A Guy In Pajamas

Still on the AGW Bandwagon

2011-11-24T21:17:00.000-06:00

Jonathan H. Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy explains why, even after all the evidence of some climate scientists behaving badly, he believes in anthropogenic global warming. It's worth reading.

Progressive Economics: The Case of Northern Europe

2011-11-24T09:18:00.000-06:00

Economist Jeffrey Sachs attacks the idea that we should cut government spending:

The upshot is that both parties champion the 1 percent, the Republicans gleefully and the Democrats sheepishly. Both parties have worked together to gut the tax code. Companies use accounting tricks approved by the IRS to shift their profits to foreign tax havens. Hedge-fund managers and recipients of long-term capital gains pay only 15 percent top tax rates. As a result of these irresponsible tax policies and rampant tax evasion, tax collections as a share of national income have sunk to 15 percent, the lowest in modern American history.

...

The lowest macroeconomic misery is in Northern Europe. Norway has the lowest score, followed by Switzerland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and Demark. All seven countries have lower unemployment rates, smaller budget deficits as a share of GDP, and lower foreign deficits as a share of GDP, than the U.S. We look pretty miserable indeed by comparison.

Yet, miracle of miracles, these seven countries collect higher taxes as a share of GDP than does the U.S. Total government revenues in the U.S. (adding federal, state, and local taxes) totaled 31.6 percent of GDP in 2010. This compares with 56.5, 34.2, 39.5, 45.9, 52.7, 43.4, and 55.3 percent of GDP in Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark, respectively. ...

... In five of the seven countries, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Netherlands, and Sweden, government spending as a share of GDP is much higher than in the U.S. These countries enjoy much better public services, better educational outcomes, more gainful employment, higher trade balances, lower poverty, and smaller budget deficits. High-quality government services reach all parts of the society.

I currently think it is absolutely essential that the US cut spending, so Sachs's data is very interesting. I've noticed several progressive writers using northern European countries as an example to show that conservatives are wrong about economics, so this is something that must be addressed. If it can't be, then conservatives need to rethink their economics. (And, of course, so do I.)

Today's Links of Interest

2011-11-23T18:29:00.000-06:00

Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters -- A scientific study shows that in some ways IQ is more important than effort.

America Before the Entitlement State

A Caveman Won't Beat a Salesman -- Peggy Noonan discusses Steve Jobs' theory of decline in business and applies it to American politics, where, she claims, we have elevated salesmen over people who know how to get things done. She then, quite sensibly, tells us why Republicans aren't anti-government:

Republicans don’t hate government, but they’re alive to what human beings are tempted and even inclined to do with governmental power, which is abuse it. And so they want that power limited. It’s not really that complicated. Democrats may try to paint it one way, but when they do, Republicans shouldn’t help them. They should show respect for the moment. They shouldn’t be unserious.

The Large Number of Near-Poor

An interesting blog I ran across: The Maverick Philosopher

American Wonderland -- A comparison of America's current political climate with Alice's Wonderland.

Today's Links of Interest

2011-11-10T22:54:00.000-06:00

Mike Mayo: Why Wall Street Can't Handle the Truth (How sounding the alarm got him in hot water, and what we can do now to reform the banking industry.)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: End Bonuses for Bankers (Another idea to solve our banking industry problem.)

Mark Steyn: Corporate Collaborators A snippet:

On Wednesday, the “Occupy Oakland” occupiers rampaged through the city, shutting down the nation’s fifth-busiest port, forcing stores to close, terrorizing those residents foolish enough to commit the reactionary crime of “shopping,” destroying ATMs, spraying the Christ the Light Cathedral with the insightful observation “F**k,” etc. And how did the Oakland city council react? The following day they considered a resolution to express their support for “Occupy Oakland” and to call on the city administration to “collaborate with protesters.”

Walter Russel Mead: Occupy Blue Wall Street? A snippet:

Blue, government-oriented Wall Street; the professional do-gooders and the progressive intellectual and foundation establishment; the unionized government workforce; and the beneficiaries of social programs: this is the blue coalition. Many blue partisans don’t fully get this; they think of Wall Street as the enemy without fully grasping the essential role that the financial community plays in the creation and administration of blue policy. The participation in and support of blue social and economic policies by American finance both enables and shapes those policies, and it was the belief on Wall Street in the 1940s and 1950s that the blue social model provided the most effective path for national economic development that created the postwar commonwealth, which many blue activists today hope to restore.

James Taranto: The Obamaville Riots

The Onion: Remains of Ancient Race of Job Creators Found in Rust Belt

Today's Links of Interest

2011-11-04T12:51:00.001-05:00

Economists Can't Be Trusted on Tax Plans: Laurence Kotlikoff

Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan is a case in point. My last column pointed out that his plan would hit the superrich -- those with lots of wealth, but little or no labor earnings -- right in the solar plexus, dramatically lowering their sustainable living standards. The day after the column appeared, the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, released a widely quoted study suggesting exactly the opposite.

I’m not surprised. The Tax Policy Center has first-rate economists, but they knowingly use wholly inappropriate distribution analysis also employed by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service and the Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis.

All five groups of tax experts take annual income as a measure of a household’s economic standing and evaluate the progressivity of tax proposals by dividing annual taxes by annual income. This is problematic, in large part because people don’t live for just one year. Their incomes and the taxes on that income change over their lifetimes.

An interesting analysis follows. Is he right?

What's Your Kid Getting From College? A snippet:

Even so, these figures don't touch the most important question: Are students getting fair value in return?

Anne Neal has been trying to help families answer that question for years. As president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, she believes students should leave college with a broad base of knowledge that will allow them "to compete successfully in our globalized economy and to make sense of the modern world." By that ACTA means universities should require a core curriculum with substantive courses in composition, literature, American history, economics, math, science and foreign language.

"The fundamental problem here is not debt but a broken educational system that no longer insists on excellence," Ms. Neal says. "College tuitions have risen more than 440% over the last 25 years—and for what? The students who say that college has not prepared them for the real world are largely right."

At WhatWillTheyLearn.com, students can click onto ACTA's recent survey of more than 1,000 American four-year institutions—and find out how their colleges and universities rate. Two findings jump out. First, the more costly the college, the less likely it will require a demanding core curriculum. Second, public institutions generally do better here than private ones—and historically black colleges such as Morehouse and service academies such as West Point amount to what ACTA calls "hidden gems."

And one more, because it's fascinating:

Intelligence Operative's Letter, Sent to Son on Hitler's Stationery

In what will likely go down as one of history’s mysteries, the CIA Museum in McLean, Va., has obtained a letter from former intelligence operative Richard Helms written in 1945 on Hitler’s stationery. Helms’ son, Dennis Helms, had received the letter when he was three years old and gave it to the museum this year.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Wall Street Vs. Government Responsibility for Economic Crisis

2011-10-23T21:18:00.000-05:00

According to Investor's Business Daily, the percentage of responsibility for the subprime and nonprime mortgage crisis is pretty clear. Out of 27 million such mortgages, the government held 19.2 million: 12 million by Fannie & Freddie, 5 million by FHA, and 2.2 million with HUD and CRA loans. Wall Street held 7.8 million.

That would mean Wall Street bears 29% of the responsibility, while Washington bears 71%.

In a related piece, Gretchen Morgenson at the NYT notes a recent speech on needed financial reforms by Paul Volcker, former head of the Federal Reserve:

THE other area that cries out for change, Mr. Volcker said, is the nation’s mortgage market, now controlled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage giants.

“We simply should not countenance a residential mortgage market, the largest part of our capital market, dominated by so-called government-sponsored enterprises,” Mr. Volcker said in his speech. “The financial breakdown was in fact triggered by extremely lax, government-tolerated underwriting standards, an important ingredient in the housing bubble.”

Today's Links of Interest

2011-10-18T23:49:00.000-05:00

Transcript and Video of Herman Cain on Meet the Press

The Koch brothers donated $20 million to the ACLU

Steven Green, as usual, drunk-blogged the Republican debate tonight

The Politics of Raising Cain

2011-10-14T11:35:00.000-05:00

Roger L. Simon sees Cain's campaign as a challenge to political professionals like Rove.

Cillizza & Blake: Why Herman Cain Can Win

Amy Gardner, Cain's Staff Trying to Keep Up

(Interestingly, she notes that Cain's trip to Tennessee may be because a lot of Country music people like him. This may answer the question some have been asking about why he's going there, like the next article.)

Cain's Curious Month Off

Was SimCity Cain's Inspiration for the 9-9-9 Plan? An amusing diversion ...

Discussions of Cain's 999 Plan

2011-10-14T09:37:00.001-05:00

999 on Cain's Website and in an editorial in USA Today

The phases of Cain's plan, copied from his website:

Phase 1, 9-9-9:

Zero capital gains tax
Ends the Death Tax.
Eliminates double taxation of dividends
Business Flat Tax – 9%

Gross income less all investments, all purchases from other businesses and all dividends paid to shareholders.
Empowerment Zones will offer additional deductions for payroll employed in the zone.

Individual Flat Tax – 9%.

Gross income less charitable deductions.
Empowerment Zones will offer additional deductions for those living and/or working in the zone.

National Sales Tax – 9%.

This gets the Fair Tax off the sidelines and into the game.

Phase 2, the Fair Tax:

Amidst a backdrop of the economic boom created by the Phase 1 Enhanced Plan, I will begin the process of educating the American people on the benefits of continuing the next step to the Fair Tax.
The Fair Tax would ultimately replace individual and corporate income taxes.
It would make it possible to end the IRS as we know it.
The Fair Tax makes our exported goods and services the most competitively internationally than any other tax system.

Discussion of pros, cons, and what the heck does it all mean [this section will get filled out over the weekend, if you care to stop back]:

Nathan Lewis at Forbes, Flat Tax vs. Fair Tax vs. Herman Cain's 9-9-9 Plan

Edward Morissey at the Fiscal Times, 9-9-Nein! The Herman Cain Mutiny

Bruce Bartlett in the NYT, Inside the Cain Tax Plan

5 Reasons to Reject It

Cain Picks Up Support

2011-10-13T21:11:00.002-05:00

from Art Laffer

"Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan would be a vast improvement over the current tax system and a boon to the U.S. economy," Laffer told HUMAN EVENTS in a statement. "The goal of supply-side tax reform is always a broadening of the tax base and lowering of marginal tax rates."

Added Laffer: "Mr. Cain’s plan is simple, transparent, neutral with respect to capital and labor, and savings and consumption, and also greatly decreases the hidden costs of tax compliance. There is no doubt that economic growth would surge upon implementation of 9-9-9."

Laffer also said that "such a system provides the least avenues to avoid paying taxes, yet also maintains the strongest incentives for work effort, production, and investment."

Haley Barbour

“If this election is where it ought to be, and that is a referendum on how President Obama is doing, Republicans are going to win. If Herman Cain is our nominee against Barack Obama, I think he’ll sweep the south," Gov. Haley Barbour (R-Miss.) told Laura Ingraham today.

Paul Ryan

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan says he “loves” presidential candidate Herman Cain’s signature “9-9-9″ tax plan.

Ryan told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview that Cain’s plan is a good starting point for debate, and shows the GOP presidential campaign season has entered into a more advanced stage where ideas — not just personalities — have come to the forefront.

A spokesman for Ryan later clarified that Ryan wasn't endorsing Cain.

Today's Links of Interest

2011-10-13T07:16:00.000-05:00

Herman Cain Takes the Lead

Cain, Perry, Romney All Beat Obama

Oxford U. History Prof. Tim Stanley says: If the Wall Street protesters really want to reform capitalism, they should join the Tea Party

Michael S. Malone: Waiting for Princip

Illegal Students

2011-10-02T13:36:00.000-05:00

Michael Flaherty at the WSJ has an article titled, The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School:

From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they "belong" at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep "illegal students" from entering their gates.

Other school districts use services like VerifyResidence.com, which provides "the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document" children going from their house to school. School districts can enroll in the company's rewards program, which awards anonymous tipsters $250 checks for reporting out-of-district students.
Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children.

In August, an internal PowerPoint presentation from the American Federation of Teachers surfaced online. The document described how the AFT undermined minority parent groups' efforts in Connecticut to pass the "parent trigger" legislation that offers parents real governing authority to transform failing schools. A key to the AFT's success in killing the effort, said the document, was keeping parent groups from "the table." AFT President Randi Weingarten quickly distanced her organization from the document, but it was small consolation to the parents once again left in the cold.

At the same time, many American schools are forced to accept the children of illegal aliens, and to even suggest that they shouldn't results in strident accusations of racism and heartlessness.

I am all for public schools educating the children of illegal immigrants. The children are not at fault, and not only would it be morally wrong to deny them an education, it would also be reckless from a utilitarian perspective. However, since those expenses have been incurred due to the deceptions and irresponsibility of the federal government, I also strongly believe that every school which educates these children should be paid to do so by the federal government. (I also believe this is the correct way to handle the local and state incarceration expenses for illegal aliens.)

For similar reasons, the AFT and other organizations that act to destroy educational choice and quality in the American public schools should be forced to pay for the consequences. That, however, would be impossible; you cannot reimburse someone for giving them an inferior education during their childhood. Consequently, these organizations should be abolished.

Today's Links of Interest

2011-10-02T10:28:00.001-05:00

Transcript of the Fox News - Google GOP Debate

Simpson & Bowles: Our Advice to the Debt Committee: Go big, be bold, be smart

Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard: Raising Cain (an interesting comparison of Cain and Obama's biographies)

Back in 2008, Cain defended TARP. This is a complex topic. I think bailing out the banks created a powerful, dangerous moral hazard, but at the same time, letting the banks fail would have had a significant negative impact on a lot of people who were innocent of wrongdoing. Sometimes there is no good option.

Michael Barone says that Cain is beginning to look like a contender.

Jennifer Rubin says Cain can shake up the GOP race.

Jane McGonigal: Gamer's Will Save the World (well, that's not really her headline, but I suspect it's true)

Today's Links of Interest

2011-09-30T07:06:00.000-05:00

Alasdair Roberts, The Wikileaks Illusion. A fascinating article in the Wilson Quarterly (why have I never heard of them before?) that looks at some of the unexpected ramifications of the Wikileaks releases.

North Carolina governor Bev Purdue:

"I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that," Perdue said. "You want people who don't worry about the next election."

The comment -- which came during a discussion of the economy -- perked more than a few ears. It's unclear whether Perdue, a Democrat, is serious -- but her tone was level and she asked others to support her on the idea. (Read her full remarks below.)

Later Tuesday afternoon, Perdue's office clarified the remarks: "Come on," said spokeswoman Chris Mackey in a statement. "Gov. Perdue was obviously using hyperbole to highlight what we can all agree is a serious problem: Washington politicians who focus on their own election instead of what’s best for the people they serve."

The End of the Blogprof, alas. Another blog I should have been reading all along, it seems, but just discovered as the shutters fell.

Here's Herman Cain's campaign website, just since he's been in the news quite a bit lately.

Susannah Breslin, How a Freelancer Learned to be a Hustler

Today's Links of Interest

2011-09-26T19:02:00.000-05:00

Jon Stewart and the Burden of History. This gets a bit personal for my tastes, but it's an interesting take.

Saddam: What We Now Know. As I've said before, he didn't have stockpiles of WMDs, but he had programs to develop them and he provided extensive support for terrorist organizations.

Fast and Furious: Whistle-blowers Allege Corruption, Cartel Ties:

Two former law enforcement officers allege that they cannot get anyone to investigate allegations that the Mexican drug cartels have corrupted U.S. law officers and politicians in the El Paso border region.

Your State University Doesn't Want You (it wants foreign and out of state students who pay out-of-state tuition)

Tea Party, Liberals Play Nice at Harvard (There's a Harvard Law Tea Party!)

Symposium on Deregulating the Legal Profession

The World Will Be More Crowded - With Old People

Gallup Says Americans Express Historic Negativity Toward U.S. Government. Two points of interest:

Americans believe, on average, that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every tax dollar, similar to a year ago, but up significantly from 46 cents a decade ago and from an average 43 cents three decades ago.
49% of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. In 2003, less than a third (30%) believed this.

Rasmussen Reports Says Only 17% Say U.S. Government Has Consent of the Governed

Today's Links of Interest

2011-09-18T20:03:00.000-05:00

Walt Harrington's article, Dubya and Me, is a fascinating look at the former president and a welcome antidote to BDS.

An article on counting crowds.

An old Front Page Mag article about one FBI translator's experience on 9/11. This article is difficult to believe, but it's worth thinking about and investigating further.

Hayek & Keynes

2011-09-16T11:03:00.000-05:00

Maybe I've posted them before, but with this recent Powerline post on the two economists, I thought it would be good to put these two videos up.

and the sequel

At Powerline, Steven Hayward brings up some interesting history. Apparently the two economists were friends and admired each other's work. It's a good post with links to more interesting stuff.

Palin and Crony Capitalism, or Fascism

2011-09-16T10:44:00.001-05:00

Sarah Palin on crony capitalism:

This icon of American industry is a company full of good employees who make some good products (and is the parent company of a huge media outlet), but GE is also a large American corporation that pays virtually no corporate income taxes despite earning worldwide profits of $14.2 billion last year, $5.1 billion of it in the United States. In fact, they claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion, meaning they received more of our hard earned tax dollars than they contributed. How is that possible? It’s because not only do they shelter their money from taxes, but they also get many tax credits, loans, government grants, and other benefits from the federal government that our smaller businesses couldn’t even imagine being able to profit from.

NYT writer Anand Giridharadas actually offers her some praise for her position. The NYT column is behind a registration wall, so I'll also link an Examiner column about the NYT column.

The Examiner columnist, Anthony Martin, calls it like it is. 'Crony capitalism' isn't any kind of capitalism at all. We need to call it by its proper name:

True capitalism stands on its own. It does not need nor seek special favors from government. In fact, when capitalism crawls into bed with big government, what you have is 'Fascism' and not capitalism.

It may be difficult to see how it is fascism. We associate fascism with government oppression, but when the government picks the winners in the economy, it also picks the losers, just like Mussolini picked the winners and losers. If you aren't in the right political crowd, in the politically-picked 'winners,' you are relegated to be a 'loser' and are oppressed by 'crony capitalism,' by fascism.

What is the Tea Party?

2011-09-16T08:48:00.000-05:00

Two articles about what the Tea Party actually is.

Dan Balz writes in the Washington Post, What the tea party is -- and isn't. Balz reports on a set of papers on the Tea Party delivered at the recent American Political Science Association conference. He touches on demographics, effectiveness, the history of the Tea Party movement, and expectations for the future.

In response, Don Surber writes The Blind Men and the Tea Party, wherein he notes that a bunch of liberal poli sci profs research the Tea Party and find exactly what liberals have been saying they would find. He notes some rather obvious questions that should have been asked, but most importantly that there was no comparison with anything on the left.

A Sickness in America?

2011-09-11T17:36:00.001-05:00

Do Progressives Shame the Country on the Anniversary of 9/11?

The claim is spot on with regard to Krugman and a number of others, but I think a number of those who would call themselves progressives do not fall in behind Krugman on this.

More along these lines from Ace, analyzing Krugman and Parker:

We have never really been arguing about whether we should go to war, or whether we should hate. The only contention of these past 10 years has been whom we should go to war with, and whom we ought to hate.

The bien pensants are quite insistent that we must not hate some External Other who serves as a bogeyman exciting our darker passions.

Rather, they urge, we must direct these darker passions at an Internal Other, the vast majority of Americans who do not consider themselves a type of latter-day digital order of Jesuits.

Apparently we all have the right basic emotional take on things; some of us have just chosen the wrong bogeymen to fear and hate.

This is exactly right. I have said for years that one of the chief difference between the left and right is that the right is concerned with external enemies and the left with internal enemies.

Althouse also addresses the topic, criticizing Krugman for not allowing comments.

Mark Steyn's Let's Roll Over discusses things missing from the 9/11 commemorations.

Today's Links of Interest

2011-09-05T08:15:00.001-05:00

Popular Mechanics: How to Make Your Own Apps reviews two pieces of app-making software, Google App Inventor for Android and GameSalad for iPhone's, iPads, etc.

Michael J. Totten reviews The Devil's Double, a movie based on the true story of Uday Hussein's body double.

Here's the trailer:

Gary S. Becker, Nobel Prize-winning economist: The Great Recession and Government Failure

Just a taste:

The origins of the financial crisis and the Great Recession are widely attributed to "market failure." This refers primarily to the bad loans and excessive risks taken on by banks in the quest to expand their profits. The "Chicago School of Economics" came under sustained attacks from the media and the academy for its analysis of the efficacy of competitive markets. Capitalism itself as a way to organize an economy was widely criticized and said to be in need of radical alteration.

Although many banks did perform poorly, government behavior also contributed to and prolonged the crisis. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates artificially low in the years leading up to the crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two quasi-government institutions, used strong backing from influential members of Congress to encourage irresponsible mortgages that required little down payment, as well as low interest rates for households with poor credit and low and erratic incomes. Regulators who could have reined in banks instead became cheerleaders for the banks.

This recession might well have been a deep one even with good government policies, but "government failure" added greatly to its length and severity, including its continuation to the present.

Update - Some more links of interest:

Arthur Herman: The Ultimate Stimulus? World War Two and Economic Growth. Herman challenges the idea that WWII brought us out of the Depression, noting data that shows the increase in government spending came at the expense of private spending. Also, he points out that the economic boom of the '50s came only with a massive reduction in government spending.

Nigel Warburton on Introductions to Philosophy

Today's Links of Interest

2011-08-30T22:00:00.001-05:00

Lawrence Solomon on how science works and the new CERN data:

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories.

...

The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory cre dence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

True? Beats me. I do look forward to reading the Nature article, however.

An Entrepreneurial Fix for the US Economy

Jim Geraghty: Taking the Alter Challenge on Obama

Left Turn: A Book with an Interesting Theory on Political and Media Bias

Crime Declining Even in Economic Hard Times

The Other McCain: The Politics of Fear:

Unjustified fear of “right-wing extremism” is fomented simply as a way of demonizing Republicans who, the liberals would have us believe, are on the one hand beholden to dangerous crackpots while, on the other hand, are also tacitly encouraging violent extremists. So if some nut commits a heinous crime and is then alleged to have been a Rush Limbaugh listener — vote Democrat!

Because if you don’t vote Democrat, the Republicans will take charge and then the brownshirts will be goose-stepping down Main Street next week.

...

Beyond such transparent guilt-by-association smears, however, we see that the fearmongers benefit from the nebulousness of the threats with which they excite the phobias of their audience. They rely on the “ghosts of fascists past” that haunt the liberal imagination, so that a rally of people waving Gadsden flags and grumbling about taxes can easily be made to conjure up nightmares of Nuremberg in 1934.

It does little good, in protesting against such distortions, to point out the blindingly obvious fact: The dreams of the Tea Partiers — fiscal responsibility, limited government, the rule of law — are the antithesis of Nazi dreams of an all-powerful totalitarian super-state. Nor does it do much good to point out what Jonah Goldberg has explained at length, that modern liberalism owes a tremendous debt of fascism.

And ~~two~~ three more links just because these sites should be linked:

Open Secrets - Keeping track of money in politics.

View from the Porch, an interesting blog I came across in my web wanderings.

The BioLogos Forum - A website devoted to dialog between science and faith.

Today's Links of Interest

2011-08-27T21:49:00.002-05:00

Goldberg: My Rick Perry Problem, and Ours

Murphy: Tea Party Rage Dies

Alter: You Think Obama's Been a Bad President? Prove It

Wehner: Answering Alter's Challenge

Ransom: Obama is a Bad President

Boehner Blasts Obama Over Increase in Regulations

Lewis: It's the Economy, Dummkopf!

Book Review: The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield

Book Review: Special Interest / Class Warfare (on school reform in the US)

And finally, Is Gibson Guitar the Target of a Politically-Motivated DOJ Investigation?

Learn Liberty

2011-08-26T00:58:00.002-05:00

I just found out about Learn Liberty from the following video posted at Gregory Mankiw's blog. It claims to be "a resource for learning about the ideas of a free society." Looks like there are a lot of interesting videos there. Here's one:

Top 3 Common Myths of Capitalism

Here's the website for Learn Liberty and their sponsoring organization, the Institute for Humane Studies.

Today's Links of Interest

2011-08-26T00:38:00.001-05:00

Foreign Policy: Life After Debt

LeafSnap - an app for those with an interest in trees

UK Riots: The end of the liberals' great moral delusion

Top 3 Common Myths of Capitalism, by Harvard economist Jeff Miron

CERN: 'climate models will need to be substantially revised'

Today's Links of Interest

2011-08-21T22:11:00.000-05:00

Foreign Policy, Life After Debt

DSLR Film Noob, another interesting blog I recently ran across.

Junk Science and Watt's Up With That fight the AGW consensus (for better or worse, I don't know)

Aquinas' Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Gotta follow that up by a link to the man himself: Summa Theologica

Then Aesthetic Judgment at the SEP along with the website for the American Society of Aesthetics

And what goes better with philosophy than beer? Here's a guide to some of the healthier beers!

Today's Links of Interest

2011-08-20T10:02:00.000-05:00

Doctors Question Use of Nazi Medical Atlas

Street Anatomy (an interesting blog)

College Rape Accusations and the Presumption of Male Guilt

Harold Bloom on Literary Criticism

Assessing Rick Perry

2011-08-17T10:02:00.000-05:00

Some interesting posts:

Pesky Truth has two posts up on Perry, one giving his positives, one giving his negatives.

Political Math has a post on Rick Perry and Texas Job Numbers that is a must-read.

The Bowles-Simpson Report

2011-08-15T19:54:00.001-05:00

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was an interesting project. According to Wikipedia, the report required a super-majority of 14 (out of 18) votes to be formally endorsed by the commission. It failed, 11-7. Nevertheless, the report was endorsed by 10 ex-chairs of the president's council of economic advisers from both Democratic and Republican administrations. It offered a way out, but Obama and the Democrats ignored it and the Republicans followed their lead.

Bowles-Simpson was probably the last chance for a true bipartisan solution to the deficit battle. Failure to take it seriously lead to the brink. Once there, both the establishment politicians and the Tea Party dug in. For their actions on the brink, both sides are equally culpable, but it was the establishment politicians who drove us to the brink, and for that, they should be pilloried in every public forum. Instead, the Tea Party is demonized, and all those with a stake in business as usual, all those who will deny Americans any genuine chance of hope, any real change, are piling on.

Terrorism. Tea Party. Hobbits. Sorted Out by Sgt. Mom.

2011-08-15T19:11:00.000-05:00

Sgt. Mom has a good post clarifying some of the key differences between terrorism, the Tea Parties, and hobbits.

Some of her commenters object, claiming the Tea Partiers are economic terrorists. My reply is still that, if any political group in America can be defined as economic terrorists, all those who put us in this economic situation, from 1937 to today, most qualify.

One bizarre commenter even called the Tea Partiers "definitely the nearest thing this country has yet produced to true fascism." Weird kind of fascists that call for a weaker, more decentralized government; less government control over the economy; and less government-corporate cronyism.

Today's Links of Interest

2011-08-13T16:58:00.003-05:00

Rick Perry Is In

The Poverty Brand

ATF Accused of Arming Drug Cartel for War

The Mathematics of Mowing

A Back-up .380

The Freedom Connector

Give the Democrats the Higher Taxes They Want

2011-08-07T09:06:00.001-05:00

In the spirit of Glenn Reynolds, I have a suggestion for a way through our current impasse on higher taxes. Democrats say we need them; Republicans have vowed to stop them. I believe both sides can get what they want, if only they are willing to compromise just a bit.

My proposal is to raise taxes on Democrats. All registered Democrats would pay an extra 5% in income tax. Now, this would violate the Republican promise to not raise taxes, but they might be persuaded to make this one exception and take a compromise. Democrats, on the other hand, would object that they only want to raise taxes on the rich, but really, aren't all Americans rich compared to, say, the average Indian or Somalian? Here, too, Democrats will have to compromise just a bit to get what they want.

NB: As to who is rich, clearly, any party that can go from crying at the tops of their lungs that Bush is Hitler and that dissent is the highest form of patriotism to calling the Tea Party terrorists -- well that's just rich, you know?

Hypocrisy from 'Restoring Civility'

2011-08-06T11:59:00.000-05:00

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air points out the hypocrisy of Froma Harrop on civility. She's all for it, except when she isn't.

Civility in Politics

2011-08-05T08:13:00.001-05:00

James Taranto's column, "Civility: The Denouement":

Hey, what ever happened to civility?

That's not a rhetorical question. Back in January, after a madman shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and a crowd of her constituents, gravely wounding her and killing six, the liberal elite briefly developed an obsession with the supposed dangers of uncivil political rhetoric.

Before a suspect had even been identified, as we noted Jan. 10, Fitzsimmons, the Tucson cartoonist, was on CNN blaming "the right in Arizona" for "stoking the fire of heated anger and rage" and making the attack "inevitable." Fitzsimmons later apologized, but former Enron adviser Paul Krugman did not. Sources inside Krugman's head told him that the Tea Party dunnit ...

There were many other examples, including Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker, who complained of "shocking vituperation and hatred, virtually all of it coming from people who call themselves conservatives." When his fellow liberals falsely accused conservatives of mass murder, Hertzberg was unshocked. ...

Then it was February, and the liberal elite lost all interest in policing "the boundaries of public discourse." The faux goo-goo group Common Cause held a rally where participants urged the lynching of Supreme Court justices. Liberals--including at least one Democratic congressman--employed actual violent rhetoric against Wisconsin's Gov. Scott Walker, whose state budget reforms stripped government employee unions of many of their expensive privileges.

And now, of course, all of liberaldom is likening the Tea Party to terrorists. But really, that message is entirely consistent with the one in January, and indeed with the message the liberal elite has been propagating since the early days of the Obama administration: that the Tea Party is illegitimate.

I would add that the actual reasons given are irrelevant; they will say anything at all to delegitimize the Tea Party regardless of any truth, surely, but also regardless of whether they contradict themselves.

Taranto's whole piece is well worth reading, as usual.

Finally, a good word for the LA Times, whose Andrew Malcolm condemns the vice-presidents eliminationist rhetoric.

Related:Anti-Tea Party Vitriol

Anti-Tea Party Vitriol

2011-07-31T16:57:00.001-05:00

Annhilating Democracy with the Tea Party

Tyranny of 87 Must Stop

The Tea Party is a real threat to America

Kerry: Tea Party a group of 'Absolutists' who don't understand what they're doing

The Tea Party Taliban

So, the Tea Party are crazy extremists, but the Glorious Compromisers of both parties who, over the last 80 years, have in unmitigated greed, pornographic power lust, and undiluted narcissism sunk us into this position are the sane ones who we should all hail as our saviors.

Annihilating Democracy? That's Crony Capitalism (see Fannie and Freddy, corporate welfare, etc.). Tyranny? Every usurpation of state and individual rights by the ever-ravenous federal government is tyranny. The Tea Party a real threat? You mean, citizens learning about and getting involved with their own government threatens your ideological goals. Kerry is such a joke ... but, YOU, Senator Kerry, have helped put us here, so if you have known what you were doing then you have intended to bring America to the brink of destruction, and if you haven't, then you're a tool, an absolute tool. And Taliban? Taliban? Please. Again: The rest of the political establishment has brought us to the brink of destruction, not of two ancient statues, but of the economic lives of 300,000,000 people and all their descendants, and all because of your ideological inflexibility and greed.

Do we need more revenue? Sure, but the last century tells us that if the government raises taxes, they will just spend it; they won't pay down the debt. So no more taxes until we make structural changes that will eliminate the debt. We don't trust you.

And yes, if what the leftist media reports is true about how much the various plans would cut were true, one of them might be acceptable. But time after time politicians and their brown-nosing media enablers have heralded on front pages that huge sums have been saved or cut only to admit, on page 27, three weeks later, that those cuts / savings were really just accounting gimmicks and the deal really raised spending by billions. We don't trust you.

We don't trust you at all, and you have given us every reason not to do so.

And all those sycophants of the Grand Compromisers who are building up hatred for the Tea Party are idiots, or they expect us to be idiots. Why would we EVER again trust the political wheelers and dealers who put us in this position? To do so would be madness, idiocy, extremism of the worst kind. Doing so would destroy us, destroy democracy, destroy our world.

Today's Links of Interest

2011-07-31T10:24:00.000-05:00

Syrian officers defect, form Syrian Free Army to fight Assad

Moody's: Neither Debt Plan Protects the Nation's AAA Rating

Fiscally responsible punk rock

Can the president ignore the debt ceiling set by Congress? Tasty snippet:

Isn't it funny how this "tea party" philosophy just sounds like a fair reading of the text? But only Clarence Thomas is crackpot enough to do that!

An interesting post and discussion in the comments on 'Asians as White'

Getting it right: Woodward and Bernstein did NOT bring down Nixon

Sen. Marco Rubio: “Compromise without solutions is a waste of time.”

Today's Links of Interest

2011-07-21T21:35:00.000-05:00

Overcoming Bias, an interesting blog I ran across. From the site: "... economist Robin Hanson's blog, on honesty, signaling, disagreement, forecasting, and the far future."

The Art of Manliness, yet another interesting blog.

Gilligan's Island all about democracy. Who knew? This guy did.

At Business Insider, Wynn CEO Goes On Epic Anti-Obama Rant On Company Conference Call:

You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it's not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don't want to say that. They'll say, God, don't be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama's deal and it's Obama that's responsible for this fear in America.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don't invest, their holding too much money. We haven't heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody's afraid of the government and there's no need soft peddling it, it's the truth. It is the truth. And that's true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I'm telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he's gone, everybody's going to be sitting on their thumbs.

The LA Times attacks the first amendment. (It's a right or it isn't; when you start saying 'These people have first amendment rights; those people don't,' you've endorsed the end of the idea of a human right to free speech.)

Today's Links of Interest

2011-07-17T08:13:00.001-05:00

A random collection of links:

Alleged Rape Victim Snaps at Defense Attorney, Tossed in Jail for Contempt in Cell Next To Accused Attacker

Why Use Google Groups

Google Groups Is Dead

Cracked

100 Extensive Libraries from Around the World that Anyone Can Access

This last from mary & mac design, whose tagline is "know what's inside the box before you look outside," a sentiment I certainly appreciate.

Paul Ryan's Plan

2011-07-10T11:50:00.001-05:00

Gregory Mankiw:

As I have pointed out before, a bipartisan group of ten former CEA chairs (including your humble blog host) has endorsed the Bowles-Simpson commission report as a starting point for dealing with the long-run fiscal imbalance. So readers might like to know that Bowles and Simpson themselves have called the Ryan plan a positive step.

If you want to learn more about the Ryan plan, you can look at this side-by-side comparison of two plans or read this CBO report.

Taxes

2011-07-10T11:34:00.002-05:00

Apparently, Minnesota is getting along well without a government (at least, without parts of one), and the Democrats and Republicans are still wrestling over the budget. It seems the Democratic insistence on redistributing wealth from private to public hands is the sticking point.

I'd like to take a closer look at a couple of articles I linked that discuss conservative tax proposals. First, Steven Hayward's proposal:

But here’s the case: one problem with our current tax policy is that at the moment the American people as a whole are receiving a dollar of government for the price of only 60 cents. (I don’t say a “dollar’s worth of government,” but let’s leave that snark for another time.) Any time you can get a dollar of something at a 40 percent discount, you are going to demand more of it. My theory is simple: if the broad middle class of Americans are made to pay for all of the government they get, they may well start to demand less of it, quickly.

...

In other words, if you want to limit government spending, instead of starving the beast, serve the check.

Indeed, tax forms sent to each individual should include an itemized receipt for the goods and services the taxpayer is purchasing, showing where every penny will go. Where the citizen has received services paid for by others, that should also be shown clearly on the receipt. When there is a proposal to increase government expenses, the cost to each citizen should be published well in advance in the form of "If bill XYZ passes, your taxes will go up by $X each year."

Hayward goes on to note that:

Back in the Reagan years, there was a vigorous internal debate about whether to resist tax increases because “starving the beast” would hold down spending. But evidence is now in: this strategy doesn’t work.

Why? He cites a 2006 CATO study that showed that decreases in federal funding correlate to increases in federal deficits. Politicians don't stop spending; when the amount of public money available decreases, they just borrow more. In addition, the author points out that Reagan raised taxes and increased federal revenues.

If tax increases are on the table, then, what kind of tax increases should we support? Let's take one more slice from Haywood as our starting point:

A debate on how to raise taxes might actually be fun to have with liberals, because their only idea—eat tax the rich—doesn’t produce anywhere near enough revenue to fund their programs.

Indeed. HotAir covers that angle, showing that if we took 100% of what the top 10% of earners in the US make, it would not be close to covering Obama's budget gap. (More: WSJ, one of HotAir's sources for their article; Walter E. Williams; Steve McCann.)

Now let's shift our attention to Reid J. Epstein's article in Politico, Debt Blogs: Out of Left (& Right) Field Ideas:

While President Barack Obama and congressional leaders are gridlocked in their attempts to negotiate an agreement to raise the nation’s debt limit, there is no shortage of wacky ideas from the nation’s online peanut gallery.
...

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit proposed a 50 percent surtax on the post-administration private sector incomes of top government officials and excise taxes on movie tickets, DVDs and digital music downloads.

But this isn't nearly enough. In the comments to Haywood's article a number of commenters take the position that everyone should pay taxes, even if it's just a few dollars a year for the poorest. This isn't a bad idea, and I've heard it in a number of other conservative forums, but again, it isn't enough. I don't have the answer, but there are two forms of tax increase I would like to see.

First, end virtually all federal corporate welfare and government subsidies of various industries through tax breaks, etc. While overall tax rates would remain the same, this would increase federal revenues.

Second, end or substantially reduce the number (or where that is impossible, the size) of public-private Frankenstein's like Fannie and Freddie. These organizations allow a few top people to take millions by risking taxpayer money; Fannie and Freddie were a key part of the housing crisis, and yet their top executives got away with millions and no condemnation, unlike executives in entirely private companies. This too, while avoiding increases in overall tax rates, would end tax subsidies to semi-private, wealthy, and powerful companies and individuals, effectively increasing taxes on them.

All of these proposals together would not be enough. At some point, there will have to be broader tax increases. However, except for ideas like the above, government must cut first. The federal government has continuously proven that it cannot handle money responsibly; it has left Social Security full of IOUs, it has wasted untold billions on pork barrel projects, and it has stuffed the pockets of big donors with public cash for decades upon decades. Federal profligacy is the reason for the crisis we are in now.

Therefore, in order to prove that tax increases will not be wasted, the federal government must now demonstrate that it can act responsibly by making deep and lasting cuts, and it must show that new tax revenues will go toward solving our financial crisis, not to the pockets of big donors or to useless "public works" projects just to buy votes for incumbents by drastically increasing transparency on the finances of the United States.

Webmail Software Comparison

2011-07-10T10:19:00.000-05:00

Noah S over at Arvixe Blog* compares the top three webmail software programs: Horde, SquirrelMail, and RoundCube. Very useful, even though it was written in 2009.

*Arvixe is a web hosting provider.

Update on Going Without Google

2011-07-09T10:51:00.003-05:00

In last Saturday's post on escaping Google I listed alternatives recommended by others.

I gave DuckDuckGo a try this past week, but it simply didn't turn up the quality of results Google does. I have since switched to Yahoo! for searching, and its results seem equal to Google's.

I have also been looking at Zoho to replace things like Gmail and Google Docs. Zoho really offers quite a bit of useful stuff. I suspect the usefulness of Zoho as a collaboration tool would depend on getting others to use it as well; most people already have a Gmail account, so it's simpler to just use Google's services.

Today's Links of Interest

2011-07-09T10:39:00.003-05:00

Thanks to Instapundit, I've been reading a lot of Susannah Breslin lately.

She led me to The Graffiti of War Project.

xkcd has an interesting comment on postmodern dating.

Speaking of which, Javier Tordable has an interesting post on the best cities for singles in America.

And, in a complete non sequitur from the above links, James Pethokoukis makes the case that Obama may have really made things worse.

However, Politico tells us, there are a number of left and right tax proposals to address the debt problem.

Steven Hayward, at Power Line, makes the conservative case for higher taxes, more or less.

Continuing a circle of non sequitur, Instapundit also sent me to Molinaro Media, which sent me to a good article on how to make text look interesting by Kurt Edelbrock.

And here's a paper on the legal relationship between photographers' rights and law enforcement.

Yet Another Deception on the Internet

2011-07-03T08:25:00.003-05:00

Today I discovered Traffic Faker, a service you can subscribe to that will generate a list of URLs and then send a robot out to plant your URL in those websites' referral logs, making it look like you visited the sites.

There's nothing illegal about it, of course, but the point is to deceive website owners into visiting your site. To which I say: What putzes! Both the company offering this service and the users of it -- putzes all!

Update: Maybe I should have titled this 'Referral Spam.'

Escaping Google

2011-07-02T19:51:00.006-05:00

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. -- Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Here are two very good articles on escaping the ubiquity of Google online. Of course, it's not entirely possible, but there are a lot of alternatives out there for Google functions.

How I Learned to Live Google Free, by Joshua J. Romero

A Week Without Google, by Chris Reynolds

Some of the replacements that interested me were:

for RSS, Sage extension for Firefox
instead of Gmail, Zoho Mail (though Romero notes that, for better security, Lavabit or FastMail might be better, and each has a plan for less than $10 a year)
for searching, DuckDuckGo seems even better than Google and doesn't save or pass on data about you or your search; Blekko also seems to have some useful functions
YouTube seems to be the indispensable Google site, though Vimeo is an alternative
Todoist replaces Google Tasks, and Romero notes it is by far superior

I will update this post with more alternatives to Google in the near future.

Update: Speaking of the near future ...

Lightning, a Thunderbird plug-in, replaces Google Calendar and Tasks
Hootsuite replaces Twitter
Chris Pederick's Web Developer replaces Chrome's WebKit (though Reynolds laments the lack of Inspect Element, some similar add-ons are available for Firefox)

There's a lot more; the above is only the beginning.

Here are two more guys who took up the week-without-Google challenge:

A Week Without Google! on Tech Guru

One Week Without Google, by Tom Krazit

The Tech Guru's article offers some more alternatives:

He suggests Yahoo! search for web searching.
Instead of Gmail, he too recommends Zoho, and as an alternative, in.com.
He claims Zoho is better than Google Docs, but also suggests Thinkfree, which offers (like Zoho) an online office suite.
For Google Maps, he suggests Microsoft's Virtual Earth (though this doesn't seem, at first glance, to lead to an easy-to-use map application - maybe this has become Bing Maps?) and Yahoo Maps, and also Ask Maps. For Google Earth, Microsoft has Virtual Earth 3D, though this seems to have been dropped.
For YouTube, he offers Yahoo Video, Metacafe, Vimeo, Revver, Blip.tv and Veoh.

A few more apps of interest that I ran across in the above articles and in research stemming from them:

Web Developer does seem cool.
SeaMonkey is an integrated Mozilla app with browser, email, HTML composer, and more.
Tabberwocky seems like an interesting Firefox tab manager.

Links on Israel-Arab Issues

2011-06-25T07:55:00.000-05:00

These are to articles I would like to explore in an essay at some point:

The Hamas -- Oops, Gaza -- Flotilla

What the Murder of Iraqi Jews in 1941 Tells Us About the Middle East Today

The Palestinians of 1967

No doubt there are a huge number of books I should read, but these provide a beginning.

Cultural Diversity

2011-06-24T12:55:00.001-05:00

The left has dominated American cultural expression for decades. A few people are beginning to bring some cultural diversity back to the nation.

Bill Whittle's Declaration Entertainment is one campaign in the movement. According to the Declaration Entertainment website:

Declaration Entertainment is a grass-roots film-financing movement that turns you, the audience, into Citizen Producers to reclaim American values and put them back on the screen. Declaration Entertainment is dedicated to making the kinds of movies Hollywood used to make - Movies about Freedom and Sacrifice, Hard-Work and Self-Reliance, Faith and Family.

Another campaign on this front is the new independent TV show created by Colony Bay, Courage, New Hampshire. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the show will premiere tomorrow and then go to DVD.

Colony Bay was founded by James Patrick Riley and Jonathan Wilson, ... who met when Wilson was forming the Pasadena chapter of Tea Partiers.

Riley, the wealthy owner of Riley’s American Heritage Farm, a 760-acre apple and pear farm in Oak Glen, Calif. financed the first episode of Courage for $120,000. His money and that of other backers will fund future episodes. The first episode was filmed on the farm, where Riley has dedicated 55 acres to “living-history” educational tourism.

...

References to the country’s founding are a staple at Tea Party rallies that are attended by an estimated 9 million people, so a show about Colonial America ought to appeal to them. Leaning primarily on Tea Partiers for your audience, though, is a risky business, as the makers of Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 learned when they tapped the political movement to market their film, which opened strong but petered out quickly.

Wilson and Riley, though, are hoping they have a show that will attract history buffs of all political persuasions, much like HBO did with its Emmy-winning John Adams miniseries and Mel Gibson did with The Patriot, a feature film that earned $113 million domestically 11 years ago.

Check out the whole article which has a lot more detail and a trailer for Courage, New Hampshire.

PJTV and Kelsey Grammer's RIGHTNETWORK also produce some conservative video entertainment.

This is just a taste of what we need, real cultural diversity.

xkcd is cool, but

2011-06-22T20:32:00.002-05:00

xkcd:

Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.

But experience can recalibrate our scale. Edit: That's not really right, is it? What I wanted to say was, while I agree that we do resize our experiences to fit our scale, some experiences resize our scale. Living abroad, combat, sex, and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer series (at least the first three seasons) would be examples of this.

IOW, while this strip is entirely plausible, when released from the box the Biden pics will take their place on the scale dependent upon experiences that are either greater or lesser, i.e., based upon how far our experiences have expanded that scale.

IOW, yeah, not buying it. Thanks for playing.

Mankiw Advising Romney

2011-06-19T10:13:00.000-05:00

Tucked in at the bottom of a new article for the NYT, A Guy in Pajamas's favorite living economist (and Harvard professor of economics, if that matters), lets us know he's advising Mitt Romney.

The article itself is about four ways Republican and Democratic health care reform plans are similar, including agreement that competition is good, an insurance mandate (Democrats penalize those who don't buy insurance while Republican plans reward those who do), taxing the rich (means testing is taxing the rich as well), and blinkered optimism - the staunch determination to not consider what will happen if their plans fail. (You'll have to read the article if you want to know why Mankiw makes these arguments.)

Then, at the bottom of all this there is Mankiw's bio line:

N. Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard. He is advising Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

So that's why he's writing about health care reform!

Progressive Bigotry

2011-06-18T10:49:00.002-05:00

Dr. Mike Adams writes an open letter to Cisco System's CEO, John Chambers, asking about the firing of Dr. Turek, who designed and conducted highly-rated teambuilding programs for Cisco, based on political beliefs that were never discussed during the training:

The morning after completing the seventh session earlier this year, a manager in that session —who was one of the better students in that class—phoned in a complaint. It had nothing to do with content of the course or how it was conducted. In fact, the manager commented that the course was “excellent” as did most who participated. His complaint regarded Dr. Turek’s political and religious views that were never mentioned during class, but that the manager learned by “googling” Dr. Turek after class.

The manager identified himself as gay and was upset that Dr. Turek had written this book providing evidence that maintaining our current marriage laws would be best for the country. Although the manager didn’t read the book, he said that the author’s view was inconsistent with “Cisco values” and could not be tolerated. (Dr. Turek is aware of this because he was in the room when his call came in.) The manager then contacted an experienced HR professional at Cisco who had Dr. Turek fired that day without ever speaking to him. The HR professional also commended the manager for “outing” Dr. Turek.

...

I assume the intent of Cisco’s value of “inclusion and diversity” is to ensure that people in that diverse workforce will work together cordially and professionally even when they inevitably disagree on certain political, moral or religious questions. Please note that Dr. Turek agrees with that value and was demonstrating it. The manager and HR professional were not. Dr. Turek was being inclusive working with them. They were being exclusive by refusing to work with him, even though his viewpoint was never discussed during his work at Cisco. (Ironically, the people who say they are fighting for “tolerance” are often the most intolerant!).

I have a couple of important questions: First, what action would have been taken had Dr. Turek been a proponent of same-sex marriage but a conservative employee had complained? Second, given your support of Senator McCain, a same-sex marriage opponent, are you qualified to be working at Cisco?

Adams has promised to publish Chambers's reply next week, so stay tuned.

David French offers more examples:

It’s amazing how many of the academy’s bad ideas leak out out from campus and begin to infect the body politic. Two of academia’s worst are the use of ideological litmus tests to determine whether a person can pursue their chosen profession and the explicit comparison of orthodox Judeo-Christian theology to violent white supremacy. Yesterday, both ideas were on very public display on opposite ends of the country.

First, Massachusetts senate candidate Martha Coakley declares that Catholics need not apply for some medical jobs. ...

Over in California, during day four of the Prop 8 trial, Yale history professor George Chauncey compared the motivations of those who support marriage with the motivations of segregationists and declared that the official doctrinal statements of the Catholic and Southern Baptist churches reflect historic bias.

Today's Links of Interest

2011-06-17T08:45:00.005-05:00

First and foremost in terms of interest, Diplomad gives us a must-read story of true-life international diplomacy (well, poetically true) in Across the River.

TIGTA: IRS Did Not Follow Law in 38% of Seizures of Taxpayer Property

UCLA professor shows liberal media distorts news bias:

In a crushing body blow to the pushers of the so-called "Fox Effect," which claims the conservative media is dragging the left into the center, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose in Left Turn claims that "all" mainstream news outlets have a liberal bias in their reporting that makes even moderate organizations appear out of the mainstream and decidedly right-wing to news consumers who are influenced by the slant.

Update: finance professor John H. Cochrane writes that QE2 basically did nothing but put us deeper in debt.

Senators Obama and Coburn Teamed Up to Track Government Spending

2011-06-16T20:30:00.001-05:00

USAspending.gov

Articles on the War on Drugs

2011-06-12T10:54:00.000-05:00

Just collecting some articles here for future discussion:

Drug Policy: Supply and Demand

Mexico drugs war: Corruption grows on US border

Mexico drugs war: Relatives march to demand justice

The Diplomad Goes on a Drug Raid

Post Script to the Birther Issue

2011-06-12T10:45:00.000-05:00

Some related links:

Mutually Assured Distraction: Birthers and Obama backers alike behave exactly as predicted, a good article by James Taranto, talks about the issue and sends us to an AP article on challenges to (the white) Chester A. Arthur's qualification to be president due to the belief he was born in Canada, a conspiracy theory that persists today:

Nearly 123 years after his death, doubts about his U.S. citizenship linger, thanks to lack of documentation and a political foe's claim that Arthur was really born in Canada - and was therefore ineligible for the White House, where he served from 1881 to 1885.

Long before "birthers" began questioning the citizenship of President Barack Obama, similar questions were raised about the early years of Arthur, an accidental president who ascended to the job after President James Garfield was assassinated.

"It's an old rumor that won't die, political slander," said John Dumville, who runs Vermont's historic sites and knows well the legend. "It's a fun story, and it comes up every year. People latch on to it and they've read about it somewhere and they want to know more."

Over at Real Clear Politics, Steve Chapman tells us Why Birtherism is Here to Stay:

Birthers don't dislike Obama because they think he was born abroad. They think he was born abroad because they dislike him. ...

The phenomenon, of course, is not limited to conservatives or Republicans. It's endemic to partisans and ideologues of every stripe. In a 1988 survey, Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to believe that inflation and unemployment rose under President Ronald Reagan -- though they had actually fallen.

A 2007 poll found that Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to say President George W. Bush knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks. A lot of them would believe he has the ExxonMobil logo tattooed on his chest.

...

Yale political scientists John Bullock, Alan Gerber and Gregory Huber say partisans don't just say false things about the opposition; they actually, sincerely believe them. These scholars asked respondents various factual questions about Obama, Reagan and Bill Clinton -- and offered monetary rewards for correct answers. Yet even when money was at stake, partisans still had a clear tendency to give answers (and make errors) that matched their preconceptions.

Previously on AGIP: The Birther *GAG* Issue

The Birther GAG Issue

2011-06-12T10:14:00.001-05:00

I hate talking about this. It has been one of the biggest wastes of time the electorate has had to suffer through in the last three years, distracting us from genuinely vital issues like the economy, foreign policy, government reform, etc., etc., etc. However, those trying to kill the birther movement are blinded by their own ideological commitments and committing wholesale slander and libel, and, worse, dumping history in the sewer to try to achieve their goals.

Let's start with Wikipedia's article on the Natural Born Citizen clause of the Constitution, which, appropriately, begins with a quotation from section one article two of the US Constitution:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

An interesting discussion of various interpretations of that requirement as well as a history of US citizenship in law and a history of challenges to the citizenship of candidates follows. It includes such fascinating tidbits as the debate over whether simply birth in the US confers citizenship (jus soli), or birth in the US to American parents, or just birth to American parents (jus sanguinis).

As late as 2008, a law professor could assert that both jus soli and jus sanguinis were requirements, indicating that Obama, whose father was a British subject and not an American citizen, would not be considered a natural born citizen. He later changed his mind:

In a 2008 article published by the Michigan Law Review Lawrence Solum, Professor of Law at the University of Illinois, stated that "[t]here is general agreement on the core of [the] meaning [of the Presidential Eligibility Clause]. Anyone born on American soil whose parents are citizens of the United States is a 'natural born citizen'". In April 2010 Solum republished the same article as an online draft, in which he changed his opinion on the meaning of natural born citizen to include persons born in the United States of one American citizen parent. In a footnote he explained that "[b]ased on my reading of the historical sources, there is no credible case that a person born on American soil with one American parent was clearly not a 'natural born citizen.'" He further extended natural born citizenship to all cases of jus soli as the "conventional view".

Given that the Fourteenth Amendment states that, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside", I think the jus soli plus jus sanguinis argument is clearly wrong. Jus soli is enough, and Obama's British father has no bearing on the question. Indeed, had both of his parents been British subjects, that would still be irrelevant. All the evidence indicates that he was born in Hawaii, which last I heard was an American state, and that alone is enough to make him a natural born citizen of these United States. (NB: One can quibble with the fact that the Fourteenth doesn't use the words 'natural born citizens.' I think it is a silly quibble, but apparently some scholars do not.)

Obama was not the first presidential candidate whose status as a natural born citizen was questioned. Wikipedia's list includes:

Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886), 21st president of the United States, was rumored to have been born in Canada.

Christopher Schürmann (born 1848 in New York) entered the Labor primaries during the 1896 presidential election. His eligibility was questioned in a New York Tribune article, because he was born to alien parents of German nationality.

The eligibility of Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) was questioned in an article written by Breckinridge Long, and published in the Chicago Legal News during the U.S. presidential election of 1916, in which Hughes was narrowly defeated by Woodrow Wilson. Long claimed that Hughes was ineligible because his father had not yet naturalized at the time of his birth and was still a British citizen. Observing that Hughes, although born in the United States, was also a British subject and therefore "enjoy[ed] a dual nationality and owe[d] a double allegiance", Long argued that a native born citizen was not natural born without a unity of U.S. citizenship and allegiance and stated: "Now if, by any possible construction, a person at the instant of birth, and for any period of time thereafter, owes, or may owe, allegiance to any sovereign but the United States, he is not a 'natural-born' citizen of the United States."

Barry Goldwater (1909–1998) was born in Phoenix, in what was then the incorporated Arizona Territory of the United States. During his presidential campaign in 1964, there was a minor controversy over Goldwater's having been born in Arizona when it was not yet a state.

George Romney (1907–1995), who ran for the Republican party nomination in 1968, was born in Mexico to U.S. parents.

John McCain (born 1936), who ran for the Republican party nomination in 2000 and was the Republican nominee in 2008, was born at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone. McCain never released his birth certificate to the press or independent fact-checking organizations ... A lawsuit filed by Fred Hollander in 2008 alleged that McCain was actually born in a civilian hospital in Colon City, Panama.

Barack Obama (born 1961), 44th president of the United States, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to a U.S. citizen mother and a British subject father from what was then the Kenya Colony of the United Kingdom (which became the independent country of Kenya in 1963).

Why is all this worth bringing up here? Because of articles like "Birtherist response highlights racial undertones of ‘debate’", by Rachel Rose Hartman, which would seem to demonstrate an incredible ideological blindness by otherwise intelligent, well-educated people.

During the 2008 campaign, questions about John McCain's birth in the Panama Canal Zone on a U.S. military base prompted some to ask whether McCain was eligible to be president, since the Constitution stipulates that anyone not born in the United States is not eligible to be president.

... When a bipartisan pair of lawyers announced the following month that McCain was indeed eligible, the issue virtually died--apart from a Senate resolution that pretty much laid the question to rest by attesting to the facts surrounding McCain's birth and citizenship.

But the winner of the 2008 election, Barack Obama, has faced a relentless campaign questioning his U.S. citizenship--and thereby the legitimacy of his presidency--that has disregarded the facts.

...

So what's fueling the dogged questioning of Obama's origins? Many critics of the birther movement say its core tenets--and its stubborn resistance to evidence disproving those beliefs--can be traced to racial hostilities. The fundamental birtherist conviction, these critics say, is that an African-American can't have legitimately won the presidency--and that his elevation to power therefore has to be the result of an elaborate subterfuge.

"There is a real deep-seated and vicious racism at work here in terms of trying to de-legitimate the president," Peniel Joseph, a professor of history at Tufts University, told The Ticket.

"This is more than just a conspiracy," Joseph added. "I think this is fundamentally connected to a conception of white supremacist democracy in this country."

The article goes on to quote Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., columnist Michael Tomasky, and Jesse Jackson as sharing this view. Hartman continues:

Birthers emphatically deny such criticism. But it's difficult to apprehend the ongoing resistance to proof of Obama's citizenship without crediting racial fear as a significant factor. At first, after all, many adherents of birtherism argued that the administration fueled speculation by failing to release the long-form version of Obama's birth certificate, but now that this version has been released to the public, the call continues to go out for other kinds of information about Obama's past to be released--a level of scrutiny that neither McCain nor Obama's 43 predecessors in the Oval Office were expected to face.

...

Trump and others have accused Obama of not authoring his memoir, while many Obama detractors continue to argue he is secretly Muslim. Both Jackson and Joseph noted that never before has a sitting president's nationality been questioned.

Meanwhile, an eye-opening recent study from the University of Delaware appears to confirm that race-minded detractors of Obama view him as "less American"--as Dan Vergano writes for USA Today.

The study, which surveyed blacks and whites on their opinions of Obama compared to Vice President Joe Biden, found that whites classified as "higher prejudice-predicted Whites" viewed Obama as "less American"--a view that, in turn, resulted in lower evaluations of the president's performance.

There are several issues missing from this article that indicate a powerful ideological blindness. In completely ignoring factors other than race, it fails to mention, for example, the fact that Obama's father was a British subject, that photos of a young Obama in Indonesian garb have made the rounds, or that Obama attended Jeremiah Wright's ("God DAMN America!") church for decades (a church which lauded Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan), or repeated charges that Obama is a socialist, all things that would at least bring up other possible reasons some Americans would have this view of Obama. There is also no analysis of birther rhetoric itself, other than to note that birthers deny the racism charge. In addition, the article ignores the lengthy history of challenging the natural born citizenship of a number of white candidates prior to the 2008 election, including two on issues of parentage.

More egregious is the complete failure to mention the sustained, hate-filled campaign by Democrats to delegitimize Bush's presidency that lasted all throughout Bush's time in office, despite actual recounts after the USSC ruling that showed Bush would have won anyway. The campaign to delegitimize Obama's presidency can be seen as a response to the dishonesty and ugliness of the Democratic war on Bush's legitimacy. Even if you disagree with my characterization of that effort, the idea that an attack by a primarily Republican demographic on the legitimacy of a sitting Democratic president is in no way related to the primarily Democratic attack on the legitimacy of the preceding Republican president seems absurd.

So here's the point: Birthers believe what they believe due to their ideological blindness. Others believe the birthers must be motivated by racism because of their own ideological blindness. These are two more examples of the bipartisan nature of the lack of intellectual curiosity that infests our nation, of the confirmation bias endemic to humanity, and of plain old stuck on stupid. Both groups are damaging this nation.

Economics Blogs

2011-06-05T12:09:00.000-05:00

Greg Mankiw's Blog

Economics One, by John B. Taylor

Limericks Economiques (yes, economic commentary in the form of limericks)

Economonomics (with haiku)

I'll probably add more in the future, but that's what I have for now.

2008 Financial Crisis Link Dump

2011-06-05T10:58:00.002-05:00

Kenneth Anderson at The Volokh Conspiracy talks about a new book on Fannie and Freddie's role in the crisis. In the post, he links an NPR interview with Gretchen Morgenson, one of the authors, and a review at the Washington Post. Anderson's post is well worth reading in full, BTW.

The book is Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon, by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner.

These reviews led me to Wikipedia's entry on George Stigler, a Nobel-winning economist and originator of the idea of 'regulatory capture,' which describes very well one aspect of my own impression of how the US government has, in large part, been corrupted.

Stigler, in turn, led me to the Mont Pelerin Society:

... an international organization composed of economists (including 8 winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences), philosophers, historians, intellectuals, business leaders, and others who favour classical liberalism. Its founders included Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman.

The society advocates freedom of expression, free market economic policies, and the political values of an open society.

I feel like I've been admitted to a higher (lower?) circle of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy ...

Anyway, interesting stuff. I look forward to reading the book.

PS On a somewhat related note, this is hilarious.

Lawrence O'Donnell Takes on Condoleezza Rice

2011-05-07T08:56:00.001-05:00

http://moelane.com/2011/05/06/lawrence-odonnell-had-32-teeth/

This interview reinforces the idea that those on opposite sides of whether or not we should have invaded Iraq inhabit two different worlds.

Edit: Here's the same video on NewsBusters with a transcript below, and a tad bit of commentary.

N.B. I was surprised to really notice for the first time that Rice's given name has two Zs in it. According to Wikipedia, the name comes from the Italian musical term, con dolcezza, 'with sweetness.' This is quite appropriate as, in addition to her academic, business, and political achievements, she is also a concert pianist. (Self-fulfilling prophecy of a kind?) And, while she can be tenacious (as in the O'Donnell interview), she does come across with a touch of sweetness.

Here is one of her pages at Stanford. Her book, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family, looks pretty interesting. Love her or hate her, Rice is a fascinating person for anyone who appreciates people as people.

Links of Interest

2011-05-06T16:38:00.000-05:00

Lots of interesting stuff to keep track of.

David Braben created a $25 USB drive PC. Just attach a monitor and keyboard and you're ready to go.

ARE more than a billion people hungry?

David Solway, Canadian poet, dissects the lingo of the left.

James Taranto tells us (or rather confirms to us) why the left needs racism. (His earlier works on the topic are here and here.)

Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years

2011-04-21T22:15:00.000-05:00

An interesting article by Mary Grabar. Here's the opening paragraph, and the rest is well worth the read:

After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly. The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting’s 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression. They believe rules of grammar discriminate against “marginalized” groups and restrict self-expression.

Links of Interest

2011-04-17T17:03:00.001-05:00

Two articles well worth reading in full. They are both about education, but from different angles.

The Management Myth:

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.

Gales of Creative Instruction:

The electron cloud is already taking us from new Oxford back to old Oxford. After all, how can the old inconvenient and expensive system survive the onslaught of free?

I can move to England, pay the non-subsidized foreigner tuition rates, rise early, go to class and take my chances on an Oxford professor. Or I can sit in my pajamas and have an Oxford prof of my choice teach me about critical thinking or the literary legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien. I can avoid the same old green gunk or socialist screeds.

Want to learn more about the Austrian School of Economics from which Dr. Schumpeter derived his doctrine of creative destruction? Here’s a free course. Want to read Adam Smith’s comments about education and virtually every other topic under the sun, here’s a free searchable e-book, and here’s a free version for your Kindle. Feel you need some help understanding Smith? Here’s a podcast course from George Mason University’s econ talk.

Looking for a Schumpeterian take on current economic events? Try Intelligent Investing With Steve Forbes. If you like your free market economic commentary in daily doses, I find the Cato Institute’s daily podcast quite refreshing. For a little more depth, here’s their weekly video.

10 Ex-Chairs: Unsustainable Budget Deficit a Threat to US

2011-03-29T20:55:00.002-05:00

Ten ex-Chairs of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, including those who served under Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, state:

As former chairmen and chairwomen of the Council of Economic Advisers, who have served in Republican and Democratic administrations, we urge that the Bowles-Simpson report, “The Moment of Truth,” be the starting point of an active legislative process that involves intense negotiations between both parties.

There are many issues on which we don’t agree. Yet we find ourselves in remarkable unanimity about the long-run federal budget deficit: It is a severe threat that calls for serious and prompt attention.

While the actual deficit is likely to shrink over the next few years as the economy continues to recover, the aging of the baby-boom generation and rapidly rising health care costs are likely to create a large and growing gap between spending and revenues. These deficits will take a toll on private investment and economic growth. At some point, bond markets are likely to turn on the United States — leading to a crisis that could dwarf 2008.

“The Moment of Truth” documents that “the problem is real, and the solution will be painful.” It is tempting to act as if the long-run budget imbalance could be fixed by just cutting wasteful government spending or raising taxes on the wealthy. But the facts belie such easy answers.

...
The commission’s recommendations for slowing the growth of government health care expenditures — the central cause of our long-run deficits — are incomplete. It proposes setting spending targets and calls for a process to suggest further reforms if the targets aren’t met. But it also lays out a number of concrete steps, like increasing the scope of the new Independent Payment Advisory Board and limiting the tax deductibility of health insurance.

To be sure, we don’t all support every proposal here. ...

Yet we all strongly support prompt consideration of the commission’s proposals. The unsustainable long-run budget outlook is a growing threat to our well-being. Further stalemate and inaction would be irresponsible.

Happy St. Patty's Day!

2011-03-17T20:18:00.002-05:00

Cheers!

Links of Interest

2011-03-17T09:30:00.000-05:00

Been sitting on these for a few days thinking I would write up something about one or the other. But, facing the truth, I have to say I don't have time to write an essay on them right now. So, I shall tuck them into this cubbyhole for future reference.

Hope. Change. Nixon. Don Surber notes some similarities, and that others are noting them as well.

The Leiter Side of Union Thuggery. James Taranto takes on unions and a pro-union philosopher.

The Limits of Common Sense. A follow up post by Taranto. (Mug tip here to Instapundit.)

Longhorns 17, Badgers 1. Iowahawk puts the funny down for a post to teach Paul Krugman about statistics and education (and why education outcomes in non-unionized educational systems are as good as or better than those in unionized systems). He follows up with answers to questions about statistics and methodology in Badgering the Witless.

And an interesting reprint of an article on cultural revolution in the art world (or, at least, a revolutionary group): Adieu to the Avant-Garde.

Will College Pay Off?

2011-03-15T08:22:00.000-05:00

I've always been told that college graduates earn more than those who only finish high school, but after I got my BA I began to wonder. Surely, which major you pick plays a big role in how much you earn, right? There is also the issue of causation. Does earning the degree cause the rise in pay, or do the qualities that helped you earn the degree pay off?

Here's a snippet from the WSJ's Mary Pilon on the topic:

One problem he sees with the estimates: They don't take into account deductions from income taxes or breaks in employment. Nor do they factor in debt, particularly student debt loads, which have ballooned for both public and private colleges in recent years. In addition, the income data used for the Census estimates is from 1999, when total expenses for tuition and fees at the average four-year private college were $15,518 per year. For the 2009-10 school year, that number has risen to $26,273, and it continues to increase at a rate higher than inflation.

So, there's a different problem altogether. Income estimates should certainly take major into account, and unless we track some other factors, it should be noted that this data is merely correlative.

Check Your Charity

2011-03-15T00:37:00.000-05:00

Andrea Coombes offers some useful advice for checking out charitable organizations before donating. Very timely, too. In addition to many practical tips for detecting fraud, she offers the following websites:

Whether you plan to text your donation or mail a check, make sure the charity is an established organization. Go to sites such as Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance to vet the charity.

...

File any fraud complaints with the Internet Crime Complaint Center . Known as IC3, the Center is a partnership of the FBI, National White Collar Crime Center and Bureau of Justice Assistance. Also, call the National Center for Disaster Fraud at 1-866-720-5721 to report the fraud.

Excuse Me, I Seem to Have Lost My Sense of Humor

2011-03-14T19:23:00.001-05:00

Have you seen it around anywhere?

(bump) Hey, is this thing on?

2008-01-29T22:35:00.000-06:00

Just checkin'.

Note to the Regulars

2007-07-19T22:48:00.000-05:00

I'd like to get in email contact w/ you.

MJ, I emailed you this evening.

Jean, I've been through your blogs and can't find an email for you. Would you email me at pajamaclad-at-yahoo.com.au, please?

Comrade Toverich, we've exchanged email before, so I should have yours, but it may take a while to find (couldn't find it on your site). If you have a minute, could you email me at the above? If not, or you don't see this (and I understand why folks probably aren't checking this site very often), I will eventually find yours and email you.

Meta-politics 5: The Ends

2007-06-08T19:43:00.000-05:00

Parts one, two, three and four laid out ideas on the principles, plan of action, and goals of the Meta-Party. This post, the last in the series, will focus on what kind of government we want to end up with after our reforms.

There will never be a perfect earthly government. But we can have one more responsible to the people, more comprehensible, more honest, more just than we have now. We can have less government waste, less corruption, and less obstruction. I think this is something the great majority of Americans can agree on.

The strong emotions about the Great Issues of the day won't go away. That will all still be waiting there for us, and at some point this coalition would fall apart. One faction or another would decide the reforms we've achieved will have been good enough, and we can all start back in on our political combat. But it will be with a much better government that will better represent all of us, and act more responsibly for all of us.

And maybe, having worked together on such a project, the members of the partisan sides won't forget that we all can work together to accomplish great things when it's necessary.

Meta-Politics 4: Partiers

2007-06-07T19:33:00.000-05:00

Parts one, two, and three laid out the main points of my idea for the Meta-Party. This post will give my thoughts on who would be needed to start.

Certainly, bloggers who understood and were dedicated to the cause for Meta-Party communications and news . We would need experts, though members could become experts by doing their homework and paying attention to one area. Our experts would need to communicate what they learn to the rest, and also establish relationships with other experts who could be useful.

We would need to communicate to Congress because reform legislation will be a key tool for reform. It would probably be a good idea to have particular members strike up correspondance relationships with congresscritters. (Yeah, we could call them 'lobbyists' or something.) We would need to communicate to the public, both to recruit and to inflame them with the zeal of The Reform Issue Du Jour, so that means more bloggers, YouTube videographers, public speakers, writers of letters to the editor, etc.

And we need an informed, active membership, willing to do a little research on their own (distributed information systems are great), communicate with the group, to respond to calls for communication campaigns (mail, email, phone calls), to donate time or money to candidates as their conscience dictates, and to meet with other members in their area from time to time for fun, friendship and scheming. Or, maybe local meetings are a bad idea. Too much time and opportunity for partisan issues to crop up and cause bad feelings. Maybe separate conservative / progressive gatherings, with the leaders meeting with both groups?

Anyway, the thing is, enough people in all those categories are already wanting reform that, if a group were serious and got the word out, they'd probably have any number of people joining with many of the above skill sets in a fairly short period of time. Creating the 'buzz' to do that is something I've never done before. As you can see from my blog, I've been reduced to a multi-cellular organism in the TTLB Ecosystem. But, I don't see a reason it couldn't be done.

This almost concludes my series on meta-politics. Tomorrow's post will be a brief wrap-up of the topic.

###

Update 6/8/07: Part five is here.

Meta-Politics 3: Objectives

2007-06-06T22:17:00.000-05:00

Meta-Politics 3: Objectives

Part one of this series discussed Meta-Party principles, and then principles we would apply to reforming government.

Part two discussed the opportunity we have right now and laid out the basic methods.

In the comments to part two, adolfo velasquez asked for examples of what such a group might accomplish, outside of Porkbusters. By chance, that is tonight's topic.

Porkbusters is a good example of the type of thing the Meta-Party would concern itself with and the methods it would use. Let's add a few things: Proven reformers would be helped with research, letter writing campaigns, campaign fundraising, re-election assistance (signs, pamphleteering, etc.), and in any other way the Meta-Party could support them. Proven opponents of reform would be hounded and hindered in every legal way.

So, what else would we attempt to do?

Our four principles for government are transparency, comprehensibility, accountability, and effectiveness.

Porkbusters is a good example of an effort toward transparency. Another goal would be the elimination of secret holds, or secret anything unless it supported reform in some way¹. Another would be getting all the government records possible online. Another would be re-starting the effort to declassify classified documents more than 50 years old, which Clinton mismanaged and Bush simply ended. Yet another would be strengthening free speech. Also, simply publicizing what's already reported and making sure key information has an impact, typical reporter / blogger functions, would be part of this.

Toward comprehensibility, Clinton's initiative to require all legislation be in plain English, banning legalese, would be one effort. Another would be to require summaries of all bills to accompany their publication, including all amendments, etc., and that this be put online immediately. Another would be to require both House and Senate to wait a minimum of one day for each 20 pages of a bill before voting on it to give everyone time to read it, with an exception clause in the case of national emergency.

Efforts toward accountability are a bit more complicated to explain, so I'll put them in a list format.

1. Politicians and government employees who commit a crime in office haven't just committed a crime, they have damaged the public's trust in government. My suggestion would be to work for tacking on something like 'breach of public trust' and a mandatory two years in prison (no plea bargains, etc.) for any politician or government employee convicted of committing a felony while in office.
2. Make party leaders in Congress more accountable by flattening the heirarchy within each house of Congress. There is no reason a long-term congressman should have significantly more power than a new one, for the same reason that one set of constituents shouldn't have far more representation than another set.
3. Make bureaucrats more accountable, meaning easier to fire if they obstruct policy. Allow the President and Congress to request investigations of leaks, with leakers forfeiting all contract rights and liable to criminal prosecution. At the same time, strengthen whistleblower laws to protect government employees from abuse.
4. I would also like to make the judiciary more accountable, but I haven't looked into reasonable ideas to do this, and that's probably a dangerous area to go into.

Finally, toward effectiveness, legislation should be put in terms of effect whenever practical. For example, on securing the border, 370 miles of fencing and doubling the Border Patrol are efforts, not effects. It would be better for legislation to include something like 'reduce illegal border crossings by 90%.' This, however, is probably the hardest thing to really know. Luckily, the government itself has agencies that assess such things, and there are other organizations that do as well. Until the Meta-Party could pay for expert studies to be done, publicizing agency and other organization studies on the effects of proposed legislation would be one way to approach this.

As you can see, I'm a bit short of ideas on effectiveness, and I haven't developed any of these ideas. Obviously, a lot of research, study, and thought will have to go into this. I've just started my thoughts on the Meta-Party, but I think it has promise. Any comments?

###

¹For example, in voting for committee heads, a public vote would be nice, but would also allow Democratic and Republican party leaders to punish party members who voted against the leadership's choice. In situations like this, secret ballots would be acceptable.

Update 6/8/07: Part four is here.

Meta-Politics 2: The Opportunity and Method

2007-06-05T22:55:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been a very long day, and it's very late. I have little time, so these ideas are very rough, but here goes.

Bill Whittle at Eject! Eject! Eject! offers a different vision for making a difference. To state it simply, it is to make America better by making Americans better. I think Whittle's vision is good and useful, but it seems like a very long term approach to me. It's one I may participate in, but I think there is another opportunity here that we shouldn't overlook.

In the first post in this series, I outlined some beginning principles. One of those principles is that the concerned group (the Meta-Party) NOT concern itself with issues government concerns itself with, but rather with how the government itself functions. This presents us with a great opportunity: A great many Americans of all political colors are dissatisfied with the way the government works. By avoiding discussions on the greatly divisive issues of the day, we can focus on fixing the government. The Meta-Party platform will appeal broadly to conservatives, progressives, libertarians, atheists, Christians, intellectuals, average people, and dogs and cats¹.

If you've never looked into it before, here is Wikipedia's list of political parties in the US. In addition to individual Democrats and Republicans, I think some of these parties (though certainly not all, and probably not most) would be natural allies for a serious reform movement. There are also a great many Americans who are unaffiliated with any political party. All of these people are unhappy in one way or another with the current political powers and are potential converts.

How does this work?

I'm not proposing another political party. I'm proposing a group of people dedicated to reform that would use whatever power it has, from simple letter-writing to fund-raising and campaigning. The members could maintain political affiliation with the political party of their choice, and if no Meta-Party issue was at stake, would vote their conscience on the issues. I see it organized and directed online, with opinion leaders guiding activities towards, for example, monitoring government activity, organizing rallies, helping get a like-minded candidate elected or a proven reformer re-elected, and always working to expand the circle of members and contributors.

The 'opinion leaders' would not direct or order members to do things. They would apply Meta-Party principles to the current political situation, collect and synthesize data, mediate member information and communication, and work to convert others. All of this could be done concurrently with other political activities.

That's it for tonight. Part 3 is coming up tomorrow.

###

¹Okay, cats, and libertarians, might be a bit polyanna-ish.

Update 6/8/07: Part three is here.

Meta-Politics: A Discussion of Principles

2007-06-04T22:22:00.000-05:00

Our current political parties have all failed, either in the abuse of power by the two major parties, or in abuse of relevance by the minor parties. Jean and others have suggested a new conservative party as an answer to this. I think that's a good idea, but I have another idea first.

The ongoing widespread dissatisfaction in both parties gives us a great opportunity to change how the government itself works. Then we can see if new parties are called for. Toward that end, I suggest we address this as meta-politics, that is, talking about the political process itself rather than the things we achieve with that process. That is the focus of this five-day series.

In doing this, I want to be clear. This is something I've been thinking about for some time, but I don't have the answers. I have ideas that I'm going to set down in a silly blog named A Guy in Pajamas, and hope some of it is actually interesting. These are live issues for me, and I hope the process of writing my ideas out and getting others' responses, thoughts, etc., will help me settle some things and get going.

A second thing I would like to note is that I am not proposing a formal organization, although that may come later. But communicating my ideas requires talking about a group of people dedicated to the same principles, and purely for the sake of convenience I will call that group the Meta-party¹.

Some key concepts for the Meta-party.

Borrowing from Stephen Covey's 7 Habits, we must work within our circle of influence. That is, we must work to change the things we have the power to affect right now.

We must also forget the idea that we are just three or five disaffected individuals. There is deep dissatisfaction across the political spectrum, and that is something we can capitalize on to expand our circle of influence further and further across our circle of concern (things we care about but currently have no / little influence over).

In talking meta-politics, we talk about how politics/government works, not the resulting policies. E.g., the Meta-party would have no official position on the Iraq war, or abortion, or home schooling. These are not the issues for us. How the government and people interact (voting, law enforcement, information flow, etc.), how the members of the government interact (Congressional / Presidential interaction, etc.), how policies are enacted (Senate procedure, pork, etc.), these are our kinds of issues.

Now, some principles to help us bring our goals for government into focus:

Transparency

Comprehensibility

Accountability

Effectiveness

That is where I begin, and that concludes Monday's post on meta-politics. I welcome all comments, chocolate, and beer and edamame. Part 2 tomorrow.

###

¹'Meta-party' could also be 'partying over parties,' a 'to-the-pub!' rallying cry, perhaps? (After our massive election wins here in a few years, no doubt.)

Update 6/8/07: Part two is here.

Chocolate (immigration) Chocolate, Mmmm

2007-06-01T19:26:00.000-05:00

Yeah, we're all comprehensively sick of the immigration bill reforms, so I thought I'd candy-coat it in the title. Sorry.

[Update, June 5: I'm blogging from the hip these days, so I'd forgotten a number of immigration reforms I'd blogged about before. Oh well. I'll leave the following up anyway, but it's not my "final proposal," so to speak, or my best.]

So, here's my counterproposal for your consideration:

1. We cannot deport American citizens. Also, it is wrong to ask poor immigrants to pay a $5000 fine to remain in the country. If a currently illegal alien is the parent or legal guardian of an underage American citizen, they should be granted amnesty and legal residence status, based on filing and paying a reasonable filing fee. Any underage siblings of an underage American citizen should also be granted the same. Finally, if an underage illegal alien has spent three or more years in the US public schools, it would be harsh to force them to return to a school system in their home country where they will have language problems. If their parents and / or guardians have been, except for their illegal presence in the US, law-abiding residents, resident status should also be granted to them. Yeah yeah yeah, it's amnesty, with compassion.

2. Outside of compassion and mercy for the children of illegal aliens, the US cannot reward illegal behavior nor punish those who have gone through the legal process to be here. Illegal aliens ineligible for amnesty will be deported as they are discovered. Additionally, the following steps will be taken: a secure national ID for all, mandatory employer checks before hiring for everyone, and for current employees, within one year. Make the fines for knowingly employing illegals to something like $5000 a head. Illegal aliens must be reported by all, except emergency medical care providers, or be considered accessories. Any "sanctuary" city is denied all federal funds; "sanctuary" is defined by the existance of a law or policy preventing police from asking about legal residence status, investigating same, or taking suspected illegal aliens into custody for checking. Local and state law enforcement agencies will be reimbursed for the expense of investigating, arresting, and holding illegal aliens. All areas along the border passable by 4WD vehicle or easily passable by foot will be fenced. The Border Patrol will be given effective numbers to patrol the border & interdict illegal ingress (with funding provided to double or triple the size, or more if that's determined to be necessary).

3. The American people strongly favor legal, mutually beneficial immigration. The immigration agency should be federally funded (instead of funded by fees as it is now) and immediately double in the number of front line workers; an additional, equal number (effectively tripling the current number) should be hired the following year. For normal green cards, the priority goes to the highly educated, technically proficient, and persecuted minorities, and the immediate families of these groups. Limits on the number of green cards available each year should be drastically raised so that the actual limit is what the agency can process, and of course, they need to have found employment or be joining an employed family member, so the job market would also affect the number admitted each year.

4. A real guest worker program wherein employers state the number of guest workers they need and recruit them at US Government-sponsored recruiting fairs abroad, which would of course include criminal & counter-intelligence background checks. These new employees are given guest worker visas. The limit should be based on the number of jobs offered, possibly with a very high annual maximum (one million / year, 4 million maximum? or, 3 million / year, 12 million maximum? or ...?). The guest worker visas are good for two years and are renewable once dependent on employer satisfaction and no criminal activity. Immediate families may come after one year. After four years, the guest worker visas can be converted into green cards with two additional years needed before the immigrant can apply for citizenship (this actually means it would take six years, instead of the standard five). Only natives of the Americas, and select oppressed minorities from other areas, qualify.

5. Points of precedence: From allied nation, from democratic nation, from the Americas, non-violent oppressed minority. Each point moves the applicant up in the line.

6. Religious visas should not be exempt from FSO judgment calls. No religious visas for anti-American polemicists.

7. Reciprocity w/ Mexico and other countries that supply large numbers of immigrants. That is, we would ask Mexico, on pain of ending their participation in the guest worker program, to exempt US citizens from their draconian immigration and legal resident laws, allowing them to own land near or on the coast, own businesses, demonstrate, etc.

Hey, it's all rough, but whaddya think?

Nationalism, Blogging, and, a Poll

2007-05-30T19:03:00.000-05:00

The former Foreign Service Officer once known as New Sisyphus has left that blog and begun a new one: New Nationalist. He is writing, among other things, a series of posts titled Nationalism 101, and one of those posts echo things I've been hearing a lot, and things I've been struggling with myself. That post is How Do We Even Start? It's a longish post, and I've excerpted just the barest essentials for quick reference. Please don't rely on this excerpt: Read the whole thing at New Nationalist, then come back. I'll wait here. Go on.

Quick excerpt:

... it becomes clearer and clearer that the scope of the problem facing Nationalists is truly astounding to behold. We are a tiny minority, outnumbered, outgunned and barely heard ... I keep considering it and considering it over and over and I keep coming up with the same answer: that nothing short of a popular movement is necessary, one that openly and honestly says, in effect, that the current USG does not speak for us and must be replaced.

...

But, you know, the time for reform has come and gone. It ain't gonna work. We need root and branch re-establishment under the watchful gaze of an energized populace led by people who get it.

...

Now, look: no amount of reform at this point is going to save the universties from the "Professor" Bakers of the world. It doesn't matter how well-intentioned the reformers are, these people, these interests are *entrenched* and it's going to take force to remove them. And I believe the moral and political justification for using such force is clear.

...

Now: Over to you. What are your thoughts? How do we even start fighting back with the odds so far against us? Do we even bother?

From next Monday, June 4, and continuing through Friday, I will blog about one issue each day that I believe such a movement would need to address. Prior to that, I may (or may not) post background or other relevant material. If the conversation gives me more thoughts, I may continue the following week as well. Let's see what happens.

Just to be clear, I'm not sure what New Nationalist means when he talks about requiring force, but I DO NOT and WILL NOT advocate or be party to violence or criminal acts. However, there is no doubt in my mind that a new movement is not only necessary, but about to begin, whether we are part of it or not. A few politicians, like Tom Coburn, have had a whiff of it, but most seem utterly unaware. And I say, that's a good time to flank and crush those who would oppose us.

Now, the poll. It's not a formal poll. I just want to know, if you were to answer New Nationalist's question, what would you say, or, what questions would you ask instead of or to enhance his. The comments are open, but certainly it would be great if others blogged about this. If you blog about it, please trackback here, or leave the permalink to your post in my comments.

Out of the Frying Pan ...

2007-05-15T20:39:00.000-05:00

I survived the semester and am now immersed in work. This too should quiet down a bit in a couple of weeks.

Thanks to everyone who dropped by and commented. And for Veeshir, wouldn't it be more interesting if I didn't make it and commented anyway? I mean, a disembodied blogger could be kinda cool ...

Meanwhile, I'm making up slogans for a new US immigration policy. How's about this one:

Make them ALL Legal -- Annex Mexico!

I may survive the semester

2007-04-26T20:53:00.000-05:00

We'll see.

Haiku Syllables

2007-02-16T09:28:00.000-06:00

Haiku is often described as having 17 syllables. However, while that may be linguistically correct, it's not the same as 17 English syllables. The Japanese actually count characters, and most of their characters do indeed count as syllables. E.g., ka, ki, ku, sa, ta, etc. However, there are a number of characters that would not count as English syllables. For example, 'n,' as in, 'joudan.' In English, 'joudan' has two syllables, but in Japanese counting, it has four - jo-u-da-n. Another such is a stop: 'matte' is a good example, with the second 't' representing a stop. In English it would be something like 'ma' (pause) 'te'. Two English syllables, three Japanese characters. Because of this, Japanese haiku tend to have about one third fewer words than English haiku, and the genre in Japan has a very different feel than in the English speaking world.

To use the most famous haiku as an example:

furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

transliterates to:

old pond, a frog leaps in water's sound

Partly because of that different feel, and also partly because rhythm is important in Japanese haiku, some haikuists who write in English count accented syllables, using a 2-3-2 format. This much more closely approximates the length and feel of Japanese haiku.

This post was inspired by a post at Assistant Village Idiot, who often has interesting things to say about language.

Poster Girl on the Wrong Side of the World

2007-02-13T23:29:00.000-06:00

Beccy Cole

A tribute to the diggers fighting alongside us in Iraq.

Mug tip to Soldier’s Dad over at Milblogs.

Siesta for your Life!

2007-02-12T22:14:00.000-06:00

Siesta cuts risk of heart disease, says study

Does life get any better? I mean, recently we’ve found that alcohol and chocolate are both good for you, and now siestas!

Allahu Akbar!

neo-neocon

2007-02-11T00:33:00.000-06:00

I've been spending a lot of my blog reading time over at neo-neocon lately. Neo's writings are insightful, well-written, and thought-provoking. Lately, I've enjoyed her series on the hatred of neo-cons, but her posts on Robert Frost have stirred the poet in me, and I've enjoyed just about everything of hers I've read.

Like Neo, I used to much more closely associate with the left/liberal side of the aisle. The barbarism of the 9/11 attacks initiated a series of changes that led Neo to try out neo-conservatism. Unlike her, my change in beliefs came gradually, over a period of years spent living outside the US and dealing both personally and professionally on a daily basis with an educated and international crowd, including Japanese, Europeans of various nationalities, Australians, New Zealanders, Chinese, Taiwanese, and various assorted Southeast Asians.

Having a high level of exposure to non-American media and socializing with a broad international crowd, I was well aware of the rising levels of anti-Americanism throughout the latter half of the 1990s and knew it did not originate with our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The cries of 'Bush is Hitler,' 'Bush lied, people died,' and 'No blood for oil,' were merely an outgrowth of an already well-established anti-Americanism that assumed the only reason the US does anything is for financial gain and that the US government, most particularly US presidents, are always lying and covering up for their capitalist imperialist buddies/masters in the corporate world.

One example of this was the campaign to demonize the US for its use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions in Desert Storm. This was an ongoing and increasingly important campaign even though the DOD, EU, UN, WHO and other agencies have confirmed that the only dangers from DU are pretty much the same as from any heavy metal, including lead. (DU is actually used as radiation shielding.) Nevertheless, activists intent on painting the US as a genocidal monster interviewed Iraqi doctors, took photos and video of deformed Iraqi infants and children, and spread these around the world via the Internet. The doctors, of course, claimed the deformities were clearly the result of the American use of DU in Desert Storm. Those spreading these stories never mentioned the Iraqi intelligence officials in the room, who were never photographed or otherwise noted. Desert Storm was portrayed as another Hiroshima, with the US inflicting a nuclear holocaust on innocent Iraqi civilians. Propaganda campaigns like these were a constant presence in my time outside the US. That was one factor behind my posts about anti-Americanism.

At the same time, I also watched events in the Middle East. Arafat, with the intifada, proved he had no intention of negotiating in good faith, that like the North Vietnamese his negotiations were only to get more support for his violence. And it worked. He controlled billions up until a couple of years before he died. The Arabs in general (there were exceptions), including Saddam, were clearly supporting Palestinian terrorism, not peacemaking, and seemed willing to fight to the last Palestinian rather than recognize Israel. They very successfully used the Palestinian conflict as a political tool against the US. That was its true value for them and why there would never be a negotiated settlement.

Iraq was actually quite similar. Saddam spent Oil-for-Food money on weapons, palaces, mosques, bribes, etc., rather than on food and medicine for his people. At the same time, he and many media sources blamed the US for the deaths of Iraqis who didn't have enough food or proper medical care. This was an increasing movement as well, with more and more coming out about the suffering of the Iraqi people, the blame being laid at the feet of America, and charges of genocide being hurled on a regular basis by America's more strident opponents. Saddam's unwillingness to honestly go through the disarmament process he had agreed to in the 1991 ceasefire agreement, culminating in Richard Butler's decision to leave Iraq, showed that Saddam most likely still had WMDs, or programs to build them, and that he would never give that up willingly. His well-documented ties to terrorist organizations and desire for revenge against the US made it probable that he would support future terrorism against the US. Bill Clinton and the US Congress made regime change in Iraq national policy, but did not do very much about it.

9/11 was a confirming experience for me. While abroad, I had heard over and over how much people (often put as 'everyone') hated the US, and watching the second tower get hit on CNN I saw the natural results of the propaganda campaigns, the millions in laundered funds sloshing around the Middle East, and the complicity of some government or governments.

I have never identified myself as a neo-conservative. After my experiences abroad, I stopped trying to fit myself into some movement, and have both benefitted and felt a lack from that decision. That said, I find it easy to empathize with Neo. Her writing has taught me things, clarified some issues for me, and provided an intellectual environment within which to think and discuss. Even her opponents in the comments tend to be intelligent and reasonable, a rarity it seems. If I don't seem to post much here at times, you can probably find me in the comments at her place.

Top 10 Reasons America Should Convert To Islam

2007-01-28T17:58:00.000-06:00

10. We would become the most influential Muslim nation in the world.
9. We could attack other Muslim states with impunity.
8. As the most powerful Muslim state, we should control the Muslim holy sites. (How do you say, 'this isn't an invasion, it's a hajj with high volumes of celebratory gunfire' in Arabic?)
7. Our Muslim enemies would either become our friends, or (once again) vow to destroy us. Either way, nothing lost and possibly something gained.
6. Anti-Americanism would suddenly be Islamaphobic and untenable.
5. France would love us again.
4. We would have a wonderful chance to change Islam from the inside.
3. Our spiritual leaders could issue fatwas.
2. As the victims of aggressive cultural imperialism, we'd be entitled to all of the above.

And the number one reason America should convert to Islam: ~~BELLY DANCERS!~~ We'd demonstrate our commitment to deep cultural sensitivity.

Just a Question

2007-01-04T13:43:00.000-06:00

for anyone saying that US assistance in Iraq is creating dependency, therefore we need to pull out so the Iraqis can get up and carry their own weight.

Sir or madam, given your view on our presence in Iraq, what is your position on social welfare and affirmative action?

Happy New Year!

2007-01-04T13:34:00.000-06:00

I hope everyone had a great one.

I visited family, which is the best thing I can think of to do. What did everyone else do?

Saw two excellent movies: The Polar Express, and Secondhand Lions. I highly recommend both of them. Interestingly, they have a similar message ...

Merry Christmas!

2006-12-24T10:50:00.000-06:00

Have a great one!

Comedies

2006-12-09T19:21:00.000-06:00

I'm looking for good comedies to watch this winter. Whaddya think?

Some of my favorites in the past, in no particular order, have been

Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Better Off Dead

The Princess Bride

Time Bandits

A Christmas Story

Young Frankenstein

Good Morning, Vietnam

A Fish Called Wanda

Any others that I absolutely must see?

Fun & Games After the Election

2006-11-09T23:56:00.000-06:00

I'm not a regular over at Treacher's, but this deserves a look. Here's a brief taste (from the comments, no less - it's all good!):

I am pretty surprised myself. I thought we were supposed to be running a highly efficient fascist regime here. And now, we can't even win an election? I mean, I've read all the research. What happened with suspending the electoral process? Why is constitution still in effect? What about our plans to declare martial law? Suspend Congress? We are doing none of it. And I was looking forward to coronation, too. :( Bummer.

Then there's A Large Regular, where we get an interview with ol' Don Rumsfeld:

Rummy: I always have time for my friends Chris. As far as feeling bitter towards the President - goodness no. I serve at the pleasure of the President and have offered my resignation a number of times. If truth be told - I'm a little bit in awe. I mean I don't think I've seen such a fine piece of political Jujitsu in my whole time in public service.

ALR: Political Jujitsu? I'm sorry Mr. Secretary but I don't follow you.

(Read the rest, as they say.)

Ace of Spades has a thread with more than 1200 comments. Amazing. Here's how it starts:

I just bought a huge solar panel. Casey/Pisslousy/Kennedy promised 2 years of sunshine. Stock up on these now people, no clouds for two years ...

Lots of funny stuff, also lots of mediocre/bad/just plain foul stuff, but a good percentage of laughs. (Really, serious foul language alert.)

This is the right attitude after a loss, folks. No conspiracy theories, immediate recognition that our guys messed up, and lots of humor. As for my experience on November 8, well, I woke up to rainbows, bunny rabbits were playing in the yard, someone left a pot o' gold on the doorstep, I won a lifetime supply of Guinness, and that cute Korean girl I've had my eye on slipped me her phone number. Thanks, Nancy!

Update: And then, of course, we have ... Ted Rall:

As ugly secrets surface, Bushists will turn desperate. Democracy has failed their grand schemes; token resignations like Rumsfeld's come too little, too late. Only tyranny can save their skins. Will the beleaguered neocons led by Cheney and Bush, cornered like rats, unleash their brand-new police state on their political opponents? Or will they tough it out and suck up the fines and prison sentences to come? The next year or two could go either way.

The nightmare is not over.

Yep, the literary version of the suicide bomber. Stand back folks, auto-parody ain't pretty.

Reality, or Alternate Reality?

2006-11-09T22:52:00.000-06:00

In contrast to my Nov. 4 post, Iraq vet Austin Bay states we've pretty much won in Iraq:

I know, the NY Times and John Kerry have told us Iraq is a disaster. No. The US has already gotten about 90 percent of what it needed on September 12, 2001. There’s a democratically elected government in the potentially most powerful (predominantly) Arab Muslim nation, a government trying to learn to crawl under the most trying conditions. It’s a government that is learning by doing — and learning often by failure. However, as long as the US and coalition remain around to coach, train, and respond to crisis, Iraqi failures will be controlled failures.

Yup. Fostering the development of choice in the Middle East — a choice other than tyranny or terror– is a tough process.

As I see it, we can win in two ways.

The quick way, which is obliterating cities or sections of cities where resistance is high -- Yes, carpetbomb them, take out everything, man-woman-and-child, in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Khan. I don't advocate choice number one. We don't need to do this to win, and doing it without it being a dire necessity is mass murder.

Or, number two, the long way. Outlast them, in the same way the British outlasted the IRA. It took 30+ years for the IRA to get tired of fighting and not getting anywhere before they negotiated a real peace. Iraq will work the same way.

The wild card is WMDs -- if the j-team nukes a US city while we're trying to outlast them, what do we do?

[Note: This post was edited for clarity after its initial posting.]

Saddam Sentenced to Hang

2006-11-05T19:47:00.000-06:00

Assuming the execution is carried out, I wonder how it will change the scene in Iraq.

Pajamas Media Roundup

What About the Iraq War Now?

2006-11-04T21:37:00.000-06:00

This is a lo-o-ong post, but one I need to do. It is more a gathering, a juxtaposition, than it is an analysis. If you want to know what I think ... I'm in grad school, and I haven't been paying attention to much beyond that. It's strange, feeling this disconnected. Many disturbing opinions, many changes ...

Zeyad, at Healing Iraq:

Monday, October 16, 2006
Another close friend of mine has been killed in Baghdad. We had lunch together in Baghdad just days before I left.

I can't concentrate on anything any more. I should not be here in New York running around a stupid neighbourhood, asking people about their 'issues'.

I now officially regret supporting this war back in 2003. The guilt is too much for me to handle.

New Sisyphus:

As a regular reader over at The Corner, one of the darker pleasures of the past year has been to watch how the regular commentators there have approached the obvious failure of our war policy in Iraq. It seems to me the responses there have divided the Cornerites into three distinct camps.

For the first camp, led by NR editor Rich Lowry, the response has been to argue the Administration's corner more loudly, though peppered with disclaimers like "if the idea here is to [insert highly improbable "secret" policy goal here] this may have the effect of stabilizing Baghdad, an important first step towards...." This ever more desperate posing is an outgrowth of the early years in the war when 85% of conservative commentators dismissed obvious signs of Bush's weakness in war matters by referring to a "secret plan," combined with an appeal to partisanship.

...

The second camp are the Second Thoughters, led by Jonah Goldberg. These are the Cornerites who supported the war from the beginning but now realize that it is objectively a failure. Thus, they are in favor of publicly saying so. However, goes the *brilliant* analysis, since we are already in theatre in force we have no choice but to see it though, for to do otherwise would be to admit defeat.

...

The third camp are the To Hell With Them Hawks, led by John Derbyshire. This group doesn't give a goddamn about Islamic democracy; they want to win. They know who the enemy is and the only response they have to him is to put him up against a wall and shoot him, preferably in full view of the cameras.

...

What is the significance of all this?

Precisely this: That was once a minority tendency in the conservative movement is now gaining more and more adherents, as the reality we face becomes ever more clear. As it dawns on more people that the very method by which we are fighting this war is fatally wrong-headed, those people will begin to demand a change in strategy.

And Mr. Sisyphus links to an interesting article by Ralph Peters in USA Today:

Iraq is failing. No honest observer can conclude otherwise. Even six months ago, there was hope. Now the chances for a democratic, unified Iraq are dwindling fast. The country's prime minister has thrown in his lot with al-Sadr, our mortal enemy. He has his eye on the future, and he's betting that we won't last. The police are less accountable than they were under Saddam. Our extensive investment in Iraqi law enforcement only produced death squads. Government ministers loot the country to strengthen their own factions. Even Iraq's elections — a worthy experiment — further divided Iraq along confessional and ethnic lines. Iraq still exists on the maps, but in reality it's gone. Only a military coup — which might come in the next few years — could hold the artificial country together.

This chaos wasn't inevitable. While in Iraq late last winter, I remained soberly hopeful. Since then, the strength of will of our opponents — their readiness to pay any price and go to any length to win — has eclipsed our own. The valor of our enemies never surpassed that of our troops, but it far exceeded the fair-weather courage of the Bush administration.

Yet, for all our errors, we did give the Iraqis a unique chance to build a rule-of-law democracy. They preferred to indulge in old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption. It appears that the cynics were right: Arab societies can't support democracy as we know it. And people get the government they deserve.

Omar, at Iraq the Model:

The situation is bad in Iraq, it's bad for both Iraqis and Americans alike and looking at the way the war is being managed right now makes me extremely worried about the future of our world. I am that worried that I feel I, or the next generations of my people, won't be safe in this world even if we were born and lived elsewhere.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Iraq might turn into a second Somalia within a year if the situation is allowed to keep descending the way it's doing now.
The Islamic Sharia courts are ruling now in Somalia while in Iraq they function undercover and it's still in our hands to stop them from extending their influence and from becoming the rule instead of the exception they are today.

Let's call the battle for middle east, and I think politicians do not need anyone to explain to them what this part of the world means…the outcome of war in Iraq does not affect Iraq alone, a victory means disrupting the ring of terror and extremism the enemies are trying to establish while failure would be equal to allowing them to establish that huge ring, or should I say that gigantic octopus of terrorists and terror-supporting regimes that would extend from Afghanistan in the east to Libya in the west and from Iraq in the north to Sudan and Somalia in the south.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Not long ago, abdication — from Rwanda or Haiti, or from the Balkans for a decade — not intervention, was the supposed sin. There were dozens of Darfurs in the 1990s, when charges flew of moral indifference. The supposition then — as now — was that those who called for boots on the ground to stop a genocide would not unlikely be the first to abdicate responsibility once the coffins came home and the military was left fighting an orphaned war.

Apparently all the high-minded talk of reform — Aristotle rightly scoffed about morality being easy in one’s sleep — was predicated only on cost-free war from 30,000 feet. Now the wisdom is that Colin Powell — the supposed sole sane and moral voice of the present administration — was drowned out by shrill neocon chicken hawks. But that was not the consensus of the 1990s. In both books and journalism, he was a Hamlet-like figure who paused before striking the needed blow, and so was pilloried by the likes of a Michael Gordon or Madeline Albright for not using the full force of the American military to intervene for moral purposes. That was then, and this is now, and in-between we have a costly war in Iraq that has taken the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans.

Finally, Dan Gordon tells us about our new, vicious pet:

I know you don’t like Bush. I don’t like Bush. Nobody likes Bush. Fair enough. He lied to you. He mangles the language. You can’t trust him. He’s in hock to Haliburton. He has some weird daddy complex. Whatever you want to believe about him, believe it. Fair enough. You win. No arguments.

And you don’t like the war. You were lied to. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Bush and the neocons made it all up. They duped us. They duped you. They duped me. They duped Hillary and Kerry. They duped us all. Dupe, dupe, dupe, dupe, dupe. Done deal. Not only did they dupe us, but they dicked it up, made every mistake in the book.

Pick whatever argument you like. They should have had more troops. They should have had less troops. They should have listend to Chalabi. They shouldn’t have listened to Chalibi. Bremer was right. Bremer was wrong. Rumsfeld’s a bozo. Bozo could have done a better job. I’ll sign on to any part of it you like. They said this is a part of the war on terror, and of course that’s a lie too.

Ooops.

What do you mean, oops?

Well, what I mean is that part is actually true.

What part?

The part about Iraq being a part of the war on terror.

You’ve got to be kidding. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11! There was no connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda!

Maybe not, but there is now.

Well, who’s fault is that?

Doesn’t matter.

What do you mean it doesn’t matter?

I mean, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how we got there. It doesn’t matter how you think you were lied to. It doesn’t matter if you think there was a connection between Sadam and Al-Qaeda. The only thing that matters now is that both Al-Qaeda and Iran and the terrorist groups they back and inspire believe that Iraq is their decisive battle. They have chosen it as the place where they will defeat America, and unlike the Viet Cong, they will not stay put. They will follow us home.

Shalash Al-Iraqi

2006-11-04T20:51:00.000-06:00

Zeyad gives us some interesting stories from Shalash the Iraqi, who lives in Sadr City:

His columns first appeared on the Iraqi online opinion website Kitabat in December 2005. They were written from the perspective of an everyday Iraqi living in Sadr City - or Al-Thawra, as he calls it, using the pre-Saddam name of the district. Shalash’s style was gritty, streetwise, brutally honest but extremely humourous. He uses colloquial and slang terms in his writing, which appealed to a wide section of Iraqi readers who identified with him.

The characters of his short stories ranged from his opportunistic uncle, Haji Shnawa, who danced for both Saddam in the past and now Sadr; the former sergeant in the Iraqi army on his street who became a corrupt Sadrist cleric; Khanjar, the local troublemaker; Khadija, the young teacher that he often daydreams about her paying attention to his romantic moves; the old lady who sells groceries and campaigns for the Shi’ite electoral list; pickpockets; porters; Mahdi Army thugs; and so on.

No one is spared of his sharp criticism. He persistently jabs Iraqi governmental officials, revered clerics, insurgents, militias, Arab leaders and Americans. Even Madonna has been a subject for one of his recent stories, in which he asks her to adopt him so he can be saved from the Mahdi Army and instead become neighbours with Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz.

Translations of some of Shalash's stories follow that.

A Quick Answer To Mideast Violence

2006-10-18T09:59:00.000-05:00

Ban caffeinated beverages and require every adult male to have two stiff drinks before leaving work, or first thing in the morning for the unemployed.

Avast!

2006-09-18T22:41:00.000-05:00

Talk Like a Pirate Day has snuck up on me.

Wikipedia entry
Find Yer Piratin' Name
Piratese translater
Corsair Ergonomic Keyboard
Knit like a pirate!
Another knit like a pirate site!
Talk Like a German Pirate
The Talk Like A Pirate Day Blog
Yet Another Talk Like A Pirate Day Blog
Official US Pirate HQ
Official UK Pirate HQ
Official Oz Pirate HQ

Freedom Walk OKC and Luke Stricklin

2006-09-11T23:34:00.000-05:00

Went to the Freedom Walk this evening. (Missed the entire speech at the Murrah Memorial, so can't say anything about that.) There were a guesstimated 150 troops marching, and probably two hundred or so civilians, though I'm no expert in crowd counting and wouldn't be too surprised to hear it was more or less.

The main reason I went was to see Luke Stricklin play the songs he wrote during his year in Baghdad with the Army National Guard.

Stricklin didn't give any speeches, just a little background on his own songs, and a thanks to the troops. He sang a little Merle, Waylon, and Willie, and two of his own songs written while in Iraq. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was good to see him live.

(PS His band was good, too, but seemed to be a pickup band, not a regular group.)

I guess for journalistic purposes I should mention that Great Divide, a rockin' country band, played next. They were good and played hard.

PS Photos will be forthcoming, but I'm having problems with my photo hosting service.

2006 October 18: Nope, no photos forthcoming. It seems I can't access my flicker account, and I don't have time to go through all the nonsense to get them posted right now.

Remember, or Never Forget?

2006-09-11T23:04:00.000-05:00

Why are we not supposed to forget 9/11? Is it so that the victims will never be forgotten? And maybe a few heroes as well? A DJ on the radio today said, "It's been five years since nine eleven, but we're still proud to be Americans."

What the heck does that mean? Ya know, I was proud to be an American before it was the "in" thing, before we could classify ourselves as a victim group. But we're STILL proud. Was that pride supposed to go away? Oh, but we're still hanging on, stretching this out as lo-o-o-ng as we can! Is that the sentiment?

I got into a brief argument with a friend over seeing United 93. He refused to see it.

"Yeah, it's all about 'oh, we can't ever forget the poor victims, waaaa waaaa waaaa.' The crybabies," was his basic argument.

"No," I replied, "It's not that at all. It's 'Remember Pearl Harbor!'"

We restated our positions a few times, glared at each other, dropped it, and carried on with a pleasant evening.

So which is it? Never forget, waaa waaa waaa? Or Remember!

Good for a Few Laughs

2006-06-30T00:56:00.000-05:00

Hatemonger's Quarterly makes nice with the Dixie Chicks.

Thanks, Kenny.

Just One More on Illegals?

2006-06-04T22:10:00.000-05:00

We-ellllllllll, I had just about decided that Bush probably mostly knew what he was doing on this immigration thing, ya know, since Fox is the best bet we have for a Mexican president and we want him to get re-elected; we need an economically strong Mexico right now and their second-biggest source of income is remittances from the US; we need Mexican help / cooperation on a range of issues such as terrorism, illegal drugs, etc.; and 12 million illegals could do a lot of damage on their way out; when I read One More Essay on Immigration*.

Oh, heck. He's right that this isn't a crisis, and there's no need to pass legislation right now. We can afford to take our time and do it right. He may be right about the rest of it, too, which is kinda scary. Go see what you folks think.

###

*I also had a conversation this afternoon that made me rethink a bit, but this essay smacked me upside the head.

(Mug tip to Consul-at-Arms.)

Michael Yon Plagiarized by SHOCK Magazine

2006-06-04T22:06:00.000-05:00

One of his photos was used without permission for the cover of their premier issue.

SHOCK is owned by HFM, which also publishes American Photo, Boating, Car and Driver, Cycle World, ELLE, ELLE Decor, ELLEgirl, Flying, For Me, Home, Metropolitan Home, Popular Photography & Imaging, Premiere, Road & Track, Road & Track Road Gear, Road & Track Speed, Sound & Vision, Woman’s Day and Woman’s Day Special Interest Publications.

Outright theft.

A Guy In Pajamas

Still on the AGW Bandwagon

Progressive Economics: The Case of Northern Europe

Today's Links of Interest

Today's Links of Interest

Today's Links of Interest

Wall Street Vs. Government Responsibility for Economic Crisis

Today's Links of Interest

The Politics of Raising Cain

Discussions of Cain's 999 Plan

Cain Picks Up Support

Today's Links of Interest

Illegal Students

Today's Links of Interest

Today's Links of Interest

Today's Links of Interest

Today's Links of Interest

Hayek & Keynes

Palin and Crony Capitalism, or Fascism

What is the Tea Party?

A Sickness in America?

Today's Links of Interest

Today's Links of Interest

Today's Links of Interest

Learn Liberty

Today's Links of Interest

Today's Links of Interest

Today's Links of Interest

Assessing Rick Perry

The Bowles-Simpson Report

Terrorism. Tea Party. Hobbits. Sorted Out by Sgt. Mom.

Today's Links of Interest

Give the Democrats the Higher Taxes They Want

Hypocrisy from 'Restoring Civility'

Civility in Politics

Anti-Tea Party Vitriol

Today's Links of Interest

Today's Links of Interest

Today's Links of Interest

Paul Ryan's Plan

Taxes

Webmail Software Comparison

Update on Going Without Google

Today's Links of Interest

Yet Another Deception on the Internet

Escaping Google

Links on Israel-Arab Issues

Cultural Diversity

xkcd is cool, but

Mankiw Advising Romney

Progressive Bigotry

Today's Links of Interest

First and foremost in terms of interest, Diplomad gives us a must-read story of true-life international diplomacy (well, poetically true) in Across the River.

TIGTA: IRS Did Not Follow Law in 38% of Seizures of Taxpayer Property

UCLA professor shows liberal media distorts news bias:

Update: finance professor John H. Cochrane writes that QE2 basically did nothing but put us deeper in debt.

Senators Obama and Coburn Teamed Up to Track Government Spending

Articles on the War on Drugs

Post Script to the Birther Issue

The Birther *GAG* Issue

More Financial Crisis Articles

Economics Blogs

2008 Financial Crisis Link Dump

Lawrence O'Donnell Takes on Condoleezza Rice

Links of Interest

Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years

Links of Interest

10 Ex-Chairs: Unsustainable Budget Deficit a Threat to US

Happy St. Patty's Day!

Links of Interest

Will College Pay Off?

Check Your Charity

Excuse Me, I Seem to Have Lost My Sense of Humor

(bump) Hey, is this thing on?

Note to the Regulars

Meta-politics 5: The Ends

Meta-Politics 4: Partiers

Meta-Politics 3: Objectives

Meta-Politics 2: The Opportunity and Method

Meta-Politics: A Discussion of Principles

The Birther GAG Issue