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Glad I’m employed.

Tom posted this at 5:57 PM EDT on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 as Wicked Crazy Massachusetts

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Roger Ebert has a must read post on the 30th anniversary of John Wayne’s death. He sums up as well as I’ve ever read what made John Wayne so great:

On screen he held so much authority so that he was not even being ironic when he explained his theory of acting: “Don’t act. React.” John Wayne, you see, could react. Others actors had to strain the limits of their craft to hold the screen with him. There is this test for an actor who, for a moment, is just standing there in a scene: Does he seem to be just standing there? Or does he, as John Wayne always did, appear to be deciding when, and why, and how to take the situation under his control?

And the Duke himself, expressing his thoughts on the greatest American art form:

But when you think about the Western–ones I’ve made, for example. ‘Stagecoach,’ ‘Red River,’ ‘The Searchers,’ a picture named ‘Hondo’ that had a little depth to it–it’s an American art form. It represents what this country is about. In ‘True Grit,’ for example, that scene where Rooster shoots the rat. That was a kind of reference to today’s problems. Oh, not that ‘True Grit’ has a message or anything. But that scene was about less accommodation, and more justice.

They keep bringing up the fact that America’s for the downtrodden. But this new thing of genuflecting to the downtrodden, I don’t go along with that. We ought to go back to praising the kids who get good grades, instead of making excuses for the ones who shoot the neighborhood grocery man. But, hell, I don’t want to get started on that

Of course, it’s Ebert, and the Duke was one of the great Hollywood right-wingers of yore, so politics can’t slip past unnoticed. Ebert’s fair enough, except for observing “I believe [Wayne] would have had contempt for the latter-day weirdos of the Right.” Yeah, right. Wayne supported Nixon and the war, he supported Reagan’s runs for governor. He was a through-and-through reactionary, and it’s impossible to imagine him any other way.

Apollo posted this at 8:33 PM EDT on Friday, June 12th, 2009 as Amer-I-Can!, Belles Lettres, Film Rants

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Jay Nordlinger praises Texas’s Ted Cruz. You should read it because Ted Cruz is a name you should remember. He will hopefully be my next state attorney general, but, as Nordlinger points out, Cruz’s future’s so bright he oughta wear shades.

I’ve had some very mild contact with Cruz through my law school. Before presenting his [winning] argument to the Supreme Court last year in Medellin, he did a moot court in front of some law school professors. He was not only practicing for the argument, but he turned it into a wonderful teaching experience for the students there. I’m extremely skeptical of the usefulessness of oral arguments in appellate cases, but an oral argument from Cruz is something unique. There were multiple levels of persuasion going on with every sentence he said; he was simply brilliant.

I briefly met him on a couple other occaisions. I don’t pretend to be a great talent evaluator, but I’ve never met anyone who made such a powerful impression in such small periods of time. He’s as smart as they come, personable, and an ideological conservative (and his wife with to CMC!). In the years to come, conservatives are going to be very pleased that he’s on our side.

Apollo posted this at 12:47 PM EDT on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 as Deep in the Heart of Texas

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Perhaps somebody or other at CATO can explain this [emphasis added]:

POLICY FORUM
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
11:00 AM (Luncheon to Follow)

Featuring Tim Reif, General Counsel, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (remarks off the record);Anne Kim, Economic Program Director, Third Way; and Dan Ikenson, Associate Director, Center for Trade Policy Studies, Cato Institute.

. . .

To register for this event, please fill out the form below and click submit or email events@cato.org, fax (202) 371-0841, or call (202) 789-5229 by 11:00 AM, Monday, April 27, 2009. Please arrive early. Seating is limited and not guaranteed. News media inquiries only (no registrations), please call (202) 789-5200.

If you can’t make it to the Cato Institute, watch this forum live online.

How, exactly, does Mr. Reif give off the record remarks at an advertised forum?  Particularly one that’s going to webcast live?  Erik Wemple at the Washington City Paper suggests this as a possible story under the given constraints:

Yesterday, Tim Reif, general counsel of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative participated in a discussion about trade policy at the Cato Institute. The session touched on the splintering of a political consensus that guided the country through NAFTA and other free-trade pacts but fell apart under the Bush administration. In a heated discussion, the Cato Institute’s Dan Ikenson argued that low trade barriers are so important that the United States should consider taking unilateral steps in that direction. Reif responded.

Picking up on Reif’s comments, Anne Kim argued that what Reif said wasn’t necessarily the case. Reif then said something else.

Ah, DC.

Hubbard posted this at 9:20 AM EDT on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 as CHANGE!, Denizens of DC

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From the Lone Star State:

Police said they were called to a motel on Wednesday (local time) where several men from the Houston area were sharing a room. Police said a 35-year-old man allegedly passed gas in the room on Tuesday night.

Police said one of the other men became upset, picked up a knife and threw it at the 35-year-old man, who was cut in the leg. The suspect was accused of then stabbing the man in the chest.

I guess Tex-Mex doesn’t agree with some people.

Dorothy posted this at 5:23 PM EDT on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 as Deep in the Heart of Texas

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Wowee:

Detroit, which has lost half its population in the past 50 years, is deceptively large, covering 139 square miles. Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston could, as a group, fit inside the city’s boundaries. There is no major grocery chain in the city, and only two movie theaters. Much of the neighborhood economy revolves around rib joints, hot dog stands and liquor stores.

Also, a listing company says the median home price is $7,500. On the one hand, that simply sounds too outlandish to believe; on the other hand, check out this, this, and this. For that last one, bids were supposedly due by March 1; it’s now the 5th, and it’s still listed, so presumably no one bid on it at that price. Zillow lists the median price for Detroit as $18,500, but one can imagine that perhaps not every house under $5,000 would make it to Zillow, inflating their median price.

Apollo posted this at 9:21 AM EST on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 as Amer-I-Can!

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During the campaign, I thought it was kinda funny that some people actually believed the stuff that Obama said about reducing deficit spending and going through the budget “line by line.” Well I think now would be a good time for us to all kick back and have a good chuckle at the Barry of Yore:

Remember, the $700 billion bailout he was talking about there was last year’s $700 billion bailout, not this year’s $800 billion “stimulus.” This all would be less confusing if they would have just taken my advice and passed an $∞ bailout, but I guess we’re getting there in bits and pieces.

Also remember, the consistent story line with Obama was “He’s so eloquent,” not, “He’s plainly lying and making crap up.” Nope, journalists and a surprisingly large section of the American electorate fell for this, and fell hard.

I got this from David Bernstein. The situation he describes of upper middle class yuppies in DC is precisely the reason Dorothy and I decided not to move back there after grad school. There’s simply too much good living to be had in the rest of this country to put up with that place.

Apollo posted this at 8:49 PM EST on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 as Denizens of DC, That's Not Change!

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A quick synopsis of an internet search I just did. Michael Ledeen made a reference to General James Mattis as “this generation’s equivalent of Patton—he writes Greek poetry, even.” I confess, after Gen. Petreus and his subordinates, I haven’t paid much attention to American commanders in the field.

A quick search, however, shows that General Mattis was an important figure in the two battles of Fallujah in 2004. Wikipedia then reports this:

On February 1, 2005, Lieutenant General Mattis, speaking Ad libitum at a forum in San Diego, said “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with you, I like brawling.” Mattis’s remarks sparked controversy and General Michael W. Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps, issued a statement suggesting that Mattis should have chosen his words more carefully, but would not be disciplined.

More carefully? You mean he shouldn’t have used contractions? I’ve been critical of American generalship in the past, but to learn that these words were publicly uttered by a man who made it all the way to the top of a military branch makes me giddy. Our generals and soldiers should revel in the destruction that they bring to our honorless enemy.

Perhaps best on the Wikipedia page, I learn this:

Lieutenant General James N. Mattis will be played by Harrison Ford in the upcoming film No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah, based on the book by Bing West.

Seriously? Harrison Ford? A movie about American soldiers in Iraq that doesn’t seem to be anti-war on its face? Sweet Pete, man, there must be a Democrat in the White House.

Apollo posted this at 2:06 AM EST on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 as Amer-I-Can!, Iraq

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David Brooks writes peculiar things when he’s outside his area of expertise. Today, however, he’s sticking to what he knows: the for-your-own-good crowd in Ward 3.  Here’s what my upscale neighbors are like:

For those who don’t know, Ward Three is a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live. Thanks to recent and coming bailouts and interventions, the people in Ward Three run the banks and many major industries. Through this power, they get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held.

The good news for rich people is that people in this neighborhood are very nice and cerebral. On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in. They live in modest homes with recently renovated kitchens and Nordic Track machines crammed into the kids’ play areas downstairs (for some reason, people in Ward Three are only interested in toning the muscles in the lower halves of their bodies).

Nonetheless, many people in Ward Three do have certain resentments toward those with means, which those of you in the decamillionaire-to-billionaire wealth brackets should be aware of.

In the first place, many people in Ward Three suffer from Sublimated Liquidity Rage. As lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants, they make decent salaries, but 60 percent of their disposable income goes to private school tuition and study abroad trips. They have little left over to spend on themselves, which generates deep and unacknowledged self-pity.

Second, they suffer from what has been called Status-Income Disequilibrium. At work they are flattered and feared. But they still have to go home and clean out the gutters because they can’t afford full-time household help.

Third, they suffer the status rivalries endemic to the upper-middle class. As law school grads, they resent B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure.

I’m in Ward One, so don’t worry, you’re safe from (if not with) me.

Hubbard posted this at 11:21 AM EST on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 as Denizens of DC

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The Prophet is appropriately annoyed:

One of the main talking points, particularly among left-wing bloggers, was that Wurzelbacher was a tax cheat because, it was revealed by ABC News, he had a tax lien of $1,182 for back Ohio state taxes. This fueled the argument that he was a fraud, his opinion didn’t matter. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Fast-forward to today. Timothy Geithner, President Obama’s choice to be the next treasury secretary, quite clearly tried to defraud the government of tens of thousands in payroll taxes while working at the International Monetary Fund. The IMF does not withhold such taxes but does compensate American employees who must pay them out of pocket. Geithner took the compensation—which involves considerable paperwork—but then simply pocketed the money.

His explanations for his alleged oversight don’t pass the smell test. When the IRS busted him for his mistakes in 2003 and 2004, he decided to take advantage of the statute of limitations and not pay the thousands of dollars he also failed to pay in 2001 and 2002. That is, until he was nominated to become treasury secretary.

Obama defends Geithner, saying that his was a “common mistake,” that it is embarrassing but happens all the time. My National Review colleague Byron York reports that, at least according to the IMF, Geithner’s “mistakes” are actually quite rare. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to believe that the man didn’t know exactly what he was doing given that he would have had to sign documents, disregard warnings, and all in all turn his brain off to make the same “mistake” year after year. And keep in mind, Geithner is supposed to run the IRS. So maybe sloppiness isn’t that great a defense anyway.

One somehow suspects that had John McCain nominated Geithner to be Treasury Secretary—which could conceivably have happened—Geithner would have been run out of town on a rail by now.  So there’s a certain partisan tinge to the coverage.

Beyond that, however, government officials tend to mostly talk to other government officials, and it’s difficult for pundits (let alone ordinary people) to get points across to them.  Eliot Cohen, though writing about foreign policy rather than economic, explains:

My first, sobering observation is that government pays only intermittent attention to talk on the outside. To a remarkable extent, in fact, government talks only to itself.

Officials in the foreign policy and defense worlds go through vast quantities of official data, briefing papers and talking points. They meet urgently with one another. They fly to foreign capitols and back in a few days. They telephone and email incessantly. Every day in the office I spent hours reading a three- to six-inch stack of intelligence, plus all the other cables, messages and memoranda that are the lifeblood of the Department of State. I scanned the press clips, reading an opinion piece rarely, usually when it was written by someone who had a track record for good judgment. By and large, the buzz on the outside was just that — a background noise of which I was dimly aware, unless it was either unusually nasty, or unusually perceptive, which often merely meant that it fit my own views.

Most commentators have a radically imperfect view of what’s going on. Those on the inside, including at the very top, know more, though less than one might think. Government resembles nothing so much as the party game of telephone, in which stories relayed at second, third or fourth hand become increasingly garbled as they crisscross other stories of a similar kind (”That may be what the Russian national security adviser said to the undersecretary for political affairs on Wednesday, but it’s not how the Turkish foreign minister described the Syrian view to our ambassador to NATO on Thursday.”) Add to this the effects of secrecy induced by security concerns, as well as by the natural desire to play one’s cards close to one’s vest, and the result is a well-nigh impenetrable murk of policy making.

But it’s even murkier on the outside. “Occasionally an outsider may provide perspective; almost never does he have enough knowledge to advise soundly on tactical moves,” Henry Kissinger once remarked. Or as the White House correspondent of one major national newspaper once confided to me, “We really don’t have a clue what’s going on in there.”

Cheery thought: Cohen was describing the last few years of the Bush administration.  The Geithner blunder is in the first few days of the Obama administration.  The unforced errors are probably going to compound.

Hubbard posted this at 12:28 PM EST on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 as Denizens of DC, Politics, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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Drudge is headlining the fact that Californians’ state income tax refunds are going to be delayed because the government is running out of cash. One can only presume that as the cash situation there gets worse, the delays will grow longer. To the law student in me, this sounds pretty capricious and I wonder whether there’s any precedent establishing a right to a timely refund of overpayments: that is, can a disgruntled refund nonrecipient sue?

But fortunately my legal education is not so powerful yet as to overcome my sense of justice. Californians have been voting themselves down the crapper for most of the last 35 years, and in a democracy the people always get precisely the government they deserve. Every time there’s some sort of minidisaster like this in California, I’m curious of where the breaking point is that they start voting for different people. But who am I to judge? If they’re fine with the nation’s third highest unemployment rate, second highest tax burden, a dilapidated infrastructure that hasn’t been improved in over a generation, and an overall situation where more Americans are leaving California than moving into it, I guess that’s fine with me.

Whatever, man; I live in Texas. Here the legislature only gets to spend money every other year and is constitutionally required to spend only the amount that the comptroller predicts we’ll take in. In the current legislative session, there’s about 11% less money to work with than in the last session, and it’s still up in the air whether we’ll tap into the state’s enormous rainy-day fund (it takes a 2/3 vote in the legislature to do so). You want fiscal discipline, we’ll show you fiscal discipline:

Texas’ fiscal troubles are nowhere near those of most other states because of the state’s economy and money left unspent by the Legislature in 2007, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst [, who sets the legislative agenda,] said in a statement.

“Today we have the funds necessary to deliver essential services instead of a deficit like dozens of states. That’s why we must continue the conservative fiscal policies, including maintaining a reasonable reserve in the Rainy Day Fund, that helped put us in this position,” he said.

This is the fourth state I’ve lived in, and the only one where there wasn’t constant talk of state budget emergencies. God bless federalism, and may He keep the Californians away from here.

Apollo posted this at 8:56 AM EST on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 as Amer-I-Can!

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It appears that just about everywhere I walk around will be having issues on Inauguration day. 

Hubbard posted this at 12:38 PM EST on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 as Denizens of DC

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Is that year after year, people keep making travel arrangements through parts of the country that get large quantities of snow and tiny quantities of heat, and then act surprised when something terrible happens to them. I’ve got a friend back home who seemed genuinely surprised that a Denver layover in December resulted in not getting to her destination until a day later.

Come on, people, reroute those flights through the southern states; catch that train in St. Louis, not Chicago! Or at least be prepared for some of us to react to your horror story with a chuckle and a, “What did you think would happen?”

Apollo posted this at 12:50 PM EST on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 as Amer-I-Can!

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What state put the 21st Amendment, repealing prohibition, over the 2/3 threshold?

Utah, the least alcohol friendly state in the union.

P.S. Note that South Carolina was the only state to reject the 21st Amendment, which goes along with my theory that South Carolina is wrong on everything: wrong on nullification, wrong on succession, wrong on Ft. Sumter, wrong on Strom Thurmond, wrong on Lindsey Graham, and wrong on prohibition. We only need one Carolina, and plainly it isn’t this one.

Apollo posted this at 2:57 AM EST on Friday, December 12th, 2008 as Amer-I-Can!

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As a suitable follow up of my last post, it’s snowing in Austin. I have a final in the morning at an unfortunate time when there’s normally bad traffic; I am not looking forward to seeing how Austinites handle driving in the snow.

Apollo posted this at 12:18 AM EST on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 as Deep in the Heart of Texas, Grumblin Mumblins

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