Category Archives: Politics

Of style and substance (abuse)

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Man, people say the Ron Paul “Paul-bots” are obsessive, but checking out Hugh Hewitt’s blog the past couple of times makes me think there’s been some kind of Rom-bot Invasion of the Party Snatchers. There’s a new post every 17 minutes defending Mitt Romney or blasting McCain, or both, and absolutely nothing else. Even a headline suggestive of an economics story is written in terms of what it means to Romney’s candidacy. If we knew the world was going to end in 3 hours Hugh’s headline would be “Apocalypse snatches victory from Mitt’s grasp at the last moment.”

Oh well, Mitt seems like a decent sort. If it’s between him and McCain I’d vote for Romney, or some 6th or 7th party candidate, before I’d vote for McCain. Or maybe I’ll just go get a tooth filled instead. This race just isn’t that interesting or amusing to me.

Not like the other side of the fence where The Big O is facing off against the Big Uh-Oh. Do you remember back in 8th or 9th grade when people would start shouting about a “girl-fight” and you’d push your way through the crowd to get a good view — and then start pushing your way back out again after getting hit with a handful of hair? Man, girls fight nasty and yet everyone assumes they’re so much more refined and cultured than boys. Just try to look away, though. Similarly Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton race around trying to convince the Dem’s flotilla of special interest groups that he or she is the biggest victim and worthy of their vote. It’s as compelling as watching “Real Life Stories of the ER”, without that annoying message warning of graphic scenes. Plus there’s always the chance of seeing Bill Clinton wag his, um, finger at us again. Good times.

Then, just as you think the story is all played out, there’s a shocking twist like Teddy Kennedy endorsing Obama. That reminded me of another episode from my younger days. Ever play “Risk”, the game of world domination? Do you remember the visceral thrill you got when one of the players from a strategic alliance that had been cleaning up the board suddenly turned on his partner and struck from the rear? Yeah, you knew it was inevitable but it still gave you a pleasant shiver. This was even better than John Kerry forsaking his running mate Edwards a couple of weeks ago to jump on the Obama wagon. I can just hear Obama saying “Thanks, John, now would you mind not standing so close to me when the cameras are clicking?” I didn’t see the Kennedy endorsement coming, though, at least not this soon. I don’t know, maybe Ted thought Obama was an Irish name?

Speaking of alliances, some are saying that the distant third place Democrat candidate John Edwards is in line to be Obama’s attorney general. Wow, a trial lawyer and union puppet as head of the Justice Department? He’d make Halliburton look like a couple of neighborhood kids opening a lemonade stand.

About that hole burning in my pocket…

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Woot! Free money from the government!

Hmmm, wonder where they got it? Maybe someone accidentally left the printing presses on overnight at the Mint.

The proposed “stimulus” sounds kind of dubious to me. Kind of like pouring some Heet into your carburetor; you get a quick roar and a flash, maybe a puff of smoke from the engine and then it’s gone. If there isn’t any gas in the tank to begin with you’re not going anywhere.

It’s hard to believe $150 billion can disappear as quickly, and with as little effect, as moth pee evaporating off a light bulb, but a little extra one-time disposable income isn’t going to encourage people to save or invest, which is what’s really needed if you want to get the engine running again.

Oh, don’t worry, I’ll take the money, alright. And any leftover cheese if the government’s still got any. It’s just hard to think of what to spend it on as the value of the money is going to depreciate even as it’s still in the mail to me. I think the wise Reverend Mother, also known as “The Finance Minister” around our house hit on the best (if most ironic) use for the almost intangible money:

Buy gold.

Bumpersuckers

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Thanks to Gary at The Llama Butchers for pointing me toward Atomic Trousers’ fisking of the top 10 worst liberal bumper stickers.

If you’re wondering how you can fisk something one to five words long it simply means you haven’t been paying attention. Here’s one of the 10:

“Remember Katrina. Fight Global Warming” – Fight it with what? Nunchucks? Me attacking global warming like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, you driving a Prius or the U.S. signing the Kyoto Protocol all have the same effect on changing the earth’s temperature: zippo. I started mocking all the angles on this bumper sticker and it started getting too long.

Biofuel me once, shame on you…

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Don’t like the opportunistic, economically-flawed, even counter-productive rush to biofuels? You’re not alone, though you might be surprised who shares your concerns.

Oxfam International, a social justice, anti-poverty organization has released a report condemning the EU’s biofuel mandates as not only being unproductive, but downright nasty:

EU proposals will make it mandatory by 2020 for ten per cent of all member states’ transport fuels to come from biofuels. In order to meet the substantial increase in demand, the EU will have to import biofuels made from crops like sugar cane and palm oil from developing countries. But the rush by big companies and governments in countries such as Indonesia, Colombia, Brazil, Tanzania and Malaysia to win a slice of the ‘EU biofuel pie’ threatens to force poor people from their land, destroy their livelihoods, lead to the exploitation of workers and hurt the availability and affordability of food.

“In the scramble to supply the EU and the rest of the world with biofuels, poor people are getting trampled. The EU proposals as they stand will exacerbate the problem. It is unacceptable that poor people in developing countries should bear the cost of questionable attempts to cut emissions in Europe,” said Robert Bailey from Oxfam.

Biofuels may offer the potential to reduce poverty by increasing jobs and markets for small farmers, and by providing cheap renewable energy for local use, but the huge plantations emerging to supply the EU pose more threats than opportunities for poor people. The problem will only get worse as the scramble to supply intensifies unless the EU introduces safeguards to protect land rights, livelihoods, workers rights and food security.

EU member states agreed that the ten per cent target must be reached sustainably, but Oxfam warns that the current proposals contain no standards on the social or human impact.

“The EU set its biofuel target without checking the impact on people and the environment. The EU must include safeguards to ensure that the rights and livelihoods of people in producing countries are protected. Without these, the ten per cent target should be scrapped and the EU should go back to the drawing board,” said Bailey.

“Let’s be clear, biofuels are not a panacea – even if the EU is able to reach the ten per cent target sustainably, and Oxfam doubts that it can, it will only shave a few per cent of emissions off a continually growing total.”

Published reports show that as much as 5.6 million square kilometres of land – an area more than ten times the size of France – could be in production of biofuels within 20 years in India, Brazil, Southern Africa and Indonesia alone. The UN estimates that 60 million people worldwide face clearance from their land to make way for biofuel plantations. Many end up in slums in search of work, others on the very plantations that have displaced them with poor pay, squalid conditions and no worker rights. Women workers are routinely discriminated against and often paid less then men.

You can read the entire report on Oxfam’s site. While there’s a certain amount of “World to end; women and minorities hardest hit” perspective, it’s an interesting take on an issue that many people, despite differing political views, still sense is profoundly wrong-headed.

HT: Amy Ridenour’s National Center Blog.

The black days of October

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Twenty years ago this month the Twins won their first World Series and my wife and I were married. Stellar events to be sure, but in the last week has been a lot said and written about Black Monday — October 19, 1987 — the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 500 points (don’t blame me, I was out of the country on my honeymoon).

Then, just a few days later, another dark day — as noted by this morning’s Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1987 that the United States Senate rejected the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork on a 58-to-42 vote. Bork was one of the leaders of a judicial theory called “original intent,” which is the idea that Supreme Court justices can only base their decisions on what the framers of the constitution originally intended. If the constitution doesn’t mention a “right to privacy” then there is no such thing as a “right to privacy.” This idea was controversial, but Bork decided to enter the debate head on, and he openly discussed his constitutional philosophy with the senators. Democrats portrayed him as a radical, and when the final vote of the full Senate came on this day in 1987, Bork was rejected by 58 to 42. Republicans have since argued that Bork was the target of a smear campaign, and they began using his last name as a verb, saying that they wanted to prevent future nominees from getting “borked.” The word “bork” was recently added to Webster’s dictionary, defined as, “[Seeking] to obstruct a political appointment or selection, also to attack a political opponent viciously.” Robert Bork said, “My name became a verb, and I regard that as one form of immortality.”

Several years ago I read Bork’s “Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.” As the two parts of the title suggest, I found the book an interesting juxtaposition of being both acerbicly entertaining and accessibly academic. Here’s one quote that describes the author’s life path:

In many ways, I understand the Sixties generation because at that stage of life, I reacted similarly. Suburban, middle-class life seemed stifling. Dixieland jazz was my rock and roll. All night partying was my escape, political radicalism my protest. The superintendent of schools in a heavily Republican suburb had to be brought in to prevent me from running an editorial in the high school newspaper calling for the nationalization of industry. Denunciations of bourgeois values rolled easily off my tongue. Fortunately, mine was not a large generation and very few of my high school classmates-none to be precise-felt the same way. There was no critical mass. By the time I got to the University of Chicago, where there were student radicals, I had been in the Marine Corps, an organization well known for teaching the reality principle to its recruits; and the Chicago school of free market economists educated me out of my dreams of socialism. I was fortunate; the Sixties generation was not.

Maybe not so “far and wee…” after all

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Courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac, yesterday was the birthday of poet e.e. cummings, known for his unusual punctuation and his way of arranging words and spaces on a page to create a rhythm for his poems. Less well known is that he was also frozen out by the literary and academic communities for being “politically incorrect”:

It’s the birthday of poet E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894), who became interested in communism as a young man and traveled to Russia to see it firsthand. He was horrified to find the theaters and museums were full of propaganda, and the people were scared to even talk to each other in public. Everyone was miserable. Cummings went home and wrote about the experience, comparing Russia to Dante’s Inferno.

His view of communism was not popular in the literary world at the time, and magazines suddenly began refusing to publish his work. For the next two decades, he had a hard time publishing his books, and he got terrible reviews when he did. Critics thought his exotic arrangements of words on the page were silly, and they said he wrote like an adolescent. Then, in 1952, his friend Archibald MacLeish got Cummings a temporary post at Harvard, giving a series of lectures. Instead of standing behind the lectern, Cummings sat on the stage, read his poetry aloud, and talked about what it meant to him. The faculty members were embarrassed by his earnestness, but the undergraduates adored him and came to his lectures in droves. He began traveling and giving readings at universities across the country, even though he suffered from terrible back pain, and had to wear a metal brace that he called an “iron maiden.” He loved performing and loved the applause, and the last 10 years of his life were the happiest.

E. E. Cummings said, “If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little — somebody who is obsessed by Making.”

Today our theaters and museums (and Nobel nominating committees) are full of propaganda and things such as so-called Fairness Doctrines and Hate Crimes proposals still try to make people afraid to talk to one another. And if your views aren’t acceptable to the gatekeepers at the Ivory Towers you won’t get invited or, if you do, you get food thrown on you.

It’s nice to see how far we’ve come.

But don’t you dare question their patriotism…

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MoveOn.org takes out full page ad in the New York Times: General Petraeus or General Betray Us?

True North has this, via Captain Ed and Colonel Joe Repya.

No more stalling for Senator Craig

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Now that Larry Craig has belatedly done the honorable thing and resigned from the Senate we are spared the torturous explanations to the effect that he is not gay but was merely tapping his foot in time to the Pat Boone tunes he was listening to on his iPod. Nor will we have to hear that in reality he has silently suffered from Restless Leg Syndrome (as a result of childhood trauma) and has now realized the need to place himself under a doctor’s care and hopes other sufferers will be inspired by his example to get the help they need before it’s too late and their own actions are horribly and publicly misconstrued.

My objection to Craig’s behavior isn’t so much because he was allegedly cruising for gay sex (not that there’s anything wrong with that. of course) in a public restroom, but that he was doing so in violation of his wedding vows. Whether it happens in the men’s room of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport or in a windowless hallway outside the Oval Office study, infidelity is sleazy and despicable. How can you trust anyone who has sworn to protect the Constitution against “all enemies foreign and domestic” on behalf of millions of people he’ll never meet when he’s already disregarded the “love, honor and cherish” promise to someone he’ll have to face the rest of his life?

The most disappointing thing about the whole Craig episode and its coverage is that it is the gay-sex angle is what is sensationalized and not the faithlessness. Strangely, in today’s supposedly metrosexual, Will & Grace, Queer As (just plain) Folk, just-another-form-of-normal culture it’s the gay angle that gets the Man-bites-dog treatment while the marital infidelity aspect is apparently so common as to be unremarkable.

And really, aren’t all of these scandals becoming so common that they barely justify the shock treatment in the media? It’s looking as if the page-abusing, hooker-visiting, perv-inducing legislators in D.C. are the norm and the front-page, 24-hour-news-cycle treatment should be reserved for the men and women who don’t lower themselves. It’s to the point where saying, “A pox on both your houses” isn’t a curse of disgust but a prophetic statement.

People who don’t live in green houses shouldn’t throw stones

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From EckerNet:

Look over the descriptions of the following two houses and see if you can tell which belongs to an environmentalist:

HOUSE # 1:
A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern “snow belt,” either. It’s in the South.

HOUSE # 2:
Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every “green” feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

…

HOUSE # 1 (20 room energy guzzling mansion) is outside of Nashville, Tennessee. It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist (and filmmaker) Al Gore.

HOUSE # 2 (model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas. Also known as “the Texas White House,” it is the private residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.

So whose house is gentler on the environment? Indeed, for Mr. Gore, it’s truly “an inconvenient truth.”

This comparison is confirmed by Snopes.

Of course, George Bush can get by with a smaller house since he’s got that roomy second residence in Washington, D.C. — which was what Al really wanted all along.