(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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?
(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.
(Review) Brendan Miniter asks a simple question. Does Howard Dean have a firm stand on anything?
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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?
(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?
(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.
(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!
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
Left Coast Conservative, a charter member of the Bear Flag League, has made the move to Movable Type. Update your blogrolls accordingly.
(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.
(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."
(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.
Yeah, I know I usually run a weekday shop, but I thought I might pop in this weekend with a few special items.
I'll be taking a few days off to enjoy the season. I hope you will, too. Seasons greetings to you and yours!
(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?
(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.
(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.
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.
(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.
(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.
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.
(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,