Chasing Jefferson

Rush Is Wrong—But He’s Not Alone

2012-03-05T05:00:00.003-08:00

Photo source: Getty Images--http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-buzz/post/rush-limbaugh-calls-georgetown-student-sandra-fluke-a-slut-for-advocating-contraception/2012/03/02/gIQAvjfSmR_blog.html?tid=pm_local_pop

Will you recognize me?

Call my name, or walk on by?

Rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling

Down, down, down, down

—Simple Minds, Don’t You (Forget About Me)

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE HAS A FRANK DISCUSSION ABOUT SEX AND SEXUAL PRACTICES. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

Let me say it right up front, so there’s no mistaking where I’m coming from:

Rush is wrong on this, and he should put the shovel down before he buries the movement.

Last week, Rush was discussing the Obamacare contraception mandate, when he turned his attention to Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student who was granted a special hearing audience by Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to testify about Georgetown’s (a nominally Catholic university) policy on contraception. According to Ms. Fluke, she and her fellow students pay as much as $1,000 a year for contraception, because Georgetown’s student insurance plan doesn’t cover it. She later characterized her statements as “speaking about the healthcare we need.”

Apparently someone needs healthcare, if the ad warnings about the effects of that little blue pill lasting longer than 4 hours are to be believed.

The legitimate point Rush was trying to make here is what the hell are they doing at Georgetown that they need $1,000 a year for birth control?!?! Just by way of example, at condomdepot.com—which offers free shipping, by the way—you can order a case of 1,000 Durex condoms for $325. Which really begs the question just how much sex Ms. Fluke and her fellow students are having that birth control is costing them over $1,000 a year? Assuming that, as cost-conscious students, they are using the most economical method available for this “healthcare” upon which they insist, at $0.33 apiece this condom option would require the use of 3,076 condoms in the course of a year to get to an annual cost of $1,000. That’s just under 8.5 condoms . . . every . . . single . . . day.

I don’t know about you, but I’m comfortable enough in my own skin to admit that I’m simply not that kind of an—er—athlete.

Of course, neither are they, which either tells us that Ms. Fluke lied to Congress when she testified that she and her classmates are spending upwards of $1,000 a year on birth control “healthcare,” or—more likely—her point isn’t really about the cost, but about her ability to make someone else pay for her to be able to have sex in the way she wants to have it (i.e., with a more expensive and presumably more convenient birth control mechanism than the most cost-effective one available). THIS is the point Rush was trying to make.

Unfortunately, Rush let his zeal for entertainment hyperbole get the better of him, and in the process of making this point he called Ms. Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.” And he was wrong, wrong, wrong to do so, and he has since apologized. Let me repeat, so we’re perfectly clear:

Rush Limbaugh was wrong to call Ms. Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

Frankly, I hate it when he does things like that, because he diminishes his otherwise legitimate message, and hurts the cause. There’s no place in public debate for that kind of vulgar name-calling, and Rush has been rightly called out all over the Leftist media, by the Democrats in Congress, and by the White House for it. And I have now called him out for it in this space.

Now, having said that . . .

I have a challenge for some of you on the Left (and I know there are a few of you who actually read this space). Many of you are simply beyond any help, and I accept that. You’re too naïve, or too ideologically blinded (or both) to be turned. I get it. But I also know there are some of you who are intelligent, basically rational—albeit perhaps misguided—adults who disagree with me on some things, and it’s really you I’m addressing.

I want you to show the intellectual honesty and the temerity to stand up and acknowledge the double standard that’s at play here.

Rusty, what are you talking about?

Where were all these self-righteous defenders of civility in political discourse on June 10, 2009, when David Letterman went on national television and accused Sarah Palin of looking like a “slutty flight attendant”? Huh? Worse, Letterman went on to drag Governor Palin’s 14 year old daughter Willow into the muck, guffawing that during a Yankees game she was “knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” That’s not funny, and it’s not cute, but somehow it was all OK, because his crass remarks were directed at a conservative woman (who, by the way, hadn’t gone to Capitol Hill to make her sexual habits an issue, unlike Ms. Fluke).

What if, say, Dennis Miller did a monologue bit suggesting that one of the Obama girls was knocked up by Russell Simmons in a White House bathroom during one of the Obamas’ lavish Hollywood fundraising parties? Jay Carney, probably Obama himself, the women of The View, and the Leftist media in general would have an anyeurism, and you know it. Yet, Letterman’s comments met with little more than the chirping of crickets.

Where were all the name-calling police May 24, 2010, when MSNBC’s Ed Schultz called conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham a “right wing slut?” Actually, the truth is since only about 12 people ever even see Schultz’ show, it’s likely that no one who matters heard him do it, but the point remains if we’re going to say it’s uncivil to call someone a slut in the course of public political discussion, where were the objectors this time? To the contrary, Barbara Walters went on The View and blew it off, joking that co-host Joy Behar has called her a slut on the show.

Oh, I guess it’s all OK, then.

Where were these people on June 18, 2008, when The Slate’s Troy Patterson, after raving about Michele Obama’s sleeveless dress during an appearance on The View, then in almost the next sentence referred to The View's conservative co-host Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s one-sleeve cocktail dress during the very same episode was “tread[ing] a fine line between merely inappropriate and plainly sluttish”?

Where were these people November 21, 2011, when Michele Bachmann was introduced on the Jimmy Fallon Show, with Fallon’s house band, The Roots playing a song called “Lyin’ Ass Bitch”? Although the band only played the chorus, the song’s lyrics refer to a woman as a “slut trash can bitch,” a fact presumably known to the band and others "in" on the "joke."

Classy.

In fairness, NBC issued a belated apology, and the drummer claimed it was “tongue in cheek"—kind of like Larry Doyle after-the-fact hiding behind the “it’s satire, don’t you have a sense of humor” defense after his vulgar belittling of Catholics.

I am in wholehearted agreement that there is no place for the crassness and vulgarity of calling Ms. Fluke a slut, and you on the Left are right to condemn Rush for doing that. But you can’t have it both ways, and your indignation becomes disingenuous when you are repeatedly and totally silent—if not egging them on, like Barbara Walters—when the target is a conservative woman.

So I challenge you on the Left to speak up, or at least be open about the hypocrisy and double-standard we're applying when it comes to calling women on the Left a "slut" vs. women on the Right.

The Religion Of Intolerance

2012-03-02T05:00:00.001-08:00

Photo source: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/04/world/la-fg-afghan-koran-riots-20110404

President Whitmore: What do you want us to do?

Captured Alien: Die. Die.

—Bill Pullman as President Thomas Whitmore and Gary Hecker as the voice of the Captured Alien in Independence Day

Some of you are going to accuse me of being a racist or an Islamophobe. At this point, I don’t care.

Many of you are aware that my daughters and I study martial arts. As is typical of many of the Asian styles, our school has a custom of bowing as one enters/leaves the training area, and we begin and end class with a series of bows to the national and state flags, and to our instructors. As is repeatedly emphasized, this is not a religious exercise, and it is not a form of worship, nor is it a gesture of submission. It is done as a show of respect—note that when we bow to our instructors, they are bowing back to us—for the instructors and for the process. We bow to our training partners before and after we spar and do other drills and exercises. We bow to our weapons and other tools before and after we use them. It is more akin to a military salute, and is considered a matter of basic etiquette. We are taught this from our very first individual evaluation prior to joining the class; everyone knows it’s part of the deal before they sign up.

The other day I was waiting for my adult class to begin, and the children in the class before mine were taking a water break. One young man finished his water and headed back onto the mat without bowing. It is very common for the beginner kids to need a reminder now and then, and as an adult in uniform and of a significantly higher belt rank, I provided that reminder. The child looked at me incredulously and said, “I don’t bow in.” I was a bit taken aback at the audacity of the response, and told him that no, we need to bow in. At that point one of the assistant instructors came over to me shaking me off, and it was then that I noticed the young man’s father—with the never-been-trimmed beard typical of Muslim men (interestingly, however, otherwise in Western business garb, so he’s apparently perfectly comfortable enjoying the economic benefits of being in the U.S.) glaring at me, and it became clear:

He’s been told he doesn’t have to bow in due to some sort of religious objection.

Not coincidentally, I expect, when it came time for the kids to close their class with a game of dodgeball, that same young man failed to honor the boundaries of the game, and failed to leave the floor after the limit of being hit twice (and thus being “out”). It was apparent that he’s been taught he’s special, and that the rules that govern the rest of us simply don’t apply to him. At least in part, the justification for that exceptionalism is the fact that he’s Muslim.

I am aware of the dangers of over-generalizing and stereotyping. But huge numbers of these people simply make no effort to get along with the rest of the world. I’m not asking them to change their faith, or adopt Western vices. But I do think a dose of tolerance for others and maybe a giant chill-pill is in order.

Witness the last two weeks’ worth of violent riots in Afghanistan, including the cold-blooded execution-style murder of two U.S. officers, and two more U.S. soldiers killed Wednesday—all because some Korans were mistakenly burned. I’m not excusing the burning of the Korans; that’s inappropriate and shouldn’t have happened any more than our military forces should be burning Bibles, Torahs, Smritis, or any other religious texts or artifacts. That’s just a matter of basic decency. But does failing in this regard really merit two weeks of riots and killings?

And you thought your two-year-old was bad.

Yet—predictably—there’s Obama falling all over himself to apologize for the burning, and even in the wake of yet more Americans being killed in the rioting over this perceived slight, he persists in claiming that his policy of appeasement has helped calm things down. But what this administration can’t seem to grasp is there’s no appeasing these folks. The rioting in Afghanistan is not an isolated incident, and it can’t be explained as simply re-directed frustration over continuing U.S. military presence. Michelle Malkin has long documented the history of what she calls “the religion of perpetual outrage.” It’s not just burning Korans. It’s cartoon depictions of Mohammed. It’s teachers naming teddy bears. It’s giving impoverished children international-themed soccer balls emblazoned with national flags—including the flag of Saudi Arabia, which bears the name of Allah. It’s sneaker and ice cream logos that, if you spend enough time with your hookah, you can convince yourself they resemble the Arabic script for “Allah.” The fact of the matter is there’s no living with these people, because they launch into a murderous rampage every time anyone sneezes.

Silence! I kill you!

Everything is an earth-stopping insult to the Islamists; but don’t you dare try to apply the same concept the other direction. Recall the story I brought to you several months ago about the Muslim students who voluntarily enrolled in a Catholic college, only then to sue over the displays of crucifixes. Or the virulent cries of racism when states attempt to ban the application of foreign law in their courts, which can only be understood as an insistence that U.S. courts apply Sharia instead of local state and U.S. federal law. It’s always about the world altering to fit them. They make no effort to assimilate, and they allow no accommodation for others. Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani—a convert to Christianity—is sentenced to death in Iran for apostasy (abandoning Islam), and apart from a tepid Congressional resolution, the whole world basically yawns; but raise zoning and basic decency objections over the building of a mosque at Ground Zero, and all Hell breaks loose over your intolerance and bigotry.

Hate-monger.

Blame it on a small fringe segment of radicals if you want. Tell me I’m over-generalizing. Fine. But at some point the Islamic community as a whole has to be held accountable. They want to claim Islam is a religion of tolerance and peace, that the violent radicals are only a tiny minority and not representative of the whole. Well, why, then, hasn’t this small group of non-representative radicals long ago been shouted down and bottled up? Where are all of the voices of peace and tolerance (or at least rational adults) when mobs of thousands go on a weeks-long homicidal rampage because a few books were mistakenly burned (you'd like to think that Allah is a big enough boy to take care of Himself)? They know who these people are and where they are—at some point the silence and inaction of the so-called peaceful majority can only be understood as complicity in the violent radicals’ conduct, if not outright endorsement of it.

The fact is these people can’t be appeased, because at the end of the day they want nothing more than all infidels—that’s you—gone. And an apology to them is nothing but a sure sign of weakness. They understand nothing but force and strength, and paraphrasing a former Middle East resident appearing on Sean Hannity’s radio show earlier this week, anyone who approaches the negotiating table first is only negotiating the terms of their own surrender.

That’s not a discussion I’m interested in having.

*********

Editor's Note: We are deeply saddened at the sudden and untimely passing of Andrew Breitbart. Our condolences and prayers go out to his family and friends. The conservative movement has lost a great one.

The Last Prejudice

2012-03-01T05:48:00.001-08:00

Photo source: http://www.planetware.com/picture/vatican-city-st-peters-basilica-scv-i749.htm

Woltz: Let me lay it on the line for you and your boss, whoever he is! Johnny Fontane will never get that movie! I don't care how many dago guinea wop greaseball goombahs come out of the woodwork!

Hagen: I'm German-Irish.

Woltz: Well, let me tell you something, my kraut-mick friend, I'm gonna make so much trouble for you, you won t know what hit you!

—John Marley as Jack Woltz and Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen in The Godfather

There’s a reason I don’t read The Huffington Post, and I almost missed this one as a result.

It seems that last week THP ran a piece by Larry Doyle entitled "The Jesus-Eating Cult of Rick Santorum." As if the title itself weren’t disgusting enough, in the piece Doyle accuses Catholics of cannibalism, terrorism, and institutionalized pedophilia, and accuses Pope Benedict XVI of being a “‘former’ Nazi” (internal quotation marks Doyle’s). Doyle further extrapolates from Santorum’s open connection to the Church a secret plan to “supplant Christianity as our official national religion”—indeed, twice in the piece Doyle purports to draw a distinction between “Christians” and Catholics. I suppose he has license to do this because he’s a former Catholic himself.

Taken to task for his remarks, Doyle issued what was expressly a non-apology, and attempted to cloak himself under the banner of “satire” that is somehow directed to Rick Santorum’s candidacy. Apparently, we’re already supposed to know that Doyle is a former writer for The Simpsons (I didn’t—shame on me), and that we should therefore automatically understand that anything he pens is both inherently funny and intended to be construed as satire. He then challenged us to look up what “satire” is.

Well, I did:

sat·ire (săʹtīŕ) n. 1.a. A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.

Hm.

The first element of “satire” is that it is an attack on human vice or folly. What human vice or folly, exactly, is Doyle attacking with Catholics? Is reception of the Holy Eucharist a vice or folly that should be held up to ridicule? And if so, what, exactly, does that have to do with Rick Santorum’s campaign for President?

Rusty, what about the Crusades and the Inquisition?

Presumably, Doyle’s vague attacks on “bloody jihads” and “reigns of terror” are intended to refer to the Crusades and the Inquisitions, to which I respond: what about them? The Crusades ended about 800 years ago, and in any event were expeditions of liberation after Muslim armies overran the Holy Land. The Inquisitions were programs intended to root out heresy—not unlike the witch trials carried out by Protestants in the Colonies in the 17^th Century; shall we go after the Anglicans and Presbyterians, too?—and while in some instances the inquisitors occasionally regrettably resorted to torture, that practice was common in all tribunals of the time. In point of fact, contrary to popular belief very few were actually tortured and killed during the Inquisitions; that is not to excuse the practice, but to explain that the actual scale of the abuses is invariably blown far out of proportion from reality. And again, for all intents and purposes, the Inquisitions ended hundreds of years ago. Neither the Crusades nor the Inquisitions have anything to do with Rick Santorum’s Presidential campaign, nor are they even currently relevant. If the purpose of “satire” is typically to prompt a change in the behavior being ridiculed, what possible purpose is served by Doyle dragging back up practices that have already long ago ended?

What about the priest sex-abuse scandal?

Again, what about it? Some in the Church, particularly in the U.S., have had some obvious failings, and the Church as an organization has in some cases not taken appropriate measures to deal with these issues. The fact that some people in the Church have fallen down—however seriously or regrettably—is no basis to condemn the institution or its teachings. But again, more to the point, Doyle’s raising of the issue has nothing to do with Rick Santorum or the body of Catholics as a whole; would he have all 70-some million U.S. Catholics fired from their jobs because a handful of priests committed the sin of pedophilia? If the sex-abuse scandal somehow disqualifies Catholics from public office, I suppose Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry should resign right now—come to think of it, that IS a good idea.

The second element of “satire” is that it employs irony, derision (laughing in scorn), or wit (cleverly amusing). In short, it is a means of drawing attention to a shortcoming by poking fun at it. But what’s funny (or witty, ironic, or derisive) about accusing present-day Catholics of participating in “centuries” of “bloody jihads”? What’s amusing about claiming that the Catholic Mass is a “barbaric ritual” in which a “black-robed cleric” (false, by the way; I have NEVER seen a priest celebrate Mass in black robes, and I can only assume that as a former altar boy Doyle knows better, meaning he’s deliberately mischaracterized the Mass to create a false impression that it is some sort of Satanic ritual) “casts a spell.” Where is the wit in falsely accusing the Pope of being a Nazi—not as in “you’re an overly strict disciplinarian,” but literally “you were an active member of Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist Party back in Germany”? Doyle’s commentary is littered with deliberate falsehoods, and is in no sense humorous or clever to anyone other than those who think Bill Maher is funny and that covering the Virgin Mary in feces is “art”—it’s just mean and spiteful.

Doyle has deliberately taken out of context statements Santorum has made on the campaign trail, and used them as a springboard to spew virulently anti-Catholic nonsense. Doyle pretends to be chastising Santorum for his commentary on President Obama pursuing a “false theology,” as though Senator Santorum was unfairly demeaning Obama’s religious faith. But when you hear what Santorum actually said in context—as he has repeatedly explained—it is painfully clear that he was not talking about religion, but worldview. That is what he meant when he said “not a theology based on the Bible”; he wasn’t saying Obama’s religion was non-Biblical (it isn’t, but that’s another discussion). Santorum was qualifying his own use of the term “theology” to say that as he was using it in that context, he didn’t mean “religion” in a deity worship sense, but in a blind ideology sense.

Of course, facts don’t matter when it comes to Catholic-bashing, and somehow Doyle gets away with it. Can you imagine the reaction from the Anti-Defamation League if you published a similar work trashing Judaism? How many riots and murders would CAIR and other Muslim organizations sponsor—better yet, how many Imams would issue fatwas against your life—if you published a piece like Doyle’s trashing Islam? So where are the Presidential apologies and calls to cool down the rhetoric? Where’s the indignation from the Leftist media? Where are the civil rights lawsuits from the ACLU? You publish a piece ridiculing the beliefs and practices of other religious groups, and you’re a bigot and a racist. But you do it to the Catholics, and well, we just don’t have a sense of humor.

I am not one of those who thinks a candidate’s faith is off-limits; anything that informs how one thinks and views the world is fair game in a Presidential race, particularly when you’ve put your faith out front as Santorum has. In that sense, if issues like abortion and same-sex relations are important to you, Santorum’s Catholicism is relevant, because it gives insight into how he is likely to think about those issues. Likewise, if national security is your issue, then Barack Obama’s long-time attendance with a pastor prone to spewing “God d#mn America” and blaming the U.S. for 9/11 is germane to understanding how he might react to foreign conflict issues as President.

You want to criticize Rick Santorum and say his views as a Catholic on abortion are wrong and therefore you can’t support him for President, fine. But if Doyle's piece is to be understood as legitimate political satire, where's his political point? He doesn't have one. Doyle’s caustic ridiculing of the faith of 70 million Americans—the largest religious denomination in the U.S., comprising roughly a quarter of the population—makes no substantive political point, and it serves no constructive purpose.

It is nothing more than a vile perpetuation of the last acceptable prejudice.

I Hope We Live To Tell The Tale

2012-02-27T05:00:00.002-08:00

Image source: http://hersheybearshockey.blogspot.com/2011/10/game-preview-bears-vs-norfolk.html

Shout, shout

Let it all out

These are the things

I can do without

Come on

—Tears for Fears, Shout

With all the recent obsession over condoms, you may have missed this one, which I suspect is exactly how the Dems hoped it would play. That's OK; I've got your back on these things.

But let's keep our eye on the ball.

Week before last, the L.A. Times recounted the tale of the Genesis Solar Project, a huge solar farm being constructed in a Southern California desert. Genesis received a partial Department of Energy guarantee on an $852 million loan back in August.

Don’t look now, but there’s trouble in green energy paradise. Again.

Construction of the farm has yet to be completed, and at this point is held up indefinitely. It seems in their rush to meet deadlines imposed as a condition of their DOE loan guarantee, planners missed a couple of things. One, construction activities interfered with the native habitat of something called the kit fox. Dead foxes started turning up all over the site, and after efforts to harass the animals into moving—where’s PETA when you need them—failed, it was determined that distemper brought about by the construction disturbances was killing the foxes off. So, in essence, this “green energy” project is in fact creating an environmental problem.

I’m drowning in the irony of that one.

The other—likely more serious—problem in terms of the project’s ability to go forward is that excavators discovered that the farm is being constructed on the site of an ancient human settlement. The Colorado River Indian Tribes have a reservation near the site, and they, along with other Native American groups, are now seeking to delay or even stop the project altogether. Meanwhile, the project stands incomplete and generating no revenue. If they have to cut too much acreage out in order to accommodate the Indian and environmental concerns, the project will become—wait for it—uneconomical.

Shocking.

This, of course, is just the latest in the constantly growing string of disasters flowing from the Obama administration’s Quixotic quest to create an industry that does not exist, to provide products no one wants, at a price no one will pay. Let’s review.

Solyndra—Bankrupt, August 2011

Of course, the poster child for the green energy train wreck is Solyndra, the California-based manufacturer of solar panels, over 1/3 owned by Obama mega-fundraiser George Kaiser. Solyndra was the first to receive “green energy” startup loan guarantees from the Department of Energy, netting $535 million in a deal that was rushed through over the objections of financial analysts. The DOE restructured that debt in early 2011 to move taxpayers behind the private equity holders like Kaiser in the creditor queue. After there simply wasn’t enough market demand for its product, Solyndra declared bankruptcy in August 2011—almost to the day that the financial analysts who objected to the loan said it would—and later sold its assets on the cheap to a new outfit also partly owned by Kaiser. So basically the President's buddies got to finance their startup with taxpayer money, moved to the front of the line to get their own money out when it went belly-up, then took the assets for pennies on the dollar, leaving the rest of us stuck with the check.

Ener1—Bankrupt, January 2012

Ener1 was a New York-based parent company of a firm that received $118 million in federal “stimulus” grants to produce electric car batteries in part for the Fisker Karma (see below), a deal that ultimately fell through. Ener1 filed for bankruptcy last month.

UPDATE 2/27/12: No sooner did I post this, than I see that A123, who won the Karma contract out from under Ener1 on the strength of some $390 million in federal subsidies, is laying workers off, despite hefty pay increases for its executives.

Beacon Power—Bankrupt, October 2011

Beacon was a Massachusetts-based manufacturer of energy storage technology. It received $43 million in Department of Energy loans. Beacon declared bankruptcy in October 2011, saying it had been unable to obtain additional private investment (one wonders why). It received bankruptcy court approval in December to begin selling off its assets.

Evergreen Solar—Bankrupt, August 2011/Now owned by the Chinese

Evergreen was a Massachusetts-based manufacturer of solar panels. It received government grants including an estimated $5.3 million in federal “stimulus” money. Evergreen went bankrupt in August 2011, and in November sold its assets to a Chinese firm.

Spectrawatt—Bankrupt, August 2011/Now owned by the Canadians

Spectrawatt was a New York-based manufacturer of silicon cells used in solar panels. It received It received $500,000 in “stimulus” grants in June 2009. Spectrawatt filed for bankruptcy in August 2011, and was bought by a Canadian firm.

Sunpower—Insolvency/Layoffs, November 2011/Now owned by the French

Sunpower, yet another California-based solar firm, received a $1.2 billion DOE loan in September 2011, the very last days of the program. Barely a month later, it announced hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, and that it was “reorganizing” and cutting jobs. It is now owned by the French oil giant Total, without whose backing, it would be bankrupt.

Amonix—Layoffs, January 2012

Amonix was a California-based solar systems manufacturer with a plant in Nevada. It was partly owned by John Doerr, Daniel Weiss, and Steve Westly, who collectively have bundled at least $700,000 for Obama. Amonix received $5.9 million in federal “stimulus” grants in 2010. Last month it announced it was laying off two-thirds of its workforce.

Nevada Geothermal—Insolvent, October 2011

Nevada Geothermal, as the name suggests, is a Nevada-based geothermal energy company that received $66 million in federal grants, and another $79 million in DOE loans; loans it immediately used to pay off or renegotiate other loans that were or were about to be in default. In other words, the company was already insolvent, a fact apparently known to the Obama administration at the time the DOE made the loans. According to the DOE website, this project created 14 permanent jobs.

Fisker Automotive—Layoffs, February 2012

As I have previously reported, Fisker Automotive is a California-based manufacturer of luxury electric cars. It received a $529 million DOE loan to produce its $102,000 Karma, which it manufactures in Finland. After producing—then recalling—a grand total of 239 units, Fisker announced earlier this month that it was laying off employees in its Delaware and California locations, despite miraculous and unverifiable DOE claims that the loan had “created or saved” 2000 jobs.

Remember back when it was all about focusing on the economy and creating jobs? These projects include five bankruptcies, one insolvency and one about to go under if it can’t resume construction, three laying people off, three now owned by foreign parents, and one manufacturing its product—to the extent it does so at all—overseas. They represent a total federal investment of about $2.5 billion, and leaving aside temporary construction, appear to have added only 14 permanent U.S. jobs (without deducting for layoffs and bankruptcies), a clip of about $178 million per job. Contrast that with the Keystone XL pipeline project Obama rejected (claiming it needed more study), which would unquestionably have created tens of thousands of U.S. jobs and not cost the federal taxpayer one red cent.

In a funny coincidence, with one exception (Nevada Geothermal—you work that one out) every one of these debacles involves federal money going to firms based in California, New York, or Massachusetts, huge chunks of it to big Obama backers.

I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

With this objective record on this issue alone, for the life of me I can’t understand how this President continues to net an approval rating as high as the 45% he’s been hovering around for months. The level of incompetency is both obviously demonstrable, and staggering. Worse, I can’t believe the GOP isn’t keeping this on the front burner and getting this message before the American public. I’m aware of it, and now you’re aware of it, but Joe Six Pack isn’t, and he’s the one who matters.

This, and the force-feeding of Obamacare, should be the centerpiece of the campaign. I hope the GOP gets around to telling this story soon, or it’ll be too late.

The Contraception Mandate And Eroding Liberty, Part II

2012-02-22T04:07:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://edamomie.com/2011/08/12/swiper-no-swiping/

Pleased to meet you,

Hope you guessed my name.

Ah, what’s puzzling you

Is the nature of my game.

—The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil

Continuing with last post’s discussion of the erosion of liberty flowing from the contraception mandate, I want to turn from the attack on our religious freedoms and our right to be secure in our persons, and look at the private property aspect of this, and of Obamacare more generally. In particular, I want to focus on the fundamental misunderstanding—or deliberate misrepresentation, depending on how you spin it—of what insurance is, because that misunderstanding appears to drive a lot of this debate.

First, it’s not “health care,” and it’s not “health insurance.” Those are monikers deliberately crafted to play into the Left’s feel-good narrative that this is all about a “right” to see a doctor. But that’s not what we’re really talking about. What we’re talking about is medical expense insurance—that is, policy coverage to offset certain costs associated with medical services. But let’s back up.

Insurance in our modern sense originated in the form of marine insurance—policies providing some measure of compensation for the value of an oceangoing vessel and its cargo in the event they were lost at sea. We can think of it as a kind of wager: the vessel owner bets $10 that the ship and its cargo will go down, and the insurer bets $10,000 that it won’t. We would never say that the vessel owner has a “right” to the vessel going down, or, for that matter, that he has a “right” to make the insurance company prevent that from happening. He doesn’t even have a right to have the government force the insurer to write the coverage. What we have is a private contract; an agreement whereby one party pays a fee in order to receive a financial guarantee from another against the happening of a specified risk.

Typically the amount the policy holder pays is very small relative to the magnitude of the risk being covered—otherwise it would make more sense to just bear the risk ourselves. The insurance provider can make this work because, just like diversifying your investment portfolio, they spread their risk across a large number of policies. In my marine example above, wagering $10,000 against a $10 premium seems like a bad bet, until we consider that the odds of that particular ship sinking are very low. Let’s say 1 in 2,000 ships actually sink. If the insurance company writes policies covering 10,000 of them, it collects $100,000 in premiums. Statistically, they can expect five of their covered vessels to sink, and thus they will have to pay out $50,000 in benefits. The remaining $50,000 goes to pay their overhead and costs of business, and anything left over is profit. That is how the insurance business works.

Of course, if we force the parties to change the coverage terms, we change the mathematics. For example, if we compel the insurer to pay $50,000 in benefits instead of $10,000, we see very quickly that the statistical risk calculation doesn’t work for him; the same five vessels will sink, costing the insurer $250,000 versus only $100,000 in premiums. The insurer must either raise the premium, or go out of business. Neither result is good long term for either the insurer or the insured.

Fundamental to the insurance proposition is that it’s a private agreement. We can write insurance to cover just about anything as long as we can reach an agreement with the insurance provider as to how much the premium is, what the insurance is to cover, what the monetary limits of that coverage are, and any time limitations that may be applicable. With medical expense insurance, the concept is NOT that you have the right to see any doctor, anywhere, anytime, for anything. These same principles of agreement apply, and you must reach an agreement with the provider as to how much your premium (co-pay is a form of per-event premium) is, what illnesses or procedures are covered, what the limits are on how much the provider will pay, and over what period of time the provider will cover you. Each of those items is almost infinitely variable, but you and the insurance provider must reach an agreement on them. Once you do, you have a private contract that defines exactly to what you are entitled.

But somewhere along the way, this idea of insurance as an agreement seems to have been lost.

The Left regards employer-provided medical coverage as some form of fundamental right—but when did this “right” come into being? Prior to the late 19^th Century, medical expense insurance as we know it did not exist. None of the Founders had it. Abraham Lincoln didn’t have it. It’s unlikely that Progressives like Woodrow Wilson or FDR had it. And before the 1960s, those who had medical expense insurance almost invariably had it through private policies that they bought themselves. The practice of employer-provided medical expense insurance only became widespread after the creation of tax rules that made it more advantageous for employers to include that coverage as a benefit in their compensation package than simply to offer their employees higher wages that they could use to buy their own medical expense coverage or otherwise spend as they saw fit.

As these employer-provided policies have become ubiquitous, however, they have come to be viewed incorrectly as some kind of entitlement, rather than as a compensation benefit provided by virtue of this three-way agreement between the carrier, employer, and the employee. You do not have a “right” to “health care” at someone else’s (the insurance company’s) expense; what you have is a right to reimbursement for whatever medical expenses are specified in your insurance agreement. And this is where the contraception mandate in particular, and the individual mandate in Obamacare more generally, have their problem.

Let’s say, for example, that the local Catholic diocese operates Holy Cross Hospital, and offers its employees medical expense coverage through Aetna. Let’s say further that every one of the Holy Cross employees is a practicing Catholic. The diocese doesn’t want to provide, and the employees don’t want to receive, a policy that covers The Pill. Aetna is perfectly happy to write a policy that doesn’t cover it. All three parties to this private agreement are happy to agree voluntarily to this arrangement—it’s exactly the way they want it. Under Obamacare and the contraception mandate announced by HHS, they don’t have any choice. They’re going to have to change their agreement whether they like it or not.

Let’s take another example. Let’s say OB1Solar is a green energy startup, and offers its employees a choice between a medical insurance plan or an extra $30,000 in base salary. Many of these employees are young, healthy, and single; they view their risk of needing medical care as slim, and thus see a greater benefit in taking the extra cash rather than the policy. They voluntarily agree to take a job without employer-provided insurance, and OB1 voluntarily hires them on that basis. Again, all the parties to this private arrangement agree it’s exactly the way they want it. Under Obamacare’s individual mandate, they don’t have any choice. They’re going to have to provide/accept medical coverage whether they like it or not.

Both mandates are an affront to the notion of private contracts, which is a fundamental aspect of private property. When and from where did the federal government—and the Chief Executive in particular—get the power not only to order you to enter into a private contract, but also to order what the terms of that contract must be? And if that power exists, where does it end? This is not just a Freedom of Religion issue reserved to Catholics. It’s an Article II issue (as I explained yesterday), and a freedom of contract/private property issue.

And that affects everybody.

The Contraception Mandate And Eroding Liberty, Part I

2012-02-21T04:29:00.001-08:00

Image source: http://woodystellycaps.blogspot.com/2010/11/jenny-agutter-logans-run.html

Slip sliding away,

You know the nearer your destination,

The more you’re slip sliding away.

—Paul Simon, Slip Sliding Away

WARNING: THIS ARTICLE HAS A FRANK DISCUSSION ABOUT SEX AND SEXUAL PRACTICES. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

Frankly, I had hoped we’d be past the whole contraception mandate issue by now, because I thought we had bigger fish to fry. Now, I’m not so sure.

Let me be clear up front: NOBODY is trying to keep you from obtaining and using contraceptives if you so choose. I don’t advocate that the government institute a legal ban on them—let’s leave aside true pure abortifacients like the so-called “Plan B,” which are a different issue—and as far as I know even the Catholic Church has never sought one, either. If you want to use a condom or The Pill, fine. I’m not going to cast any moral judgments on you. Just don’t make me pay for it, which has been the core of the standard—and correct—First Amendment free exercise of religion argument.

I fear, however, that the issue and the potential danger here go to something much deeper. Last Friday, talk radio host Andrew Wilkow was taking a slightly different tack and making an Article II argument: it’s not just that the mandate violates the First Amendment, it’s also outside the scope of the power given to the President. And Wilkow’s right. The President simply has no Constitutional authority to issue an executive edict requiring either Catholic hospitals, or their private insurance companies, to pay for contraception for someone else.

But what scares me here is the logical train Wilkow’s discussion sent me thinking my way down, because if we follow this out the implications are chilling.

Let’s start by asking the question why we need “free” contraceptives. The Left will immediately begin shrieking about the need to protect women’s right to “preventative health care.” Just last week, Press Secretary Jay Carney was out there talking about the “right” to contraception “free of charge.” House members Thursday were complaining that those objecting to the mandate were diminishing the “interests of women” “who want and need coverage for basic preventative health care services[.]”

On closer examination, this “preventative health care” mantra doesn’t hold water. As I’ve pointed out before, the only form of contraception with any legitimate preventative health care link in any normal understanding of the term is condoms, and not only are they cheap—less than a buck apiece—but they’re also already widely available for free. You simply don’t need a federal mandate that they be covered by insurance.

But what about the health consequences of unwanted pregnancy?

Well, the simple and incontrovertible fact is that the easiest, safest, cheapest, and most effective way of avoiding the potential negative health effects of pregnancy (or STDs, for that matter), is abstinence. It’s literally free even without insurance. It’s accessible to everyone, everywhere, 24/7/365. And it’s 100% safe, and 100% effective. If what you’re all about is protecting women’s health, then abstinence should be at the top of your list, and there is simply no need for an insurance mandate to force other people to pay for it.

No, this isn’t about women’s health and pregnancy. It’s about sex.

How so, Rusty?

The only reason to push contraceptives and ignore abstinence is that what the Left really wants, but can’t say out loud, is to make sure women can have recreational sex without consequences. Taking them at their word that they’re pushing this issue in the interest of women’s health, because we’ve just seen that this health concern isn’t, and can’t be, about the health aspects of pregnancy, it must be that there are health benefits related to sex itself, and contraception is somehow a necessary tool for facilitating access to those benefits.

Now, I’m not disagreeing with the idea that sex has health benefits so far as it goes, but the issue isn’t what you do or with whom you do it. It’s whether you can make me pay for it.

The underlying premise is that there’s not only a health benefit to sex without consequences, but that it’s such a compelling need that we have to override other people’s First Amendment right to free exercise of religion and their Fourth Amendment right to private property and make them pay for the contraceptives that make it possible. And we’re going to ignore the Article II limitations on the power of the Chief Executive in order to do it.

Well, where does that idea lead us?

If one citizen can be compelled to provide another citizen with birth control in order to obtain the health benefits of sex, what that really means is that the one citizen must ensure the other citizen has the things necessary to access the health benefits of sex. Well, what if even with birth control the sex just isn’t satisfactory enough to generate those health benefits? If we can compel one citizen to pay for another’s birth control in order to ensure the other’s access to the health benefits of sex, can’t the President order one citizen to pay for another citizen’s pornography (and if so, can’t that pornography take whatever prurient form is necessary to get the job done)? What about sexual aids—can the President order one citizen to pay for another’s adult toys? Once the issue is enabling access to the health benefits of sex, there’s no difference between forcing one citizen to provide another’s condom and forcing him to provide any other tool or implement necessary to enable that access.

But wait. Let’s keep following the logic train.

If one citizen can be ordered to provide the implements necessary for another citizen to get access to the health benefits of sex, it’s only a slight step further to say that one citizen can be compelled to provide another citizen with the sex itself. Those of you who like to scream about the government keeping its hands off your ovaries should start worrying about the government’s hands going somewhere else. And before you complain that I’m just out there flapping in the winds of paranoia, bear in mind that a lot of the people pushing this contraception mandate are the same folks who push for gay marriage, and who think Roman Polanski should be canonized. So there’s no telling where that might lead.

Now, do I really think it’s going to get as far as all this? No, probably not. But I raise the issue to point out the serious erosion of personal liberty that’s going on here. To return to our Article II complaint, this administration is so far out of bounds they can’t even see the Constitution from where they are now. And the more we let them get away with, the less the tethers the Constitution was supposed to place on President’s authority to act as a dictator mean.

And let me tell you, friends, history teaches us that at some point it takes a whole lot of blood to get liberty back once it’s lost.

You Are What (The Government Lets) You Eat

2012-02-16T06:02:00.000-08:00

Photo source: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2005/291105frogcooked.htm

The dream police

They live inside of my head

The dream police

They come to me in my bed

The dream police

They’re coming to arrest me, oh no!

—Cheap Trick, Dream Police

Government is out of control.

You already knew that, but wait till you get a load of this. At a preschool in North Carolina, a four year old was on her way to lunch, toting the lunchbox dutifully packed for her by her mother. A state inspector—following guidelines established by the USDA, and enforced through the federal Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services—took the child’s lunch away from her, concluding in the inspector's infinite wisdom that under the guidelines it wasn’t satisfactorily nutritious.

Here’s what the derelict mom put on the menu:

Turkey and cheese sandwich

Banana

Apple juice

Potato chips

Good Lord, it’s a wonder the child hasn’t already turned into Mr. Creosote. How about just one wafer-thin mint?

But wait, it gets worse.

Having stripped the child of the lunch provided for her by her own mother, the genius bureaucrat forced her—no doubt to the added profit of the purveyor with the government contract—instead to eat the school-provided menu, the entrée of which was chicken nuggets. So, in the interest of ensuring the child’s nutrition, we traded a turkey sandwich and a banana for freaking chicken nuggets!!!! Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, anyone?

Only government could get it this spectacularly wrong.

I know most kids love chicken nuggets, and my own kids eat them frequently. But the truth is they’re gross. Let’s think about this. With few exceptions, chicken nuggets aren’t even made from chicken meat in the traditional sense (ever wonder why they don’t bear any resemblance to any recognizable part of a chicken?). They are processed from a substance known as "mechanically separated meat," that involves taking the scraps and bits left on the bones after a chicken is butchered, running them through a sieve to create a kind of pink primordial paste—not unlike what OCP fed to Robocop. To that paste the manufacturers add thickeners, artificial flavorings, and undoubtedly huge amounts of salt and chemical preservatives. The resulting goo is then molded into the nugget shape of choice, and the thing is breaded and deep-fried.

I’m all for deep-frying, but you won’t catch me claiming it’s the height of lean, healthy eating.

In this particular instance, the ruckus stems from the State of North Carolina’s Division of Child Development and Early Education Program, which includes a requirement that sites “provide breakfast and/or snacks and lunch meeting USDA requirements.” I suppose that’s fine to set some kind of government-established nutritional criteria if what you’re talking about are government-funded meals, particularly under a state program. Where we run into trouble is the second part of the requirement: “When children bring their own food for meals and snacks . . . if the food does not meet the specified nutritional requirements, the center must provide additional food necessary to meet those requirements.” As apparently applied in practice, this doesn’t mean that the school is to supplement whatever may be lacking in the child’s meal, but that the school must actually forcibly replace the meal provided by the child’s parents in its entirety. In other words, at least in North Carolina, the USDA is now regulating what you can feed your kids.

Over my dead body.

Never mind the obvious and complete incompetence that substitutes chicken nuggets for a turkey sandwich and a banana in the name of better nutrition—either the bureaucrat is hopelessly stupid in their understanding of the federal standard, or the standard itself is indefensibly moronic. My problem here is what the hell business is it of the United States Department of Agriculture, the United States Department of Health and Human Services, or some state agency what I feed my kids? As long as I’m not putting a gun or illegal drugs in that lunchbox they take to school, what I feed my kids is between me and my kids.

This is an extremely dangerous development. If the federal government, through a state agency, can regulate—read: dictate—what a parent can put in their child’s lunchbox to take to school, it can regulate what that parent can/must feed the child at home. And if it can dictate what I feed my kids at home, it’s only a tiny extension for it to regulate what I feed myself, and then where does it stop? Rusty, nobody’s trying to regulate what you eat. Oh, no? We already see the food Nazis cracking down in the restaurant industry: compulsory nutritional labeling on menus and reduced salt in New York City restaurants, bans on the use of foie gras in California and Chicago (the latter subsequently repealed). And now we have Big Brother’s agents snooping in preschoolers’ lunchboxes.

I get it. We’re too fat. But government-imposed dietary restrictions aren’t the answer. We have to break out of this growing culture of trading personal choice in order to be free from personal responsibility and the consequences of those choices. If I want to eat french fries until I puke, that’s my business; and if I do it every day and I get fat as a result, that’s my problem.

Our Constitution was designed with limited government in mind, the idea being that most decision making is best left as close to the people it most directly affects as possible. The smallest decision-making units, and the core around which the Framers intended our lives to be structured, were the family and the individual. There is no more fundamental personal liberty than the daily choice of what we’re going to eat—decisions that for the entire history of the Republic people and families have made for themselves. Once that goes, there’s really no limit left to what the government can regulate in your personal life; what you can wear, where you can live, what color your car—er, electric golf cart—can be. Even how many times a day you may exhale that dangerous pollutant CO2. Everything’s fair game for the powers that be.

If we can’t reverse this trend and get government back in its pen, it’s not going to matter what we feed our kids, because there won’t be any America left to hand down to them.

Spinning The Cost Of Contraception

2012-02-14T04:58:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule

“I've worked out a few statistics of my own. Fifteen billion dollars in gold bullion weighs 10,500 tons. Sixty men would take twelve days to load it onto two hundred trucks. At the most, you'll have two hours before the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines move in and make you put it back.”

—Sean Connery as James Bond in Goldfinger

Figures don’t lie. Liars figure.

By now you’re well familiar with the flap over the executive mandate that religiously-affiliated universities and hospitals cover contraception and sterilization under the Obamacare plan. In yet another showing of his boundless empathy for those who disagree with him, Obama offered a “compromise” last week whereby those universities and hospitals wouldn’t have to provide that coverage themselves, but instead their insurance carriers would have to provide it.

I was going to ask whether he really thinks we’re that stupid. Alas, judging from some of the comments I’ve seen, not only does he think that, but apparently he’s right.

This “compromise” is, of course, a nonstarter, and should have been laughed down as the silly semantic game that it is. We can shift the direct cost of the contraceptives from the employer to the insurance company, but who, exactly, pays for the insurance, and what exactly do we think is going to happen to the cost of that insurance once carriers are forced by executive mandate to cover these drugs? One way or another, religiously-affiliated universities and hospitals are going to end up paying for these things, their religious convictions be damned.

What’s the big deal? It’s not like we’re making you pay for abortions.

Um, yes it is.

Many common contraceptive drugs such as The Pill and “Plan B,” and even modern contraceptive devices like IUDs work at least in part through an abortifacient mechanism. That is, they prevent implantation of an embryo after fertilization, thus not preventing pregnancy but instead inducing a very early miscarriage—an abortion. This presents a very serious problem for Catholics and many other Christians:

“Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person—among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life . . . Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense.”

Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§ 2270, 2272 (emphasis added). I don’t go through this in an effort to proselytize you, but to help you understand that for many of us being compelled to participate, directly or indirectly in abortions—and, by extension, in contraception—is a major affront to our religious beliefs. That’s why it’s so amazing to see the mental gymnastics that have been going on for some time to force this measure down our throats, despite our First Amendment guarantees.

The controversy dates back to the original regulations released by HHS in August 2011 requiring so-called “non-grandfathered health plans” to cover contraceptives and sterilization procedures for women. Although after receiving approximately 200,000 comments HHS graciously permitted an exception for “religious employers,” that term was so narrowly defined that it really only includes churches themselves, not church-supported universities or hospitals or other organizations like charitable groups. So the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston was exempted, but the seminary at the University of St. Thomas was not. After much hue and cry, HHS conceded an additional year for nonprofit organizations that do not currently provide contraceptive coverage due to religious beliefs, to comply.

A whole year for those organizations to reverse a 2,000 year old teaching. And I thought it was going to be a rush.

This time, after the latest “concession” purportedly shifting the cost from the faithful to their insurance carriers, HHS attempted to justify its new regulations by claiming that “there are significant cost savings to employers from the coverage of contraceptives.” The way HHS figures it:

“[I]t would cost employers 15 to 17 percent more not to provide contraceptive coverage in employee health plans than to provide such coverage, after accounting for both the direct medical costs of pregnancy and the indirect costs such as employee absence and reduced productivity.”

I see. It’s OK for the administration to trample on our religious beliefs because in doing so, they’re saving us money.

Obama, the "Savings President." Has a nice, hollow ring to it, doesn’t it?

But notice the underlying mental pathology here. Implicit within the dollar savings is the assumption that all of the pregnancies occurring because a certain health plan doesn’t cover contraceptives were unwanted. So, if only those women had contraceptive coverage under their employer’s health plans, they wouldn’t have had all of those babies.

Ah, I get it now. If all women had access to contraceptive coverage through their employer’s health plans, none of them would be having babies – because all of the pregnancies that occur in employees working for employers that don’t cover contraceptives are unwanted. Of course, that policy undermines Joe Biden's philosophy of children as a funding mechanism for the Entitlement State.

Continuing with its fuzzy “new math,” HHS also noted that “owing to reproductive and sex-specific conditions, women use preventive services more than men, generating significant out-of-pocket expenses for women.” What they forgot to mention is that, as of January 1, 2011, Obamacare took condoms, contraceptive creams, home pregnancy tests, and other over-the-counter contraceptive items off of the list of reimbursable expenses for healthcare flexible spending accounts in an effort to reduce the amount of money that employees could use to pay for out-of-pocket medical expenses on a pre-tax basis, thus generating more tax revenue for the government. So in the name of reducing the financial burden on women we’re ramrodding contraceptive coverage down the throats of those whose religious beliefs oppose it, while at the same time we’re adding to that burden by taking away an incentive for men to use over-the-counter contraceptives. In other words, it’s OK to exclude contraceptives if doing so generates more tax dollars, but it’s not okay to exclude them if the exclusion is based on religious beliefs.

Things are definitely becoming clearer. I’m glad we passed that bill so we could learn what’s in it.

But here’s where it’s really going to get sticky. Last week’s “compromise” shifted direct costs from religious employers to their insurance carriers. But the next move is going to be coming up with a similar mechanism for employees covered by self-funded plans. Self-funded. As in claims are not paid for by an insurance company, but out of the employer’s general asset base. According to the Obama administration, the money to pay for the contraceptive coverage is not going to come from those plans. So, where’s it going to come from? The insurance fairy?

Once again, this administration—and the Left in general—is exposed for its fundamental practical ignorance. Caught up in utopian dreams of free universal health care covering unlimited access to contraception and abortion, they lose sight of the basic fact that somebody in fact has to pay for those things. Insurance is not some magic arrangement where you just get to go to a doctor for free. It’s a private contract of wager. You pay periodic premiums set by an statistical formula that calculates the odds a given person will need treatment, such that the insurer by spreading its risk over a broad enough pool, takes in enough money to cover the claims it has agreed to pay, and still make a profit. No matter how you try to spin it, when you enact legislation forcing the carrier to cover certain additional drugs or procedures, you alter that private contract, and you change the math. You’ve added to the risk to which the carrier is exposed, and it must change the premium calculation accordingly. That added cost is passed on to the person paying the premium—typically an employer—whether they agree to it or not.

So much for the First Amendment.

Brave New World

2012-02-13T04:55:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://www.clevelandseniors.com/forever/remember-robot.htm

Be careful what you wish for

‘Cause you just might get it all

You just might get it all

And then some you don’t want

—Daughtry, Home

By now most of you have picked up on the fact that, as a matter of substantive policy, I am, well, in sharp disagreement with this President. Today’s not about that. Today I want to focus on process, and especially for those of you on the Left—you know who you are—I want you to pay particular attention, because this should scare you to death.

The year is 2038. Sounds very futuristic, but it’s really only 26 years from now. Not far off, in the grand scheme of things.

The President is Republican David Wainwright*, a former one-term senator from Alabama. Wainwright came to national prominence with a stirring keynote address at the 2032 GOP national convention. During his campaign in 2036, the Leftist media tried to raise alarms about some of Wainwright’s associations with Big Oil and the Klan, but these largely fell upon deaf ears as a public long-tired of being beaten down with excessive taxes—the so-called “Buffett Rule,” originally enacted in 2013 during Barack Obama’s second term to impose a flat tax of 30% on those making over $1 million, was later expanded to apply down to those making more than $150,000—was more interested in his “Keep Your Money” message of tax reform.

But in his second year in office, Wainwright faces serious opposition from a Democrat-controlled Congress. Nevertheless, the Wainwright administration presses forward with his vision of transforming America with the following initiatives:

Calling it “unworkable in practice,” and impatient with Congress’ failure to enact amendments on its own, Wainwright directs his Department of Education to begin granting waivers from the school integration and busing requirements of Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The first states to receive these waivers: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and Illinois.
Citing a protein deficiency in the American diet—and dismissing reported connections between high administration officials and lobbyists for the National Cattlemens’ Beef Association—the Secretary of Agriculture issues an order directing all public schools to include increased minimum quantities of beef in all school lunches.
As part of an initiative “to better safeguard women’s health,” the Department of Health and Human Services issues new guidelines requiring all women over the age of 16 to undergo annual gynecological exams, to be conducted under the supervision of an HHS officer physically present in the exam room.
Concluding that it is unconstitutional—even though no court has so held—the Attorney General, acting at the President’s direct instruction, announces that the Department of Justice will no longer prosecute cases under the Voting Rights Act. All cases on appeal are dropped.
In an effort to reduce the crippling cost of federally-funded abortions under the state-run National Insurance Program and “to enhance poor women’s access to preventative health services,” Wainwright establishes the Federal Birth Control Bureau. The FBCB’s mandate is to set up clinics in inner-city neighborhoods, where women seeking a second abortion must also submit to sterilization surgery.
The Treasury Department creates a panel—whose members are appointed by the Department, with no Senate review—to review tax cases and no longer prosecute actions to recover unpaid taxes against certain people who “have historically been economically disadvantaged” by the tax system. The criteria the White House establishes for this review center on whether the person being reviewed falls into a tax category whose share of total tax burden exceeds its share of gross national income.
To reduce the impact of ever-increasing mental health claims during the holiday season, HHS promulgates a new regulation requiring every homeowner to purchase and display a Nativity scene at Christmas. President Wainwright dismisses atheists’ First Amendment claims, saying there must be a balance between free exercise (or non-exercise) of religion, and the national interest in ensuring peoples’ mental health. As an accommodation, however, he relaxes the rule and instead requires all homeowners’ insurance plans to cover the cost of the displays.

Rusty, you’re dealing with a doomsday fantasy land. These things could never happen.

Oh, no?

Let’s rewind to the present day.

As I’ve tried repeatedly to explain in this space, the current administration has become a serial abuser of unconstitutional executive fiat power. The Civil Rights Act waivers above are in both verbiage and practice almost identical to Obama’s action last week unilaterally granting state exemptions to the requirements of No Child Left Behind. The beef example is similar to the individual mandate in Obamacare, and the gynecological exam and abortion examples are fairly natural extensions of it (once they can make you buy health insurance, they can justify almost anything as a “preventative measure” aimed at reducing the cost of that insurance). The Voting Right Act example is exactly what the current administration has done with the Defense of Marriage Act (and, in limited cases, with the Voting Rights Act itself). The panel for selective enforcement of the tax code is very much like the deportation review panels now being established. And the Nativity scene mandate is very similar to HHS’ recent rule (as “accommodated”) requiring Catholic schools to cover their employees’ contraception.

In our Constitutional system, Presidents don’t have the power to legislate. They have a veto power, but that veto extends only to entire pieces of legislation—despite Reagan’s forceful arguments for it, later echoed by Clinton and Bush 43, we still don’t have a line-item veto. Once passed and signed into law, the ONLY power a President has is the mandate to enforce it. A President cannot add laws by executive order, and cannot repeal laws through selective enforcement. Yet that’s exactly what this President is doing—bypassing and overriding both the current and prior Congresses by executive edict.

The examples I’ve used here are extreme, and they’re deliberately crafted to bother you on the Left in their substance, because I’m trying desperately to get your attention. But the real problem here isn’t the substance, it’s the process. This administration is totally out of control in terms of its usurpation of powers the Constitution does not grant to the executive. And as you can see, once we become completely divorced from our Constitutional moorings, we have a real problem. There cease to be any limits on what a President can do.

You may love it now because you like the substance of all the hope and change this President is creating. But he won’t be President forever—I’m still clinging to the assumption that even HE can’t overcome the 22^nd Amendment—and you'll find then that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. You’ll rail against a President Wainwright and claim he’s suspending the bill of rights, that he doesn’t have the Constitutional authority to do what he’s doing. And you’ll be right.

You’ll also be too late.

_____________________________

*This is a made-up name of a purely fictional character employed here for purposes of illustration only. I am not aware of any real person by that name, and any resemblance between the portrayal of the character here and any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Texas Sonograms Revisited

2012-02-09T04:39:00.000-08:00

Photo source: http://dranil-marketingmusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/more-management-concepts.htm

Lemond: Remember, Gene, keep things with the Senator on a need-to-know basis.

Ryack: Oh, you mean treat him like a mushroom: keep him in the dark, and feed him a lot of shit.

—Ken Jenkins as Major Donald Lemond, and Mel Gibson as Gene Ryack in Air America

Somebody’s gotta call these people out on this.

I’ve posted before on the new Texas sonogram law, which after the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned an injunction by U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks, took effect yesterday. There was much hue and cry in the local press over the coming Nazi intrusion into the sanctity of the patient/physician relationship, and hand-wringing over how we were unfairly demonizing and tormenting women by forcing them to view sonograms and listen to heartbeats.

Oh, the horror of human life.

Apparently confirming what a monstrosity this law is, the Houston Chronicle yesterday morning ran a front page, eight column piece titled “Sonograms evoke strong emotions as law takes effect” (electronic version here). The story led with three consecutive paragraphs describing the devastating reaction of women being forced against their will to look at and listen to the lives they were contemplating ending:

Some women covered their ears as the sounds of fetal heartbeats echoed into their exam rooms at a Houston abortion clinic.

Others tried to drown out the noise with their own voices, said Planned Parenthood officials, nervously humming or talking over the sounds of fetuses in their wombs. Still others turned their heads away from ultrasound images, an effort to opt out of part of the state’s new sonogram requirement for abortions, which the Department of State Health Services began enforcing Tuesday.

“These patients are livid, they are hurt,” said Tram Nguyen, director of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, describing recent scenes at her Houston clinic. “They feel that we are the ones being condescending and questioning their decision when we are just messengers.”

It’s no surprise to find Planned Parenthood behind the article, although query how Planned Parenthood officials know how women were reacting in the exam rooms, given their supposed worship of the privacy of the patient/physician relationship. Presumably they weren’t in the room to see it, and the doctors who were shouldn’t be talking. But I digress.

The article is clearly intended to leave the impression that the Evil State of Texas is forcing these poor women to endure images and sounds they don’t want to experience. Of course, the authors are simply shining a bright light on the Religious Right’s heavy-handed attempt at “shaming and bullying” women into not exercising their God-given right to an abortion, and we have to protect against that, right? Never mind that the Fifth Circuit has ruled on that right vis-à-vis the State’s compelling interest in protecting human life.

But what continues to irritate me with all this noise about forcing women to experience these things is the Chronicle’s and Planned Parenthood’s obvious and deliberate lie by omission:

The Texas statute doesn’t require women to view the sonogram or hear the heartbeat.

Don’t take my word for it; here’s Texas Health & Safety Code § 171.0122, added last year as part of the new sonogram law, in full and without any added emphasis or commentary from me:

* * *

171.0122. Viewing Printed Materials and Sonogram Image; Hearing Heart Auscultation or Verbal Explanation.

(a) A pregnant woman may choose not to view the printed materials provided under Section 171.012(a)(3) after she has been provided the materials.

(b) A pregnant woman may choose not to view the sonogram images required to be provided to and reviewed with the pregnant woman under Section 171.012(a)(4).

(c) A pregnant woman may choose not to hear the heart auscultation required to be provided to and reviewed with the pregnant woman under Section 171.012(a)(4).

(d) A pregnant woman may choose not to receive the verbal explanation of the results of the sonogram images under Section 171.012(a)(4)(C) if:

(1) the woman’s pregnancy is a result of sexual assault, incest, or other violation of the Penal Code that has been reported to law enforcement authorities or that has not been reported because she has reason that she declines to reveal because she reasonably believes that to do so would put her at risk of retaliation resulting in serious bodily injury;

(2) the woman is a minor and obtaining an abortion in accordance with judicial bypass procedures under Chapter 33, Family Code; or

(3) the fetus has an irreversible medical condition or abnormality, as previously identified by reliable diagnostic procedures and documented in the woman’s medical file.

(e) The physician and the pregnant woman are not subject to a penalty under this chapter solely because the pregnant woman chooses not to view the printed materials or the sonogram images, hear the heart auscultation, or receive the verbal explanation, if waived as provided in this section.

* * *

I don’t know how our Legislature could have been more clear:

“A pregnant woman may choose not to . . .”

The Texas statute not only didn’t require the women described in yesterday’s article to endure the sonogram images or heartbeat audio if they didn’t want to, IT AFFIRMATIVELY SAID THEY COULD CHOOSE NOT TO. But this fact conveniently doesn’t appear until the next-to-last paragraph of a two-page article, and it begs the question why so many women were supposedly “livid” and “hurt” about being involuntarily subjected to these images and sounds. Taking the Chronicle story at face value, one has to conclude that Planned Parenthood simply didn’t tell the women in their examination rooms that the law gave them a right to opt out. Indeed, although the Chronicle eventually notes that “women do have the option to request that the ultrasound volume be turned off”—no mention of the sonogram images—it does so at the end of a sentence that begins by saying that Planned Parenthood has been playing the fetal heartbeats for “all women who undergo the mandated sonograms.” Nothing in the article says that Planned Parenthood is actually advising them of their right to decline.

Am I suggesting that Planned Parenthood would deliberately keep women in the dark?

Don’t be ridiculous.

As a for-a-fee abortion provider, Planned Parenthood has no financial stake in doing such a thing, so why should I question its motives in how it goes about complying with Texas law? And I wouldn’t suggest that Planned Parenthood might manipulate women into a negative reaction in order to drive opposition to the statute. No, that’s thoroughly and utterly absurd.

But now that you mention it . . .

Let the facts speak for themselves. First, Planned Parenthood, along with like-minded organizations like The Center for Reproductive Rights, argued to the ends of the earth to prevent the State of Texas from ensuring that women had access to potentially relevant information as they make their decision whether to have the abortion. Having lost that battle, it now appears Planned Parenthood is deliberately avoiding advising women of their right to decline that information, thus forcibly inflicting it upon women who did not want it and had a right under the law to avoid it if they so chose—in the process placing itself in the very bully role in which it disingenuously attempted to cast the State. At both turns, Planned Parenthood has worked to keep women as ignorant as possible, presumably in order to advance its own agenda and self-interest.

Why it’s simply beyond all imagining.

The fact is the new Texas law does not require women to view sonograms or hear heartbeats; it requires that those things be made available sufficiently in advance for women to be able to absorb the information—if they choose—in making their decision. But Planned Parenthood and their media accomplices on the Left are so blindly wed to their ideological point they’ll not only ignore that truth, but apparently will lie by omission to cover it up when it matters most. And what I can’t understand is how so many, particularly women, continue to listen to and follow these people on this issue when it’s so easily demonstrated that these people are lying to them. When do they wake up and ask, if you’re so into helping me and defending my rights on this, why do you keep lying to me about it? Why are you so keenly interested that I not only have the right to obtain an abortion, but in ensuring that I actually get one—even if you have to deceive me to do it?

As I posted a couple of weeks ago on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, abortion undeniably terminates a human life. Sonogram images and heartbeat audio are the most compelling evidence of that fact. Assuming the reactions described in today’s Chronicle piece are accurately depicted, they confirm this and demonstrate that we as human beings know, viscerally, that what’s about to happen with an abortion is simply wrong. Wrong at the deepest, most fundamental level. So wrong that the only way we can go through with it is to remain deliberately, consciously, actively ignorant of the truth.

Which, of course, is exactly where those in the business of taking your money to provide an abortion and others on the Left want you.

Biblical Taxation

2012-02-08T05:15:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://carm.org/bible

Roxie: God, that was beautiful.

Billy: Cut out God. Stay where you’re better acquainted.

—Roxie Hart and Billy Flynn in Chicago

Full disclosure: I am not a theologian. Truth be told, I’m not even a very good Catholic.

But I think I got this one.

Last week at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama invoked the Bible to support his recent calls for raising taxes on the wealthy in order to continue funding entitlement programs:

“For me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus' teaching that, for unto whom much is given, much shall be required . . . It's also about the biblical call to care for the least of these, for the poor, for those at the margins of our society . . . To answer the responsibility we're given in Proverbs to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute.”

One wonders where the hue and cry is from the ACLU and the atheist zealots who sue kindergarteners for putting a Nativity scene on a school grounds at Christmas. After all, if what we’re going to do is base our tax policy on what the President believes are his instructions in the Bible, doesn’t that convert the government into a quasi-religious institution, and make taxes essentially a forced tithe?

How DARE the government intrude on the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause! Why, next thing we know they're going to be making Catholic hospitals give out contraceptives!

Oh, yeah. Oops.

I hear it a lot: folks on the Left appealing to common Christian catch-phrases or to their own selective quotation/interpretation of the Bible in order to justify Big Government programs, as though they are somehow beating me down with the ultimate trump card. After all, if I’m a Christian conservative—not to leave out conservatives of other faiths, it’s just that this particular phenomenon appears to be reserved for Christians—how can I possibly object to an initiative that comes straight out of the Bible? I believe I am my brother’s keeper.

Yeah? Well keep him, then.

The problem when folks like Obama wax biblical in a transparent attempt to "demonstrate their faith"—note the opportunistic Obama only does this at occasions like the National Prayer Breakfast—they rarely take the text as a whole, and they frequently get it wrong. Take the President’s invocation of Jesus’ teaching about the burden upon those who have been blessed. He has lifted the reference to Luke 12:48 out of context, and ignored the distinction between the service we owe to God, and the service we owe to the government (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2242). This distinction is itself biblical, as illustrated in, for example, Matthew 22:21, in which Jesus tells the Pharisees to “[g]ive to Caesar what is Caesar, and to God what is God’s.” Or Acts 5:29, where St. Peter and the Apostles answer charges from the Sanhedrin, “We must obey God rather than men.”

In discussing the expectations placed upon the blessed, Jesus wasn’t talking about a mandatory obligation to be extracted by the government. If we back up and start reading the lead-in at Luke 12:35, we see He was talking about the unknown time of His return, and the kind of self-sacrifice necessary to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. This becomes more clear when you read Jesus’ teaching together with His instruction to the rich young man (Matthew 19:16-30; Mark 10:17-24; Luke 18:18-24) to give away everything he has and follow Him. That is what is expected, and that is why He told the Apostles it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 19:24; Luke 18:25). But in his zeal to give his tax policy the superficial air of a biblical grounding, Obama missed that.

The Left also confuses their personal conviction with the ability and propriety of forcing someone else to act on that conviction. They will claim they are their brother’s keeper, but they do so to justify a policy whereby it’s not them keeping their brother, but them forcing someone else to do it. The problem with trying to ground this sort of thinking in the Bible as though it’s derived from God’s directives is that what God asks of us is voluntary. God does not want us to love Him and follow His commandments because He makes us do it—He could have made us perfect sin-free followers had He so desired. He wants us to do it because we choose to do so. Abraham did not have to slay Isaac (yes, I know he ultimately doesn't, but God allows him to go all the way to the last second, and he does so voluntarily). Jesus did not have to die on the cross.

God gave us free will, and when we look at charitable contributions in a biblical context, it is the willingness to give that is the touchstone, not forcibly taking more from those who have more. In Matthew 10:8, Jesus instructs the Apostles, “Freely you have received, freely give.” In 2 Corinthians 8:12, St. Paul urged the Church at Corinth to be eager and willing givers:

“Last year you were the first not only to give but also to have the desire to do so. Now finish the work, so that your eager willingness to do it may be matched by your completion of it, according to your means. For if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has[.]”

President Obama is correct that Jesus taught that much will be expected of those to whom much has been given, but that expectation was of free and voluntary giving. He never spoke about forcibly extracting charity at the point of a Roman sword, yet that’s exactly what a tax policy aimed at increasing taxes on the wealthy in order to fund entitlement programs is.

If we’re going to have the Bible drive our tax policy, perhaps we should consider the entire document. For example, maybe we should be looking to, say, Mark 12:41-44:

"Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny.

Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.”

Combine that with Matthew 13:12:

“Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.”

St. Mark tells us that although the rich were paying in much more than the poor—exactly our progressive tax system—rather than call for the rich to pay even more, Jesus is more interested in the poor widow contributing everything she had. St. Matthew recounts Jesus teaching that those who have more will get more, and those who have less will have it all taken away. Perhaps we should learn from this and adopt a purely regressive system where we tax the poor at 100%.

Obviously, that’s not what Jesus was getting at, but the absurdity of the extrapolation illustrates the danger in selectively lifting pieces of scripture out of context and using them to justify public policy. We can debate the relative economic merits of progressive taxation and entitlements. We can even debate whether they are the right thing to do.

But the President better leave God and the Bible out of it until he has a better handle on what he’s talking about.

Happy Birthday, President Reagan

2012-02-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

Photo source: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-11-07/news/30368599_1_government-spending-republicans-fight-gop-nomination

Today is President Ronald Reagan’s birthday, and I thought it appropriate to post some reminders from his 1964 speech endorsing Barry Goldwater for President, as much of it applies to the situation in which we find ourselves today. He says it far better than I can:

“One side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, “We've never had it so good.”

But . . . [n]o nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We've raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world.

* * *

We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don't know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.

This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

* * *

In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the “Great Society,” or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people . . . [T]hey have voices that say, “The cold war will end through our acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism.” Another voice says, “The profit motive has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state.” Or, “Our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century.” Senator Fulbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the President as “our moral teacher and our leader,” and he says he is “hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document.” He must “be freed,” so that he “can do for us” what he knows “is best.” And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as “meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government.” . . . "[T]he full power of centralized government" -- this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.

* * *

We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they're going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer -- and they've had almost 30 years of it -- shouldn't we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?

But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater.

* * *

Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we're always “against” things -- we're never “for” anything.

Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.

Now -- we're for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we've accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.

But we're against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They've called it “insurance” to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term “insurance” to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they're doing just that.

* * *

I think we're for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we're against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as was announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program is now bankrupt. They've come to the end of the road.

* * *

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So, governments' programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth. Federal employees -- federal employees number two and a half million; and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation's work force employed by government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man's property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury? And they can seize and sell his property at auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James Wier over-planted his rice allotment. The government obtained a $17,000 judgment [a little over $120,000 in today’s dollars--RDW], and a U.S. Marshal sold his 960-acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary as a warning to others to make the system work.

* * *

Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the -- or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.

* * *

Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy “accommodation.” And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer -- not an easy answer -- but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.

* * *

There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace -- and you can have it in the next second -- surrender.

* * *

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin -- just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.”

* * *

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness . . . [Y]ou and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.”

God bless you, President Reagan, and happy birthday. We shall not look upon your like again.

Federalism And The Great Rock & Roll Swindle

2012-02-03T04:40:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlexanderHamilton

Give ‘em the old flim-flam flummox

Fool and fracture ‘em

How can they hear the truth above the roar?

Throw ‘em a fake and a finagle

They’ll never know you’re just a bagel

Razzle dazzle ‘em

And they’ll beg you for more!

—Billy Flynn in “Razzle Dazzle” from Chicago

I’ve touched on federalism a couple of time in this space before. Let’s expand a bit.

Following the defeat of Great Britain and the Treaty of Paris, what existed on these shores was a loose union of 13 otherwise independent States under the Articles of Confederation. Although drafted in terms of “We the People,” our Constitution required each of the States as sovereign entities to sign off on it, rather than being adopted by popular vote. As James Madison wrote:

“Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a federal and not a national constitution.”

Federalist Paper No. 39 (emphasis original).

Ratification of the new Constitution and creation of the Union were by no means certain. Having just fought for eight years to get out from under the thumb of an oppressive central regime, the States were wary of trading one set of shackles for another. Of particular concern was that with the formation of a central government, the States would lose their individual sovereignty, and that the central government would soon grow out of control, thus putting the States and their respective citizens right back where they started. It was for this reason that the Framers added the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Bill of Rights:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Alexander Hamilton (together with his conscripts Madison and John Jay) wrote the Federalist Papers to overcome these concerns. They were, in effect, a sales pitch. Although Madison addressed the State sovereignty issue (most notably in No. 45, which I have and will continue to quote in this space often), it is the writings of Hamilton on this subject that sting today.

Like Madison, Hamilton told the readers of their Publius essays that there was nothing to fear from the Constitution, and that the central government it created would not encroach upon the liberty so dearly won:

“It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system that the State governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.”

Federalist Paper No. 28. Indeed, Hamilton pooh-poohed to the point of ridicule those who objected that a central government, once created, would eventually expand and consume all aspects of State sovereignty and individual liberty:

“The moment we launch into conjectures about usurpation of the federal government, we get into an unfathomable abyss and fairly put ourselves out of the reach of all reasoning. Imagination may range at pleasure till it gets bewildered amidst the labyrinths of an enchanted castle, and knows not on which side to turn to escape from the apparitions which itself has raised. Whatever may be the limits or modifications of the powers of the Union, it is easy to imagine an endless train of possible dangers; and by indulging in an excess of jealousy and timidity, we may bring ourselves to a state of absolute skepticism and irresolution.”

Federalist Paper No. 31. Why, these fears of a central government taking over everything, that’s just crazy talk.

As Bill Cosby would say: Riiight.

Hamilton continued:

“An entire consolidation of the States into one complete national sovereignty would imply an entire subordination of the parts; and whatever powers might remain in them would be altogether dependent upon the general will. But as the plan of the convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, exclusively delegated to the United States.”

Federalist Paper No. 32 (emphasis original). He even went on to argue that the Bill of Rights itself—which, of course, includes the Ninth and Tenth Amendments—was unnecessary, because the Constitution so limited the authority of the central government that there was no need to protect against that which that central government already couldn’t do:

“I go further and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted . . . [W]hy declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?”

Federalist Paper No. 84.

Yeah, if you’ll buy that, I’ll throw the Golden Gate in free.

In his effort to sell the new Constitution and its central government to the reluctant States, Hamilton repeatedly assured that there was nothing to be concerned about, and that the central government would be adequately held in check. Read in context with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, one can even see how Hamilton might be taken at his word.

But any good car salesman is believable.

History shows us that what Hamilton really did was pull off the greatest bait-and-switch in human history. Having sold the Constitution in 1788 as creating a limited and controllable central government, by 1790 Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury of that new central government had sponsored the first U.S. government bailout by pushing through a bill for the federal government to assume the States’ outstanding war debts, and in 1791 he established the first National Bank. Neither action finds support in the text of the Constitution, although the National Bank concept was later accepted by the Supreme Court in McCulloch v. Maryland—yes, I know McCulloch dealt with the second National Bank and not the first, but the National Bank concept was Hamilton’s—providing the framework for the exceedingly dangerous doctrine of implied powers.

Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? That’s why.

In only three years, Hamilton had laid the foundation for unleashing the very Pandora’s Box he argued so vociferously didn’t exist. His fingerprints can be seen even today in almost everything emanating from the District, including Medicaid, No Child Left Behind, TARP, “stimulus,” FEMA disaster relief, EPA, Obamacare, dictating what must be included in school lunches, and what will surely someday soon be federal bailouts of California and other bankrupt States. Hamilton’s autograph serves as a watermark to President Obama’s signature on his most recent unconstitutional executive fiat appointments of yet another series of czars and bureaucrats to regulate and dictate, without oversight from Congress or accountability to the citizenry. Daniel Hannan, in his recent book The New Road to Serfdom, warns us against this very phenomenon of allowing the central government to erect an ever-more complex series of bureaus and agencies through which innumerable un-elected and unaccountable officials become entrenched in power. These, my friends, are the steps by which liberty is lost, never to be regained.

Somewhere in heaven, the Framers are trying to find Hamilton to get their money back.

It’s Your Money, And You Can Cry If You Want To

2012-01-30T04:17:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://io9.com/robin-hood/

“Here's the deal: What I win, I keep. What you win, I keep.”

—Dan Shor as Billy the Kid in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

During Tuesday’s class warfare campaign speech—er, State of the Union—President Obama complained about what the government was going to “spend” on a tax cut for the wealthy:

“Right now, we’re poised to spend nearly $1 trillion more on what was supposed to be a temporary tax break for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.”

Let’s leave aside for this discussion the relative merits of tax cuts and whether the wealthy are or aren’t paying their “fair share,” whatever that is. I want to look at the mentality of the statement itself. The President says that cutting taxes equals spending, as though by cutting taxes the government is giving people the government’s money. This kind of thinking was sadly illustrated by a widely circulated clip of a 2009 Interview conducted by WJR Detroit’s Ken Rogulski with people waiting in line to get “Obama money.” Unfortunately, a large number of Americans, including this President, believe that the U.S. federal government is like the stone Moses struck at Rephidim, providing an endless flow of cash from no source other than itself.

Well, let’s expose the dirty little secret:

The United States federal government doesn’t own any money.

It’s true. The United States as an entity does not have, and never has had, any money of its own. The U.S. Treasury isn’t a giant piggy bank. There is no stash of “Obama money.” And it doesn’t really matter anymore whether you believe the gold is really still there at Fort Knox. The pot at the end of the federal rainbow is, and always has been, empty.

The basic fact is the only money the United States government has is what it collects in the form of taxes. In other words, what it has is what it has taken from its own citizens, literally at the point of a gun. When the government spends, it isn’t spending its money from some magic and bottomless treasure chest. It’s spending your money, at least as to the 53% of us who actually have tax liability.

This is the great lie about tax credits, rebates, and complaints that tax cuts cost the government money. It’s not the government’s money to begin with. So when it cuts taxes, or gives rebates or refunds, it isn’t giving you the government’s money; it’s giving you back money that was already yours and it took from you in the first place. Worse, of your money the government isn’t giving back to you, chances are it’s giving it to someone else, somewhere else. Let me give you an example.

Last week, the First Lady and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced changes to the rules associated with the federally-funded school lunch program. This story originally got my attention (yes, I know federally-funded school lunches have been around for a long time) because of the federalism implications of the USDA dictating what schools can/cannot/must serve, which I’ll discuss another time. But in digging into this issue, I learned that the regulations are tied to federal funding measures under the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. A January 19, 2011 memorandum from “Associate Administrator”—the title alone makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck—Jessica Shahin summarized how the USDA planned to implement it, and attached a state-by-state breakdown of how the federal funding for the program would be distributed.

I was, to say the least, shocked when I got into the details.

The four states receiving the largest allocations—California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York—accounted for $203,831,310, over half of the $375,000,000 total tab. California alone accounted for $137,764,856, or just under 37%.

Well, those are big states with huge tax bases, and we’d expect to see more being spent there than in, say, Alaska and Montana.

Perhaps, but this is way out of proportion. Comparing to 2010 IRS data (the most recent available), of these four states, only New York received a school lunch allocation less than or equal to its contribution to total federal revenues (that’s all sources, including income, payroll, estate, and gift taxes). The other three were nowhere close, with California and Michigan pulling in at a rate over 300% of their relative contribution to total revenues, and Pennsylvania at over 150%. Collectively, the four states received 54.36% of the program, while contributing only 26.83% of total federal revenue.

Compare that with states like Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. Combined, these four states contributed 19.83% of total federal revenue, while receiving 2011 school lunch allocations amounting to just 4.68% of total federal spending.

How’s that taste?

What this means is we are necessarily taking money from people in one state, and using it to fund state-administered programs—schools, and the lunches they provide, are still run by states—in other states. I don’t want kids going hungry any more than anyone else. And if the State of California wants to provide free lunches to huge numbers of children of illegal aliens, or if Detroit wants to provide free lunches to all children regardless of their parents’ income status, I suppose that’s their business. But why should they get to take money from people in Texas, laundered through the federal government, to do it?

This is but one example of the massive redistribution racket the federal government has become. It’s easy to sell people on feel-good platitudes like making sure we feed hungry babies—and to demonize opponents of such a program—and it’s easy to buy votes by taking money from one group and giving it to another. But the federal government wasn’t designed to do these things. It was intended to provide a discrete set of services that worked to the collective good of everybody—defense, foreign relations, etc. It was never intended to provide services for some states at the expense of others, or for some individual people at the expense of others.

Hamilton discussed state-to-state redistribution in Federalist Paper No. 22:

“The suffering States would not long consent to remain associated upon a principle which distributed public burdens with so unequal a hand, and which was calculated to impoverish and oppress the citizens of some States, while those of others would scarcely be conscious of the small proportion of the weight they bear.”

Ayne Rand covered person-to-person redistribution at length in Atlas Shrugged. Both reached the same conclusion: there is a limit to the burden the contributor will tolerate from the recipient.

We’re quickly replacing the work ethic that built this country with an entitlement ethic; an ethic that carries with it an embedded assumption that by not taking the entitlements, one is somehow leaving federal money on the table. Commentators in California lament that the fact children don't participate in free school breakfast programs at the same rate they participate in lunch programs is costing the State millions of dollars in additional federal largesse. Somehow we should be wanting more and more kids to be on free school meals, because that means we get more federal money taken from someone else. We have to sign up for as many federal freebies as possible, just to keep from getting ripped off by everyone else. And the spiral never ends.

This entitlement ethic breeds dependency, and weaning off a teat with diminishing capacity gets harder and harder as time goes on; look at the difficulties Europe is facing with rioting dependents as the last sane few try to pull back on the joystick before the whole thing crashes. But the programs upon which more and more depend are not sustainable. Eventually Old Napoleon collapses, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart drop out, and States revolt. What then?

We must reverse this trend now, get government out of the business of feeding people and into the business of getting out of the way of them feeding themselves. If we don’t, it’s going to get really, really ugly.

Liberal Censorship

2012-01-27T06:05:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://fupucej.freeiz.com/monty-python-spanish-inquisition-sound-clips.php

“What’s new, Buenos Aires? Your nation, which a few years ago had the second largest gold reserves in the world, is bankrupt! A country which grew up and grew rich on beef is rationing it! La Prensa, one of the few newspapers which dares to oppose Peronism, has been silenced. And so have all other reasonable voices! I’ll tell you what’s new, Buenos Aires!”

—Che, in “She’s a Diamond” from Evita

FoxNews.com is reporting that a 15 year old Wisconsin high school student was censored and threatened by the school district superintendent over an op-ed piece in the school paper.

It seems that Brandon Wegner was asked to participate in a point-counterpoint discussion of an issue of current political significance. The problem for young Mr. Wegner was he had the “against” side on the paper’s choice of topics:

Gay adoption.

The point-counterpoint format is a common angle for a newspaper to take in its editorials, particularly a newspaper legitimately interested in balanced coverage. One would think that, in a school newspaper that is faculty-supervised and—I expect—written as part of a journalism class, running pieces like this is an excellent educational exercise. But, as you can already guess, with this particular topic, Mr. Wegner was basically screwed from the get-go.

You can check the piece out for yourself here. Wegner offered a spirited argument of his case against gay adoption, citing not only Biblical authority, but studies and statistics. Another student took the “for” side, and likewise offered an enthusiastic case. By any measure, the collective piece was a decent example of the open debate that is exactly what a point-counterpoint op-ed is supposed to be.

Then all hell broke loose.

Predictably, a gay couple whose child attends the high school bitched. The school immediately apologized, not for the choice of subject matter, and not for the piece as a whole, but that Wegner had had the audacity actually to take the “against” side of the issue. The school’s apology called Wegner’s opinion “a form of bullying and disrespect.”

Apparently, “vigorous debate,” like “bipartisanship,” means “you must agree with me.”

But it gets worse. After falling all over themselves to apologize, the district dragged Mr. Wegner down to the superintendent’s office—not the principal’s office, but the head of the whole freaking school district—where apparently he was berated for hours over his supposed violation of the school’s bullying policy. He was asked to sign an apology saying he regretted writing the piece—he refused. He was then threatened with suspension, and called “one of the most ignorant kids” for standing up for his beliefs.

Let me repeat that.

A school district superintendent took a 15 year old kid he disagreed with, tried to coerce him into recanting, threatened to suspend him, and berated him over his “ignorance.”

Maybe next time he’ll take on Mike Gundy.

I’m not here today to take sides on the substantive issue of gay adoption, although you can probably guess what I think. The thing that’s of importance here is the school district’s—and the superintendent’s in particular—conduct, which should be reprehensible to any reasonable person, regardless of your view on the political subject.

Let’s start with the fact that this kid was asked to write this piece, and to take the side of the opposition. He didn’t hack into the school’s website and unilaterally spew his message over the Internet. He didn’t commandeer the school’s P.A. system and lecture a captive audience over the loudspeakers. He didn’t spray paint anti-gay slurs on the school’s front door. He was asked to take one side of a controversial issue for an op-ed piece in the school paper—a paper that, I think it’s reasonable to presume, is subject to some editorial controls and faculty reviews before being published. Now, you could reasonably question the judgment of selecting such a polarizing topic for debate in a high school paper. But once the topic was selected, if there was a problem with the content of his article, why does there seem to be no hammer coming down on the faculty member(s) who let the thing be published?

In police work, it’s called “entrapment”—luring a person into committing an offense by inviting them to do so, then charging them with that very offense you encouraged them to commit.

Second, Wegner didn’t threaten anybody. He didn’t use foul language or hateful epithets like f*gg*t or qu**r. He did quote the Bible, and Heaven forbid anyone do that. You may not like to hear homosexual practices referred to as detestable or an “abomination,”—and I’m not here to argue over the authority or divine inspiration of either the Old or New Testaments—but those are the words the book of Leviticus uses in most English translations I’ve been able to find.

Third, there’s this pesky problem of the First Amendment, which applies to State organizations via the Fourteenth Amendment. This means it extends to public schools, which Justice Abe Fortas wrote in Tinker v. Des Moines ICSD, “may not be enclaves of totalitarianism.” I recognize that First Amendment rights are somewhat limited for school newspapers, where legitimate parochial concerns may permit some censorship in order to further the educational aims of the school; but that would have entitled the school to reject the topic or pull the piece, not berate and threaten the kid for writing it. Further, there’s a big difference between censorship due to content—we don’t, for example, have to permit a high school journalist to drop f-bombs all through his article—and censorship due to the expression of an opinion on a political issue. Political speech is the very essence of what the First Amendment is designed to protect.

There can be no doubt that this has absolutely everything to do with the substance of Mr. Wegner’s opinion—namely, that he opposes gay adoption. But the Left—and particularly the gay lobby—isn’t capable of rational discourse on these sorts of issues. They say they’re all about diversity and inclusion, but the tent’s never broad enough to cover anyone who disagrees with them. Speech is free, but only as long as you agree with them. I have a buddy who’s holding his breath waiting for the ACLU to show up to defend Mr. Wegner—to the contrary, I half expect them to mount a public campaign to pressure local police to arrest Mr. Wegner on hate crime charges.

Like the tired cries of racism we hear from the likes of Maxine Waters any time she doesn’t get her way, it’s empty and childish to accuse people of bullying and hate speech every time they disagree with you. I know you on the Left don’t like it, but the fact of the matter is there are a substantial number of people—in most states, significant, if not overwhelming majorities—who disagree with you on this issue. I’m not suggesting you have to change your view, but you don’t just get to say “I’m right, you’re a bully/bigot/racist/hatemonger, debate over, you shut up.”

American discourse doesn’t work that way.

The State Of Irony Address

2012-01-26T04:29:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://bestcommercials.net/80s-commercials/banned-commercials-wendys-beef-80/

She can kill with a smile, she can wound with her eyes;

She can ruin your faith with her casual lies;

And she only reveals what she wants you to see;

Yeah, she hides like a child, but she’s always a woman to me.

—Billy Joel, She’s Always A Woman

I confess I couldn’t bring myself to watch the State of the Union. But I did read it. I’m sure it will be dissected ad nauseum in all the usual sources, and frankly there was so little substance to it that it’s not worth getting into much detail. But I did want to point out a few ironies.

1. Bailouts are bad, except when they’re good.

President Obama spent a good bit of time returning to the theme that we need an economic system that’s fair and works for everybody. And among his favorite whipping-boys on this subject were the banks, which he repeatedly castigated for the mortgage industry collapse. His message to them was stern:

“It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody . . . [Big banks are now] required to write out a ‘living will’ that details exactly how you’ll pay the bills if you fail—because the rest of us aren’t bailing you out ever again.”

Pretty interesting, given that back in 2008 then-Senator Obama voted for that very TARP bailout program. But what’s funnier about this excerpt, is that barely twenty minutes earlier he was trumpeting the “success” of his bailout of the U.S. auto industry:

“On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen . . . Today, General Motors is back on top as the world’s number one automaker. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. Ford is investing billions in U.S. plants and factories. And together, the entire industry added nearly 160,000 jobs.”

Never mind that GM is back in the #1 position largely because Toyota continues to struggle with the effects of last year’s tsunami (and I thought the tsunami was part of the reason Obama’s policies weren’t working yet), and that GM currently represents something on the order of a $24 billion loss that taxpayers will never recoup. Never mind that Chrysler isn’t even a U.S. company anymore (it’s a division of Italian automaker Fiat). Never mind that Ford didn’t even take any federal money. Look at what a glorious success Obama’s auto bailout has been!

Apparently bailouts suck . . . unless they benefit your UAW cronies.

2. Making irresponsible bets with other people’s money is bad, except when it’s good.

Continuing with his flogging of the banking industry, President Obama blamed the 2008 economic collapse on their irresponsible lending practices—practices he intends to stop through regulation, and to investigate and punish those responsible with criminal penalties:

“In 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them. Banks had made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money . . . We’ve all paid the price for lenders who sold mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, and buyers who knew they couldn’t afford them. That’s why we need smart regulations to prevent irresponsible behavior . . . So if you’re a big bank or financial institution, you are no longer allowed to make risky bets with your customers’ deposits . . . [T]he days of signing people up for products they can’t afford with confusing forms and deceptive practices are over . . . And tonight, I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis.”

As I’ve detailed before, banks don’t make bad loans on purpose, and it was affirmative action housing regulations—measures Obama supported both in the Illinois Legislature and the U.S. Senate—that forced banks to make the risky loans he’s talking about; loans they wouldn’t have made otherwise. I don’t know how you regulate away a problem that was caused by regulations in the first place, but if you want to seek out and punish the people who are truly at the root of the mortgage problem, be my guest.

You can start with Barney Frank.

But if making huge risky loan bets with other people’s money is a problem, what about “green energy” businesses like Solyndra, Beacon Energy, Evergreen Solar, Spectrawatt, SunPower, First Solar, and Nevada Geothermal? These firms received billions in federal money from the Obama administration, and every one of them is either bankrupt, insolvent, or laying off workers. Yet despite knowing—knowing—the significant risk that these ventures will fail, Obama insists on pressing forward:

“Some technologies don’t pan out; some companies fail. But I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy.”

Prosecute people who make irresponsibly risky bets with other people’s money?

Hear, hear!

3. Partisanship is bad, except when it's good.

The other pervasive theme of Obama’s address was the need to come together as Americans. He opened and closed with vignettes about putting aside differences and collaborating as a team to achieve a common aim. And towards the end he called for a fundamental change in the partisan way business is done (or not done, as the case may be) in the District:

“Finally, none of these reforms can happen unless we lower the temperature in this town. We need to end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction; that politics is about clinging to rigid ideologies instead of building consensus around common sense ideas.”

Trouble is, Obama’s been one of the worst offenders. He hinted at it a couple of times in his address, threatening to take unilateral action by executive fiat if Congress didn’t give him what he wants:

“I intend to fight obstruction with action . . . With or without Congress, I will keep taking actions that help the economy grow.”

These are not idle threats. As I’ve detailed here, here, and here, this President has time and again ignored both any spirit of cooperation and the Constitution in his blind adherence to ideology, whether by effectively passing the DREAM Act by executive order even though it failed to pass Congress, or by unilaterally deeming unconstitutional (Defense of Marriage Act) or impractical (No Child Left Behind) and refusing to enforce laws duly passed by Congress and signed into law by the then-sitting President. This is the same President who in 2009 lectured Republicans not “to do a lot of talking . . . [and to] get out of the way.”

It’s always his way, or the highway.

The fact of the matter—as pointed out by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels in his rebuttal address—while the President has paid lip service to the need for a return to fiscal sanity and unleashing the economy, only the Republicans have managed to put forward and pass any measures to that end; it’s been the President and Senate Democrats who have stood in the way. And when the rubber finally met the road and the President was presented with a Keystone XL pipeline that would have created upwards of 100,000 jobs at no taxpayer expense—a project that’s been studied for years, and originally was given State Department approval—he couldn’t bring himself to put aside the politics of bowing to the environmental Nazis in his base and allow the project to proceed.

Turn the temperature in the District down? Why don’t we start with the thermostat your office, Mr. President.

Methinks there is a lot of campaign ad fodder in here. I just hope the GOP can get its act together sufficiently to take advantage of it.

Reflecting on Roe v. Wade

2012-01-24T05:06:00.000-08:00

Photo source: http://www.truecrosschurch.org/Content-Public/Page-Edit/Page.asp?iID=-58914983

Hello, darkness, my old friend.

I’ve come to talk with you again.

—Simon & Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence

Last Sunday, January 22, was the 39^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I see that President Obama commemorated (celebrated?) the anniversary by issuing a statement that the landmark case makes clear that “government should not intrude on private family matters,”—I’m choking to death on the irony of that one—and that he “remain[s] committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose and this fundamental constitutional right.” His comments reflect a worldview that developed somewhere in the 1960s, as people convinced themselves that this was somehow about women’s rights and privacy, and that restricting unfettered access to abortion is an intolerable intrusion by government into women’s freedom to control their own bodies.

So let me pose a couple of questions.

Should I be allowed to kill my parents if I find their existence inconvenient, or if they strain my finances? If your answer is “yes,” then perhaps you should start lining up all the welfare recipients right now, because there are a whole lot of us who find them both inconvenient and a fiscal drag. My guess, however, is that your answer is—like mine—no. So I think the welfare folks are safe.

Should I be allowed to kill my 13-year-old because she has a medical condition that makes her life difficult? Should I be allowed to kill my infant because my wife has abandoned us and I find I’m just not ready to be a single parent? Once again, the nearly universal answer to these questions is no, and I expect most of you are shocked I would even raise them.

In each of these scenarios, virtually all of us would answer that I have no right to kill the person in question, and in fact you would insist that the government prevent me from doing so, and punish me if I do it anyway. Why is that so?

Unless you are an anarchist, there can be little doubt that the single most important and most legitimate function of government is to protect its citizens from being killed by other people. Indeed, if you could only vest a government with a single power, that would be it. This idea is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life[.]”

For the Founders, it was obvious in and of itself that every human being has a right to live, and they guaranteed that right in the Fifth Amendment’s promise that “[n]o person shall be deprived of life . . . without due process of law.” This compelling government interest in protecting life led the Fifth Circuit a couple of weeks ago to overturn a lower court decision striking as unconstitutional Texas’ new law requiring sonograms be made available before a woman can obtain an abortion.

Well, if the scenarios I posed above are not acceptable, at what point does abortion become OK?

As Dr. Seuss taught us in Horton Hears A Who, “A person's a person, no matter how small.”

It is an inescapable fact that an abortion kills a human being. So unless you are willing to answer the questions I posed above “yes,” and accept the proposition that it is acceptable to kill as a matter of convenience—and you’re not—it is impossible to draw a logically and morally consistent line that permits abortion, no matter how badly you want to make it so. This very dilemma is the reason the majority opinion in Roe was so strained, circular, and ultimately indefensible. We all agree it is not acceptable to kill a baby 5 minutes after she has been delivered and the umbilical cord has been cut, but what about just before the cord is cut? What about halfway through delivery (this is the damnable and unspeakable practice of so-called “partial birth” abortion)? There’s no articulable logical or moral distinction between those scenarios. So, too, if we continue backing up 5 minutes at a time; there’s never a point at which we can say there’s a defensible distinction that makes the difference between an acceptable killing of a human being and murder. Any line we draw is necessarily artificial, because it depends upon an ever-changing degree of either human medical competency (the “viability” concept of Planned Parenthood v. Casey) or human moral conviction (or lack thereof).

The Constitutional right to life cannot turn on so capricious a hinge.

Even if you do not accept that human life begins at conception, as I do, you have to concede (as even Justice Blackmun did) that we as human beings do not have the capacity to say with any certainty when it does begin. All we can know for certain is that, at some point, it does. As so many argue against the death penalty—so many, interestingly, who are on the pro-choice side of the abortion debate—why would we take the chance of being wrong, particularly when the victim of abortion is so absolutely and without question blameless?

In our Constitutional system, rights sometimes conflict, and one person’s right must yield to another’s. We resolve these conflicts by balancing the harm to one and the burden upon the rights of the other. You have a First Amendment right to speak, but that does not entitle you to jeopardize others’ right to life by yelling “Fire!” in a crowded movie house. In the case of abortion, the harm, obviously, is depriving (or, for you skeptics, at least the possibility of depriving) another human being of the right to life. There simply can’t be a greater harm than that, which necessarily means there can be no burden on the woman’s rights that would outweigh that harm. The one exception would be the deprivation of the woman’s own right to life, in which case the scales are even, and the best you can do is the Catholic Church’s teaching that we may not perform an abortion for the purpose of terminating a pregnancy, but if a medical procedure that is necessary to save the mother’s life has the unfortunate consequence the death of the child, that is acceptable. Beyond that, however, there is no way to claim a burden on a right of the mother that outweighs the unborn child’s right to life.

We also resolve Constitutional conflicts by seeking out less-intrusive means of enforcing one right without unnecessarily trampling on the other. With the availability of adoption as an alternative, the burden carrying a pregnancy to term imposes upon a woman is temporary; the harm to the victim of abortion is quite permanent. It simply isn't necessary, in order to enforce a woman's rights to terminate another's right to life. Under such circumstances, the balance can’t tilt in favor of an at-best implied "right” to an abortion over the child’s explicit right to life.

The pro-choice movement has sold people on the idea that abortion is all about a woman’s right to choose, and to control her own body. This is, put simply, a lie. Conceding for purposes of this discussion that a woman has this right to choose—the “right to privacy” from which it is purported to derive isn’t found in the text of the Constitution, but instead actually originates from a law review article written by (later, Associate Supreme Court Justice) Louis Brandeis about 100 years ago—that misses the point. Restricting her access to an abortion in no way diminishes her right to choose or to control her "reproductive health"; she made her choice and exercised her control when she chose to have sex. The pro-choice movement is not really advocating a woman’s right to choose, but a right to avoid after-the-fact the predictable consequences of the choice she made, and to do so by killing another human being.

Don’t tell me I’m being unrealistic, that women are going to have sex and get pregnant anyway, and if abortion is illegal they’ll just get dangerous back-alley procedures. That’s true of a lot of things; but we don’t legalize conduct simply because people will engage in it even if it’s illegal. People shoot heroin with dirty needles, but there are few outside the Ron Paul campaign who think we should make it legal.

Nor is this an issue, as Obama’s statement suggested, about ensuring women have the same rights and opportunities as men. What rights and opportunities do women lack that allowing unfettered abortions cures? The biological fact is that sex may result in pregnancy, and that pregnancy, if it happens, will be born by the woman; can’t change that with legislation, Constitutional amendment, judicial activism, or executive fiat. And the sad social fact is too many men participate in the sex, then run from the consequences of pregnancy because they can—but do we really want to encourage our daughters to emulate them in the most lazy, promiscuous, irresponsible, animalistic, and selfish standard of conduct imaginable?

The truth the so-called "feminists" don't want to admit is that all of both the biological and social facts of pregnancy are avoidable through abstinence—which, by the way, is safer than a clinical abortion and 100% reliable, unlike any contraceptive, including The Pill—and a woman is always free to make that choice. And rather than kill the child, perhaps we need to do better at educating our men, and then holding their feet to the fire of responsibility. But to say that abortion is the answer is to take the utilitarian position that the unborn child is nothing more than a failed science experiment to be discarded and forgotten at will if one deems its implications too imposing or inconvenient.

We’re horrified at cases like Caylee Anthony and Jon Benet Ramsey, and rightfully so. Something in our very core finds the ultimate revulsion at the deliberate killing of a child, particularly by her own parent. In most states that allow capital punishment, killing a child qualifies you for Death Row. It is inexplicable, then, that people would support our government abdicating its most fundamental responsibility and failing to protect the most helpless among us in the place where they should be safer than anywhere else on earth.

The CDC estimates some 50 million abortions have been performed in the U.S. in the 39 years since Roe—about 1.3 million a year, a pace rivaling that of the Holocaust. Over that time, how many Einsteins have we lost? How many Mother Teresas? How many Reverend Kings? How many honest, hardworking, ordinary Everymans never got a chance?

How many songs will voices never share?

That is what President Obama commemorated and said he is committed to protecting.

Political Correctness Amok

2012-01-23T03:46:00.000-08:00

Photo source: http://animal.discovery.com/mammals/cougar/

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief. The issue here isn’t whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests—we did. But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few sick, twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg: Isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!”

—Tim Matheson as Eric “Otter” Stratton in Animal House

When will this insanity stop?

In a story that’s gotten sparse national attention, students at new Corner Canyon High School in Draper, Utah selected “Cougars” as their school mascot and team nickname. The school board, however, has overridden their decision, citing complaints from some parents, and is imposing the nickname “Chargers” instead. The primary complaint?

The term “cougar” might offend middle-aged women who like to date younger men.

Yes, when someone tells us they’re rooting for the Cougars, don’t we all immediately assume they’re hoping Demi Moore shows up? I’m frankly disturbed that it even occurred to anybody, much less that it put such a burr under their saddle that they complained about it. Is this how thin our overly-P.C. sensitive skin has become?

Let me put this in perspective. Twelve colleges call their teams the Cougars. Here in Texas, where high school football is king, I count 26 schools whose teams take the field under the banner of Cougars. In other words, it’s a pretty common mascot. These P.C. nazis in Utah make it sound like the kids wanted to call their team the "N*ggers," which of course is patently offensive, and would never be acceptable; but the N-word has no other meaning or connotation. In other parts of the world, rape victims are convicted of adultery and stoned to death. Yet here in the land of the free and—ironic drumroll, please—the home of the brave, we worry about things like whether the choice of a nickname that everybody understands refers to a big cat is somehow going to offend someone.

At least we have our priorities in order.

And I don’t buy the Board’s secondary excuse that other Utah schools also use “Cougars,” and the name plus the school’s colors of blue, silver, and white are too close to those of BYU. High schools mimicking major college programs’ nicknames and color schemes is nothing new or controversial. Here in Texas we have 12 high schools duplicating the University of Texas’ “Longhorns,” with four of them also using Texas’ colors of orange and white. The board is simply trying to cover their obvious cowardly cow-towing to stupid P.C. pressure.

This crusade against team names and mascots that might hurt someone's feelings has been around a long time. In 2005 the NCAA finally succumbed to the P.C. blitzkrieg and cited 18 member institutions for having “hostile or abusive” mascots, all but ordering the schools to drop them. The NCAA may actually have had a point in cases like the Southeastern Oklahoma State Savages, where the nickname itself has an inherently derogatory connotation (not unlike the N-word). But in other instances such as the Florida State Seminoles (eventually granted an exemption) and the North Dakota Fighting Sioux the nicknames were nothing more than respectful references to groups of people with direct and obvious connections to their states’ history, similar to the Oklahoma Sooners, the West Virginia Mountaineers, or the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers. Alas, common sense gives way to knee-jerk overcorrection, and we take a sledgehammer to a gnat.

So American Indian references (regardless of taste or historical context) are taboo as choices for school team nicknames, and now they’re coming after predatory animals. What’s next? If we’re going to indulge in this level of silliness, let’s carry it to its logical conclusion. Here are some other nicknames/mascots—yes, all the examples below are real—that are also going to have to go the way of the do-do bird, lest we bruise someone’s tender sensibilities:

Fighting Irish, Fighting Scots, Ragin’ Cajuns suggest that people of Irish or Scottish descent or descended from French-Canadian immigrants to Louisiana have bad tempers.
Flying Dutchmen suggests that people from Holland take drugs.
Pirates, Buccaneers, Raiders, Marauders, Vandals promote crime.
Matadors promotes animal cruelty and offends PETA.
Camels promotes smoking.
Orediggers might offend younger women who like to date older wealthy men.
Sharks might offend local men who like to date tourist women—fins to the left—and certain urban bankers.
Rainbow Warriors might offend men who like to date other men.
Red Foxes might offend attractive women, and fans of Sanford & Son.
Mules might offend stubborn old people.
Blue Hens, Badgers might offend nagging housewives.
Quakers, Friars, Deacons, Saints, Bishops might offend atheists.
Crusaders might offend Muslims.
Red Devils, Blue Devils, Sun Devils might offend Satan-worshippers.
Huskies might offend big-boned people.
Patriots might offend people in other countries.
Coons (no joke—Frisco HS, Frisco, Texas) might offend rednecks or blacks.
Thoroughbreds discriminates against people of mixed heritage.
Spartans makes light of poor people.
Cavaliers makes light of casual or indifferent people.
Ramblin’ Wreck makes light of people with crappy cars.
Steers might upset men who have lost their testicles to cancer or injury.
Longhorns, Bulls, Stags, Bucks, Rams, Goats, Ducks, Bison, Buffaloes might upset vegans.
Cornhuskers, Aggies might upset those with gluten allergies.
Black Knights might upset people with flesh wounds.
Crimson, Cardinal, Orange, Mean Green, Maroons, Big Green, Big Red might upset people who are color-blind.
Volunteers might upset Bill Clinton.
Lions, Tigers, Bears might upset Wizard of Oz aficionados.
Gamecocks, Beavers might upset prudes.
Trojans—do I really have to explain?

As you can see, this zeal to avoid offending people quickly devolves into the absurd, and it doesn’t leave much left from which to choose. But we could go further. Given that team nicknames and even school colors really only serve to distinguish one group of people from another, shouldn’t they ALL be done away with as inherently discriminatory/divisive? While we’re at it, there are any number of school fight songs that include demeaning or even violent references to rival institutions—why, some might even call them “hate speech”—that have no place in our genteel modern society. In fact, now that I think about it, sporting contests by their very nature stigmatize the loser, so shouldn’t we stop the games altogether and encourage students instead to engage peacefully with their colleagues at other schools in friendly sing-alongs and maybe some group interpretive dance?

Somewhere, this silliness has to stop. It’s like we’ve put ourselves into a giant version of Twister where you not only have to stay on the dots, but you can’t touch another player or they’ll bruise beyond recognition. We’re eventually going to become so soft that the Iranians aren’t going to need a nuclear weapon to whip us; Ahmedinejad is simply going to call us the pussies that we’ve become, and we’ll drown in our own tears crying over our hurt feelings.

Life is a contact sport, folks. At some point we all have to grow a little bit of callous, and as Dennis Miller ranted on this very subject in 1994, do everyone else the courtesy of not treating them like they're a Faberge egg. Language is an imperfect tool. There’s always going to be a way to twist words into something someone somewhere could find a little offensive if they really try. We have to have the common sense to distinguish between words with a primary meaning that is overtly and deliberately hurtful on the one hand, and those that in their common usage have an obvious and universally understood meaning that has absolutely nothing to do with whatever special interest group might twist them to find them offensive.

A cougar is a cougar. A big freaking cat. Get over it.

Why The GOP Can’t Nominate Conservatives

2012-01-20T04:25:00.000-08:00

Photo source: http://www.dustinsview.com/2011/08/carnival-style-urination-games-what.html

Boy: Wait a second! I saw the whole thing! The machine’s fixed! Who’s she, your mother?

Tiffany Case: Blow up your pants!

—Gary Durbin as Boy and Jill St. John as Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever

If you’re a conservative, when is the last time you voted for President without holding your nose?

I’ve argued with friends about whether there’s something in the machine that’s preventing conservatives from getting nominated, or whether it’s as simple as the conservative base just isn’t big enough to get its way. But one way or another, the fact is the process is consistently yielding crappy nominees; indeed, aside from Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, the GOP hasn’t nominated a real conservative for President in nearly a century.

And it’s happening again this year. It’s only mid-January, yet the field has already lost Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and now Rick Perry. Iowa's flip notwithstanding, it appears that Rick Santorum’s bid is on life support. Anything short of a close second in South Carolina on Saturday will effectively end Newt Gingrich’s run, which means we won’t even get to February before we’re down to Mitt Romney and Ron Paul (who I assume won’t quit until he literally doesn’t have gas money to get to the next stop).

Excuse me if I don’t quite get that tingling sensation up my leg.

For all practical purposes it looks like the nomination race will be essentially over before Super Tuesday (March 6). Here in Texas, I likely won’t get any real vote, because we don’t go until April 3. Those of you in California, New Jersey, or Utah who don’t have your primary until June? You’ll be looking at a one-name ballot.

So what, Rusty? You could argue that the campaigns that have fallen or are in the process of falling have collapsed under their own weight. Running a national campaign over a long term is a necessary skill to compete in the general election, and if a candidate can’t do that—whether because they lack the organization, can't raise funds, or wet themselves on national TV—better to find that out early and weed him out. And maybe conservative candidates simply can’t muster enough votes to win the nomination (if that’s really so, maybe it’s time to form a separate Conservative Party).

But I submit that the nomination process itself is rigged against conservatives.

Consider that 12 states (13 if you include the always-critical battleground of the Northern Mariana Islands) hold their primaries before Super Tuesday. While they only hold about 15% of the total delegates, these states have an almost decisive say in who the nominee is because winning the early contests is so essential to maintaining enough fundraising momentum and national interest to stay in the race. By process of elimination that means conservatives are out before they ever get a chance.

What do I mean by that?

Of the 12 states with primaries before Super Tuesday, four are uber-liberal states that have gone to the Democrats in each of the last four Presidential elections, by average margins approaching 10 points or more: Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, and Washington. Another two—Iowa and New Hampshire—are consistently blue come national election time, going Democrat in three of the last four elections. Another five are at best erratic, splitting their recent Presidential results, and even when the GOP candidate has won it’s been by the slimmest of margins: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, and Nevada. Among the states getting their say before Super Tuesday, only South Carolina can be considered solidly conservative. But they have an open primary, meaning independents get a say in the South Carolina nomination process. What this suggests is that virtually all of this early weeding out of candidates occurs in states that skew center-left, which necessarily disadvantages conservative candidates.

Let’s take it a step further.

Thirteen states fall into what I would call the deep red, reliably conservative category, voting for the GOP candidate in each of the last four elections by an average margin of 10 points or better: Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. These states hold some 24% of the delegates. That moves to 28%—nearly double the pre-Super Tuesday delegate count—if you also include Georgia and Montana, which both have gone to the GOP in the last four elections, but with an average margin of less than 10%. These states are where the bulk of the conservative base resides, and one suspects that a Bachmann, Gingrich, Perry, or Santorum would likely take a decisive victory over Romney here—if they could last long enough to run that race. But of these core conservative states, only South Carolina gets an early say. While four states (five if you include Georgia) participate in Super Tuesday—and even that impact is dampened by the fact that super-deep-blue Massachusetts and Vermont, and unreliable-to-blue-leaning Ohio and Virginia also participate in Super Tuesday—most if not all of the conservative candidates will likely already be out of the race by then, leaving conservative voters little left from which to choose.

In other words, under the current primary system the GOP can’t nominate a conservative, because the conservative candidates are gone before the conservative voters get a chance to vote.

You could fix that by holding a single nationwide primary, but that would for all intents and purposes rule out a lesser-known candidate from the start. A marginal candidate can mount a campaign when only a few states at a time are in play, and then gain momentum (and additional funding) with some early successes; witness, for example, Mike Huckabee in 2008, or Herman Cain last Fall before he flamed out due to personal issues. But with a single national primary, only the mega-wealthy and already-famous—like a Donald Trump—could run a viable campaign.

Let me offer some suggestions. One, eliminate winner-take-all contests in favor of proportional representation (like the DNC does). This ensures that second- and third-place finishers retain relevance heading down the campaign trail.

Two, eliminate open primaries. The primary process isn’t intended for the general public to decide who the nominees are, it’s intended for—in this case—the Republican Party to decide who its nominee will be. If you aren’t part of the party, why should you get any say in that? If you’re not a Republican and want a say in who gets nominated, start your own party and make your own nomination.

Third, streamline the calendar by lumping the states in buckets, similar to the Ohio Proposal the RNC rejected coming out of the 2008 elections. I would try to keep smaller states together, regionalize where I can to minimize travel expense, and keep each bundle with a mix of typically conservative and non-conservative states. I might also save the states with the biggest delegate jackpots for a final showdown, so there typically remain enough outstanding delegates to be won that those not currently at the top of the leaderboard are still in the game. And I’d compress the schedule and get it finished earlier, so the party and nominee can focus more time and resources on going after the Democrats heading into November.

Just as an example, you might do something like this:

February 2—First Regional Test: Iowa, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, West Virginia, (roughly 132 delegates at stake).

February 23—Battleground I: Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Nebraska, New Jersey, Virginia, Wisconsin (roughly 291 delegates at stake).

March 13—Battleground II: Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma (roughly 267 delegates at stake).

April 12—Second Regional Test: Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, Vermont, Wyoming (roughly 133 delegates at stake).

May 1—Battleground III: Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, Utah, Washington (roughly 256 delegates at stake).

May 18—Battleground IV: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi (roughly 259 delegates at stake).

June 19—Final Showdown: California, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas (roughly 876 delegates—about 40% of the total—at stake).

July 4-6: Republican National Convention

My two cents, since I don’t get a vote.

Geeks Out Of Their Depth

2012-01-18T04:28:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://www.squidoo.com/smart-kids-educational-toys-games

Brian: What I had said was I’m in the math club, uh, the Latin club, and the physics club . . . physics club.

Bender: Hey, Cherry. Do you belong to the physics club?

Claire: That’s an academic club.

Bender: So?

Claire: So, academic clubs aren’t the same as other kinds of clubs.

Bender: Ah, but to dorks like him, they are. What do you guys do in your club?

Brian: Well, in physics we . . . we talk about physics, properties of physics . . .

Bender: So it’s sorta social. Demented and sad, but social. Right?

—Anthony Michael hall as Brian Johnson, Judd Nelson as John Bender, and Molly Ringwald as Claire Standish in The Breakfast Club

Continuing with a theme running over the last few posts, it should be apparent by now that government—and this administration in particular—has no business meddling in affairs of business.

You should be reasonably familiar with the story of Solyndra, the California-based solar panel maker that received over $500 million in loans from the Department of Energy in 2009, only to go bankrupt last fall. Congress and the FBI continue to investigate whether there was any wrongdoing in that deal, and while the administration has steadfastly insisted that political connections had nothing to do with the issuance of that loan over the objections of DOE financial analysts, there remains a lot of smoke for there to be no fire. Documents released on Friday reveal that the administration learned in the Fall of 2010 that Solyndra was in trouble and about to announce large-scale layoffs, and the White House was apparently more concerned with the optics of that development on the mid-term elections than on what that development said about the wisdom of such deals.

Last November, Energy Secretary Steven Chu took “full responsibility” for the decision to go ahead with the Solyndra loan, saying that decision was his, and his alone. He also conceded he did not expect taxpayers to recover much, if any, of their money. President Obama stood by Chu, and basically pooh-poohed the loss as no big deal; just one of the inevitable lumps we have to expect to take.

Better get your helmet on, Lumpy.

CBS News reported over the weekend that as many as 11 more of these “clean energy” loan recipients may be in similar trouble. Of 12 companies (including Solyndra) CBS identified as being in trouble—totaling $6.5 billion in federal loans—5 have already filed for bankruptcy. That's 12 out of a grand total of about 40 "green energy" firms receiving DOE loans. One of the bankrupts, Beacon Energy, turns out to have had an S&P rating of CCC-plus—non-investment grade bad junk bond status—yet it still received $43 million in taxpayer money. Among the not-dead-yet firms that haven’t quite found their way to the bankruptcy court are companies like Nevada Geothermal—a pet project of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—which received $98.5 million from DOE, some $80 million of which didn’t go to develop green energy and create jobs, but instead went immediately towards a prior loan that was already in default, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, one of those driving the Solyndra investigation. SunPower—recipient of $1.2 billion after being taken over by a French oil company—owes more than it’s worth. And there’s First Solar—recipient of $3 billion in federal loans—which fired its CEO after losing more than any other company in the S&P 500 in 2011.

All of these loan projects come out of the Department of Energy, and Secretary Chu continues to defend the program, despite mounting evidence that something is going drastically wrong with it. Which begs the question, who is this guy, and what qualifies him to be the man with “full responsibility” for making go/no-go decisions that are “[his], and [his] alone” on billions of dollars in federal loans to private businesses?

Dr. Steven Chu is a physics professor and a career academic. His degrees are in mathematics and physics. Prior to becoming Energy Secretary, he was a professor of physics and molecular biology at Cal-Berkeley, and before that he taught physics at Stanford. He won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1997. One gets the impression that Dr. Chu kicks ass at physics, and if you want someone to study the effect of lasers on molecular structures through the time-space continuum (don’t get too caught up in what the hell that means, it’s just a combination of words I just made up, and it may well be gibberish—I’m not a physicist), he’s probably your man.

I’m sure he’s also a nice guy and has the best of intentions. But other than the fact that he has an extensive background in receiving government grants, what the hell makes this man even remotely qualified to be taking spins of the venture capital roulette wheel with billions of dollars in house money? Dr. Chu has no background in business or finance. None. Zero. And who put him in this position? That’s right: Barack Obama, another career academic with not only zero experience in business or finance, but also no experience in management of any kind.

So we have one blind egghead leading another blind egghead.

Not only are the people in charge of these gambles singularly unqualified to be making them, I can’t find anything in the Constitution that authorizes them to make those bets. Let’s assume for a second that Dr. Chu were in fact eminently qualified with an extensive background in business and venture capital transactions. Let’s assume further that it’s a really, really good idea to provide billions of dollars in seed money for green energy startups. Even if all of that were true—and apparently none of it is—that still wouldn’t mean that the United States federal government has the power to do it.

I’ve harped on this before. The federal government is not empowered to do whatever the Executive Branch decides is a good or even necessary idea, and that’s true even if the President is right. Article I only gives Congress the power to do 17 very specifically identified things (plus the power to enact legislation to do those 17 things). NONE of them involve taking money from the citizenry to give to other citizens in the form of high-risk venture capital loans. Article II only gives the President the power to execute the laws enacted by Congress. Nothing in the Constitution authorizes the Congress or the President to operate an investment bank with taxpayer money.

Don’t even bother coming at me with the Commerce Clause. The Commerce Clause authorizes Congress to regulate commerce, not to engage in commerce:

“The Congress shall have Power To . . . regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes[.]”

The intent of that provision was not for the federal government to promote or even to manage commerce, but simply to ensure that competing state tariffs didn’t result in a Balkanized economy; Hamilton and Madison discussed this very notion repeatedly throughout the Federalist Papers (see Nos. 7, 11, 22, and 42). No, I’m not going to go back and review the thousands of pages of Supreme Court opinions over the last 150-so years explaining the “penumbras”—look it up—of power implied in those 21 simple words. It is plain from the face of those words that the modern expansion of Congressional power allegedly derived from them perverts the Framers’ intent beyond recognition.

It is exceedingly dangerous when people in power go beyond their authority. This is particularly so when they do so in areas where they think they're smarter than everyone else, including the true experts, when in reality they have no idea what they’re doing. This administration is out of its depth and out of control, and if we’re not careful, we’re all going to drown with it.

Government Has A God Complex

2012-01-17T05:33:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://eroonkang.com/16x16/?cat=4392

Welcome, my son

Welcome to the machine.

Where have you been?

It’s alright; we know where you’ve been.

—Pink Floyd, Welcome to the Machine

Back on September 8, President Obama summoned both houses of Congress for a joint session during which he browbeat them about the urgent need to take action to create jobs. He spent the next several weeks traveling the country repeatedly pushing what has morphed into a simple mantra that we’ll no doubt hear throughout the campaign:

We can’t wait.

Which is really funny, because even as he was at the podium lecturing Congress on the need to act on jobs and do it right now, the Keystone Pipeline XL project—a shovel-ready, cost-free project that would have created thousands of jobs at no cost to taxpayers—had been on his desk for two weeks waiting for his OK to move forward. Today, 145 days later, despite efforts by Congressional Republicans to force action, the White House has done nothing to permit this project to proceed.

It’s a classic case of government-knows-best regulation and red tape getting in the way of natural market engines. Following this theme, the Houston Chronicle reported on Saturday that the Energy Information Administration is expected to issue a report next week and another in March on the effect of U.S. companies exporting natural gas on jobs and domestic energy prices. The Energy Department then will presumably be relying in part on those reports in making decisions on pending applications for export permits.

By way of background, newer technology has made it economical to extract gas from tight shale formations, unlocking vast reserves. This boost in supply has resulted in a dramatic drop in the cost of gas to consumers, from in excess of $15/mmbtu in 2005, to a current price of less than $3. But in Asia and Europe, it can fetch between $12 and $18.

That is, if you can get it there.

Producers, not surprisingly, would like to utilize LNG (liquefied natural gas) facilities on the Gulf Coast to convert natural gas to liquid, which can then be shipped via tanker to markets where it can be sold at a much higher price than can be realized domestically. That’s how markets work, and in the process, the increased profit encourages more drilling, which means more jobs. That’s in addition to jobs at the LNG facility, jobs in shipping, etc.

There’s just one problem.

“Consumer advocates” object to the issuance of permits to allow producers to export the gas, because they are concerned that effectively increasing demand will increase the price of natural gas domestically. Which, of course, is also how markets work: more people want to buy the product, so the supplier of that product can command a higher price. These “advocates” want to prevent this effect, so they insist that the government erect barriers to the producers’ ability to access these other markets, essentially imposing a kind of indirect price control by artificially limiting demand.

I have to ask the question why is government involved in this in the first place? With the exception of gas produced from government land, natural gas (or the right to extract it) is the private property of the owner of the mineral rights. Typically it is extracted by a producer who has entered into a lease—a private contract—with the mineral rights owner, whereby the producer pays the owner an agreed price—“royalty”—for the gas he extracts, effectively purchasing the gas from the owner. Once extracted, the gas is the private property of the producer. So we’re talking about private property, acquired via a private contractual arrangement. Why isn’t the producer free to dispose of it as he will?

Somewhere along the way, people seem to have gotten the idea that government always has to govern. As long as it keeps ahold of the marionette strings it can tweak this and nudge that and everything will be better. After all, anything that’s artificially manipulated by a human being has to be better than what natural forces can create on their own, right?

A little Brawndo, anyone?

There’s always something for the government to stick its nose in and alter the natural result of market forces, because it knows better what markets crave. It can keep grain prices artificially high for farmers by paying them not to grow wheat and by stockpiling what they do grow, thus cutting supply. It can keep labor prices artificially high by enforcing minimum wage laws. It can keep rents artificially low by enforcing rent controls.

The problem is that, like any drug, every one of these moves to manipulate and manage the market has consequences. You can boost profits for farmers, but that will also result in higher food prices and inefficient use of land resources (not to mention the waste of grain stockpiled in government silos, never to be seen again). You can raise wages, but at the cost of jobs where businesses would have been willing to hire—and workers willing to work—for less, if only they were permitted to do so. You can create cheap housing, but that will remove the incentive and capital ability for landlords to make improvements, or often even to keep up with basic maintenance; rent’ll be cheap, but the apartment will be an endlessly-deteriorating slum.

Politicians and their appointed bureaucrats who enact these policies are typically not equipped with the expertise to appreciate the potential consequences of market manipulations, much less control those forces. But their ego and hubris get the better of them. They’ve been told all their lives that they’re the smartest folks in the room, so it’s only natural that they should take control. It’s a problem as old as Adam. Man can improve his circumstances through his labor. But the minute he thinks he knows everything, the minute he thinks he can control and improve upon nature, he screws it up. Every time.

Perhaps someone should introduce our government to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The worst of all possible political sins is to be perceived as doing nothing. But sometimes that’s the best course of action. Markets will take care of themselves. Left alone, free enterprise will get capital and resources directed to their most efficient use. Prices and wages will level at the point where they naturally should be; that which the supplier is willing to accept and the consumer is willing to pay. Rent may be more expensive, but that is offset by cheaper and more abundant food. Fuel may cost more, but more people have a job and can afford it. And so on.

If only government would get the hell out of the way.

Government Sucks At Business

2012-01-11T04:44:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://rufiojones.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/cartoon-black-history-goofy/

Annie: Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.

Frank: No, you can’t.

Annie: Yes, I can.

Frank: No, you can’t.

Annie: Yes, I can.

Frank: No, you can’t.

—Annie and Frank, “Anything You Can Do,” from Annie Get Your Gun

Ronald Reagan warned us back in 1964 that “outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.”

The fact of the matter is that the United States federal government sucks at business. Let’s leave aside for now my usual rant about the Constitution and limited government, and just consider the practical by revisiting a few examples of the “green economy” experiments the Obama administration has forced on the rest of us.

Solyndra

In September 2009, the Department of Energy approved a $535 million government-guaranteed loan to the California-based solar panel manufacturer, after pressure from the White House to speed up the process. Conveniently, the approval came just two days before a previously-scheduled visit by Vice President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Steven Chu, allowing them to use the visit to trumpet the deal as a victory for the administration’s commitment to “investing” in green technology. The deal was supposed to generate at least 4,000 jobs.

What wasn’t disclosed at the time was that Solyndra’s loan application had been tabled by the Bush administration, and financial analysts within the Obama administration—i.e., business people who might actually know what they’re talking about in this area—questioned the deal and the cash flow assumptions upon which it was based, predicting that Solyndra would run out of cash in September 2011. By March 2010, auditors were questioning Solyndra’s continuing solvency, even as President Obama was visiting the company and touting it as a model of clean technology and job creation. In February 2011, the Energy Department helped Solyndra restructure its debt, moving taxpayers to the back of the line of creditor claimants, curiously behind private investors like Obama mega-contributor George Kaiser. On August 31, 2011, almost to the day financial experts within the Obama administration said it would, Solyndra filed for bankruptcy, and laid off almost its entire workforce.

So much for job creation.

Fisker Automotive and A123 Systems

In 2009, Fisker Automotive received a $529 million Department of Energy loan—sound familiar?—to produce high-performance luxury electric cars. At the same time, A123 Systems received a $249.1 million grant from DOE to develop the battery that was eventually supplied to Fisker for use in its Karma, the $102,000-a-pop car that was to come from its DOE loan (in fairness, Fisker also plans to use part of the loan money to produce a more economical “Nina,” but production of that car won’t be seen until at least 2013).

How many of you in the 99% are lining up to get one of those?

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the showroom. First, production was delayed from 2009 to 2011 due to regulatory issues; in other words, the government’s own EPA left hand was getting in the way of its green technology right hand. Then, only 239 cars were produced, every one of which was recalled in December due to safety issues associated with the A123 battery. And even then, the EPA fuel economy ratings for the Karma (52MPGe with a range of 32 miles, 20 MPG on gasoline) ultimately fell well short of the green nirvana promised by Fisker executives (67MPGe with a range of 70 miles). But here’s the kicker:

Fisker assembles the Karma in Finland.

In Finland.

In. Freaking. Finland.

So what we see here is three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollars in taxpayer money wrapped up in a project that to date has produced a grand total of 239 cars retailing at more than double the median U.S. income, that aren’t nearly as “green” as promised and have been recalled due to safety issues, and that are built in Finland, not the U.S.

Is that all you get for your money?

Chevrolet Volt

Remember “too big to fail”?

General Motors was one of those. The U.S. Treasury spent $49.5 billion to help GM weather its 2009 bankruptcy, and the U.S. taxpayer still holds about a 25% stake in the company. At its current stock price of around $23 a share, we’re still about $24 billion in the red on this “investment.” The stock would have to more than double to around $55 for us just to break even.

Meanwhile, GM unleashed the Chevy Volt, which was to lead a new revolution in green electric cars (never mind that these cars run on batteries charged with electricity that’s still generated by fossil fuels, and no one as yet has figured out how to dispose of the dangerous lithium once those batteries die). Trouble is, with a base sticker starting above $40,000, few can afford the Volt. Even with a federal tax subsidy of $7500 to anyone who purchases a Volt, GM has only managed to sell about 8,000 units in the U.S. and Canada since 2010, again as predicted by an Obama administration task force, who advised the President in 2009 that the car “will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful.” Yet on they pressed. And now, like the Fisker Karma, it appears that GM may be moving production of the Volt abroad (such as it is)—in this case, to China.

All of this begs the question why the Left has such a hard time understanding that the government shouldn’t be in the business of being in business. For all their insistence on the importance of investing in a green future, of the need for government to stimulate growth and create American jobs, you’d expect to hear them trumpeting some success stories. Where are the concrete examples of actual substantive success in these ventures? From just the three examples above, we see some $51 billion in taxpayer money spent on projects that have resulted in one bankruptcy, two manufacturing units and the jobs they embody being shipped overseas, and the sale of fewer than 9,000 cars; cars that don’t work that well, aren’t as green as advertised, and that virtually no one can afford.

I’ve made this point before, but it bears repeating. The essence of the theory of evolution is that nature, given a large enough universe of sample events, adapts to find the most efficient means of supporting and propagating life. The same holds for capitalism: millions of people making billions of decisions driven by their own economic best interest will result in adaptations diverting capital resources to their most efficient use. Better ideas rise to dominate, and poorer ideas are cast aside. Meanwhile, the price of experimentation is very, very small; the consequences of any one of these billions upon billions of decisions being a mistake are localized and miniscule.

But when government intervenes, we give up the statistical house advantage of numbers. In place of billions of small low-risk decisions by millions of people acting in their own interest we substitute a handful of gigantic bets made by a small number of people who inherently lack the time, expertise, information, and self-interest to make them. And the consequences of any one of those bets going bad are large in scale and magnitude of their impact.

If people need a better mousetrap, profit motive will drive someone to develop it at a price people are willing to pay, and everybody wins. But if nobody wants that mousetrap, all the government accomplishes by trying to force it on the market is waste, and the only one that wins is government. That’s what happens when a handful of egomaniacal academics decide that they know better than the rest of us how to allocate our own money.

That’s why government sucks at business.

A Tale Of Two Guns

2012-01-09T04:19:00.000-08:00

Photo sources: http://www.chron.com/default/article/Parents-of-teen-killed-by-police-question-deadly-2444641.php#photo-2000111 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glock

Why you trying to second guess me?

I am tired of second guessing.

—R.E.M., Second Guessing

Here’s a story that may not be getting much attention outside of Texas, but you may want to watch.

Last Wednesday, police in Brownsville—a city on the Texas/Mexico border—shot and killed 15 year old Jaime Gonzalez in a middle school hallway. His godmother complained to the Brownsville Herald that “[i]t was not right . . . They didn’t give him a chance.”

I can only assume she was there and saw the whole thing to know that.

His parents, predictably, are already looking for a lawyer, and want to know “[w]hy was so much excess force used on a minor?” Civil rights groups are demanding an investigation. I assume it’s only a matter of time before we have Quanell X, Al Sharpton, and the other usual spotlight vultures showing up to decry once again The Man’s police brutality against people of color.

Excess force. Didn’t give him a chance. Hmm.

Here’s the thing. Jaime Gonzalez was carrying a gun. In a school. That alone really ought to end the discussion, but there’s more. The incident began when Jaime beat up another student, prompting school officials to call the police. The 911 tape reveals that officers repeatedly—repeatedly—ordered Jaime to drop the gun, and he didn’t do it. He then pointed the gun at the police, who immediately opened fire.

What makes this a little more complicated is that the gun young Jaime was carrying turned out to be a .177 caliber CO2 pellet pistol. So between the victim’s age and the nature of the weapon, the narrative quickly becomes an anti-police tale of Cops Kill Boy Holding Toy. But take a quick look at the photos at the top. One of these is the pellet gun carried by Jaime Gonzalez. The other is a 9mm Glock 17, a weapon used by police and militaries around the world. The pellet gun probably won’t kill you, but the Glock most certainly will (yes, I know, guns don’t kill people, people do—try to keep up). And I challenge you to give them just a brief glance and see if you can distinguish between the two.

Now try it under life-and-death duress.

It’s a funny thing about cops: when you point a gun at them, they’re not inclined to ask you what it is. They don’t have time to study it. They don’t get the opportunity to have you drop the magazine so they can inspect the ammunition, or measure the bore diameter. They react to defend themselves and those around them, and they do so with deadly force. They shoot center mass, because it’s easier to hit under duress, and far more likely to stop an assailant than a shot to the arm or leg. And if there’s more than one cop around when you point that gun, all of them are going to fire. It’s called “suicide by cop.”

They have to be this way. In 2011 alone, 177 police officers were killed in the line of duty in the U.S., 71 of them by being shot. That’s up from 153 in 2010. It’s a dangerous business, and it’s why they carry weapons in the first place. And a gunman in a school is no laughing matter, either. Since 1996, there have been 80 school shooting incidents in the U.S., resulting in 164 dead. What’s more disturbing is the trajectory: the period between 1996 and 2005 averaged 2.8 such incidents per year, while the period between 2006 and 2011 has seen a sharp uptick to 8.7 per year, a threefold increase.

Jaime Gonzalez’ death is tragic, as is the loss of any young person, under any circumstances. One can understand his parents’ grief. But to them, and to the civil rights zealots who are so quick to throw the police under the bus (or set up their lawsuit—I note Mrs. Gonzalez had the presence of mind to take photos of her dead son with her cell phone “to document the bullet wounds”) let me ask a couple of questions. First, what the hell was Jaime Gonzalez doing at school with any gun, toy or otherwise? His parents swear they didn’t know he had it and have no idea how he got it, answers that will no doubt be very convenient for their lawyer. I’ll bet you dollars-to-donuts the truth is that gun was a Christmas present; of course, they’ll never admit that now. But giving them the benefit of the doubt, I’ll respond with the same query I noted Bill Cosby posing to the black community the other day: why don’t you know that?

My second question is more important: what would you have had the police do in that situation? Better yet: what would you do when a person you don’t know refuses multiple commands to drop what as best you can tell is a gun and then points it at you? The police have a right to protect themselves, and a duty to protect others. I don’t know the range at which the police shot Gonzalez, but the maximum reach of a Taser is only about 35 feet; one doubts they were that close. Obviously, batons, pepper spray, and compliance techniques require reducing that range much closer, not exactly practical against someone potentially wielding a gun. That doesn’t leave the police with many options. Gonzalez’ death is a tragedy, but how much more tragic would it have been had he been about to take a real gun on a Virginia Tech-style rampage, and the police failed to stop him? What would we be saying to the parents of however many innocent victims? What would we be saying to the wife and children of a slain officer had the police delayed their reaction long enough to permit Jaime to open fire first? The police can’t take that chance.

The job of the police is difficult under the best of circumstances, but it gets harder and harder when every move is handicapped with worrying about who’s going to question their actions, and how they’re going to explain them when they get sued. It’s very easy to play quarterback from your sofa with instant replay and slow motion; it’s very, very difficult when life-and-death decisions have to be made in a nanosecond. The fact of the matter is if Jaime Gonzalez doesn’t bring a gun—of whatever sort—to school, if he doesn’t beat up a classmate, if he simply complies when the police tell him—again, repeatedly—to drop the gun, the police aren’t put in that situation and this never happens.

My heart goes out to Mr. and Mrs. Gonzalez; I wouldn’t wish the loss of a child on anyone. But it also must go out to the officers involved, who did what they had to do in a situation that afforded no time for contemplation, and no margin for error; they will have to live with Wednesday’s events for the rest of their lives.

Our Missing Self-Respect

2012-01-06T04:22:00.000-08:00

Photo source: http://archinect.com/forum/thread/103072/discrepencies-with-fast-times-at-ridgemont-high-screenplay-and-actual-movie

Seems no one’s talking ‘bout those crazy days gone by.

—Van Halen, Little Dreamer

I love Bill Cosby.

Yesterday I was reading a speech he gave at the 50^th Anniversary commemoration of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, which most of you will recall was the 1954 Supreme Court case that ended the school segregation policies known as “separate but equal.” That speech has come to be known as the "Pound Cake Speech," and in it Cosby had some very pointed remarks about the decline of civility and moral grounding—he preaches it as a lack of parenting—in the black community:

“No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.

* * *

In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on. In the old days, you couldn’t hooky school because behind every drawn shade there was an eye. And before your mother got off the bus and to the house, she knew exactly where you had gone, who had gone into the house. Parents don’t know that today.

I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? And where is his father, and why don’t you know where he is? And why doesn’t the father show up to talk to this boy?

Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! Then we all run out and are outraged, ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him!’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake as bad as anybody else, and I looked at it and I had no money. And something called ‘parenting’ said, ‘if you get caught with it you’re going to embarrass your mother.’ Not ‘you’re going to get your butt kicked.’ No. You’re going to embarrass your mother. You’re going to embarrass your family.

* * *

Are you not paying attention? People with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack—isn’t that a sign of something? Are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants back up? Isn’t it a sign of something when she’s got her dress all the way up to the crack, and got all kinds of needles and things going through her body? What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. These people are not Africans. They don’t know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shalingua, Mohammed, and all that crap and all of them are in jail.

* * *

It’s standing on the corner. It can’t speak English. It doesn’t want to speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk. ‘Why you ain’t where you is, go, ra.’ I don’t know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk . . . You used to talk a certain way on the corner, and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t land a plane with ‘why you ain’t . . .’ You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible with that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they’re moving ahead on this? Well, they know they’re not, they’re just hanging out in the same places, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you’re just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out.

* * *

What is it with young girls getting after some girl who wants to still remain a virgin? Who are these sick black people and where did they come from and why haven’t they been parented to shut up? To go up to girls and try to get a club where ‘you are nobody…’ This is a sickness, ladies and gentlemen. They don’t know anything. They don’t have anything. They’re homeless people. All they know how to do is beg. And you give it to them, trying to win their friendship. And what are they good for? And then they stand there in an orange suit and you drop to your knees, ‘He didn’t do anything, he didn’t do anything!’ Yes, he did do it. And you need to have an orange suit on, too.”

It’s a long series of excerpts, but I include them all because Cosby says it better than I can, and it means more coming from him as a black man who rose from the projects than it does coming from me.

But my point here today isn’t about race relations, Brown v. Board, or the black community. As I read Cosby’s speech, I was reminded of President Reagan’s 1989 farewell address, in which he talked about the differences between the America of the early 1960s and that heading into the 1990s:

Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American, and we absorbed almost in the air a love of country and an appreciation for its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-Sixties.

But we’re about to enter the Nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style.

* * *

We’ve got to teach history based on not what’s in fashion, but what’s important: why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant . . . If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I am warning of an eradication of that—of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.”

Cosby and Reagan come at it from two different perspectives, and they are to an extent aiming at different targets, but there’s a central core common to both messages. Cosby talked about parenting, Reagan about the discussion at the dinner table. Both were getting at the same idea of a decay in our grounding that began—and can only be corrected—at home. There was a time when some things were just understood about how you live in an orderly free society, and it didn’t mean that you do whatever, with whomever, whenever and wherever you want. Whether you were white or black, if you were a boy you went to school in a shirt with a collar, if not wearing a tie. You groomed your hair. It would never occur to you to have your pants down below your butt crack. If you were a girl, you wore a skirt that displayed a certain sense of modesty, rather than your entire anatomy. Not that things were totally Victorian or perfect, but there were things you didn’t say or do in public, because there was a universally understood code of decency.

Lest you think this is just about fashion sense or prudish morality, let me just say that the dress and conduct says something profound about our larger attitudes as a whole. There used to be a certain civic sensibility. It was not only OK, but expected, to say the Pledge of Allegiance; and that included “one nation under God” and nobody blinked or thought anything of it. You respected the police, and the nation and its institutions—you were an American, and that made you inherently special. Your job as an American was to go to school, work hard, and do the best you could to make the most of yourself that you could. All of these things went hand-in-hand.

It’s about self-respect, and I think we, as Americans, have lost it. In the black neighborhood of Cosby’s youth, there may have been poverty and disadvantage; but there was enough self–respect that children were looked after, people kept up with their grooming, and you worked hard to make the most of what those before you—in his case, the civil right pioneers whose efforts led to Brown v. Board—gave you. On a broader scale, at the beginnings of Reagan’s political life, there was enough respect of country that its institutions, history, and founding principles were taught and lived at home.

Somewhere in the permissiveness of the drugs and free love of the Sixties, in the mistrust of Vietnam and Watergate, in the press of political correctness zealotry, in the slippery slope of entitlement and the absence of consequences, we lost it. We’ve forgotten how to be civilized and conduct ourselves with some decorum and common sense. We’ve forgotten how to teach, respect, and understand where we’ve come from and who we are—I’ll bet you right now 9 out of 10 people on the street would fail a basic 9^th grade civics exam from the 1950s. We’ve forgotten how to take a lick and get back up. We’ve forgotten how to work hard and rely on ourselves.

Worst, we’ve forgotten how special it is to be Americans.

As a society, more and more are simply waiting around for government to give them something. And even among those who aren’t, too many wring their hands over what the rest of the world thinks of us, apologizing for who we are and what we have and how we live, instead of making the most of the opportunities the country our forebears left us—or what’s left of it—afford us. We teach our kids that there are no winners and losers, that it’s inappropriate to compete, and that no one ever fails. We celebrate those who burn U.S. flags, and defend those who start fights over displaying that same flag during other countries’ pseudo-holidays. Hard work, profit, and American exceptionalism have become vices to be shed and shunned, rather than virtues to be revered.

If we cannot regain our former self-respect as Americans; if we cannot get back to looking and acting like we care about ourselves and who we are, where we come from, and what we’re about; if we cannot conduct ourselves with a basic sense of decency and respect for this country and its institutions; if we cannot regain the understanding that the freedom with which we were blessed is a freedom of opportunity, not a freedom from consequences or the burdens of work; if we cannot re-learn that America is special and unique in the world, and that that’s OK; if we can’t get those things back, and soon, we’re in deep, deep, deep trouble.

Professor Krugman, Debt DOES Matter

2012-01-05T04:23:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://1-2knockout.typepad.com/.a/6a00e5505fc4968834010536e09336970b-popup

I used to like to go to work, but they shut it down

I got a right to go to work, but there’s no work here to be found

Yes, and they say we’re gonna have to pay what’s owed

We’re gonna have to reap from some seed that’s been sowed

—Dire Straits, Telegraph Road

In his latest installment of I Never Met A Dollar I Couldn’t Borrow And Spend, Paul Krugman again argues for more government debt to finance a never-ending orgy of government spending. For the good Professor, government debt is different than other debt because, in his world, governments don’t really have to pay it back.

That’ll come as news to the Chinese.

First, as I’ve tried repeatedly to point out in this space, the only money government can spend—whether directly, or in paying back money it borrowed from elsewhere—is money it takes from its citizens. There can’t be any “stimulating” effect, because the money the government purports to inject into the economy is money the government took out of the economy in the first place, a fundamental point even Krugman concedes, albeit while continuing to deny the obvious policy implication.

And one really need only look at federal spending over the last five years to see that it doesn’t work. We have gone from about $2.7 trillion for 2006 (19% of GDP), to over $3.5 trillion for 2010 (24% of GDP) and $3.8 trillion for 2011, yet we face the same question Ronald Reagan immortally posed back in 1980:

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

The fact is we have increased federal spending by a trillion dollars—36%—over the last five years, and the economy remains at best stagnant; virtually zero growth, and unemployment stuck for three years running essentially at (or above) 9%. Of course, the Krugmans and Obamas of the world never say exactly how much spending is enough, conveniently allowing them when it predictably fails to fall back on the saw that we just haven’t spent enough yet.

Leaving aside the debate over the long-dead John Maynard Keynes, Krugman’s main thesis is that government debt isn’t a problem because governments don’t have to pay that debt back. First, he says, the federal debt is one we largely owe to ourselves, which is itself a dishonest semantic game, and in any event irrelevant. The federal debt isn’t one that the United States as a political entity owes to itself and thus it simply cancels itself out, as Krugman implies; it’s a debt the United States owes to, among others, specific individual Americans. In other words, it’s not a debt we all owe to all of us, but a debt we all owe to some of us. But whether the creditor is an American citizen or the Chinese government, there’s a larger question of who we want to be as a people: Do we really want to borrow money with the specific intention of never paying it back (what in some places is called “stealing”)? Is that how we want to conduct ourselves?

Somehow I thought we were better than that, and I think men like Jefferson and Franklin did, too.

But it doesn’t matter to Krugman, because at 100%+ of GDP, the federal debt is actually less than the debt incurred to finance World War II, and what a great thing that was. What Krugman doesn’t tell you is that the immediate post-war period and right now are the only times in our history that the federal debt has ever exceeded 100% of GDP. Other than those two peaks, federal debt since WWII has hovered around 50% of GDP—roughly half the current level—and for the 140 years prior to the Great Depression it fluctuated between 0% and about 40%. The fact is that debt levels of the current magnitude are new and essentially unique in our experience. The E.U. and Japan have already shown us the ultimate consequences of this kind of debt/spending, and it isn’t pretty. When Krugman has to hold up Great Britain as his poster child for the economic benefits of excessive government debt, he basically makes the point for me.

But the real reason Krugman says governments don’t have to pay back debt is that, as he tells it, all they really have to do is keep growing the tax base. In other words, as long as there are more people to pay taxes tomorrow than there were yesterday, government revenues grow, yesterday’s debt gets serviced (i.e., the interest gets paid), and it’s all OK.

Alex, who is Charles Ponzi?

The problem is that Krugman’s underlying premise that the tax base will in fact forever continue to grow is deeply flawed. The Social Security Administration has concluded that very soon there will be too few people contributing into the system to continue to support it at current taxation and benefit payout levels. That alone suggests that the group of payors—the tax base—isn’t growing fast enough. But let’s consider the broader numbers. A March 31, 2011 Congressional Research Service report tells us that the 2008 fertility rate of 2.08 per female is below replacement level (the birth rate statistically necessary for a population to sustain itself), and that other than 2006 and 2007, U.S. fertility rates have been below replacement level every year since 1971 (contrast that with the immediate post-WWII era, when the rate peaked at 3.77 in 1957, well above the replacement level). What this means is that for the last 40 years, without net immigration, the population level—which ultimately must impact the size of the tax base—hasn’t even treaded water. This is much of the problem in Europe, where declining populations have left fewer and fewer taxpayers to support the ever-increasing government debt/spending edifice. Further, that same CRS report tells us that not only is the indigenous population getting smaller, it’s also getting older and poorer; not exactly the recipe for an ever-increasing tax base.

The tax base growth upon which Krugman depends must, therefore, come from immigration. Well, is our net immigration comprised of hoardes of wealthy people who earn incomes likely to support significant additional tax liability?

Um, not exactly.

According to the CRS report, the leading regions for net immigration are North America (read: Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, Dominican Republic) and Asia, which combine for nearly 70% of the total. Hispanics (25.3%) and Asians (12.5%) had significantly higher poverty rates than did non-Hispanic whites (9.4%). This isn’t a comment on immigration policy, but simply highlights the statistical reality that the immigration driving U.S. population growth is comprised largely of people who are less likely to add to the tax base than they are to draw from the system.

Krugman ignores this reality. What happens when there’s no longer enough base growth to service the debt? Does Professor Krugman expect those who are owed the money—whether it’s the Chinese or ordinary Americans holding savings bonds—to just eat the loss? Not bloody likely.

Krugman also misses—or deliberately ignores—the fundamental point that this is ultimately about liberty. Every dollar the federal government spends is a dollar it must forcibly take from its citizens. Every government program is yet another set of rules whereby the federal government tells you what you can and cannot do. Every time we increase spending and increase government, we give up just a little more liberty, and at some point—if we’re not already past it—the Beast will be so large we can never get it back.

What then, Professor?

The Rick Santorum Enigma

2011-12-29T07:54:00.000-08:00

Image source: http://classicmonsters.blogspot.com/2009/10/monster-day-invisible-man.html

Cellophane, Mister Cellophane

Shoulda been my name

Mister Cellophane

'Cause you can look right through me

Walk right by me

And never know I'm there.

—Amos, “Mister Cellophane,” from Chicago

As we head towards next week’s Iowa caucuses and the kickoff of the 2012 campaign in earnest, the same question keeps popping into my gulliver:

Why can’t Rick Santorum gain any traction?

Actually, Hannity posed that very question to Santorum himself a month or so ago, so I can’t claim any originality there. But for those of us who fancy ourselves conservatives, it’s a serious question worth considering.

I suppose I have some sympathy for the old William F. Buckley philosophy of supporting “the most conservative candidate electable,” and if you subscribe to that school of thought the very fact that the former Senator hasn’t gained more momentum by now renders the question of why irrelevant. But as I began this blog back in July, if we cede the discussion to the center/left in the interest of just winning elections, we may as well pack up and go home. To that end, I am more inclined to fight the fight that needs fighting, and heed the words of Ronald Reagan, who encouraged us to stick to “certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency,” and to “raise[] a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues[.]”

So, what’s not to like about Senator Santorum?

I understand there isn’t going to be a perfect candidate. But Santorum appears to lack some of the warts that afflict the rest of the GOP field. He hasn’t shown a tendency to melt down during national TV debates like Governor Perry. He isn’t prone to factual gaffes and (fairly or unfairly) subject to criticism as a fringe extremist like Representative Bachmann (for the record, I like her a lot and don’t see her as a fringe extremist, but it’s unrealistic to ignore the fact that many peg her that way). He doesn’t have the national security blind spots and affinity for nutball conspiracy theories like Representative Paul. He doesn’t display the often overbearing intellectual ego (arrogance?) that I fear may make Speaker Gingrich a paralyzingly polarizing nominee.

And most importantly, Santorum doesn’t have a history of flip-flopping on issues for political expediency as do Gingrich and Governor Romney. This is particularly important with Obamacare, which will surely be a centerpiece of the campaign discussion. Gingrich’s and Romney’s past support for the Massachusetts program that was the model for the universal mandate will severely handicap them in a debate with Obama like an 800-pound anchor chained to their ankles.

If the idea is to present a party of bold colors distinguishing our guiding principles from those of the Democrats and the Left, what is needed is the most consistently conservative candidate we can find. Substantively, Senator Santorum has been as or more consistently conservative across the spectrum of issues than any other candidate on the menu. I don’t like to divide conservatism into subsets (social conservative, fiscal conservative, etc.); you are either a conservative or you aren’t. But I will do so here for ease of discussion. Consider the following:

Reducing Government

For you Tea Party types and other fiscal conservatives, Santorum has your hymnal, and he’s singing away. He supports a cut, cap, and balance amendment to the Constitution limiting federal spending at 18% of GDP. He wants to eliminate agricultural and energy subsidies, and de-fund EPA and Planned Parenthood, and also United Nations programs that are contrary to U.S. interests. And he wants to reform—not eliminate—Social Security and Medicare.

Santorum supports massive reforms to the tax code, including eliminating the alternative minimum tax, death tax, and tax on repatriated income. He would reduce income taxes to two brackets—10% and 28%--and reduce the capital gains tax to 12%. Although not an executive function, Santorum support immediate de-funding and repeal of Obamacare. He wants to eliminate strangling government regulations that are hindering the growth of business in the U.S., and phase out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And while his advocacy of dissolving the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals is a bit more over-the-top than is necessary—that’s another post—his underlying notion that the federal courts have gotten too big for their britches is spot on.

Defense

Santorum understands that we are not engaged in a war on terror, which is a term so P.C. that it wholly fails to explain what’s really going on. We are—whether we like it or not—in a war with radical Islam. The threats from jihadists and from a potentially nuclear-armed Iran are real, and for Santorum must be dealt with pro-actively. Santorum is a strong supporter of Israel and secure borders. While he has tended towards a more Bush-like nation-building policy than I’d like, the Paulian alternative of passive isolationism is far more dangerous.

Social Issues

Santorum is more solidly and consistently conservative on social issues than any candidate in the field with the possible exception of Ms. Bachmann. Senator Santorum understands—and lives—the idea that the traditional family and the sanctity of human life are at the core of what has made this a great nation. He is as pro-life as they come, supporting the elimination of federal funding for Planned Parenthood, and during his time in Congress he sought to ban partial-birth abortions. He wrote the original Federal Marriage Amendment, and as President would direct the Justice Department to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court. You could argue, I suppose, that his social positions make him subject to charges of anti-gay bigotry; I submit, however, that anyone who is going to hang their voting hat on sexual orientation issues isn't going to vote for anyone in the GOP field anyway.

I figure Rick Santorum must be doing something right as a conservative to provoke the kind of vulgar, profane, and frankly just gross vitriol the radical Left spews about him on the Internet. Of course, the bright lights of national scrutiny may yet reveal some skeleton of which we're not aware--but that hasn't happened yet. If what you want is someone who will draw a sharp contrast from the current administration, who will represent the conservative position in bold colors and not pale pastels, I submit he’s worth a second look.

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Editor's Note: I hope everyone had a terrific Christmas, and is taking some time to spend with family. I remain on vacation through the end of the year. Thanks for sticking with me, and here's to a safe, prosperous, and tide-changing 2012. RDW