Quotulatiousness

February 28, 2012

More on those links between Pakistan’s ISI and army leaders and the Taliban

Filed under: Asia, India, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

Strategy Page has a useful summary of the state of play in Pakistan in their oft-denied support of terrorist activities in Afghanistan and in India:

Pakistan officially denies there is any direct connection between the Pakistani Army, ISI (Pakistani intelligence) and Islamic terrorists. The government has recently admitted that Islamic terrorists have had cooperation from unnamed prominent Pakistani civilians. But a growing number of former (mostly retired) military and intelligence admit that the terrorist connections did exist. Few of these men will openly admit these connections, lest they endure retaliation. The army and ISI are known to kidnap and murder critics. Pakistan is living a dream/nightmare of having created and sustained Islamic terror organizations for decades, yet never admitting the role of the government in this. The denials are wearing thin.

Pakistan remains a much more violent place than India. Each month, there are 5-10 times as many terrorism related deaths in Pakistan as in India (a country with six times as many people as Pakistan). Most of the violence is (and always has been) in the Pushtun and Baluchi tribal territories along the Afghan and Iranian borders. These lands have always been poor (except for the recently discovered natural gas in Baluchistan, and, centuries ago, some parts of the Chinese “silk road” that passed through Pushtun lands) and the local empires simply ignored the Pushtuns and Baluchis. For thousands of years, these were the “badlands” that civilized people avoided. The many Baluchi and Pushtun tribes were too isolated from each other, and in love with their own independence, to allow formation of Baluchi and Pushtun states. But the Baluchis are overcoming their differences, much to the discomfort of Pakistan. The Pushtuns are as divided as ever, united only in their hostility to outsiders (a category which sometimes includes other Pushtun tribes.) Worse for the Pushtuns, they form the majority of the Taliban, and are far more into Islamic terrorism than the Baluchis.

[. . .]

Pakistan’s army and intelligence services have been taking a lot of international heat for the years of state-approved terrorism against tribal separatists in Baluchistan (southwest Pakistan). The Baluchis want autonomy and a larger share of the revenues from natural gas operations in their lands. The ISI and army have ordered the media they control to come up with stories to explain all the kidnappings and murders of tribal activists. The general story line is that the violence (against the government, as well as the tribal activists) has been organized by Israel, the CIA and other foreign intelligence agencies. Few Pakistanis will openly criticize these stories, as that could get you killed. But the true story does get out via the Internet, although you sometimes have to wade through a lot of noise (flame wars and Pakistani government efforts to bury critical posts with a flood of pro-government replies.)

Did Greece get bailed out or did it default? A little from column A and a bit from column B

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Greece, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Detlev Schlichter explains what happened in the “big fat Greek bailout”:

Greece was bailed out for the second time in four months. Or did it default? Well, a bit of both, I guess.

All bondholders are equal. But some are more equal than others. If you are the ECB, your Greek bonds were exchanged, par for par, for new Greek bonds, and you can go on pretending that they are worth their principal amount. You won’t have to report a loss for now. But if you are a ‘private’ entity — and that is a rather loosely used term these days as it includes the banking industry which is either now partially owned by the state or to a considerable degree dependent on ongoing support from the lender-of-last resort — more than half your Greek investment was wiped out. So Greece defaulted. But as you ‘agreed’ to the ‘haircut’ it was in fact a ‘voluntary restructuring’, although you really had no choice.

[. . .]

I guess we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Greece’s economic model is fundamentally unsustainable, whichever way you cut it. Greece has been living beyond its means for a long time, and has managed to do so by flying under air-cover of the EMU project and with the tailwind of cheap credit and easy money. Spending by the Greek state accounts for more than half of registered economic activity, and a third of the workforce is employed by the public sector. ‘Activities’ are being subsumed under the heading of ‘Greek GDP’ that nobody would voluntarily pay for, that are to a large degree wasteful, and that are simply unaffordable under anything but the most bizarrely generous credit conditions, i.e. precisely those that Greece enjoyed from 2001 to 2008. Easy money has been used to paper over grave economic imbalances. Some of what is generously labelled ‘GDP’ should be discontinued — and fast.

To even suggest that such an economic model would be manageable if Greece, a country with about three quarters of the population of metropolitan Los Angeles but with less than half of L.A.’s GDP, only had its own paper currency and could inflate and devalue to its heart’s content, is economically illiterate. No country ever prospered by running budget deficits funded by the printing press or by creating domestic inflation. Devaluing your currency may give your exporters a shot in the arm — for about five minutes. But it scares your domestic savers away for years to come and severely diminishes your ability to keep or attract capital, the backbone of any sustainable economic model. To even try and attempt to ‘inflate away’ a debt load worth 160 percent of a generously calculated GDP would cause economic damage of gigantic proportion. One must have swallowed the Keynesian mythology of deficit-spending whole to believe that the country could borrow and print itself out of this mess. A proper default on its existing debt and rebuilding from a lower base — but with a hard currency — are the better options.

February 26, 2012

The Freeman: An open letter to statists everywhere

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

In a posting from twelve years ago, Lawrence W. Reed has some questions he’d like statists to answer:

You clever guys are always coming up with new schemes for government to do this or that, to address this issue or solve that problem, or fill some need somewhere. You get us limited-government people bogged down in the minutiae of how your proposed programs are likely to work (or not work), and while we’re doing the technical homework you seldom do, you demonize us as heartless number crunchers who don’t care about people.

Sometimes we all get so caught up in the particulars that we ignore the big picture. I propose that we step back for a moment. Put aside your endless list of things for government to do and focus on the whole package. I need some thoughtful answers to some questions that maybe, just maybe, you’ve never thought much about because you’ve been too wrapped up in the program du jour.

At the start of the 1900s, government at all levels in America claimed about 5 percent of personal income. A hundred years later, it takes more than 40 percent — up by a factor of eight. So my first questions to you are these: Why is this not enough? How much do you want? Fifty percent? Seventy percent? Do you want all of it? To what extent do you believe a person is entitled to what he (or she) has earned?

[. . .]

This raises a whole series of related questions about how you see the nature of government and what you’ve learned, if anything, from our collective experiences with it. I see the ideal government as America’s founders did — in Washington’s words, a “dangerous servant” employing legalized force for the purpose of preserving individual liberties. As such, it is charged with deterring violence and fraud and keeping itself small, limited, and efficient. How can you profess allegiance to peace and nonviolence and at the same time call for so much forcible redistribution?

Disaster preparedness, Wyoming style

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Wyoming legislators are serious about their state being prepared for disaster:

State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States.

House Bill 85 passed on first reading by a voice vote. It would create a state-run government continuity task force, which would study and prepare Wyoming for potential catastrophes, from disruptions in food and energy supplies to a complete meltdown of the federal government.

The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.

H/T to Hit & Run where they comment with just the right level of absurdity: “The aircraft carrier is a nice touch. I suppose if it’s a big enough disaster, Wyoming might become a coastal state.”

Update, 29 February: Sadly the bill failed on third reading, so Wyoming won’t be pursuing its own aircraft carrier:

It appears that, on reflection, the Wyoming House of Representatives has decided the risk of invasion by its neighbors is remote enough that it can do without its own armed forces for now, and in particular does not need to consider whether an aircraft carrier might come in handy. I was informed, I think by Rep. Brown himself, that the bill was “defeated on third reading and exists no more.”

[. . .]

Rep. Brown was not a sponsor of the bill, although he does seem to have voted for it on the first reading; he later offered the aircraft-carrier amendment, and then voted against the whole thing today. So, although he hasn’t confirmed it yet, it does look like he may be one of those relatively rare legislators with both a sense of humor and the will to express it in a piece of legislation (which he knew would be deleted). It’s nice to be able to get humor out of a legislature this way for once.

February 24, 2012

“[T]hose who pass for our leaders are largely anti-democratic, elitist and have little compunction about intruding into our private lives”

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Daniel Ben-Ami at spiked! recommends reading Robert H Frank’s The Darwin Economy: not because it’s well-written (he says it’s not) but because it exposes the mindset of our would-be tyrants.

Everyone interested in contemporary society should read Robert H Frank’s The Darwin Economy or a book like it. It is not that it is amazingly astute or beautifully written. It is neither. But it does give readers an exceedingly important perspective: an inside view of how the current generation of politician-technocrats thinks.

Identifying some of the key themes of contemporary political debate is easy enough. A glance at the media reveals that those who pass for our leaders are largely anti-democratic, elitist and have little compunction about intruding into our private lives. Working out how they reach the conclusions they do, understanding the internal logic or their approach, is more difficult.

In many ways, economics is the discipline best suited to the technocratic mindset. This has nothing to do with its traditional subject matter. It is not about debating how to produce goods and services or how to distribute them. Instead, it relates to how economics has emerged as an approach that distances itself from democratic politics and provides little room for human agency.

[. . .]

Finally, the narrow vision embodied in technocratic approaches leads to a blinkered approach to problem-solving. For example, most economists discuss tackling climate change in terms of the optimum design of a market for carbon trading. There is little critical debate about the nature of the threat the world is facing or of the range of possible solutions. One alternative to tinkering with the demand for carbon might be to have a huge programme for building nuclear reactors. Such an initiative would also have the advantage of helping to tackle a vital but often forgotten problem: the need for massive amounts of additional energy to fuel economic development.

The technocratic approach to policymaking has become immensely influential and pernicious. Although it is often expressed in terms of economic arguments, it has an impact across the whole range of social life. It is anti-democratic, anti-political and anti-human. To counter the rise of technocracy, it is necessary to delve deep into how its arch-exponents think.

ESR’s open letter to Chris Dodd

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Chris Dodd is apparently trying to get some kind of compromise or accommodation with the firms of Silicon Valley. ESR explains that this is not likely to yield the kind of returns he’s expecting:

Mr. Dodd, I hear you’ve just given a speech in which you said “Hollywood is pro-technology and pro-Internet.” It seems you’re looking for interlocutors among the coalition that defeated SOPA and PIPA, and are looking for some politically feasible compromise that will do something against the problem of Internet piracy as you believe you understand it.

There isn’t any one person who can answer your concerns. But I can speak for one element of the coalition that blocked those two bills; the technologists. I’m not talking about Google or the technology companies, mind you — I’m talking about the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century.

[. . .]

The difference matters because the businesspeople rely on us to do the actual technical work — and since the rise of the Internet, if we don’t like where a firm’s strategy is going, it tends not to get there. Wise bosses have learned to accommodate us as much as possible and pick the few fights they must have with their engineering talent very, very carefully. Google, in particular, got its huge market capitalization by being better at managing this symbiosis than anyone else.

I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

February 22, 2012

Peter Gleick’s career self-destruction

Filed under: Environment, Law, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Megan McArdle’s post yesterday at The Atlantic on the further revelations in the Heartland Institute caper, where Peter Gleick’s confession of wire fraud is the central bit of news:

You receive an anonymous memo in the mail purporting to be the secret climate strategy of the Heartland Institute. It is not printed on Heartland Institute letterhead, has no information identifying the supposed author or audience, contains weird locutions more typical of Heartland’s opponents than of climate skeptics, and appears to have been written in a somewhat slapdash fashion. Do you:

A. Throw it in the trash

B. Reach out to like-minded friends to see how you might go about confirming its provenance

C. Tell no one, but risk a wire-fraud conviction, the destruction of your career, and a serious PR blow to your movement by impersonating a Heartland board member in order to obtain confidential documents.

As a journalist, I am in fact the semi-frequent recipient of documents promising amazing scoops, and depending on the circumstances, my answer is always “A” or “B”, never “C”.

It’s a gross violation of journalistic ethics, though perhaps Gleick would argue that he’s not a journalist — and in truth, it’s hard to feel too sorry for Heartland, given how gleefully they embraced the ClimateGate leaks. So leave ethics aside: wasn’t he worried that impersonating board members in order to obtain confidential material might be, I don’t know, illegal? Forget about the morality of it: the risk is all out of proportion to the possible reward.

[. . .]

Gleick has done enormous damage to his cause and his own reputation, and it’s no good to say that people shouldn’t be focusing on it. If his judgement is this bad, how is his judgement on matters of science? For that matter, what about the judgement of all the others in the movement who apparently see nothing worth dwelling on in his actions?

When skeptics complain that global warming activists are apparently willing to go to any lengths — including lying — to advance their worldview, I’d say one of the movement’s top priorities should be not proving them right. And if one rogue member of the community does something crazy that provides such proof, I’d say it is crucial that the other members of the community say “Oh, how horrible, this is so far beyond the pale that I cannot imagine how this ever could have happened!” and not, “Well, he’s apologized and I really think it’s pretty crude and opportunistic to make a fuss about something that’s so unimportant in the grand scheme of things.”

After you have convinced people that you fervently believe your cause to be more important than telling the truth, you’ve lost the power to convince them of anything else.

February 19, 2012

Building a football stadium: corporate welfare at its most grotesque

Filed under: Football, Government, Media, Politics, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Patrick Reusse writes for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He’s a sports columnist, so his job — to some degree anyway — depends on the local professional sports teams (the Vikings, the Twins, the Wild, and the Timberwolves) sticking around and being competitive. Part of the sticking around these days is finding a new home for the Minnesota Vikings, who are at the end of their 30-year lease on the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. Reusse is critical of those who don’t want their tax money going into the pockets of billionaire owner Zygi Wilf:

We so easily could be another decayed downtown, if not for the corporations, and the law firms and the accounting firms, and the retailers that remain committed to being in the city, when everything could be cheaper and more convenient by joining the sprawl in Maple Grove or Eden Prairie or Eagan.

Last month, Sandra Colvin Roy, another of the dedicated lefties on the Minneapolis City Council, announced opposition to the plan for a new Vikings stadium in downtown Minneapolis without a citywide referendum (that she knows would fail).

[. . .]

And yet it’s not only Roy and her lefty colleagues who offer a roadblock to Minneapolis coming up with its stadium share. There are righties in the Legislature with equally mysterious thoughts on the city’s entertainment tax.

“You know who pays for this?” Rep. Sarah Anderson of Plymouth said. “The citizens in my district, my constituents that decide to go to Minneapolis, maybe go out to a restaurant for the night.”

Some way, we have wound up with politicians who would put the cleaver to a great asset for the state’s largest city, and then offer the silliest of explanations, like 1) several score of people sleeping outside on government property, and 2) a few guys from Plymouth who would rather not pay an extra 3 percent for a Dewars and water at the Seville.

What stands in the way of a stronger heartbeat for downtown Minneapolis are the collections of the nearsighted that we have elected.

As you’ll know if you’ve read the blog for any length of time, I’m a big fan of the Minnesota Vikings, despite never having lived there or even visited the state. I’d be very upset if they became the L.A. Vikings. But I also totally sympathize with Minnesotans who don’t want their taxes being used to give corporate welfare to the billionaire owner of the football club. Pouring money into facilities for professional sports teams is one of the very worst ways to use tax dollars, as the lads at Reason.tv explain:

And from an article last year at Hit & Run:

To put it bluntly, regardless of how much money the state treasury might be rolling in, a public stadium is not a good use of money. Indeed, sports economists Dennis Coates and Brad Humphries estimate the presence of a major-league franchise reduces overall GDP by about $40 per resident in a given metro area.

The Vikes’ ownership has graciously offered to put up $400 million and the state is looking at ponying up $300 million, which means county and local taxpayers (read: suckers) would be on the hook for the remaining $400 million. So generous of the owners, don’t you think? Needless to say, the team would get all naming rights and a host of other related goodies.

[. . .]

Here’s a real surprise: Almost 75 percent of local residents don’t think public money should be used for a new stadium but the folks literally invested in the team and the building of the stadium are all for it!

February 18, 2012

“Somewhere in the near-eternal labyrinth of the Drummond report there must be evidence that the McGuinty’s Liberal government did something right over the last decade. If there is, I haven’t found it yet.”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Terence Corcoran brings the gloom on the Ontario government’s most likely response to the Drummond report:

Ontario, get ready for The Big McGuinty. The 562-page report from the government-appointed Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services, chaired by economist Don Drummond, has all the makings of a diversionary shell game in which everybody is directed to follow the pea of spending cuts while the real game is something else.

With attention now focused on carving Mr. Drummond’s 362 recommended slices off the great Ontario spending bologna, the real bait-and-switch objective, The Big McGuinty of this giant exercise in fiscal self-flagellation, is something else altogether: tax increases.

Does anybody seriously think the Liberal government of the Rev. Dalton McGuinty, after a decade of installing feel-good spending increases and extravagant policy schemes, is suddenly going to roll it all back and reverse a decade of ideological commitment to government intervention and liberal spending programs?

The Drummond report would require policy-backtracking on a vast scale. Somewhere in the near-eternal labyrinth of the Drummond report there must be evidence that the McGuinty’s Liberal government did something right over the last decade. If there is, I haven’t found it yet.

February 17, 2012

Gary Johnson is “the candidate that the Left once hoped Barack Obama would be”

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Theo Anderson thinks that Gary Johnson is the candidate that should terrify the Democrats:

Gary Johnson is, in some important ways, the candidate that the Left once hoped Barack Obama would be. He vocally opposes the death penalty, the use of torture by the U.S. military, and the indefinite detention of people charged with a crime–even suspects charged with terrorism.

He’s pro-choice. He calls for deep cuts in the defense budget and an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and from many of our military bases around the world. He unequivocally supports marriage rights for gays and believes that legalizing marijuana — rather than building a wall — is the key to solving illegal immigration. He also favors a two-year grace period for immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, so that they can obtain work visas and continue living and working here.

[. . .]

What’s striking about Johnson isn’t just the fact that he’s to the left of Obama and most other elected Democrats on many issues. It’s also his boldness in comparison with the Democrats’ timidity. He’s been a fierce critic, for example, of the warmongering and civil-liberties abuses by both major parties over the past decade. In January, when he spoke the ACLU’s National Staff Conference, he called for repeal of the Patriot Act.

“Ten years ago,” he said, “we learned that the fastest way to pass a bad law is to call it the ‘Patriot Act’ and force Congress to vote on it in the immediate wake of a horrible attack on the United States. The irony is that there is really very little about the Patriot Act that is patriotic. Instead, it has turned out to be yet another tool the government is using to erode privacy, individual freedom and the Constitution itself.”

February 16, 2012

How long will it take for McGuinty to “lose” the Drummond report?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:24

Yesterday, the Drummond report was released, containing literally hundreds of recommendations for getting Ontario’s government back on the fiscal straight-and-narrow. Perhaps half a dozen of the recommendations will be welcomed by Dalton McGuinty and his ministers. The rest will be anywhere from mildly unwelcome to outright anathema. In the National Post, Linda Nguyen has an overview:

The Ontario government needs to “swiftly and boldly” implement all of the hundreds of recommendations in a massive report released Wednesday if it wants to eliminate a projected $30.2 billion deficit by 2017, warns economist Don Drummond.

“Unfortunately, we’re dealing with a harsh reality in identity here,” said Mr. Drummond, author of the 543-page report and former chief economist with TD Bank.

The audit, which could be an example to other jurisdictions struggling to control spending, offered 362 recommendations in various sectors including health care, education, social programs, justice and labour relations.

[. . .]

In its 2011 budget, the Ontario government had projected its deficit to climb to $16-billion, but Mr. Drummond says his projects peg it at more than double that if the province continues its current spending.

To reach the target, Ontario must decrease its total program spending to 0.8% for the next seven years.

It’s been an item of faith among Liberals and NDPers that former Premier Mike Harris carpet-bombed the provincial economy during his two terms in office. As Scott Stinson points out, however, “Ontario’s projected spending needs a 17% cut. Mike Harris only cut 3.9%”:

“Avoid across-the-board cuts. Such a blunt tool treats equally a valuable efficiently run program and one that is outdated and sloppily managed. This is dumb.”
Dumb? Such plain speaking! We are used to government reports that prefer to say a measure “fails to properly realize efficiencies by ensuring its actions are in line with forward-looking goals and objectives.”

“This is not a smorgasbord from which the government can choose only the tastiest morsels and ignore the less palatable.”
Eat your brussels sprouts, Dalton McGuinty! But despite the pleasant analogy — who doesn’t enjoy a good buffet? — this is one of the more stark lines in the whole report. Implement it all, or it won’t work, the Commission says. Yikes.

“In budget planning, do not count chickens before they are hatched.”
We’ll say this for Mr. Drummond: he’s not afraid to use the folksy language.

“Kicking the can down the road is no solution.”
See?

“Do not hang onto public assets or public service delivery when better options exist. Consider privatizing assets and moving to the private delivery of services wherever feasible.”
Also, when preparing discussions with public-service unions, bring a helmet.

[. . .]

“The province should, in future discussions with the Ontario Teachers’ Federation, reject further employer rate increases to [pension plans] beyond the current rate.”
Another one sure to be a hit with the unions. Did you know that on average a teacher retires at 59, having worked 26 years, and collects a pension for 30 years? Me neither.

“The government should work to discuss, in particular, the overproduction of teachers with Ontario’s 13 universities offering teacher education programs.”
The term “overproduction” of teachers makes them sound kind of like widgets.

“Reshape student financial assistance, including the newly announced 30% Off Ontario Tuition grant, to target more of the assistance to low-income students.”
Say, remember that key plank of your election platform? Yeah, you need to totally rethink that.

“Protocols of the Elders of Climategate”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

James Delingpole on the Heartland Institute caper:

I wasn’t going to write about yesterday’s Heartland Institute shock-horror revelations in the Guardian because I thought it was a non-story. “Independent libertarian think-tank spends trifling* sums of money to counter the state’s liberal-left propaganda”. Gosh, hold the front page. Run it next to the story about the Pope being caught worshipping regularly in Rome and the photograph of a bear pooping behind a tree…

Since then, though, it has got much more interesting. Turns out that at least some of the “leaked” documents purporting to show the round, unvarnished face of capitalist, anti-science evil may have been faked.

[. . .]

We climate realists don’t think of ourselves as anti-science.

No, really. We think we’re pro-science. That’s what we want science teachers to teach kids in schools: hard science — physics, chemistry, biology. Stuff that’s empirical. Theories that are falsifiable. Not the kind of junk science they teach in places like the school of “environmental” “science” at comedy institutions like the “University” of East Anglia. Because that’s not science at all. It’s computer-modelling, projection, which is more akin to necromancy.

So, next time you try to fake your Protocols of the Elders of Climategate document, guys, at least try to credit the people you’re trying to smear with a bit of integrity. Not everyone is like you, you realise?

February 15, 2012

American consulate chooses not to give asylum to Wang Lijun, former Chongqing City official

Filed under: China, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:08

I got an emailed link to this story at the Epoch Times, providing an account of former vice-mayor and chief of police Wang Lijun’s attempt to claim political asylum in the American consulate in Chengdu:

What exactly happened on the day Wang Lijun fled to the U.S. Consulate is not yet clear; but speculation and comments abound on China’s Internet. U.S. officials are also leaking information about what happened, and a congressional investigation into the affair has been promised.

Wang is the former vice-mayor and chief of police of the southwestern China megapolis of Chongqing City, and was the right-hand man of Bo Xilai, the city’s Communist Party chief who is known as an ultra-leftist hardliner, and who has been wrangling to win a position on the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the group of nine men who stand at the top of the Party’s hierarchy.

Wang was unexpectedly demoted on Feb. 2 from his posts and reassigned to handle “culture, education, and environmental protection.” On Feb. 5 he talked about the importance of his new job responsibilities at Chongqing Normal University and elsewhere. No one suspected that he would flee to the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu the next day.

[. . .]

While what exactly happened in the consulate in Chengdu cannot be confirmed, Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon, citing an unnamed U.S. official, has reported that the Obama administration denied Wang Lijun asylum for fear of upsetting the Chinese regime.

U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigations, has promised his subcommittee will investigate the handling of Wang’s case, Gertz also reports.

Justin Trudeau: soft separatist

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Josée Legault is busily trying to walk back her scoop, as she claims now that the information being presented in English is distorted and a false characterization of what Justin Trudeau actually said. Colby Cosh isn’t convinced:

Legault goes on to gripe about the “honesty” of this characterization. In fact, it is perfectly honest and in perfect concord with what Trudeau said, and Legault was correct to recognize it as news in the first place, even if she does not now like the result (perhaps because she has lost ownership of the scoop).

Justin Trudeau did say he was willing to contemplate separation under real-world circumstances. “One day, who knows?” is more or less exactly what he told the interviewer. This is a legitimate surprise. And while I believe that a forty-year-old man is entitled to his own opinions — not that any Quebecois baby boomer can stand to think of Justin as a person entering the era of back pain and prostate problems — the contrast with his father’s extreme anti-sovereigntist position really is worth remarking upon, if only because Justin’s surname is the source of much of his influence.

[. . .]

And yet, as sane and worthy of imitation as he seems in these respects, does anybody recognize the “Canada of Stephen Harper” Trudeau ranted against so excitingly today in front of a scrum in Centre Block? Harper’s party has not only accepted the legal fact of same-sex marriage, but has promised to shore it up against the disrepair in which the prior Liberal regime left it. The pro-life agitators in the Conservative caucus are a few barely-detectable grains of pepper amidst a kilogram of salt; on the whole, they are little more numerous and noisy than the pro-lifers in the pre-2011 Liberal caucus (who were, in one of history’s petty ironies, disproportionately victims of Conservative gains in non-metro Ontario).

February 14, 2012

Santorum is “libertarianism’s sweater-vested arch-nemesis”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:40

For pretty much any position you could name, if you mapped the libertarian opinion on it, diametrically opposed on the chart you’d find Rick Santorum. Gene Healy explains why there’s no libertarian case for voting Santorum:

To borrow from Mitt’s rhetorical stylings, I’m not severely conservative, but I do have a case of Stage IV libertarianism. And anyone who shares that condition will find Santorum’s rise particularly vexing. The former senator from Pennsylvania is libertarianism’s sweater-vested arch-nemesis.

In a Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon in Harrisburg last summer, Santorum declared, “I am not a libertarian, and I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.”

In that regard, Santorum has a pretty impressive record. By voting for the No Child Left Behind Act, he helped give President Obama the power to micromanage the nation’s schools from Washington; and by supporting a prescription drug entitlement for Medicare, he helped saddle the taxpayers with a $16 trillion unfunded liability.

Santorum voted for the 2005 “bridge to nowhere” highway bill, has backed an expanded national service program, and his compassionate conservatism has the Bono seal of approval: “On our issues, he has been a defender of the most vulnerable.” Rick Santorum: He’s from the government, and he’s here to help.

[. . .]

A recent Time magazine symposium asked leading thinkers on the Right, “What Is Conservatism?” Anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist offered this answer: “Conservatives ask only one thing of the government. They wish to be left alone.”

Tell that to Santorum, whose agenda rests on meddling with other people, sometimes with laws, sometimes with aircraft carrier groups.

“This idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do,” Santorum complained to NPR in 2006, “that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues … that is not how traditional conservatives view the world.”

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