The American Spectator

Franken + 225

Posted by Nicole Russell on 1.3.09 @ 6:24PM

On Saturday, election officials counted 933 ballots that both the Franken and Coleman campaigns agreed were wrongly tossed out. With the recount complete, Franken leads with 225, according to the Strib. Some folks are saying he'll be able to declare victory as soon as Monday. Strib:

At least two things, however, still stand in the way of Franken becoming Minnesota's newest U.S. senator: the possibility of a ruling by the Minnesota Supreme Court that more wrongly rejected absentee ballots should be counted, and a legal contest that Coleman attorneys all but promised should Franken prevail.

Seems like both possibilities are at least likely, with the latter being a sure bet.

One of the comments under the Strib's story, by a mnhusker4:

We now know that Franken made up about 1,000 votes since election night. We also know that this is statistically impossible. Good thing that ACORN had Ritchie on their side...Minnesota's reputation will be flawed forever if the courts allow Franken to steal this election.

Call me a sore loser but I tend to agree with this concerned conservative.  Though, I should say, it ain't over until Franken's walking the streets of Washington with that goofy grin on his face. 

If he's won fair and square, I say, obviously, the people of Minnesota have spoken and should reap the rewards (or the havoc) of their elected Senator.

If he hasn't, that's another thing entirely. I haven't followed this as closely as some (waiting for Philip Klein's input here) nor have I followed up with some of the folks I know at Coleman's camp and frankly (no pun intended) don't quite understand some of the rifraf going on, but it looks a little fishy. And that's no euphemism.

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Chess and the Cold War

Posted by Doug Bandow on 1.3.09 @ 6:04PM

Since TAS can't cover every good book that's published, I want to encourage readers interested in the politics behind the game of chess--particularly during the Cold War--to pick up a copy of White King and Red Queen, published by Houghton Mifflin.  The author, Daniel Johnson, is a real journalist who covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, among other important events.  It's a fun book which details how the Evil Empire attempted to use chess to its own ends, and how two determined (and highly idiosyncratic) individuals, Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov, broke the Soviet chess machine.  I review it in the Washington Times and highly recommend it.

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Those Cuddly Democrats

Posted by Doug Bandow on 1.3.09 @ 9:21AM

The party of ethics and probity appears to be having a little trouble with Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.  He just can't seem to get his story straight.  Reports the New York Times:

On April 21, 2008, Representative Charles B. Rangel met with officials of the American International Group, the now-troubled insurance giant, to ask for a donation to a school of public service that City College of New York was building in his honor.

Mr. Rangel had already helped secure a $5 million pledge for the project from a foundation controlled by Maurice R. Greenberg, one of the company's largest shareholders and its former chief executive. And C.C.N.Y. officials, according to the school's own records, had high hopes for A.I.G. - a donation of perhaps as much as $10 million.

The company has never made a contribution. But less than a month after Mr. Rangel met with its officials, the company turned to the congressman for help: A senior A.I.G. executive who had attended the fund-raising meeting wrote a letter directly to Mr. Rangel, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, urging him to support a provision of a tax bill that would save A.I.G. millions of dollars a year, according to Joseph M. Norton, a company spokesman.

Mr. Rangel's exchange with A.I.G. last spring appears to be at odds with the public statements he has made since his fund-raising for the school became an issue. When his approach to A.I.G. was first reported in The Washington Post in July, Mr. Rangel said that he could not recall any issues his committee might have considered in which A.I.G. had an interest.

"I can't think of one piece of legislation that impacts them, and there has never been a time that they've raised any legislation to me," the paper quoted Mr. Rangel as saying. Indeed, in Mr. Rangel's formal submission to the House ethics committee, asking it to review his use of Congressional stationery in soliciting money for the school, he wrote, "So far as I am aware, none of those whom I wrote had any pending requests into my office, lobbied me regarding any legislation before my committee, or asked me for assistance on legislation in which they had a special interest."

He's a problem for the House Democratic caucus.  But the biggest controversy remains on the Senate side.  Now the Illinois legislature is attempting to speed up the impeachment of Gov. Rod Blagojevich.  But getting rid of him cannot retrospectively void his appointment of Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's old Senate seat.  So will the Senate leadership really use armed guards to bar Burris from entering the chamber?  Not all Democrats are enthused about this approach.  And it appears that Sen. Harry Reid might not be acting out of the purest of motives.  Reports the Times:

Some highly placed Democrats have begun to question privately why Mr. Burris is being denied the seat if there are no problems with him personally. They said Democrats could dispose of the issue - and gain a reliable Democratic vote in the process - by acceding to the appointment if it met all legal requirements.

But the Senate's leadership remains united in barring Mr. Burris, and hopes to delay settling the matter until the Illinois legislature can impeach the governor and allow a new appointment to be made.

Mr. Blagojevich seemed on Friday to try to raise questions about the motives of Senate leaders' efforts to block Mr. Burris, disclosing for the first time that Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, had - before Mr. Blagojevich's arrest on Dec. 9 - called the governor to talk about whom he was considering appointing to fill Mr. Obama's seat.

Lucio Guerrero, a spokesman for Mr. Blagojevich, said that Mr. Reid called on Dec. 3 to discuss possible appointees, and expressed concerns that some being considered might not be able to win re-election when Mr. Obama's Senate term ended in two years. Mr. Burris was never mentioned in the conversation, Mr. Guerrero said.

"I think the governor thinks that it shows that Harry Reid may have a horse in this race, and it's not Roland Burris," Mr. Guerrero said.

The fun continues!

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Whither Marriage?

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain on 1.2.09 @ 10:43PM

We are barely five years past Lawrence v. Texas, but Conor Friedersdorf apparently can think of no legitimate argument against gay marriage and certainly will cede nothing to Mona Charen.

Is there anyone under 30 who opposes gay marriage? Is the passage of five years sufficient to deprive Justice Scalia's dissent of intellectual respectability?

I'm still thinking about Roy Moore's ruling in Ex Parte H.H.

UPDATE: In a follow-up, Friedersdorf says, "my support for gay marriage is so inextricably tied to my conservatism." And the only wonder is that Willmoore Kendall, Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver didn't beat him to it.

If it is still permissible to disagree that conservatism "inextricably" requires what Friedersdorf says it does, how did we get here? The answer can be boiled down to one word, equality.

Are men and women equal in the fullest sense of the word? If so, then equality implies fungibility -- the two things are interchangeable and one may be substituted for the other in any circumstance whatsoever. (La mort à la différence!) Therefore, it is of no consequence whether I marry a woman or a man.

The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is to‑day the audacious reform, and will be tomorrow the accomplished fact.

This is why so many of those who would defend traditional marriage find themselves unable to form a coherent argument, because traditional marriage is based on the assumption that men and women are fundamentally different, and hence, unequal. Traditional marriage assumes a complementarity of the sexes that becomes absurd if you deny that "man" and "woman" define intrinsic traits, functions, roles.

To declare men and women unequal, however, puts one outside the law -- you are guilty of illegal discrimination if you say that there is any meaningful difference between men and women. Yet if you refuse to argue against sexual equality, you cannot argue effectively against gay marriage, and find yourself subjected to lectures about "accessing the positive social norms" with nothing important to say in reply.

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Re: Moving Forward

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain on 1.2.09 @ 8:19PM

J.P., while you were pondering Buckley, coincidentally so was I -- reading his final book, The Reagan I Knew.

It occurs to me that Buckley enjoyed the great advantage of beginning a movement ex nihilo. Yes, there were others at mid-century discontented with liberal hegemony at home and Soviet aggression abroad. But conservatism in the 1950s had very little in the way of an institutional base -- the think tanks and advocacy groups and policy journals and so forth. Buckley burst upon the scene in 1951, four years later launched National Review and from that point forward held an unrivaled preeminence in the public mind as a conservative intellectual.

Now I am sure that, had you asked the embattled Buckley in 1955 if he thought his isolated position to be an advantage, he would have rather had the help of many more allied forces than he then had. Yet at least he did not have to deal with the problem of we now have of a conservative Babel, where one can find people calling themselves "conservative" who advocate anything and everything, including many things quite the opposite of conservatism.

Al Regnery has pointed out how the success of conservatism has attracted hordes of opportunists, so that people who dream of Cabinet posts and congressional seats have an incentive to attach themselves to the banner, motivated mkore by personal ambition than by philosophical agreement. And as Mr. Regnery says, there were few opportunists in 1951 because there were few opportunities. We've seen a few rats (e.g., Ken Adelman) jumping off what they perceive to be a sinking ship, and one good reason to permit pessimism about a conservative revival -- WE'RE DOOMED BEYOND ALL HOPE! -- is to encourage more rats to jump ship.

Sanchez makes many good points, but to describe support for Sarah Palin as a "death spiral" strategy is to completely misunderstand the causes of Republican woe. Sanchez has a very good point here:

Washington is absolutely crawling with snake-oil salesmen who've discovered that you can make a tidy living extracting cash from credulous politicos who didn't learn anything from the last dot-com bubble, provided you're able to sling Web 2.0 jargon passably.

This is true, and as John Hawkins pointed out, the current wave of Republican technophilia is based on a profound misinterpretation of the Obama phenomenon. The high-tech stuff didn't drive the enthusiasm, the enthusiasm drove the high-tech stuff. And, uh, who has a growing online army of more than 60,000 enthusiastic supporters? The same person who is odds-on favorite for the nomination in 2012? It seems to me that a fairly obvious plan of action is at hand, if only the damned snobs would stop whining about it.

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Moving Forward Involves Moving Forward

Posted by J. Peter Freire on 1.2.09 @ 5:03PM

Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica:

What seems to be playing out on the right of late, by contrast, is a frenzy of mutual demonization. Pace some of my progressive friends, I don't think the recent flurry of activity in the fever swamps reveals any deep, eternal truths about conservatism per se; it's just what's filled the gap created by the paucity of useful leadership from conservative intellectuals. What's needed right now is less tactical refinement, and more conversation about the agenda tactics are supposed to serve.

That's a wonderful little bit of kicking the can down the road there, a common statement of intent from the journalistically inclined right. See, we need a discussion about "What We Believe." Forget for a moment how we define who "we" are. Or how "we" get into the conversation. "We" need to arrive at some kind of consensus, and these messianic intellectual leaders, whoever they are, will facilitate the process.

That's a problem. For one thing, I don't know who Julian is referencing when referring to these people, and I kinda doubt he does either. It would help if we could define intellectual leadership. All I know is that in the wake of William F. Buckley's death, there were all kinds of tributes as to how nice and smart a guy he was, but then people went back to doing the things that didn't quite follow the Buckley Model of Doing Good Works. What follows is not a criticism of what Julian Sanchez posted. My criticism for what he has written is only, "Clear that up for your readers."

I realize that people the world over love to reference how great Bill Buckley was, and all these cool things he did, but I'd like to stress that, particularly in Washington, it's all talk. Buckley is credited with assembling an ideological AND political coalition at once. This is a difficult thing to do, and his success should be a model for others. This means more analysis ought to be applied as to how he consolidated the respect of his peers, and how he enabled others to succeed.

Too often I'm overhearing conversations, however, where someone as "the next Buckley" is being contemplated. Right now, all you have to do to deserve a comparison to the patron saint of conservatism is to try to cast out some part of the right wing fever swamp or say that your own views are the ones that would make political victory possible. If your response to this is that "We all know Buckley was more than that," I'd like to remind you that it's not enough to assert that the man could write and think or sail a boat. It's not enough to say, "He had style." That doesn't nearly address the fact that he was, himself, an organizer of men, and did so with class, and further, did so with political goals in mind.

So what are the things we should expect of "intellectual leaders"? Hm. Well, let's compile a list of things gleaned from the various books written by or about him:

• Don't cloister yourself from political activity and party causes. Political involvement provides insights into the process you're attempting to influence. How on earth would you expect to change it otherwise?
• Mentoring younger people who, in all likelihood, may never have the chance repay your kindness. Interns can't impress you if you're not patient.
• Maintain intellectually purity, but  become socially promiscuous; If all your friends are people inclined to agree with you, you're probably having boring, self-referencing, or maybe just ironic conversations. Also, nothing creates a healthy debate like a healthy relationship between opponents.
• Bite your tongue: The temptation to become outraged over an issue can be strong, and blogging or email are a wonderfully passive aggressive weapons. Picking up the phone is a great olive branch and route to understanding.
• Please at least be somewhat aware of when you're practicing the Dougherty Doctrine.

If these are the qualities necessary to be an "intellectual leader," then I'm all for it. All of these things trump the technological changes necessary to step forward. They are, after all, the human parts of a campaign to actually achieve something. You can snipe back and forth using blogs and social media all you like, but it takes more to move the ideas you agree with into the leadership of a movement.

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New Jersey Mad at the Methodists

Posted by W. James Antle, III on 1.2.09 @ 3:11PM

The New Jersey attorney general's civil rights division is going after United Methodists for allowing one of their facilities in the state to be used by the general public for weddings but not same-sex civil union ceremonies, in accordance with church discipline. The United Methodist Church isn't some fringe fundamentalist sect, but the largest mainline Protestant denomination in the country.

When I wrote a while back that the Rick Warren flap revealed that some supporters of same-sex marriage seek to "completely marginalize opposition to same-sex marriage and treat traditional Christian beliefs about human sexuality as morally equivalent to racism or anti-Semitism," some commenters protested that the same could be said for opponents of same-sex marriage. One, attempting to rephrase my initial post, suggested that social conservatives "treat traditional libertarian/liberal beliefs about human sexuality," whatever those are, "as morally equivalent to nazis or fascists."

I'm sure you can find plenty of intemperate statements along these lines by individual social conservatives opposing same-sex marriage. But I don't know of any who wish to use civil rights or hate crimes laws to in effect criminalize the beliefs of the other side. When anti-sodomy laws (which I strongly opposed) fell earlier in the decade, there was no significant socially conservative campaign to reinstate them comparable to the campaign to reinstate the antiabortion laws that existed prior to Roe v. Wade. Yet churches that continue to adhere to their traditional teachings are subject to legal harrassment unless they want to become the legal equivalent of a small private club or cigar bar.

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Washington and NATO

Posted by W. James Antle, III on 1.2.09 @ 3:00PM

He might have liked it okay during the Cold War but started asking questions about it after the Soviet Union fell: "Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies." But see what I mean about conservatives not being in agreement based on the Constitution and various utterances of the Founding Fathers?

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'Foreign Entanglements'

Posted by Christopher Orlet on 1.2.09 @ 2:19PM

Quoting Denis Consgrove:

George Washington's farewell address is often inaccurately cited for its famous admonishment: "beware of foreign entanglements." That Mr. Washington did truly not utter those words is not important...

Washington was warning about negotiating noncommercial treaties with European nations. NATO would have been an abomination to him.

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What's the Constitution Got to do with Foreign Intervention?

Posted by Doug Bandow on 1.2.09 @ 12:52PM

I see that Esteemed Editor Antle (it's important for writers to shamelessly suck up to editors) has highlighted the Peter Berkowitz piece on conservatives rallying around the Constitution.  It's an interesting argument, but another problem with Berkowitz's thesis is including a hawkish military policy as part of the constitutional scheme.  The original founders desired a national government strong enough to defend America, not to remake the world.  The idea that we should be protecting prosperous and populous allies throughout Asia and Europe and engaging in nation-building throughout the Third World runs counter to both the original constitutional design and sensible national security policy.  Europe, Japan, and South Korea are all able to defend themselves from whatever threats lurk about them.  For instance, South Korea has a GDP about 40 times that of North Korea.  These so-called allies are the ultimate international freeloaders and welfare queens, living off of American taxpayers.  Conservatives should echo George Washington and say no more unnecessary foreign entanglements.  Let's be strong enough to smite our enemies, but let other countries take care of their own enemies.

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What Bias Looks Like

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain on 1.2.09 @ 12:31PM

Connoisseurs of liberal media bias will cherish the first-class specimen provided today by Carol Leonnig in The Washington Post. One of the basic habits of liberal journalists is to apply ideological labels to Republicans while omitting such labels for Democrats, and Leonnig describes critics of the Obama transition team as ""staunch conservatives" in her first paragraph, then later describes these critics as belonging to the "ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party."

Meanwhile, similar appelations for liberals appear only when framed as accusations from the aforesaid ultra-conservatives. Ergo, to the Washington Post reporter, it is self-evident that Roger Clegg is an ideological extremist, whereas only such extremists would complain of "an ultra-left takeover by Obama advisers and nominees."

Leonnig masterfully demonstrates the Post's classic passive-aggressive method of leading the story with a dependent clause which serves to tell the reader what to think about the story that follows:

To some staunch conservatives watching President Bush relinquish the reins of power to President-elect Barack Obama, a few too many ardent liberals are now crashing the gates.

See how this works? With the dependent clause, Leonnig informs her readers at the outset that criticism of Roberta Achtenberg or Bill Lann Lee is considered legitimate only by right-wing troglodytes. You have to burrow your way past all that in order to find the actual news hidden by Leonnig's technique, namely that, contrary to the expectations raised by Obama's mantra of "Change," the incoming administration is staffing up with Clinton administration cronies, including controversial figures like Achtenberg and Lee.

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Conservatives as the Party of the Constitution

Posted by W. James Antle, III on 1.2.09 @ 12:29PM

Peter Berkowitz argues in the Wall Street Journal that conservatives of varying stripes can unite around the U.S. Constitution. I agree that conservatives should be united around the Constitution and I look forward to the longer version of Berkowitz's article that will appear in Policy Review, but I'm afraid this op-ed piece does more to show that conservatives are not in fact united in support of a constitutionalist platform. Aside from the president's judicial appointments, the Bush years will not exactly go down in history as the high water mark of constitutionalism in American politics.

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Where is Global Warming When We Need It?

Posted by Doug Bandow on 1.2.09 @ 11:09AM

I know  global warming a serious topic.  If Al Gore is right, we will burn to a crisp, life as we know it will end, and even the UN won't be able to save us.  Alas, it's hard for laymen to figure out all of the details.  Still, shouldn't global warming mean, well, the planet is warming?  But it hasn't over the last decade.  If the alarmists can't get today's temperature right, I keep wondering why we chould believe them when they purport to predict the temperature a century from now.  "Some day we'll get it right" seems to be the mantra of the alarmist lobby.

At least I'm not the only person with questions.  Christopher Booker has a wonderful year-ending column in The Daily Telegraph.  He wryly observes:

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".

Well, I guess that's why the operative phrase now is "climate change."  That way the social engineers can justify destroying the economy whatever happens to the temperature.  If temperatures rise, it shows the earth is warming.  If temperatures fall, it shows that global warming is causing the climate to change, presumably even if that means a new Ice Age.  In principle, there is no difference between droughts, floods, and blizzards--all justify turning control over to Al & Co.

Ain't the politics of science wonderful?

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New Poll Shows Netanyahu Still Ahead in Israel

Posted by Philip Klein on 1.2.09 @ 10:44AM

With Israeli elections set for next month, a new Jerusalem Post poll finds that all totaled, right-wing parties have a strong eight-seat advantage over left parties, suggesting that if the election were held today Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu would return to power as Israel's next prime minister. Most polls have shown that the Gaza operation has benefited Labor (led by Defense Minister Ehud Barak) but has either not helped or hurt the prospects for Kadima, led by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

As for this one:

The survey found that the Likud had risen from 27 seats to 29, Labor had gone up from 14 to 15, and Kadima had fallen from 27 to 23 since the previous Post poll was published on October 31. Likud and Kadima, which were tied then, are now six seats apart, and the Right bloc's advantage over the Left remains a hefty eight mandates, 64 to 56.

The Knesset has 120 members, meaning that the party that wins the most seats needs to put together a coalition with other parties totalling 61 seats to form a government.

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Friday Must Reads

Posted by Joseph Lawler on 1.2.09 @ 10:36AM

• A few must-reads from David Brooks (NY Times)

• Not the children!, taxes edition (Bloomberg)

• Franken's no. 1 casualty: Kay Bailey Hutchinson's political ambitions (The Economist)

• Are must-reads ethical? Should they be legal? (Guardian)

• The wave of the future: digging up hot rocks (Christiain Science Monitor)

• The best corrections of the year. Via Sean Higgins (Regret the Error)

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Obama's Selective Silence

Posted by Philip Klein on 1.2.09 @ 10:32AM

Barack Obama's transition team has hidden behind the "there's only one president at a time" line when it comes to making a statement on the situation in Gaza, but has no problem pushing for an economic stimulus package. "I think it is more difficult for him to engage very much on foreign policy" before the inauguration, Democratic strategist, Steve McMahon, argued on CBS. "It's very important for our country to speak with only one voice. He's respecting that tradition." Then how about he speak with one voice and say that the Bush administration is correct to blame Hamas rocket fire for the situation and that he supports Israel's right to defend itself?

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Protecting Civilians

Posted by Philip Klein on 1.2.09 @ 9:47AM

In an article on another Israeli bombing of more homes of Hamas terrorist leaders, the Jerusalem Post notes:

Palestinians and Israeli defense officials said that prior to the air strikes, the IDF either warned nearby residents by phone or fired a warning missile to reduce civilian casualties. IAF aircraft also dropped leaflets east of Gaza giving a confidential phone number and e-mail address for people to report locations of rocket squads. Residents appeared to ignore the leaflets, stepping over them as they passed by.

How many countries would fight a war against a bitter enemy that is targeting its civilians and go to such lengths to prevent civilian deaths?

Israel is in a difficult position -- as a civilized society always is when fighting a terrorist group. Hamas purposely launches and stores its rockets and hides its leaders in areas where they are surrounded by civilians so as to give pause to Israelis who they know would not indiscriminately carpet bomb Gaza. If Hamas were that concerned with the death of Palestinian civilians, they could make efforts to evacuate civilians to safe areas and separate  themselves from the civilian populations. They could also stop firing rockets into Israel, which only prolongs the bombardment of Gaza. But they won't, and that's why the blood of any Palestinian civilians is on their hands.

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Farewell, Jack Reacher. Farewell, Lee Child.

Posted by Hunter Baker on 1.2.09 @ 12:04AM

My father-in-law and I bonded years ago when he introduced me to the genre of action thrillers.  It began when he loaned me a box full of the first 60 or so Remo Williams novels.  I still remember that chapter two of each book began with "His name was Remo and . . ."

Our latest action hero has been Jack Reacher, the creation of British television writer Lee Child.  Reacher (always Reacher in the series, never Jack) is an imaginative hero.  He spent the first thirty-five years or so of his life on military bases.  First, as a child of a soldier and then as a top military policeman.  The hook is that Reacher, as a military policeman, is something like a super-cop.  His targets were trained men, often devious, tough fighters without a moral code. 

As he aged, he tired of his regimented life, quit the army, and became a wanderer.  Reacher doesn't even have a suitcase.  He wears a set of clothes until it wears out, buys good quality English walking shoes, and carries an ATM card and a folding toothbrush.  He is something of a cross between Dr. Richard Kimble (The Fugitive) and The Incredible Hulk.  Big, tough, strong, and very street smart.  He moves from place to place and gets involved in situations usually requiring his violent intervention.

All in all, it has been a highly enjoyable series.  The kind of candy I yearned for while working on my dissertation.  Upon finishing, I gorged on the likes of Reacher.

The latest, Nothing to Lose, lost me as a customer.  Lee Child, the author, seems to have REALLY enjoyed the recent works of village atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.  He seems to have enjoyed them so much that he had to come up with a highly improbable plot just to demonstrate how stupid he thinks Christians are.  Oh, and along the way he manages to claim that nothing the American military has done since 1945 has been worth the price of men's lives. 

But Child's little crusade against conservative protestants and American military efforts of the past sixty years wouldn't have been enough to send me packing if the book weren't so bad.  The villain catches Reacher multiple times and somewhat inexplicably lets him go.  The bad guy has a compound.  Reacher spends the entire novel working his way in and out of the compound as he goes between two towns, Hope and Despair.  On the one hand, the villain has put together an incredibly devious and ingenious plan to help bring about the apocalypse.  On the other, Child (through Reacher) assures us that the villain is a weak-minded man who is accustomed to believing things that comfort him.  It is profoundly boring, which is something I have never been remotely close to saying about any of the other books.  It was literally an act of will for me to continue reading Nothing to Lose.  I was determined to finish because I knew it would likely be the last run for Reacher and me.

Now, having finished, I'm sure of it.  It was.

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topics: Books

The Illinois Saga Just Keeps Getting Better

Posted by Doug Bandow on 1.1.09 @ 9:18AM

When Roland Burris, the Senator-designate for Illinois, shows up in Washington to be sworn in, he is likely to be met by armed guards at the Senate door.  What a great symbol of Democratic Party inclusiveness!

Reports the Los Angeles Times:

Should Roland Burris show up for duty in the Senate on Tuesday, armed police officers stand ready to bar him from the floor.

This cinematic showdown is among an elaborate set of contingencies that Democratic leaders are planning if, as expected, the former Illinois attorney general appointed by Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich shows up with newly elected senators to press his claim that he is the legitimate replacement for President-elect Barack Obama.

Democratic leaders hope to avert such a standoff. And Burris, in an interview Wednesday, said he hoped to claim the Senate seat without added drama.

"We're not going to create a scene in Washington," Burris said. "We hope it's negotiated out prior to my going to Washington."

Still, the Senate leaders' planning, detailed by a Democratic official briefed on their deliberations, even covers scenarios such as Blagojevich appearing in person to escort Burris.

Ironically, as a sitting governor, the scandal-plagued Blagojevich is allowed floor privileges. But Lucio Guerrero, Blagojevich's spokesman, said the governor had not decided whether to go to Washington with Burris.

With Democratic leaders vowing to bar anyone appointed by Blagojevich because of federal charges that he attempted to sell Obama's seat, leaders hope to stall Burris with paperwork. Senate rules require that an incoming senator's selection be certified by the secretary of state for his home state, and Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White has declined to sign a certification of Burris' appointment.

...

But Senate Democrats also have a follow-up plan: refusing to seat Burris until the Senate Rules Committee completes an investigation into whether the appointment process was tainted by corruption.

The plan is for the Senate investigation to extend longer than the Illinois Legislature's impeachment process underway against Blagojevich, leaving open the possibility that a new governor will make a rival Senate appointment that the Democratic leaders could seat.

Ah, schadenfreude!  It's such a great word.  You've got to wonder why we've never come up with a comparable word in English.

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Another Awful Bush Precedent for President Obama

Posted by Doug Bandow on 12.31.08 @ 6:18PM

It has become commonplace for presidents to ignore the Constitution and the law.  Unfortunately, supposedly conservative presidents don't behave much differently.

Terence Jeffrey reviews President George W. Bush's bail-out of the auto industry.  His action violates the bail-out bill approved by Congress, which limited funds for financial institutions.  Explains Jeffrey:

President Bush, of course, failed to get Congress to enact legislation to provide money to auto companies.

That brings us back to the Constitution. Article 1, Section 9 reads, "No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law."

In his commentaries on the Constitution, Justice Joseph Story explained why the Framers gave Congress this power. "If it were otherwise," he said, "the executive would possess an unbounded power over the public purse of the nation; and might apply all its monied resources at his pleasure."

President Bush may think his auto bailout spared his legacy a bad mark. In fact, it leaves America to be haunted by the precedent of an executive who unilaterally spends the people's money without the legal authority required by our Constitution.

Unfortunately, when President Barack Obama follows suit on one issue or another, there won't be much for Republicans to say.  And conservatives will need to expunge the ghost of George W. Bush to reclaim any credibility on fiscal issues or the rule of law.

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The Quotable Professor

Posted by Nicole Russell on 12.31.08 @ 5:28PM

"We can't change our country by trying to change the people in charge."

Dr. Walter E. Williams substitute hosting Rush Limbaugh's program today.

If you didn't catch him, be sure to take a listen on Rush's site.

My condolences to Professor Williams as well, for the passing of his wife December 29 of last year. He did not announce it then nor has he spoken about it publicly much (if, at all).  He only mentioned it when a woman called in asking about "Mrs. Williams" as he commonly would refer to her. They had been married 48 years I believe. Together for 50.

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Blackwell Against the Bailouts

Posted by W. James Antle, III on 12.31.08 @ 4:32PM

Ken Blackwell has weighed in with a strong denunciation of the Wall Street and Big Three bailouts. The piece is especially critical of President Bush.

This column by the man who would chair the Republican National Committee may be part of the efforts of some RNC members, noted by Doug yesterday, to position the GOP against Bailout Nation. (For a contrary view, see John's post.) It's also part of Blackwell's tendency, discussed in my column on the main site earlier this week, to be a good conservative first and a good Republican soldier second.

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A Sense of Proportion

Posted by W. James Antle, III on 12.31.08 @ 3:42PM

There's been a lot of criticism of Israel for its "disproportionate" response to Hamas' rocket-launching provocations. Bob comments on the controversy in his latest column. Contrary to what you hear from Israel's critics, the just-war standard for proportionality never required exact parity in body count. By that standard, the authorities are behaving unjustly if they kill two members of a criminal gang they were pursuing because it attacked, raped, and murdered one woman. The standard rightly applied compares the harm inflicted with the harm the military action seeks to avoid.

That doesn't mean that it is impossible in theory for the Israeli response to be disproportionate. If, for example, the Israeli military launched an attack that killed Palestinian civilians in response to a Palestinian infraction that poses no threat to Israeli civilians, that would be disproportionate. But you don't simply tally the body counts on each side to determine who is being disproportionate and who is the aggressor. There's a good discussion of this here, though many of the comments are disproportionate.

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A Political Solution

Posted by Philip Klein on 12.31.08 @ 11:38AM

J-Street (a liberal anti-Israel lobbying group that presents itself as a response to AIPAC), writes the following:

Respecting Israel's right to defend itself, we urge leaders there to recognize that there is no military solution to what is fundamentally a political conflict between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.

Unfortunately, this is a lot more easily said than done. Israel has been in negotiations with Fatah seeking a political compromise, but there's no deal that they can strike that would stop rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. Last month, when I spoke to Maen Areikat, the deputy head of the negotiations department for the Palestinian Authority, he said: "We cannot control the firing of these rockets from Gaza." And he also conceded that Hamas would never abandon its desire to wipe Israel off of the map. Therefore, Israel has no political options to stop the rocket fire. Furthermore, what political solution can there be between Israel and the Palestinians, if there isn't even political unity among the Palestinians?

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Good Riddance to 2008

Posted by Philip Klein on 12.31.08 @ 10:29AM

I'll be happy to say goodbye to 2008, the year of Barack Obama and bailout mainia, the near-filibuster proof Democratic Senate (quite possibly with Al Franken as a member), the collapse of financial markets and the U.S. economy and the return of New Deal era policy-making. Anybody have any other examples of the general suckiness of the year? Or a more positive point of view?

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Daily Must-Reads

Posted by Joseph Lawler on 12.31.08 @ 10:20AM

• Months before being tapped for Obama's team, Larry Summers details economic agenda (Harvard Magazine)

• The unions still have something to lose, so let automakers build profitable cars (WSJ)

• New York Times year's end quiz (NY Times)

• An economic crisis does not excuse economic experimentation (Washington Post)

• The most feminine of chord progressions (Boston Globe)

• Cardinal Dulles's legacy includes a vigorous defense of the death penalty (Weekly Standard)

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Re: Blago Spoils the Obama Honeymoon

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain on 12.30.08 @ 10:19PM

Doug, that was basically my point two weeks ago in describing Blagojevich as "Obama's Bert Lance." That whiff of old Chicago politics, tainting Obama's too-perfect image, pushing a wedge between Obama and his natural base, the elite media -- it very much recalls how the Lance scandal brought an early end to Jimmy Carter's honeymoon.

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Bush and Babel

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain on 12.30.08 @ 10:12PM

"It's kind of like the Tower of Babel. At a certain point in time, God smites hubris. You knew that right around the time people started saying there's going to be a permanent Republican majority-that God kinda goes, No, I really don't think so."
-- David Kuo, quoted in Vanity Fair

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Blago Spoils the Obama Honeymoon

Posted by Doug Bandow on 12.30.08 @ 9:11PM

So Blago makes a Senate appointment--of Roland Burris, the first African-American to be elected statewide in Illinois, at a moment when no other blacks sit in the Senate.  And the Dems say they won't seat Burris.  Won't this be fun!

My friend Robert A. George of the New York Post (and former Gingrich aide) peers into the future:

Obama supports Harry Reid and the US Senate's assertion that they will refuse to seat any Blagojevich-appointed senator. But, the issue of whether the Senate can block this appointment could end up in the Supreme Court. In a previous decision involving, yes, a black member of the House, New York Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the court determined that the chamber could only assess the objective "qualifications" of a member -- age, citizenship, residency, etc -- in deciding whether to seat him. Reid claims that the Senate is a different chamber, not bound by that precedent. We shall see. Regardless, anyone want to guess what Bobby Rush might be doing while the high-court of the land is deciding whether a black man should be allowed to sit in the Senate?

Such a scenario would be a nightmare for Obama, whose entire campaign -- and political life story -- is about bridging America's racial divide. Instead, the immediate fallout of his successful run for the presidency has been a farcical RNC campaign over Obama's cultural identity as the "magic negro" and now a potentially far more ominous racial conflagration over his former Senate seat.

Ain't politics wonderful!?

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Blago's Senate Appointment

Posted by W. James Antle, III on 12.30.08 @ 3:40PM

Was there anybody who didn't think Blago would do something like this if given the time? Now he's put the Senate Democrats in the position of refusing to seat an African-American to fill a vacancy left by the only African-American in the Senate. Of course, the Democratic leadership is right not to seat anyone appointed by Blago, because the appointment is tainted. But the Illinois governor does know how to create drama.

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Congratulations, John Tabin

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain on 12.30.08 @ 2:58PM

Your Feb. 3 blog post has been recognized by the Village Voice:

Pop stars made a video for Obama and the American Spectator compared it to Triumph of the Will.

Of course, the enlightened sophisticates at the Voice used an obsolete URL for the link, but it's the thought that counts.

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Ailing Medicine

Posted by Joseph Lawler on 12.30.08 @ 2:31PM

Michael F. Cannon objects to my applying the label "market-based" to Lousiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's Medicaid reform in a recent article. He notes,

Jindal’s plan is not market-based reform. As a general matter, market-based charity care is just that: private charity. So the only market-based Medicaid reforms are those that remove people from the Medicaid rolls — e.g., federal block grants, eligibility restrictions, etc.

Jindal wants to expand eligiblity. For a welfare program. And we call that market-based?

Jindal may be able to improve the quality of care through greater coordination. Which looks good on paper. But if the quality of care in Medicaid improves, more people will enroll. Only 2/3 of those eligible actually sign up for the program. (Many of the 1/3 who don’t enroll actually have private coverage.) So improving Medicaid benefits could cause enrollment to increase 50 percent. And that’s before Jindal expands the eligibility rules.

With all the additional cost pressure, what’s going to happen to Medicaid payments and enrollees’ access to docs? (There are reasons why Medicaid pays so little.)

First of all, I never called the plan "market-based." I did say it was "more market-based," which is certainly true.

Also, I feel like Cannon is missing some of the specifics here. "Greater coordination" in this case really means consumer choice, which is more like a market than the fee-for-service model currently in place. But that's only one aspect of the plan. I noted in the article that Alan Levine, the DHH secretary, wants to take two public hospitals off of the state's rolls and make one a private nonprofit hospital.

Cannon is right to be wary of expanding eligibility and crowding out private insurance. However, Jindal doesn't intend to increase the cost of the program to the state, but rather to use the savings to increase eligibility. As for crowding out private insurance, the plan includes a regulation that prohibits anyone from joining Medicaid if they've left private insurance in the past year. Furthermore, plan is aimed to increase coverage among children and caretakers under 50% of the Federal Poverty Level and to give matching contributions on a sliding scale to people with some contributions from employers, in one small area of the state. Neither of these groups is likely to have a whole lot of private insurance to crowd out.

The larger issue that Cannon is missing, though, is captured by this quote of Levine's:

...every year we don't do anything about the uninsured, we end up, by default, moving closer to a single-payer system....Because every year, more people get enrolled in Medicare, more people get enrolled in Medicaid, and more people get enrolled in SCHIP... that by itself is having a death spiral effect on private insurance.

That doesn't sound like somone terribly interested in expanding welfare programs.

In an article in the summer issue of the Spectator, Philip Klein urged conservatives to "learn to care about health care" and included this warning:

Even though Obama has not endorsed [a single-payer health care plan], he ended up with a plan that, if implemented, would expand the role of government in health care while decimating the private insurance industry. So while it would be inaccurate for conservatives to charge that Obama's plan would represent "socialized medicine" in the immediate term, there's no doubt that it would put America on the pathway to socialized medicine.

Like Cannon, I would like to see a real market for health care. But every year our health care system becomes incrementally more socialized. Barack Obama wants single-payer, but he is realistic enough to know it won't happen all at once, and so he is making the necessary changes to pave the way. Jindal is taking the steps to forestall that process and eventually reverse it. That seems like a good-faith free market reform to me.

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The Enemy of My Enemy

Posted by John Tabin on 12.30.08 @ 12:41PM

Jeffrey Goldberg hears from a Fatah friend who's rooting for the Israeli Air Force:

It's a strange world, but there you have it. I've been talking to friends of mine, former Palestinian Authority intelligence officials (ejected from power by the Hamas coup), and they tell me that not only are they rooting for the Israelis to decimate Hamas, but that Fatah has actually been assisting the Israelis with targeting information. One of my friends -- if you want to know why they're my friends, read this book -- told me that one of his comrades was thrown off a high-rise building in Gaza City last year by Hamas, and so he sheds no tears for the Hamas dead. "Let the Israelis kill them," he said. "They've brought only rouble for my people."

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The Hamas "Distraction"

Posted by Philip Klein on 12.30.08 @ 11:54AM

Over at TPM, Josh Marshall writes on Israeli settlements in the West Bank:

Whatever you can say about Palestinian terror attacks or missiles into Southern Israel and whatever you can say Israeli incursions and aerial attacks, the situation is insoluble without dismantling those settlements. And that is why Hamas, as much as it thrives on war and confrontation, is a distraction -- for some an intentional one, for others unintentional -- from this core point.

Hamas may simply be a "distraction" for Marshall, typing on his keyboard in a secure location. But I can assure you that it's more than a distraction to the Israelis who have seen their children and families blown to pieces by Hamas suicide bombers. And its more than a distraction to the citizens of southern Israeli towns, who have to leave under the fear of constant rocket attacks, with a siren giving them just 15 seconds to seek cover -- meaning people are worried about taking showers lest they be caught off guard, mothers are afraid to wear seat belts thus losing a few seconds in which they could be securing their children, and people endure restless nights.

The West Bank settlements that Marshall sees at the "core" of the issue did not exist when the Palestinian leader the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem stayed as Hitler's guest during World War II and advocated exterminating Jews in the Middle East, nor did they exist during the four major Arab-Israeli wars between 1948 and 1973, nor did they exist during the Munich Massacre at the 1972 Olympic Games carried out by the Palestinians against Israeli athletes. When Israel had settlements in Gaza, that was cited as a reason for Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians. Yet, after Israel forcefully evacuated thousands of its own citizens from Gaza settlements and destroyed them, it did not alter Hamas's behavior at all. In fact, things only got worse. Hamas used the increased autonomy to build a network of hunderds of tunnels allowing them to smuggle guns and explosives in from Egypt, they fired rockets into southern Israel, they incited a factional civil war among Palestinians and drove rival Fatah out of Gaza by gunpoint. No, the core issue is not settlements. The core issue is that there's a significant number of Palestinians/Arabs that cannot accept any Jewish presence in the region.

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Re: The RNC Steps Up

Posted by John Tabin on 12.30.08 @ 11:09AM

As sympathetic as I am to the anti-bailout angst, I gotta wonder whether the insurgent RNC members aren't opening a big can of worms. From the Washington Times article:

Nonetheless, not all RNC members -- including some of Mr. Bopp's fellow conservatives -- are pleased with the idea of having it make policy instead of simply minding the campaign fundraising store.

Fellow RNC member Ron Nehring, chairman of the California GOP, expressed more reservations.

"We have to be careful not to confuse passing resolutions for action, or creating a situation where people interpret the lack of some resolution as an excuse for inaction on an important issue," he said.

Nehring makes a good point, and I'd add that turning the RNC into a vehicle for routine policy debate would completely change internal RNC politics; suddenly ideology would matter as much as organizational competence. I'm not sure that would make the party more effective.

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The Next Surprise Meltdown

12.30.08 @ 10:56AM

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Daily Must-Reads

Posted by Joseph Lawler on 12.30.08 @ 9:43AM

• A look at Obama's SEC pick cause for hope (Washington Times)

• All New Jersey has to offer is an example of what not to do (WSJ)

• Our traditions in political speech are worth more than we know (Washington Post)

• Food, glorious food! Not in the nanny state (Weekly Standard)

• Some of the best bad guys from '08 (Wired)

• Bigger fish to fry: groups want Geithner to regulate labels on drinks (Bloomberg)

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The RNC Steps Up

Posted by Doug Bandow on 12.30.08 @ 7:43AM

With the Bush administration continuing to waste money on  just about anyone begging for a bail-out, the Republican National Committee appears to stepping into the role of loyal opposition to would-be socialists in both the current administration and the incoming administration.  Reports the Washington Times:

In what would amount to a slap in the face to a sitting Republican president and the party's Senate and House leaders, national GOP officials, including the vice chairman of the Republican National Committee, are sponsoring a resolution opposing the resort to "socialist" means to save capitalism.

"We can't be a party of small government, free markets and low taxes while supporting bailouts and nationalizing industries, which lead to big government, socialism and high taxes at the expense of individual liberty and freedoms," said Solomon Yue, a cosponsor of a resolution that would put the RNC -- the party's national governing body -- on the record as opposing the U.S. government bailouts of the financial and auto industries.

Republican National Vice Chairman and constitutional law attorney James Bopp Jr. authored the resolution and is asking the rest of the 168 voting members of the committee to sign it.

"The resolution also opposes President-elect Obama's proposed public works program and supports conservative alternatives," while encouraging the RNC "to engage in vigorous public policy debates consistent with our party platform," Mr. Bopp said.

A Republican Party that rediscovers its commitment to limited government and individual liberty could become the most important outcome of the 2008 election.

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Applauding the Messiah

Posted by Doug Bandow on 12.30.08 @ 7:31AM

Apparently President-elect Barack Obama is having a good time in Hawaii.  According to the Honolulu Advertiser, he attended a concert on Monday and "the whole audience broke into the rousing cheers of 'hurrah!' and enthusiastically welcomed him."

Oh, sorry.  That is what the Korean Central News Agency said happened when "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il attended a concert on Monday.  I sometimes get the two confused.  Actually, the best way for the president-elect to get that kind of reception would be to step onto the newsroom floor of the New York Times or the Washington Post. 

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Irony, or Just Plain Contradictory?

Posted by Nicole Russell on 12.29.08 @ 11:00PM

Caught a blurb of our local, evening news. A teenage girl, who was also pregnant, was murdered. Police are calling this a 'double homicide.'

In light of our current abortion laws and statistics, I'm wondering how this is possible.

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A Conservative-Libertarian Booklist for Spectator Readers

Posted by Hunter Baker on 12.29.08 @ 9:55PM

It is nearly New Year's Eve and the time of reflection is greatly upon us.  This reality is especially poignant in the wake of a revolutionary left-liberal presidential victory and the onset of substantial economic challenges. 

The American Spectator is well-known as a flagship publication of the conservative-libertarian movement (Yes, Virginia, there still is one.), so I thought now might be a good time to propose a list of outstanding books for the intellectually curious AmSpec friend or fellow traveler.

I would not dare attempt to put these in order based on excellence.  Just consider it a series of number ones.

1. Lancelot by Walker Percy -- A southern moderate-liberal is slowly fading out of his own life.  He doesn't know what his purpose is or where his marriage and family are going.  But then, something strange happens.  He discovers there is such a thing as evil.  Percy won the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, but Lancelot is my favorite.
2. Witness by Whittaker Chambers -- Surely, the greatest memoir of any man of the right.  Possibly, the greatest memoir ever.  I once tried to copy out the passages that meant the most to me and ended up just typing in whole pages at a time.  For those too young to know, Chambers was an American traitor loyal to the Communist cause, who left the Communists for what he felt was the losing side.  He had to do it because of his recovered belief in God.  In the course of his life, he became a senior editor of Time magazine and ultimately defeated Alger Hiss in legal battles over Hiss's identity as a communist agent.  Since Frost/Nixon is hot, you might also know that Richard Nixon's presidency would likely never have happened without his championing of Chambers' cause.
3. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand -- I can't resist putting Chambers and Rand together, especially since Chambers was the instrument William F. Buckley used to read Rand out of the conservative movement.  As a Christian, I find Rand's work antithetical to my own sensibilities, but I have to admit its power.  Besides, this is a conservative-libertarian list and she can't be left off.  On the other hand, as literature, it cannot rank with the greats.  I still remember the moment when John Galt grabs a microphone to speak to the nation . . . and one hundred pages later is wrapping it up!
4. After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre -- This is arguably the finest and most readable piece of political philosophy I have ever encountered.  Anyone who wonders why our political discourse has become so poisonous and incommensurate should read this work.  So, for that matter, should anyone interested in answering John Rawls.  George W. Bush would have known long ago that "the new tone" was destined to fail, if only he'd read his MacIntyre.
5. Anarchy, Utopia, and the State by Robert Nozick -- I'll make this one simple.  Robert Nozick provides the most convincing case for a minimalist state that I've ever seen.  You can break your head on his symbols and formulas, but bear with it because you WILL get it if you keep reading.  Even if you were only to read the short portion where he tells his "tale of the slave" you will be confirmed in your libertarian instincts.
6. Man and the State by Jacques Maritain -- This collection of lectures about the relationship between the individual, the culture, and the state contains the kind of essential thought we wish every politician understood.  Careful, wise, insightful.  You will understand many things better after reading Maritain. If you would like to read political philosophy, but have been afraid to start, this may be your entry point.
7. Stained Glass by William F. Buckley -- William F. Buckley is dead and I don't feel so good, myself.  However, I am comforted by reading his best works.  This Blackford Oakes heart of the Cold War novel is one of his strongest entries.  You want to see the kind of chess match the Soviets and Americans were playing?  Then, read this Buckley spy novel. 
8. The God Who Is There by Francis Schaeffer -- Would you like to know who was the prince of the Christian conservatives?  It wasn't Falwell or Robertson.  It was Francis Schaeffer.  The missionary who set up a Swiss Chalet spent years arguing with college students in Europe.  Along the way, he formed a convincing apologetic for the existence of God and the reality of values.  (I am almost required to point out that Schaeffer was wrong in his critique of certain figures.  So, I said it.  Still, this book is great stuff.)
9. Perelandra by C.S. Lewis -- I could have chosen almost any title by C.S. Lewis, so I picked the one that had the greatest emotional impact on me.  Perelandra is the second book of Lewis's space trilogy (underappreciated next to Narnia).  The story centers around the drama of Adam and Eve being replayed on a new planet with an earthman there to witness it.  Utterly compelling and, of course, full to bursting with philosophical and spiritual meaning.

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topics: Books

Worth a Thousand Words

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain on 12.29.08 @ 9:52PM

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Beyond the comic orthography of hate, we have reached a seminal moment in the development of the blogosphere, I would suggest, when Marty Peretz of the New Republic links Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugs. Apparently, however, this photo of a protest on New York's Fifth Avenue derives from another blog, The Silent Majority, which has a whole album of photos, plus videos including this one:

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The Case For and Against

Posted by Nicole Russell on 12.29.08 @ 9:36PM

Mona Charen's latest piece, "Defending Rick Warren," is interesting. While the title leads one to believe it may be a sort of defense of Warren's choice to speak at Obama's inauguration, it's actually more of a defense of his beliefs regarding gay marriage and thus traditional conservatives' arguments against it.

What particularly outraged gay rights activists was a comment Warren made in a TV interview when he compared two homosexuals getting married to a brother marrying a sister or an adult marrying a child...And yet, the point Warren was making was a valid one.

From here, Charen details what supporters of gay marriage always call 'the slippery slope' argument in a way that is actually quite persuasive.

It's worth a look.

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Then There's the Auto Bail-Out

Posted by Doug Bandow on 12.29.08 @ 6:24PM

As if I didn't need another reason to wish President George W. Bush & Co. ill, today is the first installment of the auto bail-out.  Never mind Congress didn't vote to waste, er, use my money in this fashion.  The president will give my money to auto companies which don't make products at a price Americans want to pay.

And no one knows what the final bill will run.  Reports ABC News:

Today is payday for two of Detroit's Big Three automakers, due to receive over $13 billion in taxpayer funds to keep the American auto industry running, and analysts say the bailout is likely to be just the beginning.

The U.S. Treasury is expected to transfer $9.3 billion to General Motors and $4 billion to Chrysler, but Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody's Economy.com, predicts that over the next few years taxpayers will pay a total of $75-$125 billion to keep the Big Three out of bankruptcy.

"The bailout will likely cost $100 billion or more before we're through," University of Maryland economist Peter Morici told ABC News, adding that much of that money, technically loans, might never be paid back.

The automakers are stalled in launching the restructuring the Bush administration wants. G.M. has put off negotiations with creditors until Jan. 5. And the United Auto Workers Union doesn't want to go along with the wage and benefit cuts the bailout agreement calls for, in hopes that the Obama administration will drop a target in the bailout that calls for the Big Three to make wages competitive with transplanted Japanese carmakers operating in southern states. The initial installment of funds is not expected to carry GM past February.

Analysts say it's not a question of whether they'll be back to ask for more money -- but when.

Please, George, just go away.  I know in theory Barack Obama could be worse.  But I'm having trouble imagining how!

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Time to Send the Bushies Home

Posted by Doug Bandow on 12.29.08 @ 5:56PM

There's nothing much to look forward to with the incoming administration.  But I certainly won't miss the current administration.  It's hard to think about what the Bushies haven't messed up. 

Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, has penned a devastating critique of the Bush regulatory record.  He is worse than Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter!  Writes de Rugy:

Some people still seem to think Republicans take a hands-off approach to regulation, probably because the party is always quick to criticize the burdens regulations place on businesses. But Republican rhetoric doesn't always match Republican policy. In 2007, according to Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, roughly 50 regulatory agencies issued 3,595 final rules, ranging from boosting fuel economy standards for light trucks to continuing a ban on bringing torch lighters into airplane cabins. Five departments (Commerce, Agriculture, Homeland Security, Treasury, and the Environmental Protection Agency) accounted for 45 percent of the new regulations.

Since Bush took office in 2001, there has been a 13 percent decrease in the annual number of new rules. But the new regulations' cost to the economy will be much higher than it was before 2001. Of the new rules, 159 are "economically significant," meaning they will cost at least $100 million a year. That's a 10 percent increase in the number of high-cost rules since 2006, and a 70 percent increase since 2001. And at the end of 2007, another 3,882 rules were already at different stages of implementation, 757 of them targeting small businesses.

Overall, the final outcome of this Republican regulation has been a significant increase in regulatory activity and cost since 2001. The number of pages added to the Federal Register, which lists all new regulations, reached an all-time high of 78,090 in 2007, up from 64,438 in 2001.

Even more worrisome is how agencies implement these rules. In a recent study titled "Homeland Security and Regulatory Analysis: Are We Safer Yet?," Jerry Ellig and Jamie Belcore of George Mason University's Mercatus Center (where I work) looked at the regulatory analysis behind the Department of Homeland Security's regulations. They found that the agency conducted shoddy, incomplete regulatory analysis; never tried to find regulatory alternatives; and didn't bother arguing that there was a market failure or a systemic problem that might warrant government intervention. According to Homeland Security's own estimate, its rules cost the economy more than $4 billion a year; the actual cost is likely to be much higher.

The conservative movement has a lot of work to do to retool itself.  But there is a simple starting point.  Don't be like the Bush administration.

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The Liberal Approach to Peacekeeping

Posted by J. Peter Freire on 12.29.08 @ 4:13PM

A friend passed along this wonderfully (un)insightful petition to stop the violence. Note the firmness of the stand taken in the text:

I support immediate and strong U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to urgently reinstate a meaningful ceasefire that ends all military operations, stops the rockets aimed at Israel and lifts the blockade of Gaza. This is in the best interests of Israel, the Palestinian people and the United States.

If only diplomats had thought of this before! A petition! To stop the violence! In fact, if only we could soften the cruel visions of violence with cute captions, in the style of ICanHasCheezeburger. Let's give it a shot:

Man. Solving international crises is exhausting. I'm going to go take a nap.

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Update from the Coleman Camp

Posted by Philip Klein on 12.29.08 @ 3:10PM

The Norm Coleman team just held a conference call in which the campaign's lawyers, Fritz Knaak and Tony Trimble, discussed the latest developments in the ongoing recount debacle in Minnestota.

This morning, the Coleman and Franken campaigns had a testy meeting over the issue of counting rejected absentee ballots, with the Coleman campaign arguing that Franken is pushing for ballots in counties most favorable to its cause be counted.

"We are stunned by the Franken campaign's hypocrisy about counting every vote," Knaak said on the call. "They don't want to count every vote. They want to count every Franken vote."

Specifically, Knaak noted that several affidavits that Franken submitted in Dakota and Ramsey counties to make the case to count certain absentee ballots turned out to be fake.

The Star Tribune has estimated that Franken is now up by 46 votes, but the Coleman campaign said they believe they are ahead. Also, if their court challenge to eliminate double-counting of duplicate ballots succeeds, they said they expect a net gain of over 100 votes.

Either way, it's increasingly looking like a race that won't be resolved for weeks, at the earliest.

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Iraq Condemns Israel

Posted by W. James Antle, III on 12.29.08 @ 1:56PM

It turns out that Iraq, the democracy and ally in the war on terrorism we are building at great cost in American blood and treasure, has sided with Hamas against Israel -- the latter a real democracy, real ally, and real opponent of Islamic terrorism. Of course, the agents of Iranian influence inside Iraq think the Iraqi government isn't anti-Israel enough. (Hat tip: Andy McCarthy.)

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Re: Second the Motion

Posted by W. James Antle, III on 12.29.08 @ 12:53PM

Actually, my biggest reservation about the plan is that the feds would keep the gas tax higher forever but eventually end the payroll tax rebate. If the deal could be set in stone, under a Democratic regime I might take it. Unfortunately, that's not the kind of option we're likely to get.

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Second the Motion

Posted by Joseph Lawler on 12.29.08 @ 11:57AM

Art Laffer and Bob Inglis (R, South Carolina) second Charles Krauthammer. Is this a bona fide conservative plan now that the arch-supply sider Laffer has endorsed it?

Although Jim's points regarding energy independence and Social Security are valid concerns, I think it's at the very least a strategically sound plan for conservatives merely because it forestalls any crippling emissions policy that would otherwise be in the pipeline and that definitely wouldn't be "net zero." Also, it cuts taxes in the places that count and would stimulate the economy without increasing the deficit, which is more than can be said for many other conservative tax proposals.

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In the Football World

Posted by W. James Antle, III on 12.29.08 @ 10:46AM

I've always liked Brett Favre and yesterday found myself in the uneviable position of having to root for the New York Jets so that the 11-5 New England Patriots could make the playoffs. (I felt less dirty than when I had to root for Dallas against Baltimore for the same reason.) Alas it wasn't to be, though the San Diego Chargers' performance against Denver last night makes me less sore about an 8-8 team, with as many wins going into last night as the Patriots had at the beginning of the month, making the playoffs. And the ouster of Eric Mangini is one silver lining to the whole thing. I hope the Patriots caught his firing on film.

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Some Thoughts on Gaza

Posted by Philip Klein on 12.29.08 @ 10:37AM

As I noted when I returned from a trip to Israel last month, any peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians is hopeless as long as Hamas remains in control of Gaza and continues its rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. It was only a matter of time before Israel took the perfectly justifiable actions it has been taking over the past few days to neutralize the rocket fire from Hamas and like-minded terrorist groups.

But over the next few days and weeks, there are a number of key questions to consider.

The most crucial is how effective Israel's military operation is in weakening the terrorists' rocket-launching capability. In 2006, after weeks of bombing and inept leadership by Ehud Olmert and then-Defense Minister Amir Peretz, Israel failed to accomplish much in its actions against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Israeli military officials have spent the last few years trying to fix what went wrong during that operation. One of the problems was that the Israeli military had been repurposed toward the type of fighting required in the West Bank during the Second Intifada in the early part of the decade, and wasn't as adequately prepared for a conflict with Hezbollah. So, when all of the smoke clears in Gaza, the Israelis will have to assess whether their government and military did in fact learn a lot from the mistakes of the Lebanon War. Haaretz reported this morning that Israeli air strikes killed four members of Islamic Jihad, including its senior commander. The paper also noted that, "[t]he strikes have driven Hamas leaders into hiding and appear to have gravely damaged the organization's ability to launch rockets, but barrages continued. Sirens warning of incoming rockets sent Israelis scrambling for cover throughout the day." If Israel is able to severely weaken Hamas, it actually would do more than anything to create the conditions in which peace would be possible between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The other important question is how the operation will affect Israeli elections scheduled for February. If the Kadima government is able to orchestrate a successful military operation, than it could boost the party's chances in the elections, and help Tzipi Livni become the new prime minister. If, however, it's another bungled operation, it would strengthen the hand of the Benyamin Netanyahu-lead Likud. Either way, the conflict could strengthen his chances by bolstering his central argument that the peace process is not currently realistic.

Hamas, which receives backing from Iran along with Hezbollah, is seen as one of Iran's means of retaliating in the event of an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities. This was clearly another calculation in Israel's Gaza operation, and it should be interesting to monitor how Iran reacts to these events.  Iranian hard-line clerics are signing up volunteers to fight in Gaza and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that, "All true believers in the world of Islam and Palestinian fighters are duty-bound to defend the defenseless women and children in Gaza Strip, and those giving their lives in carrying out such a divine duty are martyrs."

It will also be interesting to watch how the Gaza operation affects the internal Palestinian conflict between Hamas and Fatah. The two groups were poised for a confrontation on January 9, when Hamas argues that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's term ends -- a view rejected by Abbas and his allies.

And of course, this will be an early test for the Obama administration. How will he react when he can no longer hide behind saying that "there is only one president at a time"?

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Daily Must-Reads

Posted by Joseph Lawler on 12.29.08 @ 10:30AM

• William Tucker takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal on his nuclear crusade (WSJ)

• 10 of this year's tech breakthroughs (Wired)

• In case you hadn't noticed, churches are splitting along culture-war faultlines (The New Republic)

• The state bludgeons eHarmony for discrimation and sets a terrible standard (Weekly Standard)

• No, Caroline, you should be writing for a women's mag (Politico)

• We all work less, spend less, and complain more (Slate)

• Barack and Bush, best buds for now (New York Magazine)

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Crystal Balls for 2009

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain on 12.29.08 @ 10:11AM

Niall Ferguson's "retrospective" on 2009 is imaginative, but the one thing he can't imagine is that the Obama administration could be a failure. But I take a look backward at 2008 -- and the mistaken expectations that were widespread a year ago -- and draw different conclusions.

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Egypt vs. Hamas

Posted by John Tabin on 12.28.08 @ 5:35PM

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Israeli offensive in Gaza is that, for the moment at least, Israel and Egypt seem to be allied. Haaretz reports that Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni traveled to Cairo to inform Hosni Mubarak that Israel would be striking Hamas. The Egyptian government is explicitly blaming Hamas for continuing to fire rockets into Israel in the face of repeated warnings from the Israelis that there would be a response. And now Egypt is sealing its border with the Gaza strip and opening fire on Palestinians seeking refuge.

Why do Israeli-Egyptian relations suddenly seem warmer than they've been at any time since Anwar Sadat was shot? One word: Iran. Mubarak now sees Iranian dominence of the Middle East as the primary threat to Egyptian interests. "Iran wants to devour the Arab world," Mubarak has quite astutely observed. Hamas, of course, is backed by Iran. That Mubarak is now willing to ally his government with the Jewish state is huge news, and if he can bring other Arab leaders along with him could represent a sea-change in the dynamics of Middle East geopolitics.

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First, Do No Harm

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain on 12.28.08 @ 5:00PM

Jennifer Rubin on Obama's New New Deal:

The Obama transition team, soon to be the Obama administration, is concocting a reenactment of the New Deal.
A trillion dollar stimulus is going to "create" jobs, and the government will "bailout" failing industries (with additional debt funded by the Chinese, so long as they have an appetite for quickly depreciating dollars). If you think this sounds half-baked and suffers from historical amnesia, you are right.
Despite the obvious shortcomings with this approach (e.g., it's never worked before), the Republican Party so far isn't doing a very good job of coming up with alternatives. Plainly, they don't like the mounds of debt. And they are skeptical of a gigantic public works projects. But what could be done instead?

What about doing nothing? It seems to me that the "do something" demand for economic intervention is fundamentally misguided. We are experiencing the downside of the business cycle which, however painful, is certainly temporary. In its stimulus-and-buyout frenzy over the past several months, the federal government has already made extraordinary interventions. What Obama proposes is essentially more (much more) of the same.

Isn't the true conservative response to say that the federal government has already done too much, and that doing more will only compound the problem? If the problem is too much intervention -- and cutting the prime rate from 6.5 percent in July 2000 to 1 percent in October 2003 can be characterized as an intervention deeply implicated in our current woes -- then less intervention would seem a plausible solution.

The compelling urge to "do something" about the economy may be a political necessity for the incoming administration and the Democrats in Congress, but it does not follow that Republicans, a powerless minority in Congress with no meaningful influence in the Obama administration, must offer "do something" counter-proposals. Republicans could without political peril respond to Obama's New New Deal with a simple three-word message: "It won't work."

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

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Christmas, a Humbug?

Posted by Nicole Russell on 12.28.08 @ 4:09PM

I'm spending Christmas and New Year's in my home state, the frigid tundra of Minnesota (it was five below zero when I arrived). On Christmas Eve we went to see 'A Christmas Carol,' at the new building of the old Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.  Since it's an annual family tradition, I've seen the play many times but never tire of the simple, compelling tale: grumpy, penny-pinching Scrooge is persuaded by the end of the play to be generous and honour Christmas because of the three ghosts who haunt him 'all in one night.' 

This year though, in light of this last election and a weak economy (I'm not convinced we're in a an actual recession yet) the political themes of the play stuck out to me more than normal.  Though Dickens wrote the play (as Rich Lowry notes in his recent column) to salvage his career and perhaps not as much to make a political statement, no writer composes in a vacuum and most, if not all, of Dickens well known works reflected 19th century ravaged England at the time.  It was certainly a country whose workhouses were full and that literally wreaked of poverty.

I wonder, for myself and my fellow Americans: Will we be generous during this season and this next year despite our own tight pockets and the general atmosphere of Scrooginess around us (especially if the MSM has its way)?

While conservatives tend to be more charitable with their finances than their liberal counterparts, it's been a talking point of liberal political theory for some time.  And it especially was this last year.  In fact, if anything, Obama's message was as much about giving as it was about hope.  Who should be giving and how much is key though, and not surprisingly, still vague.

Something tells me though, it won't be the kind of generosity conservatives favor.

Regardless of what occurs over the next four years, I hope we don't lose our generous spirit and take to heart what Scrooge vowed at the end of his miraculous night: 'I will honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, present and future."

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Liveblogging From Israel

Posted by John Tabin on 12.28.08 @ 3:51PM

Lots of updates on the Gaza offensive here and here.

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The 'Effervescent' Barney Frank

Posted by Robert Stacy McCain on 12.28.08 @ 2:19PM

Probably "flamboyant" would have been too cliched for George Will:

In an interview with Business Week, Rep. Barney Frank, the effervescent Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, was asked, concerning the auto industry, "How do you make sure the government doesn't meddle too deeply in day-to-day operations and bring politics -- like a push for green cars -- into the equation?" Frank replied: "Oh, well, a push for green cars is very much a part of what we're involved in. We don't think that's politics." So, when the government, its 10 thumbs stuck deep in the economy, uses its power to compel an industry to pursue the objectives of the political party that controls both of the government's political branches, that is not politics.
Business Week: "Should GM acquire Chrysler?" Frank: "I'm not competent to say." Frank's humility is selective: He obviously thinks he is competent to say what kind of cars should be made.

Democrats like Frank simply can't restrain their interventionist impulses. That some Republicans harbor similar impulses -- closet interventionists, you might say --  is attested by President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which Will gives a well-deserved kick along the way.

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