Alabama in Between

Chill, please.

2012-01-22T19:13:00.000-05:00

You're embarrassing yourselves.

The Presidential primary has gotten really mean-spirited in the last few weeks, and I'm not just talking about the campaigns. Political junkies, some inside but many outside the DC beltway, have become exceptionally aggressive in their attacks on non-preferred candidates.

I almost wrote "aggressive in their advocacy", but very little of it can be called that. It's mostly just sniping at the other side.

Mittens is a RINO. Newt is a wildcard. Bain Capital was evil. Newt's dodging the "lobbyist" label for his work for Freddie and Fannie, which, by the way, are the definition of state corporatism.

Not so "inevitable" are we now, eh Willard?!

Mining on the moon, Newt? Really? What a fundamentally and profoundly stupid idea!

Let's face it, all of the Republican candidates for President are pretty seriously flawed. Each one of the big three have done or said things that under normal circumstances I would consider to be a disqualifying action or position. I'm at the point now where as long as it isn't Ron Paul, I really don't care much which one of the remaining candidates is nominated.

So to my fellow political addicts, please chill the heck out about bashing the other side. You look like giant tools trying to slam your opponents when your preferred candidate is sort of lousy himself. And really, isn't that why you're so aggressive, because your guy is weak too?

And don't forget -- one of these turds is going to be our nominee.

Romney:

"Those who pick up the weapons of the Left today will find them turned against us tomorrow."

Just so. Remember that one, Newtonians.

Shame on the Pro-Life Movement

2012-01-08T21:36:00.000-05:00

Saturday night’s Republican debate on ABC revealed a startling deficiency in the Presidential field regarding the understanding of legal underpinnings of the abortion debate.

Yes, George Stephanopolous’ question about outlawing contraception might seem bizarre in a modern context. But the question goes to the heart of the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision that established the right to privacy that provided the basis for Roe v. Wade.

Romney in particular seemed very ignorant of this intellectual lineage of Roe. This is especially uninspiring in a candidate who has changed his position on the issue.

There’s an argument that a reversal of Roe would necessarily reverse Griswold, and would eliminate a generalized individualized right to privacy. That’s why Democratic Senators always ask prominent judicial nominees if they believe in a right to privacy. (There’s also an incorrect assumption among many that reversing Roe would make abortion illegal at the national level. A simple reversal of Roe would actually return regulation of abortion to the states, where, at the time of the Roe decision, there was an early trend toward liberalization.)

When George Stephanopolous asks whether a state would have the right to ban contraception -- AS CONNECTICUT ACTUALLY DID from 1879 to 1965-- he is asking a legally and philosophically relevant question, if not an electorally pertinent one.

It speaks very poorly of the pro-life movement that the importance of this question was lost on the GOP front-runner and much of the audience.

It really shouldn’t be that hard to distinguish Griswold from Roe. A candidate could simply state that individual privacy exists, but doesn’t extend to the killing of the unborn. Pro-lifers need to give better answers on the privacy question, and it is shameful that they seem unable to do so.

All of this has happened before

2011-11-28T07:25:00.002-05:00

...and will happen again.

Haven't been blogging much. Made a few posts at some other sites, but I'm frustrated. Once again, political history is rhyming, as Mark Twain might have put it, and not a lot of folks seem to have picked up on it.

Candidates, parties, various “movements”, newspaper editorials, talking heads on Sunday morning shows, political operatives... the public at large... Everybody seems to be acting as though they haven't actually learned anything from recent history.

If you've read much of my writing for the last few years, particularly at PAWaterCooler, you might have noticed that I've tried to put a damper on the over-reliance on the left-right ideological paradigm when plotting political actions and communications. At a certain point, it becomes blindingly obvious that voters don't rely on ideology nearly as much as it is supposed that they do. Once you see it, every abuse of the old conventional wisdom sticks out like a sore thumb.

At first I thought this might present a personal opportunity. In most fields, having insight or knowledge that others lack creates an advantage. In most fields, that is. Of course in some circumstances, if you're promoting a heretical view... well, Galileo spent the last years of his life under house arrest. They don't give people house arrest for heresy anymore. They mostly just ignore you.

It's hard to whittle down into an “elevator pitch” the debunking of over half a century of conventional wisdom in your field, which to be truly convincing would necessitate several pages of charts and statistical data. I've tried. I think I even got close to convincing a semi-prominent politician over dinner. Or perhaps he was just being polite.

I've argued it from every angle I can think of. I went technically philosophical. I went economical. I used statistics. I used anecdotal reasoning. I even offered to literally draw certain people a picture... only half jokingly.

I know my particular heresy is correct. Or at least, it's as correct as Galileo's heresy was, which is to say that it's a vast improvement over the prevailing theory. I often cite the two academics whose insight I have come to rely upon.

I've come to wonder if one specific word I used -“academics”- is perhaps part of the problem. There's not much “political science” in politics these days. It's all communications, or if you're lucky, “political communications” people running the show. Are the people I'm trying to convince literally unable to understand what it is I'm trying to tell them?

Of the people I know who are smart enough to understand, I think there is some natural disbelief. They have come to rely on survey data of ideological identification for so many years that to discount that data seems ridiculous. And yet, it is so. That which gets measured gets managed, and the eggheads are trying to manage ideology because they can measure it.

But in the last few years, the exact things I tried to warn against and mitigate have turned into the familiar intra-party feuding that I believe will mean electoral failures next fall. The same players keep making the same categorical mistakes. (But hey – they're the professionals.)

All of this has happened before, and will happen again. Or so it seems right now.

Why is Cain being taken seriously?

2011-10-16T16:02:00.000-04:00

Why is it that the media -including conservative media- are taking Herman Cain so seriously?

Yes, his poll numbers are impressive for a candidate who was written off just weeks ago. But Cain's rise would not have happened had the media been doing their jobs. There are two categorical failures in the media's coverage of Cain, coverage concerning his 9-9-9 plan, and everything else. First, the tax plan:

A lot of conservative wonks are not on board with 9-9-9 for various wonky reasons. Sadly, the media has largely avoided those reasons, and has chosen to focus on made-up bullshit instead. Virtually every media report on Cain's plan portrays a nightmare scenario for middle and lower income households who would suddenly be hit with massive sales tax increases. The media conveniently omits the fact that Federal payroll taxes (-who is this "FICA" person, and why does he get so much of my paycheck?) would be eliminated under Cain's plan.

When critics leave out this crucial detail, they only invite the Cainiacs to (correctly) cry foul. All this spurious criticism then blinds Cain supporters to the legitimate problems with the Cain candidacy.

But with all the fuss about 9-9-9, we've been distracted from the biggest reason Cain shouldn't be President: He doesn't understand the Constitution.

I’m not exactly the biggest fan of the Religion of Peace (tm), but I have enough respect for the First Amendment to know that localities can’t prohibit the construction of mosques based on majority vote. Freedom of religion doesn’t work like that. That sort of fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution is a complete deal-breaker.

And we shouldn’t forget Cain's shaky remarks about the Second Amendent, which, even in the most generous view of Cain’s comments, seems to misunderstand the incorporation doctrine.

So there we have it. A guy who is dead wrong about the First Amendment, possibly the Second, and shows a general misunderstanding of Constitutional principles. Even his 9-9-9 plan shows a wrongness about the ability of Congress to bind future Congresses to a two-thirds supermajority to raise taxes. The supermajority requirement itself could be repealed by a simple majority.

How can anybody, particularly pro-Constitution conservatives, possibly be taking Herman Cain seriously?

The details of my 9-11 story are quite inconsequential

2011-09-11T21:40:00.000-04:00

I was working at my Dad's business. No television. A small radio. One crappy (even by 2001 standards) computer with dial-up internet access. We had gotten all the delivery drivers out on their routes by the time of the attacks, and Dad and I were the only people left in the warehouse.

My grandmother called about 9am. A plane had hit the World Trade Center, she explained. She said little else, but seemed exasperated. My grandmother had always been an excitable person, and I had just recently learned that years ago a plane had hit the Empire State Building, and the building had withstood it. I didn't quite understand why my grandmother was calling. Such an odd phone call.

Of course, we got a better idea as the day wore on. Without a TV, we were relying on the radio and the dial-up internet connection, the latter of which was of little use. All the news sites were swamped with traffic. Dad eventually had the idea of checking the BBC website, which did eventually load for us. All sorts of crazy reports were coming in over the radio, such as the rumor that the State Department had been car-bombed. I was kind of freaked out at this point. Who knew what else was going to happen?!

Still, we had business to conduct. Shipments to receive, customers to service. We went about our jobs with what in retrospect was stunning normalcy, still monitoring the radio for the latest updates between spurts of work.

I don't recall whether I saw any still photographs of the attack on the Beeb website, but I know I didn't see any video until I got home that day some time after 4pm. Most of the hard facts had been sorted out by then - at least about what had been destroyed and what hadn't. I was still flabbergasted when I eventually saw the video, even knowing what the news of the day had been. Such unbelievable horror, viewed all at once.

What's all this about "vetting" Perry?

2011-09-05T00:15:00.001-04:00

Look, I'm not trying to coronate the guy, and I think we've all seen how the whole political messiah thing works out, but I'm pretty much for Rick Perry at this point.

I don't quite get what all this business is about the frantic need to "vet" Perry. Yeah, I'd like to see him perform in some debates, and I'd like to hear his answers to some tough questions. But at this point I'm not sure what the big deal is that certain Republicans are having with him. The guy has been governor for a heckuva long time. It's not like he just rolled out of some Chicagoland Illinois Senate seat with no real record of accomplishments, or anything.

It's like this -- Romneycare is a dealbreaker, at least in the primary. (Are people really surprised that the base finds Romney unacceptable? Really??) And I think Michelle Bachmann has pretty much failed her public "vetting". Pawlenty dropped out, and I'm not drinking the Ron Paul Kool-Aid. By process of elimination, that pretty much leaves Rick Perry unless for some reason Paul Ryan decides to have a change of heart.

Sure, he has some klunkers in his record, notably the Guardasil snafu. And the Time magazine pre-hit piece from late June does reveal certain problems with the Texas Enterprise Fund and Texas Emerging Technology Fund programs. (On the whole, however, Texas' job creation record is nothing short of phenomenal.) But the ironic thing about the Time piece is that it inadvertently reads like a to-do and not-to-do of job creation. DO make your laws business-friendly. DON'T create slush funds to pick winners and losers. Isn't that pretty much exactly the opposite of what Obama and the Democrats did?

(Don't even get me started on that whole Sharia/dhimmi thing with Ace of Spades vs Pam Geller and Robert Spencer. Ace wins that hands-down, and I think Pam needs pharmaceutical help.)

So, yes - I like the idea of Rick Perry more than I like the actual Rick Perry. But I still like the real Rick Perry better than I like anybody else at this point. To answer the haters who think that I'm just jumping on a bandwagon without looking, I'm going into this Perry thing with eyes open. He's just a guy, not a god. I get it. I just happen to like him best right now. Get a grip.

"Establishment" gets part of the blame for TPaw's exit

2011-08-14T16:11:00.000-04:00

Surely it can be said that the Pawlenty team made some strategic errors. Lord knows I've expressed my dissatisfaction with how things were being handled. Philip Klein's analysis isn't far from my own, though I have a hard time seeing Pawlenty in the veep slot. (Not that I don't think he would be good at it.)

But whatever the Pawlenty campaign's faults, I can't let the pro-Romney "Republican establishment" entirely off the hook.

I don't want to hear that there isn't any "establishment". A guy doesn't raise ten million bucks in a day's worth of phone calls without there being an establishment on which to draw.

The Powers-That-Be should understand that a big chunk of the party isn't supportive of Romney, and that this tepid-at-best reaction will create issues in the general election. Had the proverbial old, cigar-smoking, rich, white men understood this, they might have looked for somebody else who fit the general profile of a conservative governor from a blue state who didn't irritate the base so much.

Well, they're a stubborn bunch, and the establishment has stuck with Romney. And instead of shepherding Pawlenty to the nomination with minimal friction, now they're dealing with Bachmann and Perry.

I think they could have handled Bachmann. Perry is going to be a bigger threat.

Personally, I'm leaning towards supporting Perry.

The Selfish Y Chromosome: Genetic explanation for child gender preferences?

2011-07-09T14:20:00.000-04:00

Gallup recently released a poll confirming a preference for male children. Specifically, men displayed this preference while women responded with near indifference. It would be easy to write this off as a purely cultural phenomenon --machismo, labor demand, etc. --, but I hypothesize a potential genetic explanation unique to the influence of the Y-chromosome.

Gallup makes passing mention of the theory of evolutionary advantage to having male children --presumably that males are capable of being more genetically prolific than females--, but this theory fails to account for the discrepancy between the preferences of men versus the preferences of women. On a whole-genome level, a woman would benefit genetically just as much as a man as the result of a prolific male child.

The Y chromosome is somewhat of a genetic island. 95% of the Y is unable to recombine with the X during meiosis. The Y is thus passed on virtually intact through the generations, and it is immediately apparent in newborn children whether the Y is present or not. A father with all female offspring will see his Y lineage disappear.

The X, on the other hand, is not similarly unique. The mother's two X chromosomes would have recombined during meiosis, and male children will also receive an X chromosome from the mother, avoiding the genetic dead-end of the Y chromosome in female offspring.

This Y chromosome "selfish gene" explanation thus avoids the criticism regarding the "units" of natural selection in that the genotype and the phenotype are essentially synonymous in this unique circumstance.

The "selfish Y" hypothesis is at least as credible as the original theory of evolutionary advantage, and has the added benefit of accounting for the discrepancy of preferences found between men and women.

Six Reasons the SPR Release is Stupid

2011-06-23T13:36:00.002-04:00

The globally coordinated release of petroleum reserves is the latest evidence that the Obama administration simply doesn't understand markets.

1 - The justification (or "cover") for the SPR release is the loss of North African (especially Libyan) output. However, the Libyan situation is a disruption of indeterminate length, and the SPR release is scheduled to last 30 days.

2 - The price of oil was already headed down in response to market feedback.

3 - A significant percentage of major stock market indices are populated by energy companies, which are hit especially hard by this action, thus exacerbating the ongoing stock market decline.

4 - A suggested alternate motivation for the SPR release is to shake speculators out of their positions, and introduce an element of uncertainty in order to deter future speculation. To the extent that this is successful, the world oil market will be unable to correctly determine the correct price premium corresponding to supply uncertainty. The global market will be less capable of absorbing future supply disruptions.

4a - To the extent that the expectation of future scarcity is successfully driven from the oil market, oil companies will not be given the correct price signal to drill for more oil, and future oil price shocks will be more severe due to a lack of spare capacity that was never developed.

4b - To the extent that the expectation of future scarcity is successfully driven from the oil market, consumers will not be given the correct price signal to conserve energy and buy more energy efficient vehicles, magnifying the impact of future price shocks on consumers.

5 - Impairment of marginal supply development will hit North American exploration disproportionately, deterring the creation of high-paying energy sector jobs in the US and Canada.

6 - An SPR release diminishes our ability to respond to a legitimate use of the SPR such as a natural disaster or terrorist attack.

Somebody Should Focus Group This Video

2011-06-20T16:30:00.001-04:00

Paul Ryan ably defended his entitlement plan on CNBC's Squawk Box against Jared Bernstein. Folks, this is just about as good as it gets, so if this doesn't work, then we're pretty boned.

Here's a small-ish clip:

The full video (14+ minutes) can be viewed here.

The bottom line on Medicare is that there are going to be cuts. The question is whether voters want to have some input on where those cuts get made, or whether they want the IPAD (Independent Payment Advisory Board) -- the unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats Congressman Ryan spoke about -- to make all of those decisions for everybody.

QOTD: Asterisk

2011-06-20T10:31:00.001-04:00

Jack Kelly at RCP quotes Glenn Kessler:

And what Mr. Obama said at the Jeep plant "is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have found in a short presidential speech," wrote The Washington Post's fact checker, Glenn Kessler. "Virtually every claim made by the president concerning the auto industry deserves an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan."

Quote of the Day: Indefensible

2011-06-18T10:48:00.002-04:00

Bill Daley, White House Chief of Staff:

“Sometimes you can’t defend the indefensible,”

(via Dave at AoSHQ)

More:

Daley couldn’t answer basic questions and continually faced criticism from the executives in the room. The business leaders even applauded each other’s criticism of the administration. “At one point, the room erupted in applause when Massachusetts utility executive Doug Starrett, his voice shaking with emotion, accused the administration of blocking construction on one of his facilities to protect fish, saying government ‘throws sand into the gears of progress,’” wrote Peter Wallsten and Jia Lynn Yang in the Washington Post.

Kathleen Parker Missing The Flipping Forest For The Trees

2011-06-12T14:22:00.001-04:00

The former Spitzer co-host* once again woefully laments the perceived ideological rigidity of her conservative would-be-brethren. This time she's defending the “flip-flop”, with particular emphasis on Mitt Romney. Oddly, Romney is most recently in trouble for not flipping on global warming, which makes me wonder whether Kathleen Parker finished her bottle of wine before or after submitting her work this week.

* - (No, we will never let you live that down.)

But the problem is not merely that somebody change his or her mind, as Parker would have us believe. The Republican Party is filled with folks who changed their minds on issues large and small. Reagan made George H.W. Bush change his professed position on abortion in order to join the 1980 ticket. Dubya was against nation building before he tried to nation-build in Iraq. Pawlenty has reneged on his previous support of carbon cap-and-trade. Old-hand Republicans everywhere who once supported an individual health insurance mandate in the early 1990s have largely come to denounce the idea in the present. Rick Perry, who according to many liberal opinion writers seems to be the impossible love child of Barry Goldwater, Hitler, and Yosemite Sam, actually voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and supported Al Gore's presidential ambitions in 1988. If Texas can forgive Perry for these political sins, then so shall I.

Rather, the problems with flip-flopping are those of quantity and convenience. We can tolerate the occasional flip-flop of convenience, so long as it is rare. And we can stomach a large number of changed positions, so long as the changes are credible, as in the case of an ideological conversion or epiphany. But forgive us, oh wise Kathleen, for questioning the intellectual integrity of a politician whose positions change with great frequency and during awfully convenient circumstances.

Parker seems to empathize with John Kerry and his episode of “[voting] for the $87 billion, before [he] voted against it”. She calls these remarks, “unhelpful”. But Kerry's problem was not merely that he didn't explain himself, it was that his remarks betrayed what was at best a wishy-washyness to his support of the war effort, and at worst a cynical calculation to manipulate the domestic tax policy process by withholding critical funding for the war. Kerry's entire 2004 campaign was marked by his inability to convey clear policy messages. Even as he was on the cusp of receiving the Democratic nomination, The Washington Post complained about Kerry's “fuzziness on issues ranging from Iraq to gay marriage”.

The issue about flip-flopping is not that a politician might change his beliefs in light of new facts, but the concern that the politician has no real beliefs to begin with.

Kathleen, ask yourself what you suppose Mitt Romney really thinks about gay marriage. If your answer is anything other than an unhesitating confirmation of his stated position (-opposed), then perhaps you should reflect upon that.

Wreck-overy-dot-gov: Porkulus Still Only 83% Spent

2011-06-11T20:29:00.000-04:00

Yeah, that's right. The Obama "stimulus" bill, after over two years since enactment, is only 82.73 % spent.

Screen-cap from Recovery.gov:

259.9 + 207.3 + 183.9 = $651.1 billion

651.1 / 787 = 82.73%

Recall that the entire point of a Keynesian stimulus is to spend it, and to spend it quickly. Obama couldn't even get that much right.

Paul Ryan vs Polling - Painting outside the lines

2011-05-24T17:15:00.000-04:00

Picking up on Ace's "DOOM!" meme, if we're to believe the polling about Paul Ryan's Medicare plan, the GOP is doomed. And not just the GOP, but the nation as well, because ignoring the issue is going to put us in a Greek-like situation in relatively short order. Problem being that we're not Greece, we're the US of A, and there will be a lot more collateral damage.

But Ryan isn't backing down, ignoring the hand-wringing pollsters.

Republicans need to learn to paint outside the proverbial lines.

Ryan on Meet the Press (emphasis added):

REP. RYAN: First of all, if people are describing this accurately in polls, it's far more popular than the poll you've referenced. Second of all, leaders are elected to lead. I don't consult polls to tell me what my principles are or what our policies should be. Leaders change the polls. And we are leading in the House. We are not seeing this kind of leadership from the president of the United States. The Senate Democrats haven't even proposed or passed a budget for 753 days, and we have a budget crisis. So yes, we are going to lead, and we are going to try to move these polls and change these polls because that's what the country wants.

I, I just did 19 town hall meetings, David, in, in the district that I work for that went for Obama, Dukakis, Clinton and Gore. People are hungry for solutions, and I really fundamentally believe that the people are way ahead of the political class. And I think they're going to reward the leader who steps up to the plate and actually fixes these problems, no matter how much demagoguery, no matter how much distortion, no matter how much political parties try to scare seniors in the next election. I just don't think they're going to buy it this year, and they're hungry for leaders to fix this problem before it gets out of our control.

There's a maxim among political consultants -- "If you're explaining, you're losing." And there is some truth to that, like if you're trying to explain why you voted for something before voting against it, you're in trouble. Or if you're trying to explain that, yes, the candidate does read a lot of news sources despite failing to name a single one in an interview, you're losing. If you're explaining that you cheated on your wife because of how much you love your country, you're losing.

But on certain issues, particularly existential issues, you need to do some explaining. You need to lead. You need to call the other side out for lying like Jon Lovitz on his old Saturday Night Live sketches. Paul Ryan has done that, and wins in his not-overly-conservative district because he consistently takes the time to explain his positions and people trust him.

Unlike some "damn the torpedoes" conservatives, I am generally appreciative of the wisdom obtained from good polling. But there are limitations to the utility of polls. Polls are clumsy at detecting social tipping points, and poor at anticipating results involving exogenous circumstance -- exogenous circumstances like an imminent sovereign debt crisis and a politician actually willing to lead on that issue. I have personally witnessed polling in a state-wide race where the politician moved significant numbers based on a screwball issue no pollster or consultant would have ever dreamed of. It can be done. "Leaders change the polls."

But the limitation is not just with polling and pollsters, but with the entire professional partisan political consulting universe. Consultants only know how to paint inside the lines, caring more about the quick 50-percent-plus-one win and caring less about an electoral future two years distant. Draw a quick contrast grid, emphasize your candidate's positives, slam your opponent's negatives, make a bunch of phone calls, and hang on for dear life. It's a process that works enough of the time to be useful, but it isn't a strategy for changing a lot of hearts and minds.

The special election in NY-26 illustrates this ineptitude. Corwin has backed off her support of the Ryan plan, no doubt following the advice of pollsters and other consultants. In doing so, she has forfeited credibility among both conservative Tea Partiers and independent swing voters alike. She is somehow simultaneously an ideological squish and a mean, grandma-killing ghoul. The Republican party apparatus, having lost the last two Congressional special elections in upstate New York, knows nothing other than its previous recipe for failure -- calling in (well-meaning) out-of-state shock troops and barraging the electorate with phone calls and advertisements well past the point of saturation.

I know -- "What about Jack Davis?" First of all, a lot of Davis voters are breaking Democrat. Second, to the extent that Republicans "protest" with a Davis vote, it reflects poorly upon the ability of the NYGOP and the Corwin campaign to hold their own. I despise him as much as the next guy, but don't go blaming all of this mess on Davis.

Imagine if Corwin had explained (gulp!) that the Democratic plan is to either (1) ignore the problem and blow up the system, or (2) force rationing from DC central planners? Given those two choices, isn't it preferable that oldsters have a hand in determining how best to manage their own health care budgets? If society wants to spend less money on health care, who should make those decisions, bureaucrats or individuals with their doctors?

Instead, Corwin painted inside the lines.

Newt Officially Worse than Romney on Health Care

2011-05-15T13:54:00.000-04:00

There are two categorical objections to a federal individual mandate for health insurance. The first is that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to force an individual to purchase a product -- any product. The second is the libertarian objection that it is wrong in any circumstance, whether constitutional or not, to impose such a mandate. Romney is right on the first question, and wrong on the second. Newt seems to be wrong on both.

Romney's position that MassCare was just fine, while Obamacare is unconstitutional is a perfectly coherent view. Just because it is unconstitutional for the federal government to do something does not automatically make it unconstitutional for a state government to do the same. While I disagree with Romney's defense of the mandate in MassCare as a matter of policy, it does not automatically follow that his legal reasoning is unsound.

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, seems to defend some variation on the individual mandate at the federal level.

Newt on Meet the Press today:

(Videotape, October 3, 1993)
REP. GINGRICH: I am for people, individuals--exactly like automobile insurance--individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance. And I am prepared to vote for a voucher system which will give individuals, on a sliding scale, a government subsidy so we insure that everyone as individuals have health insurance.
(End videotape)
MR. GREGORY: What you advocate there is precisely what President Obama did with his healthcare legislation, is it not?
REP. GINGRICH: No, it's not precisely what he did. In, in the first place, Obama basically is trying to replace the entire insurance system, creating state exchanges, building a Washington-based model, creating a federal system. I believe all of us--and this is going to be a big debate--I believe all of us have a responsibility to help pay for health care. I think the idea that...
MR. GREGORY: You agree with Mitt Romney on this point.
REP. GINGRICH: Well, I agree that all of us have a responsibility to pay--help pay for health care. And, and I think that there are ways to do it that make most libertarians relatively happy. I've said consistently we ought to have some requirement that you either have health insurance or you post a bond...
MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.
REP. GINGRICH: ...or in some way you indicate you're going to be held accountable.
MR. GREGORY: But that is the individual mandate, is it not?
REP. GINGRICH: It's a variation on it.
MR. GREGORY: OK.
REP. GINGRICH: But it's a system...
MR. GREGORY: And so you won't use that issue against Mitt Romney.
REP. GINGRICH: No. But it's a system which allows people to have a range of choices which are designed by the economy. But I think setting the precedent--you know, there are an amazing number of people who think that they ought to be given health care. And, and so a large number of the uninsured earn $75,000 or more a year, don't buy any health insurance because they want to buy a second house or a better car or go on vacation. And then you and I and everybody else ends up picking up for them. I don't think having a free rider system in health is any more appropriate than having a free rider system in any other part of our society.

While there are certainly ways that a system that included a mandate could be significantly less onerous than Obamacare, there is no way to square the circle on the constitutionality of a mandate. Either a mandate is constitutional, or it is not. Newt claims that Obamacare is unconstitutional, yet still supports a mandate of sorts. He cannot have it both ways.

Quote of the Day: Contented Cows

2011-05-08T19:22:00.000-04:00

A Depression-era anecdote that seems relevant in the current environment...

From Bob Dole's humor compilation book, Great Political Wit:

In the depths of the Great Depression, Hoover and Coolidge found themselves together in Marion, Ohio, dedicating the memorial to Warren G. Harding. Hoover outlined all the steps he was taking to end the nation's economic spiral, making clear his resentment over what he regarded as unfair criticism from the public.

"You can't expect to see calves running in the field the day after you put the bull to the cows," said Coolidge.

"No," replied Hoover, "but I would expect to see contented cows."

Of course, to the extent that the Obama administration's policies are just as ineffective and counterproductive as Hoover's, there's little wonder the cows aren't contented.

So we're back to dithering now?

2011-05-04T08:22:00.000-04:00

I say we should release the bin Laden photo(s), but I understand the argument against it. What's really confusing and irritating is the high level of public anguish displayed by the Obama administration. You might even say Obama is "dithering" about the decision.

All this "will they or won't they release it" stuff is idiotic. I'm not sure if I was hearing the TV correctly, but folks on a certain "forward leaning" channel seemed to suggest that the public anguish over this issue was being done with the explicit purpose of showing how seriously the administration was taking the decision.

But in the grand scheme of things, the photo-release decision is not especially consequential. If they don't release the photo, some whacky folks might not believe OBL is really dead -- but then again those are the mostly same folks who wouldn't believe it even if they did see a photo. On the other hand, some whacky folks might be offended or incited by the photo -- but those people are always finding reasons to be offended or incited regardless of what we do.

I've seen people speculate that the OBL take-down sealed Obama's 2012 re-election victory. I maintained that the OBL success wouldn't really affect Obama's long-term political trajectory. Little did I know that the forward-momentum established by the administration wouldn't survive the actual OBL story.

Stop dithering, Obama.

Dr StrangeHair - How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Donald

2011-04-28T22:04:00.000-04:00

I was admittedly more than a little annoyed to see how well Trump has been doing in early GOP primary polling. But Trump is pretty much maxed out right now. He's not going to get independent-minded folks, and he's not going to get ideologues like myself. Or anybody with tact, common sense, or an IQ notably over 100. When primary voters learn of his donations to key Democrats (like Ed Rendell and Rahm Emanuel, for starters), his continually shifting party registration, his rather ~~undisciplined~~ insane policy ramblings, and an abortion flip-flop so convenient it would make Mitt Romney blush, support for Trump will wither away.

In short, he's not going to win the Republican nomination. He's not a threat.

And if he's not a threat, perhaps he can do some good -- as an attack dog. A good chunk of the population still clings bitterly to a personal admiration for Obama, even if many have soured on his policies and governance. What Trump brings to the table is a shameless, vulgar willingness and ability to attack Obama personally. What we know from three years of Obama media coverage is that anybody who criticizes Obama on anything other than the narrowest of policy grounds gets denounced as a racist. (Actually, any criticism of Obama is declared racist, but the policy stuff is less so.) Trump has shown an enthusiasm for criticizing Obama without any concern for how it might backfire onto Trump.

Yeah, the birther stuff was idiotic. But it must be noted that the mainstream candidates all distanced themselves from the issue, and thus won't be burned by it.

I'm a little more interested in the academic records. I'd like to know what sort of GPA our sooper-geenyus President was pulling at Oxy and Columbia. (I'm guessing it was pretty good, but short of great. Remember, Dubya the dunce had a slightly higher GPA than Kerry.) I'd love to know what courses Obama took. I'd consider sacrificing a pinkie toe to get a hold of some of his papers. Again, none of the mainstream candidates need bother with this down-in-the mud stuff. Trump can be the honey badger invading the beehive, unfazed by multiple stings from an angry swarm of media-types.

It's not that I oppose Obama because I think he might have had a less than stellar GPA, took a dozen courses on Marxism, or got a C-minus in basic economics. It's that I think finding out such information might start to dispel the rainbow-farting-unicorn aura that surrounds the man. People need to like Obama less on a "personal" level.

So I've made my peace with the Trump quasi-candidacy. Let him stir up the pot of Obama's history, then fade into political (if not media) obscurity after a while. He really can't hurt anything.

NLRB And The Right To Say “No”

2011-04-22T17:33:00.004-04:00

In “The Godfather”, when Don Corleone says he's “gonna make him an offer he can't refuse”, it's generally understood that the Don isn't intending to engage in honest and meaningful negotiations. He's going to make a threat, backed by force.

The recent action by the National Labor Relations Board challenging Boeing's decision to build a new plant in right-to-work South Carolina has a similar bent. This move by Obama's NLRB is part of a continuing attempting to take away management's right to say “no” to unions in any meaningful sense of the word.

In every other facet of civilized society, meaningful consent is defined by the ability of one party to walk away. Why is employment – typically considered to be a “voluntary” arrangement – any different?

It should be noted that the South Carolina plant is a second line, and that no union worker will lose his or her job. Actually, more union jobs are being added in Puget Sound to support the South Carolina facility. All Boeing did was decide to build a plant in a place with favorable labor laws while being honest enough to say why.

This shouldn't come as any surprise to anybody who was paying attention in 2008. A visit to Obama's 2008 campaign website via the WayBack Machine shows that this recent behavior is part of a larger pattern. As far back as January of 2008, BarackObama.com promoted the following policy:

Protect Striking Workers: Obama supports the right of workers to bargain collectively and strike if necessary. He will work to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers, so workers can stand up for themselves without worrying about losing their livelihoods.

A nearly identical statement incorporating Joe Biden's name persisted on the website through the election.

This statement, buried on the Obama campaign website, told you everything you need to know about Obama's governing philosophy. "He will work to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers..." Knowing that the union could never be broken even under the most dire circumstances, labor “negotiators” would be able to demand anything they wanted – literally making offers that management could not refuse.

But this privileged status only extends to union organizers, not to individual workers. Let's not forget EFCA, the absurdly named “Employee Free Choice Act” – a.k.a. “Card Check”. Though now seemingly on ice, EFCA would have effectively eliminated secret ballot union elections, and with it the meaningful right of refusal to join a union.

If the Obama administration had its way, workers could not refuse to join unions, management could not refuse to acquiesce to union demands, and businesses could not even build new facilities except where union “negotiators” stipulated.

If Big Labor and the administration think they can make people offers that others can't refuse, it's not going too far to suggest they are acting like gangsters.

Best Graphic Ever: Ted Kennedy on Windfarm Article

2011-04-21T13:34:00.001-04:00

At FastCompany, which is a pretty good site, btw.

The Difference is the Direction

2011-04-07T10:19:00.001-04:00

Ezra Klein seems to have missed the point about Paul Ryan's plan for Medicare.

Klein's WaPo interview with some-time Ryan collaborator Alice Rivlin, who does not support the "Path to Prosperity" plan:

EK: Speaking of the Affordable Care Act, you’ve said before that the theory behind the exchanges in Ryan-Rivlin and the theory behind the exchanges in the Affordable Care Act are identical. That would mean Republicans who believe in Ryan’s model should be more optimistic about the Affordable Care Act. But Ryan has said the two of you simply disagree on how to build the exchanges. Can you explain to me the disagreement you have that would make Ryan-Rivlin different from the ACA?

AR: No. I can’t. I think he’s sort of backed himself into an intellectual corner here.

EK: When you would talk to him, did he seem to recognize that?

AR: Yes.

Sure, they're very similar. The difference is the direction in which they are moving.

Medicare is currently a massively expensive single-payer plan with minimal market restraints. To attempt to save any money under the current Medicare system is necessarily an exercise in command-and-control planning. The Ryan plan moves slightly away from that, and attempts to cap overall premium supports and let market participants figure out what to do with that money.

Obamacare goes in the opposite direction, moving from a system with significant (if insufficient) market-based checks, towards a system with more central control and higher levels of taxation and spending.

The lack of any frame of reference seems like an act of willful obfuscation. It would be like saying that one will experience hot weather when moving to Virginia. Well, yes, it's hotter than Maine, but cooler than Texas.

Pawlenty, the Un-Somebody

2011-03-31T14:02:00.001-04:00

7-up is the “UnCola”. By avoiding a lot of the negatives of other possible Presidential candidates, Tim Pawlenty is the Un-Candidate – a refreshing alternative to the other contenders. The question is who or what is Pawlenty the “un” to? Team T-Paw needs to figure out who they are attempting to displace if they want to win the nomination. I say he should be the “Un-Romney”.

Mitch Daniels sort of looks like an accountant –pasty white guy, substantially bald, medium height– and has a résumé to match. He's a former OMB director, and is known as a frugal governor. Of course Pawlenty was also a frugal governor, receiving a Cato Institute grade of “A” to Daniels' “B”. But for whatever reason, T-Paw doesn't get the love from the fis-cons like “Mitch the Knife” does. Go figure.

Romney is the guy who is ahead in most of the primary polls I've seen, and happens to be the proverbial “next guy in line” for the Republican nomination. Romney's perceived strength is also in the economic realm, but more aligned to the real economy rather than trimming the fat on government balance sheets. Of course, Romney's albatross is MassCare, a.k.a. RomneyCare. It might not be entirely fair to hang all of MassCare's faults on Romney, but the bill Romney signed is strikingly similar to ObamaCare, putting Romney in quite a pickle.

Huckabee is, of course, viewed first and foremost as a social/cultural conservative. With virtually every candidate professing pro-life, pro-gun, and pro-marriage positions, it's hard to actually distinguish the Presidential would-be's on an issue basis. From my perspective, Huck's appeal seems to be based in the identity politics of the rural and overtly religious. (And that's me being charitable to Huckabee – I really think part of his appeal stems from a class warfare campaign that has been fueled by his political vendetta with the Club for Growth.)

Each of these contenders (and others I didn't mention, including Newt Gingrich) has certain obvious flaws. Daniels has his “truce”. Romney has MassCare. Huckabee has his issues with fiscal conservatives. Pawlenty seems to be hitting Iowa as mini-Huckabee, stressing the importance of faith and hitting the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy.

I question the wisdom of this strategy. A Huck-vs-Pawlenty contest in Iowa plays to all of Huck's strong suits and all of Pawlenty's weak ones. Perhaps team T-Paw is looking at some interesting polling data telling them otherwise, but I think he should try to be the Un-Romney instead. (If some Iowa cross-tabs should happen to serendipitously find their way into my email inbox... maybe I could be persuaded otherwise.)

T-Paw is most certainly not “Mr. Excitement”. Not that anybody of the major players are, but Huckabee's the most energetic major figure in the race. Daniels? Romney? Yawn. Trying to take on Huckabee is to invite a bad comparison. No number of Michael Bay-style YouTube videos will change that. Aiming for Romney, however, would be courting a more even match.

Pawlenty has traipsed into the "class" issue before. He's got a good blue-collar story, but he's not going to “out-poverty” Huckabee. That is, not unless Pawlenty has an anecdote that beats Huck's fried squirrel story. Otherwise, Pawlenty's blue-collar background is going to fall short. On the other hand, Pawlenty's background contrasts beautifully with Romney's, and he wouldn't have to force the issue. Pawlenty can't out preach a preacher, and can't out-poor a poor boy. Don't even try.

By going with the “Huck/Iowa” strategy, Pawlenty may be cutting himself off from New Hampshire, which is much less overtly religious, and much friendlier to somebody filling the role of competent fiscally conservative governor. Think this is Romney's strength? MassCare, MassCare, MassCare.

Also, did I mention MassCare?

Romney is the giant sequoia, waiting to be felled. Whoever displaces Romney should see quite a few voters consolidate behind him (or her). Pawlenty has a decent chance to best Romney, and not so great a chance at doing the same to Huckabee in Iowa.

Pat Buchanan is forcing me to defend Obama

2011-03-30T08:41:00.000-04:00

There's a lot to criticize in President Obama's handling of the Libya situation, but that hasn't gotten in the way of Pat Buchanan's uncanny ability to be wrong.

Buchanan's 3/25 column:

When Greek patriots sought America's assistance, Daniel Webster took up their cause but was admonished by John Randolph. Intervention would breach every "bulwark and barrier of the Constitution."

"Let us say to those 7 million of Greeks: We defended ourselves when we were but 3 million, against a power in comparison to which the Turk is but as a lamb. Go and do thou likewise."

But Randolph, and by extension Buchanan, don't have the history quite square. Our rebel colonist forefathers had help.

Quoting directly from Wikipedia, bold added:

France, Spain and the Dutch Republic all secretly provided supplies, ammunition and weapons to the revolutionaries starting early in 1776. After early British success, the war became a standoff. The British used their naval superiority to capture and occupy American coastal cities while the rebels largely controlled the countryside, where 90 percent of the population lived. Then, the Continentals' unexpected victory and capture of a British army at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 convinced France to openly enter the war in early 1778, bringing the revolutionaries' military strength into balance with Britain's. Spain and the Dutch Republic—French allies—also went to war with Britain over the next two years, threatening an invasion of Great Britain and severely testing British military strength with campaigns in Europe—including attacks on Minorca and Gibraltar—and an escalating global naval war. Spain's involvement culminated in the expulsion of British armies from West Florida, securing the American colonies' southern flank.

French involvement proved decisive, with a French naval victory in the Chesapeake leading to the surrender of a second British army at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781.

I guess "Foreign aid for me, but not for thee" is Pat Buchanan's creed.

What they messed up in Firefox 4

2011-03-26T21:59:00.000-04:00

Mozilla has been pretty good about allowing the user to customize the interface. Of course, it seems that every time there's a new major release I spend the first twenty minutes trying to undo all the “improvements” the UI team made. Likewise with Firefox 4, I immediately set about trying to get my old environment reestablished.

And good Lord, did they mess it up. It's never a good sign when there's a Lifehacker post titled “How to Fix Annoyances with Firefox 4's New Look”. The saving grace is it's a little easier to tinker with than Chrome, and it's not worse than Chrome in most ways when tinkering is not possible.

1) Reload / Stop – The most obvious changes are with the tabs-on-top and the new consolidated “Firefox” menu, but I'll start with some of the more unambiguously moronic changes they made. “Reload” and “Stop” are now a single button that changes depending on whether a page is currently loading. Never mind that those are two completely different functions. The UI team seems to think that just because one would rarely need to chose between the two, that the extra button isn't worth the space.

Here's why I want them separated: Say you have a large, slow-loading page that is, let's say 90% loaded, but you want to stop the connection. You go to click on the “stop” button, but at the last millisecond the page completes, and the button morphs to “reload” before the signal gets from your brain to your index finger. Congrats, you have now just accidentally clicked the wrong button, because the correct button vanished. Enjoy waiting for your reload.

Unlike so many other UI preferences, this one seems unfixable to the user.

2) Add-on bar / Status bar – They took the “worst of both worlds” approach to the Status bar. The old Firefox 3 bar did double duty as a traditional status bar and a place to put Add-on interfaces for popular extensions like NoScript and IETab. FF4 removes the bottom status bar to free up vertical UI space. The load progress display now shows as an overlay like Chrome does. However, having removed the place for Add-on buttons, they now need a new home. NoScript appeared to the left of the URL bar, near the navigation buttons. No. Just no.

There's an option to restore the Add-On bar, and you can drag your stuff back to where it used to be. Great! Except that the Add-on bar doesn't double as a status bar, and the status overlay appears above the Add-on bar, totally ignoring that prime screen real estate where the status used to reside. Now you have a big-ass bar with like four buttons on it that uses up a bunch of space and serves no other purpose.

Fortunately there's an extension to restore the old function, “Status-4-Evar”. But there shouldn't have to be such a thing.

3) The “Firefox” menu / Bookmarks menu. One big consolidated drop-down menu? Ok. except that I use the Bookmark menu constantly. A separate bookmark menu button can be added back in, but it defaults to the right side of the screen. The problem with a right-default is that the bookmark folder menus scroll left-to-right, so now you're in zigzag menu hell, reminiscent of the Windows 95 Programs menu on a small screen. You can get the bookmarks menu placed on the left side, but it's not obvious how to do so. Loading the the UI preferences interface actually changes the displayed UI, so there are some circumstances where you're not sure whether something will stay where you put it. And be sure not to confuse the bookmark drop-down button with the bookmark sidebar button...

4) Old-style tab close buttons. As I mentioned before, I have a tendency to undo new UI changes where I can. I think some of my preferences might date back as far as the “Phoenix” development releases, later to be renamed “Firefox”. One of my older preferences is to not have close buttons on each tab, but to have a unified tab close button on the right side of the screen. This preference is enabled in the “about:config”, and is probably one of the more obscure preferences available.

The setting still exists, but the new close button and tab-list button are barely visible against the Win-7 translucent title bar.

Can you see it?

5) Menu bar / Firefox menu / Tabs-on-top / Title bar – Sure, it's easy enough to undo the “tabs on top” preference. And it's easy enough to restore the drop-down menu bar. But they didn't exactly make it look good when you do so.

Restoring the old 3.6 configuration leaves a distracting amount of window transparency, and with no good way to turn it off. Even the URL bar is transparent, affecting readability depending on what's behind it. The only solution I've seen is to use a “persona”, which is sort of like a theme but for some reason called by a different name. Unfortunately, most Firefox personae look like garbage. (Alternatively, the user could turn off transparency at the OS level, affecting all applications.)

The user is thus cajoled into using the default configuration, which is tabs-on-top and no menu bar, which for some reason restores opacity to the URL area. Go figure.

While I'm not a fan of tabs-on-top, I understand some of the theory behind it (even if tabs-on-top doesn't fully resolve the UI “ownership” issues), and I appreciate the fact that others do like it. Fine. Except that tabs-on-top robs the user of a workable title bar area. Apparently some developers view the title bar as wasted space, especially in a maximized window. But Windows-7 actually uses the title bar as a grippable space for nifty drag & drop functions. So I guess I can't take a maximized window and drag it anywhere, or shake it, or any of the new functions that Microsoft added to the title bar.

What they might have done instead is put the drop down menus on the title bar. They wouldn't take up the whole title bar, so you'd still have those functions available to you. This would look a little like what happens when you press “Alt” when using the default configuration.

Conclusion:

With Firefox 4, Mozilla has finally made so many fundamental changes to the user interface that supporting user reversions to old UI patterns has become difficult. They're taking a “if you can't beat 'em, join 'em” approach to Chrome, and for those of us who have been sticking with Firefox because it wasn't like Chrome, we're getting the first indications we might eventually be left behind.

Libya: Yoda, Kant, and Other Dime Store Philosophising

2011-03-25T13:57:00.001-04:00

(1) Yoda - The Empire Strikes Back:

Do, or do not. There is no try.

This is only a slight oversimplification of my biggest problem with Obama's offensive in Libya. If we're going to intervene in Libya, then damn it, make sure the job gets done. Don't just lob a few cruise missiles and hope for the best. Make change, oh light-bringer!

But if we're not going to go all the way, then don't bother.

(2) Having recently read the War Powers Resolution for the first time, I am starting to grasp the controversy surrounding it. I think the general idea of a war powers resolution is probably Constitutional, but I have doubts about specific provisions in the current document.

Generally speaking, I think Obama's actions in Libya are most likely Constitutional, though I am amazed by the naked hypocrisy of those like Joe Biden, by whose standards Obama should be impeached.

(3) If we are to be the world's policemen, where does it all end? How do we decide where to get involved? Why Libya and not Bahrain?

My answer: Supererogation. If we are to use a humanitarian justification for intervening in Libya, that does not obligate us to intervene everywhere. It should be plain that the US literally can not be the world's police force. Therefore, injecting the Kantian principle that "ought implies can", we are not obligated to police the world. But that should not preclude supererogatory intervention in certain circumstances of our collective choosing.

How are we to decide which cases? A capital-C Conservative answer might be when it is in the US national interest to do so.

Potent Quotables: Osama bin Buffett

2011-03-21T13:20:00.000-04:00

The Oracle of Omaha:

Over the weekend, Buffett joked with CNBC, saying, "I'm going to be the Osama bin Laden of capitalism. I'm on my way to an unknown destination in Asia where I'm going to look for a cave. If the U.S. Armed forces can't find Osama bin Laden in 10 years, let Goldman Sachs try to find me,"

Goldman and other banks received regulatory approval last week to start buying back shares and raising their dividends and it looks like Goldman wants to seize this chance to buy back the shares Buffett owns.

Whither the Powell Doctrine

2011-03-20T14:10:00.000-04:00

How does the action against Libya stand up to the lauded Powell Doctrine?

Copy and Paste from Wikipedia:

The Powell Doctrine states that a list of questions all have to be answered affirmatively before military action is taken by the United States:

1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
7. Is the action supported by the American people?
8. Do we have genuine broad international support?

Throw this in too:

Powell has expanded upon the Doctrine, asserting that when a nation is engaging in war, every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy, minimizing US casualties and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate.

From this, I add the following conditions:
(A) Decisive force used.
(B) Minimal US Casualties
(C) Quick resolution through enemy capitulation.

Let's run down the checklist...

National security interests? I guess so. Libya has oil, and Qaddafi has American blood on his hands.
Clear attainable objective? No, and I'll come back to that in a bit.
Risks and costs analyzed? Probably not, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt and overlook it.
Non-violent measures exhausted? Yes.
Plausible exit strategy? No.
Consequences considered? Maybe.
Support of the American people? I think so, for now anyway.
Broad international support. Yes.
Decisive force? No.
Minimal US Casualties? Yes, probably.
Quick resolution through capitulation? Probably not.

The overarching problem is that there are two potential objectives, and each objective creates different Powell-esque difficulties.

Assume the stated objective, which is the prevention of a humanitarian disaster, namely the ruthless slaughter of civilians in rebel territories. That is a conceivably attainable objective, but commits coalition forces to enforcing a no-fly zone (and possibly other actions) indefinitely, thus violating the "exit strategy" criterion, and arguably the criteria about decisive force and quick resolution.

Assume what some believe is the unstated objective, that Bushian, Rumsfeldian expression, "regime change". It should be obvious that decisive force is not currently deployed (and may not even be available). It may or may not turn into "Iraq II" in that scenario, but a prolonged engagement with ambiguous results cannot be entirely discounted.

I don't think Powell's analysis is the be-all-end-all of military decision making, but it's interesting to me that this engagement seems to casually violate so many criticisms that Obama and others made of the Bush administration not too long ago.

I'm not saying this mission is doomed, just that it's poorly planned and poorly articulated. I can imagine a happy scenario where the coalition arms the rebels while providing a full range of air support functions, eventually leading to the overthrow of Qaddafi. But a lot of puzzle pieces need to come together for that to happen, and that's certainly not what's being sold to the American public right now.

Roundup: DCGOP shot at, MI muni bk law, TPaw vid, federal junk cleaning

2011-03-16T15:58:00.001-04:00

(1) Somebody shot out the windows at the DC Republican headquarters. Probably some tea-party nutter...

(2) The new shape of municipal bankruptcy? Michigan considers "financial martial law" bill. (Maybe the folks in Harrisburg should be looking at this.)

(3) Pawlenty has a new video where he criticizes "crony capitalism". Yes, more of this please. Less Michael Bay.

(4) Dems think twitter will save them. No.

(5) Apparently there's $823k in the stimulus to pay for people to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex. How stimulating.

Roundup: Newt ♥s Philly, Ethanol, MinWage, Casey Cowboy Poetry, etc

2011-03-10T15:20:00.000-05:00

(1) When Newt announces for President, he's expected to do it in Philly.

(2) Is isobutanol a good bio-fuel alternative to corn ethanol? Let's hope so. If anything is to save us on the green energy front, it will be new technologies, not subsidies for the old and busted ones. If this isobutanol process is everything it's cracked up to be, it would make the previous holy grail of cellulosic ethanol look rather lame.

(3) From the "cutting off the bottom rung" department ... How bad a policy was the minimum wage increase? It might be responsible for over 40% of the unemployment rise we've seen since 2006.

(4) Let it be known -- Bobby Casey voted to save cowboy poetry festivals.

(5) An anti-appropriations committee? Long overdue.

(6) Trading in onion futures contracts is illegal. Who knew?

Funding Both Sides of the Culture War

2011-03-09T14:25:00.000-05:00

The Mo-Joe crew (sans a vacationing Joe Scarborough) was flippantly dismissive of the NPR exposé video that got a development exec axed. In the tape, the NPR executive describes Tea Party folks in racist terms. Carl Bernstein in particular seems hung up on the culture-war aspect of the NPR battle.

Problem is, conservatives are tired of funding both sides of the culture war.

(video from the Daily Caller, because MSNBC's player is a pain.)

I guess they find the argument so tedious because they presume to have won the culture war, as if "war" was a suitable metaphor. Did I miss the moment when Larry Flint planted a flag somewhere unmentionable and won the culture war?

Ideology as a Scare Word

2011-03-07T10:16:00.000-05:00

Both sides do it, but the left seems to get away with it more often.

A New York Times editorial yesterday called for Democrats to hold firm against the "reckless" budget cuts called for by Republicans, then blaming a subsequent government shutdown on those same Republicans. Here's how the NYT described the programs under the GOP first swath:

But this is not a moment for another difference-splitting deal. The House wants to carve $61 billion out of the government for just the next seven months, which would throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work and kill off scores of vital functions. Many of them, like funding for health care reform, environmental regulation and Planned Parenthood, are on the Republicans’ ideological hit list. The latest deadline for an agreement is March 18; without one, the government would close.

Cuts to the unconstitutional Obamacare implementation and pulling in the EPA regulatory power-grab are about creating a pro-growth economic environment where job creation. The cuts to Planned Parenthood are admittedly ideological, but take the entirely sensible position that, with money being a fungible commodity, an organization that is the biggest abortion provider in the country shouldn't have the support of the US taxpayer.

The NYT's position that government programs are necessary for sustaining our feeble economic recovery are no less ideological than the Republican positions they attack.

"Ideology", and any linguistic derivation thereof, is an essentially meaningless pejorative, carrying even less intellectual force than when certain conservatives label President Obama a socialist. It is a sophistic hoax to claim everything the NYT wants is logical and pragmatic, while everything championed by the other side is tagged "ideological" -- shorthand for irrational and imprudent. And it is an especially bold position to take when the Times' philosophy has not produced adequate results, and the electorate has shown quite a few Democrats the door.

Bobby Casey as Liberal as Al Franken

2011-03-01T11:01:00.001-05:00

National Journal's new legislative ranking has PA Senator Bob Casey Jr. tied with Al Franken (MN) and Tom Udall (NM) as the #15 most liberal Senator based on 2010 votes.

The rankings suggest Casey is more liberal than Dick Durban, John Kerry, and Barbara Boxer.

Obama NATO Ambassador fishing for ideas on Twitter

2011-02-27T19:20:00.000-05:00

They have no idea what to do.

A Strategy for Continuing Resolutions: Boil the Frog Slowly

2011-02-21T10:45:00.001-05:00

It seems like the Democrats are eager to see the government shut down so they can blame it on the Republicans. Dick Durban was even so bold as to blatantly lie about Social Security checks being endangered. (They aren't for existing beneficiaries. New claims will be delayed.)

Here's a strategy for avoiding a shutdown while getting as much as we can.

Start with a one-week CR that cuts spending across the board by a small figure, say 5 or 10 billion (if the CR were to be extended for the remainder of the fiscal year, which it won't). Democrats surely couldn't reasonably balk at such a modest cut and short horizon. If they did, it would be pretty clear who was responsible for shutting down the government.

The following week, ratchet that number up by 10 billion. And the next week. And the next. Pretty soon, we'll either have an agreement, or we'll have moved the line of scrimmage into the multiple tens of billions in cuts. And each week, the Democrats will have to choose between an incremental cut and a whole government shutdown.

A lot of Congressmen are jumping out of the boiling water of $100 billion in cuts, Republicans included. I think we can cook these frogs by slowly and steadily turning up the heat.

Why I still prefer Firefox to Chrome

2011-02-17T22:03:00.000-05:00

In response to the LifeHacker love-letter to Chrome, here are the reasons I don't care for it.

(1) Chrome isn't a proper multi-user application. It's not easy to run Chrome as another user, and it can't be installed on all accounts at the same time.

(2) Web install. I am a USB sneaker-net kind of guy, and web installs are the bane of my existence. Web-install plus not being multi-user means annoying downloads for each user account.

(3) I hate the tabs-on-top interface. Tabs do not logically belong on the top of the window. Any mouse-pointer accuracy gained by a tabs-on-top interface is negated (and then some) by an OS level task or menu bar at the top of the screen. (Default configuration in Ubuntu, less common in Windows).

(4) Non-native window decoration.

(5) I like my junk. Chrome is often praised for its clean interface. Well, I like my "cluttered" toolbar and bookmark system. The presence of a prominent bookmark or folder of bookmarks offers a reminder of sites that should be visited. Reliance on a search bar is equivalent to reliance on my own memory, which is not a good idea. (This is reminiscent of the GUI vs CLI debates circa 1993. And while CLI will always have its place, GUI won.)

(6) Auto update is not always a good idea. There can be reasons for keeping older versions around, at least for a little while. Who needs continuous incremental updates for features? It's a web browser, for Pete's sake.

(7) The URL box and the Search box are different for a reason. Searching the URL box looks at history and bookmarks. Search box auto-completes are pulled from the net. Why would you combine these two things?

(8) Mature extension environment. Chrome is getting there (and it would be nice to install an extension without restarting the program), but mozilla still rules for now.

(8a) NoScript. As far as I know, there is no Chrome equivalent functionality as found in the Firefox "NoScript" extension.

(9) Developer support. It just works. In my experience, more sites fail to work properly in Chrome. (And when you encounter the rare site that fails in Firefox, there's IE-tab.)

(10) RSS - I might be the only one, but I actually like the Firefox "live bookmark" scheme. I don't have a separate RSS reader and have hated every one I've tried.

Chrome touts its use of separate threads for each tab. I think this will be implemented in a future Firefox, but I haven't had the whole browser crash in a while since Firefox made plug-ins separate processes. I can kill an errant Silverlight process, reload the misbehaving tab and go about my business just fine.

Why I Want Herman Cain In The Mix (#CPAC11)

2011-02-15T12:22:00.001-05:00

I don’t necessarily think Herman Cain should be the Republican nominee for President, but part of me wants to see him do well because he brings unique attributes to the contest that could be constructive to our politics.

Cain’s CPAC address showed off his ability to captivate a crowd, but everybody who is the least bit familiar with Herman Cain already knew he could do that in his sleep. While Cain chose not to deliver policy specifics to the CPAC/Republican base audience, he is more than capable of doing so, even when sparring against the wonkish Bill Clinton. Cain could wipe the floor with Obama in a policy debate, and would be a driving intellectual force in any Republican primary field. The GOP needs candidates who can communication the issues of the day in persuasive and engaging language without demagoguery or sacrificing accuracy. Cain can do that.

Cain also represents the rise of the non-politician expert, the self-made man. In his CPAC speech, he told the audience that both of his parents walked off the farm as young adults with little more than the clothes on their backs. Cain’s biography is the American Dream on steroids, made all the poignant by his race and the era in which he earned his success. Perhaps the jump from the business world to the political world ought to be a little easier than it is. What would the landscape look like had Cain won his 2004 Senate bid?

I do have some substantive concerns about Cain. He holds a few positions that are controversial even inside the Republican Party.

He favors the “Fair Tax” plan – replacing the income tax with a consumption tax, modified by a “pre-bate” intended to help the poor. The Fair Tax plan has several problems. (1) Despite the desire to eliminate the IRS, the plan still requires a heavy enforcement presence. (2) The plan is so radically different from our current tax structure that implementation is very unlikely. And (3) it is easy for opponents of the plan to demagogue the issue by pointing out that it raises taxes on all goods (such as food, clothing, and fuel) without pointing out the benefits of the plan (which are the elimination of the income tax, the pre-bate, and greater taxation of the shadow economy).

Cain is a “one exception” pro-lifer. Many Republicans, including the vaunted Ronald Reagan, have been against abortion with the exceptions of rape, incest, and protecting the life of the mother. Cain’s singular exception for the mother’s life may be philosophically sound, but would face significant opposition in a general election. America does not agree with this formulation.

Mr. Cain’s support of the gold standard may also raise some eyebrows.

If Herman Cain wishes to be seen as a serious candidate, he will need to adjust his tone for a general audience instead of a radio talk show audience. He will need to rely less on cutesy catch-phrases such as “the un-fairness doctrine” and “health care deform” that are perfect for talk radio or CPAC, but are inappropriate for general debate. He will need to avoid saying that liberals are “trying to destroy America”, even if he believes it, and even if they arguably are, because this is not the type of rhetoric that attracts swing voters.

In his defense, it must be said that hyper-intensity is a high quality problem. It should be easier for Cain to “dial it down” that it will be for a Mitch Daniels or a Tim Pawlenty to dial it up. (Please note that intensity is a different concept than ideology. As a general matter, I am not asking anybody to be grossly more or less conservative.)

There’s a lot to like about Herman Cain, and America would benefit from seeing more from him. If the election came down to Cain versus Obama, I would proudly and unhesitatingly vote for Cain. I cannot say I would be so proud to vote for some of the other potential Republican candidates. Though I do not expect him to win the nomination, having Cain “in the mix” would ensure a debate that is both issue-based and engaging. Cain can bring people to our side, and I encourage him in that effort.

The Case for Flex-Fuel

2011-02-07T10:06:00.004-05:00

Since I ripped Newt in the previous post while supporting the flex-fuel mandate, it might be a good idea to talk about flex-fuel and the difference between government creating demand and government creating a market.

I'm not against ethanol per se. I'm against government forcing us to buy subsidized ethanol, especially corn ethanol.

I know I'm straying off the libertarian reservation here, but a mandate that new autos have flex-fuel capability is not the worst idea in the world. Current ethanol policy is essentially social engineering in the form of farm price support. Under current policy we must use ethanol -- food prices, efficiency, and environmental impact be damned. Government has created an artificial level of demand, and is not allowing the market to balance the inherent trade-offs in using ethanol as a fuel..

With a flex-fuel mandate, government would of course be forcing you to buy $100 worth of engineering and gadgetry in your car, but would not actually force you to buy E85. The "flex" part of flex-fuel means you can burn anything from straight gasoline up to E85 and everything in between. The consumer would have a choice of fuels.

A flex-fuel mandate solves a collective action problem in the distribution of E85 by creating a market rather than creating demand. Currently, so few individuals have flex-fuel vehicles that E85 pumps are scarce. With a mandate, fuel suppliers would know that their customers are capable of using E85, and could choose to supply it at a level demanded by the market. With free pricing of ethanol, consumers and suppliers will find an equilibrium price where E85 and gasoline are in rough price parity after adjusting for their relative efficiencies.

By having a diverse fuel source, we would be more insulated against price shocks from either the petroleum or the agricultural markets. If there's a drought, we would naturally shift toward petroleum to pick up the slack. If there's a geopolitical shock, we would shift to biofuels. With flex-fuel vehicles, these adjustments would happen quickly and seamlessly.

In exchange for a flex-fuel mandate, I want a few concessions from King Corn:

Mandates and subsidies for corn ethanol are to be phased out within five years.
The tariff on imported sugar and ethanol is to be lifted immediately.
Nothing above E10 is to be sold as "gasoline". (E15 is a non-starter... sometimes literally for small engines like chainsaws and snow-blowers.)

Professor Cornpone's Huckabee-ish Class and Culture Warfare

2011-02-06T23:10:00.001-05:00

I've been saying since 2008 that Huckabee was a poor facsimile of Newt Gingrich, though I never thought I'd see Newt sinking to a Huckabee-esque level of absurdly vulgar class warfare.

Newt thought it would be a great idea to slam "big city attacks" on rural areas. "Every time farmers start to do well, somebody starts to attack them." -- "Why are we attacking farmers for being productive?"

The sick thing is, I am actually sympathetic to one of Newt's major ethanol proposals (-a flex-fuel mandate for autos), but I can't stand his blatant demagoguery of this issue. Misleading attacks on the motivations of major elements of the conservative coalition are not to be tolerated. This is every bit as bad as Huckabee's "Club for Greed" nonsense. Newt, if you ever had a chance to be a real Presidential candidate, you blew it by so carelessly slandering opponents of our ethanol policy as being malevolent and uninformed.

Good job, Professor Cornpone.

An Exercise For Those Who Think Palin Is Stupid

2011-02-01T19:57:00.000-05:00

Read something Obama said, but in your mind replace Obama's voice with Palin's.

Read things Palin has said, but imagine it in Obama's voice.

GOP Still Not Connecting the Dots on Jobs

2011-02-01T13:49:00.000-05:00

Rarely do I agree with Chuck Todd, but...

Jan 31 Meet The Press (bold added):

MR. TODD: ...a couple of Cabinet agencies merged, a couple of other agencies. It'll be symbolic whether it actually is a big change. But this idea of entitlement thing, I want to say one thing, Republicans have lost--somehow have let the White House own the jobs message in this last month. And I don't understand how they let that happen. They focused on health care. They're talking about spending cuts. They're talking about the debt. Things that do matter to their base, but they've got to be careful here. They're not, they're not, there's not an obvious jobs plan coming out.

MR. MURPHY: That's true. But, you know, he has the big microphone of the State of the Union.

MR. TODD: And he used it.

MR. MURPHY: So his jobs rhetoric is great. The reason he's still in political jeopardy is his jobs results are not great. He is not perceived yet as a great economic manager, and that's going to be the battle for the presidency.

MR. GREGORY: And I still think this debate over what role the government plays in, in winning that and turning that around.

There's a lot to this, and it's a much bigger problem than some realize. A lot of people are looking for "a plan". This is an inherently un-conservative idea. The conservative jobs plan is "Stop the Insanity". Regular folks understand that blowing out the deficit to build windmills and dog parks isn't going to create jobs, but they don't necessarily understand the contrapositive sentiment, that it is beneficial to job creation to avoid squandering money on wasteful programs.

If Obama's jobs plan is all sizzle and no steak, then the GOP jobs plan is a freshly butchered carcass, unfit for immediate consumption. Some further preparation of the message is necessary.

Yes, all of the things Chuck Todd listed are part of the "jobs" story. Aside from its prima facie repulsiveness, Obamacare is a job destroyer. Spending, taxation, and debt are all ultimately about our economic health (and therefore jobs-related concerns), but it wasn't that long ago that GHW Bush derided "voodoo economics".

It's not enough that Obama's plans haven't worked (and won't). Republican spin-meisters must explain as simply as possible why they are bad ideas, and why Republican ideas are better. Do not take basic economics for granted. Connect the dots.

Roundup: Nothing Egypt Related

2011-01-31T13:19:00.001-05:00

Because there's enough talk about Egypt without my two cents.

(1) There is reasonably broad support for the thought that Republicans should consider Tea Party ideas, even among those Americans who are not themselves Tea Party "supporters".

(2) It looks like a recent Chinese propaganda video ripped a scene from Top Gun.

(3) Interested in a funeral pyre to send your loved one into the great beyond? Head to Colorado.

(4) Your Chris Christie love of the day.

(5) Apparently the band Nirvana is old enough that people can rip them off without seeming like a "me too" wannabe grunge band. Here's my take on Warpaint's "Undertow".

Paul Ryan's Response, Pt 2: Evidence

2011-01-27T14:16:00.000-05:00

Here's the problem with using an ideological message rather than a specific one: Independents aren't overly in love with the abstract notion of free capitalism. Watch this dial-group video of Paul Ryan's speech...

While Ryan does pretty well, you see in this particular segment that Democrats unsurprisingly trail off when he talks about lower taxes, and more importantly, Independents start to fade when he asserts that the American system has done "more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed". The marginal independent voter moves parallel to the marginal Democrat voter on ideological assertions about capitalism.

What I Didn't Like About Paul Ryan's Response

2011-01-26T15:56:00.002-05:00

The job of responding to the President's State of the Union address is by all accounts a thankless one. If you're lucky, nobody remembers what was said. If you're unlucky, as Jindal was, people start writing your political obituary.

The task is difficult for several reasons. The responder has second billing, (usually) no live audience, and must respond to a carefully prepared address that has been delivered just moments before. Stylistically, the responder must be critical of the President. It is de rigueur for Presidents to project optimism in their SOTU speeches, and it is difficult for such a response to burst the optimism established by the President while simultaneously establishing a competing cheerful vision.

As if this task wasn't impossible enough, it is also necessary to lay out one's criticisms and alternative visions in a way that that is psychologically accessible to non-ideological voters. If you pull out the usual trick phrases from your ideological bag of tricks, you'll find that they don't work as well with swing voters.

But regardless of the difficulties, that is the established task. And while Congressman Ryan did a respectable job criticizing the President with his bulletproof logic, the few sunny statements he made seemed bolted on like miscellaneous body parts on Heidi Montag.

We got a promissory note that the upcoming budget will "cut spending to get the debt down… help create jobs and prosperity … and reform government programs". We heard sincere yet vague talk about the Declaration, the Constitution, and the vision of self reliance and limited government.

Great. So what?

Ryan:

We believe a renewed commitment to limited government will unshackle our economy and create millions of new jobs and opportunities for all people, of every background, to succeed and prosper. Under this approach, the spirit of initiative – not political clout – determines who succeeds.

I wholeheartedly believe every word of this. And there's no doubt in my mind that Paul Ryan does too. And yet, many will see this as empty rhetoric. More importantly, success and prosperity are necessarily vague terms. Tuesday evening quite a few of us poked fun at Obama's vision of teachers accessing their high-speed wireless internet on bullet trains while sitting next to gay ROTC recruits, but Obama presented an accessible vision.

This is an inherent weakness in selling a dynamic, unpredictable, freedom-loving system; government can't project a specific vision into the future.

If I was re-writing this speech, I'd address some scenarios voters might find themselves in --starting a new business, planning for retirement, looking for a job, sending children to college, filling a gasoline tank, etc. -- and contrast the consequences of the Obama plan/vision against a brighter future enabled by potential conservative governance. Even a metaphor such as Tim Pawlenty's "cash bar at a wedding" bit would have been useful. The listener must find him/herself engaged in a contemplation of the future that the speaker is guiding.

I Can't Believe It's Not Centrism!

2011-01-23T19:38:00.001-05:00

Republicans have taken notice that Obama’s new “centrist” pivot seems to involve a lot of “investment”, i.e. more government spending. What they don’t seem to realize is that swing voters probably won’t be able to tell the difference between real centrism and the fake stuff.

Please, GOP politicos, by all means try to convince the public that Obama’s additional spending is more of the same stuff that voters rejected in November. But don’t be surprised when the public scoffs at our opposition as shallow partisanship.

You see, swing voters are not especially ideological. You might think this is an uncontroversial and uninteresting idea until you start to apply it. I usually argue the “irrational independents” line from the position of supporting more conservative candidates instead of the empty-headed supposed moderates our party organizations often try to promote, but this knife cuts both ways. When we hear that Obama is attempting to shift to the center, we must remember that this shift needn’t be more than cosmetic in order to be effective. Obama’s “new” ideas only need to pass a superficial test of sounding plausible to those voters who are least likely to have established ideas about the proper size and scope of government.

The public will see Obama talking about specific “investments” in particular things that they like, such as education and R&D. The public will hear about business tax breaks recently enacted in the Great Tax Compromise. (Of course, they will not hear about Obama’s previously longstanding opposition to those ideas.) The public will see Obama’s new corporatist “jobs” panel (or whatever they’re calling it) headed by sycophant CEO Jeff Immelt of General Electric. Obama is “pro-business”, you see!

You can criticize Obama’s policies, but you can’t do it from a perspective that even smells of ideology. The swing voter will tune you out quicker than a “Best of Ashlee Simpson” video marathon.

Magazine Size and the Insurrectionist Doctrine

2011-01-19T11:06:00.000-05:00

Daily Caller shares this video as an example of the New Tone on MSNBC strongly resembling the Old Tone, but I want to address what Lawrence O'Donnell is saying, and marry it to another aspect of the gun debate.

O'Donnell is complaining that if magazine sizes were smaller there would have been fewer people killed in the Arizona massacre. I don't know about that. There are a lot of ways to kill people. He could have used a bomb. Heck, he could have brought two or more guns and not bothered to reload.

But rather than address the limited (and more fruitful and constructive) issue of keeping the mentally ill from getting guns, O'Donnell wants to make sure everybody's gun rights are diminished.

Of course, the gun control crowd doesn't buy into the Insurrectionist Doctrine -- the idea that the people have a natural right of rebellion against any tyrannical government that might arise, and that the right to bear arms acts as a deterrent force against the abuse of power. Hypocritically, the anti-gunners scoff at the potential effectiveness of an armed rebellion while wailing incessantly about how the guns currently available to the public are too effective. Sorry, but you can't have it both ways.

Admittedly, this slippery slope has two directions. It's not unreasonable to suggest that individuals shouldn't be armed with guided missiles, or bio/chemical weapons, etc., but it's just as ridiculous to suggest (as Saturday Night Live did recently) that individuals be limited to muskets and other weapons available in the late 18th Century when the Constitution was written. Individual arms must be effective. The crowing about magazine size is a pretext for smothering the real meaning of the Second Amendment.

A Partial Defense of Ron Jr

2011-01-18T16:12:00.003-05:00

In his new book, Ron Reagan Jr. makes some claims about what he believes were early signs of Alzheimer's disease seen in his father. Generally speaking I have little respect for Ron Jr., and some of his claims warrant further inspection, but the vehement denials from some of the former President's allies also seem a bit overwrought.

Allahpundit cites this WaPo medical Q-and-A as evidence that Reagan did not have Alzheimer's while in office. Read it and judge for yourself. Here is a quote from it, bold added for emphasis:

Wallace, N.C.: Do you think that Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer's during his term as president?

David Shenk: Everyone wants to know that about Reagan, understandably. The short answer is no -- he did not have diagnosable Alzheimer's in the White House.

Alzheimer's is a progressive disease that creeps up very very slowly, and it was certainly creeping up on him during the late years of his Presidency. He knew that better than anyone, and joked frequently in speeches and with his White House doctors. But it's clear from looking at the evidence that his memory troubles in the White House were much too slight to be considered Alzheimer's.

I'd say that's at least a little ambiguous.

A few points pro and con-Ron Jr.--

Pro:

Family members can often know when something is wrong, even when others are not as perceptive. Numerous times I was told that my grandfather "seemed fine" when he had been symptomatic for a while -- even after diagnosis. And no, I don't think these individuals were all just being polite.
After consulting with a MD friend of mine, it is possible that a visual inspection of the brain as described in Ron Jr.'s book might have revealed hints of the disease, though certainly not a diagnosis.
By the time Reagan was diagnosed in 1994 he was probably in the "moderate" stage of the disease given the motor deterioration evident in his handwritten letter. It is entirely reasonable to presume that pathological origin of the disease had begun during his Presidency.
Even if the disease had begun during his Presidency (as I feel was likely), there is little reason to doubt the sound judgment of President Reagan on policy matters in the earliest stages. It's not like he was going to forget what the little red button did and accidentally nuke anybody, or do anything idiotic like try to take over health care. We joke about Zombie Reagan coming back to restore conservatism, but in all seriousness I'll take a 95% capacity Reagan over a 110% capacity Obama.
Reagan had a significant cognitive reserve, and would have adapted and performed rather well during the early stages of the disease.
While many Americans are emotionally and ideologically attached to Reagan and his legacy, he was, after all, a mere human, subject to human ailments. We should be concerned with the historical facts, not political posturing.

Con:

Reagan was diagnosed in 1994. Ron Jr.'s claims of symptoms in President Reagan's first term are stretching the believable boundaries of perception of the disease. Late second term sounds more reasonable to me.
Ron Jr. has already had to walk-back part of the story about the surgery to relieve pressure from his brain. He initially claimed that Reagan was treated in San Diego, then later at the Mayo Clinic, but has revised his story to claim that the initial treatment for the fall happened in Tuscon, and the skull pressure treatment happened two months after the incident of being thrown from his horse.
In revising his story, Ron Jr.'s initial account of "[opening] the President's skull" became "[burrowing] a hole". This should diminish the likelihood that anything significant was seen.
Ron is an idiot with a book to sell.

My doc friend (-who is a Democrat, for what it's worth) called Ron Jr's story (as cited in the above-linked Salon article) "a mix of both plausible and less plausible elements..."

That sounds about right to me.

Halperin Ironically Makes Case For Conservative Vigilance

2011-01-11T11:03:00.001-05:00

Today's Morning Joe program was a pretty kum-ba-ya affair with painfully self-aware supposed even-handedness about a "wake up call" for overheated political rhetoric on both sides. And while the deliberate appeal to the center did not do particular justice to the facts that unfolded, MoJo at least made some effort at common ground.

Yet, in the midst of this saccharine sweetness and appeal to our better nature, Mark Halperin demonstrated that he wasn't paying the least bit of attention to the tone Scarborough was trying to establish. Rather, he felt the need to denigrate conservatives for doing little other than defending themselves against a baseless attack (via Newsbusters):

You see, Mr. Halperin, we're sick of turning the other cheek. The nutjobs always get blamed on conservatives no matter what their ideology turns out to be, or if they have any at all. Ace-of-Spades listed a number of such instances where conservatives where initially imparted with some or all of the blame: the IRS plane-bomber, the Discovery Channel shooter, the hanged census worker, and the Fort Hood shooter (who according to Chris Matthews was driven by vicarious PTSD). I'd add to that list the Holocaust museum shooter (who was anything but a conservative) and Lee Harvey Oswald (a defector to the USSR and Cuban sympathizer). And we shouldn't forget the apparently fabricated reports of the Tea Party's alleged racist insults at black members of Congress.

Many of these fallacious allocations of blame are still to this day reported as fact. Nobody bothered to report that the census worker actually committed suicide. Nobody bothered to report that the plane bomber quoted the Communist Manifesto in his writings. It is still reported as fact that Tea Partiers shouted the "N-word" at black Congressmen despite an utter lack of evidence and an outstanding $100k reward for the same. We're still stuck with the JFK assassination, for Pete's sake! ("Deep in the hate of Texas!")

So it doesn't exactly wash with me when Mark Halperin tells conservatives to turn the other cheek.

What Scarborough (let alone Halperin) fails to understand is that the media narrative of "overheated rhetoric" is inherently biased against conservatives since, according to the established media perspective, it is conservatives who are pre-supposed to be more guilty of this than the Left. This disingenuous appeal for calm is little more than the "shut-up" tactic we know all too well:

Never mind that there is no evidence whatsoever that political rhetoric played any factor in this shooting. As Halperin's comments confirm, once the topic of popular conversation turns to the tone of our political discourse, the conservative side is already at a disadvantage in the mainstream media.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T16:04:00.000-05:00

"The March of the Kings" ("La March Des Rois")

START and DADT: The politics of meh

2010-12-23T21:46:00.000-05:00

New-START and DADT are two recently passed policies that are not especially praiseworthy, yet not worth getting too bothered about.

START was negotiated incompetently. It forces us to reduce our areas of strength to rough parity with the Russian arsenal without forcing the Russians to make comparable sacrifice in their areas of strength. (Never mind the concerns about missile defense technology.) If this were a Cold War era treaty there would be a fringe of people calling for Obama’s impeachment over this. But the Cold War is over, and New START leaves both parties with a sufficient nuclear deterrent. The world will not end because of START, no matter how bad it was.

Neither will the world end with the demise of “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell”. It is not unreasonable to think that open integration of gay soldiers will create problems of readiness and unit cohesion, though these concerns are surely exaggerated. Some critics of the new policy think this will be a difficult policy to implement in a time of war, but oddly enough, it might be easier to implement during war than during peace. It’s a lot easier to overlook interpersonal differences when there are bad guys shooting at you and when the gay soldier next to you just saved your life. Nevertheless, the policy will create friction within units, and I expect there will be some high-profile news stories of beat-downs and abuse.

Palin couldn't have done this

2010-12-22T09:31:00.000-05:00

Regarding any potential Presidential ambitions, Palin's early resignation as Alaska's Governor was probably a bad move. But it was a move for more effective governance in Alaska.

WaPo -- "State of Alaska to sue over polar bear protection":

Alaska officials filed notice Tuesday that the state would sue the federal government over a decision to designate a swath of the Arctic as critical habitat for polar bears faced with the effects of climate change.

Palin couldn't have gotten away with such a move. It would have immediately been excoriated as cynical political posturing, and --even worse-- a proudly ignorant case of global warming "denier"-ism.

But Parnell can do it. And that's good for Alaska.

Adam Smith's Revenge in China?

2010-12-10T12:19:00.000-05:00

Tom Friedman, call your office.

"There are empty cities."

And this is coming from a guy who was an Obama supporter, not some wild-eyed right winger.

Construction = 60+% of Chinese GDP
Exports = ~5% of GDP
"...run-away real estate market..."
"...Adam Smith's gonna get his revenge..."

How Did Obama Campaign?

2010-12-09T14:12:00.000-05:00

We've heard for about two years now that Obama had campaigned in 2008 as a centrist. So why is it now that the left is in a tizzy over supposedly broken promises, threatening a primary challenge?

Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Single-payer health care, DADT, taxes...

So did Obama campaign on a lefty wet-dream list of promises? Or did he, as the media has so dutifully reported, campaign as a centrist?

It can't be both.

I think you know where I stand on that one.

The Real Problem With Joe Scarborough

2010-12-07T20:52:00.000-05:00

I can forgive most of Scarborough's individual political heresies. For instance, I disagree with his stance on the war in Afghanistan in particular and military spending in general, but in that respect I can't say that he's in uncharted territory for a conservative worthy of the moniker. The problem is that if Joe doesn't take the orthodox position, nobody else on that channel is going to. And if you're going to play the role of the token conservative, it would be nice if the orthodox Republican positions got a little more respect a little more frequently.

Joe will gripe about the troops being in Afghanistan then look across the table at Pat Buchanan (a “conservative” who thinks WWII wasn't really necessary) for support. To those in the audience whose only exposure to conservative thought is “Morning Joe”, Scarborough represents the entire universe of rational conservatism. And if a good ol' Southern boy like Joe from the “Redneck Riviera” doesn't think the GOP has it right, by golly they must be out of their gourds!

Yes, Joe, we get it. You were in the class of 1995. You were there, man. But I don't care if you have the Contract with America tattooed on your posterior, the great Joe Scarborough is not the One True Arbiter of conservatism.

Maybe my problem is as much MSNBC corporately as it is with Scarborough, but somebody ought to be around to make the orthodox Republican case now and again on Scarborough's show, even (-or perhaps especially) if Scarborough doesn't agree. (And no, Pat Buchanan doesn't count.)

Kerry on MTP - Dumb as a Box of Rocks

2010-12-05T17:21:00.003-05:00

Seeing John Kerry's performance on Meet the Press today, every American should give thanks to the LORD that Kerry was not elected President. His forceful assertions of preposterous things makes me question why Kerry continues to be viewed as smart, and others like Dubya and Palin are viewed as rubes.

Let me be clear: John Kerry is as dumb as a box of rocks.

[MTP full transcript]

Kerry:

The Republicans are fighting to keep in place a tax policy that has failed over the last eight years. It has failed. We have had a net loss of jobs, and what we've seen is a Republican Party that's absolutely prepared to deny unemployment insurance to people who have been laid off, who can't pay their bills, who want to, you know, put food on the table for their families.

Much is made of the horrible economy Obama inherited, but nobody much talks about the economy Bush inherited, except insofar as they say it was fantastic. Well, it wasn’t fantastic, it was deteriorating. The dot-com bubble was bursting... then we had 9/11, and subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. And through all that, we had an extremely shallow recession, followed by 40 months of continuous job growth. As for the later housing bubble/bust, tax policy is not even a blip on the radar of the list of causes of that catastrophe.

Kerry:

They've said, "No, we're willing to hold that hostage so that we can give the wealthiest people in the country a bonus tax cut." And what I mean by that is, you know, people aren't focused on the fact that, under the Democratic proposal, everybody in America got a tax cut. The wealthiest people in America got a tax cut, up to the $250,000 of income. What they're fighting for is to give those people who earned more than a million dollars a year a bonus tax cut above that, even though it's the least effective way of creating jobs and, and putting impact into the economy.

So in the Kerry universe, increasing taxes for some = a tax cut for all. Just so we’re clear on that.

Kerry:

You talk about uncertainty of the economy, how much uncertainty is there to our economy when you add $800 billion to the deficit.

The total “cost” of extending all the Bush tax cuts is in the neighborhood of 3.7 to 4 trillion over 10 years. Kerry’s drawing the line at the point-seven or point-eight.

Kerry:

You know, people talk about American exceptionalism and how there's sort of this automatic for America. Yes, we are exceptional, but we're exceptional when we do exceptional things, when we behave exceptionally. We're not doing that today. We're locked down into a gridlock status where other countries are racing by us. I'll give you an example. Over the next 20 years, $600 billion is going to be invested in green technology and green energy. New jobs. New jobs that could be for Americans. Ninety percent of that investment's going to be in other countries, David.

Kerry’s idea of making America exceptional seems to be having us do what others are doing. How is that exceptional again? Green tech? Oh brother...

Kerry:

...By the Chinese and by a lot of other people. You know, two years ago China produced 5 percent of the world's solar panels. Today they produce 60 percent. We're not even in the game. We, we invented this technology at the Bell Laboratories 50 years ago. We don't have one company in the top 10 companies of the world. Shame on us. The point I'm making is that you can't just talk about American exceptionalism and then sit around and feed the frenzy of this tax cut at the upper end. You've got to invest in America's future.

This green jobs malarkey is a colossal waste. Spain tried the “green jobs” bit and it was proven to be a magnificent failure. Germany and France are likely to cut solar subsidies. It makes no sense to subsidize current-tech-generation alternatives that have no hope of becoming economical (as Al Gore recently admitted with respect to corn ethanol). It actually hurts the development of more advanced technologies that might actually be worthwhile. (Why develop new technology when the government will force the public to buy your inefficient technology at inflated rates?)

Kerry:

I mean, if you're earning more than $1 million a year, you--you're--that investment, when, when you give that tax cut, you get about a 30 cent return on the dollar given. If you give unemployment insurance, you get $1.60 back on the dollar that you put in. There are multiplier effects that are a reality of our economic laws. The Republicans are ignoring them...

Those are laughably made-up figures. And to reiterate, Kerry is taking the stance that paying people to not work is economically stimulative. Really.

Kerry:

The president of the United States came into office with a president who'd left him with a $5 trillion add-on to the debt of this country, an unprecedented financial crisis. The fact is that the TARP that we passed that everybody hates--they hate the word, they hate the concept--it saved, it saved countless numbers of jobs in this country. The Recovery Act saved millions of jobs in this country and brought our financial system back from the brink. Wall Street ought to be singing this president's praises. We've had a 60 percent increase in the stock market in two years. How often does that happen? You have a $3 trillion increase in the net value of the Fortune 500 companies, $3 trillion increase in two years. Under George Bush, in eight years, it only increased by several hundred billion. You've had the Hire Act, the Republicans opposed it. It created hundreds of thousands of jobs. The Recovery Act, the Small Business Act.

I wont defend Bush deficits, but the debt-to-GDP ratio didn’t start going gangbusters until the housing crisis set in. (Let’s not forget that Bush was also trying to maintain support for Iraq and Afghanistan with both houses of Congress controlled by Democrats as of January 2007.) The TARP, which was a Bush administration plan, originally billed as $700bn, will end up costing about $25bn when everything is said and done. The Obama stimulus, originally billed as $787bn to $862bn, will be at least a trillion after interest, and could cost something on the order of $ 3.2 trillion in the end. And for what?! An empirically failed policy.

Kerry:

The Republican agenda is tax cut and cut spending. We cannot cut our way to competition with these other countries.

Why not? We certainly can’t tax and spend our way to prosperity...

Thank heavens this dolt never got to be President.

Roundup: Casey Challengers, Coburn, DeMint, Dems, AEI

2010-12-03T14:06:00.001-05:00

(1) Potential challengers to Bobby Casey are starting to come out of the woodwork. Lilik has the scoop on what some are calling a "Ron Johnson"-like challenger, John Moran. I would not normally pay a lot of attention to a geographically challenged candidate who is not a career pol, but the comparison to the uber-high-quality candidate Johnson caught my eye. If the primary field becomes crowded (as it did in the 2010 Lt. Gov. primary), and if we get both Gerlach and Dent in the mix, a high quality central-PA candidate might just have a chance. (Also, don't dismiss State Sen Jake Corman just yet. He is definitely taking a hard look at this, and he has the potential to raise a ton of coin.)

(2) Senator Coburn's sobering remarks to the debt commission:

(3) Jim DeMint seems not to understand strategy, pledges not to oppose Senate GOP incumbents.

(4) What if Dr. Seuss drew Star Wars?

(5) Quote of the Day is from Tim Carney:

Which is more amazing: That liberals are willing to hike taxes on small business during 9.8% unemployment? Or the passion they feel for it?

(6) Check out the AEI debate between Rep. Paul Ryan and NYT-er David Brooks. I think Brooks' point about rejecting the dichotomy between sort of a Rand-ian laissez-faire and Euro-socialism is worth pondering, but I'm not buying his assessment that the Obama-crats aren't Euro-socialists, and apparently the audience didn't buy it either.

(7) You might think it's funny, but it's snot: Mucus affects your sense of smell.

(Cross-posted at PAWatercooler)

I'm always nervous when they change products I use

2010-11-30T17:22:00.000-05:00

"Now with Richer Chamomile Flavor!"

But... it was always just 100% chamomile... Huh?

Sorry for the horrible cell phone photography, but the only ingredient listed on both the new and old packages is chamomile.

We shall see about the "richer chamomile flavor".

The Bircher Zombie Apocalypse

2010-11-29T13:01:00.001-05:00

It's back. The John Birch Society, that is, and it is attempting to infect the Tea Party.

By all logic, the JBS should be dead. They were bonkers, they were exposed, they were purged, and they were forgotten. And yet, the contagion spreads.

This re-animated corpse is impossible to reason with. It might be one thing if they disavowed their insane conspiracy theories, but they haven't. They continue to engage in revisionist history about the Buckley-Welch purge, they still cling to Welch's theory of President Eisenhower as a Communist abettor, they entertain other crackpot ideas such as the "North American Union" conspiracy theory (PDF), and they promote the distinctly unconstitutional idea of state nullification of federal law (Word DOC).

The bigger problem with the Birchers (and other conspiracy theorists such as the Birthers and the Fed Plunge Protection Team folks), is not only the communicability of their troublesome ideas, but that their existence undermines serious criticism of government policy, institutions, and wayward politicians.

The Tea Party movement suffers enough handicaps and impediments. If the JBS manages to blight the Tea Party it could very quickly be the undoing of the movement.

Somebody put this shambling relic out of its misery before it does any more damage to Conservatism. And for heaven's sake, don't let them go to CPAC again.

Brief thoughts on Wikileaks

2010-11-29T09:47:00.002-05:00

Is it just me, or is the administration's response to this State Dept-centric leak surpass its response to military leaks? Does an attack on State hit a little closer to home?

At least we --presumably it was we, anyhow-- bothered to launch a DDOS attack against wikileaks' servers, which is more than we did before -- nothing.

Why is Assange still drawing breath?

The leakers in the government and the military have by any reasonable definition committed treason. Can we start calling it treason, at least rhetorically, to emphasize the seriousness of the betrayals?

Congressional Health Benefits Are Not Hypocritical

2010-11-21T17:57:00.001-05:00

Somehow, the Left got it in their minds that anti-single-payer & anti-Obamacare Congressmen accepting the health benefit that comes with their new jobs is hypocritical by virtue of it being government-run healthcare. This misses the point by a mile.

The distinction is between government as an employer and government as a general overseer and manager of everything under the sun. It is not improper for government-as-employer to offer health benefits. (At least not any more improper than it is for any other employer.)

What these Congressmen oppose is the creation of (1) a government monopoly/socialization of health care, and/or (2) heavy-handed federal control and regulation such that health care may as well be fully socialized (e.g. Obamacare).

These Congressmen are opposed to a systemic government health care regime, not merely the compensation of government employees.

Frankly, this distinction is so obvious that those criticizing Republicans on this matter must be feigning ignorance.

Newsweek's Fatal Conceit

2010-11-19T15:31:00.000-05:00

The Presidency is a big job. Back in 9th grade, my curmudgeonly civics teacher once enumerated and explained each Constitutional responsibility of the President, and after each one boomed, “Let's give him another job! The man has nothing else to do!”, then proceeded to describe the next Presidential duty. The list was pretty weighty.

So yes, the “modern Presidency” is a multitasking nightmare even under the best of circumstances. But the latest Newsweek cover and accompanying story betray a severe beating with the clue-stick that fell just short of imparting some crucial knowledge and insight.

The problem, Newsweek seems to have discerned, is that the President has too many things to worry about. Their graphic of ShivObama The Destroyer juggles war and peace (at least those are traditional areas of Presidential responsibility, shared with the Congress), an economy portrayed by a fistful of dollars, the housing market, medicine, and literally the whole world.

Let me go out on a limb here and say the President probably shouldn't be responsible for the entire world. Let's drop housing and medicine while we're at it. Purists will debate the extent of the Executive's role in the economy, but surely it can be said that the Executive has overreached in this realm as well.

It's almost as though Newsweek has stumbled upon the Fatal Conceit, that one man, or a relatively small number of men, cannot plan everything. And yet, they still fall short on the solution.

So close, Newsweek:

It’s hard to imagine how the office could sizably shrink, allowing the president to return to a more aloof, strategic role. Academics in Eisenhower’s day imagined two presidential figures, one for serious decision making and one relegated to the office’s ceremonial duties. Modern scholars see other solutions within the Constitution. “Presidents ought to give more thought to their cabinet choices, and then give them a little more deference,” says Marc Landy, a professor of political science at Boston College. The simplest experiment could involve reducing the West Wing staff, thus relying more—by necessity—on outside agencies.

(Wait, I thought Obama's problem was aloofness. Never mind, I guess.)

It's difficult to see how a ceremonial President would really free up enough time for the executive President to take care of the medicine, housing, energy, trade, etc., up to and including the whole world.

As to the dilution of executive power into the cabinet, anyone with the most cursory knowledge of Constitutional history must be aware of why we have a unitary executive. Consider the words of James Wilson, Founding Father, Constitutional signatory, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court:

The next good quality that I remark is, that the executive authority is one. By this means we obtain very important advantages. We may discover from history, from reason, and from experience, the security which this furnishes. The executive power is better to be trusted when it has no screen. Sir, we have a responsibility in the person of our President; he cannot act improperly, and hide either his negligence or inattention; he cannot roll upon any other person the weight of his criminality; no appointment can take place without his nomination; and he is responsible for every nomination he makes. We secure vigor. We well know what numerous executives are. We know there is neither vigor, decision, nor responsibility, in them. Add to all this, that officer is placed high, and is possessed of power far from being contemptible; yet not a single privilege is annexed to his character; far from being above the laws, he is amenable to them in his private character as a citizen, and in his public character by impeachment.

The only real solution is for the Presidency to do less, which seems to be the only option Newsweek and the Left have discarded.

Caddell and Schoen must have smoked some bad granola

2010-11-15T14:37:00.000-05:00

Caddell and Schoen must have smoked some bad granola before suggesting that Obama not run for re-election. There are two fundamental problems with this idea; firstly, Obama would never do that, and secondly, it wouldn’t accomplish what Caddell and Schoen think it would.

Obama doesn’t understand why Democrats got pummeled in November. He seems to think it’s (1) a function of the economic environment, and (2) not accomplishing transformational change fast enough. As to the first, that is surely a factor, but it is a factor that he and the Congress exacerbated with their agenda of, well, transformational change. Obama’s excuse of insufficient change is ridiculous because, in the words of NR’s Victor Davis Hanson, “It’s as if Bush had explained his nosedive in the polls by his failure to invade Syria and Iran or expand Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.”

Obama does have reason to be confused. Despite ongoing insistence that Obama campaigned as a moderate, anybody with the sense to consider his positions knew he was campaigning more or less openly as a small-s socialist of the vaguely euro-Fabian variety. He favored wealth redistribution through a negative tax rate. He professed a philosophy of raising certain taxes for purposes of “fairness” even when it was stipulated that raising that tax would bring in less money to the government. On his 2008 campaign website he proposed banning “scab” employees, which, in conjunction with his support for EFCA/”Card Check”, would give unions a stranglehold over capital. As a candidate, he supported the Global Poverty Act, a massive trillion dollar international redistribution scheme. Even before the total collapse of the auto industry, Obama was promoting dirigiste re-tooling loans to the Big Three. And this is without examining the shady characters from his past, or relying on offhanded remarks to plumbers -- these are merely some of the items he actually campaigned on.

So Obama campaigned as a socialist (- again, small “s”), was elected, and proceeded to govern as a socialist in keeping with his campaign promises. Surely the electorate knew what it was voting for, no? And yet, the people grumbled. It should then come as no surprise that Obama doesn’t “get it”, and from Obama’s recent media appearances it is fairly clear that this is still the case.

Schoen & Caddell:

If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.

This is a little too messianic for my tastes. If only the President would sacrifice himself, the Republic could be saved!

S & C

Obama can restore the promise of the election by forging a government of national unity, welcoming business leaders, Republicans and independents into the fold. But if he is to bring Democrats and Republicans together, the president cannot be seen as an advocate of a particular party, but as somebody who stands above politics, seeking to forge consensus.

If the guy still thinks he’s right, and doesn’t understand why (or even that) the electorate rejected his policies, he’s not going to be eager to compromise on ideological matters. Moreover, certain big issues are ones where compromise is fundamentally impossible, where completely opposite plans cannot be reconciled.

And if he still thinks he’s right, and still thinks that the voters want his particular variety of change, he’s not going to step aside in order to travel this path. Caddell’s and Schoen’s plan will die in its crib from the twin ailments of unworkability and unlikeliness.

Robinson's Tortured Logic on Torture

2010-11-10T08:47:00.001-05:00

The Morning Joe crew was rehashing the GWB interview and started talking about waterboarding. Without much apparent appreciation for his own hypocrisy, Eugene Robinson said of Dubya's use of waterboarding, "I don't think that's forgivable", but when pressed said he'd use torture to save the life of his own child in a ticking time bomb scenario.

Waterboarding for me, but not for thee. "Unforgivable" indeed.

Scarborough then asked the rhetorical question of why waterboarding was more morally objectionable than drone strikes with significant collateral damage.

Victory's Thousand Fathers

2010-11-03T19:06:00.001-04:00

John F. Kennedy, 1961:

Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.

An old high school classmate of mine who happens to be a Democratic campaign staffer called me late on election night. Among other things he said, he wanted to congratulate me on the Republican victories - with the caveat that they'd be winning a lot of those back in two years.

I appreciated the call, and had a good conversation with my friend, but I was a little discombobulated by the congratulations -- as if I had anything to do with the victories. President Kennedy may have been lamenting the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the quote above, but this time Republicans are dealing with the more positive side of the coin. Everybody seems to have contributed to the GOP victory.

In this election, I was mostly a spectator, akin to a sports fan whose team just won a big game. In common parlance, "we" won, but in reality, "the guys we root for" won.

But elections are different from athletic contests. Exogenous events have a meaningful impact on electoral outcomes. Political campaigns necessarily rely on interplay with their fans/audience for their success, whereas a sports team needs to perform well in its narrow skill set, and should ignore the audience during game play.

Yet we act as though campaigns are sports teams, and a lot of folks are cashing their victory bonus checks and trying on their metaphorical championship rings. Did the exact same Republican consultants who were supposedly blameless for the 2006 and 2008 catastrophes suddenly become geniuses? Nah.

Frankly, I was a little underwhelmed by Republican performances. By some Cook-PVI inspired logic, all we really did was get back to the equilibrium political position in the country. The fact that we didn't do better than we did speaks poorly of our party infrastructure and campaign capabilities.

Was there every any real doubt that Republicans would take the House? It should have been obvious before the first poll was taken (and certainly well before the media caught on) that this would be a big swing year. What do we have to show for it? Well, we managed not to trip over our own feet too much and picked up the House. The swing was huge, but we were starting from the nadir of the 06-08 losses.

[Yawn.]

To extend the broken sports metaphor, it goes all the way back to "pre-season". How many seats did we leave on the table due to poor candidate recruitment and poor candidate quality? How many losses (or narrow wins) were the result of ignoring fundamentals? How many seats did we lose because of petty intraparty squabbles and tribalistic behavior?

Ignore late polls and the stock market

2010-11-01T15:16:00.000-04:00

Polls: Weekend polls are notoriously unreliable. The sample is biased against people who have social lives on Friday and Saturday nights. Sunday night might be considered a little better, but this time we're talking about Halloween. Any poll conducted after Thursday night is to be ignored.

Stocks: The market has known for weeks now that the GOP will win the House and will probably fall at least one or two short in the Senate. This is baked into the cake. If this electoral outcome happens, no movement in stocks, either to the plus or minus, can be viewed as indicative of market approval or disapproval of the outcome. If the DJIA goes up, I don't want to see Republicans gloating. If it goes down, I don't want to see Dems doing the same.

The only caveat to this is if something unexpected happens. If the GOP takes the Senate, or has an extraordinary showing the House that removes the likes of Barney Frank et al., then I might expect a modest pop in the stock market. Likewise, if said wave election does not occur, then I would expect a sell-off of massive proportions.

In other news, my PA-related election predictions are up at the 'Cooler, and I put the California Senate race in the Hope for Change category.

Senate Picks: 8 or 9 GOP pick-ups

2010-10-29T20:14:00.001-04:00

Bold = Republican pick-up.

AK - Miller (R)-- Even if Murky wins this, it's still sort of an "R". The Dem is polling 3rd.
AR - Boozman (R)
CA - Boxer (D)
CO - Buck (R) -- Possible ultra surprise, watch for Tanc in the gub race.
CT - Blumenthal (D)
FL - Rubio (R)
IL - Kirk (R) -- This is a close one, but I can't see how people can vote for a guy who is literally a Mob banker.
IN - Coates (R)
KY - Paul (R)
LA - Vitter (R)
NV - Angle (R)
NH - Ayotte (R)
ND - Hoeven (R)
OH - Portman (R)
PA - Toomey (R)
UT - Lee (R)
WA - Murray (D) --One of the tightest races in the country.
WV - Manchin (D) -- I'm guessing the MinWage thing sealed that one.
WI - Johnson (R) -- Colossal upset, Johnson consistently polling over 50%.
---------

On the optimistic side, Washington is closest to an additional Republican upset, thus it is the "or 9" in my "8 or 9". Generally speaking the bias this year should be towards Republican upsets, but this is an extremely Democratic state and Rossi has a history of having elections stolen from him. But if there was to be an upset, this would be the one to look for.

This would leave the Senate 51 Dems to 49 GOP, or optimistically, 50/50 plus Joe Biden for Dem control.

At one point I could have seen California and West Virginia going our way, but I don't think those are in the cards any more.

Also, I think Vitter breaks 50% and avoids a run-off.

Of the races I expect Republicans to win, I am most concerned about Illinois, Colorado, and somewhat concerned about Pennsylvania.

From what I can tell, FiveThirtyEight has made the exact same individual predictions, but the simulation model produces a 52D to 48R Senate. I understand where that's coming from, but I disagree. No worse than 51-49.

So yes, Christine O'Donnell fans, there's a good chance you blew this one for us. Thanks bunches.

(Oops! Did I do that?)

How to Counter Fair Tax Questions - watch Rand Paul

2010-10-26T14:04:00.002-04:00

Talking about the "Fair Tax" plan is playing with fire. Any candidate who expresses the slightest interest in the plan is immediately slammed with negative ads claiming he would put a 23% sales tax on top of every purchase.

I don't think the Fair Tax plan works, but if you're bound and determined to talk about it, then you'd better be able to nail your opponent's mischaracterization of it:

(start time = 12:30)

I'm against the Fair Tax substantively and politically, but Rand Paul is still poised to win despite the backlash on this issue, so he must be doing something right.

Crazy yet quiet - my negligent blogging

2010-10-25T14:02:00.000-04:00

The election news is increasingly frantic, yet there is much less to actually report. This is the period in the election cycle where the cake has basically been baked, and we’re just trying to figure out what sort of icing it will have. Crap icing, or PCP-laced icing?

For the record, I’m predicting a vanilla-iced cake. Republicans control the House, and Democrats narrowly control the Senate. Don’t ask me for specific numbers right now, I haven’t looked at it that closely. I won’t be making a specific House prediction, though I will probably at some point look at the Senate races and the US House races in Pennsylvania.

But generally speaking, I haven’t blogged much recently because there hasn’t been much to write about. The news is increasingly poll-driven and less substance-driven. A poll is not a news story, at least most of the time.

I was going to say that I was viewing this election stoically and fatalistically (as I often do at this point in the cycle), but it’s more accurate to say that I’m bored with it. I’m peeved at some of the mistakes I see being made, and yet they continue to be made regardless of the warnings sounded by myself and others.

I continue to see people fundamentally misunderstand the swing voter and the swing district. In one PA House district I’ve been obsessed with for about five years (the 12th), the NRCC is running yet another ad linking the Democrat to Nancy Pelosi. The voters in this particular district have a history of not responding to this type of ad despite Pelosi’s strong negatives there.

Guess what, guys: it hasn’t worked before, and it probably won’t move any numbers this time either. It’s called empiricism.

Here’s the TV ad formula that everybody should have been running all cycle: [Congressman X] voted for [policy Y], and that hurt [jobs and/or voters’ wallets]. Throw in some fancy graphics and ominous music, and voila: instant TV spot. The more campaigns and campaign committees stray from this formula, the worse they will do. The sooner campaigns stop getting into petit wars over who is more (non-specifically) “extreme”, the better they will do. (I'm looking at you, Toomey camp.)

Of course, we’ll still win a ton of races, so all the idiot consultants will still come out looking like geniuses. Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan. Those marginal losses in tough districts will be chalked up to the fact that they were tough districts. Nobody will examine real causes for these losses.

But it’s out of my hands, and I’ve said most of this before, so all I can do is embrace fatalism.

Why Sean Bielat is important - Financial Attrition

2010-10-04T13:21:00.000-04:00

Could he win? Maybe. From a national perspective, however, that's not as important as one might think. It is just as important for Bielat to make Barney Frank spend all of his money trying to defend himself.

Way back in 2008 I wrote about my theory of Financial Attrition:

Entrenched incumbents almost never lose, barring the occasional "dead woman or live boy" scandal. Such Untouchables have large campaign war chests at their disposal, have first dibs at party and caucus money, and often represent safe districts. The unlikelihood of their defeat acts as a deterrent force against any potential challengers, or, if some fool does step in, the challenger's party lifts nary a finger in assistance.

What do these unchallenged incumbents do with their money? They give some of it away to help candidates elsewhere. By helping push their marginal fellow partisans over the finish line they accumulate favors for future battles.

Oppositely, what does an incumbent do when he as a challenger? He empties his coffers! Electoral history is littered with the corpses of challengers who were outspent 3-to-1 yet were only defeated by a few percentage points.

When we find ourselves with uniquely qualified challengers such as Sean Bielat giving some old warhorse like Barney Frank a run for his money, we should understand that Bielat's use of funding will be extremely efficient at denying other Democrats around the country their precious funding. One dollar given to Bielat destroys several Democrat dollars as they scramble to play defense.

Who is being occupied?

2010-10-04T12:10:00.001-04:00

Video of more socialist idiots at the One Nation rally from AFP:

Resistance
is justified
when people
are occupied.

Who among those marching morons is "occupied"??? Talk about being totally divorced from reality...

The False Moral Equivalency of the OneNation Rally

2010-10-03T20:34:00.000-04:00

It seems from my scan of traditional media sources that the established narrative of the OneNation rally is one of moral and political equivalence to Tea Party rallies and Glenn Beck's "Restore Honor" event. Some of the dino-media point out that the OneNation rally was somewhat less well attended than conservative events, and there is some de minimis mention of some of the more radical elements, but generally speaking nobody is addressing the widespread radicalism displayed at Saturday's rally.

(Yes Katrina, but not in the way you think)

Now, to conservatives, the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and the rest are bad enough. But some really nasty folks were there, and they were not particularly shy about their vile ideology. The media double standard was in full effect -- one or two borderline signs (that in some instances were planted) at Tea Party rallies speak volumes about the inherent hatred and bigotry of every Tea Partier, but OneNation's open embrace of the Communist Party USA, a number of Democratic Socialist organizations, the International Socialist Organization, and other like-minded groups is to be downplayed as much as possible.

(The soundtrack, however appropriate, was obviously not a part of the rally. I was going to apologize for the music, but they are in fact actual communists, so... if the shoe fits...)

Did you catch this frame in the video? (h/t Sean M. at DPUD)

I'm not sure if that's the Marx version, or the Bauer version, or possibly some other, but it really doesn't matter. If there was anything remotely this offensive at the Tea Party rallies we'd all know about it. But here it is, proudly displayed at the OneNation rally, and nobody seems to care. Where's the outrage?

Of course, virtually every media outlet is comparing this weekend's rally to the Tea Party and Beck rallies. But The Washington Post only mentions the New York City Democratic Socialists of America near the end of its write-up. The New York Times only reveals the presence of the CPUSA through the voice of Glenn Beck -- again, near the end of its article.

I could go on at length about the nutcases who were out in force that day, but others have done a better job at that. My point is that these wackos were there, with their idiocy boldly on display, and no mainstream reporters thought this was worth mentioning. And yet, we get endless hand-wringing about the supposed racism and extremism of the Tea Party, which strives to police its own idiots and send them packing.

So yes, Katrina vanden Heuvel, there was a test of the media's fairness and judgment. It failed that test. The Left showed its true radical colors this weekend, and the major news media didn't bother to report it.

Gold regulation in Obamacare

2010-09-29T12:40:00.002-04:00

As Nancy Pelosi foretold, we continue to find out what's in Obamacare. And it ain't good.

Thomas Sowell has discovered that Obamacare regulates gold sales. Is this some kind of Austin Powers "smelting accident" joke that the Congressional staffers were pulling on us?

I can make a case that gold isn't a great asset, although owning gold has certainly been the right thing to do recently. At best, gold is a store of value. It's not a growth asset. There's a reason it's called the "barbarous relic"; we go to great efforts to dig this yellow metal out of the ground, process it into bars and coins, and then re-bury it in vaults around the world. Sure, some of it is made into jewelry, and there are a few industrial applications, but mostly it just gets dug up out of one hole and put back into another.

One should only own gold if one thinks there is zero real economic growth in equity earnings underneath the inflation-boosted nominal growth. If there is any real growth at all, one should own stocks instead of gold.

Of course I could be wrong. And that's why Congress shouldn't regulate gold sales, particularly in a health care bill.

More of this please --> Ron Johnson

2010-09-28T22:52:00.000-04:00

How can Republicans win in hostile territory? Candidate quality:

It has very little to do with being a "moderate", and just about everything to do with the ability to convey a message.

Roundup: Reapportionment, Katy Perry, Coffee Party, Biz Bill, Borgish Jewelry

2010-09-27T20:38:00.000-04:00

(1) PA is set to lose one Congressional seat in the upcoming reapportionment. I'm just surprised it wasn't more than one.

(2) Ace wrote an absolutely spot-on critique of Katy Perry's over-sexualization of tween girls. Simply put, there's a difference between adult-themed music made for adults, and adult-themed music made for little girls.

(3) Coffee Party is a bust. Didn't all the major newspapers tell us the Coffee Party was the next big thing, capable of countering the Tea Party?

(4) Remember that small business bill Obama was so high on? Yeah, it's really not all that popular among business or bankers. Which really only makes sense -- why tax business with one hand and redistribute with the other? Just cut out the middle man.

(5) Apparently the fine line between high fashion and Borg is being blurred:

A South Park Flashback to November 2008

2010-09-24T14:36:00.000-04:00

Kyle: "No, that's not true, Ike. The economy could easily stabilize with Obama's plan."

GOP Civil War Delayed, Not Averted

2010-09-22T16:29:00.001-04:00

NR scribe Jonah Goldberg thinks tales of the GOP Civil War have been greatly exaggerated. His main argument is that everybody seems to be gravitating to the Tea Party side, and you can't have a civil war with only one side. I beg to differ on the grounds that peculiar circumstances have allowed us to stave off some of the most heated battles of our looming intraparty combat. Also, the electoral assumptions underlying each wing of the party are both wrong and incompatible with each other, and this incompatibility is destined to reemerge in the future.

It seems fate has intervened in strange ways to delay our squabbles. When RINOs quit the Republican party, even the most amorally strategic among the party establishment can hardly support traitorous individuals. Before Arlen Specter fled the GOP, the party leadership was once again gearing up to defeat Pat Toomey. The battle would have been absolutely epic. Pennsylvania might have gone Democrat for a generation as the GOP would have destroyed itself. Even for some time after Specter defected, “the establishment” was reluctant to accept Toomey as their candidate. RNC committeeman Bob Asher (a popular bogeyman for many base voters) commissioned a poll showing moderate former Governor Tom Ridge performing better than Toomey in a general election. Party leadership was openly and frantically looking for a candidate “who can win”, with the obvious implication that Toomey couldn't. It wasn't until the Ridge scenario failed to unfold that Ye Olde Establishment started softening their tone on Toomey. Now, Toomey looks like a lock for the Senate seat, but rest assured that there is still quite a bit of bad blood in the party.

Similarly, the NRSC and “the establishment” were gearing up to promote Charlie Crist. When Crist bolted exactly one year (to the day) after Specter, the Tea Party battle was won by default, not by defeat, and not by acquiescence. Now Charlie the Independent is throwing a monkey wrench into the general election works and nobody likes him much.

Likewise, Lisa Murkowski ceased to be a sympathetic character when she launched her narcissistic write-in campaign. At some point, even party bosses have to rally behind their candidates, even if only nominally.

Sharron Angle is still viewed skeptically by many Republicans. And frankly, some of those concerns are real. She's light years better than Harry Reid, and she may win, but she's hardly an ideal candidate.

Should we lose the NV, AK, or DE Senate races, plenty of the so-called ruling class will be around to say “I told you so.” (In the case of Christine O'Donnell, I'll even put myself in that category, though I will gleefully eat crow if I am wrong.)

And it would be hard for Tea Partiers not to view the recent past as a civil war. “The establishment” still picks candidates based on their perceived moderateness despite growing evidence that swing voters don’t care so much about moderateness per se. Then, they market these candidates to the base as “electable”, which seems to be code for “not conservative”. When the essential qualification for a candidate seems to be that the base will hate him, that’s a problem, and it’s not a problem that’s going away just because the country decided to have a wave election this year.

Whatever you call them, be it “Tea Partiers”, or “the base”, or “reform-minded” conservatives, they have their own idiosyncratic problems selecting candidates. Let’s face it, Christine O’Donnell may vote exactly the way I’d like her to, but an ideological checklist does not a candidate make. The base’s ideological intensity may wax and wane from election cycle to election cycle, but it will never go away entirely. (Not that it should.)

Unless and until party leaders decide that a large degree of buy-in from the base is a necessary (if insufficient) precondition for electing its partisans regardless of the political environment, and start seeking candidates who can translate ideology into a sellable agenda rather than milquetoast moderates who don’t even agree with the party line, the GOP Civil War will only be delayed, but not averted.

Watching the world wake up from History

2010-09-19T22:49:00.000-04:00

Twenty years ago this month, musical group Jesus Jones released "Right Here Right Now" as a single. The song was written amidst the rapid de-sovietization of Eastern Europe and as a response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Now nobody under the age of 19 has lived contemporaneously with the Soviet Union, and the song is used to sell Toyotas.

(You can listen to it here. YouTube embedding has been disabled by the record company.)

The world woke up from History. May we never fall asleep again.

Not Spock

2010-09-06T17:03:00.001-04:00

The traditional media often complains that Obama is too cool, too cerebral, too Spock-like.

Balderdash. He can show emotion when he's in his environment. And by "his environment", I mean an old-fashioned labor rally where class rhetoric is thrown around like a Frisbee on a college campus. He's still a community organizer at heart, and always will be.

Gibbs, Hayes, and Economic Uncertainty

2010-09-03T17:25:00.000-04:00

In the twitter war between The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes and White House spox Robert Gibbs, Gibbs cited this USA Today article to support his case for the President's small biz bill that's currently being held up.

However, I don't think it quite makes the case Gibbs thinks it does. In fact, it makes the opposite case if you look at it right [Bold added for emphasis]:

Kaur's is among about 1,000 other small businesses that "have their bank papers all done and will be funded in the days — moments — after the bill passes," says U.S. Small Business Administration Administrator Karen Mills.

In Kaur's case, she's concerned that the property seller is going to get antsy as she waits out the political decision-makers. "I keep asking my seller if he can give me a couple more weeks," she says.

Many other businesses have paused expansion as they wait for the outcome of the bill, says Bob Coleman, publisher of the Coleman Report, which provides information on small-business lending.

Some businesses can save thousands of dollars on the waived loan-fee provision alone, and they are thinking, " 'I might as well hold off and save the money,' " he says.

What I'm seeing here is that there are a lot of deals that are going to be done anyway, and folks are (rationally) waiting to see if they can stick their hand in the government cookie jar. Meanwhile, Rome burns.

I'm not usually one to trot out the uncertainty line, as I think precious few people understand it, but this is a prime example of uncertainty killing jobs.

Boredom, Message Discipline, and the GZ Mosque

2010-08-31T14:28:00.000-04:00

There's a lot of finger pointing on the right about the danger of getting off our economic message and being distracted by this Ground Zero Mosque situation.

It's the bloggers. Or the professionals. Or Sean Hannity.

Whatever.

I think the first cause of this distraction is sheer boredom with the onslaught of bad -- nay, "unexpectedly" bad -- economic news. I mean, we've won the economic debate, right? How much more can we talk about the massive failure of the Democrats' economic agenda? The porkulus. Cash for Clunkers. Trade. Public sector unions. The stagnation. The malaise. Paul Krugman's acute need for professional mental heath care.

It's going beyond boredom -- it's depressing. (Pass the bourbon, please. Knob Creek, if you have it.)

The second, though I think lesser, contributing factor is the high-school debate factor, the desire to be right at all times. Even as I write here about the irrelevancy of the GZM issue, I'm fighting back the urge to lay out my opinion, to criticize the hypocrisy of folks like Howard Dean for thinking the GZM shouldn't be built while simultaneously accusing Republicans of religious incitement...

But I know that's not a voting issue. ~10% unemployment is a voting issue -- THE voting issue.

I'm just so sick of thinking about it.

No Take Backs - A Language Gripe

2010-08-11T08:11:00.000-04:00

I've got to complain about a very common, bipartisan phrase: "take back". As in, "We're going to take back the Senate." Democrats used it in 2006, and Republicans are using it now, but it's really a repugnant verbal construction.

"Take back", specifically the "back" part, implies a restoration of some rightful order or position. But there's no such animal in American politics. No party has a standing claim on any particular body of government. There's nothing to take back. There are only offices and bodies to win control of.

Moreover, it sounds bad to the public, especially those who are not of the same party as one who speaks this phrase. So anytime a Republican says we're going to take back the House, they're probably turning off a number of attentive independents, to say nothing of the Democrats to which they might appeal.

It is especially dangerous for Republicans to use this expression in the current environment, when the Democratic talking point is precisely that we would be going "back" to the previous order.

No take backs.

Stupid Dem Talking Points

2010-08-03T09:53:00.000-04:00

In these two cases, Democrats have taken what are genuinely debatable policy positions and have insisted on patently false and ridiculous talking points in order to make their cases. Not that I'm in the business of giving the other side debating tips, but they'd actually be better off if they dropped these:

(1) - "Raising taxes to the Clinton-era level won't harm growth" -- Well of course it will. Look, there's a reasonable debate to be had about taxation and the national debt, but it's rather silly to think that raising taxes -- in whatever form that might take -- won't impact economic behavior. This is ECON-101, folks. You can make the case that it will work out in the end, or that it's justified in some sense, but you can't make the case that it won't impact growth. So just stop that.

(2) - "Extending unemployment insurance is a great stimulus because the money gets spent quickly" -- This one really takes the cake. Nancy Pelosi was lambasted when she said this a few weeks ago, and rightly so. And yet, I keep hearing that logic come up again and again on TV. Let me re-phrase the point -- they are saying that paying people not to work is good for the economy. Now, as a moral matter of throwing people a welfare lifeline when they don't have a lot of good options, extending unemployment is an honestly debatable point. But it ain't stimulus, it's welfare. And furthermore, this whole exercise is a demonstration of why Keynesian economics is insufficient, and shows the religious zeal with which a lot of Democrats cling to a broken theory. They would rather accept an obviously ridiculous conclusion drawn from a theory than admit that the theory is wrong.

Pawlenty reading the stage directions on the class issue

2010-07-26T18:50:00.000-04:00

I've made no attempt to hide the fact that Tim Pawlenty is my early favorite for President in 2012, but this statement gives me pause.

Weekly Standard:

But in the end, Pawlenty said, there won't be much difference between GOP presidential candidates on the issues. He said it's important to have a presidential candidate who doesn't live up to the stereotype that Republicans are "all CEOs" who "play polo on the weekends." Pawlenty made the case that his background as the son of a truck driver who worked his way through college helps him reach out to working class voters, who are turned off by "country club elitists."

"In the end, there’s going to be five, ten, twelve candidates standing on the stage who, at least for now, all look kind of the same... And they’re going to say about the same thing" on the issues, he said. "But the real question’s going to be, as to tone and face and credibility, who is best situated to open the door to people that are not yet Republicans? To say, we understand what you’re going through and we can make a connection with you in ways that have some credibility?"

The thing is, there's quite a bit of truth to this assessment. It's part of the reason I think Pawlenty has a decent shot at the Presidency. However, I really don't think a candidate should be saying those things in quite that way.

Reading this reminded me of a recent National Review piece written by Rob Long that appeared in the July 5th issue. It begins:

Rule One of great acting is, Do not read the stage directions.

You don’t, for instance, wrap up Hamlet’s big Act Two soliloquy — “ . . . the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” — and then say “Exit.”

Years ago, during the George H. W. Bush administration, public-opinion surveys began to register a troubling trend for a president campaigning for reelection: More and more people felt that Bush just didn’t care about people’s suffering during the (fairly shallow) recession of the early 1990s.

You’ve got to send them the message that you care, they told him. So, dutifully, in his next big public outing, he tried to send the message to the voters that he cared. He wound up a boilerplate stump speech by declaring, with as much passion as he could muster, “Message: I care!”

No, no, Mr. President, you could imagine his advisers saying. The “message” part is for us, it’s an internal thing. You’re supposed to give them the message that you care. By showing that you care.

There's a fine line here. Be cautious, Governor Pawlenty.

Breitbart - Mote vs Beam (and some Frum)

2010-07-22T15:18:00.002-04:00

Breitbart screwed up. A bit. But quite a few of his detractors are just as guilty as they claim Breitbart is.

Matthew 7:3 (KJV)

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Breitbart's initial video showed two things. (1) It showed Shirley Sherrod recounting an incident where she acted in a racist manner. (2) It showed her NAACP audience reacting positively to Sherrod's recounting of her event.

What the video did not show was the rest of the story, the redemption of Shirley Sherrod.

Breitbart's claim that the story was never really about Sherrod doesn't wash. It was always first and foremost about the woman speaking in the video and her confession of racially motivated (in)action. The audience reaction was always secondary.

But I'm bothered by the claims that the video was "heavily edited". It wasn't. It was taken out of context, but it wasn't heavily edited. Sherrod spoke those words -- a firsthand (and presumably true) account of her previous behavior. It was about 1:40 of Sherrod's uninterrupted narrative. Anybody -- like for instance, the NAACP, or Tim Vilsak, or the Obama White House -- could have (and did) come to the conclusion that Ms. Sherrod was describing something morally repulsive when she "didn't give him the full force of what [she] could do".

Blogger "Political Math":

Purported conservative David Frum says Andrew Breitbart is the Right's Dan Rather. I don't think Frum's analysis works.

(1) Dan Rather had a fake document. Breitbart has genuine source material.
(2) After Rather's document was outed as a fake, Rather continued to stand by it. Breitbart has changed his angle on the source material, even if he has done so without quite owning up to his original error.
(3) Dan Rather worked for an ostensibly "straight" major media outlet, who for some time continued to allow him enough rope to hang his career with. Breitbart runs a few websites with a plainly-stated conservative perspective.
(4) Rather continues to work in "straight" journalism (albeit in a more limited manner), and contra Frum, has not been drummed out of the biz. He continues to land guest spots on mainstream programming, where he is still treated like a straight journalist.
(5) Dan Rather had a long history of offering propaganda as straight news. Breitbart's reporting has been pretty darned good, if a little bombastic, and seeks to counter the nonsense coming from much of the traditional media.

But back to the motes and the beams -- already falsified reports of racist Tea Party misbehavior directed towards members of the Congressional Black Caucus still get cited as gospel truth. Infiltrators and "Mobys" with racist signs get reported as genuine examples of conservative racism. An uncomfortable phrase used by a black writer ("magical negro") gets tacked to a Rush Limbaugh when Limbaugh picks up the ball and runs with it. A network purposely crops the photo of a black man carrying a gun at a protest in order to promote a narrative about racist white folks carrying guns at protests.

For these sins and several others, we're still waiting for our apologies, Lefties.

The word "racist" has been thrown at conservatives so much it's become a free-standing punch line in conservative circles. Dislike Obamacare? Racist. Think the stimulus was counterproductive? Obviously racist. Don't care for arugula? Blatant racism. Those stubbornly high unemployment figures. Also racist.

The dismissal of the Black Panther case? Not at all racially motivated. "Wise Latina" jurists. Innocuous. Jumping to conclusions about cops acting stupidly? Without any prejudice whatsoever.

I can't pretend that Andrew Breitbart is without fault here, but the reaction from the left and the Frum-ish Toady-Right is absurd. The White House saw the same video Breitbart did and came to the same (wrong) conclusion.

Potent Quotables: Under-capitalized

2010-07-20T14:24:00.002-04:00

I don't think Katrina VanDen Heuvel understands what it means for banks to be under-capitalized.

Under-capitalization, as it is typically understood, is about ratios, not absolute values. If a bank has too many loans on its balance sheet versus reserves, it is undercapitalized.

As an alternate interpretation, Katrina might have meant that community banks aren't big enough, which is sort of a silly statement.

What she probably means is that she thinks hedge funds are too big. That's entirely unrelated to how much capital community banks have. She has made the typical mistake of comparing one thing to another and imagining some inequity that somebody (i.e. government) needs to correct through state force.

---

In other news, I have discovered Matt Lewis' list of influential liberals on Twitter and will be using it as blog fodder.

ACU Scores Not Currently Informative

2010-07-16T13:32:00.000-04:00

The pundits are up in arms. How could Congressman Bob Inglis, with a lifetime ACU score of 93+, possibly lose his primary? (And by 42 points no less!) How could Senator Bennett, with a life ACU of 83+, have been sunk at the Utah GOP convention? What are these crazy tea-baggers thinking?

The ACU score is sometimes a useful yard stick. I've used it myself to guesstimate which Congressional districts might be up for grabs, and to see how far a Republican can go in the moderate-to-liberal direction before he or she makes serious waves among the Republican base. (Broadly speaking, 60's is squishy but generally tolerable, 50-ish is the danger zone, and anything below 50 means serious heartburn of the Specter and Chafee variety.)

But fundamentally, the ACU score is based on a flawed model, and we should be careful not to misapply ACU scores. Politics is not uni-dimensional. It's not bi-dimensional. It is not even entirely rational from a technical perspective, so any model relying on simple distributions is going to fail from time to time.

This is one of those times.

Let's look at Inglis. Since losing, Inglis has thrown a temper tantrum against tea partiers, accusing them of racism and demagoguery, and going on Chris Matthews' show as a stooge so Matthews could beat up on conservatives. If this is any indication of how he behaved before the election, then his constituents were right to give him the boot. Inglis voted to ban standard incandescent light bulbs -- hardly a conservative sentiment, and an issue that literally reaches into every home in America and tells people how to live. He voted for TARP, and against a troop surge in Iraq. (Both of those latter issues are debatable on the merits, but one can see where Inglis has transgressed the party line.) And he ran a decidedly negative campaign, which certainly didn't improve his image. In short, Inglis went DC-native, so to speak.

Now, by National Journal's reckoning, Inglis is a 76% Republican, which is still pretty Republican by most standards. But it isn't 93.

And really, that's not even the point. The point is that the ideological distribution curve has broken down in a serious way. Voters, base voters and swing voters, are heavily discounting ideological considerations in favor of candidates who say appealing things about how to address the nation's problems. What people normally think of as "conservative" and "liberal" carries much less weight than it has in previous years.

When politicians lose touch with what the electorate wants, they get axed. That has almost nothing to do with ideology.

So when I see proclamations of everlasting doom because the Republicans nominated some "tea party candidates" here and there, I've got to take that with a grain of salt. Strike that -- a huge, industrial sized salt-lick.

Rove faces reality. Finally.

2010-07-15T12:42:00.000-04:00

Karl Rove has finally discovered and admitted his "biggest mistake", which was "failing to refute charges that Bush lied us into war".

Tell me something I didn't know, Karl. Everybody with a pulse knew this. It was painful to watch the White House briefings every day as nobody (and particularly not Scott McClellan) ever bothered to counter the narrative. It was simply maddening. How could you not have seen that you were being destroyed in the media every single day without ever lifting a finger to defend yourselves?

Does this mean Rove is going back on his previous assessment of 2006, that it had to do with scandal more than Iraq? At what point did Rove have this epiphany?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Potent Quotables: Erskine disses Obamacare

2010-07-15T09:07:00.000-04:00

Erskine Bowles on the impact of Obamacare on the long term fiscal situation:

“It didn’t do a lot to address cost factors in health care. So we’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Erskine Bowles, former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, speaking about the new health law, which was signed into law by Obama this past spring after a nearly year-long fight in Congress.

Bowles, speaking at an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that even with the passage of Obama’s legislation, health care costs are still going to “really eat us alive” unless dramatic changes are made. The commission will submit recommendations on how to fix America’s long term fiscal problems to Congress in December.

Now they tell us.

Trololo redux

2010-07-13T22:50:00.000-04:00

Trololo is the perfect Soviet song -- it has no content.

It's been some time since the "Trololo" video started going viral, but for some reason I was drawn back to it recently.

When I first saw this some months ago, I was of course jarred by the strange aesthetics, both dated and foreign, and the stiffness of the singer's physical presence.

But it is sort of a catchy melody, and the guy does have a good voice. So for whatever reason I watched it again recently, and rather enjoyed it.

And then it occurred to me that this makes an interesting statement about what life was like in the Soviet Union. The song has no lyrics. Nothing to censor. Nothing counter-revolutionary. Nothing to fear. Just a pleasant ditty, performed with a nervous and sterile rigidity.

Steele should resign

2010-07-08T16:15:00.001-04:00

I liked Michael Steele. I really did. But that was then, and this is now.

Commentators like Rush Limbaugh are correct in saying that if Steele were a Democrat, he’d have been afforded some indeterminate number of rhetorical mulligans for his all-too-frequent idiotic remarks. Sorta like the walking gaffe-machine Joe “Big F’ing Deal” Biden, visitor of Indian-accented convenience stores, who for some reason gets to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency without giving anybody in the media too much heartburn. Or Obama, who visited all 57 states during the primary elections, and wants to “spread the wealth around”. Or the late Ted Kennedy’s “Osama Obama” remark (which somehow bizarrely got blamed on Rush Limbaugh) – or that time he killed that lady. Or Murtha. Or Kanjorski. And in those cases (and others), we’re talking about people in actual positions of elective power. Steele, on the other hand, has no power over anybody save RNC employees, and has only the money that private donors afford him.

So the attention being placed on Steele is disproportionate to his actual influence on events. Fair enough.

But I hold Republicans to a higher standard. I think that’s the whole idea behind thinking one political party is better than another. If we routinely overlook remarks by Steele, or Trent Lott’s comment about Strom Thurmond, etc., we lose the moral standing to criticize Democrats. I don’t want to play a hypocritical game of “they did it (too)”. I want clarity and certitude. Politics is not a sport, with team loyalty determined by chance and ephemera. Words and character matter.

As to the actual content of Steele’s remarks, I am appalled at the support he is getting from the likes of Ann Coulter, who previously would not have been caught dead supporting any aspect of Ron Paul’s foreign policy. The war in Afghanistan was no more “Obama’s war” than Iraq was “Bush’s war”. Both wars initially received broadly bipartisan support, and I believe Afghanistan continues to enjoy the support of at least most Republicans. Obama was not even yet a Senator when the US invaded Afghanistan. Afghanistan is even less Obama’s war than Iraq was Bush’s.

So in crucial respects, Steele’s comments were flat wrong. Moreover, they echo the idiotic rhetoric that came from the Left during the Bush years, making them sound all the more nakedly politicized and disingenuous.

Questions about whether we ought to be in Afghanistan – whether we should have gone in the first place, whether it’s still worth it to be there – do represent a legitimate point of view (one with which I vehemently disagree), but Steele is not in a policy making position. As a party leader he ought to stay clear of policy debates, particularly when he strays from the consensus Republican position.

And of course, Steele has made a number of asinine comments, the most ridiculous of which was the idea that he has been treated harshly for his gaffes because he was black.

I can only offer a partial rebuttal of Cynthia Tucker’s recent accusation made on ABC’s This Week that Steele was an affirmative action chairman. It is hardly worth denying that Steele’s race was a plus for his candidacy, but two things must be said about that.

Firstly, the controversy surrounding rival Katon Dawson’s previous membership in a racially exclusive country club surely weighed heavily on the minds of the RNC membership when the contest narrowed to the last run-off. How could Republicans elect a person with such a history (unknowing or not) over somebody who would not have been allowed to join Dawson’s country club because of the color of his skin? Dawson, regardless of his merits, should have disqualified himself early on. Perhaps Saul Anuzis might have been elected.

Secondly, it’s not as though Steele was without his own qualifications. He had been Maryland’s elected Lt. Governor. He had run a law practice. And he had been chairman of the Maryland Republican Party. In short, he had more executive experience than Barack Obama. Steele wasn’t plucked from obscurity because he gave a good speech once or twice and happened to be black – he had come up through the GOP farm system and paid a lot of dues along the way.

But he hasn’t done the job he was elected to do, and worse yet, he makes excuses for his own incompetence. Steele’s continued presence at the RNC is bad for the RNC. For that reason, if for no other, he should resign.

Quote of the Day: 1099

2010-07-08T12:09:00.000-04:00

What crippling bureaucracy?

"For example, if a self-employed individual makes numerous small purchases from an office supply store during a calendar year that total at least $600, the individual must issue a Form 1099 to the vendor and the IRS showing the exact amount of total purchases."

Quote of the Day: Not a Good Trade

2010-07-06T10:30:00.000-04:00

Larry Kudlow:

In a watershed study, former Treasury economists Gary and Aldona Robbins argued a few years ago that tax cuts aimed at capital and business produced the biggest economic benefits. For example, for every tax-cut dollar on capital gains, $10.61 of new GDP is created. For every dollar of accelerated business-investment tax write-offs, $9 of new GDP is created. And for every dollar of corporate tax cuts, $2.76 of new GDP is created.

This bang-for-the-buck analysis contrasts sharply with estimates for increased government spending. According to the White House, every dollar of new government spending creates about $1.50 of new GDP — much weaker than the effects of business tax cuts. And the White House analysis looks like a stretch. The IMF has a model that says every additional dollar of government spending creates only $0.70 of new GDP. So you have to borrow a buck to get 70 cents back. Not a good trade.

More Perot Stuff - Cotton Eye Joe

2010-07-05T22:20:00.000-04:00

Where did they come from, where did they go?

Some random-ish findings about Perot voters...

Here's a better graph of the ideological distributions of 1992 Presidential voters:

You can see the right skew of the Bushies, the left skew/hump of the Clinton voters, and the Perot voters are pretty much right down the center, lining up almost perfectly with the electorate at large.

Where did they come from? The sample size was small for this cross, but basically they were 2-to-1 Bush over Dukakis in 1988:

But, contrary to popular legend that Perot cost papa-Bush the election, Perot voters were very much of the "wrong track" persuasion, and wouldn't have voted for Bush anyway:

Where did they go? The crosses were extremely small for 1996 voters in the ANES who recalled voting for Perot in 1992, but generally speaking they dispersed relatively evenly between Clinton and Dole in 1996, and of course some voted for that old coot Perot again.

(All data from the 1992 and 1996 ANES, weighted to reflect actual Presidential outcomes in those elections.)

Tea Partiers are not Perot-istas

2010-07-02T16:10:00.000-04:00

Despite what Ben Domenech, Ed Gillespie, or anyone else says, the Tea Party is not H. Ross Perot: The Sequel.

It's a tempting thought, but an incorrect one, as WaPo's Dan Balz explored back in April.

Balz cites a lot of figures, but really the argument can really be boiled down to ideology, and it's an open-and-shut case on that front. I went back to the ANES-1992 study* and compared the ideological distribution of the voting population with the Perotistas, and found that they were startlingly similar.

(* - I selected only those respondents who had voted in the 1992 Presidential election, and weighted the Presidential vote variable to reflect the actual result.)

Ideology	Perot Voters	All Voters
Extremely Liberal	1.45	1.88
Liberal	7.25	9.81
Slightly Liberal	15.94	13.42
Moderate	34.78	34.59
Slightly Conservative	25.36	22.2
Conservative	14.49	15.53
Extremely Conservative	0.72	2.58

This produces two almost identical charts:

Unsurprisingly given this ideological distribution, Perot voters were about as likely to identify as Republicans as Democrats.

Compare this to ideological figures from the Winston Group's February survey:

Ideology	RV's (Feb 2010)	Tea Partiers (Feb 2010)
Liberal	20	10
Moderate	45	26
Conservative	33	63

...and Party ID...

Party ID	RV's (Feb 2010)	Tea Partiers (Feb 2010)
Democrat	38	14
Independent	27	24
Republican	33	59

I could spend considerable time criticizing the one-dimensional ideological model and why it's insufficient to describe the Tea Party movement, but it's good enough to show that these are very different movements. The comparisons between the Perot movement and the Tea Party movement certainly bear further examination, but to say that Tea Partiers are the descendants of the Perotistas is simply incorrect.

T-Paw: Had Enough?

2010-06-30T11:08:00.000-04:00

Though he's still off the radar of most major polls, I continue to like Tim Pawlenty's style and substance, and think he has a real shot at the Republican nomination in 2012.

In the recent outpouring of GOP love for Mitch Daniels, several pundits revealed a desire for a wonky, slighly boring executive. Daniels may be the bland but competent technocrat of some conservatives' dreams, but he showed a startling political incompetency with the announcement of a "truce" on social issues. And frankly, "bland but competent technocrat" doesn't sell -- just ask Mitt Romney.

It's not that Republican candidates should emphasize social issues. That is certainly not the case. But neither is it the case that they should run away from them. ("Conservative with a moderate voice".) The "truce" was très gauche because it allowed the likes of Mike Huckabee to inflame the social base, and because it is literally impossible to declare a one-sided truce when ongoing public policy decisions must be made on social issues -- social issues don't just go away because other issues are more pressing.

Pawlenty shares a lot of Daniels' qualities, but leaves a more refined and less somniferous political impression. Given Pawlenty's well-polished appeal to the middle class voter, ability to defuse loaded political language, and his electoral success in territory typically hostile to conservatives, I think he's somebody to watch.

The Fed needs to start publishing M3 again

2010-06-25T21:22:00.001-04:00

The Fed stopped publishing M3 in 2006 because they said it wasn't worth the effort it takes to assemble the data, and that it didn't add significantly more information than M2.

This chart would tend to suggest otherwise.

That chart also suggests that the gold bugs are getting ahead of themselves. If the M3 growth is really negative (i.e. shrinking), then inflation is not imminent. Of course, if M3 is really shrinking, then the prospects for meaningful economic growth in the near future are pretty suspect too.

Are we to believe a website called "shadowstats.com"? The Fed needs to put out some reliable information on this monetary measure for public use.

Didn't I just say that? Bring it on home.

2010-06-23T10:44:00.002-04:00

Pollster Neil Newhouse on the "Wal-Mart Mom" demo:

To appeal to the voting bloc, Newhouse said, parties must show how issues will affect Americans directly and shy away from talk of deficits and government spending.

“You’ve got to personalize the issues rather than talk about the federal budget in Washington,” he said.

In the wake of one of the worst recessions in decades, most of the Wal-Mart Moms said that the economy is the most important issue. According to the study, two-thirds of those polled said that they were dissatisfied with their own financial situation, and almost half admitted that they felt anxious about falling out of their present social class.

I think I pretty much covered that ground on Monday:

As if it needed reiteration, the issue is jobs. Given the failure of the Obama economic message in key districts, and voter focus on national issues, the question is less about whether to nationalize districts like PA-12, but how. Why does it matter that Mark Critz won’t vote to repeal Obamacare? Because it hurts job creation. Why does it matter that Nancy Pelosi controls the legislative agenda? Because everything she passes is detrimental to jobs. Why are earmarks bad? Because $2 million per earmark-job is too much money and hurts private sector job creation.

Local or national in #PA12 ?

2010-06-21T15:16:00.003-04:00

Unfortunately, the debate around PA-12 seems to center around the failure of “nationalizing” the election. This failure occurred in part because Mark Critz was able to portray himself as a moderate on issues like guns, life, and health care, and in part because Critz was able to convince voters that he would model his economic plan after the late John Murtha’s porky earmarks.

In light of the seeming failure of a 1994-esque nationalization strategy, the advice from some corners seems to be to focus on local issues. This addresses the problem too narrowly. The problem is that this is a federal office, and for the most part the only “local” issues revolve around earmark spending for “jobs”. A Republican candidate can not run in a district like PA-12 without selling the message that Congress is hurting job creation, and by challenging the premise that pork spending leads to sustainable jobs.

As if it needed reiteration, the issue is jobs. Given the failure of the Obama economic message in key districts, and voter focus on national issues, the question is less about whether to nationalize districts like PA-12, but how. Why does it matter that Mark Critz won’t vote to repeal Obamacare? Because it hurts job creation. Why does it matter that Nancy Pelosi controls the legislative agenda? Because everything she passes is detrimental to jobs. Why are earmarks bad? Because $2 million per earmark-job is too much money and hurts private sector job creation.

This is in contrast to the bad sort of nationalization. Bad nationalization leads to fighting for the soul of the Republican party in a swing district general election. Bad nationalization is running as a Tea Partier with a flawed Tea Party message rather than adapting the Tea Party issues to a broader language and focus.

For years, underdog candidates campaigned against John Murtha on ethical issues, his closeness to unpopular national Democratic figures like Pelosi, and idiotic remarks Murtha made about the US Marines involved in the Haditha incident. None of it ever worked. Murtha had Federal money for “jobs”. Murtha even called his constituents a bunch of rednecks to no ill effect. (How’s that for a local issue?)

Why should these tactics start working all of a sudden, now that Murtha has shuffled off this mortal coil? Even the flawed PPP poll taken shortly before the special election showed that the Pelosi negatives were not rubbing off on Critz.

I’ve heard political consultants say “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. Well, we’re not doing any explaining, and we’re losing, so best we figure out how to explain things in simple language and well chosen narratives.

The Republican messages and policies on jobs are national. There’s no escaping this essential fact. They need to be translated into local language. Doing so requires challenging the premise that pork spending is a long term winner, and if there’s any cycle in which to promote that message, it’s this one.

(Cross-posted)

Intertubes Roundup: Unions, Kagan, Capital Twittercution

2010-06-18T14:35:00.001-04:00

(1) The UAW wants to "pound" Toyota. Because apparently they don't want any cars to be made in America, regardless of where the company is domiciled.

(2) Why aren't foreign ships helping with the Gulf cleanup? The Obama administration's servitude to unions:

Had Obama instead waived the Jones Act via executive order — as did Pres. George W. Bush three days after Hurricane Katrina — that S.O.S. would have summoned a global armada of mercy. Who knows how many fishing, shrimping, and seafood-processing jobs this would have saved? Instead, thousands of Gulf Coast workers will endure a long march from dormant docks to bustling unemployment lines.
...
“If there is the need for any type of waiver, that would obviously be granted,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs promised on June 10. “But, we’ve not had that problem thus far in the Gulf.”

Problem? What problem?

(3) Despite his vendetta with public sector unions, Chris Christie's approval numbers are hanging in there... barely.

(4) Kagan compared the NRA to the Klan? Looks like it. As the second Obama SCOTUS nominee, Kagan's not getting the scrutiny that Sotomayor got despite the presence of plenty of objectionable material.

(5) Hey, I'm for capital punishment, but this is inappropriate: execution decision announced on Twitter. (h/t)

(6) Original Tea Partier -- Palin didn't not inhale:

Palin has admitted to smoking when it was legal for personal use in Alaska, saying she "can't...say that I never inhaled." The state recriminalized the drug in 2006.

Confirming my blog naming decision

2010-06-17T17:14:00.000-04:00

This sort of political ad would probably do well in my part of Pennsylvania.