While skeptical of the identity politics issue, I’ve been mostly supportive of GoProud in the past, even if criticizing them over an ill-timed open letter. I am neither a social conservative, nor a member of the Christian Right. What I am is someone who believes, as does Mark Levin via RightScoop, that various official groups within the conservative movement should conduct themselves responsibly, especially in the press – and demonstrate tolerance for others.
In today’s WSJ, Michael Medved argues that his colleagues’ criticisms of Obama are not only over-the-top and absurd, but that they’re wholly counter-productive:
[T]he White House record of more than 200 years shows plenty of bad decisions but no bad men. For all their foibles, every president attempted to rise to the challenges of leadership and never displayed disloyal or treasonous* intent.
This history makes some of the current charges about Barack Obama especially distasteful—and destructive to the conservative cause.
One typical column appeared on Feb. 5 at the well-regarded American Thinker website, under the heading: “Obama Well Knows What Chaos He Has Unleashed.” Victor Sharpe solemnly declares: “My fear is that Obama is not naïve at all, but he instead knows only too well what he is doing, for he is eagerly promoting Islamic power in the world while diminishing the West.”
These attitudes thrive well beyond the blogosphere and the right-wing fringe. On Jan. 7, Sarah Palin spoke briefly on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, saying, “What I believe that Obama is doing right now—he is hell-bent on weakening America.” While acknowledging that “it’s gonna get some people all wee-weed up again,” she repeated and amplified her charge that “what Obama is doing” is “purposefully weakening America—because he understood that debt weakened America, domestically and internationally, and yet now he supports increasing debt.”
The assumption that the president intends to harm or destroy the nation that elected him has become so widespread that the chief advertising pitch for Dinesh D’Souza’s best-selling book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” promises to “reveal Obama for who he really is: a man driven by the anti-colonial ideology of his father and the first American president to actually seek to reduce America’s strength, influence and standard of living.”
None of the attacks on Mr. Obama’s intentions offers an even vaguely plausible explanation of how the evil genius, once he has ruined our “strength, influence and standard of living,” hopes to get himself re-elected. In a sense, the president’s most paranoid critics pay him a perverse compliment in maintaining that his idealism burns with such pure, all-consuming heat that he remains blissfully unconcerned with minor matters like his electoral future. They label Mr. Obama as the political equivalent of a suicide bomber: so overcome with hatred (or “rage”) that he’s perfectly willing to blow himself up in order to inflict casualties on a society he loathes.
On his radio show last July 2, the most influential conservative commentator of them all reaffirmed his frequent charge that the president seeks economic suffering “on purpose.” Rush Limbaugh explained: “I think we face something we’ve never faced before in the country—and that is, we’re now governed by people who do not like the country.” In his view, this hostility to the United States relates to a grudge connected to Mr. Obama’s black identity. “There’s no question that payback is what this administration is all about, presiding over the decline of the United States of America, and doing so happily.”
Regardless of the questionable pop psychology of this analysis, as a political strategy it qualifies as almost perfectly imbecilic. Republicans already face a formidable challenge in convincing a closely divided electorate that the president pursues wrong-headed policies. They will never succeed in arguing that those initiatives have been cunningly and purposefully designed to wound the republic. In Mr. Obama’s case, it’s particularly unhelpful to focus on alleged bad intentions and rotten character when every survey shows more favorable views of his personality than his policies.
Rule: Any plan that pitches itself as an effort to reduce the deficit by x amount of dollars over a ten year period is an absolute joke.
I think this is an iron clad rule. As a serious question, can anyone name me a single year since 1934 when the needs and actions of the federal government were accurately predictable 10 years earlier? Did anyone in 2001 (or 2004, or 2006 even) forsee the budget deficits of the last three years? We all griped about deficits during the Bush years, but the notion of a $1 trillion deficit (much less a $1.5 trillion deficit) was not in the realm of possibility.
I’m limiting the question to post-1934, since that’s when our modern massive federal government came to be; prior to 1934, when we actually had a small federal government, actions and outlays (except for wars) were fairly predictable. So long as we have a federal government that has unlimited purview, any budget projections beyond three years might as well be made by tarot readings and random number generation.
I sat down the other day and added up the total cost (in time and money) of my education. Had I apprenticed myself to a plumber straight out of high school, I would be immeasurably better off financially; I’d be a skilled worker with an opportunity to start my own business, and I could go as far as my skill and ambition would take me. Perhaps I’d be less interesting, but probably not. Do you know how many worthwhile hobbies one can have with an extra decade of financial stability and not taking out tens of thousands of dollars in loans?
The future of higher education simply must be different than what it is now. Currently, it’s an inefficient system to transfer money from the young and poor to the old and financially stable. Couple it with the Social Security and Medicare taxes I’m paying on my income right now (egad), and it is simply jawdropping to think about the portion of my life taken from me to support old people who have already had the opportunity to provide for their own well-being. The well-to-do elderly get my money while I have to delay trivial matters like home ownership and children. What a system!
Bring on the education reform, send the overpaid geezer professors into retirement, and give America’s youth their lives back rather than forcing them into education until they’re 30 and loan repayment (if they’re lucky) until they’re 40. A society doesn’t become great or maintain greatness by destroying the productive years of its citizens’ lives.
Ray LaHood has got to be the LVP of this administration. Ann Althouse has a proper take down of this inanity. I’m embarassed that this man used to be (and may still claim to be) a Republican, and the sooner he’s bereft of all power and influence on American life, the better off every single person in this country will be.
2. It’s “win one for the Gipper,” not “take one for the Gipper.” “Take one for the Gipper” makes absolutely no sense. The sort of thing someone only says if they’re ignorant of who the Gipper actually was.
3. What the hell sort of guy waffles about what tie to wear and then takes a subordinate’s tie? That’s not the sort of story someone retells, for it reveals numerous unflattering things. Not the least of which is that our president can’t decide on what tie to wear.
4. All that indecision, the mangled quote, the taking of another man’s tie, and thatwas the end result. I’m not saying it’s a bad tie; it’s alright. Nothing special one way or the other. But it’s a plain gray suit with a white shirt. Who can’t pick out a tie for that? Jesus, dude, it’s the biggest speech of your career, and it’s going to be on national television. Stop off somewhere and pick up a Brioni. Don’t commandeer your subordinate’s mediocre tie.
5. The more I think about this story, the more unflattering it becomes. Ponder it for a minute or two. Liberals are supposed to be the sort of people who are aware of and concerned about power dynamics and oppression. And here he is taking the tie off the neck of a subordinate because it looks better than the “five or six” ties that he’d bought himself. This is like some populist caricature of a robber-baron plutocrat, or a Biblical parable – the rich man who has it all, but then takes the one nice thing that his employee has out of sheer avarice. All Gibbs ever did was have better taste than Barry and Michelle.
Connecticut and New Jersey residents with a Hamptons summer cottage or a Manhattan pied-a-terre are about to get a nasty surprise: New York state wants more taxes from them.
A New York court ruled last month that all income earned by a New Canaan, Conn., couple is subject to New York state taxes because they own a summer home on Long Island they used only a few times a year. They have been hit with an additional tax bill of $1.06 million.
Tax experts and real estate brokers say this ruling could boost the tax bill for thousands of business executives who own New York City apartments they use only occasionally. It could also hurt sales in the Hamptons and New York’s other vacation-home communities.
“People will think twice about spending any summer time in New York,” says Robert Willens, a New York-based tax consultant. “The amount of tax they could be subjected to is likely to outweigh the benefit.”
[snip]
Tax attorneys said they were unlikely to get the ruling overturned.
Granted, this was a judge making the ruling rather than the legislature. But if owning a second home in New York—even one used only a few days a year—is going to get you treated like a full time resident of that high tax state, then there’s going to be a sell off of second homes, pied a terres, et al. To avoid a yearly tax bill of a million dollars, one can afford a lot of stays in nice hotels.
So the housing market in New York is probably going to go down. On the plus side, hotels there will probably be seeing a lot more business. Perhaps housing will soon be cheap enough there that normal people can afford to live there.
People tend to see what they want to see in political figures. Consider this old Goldberg file about three old Reaganites: Joshua Muravchik, a foreign policy specialist; Irwin Stelzer, an economist; and Michael Novak, a theologian. Each of them had a very different view of Reagan:
In the course of his answer, Muravchik said that the Reagan movement was primarily a foreign-policy cause united around defeating Communism. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I recall [he said this]. At this assertion, an “au contraire” was offered from Irwin Stelzer, Ronald Reagan’s former director of regulatory affairs. He said that Reaganism was essentially an economic philosophy and while anti-Communism was surely a vital part, foreign-policy activists were simply another wing emanating from the core of the true Reagan coalition. Seconds after Stelzer made his comments, my friend Michael Novak — one of America’s leading Catholic intellectuals, former Templeton Prize winner and an ambassador-at-large under Reagan — begged to differ. While, of course, fighting for free markets and against the Red menace was vital to Reaganism, these policies were largely outgrowths of a moral and religious vision, which is why the Reagan movement was essentially a religious cause.
In each case, what Reagan was got a heavy dose of coloring from the perspective of whoever was telling the story. Robert Samuelson comments on and falls prey to this today:
We are deluged with Ronald Reagan celebrations and retrospectives, but most are misleading. They omit Reagan’s singular domestic achievement and the wellspring of his popularity: the defeat of double-digit inflation. In 1979 and 1980, inflation averaged 13 percent; by 1984, it was 4 percent — and falling. Without subdued inflation, the economy would have remained a mess and Reagan might have lost his 1984 re-election bid. He certainly wouldn’t have won his 58.5 percent to 40.4 percent landslide.You will not find this in most of today’s Reagan appraisals, which tell us more about the appraisers than about Reagan. In an 11-page cover package, Time magazine doesn’t mention inflation but pronounces Reagan a “transformational” leader whose political style — not his policies — should be emulated by Barack Obama. In its 11 pages on Reagan, the conservative Weekly Standard also avoids inflation and argues that Reaganism endures as the rediscovery of the “principles of the founding.”
In an interesting article, the WaPo crunches the numbers on post-Heller DC gun registrations. More specifically, on what kind of person has taken advantage of the new system. Their findings:
In all of the neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River – a broad swath of the city with more than 52,000 households, many of them in areas beset by poverty and drug-related violence – about 240 guns have been registered…
In the 20016 Zip code, encompassing some of the District’s wealthiest enclaves in upper Northwest, 151 firearms have been registered. That is more than 10 percent of the citywide gun total in an area with about 14,000 households, according to U.S. Census data.
No other residential Zip code in Washington has seen as big an influx of legal guns since the ban was ruled unconstitutional…
In the District’s poorest, most crime-scarred precinct, Ward 8 in far Southeast, residents have registered about 140 guns. In Ward 3 in upper Northwest, where the violent-crime rate is nearly 10 times lower and the average family income is more than five times higher, about twice as many firearms have been registered.
It’s open to conjecture why residents in some of the District’s toughest neighborhoods have registered fewer guns than people in other parts of the city. D.C. police Lt. Jon Shelton, head of the firearms registration unit, said it could be simple economics.
“You have to figure, what are legitimate guns costing now?” he said. “A basic revolver is going for $350 or $400. And you’re talking about $650, $700 for a quality 9 millimeter. So who’s got that kind of money to just throw out there for a gun?
“Legitimate people I’m talking about now. A lot of them, these days, they’re having a hard enough time putting food on the table for their kids.”
Allow me to conjecture: the cost in time and money of getting licensed by the District is prohibitive to most working-class people; indeed prohibitive to anyone who doesn’t have hundreds of dollars and lots of time to spare.
I discovered this for myself I went through a similar process last year in Massachusetts. In order to get the standard Class-A License to Carry Firearms* and be able to take it to a gun range to shoot, one needs to:
Attend a state-approved Basic Firearms Safety course;
Attend an orientation at a gun club;
Be interviewed by the local police department during regular business hours, and;
If approved, pick up the license about five weeks later, again during regular business hours.
Putting aside the question of whether or not this is good policy, let me just relate how costly it was. The safety course took up an afternoon and cost $150. Attending my local gun club’s orientation and becoming a provisional member cost me another afternoon and an additional $175. The police interview and license application required me to take a few hours off of work and $100, and I then had to take more time off of work to retrieve my license in person after it was approved (the PD would not mail it to me). That’s $425, two afternoons, and two late-arrivals at work just to be able to purchase a handgun. That almost doubles the dollar cost of a cheap revolver and — factoring in time — probably doubles the cost of a semi-automatic.
Compared to DC, though, Massachusetts comes off looking like a bargain. As the Post’s own Christian Davenport discovered last year, the equivalent process in the District costs $830 and nearly two full working days. Again, this is simply to acquire a license from the District and does not include the cost of purchasing a firearm which — by the by — also cannot be done without traveling out of DC. When all is said and done, it’s impossible to legally purchase a handgun in DC without spending anything less than $1,100 and giving up about three days of one’s time.
As a non-married man with no kids, a middle-class, salaried job, and a boss willing to let me trade a late evening for a late morning, the Massachusetts process was more annoying than onerous; I was in no particular hurry, had few responsibilities to anyone beside myself, an accommodating employer, and I could afford it. I could have afforded the DC process as well, though not easily.
It takes little imagination to see how these requirements make gun ownership well beyond the means of anyone who works for a lower hourly wage, especially if he or she has dependents. So while everyone has the theoretical right to a constitutional right, the District has set up a system with such onerous rules and high costs that only the marginally well-off have any chance of actually exercising it.
Post-Reconstruction, that’s not how our Constitution works. Though Heller made it clear that regulations are perfectly compatible with the 2nd Amendment, there’s a certain level of difficulty and cost that makes a less about regulating a right for society’s benefit and more about doing everything legally permissible to stop them from exercising constitutionally protected rights. Unsurprisingly, the latter is exactly how DC Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray phrased the matter when he said that the District “going to have the strictest handgun laws the Constitution allows.”
If this is substantively different from the District creating a byzantine and expensive licensing process to attain a 1st Amendment permit — though car licensing makes for a better comparison in terms of potential for physical harm, necessity of skill, and cost, James Madison did not include it in his list of proposed amendments — I’m unable to see it.
* A somewhat misleading name. Basically, “carry” denotes everything from concealed carry to traveling to a gun range with the weapon locked, unloaded, and disassembled in the trunk of my car. Each of these licenses contains a list of restrictions, spelling out under what circumstances one may carry (e.g., to the gun range to target shoot); in practice, a “unrestricted” license is virtually identical from a conceal-and-carry license in other states. One’s restrictions are determined by the local police department, who are given wide discretion in these matters.
Any talk that this is an end to the national spending binge, as the Speaker has said, is overblown; this isn’t even 1/10th of the deficit. But this story provides hope that the Tea Party really has produced something new under the sun: Congressmen who are more interested in fulfilling their promises than in kowtowing to the party leadership.
Apollo posted this at 10:39 AM HKT on Friday, February 11th, 2011 as Tea Time
This is superior historical fiction: obviously well-researched, strongly narrated, with excellent characterization and some of the most effectively subtle prose I’ve ever encountered. If you can imagine the grit lack of sentimentality of The Sandbaggers set in Poland during WWII, you’re close.
The Polish Officer is the story of Captain Alexander de Milja, a military cartographer recruited into the Polish secret service at the 11th hour, literally as Warsaw burns around him. The novel follow de Milja as through various assignments throughout Europe, punctuated by love affairs, friendships, betrayals, suspense, and death — always death, which seems to potentially lurk behind every page. Most of characters in this book are intelligent and worldly enough to realize when an assignment is likely to bring a death sentence and the inverse dramatic irony is phenomenally affecting.
I wondered throughout how he was going to end the novel, as I couldn’t tell where Furst was going with all this (it only stood to reason that someone of his skill had to be leading the reader somewhere). It wasn’t until the last couple of paragraphs that it became clear and it was well worth the wait.
Egyptians need to come up with their own government. A people becomes free either when a tyrant is forcibly stripped of power (see U.S.A., Japan ca. 1945, France ca. 1789, Russia ca. 1919 and 1991) or after a very long time of gradual changes while suffering under marginally less tyrannical governments (see England).
The Egyptians have the chance to secure liberty and prosperity for themselves and their posterity. Either they can handle it, or they can’t. There’s no foreign army there to enforce good behavior; it’s all up to them.
In 1787, when America faced a constitutional crisis, some of its greatest citizens gathered in Philadelphia and, illegally, drafted a brand new constitution and seized control of the country through strength of argument and popular referendum. I’m not saying that Egyptians must do the same to earn self-government; frankly, holding anyone to the standards of The Founders is preposterous. But that’s the ideal to which popular uprisings should aspire.
Either the Egyptians can handles self-government – in which case some group will assemble and peaceably seize control – or they cannot. In either case, they shall get the government they deserve. I hope our national leaders understand that now is the time for all good men to STFU, and I hope against reason that Egyptians rise to the occasion. But the more we get involved in Cairo, the worse things will be.
Even as late as his Senate campaign, Webb favored capital-gains tax cuts, defended the Second Amendment, and seemed open to voting to confirm conservative judges. But once he was elected, the man Andrew Ferguson called “the most sophisticated right-wing reactionary to run on a Democratic ticket since Grover Cleveland” compiled a conventional liberal voting record virtually indistinguishable from Harry Reid’s.
Gone were Webb’s fiery denunciations of liberalism. He campaigned not only with Clinton but also John Kerry, a man whose hand Webb reportedly refused to shake for 20 years after the Vietnam War. The Jim Webb of Born Fighting and the op-ed page wasn’t the man who served in the Senate. The party-line Democrat and netroots darling who replaced him was unlikely to win reelection because the political ground shifted beneath Webb’s feet. He barely beat a mistake-prone incumbent in a Democratic year as Virginia was turning blue; he stood little chance as Virginia trends back to the right and has become ground zero for opposition to Obamacare, for which Webb voted.
It’s worth recalling that Webb’s left of center voting record was, if not predicted, at least strongly suspected, by none other than Andrew Ferguson:
Webb’s views of immigration, like many of his positions on questions of domestic policy, are unformed. It’s not hard to imagine where his populism and ethnic allegiance would lead him, though. One thing that all economists agree on—those who favor the present influx of immigrants and those who don’t—is that mass immigration lowers the wages of unskilled, uneducated native-born workers; “my people,” as Webb calls them. A quick way to raise those wages would be to cut off the future flow of unskilled immigration. Yet this step toward “economic fairness” is not available to a Democratic candidate these days (or to many Republicans either).
In a brief and uncomfortable stump speech, Webb told the Hispanic crowd that he was against a guest-worker program. “We must first define our borders,” he said. “And then we must ensure corporate responsibility, because a lot of this is going to come down to the employers.”
The crowd seemed puzzled. Later reporters asked Webb to clarify his position. With Tejada next to him, he said he favored some path to legalization and citizenship for the illegals already here. Tejada nodded solemnly. But what about the future? a reporter asked. Would Webb favor tough economic sanctions against businesses that employ illegals, as a way of drying up the tide of immigrants?
“Yes,” Webb said, “there needs to be corporate enforcement. We’ve had no corporate enforcement for six years! There’s got to be employer sanctions, otherwise you’re going to keep wages down. We have got to get a handle on this.”
Tejada glanced at the ceiling. Punishing employers who hire illegals is not, needless to say, part of the game plan for the community, or for Arlington Democrats.
After Webb was gone, I asked Tejada about this. “Does Webb really want to punish employers who hire members of the community?”
“The devil is in the details,” Tejada said. “Jim is a very complex thinker. We as a country need to have a long debate about these things.”
“But wouldn’t punishing employers reduce the opportunities for workers coming across the border?” I said.
“We will continue to work with Jim on this,” Tejada said. “We will consult with him, advise him going forward. Educate him.”
Every now and then, voting for the person rather than the party makes sense (see Lieberman, Joe). But in twenty-first century America, most of the time it makes sense to vote for the party, which is a better predictor of how a politician will vote than his idiosyncrasies.
When such youth voice their overheated moral indignation in the West, my view is: Why should anyone listen to them? They don’t know a thing about the world; they have never had the responsibility of running a business, have only intermittently worked, have no parental duties, and believe themselves to be the first people in the history of the world to feel indignation about poverty or inequality and are all the more proud of themselves for doing so. The Western press loves to glorify such ignorant protesters in the U.S. or Europe, however, because a. it gives them a story, and b. the almost inevitable left-wing slant of youth protests fits nicely with the press’s own pretensions towards “progressive” enlightenment.
So why should we take the youth movement any more seriously when it erupts in repressive or totalitarian regimes?
My answer: the youth in the West are pretty darn safe and they know it, but the youth abroad know they risk death. They can riot with impunity, because they know that police in Seattle or Washington or New York are going to fire rubber bullets and water cannon; the youth in repressive regimes know they face actual bullets. The Western youth have all the courage of a chihuahua barking at a muzzled rottweiler that’s behind a fence; in repressive regimes the fence is gone. In 1968, the American radicals knew that the Chicago police would act with much more restraint than the Czechoslovakian military.
The youth under repressive regimes know that they’re facing death. Just because they look like the hipsters the clutter up arty coffeeshops in Chelsea or Adams Morgan doesn’t make them any less courageous. We can hope that they make Egypt and Tunisia better places, like Yeltsin did when the hardliners called out the tanks, but they might also wind up slaughtered like in Tiananmen Square.
