The Senescent Man

Early Prediction: Obama wins Re-election

2012-01-05T14:10:00.005-05:00

Yes, I hate to say it, but that's my prediction right now. If conditions in the county remain on election day as they are right now, Obama will win.

I base that on what I'm seeing and hearing on the political landscape right now, and how I interpret the overriding political nature of the Baby Boomers. I wrote about that before on this blog, calling them the Candy Store Generation (first one is here). In my mind they—or I guess I should say "we"—have screwed up much or most of what is good about the United States. It has gotten so bad that I look for a future generation, which I call the "Had Enough Generation", who will reject what the CSG did and right the ship of state.

I believe the 2010 mid-term elections was the first appearance of the Had Enoughs. I wasn't sure if they would show their head so soon, thinking it might not be Gen X or even Gen Y, but might be somewhere out in the future. But show up the Had Enoughs did, in large enough numbers to make partial changes in Congress and scare the daylights out of the political establishment on both sides of the aisle.

But, based simply on raw numbers, the Candy Store Generation still rules this country and determines who is elected. Where were they in 2010? It was just an off-year election. They were asleep, or stoned, or busy with whatever a privileged and spoiled people do. So the first appearance of the Had Enoughs had a minor victory. But in 2012, the Candy Store Generation will be out in force. Their gravy train is threatened by those who don't want to pay the freight. There are enough voters in the CSG that I believe they will carry the day for Obama. Regardless of what polls and approval ratings suggest now, the CSG is not going to vote for those who will grab them by their hair and yank their sorry faces out of the government feeding trough. The Had Enoughs will see a little bit of a smack down in 2012.

When will the Had Enoughs be large enough to overcome the Candy Store Generation? I’m not ready to make that prediction yet. But I don’t think it will be in 2014 or 2016. It will only be when the CSG shrinks to a small enough part of the voting public, and their leadership in elected positions gives way to a younger generation. In fact, I'm still not sure that Gen X will be the Had Enoughs. The Had Enoughs will come from every generation voting. Some will come from what Brokaw calls the Greatest Generation. A few Boomers will be among the Had Enoughs. Gen X will be well represented in the Had Enoughs, but possibly it will be Gen Y before the Had Enoughs are dominant enough to really turn things around.

Having said all this, I hope I’m wrong. I hope the Had Enoughs can make gains in 2012, rather than be set back. I'll have to revisit this after the elections, and see how close I came. Meanwhile, my neck is well stretched out.

Washington, Listen to Yourselves

2011-08-03T23:19:00.000-04:00

President Obama said it in his address to the nation, the one that was followed by Speaker Boehner’s response. I have heard Obama’s claim repeated by other Democratic politicians. I haven’t researched the truth of it myself, but for now I’m going to believe it. It goes something like this.

During the Reagan administration, Congress raised the debt ceiling 18 times.
During the Clinton administration, Congress raised the debt ceiling 8 times.
During the GW Bush administration, Congress raised the debt ceiling 9 times.
Why then is Congress balking at raising the debt ceiling this time?

I may be off a little in the number of times, but not too far off. Why the GHW Bush administration wasn’t included I don’t know, or maybe it was and my memory is faulty.

Hello, Mr. President and Congress, listen to what you are saying! In the 26 years covered by the administrations listed above the debt ceiling was raised 36 times. Doesn’t that give you cause for concern? Doesn’t that tell you that the entire system is broken? How can a debtor go out and get his credit limit raised 36 times in 26 years?

I had a family member do pretty much the same thing. He borrowed heavily to finance his small business. Through a combination of difficult business conditions, government regulation, and health issues, he lost his business to bankruptcy. He convinced others to finance a return of his business. That business faced the same conditions, and five years later was on the verge of bankruptcy. He convinced his son to buy his property as a way of rescuing the business. The business failed again. To float the business he took out a credit card in his son's name and maxed it out. He did that again, and again, for a total of five times. He borrowed payments from individuals. Finally with all his resources and sources gone, the bank seized the property from the son, who had to declare bankruptcy. Thus the son is off the hook, the father will shortly be homeless, and the bank’s owners have had to pick up at least some of the tab.

I realize using a personal situation is not quite the same thing as a government. The person can’t print money. On the other hand, the person can go out and get a second job. The person can easily cut spending and quit destructive behavior with immediate decisions. Large governments can’t do that. Large governments, representing a large citizenry, have to operate on the herd mentality. Until the herd quits its destructive behavior or goes over the cliff en mass, not much can be done.

I believe, however, that the frequent requests to and acquiescence in raising the debt ceiling is evidence that we are headed for destruction. Obama’s words, as repeated by his various lackeys, prove it. Congress, you are out of your minds. Thank God for those few among your moronic membership who dared to call you on your madness. May their tribe increase.

The Borrowing Limit Deal: HE, or BAU by the Candy Store Generation?

2011-08-01T12:11:00.001-04:00

I’ve been following this debt ceiling debate closer than I should. I watch the coverage on Fox News Channel till I get tired of that, then turn to MSNBC (mainly for laughs), till that makes my blood pressure go up, then to CNN, till I can’t stand any more. Then I turn to cable channel 46 or 30, and hope I catch a replay of an episode of Criminal Minds, and see what the BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) is up to.

But there's another wording for BAU: business as usual. I can't help but think that’s exactly what this debt ceiling increase deal is: business as usual. Increase our ability to borrow to fund cowboy poetry festivals across the nation for the next two years of so, make a few designated cuts, and delay all the difficult decisions until later.

Anyone care to predict what will happen when this new super-duper congressional committee comes up with its recommended cuts just before Thanksgiving? Congress won’t approve them by Christmas. These "automatic triggers" will go into effect, but when the many members of Congress realize exactly what that means, we will have a major battle over that. Maybe some spending cuts will come to the table for debate, but so will tax increases. "The wealthy don't pay their fare share" will come up as it always does, and proponents of that will not tell the American people that taxes fall heaviest on the poor and middle class, regardless of who writes the check to the government. Indeed, they don't recognize or accept that themselves.

This will become the main issue of the election of 2012 at the presidential and congressional levels. I suppose that’s a good thing. Once again social issues will take a back seat to economic issues. Those of "Tea Party" leanings will either be strengthened or, if the Democrats and the press can succeed at branding them radical obstructionists, lose ground. I can't see clearly enough to have a clue of what will happen to Tea Party strength in that election.

This all makes me wonder if what we are seeing now the first battle between the Had Enough Generation and The Candy Store Generation. The CSG are the Baby Boomers, those who had everything given to them on a platter by a once great generation who didn't want their children to go through the hardships they did. The HEG is someone who comes after the CSG and cleans up their mess. Possibly this is the first struggle between those two for supremacy. If so, the HEG has shown up quicker than I expected it to.

But we've still got a lot of the CSG in the Congress. Just how stupid are these people? I hate to keep coming back to the Nevada Cowboy Poetry Festival, but Harry "The Gray" Reid brought it up, saying how awful it would be to de-fund them. Now Reid is not technically a member of the CSG. Born in 1939, seven years before the official start of the Boomers, he theoretically belongs to what Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation". But clearly there is a transitional group, born late in one generation but who didn't participate with the older ones in their struggles. That's Reid. That's Pelosi. They are older Boomers at heart, leaders of one wing of the CSG.

They think it is perfectly acceptable to borrow $35,000 from the People's Republic of China to fund a poetry festival, and expect their children to pay the interest on that money for perhaps twenty years and then have their grandchildren pay the bill itself sometime after that. As I said before, this is beyond ridiculous; it's moronic.

But I don't see anything yet that is going really make a dent in this out of control spending. The committee that's part of the deal probably won't work. The battle will continue. And the election of 2012 will let us know if the Had Enoughs have arrived or not. My guess is they are beginning to show, but that the Candy Store Generation will still have sufficient power to continue to make a mess of everything up until 2014. That’s when we might see the HEG make enough of a move to really change things.

Until then, it's BAU with the CSG. Let's hope they don’t run us over a cliff in these last three years. We're very close right now.

Hands Off My Money

2011-07-26T09:10:00.001-04:00

Barack, Harry, and Nancy:

The USA government has enough money coming in to service its debt and cover everything that is really essential. Everything we are borrowing money for is, in my not so humble opinion, non-essential.

So if you don't get authorization to borrow more, prioritize. This is called "money management", something you never seem to have learned.

Service the debt, and shut down the Department of Education
Pay all military bills, and make a skeleton of the EPA
Pay legitimate Homeland Security expenses, and close all National Parks
Inspect foodstuffs, but scuttle the National Endowment for the Arts
Make Social Security and Medicare payments, but darn near eliminate the Department of Labor
Don't pay yourselves.

Barack, you say you want more revenue--lots more revenue--as compensation for spending cuts. But you say the revenue will come from the richest Americans, those who earn more than $200 or $250 thousand (whatever that number is today), claiming that won't hurt the poor or the middle class.

I've got news for you, Barack, Harry, and Nancy: Taxes don't really work that way. Raise taxes on the rich, and they'll just charge more for their goods and services. They are the ones who have the power to do so. Market forces put some limit on this, but not enough to prevent some rise in prices. So it's the poor and middle class who give the rich the money they use to pay their taxes. Do you really think the rich are just going to sit idly and not recover from the poor what you take from them?

Tax the rich and you tax indirectly tax me in the middle class. Why don't you get that?

But tell you what. Harry Reid wants this cowboy poetry festival in Nevada, and thinks I should contribute to the cost of the cowboy poets getting together. I'll listen to your arguments about the need for more revenue if Harry pays for this festival out of his own pocket for the next five years, and refunds to the American people (via the US Treasury) the last five years. He's worth over $2 million (mostly accumulated since he's been a senator), and that's only $350,000. He can afford it, if he really thinks it's so important.

Why should a poor person in Rhode Island, or a middle class guy in Arkansas pay for cowboy poets to get together in Nevada? If you all think it's so important they have a forum, you should be willing to pay for it yourselves. Or, think of it this way: Would you borrow money to pay for cowboy poets to get together in Nevada? Doesn't that sound absolutely ridiculous?

Until Harry does that, I conclude you really don't have a clue about money management, and thus don't qualify to get a larger amount of public money to mismanage. You asked everyone to contact their national legislators and make their feelings known. I will do that today. What I will say is: YOU DON'T DESERVE ANY MORE MONEY TO MISMANAGE. NO TAX INCREASES ON ANYONE. Increase taxes on the rich and the poor and middle class end up paying them.

Nitwits.

What WAS Shovel-Ready

2011-07-11T14:32:00.002-04:00

Did President Obama not have any civil engineers on his staff? Or anywhere in his administration? It would appear not. All those "shovel-ready jobs" he talked about were public works projects. Well, that happens to be in my bailiwick. I've made a career or doing the civil engineering part of public works projects. And not only me, but a lot of civil engineers have done even more public works than I have, since part of my career has also involved commercial projects.

Back in early 2009 when the president was saying that ARRA funds would go to shovel-ready jobs and put people right to work, I wanted to scream "You don't know what you're talking about." The fact is, there are very few public works projects just sitting around waiting to be funded. Since most of the time funding is required to do the engineering for these projects, the engineering isn't going to be done until at least some of the funding is in place.

Northwest Arkansas recently had a "shovel-ready" job go to construction. It's the Bella Vista By-pass, an interstate highway that will fill a gap in intestate quality roads linking Missouri and Arkansas. This is a road that was not part of the original interstate highway program, but was added some years ago based on population expansion in northwest Arkansas. It will connect Fort Smith AR and Joplin MO, both of which have interstates extending some distance north and south respectively. As either state had some money to spend, they would extend their road another ten or twenty miles, and the gap narrowed.

By 2005 the gap was down to about 25 miles. The two states did some joint planning, decided on a route that would meet, and began their respective work of seeking money and acquiring rights-of-way. Missouri got ahead of Arkansas, has their money in the bank, and has been waiting on Arkansas to get their act together. Somehow, the act never got together. Arkansas sought Federal funds and never received them. They cut back the scale of the project, proposing to initially build only a high-quality controlled access two lane road. Still, since Arkansas, for some reason, thought the good people of the United States of America, rich and poor, eastern and western, north and south, should build their road for them, the project languished.

Until ARRA. Sometime in 2010 ARRA funds filled the money gap to fill the road gap, and the project became a go. The Arkansas highway department got after a client of our engineering company to get an 18-inch water line moved, and after another utility to get a 10-inch water line moved, and after phone, gas, electrical, and cable TV companies to get their utilities moved. At some point engineering documents were completed, the road project bid in March 2011, and a road contractor mobilized in May.

Last Friday, July 8, 2011, approximately 29 months after ARRA was passed, the ribbon cutting was held for this construction project. But I need to be fair. Funds were being expended as early as August 2010, a mere 19 months after ARRA was passed, and maybe a little sooner. But the lion's share of those expenditures on this project are only now about to hit the work force.

A civil engineer could have told Barack in a heartbeat that no shovel ready jobs existed in the architecture-engineering-construction industry. Construction drawings had to be drawn and construction specifications written. Land had to be acquired or condemned. Bids had to be received and low bidders qualified. Mobilization time had to be spent.

A civil engineer could have told you, Mr. President. But then your lie would have become known. Everyone would have known that it wasn't the construction projects and construction jobs that were "shovel-ready", but something else entirely, which we usually talk about in euphemisms with shoveling-like gestures. Yes, something was shovel-ready from your administration, but it wasn't the jobs.

Get ready, America. We've got at least 18 more months of having to watch where we step.

A Shameless Self-Promotion

2011-05-05T13:25:00.000-04:00

Hopefully my good friend, the Senescent Man, will not mind my making a shameless commerical plug for myself. If I'm out of line, Chuch, feel free to delete this. Given that the blog has been dormant for four months, I'm not sure who will see it anyway.

I have completed a book, and it is for sale at the Kindle store. It is:

Documenting America: Lessons from the United States' Historical Documents

Here's the link, and here's the description:

The United States is rich in documents, many which remain in obscurity, but which contain valuable information about the formation of this nation, while at the same time contain lessons for where we are right now. In this book, a number of these documents are quoted in large blocks, the importance of the document explained, and relevancy for America shown. The documents selected cover the 18th and 19th centuries. The colonial era, the run up to Independence, the formative years, and the rise to the beginning of being a great world power are all herein.

I'll say here what I didn't say in the on-line description: I wrote the book from a conservative political perspective. What I get into a document, and try to draw a lesson for the 21st century, I calls 'em like I sees 'em. But, if the document seems to espouse a non-conservative theme, I try to bring it back to a conservative understanding.

Well, there's the promotion. The book is a bargain at $1.25, all 40,000 words (about 160 pages of a standard print book. I hope some readers of TSM will buy it and post reviews on the Kindle store. Oh, and I understand that just about any electronic device can display the book, though you might need to download the free Kindle app.

Goodnight Les Miserables

2010-12-23T15:09:00.001-05:00

Here I am at home listening to much of the same Christmas music I enjoy each season, some wonderfully orchestral, some more vocal and even pop. For instance, I really enjoy Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra singing the old carols. They unabashedly sing about “Christ the King,” “born to give us second birth,…” from a time when it was considered normal operating procedure to sing Christmas carols with all glory of their original lyrics.

The other night on his regular evening program, Bill O’Reilly opined as to whether or not it was offensive to some when “flash mobs” gather in shopping malls across the country to sing Handel’s Alleluia Chorus from his exquisite Oratorio “Messiah” because the words might be offensive to some, presumably “some” are people who shop and celebrate small “c” Christmas and prefer to evacuate all meaning of its origin and significance, who have made it just another secular day off from work.

My first reaction to Bill’s question was consternation because it caused me to wonder why this question should even be asked in the first place? But even if he didn’t, and I know what he was likely driving at – that people who are offended as such were “pinheads” in his vernacular – the question in these times nonetheless is begged every day.

There is a working dynamic here. It is not just the usual offense that the gospel represents to the unchurched. I fear we are entering a new age where everything and anything that directly or indirectly makes reference of the true and original nature and meaning of Christmas will be, little by little, extricated from the public square as arcane, dogmatic, irrelevant and biased against those who prefer never to hear a word on the True Light and Hope of the world, which all of this music in effect points to.

When we fully enter that post-postmodern age where everything is completely devoid of all meaning and all reference to this wonderful message of hope, how shall we then live? What then of our world? Our society? Dear Virginia, yes there may be a Santa Claus, but as for hope? Well, I’m sorry Virginia, there is no hope for you beyond this world. There was no Savior who came to remove the dross from this fallen earth to pave a path to a new world, and hence there is only today, so live for today, “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” and it all ends, and sooner rather than later.

What would be next to remove from public view? Any classical literature the makes veiled references to redemption? Goodnight Les Miserables. Farewell to Milton, Adios “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

What then of our coming new and hopeless age? When we are on our respective deathbeds, and become more supple to that last chance at hope, there will be no redemptive literature to reflect upon, no lyrics to ponder, no music to listen to that gives consideration to a coming New and durable life without flaw, in the full light of the Dayspring, the Beautiful Rose of Sharon, whose Kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ. Alleluia.

Goodnight Les Miserables

2010-12-23T15:00:00.001-05:00

When we fully enter that post-postmodern age where everything is completely devoid of all meaning and all reference to this wonderful message of hope, how shall we then live? What then of our world? Our society? Dear Virginia, yes there may be a Santa Claus, but as for hope? Well, I’m sorry Virginia, there is no hope for you beyond this world. There was no Savior who came to remove the dross from this fallen earth to pave a path to a new world, and hence these is only today, so live for today, “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” and it all ends, and sooner than later.

What would be next to remove from public view? Any classical literature the makes veiled references to redemption. Goodnight Les Miserables. Farewell to Milton, Adios “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

As Rhode Island Goes, So the Nation Does Not Go

2010-11-06T18:47:00.001-04:00

Or should I say it the other way around? As the nation went, at least, RI did not give an iota.

We end up with the most liberal option of Governor choices. We keep our General Assembly – mostly liberal Democrats – intact. RI – Dist 1, which was formerly Patrick' Kennedy’s seat goes to liberal Democrat David Cicilline instead of worthy Republican John Loughlin. RI – Dist 2, as I expected remained with James Langevin over Mark Zacaria, though Zacaria made the cogent arguments being offered around the country of the run away US House in every debate, but he ended up doing it to no avail – because he was making his points in RI to Rhode Islanders.

My first reaction was “it' truly is time to leave the state.” Former Cranston Mayor Steven Laffey presciently predicted a Lincoln Chafee victory due several factors: the split votes for “Moderate, Democrat and Republican candidates, and that the unions would get their machine out in full force to make certain their liberal Democratic votes made it to the polls. And they won the day completely in RI.

The rest of the nation moved very deliberately in the right direction, while RI remains stuck where it has been, and with some of the highest taxes and highest unemployment in the nation. Even Michigan moved seats to Republicans to get out of their mess, but no, not RI.

But there were signs of a silver lining out there:

(1) There is a remnant of Tea Party oriented activists still intact, and ready to prepare for 2012 – which is good.

(2) The fact that Congress has moved very deliberately to the right while the President is not yielding or triangulating to the middle will mean that the RI delegation will be somewhat thwarted from their liberal agenda, and may not be all that popular in 2 years. Remember Reagan took the state in 1984, and a solid Republican presidential candidate could yield something similar.

(3) There were some good lessons learned in running in the 4 way Governor race, and the dropping of the Republican nominated Lt. Governor. I thought to myself the other day, soon after his “shove it” comment, what if Frank Caprio said he was going to drop out of the race, and ask his supporters to vote for Republican John Robitaille? Imagine not only what that would have looked like in the national media spotlight, but what that would have done to the outcome. Chafee would be toast instead of Governor Elect.

(4) The excellent idea that was“CleanSlateRI. Though it seemed to end up having little impact on the outcome, the concept is a good one that should be developed further and more robustly supported long before 2012.

While other states are looking forward to a roll back of tax burden, and a movement to prioritize spending so that taxes go down instead of increase, RI has a new governor who diabolically conjures new ways to spend taxpayers money – what few remaining taxpayers are still left in the state – and new ways to tax them.

RI Conservatives: we either have to leave (which will leave even fewer to carry the burgeoning tax load) or we need to build off what momentum we really achieved and strategize starting from now to make a major correction in 2012 – and also plan to get Chafee out in 2014 – too bad it couldn’t be sooner, though there is always the recall.

Activists unite! You have nothing to lose but higher taxes. and poor leadership.

Election Predictions Review

2010-11-05T15:11:00.002-04:00

On Monday I posted these predictions for the election:

US House: Republicans gain 72 seats
US Senate: Republicans gain 9 seats
Governors: Republicans gain a net of 7 governors

While nine house seats and one governor's race are still considered undecided, here's how it looks as if it will turn out:

US House: Republicans gain 63 to 66 seats net, 66 to 69 without considering Democratic pick-ups.
US Senate: Republicans gain 6
Governors: Republicans gain a net of 7

So, I was close in the House, over-predicted in the Senate, and was spot on for the governorships.

I now await the Senescent Man to enter the room and state how he did. It looks as if we did about the same in the House, he was closer in the Senate, and I was closer on the governorships.

You may now return to your regular programming.

Senescent Predictions

2010-11-01T19:59:00.001-04:00

My fellow Blogger, David Todd has made his predictions, and below are mine. Last election cycle, David’s predictions were better than mine. I’m looking to get even. Below are my predictions for the Congressional and Gubernatorial elections tomorrow. Here we go:

The GOP will win 78 House districts currently held by Democrats, and the Democrats will win 6 House seats currently held by Republicans, including a few surprises, or a net gain of 72. My analysis is largely based upon Jim Geraghty’s analysis, which in turn was based largely on the very accurate Scott Rasmussen. I veer from Geraghty’s analysis by predicting Keating to lose to Jeff Perry in Massachusetts, as well as Barney Frank to Sean Beilat. I agree with NRO in predicting, gladly, that John Loughlin will win Patrick Kennedy’s RI District 1 seat away from David Cicilline.

Republicans will end up with a net of 8 seats: Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada (yahoo!), North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all of which will go to the GOP. Unfortunately, Boxer will win in California, and the Democrats will eek out wins in Washington state and West Virginia; this will leave the Senate split 51–49 in the Democrats’ favor. That’s okay because there will be enough fear that Democrats won’t be apt to move any further than the middle, especially after they see their beloved Speaker go down in flames in Nevada.

Republicans will net 9 more governor’s mansions, and I veer a little afield from NRO here and predict that though Meg will lose California, the Republican will beat Deval Patrick in Massachusetts.

	Net GOP Gains
US House	72
US Senate	8
Governors	9

I also make these few predictions on the RI races:

Governor: Chafee (I ) – too bad. A result of Caprio (moderate D) and Robitaille (R ) splitting the rest of the vote.

Lt. Governor: Roberts (D ) – also bad. Leaves her visible for an eventual US Senate or gubernatorial run.

RI Dist 1 – Loughlin (R ) – As earlier mentioned and this win will make the day worth it.

RI Dist 2 – Langevin (D ) – Too bad. Only in RI would someone so pro-Obama make it through this storm

Election Predictions

2010-11-01T11:03:00.004-04:00

I've been following this election more closely than I do most mid-term elections. Lots at stake this time. Actually, it seems each election is more critical than the last one. Perhaps that is simply the perspective age brings.

Anyway, I'll keep this post short. Here's my predictions, the view from fly-over country.

US House of Representatives: Republicans gain 72 seats

US Senate: Republicans gain 9 seats, and Joe Lieberman has a very difficult decision to make, who he will caucus with.

Governorships: Republicans gain a net of 7 governors

I've done fairly well in the past with predictions. Putting it on the line this time.

Bob Beckel's Desperate Search for a Silver Lining

2010-10-28T21:59:00.004-04:00

Bob Beckel was on the Sean Hannity TV show earlier this week, either Monday or Tuesday. Now, let me say first off that I don't like Sean Hannity. I think he is a hack journalist and a lousy thinker who, by God's good graces, stumbled upon the right answers. But the wife likes to watch him, so sometimes I do too. Hannity of course gave Beckel a hard time about what appears to be huge Republican gains in the Senate and House next week. Beckel conceded that the House looks gone to the Democrats. He said he expects the Republicans to win the House, picking up upper forties or low fifties seats. Quite an admission on his part.

Now the killer admission comes in. He wouldn't say whether the Democrats will keep the Senate or not, but he said the GOP has a much tougher road there than in the House. He talked about "wave elections" in the last century, and how the party riding the wave always took control of both the House and the Senate. Since it looks like the GOP won't take the Senate, he said their "wave victory" would not be as great as previous wave victories.

I see that as a desperate attempt to see a silver lining in the Democratic wreckage. "Your party only picked up 8 senate seats, not 10, and you don't have control. Some wave you rode." Some silver lining, Bob. With the loss of 7 to 8 seats (and you may lose more), you will lose effective control of the Senate to the Republicans and a moderate coalition. In fact, if the Republicans win eight seats--which looks probable--they will have 49 senators and the Democrats will have only 49 as well. Who will the two independents (Lieberman and Sanders) caucus with? Probably with the Democrats. More interesting, what if the GOP picks up nine senators--not impossible. That will make it 50:48:2 R:D:I. If that happens, might either Lieberman (possible) or Sanders (highly unlikely) caucus with the Republicans, so that they can be in the majority? An interesting speculation.

How shiny is that silver lining now, Bob?

The Anti-Chafee

2010-10-26T20:53:00.001-04:00

Political conservatives who live in RI (all 6 of us) have a very tough decision to make next week. In the governor’s race, should we vote for John Robitaille, a conservative Republican, or dare we take a huge leap and vote for Frank Caprio, a Democrat, who will be campaigning this weekend with none other than former President Clinton?

Why would conservative Republicans give the time of day to, let alone vote for someone like Caprio? For conservatives, the good side of Frank is that he is a fiscal conservative, a lover of small business, and an opposer of overly burdensome taxes. On social issues he’s part way on the dark side; he said that if the General Assembly approved of gay marriage in RI - which they’re apt to do with so many of the leaders gay - he would sign the bill. I think he should wait to see what voters want on that issue, but there it is.

On the Republican side, Robitaille has the right stance on issues, and he’s been gaining some momentum, but the problem RI conservatives face is, who do you vote for to assure that Lincoln Chafee loses? With a recent Rasmussen poll showing Chafee in the mid-thirties while Caprio and Robitaille in the mid to upper twenties, the state sits on a precipice.

Chafee will tax us enough for the few remaining productive citizens who work and pay taxes will get to pay even more taxes unless they’re smart enough to move to less taxing neighboring states like Taxachusetts or Connecticut, a mere 40 miles away at the most. Even Taxachusetts will be a tax haven for RIer’s were Chafee to win.

RI passed the tipping point long ago where the gimme’s beat out the tax-me’s a long time ago, and will continue their stranglehold on the state to ask for more and more from the poor tax-me’s unless drastic action is taken.

In South Carolina, the Republican governor mandated that if the legislature wants to spend more on a high priority like schools or roads, they have to subordinate something else in the budget and maintain the volume of what the burdened taxpayers already contribute to the state. In 11.5% jobless RI, Chafee thinks we can increase what the taxpayers contribute so we can spend more and more.

As Bill Murray said about the groundhog in the movie “Groundhog Day,” “He must be stopped!”

If we don’t stop Chafee, the few of us who pay the taxes for all the gimme’s in the state will have to leave or become bankrupt, and that will in turn most definitely bankrupt the state.

So it’s time for us decide. If we pool our votes in one direction or the other, we can be assured of a Chafee loss, but who to choose?

As for me, I’m going to take the initiative and say I think Caprio’s got the best shot. Anyone who tells a president of his own party to “stuff it,” is courageous enough for me to know he will be courageous about the smaller things – like opposing taxes and helping to rebuild business and jobs this state.

I ask you five remaining RI conservative Republicans to join me.

What do the polls tell us about conservative chances?

2010-10-06T18:06:00.002-04:00

On this blog during the 2008 presidential primary season, I mentioned that I thought polls tend to be inaccurate during a rapidly changing situation. Specifically, the polls over-estimated the move to Obama in New Hampshire, coming on the heals of his success in Iowa. In fact, the polls over-predicted his vote, and Hillary won New Hampshire. Of course, the move of the Democratic electorate was clearly towards Obama, and later polls got it correct. That move took place over several months.

I've been watching Real Clear Politics fairly closely since mid-July, daily since about September 15. On July 21 RCP had the House of Representatives predicted results as 202 Democrat, 201 Republican, and 32 tossups. On September 15 they had it 205 Republicans, 193 Democrats, 37 tossups. The Democrats were losing ground, Republicans gaining ground. This afternoon, RCP had a number of House races change from polls published this morning. The result: 210 Republicans, 188 Democrats, 37 tossups. Thus the Republicans would have to win only 8 of those tossups to gain control of the House.

As a conservative, I could get giddy from these numbers, assuming all those Republicans were likely to be conservative and all those Democrats more likely to be liberals. But I must temper my excitement with the thought that the polls could be skewing the extent of a moving trend. Clearly the trend is Republican in this election, but how much? If RCP projections are correct, and the tossups split down the middle, the House would end up 228 Republicans, 207 Democrats. But maybe the polls are over-predicting the movement, as they did in 2008. How are we to know?

It seems to me that the difference here is the time factor. Those incorrect 2008 polls were trying to determine a shift of sentiment measured in days. These 2010 polls are measuring a months-long trend. It’s a strong trend, but taking place somewhat slowly. This seems to me to validate the polls more so than the 2008 primary polls. Plus, the polls are for a number of separate races, not a single race. Thus the rapid-trend-over-predicting model doesn't seem to apply.

This makes me feel that the polls are valid and RCP is accurately stating the change in the House: a GOP majority with seats to spare. If in the House, then maybe in the Senate. If in the Senate, then maybe in governor races and State legislatures. Of course, that’s what I want. I hope I’m not just drinking the cool aid.

Beck’s America

2010-08-29T19:01:00.001-04:00

I must say I was impressed with the turn out at Glenn Beck’s Restore America rally at the mall in DC yesterday, but I’ll also admit, I’m a bit uncomfortable. The event has all the earmarks of the early days of the Moral Majority – a well meaning conglomeration of Catholics, Evangelicals and others seeking a moral high ground for America in a political context. Beck’s “get back to God” falls into this category in my humble opinion, but it also begs an important question or two: “Which God?” “Whose God?”

Some time ago I was confronted with the very well thought out and well written Manhattan Statement. Frankly, for me, it has all the right ideas. But those who sign the statement claim to agree with one another on some basic tenets of faith, and the unfortunate thing about the Manhattan Statement is that some of the signers really do not agree about the nature of God, though they claim to, so in good conscience I could not sign it , and though one of my most favorite Christian authors,, Chuck Colson, endorses the Statement, another of my most favorite Christian writers, R. C. Sproul, could not and did not, and for the reasons I have also come to.

So if I can’t sign something as excellently thought out, comprehensive, well written and in the right direction on all matters social and political as the Manhattan Statement, I find myself all the more at odds with the very broad, very generic “get back to God” theme touted in DC yesterday. In fact, it gives me kind of a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach because I see so many who, with good intentions, are getting swallowed up in something so shallow. And when it dissipates, they will be disillusioned.

Beck is a Mormon, and as a Christian I say Christ was the God-Man sent by the Father, foreshadowed in the Old Testament as the “Son of Man” as mentioned in the Book of Daniel; Immanuel and the suffering servant in the Book of Isaiah. Mormons do not agree with Christ’s claim to diety, that as Christ claimed, “Before Abraham, I Am,” and that Christ was / is the God-man, the Second Adam, who paid humanities debt with His own flesh and blood and justified His flock. We are millions of miles apart on tenants of faith, though we may have agreement about culture, social issues, government intrusion, taxes, but let’s be honest, we do not agree on who is God.

So I’m a bit uncomfortable about Beck and those flying under his flag right now, including Sarah Palin. Oh it’s nice to hear public figures make professions of faith in public, it encourages their fans to do likewise, but give me Billy Graham for that kind of thing.

I know this is a departure from the many of my compatriot conservatives with whom I find myself in general agreement on the tactical issues, but let’s just agree to disagree about this fundamental, strategic concept for conservatism in America. My God is a lot bigger than what Beck and co. are making Him out to be. He is not a vague moral choice. He is God. And don’t mess with Him. Don’t use Him like this please. He just might not like it, and might let you know in some of the ways He showed it in His word. Be careful with this.

When you have your rallies, I might smile wryly as I hear the ideas with which I may have some agreement, and perhaps chuckle embarrassingly a bit when I hear something hollow said about a generic god, and you might find the likes of me going along for the ride for now. But let’s be clear, as the President would say in a his typical patronizing manner, I am not one of you. I march to a different Drummer, and if and when the going gets us into the slough of despond, I will not be standing with you on getting back to God. Your God is too small.

My Letter to Congressman Jim Langevin – D – RI

2010-05-18T19:45:00.001-04:00

Today, my Congressman, Rep. James Langevin, responded to me by email regarding my many entreaties to for him to oppose the ObamaCare Bill some months ago. Below is my response to him.

Dear Jim:

Thank you for getting back to me on this subject after a number of months. I am appreciative regardless of the fact that a lot has gone under the bridge since you voted for this terrible bill. But you wrote to me on an auspicious day. Excellent articles in today's Projo and Wall Street Journals underscore how anachronistic your email is today.

RIers woke up this morning to headline in the Projo of Blue Cross raising its rates about 13% for 2011. 13%. Don't tell me it would have been worse without Obamacare because since I wrote you about my opposition several months ago, articles have abounded on how this bill will cost us much more than what we pay for our current health care plans, not to mention the extra tax burden it will now place upon us as it was conveniently and only recently revealed by the CBO, long after the lemmings approved it.

Also in today's paper, not the Projo but the Wall Street Journal, is an editorial entitled "No, You Can't Keep Your Health Plan." The horror of that thought! All brought on by this awful piece of legislation which you voted for.

If you recall Jim, I sent you lemons at great expense to me to get your undivided attention as to why this bill is bad for me, bad for my family, bad for the state and bad for the nation, but you not only did not heed one iota of my advice, you out and out voted for this pig of a bill without reservation.

One last observation.

I'll confess I voted for you over more liberal Republican counterparts in the past, particularly those who were opposed to the rights of the unborn, but your position on this issue has pushed me back a bit. Today happens also to be election day in a number of states. Long time Democrat stalwarts are about to get thrown out of office. Results are not in yet, but I predict a rout. Now I will grant you that RIers' are a lot more tolerant of liberal Congressmen and women, but I have a feeling, November 2010 will be very different.

See you in November, Jim.

Regards,

Interpreting the Massachusetts Senate Vote

2010-03-23T21:31:00.004-04:00

What, you ask? Why write about this now? That was in January; the big thing in the last week, even the last two days, is health care mis-reform. True. I can only claim that this is on my mind, and has been ever since it happened. I took some notes, expanded them into a theory, and waited for a quiet evening to come up. It's here, finally. I should do some more on my taxes tonight, but I made such good progress last night that I feel like doing other, more pleasurable things tonight. Taxes I have always with me; the Scott Brown phenomenon is still here, and again to take center stage as we see how he performs regarding the next phase of health care.

Why did Massachusetts turn from its Democratic party candidate and elect a Republican? The standard interpretations of this are:

a Republican resurgence. I don't think so--not in way-out whacko Mass.
a conservative resurgence. Again, in Massachusetts? Maybe a little, or rather what the electorate voted on this time was more in line with stock conservative policies, thereby appearing to be a conservative resurgence.
anti-government health care. No, Massachusetts already have that; its electorate wouldn't mind a Federal takeover of a less-than-perfect State-run system.
anti-Obama. I doubt it, not while his popularity far out runs the popularity of the health care reform bill itself.
anti-Democratic. No, not in Massachusetts.

So what else could it be? A few things come to mind, all of which probably contribute to what my conclusion is.

anti-Federalist (i.e. anti-statist). This seems more likely. Even in Massachusetts, the state that stood alone, or nearly so, in support of George McGovern and Walter Mondale, the state that never saw a Federal law it didn't like. Yet, the rhetoric of the campaign and what coverage I saw in fly-over country suggests people getting tired of the Feds always butting in, grabbing more power, usurping more of our God-given liberties.
anti-deficit. This is likely, I think. People saw the accumulation of deficits beginning in the later Bush admin years and accelerating under Obama and his Congress. I think in part the Mass voters saw this accumulation and decided they had had enough.
anti-Washington DC. This is a strong component, I believe. Once a person gets elected to an office centered in Washington, it's hard to get them out. Those occasionally voted out just stay there and become lobbyists, waiting till their own party returns to administrative power when they can get a fat Cabinet post, all while not paying the taxes they voted on the American populace (can anyone say Tom Dashcle?). By the way, I believe the Democrats are mis-interpreting this as an anti-incumbent vote. Perhaps it's difficult to separate anti-DC from anti-incumbent, but I see a shade of difference.

All of these add up to one thing: People have HAD ENOUGH. I wrote once before, I think on this blog, about the HAD ENOUGH Generation needing to rise up and fix all the mess that the late-WW2 generation and the Baby Boomers were leaving behind. I didn't know when the HAD ENOUGH Generation would show itself. Would it be our children, Gen X? Or their children, Gen Y? I personally thought it would be the latter, believing that our children would be too much like us to perceive that the government had failed. But they seem to be rising up, if I'm interpreting the Mass senate vote correctly.

It remains to be seen if this first breath of the HAD ENOUGH Generation will be followed through in the next couple of rounds. I would have liked to have seen what would have happened if there had been an election to replace Murtha. If that one went Republican, I think it would have been a good indication. We now have to wait till November, and then till 2012, excepting any intermediate elections that would come along.

Keep going, HAD ENOUGHers. You have my best wishes as well as my support.

Breath in – Breath out

2010-02-26T20:12:00.001-05:00

Is it me, or is there something in the drinking water? There seems to be a movement afoot in social settings – industry, churches, government, designed around the concept that we are a bunch of stultifying dunderheads. We need to be taught how to do things we’ve been doing reasonably well for years. There is a “How to” guide now for just about everything from counting socks to boiling an egg. Need to run a little group? There’s a guide for that, and yes, oh, by the way, you must take the online course for that. Need to manage a small team? There’s a guide for that. Need to (fill in the blank). Yup, we’ve got a self teaching tool for that too.

Where did all this come from? I think we older (more senescent) folk can determine the answer when we go out to our driveways, get into our automobiles, start them up and head on into traffic. No one – I mean NO ONE follows any rules, not even the laws of physics. By the way, if you would like to live to see your grandkids, drive like everyone around you are aliens from Mars who have no idea what a stop sign is, let alone a turning signal.

It wasn’t long before managers and leaders from mega-churches to post offices figured out that they had better retrain us and retrain us fast – and they want to do it the same way the Republicans want to address healthcare reform: starting from “a clean piece of paper.” Care not a wit, and make no assumptions that you might be teaching an auditorium of neurosurgeons about how to put ointment on a mosquito bite. Just follow the teaching guide.

My theory is that this really all began because someone noticed the caliber of what is coming out of our education systems. Easy solution: RETRAIN EVERYONE!

I have another theory: that this will meet up with a swift demise. Something similar, perhaps, to when Jack Welch hit GE and determined that the business was running a tad inefficiently with all this type of nonsense going on, the layers it made in the structure, and the general “statist” approach on the factory floor. Not to mention that relatively normal people (i.e., normal smart people) didn’t need to be given a guide on how to breath. Suddenly, a Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley character will come on the scene like a hero in the white hat who arrives just before the train runs over the victim and stands athwart history yelling stop!

In the mean time, as for me, I’ll duck my head, learn about how to count my socks and make a boiled egg, then move on to the next insipid, sophomoric guide to a better life.

Projo Sucker Punches Scott Brown

2010-01-17T07:16:00.001-05:00

This morning’s Projo carries a rabid commentary from The Boston Globe’s Yvonne Abraham against Scott Brown, making the despicable charge that Brown is somehow against raped women. The Democrats are pretty desperate to do this, and the Projo’s complicity should be condemned roundly by level headed, middle class Rhode Islanders.

With printed media on the rocks, I think the Editorial board at the Projo has gone mad. They must have hired a bunch of recent grads and fired all the experienced regulars to save money. It’s bad enough that they raised prices by 50% in the last year – they now must subject us with hyper-liberalism and no balance to it.

In the mean time, a more interesting irony is that President Obama comes today to support the mindless Coakley, who in 2008 was rebuffed Obama, sticking tenaciously to the already defeated Hillary Clinton.

Scott Brown needs to win on Tuesday just to return sanity to a few of New England’s institutions, not to mention the nation’s health care reforms.

Go Brown!

The Real Hypocrites

2009-12-26T16:59:00.001-05:00

There is a “news” piece from the Associated Press written by a reporter, Charles Babington, on the “double standard” of the GOP in the healthcare debate. The essence of Babington’s so-called “news” piece is that Republicans hypocritically voted FOR a Medicare expansion that includes pharmaceutical drugs back in 2003 when they had control of the US Senate. The claim is that the addition of drugs to the already existing federally funded health care entitlement added half a trillion in costs all by itself, and is actually “worse than” the current expansion in government run healthcare because the half trillion dollars was “deficit financed” which is purportedly unlike the current deficit financed bill because back in 2003 we had no way to finance the drug benefit expansion, and you see this new government entitlement is paid for (out of Medicare?!?!?)

Anyway, what royals me here is that first of all, this is NOT a news item. It is pure, unadulterated, left of center biased opinion.

Secondly, there is an answer to this kind of sideswipe.

Mark Steyn says that, unlike the add on of drug benefits to an already existing entitlement, as bad as that may have been perhaps, what the Democrats have done is essentially turned over control of over one-sixth of the US economy to the government, and has placed government in between the patient and the doctor:

The monstrous mountain of toxic pustules sprouting from greasy boils metastasizing from malign carbuncles that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve is not the last word in “health” “care,” but the first. It ensures that this is all we’ll be talking about, now and forever.

Government can’t just annex “one-sixth of the U.S. economy” (i.e., the equivalent of annexing the entire British or French economy, or annexing the entire Indian economy twice over) and then just say: “Okay, what’s next? On to cap-and-trade . . . ” Nations that governmentalize health care soon find themselves talking about little else…

…My Republican friends often seem to miss the point in this debate: The so-called “public option” is not Page 3,079, Section (f), Clause VII. The entire bill is a public option — because that’s where it leads, remorselessly. The so-called “death panel” is not Page 2,721, Paragraph 19, Sub-section (d), but again the entire bill — because it inserts the power of the state between you and your doctor, and in effect assumes jurisdiction over your body. As the savvier Dems have always known, once you’ve crossed the Rubicon, you can endlessly re-reform your health reform until the end of time, and all the stuff you didn’t get this go-round will fall into place, and very quickly.

As I’ve been saying for over a year now, “health care” is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture. The unlovely Democrats on public display in the week before Christmas may seem like just a bunch of jelly-spined opportunists, grubby wardheelers and rapacious kleptocrats, but the smarter ones are showing great strategic clarity. Alas for the rest of us, Euro-style government on a Harry Reid/Chris Dodd/Ben Nelson scale will lead to ruin.

The Church Shares in Blame for Catholics who Publically Support Abortion

2009-11-22T11:07:00.001-05:00

The public argument between Rep. Patrick Kennedy and Bishop Tobin in RI begs the question,…

Why do so many Catholic politicians favor “abortion rights” when the Catholic church itself is clearly in support of the life of the unborn? Many who call themselves Catholic have supported abortion for decades and very publically. Organizations like Catholics for Choice for example, have been around since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. So why the dichotomy, and how has this odd contradiction survived for so long?

In the early 1970’s, when the court ruled for abortion, Catholic pols often hid behind arguments like “As for me, I am personally opposed to abortion, but I do not favor government coercion of others to follow what I think is a matter of personal faith or conscience.” Or “I do not wish to ‘force my religion’ upon anyone else.”

Other arguments would be aimed at having the freedom to choose (even though a bad choice which brings harm to another human being), or the rights of the mother to control her own body (at the expense of another).

In reality, Catholics who favor abortion are really political liberals who have “libertarian” views about their personal freedoms to the point of it being at the expense of others. Such ideas overstep the bounds of personal liberty and the age old maxim that my right to swing my clench fisted arm in the direction of your nose ends a nanosecond from its surface.

One could apply the vain reasoning of these liberal Catholics to a lot of other bad behaviors, which, when attempted, can be plainly seen as patently absurd arguments. For example, can anyone imagine a leader from the era of the Third Reich saying something like “As for me, I am personally opposed to death camps, but I consider their existence as a moral issue which is a matter of personal faith upon which I refuse to coerce others to follow.” Or an anti-bellum Slave owner: “I am personally an abolitionist in my heart of hearts, but cannot in good conscience force my fellow plantation owners to give up their free help.” Or “I should have the personal freedom of choice to decide what I do on my plantation – whether I have slave labor or not.” These arguments are laughable of course, yet we accept them on the subject of abortion all the time and go on our merry way.

One reason they have survived is that the leaders of the Roman Catholic church have generally acquiesced in them and continue to this day to allow its members who are pro-abortion to remain members or “receive communion.” In 1973, the Catholic church, had it really had the courage of its conviction, would have begun the wholesale expulsion of politicians and non-politicians alike with such beliefs. They would have tossed them out the front doors of their cathedrals, and with great fanfare. The views really cannot coexist.

So why has the Catholic church has been so tolerant? Why has it for the most part turned a blind eye to the masses who continue to support abortion yet continue to fill their pews? It is in my opinion the church’s support on other so-called “social justice issues.” The church opposes capital punishment, and it favors a more tolerant position on illegal immigration and the social justice and welfare of the indigent. Many of these views are charitable at their core, and right for a church to foster, but are often on the very same agenda as the politically liberal social agenda with the only thing missing from that laundry list of social issues being a “woman’s right to choose…”

So what happens? Those in the Church with the energy and momentum in supporting the churches social agenda are themselves caught up in the whole liberal social agenda. For that reason, the church should have long ago clearly and decisively incised the pro-abortionists from their roles.

I have an idea. Do it now. Use the Patrick Kennedy public debate as a moment in time where the Church comes forward with a public pronouncement, confesses its error for being so acquiescent in the past, and now sends a clear warning to other politicians and lay people to discontinue their support for government sanctioned abortion or be handed their walking papers.

A Tally on the Vote for Obama Care Last Night – The Fight Isn’t Over

2009-11-08T08:02:00.001-05:00

Here is the complete tally on the final vote last night in favor of establishing socialized medicine in this country.

RI’s Langevin and Kennedy, of course, both voted with the slim majority.

Below are some other interesting cuts of the voting data.

The first is from Red Elephant who tracked the Democrats that have the most to lose (and we hope so) for supporting Obamacare. The number next to their names is the percent of the vote McCain received in their Congressional District in 2008. The list is also color coded to denote Freshman, 1+ Term and 3+ Term incumbents and includes McCain’s performance in 2008 in that congressional district.

MS-04 Taylor         67
TX-17 Edwards      67
OK-02 Boren         66
TN-04 Davis          64
AL-02 Bright          63
ID-01 Minnick        62
MS-01 Childers      62
TN-06 Gordon       62
AL-05 Griffith         61
LA-03 Melancon    61
MO-04 Skelton      61
AR-01 Berry          59
VA-09 Boucher      59
AR-04 Ross           58
MD-01 Kratovil     58
UT-02 Matheson    57
WV-01 Mollohan   57
GA-08 Marshall     56
TN-08 Tanner        56
WV-03 Rahall        56
KY-06 Chandler   55
PA-04 Altmire        55
AR-02 Snyder        54
AZ-01 Kirkpatrick 54
FL-02 Boyd           54
PA-10 Carney        54
ND-AL Pomeroy    53
SC-05 Spratt          53
AZ-05 Mitchell       52
AZ-08 Giffords       52
NC-07 McIntyre   52
NC-11 Shuler         52
OH-18 Space         52
FL-24 Kosmas       51
IN-08 Ellsworth      51
NY-13 McMahon 51
NY-29 Massa        51
PA-17 Holden        51
VA-05 Perriello      51
CO-03 Salazar       50
CO-04 Markey      50
IN-09 Hill               50
MN-07 Peterson    50
NM-02 Teague      50
OH-06 Wilson       50
OH-16 Boccieri     50
PA-12 Murtha       50

And this is from the Weekly Standard: The thirty-nine Democrats voted against it:

1. Rep. John Adler (NJ)

2. Rep. Jason Altmire (PA)

3. Rep. Brian Baird (WA)

4. Rep. John Barrow (GA)

5. Rep. John Boccieri (OH)

6. Rep. Dan Boren (OK)

7. Rep. Rick Boucher (VA)

8. Rep. Allen Boyd (FL)

9. Rep. Bobby Bright (AL)

10. Rep. Ben Chandler (KT)

11. Rep. Travis Childers (MS)

12. Rep. Artur Davis (AL)

13. Rep. Lincoln Davis (TN)

14. Rep. Chet Edwards (TX)

15. Rep. Bart Gordon (TN)

16. Rep. Parker Griffith (AL)

17. Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (SD)

18. Rep. Tim Holden (PA)

19. Rep. Larry Kissell (NC)

20. Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (FL)

21. Rep. Frank Kratovil (MD)

22. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (OH)

23. Rep. Jim Marshall (GA)

24. Rep. Betsy Markey (CO)

25. Rep. Eric Massa (NY)

26. Rep. Jim Matheson(UT)

27. Rep. Mike McIntyre (NC)

28. Rep. Michael McMahon (NY)

29. Rep. Charlie Melancon (LA)

30. Rep. Walt Minnick (ID)

31. Rep. Scott Murphy (NY)

32. Rep. Glenn Nye (VA)

33. Rep. Collin Peterson (MN)

34. Rep. Mike Ross (AR)

35. Rep. Heath Shuler (NC)

36. Rep. Ike Skelton (MO)

37. Rep. John Tanner (TN)

38. Rep. Gene Taylor (MS)

39. Rep. Harry Teague (NM)

So, for Obamacare to become the law of the land, first the Senate needs to pass a bill, and Harry Reid can't afford to lose a single Democrat if the Republicans stick together. And then the House and Senate would need to reconcile the two bills in conference committee and each vote on the conference report before it goes to Obama's desk. This fight isn't over.

Kill this Bill!

2009-11-07T09:00:00.001-05:00

To all my friends: Tell Rep. Langevin and Kennedy what’s really in the Pelosi Health Care Bill. They may vote on it as early as today, Saturday, November 7. Or over this weekend.

Tell them, if they haven’t the four ream bill, just read this excerpted from the WSJ…

Here are some important passages in the 2,000 page legislation.

By BETSY MCCAUGHEY

The health bill that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is bringing to a vote (H.R. 3962) is 1,990 pages. Here are some of the details you need to know.

What the government will require you to do:

• Sec. 202 (p. 91-92) of the bill requires you to enroll in a "qualified plan." If you get your insurance at work, your employer will have a "grace period" to switch you to a "qualified plan," meaning a plan designed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. If you buy your own insurance, there's no grace period. You'll have to enroll in a qualified plan as soon as any term in your contract changes, such as the co-pay, deductible or benefit.

• Sec. 224 (p. 118) provides that 18 months after the bill becomes law, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will decide what a "qualified plan" covers and how much you'll be legally required to pay for it. That's like a banker telling you to sign the loan agreement now, then filling in the interest rate and repayment terms 18 months later.

Associated Press

Protestors wave signs in front of the Capitol on Thursday.

On Nov. 2, the Congressional Budget Office estimated what the plans will likely cost. An individual earning $44,000 before taxes who purchases his own insurance will have to pay a $5,300 premium and an estimated $2,000 in out-of-pocket expenses, for a total of $7,300 a year, which is 17% of his pre-tax income. A family earning $102,100 a year before taxes will have to pay a $15,000 premium plus an estimated $5,300 out-of-pocket, for a $20,300 total, or 20% of its pre-tax income. Individuals and families earning less than these amounts will be eligible for subsidies paid directly to their insurer.

• Sec. 303 (pp. 167-168) makes it clear that, although the "qualified plan" is not yet designed, it will be of the "one size fits all" variety. The bill claims to offer choice—basic, enhanced and premium levels—but the benefits are the same. Only the co-pays and deductibles differ. You will have to enroll in the same plan, whether the government is paying for it or you and your employer are footing the bill.

• Sec. 59b (pp. 297-299) says that when you file your taxes, you must include proof that you are in a qualified plan. If not, you will be fined thousands of dollars. Illegal immigrants are exempt from this requirement.

• Sec. 412 (p. 272) says that employers must provide a "qualified plan" for their employees and pay 72.5% of the cost, and a smaller share of family coverage, or incur an 8% payroll tax. Small businesses, with payrolls from $500,000 to $750,000, are fined less.

Eviscerating Medicare:

In addition to reducing future Medicare funding by an estimated $500 billion, the bill fundamentally changes how Medicare pays doctors and hospitals, permitting the government to dictate treatment decisions.

• Sec. 1302 (pp. 672-692) moves Medicare from a fee-for-service payment system, in which patients choose which doctors to see and doctors are paid for each service they provide, toward what's called a "medical home."

The medical home is this decade's version of HMO-restrictions on care. A primary-care provider manages access to costly specialists and diagnostic tests for a flat monthly fee. The bill specifies that patients may have to settle for a nurse practitioner rather than a physician as the primary-care provider. Medical homes begin with demonstration projects, but the HHS secretary is authorized to "disseminate this approach rapidly on a national basis."

A December 2008 Congressional Budget Office report noted that "medical homes" were likely to resemble the unpopular gatekeepers of 20 years ago if cost control was a priority.

• Sec. 1114 (pp. 391-393) replaces physicians with physician assistants in overseeing care for hospice patients.

• Secs. 1158-1160 (pp. 499-520) initiates programs to reduce payments for patient care to what it costs in the lowest cost regions of the country. This will reduce payments for care (and by implication the standard of care) for hospital patients in higher cost areas such as New York and Florida.

• Sec. 1161 (pp. 520-545) cuts payments to Medicare Advantage plans (used by 20% of seniors). Advantage plans have warned this will result in reductions in optional benefits such as vision and dental care.

• Sec. 1402 (p. 756) says that the results of comparative effectiveness research conducted by the government will be delivered to doctors electronically to guide their use of "medical items and services."

Questionable Priorities:

While the bill will slash Medicare funding, it will also direct billions of dollars to numerous inner-city social work and diversity programs with vague standards of accountability.

• Sec. 399V (p. 1422) provides for grants to community "entities" with no required qualifications except having "documented community activity and experience with community healthcare workers" to "educate, guide, and provide experiential learning opportunities" aimed at drug abuse, poor nutrition, smoking and obesity. "Each community health worker program receiving funds under the grant will provide services in the cultural context most appropriate for the individual served by the program."

These programs will "enhance the capacity of individuals to utilize health services and health related social services under Federal, State and local programs by assisting individuals in establishing eligibility . . . and in receiving services and other benefits" including transportation and translation services.

• Sec. 222 (p. 617) provides reimbursement for culturally and linguistically appropriate services. This program will train health-care workers to inform Medicare beneficiaries of their "right" to have an interpreter at all times and with no co-pays for language services.

• Secs. 2521 and 2533 (pp. 1379 and 1437) establishes racial and ethnic preferences in awarding grants for training nurses and creating secondary-school health science programs. For example, grants for nursing schools should "give preference to programs that provide for improving the diversity of new nurse graduates to reflect changes in the demographics of the patient population." And secondary-school grants should go to schools "graduating students from disadvantaged backgrounds including racial and ethnic minorities."

• Sec. 305 (p. 189) Provides for automatic Medicaid enrollment of newborns who do not otherwise have insurance.

For the text of the bill with page numbers, see www.defendyourhealthcare.us.

Ms. McCaughey is chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a former Lt. Governor of New York state.

Rod Dreher: Glenn Beck’s world order endangers the right

2009-10-05T18:59:00.001-04:00

I usually discover that the Projo is off its rocker. But here is an op ed piece that appeared in today’s printed version of the Projo that I agree with. As a conservative, Glenn Beck concerns me when starts heading for deep waters. Dreher is with the Dallas Morning News, affiliated with the Projo:

YOU CAN SAY THIS for Glenn Beck: He’s charismatic, he was right on ACORN and Van Jones, and he’s correct to point out that the government in Washington doesn’t work for the common good. The affable Beck articulates the legitimate anger and frustration that millions of Americans feel when faced by the fact that the country is in a hot mess of trouble.

But here’s the thing: Beck is a white Jeremiah Wright, a crazy-pants conspiracy theorist whose world-view is rooted in the paranoid teachings of a far-right Mormon political guru named W. Cleon Skousen. Before signing up as a recruit in Beck’s army, conservative Becketeers had better think long and hard about where their affable leader is taking them.

A few weeks back, the red-hot Fox News Channel phenom spent nine minutes on the air leading a seminar on public artwork in New York City. By the time he was finished, Beck had illuminated a propaganda conspiracy linking communists, fascists, the Soviet Union, the Rockefeller family and the United Nations. This is the sort of weirdo rant you expect to encounter on fringey Web sites. You don’t expect to see it on national television.

But that’s a big part of Beck’s shtick. He’s always carrying on about sinister Obamaite conspiracies threatening to overthrow the constitutional order. On the Fox & Friends morning show, Beck declared: “The Manchurian Candidate couldn’t destroy us faster than Barack Obama. If you were planning a sleeper to come in and become president of the United States, this is how he would do it.”

How is it that a man can call the American president a traitorous subversive and not be laughed, or booed, off the national stage? He’s a happy-go-lucky Howard Beale (from the movie Network). Paddy Chayefsky, you should have lived to see this moment.

Beck’s paranoia doesn’t come from nowhere. His man Skousen was a fanatical Mormon reactionary so far to the right that the Latter-day Saints Church finally felt compelled to distance itself from his teaching.

Beck, an enthusiastic Mormon convert, pushes Skousen’s 1981 book, The 5,000 Year Leap, a tendentious pseudo-history of the U.S. that interprets the founding in religious terms. Texas Gov. Rick Perry recommended it at the recent Values Voter Summit in Washington. And if the pious nationalism of that book were all you knew about Skousen, you would be hard-pressed to see what the big deal was.

But Skousen wrote many less anodyne books about politics — and held views far darker than revealed in the hokey but harmless Leap. In a 1976 lecture, the audio of which is available on the pro-Skousen Web site AwakeAndArise.org, Skousen rails like an Old Testament prophet, quoting Mormon scriptures and detailing how Satan is working with “secret combinations” — a Mormon theological term — within political parties, churches, labor unions and the wealthy elite, especially the Rockefeller family, to bring about the “One World Order.”

Skousen, like his follower Beck, is obsessed with the idea that these secret combinations are conniving to overthrow the U.S. Constitution. Though it is not part of official LDS doctrine, some Mormons believe in an apocalyptic prophecy attributed to church founder Joseph Smith, who supposedly taught that the Constitution would one dark day be hanging by a thread and that Mormon elders would rescue it.

The pudgy, sweet-natured Beck offers a more palatable form of this paranoia — but all his fruit and sugar can’t hide the Skousenite firewater. How ironic that conservative Christians who unjustly dunned conventional Mitt Romney because of his LDS faith are uncritically backing the squirrelly Beck, who looks like he’s casting himself as hero of a prophetic Mormon melodrama.

There are conservatives who know perfectly well that Beck is an unhinged buffoon who traffics in crude, ridiculous ideas. But unlike the hapless GOP, he’s popular and effective in the political war against Obama. So these conservative cynics adopt a “no enemies to the right” approach to Beck, even though he’s mainstreaming the ooga-booga worldview of a crank prophet who believed, with the John Birch Society, that Eisenhower was a closet commie.

This is foolish. Not every enemy of Obama is a friend to conservatism. In 1962, in a time when conservatives needed all the help they could get, William F. Buckley nevertheless published in National Review a lengthy denunciation of paranoid Bircher Robert Welch. How long, Buckley asked, can the right tolerate his malicious gibberish without losing credibility? National Review eventually sidelined the Birchers for good over their “psychosis of conspiracy,” thus doing the right an enormous service by making conservatism more credible with the American mainstream.

Today, poor Bill is in the grave, Glenn Beck’s ratings are soaring, and most conservatives don’t see what the problem is. One way or another, they will.

Rod Dreher is a columnist for The Dallas Morning News ( rdreher@dallasnews.com).

Happy Anniversary Senescent Old Man – Welcome New Senescent Man Blogs & New Addresses

2009-09-27T08:26:00.001-04:00

This month (September) marks the fifth anniversary of The Senescent Man Blog. We initiated this blog on or about the 3rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks. We have now moved to a new blogger address (and a new wordpress address) to stay up with the times – the new blogger format more efficiently connects to twitter and other networking tools, and the software is much easier to work with than the old. The new wordpress address (which we will run in parallel with the same postings for awhile) offer other features. We’re going to test drive both for awhile until we feel we’ve homed in on the better new format.

The new blogger address for the Senescent Man is (rightfully): http://senescentman.blogspot.com; and the new wordpress address is http://senescentman.wordpress.com. Try both of them on for size. Let us know what you think.

We are hopeful that you and others that have been most loyal to us will continue to follow, and that we’ll add many others.

Health Care Reform: Prove it, President Obama

2009-09-24T13:49:00.002-04:00

The health care debate rages. I've tried to stay out of it, believing something bad is going to come of it no matter whether I state my opinion or not, but now think I will weigh in with a couple of posts.

I watched President Obama's speech...when was it? A couple of Wednesdays ago, maybe? You know the one, where Representative Joe Wilson shouted "you liar" when Obama said no illegal aliens would be covered. I sat there fairly calm during it, and don't think I once shouted at the television. Though I did give the president some long-distance advice he didn't immediately take.

The thing that struck me most was that Obama said we could pay for most of the increased cost--just under a trillion dollars--with 1) increased efficiencies, 2) eliminating unnecessary treatments, and 3) ending Medicare/Medicaid fraud. Leaving the first two for a moment, who can argue with ending M/M fraud? That would be a good thing, right? I'm all for it. But...

...WE DON'T NEED ANY REFORM TO DO IT! DO IT NOW!!!

President Obama, do you know how stupid what you said sounds? If you know there is fraud in M/M, why haven't you appointed someone to root it out and end it? Why haven't you made this a priority? Why haven't you used it as a knife in the back of the departing Bush administration to show what a bunch of idiots they were? And if M/M fraud is such a problem that you can't be bothered to do anything about it, why in God's name should we trust your administration--or any administration--with an even bigger hand in health care? Good grief, Mr. President, think about your words.

How much fraud is there in M/M? I'd like to see it quantified in terms of percent of all dollars paid to physicians and care-givers, and in terms of actual dollars per year. I'd like to see some evidence as to why you think this is the correct number to base savings from ended fraud on? How long has this been going on? What are the specific steps that you propose to end the fraud? Who in your administration is handling this? To whom are they accountable? What savings do you expect in year 1, year 2, etc. from the increased fraud prevention efforts that you can implement immediately, without needing to go to Congress?

The answer, of course, is nothing. Obama is not doing anything special about rooting out fraud in M/M. If he were, he would already have been singing about it from the rooftops. He would have been chiding Bush, Cheney, etc. and making political points.

Mr. Obama, prove that the amount of fraud in M/M is enough to make a significant debt in that universal health care proposal of yours by ending fraud right now. Show us the savings. Maybe then I'll have a little trust in you, that you can do what you promise in regards to health care. Do it for the rest of this term. Then let's talk about health care reform.

Kanye West is a Racist

2009-09-16T23:11:00.002-04:00

I don't know Kanye West. I may have heard the name from time to time, but couldn't have told you if he was a band leader, a famous doctor, or a czar in the Obama administration. That's how far removed I am from popular culture. But of course I've heard the news and seen the sound bite of interest.

I conclude that Kanye West is a racist. Taylor Swift--who I also didn't know, so far am I removed from popular culture--a lilly white woman, was getting that award. Good on her. West, the black man, took the mic from her and began praising a music video done by Beyonce, a black woman, and I think West was saying or implying that Beyonce's music video was much better than Swift's video and that Beyonce, the black woman, should have received the award rather than Swift, the white woman. Do y'all think I've got that correct?

Obviously, West's action was that of a racist. He was incensed that the black woman didn't win, and so couldn't allow the white woman to have her 15 seconds of fame. I believe West's apologies are insincere, and he is a racist at heart and needs to be censured by the organization that was giving out the awards. So far am I removed from popular culture, I don't even know what organization that is.

Happy Anniversary Senescent Old Man – Welcome New Senescent Man & New Address

2009-09-06T20:06:00.001-04:00

This month marks the fifth anniversary of The Senescent Man Blog. We began the blog around the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks. We have moved to a new blogger address to stay up with the times – the new blogger format will more efficiently connect to twitter and other networking tools, and the software is much easier to work with than the old.

The new address for the Senescent Man blog is (rightfully): http://senescentman.blogspot.com

We are hopeful that you and others that have been most loyal to us will continue to follow, and that we’ll add many others.

Ted Kennedy RIP

2009-08-26T21:13:00.001-04:00

I have to write really fast here, so forgive my mistakes. I have to be somewhere, and frankly the topic doesn’t deserve too much of one’s time, but it is a milestone for which to take notice. The death of Senator Ted Kennedy has raised a plethora of interesting political issues:

For one, what the affect will be on the health bill which Democrats now threaten to name the Kennedy bill in honor of the man that pursued socialist medicine and other overtly socialized causes for years. Somehow the naming of this turkey as the “Kennedy” bill is going to tame all the town hallers and make us all go into a slumber of good feeling. What it will do is encourage some unthinking voters to favor it for reasons of nostalgia. Imagine finding yourself in front of one of those death committees at some godforsaken nursing home in a few years and learning that the government bureaucrats have decided your number was up, and just because you were a fan of the Kennedy clan, and made the grave error of deciding to support his stupid socialized medicine bill to give honor to the name?!

And then what about all the sleazy things Ted was well known for over the years. Not to speak ill of the dead, but his cheating in college, the unnecessary death of Mary-Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, the defending of alleged rapist and relative Will Kennedy Smith with whom he and son Patrick (yes, RI’s own) hung out together in Florida years ago.

Several good books were written about Chappaquiddick, and all of them pretty much condemned Ted’s terrible, immature and self centered behavior designed extemporaneously to save his own hide and preserve his political career.

Okay, so the Senate is a lady’s and gentleman’s club, and a lot of conservative colleagues respected Ted as he got older and as he finally matured when he reached his 70’s. Why, then, why must we have socialized medicine shoved down our throats simply because the man was transfixed with the idea and the majority of his fellow Democrats wish to honor him? Honor him with a trophy or something. Give him a great send off, but please name this bill after him, and use that to get it passed when it should be deep sixed.

Sure, he was the brother of John F. Kennedy, and even conservatives thought well of anti-communist, tax reducing JFK (except perhaps for his own personal exploits), but it started when brother Robert needed a way to distinguish himself from Texas Democrat LBJ who took over after John’s assassination. Robert saw that in the late 60’s he could carve out a constituency in a run for the presidency in the leftism that became popular and then prevalent at the time. Ted merely followed Robert’s designed strategy. Perhaps he could have been more moderate a Democrat, and how that would have changed history. Too bad he hadn’t an idea of his own in this regard, except to move deliberately and inexorably leftward. Too bad. RIP.

Not Above His Pay Grade

2009-08-17T18:09:00.002-04:00

The debate is currently raging over health care. Barak is pushing it as hard as he can; for the most part the Senate and House are running away from it; and Secretary Seblius is parsing it. One point of contention are the so-called "death panels,"--which are to counsel people to end their treatment (and thus their lives) perhaps earlier than justified. Some say this provision is in the bill, some say it isn't. Some say it was in the bill but now isn't, some say it was never in the bill. Some say it's fear-mongering lies on the part of one side, some say it's the ultimate price for a government run systems.

Truth be told, I haven’t time to access and read the bill, and so don't know which side is telling the truth. Concerning any type of public option for health insurance, I’ll follow my normal knee-jerk reaction: Leahy and Shumer are for it, so I'm against it.

But why have the rumors (or lies) and distortions and the extreme interest in the death panel provision gone this far? It is simply that it is believable, based on Barak's own words in that sound bite played so often. You know the one where he tells the woman with a 100 old mother who was faced with the decision of whether to have an operation. What was it Barak said? "Maybe it would have been better for her to take a pain pill." Something like that. And I hope I'm getting the context correct; always difficult to tell from sound bites.

This is the same man who said determining when life began was "above my pay grade." It appears that knowing when a life should be ended is NOT above his pay grade. If he is willing for a senior citizen to take a pill to ease suffering as an earlier than necessary death comes on, it is believable that the government would push the elderly toward choosing death.

The source of the death panel rumors? Barak himself.

Calvin 500

2009-07-11T19:25:00.001-04:00

In March, Time Magazine listed “Ten Ideas Changing the World Right Now.” Third on their list and nestled among other notions like “reinstating the interstates” was something they called “the new Calvinism.” It’s not that easy to see, however, how this old world view is somehow repackaged, alive and changing the social order as we approach the 500^th birthday of its originator this July 10.

People are quick to associate Calvinism with a Puritanical sternness and a fatalistic, predestined fate, but laying aside what some would argue are distortions of Calvinism, let’s consider John Calvin the man, how he affected his world in the 16^th Century, what role he may have played in how we developed as a culture and how his ideas may be affecting us even today.

Calvin was one of several 16^thCentury architects (though some say THE chief architect) of the Protestant Reformation. He established a body of theology and connected it to the soul of what was a fledgling Protestant revolution, documenting his beliefs in his Institutes which he wrote in 1534 at the age of 25.

In Calvinism, common labor was considered “a calling from God,” as sacred as serving as a priest or minister. Every task, no matter how menial, was accomplished with a sense of duty to mankind.

Education in Calvin’s day was limited to the aristocratic class, so he launched an academy in Geneva, Switzerland training people in whatever “God had called them to do.” It was revolutionary in the 16^th century for a college to teach law, medicine, math and engineering. When Calvinism arrived in the American colonies, the first colleges – Harvard, Dartmouth, Brown, Yale, Rutgers and Princeton – were launched to train Calvin influenced teachers.

Calvin believed that the pillars of Western law, order and justice were founded in Mosaic Law, and as such engineered the codification of laws based on scripture. Influenced by Calvin, Sirs Edward Blackstone and William Coke established what we now refer to as the Common Law which later formed the basis for laws in the Colonies, and are still in application today.

Deeply rooted in Calvinism is a true love of freedom and free market capitalism. Through the hard work of one’s “calling” and the excellence pursued by the measure of a just God, common workers would invest in private capital, risk taking, personal and private ownership, while showing charity towards the poor. Wherever Calvinism spread, it was often followed by investment in capital, productivity and an improvement of the standard of living, while other parts of Europe usually were stricken by poverty under absolute monarchal rule.

Derived from the eldership model of the Bible, Calvin promoted representative government, the limitation of government power, a plurality of leadership, and branches of government with checks and balances where no one branch would rule without the symmetry and balance of the other branches, to preserve individual liberty. It is no wonder that historians like 19^th Century German author Leopold Von Ranke would say that “John Calvin was virtually the founder of America,…”

Besides a change in tone and content emanating from today’s pulpits which are challenging people’s beliefs, do we not see other trends exhibiting the invisible hand of a resurgent Calvinism? What about reforms in education strategy? How about the reform and restructuring of world markets?

To cite an example, earlier this month, Boston’s Mayor Tom Menino surprised teachers and constituents by giving a powerful speech on school reform where he advocated the “transformative change” available to Boston through “charter schools.”

The zeitgeist of a new Calvinism is also subtly inspiring the work ethic of boomers, influencing them to rethink taking their retirements. A June 2009 article in the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute discusses “The Coming Entrepreneurship Boom,” which the authors claim is occurring not in spite of an aging population but because of it. We’re likewise witnessing the death throes of gigantic, bureaucratic, government protected conglomerates, like GM, which are faltering as they compete ineffectively against agile, rapidly growing and competitive small businesses.

And what about those freedom loving, empathetic Twitterers who have been overtly supporting the street demonstrations for freedom in Iran?

As we approach the celebration of the 233^rd anniversary of the birth of our own Independence, we should consider that there was once another revolution that predated our own which not only had an impact on our Founders but remains active and alive even today influencing change through an emerging and new reformation resembling a very, very old one.

Obama's Words on Roberts Reveal a Lot About Obama

2009-06-06T15:03:00.001-04:00

I came across this in today’s Wall Street Journal in the letters to the editor section, and I found that the more I pondered what this writer has stated, the more I think it lands in the heart of Obamaland. This is the reason why conservatives like Christopher Buckley, David Brooks and others were enamored of Obama prior to the election, why some still stand in awe.

Obama's Words on Roberts Reveal a Lot About Obama

I found the excerpt from Barack Obama's 2005 Senate speech, "Why Obama Voted Against Roberts" (June 2), fascinating because it shows very well how President Obama operates. He makes fantastic speeches which all praise principle, values and common sense. Many conservatives would not even deliver speeches as deeply conservative as Mr. Obama's. Yet when he casts his vote, he is a super liberal, to the left of the left. The usual liberal "culprits" show their colors at the first word they pronounce. One or two sentences and one knows that a liberal is talking. But not with Mr. Obama. This is what has contributed to his initial successes but will ultimately be his downfall. If you find so many good qualities in Justice Roberts, and find he may be "deficient" in 1% or 2% of his personality, why vote against him?

George Naniche
Moraga, Calif.

Indoor Prostitution List by Senate District

2009-06-01T19:13:00.001-04:00

Put your State Senators to work…

The following is a listing of known venues of indoor prostitution by RI Senate District collected and compiled by Melanie Shapiro and Donna M. Hughes from the University of RI whose comments on the movie Happy Endings? was shared in a previous post:

District	Senator	Brothel	Notes
1	Maryellen Goodwin	Beautiful Life 19 Atwells Avenue Providence, RI 02903	An Asian spa-brothel that is prison like: the fire escape is ripped off, there are bars on the windows, and the exits sealed. Beautiful Life has been open since February 2007.
		Cadillac Lounge 61 Charles Street Providence, RI 02904	A strip club where prostitution has been reported by men on an Internet forum.
		Central Health 76 Derry Street Providence, RI 02903	A Korean spa-brothel that has been open since at least 2005. It was one of 31 brothels in a multi-state federal investigation of Korean organized crime sex trafficking and money laundering. The manager was arrested in 2006. Central Health is located near a housing project and a school.
		Club Fantasies 28 Sims Avenue Providence, RI 02909	A strip club. “Johns” report on Internet forums that there is prostitution there.
		Foxy Lady 318 Chalkstone Avenue Providence, RI 02908	A strip club. “Johns” report on Internet forums that there is prostitution there.
		Heavenly Hands 46 Admiral Street Providence, RI 02908	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since January 2009.
		Lily’s Spa 375 Admiral Street Providence, RI 02908	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since 2004. The brothel owner, Choon Yeol Jeon residence is at the brothel. Women live on the premises. ”Johns" say that the women are younger than at other brothels and are rotated faster than other brothels.
		North Main Street Spa 1185 North Main Street Providence, RI 02906	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since 2000. Connected to Harmony Spa. The president, Naja Ho, is listed as residing at the brothel. The manager, Sumi Ray, was arrested for allowing women to perform massages without licenses. Women live on the premises.
		Sunflower Spa 627 Douglas Ave Providence, RI 02908	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since July 2008. The incorporator, Chunyu Guo, is listed as living there. Located in a residential area. “Johns” say on Internet forums that the inside is not clean.
2	Juan M. Pichardo	Japan Spa 1021 Broad Street Providence, RI 02905	An Asian spa-brothel that opened in early 2005. Japan Spa is located above a hair salon. One “john” reported a woman at the spa-brothel pleaded for him to marry her and take her back to South Korea.
		J.J. Tuina Bodywork 30 Pontiac Avenue Providence, RI 02907	An Asian spa-brothel located a few doors from Red Rose Spa. Open since early 2008. The president is listed as residing there, a tiny, one floor building. Several women reported to ”johns” that they were frightened.
	.	Red Rose Spa 2 Pontiac Avenue Providence, RI 02907	An Asian spa-brothel open since 2007. One of the managers, Hui Pinf Lu, is listed as residing in Flushing, NY, an information and transit hub for Korean sex trafficking. Located at a busy intersection off of Reservoir Avenue a few doors down from J.J. Tuina Bodywork.
3	Rhoda E. Perry	Body Work 91 South Angell Street Providence, RI 02906	An Asian spa-brothel open since March 2009, operating out of an apartment.
		Downtown Spa 385 South Main Street Providence, RI 02903	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since 2006. It is one of the brothels involved in a Federal human trafficking case in 2006. It was part of a large Korean organized crime sex trafficking ring spanning from Boston to South Carolina. Women are rotated on a network of brothels along the east coast. “Johns’ say the women are reluctant to engage in sex acts, but they make them to it anyway. Women were also reported to be sent out for plastic surgery.
4	Dominick J. Ruggiero	Wanskuck Wellness Center 725 Branch Avenue Unit #132 Providence, RI 02904	An Asian spa-brothel open since early 2006. Located next to an adult entertainment store and connected to Wellness Spa in Plainville, MA. “Johns” say they women are held in debt bondage
5	Paul V. Jabour	425 Atwells Avenue Providence, RI 02903	An Asian spa-brothel open since April 2009. It is in a residential apartment.
		Asian Body Work 326 Broadway Street Providence, RI 02903	An Asian spa-brothel open since May 2009. It is in a residential apartment around the corner from an elementary school.
		Bali Day Spa 204 Westminster Street Providence, RI 02903	An Asian spa-brothel open since 2004. The president, Wai K. Lew is listed as residing there. Women live on the premises. It is connected to ABC Spa and Sundance Spa.
		Fuji Spa 417 Atwells Avenue Providence, RI 02903	An Asian spa-brothel that opened in April 2009. It is located in an historic purple Victorian home.
		One Spa 55 Bradford Street Providence, RI 02903	An Asian spa-brothel open since January 2009. Located above the Federal Hill Gazette office in an apartment. It is connected to Down Town Spa. ”Johns” say the women here are rotated very quickly. The women live at the brothel.
		Satin Doll 35 Aborn Street Providence, RI 02903	A strip club where prostitution has been reported by ”Johns” on the Internet
6	Harold M. Metts	Balloons 257 Allens Avenue Providence, RI 02905	An 18+ strip club. “Johns” say there is underage prostitution there. Club Balloon is open 24 hours a day. In 2008, Angel Varagas of Woonsocket was murdered outside the club.
		Cheaters 245 Allens Avenue Providence, RI 02905	A strip club. ‘Johns” say there is prostitution there.
		Club Desire 1 Franklin Square Providence, RI 02903	A strip club. “Johns” say there is prostitution there.
		MegaPlex 257 Allens Avenue Providence, RI 02905	A gay bathhouse where prostitution has been reported by men on Internet forums.
		Spa 81 81 Richmond Street Providence, RI 02903	A spa-brothel open since 2007. Was previously QQ Spa, an Asian spa-brothel. Now it advertises American women of non-Asian ethnicities. Spa 81 is located above Club Hell.
		Studio 253 Adult Emporium 257 Allens Avenue Providence, RI 02905	An 18+ nude modeling studio where prostitution is reported by “Johns” on Internet forums.
8	James Doyle II	Daily Spa 508 Armistice Blvd Pawtucket, RI 02861	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since 2008.
		Far East 72 East Street Pawtucket, RI 02860	An Asian spa-brothel open since early 2007. Hyo Sik Kim, the current manager, has a criminal record. It is connected to Downtown Spa, which was found to be part of a large Korean organized crime and sex trafficking network investigated by Federal agencies
		Harmony Spa 11 Benefit Street #A Pawtucket, RI	An Asian spa-brothel that opened in April 2009. It is connected to Century Spa, North Main Street Spa, and Sundance Spa.
12	Louis P. DiPalma	Lee Health Center 1341 W. Main Road Middletown, RI 02842	An Asian spa-brothel that opened in 2006. A family-oriented business located nearby was forced to relocate because of the brothel.
		Salon 657 Middletown, RI 02842	A spa-brothel with American women.
14	Daniel DaPonte	Century Spa 150 Warren Ave East Providence RI 02914	An Asian spa-brothel that opened in March 2009 and is connected to Harmony Spa. Located in a house in a residential area.
		Shiatsu Spa 254 Warren Ave East Providence, RI 02914	An Asian spa-brothel that opened in January 2009. It is connected to Fuji Spa. Located in a house in a residential area.
15	John F. McBurney III	Pleasant Street Spa 88 Pleasant Street Pawtucket, RI 02860	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since 2003. Located in a small shopping complex, next to a family pizzeria.
16	Elizabeth A. Crowley	Simple Pleasures 753 Broad Street Central Falls, RI 02907	An Asian spa-brothel that opened in April 2009.
		Sundance Spa 49 Sheridan Street Central Falls, RI 02863	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since 2006.
17	Edward J. O’Neill	ABC Spa 417 Smithfield Avenue Providence, RI 02904	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since 2008. It is connected to Bali Day Spa and Sundance Spa. Can be seen from a popular Rhode Island restaurant.
		Mineral Spring Massage & Bodywork 1410 Mineral Spring Avenue North Providence, RI 02904	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since 2006. Located in a strip mall.
26	Beatrice A. Lanzi	Anne’s Garden Spa 415 Atwood Avenue Cranston, RI 02920	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since 2008. It is connected to Anne’s Garden Spa in Brighton, MA.
		Asian Bodywork Center 786 Atwood Avenue Cranston, RI 02920	An Asian spa-brothel that has been open since 2008.

On the Slave Trade in RI Today (Yes I said Today)

2009-05-28T17:31:00.001-04:00

Several people have asked Professor Donna M. Hughes of the University of Rhode Island for her opinion about the film “Happy Endings,” a documentary on Asian indoor spa-brothels located in RI, a film by Tara Hurley. On Sunday, Professor Hughes had the opportunity to see the film in its entirety. Here are her comments.

The film should not be viewed by underage children because it includes a sex act filmed in one of the spa-brothels. Some adults may be offended by this.

This is not a film that should be used for education on sex trafficking.

Tara Hurley, the filmmaker, has testified before the RI House Judiciary Committee and said on talk shows that based on observations making the film, there is no sex trafficking in Rhode Island. This is the view that is conveyed by “Happy Endings?”

There are serious omissions of information about the people in the film and political biases that the filmmaker does not acknowledge.

The filmmaker does not identify the three Korean women interviewed in the film as brothel owners or operators. They are not the women doing the sex acts. By definition, the women interviewed in the film are women pimps and possibly traffickers. The women-pimps have a vested interest is saying that the women are there voluntarily. (Letting the women-pimps speak for the women doing the sex acts is like letting the owners of a sweat shop speak for the people running the sewing machines. Of course, they say the workers are content.)

Much of the film was made at an Asian spa-brothel called Central Health (76 Derry Street, Providence). This brothel was included in a federal investigation of Asian Organized Crime for sex trafficking and money laundering. It was one of 31 brothels in an organized crime network operating along the east coast from Boston to South Carolina. (U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York v. Tae Hoon Kim, Sung Chul Il, Fnu Lnu, Tae Jun Park, Kyong Polachek, Byong Il Son, Jin Sook Kim Lee, and Miae Choi-son, August 14, 2006.) During this investigation victims of trafficking were identified. They were controlled with threats to their families in South Korea.

One woman-pimp who is interviewed in the film tried to open a spa-brothel in Fox Point (and was defeated by community organizing against it). She was the operator of Asian Fantasies spa-brothel in Warwick (1550 B Post Road), which was raided last month (April 11, 2009).

The third woman says at the end of the film that she is going to open her own spa-brothel.

We never hear the voices of the women at the bottom, the ones who are sexually exploited and often abused, and sometimes trafficked. We only hear the voices of the women-pimps and two male pimps.

Filmmaker Hurley does not identify close relationship to the sex industry. According to her own blog she has been asked by the Erotic Service Providers Union to be their representative in Rhode Island. A convicted madam from this organization visited her in February. They discussed strategies to decriminalize prostitution.

Hurley has been showing her film in sex industry venues (not human rights film festivals). The film “Happy Endings?” premiered at an erotic film festival (Cinekink) in New York City in January. Next it will be shown as part of a Sex Workers Film Festival in San Francisco in June. (The hostess of the festival is Carol Leigh, also known as “The Scarlet Harlot,” who recently published a book entitled The Unrepentant Whore.)

The film has a grotesque quality to it. All the faces are blurred out, the voices are disguised. The camera often focuses only on the mouth or body of the speaker. There is grainy black and white footage from surveillance cameras inside the spa-brothel. For a number of scenes of men coming to the brothel, Hurley filmed from an upstairs window of the brothel.

If you already know something about sex trafficking in Rhode Island, you can pick-up a few interesting details from the film, but overall, most viewers will leave confused, or worse, they will believe what the women-pimps that say about women choosing to work in the brothels. It is not fair to the exploited and abused women to pretend that this film represents their lives.

What Do Rhode Islanders Really Believe About Gay Marriage

2009-05-28T16:35:00.001-04:00

A couple of things happening in RI today.

Brown Taubman Center Poll:

First, the Projo’s top of the fold piece on a poll taken by Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy on Rhode Islander’s views on same sex marriage. RI is dominated by blue collar, Catholic Democrats , and unless something happened while we were sleeping, the results of this poll seems very questionable, and I hope it places very large question marks on all polls coming out of Brown. The Projo reporters would have been wise to vet the results further. Maybe Projo isn’t paying their reporters well enough for them to do some extra legwork because internet competition is causing them to tighten their belts? Maybe the reporters were so enthusiastically in favor of what they wanted to hear and believe that they figured, well, after all this is BROWN. I mean BROWN University. It must be true. Fallacy of Appeal to Authority.

Here’s why the poll results are specious, and from their own data. The following is from the Taubman website:

May 2009 Survey Questions and Responses

Would you support or oppose a law that would allow same-sex couples to get married?
Support 60%; Oppose 31%; DK/NA 9%
Would you support or oppose a law that would allow civil unions for same-sex couples?
Support 75%; Oppose 17%; DK/NA 8%
Do you think same-sex couples should be allowed legally to marry, should be allowed legally to form civil unions but not marry, or should not be allowed to obtain legal recognition of their relationships?
Should be allowed legally to marry 55%;
Should be allowed legally to form civil unions but not marry 22%;
Should not be allowed to obtain legal recognition of their relationship 15%;
DK/NA 8%

Okay, here’s what puzzles me: In question 1, 60% support same sex couples marrying. Yet, in question 3, 55% support same sex couples being allowed to marry. Now why such a quick shift from the same sample of respondents? I realize there is a margin of error, but regular people if they said “support” in question 1 would also say “should allow legally to marry” in question 3. Right? Even though there is a purported majority in both, the disparity of the percentage leaves one to wonder about the accuracy of all of it, if you get my drift.

Also, there is no information on where the respondent sample came from: phone calls? door to door polling? dorm room interviews?

There is specific mention of the difference between respondents and their age group – from the report:

Younger voters support same-sex marriage at a higher levels than older voters. For example, among 18-29 year olds, 87 percent support same-sex marriage, as do 70 percent of the 30-39 year olds. Among those 60-69 years old, however, only 49 percent support same-sex marriage, and only 32 percent of those 70 and older support same-sex marriage. The survey also uncovered partisan differences in support for same-sex marriage. While 77 percent of Democrats say they support same-sex marriage, only 28 percent of Republicans do. Among independents, 56 percent said they would support a law allowing same-sex couples to marry.

What was the size of the 18-29 year old respondent sample? How did it compare with the 60-69 year old sample? How do we not know if, of the total 593 respondents, 500 were 18-29 year old Brown students? We don’t.

And in RI, everyone knows that liberalism, for the most part, resides among Republicans. Democrats, as I mentioned earlier, tend to be more conservative. RIer’s who’ve been around know this. So why are the results of Democrat respondents versus Republican respondents so, well, non-Rhode Island-ish? Republicans in RI overwhelmingly against gay marriage? No way. Democrats overwhelmingly for? Not possible. This is RI, not Utah. Something is wrong with this picture.

Frankly I therefore don’t believe these results, and neither should you all. And here’s a couple of other reasons why too:

On the Projo website which includes this article, signed in readers could comment, and one comment caught my eye. It read: ‘Taubman Center "polls" are always to be viewed with a jaundiced eye as the sample is largely made up of the "East Side" group. Skewed slightly toward the "Left".’

Someone else commented that liberal university polls predicted California’s favorability to gay marriage before the recent election and prop 8 which we all know proved the opposite. And that was during a liberal Democrat landslide.

I am a realist, and believe somewhat along the lines of Whitaker Chambers, that we’re fighting a losing battle here, and ultimately the Left will win out on this issue. After all when political conservatives like Ted Olsen are ready to argue in favor of gay marriage, it’s time to pack it up; but for now, let’s be real about what RIer’s really think.

The Governor Race:

Secondly, the news about Arlene Violet considering a run for governor. Now I like Arlene as an entertainer in the same way I am amused and entertained by the likes of Rush Limbaugh (she is no Rush Limbaugh of course), but I would not like a Violet governorship. What I see brewing is a major battle among the Democrats: Lynch, Roberts, Caprio. I see Caprio potentially winning the primary, but that remains to be seen – I am not sure Lynch will win despite his positives – he is rather obsequious and smarmy and eventually that will wear thin. Lincoln Chafee has already indicated he’s running as an independent. The Republicans will not put up anyone as conservative as Carcieri unfortunately, we we’ll get the likes of Violet. So can you see a Caprio – Chafee – Violet race in November of 2010?

I won’t predict further as I usually guess wrong, but you get the picture. Not pretty.

“Nuts”

2009-05-23T22:32:00.001-04:00

It’s Saturday night, and Memorial Day “observed” is not for a couple more days, but the cable stations are playing old war movies. I came across the last of the HBO series “Band of Brothers” Episode 9 when they liberated a concentration camp on their way into the heart of Germany near the end of the war. HBO did a remarkable job reenacting a true event, the incredulousness of the American Army as it discovers the heinous and criminal inhumanity of the Nazis. On the other channel was an old 1949 movie about the Battle of the Bulge and the 101 stuck in Bastogne. When the Germans told them they were surrounded, the commanding officer had only a one word response: “Nuts.”

Episode 9 of “Band of Brothers” was entitled “Why We Fight.”

A reminder of why we fought in past wars, and why we will fight wars in the future assuming Western Civilization lives on. Young men have given their lives; young men will give their lives again. As a father of a young man, I grieve bitterly with only a shadow of a sense of the cost. To those we remember this weekend:

“When they shall die, take them and cut them out in little stars and they will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

Wm. Shakespeare

Is There a “Middle Ground” on Dealing with Terrorism?

2009-05-23T08:29:00.001-04:00

On the recent “debate” between former VP Cheney and President Obama, an analysis from Gerald F. Seib of the WSJ, an excerpt:

Mr. Obama portrayed the search for the proper strategy for handling terror suspects as a debate between those on the left who "make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism" and those on the right who argue that "anything goes" in fighting terrorism.
"And both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right," he said.
Mr. Cheney would have none of it. "The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism," he said. "They may take comfort in hearing disagreement from opposite ends of the spectrum....But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground. And half-measures keep you half-exposed."

I agree with the former VP, but you decide.

No Credit for You

2009-05-19T13:52:00.001-04:00

When one squeezes the balloon in one direction, it grows in the other. What I suspect will happen now that the Senate has passed credit card reform legislation is that the House will surely approve some version of the bill, and it will be undoubtedly signed by the President; but ultimately it will have an effect on consumers, and not necessarily a good effect. People will find it a lot harder to get credit, and the convenience of a credit card. In order to counter the impositions placed upon them by this legislation, credit card companies and banks will offset the new demands by making it a lot harder for people to obtain credit cards. This may be momentarily helpful in that Americans are credit crazy and heavily in debt right now, and perhaps it will deter bad behavior; but it will also still commerce, and a slow economy could continue for a much longer time. When you fiddle with markets, markets tend to fiddle back.

Jack Kemp, RIP

2009-05-03T22:46:00.002-04:00

Jack Kemp was a different kind of politician. The polar opposite of the Arlen Specter types who only want power for themselves. Kemp wanted to empower every American and probably every non-American, for that matter, by giving them the freedom and opportunity to achieve everything they yearned for. Read one commentary on his life here.

State of Tedium

2009-05-03T18:22:00.001-04:00

I recently watched the 6 hour BBC version of the relatively recent movie “State of Play” starring Russell Crowe, Helen Mirren and Ben Affleck. The BBC version weaved an intricate plot about a member of Parliament, played by British actor David Morrissey, who was an heroic opponent against the mean ol’ right wing energy companies who were exploiting the people. The 2 hour “American” version is about a Congressman played by Affleck – someone who has never once convinced me as an actor – set in Washington DC. In this version, Affleck is an heroic opponent to the mean ol’ right wing private contracting “Blackwater” type outfits.

If you are a DC-afile then you might enjoy the scenery. Ben’s Chili Bowl. Union Station. The monuments. Ah.

The self-righteous and politically “aware” Affleck patronizes us with several tirades against these right wing villains who sound like, if unchecked, will one day rule not only the world, but over the entire Universe. The writers lose all credibility here. This kind of conservative bashing is outright tiring: banality bathed in ennui to people like me. If I was watching this at home on DVD, this nonsense along with the watered down plot would be the point I turn off the DVD and return to “Days of Our Lives. The writers stretch it so far that one of the obvious dirt soaked bad-guy Congressmen we find at the denouement, you had to know, was some kind of Christian right winger who takes umbrage of the Affleck character “taking the Lord’s name in vain…” My, how hypocritical and so, so ho hum.

A couple of weeks ago, Joe Morgenstern of the WSJ picked up on the superiority of the BBC version. Watching the two is like reading a book, then going to see the movie version. Always a bit disappointing, and certainly over exploitive of those guys who are always the villains. But at least the shots of downtown DC are fun to see.

…We All Have Our Roles

2009-05-02T17:44:00.001-04:00

From Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review,…

I’ve been travelling this week and meeting with some wonderfully good people here in Los Angeles so I haven’t kept up with every step of the back and forth Danielle got rolling. But, having read some of it, and firmly believing this Notre Dame story is a significant one for the nation and the Catholic Church and human dignity, I want to say something as a Catholic, a conservative, a pro-lifer, a citizen of the United States of America, where Barack Obama is my president.

I feel nothing beleaguered in me. I am not isolated. To be frank, I know that my Redeemer lives. So that’s that.

That’s simplified, or shorthand, at least. But it’s why [Professor] Mary Ann {Glendon] did what she did and why I love her for it. She’s operating very much in this world, but knowing she owes her ultimate trust and service to another. She loves her country, whoever the president is, and knows the importance of the processes and the institutions. Notre Dame, though, is one of those important institutions. And what is its reason for being? That question needs to be answered within, or they’re just not going to be prepared for their supposed dialogues with the most powerful and influential and arguably persuasive personality of the present moment.

I love a story Rush Limbaugh tells of being at National Review’s 50th anniversary party. I may butcher the story, but the gist of it is a beautiful young soul of a man approached him, an obviously wounded warrior in his dress best, and expressed his admiration for Rush. Rush was so moved and humbled and when he expressed an unworthiness, our young hero said, Mr. Limbaugh, we all have our roles.

That’s it. And that’s why Mary Ann did what she did. And that’s what Notre Dame needs to be meditating on (every day, and everyone). That’s what conservatives need to be doing as a movement and as individuals and individual parts. Otherwise it’s all a crapshoot. It might be any way, to some extent, but if you at least walk into every new door knowing your role there – walk in knowing what you’re about — you’ve got something to work with.

Notre Dame is a tremendous institution. But if it loses its mission, it’s for naught. That’s why Mary Ann did the right thing. As that young mom wrote Friday, addressing Notre Dame’s president:

Who draws support from your decision to honor President Obama—the young, pregnant Notre Dame woman sitting in that graduating class who wants desperately to keep her baby, or the Notre Dame man who believes that the Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion is just dining-room talk?
Mary Ann joined no one in any way in questioning or demeaning the moral legitimacy of the office of the presidency or the president himself. It is precisely because Notre Dame and the president have such great responsibilities that she had to stand athwart and say thank you for the opportunity to highlight some fundamentals. I believe she couldn’t have done that on Commencement Day without doing some damage (ironically in the way Danielle suggests she has).

Mary Ann Glendon’s move had nothing to do with self-destruction, but renewal. Public fights can not be engaged in successfully without constant private work, too.

Interview with RI Sec’y of Treasury, Frank Caprio

2009-04-26T16:59:00.001-04:00

I don’t often talk about local politics on this blog, but I noticed with interest an interview with RI Secretary of the treasury, Frank Caprio which aired this morning against NBC 10 news veterans Jim Taricani and Bill Rappleye. The two baited Caprio for the whole half hour, and I couldn’t help but notice the patience and composure of the man as well as the surprisingly excellent answers he gave. Rappleye’s questions were the most obtuse: “do you think that teacher assignments should be based on merit rather than seniority?” Then later, after Caprio explained that he wouldn’t want to micromanage school districts, and by the way, neither should the legislature, Rappleye adds, “but a bedrock tenet of unions is seniority, if you tell teachers that seniority doesn’t count anymore [sic], you’re going to upset the unions, aren’t you?” Please! Where does this nonsense come from?

Caprio is a contender for Governor, and though a Democrat, seems to be handling taxpayer money, even through this most difficult period in our history, with a degree of prudence. He is also pro-life, and thinks some of the anti-business tax policies, which scare away job growth in the state, are a danger to the state’s economic wellbeing.

A memorable remark, and I paraphrase: “In our region, New Hampshire has the lowest tax rates; New Hampshire has the lowest unemployment. You think that’s a coincidence? RI has some of the highest tax rates; RI has one of the highest unemployment rates…When the Federal government raises taxes, it doesn’t cause taxpayers to flea the country, but when RI raises taxes, those who bare the burden leave,…” and I would add, those who leave are the ones paying the most, leaving behind an even greater burden on a fewer number left to pay the tab for the public trough. And all the while the number on public assistance grows and grows into a death spiral for the state and its economy.

With Stave Laffey out of the race, and with the hyper-liberal 1970’s peacenik and appeaser Lincoln Chafee threatening to run for governor, Republicans should consider their options well.

We View the [Bush] Policy as Having Failed

2009-04-25T12:01:00.001-04:00

From the NYT, HT: Donna Doleman

Clinton Scores Points [with the whackos of the world] by Admitting Past U.S. Errors

Kena Betancur/Associated Press

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke during a press conference in Santo Domingo, on Friday.

By MARK LANDLER

Published: April 17, 2009

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — It has become a recurring theme of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s early travels as the chief diplomat of the United States: she says that American policy on a given issue has failed, and her foreign listeners fall all over themselves in gratitude.

On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said here that the uncompromising policy of the Bush administration toward Cuba had not worked. That, she said, is why President Obama decided earlier this week to lift restrictions on travel and financial transfers for United States residents with relatives in Cuba.

“We are continuing to look for productive ways forward, because we view the present policy as having failed,” Mrs. Clinton said at a news conference in this sun-dappled capital, hours before flying to join Mr. Obama at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago.

The contrition tour goes beyond Latin America. In China, Mrs. Clinton told audiences that the United States must accept its responsibility as a leading emitter of greenhouse gases. In Indonesia, she said the American-backed policy of sanctions against Myanmar had not been effective. And in the Middle East, she pointed out that ostracizing the Iranian government had not persuaded it to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions.

Like other leaders around the world, Mrs. Clinton’s host, the president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández, responded effusively on Friday, hailing the secretary and her boss, Mr. Obama, for their view on Cuban policy, which he said took “great courage” and could utterly transform the political landscape of Latin America.

“President Obama is paving a new road,” he said. “It is recognition of the fact that previous policies have failed. Fifty years of a policy that has not generated the originally sought purposes can be called a failure.”

In fact, Mrs. Clinton’s aides clarified, she was not condemning the half-century-old trade embargo against Cuba, which the Obama administration has not yet agreed to lift. Rather, her reference was to the strict travel and financial restrictions imposed by the Bush administration.

But it hardly seemed to matter. For a senior American official — someone who almost became president — to declare that the United States had erred, makes a major impact on foreign audiences.

Mrs. Clinton drew a similarly gratified response when she said in Mexico recently that the huge American appetite for drugs was fueling the booming narcotics trade in that country and elsewhere in the region.

She repeated that message in the Dominican Republic on Friday, telling a questioner at a town hall meeting here, “We acknowledge we have a responsibility, and we have to act in concert with you.”

Regret is a new role for Mrs. Clinton, but one that she has had plenty of opportunity to observe up close. On a single trip to Africa in 1998 her husband, former President Bill Clinton, apologized for American participation in slavery; American support of brutal African dictators; American “neglect and ignorance” of Africa; American failure to intervene sooner in the Rwandan genocide of 1994; American “complicity” in apartheid; and even for a failure that occurred far from Africa — America’s slow response to the bloodshed in Bosnia.

In most cases, Mrs. Clinton has been simply disavowing a policy of the Bush White House — something she did with zeal as a Democratic candidate. But the words carry much more weight overseas. And there is some evidence that these gestures are starting to register.

On Friday, Cuba’s president, Raúl Castro, welcomed the administration’s easing of travel restrictions, saying he was open to dialogue with the United States on a full range of topics, including human rights and the release of political prisoners — something Mrs. Clinton had demanded a day earlier.

“We have seen Raúl Castro’s comments and we welcome this overture,” she said. “We are taking a very serious look at it, and we will consider how we intend to respond.”

Last week, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, softened his tone against the United States, suggesting that Iran would make a new offer to the West on its nuclear program.

There are holdouts, of course: North Korea has greeted the Obama administration by testing a missile, ratcheting up its language and threatening to pull out of multiparty talks on its nuclear program. Mrs. Clinton, in turn, has had few warm words for North Korea’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il.

But in many countries, her statements have elicited an almost palpable sense of relief. And she suggested that the Obama administration’s drive for warmer relations with old foes was just getting started.

Asked whether the United States would build bridges to hostile Latin American leaders, like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Mrs. Clinton said, “Let’s put ideology aside; that is so yesterday.”

The Candy Store Generation, Part 4 - The Panic of 2008

2009-04-23T08:12:00.004-04:00

Fast forward to the last four months of the Bush Administration, and the Panic of 2008. The economy was already in a downturn, and had been for some months. We all got a stimulus check, a return of our tax money, earlier in 2008. So we already knew things were going downhill.

Then banks that were "too big to fail" started to fail. We learned they were "too big to allow to fail"--or so we were told. How many billions of dollars were authorized or appropriated to rescue failing banks? Was it $700 billion? I think the earlier stimulus bill was about $300 billion, so that put us at a trillion dollars, spent or authorized, to prop up an ailing economy.

Of course, we weren't through yet. Bail-out of the United Auto Workers at General Motors and Chrysler was to come, a paltry $20 billion or so. Then there's the next stimulus package, passed in the early days of the Obama administration. There's no telling where that ended up. No one read the bill in any of its several versions. $800 billion is the best guess, but it might be a hundred more.

So we are up to about $2 trillion dollars of spending, give or take a couple of hundred billion, either already done or fixin' to be done, to keep our economy from going into a depression. We, the Baby Boomers in control of Congress, the Baby Boomers who are running the corporations, the Baby Boomers who are filling the majority of places in the work force and beginning to creep to retirement age (the oldest of our group are already there) have done this. Where did we get the money? Did we have it, stashed in a failing bank? Was it buried in a field? Of course, no. We manufactured it out of thin air. We are either going to print it or borrow it. Borrowing we are familiar with, since we've done so much of it over the years. Printing money is kind of new, but we are willing to try it. Call it "Instant Money".

And, typical of the Baby Boomers, the Candy Store Generation, we are not looking far enough ahead to think about how we will pay the bill for debt service when it comes due. We'll no doubt piddle around with it over the next ten years, but really the bill will be paid by the next generation, the Gen X-ers as they are called, or maybe even the ones after them, Generation Y. One of these groups will eventually take real steps to fix everything. That will be when the bills come due and the taxes need to be raised to pay them and they will stand up and say "had enough." Had enough of borrowing. Had enough of confiscatory taxation. Had enough of these lame-brained Baby Boomer schemes to continuously live off other people's money. And they will be called the "Had Enough" Generation.

I don't know if I'll live to see the Had Enough Generation clean up the mess the Candy Store Generation has made. It's a good sized mess. Candy wrappers everywhere. Failing social programs. Failing retirement programs (i.e. Social Security, which we wouldn't fix for our children so long as it still worked for us). Expansion of rights based on prosperity not on what God gave us. Unrealistic expectations suddenly crashing down around us. A debt amassed that no reasonable bank would loan proportionately to any corporation or individual. We've sure made a mess that we're leaving the Had Enough-ers to clean up.

I guess "The Greatest Generation" didn't teach us too good.

The Candy Store Generation, Part 3: Even the Corporations

2009-04-19T18:14:00.003-04:00

The Baby Boomers, who I'm calling the Candy Store Generation, could also be called the Instant Generation. Instant food, instant prosperity, instant news, instant answers, instant replay, instant resolution. Things moved fast for us. En-mass, we entered grade school mostly in the 1950s, high school in the 1960s, college in the late 60s and early 70s, the work force in the 70s, toiled under old codgers in the 80s, and finally entered management in the 1990s as the "Greatest" generation had almost all retired.

By the 2000s we were running the corporations; we were stockholders--sometimes major stockholders; we ran the mutual funds; we called the shots. Among the worker bees who filled the ranks of corporate employees, while the next generation had begun to join us, most of the workers who produced most of the good and services were being produced by Baby Boomers. So we made the products, provided services, managed the companies, received the dividends, and benefited from stock price increases. Or, if we weren't yet to the point of being stockholders, our parents were, and they would soon be assuming room temperature and those stocks would be ours.

So what did we do with all this influence? As the instant generation, we expected instant results for our money. Stockholders demanded dividends each quarter and rising stock prices. Corporate boards, being of the same mind themselves, were quite happy to oblige the stockholders. CEOs, COOs, CFOs, and all the other C--Os, being of the same mind themselves, were quite happy to manage the businesses that way. So the focus became extremely short-term, only to the end of the next quarter.

I wanted to develop this train of thought more, but suddenly I'm out of ideas or words. Hopefully I have painted a clear picture. We, the Baby Boomers, being in the candy store, ran our economy with such a short-term focus that long-term success was improbable if not impossible.

The Candy Store Generation, Part 2: The Bush Years

2009-04-18T20:11:00.002-04:00

Children in a candy store. I can think of no better way than that to describe Bush and Gore--and the nation they sought to lead--on the campaign trail in 2000. they are Baby Boomers, both children of privilege, both trust fund kids of rich daddies with political pedigrees. The Bush family money seems to have gone back farther than the Gore family money. But them, Bush was more involved in learning how to make money, while Gore knew nothing more than feeding at the public trough.

Bush, being narrowly elected, and with an evenly divided Congress, was slow to act. Except when a crisis such as 9-11-2001 required fast action, Bush seemed to be a plodder in both his thinking and his doing. It took years for him to bring forth legislative proposals for Social Security reform and a comprehensive national energy plan, just to name two things. That slowness, though, was actually calming. How glad I would be for such slowness today.

Yet, faced with the crisis of 9-11, and its barely related crisis of the Iraq war, Bush's call to the American Citizen on how best to support the national effort was: Spend! Travel! Fly! Live life as normal. Don't let our enemies know we even felt their gnat buzzing at our face. Don't worry about sacrifice. The candy store was on fire, yet we were called upon to keep buying and ingesting.

Which we did, as if this would end the problem. Digital TVs awaited, and newer, slimmer, and more powerful devices for playing more song. Thus we sought instant correction of a national disaster.
And that describes the Candy Store Generation: the instant generation. Instant resolution of crises in a 30 or 60 minute TV drama or a two hour movie. Instant information for purchasing decisions in a 30 second commercial. Instant food from the microwave or the restaurant. Instant promotions in business without taking the normal development time. Instant replay. Instant prosperity through borrowing.

Or, rather, instant appearance of instant prosperity through borrowing. Over=sized houses full of stuff, driveways full of cars bought with other people's money, hours full of comings and goings that cost money, the bills delayed to a future time, to be paid in cheaper dollars. We borrowed our way into personal prosperity, our long-term views dampened by instant success. Never did we seek to see over the next hill. Life was too good on this side.

The Candy Store Generation, Part 1: Election 2000

2009-04-16T13:52:00.003-04:00

September and October, 2000. The presidential debates. Vice President Albert Arnold Gore Jr. vs. Governor George Walker Bush from Texas. Most of us watched them, and may remember something of the proceedings.

The backdrop was the winding down of the Clinton presidency, the last six years of which were with Republican majorities in Congress, both House and Senate--majorities large enough that Clinton could not pick off a few disgruntled Republican moderates or liberals (yes, the latter existed back then, as Rhode Islanders know too well) and get his preferred agenda passed into legislation. He had to deal with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole then Trent Lott, who set the economic agenda. Fiscal responsibility was in, and "The era of big government [was] over."

Nearing the end of those six years, the budget was more or less balanced, and, thanks more to Congress than to the president, the Congressional Budget Office was projecting surpluses as far as could be forecast, perhaps totalling a trillion dollars over a decade. Conditions not seen for a generation--or two--or maybe three.

So the presidential debates took place amid economic good times, and a key topic was what to do with the surplus. Gore's solution: bold new social programs, and pay off the national debt in twelve years, rather than continue to roll it over (as a taxpayer who expected to be in twelve of his sixteen peak earning years during that time, I wasn't sure why I should be called on to obliterate in twelve years what a procession of Congresses created in forty), no relief for tax payers. Bush's solution: bold new social programs, coupled with tax reductions that paid lip service to the notion that the surplus would be (remember, it hadn't actually happened yet; it was just a projection) an excess of government revenue--taxes and fees--over government needs. It wasn't the government's money; it was the taxpayer's money. And the candidates were fixin' to either spend all or most of it on social programs, programs unthinkable a generation before, "rights" suddenly discovered as possible through prosperity, not endowed by God.

I was struck by the idiocy of it all, and how everyone running for office, everyone in the media, everyone around me listening to the rhetoric, lapped it all up. I saw myself in a candy store, watching those around me. Gore and Bush were children in the candy store, there with their daddies. Daddy, who came of age during a depression, was a frugal soul, and normally gave each child a few grudging pennies and told them to buy as much as he could. But on this day, as I watched, their daddies gave each of them $100 dollars and turned them loose. Children expecting Daddy to give them a few pennies when he gave the 10,000 are dangerous. They went crazy, created havoc as they purchased a full hundred dollars worth and made themselves sick on the confections.

Besides the election of Republican majorities elected in 1994, Congress changed in another way between that year and 2000. In 1981 when Ronald Reagan took office, with a Democratic House and Republican Senate, he was able to make headway toward fiscally responsible government because Congress was still composed of a majority (or at least a sizable contingent including the leadership) of "the greatest generation"--those born in the late teens, 20s, and early 30s of the 20th Century, who weathered a long depression, fought and won a world war, drove the nation to post-war prosperity, and faced their own racial prejudices and enacted public policies to offset what their bigoted hearts felt. But by 1994, the balance in Congress had begun to tip, a process more or less completed by 2000, from that generation to its progeny--the Baby Boomers, a generation raised on privilege and ease, coddled by our televisions and indiscriminately drinking words of the information age, accepting of big government--my generation.

In three additional posts (hopefully over the next three days, if the creek don't rise), I'll explore this concept of the Baby Boomers being the Candy Store Generation. This will be my thoughts, rather than extensive research. Perhaps, some day, the research will follow.

Pointing Out Obama’s Pirate Problem

2009-04-11T08:01:00.001-04:00

Mack Owens of Newport, RI, and a prolific writer in such periodicals as the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the RI’s own Anchor Rising, points out Obama's problem in dealing with the piracy.

An excerpt:

When Somali pirates hijacked the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama this week and took 20 Americans hostage, President Barack Obama refused to comment. It seems that our new president is desperate to do everything he can to distance himself from his predecessor, which is why his team has launched a campaign to rebrand the War on Terror. The results are mystifying. "Overseas contingency operations" is the new name for the war, while "man-caused disasters" is a euphemism for terrorist attacks.

But read the whole thing.

Taliban attack NATO supply lines in northwest Pakistan

2009-03-28T18:54:00.001-04:00

From Bill Roggio at

"The Long War."

The Taliban have temporarily shut down NATO's main supply route into Afghanistan after damaging a bridge in Pakistan's Khyber agencies. The strike coincided with an attack on a truck terminal in Peshawar that is used by NATO supply convoys.

A bridge that served as "a key road link" between the provincial capital of Peshawar and the Torkham border crossing was damaged after being struck by a mortar, Daily Times reported. The damage has forced the bridge in the Landi Kotal region to be shut down. The closure has halted the flow of NATO supplies into Afghanistan.

The President's Press Conference I

2009-03-24T20:53:00.001-04:00

I guess I have to admit that the Press is not throwing softballs at Obama today. But I really don't understand how the President is going to help us lower the deficit by dramatically increasing and the deficit. Maybe it's counterintuitive, or maybe its suicide.

I also cannot understand how addressing health care issues is going to be a frugal step - something that is supposed to help us. I keep getting a vision of healthcare run by the TSA or the Post Office, by folks who know not a whit about healthcare.

The President's Press Conference II

2009-03-24T20:39:00.001-04:00

I predict a steep drop in the markets tomorrow as a result of the rather scary scenario painted by the President tonight on what he plans to do to healthcare, but more importantly, what he is about to do to the tax code.

The so called "rich" will stop buying real estate, and will slow or stop their charitable contributions under the President's plan, supported by a very willing left wing Congress. If we pull out of this economic morass, it will be in spite of these attempts to "help" the middle class.

Huh!? The Economy is Wha!? What Planet is He on?

2009-03-16T18:32:00.001-04:00

I like this picture from the Fox News web page this evening.

Actually, I thought McCain was kind of dopey for saying something like this during the campaign, but I think I knew what he meant at the time. I expected average voters to consider him disengaged and overly optimistic, and they did in droves. I do think now that Obama is stating the same indicates that the wheels have fallen off the cart - and so soon! Too bad; despite his hyperliberalism, I had higher hopes in him than this. Not to mention the constant and ugly barrage of left wing decrees.

You may recall my worry that he was an activist, though at the time the idea was poo-pooed by many.

A Belated Happy 200th

2009-03-14T14:07:00.001-04:00

Abraham Lincoln, if alive today, would have reached his 200th birthday last month. Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard has a piece on those who make themselves out to be a modern day Lincoln, including Mario Cuomo and none other than His Royal El Presidente.

A snippet:

Mario Cuomo has written one book (Why Lincoln Matters) and edited another (Lincoln on Democracy) dedicated to the proposition that Abraham Lincoln is a lot like Mario Cuomo. But he recently revised his view. Lincoln is actually a lot like Barack Obama. Cuomo listed the similarities in an op-ed that appeared in Newsday on Inauguration Day.
"Obama, like Lincoln, rejects rigid ideology in policymaking," Cuomo wrote. Both presidents declared their preference for "common sense" and "pragmatism," in stark contrast to those presidents who have declared their opposition to common sense and pragmatism. Accordingly, Cuomo went on, "Obama . . . like Lincoln, will not hesitate to call for substantial governmental assistance in the effort to right the Ship of State."
"Obama, like Lincoln, has superb personal gifts." These include a keen mind, poise under pressure, a prose style that sings, and a gift for delivering tub-thumpers. Both Obama and Lincoln lacked significant executive experience, Cuomo pointed out; both were political underdogs; and both were raised in "modest circumstances"--Lincoln on subsistence farms that were largely unchanged since the Iron Age, and Obama at a prep school in Honolulu, followed by Columbia University and Harvard Law School.
And then there's the shared mistrust of military force. "Lincoln knew, as Obama surely does, that we cannot end terror here [or] in the Middle East . . . just by having the world's most powerful weapons and the best fighting force." To sum up, Cuomo said, "Obama . . . shares Lincoln's extraordinary vision."
And yet, Cuomo added, and yet: There's a difference between these two pacific, statist, pragmatic presidents--these underdogs under the skin. Obama, taking office, has a tougher job than Lincoln ever did. Obama faces environmental disaster, genocide, worldwide hunger, and a "serious recession." Lincoln, Cuomo wrote, had only "one issue" to resolve. That would be the Civil War.
The declared similarities among Lincoln, Cuomo, and Obama will strike some of us as implausible. But Cuomo's view of Lincoln is already popular and gaining ground, here at the bicentennial of his birth. George McGovern, to cite another antique Democrat, wrote on Lincoln's birthday that Lincoln was a forerunner of Obama-like "change" and the perfect antidote to neo- conservatism. Opinion-slingers from Election Day onward made the same point--including the president himself, who after his election evoked Lincoln so often that he began to seem like a boy bouncing on tiptoe, shoulders thrown back, measuring his height against Dad's.
And so what? Americans are always trying to remake their greatest president in their own image. From the bottomless hamper of historical evidence we pick the scraps that can be stitched together to make the Lincoln of our dreams. Christians find Lincoln the prayerful mystic, military men see Lincoln the brilliant strategist of war, politicians buck themselves up with Lincoln the wily and beneficent leader, and even gay activists see, if not Lincoln the gay activist, then at least a Lincoln who was actively gay. So why not a Lincoln dolled up as a liberal Democrat circa 2009?
As if on cue, Ronald C. White appears with his new biography. A former professor at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, he has made an 800-page attempt to do what Cuomo did in an 800-word op-ed. It arrives amid an unstoppable and apparently endless torrent of Lincoln books roaring out of the warehouses, so blinding it becomes hard to tell them apart: "Which would be best for Father's Day--November 1862: Lincoln's Month of Change or July 1863: Lincoln and the Month that Changed America or maybe The First Half of the Second Week of May 1864: The Bloody Four or Five Days that Changed Lincoln?"
A. Lincoln: A Biography stands apart from all these, however. It has the potential to fix the Cuomoized Lincoln in the popular imagination for a long time to come.
This is mostly a matter of good timing. Every 15 or 20 years, a new cradle-to-grave, one-volume Lincoln biography like White's comes along, claiming to be the "standard life," as the booksellers used to say. If the public likes it, it takes its place in an ancient line of succession. One standard life displaces an earlier standard life, and then in time it is itself displaced by a still newer standard life. Lincoln the Unknown by Dale Carnegie held the position from the 1930s to the early 1950s, when Benjamin Thomas dethroned it with Abraham Lincoln: A Biography (still the best life of Lincoln in print). Thomas was bumped in the mid-seventies by Stephen B. Oates and his With Malice Toward None, which was pushed aside by David Herbert Donald'sLincoln in 1995. At age 14, Donald's book has grown whiskers--gotten stale, I should probably say--so White's book arrives at just the right moment. USA Today has already declared it the go-to bio.
"If you read one book about Lincoln," said the reviewer, "make it A. Lincoln."

Be my guest to read the rest,...

Newt May Be Up To Something

2009-02-27T19:29:00.001-05:00

This from Commentary's Jennifer Rubin:

Perhaps the most intriguing and least easy to categorize speech at CPAC came from Newt Gingrich. It was the most partisan of assaults and the least pro-Republican in advocacy. It was the most raucous and the most sober. And it was not clear whether it was the opening of a presidential campaign, a political movement, or just a graduate course on political science.
First a word about tone and presentation. It is an art to give a speech to a large room packed with supporters and not talk in “speech” voice with awkward phrasing, trite lines and predictable timing. Gingrich has a well-modulated voice and the ability to deliver biting sarcasm without a sneer. He spoke in conversational language and in quiet tones and held the room in the palm of his hand.
But he didn’t start that way — entering from the back of a jammed room like a candidate, or perhaps the president entering the House of Representatives. Ah, I thought, this is the presidential campaign starter. But maybe not.
He was relentless in attacking the president, Nancy Pelosi (whom he teased mercilessly about popping up to applaud the president’s speech before he completed the applause lines) and the Obama administration. He began by excoriating Eric Holder for his comments that Americans were “cowards” and declared that he “welcomed the opportunity to have a dialogue with you about cowardice anytime and any place.” He then suggested Detroit where they could chat about failed government, failed bureaucracy and failed schools. He declared that we “should be committed to liberating the people of Detroit.
But his sharpest criticism was reserved for liberals and the president. Reading from the New York Times, which declared that the new budget “sweeps away Reagan’s ideas,” he mused that the Times certainly hoped so and had suffered great disappointments –the Soviet Union disappears, private industry thrives, big government fails and they lost readership. He deadpanned :”It was great 25 years.”
His ire was mostly directed at the Obama budget, which he says is an effort to “create a European model.” And his language was harsh. ”The administration thinks we’re just plain dumb,” he said. ”A bill with 8,000 earmarks doesn’t count? I was looking for change I can believe in. I wonder how dumb they think we are, that they think we wouldn’t notice 8,000 earmarks.” And on tax policy he noted that Obama is “not going to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250, 000–unless they use electricity.” Or other fuels.
But the heart of a speech was call to make the 2010 and 2012 elections “the most consequential in U.S. history. ” He declared, “Every person who didn’t read the stimulus — everyone of them deserves to be defeated.” But this was not a Republican call to arms per se — indeed, this is where it got interesting. In his vision, Obama is part of the “failed Bush-Obama” policies of big government, lots of bureaucracy and high taxes. That’s the political or intellectual exercise he is engaging in and asking others to engage in — Obama is the past ( already!) and part of the failure of big government. Gingrich’s movement, by contrast, is the low tax, anti-bureaucracy, pro-jobs “American party.”
Unlike Ronald Reagan, Gingrich isn’t per se calling Democrats and Independents to join the Republican party. No, he’s is calling for a “tripartite” movement to oppose the failed Obama/Bush regime. A true third party? Or a stealth presidential campaign? It wasn’t clear.
Gingrich was in top form today. However, it is not altogether clear, other than throwing out the Democratic Congressional majority, what he is up to. And perhaps he hasn’t quite decided himself.

I think he has decided and knows just what he's doing.

The only Thing We Have to Fear is...

2009-02-15T17:52:00.001-05:00

I was giving a listen to NPR this morning, and to my amazement, they were subtly harping on President Obama, saying something like this: "The President said that the only thing we have to fear is..." ...not fear itself, but...that Americans will lose more jobs, savings and homes. And that "this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse,..."

And now his former rival, an opponent who was overly gracious in his treatment of Obama during the campaign, John McCain, had this to say in the morning news shows:

"[The President is off to] a bad beginning because it wasn't what we promised the American people, what President Obama promised the American people, that we would sit down together," McCain told CNN's "State of the Union With John King."

I think Obama was a clever and attractive candidate, but we'll leave the jury out awhile longer on what kind of president he'll ultimately be, but I agree with McCain. He's off to a bad start. Uninspiring, but more importantly, fear mongering to get what amounts to heavily larded spending bills to be carried on the backs of the already over-taxed middle class in the name of reviving the economy. Instead, he's on his way to burdening it even more than it is.

And have you heard the latest, now that they've rammed the porkulus bill through Congress, statehouses and city halls are pondering what they can get to do with all that money. I can't thing of a greater thing over which to be in fear but how a government bureaucrat may be pondering how to spend my tax money, but not only my tax money, but the tax money of my children and my children's children to the nth power.

Can you say the D word?

Has Capitalism Failed Us?

2009-02-08T16:47:00.001-05:00

HT: Instapundit.

Speaking About Abortion,...

2009-02-01T17:44:00.001-05:00

John Piper - recently - on the subject:

The Ad NBC Won't Play Tonight

2009-02-01T17:35:00.001-05:00

I am not a Catholic. I also do not think this ad overly heavy or profound from my point of view, but it is what it is, and NBC said, no:

The View from Fly-over County: Panic of 2008 >> Depression of 2009-2016

2009-01-30T14:32:00.002-05:00

Today, for the seventh time in my career, I survived a corporate layoff (actually the 8th if you include the 1975 episode, but those were transfers to avoid layoffs). Today we went from a firm of 140 or so people to a firm of 105 people, plus or minus a couple. I will have another 10 percent pay cut (after the 10 percent pay cut I took last April), the three upper managers are taking another 15 percent pay cut after the 30 percent cut they took last April.

These cuts are deep. A couple of single moms are now gone. A couple of promising non-professional-level staff are gone. Our CFO will have to pick up her accountant's tools again. I will have to be more involved in projects and try to bill time, rather than being 100 percent overhead.

I have news for my senators and congressmen, for Pelosi and Reid, and for Barrack: The stimulus package you all are mindlessly shepherding through a glazed-over Congress is not going to work. It is pork, pure and simple. It is money for every failed plan from the last six decades.

What we need now is tax relief, not in 2009 but in 2008. Immediately Congress should pass a tax cut retroactive to January 1, 2008. Every tax bracket, every income level, corporate and personal. Cut rates, increment brackets. Index exemptions. That will put money back in people's hands in a jolt, and do more than all these programs.

How can this be done retroactively? Especially after all the tax packets for 2008 have been mailed? Easy: Clinton rammed a retroactive tax increase through Congress in 1993, so the precedent has been set. Just do it, and let the bloated bureaucrat bags at the IRS figure out how best to disseminate the information.

Overturning Bush's Abortion Restrictions Help What?

2009-01-25T18:54:00.001-05:00

How in the world does reinstating government supported abortion assist in the financial crisis? (HT: The Corner)

To wit (from This Week on ABC):

STEPHANOPOULOS: We also heard from Congressman Boehner coming out of the meeting today that again a lot of that spending doesn't even meet the same test you just talked about right now. Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy

A Depression---Right on Schedule

2009-01-20T12:02:00.004-05:00

I am getting so sick of people blaming the current financial situation on Bush. He is no more responsible for this than Clinton was for the minor recession Bush inherited, or the elder Bush was for the recession in the latter years of his term, or even than Carter was for the multiple economic problems during his term.

Economic booms and the following panics/depressions/recessions/slowdowns--call them what you will--happen mainly because of demographics. This fact was explained in Harry S. Dent’s book The Great Boom Ahead. This book explained how the rise and fall of birth rate throughout American history coincided very nicely with economic cycles 45 years later. Dent attributed this to the fact that a family reaches it's peak spending years about when the parents reach 45, or maybe 47 for a generation that began their families a little later. At that point, families break up and new families start. New families don’t yet have the buying power their parents have, and so spend less. Since consumer spending accounts for at least two-thirds (if not three-fourths) of the economy, by tracking the number of births, you can track the number of 45-47 year olds, and you can tell when your economic peaks and valleys will be. That is Dent’s theory. Other factors may drive the severity, or hasten or delay the event, but demographics is the main driver.

In The Great Boom Ahead, Dent showed charts of birth rates, and the peak of the baby boomers happened in 1961. Using 47 as the peak spending year for a generation that tended to marry later, he showed that 2008 was a possible start of an economic downturn, a severe one, that would last until 2016, corresponding to 47 years after the uptick in births when the youngest wave of boomers began having children.

Could all this be true? Consider the severe depression we had in 1973-74. The Arab oil embargo and corresponding spike in gasoline prices probably had something to do with that. But 45 years before that was 1928, right before the start of the Great Depression, before dads and moms might have decided they couldn’t afford to have more kids, and at the end of a lesser baby boom that followed World War 1. What about the 1980-82 recession? Forty-five years before was 1935, the darkest part of the Depression, when the birth rate was fairly low.

I'd need charts in front of me to do more correlation, but Dent has convinced me. Now, I know that he fell out of favor in the '00 decade, when he tried to apply his theories of economic booms and busts to specific target amounts for stock indices. Shame on him for not sticking to what he knew best. Events have turned out to prove him correct on his basic assessments.

Since birth data is available in the USA only since 1911, that can't be used to assess the cause of the Great Depression. Or can it? If data isn't available, at least we know history and can speculate with some reasonable accuracy what events did to the birth rate. The Wall Street collapse was in 1929, the depression began probably in 1930. Count back 45 years before 1930 and you have 1885--twenty years after the end of the Civil War, and probably at the peak of the baby boom that surely must have happened after that war ended, the war that had the highest percentage of our population off on the battlefield. The Civil War boomers, if I may call them that, probably had their peak birth rate around 1885; I bet this was followed by a number of years, perhaps as long as a decade, of reduced birth rate, until their children began having a lot of children. Hence the number of 45 year olds must have greatly diminished around 1930. And voila, a depression that last a decade, ending as much from the increasing number of adults approaching age 45 as the outbreak of war, and less to do with New Deal meddling, possibly even overcoming New Deal meddling.

So, the current economic situation is not due to anything George Bush did or did not do. It is due to the end of peak spending by the largest wave of Baby Boomers. And it is right on schedule. Look for the USA to climb out of it around 2016, again right on schedule. And all the tinkering that GWB has fallen into, and that Paulson is wrecking with relish, and that Obama plans to expand with glee, will have no positive impact.

And What of this Comparison to Abraham Lincoln, Doris?

2009-01-18T10:29:00.001-05:00

Do not, under any circumstances, bother to catch the replay of today’s session of Meet the Press.

Tim Russert has got to be spinning in his grave like a rotisserie on steroids over the pick of David Gregory to replace him. Egad!

You know there is a theory in business that the average enterprise lasts roughly 40 years. Some exceptional ones make it to 60 or even 80. The really rare ones beyond that. How old is Meet the Press? 50? I guess it really doesn’t matter, but with the new reign of Gregory the Lost, MTP is about to begin its final gargle.

Right after David Brooks, former conservative intellectual who had been, at one time, worth listening to, and now is probably attending too many cocktail hours at the homes of PBS, NPR, NYT and MTP bigwigs, and has now taken on a slight patina of hyper-liberalism, ventured into the concept of how Obama might best ask us all to sacrifice our pensions (easy for him to say),…that Gregory the Lost tosses this moronic softball question to, guess who: Doris Kearns Goodwin. “And what of the comparison to Abraham Lincoln?”

Wait. Stop.

Let me answer that one, because the MSM, the insanely liberal Press, they keep alluding to this. Frankly, I will grant that Obama has a lot common with one former, young, liberal, literate and articulate former president: John Kennedy. Not all things, but some things. But with Abraham Lincoln who presided over a torn nation in civil war, who experienced deep personal human tragedy, who originated, i.e., not repeated or quoted, great language, remarkable and memorable statements, a sincere and religious man tested beyond what most men have been – he, I submit, was a very different man. So CUT IT OUT!

Yes, yes, celebrate the inaugural. But I also say consider Obama as any other man taking on a new job. And regardless of his ethnicity, race or creed, give him, I say, a chance to preside over the nation. And let’s not attribute to him too soon great and wonderful messianic action. Give him some time. Let’s see what he can really do for the nation.

Obama on Bush

2009-01-17T11:00:00.001-05:00

Obama on CNN:

I can't say I disagree with this:

Asked if there was anything he wanted to take back, now that he has spent more time with the president, Obama praised Bush's team for helping with a smooth transition and said part of what America is about is being able to have "disagreements politically and yet treat each other civilly."
Obama also said he thought Bush made "the best decisions that he could at times under some very difficult circumstances."

Are you a risk taker? Check your hands

2009-01-13T22:10:00.002-05:00

A new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science indicates that your level of risk tolerance and financial success may be related to your tolerance for Testosterone, and amazingly can be measured by the ratio of the length of your ring finger to your index finger!

Read the story Here, and then take a look at your hand to measure your future success!

Are the Israelis Targeting Children at Hospitals and Schools in Gaza??

2009-01-10T16:55:00.001-05:00

Missile reportedly kills top al-Qaida operatives

2009-01-08T19:32:00.001-05:00

This item is not being reported very extensively on the wires, but, via MSNBC:

A New Year's CIA strike in northern Pakistan killed two top al-Qaeda terrorists long sought by the United States, including the man believed to be behind September's deadly suicide bombing at a Marriott hotel in the Pakistani capital, U.S. counterterrorism officials told The Washington Post Thursday.
Agency officials determined in recent days that among the dead in the Jan. 1 missile strike were a Kenyan national who used the name Usama al-Kini and who was described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations in Pakistan and his lieutenant, identified as Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, the sources said. Both men were associated with a string of suicide attacks in Pakistan in recent months and were also on the FBI's most-wanted list for ties to the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa.

There's more...

Which Side Are You On?

2009-01-08T19:17:00.001-05:00

In case you're wondering why I side with Israel in this recent conflict with Hamas in Gaza, I reefer you to this video courtesy of LGF:

A "self-help project that takes forever"

2009-01-05T19:41:00.001-05:00

The NY Times just named Groundhog Day, a Bill Murray movie, as among the top ten movies ever, among such greats as Vertigo, Shane, Red River and Meet Me in St. Louis (among others). Here's why:

Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis. Another Pygmalion story, but this time the material the sculptor works on is himself. Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is a jaded, dyspeptic, arrogant, cynical and obnoxious TV weatherman who on Feb. 2 finds himself covering the emergence of the groundhog in Puxatawney, Pa. When he wakes up the next morning, he finds that it is not the next morning, but Groundhog Day all over again and all over again and all over again. (His own spring will be late.)
His responses to being trapped eternally in the same day include disbelief, despair, excess and hedonism before he settles down to make the best of the situation, which, it turns out, means making the best of himself — a self-help project that takes forever, but forever is what he has. (It is as if he were at once the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future and the object of their tutelary attention.). By bits and pieces, fits and starts, he makes himself into the most popular fellow in town and wins the love of his producer, the beautiful Rita (a perfectly cast Andie MacDowell). The miracle is that as the movie becomes more serious, it becomes funnier. The comedy and the philosophy (how shall one live?) do not sit side by side, but inhabit each other in a unity that is incredibly satisfying. This is a “feel-good” movie in at least two senses of the word “good.”

I think there is definitely a Judeo-Christian ethic in there somewhere, and it is likely why I make a habit of watching this moving once a year, right around the second of February, which is about to come around again in the nearer future.

To read about the other nine, go here.

Senator Claiborne Pell, RIP

2009-01-02T16:38:00.001-05:00

My recollection isn’t very keen these days, but I too have a “story” about the now deceased Senator Claiborne Pell from Rhode Island. I recall his visiting the University of Rhode Island in those not so halcyon days of the 70's surrounded by an entourage of Left and liberal leaning students and aides. He was a conventional Democrat from a Democrat ruled US Senate who was highly revered particularly in education circles due to his now famous Pell grants for poorer college students, among which I was one at the time.

Ingrate that I was, I headed up the college Republicans at that time, and considered it a duty (correction: a delight) to cause him some trouble – but there was no way for me to accomplish this with ease. So I accosted him outside one of the dining halls with a question or two about some inconsistency in his voting record, I think, on the war in Vietnam, and he politely asked me to “send” him “a post card,” and one of his aides would send me the facts and figures. A pretty good and fast put down.

I was none too pleased with that answer, of course, and on another occasion, an entourage of my right leaning buddies showed up at Edwards auditorium to accost him again. We were lined up pretty much in the last few rows, and one of my close friends hollered out him a question which wasn’t heard too well from the front stage. My friend retorted, “I SAID…” which sounded more like a scold than a question, and we were all the more gratified at the jeering and heckling that ensued.

But Senator Pell was a worthy representative of the other cause; a man well bred in culture and education, and who appeared to have been, at the time, much better mannered, conscientious and, yes, even honorable than most US Senators of his day, but particularly US Senators of these more recent days.

We wish him a safe journey to the other side of the Jordan.

In the New Year, a Past Remembered and to be Avoided

2009-01-01T15:32:00.001-05:00

From an April 1933 Time Magazine article on the emergence of Hitler and the Nazi's. Warning about the text. It does not contain language which today would be considered more sensitive to various constituencies. In other words, there is no modern day political correctness applied in the language of the text. But there are some interesting parallels for our times about which we would be wise to take heed to guard against what Santayana admonished that "those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it":

1924. Barbed wire entanglements thrown up around Munich's former Military Academy to keep back a mob which roars, "Hail Ludendorff! Hail Hitler!" Stiffly in full uniform & medals, Prisoner Ludendorff poses with Prisoner Hitler who wears his raincoat with an air of defiance. Together ex-General Ludendorff and ex-Corporal Hitler, tried on charges of high treason for having led together the .famed Munich Beer Hall putsch which failed, cost 18 lives. Prisoner Hitler, as leader of the party of seven men which by this time has become the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of 30,000, shouts at his judges: "I know your sentence! But that high court above will not ask us, 'have you committed high treason?' That court will judge us all: the Quartermaster General [Ludendorff] of the old Army, his officers and soldiers, who have wanted to do their duty as Germans for the people and the Fatherland, who wanted to fight and die! You may doom us a thousand times and yet the Goddess of the Eternal Court of History will tear to pieces the indictment of the State prosecutor and the sentence of this Court! Her verdict will be acquittal!"
When Herr Hitler has been convicted, the crowd cheers him so fiercely that he has to be shown on a balcony, take several bows. When General Ludendorff is acquitted (obviously in tribute to his War-time service), he sneers at his judges: "My acquittal is a humiliation which this uniform and these decorations have not deserved!"
Convict Hitler and eight others receive the light sentence of detention in a fortress where they have connecting rooms. During his ten-month sojourn there, Prisoner Hitler pens the 800 bombastic pages of Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"). Says the warden as they part: "I too, Herr Hitler, am now a Nazi."
1932. In his presidential study 85-year-old Paul von Hindenburg disdainfully refuses 43-year-old Adolf Hitler's plea that he, as leader of the Nazi Party (largest in the Reichstag) be made Chancellor with "precisely the powers" of Benito Mussolini (TIME, Aug. 22). Less than six months after this rebuff, the Goddess of the Eternal Court of History—as Orator Hitler so fetchingly calls her—makes him Chancellor of the Reich by assent of Old Paul von Hindenburg (TIME, Feb. 6).
Last week his Goddess seemed to fling all Germany prostrate before Conqueror Hitler's triumphal car.
Hitlerism, In what sign does the pudgy little vegetarian with the Charlie Chaplin mustache conquer?
Today most Germans are agreed that Hitlerism, with its bombastic counsels of violence, treaty-breaking and Jew-baiting, would have swept their country years ago had not Germans been lulled by a false, post-War prosperity induced in the Fatherland by a flood of U. S. loans. These loans enabled Germany to pay Reparations with borrowed money, turned the shackles riveted on her by the Treaty of Versailles almost into golden bracelets. When Depression showed the bracelets to be iron, Germany-in-chains was ready to break them by turning to the doctrines of Messiah Hitler who had been preaching repudiation from the first. [my emphasis]
Basically Hitlerism is a doctrine of confused tenets, further confused by Orator Hitler as he goes along. Take, for example, the plain, basic word capital. No thinker himself, Herr Hitler has confessed that Hitlerism's tenets about capital are borrowed from a onetime building engineer, Herr Gottfried Feder, recently appointed by Chancellor Hitler to the Reichstag Finance Committee. According to Feder there are two kinds of capital: 1) raffendes or "grasping capital" hoarded in banks, from which interest or dividends is received by such 'rascals' as Jews; and 2) schaffendes or "creative capital" which is the life blood of German enterprise and therefore good, even though paying interest or dividends. Thanks to this masterly though absurd "distinction," a Hitlerite can preach expropriation of capital to factory hands, then walk into the directors' room and promise protection of capital, remaining all the while "consistent." "National Socialism." the name of the Hitler Party, is another piece of intentional confusion, useful in catching both Nationalist and Socialist votes— votes which had meant exactly opposite things until stirred into Hitlerism. [my emphasis]
Finally certain Jews—who contribute to Nazi funds—are supposed to be outside the application of Hitlerism's most if not only definite tenet: antiSemitism. In their Jew baiting (and in every Communist, Nazis see a "tainted" German, probably Jewish if his ancestry were known) the Hitler Storm Troopers take real pleasure. True Germans, they feel, are instinctively Jew-baiters. To prove this Nazis quote:
Frederick the Great: "We command that the Jews in the smaller towns, especially those which lie in the country, and which can be harmed most by Jews, be sent away."
Bismarck: "I will give the Jews every right, except that of holding a high office in a Christian state."
Wagner: "The Jew is the plastic demon of the decline of mankind."
Up to last week Adolf Hitler, who dotes on Wagnerian music and surrounds himself with portraits and busts of Bismarck and Frederick the Great, had set forth nothing which could be called a program of what his Government intends to do for and with Germany. From now until April Fool's Day (on which the new Reichstag will convene) Chancellor Hitler intends to rule virtually as a dictator. According to Nazi henchmen, the Reichstag will transact only two pieces of business: it will give Germany a new national flag, will then "adjourn indefinitely."

Rick Warren's Answers to Terry Eastland on His Invitation to Pray at the Inaugural

2008-12-31T11:00:00.001-05:00

Terry Eastland's questions (HT: Weekly Standard)

Warren’s answers:

How hard or easy was the decision to accept the president-elect’s invitation?

I am both humbled and honored to have a tiny part of a history-making day, when our country inaugurates our first African- American president. The invitation was completely unexpected. I could name several dozen wonderful pastors, both black and white, who would do a better job.

Do you expect to look at some past inauguration prayers to see what’s been done before?

I’ve always been an avid student of American history, since a Richard Warren was one of the 41 Pilgrim signers of the Mayflower Compact. I already have a collection of many of the important prayers in U.S. history, including a binder of every inaugural prayer. Of course, I’ll reread them all again before Jan. 20th. I own Abraham Lincoln’s handwritten note confirming the need for a national chaplaincy to care [for] wounded soldiers during the Civil War and approving a pastor.

How do you think about the kind of prayer to be given at a (any) public event, given that the audiences at such events usually have various faiths represented?

It doesn’t bother me at all when an Imam prays a Muslim prayer in [a] public arena or when a Rabbi prays a Jewish prayer in public or when anyone expresses their personal faith in public. This is America. We don’t deny our differences but we are respectful of all of them. I’m a Christian pastor so I will pray the only kind of prayer I know how to pray.

By which I mean both what is prayed for and how it is prayed?

Prayers are not to be sermons, speeches, position statements, nor political posturing. That’s the fastest way to kill a prayer. They are humble appeals to God. My hope is that all Americans will pray for the new president.

Civil Libertarians - Take Note

2008-12-29T20:51:00.001-05:00

This incident has a ring to it for me. It has been called the most ridiculous case of on-campus political correctness of 2008 (via Instapundit) HT: Weekly Standard:

Who are We? And What Might We Look Like by 2025?

2008-12-28T18:04:00.001-05:00

From NRO:

...Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington, [is likely] the most important political scientist in America. His last book, The Clash of Civilizations, forecast the civilizational tensions that became obvious to everyone in the post-9/11 world. When Huntington writes, people listen — or they should.

Huntington's prodigious credibility makes his warning of the possible end of the United States as we know it in his new book, Who Are We?, all the more alarming.
He writes that "few Americans now anticipate the dissolution of...the United States." But few anticipated the collapse of the Soviet Union either. Huntington warns, "The greatest surprise might be if the United States in 2025 is still the country it was in 2000 rather than a very different country (or countries) with very different conceptions of itself and its identity."
Huntington sees an America gripped in a "crisis of national identity." What is that identity? It is partly based on what Huntington calls "The Creed," our belief in liberty, democracy, individual rights, etc. But The Creed has a particular source: America's Anglo-Protestant culture, which includes "the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create heaven on earth, a 'city on the hill.'"

The whole thing.

Bill Simon's Advice on Where Conservatives May Go from Here: Retool

2008-12-27T09:34:00.001-05:00

From a WSJ weekend interview...an excerpt:

In the wake of Barack Obama's victory, as conservatives ponder how they will use their time "in the wilderness," they could do worse than to emulate Mr. Simon's example.
While there is no question that Bill Simon would prefer conservatives to be in power, he says there is a "silver lining" to the current situation. He is hoping they will use this period for "retooling." "We certainly lost our way with respect to spending discipline," he says, noting that under the past eight years of Republican control, "the federal government got very fat and happy." Sure, he acknowledges cheerfully, "Obama is riding in here with the wind at his back. But he's got a lot of challenges."
With a boyish grin, Mr. Simon tells me he is always optimistic about the future. On his last trip to New York, he ran the marathon. And when it comes to politics, Mr. Simon thinks in terms of the long race too. "If you have a good idea and you have the courage of your convictions, I think Americans welcome you back." History, Mr. Simon says, "is replete with examples of this, like when Reagan ran for governor of California. Two years before that, in '64, Goldwater got cleaned out. Everyone thought the conservative movement was dead. But then Reagan, a rookie, a neophyte who never ran for public office, got elected governor of California."

But read the whole thing.

Merry Christmas 2008

2008-12-24T17:14:00.001-05:00

...with this Christmas season event in Afghanistan from 2007. We wish you a very Merry Christmas, and the Taliban get something in their stockings too,...(HT: NRO)

OK, Virginia, There's No Santa Claus. But There Is God

2008-12-24T11:43:00.001-05:00

An excellent piece from a recent WSJ,...Merry Christmas everyone...

By TONY WOODLIEF

My 8-year-old son, Caleb, puts his hand on my shoulder; he wears an expression that shows he wants to have a man-to-man talk. "Dad," he says, "I know there's no Santa Claus." He rattles off his indictments, starting with the pure physics of the enterprise. There's no way one guy can visit every house in a single night. And how does he get into houses with no chimneys? Then there's the matter of zoology -- not a single nature book on our shelves mentions flying reindeer. Perhaps most important for an 8-year-old, there's the weight of public opinion -- none of Caleb's friends believe in Santa any more. He leans close, his voice taking that tone of worldliness that is at once endearing and saddening to a parent. "He isn't real, is he?"

Corbis

Perhaps a more responsible parent would confess, but I hesitate. For this I blame G.K. Chesterton, whose treatise "Orthodoxy" had its 100th anniversary this year. One of its themes is the violence that rationalistic modernism has worked on the valuable idea of a "mystical condition," which is to say the mystery inherent in a supernaturally created world. Writing of his path to faith in God, Chesterton says: "I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician."

Magic-talk gets under the skin of many, like renowned scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins. This is doubly so when it is what the Christ-figure Aslan, in C.S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," calls "the deeper magic," an allusion to divinity. Mr. Dawkins is reportedly writing a book examining the pernicious tendency of fantasy tales to promote "anti-scientific" thinking among children. He suspects that such stories lay the groundwork for religious faith, the inculcation of which, he claims, is a worse form of child abuse than sexual molestation.

I suspect that fairy tales and Santa Claus do prepare us to embrace the ultimate Fairy Tale, the one Lewis believed was ingrained in our being. New research from the Université de Montréal and the University of Ottawa indicates that children aren't overly troubled upon learning that Santa is a myth. But the researchers remained puzzled because while children eventually abandon Santa, they keep believing in God. Lewis would say this is because God is real, but Mr. Dawkins fears it is the lasting damage of fairy tales. While Mr. Dawkins stands ironically alongside Puritans in his readiness to ban fairy tales, Christian apologists like Lewis and Chesterton embraced them, precisely because to embrace Christian dogma is to embrace the extrarational.

Today's Christian apologists, by contrast, seek to reason their way to God by means of archaeological finds, anthropological examinations and scientific argumentation. That's all well and good, but it seems to miss a fundamental point illuminated by Chesterton, which is that, ultimately, belief in God is belief in mystery.

As a parent, I believe (with the older apologists) that it's essential to preserve a small, inviolate space in the heart of a child, a space where he is free to believe impossibilities. The fantasy writer George MacDonald -- author of "The Light Princess" and "The Golden Key" -- whom Lewis esteemed as one of his greatest inspirations, suggested that it is only by gazing through magic-tinted eyes that one can see God: "With his divine alchemy," MacDonald wrote, "he turns not only water into wine, but common things into radiant mysteries." The obfuscating spirit of the "commonplace," meanwhile, is "ever covering the deep and clouding the high."

This sheds light on a seeming paradox in St. Paul's letter to Roman Christians: "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. . . ." How does one see "invisible attributes"? Only people raised on fairy tales can make sense of that. It belongs in a terrain where magic glasses can illumine what was heretofore hidden, where rabbit holes open into wonderlands. No wonder some atheists like Mr. Dawkins want to kill Harry Potter.

I know Caleb and his brothers will figure out the Santa secret eventually, but I'm with Chesterton in resisting the elevation of science and reason to the exclusion of magic, of mystery, of faith. That's why I'm not giving up on Santa without a fight. Not everything we believe, I explain to Caleb, can be proved (or disproved) by science. We believe in impossible things, and in unseen things, beginning with our own souls and working outward. It's a delicate thing, preparing him to let go of Santa without simultaneously embracing the notion that only what can be detected by the five senses is real.

This all sounds like madness, I know, to people like Mr. Dawkins. But Chesterton held that believing in impossible things is actually the sanest position. "Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not," he hastened to add, "in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination." The alternatives to embracing man's mystical condition, he argued, are either to go the way of the materialist, who understands everything according to scientific principles, yet for whom "everything does not seem worth understanding," or the madman, who in trying to "get the heavens into his head" shatters his rational (but woefully finite) mind.

Interestingly, the curse leveled by Lewis's White Witch on Narnia -- an endless season of winter absent Christmas -- evokes both: an unholy snow smothering wondrous creation in false uniformity, and at the same time a kind of madness well understood in snowbound regions. It's not surprising that one of the first signs of the Witch's coming demise is that Father Christmas appears: "'I've come at last,'" says Santa. "'She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last.'"

Oxford University Press recently announced that it will be dropping words like "dwarf," "elf" and "devil" from its children's dictionary to make room for words like "blog," "Euro," and "biodegradable" -- a blow not just to language but to the imagination. I'm sticking with Santa, however, knowing that my children will gradually exchange the fairy tales of youth for a faith -- I hope -- in mysteries that even diehard Christians seem increasingly embarrassed to admit as such. In our house, at least, there's no shame in believing the impossible.

Puritans and atheists alike may disapprove, but our home is filled with fairy tales and fiction books, in hopes that the magic sprinkled across their pages will linger in the hearts of our children. In this we side with Chesterton, who wrote: "I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since."

Mr. Woodlief blogs about family and faith at www.tonywoodlief.com.

Living to Self in the Age of Obama

2008-12-23T09:37:00.001-05:00

An excerpt from an excellent editorial in today's WSJ,..

"We are the one's we've been waiting for," "We are the change that we seek," and "Yes we can" -- among his campaign's more memorable catchphrases -- are merely three solipsistic, dimly oracular, weirdly empowering tautologies neatly suited for this Me-We age.

Princess Caroline?

2008-12-21T13:19:00.001-05:00

What a monarchist thinks about Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg being added to the US Senate, or for that matter, VP Elect Biden's son.

Don't Bail Out the UAW

2008-12-08T16:24:00.003-05:00

It seems to me that the auto company bailout is not bailing out the companies at all. And it's not bailing out the "automobile manufacturing industry", because there are plants elsewhere in the USA that are making foreign brand cars. No, what's really being bailed out are the United Auto Workers.

If the three big fail--go to either chapter 11 or chapter 7 bankruptcy, who loses the most? Obviously stockholders will lose something, but the stock prices are so low now, who would loose much more than they already have? The corporate executives will lose posh jobs, and have to live off the millions they have banked over the years. But Congress historically has not cared for either one of those, especially a Democrat party dominated Congress. If the Big 3 companies go to bankruptcy, and they can’t come out from under it, they would shut down. Those who would have bought a GM, Ford, or Chrysler car will have to buy another. Most likely it will be a foreign brand car built in the USA. Detroit's loss will be Tennessee’s gain. The plants of the companies not affected by the bankruptcies will go to three shifts, maximum production, and might be glad to have those Detroit workers for half the money and benefits.

No, this bailout is for the United Auto Workers, who have pushed their companies over the years to this point. I grew up in a union household, and have seen it at work. The unions push, push, push for the highest possible wages, thinking only of the next twelve months, not the long-term viability of the company they work for. They unions push, push, push for the absolute best benefit package they can get, including retirement benefits. While this has the appearance of being concerned about the long-term, it is really a mentality of "what is the most I can get at this moment?" mentality.

The bailout is being couched in terms of bailing out the companies, but make no mistake: the Democratic dominated Congress cares nothing for those companies. But if the companies fail, the union idiocy will be exposed.

Not that stockholders and the management they hire is much better, always thinking of the next quarter, never considering the projections for the future and the corporate long-term viability. But it’s the union that stands to lose the most. All those current jobs, although I don’t think that is the real issue. It’s the many retirees, now living off their collectively bargained retirement pay. If the companies go under, all those retirees will have to live off Social Security, and the UAW idiocy of pushing for higher salaries and benefits than the long-term market could bear, will be exposed.

This bailout is also the government covering its own sins. Its sins of regulation creep, which each year sees more regulations piled on an industry that has been sinking. Its sins of believing the unions were doing something good for their workers and the nation. Its sins of mishandling banking regulation and deregulation. Both the Executive Branch and the Congress are at fault. If they let the Big Three fail, they will be found partly culpable for the failure. Right alongside the United Auto Workers.

No bailout for unions. No using my tax dollars to hide the government’s sins.

2008-12-05T16:41:00.001-05:00

It’s beginning to look like Obama has a good eight years ahead of him, unfortunately.

Let Them Fail

2008-12-02T15:46:00.002-05:00

I wish Congress would grow a spine and tell the big three automakers to get lost; that if their business isn't viable as currently structured, go to bankruptcy and restructure. Why should a dime of taxpayer money go to these three mis-managed companies?

What would happen if the big three had to declare bankruptcy? They would immediately have protection against creditors while they worked with a bankruptcy court judge to restructure. Part of that restructuring will be getting rid of the corporate fat; part will be cutting wages; and a big, big part will be cutting benefits to retirees. I think that, more than anything, is what is giving them trouble staying viable. The unions looked out for themselves so much, and used so much muscle against management, that the unions have made the company non-viable. Blame management for caving too easily; blame the unions for taking such a short term approach to salary plus benefits.

Let them fail. I see no consequences of enough significance that tax money would be needed to prevent those consequences from happening.

Again, it seems Americans cannot take economic pain anymore.

The Terrorists in India Scoped Out the Taj When After it Tightened Security

2008-11-30T11:27:00.001-05:00

Evidently the Taj had been given some threat or warning, and tightened their security. It seems the terrorists scoped out what tightened security looked like during that period a month or so earlier than the attacks, then knew how to penetrate.

From a CNN report:

A. Vaidyanathan, an economist who was a guest in the hotel when the attacks occurred, told The Hindu newspaper on Friday that he had noticed tight security at the Taj Mahal when he stayed there last month -- a measure he indicated was unusual.
"The last time I went, last month, there was very tight security. You could not get into the [hotel]. There is an entrance there, which is closed. At the entrance to the tower, they had two-level security," he told the newspaper.

Two British-born Pakistanis Among 8 Gunmen Seized in Mumbai

2008-11-28T10:41:00.001-05:00

Commentary picked up on the fact that there may have been two British nationals from Pakistan who were among the perpetrators in Mumbai. From the Telegraph:

Two British-born Pakistanis were among eight gunmen seized by Indian commandos who stormed buildings to free hostages, Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Mumbai, reportedly said.
The Foreign Office earlier said it was investigating reports on NDTV, a local television news channel, that the terrorists - who swarmed luxury hotels and other tourist sites in the city - included "British citizens of Pakistani origin".
The development came as Gordon Brown called for international co-ordination to combat terrorism in the wake of the attacks. He said: "We have got to look at how international action against terrorism can be improved."
On the claim that Britons could have been among the perpetrators, he said: "I would not want to be drawn into early conclusions about this.
"Obviously when you have terrorists operating in one country, they may be getting support from another country or coming from another country, and it is very important that we strengthen the co-operation between India and Britain in dealing with these instances of terrorist attacks...."

If true, this lends weight to the argument that the war on terror is a global conflict tantamount to the early days of the cold war where spies and overt proponents of communism lived and wrecked havoc among the those attempting to live peaceably in the West.

Annual Thanksgiving Remarks

2008-11-27T10:48:00.001-05:00

First, an excellent piece on the origin of the American Thanksgiving holiday. Excerpt below:

"It was the first of many Thanksgivings ordered up by Samuel Adams. Though the holidays were almost always in November or December, the exact dates varied. (Congress didn't fix Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November until 1941.)
"In 1778, a Thanksgiving resolution drafted by Adams was approved by Congress on Nov. 3, setting aside Wednesday, Dec. 30, as a day of public thanksgiving and praise, 'It having pleased Almighty God through the Course of the present year, to bestow great and manifold Mercies on the People of these United States.'."

But there is more,...

Secondly, an excerpt from Rick Brookheiser at NRO that expresses a thought about thankfulness about which I concur:

"I am unutterably, and even so insufficiently, grateful that there is something rather than nothing, and that one of the things that is is me — a free, fortuitous, didn't-have-to-happen, once-in-infinity lottery ticket for which I was the lucky winner. Nonexistence would have been so dull, would it not? And even if that's where I'm headed, I hope to be able to say, 'Thanks, it's been real' as I go."

And finally, my own thanks:

Thanks to the Almighty, the One and only ONE, who has intervened in the vain life of this middle class, middle aged man, subject to entropy, but covered with the undeserved riches of a loving family, true friends, employment, and health. Life is filled with change, but there is One true friend who never changes.

Another Sign of Victory in Iraq

2008-11-27T09:25:00.001-05:00

HT: Instapundit; from a military news website:

Here is one of the biggest stories to come out of the Middle East in quite some time. You probably can’t find it in the New York Slimes or the Washington Compost (copyright, Mark Levin), but rather on the exceptionally useful web site of our military Voila’:

TIKRIT, Iraq – Eighteen females in northern Iraq who were associated with Al-Qaeda in Iraq suicide bombing cells turned themselves into Coalition forces on Nov. 26.
The females were persuaded by their mullahs and fathers to cease their training in suicide operations and reconcile.
Today, these women took the first step in reconciliation by turning themselves in and signing a reconciliation pledge.

Individuals who turn themselves into CF and want to demonstrate their willingness to cease attacks against the Government of Iraq, Iraqi civilians, Iraqi Security Forces and CF can enter the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) process. Eligible petitioners provide weapons and information on insurgent groups and sign a pledge to cease attacks and declare their support for the GoI.

Let’s start with the dateline: Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home town. How good is that? Then comes the really good part: these women were talked out of terrorism by their fathers and by their mullahs. So we’re talking about Shi’ites, and the men folk in their town, whether religious or “just dads,” got wind of their daughters’ intentions and talked them out of it.

While We Move Leftward, Venezuela Moves Rightward

2008-11-24T19:50:00.001-05:00

It appears Hugo Chavez has been given a shove to the right. From the NYT, HT: NRO:

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez’s supporters suffered defeat in several state and municipal races on Sunday, with the opposition retaining power in Zulia, the country’s most populous state, and winning crucial races here in the capital, the National Electoral Council said.

Pro-Chávez candidates won 17 of the 22 governor’s races at stake. Many of the seats that Mr. Chavez’s supporters did win were in relatively sparsely populated rural states.

The losses were Mr. Chávez’s second setback at the polls in the past year, after the defeat of a proposed constitutional overhaul last December that would have enhanced his powers. The results will put opponents of Mr. Chávez in charge of areas with more than a third of Venezuela’s 26 million people.

In the early hours of Monday, electoral officials announced opposition victories in two important states, Táchira, on the border with Colombia, and Carabobo, with a large industrial base.

An opposition candidate also won in Sucre, a municipality in Caracas with sprawling slums that had been a symbolic bastion of support for Mr. Chávez since he rose to power a decade ago.

“These victories came in the economic and political centers of the country,” said Luis Vicente León, director of Datánalisis, a polling firm here. “They represent the most important symbols in terms of cities and population.”

Particularly here in Caracas, the results were rooted in festering discontent over the government’s inability to lower violent crime as homicides and kidnappings have surged over the past decade, making it one of the world’s deadliest cities.

China Hacked Into Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Blueprints

2008-11-24T07:49:00.000-05:00

Something out of the ‘60’s has returned. From AIAA HT: BusinessWeek (11/22, Epstein) reported, "A congressionally created commission has warned that China is stealing vast amounts of sensitive information from government and corporate computer networks in the US. ... This theft is part of China's preparation to outmaneuver the US electronically in any future conflict, according to the bipartisan US-China Economic & Security Review Commission. The panel...said in its annual report...'China is targeting U.S. government and commercial computers for espionage.'" According to the report, the "10 most prominent US defense contractors" have been targets of these cyber crimes. "An example of Chinese espionage cited...involves an incident in 2005 in which Chinese cyber-burglars downloaded files about the propulsion system, fuel tanks, and solar panels of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter."

Is it 2008-or 1984? - Victor Davis Hanson - The Corner on National Review Online

2008-11-23T15:25:00.001-05:00

Is it 2008-or 1984? - Victor Davis Hanson - The Corner on National Review Online

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Attorney General Mukasey on Al Qaeda Detainees and Congress's Duty

2008-11-21T18:25:00.001-05:00

Reprint from the WSJ:

Habeas corpus hearings could set terrorists free inside the U.S.

By MICHAEL B. MUKASEY

Last June in Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time in our history that aliens captured and held as enemy combatants abroad (in this case, at the Guantanamo Bay military base) had a constitutional right to challenge their detentions by filing petitions for habeas corpus in federal court. The Court recognized that its holding was unprecedented. Yet it said that it was not deciding how such proceedings should be conducted, or even what the government must show to prevail.

Yesterday, the federal district court in Washington concluded the first such habeas proceeding for six detainees. It held that the government had established a basis for holding only one of them as an enemy combatant. The court acknowledged that the evidence the detainees were planning to travel to Afghanistan to join the fight was perfectly appropriate for use as intelligence (the purpose for which it was collected) -- but that such evidence was not sufficient to carry the government's burden of proving in court that the detainees were enemy combatants.

Of course, we believe that the court should have reached a different conclusion with respect to the five detainees. But on a more general level, the court's order highlights the challenges that inhere in applying a civil litigation framework to wartime decisions that often must be made on the basis of the best available intelligence.

Other federal courts hearing the approximately 250 Gitmo habeas cases have sought to answer similar questions. But as different judges reach different answers -- and as some of those answers, I fear, create risks for our national security -- there remains a pressing need for Congress, working with the administration, to establish one set of rules that is both consistent with the Supreme Court's decision and recognizes the important national security and intelligence interests of the United States.

The questions with which courts have grappled are of critical importance. They include foundational issues: How should we define an "enemy combatant" during a conflict with a nontraditional enemy like al Qaeda? They include trial issues: What evidence may the government rely on when making that determination? And they include practical issues: What does it mean to order a detainee "released"? Can a court order release into the U.S. if a detainee cannot be transferred to his home country, either because it won't accept him or because we fear he might be mistreated upon his return?

In July, I urged Congress to work with the administration to fashion a uniform set of rules for these cases, expressing two basic concerns with leaving these matters to the courts. The first was that the courts would reach inconsistent decisions, leading to protracted litigation and the likelihood of different procedures in different cases.

The second was that the courts would not be well-positioned to address fully our national security and intelligence interests. As a former federal judge, I know well the constraints on federal courts. They cannot find facts on their own and are limited to the evidence presented by the parties before them. By contrast, Congress and the executive branch are well equipped to learn and evaluate facts, and skilled in balancing the difficult policy choices at stake.

In the absence of legislation, however, the courts have proceeded with these cases. I appreciate the difficulty of the task that these judges were given, and I believe they have done an admirable job under the circumstances. Nevertheless, we have seen courts diverging on key issues, meaning that the rules in each case will likely vary significantly and will likely be finally resolved only after multiple appeals.

More importantly, in many cases, the government has faced great difficulty in collecting and presenting evidence in a manner that protects the vital sources and methods upon which our national security depends. Indeed, lacking clear protections for classified information, we have found at times that we are simply unable to provide our best evidence to the court. Our national security framework, in short, is not -- and should not be -- designed primarily to handle the burdens of discovery accompanying ordinary civil litigation.

Although a new president comes to office in January, these cases are moving forward quickly and the need for legislation is urgent. It is not yet too late for Congress, working with both this administration, and members of the incoming administration, to come together to fix this problem and to develop a sensible framework. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I believe that Americans agree more than they disagree about the principles that should govern this process.

First, Congress must make clear that release from the Guantanamo Bay military base does not mean that a detainee is entitled to enter the United States. Where a court finds that a detainee cannot be held as an enemy combatant, he should be returned to his home country or another country willing to receive him. He should not be permitted to jump the immigration line and enter this country.

Second, habeas corpus proceedings must protect the integrity of classified information and prevent disclosing that information to our enemies. Simply put, Congress should devise rules that allow the government to present the most highly classified information to the courts for their sole review.

We should not be forced to choose between continuing to hold a dangerous detainee and jeopardizing the intelligence sources and methods that Americans have risked their lives to obtain, and which our enemies may then render useless.

Third, Congress should establish sensible and uniform procedures that will eliminate the risk of duplicative efforts and inconsistent rulings, and strike a reasonable balance between the detainees' right to a hearing and our national security needs. Such practical rules must assure that court proceedings do not interfere with the mission of our armed forces.

Federal courts have never before treated habeas corpus as requiring full-dress trials, even in ordinary criminal cases. It would be unwise to do so here, given the grave national security concerns at issue.

Devising a legal framework to review our military's detention decisions is an unprecedented challenge. It should not be left to the courts alone.

I firmly believe that Congress, the administration, and the incoming administration can work together to establish rules that at once provide a fair hearing and are respectful of the nation's security interests. It is not yet too late, and it certainly is worth the effort to try.

Mr. Mukasey is the attorney general of the United States.

This "Team of Rivals" Business

2008-11-18T19:49:00.001-05:00

Courtesy of the Corner, a perspective on Kearns-Goodwin's theory on a "team of rivals" emulating Lincoln in an Obama administration purporting to emulate Lincoln from a history buff:

I really wish someone would check the facts on this Team of Rivals business. I am just a chemist, but I have been reading Civil War books since I was in third grade.

These are more questions than anything else, and I confess I have not read Kearns-Goodwin's book. I intend to someday. I have great respect for her as a historian. But having said that.....

There seems to be this mythic legend about Lincoln choosing all of his rivals for the nomination for cabinet posts since these were the best and brightest men the country had to offer. While there is something to that idea, it is not nearly so ideal as the myth.

Some of Lincoln's cabinet appointments may have been a matter of horse-trading. Lincoln's campaign manager was a man named David Davis, the Karl Rove of his day. At the convention, as the votes were being taken one round after another, Lincoln sent a telegram to Davis (candidates did not attend the convention in those days) that said, "make no contracts that will bind me." Davis was shown the telegram by a horrified staffer, since Davis had been making promises right and left. Davis' reply was basically, "We're here and he's not." I don't know if that story is in Team of Rivals, but it is in Shelby Foote. Civil war history begins and ends with Shelby Foote.

One of the rivals was William Seward. Seward as an able ambitious man and was appointed Sec. of State. After initially trying to set himself up as Prime Minister of the Cabinet, Seward eventually became an admirer of Lincoln and carried out his policies. This is just my opinion, but I think they shared a love of story-telling. Seward was almost as much of a yarn-spinner as Lincoln and the two seem to have genuinely enjoyed swapping tales. As I read history, Lincoln did not have many friends. Seward may have indeed qualified as a friend. Seward fits into the story of the Team of Rivals.

but on to the rest.

Salmon Chase, ex-Gov of Ohio and rival for the nomination was made Sec. of Treasury. He was an able ambitious man, with no experience in finance or treasury. He himself admitted, he did not truly know what he was doing. He was a stiff humorless man with little respect for Lincoln and I doubt if he ever changed his opinion in that regard. While Chase was an able Sec of Treasury in his time, when Lincoln became a much more able executive, Chase was replaced with Wm Fessenden of Maine. Fessenden was also a capable man, anti-slavery, and much easier to deal with than Chase. Not the least of this was the fact that Fessenden was not a rival for the Presidency. Lincoln was a man of almost no executive experience. The largest thing he had ever run was his law office. It was only his incredible political talent that allowed him to survive his first two years and learn how to be an executive.

Simon Cameron was a rival for the nomination. Cameron was a Gov. of Pa. He was appointed Sec. of War. He didn't last long and was widely regarded as incompetent and corrupt. No one would have considered Simon Cameron among the countries best and brightest.

Edward (Edwin?) Bates was a Gov. of Mo. He would have been a rival for the nomination. Bates was Attorney General. He was regarded as a poor lawyer. But, Lincoln regarded himself as a pretty fair constitutional scholar and in a sense in Lincoln's cabinet and Attorney General was redundant.

Gideon Wells was a Conn newspaperman who was made Secretary of the Navy. Not a rival. No prior Navel experience. Although he was effective. Before the army the Union Navy began to promote young, aggressive commanders (in Farragut's case not so young, but he made up for it with even more aggressiveness.).

Edwin Stanton was appointed Sec. of War after Cameron. I believe it is Stanton who would have referred to Lincoln as a long-armed ape. Stanton was in no way a rival for the Presidency. He was too unlovable to ever be elected Pres on his own, and he knew it. Stanton was ruthless, devious, merciless, tireless, and efficient. He was exactly what was needed as a Secretary of War. He was an excellent compliment to Lincoln. He was the bad cop. He was incredibly smart, but not well liked. By the time of Lincoln's assassination he would have come to almost worship Lincoln. But, he was not a rival for the nomination in 1860 or in 1864.

Sometimes the best and the brightest don't work out. John Freemont, the legendary Pathfinder, was given a commission as a General. He proved to be mostly worthless. U.S. Grant had been reduced to selling firewood on the streets of St. Louis before the war and was only able to win a commission in the Ill. militia when the war broke out.

I apologize for the long rant. But I have been getting a bit tired of this team of rivals business.

Lots of Reasons for Scurrying for that Little Bag in the Seat Pocket in Front of You

2008-11-10T16:58:00.001-05:00

Reason number one

Reason number two - by the way, when I went to the Reagan inaugural, it only cost me ~ $100.

Reason number three

and the list will go on for awhile,..like at least another four years or so.

Obama Begins to Follow Through on Promises to the Left

2008-11-09T17:19:00.001-05:00

To those wishful thinking moderates and conservatives who have been saying rather matter-of-factly that Obama only said what he said during the campaign just to get elected, and that he is really much more moderate than meets the eye, to them I say, take a look at this: (HT: The Corner)

Obama himself has signaled, for example, that he intends to reverse Bush's controversial limit on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, a decision that scientists say has restrained research into some of the most promising avenues for defeating a wide array of diseases, such as Parkinson's.

Bush's August 2001 decision pleased religious conservatives who have moral objections to the use of cells from days-old human embryos, which are destroyed in the process.
But Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said that during Obama's final swing through her state in October, she reminded him that because the restrictions were never included in legislation, Obama "can simply reverse them by executive order." Obama, she said, "was very receptive to that." Opponents of the restrictions have already drafted an executive order he could sign.

The new president is also expected to lift a so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he rescinded the Reagan-era regulation, known as the Mexico City policy, but Bush reimposed it.

I don't see why we should believe that Obama is going to be any less liberal; than he was in the US Senate where he held the distinction of being the most liberal Senator. He is going to shock a lot of people in my view, and for a time, with impunity during a honeymoon.

Three Reasons Why (I Think) McCain Will Lose Today

2008-11-04T13:39:00.003-05:00

1. The candidates are too similar to each other. Sean Hannity is wrong in this when he says there is a stark difference politically between Obama and McCain. McCain is just as likely as Obama to find a government solution to every problem. His solutions may be slightly different than Obama's, but it will still be the government solving people's problems. The nanny state will come with either one, and not much sooner with Obama than McCain.

2. The party perceived as starting a war almost always loses. In the post-World War 2 era, consider this record:

1948: at peace; Democrat returned.

1952: at war in Korea; Republican elected.

1956: at peace; Republican returned.

1960: at peace; Democrat wins by a razor thin margin based on much corrupt voting and daddy's money

1964: at peace; Democrat returned

1968: at war in Vietnam; Republican elected

1972: war in Vietnam almost over; Republican returned

1976: at peace; Democrat wins in post-Watergate backlash against Republican

1980: at peace; Republican wins

1984: at peace (I guess Grenada doesn't count); Republican returned

1988: at peace; Republican returned

1992: Gulf War fought during term; Democrat win

1996: at peace; Democrat returned.

2000: at peace; Republican wins EC while Democrat wins popular vote

2004: at war in Iraq and against terrorism; Republican wins by slim margin--the only time since WW2 that the party who promoted war during the term won.

2008: at war in Iraq/against terrorism; -----------

3. America is, in general, a just and fair nation. We are still atoning for our sins of slavery and post-slavery discrimination. Obama will gain some votes on that basis alone.

A Message from One of the Founding Fathers on this Election Eve

2008-11-03T18:36:00.001-05:00

"Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present or a compliment to please an individual -- or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country." --Samuel Adams (HT: The Patriot)

Bits on Biden, Pieces on Palin and other Observations as We Wind Down to Tueday

2008-11-02T11:22:00.001-05:00

Some miscellaneous observations from Jennifer Rubin at Commentary:

Nanny-in-chief? So says Roger Kimball.
Valuable time on SNL for John McCain - self-deprecating while actually tweaking his opponents. About as well as a Republican can hope to do.
The Gray Lady’s Public Editor says the MSM shouldn’t predict or assume an Obama victory, but instead report on the campaign as it unfolds. Now he tells us. Next thing you know he’ll tell us they should have investigated the Rashid Khalidi connection or asked Obama harder questions in interviews.
Now and then Maureen Dowd asks a good question: “Why did [John McCain] allow his staff to put Palin on a couture catwalk in a tin-cup economy and then, when the price tags were exposed, trash her as a ‘diva’ and ‘whack job,’ thus becoming the rare Republican campaign devoured by Democratic-style vicious infighting?” If he doesn’t pull a rabbit out of the hat on Tuesday I bet McCain and Hillary Clinton will have plenty to commiserate over.
Just imagine if a Republican had a relative living in poverty, illegally in the U.S. and on public housing to boot. And who gave illegal campaign donations to him. You don’t think ACORN missed her in their registration drive, do you?
You mean Barack isn’t going to bar lobbyists from his administration? Really, it is amazing people bought all the New Politics hooey. Do you thing they’ll be shocked to find out that 95% of people can’t get tax cuts?
John McCain doesn’t much appreciate Obama’s comment that his faith in America was “vindicated” when he won the Iowa caucus. There is something scary about a candidate who equates his country’s virtue with his own political fortunes. This confusion between country and self is not a healthy thing.
Ross Douthat writes of the McCain camp: “It’s been worse than an evil campaign; it’s been a dumb one.” I may disagree with him as what was dumb, but the bottom line is right. True in the micro-sense (where was this for months?) and in the macro-sense (what was the economic message until Joe the Plumber showed up?).
David Frum writes: “To his credit, Biden has conscientiously worked to familiarize himself with the great questions of national policy.” Yes, but the answers are all wrong. (”Learned nothing, yet remembered everything,” as they say of the Bourbons.)
All that effort and, yet, Obama is doing a tad worse than John Kerry among weekly church goers. Gosh, maybe they don’t like his position on abortion, his view of the judiciary and his past associations. It might be that people of faith aren’t easily sold a bill of goods by someone who doesn’t agree with their values. Who would have thought?

There's more.

A Quadrennial Address on the Eve of the Presidential Election

2008-11-01T13:20:00.001-04:00

Honored readers, guests, fellow bloggers, scholars, friends and relatives:

This is the first of what I hope will remain a tradition of short addresses to the fair readership of TSM, God willing, on each weekend before the quadrennial event known as the Presidential Election.

I've noticed something in this election that I have seen before, and I see building gradually, but is now all more prevalent than before, and it concerns me a great deal, and that is the attitude of voters, particularly young voters. What I have witnessed is a lack of civility and an awful, crass disrespect for people on both sides of the aisle, but particularly against those who support traditional Republican values or people tending to support McCain or other Republican candidates.

There is enormous, hyperbolic disdain, and a never ending torrent of bitterly sarcastic displays in You Tube productions, Twitter feeds, emails, blogs, letters to the editor, articles in periodicals such as Rolling Stone magazine (anything written by Matt Tiabi for example) and in any forum, electronic or otherwise. It is an SNL mentality, but taken to an extreme. I do believe the electronic media revolution has contributed greatly to this phenomenon. Spend a few minutes watching and reading the "tweets" on Twitter.com under "election," and you will find at least nine out of ten comments are terribly crass, crude, nasty and overtly prejudiced.

Everyone enjoys a good bit of clever humor, but humor that is a never ending garbage pale tirade at the expense of others, a specific class of people, or specific people, is not all that amusing, and in fact is a bit frightening. It borders on the kind of behavior exhibited by Hitler Youth before WWII was in earnest. And which later resulted in the organized snarling at people they didn't like, and eventually led to Krystallnacht escalating to other gross and nasty behaviors prior to our involvement in the war.

The debate at the moment is will these young activist, brash people actually vote, as in years past, they never seemed to materialize at the polls, but I differ with those who think it will be business as usual for them. I think they will come out, and they will make a difference, and will impact this election, and not really for the better.

Young people surveyed at random and asked about fundamentals of history and democracy seem to be woefully lost. Yet they will vote in their ignorance, and they will do so with passion and vigor. It will contribute to the likely and unfortunate result of the election, and the ushering in of a period that will strain the middle class with a greater burden of taxes, with continued chaos in the markets rather than a quelling and a damping effect on the swinging amplitudes, and it will allow bullies to wreck havoc in others parts of the globe with impunity.

Some say maybe we need such a period to recalibrate and reinvigorate the right. I am not of the breed. I think 4 or 8 years in the wilderness will be very damaging, and leave a legacy of things to fix that will remain on the doorstep of whoever comes later to correct the mess for years to come.

I believe that the growing array of conservatives and so-called conservatives, former Reagan officials, and other prominent Republicans who have announced their support for Obama will result in many if not all of the same regretting their choice, and their public pronouncements. Obama is so liberal, his Supreme Court nominees will be so liberal, his inaction in the face of world crises affecting Americans will be so isolationists, his "spreading the wealth," his taxation of the middle class, his support for gay marriage, and his many other beliefs and behaviors along these lines too numerous to mention will ultimately embarrass these folks, i.e., the Colin Powell's and Chris Buckley's.

In his second letter to his fellow Christian believer and fellow pastor-teacher Timothy, the historical figure, Saint Paul of Tarsus said, "For a time will come when the people will not endure sound doctrine; but desiring to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves [leaders] in accordance with their own selfish desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth, and will instead grasp hold of myths,..." Obama is a very attractive, smooth talking pol, who has what appears on the surface to be an even temperament, which I understand has been a very attractive characteristic, particularly with women voters. But what do we really know about this person? Is this the true man? I think all we have seen is a facade. What will be the reaction when the real Obama is revealed? And by then he will have been elected president.

In the most recent Weekly Standard, William Kristol comments on the McCain "juggernaut."

It's always darkest before it goes totally black. This is one of John McCain's favorite remarks, ascribed (apocryphally, it seems) to Chairman Mao. Well, with ...days to go before the election, it's getting pretty dark out there.
Still, we hope for a McCain-Palin victory, for the sake of the country. And also for the pleasure of seeing the dejection of the mainstream media, the incredulity of the leftwing triumphalists, and the humiliation of the pathetically opportunistic "conservatives" who've been desperately clambering on board the Obama juggernaut. We're proud to stay off that juggernaut. We're proud, in our modest way, to stand with John McCain and Sarah Palin against it.
An Obama-Biden administration--working with a Democratic Congress--would mean a more debilitating nanny state at home and a weaker nation facing our enemies abroad. We, of course, have confidence that the nation would survive such an interlude, and we would even hope that a President Obama might adjust course from the path he's advertised, especially in foreign policy. But the risk of real damage is great, especially when compared with the prospect of a tough-minded center-right McCain-Palin administration that could lead the country sensibly through these difficult times.

I leave you now to make your respective choices. Choose wisely, but prepare to gird yourself for not so pleasant outcome.

CNN's Audacity

2008-10-31T17:27:00.001-04:00

I'm stuck in a concourse in Atlanta somewhat forced to watch CNN while waiting for a plane. CNN, in the few nauseating minutes I've watched, has insulted Gov. Palin, interviewed Obama ad nauseum and discussed the so called news that, by his grace, the One might actually lower himself to offer "a job" to McCain once we get through that falderal of an election. All this with the polls tightening and McCain now within only a few.

How embarrassing it would be to the MSM were McCain to pull an upset.

It is no wonder that CNN, NBC and the others have all lost viewers because of their overt bias in the recent weeks and months. Whatever the outcome, CNN has lost me. So has NBC and MSNBC.
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Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Device

A Senescent Man's Guide to the Presidential Choices

2008-10-27T21:32:00.001-04:00

Taken from today's WSJ, and put in table form to make review and decision making easier.

	Both	McCain	Obama
Short Term Economic Relief		Sen. McCain proposes cutting the capital-gains rate on stock held for more than a year to 7.5%. He also would increase the amount of stock loss that is deductible against ordinary income from $3,000 to $15,000, and would tax withdrawals by seniors from IRAs and 401(k)s no more than 10%.	Sen. Obama proposes a $1,000 Emergency Energy Rebate to families ($500 for individuals) and penalty-free withdrawals of 15% from 401(k)s and IRAs up to $10,000. He also wants to temporarily suspend minimum distribution requirements for retirement accounts.
Income Taxes		Sen. McCain wants to permanently extend all 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, raise the personal exemption for each dependent from $3,500 gradually over several years to $7,000 and keep the top tax rate at 35%, leaving "upper-income taxpayers" with "the most to gain under McCain's plan," according to a report by Deloitte Tax. The nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates that the top 1% would see a tax cut of more than $125,000.	Sen. Obama favors tax cuts for middle-class workers and tax increases for top earners -- families that make more than $250,000 and individuals making more than $200,000 a year. He wants to extend most of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, but raise the top two marginal rates to 36% and 39.6%. Sen. Obama wants to eliminate taxes on seniors making less than $50,000 a year and to provide a "Making Work Pay" tax credit of 6.2% of the first $8,100 in wages (about $500) for individuals earning less than $75,000 a year. Outside analysts estimate that the top 1% of wage earners would see an average tax increase of $19,000.
Estate Taxes and AMT	Both candidates support extending the Alternative Minimum Tax's 2007 "patch" exemption levels and index for inflation, and changing the federal estate-tax law to make the $2 million per-person exemption ($3.5 million next year) portable or transferable from one spouse to another.	Sen. McCain has proposed a 15% estate tax (down from the current 45%) on roughly 0.2% of estates, those valued at more than $5 million per person. A $5 million estate would pay nothing under this plan, Deloitte Tax notes.	Sen. Obama wants to freeze the 2009 estate-tax structure, which taxes roughly 0.3% of estates -- those valued above $3.5 million per person -- at a top rate of 45%. According to Deloitte Tax, a $5 million estate would pay a tax of $675,000 under this plan.
Health Care		Sen. McCain wants to replace the current income-tax exemption for health-insurance premiums paid by employers with a refundable tax credit of $5,000 per family ($2,500 for individuals). Any unused credit could be deposited into a Health Savings Account. His Guaranteed Access Plan (GAP) would allow people denied coverage to obtain insurance through state-run high-risk pools administered by private insurers, according to a report issued by the Joint Center for Political Economic Studies. Sen. McCain wants to allow people to purchase insurance across state lines, which could reduce the effectiveness of state regulations. Under this plan, premium payments for families would increase by about $379 and direct payments for health services by about $105. "This would be more than offset by a net increase in tax subsidies of $1,570" and wage gains resulting from employer savings, the Lewin Group says. The Lewin Group projects that the McCain plan would reduce the number of uninsured by 21.1 million people.	Sen. Obama proposes income-related subsidies for health insurance through a new national exchange, along with expanded access to Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and mandatory care for children. He would require employers that don't offer health coverage to contribute a percentage of payroll toward the national plan, with small businesses being exempt (and eligible for refundable tax credits on 50% of premiums). Under this plan, premium payments for families would fall by about $185 and direct payments for health services by $253. The Lewin Group projects the Obama plan would reduce the number of uninsured by 26.6 million people in 2010, from 48.9 million.
Investments	Both candidates offer plans to support small businesses, but they offer different strategies for capital gains, dividends and retirement savings that will affect investors.	Sen. McCain calls for maintaining the 15% top tax rate on dividends and long-term capital gains.	Sen. Obama wants to eliminate all capital-gains taxes on start-ups and small businesses but raise the top long-term capital-gains rate on securities and qualified dividends from 15% to 20% for families making more than $250,000 a year ($200,000 for individuals). He wants to tax carried interest as ordinary income.
Retirement & Social Security	Both candidates have moved to temporarily suspend the requirement that people over age 70½ tap their retirement accounts, but neither candidate has offered a substantial long-term plan to overhaul the way Americans save for retirement.	Sen. McCain favors privatizing Social Security in programs that allow younger workers to place a portion of their payroll taxes into personal accounts invested in the market.	Sen. Obama wants to institute a 2% to 4% payroll tax on incomes above $250,000, split between employer and employee. It would take effect in 10 years or more. He also proposes a retirement-security plan to automatically enroll workers in a workplace pension plan. Employers that don't offer a retirement plan would be required to enroll employees in a direct-deposit individual retirement account. Sen. Obama also proposes a saver's credit to match 50% of the first $1,000 of savings for families earning less than $75,000.
Source: WSJ

Noticing Less Interest in the Traditional Network News Outlets? You're not Alone

2008-10-27T20:52:00.001-04:00

From colleague and fellow blogger, Steve Graham:

The following is from an ABC News Site:

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.
The media have covered this presidential campaign with a bias and that ultimately could lead to its downfall.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.
You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).

But read the whole thing.