The Review

Dude, the 60s are over

(Review) Byron York writes that John Kerry seems stuck in the 60s.

Is Kerry's the only campaign to play Jimi Hendrix — specifically, "Fire" from the 1967 album Are You Experienced? — at rallies? Other candidates — like John Edwards, with his theme song, John Mellencamp's "Small Town" — aren't exactly cutting edge, but they have chosen somewhat newer stuff.

And what about the music on Kerry's bus? Before the Iowa caucuses, Washington Post reporter Ceci Connelly described the candidate hanging out on the bus with Peter Yarrow, his old friend from Peter, Paul, and Mary. "Pedro, sing us a song," Kerry ordered one day. Yarrow picked up a guitar and began to play and sing — and later waxed nostalgic about the antiwar rallies he attended way back when with Kerry and Eugene McCarthy.

Earlier, Connelly wrote, when Yarrow sang "Puff the Magic Dragon" at an event in a private home in Ames, Iowa, "Kerry lifted his fingers to his mouth for a quick toke on an imaginary joint. You can almost see his thick mane of silver hair returning to the shaggy brown do of those days."

Even Kerry's latest soundbite, the speech in Ohio Tuesday in which he described President Bush as a "walking contradiction," was apparently a reference to the old days. In this case, it was Kris Kristofferson's "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33, " from 1970, with its line, "He's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction."

This man is living in a time warp. No wonder Kerry sees any conflict — Gulf War I, Afghanistan, Gulf War II — as a potential Vietnam. In Kerry's world, Vietnam is running on a continuous loop on that big screen TV — with Jimi, Kris, and Peter, Paul, and Mary singing in the background.

Jebus, how much longer do we have to wait before these hippies get too old to bother us any more? How much longer am I gonna have to listen to this crap about "Nixon's War, man!"

Yeah, it was Johnson's War, moron, and it was over 30 years ago! Move the f*ck on!

Note to "The Greatest Generation": First, thanks for whacking the Nazi's and all, but don't expect any gratitude for raising the most self-absorbed, whiniest generation ever.

Krugman on Free Trade--Finally!

(Review) Well, after a couple of weeks of wondering where Paul Krugman stands on free trade now that his party's presidential candidates have been moving in a protectionist direction, we now know.

Krugman believes in free trade, but he's not a fanatic about it or anything.

Let me spare you the usual economist's sermon on the virtues of free trade, except to say this: although old fallacies about international trade have been making a comeback lately (yes, Senator Charles Schumer, that means you), it is as true as ever that the U.S. economy would be poorer and less productive if we turned our back on world markets. Furthermore, if the United States were to turn protectionist, other countries would follow. The result would be a less hopeful, more dangerous world.

Yet it's bad economics to pretend that free trade is good for everyone, all the time. "Trade often produces losers as well as winners," declares the best-selling textbook in international economics (by Maurice Obstfeld and yours truly). The accelerated pace of globalization means more losers as well as more winners; workers' fears that they will lose their jobs to Chinese factories and Indian call centers aren't irrational.

Addressing those fears isn't protectionist. On the contrary, it's an essential part of any realistic political strategy in support of world trade. That's why the Nelson Report, a strongly free-trade newsletter on international affairs, recently had kind words for John Kerry. It suggested that he is basically a free trader who understands that "without some kind of political safety valve, Congress may yet be stampeded into protectionism, which benefits no one."

Mr. Kerry's Wednesday speech on trade seemed consistent with that interpretation. He decried the loss of jobs to imports, but was careful not to promise too much. You might say that he proposed speed bumps, rather than outright barriers to outsourcing: rules requiring notice to employees and government agencies before jobs are shifted overseas, steps to close tax loopholes that encourage offshore operations, more aggressive enforcement of existing trade agreements, and a review of those agreements with an eye toward seeking tougher labor and environmental standards.

I. Am. Stunned.

I guess I shouldn't be, because...well, it's Paul Krugman in the New York Times. But this kind of cynical backpedaling is simply breathtaking, considering the man's lifelong work.

The first Krugman popular economics book I ever read was Peddling Prosperity. Half of this book is a detailed explanation of how the whole idea of "Fair Trade" or "Managed Trade" as proposed by the Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich was complete hogwash.

Now, all the sudden, it's all "safety valves"on free trade and "speed bumps" to outsourcing.

Essentially, after writing a best-seller decrying the foolishness of managed trade, he now says that John Kerry is practically a saint for proposing managed trade.

I thought I was relatively inured to the political opportunism Krugman regularly demonstrates in the Times. But, I guess not.

On the other hand, it's not every day that you see a guy essentially declare his whole life's work a bag of crap just to help his favorite candidate get elected. I mean, you gotta give the guy credit: That's committment.

An FMA I could live with

(Review) If there does have to be an FMA passed, then Michael Horowitz has the least objectionable one I've seen.

Except for distinctions based on race, color or religion, the establishment of civil marriage in all of its forms, and the benefits thereof, shall in each state be solely defined by the legislature or citizens thereof, and shall have such legal force in the remaining states as the legislatures or citizens of such states shall determine.

Of course, it wouldn't actually be a Marriage Protection Amendment. It would be an amendment that reinforces democratic governance, which strikes me as appropriate, even if I wish it was uneccessary.

Bear Flag Review

(Review) Thanks to S&A for this week's Bear Flag Review.

Well, the first half of it anyway.

Wedge Issue

(Review) John Podhoretz takes a look at the wedge issue of gay marriage, and makes some good points in addition to the Krauthammer points I address in the post below.

Bush is no culture warrior, and those who are accusing him of it are simply trying to change the focus of the discussion. The story these past months is not that conservatives are acting up against gay marriage. It is that the forces who support gay marriage have decided to stage an assault on the rule of law and the proper functioning of government.

A court in Massachusetts has decided that state legislation declaring marriage the union of a man and a woman is unconstitutional, simply because - well, because the judges are ideologically opposed to the legislation and therefore have taken it upon themselves to cancel it. And the mayor of San Francisco has been overseeing illegal "marriages" of gay couples despite the fact that the state of California, which legalized civil unions, has a law explicitly banning the act.

Is gay marriage to be imposed on a nation of 290 million people by a few Massachusetts judges and the mayor of a medium-sized city - when this nation's House and Senate in 1996 passed a bill defining marriage as the union of a man and woman that was then signed into law by Bill Clinton?

...That process was duplicated in 39 states, including Massachusetts. The view that gay marriage should not be legalized is firmly established as the majority opinion of the people of the United States as expressed by their representatives at every level of government...

By going this route, Bush hasn't taken an easy political path, but a difficult one. Given the conviction of gay-rights supporters that they have the better of the argument and that the country is moving in their direction, why should they fear a battle over an amendment? If they're right, they'll prevail. The president will lose, and inevitably, gay marriage will become legal.

Could it be because they know the only way they will get their way is through the injudicious acts of unelected judges imposing their revolutionary social agenda on a nation that doesn't actually want its most basic institutions redefined into meaninglessness?

I suspect this is precisely the reason. When corresponding with gay marriage advocates like Trey Givens or BoiFromTroi I get the impression that they think that gay marriage will never pass if put to a vote, therefore, the democratic process can't be trusted to give them what they want.

I think that such arguments are a) outrageously cynical, in that they imply a lack of regard for the Constitution and the courts as nothing more than a rights-dispensing machine that gives them the outcome they desire, and b) factually incorrect.

I think a majority of the public would allow gay marriages (or civil unions that have precisely the same legal rights and priviliges as marriage even if we call them something different) if the arguments were properly made. I think people want to be persuaded, because I think Americans are a fair-minded people.

That means acknowleging and properly responding to opposing arguments, not just dismissing them as gay-bashing nonsense. This is not a war you can win by being confrontational. But it is one that can be won by appealing to the fairness and decency of our people.

The average American is not really interested in imposing gratuitous difficulty on his fellow citizens. If anything he is interested in a live and let live policy of social libertariansm. That is the side of Americans you need to engage.

Because, while they can be persuaded, Americans hate being told what to do.

When I was stationed in The Netherlands, at HQ AFCENT, I noticed something peculiar. Because I was a military cop, I was always in a position of having to tell people to do things they might not otherwise want to do. If they objected, you would have to force them to do what you said.

If this happened with a German, then from that point on, every time the German saw you, he would wave and smile and say "Hello", no matter how acrimonious the original argument had been. Every time he saw you, he'd want to shake your hand and ask how you'd been.

It was just freakin' wierd.

Because if the same thing happened with an American, every time you saw him after that, he would just give you "the stare", and maybe nudge a buddy and tell him, "You see that MP over there? He's a dick."

Force a German to obey you, and you've got a friend for life. Force an American and you've just made a lifelong enemy.

Gay marriage advocates can win the debate on gay marriage, but only if they appeal to the better angels of America's nature. Trying to force the issue, the way gay marriage advocates are now, is far more likely to result in the FMA than it is to result in gay marriage. 

A good place to start would be by taking the default position your opponents are decent people of good will rather than vile, fag-bashing homophobes, unless they prove themselves to be so.

Intellectual honesty is important

(Review) Charles Krauthammer writes that, while he supports civil unions for homosexuals, he's not willing to have the decision shoved down his throat by the courts. Even Justice Ginsburg, hardly a conservative icon, implies that it's unwise.

We are the only Western country to have legalized abortion by judicial fiat rather than by democratic approval of the people or the legislature. Are we going to do it again with gay marriage? We know what short-circuiting democracy does. Thirty years after Roe v. Wade, abortion still brings masses of demonstrators into the streets.

Roe v. Wade, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, "halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue."

Certainly, that's a point I've made several times. Going to the courts short-circuits the democratic process, which, as the abortion debate has clearly shown, creates more problems than it solves.

Even more interesting has been watching the reactions of people like Andrew Sullivan, Rosie O'Donnell, et al., in response to the President's support of a Federal marriage protection amendment.

I don't support a marriage amendment, of course, since that's not the purpose of the Constitution. And I don't want to go through some long, agonizing process like we did with the 18th/21st Amendments over alcohol prohibition, when we realize a decade hence, that Amending the Constitution to protect marriage is essentially a silly idea.

But one thing that gets right up my nose are people accusing the president of using this issue to create a wedge issue. As Krauthammer comments:

Bush had no desire to get involved in this issue. If not for the activism in Boston and San Francisco, it would not be an election issue at all. Boston and San Francisco have made the question very stark: We are going to have national gay marriage or we are not. "States' rights" is a phony - and ironic - alternative that will not withstand constitutional muster.

I welcome the debate on the constitutional amendment because it will shift the locus of this issue from unelected judges to where it belongs: the House and the Senate and the 50 state legislatures. In the end, however, I would probably vote against the amendment because for me the sanctity of the Constitution trumps everything, even marriage. Moreover, I would be loath to see some future democratic consensus in favor of gay marriage blocked by such an amendment.

Nonetheless, that does not render the abusive, ad hominem charges made by the marriage revolutionaries any less hypocritical. Gay activists and their judges have every right to revolution. They have every right to make their case. But they deserve to be excoriated when they then cry, "culture war!"

Gay marriage advocates are the ones pushing to change the definition of marriage. They are the ones who have forced the issue in Massachusetts. They are the ones behind all the marriage licenses being issued in San Francisco.

So it's a bit disingenuous to push for what is, no matter how you look at it, a social revolution, then, when the other aide reacts to your efforts, accuse them of kindling a culture war.

That is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie.

Excuse me, you're the people who're pushing the social revolution. It isn't as If W just woke up day before yesterday, and said to himself, "You know what really ticks me off? Those fags. I need to slap them down publicly." This was a response to months of legal wrangling in Massachusetts and civil disobedience by the city government in San Francisco.

So you don't get to pretend that your view is perfectly mainstream and reasonable while any opposing view is the result of homophobia and hatred. And you don't get to accuse the president of "kindling a culture war" that you started.

You know what? I'm perfectly happy to have gay marriage. Doesn't bother me a bit. The problem with marriage is not that gays are getting married but that straights aren't staying married. I don't think gay marriage is a right, but I'm perfectly willing to allow it as a matter of fairness. Not because I think it's an ethical requirement, mind you, but because I'm a nice guy.

But being forced to do it by the courts, without any democratic audit, just sticks in my craw. And listening to the sickening, intellectually dishonest vituperation I've been hearing for the past two days really torks me off, too.

So, note to gay marriage advocates: If you think these kind of rhetorical tactics are winning you any friends among the moderate electorate, then it's a fools' paradise you're living in.

And I can tell you, it doesn't do anything to keep my vote in your corner, either.

Of course, if you can jam it down my throat through judicial fiat, then my vote is irrelevant, isn't it?

Which is, I suspect, the whole point. 

The Watcher's Council

(Review) I didn't win, but thanks to the Watcher's council for nominating one of my posts for the weekly vote.

Speaking Truth to Power

(Review) McQ, at the QandO Blog comments on Alan Greenspan's statements vis a vis the deficit and taxes, and social security.

Naturally the Democrats are having a cow.

But as I've said here ad infinitum there is no free lunch. You can have all the government services you want, but eventually they have to be paid for. You can, as we've been doing for the past 30 years, angage in runaway deficit spending and put off that payment for a while. But the Bills do come due. Either you have to cut spending or raise taxes to cover the bills.

Look, this isn't rocket science. if you want $X amount of services from the government, they will cost $X dollars. If you borrow money to pay for those services up front, they will cost $X +$N. Government services aren't made from the ether. Theyt have to be purchased just like any other good or service.

McQ writes:

Now days if you attempt to speak the truth, you're called upon to resign. A bit like killing the messenger bearing bad news, isn't it? Doesn't change the news one bit.

But, you say, why was Greenspan talking about Social Security now being such a big problem?

Because the political hacks who call themselves our representatives have been ignoring problems for YEARS. Its called the "third rail of politics" and they've refused to touch it.

Its never been a secret ... its all a numbers game, really and they've known the reality of those numbers for years as well.

77 million "baby-boomers" move into the retirement ranks and projections show the country will go from having just over three workers supporting each retiree to 2.25 workers for every retiree by 2025.

You don't have to be a member of Mensa to figure that one out, do you? Sound like a sound fiscal model to your, or a little more like a Ponzi scheme every passing day?

See you at 65 or 67 or whatever age they decide they'll pay you some of the money you've been shoveling in for years. Try not to die before you at least get SOME of it back.

The Democrats' answer hasn't changed since Jimmy Carter. Tax and spend, tax and spend.

Sometimes, I think the best thing that could happen would be to have Democrats running all three branches of government. Four or eight years of that would cool the ardor for socialism for decades.

It would be sweetly poetic justice if it weren't for the fact that millions of Americans would pay for the Democrats' economic stupidity with their livelihoods.

As Hugh Hewitt calls it, the San Francisco Chronically Wrongicle

(Review) Reviewer Don Lattin, the San Francisco Chronicle's religion writer has reviewed Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. In a wide-ranging (i.e. incoherent) review, Lattin offers up this gem, as he attempts to draw a picture for us about life in first-century Palestine:

Jesus and his early followers were Jews living in mostly Jewish territories on the outskirts of the Roman empire.

At the time, the Jewish world was in turmoil. There was a Jewish king, Herod, who collaborated with the Romans, as did some of the Jewish religious authorities.

There were prophets, rebels, mystics, fundamentalists and more than one guy claiming to be the messiah.

They all were trying to survive under the forces of an imperial occupation -- not unlike the Sunnis and the Shiites amid the chaos of today's Iraq.

It's such a stupid and egregiously tendentious simile, that all I can do is smile. I mean, I can't even get mad at the anti-Americanism it implies, because I find the utter crassness so humorous.

But, I should make it clear. The number of crucifixions so far in occupied Iraq: 0.

It's just amusing to see how, when writing on a totally unrelated subject, the author can get in a jab about his pet peeve, the War in Iraq. It's the same kind of target lock that John Kerry has about Vietnam:

"Senator Kerry, why do you so strongly support government-financed health care?"

"Well, you know, it goes back to when I was wounded in Vietnam. As I felt the hot metal shrapnel tear through my body..."

Really, there's an art to doing this, and getting it down so pat that it even seems natural when you pull it off, is a real acomplishment.  

Similarly, and worth at least an honorable mention, is Patricia Wilson's piece for Reuters (naturally), titled "Democrat Kerry Urges Caution on 'Passion'".

Kerry, a Catholic, said he was worried about the movie's potential anti-Semitism. Some critics have complained that Gibson portrays Jews as responsible for Jesus' death.

"I am concerned," he told reporters. "I don't know if it's there or not but there's a lot of it around now. I think we have to be careful."

The four-term senator from Massachusetts hasn't had much time to see movies lately. He has been running for president virtually since the beginning of last year.

In fact, the last movie he saw in a theater was another Mel Gibson flick released in 2002 called "We Were Soldiers," set in Vietnam where Kerry commanded a Navy Swift boat and was decorated for heroism.

You just have to admire that kind of artistry. 

It's the "common touch" that makes him so attractive

Photo: Reuters/Jim Bourg

What is Big Labor thinking?

(Review) I'm usually very shy about quoting Ann Countler on these pages. Oh, sure, I read her every chance I get, because it's a delicious, sinful little pleasure. But I usually don't quote her because she's often so strident.

Today, however, she does bring up an interesting point.

In the past decade, the AFL-CIO has lobbied Congress on three major issues of any importance to union members:

Oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement;

Oppose permanent normal trade relations with China;

Support drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The unions lost every vote. Demonstrating his savvy political skills, the head of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, repeatedly throws the federation's support to political candidates who opposed labor on all three issues. So if you ever find yourself negotiating with Sweeney, make sure your opening bid is "nothing"...

Strictly following his strategy of selling union votes for nothing, the AFL-CIO has endorsed Sen. John Kerry – who voted for NAFTA, voted for trade with China and voted against drilling for oil in Alaska. Skilled laborers will have to wait another day for "fair trade" and high-paying jobs in Alaska, but at least Sweeney's candidate supports the issues that really matter to the average blue-collar worker: gay marriage, global-warming treaties and hybrid cars.

Kerry denounces "Benedict Arnold" CEOs who ship "American jobs overseas." (Experts are still trying to figure out why Kerry didn't mention his service in Vietnam in that statement.) Sweeney seems to be satisfied with Kerry's explanation that – like his vote for war with Iraq – he voted for free trade, but then was shocked when free trade resulted.

Sen. John Edwards calls protection of U.S. jobs "a moral issue." Reminding audiences that he is the son of a mill worker almost as often as Kerry mentions that he served in Vietnam, Edwards says that "when we talk about trade, we are talking about values." As the son of a mill worker, he has seen with his "own eyes" what bad trade agreements "do to people." Of the evil trade agreements (supported by AFL-CIO's candidate) Edwards says: "Those trade deals were wrong. They cost us too many jobs and lowered our standards."

Except – like Kerry – Edwards also voted for those trade agreements every chance he got. In 2000, Edwards voted for trade with China. Having seen with his "own eyes" what happens "when the mill shuts down," Edwards voted to shut down a few more mills. Edwards also voted his conscience to oppose drilling in Alaska. Whenever Edwards' conscience speaks to him, it sounds remarkably like Barbra Streisand.

Edwards' only fig leaf for claiming he backs labor is a hypothetical vote he never actually cast. He bravely claims he would have voted against NAFTA – if only he had been in the Senate when it came up for a vote.

That's an interesting moral calculus. Edwards didn't mind forcing American workers to compete with a billion Chinese – famously including child workers and slave laborers. But trade with Canada and Mexico he says would have offended his delicate moral sensibilities.

The question, really, is, why do unions always back democrats. It's not like they've gotten any traction with the Democrats on...well...anything.

I've never really figured this out either: Why does the union rank and file elect weasels like Sweeney?

It just seems counterintuitive. And, if you're a union member who's voting your own self-interest, self defeating. As Coulter points out:

There is only one candidate for president who didn't vote for NAFTA, didn't vote for trade with China and supported drilling in ANWR. That candidate is George Bush. He got into office by beating Al Gore – the guy who was the head cheerleader for NAFTA. And unlike Dick Gephardt, Bush spends more time on the phone with Jimmy Hoffa than with Barbra Streisand. As president, Bush enraged free traders – and our precious European "allies" – by imposing tariffs on steel imports.

Along with tariffs on softwood lumber and textiles.

It's just a curious alliance, this Democrat/Big Labor hookup, and I just don't see what Labor gets out of it. Is it because public-sector unions like AFSCME and NEA are so powerful, and so dependent upon government largesse?

Wierd.

Howard Stern: Fired

(Review) The broadcast community is running a bit scared these days. The FCC has decided not only to apply the decades-old FCC rules against obscenity from 6 am to 10pm, they want to increase the fines from $27,500 to $250,000.

Clear Channel communications, who own all radio stations everywhere (almost) have laid down the law to CCC staff. If you get fined for indecency by the FCC, you're fired.

Today, they pulled a successful show that ran on 4 Florida stations, the amusingly named "Bubba the Love Sponge", as well as pulling Howard Stern off the 6 CCC radio stations on which he was broadcast (Stern works for Infinity, not CCC).

Of course, Howard is hopping mad. And, of course, the usual suspects are whining about free speech.

Cry me a river, Howard. It's commercial speech, first of all, not political speech, so you're kinda suckin' wind. Second, it's not the government that's laying the heavy hand of The Man on you, it's a private entity. Private parties can't violate your right to free speech. They can hire or fire you at will. If you think CCC is violating your right to free speech, then your just a Constitutional ignoramus. They are under no obligation whatsoever to provide you with money and a microphone.

It is, after all, their microphone.

It looks like the pendulum is swinging back, after a decade of relative openness.

Now there are a lot of arguments for and against regulating speech via the FCC. But it seems to me that the government does have a legitimate argument that obscene and outrageous speech should be limited by people who use the public airwaves. The government is after all, providing broadcasters with extremely lucrative portions of bandwidth, allowing the companies to rake in truckloads of cash. It seems like, in return, the government does have some authority to mandate minimal standards of civility in free broadcasts.

If you want something a little raunchier, you can always watch cable and subscribe to XM radio. 

A close election?

(Review) Hugh Hewitt writes that all the predicitons of a close election between Bush and Kerry might be pure bunk. Because Kerry, like W, has a past.

The preliminary evidence I have gathered via a playing on my radio show of the audio of Kerry's April, 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee indicates that a large part of the public is very interested in what Kerry did, and that the vast majority of that group holds him in deep contempt because of his actions, and that most of that majority are retired or active duty military. Kerry has his defenders in the military and among the veterans, but everything I have heard or read tells me that the men and women who have worn or are wearing the uniform view Kerry's antiwar activities as profoundly wrong and disqualifying for the presidency.

Count me in on that. Kerry's "band of brothers" is more like a small combo than a whole band. The rest of the orchestra is on the other side.

Some have argued that Kerry's past is past and anyway, Americans vote their futures. Historically, of course, that isn't correct, as Bloody Shirt elections and Watergate babies attest. There are plenty of pundits who would prefer that we not look back at Kerry's votes against the B-2, the Abrams tank, the Patriot missile, the Aegis cruiser and land-based missile defense, much less his salad days with the radicals of the early '70s. In Kerry's testimony to the Senate, he spoke approvingly of the "Indian nation of Alcatraz," the band of radicals who had occupied the island in San Francisco bay--a jarring reminder of the politics of those unhinged days. Kerry was very much a part of the strange doings of those years; there are great numbers of Americans who haven't forgotten.

And, I suspect W will ensure that our memories get even sharper by November.

Your personalized voting guide

Once again, it's election time, here in California, with the Primary just days away. Also on the ballot Tuesday are some important Ballot propositions.

So, let me tell you how you need to vote next week.

Prop 55: NO
Prop 55 would allow the state to sell $12.3 billion in general obligation bonds for school improvements. It's for the Children!© Well, now that we are utterly, utterly broke here in California, the kids are just gonna have to suck it up with the rest of us. As a little reminder, our credit rating places us slightly south of Chile in the desirability of our bonds. We'll have to pay bond yields that look the the interest rates charged by people whose middle names are "the" (Jimmy the Fish, Tony the Hammer, etc.) Sorry the kids can't have new schools and all, but we already spent all their money on medical care, education, and welfare for illegals, at the rate of $7 billion per year. Oh, and by the way, practically all this money would go to LAUSD. You know, the guys who regularly fritter away every dollar they get on useless adminsitrivia?

Prop 56: NO
This is one of those stealth propositions that says one thing but means another. It's being sold as a way to discipline the legislature. »Why, if they don't get a budget done on time, they won't get paid!« In reality, though, this proposition eliminates the requirement that tax increases get a 2/3 majority in both houses of the legislature. Under this proposition, the majority party, i.e. aging hippie Democrats from San Francisco, will be allowed to raise taxes pretty much anytime, at will. The only people who'll be losing any pay under this proposition will be taxpayers, who'll have their pay hoovered up by Sacramento at the drop of a hat. Remember, please, the only reason why State Senate Leader John Burton (D-Pluto), et al. didn't shove $12 billion in new taxes down our throats last year was that the 2/3 rule prevented them from getting the votes to enact it.

Prop 57: YES
This is one of those, "you've already screwed me, so now I gotta pay for it or get screwed worse" measures. Here's the deal: The Lej has spent like a drunken sailor on a Singapore shore leave for the last three years. They didn't have the money to cover all that spending so they borrowed the money on a short-term basis. The trouble is, now we don't have the money to pay those bills when they come due. So, in June, we gotta have $11 billion in hard cold cash to pay off those short-term bonds, or we gotta default on them. What this allows us to do is to do a one-time borrowing of $15 billion, and convert all those short-term obligations to a 30-year note. Now remember, that money has already been borrowed, we just don't have the money to pay it all back by June. This allows us to convert it to long-term debt that we can pay off with much smaller payments each year. The legislature has already screwed us by borrowing this money, this is just the best way available to clean up the mess. If we don't, then we're gonna have massive budget problems in June. We gotta suck it up on this one, too, and bite the bullet. We also gotta ensure that this never happens again, hence the next proposition on the ballot.

Prop 58: YES
This proposition goes hand in hand with the previous one. In a sense, we're saying, OK, we'll borrow the money to pay off your spending spree, but now you've gotta straighten up and fly right. The proposition does a couple of things. First, it puts a spending cap on Sacramento, by requiring that spending not exceed income each year. We did have a balanced budget requirement previously, but it had a hole large enough to drive a truck through, hence our current problems. This closes that loophole. Second, it requires that the state build a reserve account of at least $8 billion. In the 1990s while revenues were booming, the state spent all that extra revenue as soon as it came in. Once the economy slowed, there wasn't enough revenue to cover those increased commitments, and since the state hadn't put any money aside, we were pretty much screwed. Finally, the proposition prohibits any future borrowing to pay off deficits. Hopefully, passing this proposition, along with 57, will keep our heads above water, financial-wise.

So, you now have your orders, and I expect all of you to vote correctly.

That is all.   

A supply-sider's view

(Review) Larry Kudlow writes that the Democrats are simply ignorant about economics.

Modern Democrats love jobs but can't stand the businesses that create them. They also claim to want prosperity, but don't want anyone to get rich should prosperity come about. Kerry and Edwards, for example, propose a sharp steepening of marginal tax rates on upper-income brackets and the investments that successful earners would make. But if these policies came to pass, they would rob the economy of the vital incentives necessary to expand the supply of capital that is crucial to inventing new products, forming new businesses and creating new jobs.

The Democratic Party has literally no understanding of the dynamic job-creating process -- what the eminent economist Joseph Schumpeter termed "gales of creative destruction." In the last 10 years -- a period that included NAFTA, the emergence of China, and the high-tech revolution -- 18 million new jobs were created, even with the 2000-02 economic downturn. Yet behind those 18 million new jobs, the economy actually wiped out a staggering 339 million old jobs, while creating an astonishing 357 million new jobs.

The free-market capitalist system, by its very nature, is all about choice, competition and freedom. Democratic ideas to restrict economic freedom by closing trade markets and steepening tax rates will doom us to stagnation.

As I've said before, the Democrats haven't had a new economic idea since Das Kapital was published in English.

The Gray Lady has spoken

(Review) The New York Times today reveals their choice for Democratic presidential nominee. They choose john Kerry, naturally. And their reasoning makes perfect sense.

In Nut Land.

Emphasis in the quotes that follow, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. It helps me separate out the truly stupid stuff from the merely foolish.

It's true that Mr. Edwards has as much or more experience than George Bush did when he entered the White House in 2001. But that was a different era. Now Americans understand better that they live in perilous times, and they aren't likely to feel comfortable switching leaders this fall if the challenger seems to require a lot of on-the-job training. Mr. Bush himself was not well served by the thinness of his résumé when Sept. 11 occurred.

Really? Because, in the space of two years, he liberated two separate countries from stultifyingly brutal dictatorships, eliminated the Taliban's main support and training base, and killed or captured the majority of Al-Qaida's leadership. And, to top it all off, he's managed to prevent a single terrorist attack of any significance anywhere in the United States sine 911.

Yeah, if he'd had a sharp, punchy resume like John Kerry, why he'd have done....none of it. He'd have put the FBI on the trail of the 911 hijackers. After all, he assures us that the War on Terror is really a Law Enforcement deal, mainly. So, really, it's not so much a War as it is a Major RICO Investigation of Terror.

If John Kerry had been calling the shots, the industrial plastic shredders would still be running in Baghdad, with Uday contemplating whether to run his victims through head-first or feet first, and whether he should have their wives raped in front of them first, just so it'd be the last image they had in their heads when they went through the choppers.

Mr. Kerry, one of the Senate's experts in foreign affairs, exudes maturity and depth. He can discuss virtually any issue of security or international affairs with authority.

Yes, Mr Kerry's quite the expert. He's consistently voted against the very weapons systems that our now the mainstays of our military power. He voted for cozying up to Russian puppets like the hideous Daniel Ortega. He was for a nuclear freeze, so that the USSR, the longest lived Evil Empire of the 20th Century, could be appeased.

As far as I can tell, all of Kerry's expertise points to the conclusion that his main talent is being on the wrong side of every major political issue of his life. Only in government can you be such a consistent failure, and be proven so incontrovertibly wrong, and yet still be considered a candidate for the most powerful office in the country.

What his critics see as an inability to take strong, clear positions seems to us to reflect his appreciation that life is not simple. He understands the nuances and shades of gray in both foreign and domestic policy. While he still has trouble turning out snappy sound bites, we don't detect any difficulty in laying down a clear bottom line.

Oh, so now an inability to take strong clear positions is a strength. Silly me, I always thought it was a sign that one was either philosophically or ideologically unmoored, or was simply an opportunist, taking whatever positions that seemed best calculated to improve one's electability. Evidently, I missed the memo that explains that this is actually a sign of good leadership.

How clear, exactly, are those bottom lines of Kerry? He voted against the First Gulf War, because he was for it, but he voted for the second Gulf War because he was against it.

Well, I guess the bottom line there actually is pretty clear. "Whatever gets me elected, that's the bottom line."

If that's what the Times' editors meant, then I guess I agree.

If Mr. Kerry wins the nomination, the Bush administration will undoubtedly attempt to paint Mr. Kerry as a typical Massachusetts liberal, but his thinking defies such easy categorization. His positions come from mainstream American thought, centrism of the old school.

I can't imagine anyone who lives outside of Manhattan, Hollywood, or San Francisco writing this line with a straight face. Kerry has a senate voting record that puts him slightly to the left of Teddy Kennedy, for cripe's sake! It's an odd kind of "centrism" that puts Teddy Kennedy in the center-right.

The Bush Administration won't attempt to show Kerry is a Massachusetts Liberal, they'll prove it by the simple expedient of showing his Senate voting record. It's not like the Bushies are making this stuff up. It's Kerry's record. He's the guy who cast the votes. Don't toss it all off like it's some sort of Karl Rove "dirty tricks" campaign.

And the Times' leadership has the temerity to be insulted when someone implies they have turned into a partisan rag... 

Outsourcing: The view from the other side

(Review) Tom Friedman is in Bangalore, and he's looking into what "outsourcing" to India looks like in India.

"How can it be good for America to have all these Indians doing our white-collar jobs?" I asked 24/7's founder, S. Nagarajan.

Well, he answered patiently, "look around this office." All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke, because when it comes to drinking water in India, people want a trusted brand. On top of all this, says Mr. Nagarajan, 90 percent of the shares in 24/7 are owned by U.S. investors. This explains why, although the U.S. has lost some service jobs to India, total exports from U.S. companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $4.1 billion in 2002. What goes around comes around, and also benefits Americans.

Protectionists act as if outsourcing all goes one way. It's all heathen foreigners stealing American jobs, or disloyal American companies shipping jobs overseas. Those jobs are ours, and how dare the bloody wogs presume to do them!

Well, quite apart from anything else, the fact is that we really don't want to keep those jobs here. Yes, it's true that individual workers get hurt by outsourcing. They lose their jobs and livelihood, and as a compassionate society, we are troubled by this.

The trouble is that the obverse side of the outsourcing coin isn't that visible to us. We see the industrial worker laid of from his job down at the mill, but we don't see Microsoft, Coke, or Cisco hiring new employees to produce the products we're selling overseas as exports rise. And we don't see how a company that saves labor costs by outsourcing can lower prices, making their products more generally available.

Over the long term, by which I mean from business cycle to business cycle, we create about 3 million net new jobs every year. If all of our workers are busy down at the mill, or taking customer support calls in a call center, who's going to do those new jobs?

How many people worked at Microsoft, or Apple, or Cisco or Sun Microsystems, or SAIC, or any of a hundred other companies 30 years ago?

Answer: None.

Yet, in that 30 years, despite the job losses in the rust belt and Detroit, we've still managed to create tens of millions of new jobs.

Now, there may be a lot of policies we might want to implement, such as worker retraining, so that those mill workers who lose their jobs can learn other skills, and get other jobs. That's fine, and there's all kinds of stuff we can talk about there. But the one policy that will do the most harm to the largest number of people is trying to "protect" American jobs from outsourcing.

You can do all the Buchananite/Perot-nist ranting and raving, and can produce all the pie charts you want. All that makes you is a crank with cool graphics. 

Being a Vet is not a free pass

(Review) Thomas Sowell, in his random thoughts column, comes up with this little tidbit:

Benedict Arnold was a war hero, wounded in battle -- before he turned against his country. Hitler was likewise a decorated and wounded veteran of the First World War. Being a war hero is not a lifetime "get out of jail free" card, exempting you from responsibility for what you do thereafter.

Just a little something to keep in mind, without naming names or anything. 

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer "universal health care."

It's even more amazing when you see the end results, wich tend to be either vastly increased medical spending, severe non-price rationing, or, as is more usual, both.

Any time you start proposing a policy, before you do so, you always need to ask yourself, "And then what will happen?" Ask yourself that about four or five times.

No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.

Yeah, funny how that works.

Get over it

(Review) Famed feminist, bestselling author, and rhodes scholar Naomi Wolf has a horrifying story to tell. A secret so dark that now, twenty years later, she must write to express the pain and humiliation that still haunt her, two decades later.

In 1983, it seems, when she was a senior at Yale, she invited her professor, Alan Bloom to her apartment, along with two other students.

As Wolff tells it:

The four of us ate a meal. He had, as promised, brought a bottle of Amontillado, which he drank continually. I also drank. We had set out candles—a grown-up occasion. The others eventually left and—finally!—I thought we could discuss my poetry manuscript. I set it between us. He did not open it. He did not look at it. He leaned toward me and put his face inches from mine. “You have the aura of election upon you,” he breathed.

I hoped he was talking about my poetry. I moved back and took the manuscript and turned it around so he could read.

The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh.

I lurched away. “This is not what I meant,” I stammered. The whole thing had suddenly taken on the quality of a bad horror film. The floor spun. By now my back was against the sink, which was as far away as I could get. He moved toward me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting. Bloom disappeared.

When he reemerged—from the bedroom with his coat—a moment later, I was still frozen, my back against the sink. He said: “You are a deeply troubled girl.” Then he went to the table, took the rest of his sherry, corked the bottle, and left.

So, I gotta wonder, is this really worth several thousand words in New York magazine? I was afraid that my reaction was because I am neanderthal troglodyte, until I saw Anne Applebaum's Washington Post column about Wolf's article.

Applebaum isn't much impressed either, and comes close to implying a lack of honesty on Wolf's part.

But Wolf's article is not merely about that event (a secret that she "can't bear to carry around anymore"). The article is also about the lasting damage that this single experience has wrought on a woman who has since written a number of bestsellers, given hundreds of lectures, been featured on dozens of talk shows and photographed in various glamorous poses, including a smiling, self-confident head shot on New York magazine's Web site this week. Not that she mentions her achievements. On the contrary, she implies that this terrible experience left a lasting mark on her academic and professional career: "I was spiraling downward; I had gotten a C-, a D, and an F. . . . My confidence shaken, I failed in my effort to win the Rhodes Scholarship."

She also implies that she never recovered academically, which isn't quite the case. I was her contemporary, and happen to remember some of her achievements. But although I scoured the article, I could find no reference to the fact that Wolf did eventually win a Rhodes Scholarship, thanks, in part, to a recommendation letter written by Bloom. Or that, while in England, she began writing "The Beauty Myth," the first of those bestsellers.

What's even worse, writes Applebaum, is how Wolf voluntarily strips herself of her achievements to claim the "victim" mantle.

But in the end, what is most extraordinary about Wolf is the way in which she has voluntarily stripped herself of her achievements and her status, and reduced herself to a victim, nothing more. The implication here is that women are psychologically weak: One hand on the thigh, and they never get over it. The implication is also that women are naive, and powerless as well: Even Yale undergraduates are not savvy enough to avoid late-night encounters with male professors whose romantic intentions don't interest them.

The larger implications are for the movement that used to be called "feminism." Twenty years of fame, money, success, happy marriage and the children she has described in her books -- and Naomi Wolf, one of my generation's leading feminists, is still obsessed with her own exaggerated victimhood? It's not an ideology I'd want younger women to follow.

On the other hand, if some professer tried a lame pickup line on me like, "You have an aura of election about you," I'd probably throw up, too. But, I doubt I'd still be moaning about 20 years later, after a highly successful career.

Some votes are harder to explain than others

(Review) According to the Washington Post, Kerry is a bit touchy about his record of defense votes.

As a candidate for the Senate in 1984, Kerry proposed eliminating a series of weapons systems, including the B-1 and B-2 bombers, the F-14A, F-14D and F-15 fighter jets, the Aegis air-defense cruiser, the Patriot missile system and the M1 Abrams tank, among others. Kerry told the Boston Globe last year that some of those proposals were "ill-advised, and I think some of them are stupid in the context of the world we find ourselves in right now and the things that I've learned since then."

Asked Monday when he changed his mind and which proposals were ill-advised, Kerry replied, "I never voted for one of those, I don't think, so I very quickly came to that conclusion when I was in the United States Senate in 1985 and 1986."

Kerry immediately amended that statement, saying he had opposed former president Ronald Reagan's missile defense system, anti-satellite weaponry and the MX missile. "I think I've tried to do things that made sense for the long-term defense of our country," he said.

That touched off a flurry of documents from the Republican National Committee and the Bush campaign citing votes Kerry made against a number of those weapons systems, and a response from the Kerry campaign asserting that he had sought to cut fat from the Pentagon budget but had supported a strong defense throughout out his career.

And not only that, he was in Vietnam, too!

Obviously, he's a bit touchy about his senate voting record. As well he should be.

I love Kerry's quote, too, admitting his votes were "ill-advised, and I think some of them are stupid in the context of the world we find ourselves in right now and the things that I've learned since then."

So, he admits, then, that his decisions about national security have essentially been unsound? Well, if that's the argument he wants to make, I'm certainly not going to quibble with it.

"The Anti-NAFTA Candidate"

(Review) David Ignatius is a little peeved at Democrats for their newfound populist, protectionst leanings. Not to put too fine a point on it, it makes them sound like cranks.

Clinton's message during his 1996 reelection campaign was that there was no easy escape from global competition. Protectionism would only hurt U.S. workers in the long run. The answer was education and job training that would give U.S. workers the skills to compete -- to "build a bridge to the 21st century," as Clinton put it in the signature line of the 1996 Democratic convention.

Now, contrast Clinton's blunt advice with the pandering and prevarication on trade issues of this year's leading (which is to say, surviving) Democratic candidates, Kerry and Edwards.

In the run-up to last week's Wisconsin primary, Edwards was proclaiming himself the anti-NAFTA candidate, which to me is the economic equivalent of joining the Flat Earth Society. A defensive Kerry was almost apologizing for his support for the 1993 free-trade pact with Mexico and blasting "Benedict Arnold CEOs" who export jobs overseas in an effort to cut costs.

This anti-trade talk is dangerous nonsense, and the Democrats should be embarrassed by it. It suggests to U.S. workers that there is an alternative to change and adaptation -- to getting the skills that are necessary to compete in an increasingly competitive world. That's wrong, most of all because it misleads people about their real options. Rather than helping workers build a bridge to the future, as Clinton tried to do, these Democrats talk as if they want to build a roadblock. Shame on them.

This protectionist nonsense is nothing more than dangerous pandering. Dangerous because it doesn't help. Reality is what it is, and pretending it's otherwise won't make it go away.

Our troops

(Review) Ralph Peters says it all:

The American soldier is a historical anomaly - not a grasping conqueror, but a man or woman of courage and good heart who wishes only to do what must be done, and then go home. Our troops are inspiring in ways that no campaign speech or campus rally will ever rival. They live the virtues - courage, patriotism, love of freedom, self-sacrifice, honor - of which their critics are embarrassed to speak.

They have a wicked sense of humor. They're exuberantly politically incorrect. They're part of the most thoroughly integrated, representative American institution - our military. And when the American people and our leaders stand behind them, they can do any job on earth.

Defying countless predictions of disaster, our soldiers have accomplished more in Iraq than we had any right to expect. And they did it not because of some brilliant master plan - there was none - but because they took a look at the bloody mess they inherited, rolled up their sleeves and went to work to fix it.

They're the best we've got.

Roger that.

No Wedding bells for you boys

(Review) President Bush has announced his support for a Federal Marriage Amendment.

*sigh*

So, my question to Gay Marriage Advocates: Happy now? If this Amendment is passed--and I have every reason to believe it will--then you can take your "constitutional rights" argument and shove 'em.

So, good going. You've managed to take an issue the public was slowly coming to accept, and alienate the majority of the electorate by trying to shove it down their throats via the judiciary. The American people are pretty defenseless over the long term against arguments about fairness. But we're a pretty stubborn people when you try to shove things down our throat.

So, how's that workin' out for you?

Idiots.

And for members of the judiciary, what were you thinking? Hasn't the last 30 years of turmoil, acrimony, and judicial politication following ROE v. WADE taught you guys anything?

Here, repeat after me: "This is a matter for the state legislatures to decide." Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Of course, if you start saying things like that, then you'll probably miss the heady feeling that comes of dictating policy for the Republic by fiat. It is, after all, good to be the King.

Here's a little lesson. If you lose in the legislature, you can always go back the next session. And the next. And the next. If you lose in a Constitutional Convention, then you're pretty much screwed.

By making this a legislative issie, you probably would've gotten gay marriage in the fairly near future in VT, NY, MA, CA, WA, IL, and some other states.

Now, you face an excellent change of never getting it anywhere at all.

Draft Dodger

(Review) Byron York writes that Democrats are preparing a massive attack on Dick Cheney's lack of military service and his history of deferments during the Vietnam War.

That sounds like a pretty silly strategy to me. Cheney was born in 1941. That means he'd have been 18 in 1959. Byt the time LBJ really kicked things off in the Nam, it was 1965, making Cheney 26 years old. Dick Cheney was never gonna go to Vietnam, even if he had been drafted.

Besides, I've got a copy of the Constitution around here somewhere and it doesn't say anything about military service being a requirment for the Vice-Presidency.

Or the presidency for that matter.
 

The King of not getting it

(Review) Parolee gets tired of waiting for his case to be called. Steps outside the courtroom to light up a joint. Hilarity ensues.

How it will be

(Review) The President opened up his campaign last night, contrasting his positions on the economny and the war on Terrorism with the Democrats. He also took on John Kerry's record of flip-flops.

"The other party's nomination battle is still playing out. The candidates are an interesting group with diverse opinions," Bush said. "They're for tax cuts and against them. They're for NAFTA and against NAFTA. They're for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act. They're in favor of liberating Iraq, and opposed to it. And that's just one senator from Massachusetts." His supportive audience erupted in laughter and applause.

I think we'll be hearing more of this. So, evidently does the Kerry campaign, and they don't like it.

Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter disputed Bush's list of purported flip-flops. Kerry opposed Bush's tax cuts for the richest Americans and stands by that; voted for NAFTA and stands by it; voted for the Patriot Act, but believes the Justice Department is using it to trample civil liberties; and stands by his vote to authorize force for Iraq, but believes Bush's prosecution of the war "created a breeding ground for terror" and alienated allies, Cutter said.

Well, she can dispute anything she wants, but Kerry's votes, and his public statements about those votes are a matter of record. And, looking at that record, Kerry appears to take both sides of any major issue witrh a timing based solely on what he thinks will do him the most political good.

Time to get tough

(Review) Mark Levin writes that it's time for President Bush to start hitting the Democrats hard about their weakness on national security. A shortcoming which has been the Democrats' main foreign policyweakness for decades.

President Bush has done more in three short years to liberate and defend Muslims the world over than any former president, any foreign leader, or any Muslim leader. He set in motion events that freed 50 million Afghans and Iraqis. In so doing, he badly damaged the terrorist networks that had been funded, encouraged, and embraced by the oppressive Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes. We can react forever to Democratic demands for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — weapons Democrats themselves have argued existed for more than a decade. But their main concern is hardly WMDs; their purpose now is to downplay or dismiss the remarkable accomplishments of the Bush presidency in a part of the world where America has suffered repeated setbacks under both Democratic and Republican presidents...

Call it preemption. Call it self-defense. Call it liberation. In truth, President Bush is advancing the Reagan Doctrine, or what should now be called the Reagan-Bush Doctrine. Ronald Reagan rejected the Iron Curtain, he rejected Communism, and he rejected the status quo. He came to office when the Soviet Union was extending its tentacles over several continents, including South America. He believed that, for humanitarian and national-security reasons, the Soviets had to be defeated, not tolerated. And against all conventional wisdom, and severe criticism from many of the same Democrats who now disparage George Bush, Reagan did just that. Hundreds of millions were freed, and the Russians are no longer the threat they once were. Who would have thought it? Certainly not the Democrats.

But they were wrong.

When I first went on active duty in 1984, we were training to fight nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare in Central Europe. Soviet Communism seemed like our permanent enemy. HAd you asked me in 1984 what I thought I would be doing in 1993, I would have answered that Iwould be stationed in Europe somewhere, watching for the moment when Soviet tanks rolled across the Fulda Gap.

But by 1993, the USSR had been defunct for two years.

And I doubt very seriously that would've happened if Reagan had been forced to go along with people like John Kerry, who voted against the MX missile, the Ground Launched Cruise Missile/Pershing deployments, and for a nuclear freeze, abandoning Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, and all the other foreign policy idiocy to which the Left was, and is, so erroneously devoted.

The Hollow Army

(Review) James Fallows writes for The Atlantic that the US military is stretched to the breaking point.

The article is too complex to quote little snippets from, and you should read it all. Basically, he posits the operational tempo is simply too fast for the number of troops we have to keep up with it.

I was on active duty in the 80s, when the US Armed forces reached a 3.8 million people. Bythe time I left, in 1993, we werre down to 2 million. Now, there are 1.4 million on active duty.

At the same time, the number and frequency of deployments has steadily increased. Back when I was on active duty, you could reasonably expect a deployment around once per year for 60-90 days, most of which were voluntary. Now, troops routinely spend at least 6-9 months per year away on mandatory deployments. In addition, tens of thousands of guardsmen and reservists have been called up for one-year tours of active duty, which causes a not inconsiderable economic strain for their families, businesses and communities.

The Bush Administration, led astray perhaps by Donald Rumsfeld's zeal for "Transformation" is trying to fight a global war on terror on the cheap. They aren't asking for large increases in funding or manpower for the DoD.

In many ways this probably seems quite reasonable to the Administration. But, no matter how much transformation can theoretically downsize troop levels, there is a limit to how much the trrops themselves will put up with.

When you have an all-volunteer force, you simply can't keep deploying them ad infinitum. They need time to rest, be at home with their families, and recharge their batteries after a while.

Transformation, it seems to me, is leading the administration down a path that insuffieciently accounts for the affects on the human capital of the military. That's a capital error when dealing with volunteers.

Steyn on Kerry

(Review) Mark Steyn presents a vicious rebuff to the media, and to the Kerry campaign, by writing the truth.

I dozed off the other day watching a White House press conference in which President Bush was asked nary a question about anything that had happened since 1972, and I dreamt there was a muffled explosion from al-Qaida down the street blowing up the Capitol. And, when it had died away, the press corps brushed the plaster dust off their suits and said, ''But, Mr. President, critics point out that National Guard pay stubs from the '70s are notoriously easy to forge.''

It's been said that America is divided into Sept. 11 people and Sept. 10 people. The former category are those for whom Sept. 11, 2001, changed everything. The latter are those for whom Sept. 10, 1972, changed everything. That's when Bush didn't show up at the Air National Guard base because he was dancing naked on a bar in Acapulco with Conchita the surly waitress. Or whatever. If you think this is the most important issue facing America, feel free to vote for John Kerry, who back in 1972 was proudly serving his country by accusing its armed services of committing war crimes.

These would be the same American soldiers that Kerry now refers to as his "band of brothers".

Assume for the purposes of argument that the media are right: that John Kerry's four months in Vietnam are so impressive they outweigh two decades of zero accomplishment in Washington, save for a series of votes remarkable for being wrong on every major issue, from Reagan's raid on Libya to the Gulf War to every new weapons systems for the U.S. military. What will President Kerry do?

This is how he characterized the war on terror to Tom Brokaw: ''I think there has been an exaggeration,'' he said. ''They are really misleading all of America, Tom, in a profound way. It's primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation.''

That's all I need to know.

Bush wants to take the war to the enemies, fight it on their turf. Kerry wants to do it through ''law enforcement'': If the Empire State Building gets blown up, he'll launch an investigation immediately. It's not enough.

Even if Bush was AWOL 30 years ago, on everything that matters John Kerry is AWOL now.

This is why no Democrat will ever get my vote again until they can prove that some of the spirit that animated Harry Truman and FDR in defending this country is still extant in their party.

Until they do that, then I'll regard every other policy position they have as an irrelevance. 

Bush to Senate Dems: Drop Dead

(Review) President Bush has given Alabame Atorney General William Pryor a recess appointment to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The usual suspects are yapping like scalded chihuahuas.

More on Gay Mariage

(Review) Trey Givens goes all the way with me, almost, in my arguments about [Note: about, not for or against.--Ed.] gay marriage.

So, Mr. Franks asks, "The true question is whether or not such discrimination [between consentual unions] serves a useful purpose about which we should think very carefully before tinkering." And of course it does not serve any rightful purpose.

Maybe I missed something about Dale Frank's position on this, but it sounds like he's laid out the problem correctly, his closing statements just seem like maybe he doesn't want to do the math.

I am not arguing against gay marriage. I am arguing against perverting the constitution in order to reach a desired outcome.

I acknowledge, however, that if this become a matter of public debate, rather than legal challenge, then there are those who will oppose it for a variety of reasons. The true question is, therefore, precisely as I phrased it..."whether or not such discrimination [between consentual unions] serves a useful purpose about which we should think very carefully before tinkering."

Now, Givens' answer might be, "Tinker away, Baby!" As it happens, as far as gay marriage is concerned, that's my answer, too. I can think of a number of rational reasons to restrict polygamous and incestual relationships on other than moral grounds. But that is a legislative distinction not a constitutional one.

But, many gay marriage advocates are terrified of even implying that support for gay marriage might start us down a slippery slope towards legalized polygamy and incest.

And, you can see, just by looking through the comments on Boi's web site here and here to my posts, that--Givens excepted--no one wants to take the step and say, "Yes, if bans against gay marriage are unconstitutional, then so are bans against polygamy and incest." But if we are constitutionally forced to recognize that banning one type of consensual adult relationship is wrong, then we must honestly recognize that the constitutional protection we espouse must extend to all consensual adult relationships.

Givens may be happy to agree, but, I think it's fascinating that so many other gay marriage advocates are far less willing to do so.

What I am doing is not arguing for or against gay marriage, I'm just pointing out the weaknesses in the constitutional arguments for it that say Gay marriage is constitutionally mandated, but all that other icky stuff isn't.

There's no need to jump through these rhetorical hoops, except for the fact that most gay marriage advocates don't think they can get a majority of their fellow citizens to approve of it. That being the case, they are obliged to make bogus constitutional arguments to pursue the matter through the courts.

It seems to me that it would, in fact, be better, or at least more honest, to go to the public and say, "Look, you guys have the power to extend the right of marriage to gays. We are just as committed in our relationships as you are in yours. We seek the same things in marriage as you do. Why not vote to let us have it as a matter of fairness?"

That approach, it seems to me, short-circuits the right's ability to make slippery slope arguments, because, in the real world, if it's left as a matter of legislative or public discretion, there'll never be legal polygamy or incest anywhere in the US.

Except maybe in Utah.

Where, hopefully, it'll just be polygamy.

Of course, I say that as a resident of California, a state that allows 1st cousins to marry. So, really, we're already just a step away from Dueling Banjos on the porch as it is. 

UPDATE:

Trey Givens comments:

I figured out what I missed. Maybe this clarification will help others:

"The true question is whether or not such discrimination [between consentual unions] serves a useful purpose about which we should think very carefully before tinkering [with the Constitution.]"

or even better:

The true question about which we should think carefully before tinkering with the Constitution is whether or not such discrimination [between consentual unions] serves a useful purpose.

I'm not busting on you here, I really am writing for elucidation. So, in this one case, please don't think I'm being a snot.

(Other cases may yet be considered.)

Actually, I wasn't referring to tinkering with the Constitution at all. I was referring to tinkering with marriage. As I said, any decision we make should be a legislative decision about what constitutes marriage.

Marriage is an important institution. Indeed, we regard it as the bedrock relationship in our society. So, it behooves us to make a rational decision about whether or not we wish to tinker with it.

At the end of the day, I suspect that answer will in due course be "Yes", in the case of gay marriage. But that is the debate we need to be having, i.e. rational reasons for legalizing it or not, and doing so through the exercise of our judgement; making the informed decision that this is a case in which we should tinker with our definition of mariage to include gays and lesbians. The way to do that is to rationally shoot down arguments that allowing gays to marry will fracture the foundation of our society, cause the breakdown the family, cause dogs and cats to sleep together, etc.

The debate we should not be having is whether or not the Constitution has anything to do with marriage at all. It's hardly going to win friends or influence people to simply declare, "The Constitution says I can, so you can go suck it!" Because A), as far as I can tell, the Constitution says no such thing, and B) if you get the opposition PO'd enough, they will ensure the Constitution does say something about it, and I guarantee you won't like what it says.

I dunno, but I think what's bothering Givens and others is that the way I'm phrasing the question seems to imply that we will decide to exclude gay marriage as a possibility. But, in the short term at least, that's very possible, and we have to acknowledge that.

But our task in a democratic Republic is to convince our fellow citizens through reason and persuasion, not to bludgeon them over the heads with court orders. We did that with abortion and that's done more to fracture and divide our politics and judiciary since the era of slavery.

Good going pro-choicers.

If we'd left abortion to state legislatures, it would be a dead issue right now.

The march of progress

Photo: AFP

I'd rather be right than president

(Review) Ralph Nader rides to the rescue!

Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate who ran for president in 2000 as a Green Party candidate, will enter the 2004 race for the White House as an independent candidate, advisers told Fox News on Friday. A formal announcement by Nader is expected this weekend.

Let me be the first to say, "Go, Ralph, Go!" Where do I go to give him money?

Mark Steyn: The Anglosphere's priceless treasure

(Review) Steyn takes on the Candaian uproar over the antics of Triumph the Comic Insult Dog, and concludes that "entire country has been relocated to the rue des Pussies."

Let's go back to Triumph the dog's contention that Quebec men are mostly homosexual. In 1991, Edith Cresson made the same allegation against the British. At the time, she was the prime minister of France. In other words, she wasn't just Conan O'Brien's hand puppet; she was President Mitterrand's hand puppet. And she was flesh and blood, which was indeed the main basis of her assertion: She claimed that as a vibrant sensual woman she found more men came on to her in the streets of Paris than London and concluded from this that Englishmen were obviously gay.

Instead of falling into po-faced whining like the Toronto Star, Britain's Sun ran a picture of two Frenchmen carrying those dinky little male purses they're partial to over there, under the headline: "They Don't Call It Gay Paree For Nothing." Instead of huffing and puffing about "racist filth" like Canadian Members of Parliament, one British MP attempted to introduce the following motion: "This House does not fancy elderly French women." That's the way a mature, confident society deals with such provocations--with cheap jokes and extensive lists of "Famous French Poofs"--not the reflexive cringe that cries "racism" and calls for "hate crimes" investigations.

Mature? Confident? How patriarchal.

I'm shocked--shocked!--to learn this

(Review) According to the Washington Times:

The number of illegal aliens caught crossing into the United States increased dramatically just days after President Bush proposed a guest-worker program that would give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants now in this country, according to the union that represents the Border Patrol's 9,000 field agents.

The National Border Patrol Council said apprehension totals increased threefold in the San Diego area alone, adding that the vast majority of aliens detained along the border told arresting agents that they had come to the United States seeking amnesty.

Huh!

It seems that people respond to incentives. Who'd have thought.

And, by the way, however did they get the idea that the president's plan was an amnesty? He specifically said it wasn't an amnesty.

On the other hand, I said it was. And it looks like of lot of Mexican nationals said so, too.

Victor Davis Hanson

(Review) I am becoming a truly rabid fan of this man. I offer just a small piece of the goodness that is VDH in today's wide-ranging analysis.

The WMD controversy is similar. It is legitimate to question the nature of American intelligence as long as the fate of Saddam's once-undeniable arsenal remains murky. And the Democrats can legitimately score points in alleging that the administration put too much emphasis on a single case for war when there were a dozen other reasons for regime change that were far more compelling.

But they were not content with that fair enough tactic. No, they had to press on with really offensive rhetoric — Messrs. Gore and Kennedy alleging conspiracies, near treason, and the "worst" diplomatic decision in U.S. history. A sad cast of provocateurs and Vietnam War-era retreads like Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Al Franken, and Not in Our Name were more often to be the intellectual godheads of the Democratic response than the ghosts of Harry Truman, JFK, and Scoop Jackson. A Hubert Humphrey would not have let a creepy Abbie Hoffman in the same room with him; Wesley Clark smirks on stage alongside a buffoonish Michael Moore as the latter calls a war-time president a deserter.

Yet the problem with this additional slander is that the war, in fact, has turned out to have a lot to do with WMD — and will bring dividends that are far more important even than disarming Saddam. Pakistan is now revealing the extent of its nuclear treachery; the developments in Libya are surreal, but inexplicable apart from the removal of Saddam; and a newly energized U.N. inspection team suddenly finds traction with Iran. Thus the more the Democrats allege American fantasies about WMD, the more quite dangerous regimes instead see reality — and fear that their own arsenals might ensure them a rendezvous with something analogous to the fate of Saddam Hussein.

Read, as Glenn would say, the whole thing.

Tell me again, why did we liberate them?

(Review) The French are up their usual tricks.

France is considering sending troops to Haiti, smack in the middle of America's Caribbean back yard, to quell unrest against a Marxist-leaning president by fellow Haitians who reject his iron grip on power.

Wasn't that precisely what the Monroe Doctrine, announced in 1823 as Europe sought to subvert local governments in America's backyard, was supposed to prevent?

The French claim they have 2,000 citizens living in Haiti, and must send a "rescue mission" to protect them during the violence. If that sounds familiar, it should. France has used similar pretexts in Congo, Ivory Coast, Chad and elsewhere whenever it has sought to reverse regimes, install friendlier dictators or otherwise protect French national interests.

And, will the French be securing UN permission for an invasion of Haiti?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Woohoo! Hee hee!

Heh.

Ah, sorry about that.

No, of course they won't. Why should they. They never have before.

The author of this article, Kenneth R. Timmerman, a senior writer for Insight Magazine, is author of The French Betrayal of America, forthcoming from Crown Forum.

He reveals, for the first time, how the French completely screwed us over at the UN last year.

In fact, I can now reveal, Mr. Chirac personally telephoned President Bush at the White House to assure him France would support the United States at the U.N. in seeking a new Security Council resolution. Mr. Chirac even ordered the French Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare units to be send to Iraq as part of a U.S.-led liberation army.

But on Jan. 20, 2003, Mr. de Villepin pulled the rug out from under Mr. Powell and the president, announcing behind Mr. Powell's back at the United Nations that France would under no circumstances send troops to Iraq — in direct contradiction of those promises he and Mr. Chirac had made to the United States.

To this day, the French have remained unrepentant about their lies, apparently in the belief this is what big boys do when they play on the world stage.

With "friends" like these...

The Dark Side of Free Trade

(Review) Bob Herbert doesn't know much about free trade. But he knows he's again' it.

The middle class is in trouble. Globalization and outsourcing are hot topics in this election season because so many middle-class Americans, instead of having the luxury of looking ahead to a brighter future for the next generation, are worried about slipping into a lower economic segment themselves.

This is happening in the middle of an economic expansion, which should tell us that the terrain has changed. In terms of job creation, it's the weakest expansion on record. The multinationals and the stock market are doing just fine. But American workers are caught in a cruel squeeze between corporations bent on extracting every last ounce of productivity from their U.S. employees and a vast new globalized work force that is eager and well able to do the jobs of American workers at a fraction of the pay.

Somehow, I knew those heathen foreigners would be a problem. And, of course, we certainly can't forget the all-purpose villain of the Left, the »unregulated multinational corporation«.

The implicit argument is that all those heathen foreigners can starve to death, as long as Americans get to keep their jobs. And, really, that's not a view I'm totally unsympathetic with.

But, it does ignore the fact that, when measured all across the business cycle, we tend to create about 3.5 million net new jobs a year in this country.

Now, we haven't created a whole lot of new new jobs so far in the current recovery, but the unemployment rate has declined steadily. Clearly, more people are working somewhere.

The knee-jerk advocates of unrestrained trade always insist that it will result in new, more sophisticated and ever more highly paid employment in the U.S. We can ship all these nasty jobs (like computer programming) overseas so Americans can concentrate on the more important, more creative tasks. That great day is always just over the horizon. And those great jobs are never described in detail.

This is, quite simply, utterly false. How does Herbert explain companies like SAIC, the largest employee-owned corporation in the world, all of whose 40,000 employees work in industries that didn't even exist 30 years ago? How about the millions of people that work at Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, Motorola, Cisco.

If Bob Herbert had been writing this column thirty years ago, he would have been moaning about American Television manufacturing was collapsing, and where were all these highly skilled, high-tech workers going to go when the last Sylvania plant shut down, and all TVs were made by cheap Japanese labor.

Had he been writing it 20 years ago, he would be complaining that the Japanese were blatantly taking advantage of our free trade policies, throwing Americans out of work by flooding us with cheap imports. Moreover, they were buying up all our flagship real estate properties. Why, by the year 2000, he'd have written, the Japanese will own us all, lock, stock and barrel!

My point is not that free trade is painless. Obviously, for some people, it isn't. A lot of those TV repairmen and assembly line workers lost their careers. Perhaps they had to take less skilled, lower paying jobs to make ends meet. But, it's important to note, that their kids are executives at Oracle, or Sun, not assembly line workers at some Sylvania TV plant somewhere.

One of the primary reasons to move jobs overseas is to make room in the labor force to fill the new jobs that are created as technology advances. And, unless you are like the apocryphal patent office official who supposedly proposed shutting down the US Patent office in 1899, because everything possible had already been invented, then it's hard to argue that this time, the party's over, and that only despair and ennui can follow.

Take a look at the companies in the Fortune 500, and compare it with the 1975 list, then tell me that those new jobs are always "over the horizon". We're already living over the horizon, baby.

No one really knows what to do — not the president, not John Kerry or John Edwards, and most of all not the economists and other advocates who have been so certain about the benefits for American working men and women of unrestrained trade and globalization.

Well, actually, I know what to do.

Nothing at all.

Well, that's not exactly true. There is one thing we have to do if we wish to remain competitive: Reform education so that we produce people who actually have one by the time they leave high school.

But that's an idea you certainly won't hear from John Kerry. 

Bob Dole, Redux?

(Review) In 1996, Bob Dole ran for president with the unspoken slogan, "Bob Dole. Because it's his turn." Dole really offfered nothing to the voters, other than the fact that he wasn't Bill Clinton. As it turned out, that wasn't enough.

Now, Former Fed Governor Lawrence Lindsay writes that John Kerry is similarly bereft of any detailed ideas about what he'd do as president.

The Kerry campaign is for controlling healthcare costs and reforming Medicare but has no plan on how to do so. Mr Kerry says he will review all trade agreements in the first four months. To what effect? The candidate running on fiscal discipline does not even have a budget. The Bush campaign kept a detailed budget that simulated non-partisan congressional scoring methods from day one.

Mr Kerry's disappointing lack of detail is mirrored by an even more disturbing vacuum on the personnel side. Mr Kerry has smart political tacticians, such as Bob Shrum, and good speechwriters. But who is his chief economic policy adviser? Who is his chief national security adviser? The Bush campaign formally announced that Condi Rice and I would fill those roles in March 1999. At that point, Mr Bush and I had been discussing economic issues for well over a year and his conversations with Ms Rice had been going on at least as long.

As the clear choice of his party's Washington-based establishment, Mr Kerry could have attracted top talent back in late 2002. Given his intellectual proclivities, it surprises me that he did not. It is also surprising that the media let him get away with this.

It will be hard,though, to maintain that kind of aloffness from detail for the entire presidential campaign. Sooner or later, both the press and the voters will get tired of hearing Kerry say, "We need solutions, not slogans", then move on to other things before actually presenting any of those solutions he claims we need.

With four months until the Democratic convention, Mr Kerry is going to have to think hard about what he will do if elected. My hunch is that this autumn, voters will care a lot less about Mr Kerry's curriculum vitae and electability and a lot more about what will happen after the election. If so, not being George Bush will not be enough for John Kerry any more than not being Bill Clinton was enough for Bob Dole. That is the Kerry campaign's problem. But it will become the country's problem if Mr Kerry is elected.

A lot of presidents have directionless second terms. With Kerry, we stand a very good chance of getting that right from the get-go.

The right-wing smear machine

(Review) Charles Krauthammer writes that the Democrats sound like whiny little brats. After spoending the last several weeks carpet-bombing George W. Bush, they're now complaining that the "Right-wing smear machine" needs to be called off.

Krauthammer asks, "when was it called on?"

What, in fact, have the Republicans mustered? A single Internet ad about Kerry, the Senate's king of special-interest money, denouncing special interests. And one speech by the Republican National Committee chairman on Kerry's conventional liberal (i.e. budget-cutting) positions on defense and intelligence.

The Republicans have yet to go after Kerry on his most critical vulnerability, his breathtaking penchant for reversing course for political convenience:

• Votes against the Persian Gulf War, which he now says he favored.
• Votes for the Iraq war, which he now says he opposed.
• Votes against the $87 billion for troop support and Iraqi reconstruction, while saying that he favors troop support and Iraqi reconstruction.
• Votes for the No Child Left Behind Act, which he now attacks incessantly.
• Votes for NAFTA; he now rails against the unfairness of free trade.
• Votes for the Patriot Act; he now decries the assault on civil liberties.

I gues those are the types of "smears" Kerry is worried about.

Good ol' John Kerry. No matter what you believe, Kerry can point to his record to prove that he believes it, too.

Tell me something I don't know

(Review) Kevin Ferris, an editorial board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer, writes that he needs to hear something more substantive from the Democrats than, "George W. Bush is a weasel."

I already know Bush had an undistinguished career before the age of 40 or so, but I also saw him step up to the plate after Sept. 11. I know when he's scheduled for something like a Meet the Press interview that there's a chance things won't go well - just as I know he's given some of the best speeches about freedom, human rights and democracy of the last half century. I know about his administration's stubborn refusal ever to admit a mistake, while noting with relief that it can and will correct its course.

Democrats need to tell me something I don't already know. How (or will) the war on terrorism continue under a Democratic administration? What parts have gone right? What needs to change? When do you look for broad international coalitions, and when do you go alone? Can you withstand the international condemnation that can come with going alone? What will your policy of preemption look like? What will you do differently to keep places such as Iran and North Korea free of nuclear weapons? Will foreign leaders - allies and foes - believe you when you threaten to use force?

This strikes me as a key weakness of the Democrats' campaign thus far. There is an awful lot of criticising W for what he's done, or failed to do. But none of the Democratic contenders have laid out a particularly compelling outline of how they'd answer the questions Ferris asks.

Daniel Henninger, in today's Wall Street Journal adds that the type of campaign we've seen so far from the Democrats cheapens the electoral process.

At the same time the Democrats are pushing the "Bush Lied" meme, newspapers are running front page stories about Pakistan's A. Q. Khan agressively pushing nuclear technology off on anybody who'll buy it.

But what about Iraq? In this country's increasingly admit-nothing style of politics, one might conclude from listening to the Democratic presidential candidates that Iraq is on Mars, that its role in any of this obviously real global trade for weaponized nuclear technology was minimal or had become nothing, and so President Bush's reasons for replacing the Saddam Hussein regime were a "pretense," "made up," a "distortion," and a "lie."

Americans are entitled to believe all of this if they wish, even in good faith. And our political establishment is entitled to spend the next eight months of the election debating how many angels danced on the head of Mr. Bush's intelligence estimates. And the Democrats may sustain a strategy to dismantle and demolish the authority of an American president. But it may not be in the country's interest to do so, and given what we now know about rogue nations seeking rogue weapons, it is dangerous to do so.

The "Bush Lied" meme is a wonderful campaign theme, because so litle is needed to justify using it. "Bush said there were WMDs in Iraq. We haven't found any. Ergo, W is a liar. QED." It's certainly the most tendentious interpretation of those facts, but as long as it's effective, Democrats aren't particularly interested in its honesty.

Well, sure, who wouldn't? Especially if you already have a whole sheaf of 7 3/4% 30-year treasuries

Photo: AP Photo/James A. Finley

They're almost as large as the "Berkeley Professors for Bush" Committee

Photo: AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill

Yeah, she looks like she can hardly contain herself

Photo: Pool/Reuters

The day she pops, it's gonna be great TV

Photo: Reuters/Brian Snyder

Keeping the Dream Alive

Photo: AP Photo/Toby Talbot

What's love got to do with it?

(Review) Chicago may soon join San Francisco in issuing marriage licenses for homosexual couples.

Mayor Richard Daley said he would have "no problem" with Cook County issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in Chicago, the nation's third largest city. Entering a national debate over gay marriage, Daley urged sympathy for same-sex couples because "they love each other just as much as anyone else."

Now, I have no doubt that homosexuals love each other just as deeply as anyone else. I grant that homosexual love is not one iota less spiritual and meaningful as any other kind of love.

I'm hard-pressed, however, to see why the depth of homosexual love has any relevance whatsoever to the debate on gay marriage. There may be any number of relevant arguments for why gay marriage should be legalized but love isn't one of them.

We don't, for example, approve of adultery because the adulterous partner loves his mistress. Indeed, we condemn it. We don't approve of an incestuous relationship because an adult brother and sister love each other. We don't approve of polygamy because a man or woman may love more than one opposite-sex partner. Yet, Mayor Daley makes the "love" argument, and it tends to shut off the debate.

But it seems to me that what were talking about here is redefining, for the first time in history, the definition of what marriage and family is. That strikes me as having public policy implications that are entirely irrelevant to who loves whom.

Even if you want to consider the issue as one of discrimination, you still have to answer what I saucily describe as the Santorum Question: If homosexual marriage is unlawful discrimination, then why isn't a ban on adult incest or polygamy also a form of unlawful discrimination?

I have yet to hear a coherent answer to that question. And I expect that if I were to ask why homosexual love is more valid than those other forms of consensual adult love, the responses would be equally incoherent.

This is yet another reason why I feel this is an issue that must be decided through the wisdom of the electorate as a whole, rather that being dictated by judicial fiat. We are, after all, talking about making edits to the basic unit of human society. It seems to me then that we need to ask much more penetrating questions about it, than whether or not love triumphs over all.

And, frankly, we need to address other issues than deciding whether it's discriminatory. Obviously a ban on homosexual marriage, like a ban on adult incest or polygamy, is discriminatory. The true question is whether or not such discrimination serves a useful purpose about which we should think very carefully before tinkering.

And I think it's likely that we'll get much more careful consideration by making this an issue of public debate and resolution than we will by having it imposed by the judiciary.  

(Cross Posted to BoiFromTroi)

"Fairly managing free trade" and other oxymorons

(Review) McQ, of the QandO blog, takes on the Washinton Post's Steven Pearlstein on the issue of "outsourceing", i.e. free trade.

Pearlstein, of course, is all for free trade. Except when he isn't. To make things all nice and fair, Pearlstein proposes a 1% tariff.

I'll let McQ take it from here.

If I read this correctly, the “winners from trade” (I would assume those to be countries with trade surpluses) would compensate the “losers from trade” (those being countries with a trade deficit) with a 1% tariff, which, in the case of the US would mean 15 billion which it could use for wage insurance, health care and college tuition for dislocated workers.

Ah ... so India or China, for instance, would pay America 1% of the worth of a service sector job that ends up in either country, is that correct?

Does anyone believe India or China is going to pay for that job even if they got this 1% tariff into effect?

Heck no, Corporation X which transferred that job is going to be taxed by India who’ll then pass that along as the tariff. And does anyone believe Corporation X is actually going to pay that tax? Of course not ... it will simply pass along that cost to whom? Yes, YOU dear consumer. It would simply be another in a long line of hidden taxes YOU would pay.

Tariffs are taxes on consumers. "No matter how much you wiggle or prance..." as the old rhyme goes, you are gonna end up footing the bill.

I'm always amused by those who propose business taxation, and pretend that it will be some sort of burden of businesses that will "force them to pay their fair share". Uh-huh. It's as if they live in the Land of Pretend, where businesses don't pass on the cost of taxation to the consumer.

In the real world, however, things work differently.

Mmmmm, Federalism

(Review) Jonah Goldberg argues that if we'd just let state legislatures worry about gay marriage, we'd all be better off.

The glass-is-half-full news has been that liberals, who've despised federalism with increasing intensity since the New Deal, suddenly learned a newfound respect for the concept on the issue of gay marriage.

Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, for example, touts the genius of federalism whenever he can, including most recently on Fox News Sunday when he indicated once again that he thinks having same-sex marriage legal in some states but illegal in others is an acceptable compromise.

The glass-is-half-empty news is that conservatives are suddenly less enamored with federalism. For a host of reasons -- some highly technical others flatly moral -- many conservatives want to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage in all 50 states.

I've been opposed to that for two reasons. The first is that I'm not a fair-weather friend of federalism. Real diversity, as the founders envisioned it, requires accepting that some communities will do things you don't approve of.

And if you don't like it, you can move elsewhere.

Say anything

(Review) Andrew Sullivan savages John Kerry for his inability to take an unequivocal stand on practically any issue.

It's all Drudge's fault

(Review) Chris Suellentrop thinks he knows another reason for Kerry's weak showing in Wisconsin. It's Matt Drudge's fault.

One final thought about Tuesday's results: Isn't it possible that Matt Drudge, and not NAFTA, was the factor that led all those undecided voters to break for Edwards at the last minute? If a Wisconsin voter knew one thing about Kerry, a Dean staffer told me, it was that there was a rumor that the senator had an affair with a younger woman. It was all over local radio, not to mention the fact that Rush Limbaugh was flogging it for three hours each afternoon. Yes, the woman has denied it. Yes, there's no evidence for it. And yes, there is evidence that Drudge got the facts wrong in his report. But just because a rumor is unsubstantiated doesn't mean that voters aren't affected by it. Live by electability, die by electability. If the entire rationale of your campaign is that you can win in November, voters would be completely justified in rejecting you because of a rumor, even one that they believe is untrue, if they think that other voters might not vote for you because of it. I can't quantify Drudge's impact on the campaign, but his rumor-mongering is the simplest explanation for the closeness of the race. I find it hard to believe that the independents and Republicans casting ballots for Edwards harbor deep anti-NAFTA feelings, while the Democrats voting for Kerry are ardent free traders.

Well, when you put it that way...

The honeymoon's over

(Review) Bill Safire points out something that I think explains why Kerry didn't do as well as expected last night in Wisconsin.

There's a new phase a-coming. Kerry has had his comeback honeymoon. He has offered only a high-carb diet of populist platitudes in stump speeches. For a serious man running for a serious job, Kerry has not made a policy speech since December, when he was nobody.

The Washington Post editorialist just noted "his fuzziness on issues ranging from Iraq to gay marriage. . . . He voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement yet now talks in protectionist terms. . . . He must explain how he would manage the real and dangerous challenges the U.S. now faces in Iraq--without the fuzzing." The Post's Fred Hiatt is not yet Meg Greenfield, but his influential wake-up call is sure to be echoed--especially in light of Wisconsin's results.

The honeymoon period is certainly exhilarating. The press is filled with puff pieces about how the frontrunner was such a "centrist governor", or about his heroism in Vietnam, or such like.

Eventually, however, you have to offer something substantive if you expect to be a serious presidential candidate. Saying things like "we need solutions, not slogans" only gets you so far, since that is, in fact a slogan, and not a solution.

The trouble is, once Kerry gets pinned down on his positions, the fuzz disappears, and people get to see more or less what he really thinks about the issues. I just don't think you can hold as many hard left positions as Kerry does and be an attractive nationwide candidate.

And I don't think that, once people get a closer look at him, Kerry is a personally attractive candidate. I don't mean he's not pretty, but that he's not appealing.

As the honeymoon recedes, I think Kerry is going to look less and less attractive, even to Democrats. And in November, I think we face the real possibility of another McGovern-style debacle for the Democrats.

So, who gets his email list?

(Review) Yougotta love this headline: "Dean to End Campaign but to Keep Fighting".

The party officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Fox News that the former governor is not shutting down his campaign, but instead ending his formal candidacy for president of the United States.

The new Dean campaign will be a fundraising organization that concentrates on Dean for America causes and on keeping his supporters energized, party sources told Fox. But his name will still be on ballots in many states.

$41 million, gone "poof", just like that. But he's gonna "keep fighting". Presumably from his high tech headquarters deep in the Vermont woods.

So, now it's Kerry and Edwards. Who gets the Dean voters? And after Edwards' strong showing last night in Wisconsin, is this now a two-man race on the Dem side?

That's quite a choice for the Democrats. Kerry, war hero or not, has that Massachussetts liberal thing happening. That's not an advantage in a national campaign. And, despite his actions in Vietnam, his actions since then raise a lot of questions. Edwards, on the other hand, has the huge problem of being a complete novice on foreign affairs, which is not an advantage in the middle of a world-wide war on terror.

I think neither guy is particularly electable, unless W screws up big-time.

Which Party

(Review) David brook asks, "Are the Democrats the Party of Harry Truman, or the party of Jimmy Carter?"

Now, in the midst of the war against Islamic totalitarianism, the crucial question is this: Is the Democratic Party truly set to reclaim the legacy of Truman and Kennedy, or is it still living in the shadow of Vietnam?

If you talk to Democratic foreign policy elites in Washington and New York, you come away convinced that the party has recovered from Vietnam, and is ready to assert power, albeit in multilateral guises. If, on the other hand, you attend Democratic primary rallies, you come away convinced that the party is still, at its base, the Jimmy Carter party when it comes to global affairs.

And if you listen to John Kerry, you come away not knowing what to think. He seems like a man betwixt and between, unable to issue a clear statement about America's role in the world, and hence floating toward whatever is expedient at the moment.

I think the Democrats are already in the Carter Camp. The idea of democrats of the last generation, which was that America was an exceptional country, and that America could use her power--even unilatrally--for good, have been lost to today's democrats.

And I think voters will realize that by November, too.  

Mark Steyn is Merciless

(Review) I bet he was a vicious theater critic. Because Mark Steyn has no mercy when it comes to political criticism.

In 2002, the Dems had no ideas and they ran on biography: In Missouri, Jean Carnahan was the brave widow of the late governor; in Georgia, Max Cleland was a Vietnam veteran and triple amputee; in Minnesota, Walter Mondale was the lion of the '84 campaign and a friend of Paul Wellstone. In all three cases the public shrugged and voted Republican. These are serious times and they demand politicians rise to them.

Yet here we are two years later, and they're running on biography all over again. But this time their chosen biography is Vietnam, and for many Americans, and especially boomer Democrats, that's far more psychologically complicated. Look at Kerry's stump speech: ''We band of brothers,'' he says, indicating his fellow veterans. ''We're a little older, we're a little grayer, but we still know how to fight for this country.'' Thirty years ago, he came back from Vietnam and denounced his ''band of brothers'' as a gang of drug-fueled torturers, rapists and murderers.

These versions are not reconcilable. When he was palling around with Jane Fonda in the '70s, he hated the military. It wasn't just that he opposed the war but that he accused his ''band of brothers'' of a level of participation in war crimes and civilian atrocities unmatched by the Japanese, the Nazis and the Soviets. If he'd said, ''We band of brothers . . . We're a little older, we're a little grayer, but we still know how to get high, murder the gooks and rape their womenfolk,'' it would at least have been consistent with his congressional testimony.

So one John Kerry is a fake. Which is it? The Jane Fonda in pants of the early '70s? Or the Bob Hope USO tour Kerry of today? Running on biography is lame enough. Running on fake biography is pathetic.

The Democratic party is simply out of ideas. And the few ideas they have left--higher taxes, submission to the UN, withdrawing from the war on terror--are either foolish or dangerous.

I'd like an amendment, but not this one

(Review) Bill Kristol and Joseph Bottum make the case in The Weekly Standard for a constitutional amendment to prevent homosexual marriage.

A dozen legal battles stand between the Massachusetts court's dictate for one state and the legal redefinition of marriage in the rest of the nation. Each of these battles is important, and each must be fought. But they are, to a large degree, merely holding actions and last-ditch attempts to use some courts to limit other courts. Short of an all-out balance-of-powers fight between the branches of the Massachusetts state government, there will be legal same-sex marriages in the United States in three months--and directly afterward, we will have court cases in every other state demanding recognition of Massachusetts's licenses. Judicially ordered homosexual marriage has arrived for the entire nation, however much Americans might have hoped to avoid the question, and immediate intervention at the highest level of national law is necessary if we want to stop it.

I guess this is one of those issue where I look on both sides and wish emerods on both their houses. I believe that having the courts declare homosexual marriage to be a constitutional right is illegitimate on its face. I also believe that amending the constitution to address marriage is equally illegitimate.

This is, in my view, a matter that sits solely in the province of the state legislatures.

The problem, of course, is that we've forgotten, as a society, what the constitution is for, and what rights are. The purpose of the Federal Constitution is to define our system of government and it's powers and limitations. That's all. To that end, certain rights are defined in the document.

Now, rights are serious things. By declaring something to be a right, we are saying that there are certain things that the citizenry is free to do, or certain powers that are denied to the government, no matter what the social cost may be. I'm sure that the right against self-incrimination or the bar to indiscriminate searches have a measurable social and economic cost. Criminals who might otherwise be rotting away in jail cells (or buffing themselves up on the exercise yard free weights, as the case may be) are left free to prey on us. We pay for that in increased insurance costs, or in the direct costs of being robbed. But the principles embodied in those rights are so important that we bear those costs rather than abrogate those rights.

Today, it seems that everything's a right. Handicapped people, for example, now have the "right" to change the rules of pro golf, so that they can compete, because they are physically unable to play the game under the normal rules. Some argue that welfare, or free education, or any number of other things should be "rights". Homosexual marriage, it seems to me, fall into that category of "rights".

But the whole purpose of inserting rights into the Constitution was designed to do one simple thing: To ensure that political sovereignty resided in the will of the people, not in some narrow political or technocratic class. The whole point of having rights was to prevent the government from using coercion, such as malicious prosecution, or quartering army troops in ones home to enforce some political orthodoxy.

And while the Constitution certainly leaves open the possibility that rights other than those enumerated might exist, the thrust of the Bill of Rights was to limit the power of government in its pursuit of political ends. In other words, to limit the possibility of tyranny.

What the constitution is not supposed to do, it enumerate specific, non-political rights. The framers would have laughed openly at the idea of providing a list of rights such as, the right to free speech, a free press, and the right to sell an orange les than two inches in diameter at the local produce market.

Those are matters of regulation best left to the states.

The constitution is about the government's powers, and the limitations thereto. The presumption of the constitution is that as long as the government is prevented from using coercion to affect the political process, the will of the people should ultimately prevail. By securing political freedom, the framers assumed we could order our legislatures about sufficiently to form the government that seems best suited to our needs and values.

One thing the Constitution is not supposed to have is a passage on who can marry whom. Apart from anything else, it's none of the Federal government's business determining who gets married to whom.

So, I'm pretty much dead set against a Federal marriage amendment.

Of course, using the same reasoning, I'm dead set against finding a right to homosexual marriage buried somewhere in the text of the document. Are allowing homosexuals to marry implicit in the concept of ordered liberty? Is it so rooted in the traditions of our people as to be fundamental? Would we send our sons and daughters overseas to kill foreigners to secure the right of homosexuals to marry?

Not hardly.

So, it's not a right, and nothing the courts can say will ever convince me otherwise.

Now I know I'm a minority on this. I'm one of those "strict constructionists" who believes that the whole concept of a "right to privacy" is utter hogwash. And I think that the increasing "rights talk" to which we're subjected is dangerous, and threatens our democracy. It is libertine in concept, and it's wrong. But it's just as wrong to monkey with the Constitution to start identifying specific items that are, or are not rights. And it's useless to attempt it as well. Once you get into the habit of proposing amendments every time the court does something you don't like, there'll be no end to the amendments you can have. You'll end up with a document that reads like the 1876 Constitution of Texas, and is every bit as effective.

The real problem lies in the courts, and the increasingly expansive way in which the courts exercise their powers of judicial review. A federal marriage amendment doesn't address that issue, which is the root problem. Judicial review of the constitution is not actually addressed in the text of that document. It is a right asserted by the Court in Marbury V. Madison, and exercised every since.

It seems to me that what is really needed is not a marriage amendment, but an broader amendment that addresses the judicial power of review. Currently, that power lies completely outside the democratic process, and, therefore is immune from any form of public audit. It strikes me as completely legitimate to amend the Constitution to remove that affliction, and to proved a set of checks and balances on the judiciary, just as there are for the executive and judicial branches.

Only the judicial branch of government makes such a claim to unlimited power. But, our government is in part founded on the proposition that unlimited power is always prone to abuse, and is the surest road to tyranny. Removing the court's unlimited power of review strikes me as a proper use of the amendment process.

The trouble is that I'm unsure how to go about this. It seems to me that in cases where the court is creating new constitutional rights, that decision should be validated by supermajorities in either the congress or the state legislatures. Or, perhaps Congress should have the power to confirm or overturn the court by a supermajority vote, on any issue it wished. Perhaps we should elect judges for failry lengthy terms. Like I said, I'm not sure how to go about it, but I am sure that no branch of government should have unlimited authority to do anything.

In the exercise of this power, the courts have increasingly inserted themselves into public policy questions that are not their rightful concern. As a result, the courts have grown increasingly politicized, with confirmations becoming outrageously antagonistic. This has reduced respect for the courts among the public, which sees the court system as another political tool, rather than neutral arbiters of the law.

So, I don't find a right to homosexual marriage embedded in the "emanations" or "penumbras" of the Constitution. And I don't want to find a marriage amendment in the text of the thing either. What I want is a court that neutrally and impartially renders judgments on the law, and is finally subjected to some sort of public audit.

Let's get issues like homosexual marriage back in the legislature where it belongs, rather than trying to have it declared legal by judicial fiat no matter what the public thinks. We're supposed to have a democratic Republic here. Let's act like it.

The very deep thoughts of Don Henley

(Review) Don Henley writes in the Washington Post today that the music business is all higgledy-piggledy. He argues that the only way to fix the music business--of course--is through government intervention.

Artists are finally realizing their predicament is no different from that of any other group with common economic and political interests. They can no longer just hope for change; they must fight for it. Washington is where artists must go to plead their case and find answers.

'Cause, as everybody knows, Washington is just full of...uh...answers. Even former 70's supergroup drummers with multimillion dollar incomes know that Washington is the place to go when you're looking for serious cash. After all, only the government can funnel cash into your pocket by fiat.

Henley writes, without apparent sarcasm:

Today the music business is in crisis. Sales have decreased between 20 and 30 percent over the past three years...The industry, which was once composed of hundreds of big and small record labels, is now controlled by just a handful of unregulated, multinational corporations determined to continue their mad rush toward further consolidation and merger. Sony and BMG announced their agreement to merge in November, and EMI and Time Warner may not be far behind. The industry may soon be dominated by only three multinational corporations.

Well, unregulated multinational corporations. Is it possible to construct a more ominous populist boogeyman?

But look at that passage more carefully. If sales have slipped by 20%-30% over the past three years, then where is the cash going to come from to fund the merger of those unregulated multinational corporations? In fact, with falling record sales, how many of those large merged corporations will remain viable? And, if record sales are falling that steeply, why is government action needed in the first place? It seems to me the market is already acting to punish the consolidation of the music industry and the disappearance of variety by starving the record companies of income. That's what markets are supposed to do.

I suspect that means that Henley finds it difficult to buy a new Gulfstream G-5 for the world tour this year, but we all have to make sacrifices, as they say.

I love Henley's apparent lack of irony as well. He starts out with the unregulated corporation jive:

The industry, which was once composed of hundreds of big and small record labels, is now controlled by just a handful of unregulated, multinational corporations determined to continue their mad rush toward further consolidation and merger...

Then, when he addresses Internet piracy a few 'graphs later, he writes:

Many kids rationalize their P2P habit by pointing out that only record labels are hurt -- that the labels don't pay the artists anyway. This is clearly wrong, because artists are at the bottom of the food chain. They are the ones hit hardest when sales take a nosedive and when the labels cut back on promotion, on signing new artists and on keeping artists with potential. Artists are clearly affected, yet because many perceive the music business as being dominated by rich multinational corporations, the pain felt by the artist has no public face.

Hmm, I wonder why the kids have that perception? Could it be because people like Henley are complaining that the music industry is "controlled by just a handful of unregulated, multinational corporations"?

The bottom line, according to Henley:

So whether they are fighting against media and radio consolidation, fighting for fair recording contracts and corporate responsibility, or demanding that labels treat artists as partners and not as employees, the core message is the same: The artist must be allowed to join with the labels and must be treated in a fair and respectful manner. If the labels are not willing to voluntarily implement these changes, then the artists have no choice but to seek legislative and judicial solutions. Simply put, artists must regain control, as much as possible, over their music.

In other words, "give us more money!"

Oh, OK, I know I'm being too hard on Henley. Musicians aren't particularly known for presenting their thoughts in a logical manner. Or really for having very deep thoughts in the first place. So fisking Henley over his Wapo op/ed is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. With a guided anti-tank missile. Of all the knives in the drawer, Henley isn't the Henckels Rostfrei, if you know what I mean.

And he actually makes a few good points.

I too, find the whole consolidation thing troubling as well. You see, economics is very good about showing us the costs of our choices. It's not, however, very good at telling us whether or not we should pay those costs. Economics is silent--like all science--on questions of value and meaning.

Perhaps we do get more efficiency and lower prices from Wal-Mart, and I certainly won't argue that's a bad thing. But, it seems to me that we also get things from our relationship with the Mom & Pop stores that Wal-Mart has replaced. Personal things, like relationships that can't be counted in dollars and cents. With Wal-Mart, we lose a sense of personal connection with local businesses, and even if we grant the Wal-Mart people the best will in the world, the fact is that the owners of Wal-Mart are faceless strangers in our community. And the choices they give us are the same as they give people in North Dakota, or Maine. Yes, we gain much with Wal-Mart. But what do we lose? And is the trade-off worth it? That answer can only be found in our values, not in economics.

The music industry faces the same trade-offs. With large music companies, there tends to be a move towards the mainstream, which marginalizes indie artists. On the other hand, indie artists might have found it easier to sign with a record label in the past, but how could that small label get their records distributed nationwide? Now, the exact opposite occurs. Getting signed with a record label now automatically ensures nationwide or worldwide distribution. It's just a lot harder to get signed. And, really, think back to the 80s. What are the chances that groups like Black Flag, or Lee Ving or the Dead Kennedys could get a record deal today?

Then, of course, there's broadcast consolidation. That bothers me too. I remember not too long ago that when you walked into the studio, you went to the music library, and programmed your show right on the spot. Heck, I remember walking into the studio 1 minute before air time, grabbing one CD on my way into the studio, and just creating my show on the fly from then on.

Not any more. Heck, you don't even play your own records any more. You have a play list already written for you, all cued up on computer. All you do is talk between songs, and a good portion of that is scripted for you, too.

I think the bottom line is that I distrust mergers and consolidation. I object to concentrations of power as a general philosophical principle, whether that power is concentrated in the hands of the government, or in the hands of large corporations. The greater the power, after all, the greater the possibility for abuse. After all, isn't the music industry's reaction to P2P piracy a perfect example of this? Suing 11 year-old little girls? So, despite the undeniable benefits such consolidation can often have of productivity and lower prices, I am suspicious of the trade-offs involved.

Not that I'm in favor of piracy, you understand. It's wrong, and I'm against it. Yes, I used Napster in the old days, but I felt really guilty about it.

But the music industry's response hasn't been helpful. Last time I looked a CD still costs $16.99. Seventeen bucks for a CD with 9 songs, with 4 of them being B-side filler crap? I mean, really, can't we be a little more flexible on the pricing here? At least on iTunes, I only have to pay for the tracks I want, even if 99¢ per track still strikes me as a bit steep.

The fact is that piracy is here to stay, though. It's too easy to do now, and too hard to track. P2P makes any attempt at enforcement spotty at best, and doomed to the same success as the War on Drugs has been. You simply can't catch enough people to serve as a credible deterrent. But, rather than try to create a new business model, the industry has concentrated on enforcement actions.

That's really inexcusable, because the industry has had 25 years, every since the invention of the cassette tape, to figure out how to come up with a business model that minimizes the incentive towards piracy. And it's not like it's rocket science. If you want to reduce piracy, lowering the cost of your product might be a good way to start. Digital music, for example doesn't cost a lot to produce, so why charge 99¢ per track? I'm the guy who's taking the time to download it and produce the physical CD. 99¢? Really?

On the other hand, the ease of distributing digital music raises an interesting question. Does an indie artist actually need a record company any more? After all, you can make your own MP3s and stick 'em up on a web site and sell them yourself to the whole world, without having to share one red cent with BMGWBCBSAristaTowerCapitol Records. The digital revolution has only just begun to affect the music industry. It may very well be that the record label is a dinosaur that's on it's way out, as is the "magical" record store, as direct distribution from the artists takes the place of record companies.

Henley's main problem is that he is a 70s record industry guy. But the world has changed a lot; too much, in fact, to be looking for 1970s solutions in a 21st century world. And the government has just as much insight on how to solve these new 21st century problems as Don Henley does, which is to say, not at all.

I may not like consolidation, but I don't have confidence whatsoever that government has the solution to it. Or rather, I'm afraid government solutions will end up being worse than the problem.  

Biography isn't enough

(Review) Charles Krauthammer writes that, no matter how impressive you might find John Kerry's 4 months of service in Vietnam, it's entirely irrelevant to whether or not he's qualified to be president. Or is it?

The very idea that national service, even heroic service, necessarily correlates with great presidential leadership is simply irrational. By that logic, Douglas MacArthur would have made a great President. By that logic, Ulysses S. Grant was a great President. (It's not just an American phenomenon: the most decorated veteran in Israel's history, Ehud Barak, was a disastrous Prime Minister.) Even more impressive is the fact that two of the greatest war Presidents in American history — Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt — had military backgrounds that make Bush's look distinguished: Lincoln, minimal (less than half a year of militia duty); Roosevelt, none.

Kerry tells his campaign audiences how, as a returning Vietnam vet, he stood up to the waste and carnage and injustice of what he calls "Nixon's war." All true, except for one inconvenient fact. The man who got us into Vietnam — committing what is arguably the most egregious presidential misjudgment of the 20th century — was not Nixon. It was Kerry's political hero, John F. Kennedy: Ivy League, U.S. Navy, decorated officer whose wartime valor propelled him to Massachusetts Senator and then Democratic candidate for President of the United States. Sound familiar? So much for biography.

Of course, by that standard, Bill Clinton should have been another Woodrow Wilson.

Misunderestimating, again

(Review) Jon Podhoretz writes that the Left has learned nothing about W in the past three years.

Over at Time magazine, Joe Klein complains bitterly that the president once told Sen. Joseph Biden, "I don't do nuance." But, whines Klein, "the struggle against Islamic radicalism is a festival of nuance. It is not quite a war, and it doesn't yield easily to simple notions of good and evil, friend and foe."

When Dubya said he didn't do nuance to Joe Biden, it was because Biden was hocking him about a $20 million program for Afghanistan. At the time, the country was still on Orange Alert, hearing chatter about the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge and trying to sort out what kind of effects a "dirty bomb" explosion might have. Do you really want the president of the United States to be gabbing about the most effective way to streamline Afghan education?

I don't. Klein and Alter do. They are still consumed by the example of Bill Clinton, a president who could talk for four hours about a $20 million program to deny deadbeat dads a driver's license while Islamic radicals tried to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993, blew up the Khobar Towers in 1996, destroyed two American Embassies in Africa in 1998 and attacked the USS Cole in 2000.

Bill Clinton was the key example over the past 100 years of a man impersonating a president. George W. Bush wakes up every morning trying to figure out how to make America safer and the world better - and how to keep people like Howard Dean and Jonathan Alter from convincing everybody to raise your taxes.

How very unsophisticated of him.

As the saying goes, one definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result. That's a pretty good description of how Democrats react to George W. Bush.

Who cares what the law says?

(Review) San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome has set of quite a hullabaloo. Having decided that he ebelives homosexuals should marry, he's directed the County Clerk to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

California state law, needless to say, bans marriage between gay couples. Moreover, Prop 22, a ballot measure passed a few years ago, banned gay marriage with more than 60% approval.

To Mayor Newsom, of course, those laws are inconvenient, so he's decided to simply ignore them.

Newsom has argued that the equal protection clause of the California Constitution makes denying marriage licenses to gay couples illegal. But lawyers for a group formed to defend Proposition 22 — a 2000 ballot initiative that says the state will recognize only marriages between a man and woman as valid — contend the mayor lacks the authority to make that decision.

In this country, when we think a law is wrong, we have a variety of means at our disposal to change the law. One of those methods is not for local officials to declare the law invalid and begin unilaterally abrogating it. Mayor Newsom might believe all manner of things aboput California law, but his opinion is utterly irrelevant. If the courts of California do not agree with him, and so far they haven't, then he doesn't get to implement his own private vision of the state constitution in San Francisco.

Fortunately, Mayor Newsom's actions have concerned a relatively benign matter, homosexual marriage, but he still needs to be slapped down rather harshly for his actions.

Imagine the uproar if he'd decided, for example, that racial preferences for city contracting and hiring violated, in his view, the 14th Amendment's Equal protection clause. But, if Newsom gets away with this, then why can't somne other Mayor decide precisely that?

There is a reason why we've always prided ourselves on being a government of laws rather than of men. Once local officials can decide to enforce the laws--or not--as a matter of personal whim, then it's only a matter of time until we find out that our rights have become completely fungible. The law becomes capricious, and politically influenced to such a degree that no law can be counted on to mean what it says.

Yes, the law is inflexible, and with that inflexibility comes a kind of unfairness. As the French put it, "The law, in its majestic equality, bans the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges and begging in the street." But at least everyone knows what the law is, and the standards it sets.

Once local leaders can interpret the law any way they please, the law becomes literally a trap for the unwary, the unpopular, or the politically disfavored.

I can think of no action more dangerous to liberty than for local officials to be allowed to interpret the law as it pleases them. And I can think of nothing more shortsighted than for gays to applaud this kind of shenanigans.

Gays are a pretty small--and frankly, relatively unpopular--minority in this country. It seems to me that they should be the last people to applaud a capricious application of the law. I expect that outside of San Francisco, most other jurisdictions would, if allowed, intepret the law in ways that are a whole lot less favorable to homosexuals. Why, some local officials might decide that anti-sodomy laws are constitutional, no matter what the Supremes say, and that homosexuals should be clapped into jail for their perversions.

That's the trouble with capricious law. It never seems to work in your favor all the time. And you never know when it'll come back to bite you on the butt.

...And we're back!

I trust everyone had a nice holiday. Actually, I suspect many of you didn't have a holiday yesterday at all. President's day doesn't seem to be a high-value holiday for a lot of businesses.

Sorry.

I did have a holiday, and I enjoyed it immensely, especially considering that we now enter the long, dry, holiday-free period that lasts until Memorial Day, which is many, many weeks from now.

*sigh*

In any event, quite a lot happened, and I need to catch up on it, so here we go... 

The perfect 60's-generation candidate

(Review) Daniel Henninger writes that John Kerry is the perfect candidate of the 60's generation. Which, since Kerry is wrong on practically every political issue facing us today, is, I guess, pretty much true. And why should this surprise us? He's been wrong about everything else in the past.

It doesn't matter that the iconic president bearing Mr. Kerry's initials (as a young man, Mr. Kerry dated Jackie Kennedy's half-sister, Janet Auchincloss) sent the U.S. into Vietnam on a flying carpet of moral certainty. Or that the political commitment to repulse communism in Vietnam, a commitment that troubled Mr. Kerry as he departed in 1968 for heroic service in the war and revulsed him when he left, was set by Lyndon Baines Johnson. Primary Democrats, for reasons that await the tools of psychoanalysis, believe Vietnam was "Nixon's war." After winning Iowa's caucuses, Mr. Kerry volunteered, "I stood up and fought against Richard Nixon's war in Vietnam."

The Republican Nixon's too-ardent anticommunism, they came to believe, was the provenance for Ronald Reagan's wrongful spending on the communist "threat." So it followed that Primary Democrats would then resist Ronald Reagan on Grenada, Nicaragua and installing Pershing missiles in Europe. As senator, Mr. Kerry held hearings into Ollie North and the Iran-Contra connection. In the same Iowa interview just last month, Mr. Kerry described that effort in the words used in the 1980s by all Primary Democrats: "I stood up and fought against Ronald Reagan's illegal war in Central America."

Yep, that's John Kerry for you, standing up against America at every opportunity. Fortunately, Reagan, unlike Nixon, ignored Kerry for the mindless irrelevance he is. 

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

(Review) Charles Krauthammer wonders why Al-Qaida hasn't launched another spectacular terrorist attack on US soil. No one really wants to talk about it:

The administration dare not take credit for what is on the face of it an amazing phenomenon, but one that can reverse itself in a flash. And the opposition hardly wants to highlight a development that might shed favorable light on this administration's post-9/11 stewardship.

But the question is still out there. Is it because Al-Qaida is too damaged to make another attack work? But surely, they could do something awful, even if on a smaller scale. Hamas does it in Israel all the time.

Let's say that Al Qaeda is so badly hurt that it cannot organize another 9/11. But how much training and planning can it take to blow up a few truck bombs in crowded shopping malls? It is hard to believe Al Qaeda is not capable of doing that. Considering the economic and psychological havoc it would wreak, why haven't they?

Maybe it's because the Bush Administration has done such a bang-up job at securing the country. But,even if that's true, they can't really claim credit for it.

Maybe Al Qaeda does lack the capacity for even simple terrorism on U.S. soil. If so, it speaks well for an administration that immediately after 9/11 designed and carried out a radically new strategy, both offensive and defensive, to fight the war on terror.

But no one dares to say it. It could prove catastrophically wrong tomorrow.

All we can really do is wait. And wonder.

A no-win situation

(Review) Tom Bavan, writes that Kevin Drum, the Calpundit (definitely not a member of the Bear Flag League), by claiming that Bush's TX ANG records were "scrubbed", has clearly shown that it's impossible for the president to clear himself of wrongdoing, no matter what the evidence.

In fact, the trap has now been set so the President loses whether he releases his records fully or not. If he does release the files and there is something embarrassing in them - even if that something doesn't contradict his claims of having done his duty - he will be pilloried.

But now if he releases the records and there isn't anything embarrassing in them, the Bush-hating left will shrug their shoulders and say, "well, we knew his files were cleansed anyway" and go right back to assaulting his character and his service. It's a no-win.

When it's about something other than the truth, it's always a no-win. These are the same people who defended Bill Clinton's draft-dodging allegations by saying it didn't matter. Now that it's a political opponent, a possible lack of sterling service goes directly to the heart of our republic.

I would never make it in politics, I guess. When faced with an accusation by any of the political operative weasels, I couldn't maintain my cool. I'd be holding press conference to call Chris Lehane or Bob Schrum, or whoever a damned liar, and probably publicly threaten to beat the crap out of them.

I guess having been in the shouting and killing people business during the formative years of my adult life has left me a little rough around the edges. I just don't have the tact, or the patience to put up with crap like this.

Frankly, I don't know how anyone manages to do it. I'd be led away in handcuffs within days for Battery.

The top ten resons for publishing infidelity rumors

(Review) Tim Noah gives us a list of perfectly good (tongue in cheek) reasons for the press to run with the Kerry infidelity story.

I really don't care whether Kerry bangs the interns or not. I just think it's kinda funny watching Democratic candidate after candidate implode.

IF this turns out to be true, it's the kind of thing that could completely derail the Kerry bandwagon. I guess that would make John Edwards the frontrunner.

With the luck Dem front-runners are having this year, that would probably mean that in about three weeks, we'd find out he was gay.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Hoovering the money out of my wallet

Now that it's available for the PC (Yes, I prefer the PC. I've had both Macs and PCs and all things considered, I prefer to have access to, you know, software), I finally downloaded iTunes.I ended up with 4, 80-minute CDs of music by the time the night was over.

At least knowing where all my disposable income is going will now be much easier to track.

Being a veteran is not a free pass

I was watching Dennis Miller last night, and during the show the subject of John Kerry's Vietnam War protests came up. Miller argued that he really didn't care about what Kerry did after the war. As far as he was concerned, Miller said, Kerry earned the right to come home and protest the war anyway he liked. He paid for that right by going to Vietnam and putting his life on the line for the country. In essence, Miller argued that by fighting in Vietnam, Kerry gets a free pass for his later anti-war activities.

Now, there is much merit to this argument. It prompted me to think again about my distaste for Kerry's anti-war activities. There is much to be said for the argument that many of the war protestors were young men who were protesting mainly because they were unwilling to serve. We may discount such protests to some extent, because we suspect their objections have, at least in part, some other basis than a disinterested opinion about our national goals. One suspects that if they weren't at risk of being sent over to Vietnam to get shot at, their protests might have lacked some…urgency.

Kerry, of course, waited until he returned from Vietnam to protest. As such, we have to credit him with being sincere in his opposition to the war. He had already been there, and no one was talking about sending him back again. We automatically wish to credit such protests with an authenticity that is lacking in the other protestors, whose main sacrifice was to spend the money to stay in school and get a college deferment, or to go to Canada for the duration. Yes, those are sacrifices of a sort, but they are entirely different in kind than the sacrifice of actually fighting in the war, and laying one's life on the line.

But, after thinking about it, it seems to me that Miller gives Kerry too much credit. Because while it is true that we should weigh the protests of veterans on a different scale than we do others, we must also be mindful of the nature of the protests themselves.

Let me illustrate my point in this way. Imagine, if you will a WWII veteran. Let's call him Mac. Mac hits Omaha Beach in the first wave on D-Day as a 1st Lieutenant commanding an infantry platoon. He fights steadily for four months. By September, 1944, he is wounded, for the third time, in Holland during Operation Market Garden. As a result, he is evacuated to the United States and discharged.

Mac decides to protest the war. Now, there are many valid criticisms Mac could make. He could, for example, point out that Germany is not really a threat to the United States. Its navy is far too small to threaten an invasion, and the Germans are not a particularly naval-minded people. He might point out that it's hypocritical to ally ourselves with the USSR, whose leader, Josef Stalin, is, after all, as big a rat bastard as ol' Adolf ever was. He might comment that it was the Japanese who were the real threat (they did, after all, attack Pearl Harbor without warning), and our war against Germany was a distraction from our real struggle, the war against Al-Qaida…Oops, I'm sorry, I meant Japan. He might even criticize the American military leadership in Europe as being demonstrably incompetent by favoring the slow, attritional strategy of a wide push into Germany over a lengthy front, as advocated by Field Marshal Montgomery, instead of the rapier-like thrusts of armored columns pushing deep into the German heartland as advocated by Lt. General Patton.

Now, this kind of protest strikes me as perfectly legitimate. I might disagree with Mac's conclusions, and we might have quite a lively argument, but nothing he says at this point steps over the line into illegitimate protest.

But, let's say Mac goes further. Let's say Mac argues that we're fighting the wrong guys. That we should be allied with Germany, and attacking those Red SOBs in Moscow. That Germany really did have a pesky Jewish problem, and that maybe Adolf was doing the right thing with his concentration camps and the like. That, really, the only reason we were fighting Hitler was because the Jew manipulators surrounding Roosevelt had blinded him—as those tricky Jews so often do—to the strategic realities that determined where America's best interests really lie, which is in the fight against Jewish Bolshevism, instead of those stout anticommunists, our true friends, the Nazis. And, let's say Mac's final criticism was that American soldiers were being intentionally turned into war criminals by a high command that wanted to crush the Europeans; to destroy their cities and factories, and to cow and subjugate their people in order to make compliant, meek customers for US business interests after the war.

Now, Mac might be a veteran, and I would certainly honor his service. I would also, at this point, have to physically restrain myself from whacking him in the side of the head, because Mac has moved out of the area of legitimate criticism. No matter how much I might appreciate Mac's heroic service, I have to judge his protests separately, and base my judgments solely on their content. Being a veteran does not give Mac a free pass to say what he wants. He has a moral responsibility to be as truthful and factual in his protests as is possible, and to refrain from making outrageous and slanderous charges against both his government and his fellow veterans.

Sure, he has the right to make any protest he desires, without let or hindrance from the government. Free speech and all that, and jolly good we have it, too. But I have the right to make a counter-protest, which is that Mac needs to shut the hell up with his kraut-loving jive and get out of my face before I give him a taste of knuckle sandwich. I may also be further of the opinion that Mac's service to his country has not affected his basic character, which is that of a hideous human being whom I should spurn as I would spurn a rabid dog.

John Kerry, as I'm sure is obvious by now, is Mac. Kerry was not content to say, when he returned from Vietnam, that it was an unwise effort. There are any number of legitimate criticisms that could have been made--and were made--by Kerry. He could have been content to argue that our proper role in Vietnam was support for the South Vietnamese, who should have been fighting this war themselves. He could have stopped at saying that the Domino Theory was fallacious, and that whether or not Vietnam fell to the commies, it was not, ultimately, strategically important to the US. He could have argued that our tactics and strategy in Vietnam were doomed to failure, because we were not accurately assessing their effects. He could have argued that our cause was ultimately hopeless because, at the end of the day, we were going to have to leave Vietnam and come home, but the Vietnamese already were home, and would be able to eventually outlast us, even if it took decades, and that, as a result, America was pouring blood and treasure down a sinkhole for no purpose.

But, of course, like Mac, he wasn't content to stop there. Kerry testified before Congress:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

Oddly enough, with all the raping and pillaging going on, Kerry never actually saw any of it himself. And he certainly didn't participate. But he heard some other guys talking about it, so it must be true.

Of the two or three million people who served in Vietnam, Kerry found 150 who talked about these hideous crimes. And let's not forget, these weren't the casual war crimes that, though regrettable, occur on the spur of the moment, in every army, in every conflict in history. No, these were crimes committed daily, with the full knowledge of the chain of command. Why, it's a conspiracy at the highest levels of MACV! General Westomoreland must personally be directing it!

Naturally, the Winter Soldiers "Investigation" didn't actually use any, you know, rules of evidence, or anything. And, as it turns out, not all those 150 guys had actually been in Vietnam. Or, in fact, been in the service at all.

We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater or let us say a non-third-world people theater…

Of course. Obviously. We would never do anything like that to Europeans. I mean, my God, it would be like…like…fire-bombing Dresden!

No, clearly, this was a racist war, intentionally using cruel weapons, just for the sheer pleasure of bumping off gooks and slants. That we had built this arsenal originally to fight the Russians was, of course, of no consequence whatsoever.

Kerry, in my view, clearly stepped out of the realm of legitimate criticism. He slandered an entire generation of soldiers who served in Vietnam as a bunch of rapists and baby-killers. He accused the military of actively aiding and abetting war crimes. He accused the US government of intentionally conducting racially genocidal warfare.

So, forgive me if I'm not too freakin' impressed 30 years later when he tries to convince me how proud he is to have served in the criminal and racially genocidal war in Vietnam. I am absolutely unwilling to forget that he slandered the country, and the soldiers who served it, just because he now finds it politically expedient to refer to those soldiers as his "brothers", rather than rapists and baby-killers, as he found it expedient to do 30 years ago.

No, I've listened to Dennis Miller, I've thought about it again, and I am even more convinced that John Kerry's assumption of a "war-hero, patriot" persona is an insult and a travesty. He went to Vietnam, fought, and got wounded. Great. Good Job.

That makes him a veteran, not Jesus.   

John Kerry agrees with you

(Review) Jeff Jacoby writes that, no matter how you feel about the pressing issues of our day, the chances are that John Kerry can say he agrees with you.

Here's how it works: Say you're in favor of capital punishment for terrorists. Well, so is Kerry. "I am for the death penalty for terrorists because terrorists have declared war on your country," he said in December 2002. "I support killing people who declare war on our country."

But if you're opposed to capital punishment even for terrorists, that's OK -- Kerry is too! Between 1989 and 1993, he voted at least three times to exempt terrorists from the death penalty....

Take the Patriot Act. Kerry condemns it fiercely as the stuff of a "knock-in-the-night" police state. He vows "to end the era of John Ashcroft" by "replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time."

So does that mean he voted against it in 2001? Au contraire! Kerry voted for the law -- parts of which he originally wrote. He singled out its money-laundering sections for particular praise but declared that he was "pleased at the compromise we have reached on the antiterrorism legislation as a whole."...

Then there's the war. Many observers have remarked on Kerry's dual stand on the military campaign that liberated Iraq -- he voted for it but vehemently condemns it. In 1991, by contrast, he did the opposite: He voted against using force to roll back Iraq's invasion of Kuwait yet he claims it was an operation he firmly supported. "I believed we should kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait," Kerry told The Washington Post last month. So why did he vote no? Because he wanted the first President Bush "to take a couple more months to build the support of the nation."

Or so he says now. What Kerry actually said in 1991 was that there was a "rush to war" that might lead to "another generation of amputees, paraplegics, burn victims." He blasted the elder Bush for being too "unilateral" -- hmm, that sounds familiar -- and demanded: "Is the liberation of Kuwait so imperative that all those risks are worthwhile at this moment?" Eleven days later he wrote to a constituent that he opposed the war and had wanted to give economic sanctions "more time to work." Nine days after that he wrote to the same constituent and said that he "strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis."

So, no matter what your position is, when you ask yourself the question, "Would John Kerry support this?" you know the answer is, "Absolutely!"

That was then, this is now

(Review) Ruben Navarrette writes that if the Dem's think Kerry's Vietnam service resonates with everyone, they're sadly mistaken.

The Kerry candidacy is the perfect tribute to self-absorbed baby boomers. Many have spent the past three decades using Vietnam as a measuring stick to assess everyone who lived through it, whether they spent those years protesting the war or fighting in it.

Just don't expect much of this to resonate with my generation of Xers, or the generation that follows it — those now in their teens and 20s.

We have had different experiences, and we've emerged with a different measuring stick. For my part, the decisions made by a George W. Bush as a young man — or, for that matter, by Bill Clinton or John Kerry — are of little consequence.

If the pitch is national security, all that matters is how they responded to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Before 9-11, the baby-boomer obsession with Vietnam may have been tolerable. Now it just seems trivial. My generation and the one that follows don't need John Kerry's home movies.

The measuring stick of Vietnam was OK for a generation that didn't live through Pearl Harbor, didn't win World War II, and didn't defeat fascism on two continents. But it doesn't do much good for those who watched as their country was brutally attacked, thousands of its people slaughtered on their own soil.

I'm sick of Vietnam being the centerpiece of presidential campaigns. The only thing that candidates in both parties should be obsessed with at this point is ensuring that Americans never again feel what they did on the terrible September morning.

It's pretty darn had to argue with that.

If this is true, then the Election Campaign is about to get interesting

(Review) The Drudge Report is saying that a bimbo explosion is just about ready to take out John Kerry.

A frantic behind-the-scenes drama is unfolding around Sen. John Kerry and his quest to lockup the Democratic nomination for president, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

Intrigue surrounds a woman who recently fled the country, reportedly at the prodding of Kerry, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

A serious investigation of the woman and the nature of her relationship with Sen. John Kerry has been underway at TIME magazine, ABC NEWS, the WASHINGTON POST, THE HILL and the ASSOCIATED PRESS, where the woman in question once worked.

A close friend of the woman first approached a reporter late last year claiming fantastic stories -- stories that now threaten to turn the race for the presidency on its head!

In an off-the-record conversation with a dozen reporters earlier this week, General Wesley Clark plainly stated: "Kerry will implode over an intern issue." [Three reporters in attendance confirm Clark made the startling comments.]

The Kerry commotion is why Howard Dean has turned increasingly aggressive against Kerry in recent days, and is the key reason why Dean reversed his decision not to drop out of the race after Wisconsin, top campaign sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT.

Well, I'm just flabbergasted. If this is true, it blows the whole presidential nomination race right out of the water. Also, if it's true, I gotta tell you, it'll just peg the schadenfreude meter right up against the stops.

On the other hand, This could be pretty bad news for republicans, too. This leaves John Edwards as the last man standing in the Democratic race. And believe me, John Edwards can beat George W. Bush.

Other possibilities:

1. Kerry implodes, and Howard Dean sweeps in again to win the remainder of the primaries.

2. No one gets enough delegates to pull off a win at the Democratic Convention. In an effort to settle on a compromise candidate, the convention drafts Hillary Clinton.

It seems to me that if Kerry's campaign blows up in his face, the Democrats either have to pick Edwards, or they just crumble in disarray. A return to Dean, or picking someody new at the convention would just be devastating for them.

All I know is that, if this is true, then all bets are off. 

False Positive

(Review) Speaking of The New Republic, Jonathon Chait writes that, despite all the talk about Kerry's VA and TN wins proving he can win in the south, Chait's not buying it. The Democratic primaries are, for the most part meaningless when it comes to judging overall electability.

The Democratic primary is not reflective of the general electorate--it attracts, by definition, voters inclined to support Democrats in the fall. When George W. Bush in 2000 won, say, the California primary, it hardly proved his ability to compete in that state in November. (Bush went on to lose California by 12 points.) Most important, Kerry won Virginia and Tennessee under circumstances in which losing would have been nearly impossible. He has ridden a wave of favorable publicity. Nearly every article about the campaign has underscored that his nomination is inevitable. His opponents have not attacked him, and have not been able to afford much in the way of television advertising. In fact just about the only way his opponents have gotten their name out to the public is through media coverage that inevitably centers on the theme of why they're losing and how soon they'll drop out. Under such circumstances, how on Earth could Kerry not win?

I think Democrats are fooling themselves about Kerry. No, It's even worse than that. I think Kerry is becoming the default candidate because he's the best of a slate of unelectables. He is, literally, the lesser evil of those available.

John Edwards is probably the second most electable. He would be the most electable, except he faces the handicap of knowing literally nothing whatsoever about foreign policy, which is not the best credential to display in what is essentially a wartime election.

So, I guess it's Kerry. And the press, et al., are fawning over him right now. He's in the giddy honeymoon period where everyone is still saying, "Ooh, Johnny, you were so brave! Your medals are so handsome!"

Honeymoons, however, don't last forever. By Mar 2, the nomination will be wrapped up, whereafter one of two things will happen. Either a) Kerry will disappear off of the national radar scope like flying saucers over Area 51, until around August sometime, or b) as soon as the honeymoon is over, tougher questions will begin, like, "So, whose medals were those you threw away? And how many of your fellow Vietnam vets do you estimate are war criminals, based on your 1971 testimony before Congress?"

I suspect that b) will occur, and, becasue the Democrats have intentionally created a front-loaded primary schedule this year, Kerry will have a long, long, time to face those questions, and many others about his voting history as a senator.

George W. Bush may lose this election, but it's his to lose, not John Kerry's to win.

Why the Little General lost his last campaign

(Review) The New Republic's Ryan Lizza thinks he knows why Wes Clark's presidential bid failed.

There are a few reasons the Clark campaign failed. Clark started the race not as a person, but as a concept cooked up in Washington by Democrats terrified at the prospect of nominating Howard Dean. He was a resumé candidate who was theoretically ideal--a four-star general, a southerner, antiwar, blah, blah, blah--but less than awe-inspiring on the stump. His successes on the battlefield had no correlation to how he would perform in a campaign. "This was Michael Jordan playing baseball," says Democratic strategist Kenny Baer.

Huh. Okay, maybe. Maybe it did fail because he was just a "concept" candidate, and Dean's implosion made him irrelevant. Sounds good.

Or, maybe Wes Clark was too full-goose loony for even Democrats to stomach.

Those national guard records

(Review) Paul Greenberg recalls the various snafus he went through due to screw-ups of the military's bureaucracy, and concludes:

It occurs to me that if George W. Bush, now listed in the roster as commander in chief, could just get the vote of every GI who'd ever gotten tangled up in military paperwork, he ought to win this year's presidential election by the biggest landslide ever.

I was lucky, I guess. I only had one run-in with such screw-ups in my career.

I had been assigned to the NATO International Military Police at HQ Allied Forces Central Europe (AFCENT)--now changed to AFNORTH--in Brunssum, the Netherlands, for a permanent change of station.

Originally I was told I'd be flying in to Brussels on a certain date. As it happened, however, my NATO security clearance was granted more quickly than expected, so the Air Force changed my travel plans. I left two weeks earlier, on a flight to Amsterdam, from whence I took a flight to Maastricht.

After arriving in Maastricht and getting my luggage, I looked around for someone--anyone--in uniform to greet me. Soon, I was all alone in the terminal.

I had about $100 on me, and exchanged it into Dutch guilders, and went off to find a pay phone. Fortunately the telephone operator--as nearly all European telephone operators do--spoke English. She hooked me up to the main AFCENT switchboard, and they connected me to the USAF detachment there.

My conversation with the Airman who answered the phone went something like this:

ME: Hello, My name is Staff Sergeant Franks. I just arrived, and no one is here in Maastricht to meet me. I thought my sponsor was supposed to be here."

HIM: Sergeant Franks? Where are you?

ME: I'm in Maastricht.

HIM: What are you doing there?

ME: I'm on my way to your location to report in to the CO.

HIM: But why are you here now?

ME: Because my orders tell me so.

HIM: But, you're not supposed to be here for another two weeks. And you're supposed to fly into Brussels.

ME: First, that's not what my orders say. Second, no matter what they say, I'm here now, and I need someone to come get me!

HIM: But you're not supposed to be here!

Now imagine repeating the last two sentences of that conversation for the next ten minutes. Eventually, of course, someone was dispatched to pick me up.

Now, my grandfather had a good one. He was a Yeoman Second Class on an LST in 1942. Right after the Torch landings in North Africa, the ship got a mail delivery. In his mail, my grandfather found a letter from the War Department that had been forwarded from his address in Texas.

When he opened the letter, he was notified that he had been ordered to report to an Army induction center some three months previously and had not shown up. Unless he reported within the month, he'd be prosecuted for draft dodging.

Seizing the initiative, my grandfather raced to his CO's cabin (he was the yeoman) and told his CO, "Sir, I've got to go home." And he presented the CO his letter from the Army.

His CO just smiled, took the letter from him and said, "Nice try."

My grandfather did sterling service in the Navy, hitting the beach in North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and Omaha Beach. He was in the first wave at Omaha Beach, and his landing craft was hit, and he had to hit the beach along with the Army guys, and he was trapped there until D+1, when he could be evacuated. In recognition of his sterling service, he was promoted to Chief Petty Officer.

Three times! 

How to fight outsourcing

(Review) Nicholas Kristoff asks if you can answer this question, then goes on to write that, if we're worried about outsourcing, then improving education is the way to fight back. Because 83% of Japanese high school seniors can answer that question.

Mr. Subbakrishna, a management consultant specializing in technology, notes that in his native Bangalore, children learn algebra in elementary school. All in all, he says, the average upper-middle-class child in Bangalore finishes elementary school with a better grounding in math and science than the average kid in the U.S.

I saw the same thing when I lived in China and interviewed college applicants there. The SAT wasn't offered in China, so Chinese high school students took the Graduate Record Examinations — intended for would-be graduate students — and many still scored in the 99th percentile in math.

The latest international survey, called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, found that the best-performing eighth graders were, in order, from Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Belgium and the Netherlands. The U.S. ranked 19th, just after Latvia. (India and China weren't surveyed.)

"For too many graduates, the American high school diploma signifies only a broken promise," declares a major new study released yesterday by three education policy organizations. Called the American Diploma Project, it found that 60 percent of employers rated graduates' skills as only "fair" or "poor."

The broader problem is not just in schools but society as a whole: There's a tendency in U.S. intellectual circles to value the humanities but not the sciences. Anyone who doesn't nod sagely at the mention of Plato's cave is dismissed as barely civilized, while it's no blemish to be ignorant of statistics, probability and genetics. If we're going to revere Plato, as we should, we should also remember that his academy supposedly had a sign at the entrance: "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here."

Something happened to this country in the 1960s, and we're still paying for it.

Several years ago, I was visiting the campus of North Texas State University in Denton, TX. On the office door of one of the professors there, I saw a reproduction of a Frederick Remington painting showing a Native American gathering of some sort, where the Indians were dancing and leaping, raising a huge cloud of dust in their frenzy. The professor had written a caption underneath the picture: "Commencement Ceremony, University of New Mexico, 1969"

How terribly droll.

And how terribly sad, because those same hippies went on to graduate school, or got their teaching certificates, and they took with them all that 60s lefty baggage. So, what we have now is a situation where the educational community is so completely immersed in that hippie crap, having soaked in it unceasingly for the last thirty years, that High school graduates couldn't think their way out of a wet paper sack.

"Rote learning" is bad, they tell us, because it doesn't allow the student the chance to ask, "why?" Competition for grades and Dean's lists are bad, because it'll damage the self-esteem of the poor little darlings who don't do as well. Why, they might get the idea that some children are smarter than they are. And in our perfectly egalitarian society, we can't have that, can we?

One hundred years ago, a high school graduate could quote Cicero in Latin, or Plutarch in Greek, or both. He knew calculus, algebra, geometry, and chemistry.

Go back even farther and take a look at letters written by Civil War soldiers who dropped out of school in the fifth grade. Geez, those dumb farm boys wrote like Faulkner!

Dearest Mary;

The morning sun rises warm and orange, slicing through the cold gray mist of the Pennsylvania meadow in which we have made our bivouac. As always at these moments, when the optimism of a new day arrives to dispel the somber and frightened gloom of night, my thoughts turn to you, and our plans for our future...

Judas Priest! The average English Lit postgrad can't write like that.

American high schoolers are ignorant. Not because they are dumb, but because we have made them that way. We have given the "educators" full reign to implement their "progressive" ideas, and all we've got out of it are functionally illiterate high school graduates.

Maybe the educational methods of the past were to rigid and inflexible; maybe some reforms were long overdue. But at least those old-fashioned methods produced high school graduate who could speak proper English, along with Latin, Greek, and French or German, and who could do algebra in their heads.

Whatever it is we've traded to get rid of the "old-fashioned" educational methods doesn't appear to have been worth it.

So, if we expect to keep jobs in America, we'd better be able to produce a quality, well-educated workforce. So far, we've pretty much sucked at that. 

It makes so much sense, no one will ever listen

(Review) Robert Samuelson writes that the Bush Budget is a joke. And, so would any other budget proposed by any other president. The problem lies not in politics so much as it does the culture of Washington.

The most revealing factoid about the Bush administration's budget is this: After scouring the entire $2.4 trillion of federal spending, the White House found 65 programs that it deemed so unneeded or ineffective that they should be eliminated. How much do these programs cost? About $4.9 billion. Although that's a lot of money, it's only 0.2 percent of federal spending -- two-tenths of 1 percent. This qualifies as an aggressive assault on government spending? There's the budget problem in a nutshell: Government programs are virtually immortal. Because nothing can ever be revoked, the budget becomes a perpetual motion machine for higher spending. New programs for new needs get piled atop old programs. Since 2001, homeland security spending has risen 115 percent, to $28 billion. And retirees always get more because their numbers and health costs keep rising. In 2000 there were 35 million Americans over 65; by 2030, the number may be 70 million. Already, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are 40 percent of the budget.

Aggressive assaults on spending are practically impossible in the Beltway culture. Every spending program has an advocacy group that will scream bloody murder if their program is cut.

We've been spending billions on FDR's "Rural Electrification" program for 60 years. I got news for you, the rural is already electrified. The program still exists, though.

Samuelson proposes that a blue-ribbon commission study the budget with a mandate for making real cuts.

Nice idea, never happen.

But clearly something should be done. If we want to create new programs, it has to be made clear that the government has a responsibility to pay for them either through higher taxes or reduced spending on other programs.

We simply can't continue to spend $300 billion we don't have every year. Some argue that, of course we can, we did it throughout the 80s and the first half of the 90s. To which I respond, that's one reason why we can't continue to keep doing it now.

One of the criticisms that budget hawks invariably hear--and, indeed, I've made it myself, if the truth be known--is that debt as a proportion of GDP really isn't all that bad, hovering around 85%. Why, if you are paying a mortgage and a couple of car notes, your debt ratio is probably closer to 200% of your annual income.

Well, that's as may be, but there is a slight difference. You can sell your home, pay off the loan, and recover the amount of your equity. You can sell your cars.

For the most part, the government can't. Sure the government owns a lot of land, but it happens to be mainly desert and scrubland in the middle of Utah or Nevada that nobody in their right mind wants to buy. In other words, you have valuable assets that you can use to convert your debt to cash. The government doesn't.

Moreover, every month, as you pay down your debt, your debt ratio decreases. If, however, you were to increase your debt ratio by 3% or so each year, you'd quickly find that unsustainable, even in your personal life. Just like the government, you'd either have to increase your income, or lower your spending. In that, at least, the parallel is exact.

You can maintain a higher debt ratio in your personal finances because you have assets. The government, though, is like a man who rents his house, leases his car, and increases the debt balances on his credit cards every single year, and only makes the minimum payments to cover his interest charges. And the key number to watch for is not so much what the debt ratio is, but what percentage of his income is available to pay those debts.

Once you factor in how much his current operating expenses are (i.e., 30% for housing, 15% for transportation, 20% for food, 10% for utilities, etc.), then the percentage of income remaining to pay those credit card bills gets awfully small. And once you exceed that percentage, it's time to get a second job, or start looking for a smaller place to live.

There simply is no free lunch, not even in government finance. 

The Little General Says farwell

(Review) Wes Clark has retrived his hat from the ring, and going home to lick his wounds.

This is essentially over. Unless some wildly improbable event happens, like Dean winning California 3 weeks from now, it's Kerry all the way.

Political ads we'll never see

(Review) Lileks has an idea for a great political ad for George W. Bush.

I'm waiting for an ad that simply puts the matter plainly: who do you think Al Qaeda wants to win the election? Who do you think will make Syria relax? Who do you think Hezbollah worries about more? Who would Iran want to deal with when it comes to its nuclear program--Cowboy Bush or "Send in the bribed French inspectors" Kerry? Which candidate would our enemies prefer?

O the shrieking that would result should such an ad run. You can't even ask those questions, even though they're the most relevant questions of the election.

We'll never see an ad like that. But he's right, those are the questions that should be asked.

It's his current record that counts

(Review) McQ points out that its Kerry's record as a senator that should be the one we consider, not what he did 30 years ago as a junior officer.

Being pro-free market and pro-business are two different things

(Review) Bruce Bartlett writes that many on the left don't really know the difference between supporting free markets and supporting business. They simply aren't the same things.

Principled conservatives believe in the free market. While this may seem to equate with a pro-business viewpoint, in fact it often does not. The last thing most businessmen want is a free market, where they must compete, slash prices, continuously innovate, suffer narrow profit margins and live constantly on the edge of bankruptcy. They would much rather have assured profits, monopoly positions, price supports, trade protection and the other trappings of a corporate welfare state.

It has been ever thus. Adam Smith wrote in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations that anytime two or more businessmen get together, their prime topic of conversation is how to fix the market to produce greater profits for themselves.

Business, especially Big Business, is just a as much a danger to free markets as Big Government.

Dems don't get it

(Review) Nicole Gelinas writes that the Democrats still don't seem to have grasped that we are actually in a war on terror.

But no matter how good the FBI is, at the end of the day, it's the DoD that will win it for us.

No one doubts that we must improve our intelligence-gathering capabilities. But 9/11 proved that international terrorism can't be halted with aggressive law enforcement.

Those who bombed the Trade Center in '93 are rotting in prison; that attack ended in a law-enforcement victory for America. But the Twin Towers are no more; throwing Ramzi Yousef in jail was no deterrent. Law enforcement is no answer when those who hate us will die to kill us.

Can the FBI help? Sure. But daisy-cutters trump a wiretap anytime. Libya's Moammar Khadafy isn't dismantling his weapons programs because he's afraid of the FBI - he just doesn't want to find himself at the bottom of a spider hole in 2005.

I am constantly amazed by how many on the Left just don't get it. Look at the exit polling done in the Democratic primaries. The threat of terrorism consistently comes in dead last on their list of important issues.

There are some people who will ignore reality until it slaps them sharply across the face. And that's exactly what Democrats are doing with national security and the war on terror.

If John Kerry does win the next election, then, sometime about halfway through his first term, when yet another 911 attack is launched with chemical, biological, or radiological weapons, and thousands more Americans die, maybe then these idiots will wake up and smell the freakin' coffee. And, hopfefully, it'll destroy the Democrats' credibility on national security issues for the next generation.

Frankly, I'm getting pissed off. I am simply sickened at watching John Kerry show up with his "band of brothers", and bask in his "heroic" war service. He wasn't basking in it 30 years ago when he was calling his "brothers" a pack of rapists and baby-killers at rallies with Hanoi Jane Fonda.

Yeah, his service was honorable and noble. It was all those other guys who were baby killers, I guess, huh, John?

I'm just not freakin' impressed with Kerry's "heroic" service. He spent 4 months in Vietnam, and got slightly wounded on three separate occasions.

Big deal.

The average grunt spent a full 12 months there, and "wounds" like John Kerry's were dime a dozen, and, for the most part, weren't recognized with a Purple Heart. And, besides, I'd say he more than made up for that when he got home, and slandered his fellow soldiers as war criminals.

One of the nice things about having been on active duty from 1984 to 1993 is that I don't have to pretend to be impressed with Kerry's service. F*ck John Kerry.

I wouldn't walk across the street to spit on John Kerry if he was lying in the gutter.

Well, that's not true. I would.

Feeding Frenzy

(Review) I have to tell you, the press looked like a pack of hounds at the White House Press Briefing today. Still, it looks like the ARPC came up with ther President's full pay records, which cover the period of his records that were ost by the TX ANG.

Proof, as if any more were needed, that Terry McAuliffe is a liar.

The actual documents are here.

Words Mean things II

(Review) Several commentors at Michael Williams blog direct readers to some newer interpretations, mainly from conservative Christian sources, that say the Translation of Exodus 21:22-25 can be read so that the Hebrew Word for "miscarriage" can also be read to mean premature birth.

Here of course, is a key problem with translation from other languages that lack the vocabulary, and hence the specificity of English.

I would point out, however, that Both Early Church and Judaic sources interpret this as I do.

The 4th Century Vulgate translation renders this text from Hebrew as:

If men were fighting and someone struck a pregnant woman and she miscarried but she herself lived, he will be subject to a fine, as much as the woman's husband shall request and as the judges decree. If, however, her death shall follow, let him pay a soul for a soul, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burning for a burning, a wound for a wound, a bruise for a bruise.

Josephus, the 1st century Jewish historian and author, explains the passage as:

He who kicks a pregnant woman, if the woman miscarries, he shall be fined by the judges for having, by the destruction of the fruit of her womb, diminished the population, and a sum is also to be given by him to the woman's husband. If she should die by the blow, then he likewise shall die, the law deeming it fit that a soul be paid for a soul.... One who mains someone will suffer the same, being deprived of that which he deprived the other, unless the one who was maimed is willing to accept money [instead]. For the law permits the victim to establish damages for the incident, unless he wishes to be particularly severe (Jewish Antiquities 4:278, 280).

Josephus' commentary is perfectly in line with the nearly unanimous opinion of the Ancient rabbis.

This is not an unusual position today, either. The official position of the Mennonite Church, for example, states in this context:

The Bible does not speak directly to the question of abortion. A biblical passage that indirectly speaks to the status of the fetus (Exodus 21:22-25) seems to place a higher value on the life of the mother than the fetus. For the death of the fetus the husband is to be compensated with money, but where the wife suffers hurt or death, there shall be "life for life, eye for eye."5 The Bible places a high value on the life of the fetus, though it does not necessarily support its defense to the exclusion of all other considerations.

We understand that the fetus is not just a piece of tissue to be discarded at will. On the other hand, neither is the fetus treated as a human/person in the full sense of that term.

Admittedly, the Hebrew of this particular passage is difficult, but I believe the reading I have presented is the accurate one, and the one that appears to have been almost unanimously held by the oldest Hebrew sources and commentary on the Torah.

This does not mean that the Biblical position is that abortion is moral. Clearly it is not only deeply immoral, but a crime as well, both in the Jewish and Christian traditions. It is not equivalent to murder, however, which was my only point. 

Our Fiscal Outlook

(Review) Bruce Bartlett has some questions about the president's stewardship of the Federal Budget.

This brings us to the most important chapter in President Bush's budget, the one entitled "Stewardship." Buried in an appendix volume where reporters are unlikely to notice it, the chapter paints a chilling picture of long-term budgetary trends. It shows federal spending rising from about 20 percent of gross domestic product this year to 53 percent in 2080. Much of this comes from interest on the debt, which rises by 20 percent of GDP. But this is because the budget assumes that taxes will not rise to finance rising entitlement spending. In all likelihood, taxes will rise sharply at some point. It is completely unrealistic to think that federal taxes will remain close to 20 percent of GDP for the next 75 years.

Unrealistic indeed, You can borrow money for a while. You can borrow money for quite a long time, but sooner or later, you have to stop borrowing and paying the bills. The way we pay the bills in terms of fiscal policy is by raising taxes.

So, enjoy those Bush Tax Cuts while you've got 'em.

Shockingly, the LA Times is wrong

(Review) The editors of the Los Angeles Times have come out in favor of Prop 56. The editors tell us that lowering the budget threshold from 67% to 55% will help stop partisan wrangling, and make it easier for a budget to be created each year.

And raising taxes? Well, the editors say, you don't need to worry your pretty little head about that.

In the real world, Proposition 56 would be most unlikely to produce a big crop of tax increases. California governors have a line-item veto power that requires a two-thirds vote to override, and Schwarzenegger would no doubt demonstrate how to use it liberally. Proposition 58 on the same ballot, if it passes, will also help limit spending. Without Proposition 56, even Schwarzenegger may not be able to muster the two-thirds vote needed to pass his budget this summer.

Schwarzenegger, however, will not be the Governor forever. If someone like Gray Davis were governor, we might have seen--indeed, would have seen--substantial increases in taxation.

And let's not forget that the legislature has already amply demonstrated its propensity to raise taxes, rather than cut spending. It was precisely that propensity that led to the passage of Prop 13, requiring a 2/3 vote to raise property taxes, after constant tax increases left californians increasingly unable to afford their own homes as tax rates skyrocketed.

Steep tax increases were the Democrats' answer tothe current budget problem. Spending cuts? Nope. Not even on the drawing board. Instead it was a package of $8 billion in new taxes.

Californians know all about how much impetus towards tax increases Prop 56 would induce, because it's Sacramento's standard answer to everything.

But, the Times' editors seem to assert, we're all better now, and the lej would never, ever do that to us again. And besides the governor would veto it, anyway.

Uh, huh.

The two-thirds vote requirement has certainly failed to keep spending down, and a 55% rule would be more honest and encourage moderation.

And precisely how would that work? The majority party could simply dispense with the objections of the minority party and pass essentially whatever budget they wish. The Times is explicitly arguing that if the majority party can ignore the minority's objections, they'll pass a more moderate budget.

This argument not only defies California's legislative experience, it defies simple common sense.

Ideally, this measure would be part of a reform package that would give the state a less-polarized Legislature. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and others need to push reforms to the redistricting process and legislative term limits that would foster more responsible and centrist legislators.

Well, ideally, perhaps it would. But it isn't. All those other reforms are conspicuously absent from the list of propositions about which we will be voting in three weeks.

Ideally, the editors of the Times would make cogent, rational, fact-based arguments defending the paper's points of view, but I'm not holding my breath for that either. 

Democrat security policy in a nutshell

(Review) Michael Barone quickly and suiccinctly devastates all the Democrats' national security arguments against Bush's reelection.

Did he manipulate the intelligence? No. U.S. intelligence concluded that Iraq has had WMD since the 1990s, when Bush was governor of Texas. The major foreign intelligence services all agreed. Did Bush lie about it? No. He reported accurately what the agencies said. Did he base his case for war solely on WMD? No. He also argued that military action would oust a regime that supported terrorism and that a free Iraq would make the Middle East less dangerous.

Nor is it clear that this is an intelligence failure that could have been prevented. Saddam Hussein acted as if he had WMD, violating United Nations resolutions seeking disclosure of his weapons. Kay now theorizes that Saddam's scientists may have deceived him by telling him they were working on WMD when they weren't. If so, how was U.S. intelligence to know that? And would it have been prudent to rely on such reports? The fear of Bush's opponents is that overestimates of an evil regime's capacity will lead to unnecessary wars. But the more characteristic failure of intelligence has been to underestimate evil regimes' progress toward WMD, as in the cases of Iran, North Korea, and Iraq itself in 1991. In the post-September 11 world, underestimates are surely more dangerous than overestimates.

Barone then goes on to perform a brief savaging of John F*** Kerry.

Which leads to the question of how they--especially the Democratic front-runner, John Kerry--would conduct foreign policy differently from Bush. Kerry presumably would not have taken military action against Iraq without France's approval, but he supported Bill Clinton when he threatened to do so in 1998. He might well engage in bilateral negotiations with North Korea, instead of the multilateral negotiations Bush has been insisting on, and make a deal like the Agreed Framework of 1994--which the North Koreans have blithely admitted they violated.

Kerry might make more efforts to negotiate with the so-called reformers in Iran, although the America-hating mullahs hold all power. He might, as he has on the campaign trail, make soothing noises about the Kyoto treaty to make friends with the Europeans (which means basically France and Germany, since most European nations supported us on Iraq). But he failed to vote against the 1997 resolution in which the Senate rejected the central premise of the Kyoto treaty by 95 to 0.

Kerry, might, in fact, do a lot of things, none of them particularly good.

Words mean things

Michael Williams and Xrlq have been engaged in a debate on the rhetoric used by pro-life advocates in the debate on abortion. Like Xrlq, I have serious reservations about the rhetoric of the pro-life side as well, specifically in equating abortion with murder.

Williams is fairly unapologetic in doing so.

It's fine and good to win a debate fairly without resorting to emotional rhetoric, but sometimes the issue is so important that it's better to win at any cost than to worry about intellectual niceties. Such is the case with abortion. I'm all for detached, objective discussion in most cases, but one-third of my generation has been murdered by their parents¹. I'm more concerned with stopping the butchery than with dispassioned objectivity, and I purposefully use emotional terminology to tailor my message in the manner I believe will be most effective in convincing my readers.

I don't usually mind rhetorical flourishes. They're often enjoyable. But the above is an example of going too far. Words do, after all, mean things, and staking out a philosophical principle as Williams does, and declaring abortion to be murder, has logical and practical consequences. Some important questions are raised by this kind of rhetoric, and they deserve a fuller examination.

First, from whence comes the belief that killing an unborn fetus is murder? The response one often hears is that it comes from the Bible. This is, however, factually incorrect. The only context in the entire Bible in which the killing of the unborn is mentioned is in Exodus 21:22-25. In this passage, God is imparting the law to Moses, and tells him²:

22. If men contend with each other, and a pregnant woman [interfering] is hurt so that she has a miscarriage, yet no further damage follows, [the one who hurt her] shall surely be punished with a fine [paid] to the woman's husband, as much as the judges determine.

23. But if any damage follows, then you shall give life for life,

24. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,

25. Burn for burn, wound for wound, and lash for lash.

So, notice the principle that God himself presents to Moses. If the woman is accidentally killed, the offender is put to death for murder. If the unborn child is killed, however, no murder has been committed, and the offender must pay a fine as the judges direct. Killing an unborn child might indeed be deeply immoral, but there is no scriptural justification for calling it murder. You may say that you personally consider it to be murder, or that your religious tradition says it is so, but to claim that the Bible says so is, without putting too fine a point on it, heresy.

The other problem I have with the "abortion is murder" rhetoric is that those who make it wish to do so without taking any responsibility for the moral corollary implicit in their argument, which is that if abortion is murder, the preemptive killing of those who perform abortions is morally just. Indeed, they shy away from this corollary with an alacrity that is amazing.

This is, however, intellectually dishonest. If abortion is in fact murder, and the killing of hundreds of thousands of fetuses each year is comparable to the holocaust, then you must explain why preventing abortions by killing abortion doctors is not morally justifiable.

The main argument pro-lifers make against killing abortion doctors is that we are a society of laws, and we must obey the law. Well, the rule of law is certainly important, but it's an argument I doubt anyone would be making if you were to substitute the term, "20 year-old college girl", or "Jew", in place of the term "fetus".

Nazi Germany was a society of laws as well. As it happened, however, there was a certain class of German citizens who were legally allowed—indeed, required--to kill Jews at their discretion. What response to such laws is more moral: preventing the wholesale slaughter of Jews by killing the relatively small number of SS officers, or "obeying the law" and, by inaction, allowing 11 million Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, etc., to be slaughtered in concentration camps?

Now, substitute the words "fetuses" for "Jews" and "abortion doctors" for "SS Officers". If you come up with a different answer, then you don't believe abortion and murder are equivalent, no matter what you say.

If the act of abortion is every bit an act of murder as slitting the throat of a pretty co-ed, or putting a 9mm round in the nape of some Jew's neck, then it must be equally moral to kill abortion doctors as it was to kill Nazis in an attempt to end the carnage.

If you wish to make moral equivalence argument such as "abortion is murder", then you must acknowledge that the equivalence applies all across the board. Philosophical principles have practical applications and consequences, and if you declare abortion to be murder, then you can't get all squeamish and try to distance yourself from the consequences when someone like Eric Rudolph decides to take you seriously.

Pro-life people will jump through all sorts of verbal contortions to avoid admitting what they really think, which is either a) abortion is not murder, and therefore the pre-emptive killing of abortion doctors is unjustified, or b) abortion is murder, making abortion doctors mass murderers who can be morally prevented from performing abortions by any necessary means.

Pro-lifers are trying--dishonestly, I think--to have it both ways. They want to argue in one breath that abortion is murder, then in the next, that it isn't bad enough to take extraordinary action to overturn such an unjust law.

It's an argument I doubt they'd be making if we were talking about the perfectly legal murder of 2 million teenaged girls every year, which leads me to believe that, when they spout the "abortion is murder" rhetoric, they don't even believe it themselves.

That is not universally true, however. As Williams states in his comments,

Which is higher? Morality or law? The rule of law has value in and of itself, but that value can't trump every other moral consideration.

I'm really in a quandry over the issue, because my morality seems to be leading me in a direction I don't really want to go. That doesn't mean my morality is wrong, however.

Nor does it mean that it is right, either.

It is, however, leading you in a direction that is appropriate to the "abortion is murder" rhetoric, which should be a very good indication of just how dangerous such rhetoric is. If your morality is leading you in a direction you don't want to go, then you need to stop and take stock.

It may very well be that your ideology is taking you in a direction your morality doesn't want to go.
__________
¹ Emphasis his.
² I'm using the Amplified Bible in this passage, mainly because it provides better context through the inclusion, in brackets, of additional phrases that more fully express the connotations of the terms used in the original language.
        

Ah, the innocence of amateur sports

(Review) You'd think the University of Colorado would have a better sports program...

The head football coach at the University of Colorado has told a former colleague it would be harder to recruit star athletes if the school did not show them a good time and take them to sex parties.

"If recruits aren't being shown these type of activities ... it would be a recruiting disadvantage," Robert Chichester, a former associate athletic director at the university, quoted head coach Gary Barnett as having told him.

After all, you can't pay the athletes. That would be wrong. 

Helpful advice

(Review) Here's a helpful hint: If you have a large amount of marijuana, and it gets stolen, filing a police complaint will bring swift response.

Bear Flag Roundup

There is a serious amount of good blogging going on with the Bear Flag league. Here's a few samples.

Aaron's Rantblog has a suggestion: Tech Support Triage.

Baldilocks writes that it's amazing the way the human mind works. Selective, too.

Blogospherics couldn't resist the pressure, and finally commented on the whole gay marriage deal.

BoiFromTroi provides an invaluable Wonkette geography guide.

Below Street Level lists the two most important issues facing us today that we need to come to grips with.

Calblog writes that America is Freedom's Last Redoubt.

Citizen Smash has come up with a great idea for a new--and quite vicious--reality show. I'd watch it.

Cobb writes that there are two things that give a person a free pass to do pretty much anything they please. And he's getting tired of having to give out free passes.

Daily Pundit is steamed--but not surprised--that Sacramento Democrats hate Arnold more than they love California.

E-Claire writes that you've got a lot of reading to do.

New Bearflagger Feste...A Fools Blog reports that leftist clowns are making appearances in San Francisco's BART subway system. Yes, clowns. Kill me now.

At Infinite Monkeys, it's the president of cats.

The Interocitor wonders why the Mars rover looks so much like Johnny 5 from Short Circuit.

Left Coast Conservative point out that John Kerry did, in fact, serve in Vietnam. In case you didn't know.

For the perhaps the first time in your life, you can create a zeugma, and submit it to Little Miss Attila.

Jockolarocracy provides a little perspective on the John Kerry Coronation.

Lex Communis notes that role models for young girls have dwindled to nothing more than variants of "the courtesan".

Master of None is asking why people are still giving money to Howard Dean.

Miller's Time shows us an unfortunate tattoo.

The Mulatto Advocate comments on defining blackness.

Howard Owens has listened to Patrick Stewart, thought about it, and decided the Borg should have kept him.

Pathetic Earthlings comments on whiskey collecting. Collecting? Not just the bottles? Nope.

Patio Pundit points out some honest differences between two good men. Well, one good man and John Kerry.

Patrick Prescott asks, "Are these guys we're supposed to give amnesty to?"

Patterico has added some lefty bloggers to his blogroll.

At PrestoPundit, Bill Clinton leaves a message for George W. Bush.

The Right Coast how the conspiracy theorists will come up with an explanation of Bush's appointments to the intelligence panel.

Right on the Left Beach notes that W isn't as dumb as he looks.

Shark Blog notes that theres a reason why Germany has universal healthcare and an 11% unemployment rate. It seems the two may be related. Who knew?

Slings and Arrows notes that what John Kerry did isn't nearly as important as what he will do.

The SoCal Law Blog notes that Janet Jackson may learn how expensive a nipple ring can really be.

Tonecluster notes that if Arabs are upset with the US response to terrorism, then they should keep screwing around with Russia and China and watch what happens.

When reading Window Manager, remember, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Xrlq notes that it getting harder to call it a "jobless recovery".

Blogging is alive and well in California.  

Welcome to The League

(Review) The Bear Flag League Welcomes a new member, Feste...A Fool's Blog.

Show him some love.

A war based on lies

(Review) Jonathon Rauch writes that the war in Iraq was a mistake, based on lies about Iraq's WMD capabilities.

So it is time to admit that the war was premised on a mistake. Had I known then what I know now, I would have opposed it. Next question: Does that mean the war itself was a mistake? Yes. But it was a special kind of mistake: a justified mistake.

A policeman shoots a robber who has killed in the past and who brandishes what seems to be a gun. The gun turns out to be a cellphone. The policeman expects a thorough investigation (and ought to cooperate). In the end, if he is exonerated, it is not because he made no mistake but because his mistake was justified. Reasonable people, facing uncertainty, would have thought they saw a gun.

George W. Bush and the CIA thought they saw a gun. So did French President Jacques Chirac, who last February warned of Iraq's "probable possession of weapons of mass destruction." So did Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, a former Vermont governor, who last February said, "My personal belief is that Saddam may well possess anthrax and chemical weapons. That being the case, he must be disarmed."

If reasonable people thought Saddam possessed forbidden weapons, that was because Saddam sought to give the impression that he possessed them. He may have believed he possessed them. (His fearful and corrupt scientists, Kay hypothesized, may have been running a sham weapons program.) For four years after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq successfully hid its chemical weapons program. When a defector blew the whistle, weapons inspectors were stunned at the extent of Saddam's deception. The Iraqis responded not by coming clean but by redoubling their efforts to obstruct and intimidate -- for example, interfering with inspectors' helicopter flights and, at one point, firing a grenade into their headquarters. No one could have failed to conclude that Saddam was hiding the truth.

The truth he hid, however, was not his weapons but his weakness. Or perhaps his minions were hiding his weakness from him. In either case, his power and prestige depended upon his fearsome reputation at home and his defiant posture abroad. He was contained but could not afford to let anyone know it, for fear of being invaded or overthrown. So he waved what looked like a gun and got shot.

Many people now demand to know why American intelligence was so badly fooled. The subject certainly merits investigating. Questions should be asked. Chins should be stroked. But even without an investigation, we know the most important reason we were fooled: Saddam Hussein did everything in his power to fool us, and by the time he stopped trying to fool us -- if he stopped trying -- it was too late for anyone ever to believe him.

The war was based on lies. Not Bush's or the CIA's; Saddam Hussein's.

Saddam Lied. People Died.

Mainly his people, but still...

Miracle

I got home tonight, and Chris was antsy. She'd had a bad day, and wanted to get out of the house, get dinner, and catch a movie.

We decided on Miracle, starring Kurt Russel as Herb Brooks, the Coach of the 1980 USA Olympic hockey team.

OK, actually, I decided on it--"It's about hockey", she whined-- and Chris went along.

Now, she's glad we went.

Good to see Kurt Russel back in a Disney film, by the way.

Good film, too.

Russel, of course, is really good, when he wants to be, and evidently he wanted to be really bad for this film. He had Brooks down cold. Thick Minneapolis accent you could cut with a knife. Brown plaid polyester pants or sport coats with wide striped blue ties.

The thing that makes this film, though, is the cultural context presented in the film. As the opening makes clear, the 70s were a bad decade. I mean, everything went as bad as it possibly could. Vietnam, Watergate, Inflation, the Oil Embargo, Carter's "malaise" speech, Afghanistan. The whole dreary wretched thing.

But what happened with the US hockey team in Lake Placid became a harbinger for what the 1980s would be. It's almost as if it closed out the end of a bad decade and started a new decade with a precursor of how it would actually end, nine years later, with the Berlin Wall tumbling down, and the USSR slinking into irrelevance, and shortly afterward, into history.

One of the neat things they did was to Use the actual tapes of Al Michaels' and Ken Dryden calling the games for ABC. Then they recreated the actual plays that Al Michaels were calling and synchronized the visual action in the film with Michaels' calls. Now that's attention to detail.

The audience really got into it. They started clapping for US goals in the games, and then when AL Michaels said, "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!" The audience cheered. It was like they were watching this for the very first time.

The movie just did a great job in connecting that Semifinal game with Soviets with the larger cultural significance it assumed, and it caught the audience up in it.

Highly recommended. 

It's a red-letter day

(Review) After reading Cobb's take on the most recent Star Trek socio-politico-economic debate currently going on at various places in the blogosphere, I have decided for the first time to finally break my silence on Trekish things.

Before I begin, I should tell you that I remember when the original Trek was on NBC. I remember playing with neighborhood friends at 4 years old (1968), and deciding who was gonna be Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty.

I also taught computer training regularly at Paramount while DS9 and Voyager were in production there, and I used to spend my lunches hanging around on the sets.

I think I have better than average Trek knowledge.

I also have better than average knowledge of economics, both from my formal schooling, and from hosting a daily 4-hour financial news/talk radio program in LA for a few years.

Matt Yglesias writes:

[I]t seems clear to me that Star Trek (at least in its The Next Generation form) advances a specifically Marxist view of politics. The idea is that, at some point in the future, technological progress driven by capitalist competition and innovation, will lead to the invention of the replicator, thus bringing about Marx's "overabundance of goods" and leading to the collapse of market exchange as a viable means of social organization.

Well, as the Picard character once said on one of those we're-low-on-location-budget-so-let's-move-over-to-the-20th-century-earth-sets-on-the-other-side-of-the-Paramount-lot episodes, "I'm afraid you would find the economics of the 23rd century rather difficult to understand."

He must have been talking about Matt, and most other people alive today as well.

Economics is the study of how human beings respond to scarcity. Food, water, clothing, shelter, and all other resources are finite. Human wants are infinite. Economics is the study of how human beings make choices in response to that scarcity.

All economics, even Marxism, are based in the concept of scarcity. Marx merely believed the value of a good or service consisted solely of the value of the labor required to transform raw goods into finished products. But the reason labor itself was valuable was because of scarcity. There is, after all, a finite number of laborers, meaning that the production of goods had to be allocated through the labor available to produce them.

What makes Star Treks economics fundamentally different, and, in many ways, fundamentally incomprehensible to us, is that scarcity is no longer a factor. The invention of the replicator in the ST universe means that essentially no good is scarce. Practically any physical good can be obtained at negligible cost, either through replicators, or through construction by Artificially intelligent robots.

So imagine a universe in which your food, clothing, vehicle, home, and practically every other tangible good is essentially free, and in which energy can be obtained for free through your home's antimatter reactor.

Now, the reason we all have to drag ourselves out of bed Monday through Friday is to obtain the money we need to trade in exchange for goods and services. If we could have all those things for free would we actually work?

Probably not.

Still, we couldn't just sit on our bums all day without going stir crazy. Even constant sex with "Claudia Schiffer" in the rec room holodeck would get old after a while, as hard as that might be to believe. Human beings, in short, would still have needs.

But, as Maslow tells us, there is hierarchy of needs. Once we've taken care of physical needs, we still have social needs, and self-actualization needs.

So, if you didn't have to work to survive, you would probably "work" as an avocation, doing things you love to do.

Would you even be paid for working? Why? What would you buy with that you don't already have for free?

If it was me, I'd be perfectly happy to teach classes in computer science, economics, history and all sorts of other things that fascinate me. At other times, I would want to go to school, and learn about more things that fascinate me.

Frankly, I think the economics of such a society would be fairly hard to envision.

For instance, how would the service economy work? If you were hit by an aircar, would you pay for a lawyer, or would there simply be people for whom litigation was a pleasure, and who would take your case for free, because they like litigating?

But there would still be scarce things. Book collectors might still wish to obtain signed first editions of John Grisham novels. But that opens up a whole can of worms, too. How would they obtain them? There would have to be some medium of exchange, but what would it be? And, if you aren't particularly interested in formulaic legal novels written by long dead scribblers, what you use that medium of exchange for, what with most other things being essentially free? If you own a first edition Grisham, what would I have to give you in order to obtain it for myself, if you already have everything else you want?

The replicator moves the debate will outside the capitalist-Marxist paradigm, into something largely unknown. I think a lot of trial and error would have to be done to come up with rational answers to these questions.

Of course, the Ferengi make an interesting case in this context. I mean, they're just completely amoral free-marketers, are they not? They have a whole society ruled by the sacred Rules of Acquisition.

But, presumably, they have replicators as well, and as many Claudia Schiffer holo-wives as they could want. So why all the unregulated capitalism?

Well, in their case, it appears to be a cultural deal. They don't want all the gold pressed latinum to ease them in their old age. They already are fantastically rich simply because they have replicator technology.

But the number of latinum bars one has is a good way to keep score. The higher the number of gold-pressed latinum bars one has, the higher their social status. If they've managed to obtain the latinum by hoodwinking someone else for it, their status is increased even more.

"Riches" in the Ferengi sense have negligible economic value, but immense social value. They serve a cultural purpose, even if they no longer mark extreme differences in economic status. Indeed, the ownership of "riches" has a significant place in how the Ferengi organize their political structure, since obtaining riches is taken by their culture to be a prime indication of good judgment and fitness to lead.

So, even the Ferengi are not quite what they appear on the surface.

And Star Trek's economics aren't as Marxist as Yglesias thinks either. Without scarcity, there's no Marxism at all.

Apart from anything else, there's no proletariat.  

The essence of Kerry

(Review) Rich Lowry sat down for a revealing interview with John Kerry, who, in case you weren't aware, served in Vietnam.

Q: Senator, the Vietnam War is often a subtle undercurrent to your campaign, and some Democrats have been criticizing President Bush for serving in the Texas Air National Guard. Are you making Vietnam an issue?

A: No. I have always said, across my long, distinguished career of public service, that I would never judge the choices of anyone during the Vietnam War. Not those who chose to burn their draft cards. Not those who chose to flee to Canada. Not those who chose to drop acid and commit public sex acts. Not even those cowardly weasels who chose to serve in the National Guard.

When I was maneuvering through the Mekong Delta, and the jungle heat was nearly intolerable, some of my comrades in arms would say, "I hate those cowardly pantywaists who stayed home to serve in the National Guard." And I would say to my men as we dodged incoming fire: "No. No! We are here risking our lives every single hour of every single day in order to defend the freedom and security of even those cowardly weasels back home in the National Guard."

Q: To keep the focus on Vietnam for a moment — if you don't mind — after you came home you engaged in antiwar advocacy that has drawn criticism. For instance, you testified before Congress that your fellow servicemen routinely raped, beheaded and tortured people in Vietnam.

A: This is a campaign about the future.

Yeah. His future, not ours.

Happy Birthday Mr. President

Today is Ronald Reagan's birthday. He's 93. In honor of that day, I present, once again, my Birthday wishes for him:

Dear President Reagan;

I wish you could read this, and remember the great things you did for our country.

I wish you could know how radically you changed the world for the better.

I wish you could recall how they did tear down that wall.

I wish you could see how many people live their lives in peace and freedom today because of what you said, and what you did.

I wish you could feel the deep gratitude and appreciation so many of us have for your courage and leadership.

But we remember, and we know, and we won't forget.

Godspeed, Mr. President. Godspeed.

Opposing views on Kerry

Charles Krauthammer writes that John Kerry holds an election trump card in a wartime election, because he's a combat veteran. Collin Leavey, on the other hand thinks Kerry is playing a dangerous game with his Vietnam war experience.

Krauthammer:

The reason is deeply visceral. It is not just that you think a veteran -- or, even better, a hero -- has a better understanding of war, its strategy and its costs. It is that when the bad guys are after you -- say, after they kill 3,000 of your countrymen in one day -- you like the idea of a national leader who has no compunction about killing.

Kerry makes the point with extra emphasis by noting that he hunts. And plays hockey. Post-Sept. 11, that's the kind of guy even Democrats want wearing the sheriff's badge.

Leavey:

Voters honor the service and patriotism of military veterans. Indeed, so much so that they can be quickly turned off by use of such symbols cynically to evade scrutiny and accountability.

That's why Kerry's best move now might be to shut up about Vietnam. He's about two applause lines away from convincing voters that he's trying to cash in on a war that cost thousands of his fellow volunteers and draftees their lives.

I guess I have to say that I'm pretty uninterested in who had a better war record 30 years ago, or who went to Vietnam or who didn't. FDR didn't sem particularly handicapped by not having served a day in the military. Nor did Abraham Lincoln's limited service of at most 4 months in the Illinois militia handicap him.

What is important about John Kerry is not what he did in Vietnam. What is important is what he did after Vietnam, when he came home and accused an entire generation of American soldiers of being rapists and baby-killers. What is important is that right now, as American Boys are fighting and dying overseas, he thinks the War on Terror should be fought by the FBI.

Military service is simply irrelevant to the presidency, and Mr. Kerry's long-ago service certainly doesn't make up for his pathetic lack of strategic insight now.

Andf, while we're on the subject of Mr. Kerry, let me just say this. John Kerry is a despicable human being. He says he's never questioned the decisions anyone made during the Vietnam Era to become conscientious objectors, or avoid the draft, or go to Canada or...wait for it...join the National Guard. "These," he piously exclaims, "are decisions people make." So, in Mr. Kerry's mind joining the Guard is just like fleeing to Canada.

Unless, of course, you were one of those unfortunate guardsmen deployed to Vietnam and subsequently KIA. Or one of the guardsman who, right this minute, is patrolling in Baghdad.

In one brief paragraph, Kerry managed to call the guard a cadre of cowards and shirkers who avoid war through a technicality. This is outrageous, insulting, and deplorable. And it proves, as far as I'm concerned, that John Kerry is a hideous human being.

Getting back to work

(Review) The Employment report shows that 112k new jobs were created last month. That's quite bit less than market expectations, and at 136k, the expectations weren't very high.

The unemployment rate declined a bit, down to 5.6%. That adds a bit more confusion to the picture, mainly because the unemployment rate comes from a different set of data than non-farm payrolls, and the two have been hard to reconcile the past several months, as the unemployment rate declined while non-farm payrolls have been stagnating.

I think one or two things is happening out there that makes the weak payroll numbers misleading. Think about it. We've lost 2.5 million net new jobs over the last three years, and the unemployment rate peaked at 6.4%. A decade ago, after losing 1.6 million jobs, it peaked at 7.8%. That doesn't make sense, if all else is equal.

What I think is happening is that a lot of IT people are working on a contract basis. That's how my chick works. Indeed, the majority of her work still comes from the company she used to work for as an employee until last year. So, I think there's a lot more freelancing out there than we're aware of.

Second, I think that some of the boomers, who are now in their late 50s, have decided to hang it up and retire. They were gonna retire in 2-5 years anyway, why not just go ahead and do it now?

At any event, this strikes me a reasonable explanation for why the unemployment rate is still so low, and why job growth is so anemic.

Perhaps we should start looking at revising the way we collect and present the unemployment statistics, so that we can glean more meaningful data from them as the nature of the workforce changes.

The law means whatever a majority of robed lawyers says it means

(Review) The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachussetts, has, once again, decided that the Constitution of that State has a meaning that was utterly unknown by its authors, and announced that it requires allowing homosexual marriage in the Commonwealth. None of that wishy-washy civil unions bushwah for the Bay State.

Naturally, any input from the citizenry or their representatives in the legislature is uneccessary. After all, in our system of goverment, it is judges who are sovereign, not the people. Indeed, the only purpose of this advisory opinion was to make it clear to the legislature what the SJC requires of them.

Now, they know. 

UPDATE:
BoiFromTroi has a totally different take on the issue, and has opened his comments about it to all. My response has been duly entered there.

The Oxymoron of Welfare State Benefits

(Review) Why do I, as I stated earlier, prefer a bare minimum of state benefits? The inimitable Arnold Kling explains it precisely.

Like company benefits, the concept of middle-class benefits in the form of government programs in education, health care, and Social Security is an oxymoron. On average, the value of what we receive is less than the value of the taxes that we pay to support these programs. That is because tax collection is not a costless process. Taxes create considerable friction in the economy by distorting choices. Payroll taxes penalize work. Personal and corporate income taxes penalize thrift. The lost output and reduced capital stock that result represents what economists call "deadweight loss," and it amounts to trillions of dollars. In the case of Social Security, for example, see this analysis by Martin Feldstein. As with corporate benefits, I am not sure why the public does not see through the scam of government benefits for the middle class. However, one possible reason that people under-estimate the cost of the welfare state is that much of that cost has been shifted into the future. The taxes that will be required tomorrow to meet the promises that we make with Medicare and Social Security today are staggering to contemplate.

And yet, we still deceive ourselves.

The high cost of medical insurance

(Review) Jim McMeans, a business owner in Danielsville, GA, writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that individual medical policyholders are getting screwed by insurance companies.

In the State of the Union address, President Bush proposed health savings accounts, tax credits and allowing small businesses to jointly purchase health insurance plans as partial solutions to the rising cost of health care.

As a self-employed small-business owner, I can testify from experience that these ideas amount to the equivalent of treating a cancer patient with an aspirin, a Band-Aid and a face-lift.

Small businesses could save 10 to 15 percent by jointly purchasing health care policies, said Melody Harrison, Georgia director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses. But a typical family health insurance policy is $750-$1,000 per month. Even saving 20 percent will not make health insurance affordable.

So far, that's not anything we don't know. But, according to McMeans, it gets worse.

Our insurance agent confirmed that the business model of these insurance companies was to collect three to four years of premiums, then chase the policyholder away with large premium and deductible increases. By doing so, they practically eliminate the possibility of ever paying a claim. Their business model can be summed up in the slogan, "Gone in 60 Months."

Well, that's kind of a nasty way to do business. Collect the money, then drive the customer away before he can file a claim. Must be quite profitable.

Or maybe not. Health insurance companies, after all, are gonna get stuck with someone's bills down the line, and that's the problem. As I learned last October, a stay in the hospital runs about $10,000 per day. So, a couple of days of care wipes out a lot of premiums.

The problem is not predatory health insurance companies. The problem is the cost of medical care.

This is not something either party can afford to ignore. Too many people and businesses are finding coverage less and less affordable.

Make no mistake about it, our current health care system is going to be reformed within the next 10 years. The only question that remains is whether the reform will be a complete switch to a government-run universal health care system, or a radical market-based reform that eliminates third-party paymnents for routine care, and creates a free market, fee-for-service model in health care at the doctor-patient level.

If I was a betting man, I wouldn't bet on the latter.

Moderately Important Tuesday Results

(Review) Wiliam Saletan writes about what yesterdays primaries really mean.

I think Edwards would be the strongest Democrat in the general election. Nobody expected him to do this well in Oklahoma. But when the history of the 2004 race is written, my guess is that we'll look back at Oklahoma as Edwards' Stalingrad. He had to kill off Clark. The media were itching to write off Clark, and a no-win night would have given them license to do so. Now they can't. Clark will go on to Tennessee and Virginia, where he'll do what he did in Oklahoma: split the non-Yankee vote and keep Kerry in the lead. Maybe Edwards will win Tennessee and Virginia, and Clark will fade. But by then it may too late to stop Kerry.

You know, I just don't get the sense that the Democrats like Kerry. They're saying all the right things, but almost because it's obligatory, not because they actually mean it. I don't think that bodes well for him. 

UPDATE:
Ronald Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times appears to agree with me.

Where are all the new jobs?

(Review) Mort Zuckerman writes that the US job machine's broken, and unless it's fixed, we aren't going to see this recovery add a lot of net new jobs.

Last year, the President and his aides promised that their tax cut would give America what it needed most: jobs. Never happened. Total job creation was supposed to average out at 306,000 a month, but not even a third of that has been achieved. The numbers clearly undercut the Bush claim that tax cuts for the wealthy would generate jobs for the middle and working classes.

The jobless recovery we're now in is unlike anything the American economy has ever seen. Typically, the Great American Job Machine energizes our economy. New jobs beget more income, which begets more spending, which begets more hiring, incomes and spending. What we're seeing now, however, suggests that there may be something fundamentally wrong in the engine room of the American economy.

In the recoveries of the mid-1970s and 1980s, America was generating about 300,000 new jobs a month within six months of cyclical upturns. In the early 1990s, this expansion slowed to about 200,000 a month, and we had to wait a full two years for that.

You know I was gonna let the "tax cuts for the wealthy" line slide, but I just can't. The bottom 50% of taxpayers only pay 3.6% of all federal income taxes. ANY tax cut at all is essentially a tax cut for "the rich" because they're the only people paying taxes. I mean, Jeebus, it's not rocket science. If you aren't paying taxes you don't get a tax cut. You've already had your taxes cut to 0! What else are we supposed to do?

OK, sorry, had to get that off my chest.

Now, he's right about one thing, which is that job growth seems to have slowed. But figuring out why, and how to fix it, or even if it should be fixed , might be a matter of some difficulty.

One thing that's happened is that productivity has exploded in the last decade. We can make more stuff with fewer workers than ever before. The downside to this is that fewer jobs are available. That might make for difficult times for some workers for a while, but it isn't a "problem" that needs to be solved. Increased productivity is the only way to increase the pay--and wealth--of workers. (But, while that may be true, it's pretty cold comfort to the manufacturing worker whose job is gone forever.)

Zuckerman, however, is trying to make the point that there's something fundamentally flawed with the economy, and its ability to create new jobs. Maybe so, but I doubt it. And even if he is right, there may be a perfectly good reason that makes it an innocuous trend.

First, making economic comparisons between the 80s, 90s and now are problematic. Many of you may not remember but 1981-1982 were simply devastating years for the economy. Back-to-back recessions seriously shrank real GDP, as the Fed used godawful high interest rates to wring inflation out of the economy. Unemployment rose to 10.8% for November and December of 1982. In 1981-82, we lost 2.838 million jobs. By contrast, the recession of 1991-92 was much milder, shedding only 1.617 million jobs, and giving us a peak unemployment rate of 7.8%.

So, we had a much lower baseline from which to start creating jobs on 1983, as we emerged from a much deeper recession. That alone seems to explain to me the slowdown in job creation from the 1980s to the 1990s. There were simply fewer jobs that needed to be created.

In addition, the 1980s were not a time of high productivity growth. Indeed, economists at the time were moaning about how American workers were going to be pauperized by the lack of productivity growth, as the Germans and Japanese took over the world. But that lack of productivity growth, which was historically, abnormally low, helped make the rate of job creation abnormally high.

Another key point of difference is the war on terror. Businesses are uncertain about what the future holds. There has been in many quarters at least some level of fear that we might eventually face what Israel has been facing in terms of regular terrorism. Fortunately, that fear seems to be receding, but it has certainly helped, along with the great strides in productivity, to make business leaders hold off on expansion or new hiring--except for contractors, where hiring has been rather brisk (and who often aren't counted in the payroll employment figures, because they're self-employed)--until the picture becomes clearer.

Also, those of us who were just starting our economics coursework in the 1980s should remember that at the time, the Non-Accelerating Inflationary Rate of Unemployment, the sacred NAIRU, the mythical rate of "full employment", was believed to be around 6%. Anything lower than that risked increasing inflation through a horrific wage-price spiral. Terrible really. Everybody was perfectly happy with a 6% unemployment rate prior to 1995, because we thought that was about the best we could get.

But, in the 1990s the unemployment rate was down to 4%, and we were as inflation free as little birds. So, now, our 5.7% unemployment rate, seems like some sort of lame, suck, mediocrity. (Yes, I understand we lost 2.645 million jobs from 2001-2003. I'll get back to that.) But it may be that the low unemployment rates of the 1990s were an aberration caused by the dotcom boom. There were quite a lot of people "employed" at very low wages at thousands of dotcom startups across the country. And why not? If your dotcom could make it to the NASDAQ, you could go public, and everybody would be rolling in dough, snorting coke through $100 bills, straight off of hookers' bre...oh, wait a minute…that was 1980s Wall Street. Well, then, everybody would be rolling in dough, gulping Jolt Cola, and playing Lara Croft: Tomb Raider all day. So, a lot of people were "employed" at fairly small salaries, but they weren't demanding wage hikes. They were just waiting for their 5¢ per share stock options to pay off when the company went IPO at $60 a share, and they could get their hands on some real money.

Which never happened, leaving them without jobs or stock options.

For those of us with real jobs, of course, all that stuff that had no effect, but it did affect the employment statistics in general, which also made the inevitable bubble-bursting a bit of a harder crash.

And, of course, 911, and the subsequent economic losses acount for a really disproportionate share of the job losses, too.

So put 911 together with what has been almost a collapse of the IT industry due to a relatively rare investment bubble, and you have a sticky situation, but not a routine one, or one that particularly indicates some particular weakness with the US economy's ability to create jobs. It's just the confluence of two unusual, but highly destructive events, coincidently related in time. That's unfortunate, but it doesn't necessarily point to anything fundamentally wrong with the economy.

Finally, I think we also have to realize that, even if job growth is slowing, there's probably a darn fine economic reason for it. Over the next two decades, about a quarter of the workforce is gonna retire.

Remember the baby boomers? Well, they're just about done working. Our problem is about to become one of having too few workers to fill existing jobs, not one of too few new jobs. So, our lack of job creation may not be a problem, per se, merely the beginning of an adjustment to the huge demographic change in the workforce that's already starting. Creating many new jobs at this stage of the game might simply be pointless, because we will soon reach a point where nobody will be available to fill them.

Now long-term economic forecasting is as much of an oxymoronic term as military intelligence, but it might be that we're in for a decade of weak job growth as the population of the work force adjusts to the mass of retirements that are about to hit. In other words, we might be stuck in the lag between the two for the next 5 years or so.

Or, it might be that on Friday, we learn that 400k new jobs were created in January.

That's what makes economic forecasting so fun!

Yes, Zuckerman is right that we aren't creating new jobs at the same rate we did in previous decades. But he may be completely wrong in assuming that it's an indication of a problem. Even more importantly, it's probably entirely out of the control of anyone in Washington to change.

Our cheery fiscal policy future

(Review) David M. Walker is the Comptroller General of the United States, which means he runs the General accounting office, or GAO. In that capacity, he has decided to give us a little tour of the future of the country's fiscal policy.

Welcome to hell.

The fiscal 2005 budget President Bush released on Monday includes a deficit of $364 billion. Although the administration and the Congressional Budget Office show declining deficits in the years ahead, and an improving economy will reduce deficits further, the long-term projected gap is now so large that we will not be able simply to grow our way out of the problem. Difficult choices are inevitable.

This is pretty much what I said yesterday. So, now it's not just some libertoid crackpot in California saying it, it's the nation's chief accountant, the Comptroller General of the United States of America, or as I call him, Numbers-boy.

And Numbers-boy isn't too sanguine about the future.

The federal government's gross debt — the accumulation of its annual deficits — was about $7 trillion last September, which works out to about $24,000 for every man, woman and child in this country. But that number excludes items like the gap between the government's Social Security and Medicare commitments and the money put aside to pay for them. If these items are factored in, the burden for every American rises to well over $100,000.

Now, the Democrats can drone on and on all they want about putting Social Security in a lock box, and Medicare in a steamer trunk, and welfare in a coffee can hidden under the nation's kitchen sink, way in the back of the cabinet behind a box of O-Cello sponges. But the fact is that it's too late. There's nothing left to lock up.

Social Security's long-term assets consist primarily of little notes from the Treasury that say, "We took a couple of bil out on Tuesday. We'll put it back in soon." Notes that go all the way back to 1941.

We never count that as debt, but it's still there, a vast unfunded pension liability that exists because the federal government has routinely pulled Social Security revenues out to pay for items in the general fund. Social Security consists of a pile of IOUs that the federal government doesn't have the cash to redeem.

But wait, it gets worse. Evidently, the government won't have that money any time in the future, either.

The new Medicare prescription drug benefit will add thousands more to that tab. This benefit is unquestionably popular and will make it easier for some older Americans to afford expensive prescription drugs. But it also comes with a steep price tag that few want to talk about. The truth is that the drug benefit as signed into law is one of the largest commitments ever undertaken by the federal government. Preliminary estimates of its long-term cost in current dollars range up to $8 trillion.

To put that number into perspective: it is about four times the entire federal budget. Long-term simulations from the legislative agency I head, the General Accounting Office, paint a chilling picture. Even before the new drug benefit was enacted, these simulations showed that by 2040 current policy could require a 50 percent reduction in federal spending or a doubling of taxes to balance the budget.

Either would be devastating. And keep in mind, it is likely that efforts will be made to expand the drug benefit in the future.

Eight trillion dollars.

$8,000,000,000,000.00

$8x10¹²

There's really just no way to write it without it being a big freakin' number, is there?

And there's simply no way we can maintain both Social Security/Medicare at current levels of benefits, and current levels of taxation. It is literally a physical impossibility, no matter how much miraculous economic growth you assume.

If we want to keep all the neat bennies we've voted to give ourselves through our representatives in Congress, then we are going to have to jack up taxes high enough to fund them. If we want to keep taxes low, then we're gonna have to kiss our sweetheart, government-funded retirement deals goodbye.

There is no free lunch. We've pretended that there was every since FDR. But we've been fooling ourselves, and now the bill's coming due.

So, as Exhibit I in the case for how a nation taxes and spends itself into poverty, I give you Social Security/Medicare.

I suggest you start buying Alpo now, while it's still cheap.  

I'm sure there's a little story here. I'm just not sure I want to know what it is.

Photo: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Krugman's Criticisms

(Review) I always cringe when I read Paul Krugman. Mainly because he's really done some fine academic work, and reading his New York Times op/eds always brings the point starkly home that a PhD in Economics is not the key to informed political analysis.

Today, Krugman talks about the budget.

The prime cause of giant budget deficits is a plunge in the federal government's tax take, which fell from 20.9 percent of G.D.P. in fiscal 2000 to a projected 15.7 percent this year, the lowest share since 1950.

But, the way he says it, it sounds like a bad thing.

About 45 percent of this plunge can be attributed to the Bush tax cuts.

Well, good. One of the purposes of tax cuts is to deprive the government of that money so that the citizenry can keep it. Still not seeing the problem here.

Oh, OK, that isn't exactly true. I do see the problem. The problem is, essentially, that the electorate wants all kinds of goodies from the government, and they don't want to pay a dime for them.

That's always the problem with fiscal policy.

It's true that increased spending also contributes to the deficit, and that there has been a substantial increase in discretionary spending — spending that, unlike such items as Social Security payments, isn't automatically determined by formulas. But the bulk of this increase has been related to national security.

Traditional budget measures distinguish between defense and nondefense discretionary spending. Even by these measures, defense accounts for most of the increase in recent years. But a better measure would group homeland security and other costs associated with 9/11 with defense, not domestic programs. The Center for American Progress — confirming related work by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — estimates that from 2000 to 2004 security-related discretionary spending rose to 4.7 percent of G.D.P. from 3.4 percent, while nonsecurity spending rose to only 3.4 percent from 3.1 percent.

In other words, the role of nonsecurity spending in the plunge into deficit is trivial, compared with tax cuts and security spending. (Credit where credit is due: the administration's budget numbers show the same thing.) And even severe austerity on nonsecurity spending won't make a significant dent in the deficit.

So what will it take to get the budget deficit under control? Unless Social Security and Medicare are drastically cut — which is, of course, what the right wants — any solution has to include a major increase in revenue.

The awful fact is that Krugman is perfectly correct.

I know the idea behind supply-side economics--which is mainly quackery, by the way--is the idea that lower taxes promote economic growth that, in turn, provides the government with higher tax revenues.

Now, maybe that's true when Ron Reagan comes along, eliminates about 7 tax brackets, lowers the top rate from 75% to 28%, and indexes the rates to inflation. But it's very difficult to argue that reducing the top rate from 39% to 35% will accomplish the same thing. In fact, a casual glance at the Laffer Curve indicates that such a tax cut might reduce government revenues.

It all depends on where the Laffer Curve's equilibrium point is at the moment, and, since Supply-Side theory makes it impossible to identify the equilibrium point, except perhaps in retrospect, we won't know for...well, years.

What we do know is that we're spending money like a drunken sailor on a Singapore shore leave, it's money we don't have, so we're putting the extra $400 billion on the national MasterCard.

Even a casual look at the budget makes it clear that we' aren't gonna cut that $400 bil out of discretionary spending. It's got to come out of higher revenues from economic growth, or through cutting nondiscretionary spending.

Now, Krugman completely ignores the possibility of revenue increases through economic growth. That's because he's intellectually dishonest when he doesn't have a referee committee breathing down his neck. I'll bet that makes writing an essentially unedited NYT piece spectacularly liberating.

I, however, do care about intellectual honesty, so I will address it. I certainly expect the economy to continue to expand. I expect new jobs to be created, happiness to fill the land, etc., etc., etc.

I am entirely unsure, however, that the growth in revenues through economic expansion can keep up with 4% increases in discretionary spending coupled with the way non-discretionary, i.e. Medicare and Social Security has been puffing up like a tick.

My Dad is now 59 years old, and Mom is now 57 years old. They will be among the first of the huge Baby Boom generation to retire. If you think non-discretionary spending is exploding now, start watching it in 2010. So that's gonna take annualized GDP growth somewhere in the range of 7%-10% every year for the next 30 years, just to keep even. Anybody want to bet on the probabability of that happening?

Krugman's argument, of course, is that the government taxes too little. My argument is that the government spends too much.

Krugman's right. I do want to slash Medicare and Social Security spending. Oh, and note to older people: Don't tell me, "I've been putting that money in my social security account, and it's mine! I want it!"

First, you're wrong. You don't have a Social Security "account". If you think you do, you're sadly--and inexcusably--misinformed. You have a social security number, which is nothing more nor less than a tax ID number. Your social security taxes do not go into your "account". They go into payments for current retirees. The whole thing's a shell game, and always has been. And, like any good pyramid scheme, the full cost is about to fall on the last generation of suckers, who won't see a dime of their benefits.

Second, I'll make a deal with you. You can have all the money you've put into it. And not one cent more. Right now, retirees use up every penny they've put into social security within five years. You don't just get your money, you get everybody else's money too, from the time you're 70 to the time you die, which means, actuarially, you're living the last 8 years of your life on my dime, not yours.

To make social security work, and keep on working, we have to make drastic changes to it. We have to do one of two things:

1) Change it from a defined benefits pension plan, where everybody gets the same amount, no matter how much they put into it, to a real account-based pension plan, where you get out what you've put in, and your retirement stipend is based entirely on what you've contributed, or

2) Means test it, and make it a real form of social insurance. Just like car insurance, you pays your premiums and you takes your chances. All it will do is guarantee a minimum, nontaxable income, say, $1600 per month. If you have private retirement that pays $1600 a month or more, you get nothing. If it pays $1599 per month or less, you get an amount of money every month to bring your income up to the minimum retirement income of $1600 per month.

As for Medicare, well that's a freakin' disaster. And now, with new prescription Drug benefits, it's gonna be an even worse freakin' monster. Without complete medical reform, I don't even know how to attack it. No reform of Medicare will ever work without reform of how medicine is delivered in the country.

We have a complex system of 3rd-party payments in this country. That simply has to go. We will never get control of medical costs as long as 3rd parties bear the lion's share of paying for them.

Prior to WWII, when we stumbled into the current employer-driven health insurance model, almost all routine medicine was fee for service. Patients were customers, and doctors competed for their business. That meant competition in both price and service. Medical insurance was relegated to coverage for major medical problems, while routine medicine was a "cash and carry" business. We are simply going to have to go back to that kind of two-tier model if we ever expect to have any sort of rational medical pricing ever again.

But, to get back to Krugman, our problems aren't that we don't give enough of our income to the government. It's that we ask for too much from government. Somebody has to pay for everything we want government to do, and that somebody is us. If we want platinum social benefits, then eventually, we are gonna have to have platinum tax rates, too.

The difference, really, between Paul Krugman and I, is that he wants platinum-level government benefits, and I barely want copper-plated ones.   

A Pointless Inquiry?

(Review) Military Historian John Keegan, who has just published a new book on the subject, Intelligence in War, writes that an inquiry into the WMD intelligence is pointless, since all intelligence is a matter of interpretation.

Usually, however, intelligence does not provide unequivocal answers, but only indications, which require imagination to interpret correctly. Interpretation inevitably leads to disagreements among the intelligence officers concerned. Before Midway, the most important naval battle ever fought, the heads of the naval plans and communication departments in Washington were at open war over interpretation.

An even more striking example of disagreements, bearing directly on the current Iraq controversy, was over intelligence of German secret weapons. A strange leak, the Oslo report, had warned the British in 1940 that Hitler was developing pilotless aircraft and rockets. It was ignored until, in 1943, reports from inside occupied Europe referred to the subject again.

A committee was set up, chaired by Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill's son-in-law. Its findings were reviewed by another committee, of which Lord Cherwell, Churchill's scientific adviser, was the most important member. Cherwell absolutely denied the possibility of Germany having a rocket, and produced the scientific evidence to prove it. He persisted in his denial throughout 1943 until June 1944, when remains of a crashed V2 were brought to Britain from neutral Sweden. Shortly afterwards, the first operational V2 landed on London. Churchill was furious. "We've been caught napping," he burst out in Cabinet.

Being caught napping is a bad thing. And therein lies the problem. Assume Set A of known facts:

1) Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program in the past. It was thought the program was stopped by Israel's destruction of the Osirak Reactor, but after the Gulf War, we learned that the program was, in fact, far more advanced than we realized. UN Weapons inspectors under Hans Blix completely missed the existence of this WMD program. This program was active for nearly 20 years, despite setbacks.

2) Saddam Hussein had a Chemical WMD program. We know he used chemical weapons during the war with Iran, and he used them against the Kurds. Massive stockpiles of such weapons were uncovered after the Gulf War.

3) Saddam Hussein had a direct obligation to allow UN weapons inspectors unfettered access to the country. He denied them this access.

4) Defectors from Iraq, including the former head of its nuclear program, assured us that Iraq maintained a WMD program.

5) Communications intercepts showed the Iraqis were deliberately hiding some items from UN inspectors.

Now just consider those 5 things. The "known knowns", as it were. What does it mean? Nowhere is there clear evidence of an existing WMD program. All you have is circumstantial evidence.

So, the real question becomes, what is the most prudent interpretation to put on the known facts? Is it more prudent to take the route the British took vis a vis the V-2? Or is it more prudent to assume that the Iraqis are hiding stuff because they have something to hide?

And, Saddam himself was no help, either.

Above all, it must be remembered that British intelligence was attempting to penetrate the mentality of a man and a regime which were not wholly rational. It now seems probable that most of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed in the early 1990s, either by the first UN inspection team (UNSCOM) or as a precautionary measure on Saddam's own orders. Saddam was, however, unwilling to admit to such a loss of power, because of the prestige his possession of WMD brought him in the region. His policy of disposing of his WMD while refusing to admit the disposal was completely illogical.

But then almost nothing in Saddam's megalomaniac world was logical. What logical ruler would deliberately provoke two disastrous wars, either of which might have been avoided by the practice of a little prudence?

It looks as if Saddam was running a bluff. He was holding a pair of twos, and decided to try and convince the Bush Administration that he was holding a full house. The Bush Administration, however, was holding a Royal Flush.

But again, if Saddam Hussein acts like he has a WMD program he's trying to keep secret, is it more prudent to assume he's doing that because he actually has a secret WMD program, or is it smarter to assume he's just bluffing.

Oh, and by the way, the lives of potentially millions of US citizens depend on you making the right choice.

It's difficult to see how you interpret that information in any other way than to assume it means he's got an active WMD program, and that he's trying to keep you away from it in order to gain access to WMDs at the earliest possible moment.

I would disagree with Keegan that such an inquiry is entirely pointless. Perhaps he's right that it is in the context of the UK, but I think the American context is different.

Even if we assume, as Keegan does, that inquiring into the interpretation is pointless, which, by and large, I beleive it is, that still leaves some questions unanswered.

1) Why does the CIA have such a dearth of HUMINT in the region? Is this the result of laxity by the CIA or the result of unrealistic restrictions imposed by Congress?

2) What revisions or procedures are necessary to improve the intelligence gathering tools at the CIA's disposal?

3) What discrepancies, if any, were there between the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA, the Pentagon's Intel shop) and the CIA in terms of intelligence gathered, and how widespread was intelligence sharing between the two agencies. Similarly, how about COMINT from the NSA?

So an inquiry isn't necessarily pointless, but it certainly needs to concetrate on what is fixable, such as procedures and technologies, rather than on interpretation which is--and will always be--unfixable.

What went wrong at the CIA

(Review) The president will be announcing a commission to try to find out why the CIA appear to have been so spectacularly wrong about Iraqi WMDs. Nobody's really happy about it.

Democrats say they're worried an inquiry into intelligence failures planned by President Bush won't be truly independent. Some Republicans worry the inquiry — at least the fifth now underway — will distract the CIA from key tasks.

Essentially, Democrats are worried there'll be a whitewash. Republicans are worried that there won't.

Meanwhile, we get this little tidbit, which tells us that George Tenet is doing such a bang-up job as DCI that we can expect his to keep his job.

We should have had a commission looking into CIA incompetence in 1990. The CIA was so spectacularly wrong about the end of the Cold War, and the strength of the Warsaw Pact, that practically everything that happened in foreign affairs between 1989 and 1991 caught them slack-jawed with stupefaction.

The Soviets, it turned out, weren't 9-foot tall superbeings from the future, as the CIA kept constantly assuring us. They were, instead, dumpy alcoholics in green plaid suits with blue striped ties, who didn't even have moderate confidence in the political system in which they'd been raised.

When I was on active duty during the Reagan and Bush 1 Administrations, every year--until the USSR collapsed-- the DoD would put out this glossy book called Soviet Military Power, 198X, the "X" standing for whatever year it was. Anyway, the book was just chock full of frightening figures. Here we were, standing at the Fulda Gap faced by thousands of Soviet tanks, artillery pieces, helicopters, aircraft, and millions of men.

Pretty sobering stuff. Here was this huge juggernaut just looming over us, poised to take us down in minutes in a blistering hailstorm of steel and lead.

In fact, Soviet enlisted men, being from somewhere in East Kaplachistan, didn't speak a word of Russian, while Soviet officers, all being from metropolitan Russia, didn't speak a word of Kirghiz, or Georgian, or whatever. Their standards of training and maintenance were so low they had to practice for months and months just to perform a one-week exercise whose every move was scripted down to the last detail. If anything broke, it was discarded where it dropped, because it was damn sure no soviet soldier was gonna be able to repair it. Soviet tanks could be taken out with an M-16 because the only place they had to store fuel was in 55-gallon drums strapped to the tank. You didn't need your wire-guided Roland anti-tank missile launcher to stop a T-72. A 25¢ tracer round from your rifle would work just as well.

Yeah, OK, the Roland was a lot more fun to fire.

But, essentially, the Soviets presented us with the same offensive juggernaut that faced Adolf Hitler in 1941. Their most effective tactic against the Nazis was to slow them down by surrendering in the hundreds of thousands, thereby putting excessive strain on the German advance due to the necessity of guarding and transporting a million or so POWs back to the Reich.

But, every year, we read Soviet Military Power, and we secretly shivered at the thought of having to face the well-equipped, well-fed, ideologically zealous Soviet Man face-to-face on the battlefield.

Well, nothing much appears to have changed at the CIA. "911? Huh. Never saw that coming. WMDs in Iraq? Oh, yeah. They're just scattered on the ground like pebbles. Little SOB has 'em everywhere."

But George Tenet gets to keep his job?

Well, maybe that is a little unfair. After all, the CIA isn't entirely responsible for its dismal record at figuring out which end was up for the last 25 years or so. They had a lot of help from the Democrats.

Which is why having the Democrats moan about how badly the CIA does its job is just a little disingenuous. During the Carter Administration, congressional Democrats, under the leadership of Frank Church, so gutted the CIA's Ops division, and so hedged the Agency around with so many idiotic little rules, that by the time they were done, the CIA was a dispirited, timid little organization that was practically afraid of its own shadow. All the hard, silent men that did the dirty job of running agents and slitting their Soviet counterparts' throats and dumping them into canals in Amsterdam were abruptly retired.

Now the Democrats have the gall to demand that the CIA explain why it doesn't have the HUMINT resources, i.e. spies, to gather accurate information. Well, why don't you ring up Teddy Kennedy and ask him? He was there, he can explain it all to you clearly. Because your party gutted the agency's ability to set up and run HUMINT networks a quarter-century ago, and you've hounded them about practically everything they've done since.

Remember, it was just a year or so ago when Democrats were bitching and moaning that the CIA was turning over suspected foreign terrorists to various Mideastern governments who would…uh…question them rather…uh…intensely. The same thing happened when Congress learned that the CIA itself was keeping the poor darlings up late at night, interrupting their sleep, questioning them at all hours. Bad CIA! Bad!

Or in 1984, when the CIA mined the harbors in Nicaragua…Well…OK, that was probably going too far.

But still, congressional Democrats are always ready to take out the big stick and whack the CIA for any perceived infraction. At the same time, they want to criticize the agency for not being daring enough. Democrats are moaning that the CIA doesn't have enough HUMINT, but they are the guys who passed a law requiring that the CIA only hire agents that have been very, very good boys, resulting in the CIA's inability to use people who actually could be agents, because such people are very rarely good boys.

But, of course, no commission will put any of that blame where it lies. Just as it always does, the CIA will take the whole fall.

It's not Super Tuesday, but let's call it Moderately Important Tuesday

(Review) Seven states are up for grabs today in the Democratic presidential nomination race. For most states it looks to be a Kerry walkover. SC and OK, however, are primed to go for Edwards and Clark, respectively.

Now the Dean strategy here has been interesting. Essentially, he's just let this whole day slide. Yeah, he's campaigned some, but he hasn't really dropped a dime into any of the states in play today. He's waiting for MI, WI, and NY. The electorate there is more reliably liberal than most other states, and he figures that concentrating there will give him a shot at a comeback, especially since those states have some hefty delegate counts.

In the real world, however, that's just gonna be too little, too late. Kerry is riding high now, and signifigant wins today will move all the momentum Kerry's way.

Of course, Kerry hasn't been subjected to a lot of media scrutiny yet. We're still in the honeymoon period with Kerry, pretty much as we were with Dean, prior to his remarks that catching Saddam was no big deal, and maybe it was all a plot by the Bushies, and besides, we live every day in the shadow of danger, etc. So, right now, the media is still casting coy glances at Kerry, playing with its hair, and touching Kerry gently on the arm every other sentence.

That won't last.

Pretty soon now, the press will start asking tough questions, and putting the pressure on Kerry. Asking if an ADA rating of 96% puts him outside the mainstream (as well as putting him to the left of Ted Kennedy), asking about those medal ribbons he threw away, about his apparently false testimony to Congress in 1971, and the rest of it.

The press is a fickle lover, first fawning and submissive, then vicious and vindictive. We're still in the former phase. We'll see how well Kerry does when the press honeymoon's over.

Watching Kerry on the stump, though, I have to say that he's a bad candidate. He's got that whole Walt Disney Animatronic thing going. He's not quite Al Gore, but he's a lot closer to Al than he is to, say, Bill Clinton.

And you know, he does look French. Mesdames et messieurs, je présente Monsieur le President Jean Kêrré, s'il vous plait. Some sort of Eurotrashy layabout, anyway. Former Austro-Hungarian royalty, perhaps.

And you gotta love a guy who's so massively rich, but has the brass to moan about the plight of the working class, with whom he, naturally, has so much in common.

Familiarity, I think, might very well breed contempt where Kerry's concerned. 

Not much of a penny-pincher for a Republican

(Review) Stephen Moore has looked at the Federal Budget. He doesn't like it one bit.

The president will predictably boast that this is a lean budget that spends money judiciously on top national priorities like homeland security and not a penny more. He will try to assure conservatives that this budget limits the growth of federal non-defense, non-security spending (social programs) to less than 2 percent. His Democratic rivals will complain that this is a penny-pinching budget that under-funds education, health care, the environment, and on down the line.

They are both wrong. A federal budget that will spend more money in a single year than the entire GDP of France and three times what it cost to fight World War II can hardly be disparaged as inadequate or celebrated as tight-fisted. Uncle Sam, Inc., will spend more money in just this year than it spent combined between 1787 and 1900 — even after adjusting for inflation. Ironically enough, we are now celebrating the ten-year anniversary of Newt Gingrich's bold declaration that "we Republicans will make government smaller and smarter." It didn't exactly turn out that way, given that the budget is now nearly $1 trillion larger than it was when the Republican revolution was launched.

Now, think about that. We'll spend more money next year that the Federal government spent from 1787 to 1900.

And the sad thing, the truly sad thing, is that the Republicans are still the party of smaller government.

No Unit reunions for The Little General

(Review) Jim Geraghty writes that Wes Clark doesn't have too many army buddies.

It is worth recalling that every one of Clark's peers, no matter how much they disdain him, acknowledge that he is a smart guy. And his service to his country is nothing but commendable. But one of Clark's former colleagues summed up his conflicted feelings about Clark thus: "He's got unequaled strengths in intellect, and weaknesses in ambition. The question is, does the ambition get so blinding that it gets in the way of his intellect?"

Wes Clark is the model of a certain type of peacetime careerist officer. He gets all the right tickets punched. He's smart and competent.

But he's not, frankly, the kind of guy you want to follow into combat.

It's difficult to explain it too you if you've never served in the military, but there are generally two types of officers: Careerists and Leaders.

Your careerist wants to be a general. He goes to all the right training schools. He cultivates close relationships with his superiors, in order to be chosen for the appropriate career-enhancing assignments.

The Leader doesn't really care about much more than being an example to his people, and getting them ready to go to war. He may actually go to all the right schools, and get all the tickets punched, but he does so as an incidental matter, not as the primary focus of his career.

But the Leader isn't all that happy at jumping through hoops. He's more interested in being with his troops. And they have a tendency to top out at Light Colonels, and then retire, while their Careerist brethren go on ahead to the general grades.

But, believe me, the people who serve under each type of officer know exactly what category he falls into.

The trouble with a peacetime army is that you really don't have an empirical method for judging who your best combat commanders are going to be. So, you set up all these artificial hoops for officers to jump through, in the hopes that, if nothing else, you'll winnow out the incompetents, which, in general, you do.

But that doesn't mean that your generals are as competent as they could be. Clark is also a good example of this. As the RAND study of his Kosovo operations says:

Even in the case of fixed infrastructure targets, Clark reportedly would venture deep into the most minute details of the target list. "Let's turn to target number 311," Clark would say, by this account "opening his binder as other participants flipped to the proper page, as if they were holding hymnals." He would then raise questions about a target's relevance, expostulate on allied sensitivities, or abort attacks already in progress. He would also, by this account, sometimes gainsay his own intelligence experts and targeteers by looking at a particular DMPI [designated mean point of impact] placement and asking "Isn't that an apartment building?" or "Can't we move that DMPI over 100 feet?" At which point Short would be seen "slumping back in his chair, folding his arms in disgust, and mentally checking out." ... By this informed account, it was never clear to participants whether Clark, through such ex cathedra interventions, was genuinely responding to political pressure from above or was engaged in a divide-and-rule game by playing on putative "constraints" to his advantage and gathering diverse inputs and opinions until he heard the one he wanted to hear.

Once a real war starts, like WWII, the Careerists generally get tossed out as the Leaders gradually take over. Of course, once the balloon goes up that's an inconvenient time to find out, as we did in the Civil War, that a full third of your officers aren't particularly effective combat leaders, no matter how good they looked on paper.

Had Kosovo been a long-term operation, It's doubtful that Clark would have survived. He had all the right career boxes checked. And all those check marks count as nothing if you can't produce tangible success in the field.

One of George C. Marshall's greatest WWII triumphs was the fact that he was able to weed out the chaff in the US Army prior to the start of hostilities. Marshall rehabilitated men like George Patton, whose careers would otherwise have essentially been over. Younger officers, like Eisenhower, were jumped in rank over their more staid, careerist seniors.

But, we've been essentially a peacetime force for a long time, and, no matter what you do, Careerists like Clark will always crop up and be successful.

Now, maybe some of you think that's a harsh judgement about a man who spent his adult life serving his country. But I spent 10 years of my adult life doing the same thing, and, believe me, from the inside, you form harsh judgements about officers like Clark on an entirely different basis.

Apart from anything else, your own military service liberates you from having to mouth the expected pieties about duty and service. And that accounts, I think, for a very great deal about why the Little General spent 30 years in the Army and left without a friend who thinks he's a good choice for president. 

Ah, Tradition

Photo: AFP/Awad Awad

Frankly, that's more than I wanted to know about their relationship

Photo: Gary Hershorn/Reuters

Saved by the bell

Photo: AP Photo/Jose Goitia

It's called a shuriken, actually

Photo: AFP/Getty Images/Donald Miralle

After seeing his shadow, Punxutawney Phil predicts six weeks of Weight Watchers™

Photo: AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar

The failure of the European Model

(Review)For Europeans, the economy is the elephant in the living room. Large, cumbersome, dangerous, and no one ever, ever, wants to talk about it.

But, Robert Samuelson writes, they'd better start talking quick.

Europe's economic model could once be defended as a justifiable political choice. People could select their flavor of prosperity. America's flavor—more competition and insecurity—wasn't for everyone. Europe could pick less anxiety and more vacations. It could sacrifice some economic growth for a bigger welfare state (more jobless benefits, universal health care). This argument no longer works.

Why not? Well, the economy is so enfeebled by high taxes and restrictive regulations that it can't pay for all the benefits. The gap between promise and performance must widen and, in the process, spawn disillusion and discord. One early example involves France's and Germany's violation of the Stability and Growth Pact, which requires member countries to hold their budget deficits to less than 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). In 2002 and 2003, France and Germany failed and, rather than face penalties, forced other countries to suspend the rules. Naturally, smaller countries that complied were furious.

Greater conflicts loom. In May the European Union expands to 25 members by adding 10 countries with 74 million people (the largest: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic). The presumption is that shared prosperity will promote mutual good will. The danger is that shared stagnation will aggravate mutual ill will. A larger threat arises from aging populations and expensive retirement programs. Government spending in the European Union already averages 48 percent of GDP (the United States: 34 percent). By 2030 the older (65-plus) population is projected to rise 55 percent, while the working population (15 to 64) shrinks 8 percent. Promised benefits can't be paid without crushing taxes or implausible budget deficits.

Without serious, structural reform, the Europeans economies will continue to go nowhere. Slowly. 

Heads must roll II

(Review) Zbigniew Brzezinski writes for the Washington Post that the intelligence failure over Iraq's WMDs does real harm to our international credibility, and that we need to take positiver steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.

The administration should candidly acknowledge that the United States was misinformed about the state and level of Iraqi armaments, a fact already quite evident to much of the world. Continued evasion on this subject is a disservice to America.

A shake-up of leadership in the intelligence community is needed and appropriate; measures to that end should be promptly taken. Accountability is needed to restore credibility.

A small committee of experienced individuals trusted by the administration...should be tasked on a short deadline to present the president a plan for changing the priorities and the modus operandi of the intelligence community, with high emphasis on the development of an effective clandestine service.

Now, the only thing I really have a problem with is the first point. Brzezinski writes as if the US was the only country who's intelligence about Iraq was faulty. But that's revisionism. Everybody thought Iraq had WMDs.

Tony Blair faced down both Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin at an EU conference, telling them to their face that they knew as well as he did that Iraq had WMDs, because that was what all their intelligence services were saying. Everyone "knew" that Iraq had WMDs. The intelligence failure that afflicts the US, also seems to afflict every other reasonably competent intelligence service in the world.

And it seems that Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, thought he had a WMD program. Now, either they had WMDs and got them all out to Syria when it started collapsing around the regime's head. Or maybe the Iraqi WMD program people were shining Saddam on, telling him they were doing all this research when, in fact, they weren't doing much of anything but taking his money, afraid to tell him the truth about his WMD programs How, after all, would Saddam know the difference. It's not like he has a degree in chemistry?

Besides, Saddam didn't like to hear that his orders weren't being obeyed, and had a tendency to shoot the messenger.

Literally. Along with the messenger's family.

But whatever the reason, the last the French or Russkies or anyone else can do is get up on their high horse and criticize us for intelligence failures.

Yeah, we have to try and find ways to prevent a repeat, but let's not pretend that the Euros, or anyone else, was any closer to the truth than we were.

Heads must roll

(Review) Brookings Institute boffin Peter Brookes writes thsat President Bush should do a little housecleaning in the Intelligence Community.

Accountability. President Bush is known for his loyalty to those who serve him, but he should be outraged by apparent shortcomings in pre-war Iraqi intelligence. Someone must be held accountable. As the president's senior intelligence advisor, that person is George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Tenet was appointed by President Clinton and holds the distinction of being the longest serving DCI since the position was established in 1947.

If the Iraqi intelligence assessments prove to be wrong, Tenet should step down. (This wasn't the only major intelligence failure on his watch - the most notable other one being 9/11.)

Mistakes will be made in the intelligence business. It's both art and science. But accountability is critical to maintaining the integrity, credibility - and morale - of the intelligence community. Letting heads roll is often absolutely appropriate, and necessary, to address failures in leadership, management or judgment.

Review. The White House should support an independent review of pre-war Iraqi intelligence. The IC shouldn't be allowed to police itself, and it may be a bridge too far for Congress to conduct a non-partisan assessment in an election year. The mandate wouldn't be a review of White House policy, but a review of the intelligence process that lead to the policy decisions. To keep it from becoming a political circus, the review could be scheduled to conclude after the national elections in the fall.

The world is too dangerous for us not to figure out what went wrong; glean lessons learned from those mistakes, and take measures to fix it - immediately.

Good advice.

Another one-term Bush presidency

(Review) Robert Novack writes that John Kerry, the artful dodger of todays political scene, may kill Bush hances for a second term, and shoudln't be underestimated.

This may be a case where the liberal is a sufficiently agile dodger to blur his past, and the Republicans must rely on George W. Bush. On Friday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan bridled at the thought of the president suffering a deficiency in credibility. But that in truth is the biggest problem he faces today.

Republican attacks on Kerry aren't working, but it isn't because Kerry's got some Clinton-like charm and skill at weaseling. They aren't working because the voters don't care.

Look, the election is almost a year away. And only about 35% of the electorate is actually gonna vote on primary elections, and 65% of them are gonna be Republicans or independents.

Nobody is paying attention to how liberal Kerry is. And they aren't going to start paying attention until sometime in September.

All this stuff about how badly Bush would do "if the election were held today" is just total crap. The election won't be held today, or at any day in the immediate future. People will know things then that they don't know today. They will have had three months to get an in-depth look at Kerry, warts and all.

Now, one thing is true, and that is that Bush has a credibility problem. But, really, that didn't seem to hurt Bill Clinton all that much, and he had credibility problems in spades.

A "wardrobe malfunction". Uh-huh. Right.

(Review) Both CBS and MTV are apologizing for the "unintentional" airing of Janet Jackson's...uh...assets to the nationwide TV audience for the Superbowl Halftime show.

The two singers were performing a flirtatious duet to end the halftime show, and at the song's finish, Timberlake reached across Jackson's leather gladiator outfit and pulled off the covering to her right breast. Her nipple was covered by a pastie.

Now, think about that last sentence for a second. If you aren't planning to expose yourself, why would you wear a pastie? As far as I'm concerned, the very fact that pasties were involved indicates to me that there was an express intention to expose a little extra skin.

"I am sorry that anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime performance of the Super Bowl," Timberlake said in a statement. "It was not intentional and is regrettable."

Ah. A "wardrobe malfunction". I see. And, precisely how was the wardrobe supposed to function when Timberlake reached over and ripped off Ms. Jackson's bodice? Was it supposed to generate an opaque force field?

This sounds to me like a little surprise that either the MTV folks threw in--in case of extraordinarily bad judgement, as it turned out--or something that Jackson and Timberlake worked out by themselves, and sprung on everybody at the actual show.

But one thing seems certain. Jackson knew it was gonna happen, and that's why she wore a pastie.