The Review

California's lame business climate

(Review) Thomas Sowel lists the ways in which the aging hippies who control politics in California have destroyed the state's business climate.

If you think federal safety regulations go beyond all reason, they are nothing compared to California safety regulations. Among states with their own workplace safety regulations, in addition to the federal ones, California prosecutes more employers than all the other states put together.

High taxes on California businesses and high workmen's compensation costs are all part of the same anti-business mindset. Employees of these businesses do not get off scot free either. Other laws restricting the building of housing have given San Francisco the highest rents of any city in the country. Housing prices in the surrounding areas like Marin County and San Mateo County are sky high as well.

This means that people who work in such places in modestly paid jobs -- including nurses, teachers and policemen -- are usually forced to live far away and commute, spending three or four hours a day fighting congested highway traffic.

[...]

When the state budget is deep in the red, the state legislature's answer is to raise tax rates. Not only do they not want to cut spending, it would never occur to them that moderate taxes paid by more businesses could bring in more revenue.

On the contrary, the exodus of businesses gives them just one more reason to raise tax rates some more on the remaining businesses, in order to make up the difference.

Massive bureaucratic red tape is also part of the anti-business package. The head of Sun Microsystems said: "There's a million rules that make the cost of operating here just off the charts."

The net result is that some businesses are moving to other states, taking their jobs and their taxes with them. Other businesses that are looking for a place to locate or expand know that in California they will be treated like chickens to be plucked.

It's not the "Golden State" anymore.

Grow up, Howie

(Review) Will Saletan says that Howard Dean needs to grow up.

Until now, this belligerence has served Dean well. In a nine-candidate field, he has distinguished himself by constantly attacking the "Washington Democrats" who stood with Bush on this or that issue. Each time an opponent counterattacks, Dean's campaign exhorts his followers to send the opponent a message by sending Dean money. "It's a polite way of saying where you can take it," Dean explained Friday.

But after a while, telling people where they can take it becomes a problem. The list of constituencies to whom you've given the finger grows. "Them" starts to outnumber "us." Clinton warned of such self-destruction when he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992: "For too long, politicians have told the most of us that are doing all right that what's really wrong with America is the rest of us: them. … We've nearly them'd ourselves to death. Them, and them, and them. But this is America. There is no them; there is only us."

Dean doesn't see it that way. He isn't trying to make enemies; he's just having fun. He recognizes malice and pettiness only when he's the target.

I'm interested to see how this will actually play with voters. Sure, he's a press darling, because he says the most outrageous things. And anger makes for good TV.

I just wonder how well it translates into the voting booth.

Remember, no one has yet cast a single vote

(Review) David Schribman writes that, despite all the hype pointed at Howard dean, voting for the Democratic Party's presidential nominee hasn't yet begun. No matter what the line is now, it may all change radically, as it often has in the past, once the voting starts.

Here's the story line thus far: Obscure governor of tiny, faraway state adopts an angry-middle-aged-man persona, abandons relentlessly moderate gubernatorial record to assume a raging liberal posture, stirs deep emotions in people who have seldom voted and never contributed money, taps profound frustration of activists who believe they wuz robbed in Florida in 2000, wins endorsement of the tragic figure who won the popular vote three years ago and, by New Year's, nearly clinches the Democratic presidential nomination.

One more thing: In the background, the Republicans cheer. The only one who wants Howard Dean nominated more than Joe Trippi, his Svengali, is Karl Rove, President Bush's Rasputin.

If you've read this far, you know that almost all of this is nonsense and, if you've paid attention to insurgencies before, you know that a lot can happen in 19 days, which is exactly the amount of time before the real beginning of campaign 2004 and the Iowa caucuses. A lot more can happen in 27 days, which is the amount of time before the New Hampshire primary.

I remember Ed Muskie, a front-runner if there ever was one, collapsing in tears in New Hampshire, and turning into the biggest loser in American politics that year.

Or rather, he would have been the biggest loser of that year, if George McGovern hadn't gone on to be stomped by Dick Nixon in one of the largest landslides in US history.

All we've seen so far is the opinion of PR and press hacks. What happens on the day of the elections is a completely different story.

The innards of the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll reveal a fascinating aspect of this campaign -- the notion that Dean's support is heavily dependent on Democrats with what political scientists call low-intensity party identification. In short, they're Democrats, but a bit squeamish about it. Maybe they're independents at heart. But that's OK; real independents can vote in the New Hampshire primary, too. Moral: Pay almost no attention to Democratic candidates who, in the final days, are concentrating on Democratic audiences and constituencies. Independents will provide the margin of victory in this primary.

And the question is, can Dean get them out? It's one thing to have a good presence on the Internet and get a lot of money raised. Indeed, it's a very good thing, as the cash-strapped Kerry campaign could tell you.

But, does Dean have the grass-roots organization on the ground to get out voters who don't really identify that strongly with the Democrats (mainly because they prefer the greens)? If not, he's in trouble, because the loss of just a few percentage points, a couple of thousand voters, may mean the difference between victory or death in a closely contested primary campaign.

Dean's trouble is that he is the front-runner. Or, at least, he's believed to be, which is much the same thing. This makes the early primaries vitally important for him, because a second- or third-place finish is effectively a defeat for him. Dean carries, just like Muskie in '72, the burden of high expectations.

Muskie, after all, won in New Hampshire. But it wasn't the big win everybody expected, so it was a loss in strategic terms.

Dean can't finish in second or third place. He has to win, or he's very much in danger of going the way of Ed Muskie.

Although, we hope, with fewer tears.

The decisive year

(Review) Ralph Peters writes that, despite the great success and progress in the War on Terror in 2003, 2004 will be the decisive year.

Yet 2004 is going to be a year of decision in the War on Terror. As our presidential election approaches, the terrorists remaining at large will sacrifice their last reserves in an effort to dislodge President Bush, freedom's great crusader, from the White House.

The terrorists will seek to convince American voters that the War on Terror is failing, paving the way for the electoral victory of a weakling and allowing them to surge back into vacuums created by an American retreat.

Their last, desperate hope will be to hit us so hard that we elect a coward in place of a hero.

Frankly, I'm surprised that there hasn't already been a major terrorist attack since 911. But if there is one, I hope the American people will realize that replacing W with an advocate of retreat and surrender will cost us even more in lives and treasure. 

Still living in a 9/10 world

(Review) From FOXNews:

A woman allegedly tried to choke a federal air marshal after she became disruptive on a flight from Pittsburgh to Minneapolis, authorities said.

The air marshal approached the woman, who was allegedly intoxicated, vocal and obnoxious aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 1057 on Tuesday, Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman Jennifer Marty said.

After the woman continued to be disruptive, she tried to choke the marshal in a later exchange, Marty said. She also kicked the marshal in the groin and bit a law enforcement officer after she was escorted off the plane, Marty said.

Here's a bit of advice. Even if you assume that at one time you could get away with this kind of thing, you'd better not assume it now.

Airline people have no sense of humor about this stuff, post-911, and air marshalls have even less. Indeed, air marshalls have no sense of humor at all.

So, maybe you should think twice about ordering that second Crown and Seven.

OK, you're not fired

(Review) Initial jobless claims hit their lowest point in three years this morning, coming at well below expectations at 339k.

This is yet another sign that the job market is on its way to recovery as well.

Some new year's resolutions

(Review) Lileks has some suggestions for New Year's resolutions for Bush Haters:

I resolve to examine at least one of the president's statements, acts, gestures or facial expressions without first insisting it proves that the man is a stupid chimp evil liar plastic-turkey-holding DRAFT DODGER MY GOD CAN'T YOU PEOPLE SEE HIM FOR WHAT HE IS?

I resolve to consider that not everything Bush says is a lie. Example: If Bush says that ''two plus two equals four,'' I will not spit, ''Oh, that's Enron math,'' and spend the rest of the day rebalancing my checkbook in Base Eight.

I resolve to grasp the absurdity of appearing on national talk shows to insist that our freedom of speech has disappeared.

I especially like that last one.

Understanding the Mideast

(Review) Dennis Prager writes that if you want to truly understand the Middle-East conflict, the earthquake in Iran tells you everything you need to know.

A massive earthquake kills between 20,000 and 40,000 Iranians, and the government of Iran announces that help is welcome from every country in the world...except Israel.

This little-reported news item is of great significance. It begs commentary.

Israel not only has the world's most experienced crews in quickly finding survivors in bombed out buildings, it is also a mere two-hour flight from Iran. In other words, no country in the world would come close to Israel in its ability to save Iranian lives quickly.

But none of this means anything to the rulers of Iran. The Islamic government of Iran has announced to the world that it is better for fellow countrymen and fellow Muslims -- men, women and children -- to die buried under rubble than to be saved by a Jew from Israel.

That is how deep the hatred of Israel and Jews is in much of the Muslim world.

There is simply no hatred anywhere else in the world, that is analogous.

As always, go read Victor Davis Hanson now

(Review) VDH is on a roll today.

There is something terribly wrong, something terribly amoral with the Western intelligentsia, most prominently in academia, the media, and politics. We don’t need Osama bin Laden’s preschool jabbering about “the weak horse” to be worried about the causes of this Western disease: thousands of the richest, most leisured people in the history of civilization have become self-absorbed, ungracious, and completely divorced from the natural world — the age-old horrific realities of dearth, plague, hunger, rapine, or conquest.

Indeed, it is even worse than that: a Paul Krugman or French barrister neither knows anything of how life is lived beyond his artificial cocoon nor of the rather different men and women whose unacknowledged work in the shadows ensures his own bounty in such a pampered landscape — toil that allows our anointed to rage at those purportedly culpable for allowing the world to function differently from an Ivy League lounge or the newsroom of the New York Times. Neither knows what it is like to be in a village gassed by Saddam Hussein or how hard it is to go across the world to Tikrit and chain such a monster.

Our Western intellectuals are sheltered orchids who are naïve about the world beyond their upscale hothouses. The Western disease of deductive fury at everything the West does provides a sort of psychological relief (without costs) for apparent guilt over privileged circumstances. It is such a strange mixture of faux-populism and aristocratic snobbery. They believe only a blessed few such as themselves have the requisite education or breeding to understand the “real” world of Western pathologies and its victims.

[...]

Perhaps the most pathetic example of this strange nexus between first- and third-world Western bashing was seen in mid-December on television. Just as the United States government declared a high alert, one could watch a replay of the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy trashing America to a captivated, near-gleeful audience in New York. Her dog-and-pony show was followed by pathetic pleading from her nervous interrogator, Howard Zinn, not to transfer her unabashed hatred of the Bush administration to the United States in general.

Mimicking the theatrics of American intellectuals — Roy’s hands frequently gestured scare quotes — she went from one smug denunciation to another to the applause of her crowd. Little was said about the crater a few blocks away, the social pathologies back home in India that send tens of thousands of its brightest to American shores, or Roy’s own aristocratic dress, ample jewelry, and studied accent. All the latter accoutrements and affectations illustrated the well-known game she plays of trashing globalization and corporatization as she jets around the Western world precisely through its largess — all the while cashing in by serving up an elegant third-world victimization to guilt-ridden Westerners.

And it's only Western civilization that makes it possible. Quite a conundrum, isn't it?

Note to Paul Krugman: Jobs are a trailing indicator

(Review) You know, Krugman is a real economist. He has a degree and everything. Therefore he must know what's wrong with his own statement below.

Commerce Department figures reveal a startling disconnect between overall economic growth, which has been impressive since last spring, and the incomes of a great majority of Americans. In the third quarter of 2003, as everyone knows, real G.D.P. rose at an annual rate of 8.2 percent. But wage and salary income, adjusted for inflation, rose at an annual rate of only 0.8 percent. More recent data don't change the picture: in the six months that ended in November, income from wages rose only 0.65 percent after inflation.

Why aren't workers sharing in the so-called boom? Start with jobs.

Payroll employment began rising in August, but the pace of job growth remains modest, averaging less than 90,000 per month. That's well short of the 225,000 jobs added per month during the Clinton years; it's even below the roughly 150,000 jobs needed to keep up with a growing working-age population.

So, payroll growth has remained slow. What does that tell us? Not much.

Businesses do not invest in new jobs until they are sure that they have enough profit growth and/or increased production to make such long-term investments. Jobs are the last sector to show improvement.

Krugman has to know that jobs are a lagging indicator. So unless he's arguing that job growth will continue to be slow, and, interestingly, he isn't, then it's difficult to see what his point is.

But if the number of jobs isn't rising much, aren't workers at least earning more? You may have thought so. After all, companies have been able to increase output without hiring more workers, thanks to the rapidly rising output per worker. (Yes, that's a tautology.) Historically, higher productivity has translated into rising wages. But not this time: thanks to a weak labor market, employers have felt no pressure to share productivity gains.

Yes, historically, productivity gains have increased the wealth of workers. Indeed, that's the only way to increase the wealth of workers. But it happens over time. Not from freakin' September to December!

So, yeah, what he's saying is true, but it's freakin' pointless! Once the labor market does tighten, the wage increases from productivity gains will be received by the workers, because employers will have to bid up the price of labor to attract new employees. That's the way it's always happened in the past. Why would it be different this time, for Cripes sake!

So if jobs are scarce and wages are flat, who's benefiting from the economy's expansion? The direct gains are going largely to corporate profits, which rose at an annual rate of more than 40 percent in the third quarter. Indirectly, that means that gains are going to stockholders, who are the ultimate owners of corporate profits. (That is, if the gains don't go to self-dealing executives, but let's save that topic for another day.)

And what do you think will happen to those profits. Hmm, do you suppose they will just sit in pillowcases buried in the back yard? Will that money magically drop out of the economy?

No, people will use it to buy stuff. Which means that businesses will have to expand to meet the increased demand. That expansion will require the hiring of new employees.

It's called the Circular Freakin' Flow of Freakin' Money, you moron! You learn it in about the third week of Econ 101!

Jebus, this torks me off! This is why I simply can't read Krugman regularly. A man like Krugman can't be making mistakes about this stuff. It simply has to be intellectual dishonesty. I don't know whether he's deliberately distorting the facts, or he's so blinded by Bush Hatred that he can't think straight, but it's just dishonest to the core.

I don't know how Donald Luskin does it.

The "shrewd" and "pragmatic" Howard Dean

(Review) Brendan Miniter asks a simple question. Does Howard Dean have a firm stand on anything?

I want a dime bag of what E.J. Dionne has been smoking

(Review) For the Democrats, it appears that their analysis of the 2004 elections is becoming much like Dr. Johnson's definition of second marriages: the triumph of hope over experience.

Otherwise, how can E.J. Dionne possibly believe this drivel:

In the 2000 election, Bush had an advantage over Al Gore because Republican rank-and-filers so hated Bill Clinton -- and so wanted to win -- that they gave Bush ample room to sound as moderate as John Breaux or Olympia Snowe. Bush's 2000 Republican National Convention hid the base behind the appealing face of inclusiveness and outreach. Gore, in the meantime, had to claw back the votes of liberals and lefties who had strayed to Ralph Nader.

This time, the Democrats will have most of the election year to appeal to swing voters. Democrats are so hungry to beat Bush that they will let their nominee be pragmatic and shrewd.

That's why 2004 will be very different from 2003. Democrats who loved Dean's attacks on Bush this year now want Dean to prove he can beat him. Dean's opponents know this, which is why their core case is that Dean can't win. And watch for the appearance of the new, pragmatic Howard Dean, the doctor with an unerring sense of his party's pulse.

This is just utter foolishness. I love this line: "Democrats are so hungry to beat Bush that they will let their nominee be pragmatic and shrewd." Yeah, that's Howard Dean, all right. Pragmatic and shrewd.

This is simply delusional. Swing voters aren't interested in an overtly ideological candidate for president. And swing voters have never, and will never vote for a candidate whose primary message on domestic policy is to raise taxes, and on foreign policy promises retreat and surrender in the face of America's enemies.

Which goes back to the previous post about Bush Hatred. These guys just hate Bush so much that they are constructing an alternate reality whose facts are completely at variance with what we know to be true about American politics.

Howard Dean may have an unerring finger on the pulse of the Democratic Party's primary voters. But so what?

Only 35% of the electorate identify themselves as Democrats. Of those, he's got the votes (presumably, since there haven't actually been any votes yet) of about 30% of them. And that 30% are the most likely to vote and the most committed, which is why the Democratic nominations process is tilted so far to the left.

In the real world, however, that's 10% of the electorate. And it's the 10% that are the farthest out of the mainstream. That isn't, in case you haven't been keeping up with current events, the 10% that elects presidents.

Oh, and by the way, do you really think Karl Rove and the Team Bush will fail to remind voters that the new "pragmatic and shrewd" Howard Dean is the same angry crank who's running now?

Sure, the election is 10 months away, and a lot of things can happen between now and then. But this election is George Bush's to lose. If the Democrats win, it'll be by default, not because they've gotten all "pragmatic and shrewd".

Oh, and by the way, another problem Dionne smoothly skips over: "Gore, in the meantime, had to claw back the votes of liberals and lefties who had strayed to Ralph Nader."

Well, Nader's already said he's running again. If Howard Dean becomes the names "pragmatism" and "shrewdness", won't that have some effect on his support among the current crop of WTO protesters that are fawning over him? Do you think that maybe a Nader candidacy might draw those same people back, after Howard Dean becomes another DLC sell-out during the General election?

This column might make a great plot for some Allen Drury-style political novel, but novels are supposed to be about fantasy.

Reliable political/analysis columns, on the other hand, are not.

The trouble with Bush (and Clinton) Hatred

(Review) Robert Samuelson is just spot on today, in describing the causes of Bush Hatred.

Once disagreement turns into self-proclaimed hate, it becomes blinding. You can see only one all-encompassing truth, which is your villain's deceit, stupidity, selfishness or evil. This was true of Clinton haters, and it's increasingly true of Bush haters. A small army of pundits and talking heads has now devoted itself to one story: the sins of Bush, Cheney and their supporters. They ruined the economy with massive tax cuts and budget deficits; the Iraq war was an excuse for corporate profiteering; their arrogance alienated foreign allies.

All ambiguity vanishes. For example: The economy is recovering, stimulated in part by huge budget deficits; and many traditional allies of the United States like having Bush as a political foil to excuse them from costly and unpopular commitments.

In the end, Bush hating says more about the haters than the hated -- and here, too, the parallels with Clinton are strong. This hatred embodies much fear and insecurity. The anti-Clinton fanatics hated him not simply because he occasionally lied, committed adultery or exhibited an air of intellectual superiority. What really infuriated them was that he kept succeeding -- he won reelection, his approval ratings stayed high -- and that diminished their standing. If Clinton was approved, they must be disapproved.

Ditto for Bush. If he succeeded less, he'd be hated less. His fiercest detractors don't loathe him merely because they think he's mediocre, hypocritical and simplistic. What they truly resent is that his popularity suggests that the country might be more like him than it is like them. They fear he's exiling them politically. On one level, their embrace of hatred aims to make others share their outrage; but on another level, it's a self-indulgent declaration of moral superiority -- something that makes them feel better about themselves. Either way, it represents another dreary chapter in the continuing coarsening of public discourse.

Once again, if you, like Jonathon Chait, feel oppressed by W's very existence, then you probably need to get a life.

So, I guess she's a neo-con now

(Review) It's been said that a conservative is just a liberal who's gotten mugged. For Amy MacKinnon, the mugging came on 11 September, 2001.

She writes that she'll be voting for W in 2004.

Well, kudos for coming over from the Dark Side, but you still need to do a little thinking. As a former Democrat, I understand that's not an activity to which you've been inclined, but you've got to start now.

When Mr. Bush first ran for president in 2000, I found both his politics and his campaign methods anathema to the American concept of justice. I was with the many who questioned whether his intellect, interest, and experience were commensurate with the demands of being the leader of the free world. I didn't approve of his so-called middle-class tax cuts, nor his incorporating nuclear power into his energy plan, nor his judgment in appointing an attorney general inclined to sheathe immodest works of art.

OK, Amy, two things here.

First, energy policy. You can't say this:

"I didn't approve of...his incorporating nuclear power into his energy plan,"

and then, a few paragraphs later, say this:

"[O]il still controls America. It's a lesson we should have learned following the oil crisis of the '70s, but again we chose to ignore the inevitable at our own peril.

It's not like there's a lot of other options, Amy. You can whine about how we need windmill farms and solar collectors, but that's just a pipe dream. The technology isn't there. Sorry. So, we have to either drill for oil, and disturb all the fuzzy bunnies, or we gotta build nuclear reactors.

Second, there's this line:

"I didn't approve of his...judgment in appointing an attorney general inclined to sheathe immodest works of art."

Let it go, Amy. It didn't happen.

Yes, the art was sheathed, but not because the AG thought it immodest. It was done because the blue curtains looked great on TV. This myth has already been debunked. Move on.

Mommy, John Kerry's callin' me names!

(Review) Howard Dean. I love this guy!

He's upset that the other candidates are saying bad things about him. Characteristically, it makes him whine.

Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean is complaining that other candidates are being too rough on him and he has taken a swipe at Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe for not stepping in to tone down the attacks. But the front-runner's complaint has had the effect of increasing those attacks. Some of Dean's rivals for the Democratic nomination say the former Vermont governor has been relentlessly negative — calling his rivals "cockroaches," the Democratic leadership in Congress "prostitutes" and Democrats who support tax cuts and a strong defense "Bush lite." In return, they say Dean's latest attacks on the DNC show he is nothing more than a whiner.

"I've got some news for Howard Dean," presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, who ran as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2000, said Monday. "The primary campaign is a warm-up to what George Bush and Karl Rove have waiting for the Democratic nominee. If Howard Dean can't stand the heat in the Democratic kitchen, he's going to melt in a minute once the Republicans start going after him."

Like Lieberman, Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt also lashed out at Dean, releasing a statement that said that Dean has run a relentlessly negative campaign but appears not to have thick enough skin to take what he gives.

"Howard Dean has spent the last year criticizing me and other candidates at every opportunity. Now, as he makes a series of embarrassing gaffes that underscore the fact he is not well-equipped to challenge George Bush, he suddenly wants to change the rules of the game," Gephardt said.

Cry me a river, Howie.

They just don't get it

(Review) Lileks comments on the reaction tothe Bush Administration sending aid to Iran to help with the aftermath of the earthquake.

But the adminstration's aid effort is a surprise to certain domestic elements. I heard a network news feed on the radio say that the US was sending aid despite having branded Iran as a member of the Axis of Evil. Oy. Did the author of that dispatch believe that the administration regarded the Iranian people as a seething mass indistinguishable from the calculated madness of the ruling clerics?

If US aid to Iran comes as a surprise to anyone, then they don't understand the US.

Of course they they don't.

You get the government you deserve

(Review) Jon Henke wonders what kind of negative campaign ads you'd have to run to prevent this:

Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, on trial before the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague, was elected to the Serbian parliament today, but would not sit in the assembly, officials said.

Aaah. European politics.

Howard Dean: Do as I say, not as I do

(Review) It appears that Howard Dean's outrage over the Bush Administration's refusal to go public with details about the Vice President's is essentially manufactured. That is to say, false. Hypocritical, even.

Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean has demanded release of secret deliberations of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force. But as Vermont governor, Dean had an energy task force that met in secret and angered state lawmakers.

Dean's group held one public hearing and after-the-fact volunteered the names of industry executives and liberal advocates it consulted in private, but the Vermont governor refused to open the task force's closed-door deliberations.

In 1999, Dean offered the same argument the Bush administration uses today for keeping deliberations of a policy task force secret.

"The governor needs to receive advice from time to time in closed session. As every person in government knows, sometimes you get more open discussion when it's not public," Dean was quoted as saying.

Please, please, please, Democrats, nominate this man as your presidential candidate! This guy's not only a bigger crank than McGovern, he's crazier than Tom Eagleton.

Real Tolerance

(Review) Peggy noonan writes that, when she put up a little statue of the Virgin Mary at her place on Park Avenue, it caused an uproar. But, in Brooklyn, she's found true tolerance.

When the PC talking points came out in 1985 no one sent Brooklyn the memo. We have mezuzahs and Marys all over the place. We have a vital synagogue and social center just down the block, and the headquarters of the Jehovah's witnesses down the other; the synagogue is next to a home for Franciscan priests. A few blocks away on Atlantic Avenue the mosques are next to the Baptist churches. One of my neighbors is an ardent Lebanese Maronite, and another is a lover of Buddha. He keeps a statue in the window.

This is actual diversity. Everyone gets to be, we don't fear faith. May the world in 2004 be more like Brooklyn, and may its arguments over religion and the public square be solved the Brooklyn way.

Why can't the PC Brigade of Banners just live and let live?

Hell, no, we won't go!

(Review) Paul Jacob writes an impassioned screed against drafting young people for military or civilian service, as proposed by, among others, by Representative Charles Rangel of New York, Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina and David Broder of the Washington Post.

I have a 19-year old daughter. Under these proposals, women as well as men would be conscripted and required to perform either civilian or military service, with more bennies given for military service. Mr. Broder and other supporters of the draft and national service may not like the way my daughter has turned out, but I’m pretty proud. She’s making her own way in the world and the last thing she needs is any of these bozos screwing up a couple years of her life with their stupid schemes.

Wow. So, your daughter owes absolutely no service at all to the society of which she is a part? So, precisely what then, if anything, does your daughter owe to the society in which she was raised, Mr. Jacob?

Maybe we should have a draft, and maybe we shouldn't. I don't really know. I am conflicted on the issue.

I served through the 1980s and 1990s, so the all-volunteer force is what I know. A conscript force might be very different. It might be less effective. Or, since the troops would come from a greater cross-section of American society, it might be more effective. I'm simply not sure how conscription affects readiness or capability.

Also, I'm not keen, as a general principle, on the idea of the government forcing people to serve. At the same time, I recognize that there are certainly cases of national emergency, like WWII, where there is simply no other choice.

So, like I said, I'm conflicted.

Still, what I do know is that I'm irked by guys like this, who assume that the military is a burden that will screw up their precious kid's lives, but the lives of poor black or Appalachian children will be improved thereby. That their children are just too darn important to have anything to do with the military, who are, as is well known, a group of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.

But there's something in me that says that all of us owe America something. We are extraordinarily blessed to live in a country where we can compare the president to Adolf Hitler without fear of a midnight knock on the door from the FBI; where we make salaries greater than 99.99% of the world's inhabitants; where the chief health problem is...wait for it...obesity.

Don't we own America something in return? Are all the liberties and vast wealth we enjoy merely entitlements for which we need be neither thankful, nor willing to provide any amount of service in recompense? If we accrue the benefits of being Americans, don't we all owe some debt of sharing, even for a brief time, in her defense?  

The great dichotomy of the founders

(Review) Michael Knox Beran writes that the current focus on the Founding Fathers as slaveholders is an intentional attempt to obscure the accomplishments for political reasons.

The cumulative effect of the new mandate to put slavery "at the center of the story of early America" is likely to be devastating. Imagine if, in the centuries after the fall of Athens, the West had concentrated single-mindedly on the fact — quite undeniable — that the Greeks kept slaves. Imagine if every book that appeared on Plato, Aristotle, and Sophocles put at "the center of the story" the sin of Greek slavery. If the mantra "Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves" had been applied to the Greeks as rigorously as it is now to be applied to the American Founders, Saint Augustine would never have happened. Neither would Aquinas have emerged, in any form remotely resembling the one we know. The same goes for Dante, Petrarch, the Renaissance, vast chunks of our inheritance.

Slavery is a great evil; and Lincoln was right to say that if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. But the new litmus test being foisted upon us does little to help us understand the nature and extent of slavery’s evil — or any other evil. The new standard is in its own way a narrow and bigoted one, unequal to the complexity of the human psyche, its apparently unlimited capacity for good and for evil. The souls of Founders are as complicated as those of other people; and they deserve to be the subject of a higher conversation than that which is now coming to prevail.

It is, in general, a critical error to judge the men of other places and times by the standards we have today. By today's standards, Christopher Columbus was a callous, heartless man. By the standards of 15th Century Spain, he was a wild-eyed, humanitarian, dreamer, who at one point, was in serious trouble because his enemies were intent on proving to the King of Spain that Columbus was too kind-hearted to be allowed to run a colony in the Americas.

By the same token, slavery has been perfectly acceptable in all societies and cultures worldwide, throughout history. Only in the last 250 years has slavery become to be seen as a positive evil.

The Founding Era occurred right at the beginning of that political and moral change in the way slavery was regarded. The Founders were, like all men everywhere, children of their own time. Condemning them for it is foolish. 

When Blue States Attack

(Review) Despite the fact that I generally don't like to link to Ann Coulter, because I think she's often too far over the top, this article raises an interesting point.

It's the blue states that are constantly sending lawyers to the red states to bother everyone. Americans in the red states look at a place like New York City – where, this year, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade featured a gay transvestite as Mrs. Claus – and say, Well, I guess some people like it, but it's not for me.

Meanwhile, liberals in New York and Washington are consumed with what people are doing in Alabama and Nebraska. Nadine Strossen and Barry Lynn cannot sleep at night knowing that someone, somewhere, is gazing upon something that could be construed as a religious symbol.

It's never Jerry Falwell flying to Manhattan to review high-school graduation speeches, or James Dobson making sure New York City schools give as much time to God as to Mother Earth, or Pat Robertson demanding a creche next to the schools' Kwanzaa displays. (Is it just me, or is Kwanzaa becoming way too commercialized?)

But when four schools in southern Ohio have displays of the Ten Commandments, sirens go off in Nadine Strossen's Upper West Side apartment. It will surprise no one to learn that the American Civil Liberties Union promptly sued and the schools are now Ten Commandments-free.

[...]

The alleged legal basis for removing all of these Ten Commandments monuments is the establishment clause of the First Amendment. That clause provides: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The vigilant observer will note instantly that none of the monuments cases involves Congress, a law or an establishment of religion.

Monuments are not "laws," the Plattsmouth, Neb., public park is not "Congress," and the Ten Commandments are not a religion. To the contrary, all three major religions believe in Moses and the Ten Commandments. Liberals might as well say the establishment clause prohibits Republicans from breathing, as that it prohibits a Ten Commandments display. But over the past few years, courts have ordered the removal of dozens and dozens of Ten Commandments displays.

How a local judge acknowledging a higher power with a symbol used by all three major religions is the same as Congress establishing a national religion remains a legal mystery – like, how the University of Michigan can use one admissions standard for blacks and another for whites and yet it's not race discrimination.

The Left and the Right both have an attitude that Nat Hentoff described in the title of one of his books: Free Speech for Me--But Not for Thee. That having been said, however, one must at least acknowledge that Pat Robertson, unlike Nadine Strossen, isn't in the business of sending hordes of lawyers out into the country to sue everyone he doesn't agree with in Federal court.

And, frankly, one wonders why that is. Could it be because, if put to a vote, the electorate wouldn't support their positions?

The other point, and one that I think is even more important, is the move towards complete secularization of the states. At the federal level, of course, there have always been secularists. James Madison, for example, a member both of the Constitutional Convention who was also elected to the 1st Congress (which wrote the Bill of Rights), was a thorough-going secularist. He felt that even the Congress' creation of the Chaplain's office was a violation of the First Amendment.

States, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter. It wasn't until the end of the 19th Century that the "incorporationist doctrine" derived from the 14th Amendment began to apply the provisions of the Constitution against the states. For example, Massachusetts had an established state church until the 1820s.

I think the federal courts often go too far in applying the 14th Amendment against the states. The whole point of federalism is to have 50 different "laboratories of Democracy" and republican government, and to allow the citizens of each state to allow their public institutions to reflect their peculiar histories and culture.

But, it seems often as if Nadine Strossen can hardly sleep at night, knowing that someone, somewhere, may be reading the constitution differently than she does. She simply must send the lawyers now! 

A dangerous crank

(Review) Byron York writes that George Soros may be a crank, but his money makes him a dangerous crank.

Hmm.

Well, maybe so, but it's his money. If he wants to throw it at MoveOn.org, he's perfectly free to do so, as far as I'm concerned.

OK, so like York, I'm a bit disgusted by Soros' hypocrisy. This year alone, Soros has given $15 million to groups like MoveOn as part of his personal campaign to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. And the well's not dry yet, either:

In the coming months, Mr. Soros will likely contribute even more; he has said that he would give every penny he had if it would guarantee the president's defeat. (And to think that just a short time ago Mr. Soros was avidly supporting campaign-finance reform groups, so dedicated was he to ridding politics of the corrupting influence of big money.)

Funny how little regard the Left has for campaign finance reform when it's their ox being gored.

There is, despite more than a decade's worth of empirical evidence that argues against it, this idea that if candidate X can only spend enough money, Candidate Y will always be beaten. Soros appears to have fallen prey to this myth.

Sure money is a very useful tool, and it's effective use will allow a candidate that might otherwise be a lost cause to run a very competitive race.

But, still at the end of the day, it's the voters who make the decisions about who wins and who loses. If money were all that matters, Ross Perot or Steve Forbes would have been elected president, and Michael Huffington would be a Senator from the state of California.

In other words, having a lot of money is nice, but it doesn't win elections unless your candidate can find some sort of resonance with the voters. And no matter how much money Soros has, his message simply doesn't appear to resonate with anything like a majority of the electorate.

Let Padilla Go! To a trial in federal court, that is.

(Review) Nat Hentoff agrees with me, and the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, that Jose Padilla--a native-born American citizen--may not be held in Federal custody indefinitely.

In the case of American citizen Jose Padilla, held — solely on the authority of the president — for 18 months in a Charleston, S.C., brig without charges, indefinitely and without access to a lawyer as an enemy combatant, the Second Circuit ruled:

"The president, acting alone, possesses no inherent constitutional authority to detain American citizens seized within the United States, away from the zone of combat, as enemy combatants."

In the 2-1 decision, the majority cited a 1971 Non-Detention Act by Congress, which itself was a reaction to the widely criticized imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in detention camps during World War II. The act unequivocally states that, "No citizen shall be ... detained by the United States except pursuant to an act of Congress."

Actually, back in 1936 (in Valentine vs. U.S.), the Supreme Court had declared that "the Constitution creates no executive prerogative to dispose of the liberty of the individual. Proceedings against him must be authorized by law." The case involved the extradition of U.S. citizens to France for crimes allegedly committed there.

Now, we'll see if the government can prove whether Mr. Padilla is an enemy combatant. And while we're at it, maybe we can come up with a more limited and explicit idea about who can actually be declared an enemy combatant.

That old-time religion

(Review) It turns out that Howard Dean has a hunka, hunka burnin' love for the baby Jesus. I was as shocked to learn about this as Jesus himself probably was. So was Zev Chafets.

The Dean we have come to know is the very model of the modern metro-secularist, a Christian so tepid that in the 1980s he quit his Episcopal church in a dispute over a bicycle path.

But on the eve of primary season in the Bible Belt, Dean has found religion. And not just any religion. That old-time religion.

He confided to The Globe that he prays every day, is a committed believer in Jesus Christ and plans to include his relationship with his Savior in his hitherto godless campaign speeches.

This will probably come as a surprise to Jesus. It will not, however, shock Southerners long accustomed to the Northern belief that they will swallow anything.

As a Southerner myself, let me just say this: We may be dumb as a box of hammers, but we're smart enough to recognize a phony. And don't think we don't know how Northerners like Dean regard us.

These people don't believe in much, but they are fervent on the subject of their own superiority. To them, America's red states (as identified in TV maps on Election Night 2000) are populated by ignorant cowboys, unwashed swampies, hellfire preachers, beauty parlor bimbos, redneck sheriffs, Confederate flag wavers and retarded hillbilly kids sitting in trees playing the banjo.

This picture of Southern inferiority, like all articles of faith, is immune to both empirical observation and personal experience. To guys like Dean, Dixie is and will forever remain a vast county fair where a slick Yaleman can sell 5-gallon jugs of snake oil in return for votes.

But even a casual perusal of elections over the past century should indicate the fallacy of this idea.

There's a reason no Northern Democrat has been elected President since John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon in 1960 (in a contest at least as close and as fishy as the 2000 vote) or that only three have gone to the White House in the past century and one, Woodrow Wilson, was born and raised in the South.

Which is why, in the upcoming election, a Southerner will also win.

It's a fantasy world they're living in

(Review) Politicians are congenitally unable to tell the truth. They are even more so when the truth is an unpleasant one. Such is the case with Social Security, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Without making your eyes glaze over with the numbers, here's the CBO's basic message: The trajectory of federal spending in health care, when combined with the lower revenue path implicit in the tax cuts the President has enacted, is leading America toward an explosion of debt that is unsustainable. The current "plan" would also leave us with a government able to do little more than fund health care and pensions for seniors.

The CBO's other clear message is that the changes this fiscal collision will entail for programs such as Social Security and Medicare (as well as for our tax structure) are better made sooner than later. This is the only way to assure that Americans can intelligently plan for their retirement, and that the costs of adjustment are shared by different generations over several decades - not imposed suddenly in a crisis.

Unfortunately, the CBO's analysis, with options coolly laid out to address the coming crisis, isn't echoed anywhere on the campaign trail - where both parties operate on the principle that some facts are simply too unpleasant (and thus too risky) to share with the American public.

Take Social Security, about which the "debate" has been predictably unhelpful. The Republican Party has pledged, most recently in the 2002 election, "to oppose any proposal that would cut benefits, raise taxes, or raise the retirement age." Democrats hold these positions, too.

OK. So no cut in benefits, no tax increases, and no increases in the retirement age. Presumably, then, the plan is for government retirement fairies to solve the problem by sprinkling it with magical pixie dust.

I have been saying for years that Social Security is dead, at least for my generation. There is no way in the world that it will be humanly possible to fund the Baby Boomers' retirement. It just can't happen. The Federal government has already borrowed trillions from the social security fund. A substantial portion of the fund's assets is nothing more than government IOUs.

It is a ponzi scheme in which my generation has been left holding the bag. Social Security is not as some foolishly imagine, a trust fund where all your own contributions have been stored for your own retirement. Current benefits for Social Security are paid entirely out of current taxes. Well, the baby boomers are all about to retire, and they are expecting me to pony up the bill to pay for it.

There's only one problem. In order for me to do that, something like 40% of my income will be required to pay the bills for social security. Those aren't the kind of tax rates that make American voters happy. The Euros may regard such extortionate tax rates with sheep-like acceptance, but the average American won't.

As it stands now, Social Security will completely collapse, unless drastic measures are taken.

It wasn't pacifists who liberated Nazi death camps

(Review) Austin Bay points out that it wasn't the pacifists who destroyed the evil of Nazi Germany, and suggests that, as well as being Time's "Person of the Year" the US Soldier should also win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Frankly, I reject the idea that pacifism, as a philosophy has any claim whatsoever to moral supremacy. Actually, I'll even go farther than that.

Pacifism, as a philosophy, is inherently evil. At the very least it is a knowing enabler of evil.

As Poul Anderson wrote in his novel, Ensign Flandry pacifism denies that we have a responsibility not only to confront evil, but to defeat it. It denies that we have a right to use violence, if necessary, to defend ourselves, while providing no meaningful way to overcome those who are willing to use violence to harm us.

The pacifist argument is that if evil men kill us, then we at least won't be guilty of committing violence if we let them slit our throats. Pacifism is, in effect, a "zero-tolerance" policy for violence. But this, like every zero-tolerance policy, is really a "zero-thought" policy. It is a refusal to use human judgment to determine when resistance to evil--even violent resistance--is moral.

It is moral blindness. It equates the killing of Nazi concentration camp guards as an evil equal to that of the Nazis killing of innocent victims. Anyone who actually believes that is, frankly, a moral cripple.

What the pacifists inexplicably fail to understand is that most human acts are, in and of themselves morally neutral. It is the context of an act that makes the act immoral, not the act itself.

Let us say that you get a knock at your door late one evening. When you answer the door, a disheveled woman is standing there. She tells you that she is being pursued by a rapist, and she begs you to take her in and hide her. You do so.

A few moments later, the rapist appears at your door. He demands to know if you've seen the woman. You tell him that you have not, and the rapist leaves. The woman has thus been spared.

Now, have you made yourself into a liar? I mean, isn't lying always wrong?

No, of course it isn't. By lying to the rapist, you have averted a far greater evil. But the principle espoused by the pacifists is that violence is always wrong, no matter what the circumstances. Which is much the same as saying that lying is always wrong. By that argument, you should just tell the rapist the truth. After all, no matter what he does to that poor young woman, it really doesn't have anything to do with you. And you don't want to commit the sin of lying, which is, after all, always wrong.

Perhaps you should observe the rape and prudently counsel him that what he's doing is wrong. That way, you can give yourself a pat on the back for using non-violent resistance to confront the rapist.

Not that any of that will help the girl, of course.

Indeed, the whole idea of non-violent resistance is rather foolish as well. It only works in a limited sense, in that it is effective only against an opponent who is willing to accept moral restraint on his own actions.

Dr. King could use non-violent resistance against the Jim Crow South because, at the end of the day, while Bull Connor might have been willing to turn fire hoses on marchers, Orville Faubus wasn't willing to call out the National Guard to shoot them down in the streets.

Ghandi could use non-violent resistance against the British for the same reasons. But a science fiction author (I think it was Harry Turtledove, but I could be wrong) once wrote a short--a very short--story about an alternate history in which Germans invaded and captured India during WWII. In the story, Ghandi led a non-violent march against the Nazis. The German commander, Field Marshal Walter Model, simply ordered his troops to machine-gun the marchers. Upon finding Ghandi and Jawarhalal Nehru alive, he had them carted off to a local prison and shot in the head.

So much for Ghandiji.

If the pacifists had their way in the 1930s and 1940s, Europe would still be a Nazi stronghold from the Atlantic to the Urals. The Slavic peoples of Europe would be illiterate slaves of their German overlords, and all of Europe would, of course, be Judenrein, the last of Europe's Jews having floated up the crematorium chimneys sometime in 1946.

The pacifists, of course, would still be congratulating themselves that they didn't allow themselves to sink to the level of the Nazis by actually going to war against them, blithely ignoring the fact that their failure to do so led to the extermination or enslavement of entire peoples.

The only thing required for evil to win is, as the famous aphorism goes, for good men to do nothing. Pacifism is good men doing nothing writ large.  

Another blogspot blog dies

Left Coast Conservative, a charter member of the Bear Flag League, has made the move to Movable Type. Update your blogrolls accordingly. 

...But it's an honor just to be nominated

(Review) One of my posts was selected for inclusion in the Watcher of Weasels recurring poll for best blog entries.

I got 1/3 of a vote.  

Just a little anti-spam web administration

Spambots: Try this on for size.

This is just what we need...

(Review) Great. The UN wants to take control of the internet.

Not seeing the forest because of the trees

(Review) Charles Krauthammer is bitingly sarcastic about the Left's unwillingness to admit that Khadafi statred shaping up about Libya's WMD program as a result of Saddam Hussein's service as an example pour encourager les autres.

Imagine this kind of thinking 58 years ago: "Japan Surrenders -- Years of War Deprivation Proved Too Much."

Dateline Tokyo, Aug. 14, 1945. Japan capitulated yesterday to the allies, worn down by the accumulation of hardships from the war begun with the sudden outbreak of violence in Hawaii in December 1941. The housing shortage in Tokyo had become particularly acute, especially since the nights of March 9 and 10. And there also has appeared to be an abrupt downturn in recent economic activity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It's actually quite funny watching people like the EU's Romano Prodi, or Sen. John Kerry jumping through hoops to contrive similar explanations for the Libyan deal. 

UPDATE:
Hmm. It turns out that the Washington Post bowdlerized Krauthammers column. Via Patterico, I see that the Ranting Profs have learned that the Post cut out the introduction that Krauthammer started this piece with. Why? Because it was embarrassing to the Post. Krauthammer started his column with an actual Post headline that makes them look silly:

"Libya Vows to Give Up Banned Weapons; Two Decades of Sanctions, Isolation Wore Down Gaddafi” -- Washington Post headline, front-page news analysis, Dec. 20.

That makes the snarky passage I quote above even more biting. Too biting, evidently, for the Post's editors. Patterico notes, "Remember this the next time the folks at the Post get self-righteous about politicians trying to cover up something embarrassing."  

Howard Dean is making sense. In a pig's eye.

(Review) George Will wonders what planet Howard Dean lives on.

Regarding foreign policy, Dean recently said not only that America is no safer because Saddam Hussein was captured but that America is "no safer today than the day the planes struck the World Trade Center." Well. He says he supported the war to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan, although he thinks it made us no safer. And even though he says the war in Iraq made us no safer, he says he would "not have hesitated" to attack Iraq if the United Nations had given us "permission."

Because Dean's foreign policy pronouncements have been curiouser and curiouser, his recent speech on domestic policy did not get the attention it deserved for its assertion that America is boiling with "anger and despair." Republicans are, Dean says, trying to "dismantle" the welfare state -- presumably when they are not enriching Medicare's entitlement menu -- and they aim "to end public education."

Dean is why there is both good and bad news for Democrats in Newsweek's latest presidential poll. The good news is that George W. Bush is in a 46-46 dead heat when matched against an unnamed Democrat. The bad news is that the Democratic nominee will have, among other problematic attributes, a name, probably Dean's.

Howard Dean probably does see a lot of anger directed towards W. But, since he's essentially preaching to the choir, that's not much of a surprise.

Some holiday weekend blogging

Yeah, I know I usually run a weekday shop, but I thought I might pop in this weekend with a few special items.

Happy Holidays, Everybody!

I'll be taking a few days off to enjoy the season. I hope you will, too. Seasons greetings to you and yours!

Hitch has a question

(Review) Christopher Hitchens has an important question for Howard Dean.

Not to end on too festive or seasonal a note, but the disarming of three rogue regimes in under one year isn't bad. If Howard Dean really believes that we are no safer than we were on Sept. 11 (and I presume he can't literally mean that the removal of the Taliban made no difference), then it's time he said what he would have done differently.

And it needs to be something more than, "I would have cooperated more closely with our allies." And when that cooperation produced nothing, then what?

I don't know how I missed this

(Review) Gen. Wesley Clark, speaking on the MSNBC show Hardball:

CLARK: Well, if I were president right now, I would be doing things that George Bush can’t do right now, because he’s already compromised those international bridges. I would go to Europe and I would build a new Atlantic charter. I would say to the Europeans, you know, we’ve had our differences over the years, but we need you. The real foundation for peace and stability in the world is the transatlantic alliance. And I would say to the Europeans, I pledge to you as the American president that we’ll consult with you first. You get the right of first refusal on the security concerns that we have.¹ We’ll bring you in.

WTF!? The Euros will get the "right of first refusal" on American security concerns!?

Why not just be done with the whole US Government deal we've been working with for the last two centuries and just make ourselves a protectorate of France?

But why should this surprise me? I mean, it's really just the Democratic Party's entire national security platform in a nutshell, isn't it?

I can just hear Wes Clark's inaugural address:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty, as long as France and Germany say it's OK."

I mean, we're not, you know, fanatics about it.

Fortunately, the American people will have "the right of first refusal" on Clark.
__________
¹ Emphasis is mine.  

Common-sense constitutional analysis

(Review) Baldilocks proves you don't need a law degree to know that McCain-Feingold should be unconstitutional. In fact, it probably helps if you don't.

Along the way, she poses some interesting questions.

What is wrong with influence, in and of itself? Influence can be large or small, good or bad. Is the potentially large influence of a big money contributor always bad? That’s how this normal citizen reads this SCOTUS decision. In judging that the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold is valid, the SCOTUS applies unequal protection of the law to the respective influence of a rich man/entity and an man/entity of modest means.

Being rich and having influence is being made to be illegal, because of that unspoken assumption: rich people are bad, every last one of them. Will it stop there? Who will be declared to be “bad” next? Who’s the next group that will be deemed to have too much of a sinister influence on political campaigns?

Actually, I'm afraid of what the answers might be.

A kind word for Microsoft

This weekend, I broke down and upgraded from Microsoft Office® 2000 to Office® 2003 Professional.

The biggest change is in Microsoft Outlook®. For example, the email filter for catching junk email actually work! Since I last checked at 06:00 this morning, I received nearly 200 email messages. About 8 junk email messages made it through. 174 were caught by the filtering system and placed in the junk mail folder. This makes going through my email a lot easier.

Also, Outlook blocks pictures placed in the text of the email, so all the porn spam pictures don't appear, either. Even though I don't really have serious objections to seeing pictures of attractive naked women, if I had kids, it would get me seriously PO'd.

So far the suite as a whole seems very nice.

That darn Gore boy

(Review) Albert "Party Boy" Gore III is back in trouble, again. This time, he's been busted for pot possession. Last time it was DWI.

Of course, if Al Gore was my dad, I'd probably be hitting the sauce pretty heavily myself.

More on Libya's newfound spirit of cooperation

(Review) Andrew Apostolou nails it:

The announcement of Libyan disarmament could not have happened without the liberation of Iraq. That the deal was concluded just days after the capture of Saddam Hussein was a happy coincidence. What made all the difference, however, was that Bush and Blair enforced the U.N. resolutions on Iraq, ending the defiance of Saddam Hussein and the torment of the peoples of Iraq. Bush and Blair have turned the threat back onto the dictators, treating the WMD programs as the death warrants for these wicked regimes, not their tickets to survival. The liberation of Iraq communicated the simple point that international obligations are to be observed; they are not an initial negotiating position with which one quibbles, negotiates over, and ultimately evades. While many in the think-tank lunch circuit in Washington, D.C. may find it hard to grasp, this message has been received loud and clear in Tripoli.

Loud and clear, indeed.

The government takes care of me

My employer has just passed out a little flyer to all the employees. It explains California's new Paid Family Leave program.

I can now take six weeks off per year, to take care of a sick spouse, child, parent or domestic partner, or to bond with a new child.

How nice.

Of course since I have no children, and my domestic partner is good health, I will never be able to use this six weeks off per year.

I will, however, be allowed to pay for others to take it. The Paid Family Leave program, you see, is funded by "contributions" from employees to the State Disability Insurance program. So, my annual SDI premium is being raised from $512 to $812 per year. So, according to this flyer, I get to "contribute" $300 a year for someone else to take Family Leave that I will be unable to use.

It's a "contribution", you see. I'm "contributing" my money. It's because I'm such a jolly fellow.

I could have, had I chosen, bought private disability insurance to cover me in case Chris or my Mom gets sick, and I had to take time off from work to be with them. But I didn't.

Fortunately, the State of California is run by wise and benificent philosopher-kings who have corrected my obvious stupidity. Now we have a state-mandated Family Leave system. And all it requires of me is a $300 "contribution" every year.

Besides, I would have just blown that $300 on trivial things like food, clothing, mortgage payments, or something equally silly. 

Capital punishment

(Review) Steven Pollard writes in the Telegraph that, after comparing the cases of Saddam Hussein, and British multiple murderer Ian Huntley, this is the week he changed his mind about hanging.

Either capital punishment is immoral or it isn't. By refusing to condemn any potential execution of Saddam, Messrs Blair and Straw and the others who have fallen into line behind them are, from their perspective on capital punishment, supporting a grotesquely immoral act. They are also exposing the deep flaws in their opposition to the death penalty at home. If it is wrong to execute Ian Huntley, it is wrong to execute Saddam. But that works in reverse, too. If, as the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary appear to believe, it is morally acceptable to kill Saddam, how can it be any less so to kill Ian Huntley? It is a perverted moral calculus which holds that murdering two children is somehow more acceptable than murdering 300,000.

I have never been an absolutist in my opposition to ending human life. Since I accept that there are times when it is right to kill, in the last week I have had to ask myself an unsettling question: when could there be a clearer-cut example of living, breathing evil, and when could the extermination of that evil be more justified? As I watched the wonderful pictures of Saddam's humiliation, I could not - nor can I still - think of a single reason why he should not be executed. I am left with only one response, which is that Saddam should indeed be put to death - after due process.

Much as I have tried to escape this conclusion, I cannot: there are no sensible grounds on which one can argue that it is morally right to execute Saddam but not Ian Huntley. Anyone who accepts that Saddam should be killed must also accept the case for capital punishment more generally. We can argue about details - to which forms of murder it should apply, and in what circumstances - but the principle is clear. Accept the moral validity of executing Saddam and you must accept it for executing Huntley - and, indeed, anyone convicted of cold-blooded and deliberate murder.

The imprisonment of Saddam has made me realise that, far from opposing the death penalty, I can see no moral alternative to it. As for the idea that it is better that 99 guilty men go free than one innocent man is hanged, the response of one visiting member of the Chinese judiciary to that statement is perhaps the most pertinent observation: "Better for whom?"

Despite its being outlawed, something like 60%+ of Britons would like to have the Death Penalty put back on the books.

You know, Mark Steyn is just a national treasure for America. Or Canada. Or Britain.

(Review) Steyn speaks:

Certain columnists, whom modesty prevents me from mentioning by name, have painted an eerily accurate picture of his living conditions these last six months. Even so, there's something almost exquisitely apt in the circumstances of his capture, pulled up out of a hole he'd dug for himself. The Democrats, the French, the European media and the various other parties who've invested in the Bush-quagmire story have also dug a hole for themselves. Al Gore briefly emerged from his own pit of obscurity a couple of days before Saddam's capture to denounce the Iraqi operation: "My friends," he said, "this nation has never, in two centuries and more, made a worse foreign policy mistake." On the morning itself, the most pitiful of the "serious" candidates, Sen. John Kerry, couldn't resist digging himself in a little deeper: "This is not just about one man," he complained, urging that now would be an excellent opportunity to hand everything over to the U.N., the Hague, the Arab League, the Westchester County League of Women Voters and other respected bodies.

Kerry doesn't get it: If it had been left to Kofi Annan, the French, Germans, Russians, Canadians, Arabs and all but two of the nine Democratic Presidential candidates, Saddam Hussein wouldn't be being inspected for lice by American medics, he'd still be sitting on his solid gold toilet in his palace reading about the latest massive anti-Bush demonstrations in Le Monde. The Iraqi people don't want to place their future in the hands of an "international community" that found it more convenient to allow Saddam to go on torturing them.

Very nice.

Dean: Not making sense

(Review) Fareed Zakaria writes that Howard Dean can't have it both ways. He can't say the war in Iraq was a mistake, but then say that we have to stay there and see it through.

The broader problem, however, is that the Iraq war has happened. Arguing against it now is refighting history rather than presenting a vision for the future. More important, today the reconstruction of Iraq is at the center of American foreign policy. In dollars, public attention and potential consequences, it is the largest single project that the United States has undertaken in a generation. President George W. Bush has placed it at the heart of his world view, making an eloquent case that helping to turn Iraq into a stable, modern and democratic state will send a signal across the Middle East, encourage economic and political reform and stem the forces that fuel terrorism. The Democrats have to decide where they stand on this basic, big issue.

Dean says he thought the war was a terrible blunder—a "catastrophic mistake," said Al Gore when endorsing him—but now that we're there, we should stay and see it through. This makes no sense. If the war was a blunder—draining resources and distracting Washington—the smartest thing to do is get out fast. Dean has argued that America must stay in Iraq because it cannot allow the country to become a base for Al Qaeda. But that outcome could easily be avoided by our pulling out and turning the place over to a general or Shiite leader who will also have no interest in having his country become a Qaeda base. Why bother helping in a massive transformation of politics, economics and society in Iraq? In a sense, the most consistent Democrat in the race is not Dean, but Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who says the war was a mistake, so let's leave now.

It's actually kind of amusing watching the Democratic presidential race right now. After the last week or so, its got that whole train-wreck fascination vibe happening.

Goodbye free speech

(Review) Long-time civil rights activist Nat Hentoff isn't happy about the McCain Fiengold law.

Not happy at all.

Libya and the threat of force

(Review) Bill Safire agrees with me that Khadaffi wasn't particularly motivated by diplomacy.

That was not what caused this tyrant suddenly to confess to buying and developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and to promise to reveal all to inspectors. He was transformed into a pussycat by the force of American arms in stopping the spread of mass-destruction weaponry...Not all rogue nations have gotten the word...On the whole, however, the post-9/11 Bush foreign policy — to remove the global threat of terror enabled by regimes opposing freedom — is succeeding. Events are proving that we and our coalition allies were right to root out the sources of terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the skin-saving démarche of Qaddafi demonstrates, introducing freedom to countries long denied it has a powerful effect on the actions of regional neighbors.

Yes, it's amazing how that works. And oddly enough, the phrase that explains it best is, of all things, French: pour encourager les autres.

As our old Soviet friends used to say, "It is no coincidence..."

(Review) The news about Libya's dictator, Col. Moammar (Muammar? Mohamar? Muhamar?) Khadaffi (Gadhafi? Qadafi?), and his new-found willingness to open that country up for WMD inspections has been met with the predictable responses by all the usual suspects.

It's amusing to see the same people who have opposed the Bush Doctrine now claiming that Gadhafi's conversion is the triumph of "diplomacy." European Commission President Romano Prodi averred on the weekend that Libya's reversal "demonstrates the effectiveness of discrete diplomacy and engagement, which has been the European Commission's consistent approach." The French and Senator John Kerry said something similar, as usual. But years of diplomacy by itself didn't seem to move Libya from its terrorist ways. Only when Gadhafi could see that WMD programs were a path to his own self-destruction, as they were in Iraq, did he agree to turn state's evidence against himself. Mr. Bush's new Proliferation Security Initiative, which is attempting with 10 other nations to use the military to intercept WMD shipments, was also noticed by the Libyan.

Mr. Kerry's Saturday statement that "this significant advance represents a complete U-turn in the Bush Administration's overall foreign policy" shows why he's going to have to mortgage more than his Beacon Hill home to become commander-in-chief. He doesn't understand that the credible threat of force, and often its use, is essential before diplomacy has any chance of working.

Jeez, these guys are just the Kings of Not Getting It.

Have the Europeans learned nothing at all from their own history. Are the 1930s so enshrouded in the mists of antiquity that the Europeans are incapable of divining the mistakes they made that led to the monstrous tragedy of WWII?

And what of Sen. Kerry? The United States has been in a legal state of war with Libya for decades. I believe, without checking up on it, that Col. Khadaffi declared war on the United States in 1969. In any even, we've been legally at war for decades, although it is a serious measure of Libyan impotence that hardly anyone on this side of the Atlantic knows it.

But our own dealing with Libya should be instructive. I took part in the 1986 raid on Libya. Prior to that raid, Libya was an increasingly influential--and public--player in European terrorism. After the 1986 bombing, however, Libya's willingness to directly challenge the United States took a sharp turn southward. While it may not have solved the problem, President Reagan's demonstrated willingness to go to the mat with Libya substantially reduced Col. Khadaffi's involvement with anti-American terror, and it completely eliminated the nonsense about Libya's "ownership" of the Gulf of Sidra.

Dictatorships generally do not respond to diplomacy unless their leaders can be made to feel that their very grip on power is threatened. Dictators, in general, must be forced into compliance with international norms of behavior. This has ever been the case.

This is why the Europeans, as well as the Commonwealth nations, can talk to Robert Mugabe until their lips turn blue, and he will dismiss them with insouciance. Or contemptuously remove himself from international forums that treat him with insufficient servility.

Something I wrote last year about Iraq is equally applicable to Libya.

The reason one-man states find it difficult make rational calculation is deeply rooted in human nature. When you rule a country and are surrounded by sycophants who constantly assure you that you are the reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar the Great, eventually you begin to believe it. How do you maintain a sense of proportion and rationality about your decisions when every decision you make, good or bad, is praised by everyone you meet as the wisest choice in history? If everybody around you constantly tells you that you're a genius, and your plans cannot fail, eventually, you begin to believe it yourself. At the very least, such an environment naturally compromises the ability to make realistic assumptions upon which to base decisions.

States like Iraq are not normal in the sense that they are incapable of recognizing international norms as applying to them. As such they are incapable of responding rationally to international pressure. Diplomacy, sanctions, and other forms of international censure rarely work with such states because they are immune to criticism from their own population, and feel relatively safe from having military action imposed upon them, often because they are not entirely rational in appraising the results of their provocations.

Khadaffi's willingness to come to an amicable agreement with us now, after three decades of being "at war" with us, is not a triumph of diplomacy, no matter how deeply Mr. Prodi may believe otherwise.

What happened in Libya was the Mr. Khadaffi watched America overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Ba'athist regime in Iraq. Moreover, he has direct memories of what his last run-in with an American President, Ronald Reagan, cost him. All of the sudden, he no longer felt "relatively safe from having military action imposed upon" him, and surprise, surprise, he's willing to negotiate while he still, can.

As the example of Saddam Hussein shows, negotiating with an American E-5 buck sergeant from your little whole in the ground is probably a less than optimal way keep yourself in Kentucky Bourbon and fine German automobiles.

Khadaffi's sudden reasonableness about WMDs hasn't come about because the US State Department is full of silver-tongued orators who could sell snow to Eskimos. It came about because the sight of US troops patrolling the streets of Baghdad and Kabul, while the former masters of these cities cower in caves and spider holes was an object lesson in reality that was too strong to deny.

That Mr. Kerry, and the rest of the Democratic presidential candidates, believe otherwise is simply more proof (as if any were needed) that they simply aren't qualified to be President of the United States.

It costs $1 billion per week. Feel Safer?

(Review) The nation's terror alert status has a little too much red, and too little yellow. It's Orange.

I suspect that until the War on Terror is completed, every major holiday will be like this.

Don't have a cow, man

(Review) The editors of the Wall Street Journal are hopping mad over the 2nd Circuit's ruling vis a vis Jose Padilla.

The 2-1 Second Circuit decision says that the President may not detain Americans as enemy combatants. If it stands, the ruling will give terrorists a large incentive to organize themselves in cells of U.S. citizens along the lines of the Lackawanna Six. The case now heads for the Supreme Court, which will almost certainly agree to decide it, especially since the ruling conflicts with a Fourth Circuit decision upholding broad powers for the President in wartime.

There are many problems with the court's analysis, starting with the view that the U.S. is not a "zone of combat." Perhaps the Second Circuit judges should take a walk in their own downtown Manhattan neighborhood, a few blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood. The two majority judges, Rosemary Pooler and Barrington Parker, might ask the visitors staring at the metal cross that still stands at Ground Zero whether or not "combat" occurred in this "zone."
This kind of thinking ignores that the U.S. is fighting, and American soldiers are dying in, a war on terror. The pre-9/11 mentality sees fighting terrorism as a law enforcement effort and lumps terrorists in the same category of criminals as car thieves. Wait until a few thousand people are dead, and then see if we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt who did it. But in a world in which terrorists have access to weapons that can kill thousands in an instant, all of the U.S. is potentially a "combat zone."

Well, actually, that's not what the judges said at all. What they said was the president can't just start calling anyone he wants to an "enemy combatant", without congressional approval, which, by the way, he doesn't have. If you want the president to have such powers, then give your congressman a call and encourage him to introduce and vote for such a bill. But I get very edgy around people who tell me how deeply they care about liberty, but then start worrying that the president doesn't have the imperial power to detain anyone he wants for an indefinite period time when things get a little dicey.

Hey! Liberty is a little dangerous. Suck it up.

Additionally, it seems important to note that Mr. Padilla wasn't found on a foreign battlefield holding a smoking AK-47, surrounded by the dead bodies of American soldiers. He was picked up at O'Hare, getting off a plane. In the former case, he would quite obviously be an enemy combatant. In the latter case, the only knowledge we have of his "combatant" status is that the president says he is.

But then, the president says a lot of things, doesn't he?

Yes, it is true that there are a substantial number of people who'd like to pretend that terrorism is a purely Law Enforcement concern. The editors of the Journal quite rightly consider such people to be fools. It is also true, however, that American citizens, even enemy combatants, receive a higher level of constitutional protection than enemy combatants who are also heathen foreigners, even if that higher level of protection allows them to enjoy a brief but fair trial before their hanging.

I don't have any problem with hanging Mr. Padilla. I wouldn't have a problem with a having him receive a summary court-martial and being shot out of hand by a military tribunal if he was found on a foreign battlefield.

But that isn't what happened, and, as such, he deserves all the rights of an American citizen, not to be held in prison at the pleasure of the president.

He is, after all, only the president. Not the king.

It's so tragic, I cried. OK, they were tears of laughter, but still...

(Review) Our NBC-affiliate TV news web site for KNSD here in San Diego is running this story on their web site.

A 24-year-old Mexican man is dead after reportedly playing a human piñata for some children.

A newspaper, Reforma, said the man was standing on a beam with a rope loosely tied around his neck and ropes tied around his hands and feet.

He was letting his younger brother and sister swing at him with sticks but lost his balance while trying to avoid being hit. He strangled when the rope tightened around his neck.

Now, the question I have is, what were the kids supposed to get when they whacked him so hard that he split open? I mean, it wasn't like there was gonna be a shower of candy.

I can just see him, swinging by his neck, and thinking, "Hmm. Is it just me, or is it starting to get stuffy in here?"

Some people are just too stupid to live.  

Time and Billing Update

For those of you who are interested, the newest version of my Time and Billing Access® database is up.

I have added new functions to plan future projects by entering planned labor, expenses, and travel. In turn, this information is used to automatically generate a time/cost proposal for prospective clients. In addition, the project tracking report now compares the planned expenses, travel, and labor with actual travel, mileage, labor, and expenses, and reports variances from the planned amount.

I've been gratified by the response to the Time and Billing application, and I hope that it allows more of you to use it, now that it incorporates both travel and project planning functionality.

You can download the new ZIP file containing the database, Word® document templates and the HTML help files by clicking here.

And, of course, if you find it useful, a few bucks in the tip jar would be a nice thing for you to do. 

Light Blogging

Today, and probably tomorrow are gonna be bad blogging days. Sorry.

A triumph of political correctness

(Review) Robert Samuelson weighs in with those of us who think the Supreme Court's McCain-Feingold decision was a crock, and a blatant violation of the first amendment. Moreover, writes samuelson, the court's decision rests of shaky evidence.

To justify abolishing basic constitutional rights, the court cites the danger that wealthy interests could, through campaign contributions, capture government for their purposes. But if the wealthy are trying, they either have botched the job or are remarkably charitable.

Consider. In 2000 (the latest figures) the richest 1 percent of Americans paid 26 percent of federal taxes and the richest 10 percent paid 52 percent, says the Congressional Budget Office. Meanwhile, most spending goes to the poor and middle class. In fiscal 2003 federal spending, excluding defense and interest payments, totaled $1.6 trillion. Of that, 81 percent went for social programs, including $475 billion to 47 million Social Security beneficiaries, $249 billion for 41 million Medicare recipients, $161 billion for 40 million Medicaid beneficiaries and $25 billion for 21 million food stamp recipients. Similarly, most regulations target businesses.

Maybe there's strong evidence that big contributions have corrupted lawmaking. Actually, there isn't. The court majority asserts that there is, but in a 119-page decision the justices devote only one paragraph to the evidence. They mention three controversial proposals that allegedly foundered on contributors' influence. Who said so? Well, two former senators who favor McCain-Feingold. What else would they say?

It seems to me that the furthest the campaign finance system could be reformed, as I understand the Constititon, would be to force all donors to be public listed as quickly as it is possible for the campaigns to do so. I think one can also prevent corporations, unions, and PACs from making donations, since they are not actual persons.

Other than that, I think most campaign finance reform is unconstitutional.

Not that it really matters anymore. 

Undermining the Government of the United States

(Review) I'm a bit late to this, but it needs to be highlighted. Thomas Sowell is taking on the US Supreme Court. And doing it well.

If you think the issue in the recent Supreme Court decision upholding campaign finance legislation is whether campaign finance reform is a good idea or a bad idea, then you have already surrendered the far more important and more fundamental idea of Constitutional government.

There is nothing in the Constitution of the United States which authorizes Congress to regulate what is said by whom, or under what conditions, in a political campaign. On the contrary, the Constitution says plainly, "Congress shall make no law" -- no law! -- "abridging the freedom of speech."

The merits or demerits of this particular law, restricting what you can say when, or how much money you can contribute to get your message out, are all beside the point. Just what part of "no law" don't the Supreme Court justices understand?

The sad -- indeed, tragic -- fact is that they understand completely. They just think that this legislation is a good idea and are not going to let the Constitution stand in their way.

Moreover, they know from experience that if they can snow us with huge amounts of pious rhetoric, saying the kinds of things that the mainstream media will echo, that their wilful exercise of power will go unchallenged. In short, the Constitution be damned, we're doing our own thing.

At least the people who engaged in wild west shootouts or lynch mob violence spared us the pretence that they were upholding the Constitution. Whatever horrors these lawless and murderous people might inflict at particular times and places, they never had the power to undermine the very basis of the government of the United States.

We are losing our liberties step by step. And the Supreme Court in particular, as well as Federal Courts in general, are the prime locus of the problem.

Our children will grow up in a country that is substantially less free than the one we grew up in, and they shouldn't forgive us for it.

Hamilton was wrong

(Review) Walter Williams writes that our liberties have eroded to such an extent that it may never be possible to regain them.

"Mistaking fantasy for reality"

(Review) Andrew Sullivan skewers the Democrats' criticism of the administration's Iraq policy with a thorough fisking. He concludes:

It's good, of course, that many in the Democratic Party leadership now want to reassure Americans that they are not merely the antiwar party. But in their vague and convenient allusions to an "internationalization" option that simply doesn't exist, they are mistaking fantasy for reality. Worse, they may be coming up with an option that they themselves know is unfeasible--merely in order to keep a distance between themselves and the coalition's fate in Iraq. That's putting short-term partisan gain over serious grappling with national security. Which is what many of us suspected of the Democrats in the first place.

Suspected? It's been a lot more than a suspicion.

A "bike path" world view

(Review) Mark Steyn skewers Howard Dean's inability to address serious issues in a serious way. But, as Steyn writes, he's hell on the little things though.

There was a revealing moment on MSNBC the other night. Chris Matthews asked Dr. Dean whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in an American court or at The Hague. "I don't think it makes a lot of difference," said the governor airily. Mr. Matthews pressed once more. "It doesn't make a lot of difference to me," he said again. Some of us think what's left of Osama is already hard enough to scrape off the cave floor and put in a matchbox, never mind fly to the Netherlands. But, just for the sake of argument, his bloodiest crime was committed on American soil; American courts, unlike the international ones, would have the option of the death penalty. But Gov. Dean couldn't have been less interested. So how about Saddam? The Hague "suits me fine," he said, the very model of ennui. Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude.

So what does get the Dean juices going? A few days later, the governor was on CNN and Judy Woodruff asked him about his admission that he'd left the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist because "I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path." I hasten to add that, in contrast to current Anglican controversies over gay marriage in British Columbia and gay bishops in New Hampshire, this does not appear to have been a gay bike path: its orientation was not an issue; it would seem to be a rare example of a non-gay controversy in the Anglican Communion. But nevertheless it provoked Howard into "a big fight." "I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens group," he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting.

And that's our pugnacious little Democrat. On Osama bin Laden, he's Mister Insouciant. But he gets mad about bike paths. Destroy the World Trade Center and he's languid and laconic and blasé. Obstruct plans to convert the ravaged site into a memorial bike path and he'll hunt you down wherever you are.

Yes, that Howard Dean is a fighter. Unless American interests or lives are at stake. Then he's all, "Well, what would France want us to do?"

Yeah. Good strategy for winning in '04, Howie. You just stick to that.

A historic day

(Review) Today is the 100th anniversary of the first flight of a heavier than air powered aircraft. We've come a long way since Wilbur and Orville.

Why, it's just blatant commercialism!

No, none of that Commie, "share the wealth" foolishness with me, no sir! Just good old capitalism!

Maybe we should have looked at the Wilson connection more closely

(Review) Andrew Thomas writes that Gov. Schwarzenegger's budget deal with the legislature is the same kind of betrayal the Pete Wilson practiced in 1991.

Schwarzenegger hailed the budget accord as signifying "a new day for California." But in fact it marked the end of any hope that the state's fiscal crisis might lead to permanent reforms that would limit the future growth of government spending and taxes. Moreover, the governor's stunning act of perfidy toward his own party, while perhaps in his own short-term political interest, should alarm the millions of Republicans and conservatives who cheered Schwarzenegger's election.

We wanted a guy who would tell the legislature no. We thought Arnold was that guy. It's beginning to look as if he isn't.

That's OK. We can toss him out in another two years if he continues to displease us.

The main point however, isn't as strong as Thomas paints it. The Republicans are basically a rump party in the legislature. The Democrats hold all the power, and they are they guys you have to broker with.

Politics is the art of the possible, and with aging hippies like John Burton running the Senate, what is possible might not be all that much.

Changing the dynamic in Sacto means a lot more than just electing a new overnor. To really change things, we've got to elect a new legislature as well. 

Cake: Have it. Eat it. Please choose only one.

(Review) Patrick Oliphant points out yet another Dean flip-flop.

On the substance of the issue, it is Joe Lieberman who poses the issue most directly. All Lieberman is trying to understand is how the good doctor would deal with the fact that if the country had followed his advice last winter Saddam would still have been in one of his palaces last Saturday, not in that spider hole near Tikrit.

I preferred Dean's more indecisive period just after Baghdad fell last April, when he confessed ambiguity when asked if the United States was better off with Saddam toppled from power. His more recent discovery of the view that it really is a good thing he's gone is more troubling because it raises the obvious question of how you can claim credit for having been against something whose main result you consider good.

Supporting Howard Dean must require an extraordinary ability to deal with massive amounts of cognitive dissonance.

Behind the Dems' rhetoric: more rhetoric

(Review) Max Boot writes that despite all the Democratic candidates' criticism of the Bush Administration's policy in Iraq, none of them appear to have an actual plan of their own.

This would seem a bit internally inconsistent since the Democrats are calling for Iraq to be turned over to the "international community" and to "the Iraqi people." Which is it? It can't be both. This also conflicts with another standard Democratic criticism — that the administration is guilty of what Kerry has described as a "cut-and-run strategy." What is the Democrats' favored strategy of "internationalizing" Iraq if not another way for the U.S. to "cut and run"?

But is the Democratic plan a realistic option? Specifically, is there any reason to think that the "international community" — that wonderful abstraction — is ready and willing to assume responsibility for Iraq?

The answer is no. The United Nations pulled out almost all of its staff after its Baghdad headquarters was pulverized in a suicide bombing in August. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has not given any indication that he is rethinking that decision. It's a little difficult to run Iraq — or even to hold an international tribunal to try Saddam Hussein — if you're too scared to go there.

Well, what about NATO? Surely a few car bombings won't scare off the world's mightiest military alliance? On the surface this would seem to be a more plausible option. A number of NATO members, led by Britain, Poland and Spain, already have sizable troop contingents in Iraq, and NATO is already providing some planning capability to support this deployment. It would be great if NATO took a bigger role, but this line of thinking runs smack into the alliance's lack of deployable military assets.

Just look at Afghanistan, where NATO has already taken over responsibility for the 5,700-strong International Security Assistance Force and has pledged to extend its reach beyond Kabul. This month, the indefatigable NATO secretary-general, Lord George Robertson, begged his members to supply some helicopters to the peacekeepers, who have only three of their own.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the French defense minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, responded with a sarcastic sneer: "I have a helicopter for you, Lord Robertson. I will send you a plastic model of one for Christmas."

If European states are reluctant to do more in Afghanistan — an intervention they all supported and one that has won the strongest possible United Nations support — what chance is there that they will do more in Iraq?

It would, on the other hand, give Howard Dean someone else to blame when the effort fails.

A clueless dreamer

(Review) David Brooks writes that, even when he musters all the gravitas he can he proves himself to be fundamentally unserious.

Dean is not a modern-day Woodrow Wilson. He is not a mushy idealist who dreams of a world government. Instead, he spoke of international institutions as if they were big versions of the National Governors Association, as places where pragmatic leaders can go to leverage their own resources and solve problems.

The world Dean described is largely devoid of grand conflicts or moral, cultural and ideological divides. It is a world without passionate nationalism, a world in which Europe and the United States are not riven by any serious cultural differences, in which sensible people from around the globe would find common solutions, if only Bush weren't so unilateral.

At first, the Bush worldview seems far more airy-fairy and idealistic. The man talks about God, and good versus evil. But in reality, Dean is the more idealistic and naïve one. Bush at least recognizes the existence of intellectual and cultural conflict. He acknowledges that different value systems are incompatible.

In the world Dean describes, people, other than a few bizarre terrorists, would be working together if not for Bush. In the Dean worldview, all problems are matters of technique and negotiation.

Dean tried yesterday to show how sober and serious he could be. In fact, he has never appeared so much the dreamer, so clueless about the intellectual and cultural divides that really do confront us and with which real presidents have to grapple.

Howard Dean: Clueless Dreamer. Hey, that is a catchy slogan. 

Ender's a little PO'd

(Review) Orson Scott Card, whose novel Ender's Game is widely regarded as one of the finest science fiction novels ever published, is taking his fellow Democrats to task. Many of them, he essentially says are traitors.

And the most vile part of this campaign against Mr. Bush is that the terrorist war is being used as a tool to try to defeat him--which means that if Mr. Bush does not win, we will certainly lose the war. Indeed, the anti-Bush campaign threatens to undermine our war effort, give encouragement to our enemies, and cost American lives during the long year of campaigning that lies ahead of us.

Am I saying that critics of the war aren't patriotic?

Not at all--I'm a critic of some aspects of the war. What I'm saying is that those who try to paint the bleakest, most anti-American, and most anti-Bush picture of the war, whose purpose is not criticism but deception in order to gain temporary political advantage, those people are indeed not patriotic. They have placed their own or their party's political gain ahead of the national struggle to destroy the power base of the terrorists who attacked Americans abroad and on American soil.

Patriots place their loyalty to their country in time of war ahead of their personal and party ambitions. And they can wrap themselves in the flag and say they "support our troops" all they like--but it doesn't change the fact that their program is to promote our defeat at the hands of our enemies for their temporary political advantage.

I can think of many, many reasons why the Republicans should not control both houses of Congress and the White House. But right now, if the alternative is the Democratic Party as led in Congress and as exemplified by the current candidates for the Democratic nomination, then I can't be the only Democrat who will, with great reluctance, vote not just for George W. Bush, but also for every other candidate of the only party that seems committed to fighting abroad to destroy the enemies that seek to kill us and our friends at home.

I wonder how many "Bush Democrats" there really are out there.

Yesterday at the Howard Dean campaign blog one commenter wrote that, upon hearing that Saddam had been captured, the thought of the boost that gave the Bush Administration just caused her to burst into tears.

There is, it seems to me, a fundamental hatred of America on the Left. How else do you explain that these people would rather see the US defeated by religious fundamentalist terrorists than allow their domestic political opponents to gain even the slightest advantage? How else to explain why the capture of Saddam Hussein would lead to weeping in despair?

That is simply pathological. Hey, folks, it's just politics. Get a life. Read a book for cripe's sake. Mr. Card's classic novel would be a good place to start, in fact. If you are so invested in politics that setbacks to your side start you to weeping openly in public, then you have serious problem with perspective.

Although, having said that, a problem with perspective is one of the Left's primary faults. Out on that end of the spectrum, America is not a relatively benign country where the vast majority of people have comfortable lives and wealth greater than 99% of the people on the globe.

No, to them America is a hideously racist and class-conscious society where minorities are routinely beaten and jailed for no good reason, where the rich executives at Halliburton secretly control our lives, where dark, sinister cabals control what we are allowed to see and read in the media, where the poor and dispossessed starve and die in the streets because of our callous and uncaring government, and where religious right-wingers are working to impose a brutal Christian theocracy.

To acknowledge that America is not perfect isn't good enough. Because if man is perfectible through politics and utopia is possible, the fact that we haven't achieved it is prima facie evidence of a societal conspiracy to prevent it. We are not, them, simply a flawed--that is to say, human--society, but rather actively evil in our determination to prevent the arrival of the utopia that the Left knows it is possible to achieve.

And, of course, those who oppose such a vision can't simply be wrong. They must be actively evil as well. How else can their opposition to creating the "workers' and peasants' paradise" be explained? People who oppose them must want to see minorities suppressed and the poor starved to death. Such forces, of course, must be crushed.

And we have already seen the results of that kind of thinking: Gulags like the camp at Sovloki, with its large, grimly cheerful sign, stating, "With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness." 

"Sir, there ain't no more strawberries."

(Review) Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) demonstrates how far into paranoid delusions the Left has fallen.

On Seattle radio yesterday, Rep. Jim McDermott questioned the timing of Saddam Hussein's capture, saying, "I'm sure they could have found him a long time ago if they wanted to."

His comments came during an interview on "The Dave Ross Show" on KIRO-FM.

"I've been surprised they waited, but then I thought, well, politically, it probably doesn't make much sense to find him just yet," he said.

"There's too much by happenstance for it to be just a coincidental thing that it happened on this particular day," he continued.

Rep. McDermott then began rolling steel ball bearings between his fingers as he declared, "Ah, but the strawberries! That's when I knew I had them! I proved with...geometric logic that a second key did exist!"

This is just too rich. After a decade of ridiculing the Clinton-haters over the "Mena Airport" and "suspicious deaths" theories, now they've simply fallen off the same edge themselves.

Evidently, however, someone talked some sense into Captain Queeg in this case. By later in the day, McDermott changed his tune.

Later yesterday, the Seattle Democrat said he did not know whether the Pentagon had manufactured the arrest of the Iraqi leader. "I think the fact is that the administration has been desperate to find something (positive), and this came up.

"I don't have any knowledge if they knew about it (Saddam's hideout). I think they (Bush administration) got a Christmas present early."

Uh-huh. "Please ignore my unhinged paranoid ramblings of earlier today."

This eye-popping, slack-jawed moron has, by the way, been sitting in the US House of Representatives since 1988. With all the coffee available in Seattle, you'd think that the voters there would wake the f--- up and smell some of it.

Uh, that was a little joke, Congressman

(Review) Jon Henke notes that Dick Gephardt doesn't appear to have much of a sense of humor.

I should also add he doesn't have much in the way of eyebrows either. 

I'm a good negotiator! No, really!

(Review) Dan Weintraub isn't to impressed with the compromise Gov. Schwarzenegger worked out with the California legislature.

The more times I read the bill, the more I’m left scratching my head at how little Gov. Schwarzenegger seems to have extracted from Democrats in exchange for a huge concession: his decision to drop any plans for writing a spending cap into the state constitution. Once he dropped that demand, he should have been able to run the table on the rest of the negotiations to establish a real balanced budget requirement, a bullet-proof reserve for economic downturns and a solid process for making mid-year corrections to stop a deficit from growing out of control...As several senators said Friday, this measure probably doesn’t do any harm. But it doesn’t do a whole lot of good, either. Examples:

• The reserve isn't big enough.
• There's no guarantee that the reserve will be funded.
• The reserve isn't protected from routine raiding, even in good times.
• The governor didn't get sufficient authority to intervene when a deficit emerges.
• The balanced budget provision isn't mischief-proof.

The outcome suggests that Schwarzenegger is not as good a negotiator as he thinks he is, or at least those skills weren’t evident in this round...He should just admit the truth: this is the best he could get from the Democrats. It’s a harmless first step but not nearly enough to achieve the goal he set for himself and the state.

So far, the best that can be said about Schwarzenegger's governance is, "Mostly harmless." We were hoping for something better than that.

Media Roundup

Guess what every pundit in the country is talking about today?

Bill Safire got caught by surprise:

On Saturday night, I stuffed myself on lamb chops and potato pancakes at a holiday party at the home of Don and Joyce Rumsfeld. Along with other media bigfeet, I chatted up Rummy and C.I.A. chief George Tenet, both of whom were in on the secret of the capture of Saddam a few hours before. Neither man even hinted at a thing. So much for being a Washington Insider.

But, you got a good dinner out of it, Bill.

Lawrence F. Kaplan channels Winston Churchill, telling us that this is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Amir Taheri enumerates both the good and bad consequences of Saddam's capture.

Austin Bay writes that the symbolism is just as important as the reality.

His arrest won't bring holdout fascist crime to a screeching halt, but it deflates the biggest fear of the Iraqi people, the return of the dictator after the United States and Britain leave.

A fear that will be permanenty extinguished when Saddam takes a long drop at the end of a short rope.

David Ignatius writes that the Entire Arab world has gotten a glimpse of the truth.

The pictures went out live on al-Jazeera to the Arab world, and for once no amount of spin could blunt the images: Arab viewers could see jubilant Iraqis parading in the streets, honking horns, passing out sweets, firing guns in the air in celebration.

Spin only goes so far.

Trudy Rubin writes:

But the seizure of Saddam, alive, provides a psychological turning point in the Iraq story. It gives U.S. officials a crucial second chance to get their flagging postwar policy right.

Hopefully, we'll grasp the opportunity.

Jim Hoagland writes that Saddam's claim to be the New Saladin is now exposed as the fraud that it truly is.

Saddam Hussein's ignominious surrender captured the essence of his quarter-century of misrule over Iraq: He was exposed as a blustering fraud who robbed his people to line his own pockets and to satisfy his monumental vanity. In the end he could not escape his own personality or the pursuing U.S. Army.

John Podhoretz says this sends out a message to the world that we will get the job done.

We didn't get Saddam by dropping daisy-cutter bombs on him in March and April. We didn't get him when we killed his sons over the summer. But we kept at it with determination and resolve.

Cragg Hines writes that it was the best perp walk ever.

It was the ultimate perp picture, a snatch of videotape showing a bedraggled Saddam Hussein with an American medic's tongue depressor rummaging unchallenged in the former dictator's mouth. Say ah, you evil jerk.

I wonder how the cavity search went. Not too comfortable, I hope.

Naturally, those of a more Leftish persuasion aren't having a lot of problems containing their joy.

Bill Saletan writes that this doesn't mean Howard Dean is toast. He can still win. Things can still go bad for W. Basically, it's a whole article that reads like Fredo telling Michael, "I'm smart! I can handle stuff!"

Ronald Brownstein writes with barely-concealed hope that things could still go wrong in Iraq. And the economy can get bad, too. And we aren't getting a lot of people back to work.

It just makes you smile.

Pale faces and strained smiles

(Review) The Democratic Presidential candidates greeted the capture of Saddam Hussein with a grim sort of "glee", perhaps because his capture takes away yet another arrow from their quivers to shoot at President Bush.

Joe Lieberman has evidently decided to pull out all the stops and shoot for the "Reagan Democrat" vote. Unfortunately for Lieberman, the vast majority of what 20 years ago we called "Reagan Democrats" are now called "Republicans." Still, it's probably the best shot he has. At least he was pulling no punches by stating forthrightly that, if Howard Dean had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.

Dean and Kerry, for their part, hoped that this would prompt the president to internationalize the reconstruction effort.

And why, precisely should it do that? Perhaps that might be a valid point if French, German, or Russian help had been instrumental in capturing Saddam. As it is, it seems to me that Saddam's capture further reinforces the point that, at the end of the day, we don't have any particular need to beg them for permission to do anything we need to do.

Had we followed the Dean prescription for "internationalizing" the effort in Iraq, the only thing that would be different now than in 2002 would be that French posteriors would be lavishly coated with American kisses. The trouble with the "internationalizing" mantra is that it effectively means that our foreign and security policies are set in Paris, Berlin, or Moscow, rather than in Washington.

Unless one assumes that leaders in those capitals are as concerned with American lives and security as our own leaders, then such a policy is remarkable only for its foolishness.

And, now, we can close the book on his sad chapter in history

(Review) I'm sure you've already heard it, but I want to add my voice into the celebration. Saddam Hussein is, finally, in our hands.

First a fair trial. Then a hangin'. 

Bear Flag Update

The world moves on. Blogspot loses, and Movable Type gains new converts. Two fellow Bearflaggers have made the move to MT:
Patterico's Pontifications and Aaron's Rantblog.

If you're not reading them regularly, well, you should be.

AT least someone is fact-checking Krugman

(Review) Jon Henke notes that Paul Krugman's New York Times column today is disputed by the news coverage of his own paper.

Too bad that the blogosphere is stuck with the tedium of doing fact-checking since the Times won't do it.

Bad reindeer

(Review) This is the shocking AP headline:

"Feds to Seek Death Penalty for Rudolph"

And, thus, the re-election of George Bush in 2004 is confirmed

(Review) Ralph "It's all about me" Nader is ready to completely spoil any Democrat's chances at election next year.

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader said Thursday he is leaning toward another independent run for the presidency and will make his decision public in January.

"We're testing the waters," Nader said in an interview with CNN. "It's a high probability but that is yet to be determined."

Nader has formed an exploratory committee for a 2004 run and said he would gauge his support through the success of fund-raising efforts and the number of volunteers who come forward.

Heh.

If you think Howard Dean is angry at George Bush, wait until Ralph Nader costs him the election.

Euro-whining

(Review) Kofi Annan now joins in the chorus of squeals

Gerhard Schröder had spoken earlier after a meeting in Berlin with Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general. Mr Annan called the decision by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, "unfortunate" and likely to damage attempts to rebuild transatlantic ties bruised by disagreement over the war.

Yeah, well, how much damage was done to our important transatlantic ties when Mr. Schröder ran a national election campaign last year whose primary issue was what a lot of nasty blighters the Americans were? A campaign in which a German cabinet minister compared George Bush to Adolf Hitler.

The Secretary General didn't have a frickin' thing to say about that, now, did he?

Maybe it is a slap in the face, but it's not a gratuitous one

(Review) Jed Babbin says it's a good thing the Administration has banned opponents of the war in Iraq from partaking in reconstruction contracts there.

Even if we didn't have good reason for excluding French, German, and Russian companies — which we do because of their governments' opposition to the war — we should exclude them because of what those governments are doing right now. We should have strong trade sanctions against nations that trade with terrorist nations. Which includes, among others, means the EU.

Earlier this week the EU announced the conclusion of negotiations with Syria on a new economic-cooperation agreement. If they trade with terrorists, they will let workers — i.e., terrorist agents and operatives — be employed by their companies in Iraq. Such nations, and their businesses, cannot be trusted to create or to maintain the on-the-ground security essential to the success of the massive construction projects in Iraq. And excluding the demonstrably untrustworthy is necessary to the success of our crackdown on the insurgents.

So, you see, there is a good reason, other than making the frogs scream. Although, really, that alone would be good enough for me.

Critical Mass

(Review) Victor Davis Hanson writes that the momentum in the war on terror is moving our way.

Our enemies instead are now reeling — if ever so insidiously. They have lost the free use of Afghanistan. Saddam's Baathists are little more than criminals and thugs in hideouts — soon to follow the fate of Saddam's progeny, statues, and "Hammurabi Division." Gone are Iraqi subsidies for suicide murderers, help for al Qaeda, and the stockpiling of huge caches of imported weaponry.

Indeed, Iraq has been trisected, with oil-rich Kurdistan and the Shiite south stabilizing, as the murderers operating in the Sunni Triangle are now isolated and in the cross-hairs of some pretty dangerous folk. Their desperate gambit to murder Italians, Spaniards, UN personnel, and other Iraqis has backfired — and has only solidified the world's consensus that such killers deserve and will receive no quarter. It will take years to assess properly all the positive benefits that have accrued from the demise of Saddam Hussein — precisely because the full extent of his evil will take just as long to explore fully.

The road ahead may be rough, but we are, at least on the right path.

Our tort-uous legal system

(Review) Bruce Bartlett provides us with more ammunition for the cause of tort reform.

This last point is reinforced by a new study from Tillinghast-Towers Perrin, a consulting group. Last week, it estimated that U.S. tort costs climbed to $233 billion in 2002, or 2.23 percent of the gross domestic product. This is like an $809 per year tax on every American, paid in the form of higher prices for goods and services, higher insurance costs and a deterioration in living standards...

Of course, legitimate personal injuries deserve compensation. But, less and less of each dollar awarded in tort suits actually compensates for injury. According to the Tillighast study, only 22 cents on the dollar compensate for actual economic loss. The rest went to lawyers or involved punitive damages or those for "pain and suffering" that went far beyond compensating actual loss.

Because juries are now willing to award absurd sums, the court system has become like a lottery, encouraging sleazy lawyers and greedy plaintiffs to take advantage of it...

[B]ecause companies still have to worry about jackpot awards, they change their behavior in ways that are often injurious to everyone. For example, it is thought that $50 billion to $100 billion is wasted each year on unnecessary medical tests that doctors order just to protect themselves from a lawsuit...

People are not unaware of the heavy cost they pay for an out-of-control legal system...Yet every effort to reform the system is blocked by the trial lawyers who have gotten rich off of it. And as the biggest contributor to the Democratic Party, they have the clout to do it.

Shakespeare was right.

The "Conservative Rehnquist Court"

(Review) Ramesh Ponnuru writes in NRO that the McCain-Feingold decision should disabuse us of the notion that there is any such thing as a conservative Rehnquist court.

Unilateral withdrawal

(Review) David Ignatius writes from Tel Aviv that the Israeli government may be about to do something momentous: unilaterally departing from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has also begun to drop hints about unilateral withdrawal. He has talked about "painful concessions" and described "occupation" as "a terrible thing for Israel and the Palestinians." Israel is buzzing with rumors about what he may propose in a speech next week.

Aides say Sharon would still prefer a negotiated settlement, because Israel could hold its Palestinian partners accountable for their actions. But if negotiations are impossible, Sharon, too, might favor withdrawal to defensible borders -- though aides say he would not give up as much territory as Olmert's plan implies...Yaron Ezrahi, a professor of political science at Hebrew University, sums up the new consensus this way: "First, there is no military solution to our conflict; second, Palestinian terrorism can continue regardless of the strength of the Israeli army; third, the price of settlements to Israeli economics and politics is intolerable."

"It is not ideology that speaks now, but necessity," Ezrahi argues..."The reality principle has taken over Israeli politics."

If the Israelis do so, then the question becomes whether departing from the occupied territories will take the wind out of Hamas' sails, or whether a perception of Israeli weakness will prompt even more forceful attempts to destroy Israel.

Our "friends" the Saudis

(Review) Steven Schwartz writes in The Weekly Standard that our very close and valuable allies, the Saudis, are up to their usual tricks in the Balkans. Fortunately, Balkan Muslims appear to know what's what.

"We cannot accept the endless agitation presenting democracy as opposed to Islam," [leader of the Albanian Democratic party Arben] Xhaferi said. "Albanian Islam faces an immense threat from fundamentalism. We are traditional in our Islam, which for us means pluralism, respect for the other religions represented among us, and repudiation of Arabization. Fundamentalist Islamists preach that there is only one Islam, represented by them, just as Hitler said there could be only one nation under one Führer."

"It is absurd that Wahhabis should come here and demand, in the name of Islam, that we live and dress like them," Xhaferi said. "Albanians will not allow foreigners of any kind to tell us our customs must be abandoned and our behavior determined by Islamic totalitarians. We have our own history, our own culture, and our own Albanian model of Islam, based on interfaith respect and the understanding that religion is private. They will not destroy us."

You gotta love his attitude.

As for the attitudes of the Saudis...

Getting it Wrong

(Review) Bob Herbert, like many other die-hard democrats, just doesn't get it. Or rather, he gets part of it, but the wrong part.

Any Democrat will be a long shot next year. Without an infusion of new voters (young people, white working families, Hispanics and women) and another huge turnout by African-Americans, the Democrats are doomed.

The strongest ticket might be Dean-Clark. But the Democrats need more than a candidate or two. The party needs a plan. It needs a coherent, compelling, convincing narrative that shows how voters and the nation would be better off under Dr. Dean or General Clark or Dick Gephardt — take your pick — than they are now.

To regain control of the White House, the Democrats need to give voters, who are frightened by terrorism and disoriented by the pace of 21st-century events, new reasons to hope. That can only be done by a thoughtful, united, energized and creative party. A party with a plan and a ferocious will to win.

A party that I don't see at the moment.

The trouble with this analysis is that while he has part of it right, i.e., that any Democrat is a long shot to win the presidency next year, his proposed solution is wrong.

The Democrats have a ferocious will to win. Indeed, the will to power is one of the most salient characteristic features of the left. Just review the past two years of obstruction and filibustering Bush's judicial nominees in the Senate.

The problem isn't that the Democrats don't have clear message. They do: raise taxes; retreat in the war on terror; allow France a veto on American foreign policy. Their trouble the Democrats have is that this isn't a message most Americans want to hear. No one ever won a national election campaigning on a platform of higher taxes at home and surrender abroad.

Herbert, like many of his ilk, are suffering from I call the Pauline Kael syndrome. Everyone they know, everyone they talk to, says the same thing: "If only we moved farther to Left, more people would vote for us."

It takes a massive and concentrated effort of the will delude yourself into thinking such nonsense. The American electorate is, if anything, rabidly moderate.

The number of registered Democrats is shrinking and the number of Independents and Republicans is increasing, even as the Democratic Party moves farther to the Left. That's not because the Democrats aren't moving to the Left fast enough or far enough. Bill Clinton didn't get elected to office twice because he was a social democrat.

Democrats are deluding themselves into thinking that what this country is really looking for is a "progressive." That's the kind of thinking that, if left untouched, will have them exist as a minority party for the next generation.

Dow 10,000

(Review) Finally, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 10,000 for the first time since May, 2002.

Thomas Sowell: The voice of reason

(Review) Tom Sowell asks, "what is this bugaboo that people have about Wal-Mart?"

First he addresses Wal-Mart's "market power."

Apparently this giant chain sells 30 percent of all the disposable diapers in the country and the Times reporter refers to the prospect of "Wal-Mart amassing even more market power."

Just what "power" does a sales percentage represent? Not one of the people who bought their disposable diapers at Wal-Mart was forced to do so...Let them jack up their prices and they will find themselves lucky to sell 3 percent of the disposable diapers. They will discover that they are just as disposable as their diapers.

He then points out how transient "market power" is.

Much is made of the fact that Wal-Mart has 3,000 stores in the United States and is planning to add 1,000 more. At one time, the A & P grocery chain had 15,000 stores but now they have shrunk so drastically that there are probably millions of people -- especially in the younger generation -- who don't even know that they exist...Let the people who run Wal-Mart start believing the talk about how they "control" the market and, a few years down the road, people will be saying "Wal-Who?"

The number of "powerful" retailers who've been eclipsed by the competitions is endless. Sears, JC Penny, A&P are just a few. Oh, by the way, when was the last time you saw a Piggly-Wiggly supermarket? Uh-huh. That's what I thought.

With Wal-Mart, as with A & P before them, the big bugaboo is that their low prices put competing stores out of business. Could anyone ever have doubted that low-cost stores win customers away from higher-cost stores?

This what is known as a "blinding glimpse of the obvious" (BGO) Except, of course, among a large proportion of people with advanced degrees. There is, it seems, a peculiar form of stupidity that one receives as one advances beyond a bachelor's degree.

Another BGO: Life is full of trade-offs.

How could industries have found all the millions of workers required to create the vast increase in output that raised American standards of living over the past hundred years, except by taking them away from the farms?

And don't forget the carriage and buggy-whip makers whose careers were destroyed by the automobile. Not to mention the thousands of people employed to clean the steaming mounds of horse crap off our streets. What about them?

The mind boggles at what would have happened when the automobile came along if the current Federal government had been around. I can just see the Federal government's 1899 job-saving plan:

• An immediate ban on all production of internal combustion engines, except for military or scientific purposes.
• Banning the private ownership of any petroleum based product except for heating oil and kerosene.
• A $300 billion farm subsidy to ranches that raise horses.
• 500% tariffs on all imported automobiles.
• A new DOE program to put 100,000 more street sweepers on the street.

Judge Robert Bork once said that somebody always gets hurt in a court room. Somebody always gets hurt in an economy that is growing. You can't keep on doing things the old way and still get the benefits of the new way.

This is not rocket science. But apparently some people just refuse to accept its logical implications.

A final BGO: There is no free lunch. 

It's censorship, pure and simple

(Review) Jonah Goldberg writes that the Supreme Court's CFR decision is pure censorship. And, it's precisely the kind of censorship the Constitution prohibits.

"The notion that the government can tell an organization like the ACLU when and how it should address important civil liberties issues is a form of censorship masquerading as campaign finance reform," ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero declared after the ruling.

Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, said the ruling is "the most significant change in the First Amendment since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which tried to make it a crime to criticize a member of Congress."

They're both right.

But, again, I'm not against the ruling because it's censorship. Censorship is a morally neutral government function. I'm against the ruling because it is precisely the kind of censorship the Constitution is supposed to limit to the maximum extent possible.

To me, all of these people who screech about how shifting a movie about Ronald Reagan from CBS to Showtime is "censorship" are buffoons, for reasons too extensive to recount in this limited space. The folks who exclaim that banning cigarette advertising to kids is censorship are right, but at least there's an argument to be had over whether keeping kids off cigarettes is a legitimate state interest.

But political speech is what the First Amendment is about. The artistic types who think the first amendment protects every taxpayer-financed bit of sacrilege on every public museum's wall, may have every right to be angry about government censorship of art, but art wasn't what the First Amendment was primarily designed to protect. The First Amendment was first and foremost designed to protect the expression of overtly political speech, of criticism of the government and elected officials.

So, is this it? Are we just gonna sit by and take this blatant censorship because it's part of the sacred goal of "campaign finance reform"?

Well, yeah, it looks that way.

Goldberg does go a little off the deep end on this though, as he starts to criticize the blogosphere:

By the way, where the hell is this much-vaunted blogosphere? If three freshman congressmen from Wisconsin hinted that they wanted to regulate the use of umlauts on the Internet in honor of Leif Ericson's birthday, bloggers would be on the steps of Congress up-ending cans of gasoline on themselves in protest at such an infringement on free speech. But here we have all three branches of the government severely restricting independent speech outside of the dinosaurs of Old Media and the relative silence — minus a few noble exceptions (The Volokh conspiracy, Instapundit) — is deafening.

Not all of it is, Jonah. In the wake of yesterday's decision I wrote this and this.

Clearly, Goldberg isn't reading The Review. And why not?

This prompts me, once again, to think about the issue of judicial review. Frankly, I'm getting awfully tired of Courts telling me that the Constitution means something other than the plain text of the document says.

The whole trouble with the idea of unrestricted judicial review is that if the courts are the last word on the issue, sooner or later they're gonna start acting like it. The only possible outcome of that kind of judicial activism is the replace our republic with a judicial oligarchy, in which the law is whatever 5 out of 9 robed lawyers say it is.

In a country where the people are sovereign, that seems like a key defect of our system of government. Because as it stands now, sovereign power resides in the Supreme Court, as unelected and undemocratic body as exists anywhere in this country.

If we can't even keep judges from enforcing the plain text of the Constitution, then they simply can't be allowed to be the last word on Constitutional issues.

"Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

My copy of the Constitution doesn't say "except when less that four weeks prior to election," or "except when special interests do it." It also doesn't say, "except when rich, egomaniacal investors like George Soros give soft money to the Democratic Party." Is says Congress shall make no law. I guess "no law" doesn't mean "no law" to the Supreme Court. It means...well...who knows what the hell it means? But, obviously, if McCain-Feingold is constitutional it doesn't mean what it says.

Oh, by the way, note to George W. Bush: This is what happens when you sign bills into law that you know are unconstitutional. Thanks, W.

Want to amend the constitution? The forget about gay marriage, or the balanced budget. Let's think about some way to reign in what is truly becoming an imperial judiciary. That implies some method of popular review of the Supreme Court's decisions.

But what that might be, I don't know. Any suggestions? 

UPDATE:
To show how wrong Jonah Goldberg is, here's a bit of a roundup on the Decision:

The Spoons Experience provides us with a handy, annotated version of the Bill of Rights as it now currently exists.

The SoCal Law Blog provides a roundup as well, cross-posted at XRLQ.

Ballon Juice is just filing this under "Outrage".

Greedy old geezers

(Review) Steve Chapman tries to explain why America's elderly--and almost elderly--are so spoiled.

Why do we keep indulging the grizzled ones? The most obvious reason is that they are so tireless and well-organized in demanding alms. No politician ever lost an election because he was too generous to little old ladies. A lot of people are suckered by the image of financially strapped seniors, even though the poverty rate among those 65 and over has been lower than that for the population as a whole since 1974. But it's not just the interests of old coots that are being served here. Young and middle-aged adults tend to look kindly upon lavish federal generosity to Grandma because it means she won't be hitting them up for help. Paying taxes may be onerous, but it's nothing compared to the cost, financial and otherwise, of adding a mother-in-law suite to the house. Working-age folks also assume that whatever they bestow upon today's seniors will be likewise bestowed on them, and in the not too distant future. It's not really fair to blame the greatest generation for this extravagance. They are guilty, but they have an accomplice.

I guess I was born 20 years too late. Because I expect by Social Security will be bupkis by the time I retire in 27 years.

On the other hand, the current generation of oldsters does have one point: "Hey, we beat the Nazis. We deserve it."

I'm not sure that holds true with the Baby Boomers, however.

It's surely no coincidence that the new drug benefit is being enacted just as the first baby boomers are nearing retirement age. Nor can it be forgotten that the organization formerly known as the American Association of Retired People—it's now just AARP—has lately broadened its membership to include all the boomers it can get its wrinkled hands on. AARP, to the surprise of many, endorsed the plan. And what a surprise it is that the prescription drug program, which will cost some $400 billion over the next 10 years, could balloon to $2 trillion in the 10 years following that—when guess-who will be collecting. You would expect taxpayers in their peak earning years to recoil in horror from a program that will vastly increase Washington's fiscal obligations for decades to come. In fact, they—make that we—can see that the time to lock in a prosperous old age is now, before twentysomethings know what's hit them.

Boomers have gotten our way ever since we arrived in this world, and the onset of gray hair, bifocals, and arthritis is not going to moderate our unswerving self-indulgence. We are the same people, after all, who forced the lowering of the drinking age when we were young, so we could drink, and forced it back up when we got older, so our kids couldn't. On top of that, we're used to the best of everything, and plenty of it. We weren't dubbed the Me Generation because we neglect our own needs, Junior. If politicians think the current geezers are greedy, they ain't seen nothin' yet.

And the Boomers are the ones with their hands on the money spigot right now. My generation, their kids, are just screwed. 

Susan Estrich: Gore's a loser

(Review) Long-time Democratic operative Susan Estrich lets Al Gore have it with both barrels over his endorsement of Howard Dean.

There's a reason he isn't president, and it's not just the chads in Florida. Gore has the worst political instincts of anyone to have gotten as far as he did.

Once again, he has proven why he is a loser and not a leader.

C'mon, don't hold back. Tell us what you really think.

A sad day for American Democracy

(Review) The Cato Institute's John Samples writes that the Supreme Court's McCain-Feingold decision gives Congress a green light to ban any political speech it doesn't like.

Beyond the specifics of McCain-Feingold, the court has granted Congress more power over political speech. In the past, Congress was allowed only to regulate money in politics to prevent corruption. Now the court says Congress can limit political fund-raising to prevent "undue influence" by some Americans. Because no one knows how much influence is "undue," the court has given Congress a blank check to restrict funding for political activity.

Before this decision, Congress only could regulate the financing of ads that expressly advocated the election or defeat of a candidate. Now Congress has a green light to regulate the funding of any and all ads on political issues during an election.

In effect, McCain-Feingold is little more than an incumbents protection act. It gives incumbent officeholders a huge advantage in fund-raising by blocking insurgent candidates from receiving large donations. It reduces the number of candidates by making the fund-raising duties so long and arduous that fewer people can afford to run for office. Meanwhile, incumbents can hold nightly fund-raising dinners for their entire term in office.

And, of course, if I and a few of my fellow citizens wish to get together and pay for a political add that criticizes a candidate, we are now banned from doing so for weeks before the election.

Sure, I still have a right to free speech. Just not during the key points in an election campaign, when it matters the most.

This was a great country of free people we had going here once. Now, our liberties are just vanishing, bit by bit. We will turn over to our children a substantially different, and substantially less free country than the one we received from our parents.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

Tammy Bruce, neoconservative

(Review) 10 Years ago, Tammy Bruce was a well-known liberal. President of the LA chapter of NOW. Today, she's a Wolfowitz hardliner. Her response to Old Europe being denied reconstruction contracts: Good.

I will remind all of you that it was the wrangling and delays at the UN, led by France, and facilitated by its little sycophantic friends, that gave Saddam Hussein months of lead time to hide his WMDs and make plans for his own escape.

It is worth remembering that everyday an American dies in Iraq due in part to the refusal of those cowards in Old Europe to assist in the liberation effort. Saddam, the remnants of his regime, and the al-Qaeda foreign fighters who operate in Iraq are aided and comforted by the attitude of Old Europe.

Every bomb that goes off, every missile that is shot, is made possible in part by the emotional support the scum of the earth receives from Frenchman who sit and chew on their croissants and maintain their Red Wine stupor on the Left Bank.

When you look at it that way, the whiny complaints of the Euros simply roll off like water off a duck's back.

Hitch Speaks II

(Review) Don't miss Part II of Jamie Glazov's interview with Christopher Hitchens.

It's just not fair! Ribbit. Ribbit.

(Review) The Euros are in high dudgeon about being locked out of reconstruction contracts in Iraq.

This is a gratuitous and extremely unhelpful decision at a time when there is a general recognition of the need for the international community to work together for stability and reconstruction in Iraq," Chris Patten (search), the European Union's commissioner for international relations, said through a spokesman.

Of course, it was gratuitous or unhelpful when the French threatened to veto any UN calls for military action in Iraq, too. But, I guess that doesn't count, huh, Chris?

To be fair, not all the Euros take the position that they should be allowed to escape any of the risks of war, but be allowed to make profit off it.

The German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel sympathized with the U.S. position.

"It is childish to reject the war but to be offended when afterwards no profit is to be made from reconstruction," the newspaper said Thursday.

Frankly, it's disturbing when a group of Germans are the sole voice of political sanity in Europe.

Lt. Col. West dodges a court-martial

(Review) Lt. Col. Allen West, who was facing charges for intimidating an Iraqi prisoner will not be court-martialed.

According to Article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), prior to a court-martial, military members are given a hearing that is much like a preliminary hearing in the civilian justice system, except that it is much less of a pro forma exercise. In this Art. 32 hearing, both prosecution and defense present their case before a military judge.

The results of Lt. Col. West's hearing are that he will not receive a court-martial. Instead, he will be offered (and he has accepted) Commanding Officer's Non-Judicial Punishment, as defined in Art 15 of the UCMJ.

The UCMJ sharply limits a commanding officer's available list of punishments. Moreover, whatever punishment is meted out, it does not count as a federal felony conviction in the way a court-martial does. It is, instead, an administrative action.

Also, accepting an Art. 15 does not automatically mean that you will be punished. Instead, you have what is essentially a hearing in front of your CO, and can present witnesses in your defense, etc. The CO then determines what, if any, punishment is appropriate. In West's case, the punishment can extend to fines of ½ of West's base pay for 2 months, 45 days of extra duty, a Letter of Reprimand, and/or 45 days of Restriction to Quarters (except when on duty). But no reduction in rank or confinement.

His career, of course, is over. A field grade officer who receives an Art. 15 will not be selected for promotion to a higher grade. This inability to advance in rank will, in effect, force Lt. Col West to retire in due course.

What Lt. Col. West did was wrong as a matter of military law. US soldiers are forbidden to mistreat prisoners in any way. Lt. Col. West bluffed an Iraqi--captured in the act of attacking West's troops--into thinking West would shoot him in the head if he didn't provide information about the attackers. In furtherance of that, West fired his M9 service pistol very close to the Iraqi's head. The Iraqi then gave up the required information, thus helping West save the lives of the men under his command.

I have to tell you, that were I in West's position, I would have done precisely the same thing. The niceties of the Geneva Convention and the Law of Armed Conflict are one thing--and important things as well. But saving my men's lives are another, more important thing. So, I would have done it, too.

I also would have known in to be illegal and that, if I was caught, I would probably have to answer for it. And I would have paid it gladly knowing that I had saved some of my men's lives. Better that, and to be punished for it, than to watch my men die, knowing I might have saved them.

He deserves some punishment, but not imprisonment or demotion. As far as I can see, the result of the Art. 32 hearing is appropriate. His commander, Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, will probably give him a letter of reprimand.

"Every vote must count"

(Review) Bill Saletan writes that in the 2000 election mess, Al Gore was telling us how important it was that every vote be counted. He was a real fanatic about in back then. Today, not so much.

Should Democrats fight it out and see who wins? Not if Gore has his way. "Democracy is a team sport," he declared as he endorsed Dean in Harlem this morning. "All of us need to get behind the strongest candidate."

Who decided Dean was the strongest candidate? Not the voters: They haven't voted. Not the polls, either: They've shown Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, and Wesley Clark scoring better than Dean in hypothetical match-ups with President Bush. The person who anointed Dean the strongest candidate is the same intervening politician who complained three years ago about intervening politicians.

Little did I realize when I wrote this caption, that it would be prescient.

Kowtowing to the Chicoms

(Review) The Washington Post is unsparing in it's criticism of the President for failing to stand up to Mr. Wen, the Chinese Premier.

For the past several weeks, Taiwan and China have been exchanging rhetorical broadsides about how the island's political future might be decided. Taiwan's democratically elected president, Chen Shui-bian, has been hinting that maybe his people should make a democratic choice about whether to unite with China or become independent. Beijing's Communist dictators have replied with bellicose threats to settle the matter by force, no matter the price. Yesterday President Bush essentially placed the United States on the side of the dictators who promise war, rather than the democrats whose threat is a ballot box. His gift to visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was to condemn "the comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan" while ignoring the sanguinary rhetoric of the man standing next to him. Mr. Bush had his reasons for doing so -- above all to avoid one more foreign policy crisis during an election year. But in avoiding a headache for himself, he demonstrated again how malleable is his commitment to the defense of freedom as a guiding principle of U.S. policy.

[...]

It's bad enough that the world's largest dictatorship might consider a nonbinding referendum opposing the use of force to be a provocation justifying war. But for the United States to accept such totalitarian logic is inexcusable. Mr. Bush says his policy is to oppose any unilateral change in the status quo by either side and to observe the "one China" policy of previous administrations. Aides say Beijing has been told that the use of force is unacceptable. But Mr. Bush didn't say that. Instead he swallowed Beijing's argument that Mr. Chen's referendum is somehow intolerable, and he dispatched a senior aide to Taipei to insist that no vote be held. A president who believed his own promise to "favor freedom" would have said yesterday that China's "comments and actions" -- from invasion threats to missile deployments -- were of considerably greater concern than a proposed exercise in voting booths.

The first second the Chinese think they can get away with it, they will launch an all-out assault on Taiwan. Temporizing by the president of the US doesn't help make this less likely, either.

Jettisoning the two-China policy was one of the worst foreign policy mistakes we ever made.

Rewriting History

(Review) Andrew Sullivan writes that one of the reasons the Kerry campaign hasn't taken off is that John Kerry (Who fought in Vietnam, in case you didn't know) refuses to take responsibility for his own political decisions.

Exhibit number one is Kerry's refusal to adequately explain why he voted for the Iraq War resolution.

None of this makes sense. Everyone knew last year that the president was considering war against Saddam Hussein. No one who voted in the Senate or House could have been under any illusions about what their vote could ultimately mean. For Kerry to reinterpret his vote last fall as simply a vote for diplomatic pressure on Iraq may be a good way to finesse the issue on the stump. But anyone with a decent memory will recall exactly why the vote was necessary and what its meaning was. If you give someone a blank check, as Kerry and so many others did, you can't then complain when he writes in the amount he wants. Especially when that amount was very clearly telegraphed ahead of time. If Kerry had doubts about Bush's ability to follow through, he should have voted against the war resolution. And the fact that, even now, he cannot take responsibility for his easy legislative position does not bode well for his ability to take similar responsibility when in the executive branch.

Well said.

One Iraqi's Opinion

(Review) David Ignatius, whose Washington Post column is, in my view, rapidly becoming required reading, gives us the views of one Iraqi, Ayad Allawi, who has so far been right on all the big issues.

So how can the U.S.-led coalition rebuild trust and security in Iraq? Allawi urges the Bush administration to fix past mistakes and build strong, inclusive Iraqi institutions.

The Iraqi army should be rebuilt quickly, to a force of up to 250,000, he contends. Officers from the old army should be vetted and retrained in Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan and perhaps Turkey. No members of the old Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard need apply, but most others would be welcome, he says.

A new Iraq will need an intelligence service, and Allawi urges a force of several thousand people. The coalition should continue with its plans to train about 140,000 members of a new civil defense force to help police Iraqi cities, roads, bridges and pipelines. Within that force, Allawi wants a 700-man counterterrorism brigade recruited from the militias of the five leading political factions -- to draw the militias under the wing of a new Iraqi state.

The Bush Administration had better start listening to someone, because, since winning the war in Iraq, they haven't been too successful with their ideas on winning the peace. 

Hitch Speaks

(Review) Jamie Glazov conducts a fascinating interview with Christopher Hitchens (is there any other kind) for FrontPage Magazine.

Cry me a river, froggie-boy

(Review) Our "allies" are protesting the US decision to limit Iraq reconstruction bids to coalition member countries only.

Nations that opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq denounced on Wednesday the Pentagon's (search) decision to bar their companies from bidding for $18.6 billion worth of reconstruction contracts, with France questioning its legality and Canada (search) threatening to halt aid. Germany (search) denounced the Pentagon decision, calling it "unacceptable," and Russia issued an implicit threat that, in response, it would take a harder line on restructuring Iraqi debt as Washington seeks.

Note to backstabbing European bâtards: This is how the real world works. Get over it.

I love the European sense of entitlement. Old Europe opposed us on Iraq right down the line. Chirac threatened the French veto in the UN Security Council. German Chancellor Gerhard "No, my hair isn't dyed. Why do you ask?"Schröder based an entire national election campaign on the theme of "Americans are just nasty little blighters." And the Canadians...well, who the hell cares what the Canadians think, eh?

But, of course, now that there's some scratch to be made, all the sudden they come over all concerned for the Iraqi people, and their desperate need for rebuilding.

Yeah. Too bad they didn't show the same level of concern when Uday was stuffing dissidents into industrial plastic shredders feet first. Or while those 300,000 people in mass graves were being put there.

Oh, and by the way, when do get our money for the Marshall Plan back?

McCain-Feingold is OK

(Review) The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, has upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

I, along with 4 justices of the Court, think this is a completely wrong-headed decision. I believe it violates the First Amendment in several important ways.

Now, the really interesting thing is that this will hurt the Democrats--who were the main supporters of the law-- far, far more than it does Republicans. Democrats, for example, rake in huge amounts of soft money from the rich. Republicans, on the other hand, get the lion's share of their money from smaller, individual hard-money contributions.

Now, soft-money fund raising has been banned.

Supporters of the new law said the donations from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals capitalized on a loophole in the existing, Watergate-era campaign money system.

That one sentence describes almost the entirety of the Democratic Party's fund-raising machinery.

I suspect that Democrats are about to begin rethinking their support for this law.

I don't care if there's a budget crisis, I want my money!

(Review) City and county officials all over California are on the verge of apoplexy--or like LA Mayor James Hahn, over the verge--over Sacramento's plan for dealing with the repeal of the car tax.

In a move that local governments fear would blow new holes in their beleaguered budgets, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration plans to use revenue they would normally get to make refunds to vehicle owners who paid a higher car-tax rate this fall, officials said Monday. It could mean that local governments, already facing reduced payments from the state, will get little or no vehicle license fee revenue for three months.

" 'Fiscal crisis' does not begin to describe what it means for them," said Chris McKenzie, executive director of the League of California Cities.

For LA alone, that means a drop of $19 million per month in city revenues. For LA County, the car tax revenues amount to about 30% of the county's revenues.

And this comes just two weeks after Schwarzenegger personally assured several mayors that their car tax revenues wouldn't be touched. As the Los Angeles Times, admittedly not the most objective sources where Arnold is concerned, puts it:

Retreating from two central campaign promises that helped make him governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday dropped his personal "guarantee" that cities and counties would be compensated for billions in lost car-tax revenue and reversed his pledge to safeguard spending for public schools.

Prop 98 requires that 40% of the state's budget be spent on schools. Arnold's suggestion that it be...uh...suspended for a few years has school officials in fits of apoplexy, too.

During a nationally televised interview on CNN, Schwarzenegger said he was negotiating with education officials to see whether an agreement on school funding next year could ease the budget crisis.

"We maybe have a suspension or have some relief there so that we can pull out of these next two years and then pay it back, maybe," he told interviewer Judy Woodruff.

His use of the word "suspension" sent a shock wave through school groups who have successfully battled for 15 years to avoid a vote by the Legislature to suspend the Proposition 98 guarantee.

And, just to add a little icing on the cake, Moody's has decided that the budget mess in Sacramento means that California's government is an even bigger deadbeat freeloader than it thought.

California, the U.S. state with the highest borrowing costs, had its credit rating on $30 billion of bonds cut one level by Moody's Investors Service after lawmakers rejected Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's spending cap.

Moody's downgraded California's general obligation bonds to Baa1, the third lowest of 10 investment grades, from A3. After the third ratings cut in 10 months, California is rated the same by Moody's as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, as well as Lithuania, Malaysia, Thailand and Chile.

For those of you who are worried that California is on the way to becoming a third-world country, well, maybe you have a point.

And the problem isn't going to go away. Oh, no, sir. The real problems haven't even begun.

California, the most populous U.S. state, is at risk of running out of money in June without a bond sale. The state is facing a $4 billion budget deficit this year and needs money to repay $14 billion in notes and warrants that come due in June.

And right at this moment, how much money do we have to pay off that $14 billion? $0.00

California has a problem. Well, actually, it has a whole buttload of problems, but the one to which I'm referring is the way the budget works.

California's state finances are a crazy quilt of spending measures, many of them dictated by ballot referendum that eliminates any discretion on the part of the legislature when it comes to spending money.

Consider this: Unlike most other place, local property taxes in California don't go to cities and counties. Instead, cities and counties are required to turn those revenues over to the State. The state extracts the lion's share to put into the education budget. In an odd accounting gimmick, the money the state collects in vehicle taxes is supposed to be sent back to local governments.

Local governments are losers in this deal. As I've pointed out before:

City finance in California is fairly precarious because the appetite for spending in Sacramento has turned cities into net donors to the state treasury. Currently, California cities receive less than $300 million in state assistance. That's 0.5% of the General Fund. At the same time, property tax revenues shifted away from the cities to the state through the Educational Revenue Augmentation Fund (ERAF) amount to more than $800 million.

Sacramento hoovers up all the local tax revenues then doles money back out to the cities as if it were doling out vials of it's own blood. The state then tells the cities, in effect, "Well, if you need more money, you can always raise taxes."

That way, the cities get to bear the onus for raising taxes while the legislators in Sacramento can keep feeding their appetite for revenues--and spending--without have to take responsibility for raising taxes to feed it.

In other words, city government in California is screwed, blued, and tattooed.

The other problem is that the budget has been divided up into too many special interest slices of the pie, because of the innumerable ballot referendums that mandate spending on specific items, mo matter what the legislature might wish.

Prop 98 is the perfect example of this. It says that 40% of the state's budget goes to schools. No ifs, ands, or buts. And if you even act like you might want to take a critical look at this, because, say, the state is rapidly running out of money (in which case the schools will receive 40% of $0.00), the California Teachers' Association and the rest of the education lobby has a conniption fit.

"To sort of broach the issue of suspension is an alarming development," said Kevin Gordon of the California Association of School Business Officials. "But hopefully, the emphasis of his comments were on opening the dialog, not necessarily an undue focus on suspending Proposition 98."

The Education Coalition – which includes groups representing teachers, school boards, administrators and parents – has tried to make suspension of Proposition 98 unthinkable for lawmakers.

"The minute you suspend it once in this type of circumstance, I think you are inviting a permanent undermining of Proposition 98," Gordon said.

Oh. I see. Well...good.

A big part of the problem is that there are way too many ballot-mandated spending provisions like this. As a result, the legislature has very, very little flexibility when it comes to setting spending priorities.

I have to admit, I was part of the problem, too. For example, I supported Prop 53, which would have imposed a mandate to spend 3% of the state budget on infrastructure. That was unwise. One of the primary reasons that infrastructure spending has dropped from 20% to 1% of the state budget is that all the money has been eaten up by ballot measures like Prop 53. The other reason, of course, is that the budget is also gigantically bigger, and there are a lot more things that we're spending money on.

Meanwhile, in Sacramento, the legislature is refusing to vote on a spending cap to prevent them from overspending the way they did in the late 90s. And they are refusing to implement the $15 billion, 30-year bond deal that would allow us to pay off the $14 billion in obligations that are due in June.

*sigh*

This is gonna get a lot worse before it gets better, you know.

Thanks for chiming in, Mr. Sunshine

(Review) Ralph Peters predicts--with 100% certainty--that islamists will soon be setting of suicide bombs in the US.

For the price of a single confused young person's life and some inexpensive gear, a well-targeted suicide bombing in Manhattan could whack the stock market, create an atmosphere of general fear and cost our economy billions in hasty, clumsy response measures. As a tool for making war on a superpower, it's a magnificent conception.

And suicide bombing isn't even a weapon meant to win a war. It's a tool meant to punish, to slaughter. It's a revenge weapon, whether it involves a hand grenade or a "dirty bomb" packed with radioactive material. It represents nihilism posing as religion. No matter what goals our enemies announce, their underlying purpose is destruction.

Thus far, we've been blessedly lucky. We've watched the horrible suicide-bombing campaign terrorists wage against Israel from the safety of our homes and offices with a sense that, well, those things happen over there. Some Americans even criticize Israel's attempts to pre-empt suicide bombings as acts of aggression.

Wait until it happens here. Many of those who criticize Israel will change their tune after a suicide bomber walks into a colleague's classroom or their favorite coffee shop.

What much of the world fails to understand about Americans is that, while we are an extremely tolerant and compasionate people, when we snap, we snap all the way. They see our tolerance and reluctance to go to war, and our reluctance to take American casualties as weakness. They never think about what we become when they really get us angry.

I can't think of anything more likely to send the American people howling for the heads of every Islamist in the world than a campaign of suicide bombing.

Who is Howard Dean

(Review) David Brookes' profile of Howard Dean in today's New York Times is subtle, yet damning.

My moment of illumination about Howard Dean came one day in Iowa when I saw him lean into a crowd and begin a sentence with, "Us rural people. . . ."

Dean grew up on Park Avenue and in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of Sheba. Yet he said it with conviction. He said it uninhibited by any fear that someone might laugh at or contradict him.

[...]

The old Dean was a free trader. The new Dean is not. The old Dean was open to Medicare reform. The new Dean says Medicare is off the table. The old Dean courted the N.R.A.; the new Dean has swung in favor of gun control. The old Dean was a pro-business fiscal moderate; the new Dean, sounding like Ralph Nader, declares, "We've allowed our lives to become slaves to the bottom line of multinational corporations all over the world."

[...]

But the liberated Dean is beyond categories like liberal and centrist because he is beyond coherence. He'll make a string of outspoken comments over a period of weeks — on "re-regulating" the economy or gay marriage — but none of them have any relation to the others. When you actually try to pin him down on a policy, you often find there is nothing there.

For example, asked how we should proceed in Iraq, he says hawkishly, "We can't pull out responsibly." Then on another occasion he says dovishly, "Our troops need to come home," and explains, fantastically, that we need to recruit 110,000 foreign troops to take the place of our reserves. Then he says we should not be spending billions more dollars there. Then he says again that we have to stay and finish the job.

At each moment, he appears outspoken, blunt and honest. But over time he is incoherent and contradictory.

He is, in short, a man unrooted.

"Us rural people," indeed.

Hillary Clinton: Enemy of the Anti-War left

(Review) Just as William Safire praised Hillary Clinton yesterday for her hawkishness in the War on Terror, so is Andrew Sullivan.

British anti-war liberals, lefties, and conservatives have just won a new enemy. This gung-ho member of the neocon cabal, this imperialistic threat to world peace, this destroyer of multilateral alliances actually believes that president Bush is too soft for the Iraq war. The president is too swift to turn over sovereignty to Iraqis, according to this critique. He needs to pour in more troops, display more resolve, demand more from allies, and take more time to get the job done right. Who is this foe of the anti-war left? Drum roll, please. It's Hillary Clinton.

Surprised? Well, so am I. But she appears to have as Baldric would say, "a cunning plan".

But Hillary did not engage in angry denunciations of the war, in the style of Howard Dean. She pulled a Margaret Thatcher instead. It's worth remembering she voted for the war against Saddam in the first place. And now she praised the president's visit, while criticizing him from the right. "I applaud the president. It sends a message of support," she said. "But on the other hand it isn't a substitute for a plan to increase security or to eventually create more independence for Iraqis."

What would increase security? "We have to exert all of our efforts militarily, but the outcome is not assured," Clinton opined. She opposed what she called a premature handing over of authority to the Iraqis: "I think an exit strategy, unfortunately, is being driven by our political calendar, not necessarily what's in the best interest of a long-term, stable Iraq." She called for more U.N. involvement and more allied troops, despite the fact that the Bush administration has asked for both and been denied. She was doing what successful Democrats have often done in the past - from Truman to JFK. She was outflanking a Republican on defense from the right.

It was a nifty rhetorical strategy - far shrewder than anything most of the Democratic candidates have been saying. And as the blogger Mickey Kaus observed, she can't really lose. If Bush's strategy succeeds, she can say that she favored the war and its objective of a stable democracy in Iraq. If Bush's plan fails, she can claim that she supported different tactics. Certainly she cannot be accused of selling out American troops, being weak on national security or wishy-washy in the war on terror. Maybe she's sincere. Maybe she's not. Either way, she wins.

Whatever else you may think about Hillary Clinton (the fetching Christine, my Signifigant Other, hates her) she is a smart, sharp pol. Maybe Howard Dean ought to ask himself a) why she isn't running for president this year, and b) why she's taking a foreign policy stand that is so radically different from his. Does she know something he doesn't?

Count on it.

A Troubling Influence

(Review) My old friend, Frank Gaffney is raising some serious questions about Grover Norquist, and his ties to Islamist radicals and, to be blunt, terrorists.

I've known Frank for about 10 years now, and I'm acquainted with Grover as well, having interviewed him several times. Frank was a defense official in the Reagan Administration, and now heads the Center for Security Policy in Washington. Grover is a long-time advocate of smaller government, lower taxes, and he was a staunch anti-Communist when it really mattered.

Grover is a well-respected--and powerful--libertarian/conservative force in Washington, and my impression of him in the dozens of times we have spoken is that he is the last guy who's consort with this country's enemies.

But Frank raises some very serious questions about Grover's Islamist ties, and, as far as I can tell, Grover hasn't really answered him.

The Big Endorsement

(Review) Al Gore has thrown his support behind Howard Dean. I guess the Dem nomination race is essentially over at this point. It's difficult to see how anyone but Dean becomes the nominee, even though the first caucus in Iowa hasn't even happened yet.

"I'm very proud and honored to endorse Howard Dean as the next president of the United States," Gore said with Dean at his side.

"Howard Dean really is the only candidate who has been able to inspire at the grassroots level, all over this country, the kind of action and enthusiasm for democracy and for change and transformation of America that we need in this country. We need to remake the Democratic Party, we need to remake America. We need to take it back on behalf of the people of the country."

I'm not sure anything Gore said is really true at all. What Dean has been able to do is to tap into the Bush hatred so prevalent in the party's leftmost wing, who happen to make up the lion's share of Dem primary voters.

These are not, however, the people who win elections. Dean will get the support of more than half of Democrats. That's 15% of the electorate.

But, being able to tap into the anger and hatred the Left has for Bush doesn't strike me as a particularly effective way to win an actual election. There was plenty of Clinton hatred in 1996, but tapping into it didn't do Bob "Where's the Outrage" Dole much good on the first Tuesday in November.

The fact is that the haters, either of the Left or the Right, are the fringe of their parties. But their support doesn't translate well into the general election, because the majority of the electorate is repelled by ideologues.

There are certainly plenty of pitfalls that may trap George W. Bush before next November. The economic recovery may stall. Things may head south in Iraq, due to his rather inept handling of the occupation. But that really means the election is his to lose, not Dean's to win.

Yes, the last election was close, really, too close to call. But was that because people were prone to reject the Bush program, or was it because there was some doubt about his ability to govern? Because if it was, as I believe, the latter, then I think he's laid those doubts to rest for the most part. And if so, that makes him, as a sitting president, the presumptive winner of the 2004 election.

We tend not to reject sitting presidents, absent compelling reasons. With Carter, it was the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and his apparent impotence to do anything about it. With Bush 41, it was his apparent inability to recognize that the economy had turned fairly sour. And his inept efforts to belatedly recognize it ("Message: I Care.") were ham-handed and condescending. Even at that, without Ross Perot in the race, it seems not unreasonable to believe that Bush would have won, anyway.

I think the Democrats are deluding themselves if they think that an angry, short-tempered Howard Dean is the guy that will lead them out of the political wilderness. I think they are mistaking the feelings of a relatively small group of Democrats with that of the electorate at large.

One is reminded of Pauline Kael who, upon learning that Richard Nixon had defeated George McGovern, is said to have blurted, "How can that be? No one I know voted for Nixon."

I think the Democrats are headed for a similar moment if they nominate Howard Dean.

It may be "soft" but it certainly isn't "power"

(Review) Amir Taheri writes on the perils of "soft power" in today's New York Post.

Soft power, however, is as old as history. The payments of tribute, and exchange of gifts, including hostages and slaves, are forms of soft power used throughout history. Semiramis and Cleopatra used another form of "soft power" by enticing enemy generals into their beds. Machiavelli's Realpolitik cocktail was a mixture of persuasion (soft power) with coercion (hard power).

Needless to say, it is preferable to achieve one's goal with soft power rather than hard, which could include war. The problem, however, is that many individuals and regimes regard the use of soft power by an adversary as a sign of weakness, and are thus emboldened in their deadly enterprises.

The use of soft power did not prevent Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia and the end of the League of Nations. Soft power extracted a "peace in our time" from Hitler in Munich, but accelerated the advent of the Second World War.

For the most, the nations who have resorted to soft power "solutions" have done so because they lacked either the strength or the will to do otherwise. Neville Chamberlain flew for the very first time in his life, to Munich, in order to deliberately give away the entire Czech nation to Hitler. It wasn't really his to give, of course, but the Czechs were, after all, "a faraway people about which we know little."

Hitler, of course, recognized this for what it was. "I saw my enemies at Munich," he later declared. "They are little worms."

The problem with soft power is that it is all too easily mistaken for weakness, mainly because it is most often the resort of weak states. The EU, for example, is the world's prime proponent of soft power. But, since, with their combined military might, they couldn't organize a successful panty raid on a girl's dormitory, they have no other choice.

Dictators are especially prone to dismissing soft power in much the same way as Josef Stalin dismissed the soft power of the Pope. "How many divisions has the Pope?" Stalin asked.

The answer was: Not enough.

Pander Bears

(Review) Wow. Even the Washington Post is disgusted with the amount of pandering the Democratic presidential candidates are willing to do.

The Democrats pay lip service to the notion of "paying for" their new programs, but their methods are either politically unattainable (roll back all the tax cuts) or gauzy wand-waving (get rid of waste). Even if a Republican-controlled Congress were inclined to undo some tax cuts, they weren't affordable in the first place; the savings wouldn't be found money to be instantly plunked into other spending.

The candidates' pandering isn't limited to peddling new programs. Mr. Bush announced the other day that he was lifting the steel tariffs, and bingo, there were Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Dean -- a reformed NAFTA supporter -- to denounce him. Meantime, any experimentation with responsibility is immediate fodder for attack. Witness, for example, Mr. Kerry's outraged demand of Mr. Dean at a recent debate: "Do you intend to slow the rate of growth in Medicare?" Imagine such heresy. Is there no interest group the candidates are willing to offend with honesty, no party constituency to which they won't kowtow?

Don't worry about answering. The question's obviously rhetorical.

Two Chinas

(Review) Peter Brookes writes that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is coming to Washington in order to try and push us around on Taiwan. Brookes suggests that we do a little pushing of our own.

In the face of a barrage of well-scripted Chinese talking points, President Bush would be prudent to remind Wen that there is a steady hand on the tiller of U.S.-China-Taiwan policy, specifically:

* There has been no change in U.S. policy: America's recognition of the PRC was, and is still, based on the premise that Taiwan's future will be determined peacefully and by mutual agreement of the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. China's deployment of 500 ballistic missiles opposite Taiwan undermines that foundation. So, Mr. Wen, call off the dogs.

* America will respond to China's military buildup by continuing to sell arms to Taiwan to maintain the military balance across the Taiwan Strait. The choice of an arms race is Beijing's. And the security of the first democracy in Chinese history (i.e., Taiwan) is in America's interest.

* Washington has a robust, mature relationship with the government of Taiwan, and this serves everybody's interest. It is Washington's expectation that Taiwan, like China, will do nothing to destabilize the peaceful status quo across the Taiwan Strait - especially for domestic political purposes. Chinese threats will only strengthen Taiwan's call for independence.

* The United States appreciates China's assistance with the North Korean nuclear dilemma. But considering China's proximity to North Korea and the effect of a war along China's periphery, Wen should not lose sight of the fact that a peaceful, nuclear-free Korean peninsula is in China's interest at least as much as it is in America's.

I am reminded of the old Doonesbury strip when the Raoul Duke character was made Gerald Ford's envoy to China. In his first meeting to the Chinese on the tarmac at Beijing Airport, his reply to the Chinese foreign minister's welcome speech contained the phrase, "I'm sure I would be just as saddened as you to see US gunboats steaming up the Yangtze."  

Fortunately, his translator, "Honey" Huang, conveyed that to the minister as, "He also wishes your wife long life and good health."

Praising Hillary

(Review) William Safire writes that Hillary Clinton could be quite a threat to George W. Bush.

Consider the political meaning of all this. Here is a Democrat who has no regrets for voting for the resolution empowering the president to invade Iraq; who insists repeatedly and resolutely that "failure is not an option"; who is ready to send in a substantially greater U.S. force to avert any such policy failure — and yet whose latest poll ratings show her to be the favorite of 43 percent of Democrats, three times the nomination support given front-runner Howard Dean.

What cooks? One reason is that Hillary stands aloof, hard to get, while all the others are slavering for support. Another could be that most Democrats don't yet realize she's a hard-liner at heart. A third is that her personal appeal to liberals (and apoplectic opposition from conservatives) overwhelms all Democrats' policy differences. A fourth — and don't noise this around — could be that she speaks for the silent majority of centrist Democrats who yearn for the Old Third Way without Mr. Clinton.

President in 2008? 

Our "friends" the Saudis

(Review) US News details in a 10-page story, how much of modern terror can be traced directly to our good friends, the Saudis.

Warning: USNews.com is now configured to throw more pop-ups at you than a porn site.

Litigation Hell

(Review) Newsweek covers the massive cost that litigiousness imposes on our society.

Curious as to why medical insurance costs are doubling every 7 years? Ask no more:

Most Americans do not go to work every day, at least not yet, wondering if they are going to get sued. But many doctors do, especially those in high-risk specialties like obstetrics and surgery. “Every patient is a potential litigant, every family member is a potential plaintiff,” says Dr. Thomas Rawlinson, a Memphis, Tenn., internist. Fear of a lawsuit would probably deter him from stopping to help a stranger injured in an accident, he says—and Rawlinson hasn’t even been sued yet.

While doctors win most malpractice cases that go to trial, their insurers lose often enough to want to settle many claims. (In California recently, a couple won a $70 million judgment against Stanford University Hospital and two other health-care centers for failing to prevent their child from becoming disabled by a rare birth condition.) Sometimes, the malpractice is egregious. But then there are cases that, in an earlier era, would have been dismissed as the patient’s own fault. Take the pending lawsuit by a 29-year-old drug addict who sued a Pennsylvania mental hospital for failing to prevent her from overdosing on drugs and cutting herself. The hospital should have warned visitors against bringing drugs into the hospital, the lawsuit claimed. The staff should have noticed that —a visitor had sneaked some heroin and cocaine to her. The hospital’s job, her lawyers claim, was to protect her from herself.

No wonder, according to one estimate, doctors waste $50 billion to $100 billion on “defensive medicine” to prove that they left no stone unturned, no test untried, no medication unprescribed, no specialist unconsulted. That kind of money could buy health insurance for the 40 million Americans who have none.

Of course, it's just not medicine. Literally every aspect of our society has been trouched by litigation fear. Until we have some moderately draconian tort reform, we will continue paying the cost of that fear.

Winning hearts and minds

(Review) In contrast to my last post, the views expressed by military commanders in this Washington Post article in Iraq seem more positive and hopeful. Typical is the response of Col. Jefforey Smith, CO of the 3rd Brigade, 505 PIR, 82d Airborne:

We do not sit around and compare numbers of enemy and friendly wounded and killed in action and number of captured people. We do discuss the effects of our leadership engagement with local Iraqi leaders, cooperation and communication with Iraqi security forces and most importantly the effects of our dialog with the Iraqi people. Additionally, we work very hard to assist with economic and governance development. And yes, we discuss enemy vulnerabilities and capabilities and plan and conduct military operations to take them down. Examples of signs of progress in my area of responsibility [include]:

• Improved cooperation with Iraqi Police [and] Facility Protection Service security forces . . . ;

• Greater willingness of the Iraqi people to be forthcoming with information that leads us to Former Regime Elements . . . ;

• Iraqi Police are doing a better job enforcing basic law and order . . . .

I sure hope that's true. But, as much as I hope so, I still hear, in the back of my mind, Gen. William Westmoreland saying, "I believe we can see the light at the end of the tunnel." 

Off the reservation

(Review) Former House Speaker and current member of the Defense Policy Board, Newt Gingrich has some serious questions about our strategy in Iraq.

Gingrich argues that the administration has been putting far too much emphasis on a military solution and slighting the political element. “The real key here is not how many enemy do I kill. The real key is how many allies do I grow,” he says. “And that is a very important metric that they just don’t get.” He contends that the civilian-run CPA is fairly isolated and powerless, hunkered down inside its bunker in Baghdad. The military has the money and the daily contact with the locals. But it’s using the same tactics in a guerrilla struggle that led to defeat in Vietnam.

I would quibble with the factual accuracy of that last statement. American forces were never "defeated" in Vietnam, even if America itself was.

What the Commanders in Vietnam never did, however, was tailor the fight to the type of war they faced. In the first half of the conflict, while it was a guerrilla insurgency, they tried to fight it as a conventional war. Later, as it became a conventional war, with NVA regulars fighting openly in the country, the Army began fighting it as if it were a guerrilla insurgency.

In any event, no matter how the war was fought, winning hearts and minds was the only true victory we could ever had. At the end of the day, the Vietnamese people had to live there. We didn't. We could always go "home."

By the same token, Iraq isn't our country. And, just like the North Vietnamese, we can never kill enough Iraqis (or Saudis, Syrians, Lebanese, etc.) to end the insurgency there.

Only a functioning Iraqi government--with a fair amount of legitimacy in the Iraqi public's regard--can provide the means to end the insurgency. One of the main problems in Vietnam was that, once we acquiesced in the assassination of President Diem (who was, it must be said, no sweetheart) we continued to acquiesce in allowing a succession of military strongmen to run the place, solely for the purpose of looting it for their own benefit. As a result, there was little love for the government in South Vietnam, and little incentive for the people to defend it against the NVA and Viet Cong. What was needed in Vietnam was not a succession of Generalissimos like "Big" Minh, but a government with some semblance of legitimacy with the people, and one that also exhibited a least a shred of compassion for them. Similarly, some sort of respectable Iraqi government is what is needed now.

But our efforts seem less focused on getting that government going than they do on hunting down insurgents.

Now, don't get me wrong, hunting down insurgents is both a good and necessary thing. But it is not, in and of itself, a winning strategy, however necessary is might be as an adjunct of one.

It's also a heck of a lot more seductive because, let's face it, it's easier. I mean, how do you create some sort of legitimate government out of a mix of independent minded Kurds, a poor Shiite minority, and a relative rich Sunni minority that's run the place for the last half century? How do you keep everybody satisfied?

No, it's a lot simpler to hunt down and kill insurgents. But it's not the most effective thing.

The rumor mill in the Pentagon suggests that Bush’s “exit strategy” is to get American troops coming home in waves by next November’s election. Obliquely, Gingrich indicates that would be a huge mistake. The guerrillas cannot be allowed to believe that they only have to outlast the Americans to win. “The only exit strategy is victory,” Gingrich says. But not by brute American force. “We are not the enforcers. We are the reinforcers,” says Gingrich. “The distinction between these two words is central to the next year in Iraq.” Gingrich’s voice rang with his customary certainty. Hard to know if Rumsfeld and Bush are listening.

This, of course, is what I'm afraid of. All the troops come home, leaving in place a "legitimate" Iraq that can reliably wait until after the 2004 elections to implode.

And if Iraq later becomes a pest-hole of poverty, and corruption thats serves as a terrorist recruiting ground, then we can always piously proclaim that it's all the Iraqis' fault. After all, the place was running fine when we left. 

Fiddling while Rome Burns

(Review) The California Legislature. Sometimes I think the worst indictment of democracy is that it allows us to elect a collection of buffoons like this.

My ire is aroused, naturally, but the legislature's rejection of Arnold's proposed spending cap.

The state now faces the prospect of running out of cash next summer. Earlier, former Gov. Gray Davis (D), who was ousted Oct. 7 in historic recall, and the Democrat-controlled legislature closed an unprecedented $38 billion shortfall in part by borrowing $14 billion in short-term loans, which come due in June. Schwarzenegger further deepened the debt by eliminating the tripling of the state's car tax, with its $4 billion in added revenue, on his first day in office.

Wow. This paragraph needs so much explanation it's hard to know where to begin.

First of all, the $14 billion in borrowing was illegal. The state constitution requires both a supermajority in the legislature and voter approval. There was no effort at all to put this issue before the voters, mainly because the voters would have rejected a $14 billion borrowing effort that had to be paid back in 1 year. Schwarzenegger's plan was to convert this borrowing to a 30-year bond issue, to remove the immediate fiscal pressure of paying it back, giving the state some breathing room, since its already strapped for cash.

As far as the car tax goes, we really don't know how much added revenue the tripling of the car tax would have bought in. what we do know is that car sales plummeted by 75% as soon as it went into effect, which makes that "$4 billion" a very, very hypothetical number. And I think we can pretty safely say that the tripling of the car tax--which, it can also be argued, was also illegal, since Gray Davis' authority to do so was...questionable--is one of the main reasons why Gray Davis was driven out of Sacramento like some sort of poison troll.

Californians, frankly, are getting tired of the "Sacramento attitude", which is essentially, "Oops, sorry we spent all the state's money on useless crap. Now, you have to give us more." It's the sense of entitlement that the Sacramento politicians have. "Oh, there's not enough money to fund Lesbian/Gay/Transgendered programs in Elementary schools? Well, then, let's just raise taxes! Ooh, ooh, especially on the rich!"

The rich, as is well known, could fund the entirety of government spending, if they weren't just bloated plutocrats who are concerned with only their own prerogatives.

Like Barbra Streisand.

And, the available evidence is that the attitude I just described is still going strong in the state's capitol.

Democrats, who hold a solid majority in the legislature, say the constitutional spending cap is too strict and would essentially freeze future state spending, and allow budgets to rise from today's levels only to accommodate population growth and inflation.

"What!? A cap on spending determined by empirical limiting factors? Why, it just isn't done!"

Funny, though, that's how I have to restrain my budget. Unlike the legislature, I can't hold a gun to my boss' head and force him to pay me more. I have a whole bunch of external limiting factors, like the size of my paycheck, that restrain my personal budget. Legislators in Sacramento feel they can generally ignore such restraints.

And, so far, they've been right.

Waving the bloody shirt

(Review) Ah, just in time for the 2004 election, the "Stolen Election" of 2000 is back.

Rekindling bitter memories, Democratic leaders and presidential candidates accused President Bush of stealing the 2000 election in Florida and pledged Saturday to avenge that loss next year.

"Florida is the place where America's democracy was wounded," White House hopeful John Kerry (search) told 5,000 delegates at the state party convention.

Former U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek brought the activists to their feet with an angry reminder of the long-count election. "We should be ready for revenge!" she shouted as crowd members blew whistles and cheered.

Get over it.

Facts are inconvenient things, and the facts are that, while any result in Florida would have been well within the margin of error, every statewide recount concluded that W won a very narrow majority of the votes cast.

Now, you can complain that people were confused by the "butterfly ballot", but that was the fault of the Democratic election officials who created it, not W. You can complain that too many Jewish retirees voted for Pat Buchanan out of some "confusion" as well, but, oddly enough, Buchanan actually did better in those same precincts in 1996. You can complain that Gore actually won the nationwide popular vote. But that isn't the system we have, or have had for 200 years. In our system, we have 50 separate elections, all of which happen to take place on the same day. The nationwide popular vote is irrelevant.

As if to underscore that the recount left a bitter residue on American politics, several Democrat delegates swarmed [Ralph] Reed's informal news conference and chanted "No GOP!"

Ah, the Party of Tolerance®, demonstrating the respect for Free Speech for which they have become so famous.

[Howard] Dean said the results will forever be in doubt because the recount was stopped. "What happened here two years ago was a perversion of democracy," he said.

Whereas, the Gore team's attempt to have military votes discounted, while trying to have selective recounts in heavily democratic counties--under, I should point out, vote counting rules that were changed after the initial count, a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act--was a sterling example of democracy at it's finest.

Hey, here's a idea: Why not have an election wherein you explain what the party wants to do in the future, rather than kvetching about the past? Because, you know, that "stolen election" crap didn't work out to well for you in 2002.

When Jeb Bush got re-elected.

Exactly where did you take economics?

(Review) David Ignatius seems a bit confused about why the dollar's value in the FOREX market continues to drop.

The dollar is sinking these days on good news and bad, and the explanation is pretty simple: Investors around the world are worried that the Bush administration's policies are eroding the value of the U.S. currency. So they're rushing to unload greenbacks, in what could soon become a full-blown financial crisis.

Ah. Well, I knew somehow it had to be George Bush's fault.

Yes, the fact that American consumers have a unslakeable thirst for imports has nothing whatsoever to do with it. A ballooning current account deficit is entirely irrelevant, I guess.

It's all W's fault, because he's not signaling that the government will keep the dollar strong.

Hence the nightmare scenario: Between them, China and Japan now hold more than $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds, the trader estimates. But with the declining dollar, the Asian giants have suffered severe losses on these portfolios. If they decided to hedge just 20 percent of their dollar exposure, they could drive the dollar down from this week's low of about $1.21 against the euro to $1.35, contends the trader, and other sellers would trigger a further weakening to $1.45 or so. Facing that sort of decline, the Fed would have to boost interest rates to protect the currency. And higher rates, in turn, would drive down the U.S. stock market.

And precisely why the Devil would the Fed have to do that? A cheaper dollar would make imports must less competitive with American made products, while at the same time, making American products more competitive overseas. That implies increased sales of American goods in the export market, meaning more profits and more jobs.

And the Fed would want to keep that from happening? With inflation hovering at just slightly north of 1%. The inflation rate is very low--too low--in fact, and deflation has been a big worry over the last 18 months.

It isn't the Fed's mandate to maintain the value of the dollar in the FOREX market. The Fed's main concern is price stability in the US. Secondarily, it is concerned with helping economic growth.

So I find his explanation about the horrific dangers posed by a weak dollar to be way overblown.

No, the folks over at The Economist have a much better and more rational take on what is happening to the dollar.

Is a weaker dollar cause for concern? For America, it should be a boon, helping to boost exports, profits and jobs. The usual worry that a falling currency will lift inflation is also lessened, because America still has ample spare capacity and its inflation rate (1.3% on its core measure, excluding energy and food) is, if anything, too low—the Fed would welcome a modest rise. If a continuing gradual fall in the dollar trims the current-account deficit, this could, paradoxically, also lessen the chance of a sudden collapse of confidence in the dollar.

I'm fairly happy with a weak dollar. As long as we keep buying foreign goods, then the dollar has to fall as demand for it slackens. And there's nothing George Bush can do about that, although, with steel tariffs, he certainly tried. 

George Soros, Billionaire Egomaniac

(Review) George Soros writes in the Washington Post today to explain why he's giving millions of dollars to defeat George Bush.

Nowhere in the article, however, does he explain his real reason. He is, I think, offended because the Bush Team is expounding on a mandate to remake the world.

Soros despises that because he's on the same mission. Soros reminds me of nothing more than British Prime Minister William Pitt, who once stated, "I know that I can save this country, and that I alone can."

In the end, of course, Pitt didn't save Britain's empire. Instead, he watched as the American colonies went forth to fulfill their own destiny as an independent nation.

I suspect that Mr. Soros will learn the same lesson the Michael Huffington and Ross Perot learned. No matter how much money you're willing to pour into an election campaign, it won't win the election for you unless the voters want to hear your message.

So far, the voters seem pretty uninterested in the Left's message of abasement and surrender in the War on Terror.

Bush Derangement Syndrome

(Review) Psychiatrist and columnist Richard Krauthammer has, 25 years after his discovery of Secondary Mania, discovered a new psychiatric syndrome.

Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush.

And the bad news: it's spreading quickly.

It is, of course, epidemic in New York's Upper West Side and the tonier parts of Los Angeles, where the very sight of the president -- say, smiling while holding a tray of Thanksgiving turkey in a Baghdad mess hall -- caused dozens of cases of apoplexy in otherwise healthy adults. What is worrying epidemiologists about the Dean incident, however, is that heretofore no case had been reported in Vermont, or any other dairy state.

Moreover, Dean is very smart. Until now, Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) had generally struck people with previously compromised intellectual immune systems. Hence its prevalence in Hollywood. Barbra Streisand, for example, wrote her famous September 2002 memo to Dick Gephardt warning that the president was dragging us toward war to satisfy, among the usual corporate malefactors who "clearly have much to gain if we go to war against Iraq," the logging industry -- timber being a major industry in a country that is two-thirds desert.

[...]

That's what has researchers so alarmed about Dean. He had none of the usual risk factors: Dean has never opined for a living and has no detectable sense of humor. Even worse is the fact that he is now exhibiting symptoms of a related illness, Murdoch Derangement Syndrome (MDS), in which otherwise normal people believe that their minds are being controlled by a single, very clever Australian.

I think it's just extraordinarily funny to watch the Left go into delusional paranoia. For 8 years, they laughed at the far Right's Clinton-bashing. Now, they've gone the way of Jonathon Chait.

But, remember how effective that right-wing paranoia vis a vis Clinton was at election time? Well, I expect it to be equally helpful to the Left next year.

This isn't Grenada

(Review) Victor Davis Hanson, as always, is thinking very clearly about the War on Terror.

A Radio Free Europe, though valuable, nevertheless did not free Eastern Europe; nor did Voice of America. Containment and deterrence did. As long as governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and many Gulf states encourage hatred of the United States, we must quietly consider them de facto little different from a Libya, Syria, or Iran. For all the glitter and imported Western graphics, al Jazeera and its epigones are not that much different from Radio Berlin of the 1930s.

We had also better reexamine entirely the way we use force in the Middle East. We did not drive on to Baghdad in 1991 out of concern for the "coalition" — and got 350,000 sorties in the no-fly zones in return. We chose to worry about rebuilding before the current war ended, and let thousands of Baathist killers fade away, and in the aftermath allowed mass looting and continual killing before our most recent get-tough policy.

In fact, anytime we have showed restraint — using battleship salvos and cruise missiles when our Marines were killed, our embassies blown up, and our diplomats murdered; allowing the killers on the Highway of Death to reach Basra in 1991; letting Saddam use his helicopters to gun down innocents — we have earned disdain, not admiration. In contrast, the hijackers chose not to take the top off the World Trade Center, but to incinerate the entire building — proof that they wished not to send us a message but to kill us all, and to kill us to the applause of millions, if the recent popularity of Osama bin Laden and his henchmen in the Arab street is any indication.

[...]

Peace and harmony will come, but only when the Middle East, not us, changes-which, tragically, will be brought along more quickly by deterrence and defiance than appeasement and dialogue. President Bush was terribly criticized for his exasperated "bring them on," but that was one of his most honest, heartfelt — and needed — ex tempore remarks of this entire conflict.

We are not in a war with a crook in Haiti. This is no Grenada or Panama — or even a Kosovo or Bosnia. No, we are in a worldwide struggle the likes of which we have not seen since World War II. The quicker we understand that awful truth, and take measures to defeat rather than ignore or appease our enemies, the quicker we will win. In a war such as this, the alternative to victory is not a brokered peace, but abject Western suicide and all that it entails — a revelation of which we saw on September 11.

Read the whole thing.

California, from red to black

(Review) Donna Arduin, Arnold's new finance director details in today's Wall Street Journal how the governor plans to bring California back to fiscal solvency.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not create this crisis. But he is proposing a way to help lead California out of it.

First, the governor is asking the Legislature to send to the voters a constitutional spending limit that will significantly curtail spending next year.

Second, he is asking the Legislature to send to the voters authorization for a general obligation bond--but only if the spending limit is approved--in order to reduce the cost of currently contemplated borrowing.

Third, he is asking the Legislature to start curtailing overspending--and start now. In order to balance the current year's budget and begin to gain control of our fiscal situation, Gov. Schwarzenegger has said that he would ask the Legislature to enact roughly $2 billion in current-year spending reductions.

Good tactic, putting this into the Journal, by the way. Sends a message to the Street that essentially says, "Hey, lend me a few bucks. I'm good for it. Muscle-boy'll pay it all back." California already has a credit rating that would shame the average trailer park resident. Talking up the market never hurts.

Still, I'm a little leery about that third point. The Democrats will do everything in their power to prevent any spending cuts at all.

State Treasurer Phil Angelides (D) is already foaming at the mouth over it.

In contrast, state Treasurer Phil Angelides - another Democrat and a leading contender to challenge Schwarzenegger for governor in three years - spent part of the day in Southern California as part of a barnstorming tour to fight the governor's budget plans. He has said that the $15 billion is too much and argued the spending cap does not solve the budget problems.

Yeah, cutting spending never solved a budget problem on Angelides' planet. Here on earth, however, where the rest of humanity lives, that's how we solve our budget problems all the time.

Angelides, of course, has a better plan. Being a good Democrat, his plan is to...all together now...Tax the Rich®. In fact, Phil's got about $8 billion in new taxes he thinks we ought to try. And he knows that we'll get every penny of that $8 bil, because no businesses or individuals would ever leave California because taxes were too high.

Meanwhile, in the legislature, Democrats are getting ticked off because Schwarzenegger says they are responsible for the budget problems we currently have.

[I]ncoming Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, D-Los Angeles, sharply criticized the governor for remarks Nunez said Schwarzenegger made the past two days blaming the Democrats for the state's fiscal crisis. Nunez said the governor's "public bashing" has undermined the trust of his caucus and jeopardized negotiations.

"If I were speaker today, I wouldn't negotiate with him until he changes his tune." said Nunez.

OK, let's see. For the past 2 years, all but one statewide elected official has been a Democrat. For the past 5 years, the Governor has been a Democrat. For the last 8 years, Democrats have been the majority party in both the Assembly and the Senate. So, for the last five years or so, Sacramento has essentially been a company town for the Democratic party.

But it's not their fault.

Uh-huh.

It must have been the budget pixies, who magically made spending increase by 43% from 1998-2002.

Senate Leaders like aging hippie John Burton (D-San Francisco--of course) are also on the Tax The Rich® bandwagon as well.

Somehow the idea that rich can live perfectly comfortably in, say, Arizona, seems never to entered their pointy little heads. But you can bet your butt the rich know it.

I have good news and bad news

(Review) First the good news:

President Bush will lift virtually all tariffs he imposed on foreign steel in March 2002, Fox News confirmed Thursday, and the announcement is expected to be made later Thursday.

Now the bad news:

But the president will soften the blow on the domestic steel industry by announcing new measures designed to protect against unfair foreign competition, Republican and industry officials said Thursday.

I see. So we'll still have to pay higher prices for cars, appliances, tools, bicycles, etc., so that Bush can try to bribe steel workers in Pennsylvania into voting for him.

Funny how that minimills in Alabama or Georgia don't have any problem competing with foreign steel, though, isn't it?

"The decision I make will be based upon my strong belief that America's consumers, the American economy, is better off with a world that trades freely and a world that trades fairly," Bush told reporters Thursday.

Uh, if that was true, you wouldn't have slapped the steel tariffs--or the lumber and textile tariffs--on at all.

Geez, at least be honest enough to at least tacitly admit that this was simply a pork-barrel measure designed to buy votes in a few key states. And that it ended up backfiring on you.

But you can't have it both ways. You can't "Smoot-Hawley" the rest of the world in a blatant attempt to troll for electoral votes, and then crow about what a keen free trader you are.

Cake. Have it. Eat it. Please choose only one.

Homicide, but not murder

(Review) Hamilton County, Ohio, Coroner Carl Parrot says that the death of Nathaniel Jones, who died after a struggle with police, is a homicide. But Parrott was quick to point out that doesn't mean the police did anything wrong.

Hamilton County Coroner Carl Parrott said his autopsy showed that Jones suffered from an enlarged heart, obesity and had intoxicating levels of cocaine, PCP and methanol in his blood.

Parrott said the death will be ruled a homicide, but that such a ruling "should not be interpreted as implying inappropriate behavior or the use of excessive force by police."

Jones' body had bruising on the lower half, but did not show signs of blows to the head or organ damage, Parrott said.

The coroner said he had to rule the death a homicide because it didn't fall under other categories of a death in Ohio: accident, suicide or natural.

Jones' death certificate will list a cause of death as an irregular heart beat because of a stress reaction from the violent struggle, Parrott said.

That sounds to me as if he was struck on the legs, and that the officers refrained from striking him with batons in any vital areas. That sounds like an in-policy use of force to me.

The relatives and "activists" in Cincinnati, naturally disagree.

Bessie Jones broke down in tears as she talked about her grandson, describing him as a happy-go-lucky man his family nicknamed Skip.

"They talk about Skip like he was an animal," she said. "He wasn't. Skipper was just a good old, fat jolly fella. He wasn't violent."

Ah, good ol' Skip. Skippy. The Skipster. Skipmeister. Just a fat jolly fella. Why, he was just like Santa Clause really.

If Santa Claus had been videotaped as he "ignored orders to "stay back," took a swing at an officer and put his arm around one's neck," I mean.

Rule #1 for dealing with police: Never, ever offer physical violence to a police officer. I can assure you, from the personal experience of a decade as a military policeman, that if you do, you will open a can of whipass that you will find very difficult to close.

Unfortunately, you have to be thinking rationally to remember that rule, and Santa was a bit impaired, having "intoxicating levels of cocaine, PCP and methanol in his blood." Methanol; That means "booze".

I certainly don't think he could have safely handled a flying sleigh in that condition.

[Jones family Attorney Ken] Lawson said Jones' body was being taken to Indianapolis for an independent autopsy. He said the family has not decided if it will file a wrongful death lawsuit against they city, but felt that an independent investigation is needed.

Police Chief Thomas Streicher Jr. has said the videotape showed that police officers observed department guidelines..."I think it's odd that we can all look at the same thing and come to different conclusions," Lawson said.

Well, counselor, I don't think it's odd at all. If your default position is that CPD is little more than a band of blue-uniformed Klansmen, and a fairly large payday awaits you if you can convince a jury of that, I'd find it odd if you didn't see something different.

Moreover, I suspect that even if that wasn't true, it would be pretty unusual for any family to watch their grandson or uncle being beaten with batons, then hold a public press conference and say, "Yep, he deserved it. In fact, I think they should have thrown a few rabbit punches to the back of his neck." What do you think the family is going to say?

Now, I disagree with the Jones family position, because, as far as I can tell, the officers on scene did exactly what they were supposed to do. Jones bought the consequences on himself, through his ill-advised actions. I would hope that in a similar situation, I'd be honest enough to realize that, and keep public silence, rather than hiring a lawyer and looking into a wrongful death suit.

I understand the Jones family is saddened by the death of Mr. Jones. I have, therefore, compassion for their loss, even if I disapprove in some ways of their reaction to it. They are, in a very real sense, victims of Mr. Jones' irresponsibility. For Mr. Jones, I have no compassion at all. But I'm not going to quibble with a grieving family too much.

The "activists" who make their livings out of tragedies like this, however, are another matter.

Activists say Jones' death was another example of brutality by Cincinnati police against blacks in a city that was rocked by race riots two years ago. Jones was black, as were some of the officers involved.

Ah, but since they were working for The Man, they obviously weren't "authentic" blacks, as Lani Guinier would put it. So, essentially, all the officers were effectively white, because they wore blue.

Here's a couple of general rules that I have found useful in life, and I expect you will, too. Rule #1: The moral stature of any person or group is most clearly demonstrated by its willingness to criticize its own.

One of the reasons I make my disagreements with the Bush Administration a central part of my blogging is because intellectual honesty requires that you point out when your side is not doing the right thing. If you can't do that, then you're simply a PR hack, and people have a right to take everything you say with a grain--or a whole fistful--of salt, because you aren't being honest with them.

For instance, black activists are always going on about how 1/3 of all African-American males are either in or have been in prison or on parole. What they never tell us, is, how many of them are guilty? The activists never want to concentrate on issues like guilt or innocence, mainly because it wouldn't do their cause much good.

But, numbers aside, that would seem to be an important point, because if they actually did the crimes of which they are accused, their color is irrelevant. Because if they did, indeed, commit the crimes that landed them in prison, they are not "victims of institutional racism." They are simply criminals who need to be incarcerated. But acknowledging that wouldn't do much to advance their argument that the criminal justice system is inherently racist.

The truly tragic thing about this type of activism is that the vast majority of the victims of black criminals are...wait for it...black people!

Which brings me to Rule #2. The Talmud has a little bit of wisdom that basically says that if you generally show compassion to those who don't deserve it, then you will not show compassion to those who do.

The activists' concern for the black inmate population is a prime example of that rule. The vast majority of crimes are not interracial. While it is true that interracial crimes overwhelmingly consist of a black offender and a white victim, the fact is that interracial crimes just aren't that common. Both white and black criminals prey mainly on their own communities.

Which means, of course, that activism designed to reduce the number of black criminals sent to prison invariably results in those same criminals victimizing an increased number of black people.

But who actually deserves the compassion? The black criminals, or the black victims of their predation?

I prefer to reserve my compassion for the victims of evil, rather than its perpetrators.  

Where there is no vision, the people perish

(Review) Well, it's certainly past time for something like this:

President Bush wants to send Americans back to the moon--and may leave a permanent presence there--in a bold new vision for space exploration, administration officials said yesterday. The return to the moon would be for the purpose of technological advancements in technology, including energy exploration and testing a military rocket engine.

You know, in the 1930s, everybody thought that by now, we'd all have our flying cars, and be taking vacation trips to the moon. In fact, they still thought that in the 1960s.

But in the 1970s, something went terribly wrong. In 1969, the entire nation--the entire world was rooted to the television set watching Buzz and Neil ponce about on the moon. By 1972, people were calling their TV stations to complain that coverage of the Apollo 17 landing was preempting their I Love Lucy reruns.

And we haven't been back since.

But the United States reaped enormous benefits from the space program. Advances in computers, air conditioning, component miniaturization, new manufacturing materials, etc., all came about, either directly or indirectly as a result of the space program.

Our solar system has boundless resources just sitting there in a sterile vacuum, just waiting to be used. For instance, one single nickel-iron asteroid of average size would yield an amount of metals equal to an entire year's production from every mine in the world. Imagine all sorts of dirty and dangerous manufacturing done on, say the moon, instead of the earth. (And, if the environmentalists object to "damaging" the moon's "environment", we can just promise to bombard it with asteroids when we're done, to return it to its pristine state.)

We need to have a national purpose that is larger and more noble than the current one of killing Islamofascists (however much that might need to be done). Something that calls out the best in our country and our people, and that will, in the long run, provide incalculable benefits not only to us, but to the entire human race.

It would be nice to live long enough to see self-sustaining human colonies on the moon and on Mars. And to see space travel as the occupation of 20 year-old miners, instead of 40 year-old military test pilots.

It's nice to feel appreciated

(Review) Jon Henke, of QandO blog fame, has some very nice things to say about me in his interview at "Jennifer's History and Stuff."

I wish Jon was on the Left Coast, instead of the Old Dominion. I knew him in the Usenet/discussion group world before blogging even existed. I've never met him, but I'd certainly like to.

In any event, I'm gratified by his kind comments.

The fruits of my labor

I thought it might be nice to share with you a little of what I do professionally. One of the projects I've been working on is an update to the Microsoft Access® database I use to track my time and billing for my software development clients.

I have just updated this application into a new version, and have decided to make it publicly available to everybody.

You can download the application from here. This is a 1.3MB zip file that contains the Microsoft Access® database in which the application is built; the help files; and the Microsoft Word® templates that the application uses to generate invoices, work records and other reports.

If you want to know more about the application, you can peruse the help files here.

Because this is a Microsoft access® database and it uses Microsoft Word® to generate the reports, this means that you will need to have, as a minimum, Microsoft Word® 2000 and Microsoft Access® 2000. If you don't have both of those programs, or newer versions of them, you won't be able to use this application at all.

The database code is all open, so you can modify it if you wish. Because I didn't really create this for anyone else but me, the code is not commented, so good luck figuring out what I'm doing. Still, it's all open source, as it were, so knock yourself out.

All I ask is that, if you like the application, you visit the tip jar and slip me a few bucks.

I think it's a pretty cool application, actually, and this is the application that Chris and I use to track our time and billing for our clients.

If you have a need for something like this, then I hope you like it as well. 

Lesson #1: Always check before, not after

Photo: Reuters/Ammar Awad

Arming pilots: good. Arming flight attendants: Well...

Photo: Reuters/Tim Shaffer

The world according to Howard Dean

Photo: Reuters/Richard Carson

Hey, the alternative caption was a Lord Robertson fart joke

Photo: Reuters/Thierry Roge

This, kids, is what we call 'irony'

Photo: Reuters/Crack

Yes, that's what the photo credit says. Crack.

I know.

The forest will be both healthy and young

Photo: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

It's not as catchy as the original tune

Photo: Reuters/Jeff Topping

Just slightly out of touch...

Photo: AP Photo/Reed Saxon

Looking for a Fight

(Review) Ralph Kinney Bennett has it exactly right:

In the military, routine is often a necessity, but coalition forces cannot afford to behave routinely in Iraq. The name of the game now is to deny the guerrillas their inherent advantages. And one of the most important steps American forces can take is to consider every movement of military personnel -- no matter how routine or benign -- as the movement of an armed column looking for a fight.

This is not merely "force protection," to use the Army's term of art. This means that whether they are paying a courtesy visit to village chiefs, taking a load of supplies to a rebuilt school, delivering the mail or delivering ammo to a "front line" unit, the troops involved should embark upon the mission as an opportunity to destroy the enemy.

This means that military police need more than their sidearms. This means that what are commonly called CSS (combat service support) units must be prepared not merely to fight back if attacked, but to fight at every opportunity. In short, supply convoys must be accompanied by heavily armed vehicles ready, not merely to defend the supply vehicles, but to pour withering fire into any ambushing units. And the convoy personnel should be combat personnel ready to employ firepower.

It may come as a shock and surprise to many of our citizens, but the only reason we have armed forces is to kill foreigners.

You can try to pretty that up as much as you want, but the bottom line is that the business of the military is to kill people and break things. And Iraq is still a country where there are many people to be killed, and many things to be broken.

Misplaced priorities

(Review) Ralph Reiland says that our pritorities when it comes to fighting the War on Terror are taking a backseat to...other things.

Not the way to win

(Review) Michael Ledeen notes that, whatever it is we're doing in Iraq, we aren't winning. Indeed, appears that we aren't even trying to win.

It seems that the administration has decided to "manage" Iraq until Election Day, and then take stock of the situation. That, too, is a suicidal conceit, for no matter how marvelous our armed forces are, it gives the entire initiative to our enemies. And, as General Patton once remarked with his usual bitterness, fixed defenses are a tribute to the stupidity of the human mind. Yes, we are defending ourselves better, and yes, we are rounding up lots of bad guys, and yes, we are killing them in mounting numbers. All to the good. But the terrorists are looking at a target-rich environment, and we cannot defend all the targets.

Managing Iraq, which means taking it easy on Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, also means condemning lots of people to death who could be saved if we waged war against our enemies.

This is, I think, my estimation of what the Administration is doing as well. And I don't like it. We shouldn't be defending ourselves from our enemies, they should be doing the defending. We should be hunting them down like dogs, ceaselessly and mercilessly.

No amount of presidential bravery, no number of magnificent speeches, can save the lives of our people and of our allies, and give the Middle East a hope for real peace, if we insist on "managing" the terrorist war and play pretend diplomacy, which is what we're doing these days. The terror masters know they must drive us out of Iraq. They know they must split off our allies. They believe the best way to do this is to kill more and more Americans, Italians, Spaniards, Japanese, South Koreans, Turks, Poles, and Iraqis.

They are not running for reelection, and they are not trying to be loved. They want to be feared.

Unfortunately, Bush is running for re-election, and it looks like the War on Terror is being put on hold until the election is over. We will accomplish nothing in the next year that is worth accomplishing, unless we can do it in such a way as to avoid a potentially embarrassing--and election-losing--problem for the president.

So, this means that for the next year, a lot of terror masters will be getting the breathing space they want, instead of the nine grams of lead they deserve. 

With enemies like these, who needs friends?

(Review) John Podhoretz writes in the New York Post that the ranting about the President's Thanksgiving trip to Iraq shows that President Bush's critics are essentially unhinged.

Why, others want to know, didn't Bush stay longer in Iraq? See more troops? See more Iraqis? Why didn't he go to Germany to visit the wounded in hospitals? Why was he wearing an army jacket?

If Bush visited a hospital in Germany, they would ask why he wasn't visiting Iraq. If he stayed longer in Iraq, they would want to know why he was using the troops as a campaign prop. If he visited lots of Iraqis in Baghdad, they'd want to know why he wasn't going to Mosul or Kirkuk.

These responses range from the peevish to the dyspeptic, from the merely cynical to the near-psychotic. Bush is increasingly fortunate to have such people as his enemies, because their demented anger continues to seep into mainstream Democratic Party discourse and threatens to make all anti-Bush rhetoric seem like the ravings of a bunch of lunatics. That happened during the Clinton years, and it's happening now.

Oh, yes, I remember how it was. All the stories about the Mena Airport. How many peoiple Bill Clinton had killed because they would "talk" about his drug-running.

Bill Clinton's vice wasn't that he headed a dark cabal of drug dealers and murderers. It was that he couldn't keep his pants zipped. And that was about it.

So, the Right sounded like a bunch of wackos in the 1990s. And I would argue that this wackiness actually helped Bill Clinton get re-elected in '96. Because after a point, when your critics begin to sound like loons, people also shut out legitimate criticism as well.

Now the shoe is on the other foot, and The New Republic's Jonathon Chait babbles like a Bellvue outpatient about how "oppressed" he feels just knowing that George Bush is president.

Get over it, Lumpy. 

Bush and Military Funerals

(Review) Andrew Sullivan combats the rather stupid meme that George W. Bush doesn't care about our soldiers because he doesn't attend military funerals, in what some have called the "time-honored way".

In point of fact, the time-honored tradition towards military funerals is for presidents not to attend them.

The History News Network provided a recent, helpful study of what the precise presidential tradition is in this regard.

They find no evidence that FDR attended military funerals, although, like Bush, he spoke of his empathy for those who had lost their lives and their families. Lyndon Johnson attended two funerals out of tens of thousands under his watch in Vietnam. Richard Nixon attended none. Jimmy Carter attended none--but he was present at a memorial service for those who were killed in his aborted mission to free the Iran hostages. The first president Bush attended no military funerals. Neither did president Clinton. Yes, they attended some memorial services--but so, of course, has the current president, most notably after 9/11. There is, then, no "time-honored way" in which presidents have gone to funerals for individual service members.

Moreover, speaking as a former career military man, I don't think I'd want the president to attend. The funeral is supposed to be about the service member himself. The president's attendance makes it about the president, not the service member.

The security protocols alone would make the funeral a tortuous experience for a family that is already grieving. Why impose the burden of presidential visit on their private grief?

"OK, your son's funeral is about to start, ma'am. Just let me do a quick pat-down and a search of your belongings before you enter the presidential presence."

If I had been killed in Central America, or Panama, or the Gulf, the last thing I would have wanted is for the President to pop by my funeral for a photo op with my weeping mom.

Those Darn Sunnis

(Review) Trudy Rubin writes in the Philadelphia Enquirer that much of the terrorism/guerrilla problem in Iraq is the lack of a "Sunni strategy", i.e. figuring out how to deal with the minority (15%) Sunni Muslims in Iraq who, under Saddam Hussein, ran the country.

The clear postwar challenge was to formulate a strategy to isolate the Sunni bad guys. This required an effort to persuade most Sunnis that they had a future inside the new Iraq - and should reject the old guard. Instead, administration policy has inflamed broad Sunni opposition to U.S. troops.

I observed, on two trips to Iraq, that officials couldn't seem to agree whether to woo or punish the Sunni population.

In May, U.S. officials abolished the Iraqi army, throwing thousands of Sunni officers with guns out of work without severance or pensions. Thousands of members of Hussein's Baath Party were tossed out of jobs, even those who had to join for career reasons. These moves created a bitter constituency with motive to oppose occupation forces.

Frankly, the Sunnis have been running the country like their own personal dog kennel for decades. Now, in a Democratic Iraq, they will be, like the Kurds, a relatively small minority.

It's clear that the Sunnis need some sort of incentive to work with us, and they're just not getting it.

I think this is what Rick Santorum meant

(Review) The lead says it all:

A lawyer for a Utah man with five wives argued Monday that his bigamy convictions should be thrown out following a Supreme Court decision decriminalizing gay sex.

The nation's high court in June struck down a Texas sodomy law, ruling that what gay men and women do in the privacy of their homes is no business of government.

It's no different for polygamists, argued Tom Green's attorney, John Bucher, to the Utah Supreme Court.

"It doesn't bother anyone, (and with) no compelling state interest in what you do in your own home with consenting adults, you should be allowed to do so," Bucher said.

Huh. Well, there you go. Once you start tossing around Constitutional principles, this is what you end up with. Constitutional principles do not make fine distinctions between two like things.

If the "right to privacy" (a right I am convinced exists nowhere inside the Constitution, or in any of its "penumbras" for that matter) means that what consenting adults do in private is no concern of the state, then how do you distinguish between sodomy, polygamy, or anything else?

Well, you don't. The Constitution is not a scalpel, it is a big, honking club, and once you invoke it, you open the door to arguments like those above.

And what is really irritating is that the guy who is the principal in this story is complete scum.

Allegedly.

Green, who is not affiliated with any church, was convicted of four counts of bigamy and one count of criminal nonsupport of his 30 children in August 2001.

Besides his five-year sentence, he faces up to life in prison after being convicted of child rape for having sex with one of his five wives when she was 13.

"He preys on young girls," assistant Utah Attorney General Laura Dupaix said. "This case is about a man who marries young girls and calls it religion."

And that's probably very true. But, if the Constitution prohibits sodomy laws, or it requires, as the Massachusetts Supreme Court supposes, the right of homosexuals to marry, when why can't one person be married to a number of other persons? What is the constitutional distinction between private consensual sodomy, adultery, or bigamy? Because, whatever it is, I don't see it.

Look, at the end of the day, if the legislature votes to make homosexual marriage legal, then I'm fine with that. And I think laws against sodomy or adultery are foolish, just as I think laws against gambling, prostitution and drug use are foolish. But I don't assume I have a Constitutional right to cavort with hookers, no matter how private our activities might be.

That's what we have legislatures for, to make those distinctions. All the Constitution is supposed to do is provide open and equal access to the political process, free of governmental intimidation. The rest of it is supposed to up to the political process to figure out.

Polygamy was renounced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1890 as part of a deal to grant Utah statehood, and the church now excommunicates those members who practice or advocate it. Polygamy has an estimated 30,000 practitioners in the West.

So, then, excommunication hasn't been totally effective. Well, mark my words: from now on, any time any of those 30,000 polygamists gets hauled up for bigamy, he will start flailing about with the Constitution, whacking anybody in arm's reach with the argument that the Supreme Court's judicially-crated "right of privacy" means he can marry as many women as he wishes.

And within a decade, he'll be absolutely right. 

UPDATE:
Oh, and by the way, conservatives aren't too innocent here either. What about this Constitutional amendment to protect marriage that's been introduced in Congress? What's that?

The Constitution isn't supposed to say a frickin' thing about marriage. The Constitution is supposed to define how the government works, and what the limits of government power should be.

Judas Priest! Eventually the Bill of Rights will contain 689 articles, with gems such as, "The right of the people to have at least 4 California Brittles in each box of See's Candy shall not be abridged."

On the other hand, what can you do? Every lawyer with a black robe--and quite a few without one--is keen to find his own pet Constitutional right in there somewhere. I guess the Conservative argument is that you have to amend the Constitution in order to nullify the plethora of judicially-created rights that are promulgated from it.

Welcome to the "Living Constitution", a perfectly fungible document that means whatever we wish it to mean at this moment.

Oh, and by the way, in case it hasn't occurred to you yet, if the judiciary can create new rights out of whole cloth, they can just as easily eliminate existing rights, like your right to keep and bear arms, because, after all, the plain text of the document isn't what it "really" means.

Just a thought. 

Demoralizing the troops

(Review) Dick Morris has quite a lot to say about Hillary Clinton's Thanksgiving trip to see the troops, and none of it is good.

Using Iraq as a pulpit, she attacked Bush for having been "obsessed with Saddam Hussein for more than a decade." If only her husband had shared that obsession, Saddam would not have been permitted to rearm with oil revenues that President Clinton let him have and freed from inspectors that the Clinton administration let him kick out.

It is fine for a U.S. senator to go to Iraq to see for herself what the conditions are over there. It is even OK to get the taxpayers to foot the bill for the trip on military aircraft. She is, after all, a member of the Armed Services Committee in the Senate.

What is not OK is to attack the president while you are there or to use your visit as a platform to criticize the war effort and the Pentagon. There is plenty of opportunity for that after one is home, out of earshot of the troops who must fight this war.

Yeah, I think I have a pretty good handle on what most of the troops felt, and, so does Morris.

The senator told the troops that while "Americans are proud" of them, "many question the administration's policies." Being told that you might die in a war that is under attack by people back home must be a great stimulant to combat morale. How sensitive of her to have shared that particular message with men and women who must face death to execute these policies.

She also made sure to plant doubts among the troops about the ability of their commanders, saying that "the obstacles and problems are much greater than the administration usually admits to."

With Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for a friend, American soldiers don't need any more enemies.

I guess Hillary just couldn't resist the temptation to demoralize the troops at Thanksgiving.

You know, her husband was simply a masterful politician. But she is so politically tone deaf, it defies belief that she could be elected senator. And, outside of New York or California, she probably couldn't be.

The New York Times' headline was "Hail to the Chief; Hail to the Senator." But the visits are hardly comparable. Bush's was designed to raise morale, Hillary's to raise objections.

Bush sought to assure the troops of the united support of the people. Hillary wanted them to know that many people objected to what they are trying to do.

Bush's message was that we will persevere in the face of terrorism. Hillary's was that this war was due to one man's "obsession."

Sen. Clinton will do anything she can to attract attention and, where possible, divert it from the Democrats who are really running for president. But this trip, at this time, in this manner, in that place was wrong politically and morally.

You know, we'll never be rid of the Clintons now. They'll be the trailer park version of the Kennedys, right up until the day they die.

...As I was saying...

Whew! Glad that's over with! Back to a little more free time.

In the past 5 days I've just been slammed. I've had three web development jobs going on simultaneously, along with a Microsoft Access database project (about which, more in due course). So, I've been putting in 14-hour days for the past week.

Of course, with that kind of schedule, something had to give, and unfortunately, blogging was it. I enjoy blogging immensely, of course, just as I do the certain small notoriety it brings. It does not, however, pay well. Actually, it doesn't pay at all.

I mean, it's like you don't even see the tip jar over there on the left.

But, since my recent hospitalization cost me over a week's income, I've had to scramble to make it back up, and, hence, my little blogging hiatus.

But, I'm back now, so posting should resume as normal.

And I'm very happy to be back, by the way.

Apologies

I know blogging has been nonexistent. Unfortunately, I am jammed up on a software project for a couple of days. Hopefully, I will be back sometime later this week.