by 12 points in a three-way race, a poll released on Thursday shows.
The latest Quinnipiac University poll, conducted between August 10-14, shows Lieberman leads Democrat Ned Lamont, a wealthy businessman with little political experience who has played on anti-war sentiment, by 53 percent to 41 percent among likely voters in November’s election. The Republican candidate Alan Schlesinger drew 4 percent, the poll shows.
Granting the obvious caveat that there’s still a long time until November, this poll suggests that Lamont already peaked and that he’ll have a tough time drawing support outside of the Democratic Party. The Quinnipiac news release breaks the numbers down further:
In this latest survey, Lieberman leads 75 - 13 - 10 percent among likely Republican voters, and 58 - 36 - 3 percent among likely independent voters, while likely Democratic voters back Lamont 63 - 35 percent.
So even if Lieberman hangs on to a third of Democrats, he can still win handily.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
How Government Treats The Private Sector
Posted by on 8.16.06 @ 5:02PM
Last week I responded to an argument that we ought to open Medicare to all and let it compete with the private sector health insurance. One of my responses was that since the government gets to run Medicare and regulate private health insurance, it was a bit like letting a referee both officiate and play in a game.
You can get a good glimpse of this by looking at Medicare Part C, which was supposed to let private insurance companies offer health savings account-type policies to seniors (called medical savings accounts (MSAs) under Medicare). However, Part C was weighed down by so many regulations that virtually no private insurance plans bothered.
Apparently the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) decided to revamp the application process. Under “Downloads” on the CMS website, there are nine different links for “useful information” and memos before you get to the applications.
The application for the MSA program puts a zip file on the desk top, and the resulting file has three word documents, a three page application, a thirty-eight page set of guidelines, and a twenty-two page initial contract application. “Initial”?
(God forbid if you download one the files for the applications for one of the other types of plans.)
This makes me wonder, who has the time to fill out these applications and go through the endless process of getting CMS to approve a plan? Probably only the big insurance companies, which means that the effect of these regulations is to limit competition. I wish I could believe that the end result was not intended, but after reading Tim Carney’s book, I doubt it.
Oh, the new procedures came out on July 10th, and you had until August 10th to finish the applications.
Torture Works
Posted by on 8.16.06 @ 3:58PM
Yesterday's Guardian reported that
Lamont America
Posted by on 8.16.06 @ 12:01PM
The resident Cominternist at the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson, scoffs at talk that Joe Lieberman’s defeat in Connecticut means the Democratic Party has moved left. But then he happily informs readers that not only Ned Lamont is anti-free trade, but so are other key Senate candidates Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders.
Another Ned Lamont endorser: Michael Schiavo, the devoted husband who couldn’t wait to pull the plug on his wife last year in order to remarry. He’s devoting his free time to opposing every politician who sided with his wife’s parents in the case. Thus, he’s backing Democrat Angie Paccione in a Colorado congressional race. In welcoming his support, Paccione chose language that was, shall we say, unfortunate. “We need more individual citizens like him to step up and put an end to it.”
The Vulnerability of the Film Critic
Posted by on 8.16.06 @ 10:45AM
I have a good friend who is a reporter for a big station in a big market. He wrote me a few days ago complaining about the explosion of blogs and net sources who reduce his work to just one small voice among the multitudes. As a frequent net writer, I had to tell him my sympathies were in favor in the democratization of discourse.
But you know who is really threatened by blog work? Film critics, that’s who. Think about it. Bloggers have a tough time competing with news outlets when it comes to actual reportage, but they have no similar trouble with film review. It’s a skill, not a matter of resources. If you have the ability to review film intelligently, you can compete head-on with Mr. Ebert or Entertainment Weekly.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Speaking of Nevada
Posted by on 8.15.06 @ 3:49PM
Is Club for Growth about to chalk up another win? The latest poll results for the GOP primary in Nevada’s 2nd House District show Dean Heller and Sharron Angle (the Club’s candidate) tied at 32%. Late in July, a different poll showed Angle down by 16 points.
As the article notes:
Eric Herzik, a University of Nevada, Reno political science professor, said he was surprised by the latest poll results.He said Angle has clearly benefited from television ads, paid for by the Club for Growth, that portray Gibbons and Heller as liberals.
The group, which favors limited government and taxes, is credited with helping conservative Tim Walberg defeat moderate incumbent Rep. Joe Schwarz in Tuesday’s Republican primary in Michigan.
“The ads have just hammered them (Heller and Gibbons), and she (Angle) has pointed out she is the most conservative candidate - and she is,” said Herzik, a Republican. “They are running negative ads because they work.”
Will Angle win? We’ll know later this evening.
Re: George Allen
Posted by on 8.15.06 @ 1:32PM
Dave, I have to second your post. My sense of it, after watching the video and through my experience with Allen, is that when he shoots off his mouth, it is not out of malice but carelessness. He thought of a quick name for the guy, when a name was unnecessary to make his point.
Allen often speaks without thinking, best typified by his response to the question of what Thomas Jefferson (his political hero) would have thought of the prescription drug benefit: Allen hadn’t considered that in voting to expand drastically the federal government.
George Allen
Posted by on 8.15.06 @ 11:59AM
Over at The Corner, Tim Graham blogs on Senator Allen’s Macaca remark. I agree with everything Graham said. The press blows up every GOP racial screw up, but Biden’s Dunkin Donut remark or Hillary Clinton’s gas station remark, barely a whimper.
Nevertheless, I have to add that this incident makes me question very seriously Allen’s judgment. First, Allen’s past on racial issues has long been fodder for the Democrats and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself.) Second, surely Allen must be aware of The New Republic’s scurrilous article from earlier this year—so he should be on high alert for anything that even smacks of racial insensitivity. Finally, Allen made these remarks to a gent who was running a video camera!
Frankly, I don’t know what Allen was thinking, which leads me to believe that he wasn’t thinking at all. If this is how Allen behaves on an issue that he has been recently smeared with and when his comments will be recorded for posterity, I have to wonder whether he has the discipline to withstand the withering grind that is a presidential campaign.
Is Olmert Finished?
Posted by on 8.15.06 @ 11:30AM
Golda Meir was forced to resign as Prime Minister of Israel in the wake of 1973's Yom Kippur War, should the current Olmert government face the same fate in the wake of its failure in the war against Hezbollah? Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick answers a resounding Yes. I'm inclined to agree.
Glick outlines what a military and diplomatic disaster the war was for
Speaking of…
Posted by on 8.15.06 @ 11:25AM
…Tim Carney, here’s my interview with him about The Big Ripoff.
Big Ripoff At America’s Future Foundation
Posted by on 8.15.06 @ 11:14AM
Just a reminder, this evening the America’s Future Foundation will hold a roundtable featuring Tim Carney, author of The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money. Admission is only $5 for non-members.
And remember ladies, Tim is the posterboy for American conservative male hotness!
Fiscal 9/11
Posted by on 8.15.06 @ 10:38AM
When it comes to the issue of making true cuts in government spending, I’m a bit of a fatalist. In my view, the only way things will change is if we suffer a financial disaster on the scale of 9/11 as we collapse under the weight of the welfare state.
Pork projects such as the “Bridge to Nowhere” make great headlines, but at the end of the day the only way we’re going to reduce the size of government is by making serious changes to mandatory spending on entitlements. Mandatory spending already accounts for a majority of the budget, and by 2016 it’s projected to swallow up nearly two-thirds, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The failure of a relatively modest Social Security reform last year, with a determined president and Republican control of Congress, left me completely pessimistic about the chances of entitlement reform. While, in polls, people will say that they want smaller government and fear the Social Security crisis in general, when it comes to actually cutting programs that they like, they are opposed.
Trying to cut entitlement spending goes against human nature, which is focused on the short-term. A person who eats too much knows that it may lead to health problems down the road, but those potential health problems aren’t yet real, while cheeseburgers, fries, and hot fudge sundaes are delicious and offer immediate gratification. Fiscal conservatives showing Americans charts projecting what’s going to happen 10 or 20 or 40 years from now is not as compelling as media stories about seniors being thrown into the gutter.
I don’t see that dynamic changing until an economic disaster results from entitlement spending. At that point, entitlement reform no longer becomes just a responsible long-term thing to do, but it enters Americans’ short-term radar, just as terrorism did after 9/11.
On Fiscal Conservatism
Posted by on 8.15.06 @ 9:42AM
Current politicos and would-be public servants love to describe themselves as fiscal conservatives and social liberals. It sounds so logical. We take a solid, quantitative look at the realities of money and budgets, but we recognize that there is nothing normative in the hazy realm of morality.
Unfortunately, the apparent coherency is only skin-deep. Social liberalism (as in moral laissez-faire with regard to sex, drugs, etc.) is an untenable position in a welfare state. You can’t agree to pay for everything and then allow the partiers to empty out the coffers with their crazy behavior. Down that road lies financial ruin. We can’t even talk about laissez-faire morality until the welfare state is scrapped or scaled back to a point we would find unrecognizable.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Re: Redefining ‘Fiscal Conservative’
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 10:45PM
Tabin, three cheers. You’re dead right. “Fiscal conservative” is as much a code as anything else used to cabin off right from left with a bad conscience. It stinks, I think, as bad as a certain smell rising from the corpse of Joe Lieberman. That corpse, of course, will walk again, as it should; but Pat Buchanan is not just whistlin’ Dixie when he lambastes the Lieb’s neocon hagiographers.
The last laugh is that actual fiscal conservatism is virtually a dead letter. The rabbit hole we’ve tumbled down has, as Sam Elliot put it in The Big Lebowski, “no bottom.” The illness that has gripped American spendiness is terminal, until further notice — in the household as well as the federal purse. We might have to tear down the GOP — at least, for a laugh, as it’s usually done, in primary season — in order to tear down entitlement spending. This is one of those fine trades for which we have won compassion and security. It’s bosh and we know it is. But who will step into the breach? Mike Pence?
Re: Redefining ‘Fiscal Conservative’
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 8:30PM
I addressed this topic almost three years ago, when I observed that
A fiscal conservative may be untroubled by budget deficits or obsessed with them; may want to raise spending or rein it in; and may want to raise taxes or cut them. “Fiscal conservative” now means so many things that it means nothing for certain. It’s a dream label for a politician: obscuring more than it reveals, it says to the vast majority of the electorate: Whatever you think, I agree.I’m still sort of hoping that the taxonomy I created back then to explain the unbundled strains of “fiscal conservatism” will eventually catch on.
Re: Redefining Fiscal Conservative
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 4:57PM
Phil: I’m inclined to agree. If for no other reason, the only way the GOP gets to hang on to its tax cuts of recent years is if it puts the lid on spending.
Re: Redefining Fiscal Conservative
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 4:48PM
For a long time, I’ve thought that conservative voters should no longer be eager to get behind Republicans merely because of their support for cutting taxes. In fact, at this point I think it makes more sense to support a Republican who would keep taxes the same, but cut spending. Of course, in the long run, the only way to limit the size of government is through serious entitlement reform. But given last year’s Social Security debacle, I’m not going to hold my breath.
Redefining ‘Fiscal Conservative’
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 4:08PM
David Boaz at Cato notes that the mainstream media is in the habit of calling politicians who oppose tax cuts and support more spending as “fiscal conservatives.” It’s confusing until you understand what meaning the MSM imparts to “fiscal conservative”. About two years ago I was talking to former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore who was complaining about various liberal efforts to redefined fiscal conservatives as any politician who increases spending as long as he supports the taxes necessary to pay for it.
Thus, the confusion evaporates: those politicians oppose tax cuts because those cuts diminish the revenue needed to pay for spending. And that, according to the MSM lexicon, makes them fiscal conservatives.
UPDATE: Boaz replies: “Good point, except that none of these guys are proposing enough taxes to pay for all the spending they support. So even that test fails.”
No doubt.
For When AmSpec Redesigns the Blog
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 1:26PM
Wlady, you should put this in the AmSpec blog’s sidebar.
Containing Iran
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 1:20PM
Writing in the Atlantic Monthly (subscription required), Jonathan Rauch argues:
Here are some things we have seen before: a nuclear-armed country with a brittle and aggressive ideology, world-revolutionary aspirations, and a belief in the historic inevitability of its triumph against a decadent and ultimately hollow West. In that country, an unpopular and divided regime, with hard-liners and relative pragmatists squabbling for influence. A crumbling resource-dependent economy. A paranoid worldview in which
is an omnipresent military and ideological threat. A tactical predilection for supporting and manipulating insurgent proxies around the world, rather than engaging in direct confrontations. Above all, a belief that nuclear weapons are strategically essential to deter the America and maintain national prestige… . United States
is, if anything, more vulnerable to long-term pressure than the Iran was. It is smaller and weaker in every dimenstion. Its economy is a mess. Its oil weapon fires backward as well as forward, because oil sales keep USSR 's economy afloat. And, unlike the Iran Soviet Union ,has no conceivable hope of disarming or crippling Iran with a first strike; America 's deterrent against America is massive, credible and impregnable. Iran … the
dealt with the Soviets, who were at least as murderous as the mullahs and far mightier, and the end result was regime change. It took a while, but containment is a long term game, and it's a game on which the United States wrote the book. United States Here are some things we have seen before: a nuclear-armed country with a brittle and aggressive ideology, world-revolutionary aspirations, and a belief in the historic inevitability of its triumph against a decadent and ultimately hollow West. In that country, an unpopular and divided regime, with hard-liners and relative pragmatists squabbling for influence. A crumbling resource-dependent economy. A paranoid worldview in which
is an omnipresent military and ideological threat. A tactical predilection for supporting and manipulating insurgent proxies around the world, rather than engaging in direct confrontations. Above all, a belief that nuclear weapons are strategically essential to deter the America and maintain national prestige… . United States
is, if anything, more vulnerable to long-term pressure than the Iran was. It is smaller and weaker in every dimenstion. Its economy is a mess. Its oil weapon fires backward as well as forward, because oil sales keep USSR 's economy afloat. And, unlike the Iran Soviet Union ,has no conceivable hope of disarming or crippling Iran with a first strike; America 's deterrent against America is massive, credible and impregnable. Iran … the
dealt with the Soviets, who were at least as murderous as the mullahs and far mightier, and the end result was regime change. It took a while, but containment is a long term game, and it's a game on which the United States wrote the book. United States
Hat tip Hit and Run.
Me: As evil and murderous as the U.S.S.R. was, its leaders were still interested in self preservation. The jihadists who run
Hey Hey, Ho Ho, We Support The PLO!
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 1:02PM
That slogan is so cute when it is chanted by grade school girls.
Ahmadinejad and Hitler
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 12:29PM
Over at RealClearPolitics, John McIntyre points out some of the eerie similarities as well as differences between Ahmadinejad and Hitler, following the Wallace interview:
I found his answers to Wallace extremely cunning, crafty and dangerous. You can almost hear Hitler spouting out "grievances" of the Sudentland Germans and the Germans in
Danzig when you hear Ahmadinejad take up for the Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iraqis. Granted, Hitler controlled one of the most powerful and advanced societies in the world by the late-1930's, and Ahmadinejad's Iran is far lower on the scale as a threat to project force. However, Ahmadinejad is making a play in many ways to speak for the world's one billion "aggrieved" Muslims, where Hitler only professed to speak on behalf of a mere 100 million Germans.
I'd just like to add a few thoughts. Firstly, however large the German military was by the late 1930s, it must be said that WW II was still a conventional war. As we have seen in both
The Left on Terror: What, Me Worry?
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 11:35AM
When conservatives accuse anti-war liberals of being unserious about the War on Terror, liberals respond that they take the terrorist threat very seriously and want to be tough on terrorism, but that they just oppose the Iraq War because it is a distraction. Two recent postings on DailyKos, the online headquarters of the Netroots Left that has taken over the party with the victory of Ned Lamont, provide contrary evidence. The first posting pokes fun at the
The Bush administration doesn't go far enough for me…
Obviously, terrorists use airplanes. So please … just shut down the airlines already…
Congregating in tall buildings should be forbidden too…
It's high time to get rid of condos and apartments too…
While we're at it, confiscate phones, all of them. Landlines, cells … whatever. Shut down the internet…
People, don't you see? Don't you see how much safer we'll be if we simply stay at home, quit traveling, quit meeting in public, quit living together in large numbers, cut off all communications with the outside world?…
And another one:
Despite your best efforts, I'm not obsessed with terrorism. Sheesh, I barely even think about it. I face bigger statistical risks, in every way, every day, and on every scale, just driving across a set of railroad tracks and down the interstate smoking a cigarette in the rain, and I don't worry much about that either.
At one point you could dismiss these people as a fringe group, but now they are the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.
‘Nazi Kikes Out of Lebanon’
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 11:11AM
So reads one sign at the “Stop the U.S.-Israeli War” rally held in San Francisco over the weekend. That and plenty more similar images captured by Zombie (including photos of people waving Hezbollah and Hamas flags and dressing up as terrorists).
What’s most striking is that in the past, most anti-Israel protesters attempted to hide their anti-Semitism by framing it as merely being anti-Israel. But now, no such pretense exists.
Meanwhile, Little Green Footballs has similar images from DC and demonstrates how the mainstream media whitewashes the protests to only show images to make the rally seem family-friendly.
Same lesson as Mike Wallace’s interview with Iran’s Ahmadinejad: as long as you hate President Bush, you get a free pass for hating Jews as well.
Re: America, Land of the ‘So-Called’ Free
Posted by on 8.14.06 @ 12:05AM
Thanks, Philip, for the martyrdom operation of enduring that fawning and preposterous ritual which seems to have been Mike Wallace’s interview with the Devil’s version of Ringo Starr. One of the casualties of being without television is missing these segments for the ages. Iran is quite clearly a monster state in a way not even North Korea, in its fuddy-duddy condition of insularity, can accomplish. Pyongyang is but the mad laboratory in the world’s basement.
And people are kidding themselves if they think that any of this would be acceptable or even more acceptable with Saddam Hussein carrying on. I suppose the same wicked Americans who supported Iraq against Iran while they duked it out in the eighties are nothing at all like modern critics who would look so well on a Sunni-Shia nuclear arms race rather than what we have now? Events threaten to outpace a levelheaded digestion of our memories of them. I take a dip here on the Iranian impact upon a judgment of failure in Iraq. We all need a plunge of disciplined remembrance.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
The Outrage of the Week
Posted by on 8.13.06 @ 11:13PM
So, I’m hanging out with a lot of happy midwesterners at the Wilderness Resort in Wisconsin Dells. Enjoying my Paul Bunyan breakfasts and waterparks galore. Everything is just lovely until I page through the funnies and run into this gem from Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller:
“Everyone here is granted one wish? That’s so cool!”
“Well, not always. See that man over there? He was a strict constitution originalist on the Supreme Court and wished to see all the amendments removed.”
“Clarence, be a good slave and fetch me some coffee.”
“Yessir!”
“And who’s that guy who owns him?”
“That’s Antonin Scalia. He made the same wish.”
Now, let me tell you something. There’s ugly and there’s stupid. And there’s ugly and stupid. This comic by Wiley Miller hits on both cylinders.
First, a constitutional originalist has nothing against amendments to the constitution since they are provided for in the text itself. Second, the hatefulness of presenting Clarence Thomas as a self-destructive slave wannabe and Scalia as a hopeful slave owner is simply disgusting. I cannot imagine an attack of similar vehemence from a conservative writer passing without complete exile from polite company.
See you in the not-so-funny papers.
America: Land of the ‘So-Called’ Free
Posted by on 8.13.06 @ 9:26PM
I just got finished watching Mike Wallace’s interview with Iran’s Ahmadinejad on “60 Minutes,” and it was one of the most pathetic, most offensive, examples of American journalism I have ever seen. Wallace was so desperate to come out of retirement to interview the modern day Hitler that he was willing to become his propagandist.
He allowed Ahmadinejad to portray himself as a loving father of three who enjoys reading and exercise and supports human rights and an end to oppression. If only President Bush didn’t spend so much money on war, we could all live in peace.
At no point did Wallace challenge Ahmadinejad on the severe human rights abuses within Iran (for instance, the recent beating and arrest of hundreds of women’s right’s activists by Iranian police).
Wallace allowed Ahmadinejad to completely wiggle out of his Holocaust denial and his call for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” The gist being that even “if” Germany committed the Holocaust, then the Palestinians shouldn’t be punished because they had no role in the Holocaust. In his interview with Hannity, Wallace called this argument “interesting” and declared that Ahmadinejad wasn’t anti-Jewish, just anti-Israel.
At one point Wallace was trying to get Ahmadinejad to give more concise answers, but Ahmadinejad refused and playfully offered to end the interview. And Wallace said, “I couldn’t be happier for the privilege of sitting down with the president of Iran.” (That was according to my notes, I don’t have a transcript in front of me so the words may be slightly different, but the basic idea was the same.)
Perhaps one can expect a certain amount of sucking-up when a journalist is desperate to score a big interview, but Wallace crossed the line when he asked Ahmadinejad about President Bush and referred to him as the commander-in-chief of the “so-called ‘free’ world.” In this case Wallace explicitly became a propagandist for Iranian tyranny, by endorsing a morally relativistic universe in which maybe Iran is really the free world and America isn’t.
It doesn’t matter if you oppress your own people, threaten to annihilate a country with 5 million Jews in the context of seeking a nuclear weapon, or give fiery speeches to chants of “Death to America.” These days, as long as you have enough hate for America, Israel and President Bush, you can expect a free pass from the liberal media.
The Sissy Dimension
Posted by on 8.13.06 @ 9:04AM
Lieberman as Saddam, Daily Kossacks as Marines here. Is this the New New Left’s idea of strong on defense?
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