Quotulatiousness

November 25, 2011

Climategate 2.0 for dummies

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

For anyone who managed to avoid hearing about the original release of emails from many of the leading lights in the anthropogenic global warming community, revealing a much more sordid and less-than-honest process to publicize information on the global climate, James Delingpole explains why the latest batch of emails are important:

The latest batch of emails, leaked by a person or persons unknown (but whoever they are they deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor at the very least) comprises 5,000 files, dumped as before onto a Russian server, revealing private correspondence between many of the scientists at the heart of the Great Global Warming scam.

These are men like Penn State’s increasingly infamous Michael Mann (inventor of the discredited Hockey Stick) and the University of East Angia’s Phil Jones: not just two-bit research assistants but the “experts” whose data, research papers and lobbying forms the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) pronouncements on Anthropogenic Global Warming.

The IPCC, in turn, is the organization on whose doomy prognostications of man-made climate disaster our political leaders base their policy. So when Obama pours billions of your tax dollars into failed clean-tech companies like Solyndra, when you are banned from using the kind of lightbulbs that actually illuminate a room rather than merely flicker and give you a headache, when the EPA’s Lisa Jackson tries reducing the number of showers you take or seeks to regulate when you use your aircon, when your energy bills rise and your flights grow more expensive due to carbon taxes — all these infringements on your economic wellbeing and your liberty can be traced back to these Climategate scientists. This is why Climategate matters.

November 23, 2011

QotD: How the sequester is a symptom of political cowardice

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Those who can do. Those who can’t form a supercommittee. Those who can’t produce a majority vote in a supercommittee sequester. Those who can’t even sequester are telling the world something profound about American inertia.

As Veronique points out [. . .], the “automatic” sequestration cuts would over the course of ten years reduce US public debt by only $153 billion. Which boils down to about a month’s worth of the current federal deficit.

Yet even slashing a pimple’s worth of borrowing out of the great oozing mountain of pustules will prove too much for Washington.

Mark Steyn, “Happy Sweet Sequester’d Days”, National Review Online, 2011-11-21

November 22, 2011

Herman Cain and the most awkward anecdote so far

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

I suspect Herman Cain has managed to talk himself out of the GOP nomination race with little anecdotes like this one:

Cain speaks for nearly a half an hour and despite a couple fleeting “999” mentions, keeps his speech to topics of faith and his recent battle with cancer. He begins with a story about how he knew he would survive when he discovered that his physician was named “Dr. Lord,” that the hospital attendant’s name was “Grace” and that the incision made on his chest during the surgery would be in the shape of a “J.”

“Come on, y’all. As in J-E-S-U-S! Yes! A doctor named Lord! A lady named Grace! And a J-cut for Jesus Almighty,” Cain boomed.

He did have a slight worry at one point during the chemotherapy process when he discovered that one of the surgeon’s name was “Dr. Abdallah.”

“I said to his physician assistant, I said, ‘That sounds foreign — not that I had anything against foreign doctors — but it sounded too foreign,” Cain tells the audience. “She said, ‘He’s from Lebanon.’ Oh, Lebanon! My mind immediately started thinking, wait a minute, maybe his religious persuasion is different than mine! She could see the look on my face and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Cain, he’s a Christian from Lebanon.'”

“Hallelujah!” Cain says. “Thank God!”

The crowd laughs uneasily.

Oh, good. He’s not quite xenophobic, just religiously . . . cautious. At least he chose the right kind of place to tell this little story:

By the time Herman Cain took the stage, Jesus had already been crucified, resurrected and returned to Earth to collect the faithful once that day.

Cain made a campaign stop Friday at The Holy Land Experience, a Christian-theme amusement park in central Florida where visitors pay $35 to watch a reenactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ just minutes from Disney World.

In the park, which is run by the religious television station Trinity Broadcasting Network, employees dressed as shepherd boys, pharisees, Roman soldiers and merchants from first-century Israel lead the faithful on tours through the re-created streets of old Jerusalem, perform re-enactment shows and serve as baristas in the coffee shop. Over the course of a day at Holy Land, you can take communion — fed to you from the hand of a bearded actor playing Christ with flowing brown hair — browse an impressive collection of early Bibles, rock out to praise-song karaoke, get baptized and even have your picture taken with Jesus on a Harley.

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.

November 20, 2011

How is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff like a used car salesman?

Filed under: Government, Military, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

Answer: when he uses the latest technology to get the Defense Secretary to a meeting on time.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta shoved his head into a snug aviator helmet topped with goggles one September morning and swooped into Lower Manhattan on a V-22 Osprey, a $70 million aircraft that Marines use for battlefield assaults in Afghanistan.

“How’d you like that gizmo?” Mr. Panetta said after landing at the Wall Street heliport in the Osprey, which takes off like a helicopter, flies like an airplane — and has been responsible for the deaths of 30 people in test flights.

Defense Department officials say the hybrid aircraft was the fastest way to get Mr. Panetta and his entourage to New York that day. But anyone who has followed the tortured history of the Osprey over the past quarter-century saw the persistent, politically savvy hand of the Marines in arranging Mr. Panetta’s flight — and another example in what has become a case study of how hard it is to kill billion-dollar Pentagon programs.

“At a car dealership, what the salesman wants to do is get you inside the vehicle,” said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and defense analyst. “You take the test drive and wow, it’s got a great stereo, it feels good, it has that new-car smell.”

That flight with Mr. Panetta, he said, is “an insurance policy against future defense cuts.”

November 19, 2011

The GOP’s dream candidate . . . for the Democrats

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

I’m still somewhat in shock that Newt Gingrich is taken seriously as a candidate by the GOP. I’m even more bowled over by the fact that he’s at least temporarily neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney. I’ve already suggested that someone do a “Santorum” on him, but Dan Savage would probably like to see Gingrich take the nomination, because it’d mean a landslide win for Barack Obama next year regardless of the state of the economy or how many other military adventures he takes on.

Doug Mataconis seems equally perplexed by the Newtmentum:

Newt Gingrich has pronounced himself a “co-frontrunner” for the Republican nomination. The polls bear him out. So, how did we get to the point where a fat, condescending, serial adulterer who left office in disgrace twelve years ago is the latest challenger for the conservative mantle?

[. . .]

Gingrich is a bright guy who’s voraciously interested in ideas and the world around him. He has his PhD in European history from Tulane. He served 20 years in Congress, the last 6 of them as Speaker. He’s written more books than some of his opponents have read. So, he’s by far the most plausible of the Not Romneys to emerge thus far.

The reasons most of us have written him off are manifold.

First, he’s got a long history of morally dubious behavior. The circumstances surrounding his two divorces are disturbing. While the first is the stuff of urban legend, I’m actually much more troubled by the second which occurred when he was a middle aged man serving as Speaker of the House and leading the impeachment of a president for minor crimes surround his own affairs. And then there is the flurry of ethics charges while he was in Congress and his questionable lobbying activities afterwards.

Update: Radley Balko reminds us that Newt is a huge hypocrite on drug policy, too:

While drug war realist Gary Johnson can’t get invited to the debates, and fellow realist Ron Paul got all of 90 seconds to say his piece last time around, Newt Gingrich has inexplicably risen to the top of the polls in the GOP primary. It’s worth reviewing again just how God-awful Gingrich has been on the drug war over the years.

Over at TalkLeft, Jeralyn Merritt notes that Gingrich once introduced a bill mandating the death penalty for drug smugglers. Gingrich’s bill would have required execution for anyone attempting to bring 2 ounces or more of pot into the country. Merritt also reminds us of this shameless, astonishingly stupid attempt to justify his policies with his own drug use:

    “See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”

There’s much more. In 2009, Gingrich agreed with Bill O’Reilly’s call for Singapore-style drug laws in America. In Singapore, the police can force anyone to submit to a urinalysis without a warrant. They’re permitted to search you without a warrant. And if you’re seen in a building or in the company of drug users, you’re assumed to have been using drugs as well, unless you can prove otherwise. They also have Gingrich’s favored mandatory execution of anyone possessing over a specified amount of illicit drugs. (And there’s little evidence that the policies are working.)

November 17, 2011

Can someone do to Gingrich what Dan Savage did to Santorum?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

I was pretty sure that the GOP had gotten rid of Newt Gingrich back in the 1990s in the same way you’d scrape dog poop off the sole of your shoe, but through some totally inconceivable twist of fate, he’s back:

Republican voters’ esteem for Newt Gingrich has been rising fast. At this rate it might someday equal, though not surpass, his regard for himself. Gingrich is not a person with an ego. He’s an ego with a person.

Just listen to his explanation of why it took him a while to catch on with voters: “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate and what I’m trying to do.”

Other GOP candidates sound like they are merely campaigning for office. Gingrich, however, hurls verbal thunderbolts like Zeus, as the lights flicker and the earth shakes. Hopelessly in love with the sound of his own voice, he exhibits a stern, overbearing self-assurance that gives his pronouncements weight even when he is uttering nonsense.

[. . .]

Still, it’s hard to believe his campaign will survive extended scrutiny. One reason is his know-it-all personality. George W. Bush was the guy you’d like to have a beer with. Gingrich is the guy you wouldn’t want to be stuck next to on a long flight.

[. . .]

It’s not just this administration that causes him to shoot blood out of his eyes. He said Muslims should not be allowed to build a mosque near Ground Zero “so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” He said that “our elites are trying to create amnesia so that we literally have generations who have no idea what it means to be an American.” Newt loves to conjure up terrifying monsters that only he can vanquish.

At moments like these it’s hard to know whether he suffers intermittent derangement or simply will stop at nothing to demonize political opponents. Either way, he bears no resemblance to anyone Americans have ever entrusted with the presidency. Gingrich is, as he says, unique. That’s just the problem.

Snapshots from Greece

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Greece, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Brendan O’Neill has a few snippets from Athens:

‘Prime ministers should be chosen by us, not Angela Merkel,’ says the taxi driver taking me to the Acropolis. Taxi drivers here love talking politics, and they love hating Merkel. She’s treated as the arch villain of this tragedy. Magazine covers show a massive Merkel playing with Greek politicians as if they were dolls. Graffiti invites her to do things that are probably anatomically impossible. My advice to her is to avoid visiting Greece for the duration of The 100 Days. Probably longer.

•••

The taxi driver also tells me he can’t relate to Papademos. ‘He’s not a man of the people’. But it’s precisely Papademos’s lack of experience in dealing with the grubby, demanding demos that endears him to the EU elite, which fought tooth-and-catapult to have him installed as PM. As one European economist put it: for Brussels the great thing about Papademos is that he ‘speaks the language and shares the philosophy of [the] EU and ECB’ and that he ‘comes in without officially representing a party’. That is, he’s apolitical, unchosen, boring and bureaucratic — just the kind of politician the EU likes. It’s already a cliché, but that doesn’t stop it being true: Athens is now both the birthplace and graveyard of European democracy.

•••

Yet the graffiti expresses exasperation as well as anger — a deep disappointment with Greek workers. Commonly scrawled phrases are ‘Wake up!’ and ‘Stop being slaves!’ You get the impression that the Greek left, which is rowdier and noisier than its western European counterpart, is as annoyed with the masses as it is with Merkel. In Syntagma Square, nothing much remains of the radical protest camp that so excited outside observers earlier this year and which provided the template for the global ‘Occupy’ movement. There is just a memorial tree, with political paraphernalia attached to it in remembrance of the camp. It’s like one of those shrines that pops up on roadsides where someone has been killed by a speeding car, only it is adorned, not with wreaths, but with balaclavas, goggles and batteries (which were thrown at the police). It has the unwitting whiff of being a gravestone not only for the Greek left, but for Greek politics itself.

November 16, 2011

The gender wage gap won’t go away

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Kay Hymowitz explains that even with the best will in the world, the wage gap — often referred to as the 75-cents-on-the-dollar phenomenon — between men and women will persist:

Let’s begin by unpacking that 75-cent statistic, which actually varies from 75 to about 81, depending on the year and the study. The figure is based on the average earnings of full-time, year-round workers, usually defined as those who work 35 hours a week or more.

But consider the mischief contained in that “or more.” It makes the full-time category embrace everyone from a clerk who arrives at her desk at 9 a.m. and leaves promptly at 4 p.m. to a trial lawyer who eats dinner four nights a week — and lunch on weekends — at his desk.

I assume, in this case, that the clerk is a woman and the lawyer a man for the simple reason that — and here is an average that proofers rarely mention — full-time men work more hours than full-time women do. In 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 27 percent of male full-time workers had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 15 percent of female full-time workers; just 4 percent of full-time men worked 35 to 39 hours a week, while 12 percent of women did. Since full-time men work more than full-time women do, it shouldn’t be surprising that the men, on average, earn more.

The other arena of mischief contained in the 75-cent statistic lies in the seemingly harmless term “occupation.” Everyone knows that a CEO makes more than a secretary and that a computer scientist makes more than a nurse. Most people wouldn’t be shocked to hear that secretaries and nurses are likely to be women, while CEOs and computer scientists are likely to be men. That explains much of the wage gap.

But proofers often make the claim that women earn less than men doing the exact same job. They can’t possibly know that. The Labor Department’s occupational categories can be so large that a woman could drive a truck through them. Among “physicians and surgeons,” for example, women make only 64.2 percent of what men make. Outrageous, right? Not if you consider that there are dozens of specialties in medicine: some, like cardiac surgery, require years of extra training, grueling hours, and life-and-death procedures; others, like pediatrics, are less demanding and consequently less highly rewarded. Only 16 percent of surgeons, but a full 50 percent of pediatricians, are women.

November 15, 2011

The Occupy movement: the height of 21st century civilization?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

Natalie Rothschild takes issue with a fellow journalist’s characterization of the Occupy movement:

A late October edition of the New Yorker carried a ‘postcard’ piece on Occupy Wall Street (OWS). On the third re-read it began to dawn on me that, perhaps, the writer was not being sarcastic, despite her grandiose opening line: ‘Visiting the site of Occupy Wall Street last week . . . was a bit like visiting civilisation at its peak: Paris in the Twenties, Rome in the second century, or, at the very least, Timbuktu in the fifteen hundreds.’

Really? I mean, really? I had recently visited the OWS Zuccotti Park encampment, too, and I’ve been there several more times. Over time, the camp has become better organised. There are now tents, clean-up teams, a set of portable toilets, a library and information points. But ‘the height of civilisation’? Come on.

[. . .]

None of this fawning has stopped occupiers and their supporters from decrying the mainstream media’s coverage — there’s not enough of it, apparently, and most of it is anyway shallow or negatively skewed. In truth, the OWS coverage has been dense and overwhelmingly positive.

The few critics of OWS have been slammed as contemptuous ignoramuses, as corrupt apologists for ‘the one per cent’. Or it is said that they simply ‘just don’t get it’ because they haven’t engaged with the new form of direct, participatory democracy practiced in Zuccotti Park. But, then, even those journalists who have reported directly from the Occupy headquarters and have taken note of the eccentricity and confusion that undoubtedly exist there have been said to be blinkered by prejudice or interested only in shallow, headline-grabbing snapshots. Any commentary that is less than praising is slammed as mocking or as right-wing mud-slinging.

November 12, 2011

Scottish Conservative Party goes non-conservative with new leader

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

It sounds like the set-up to a joke, but it really is true: the new party leader is a lesbian kick-boxer:

The 32-year-old former BBC journalist edged out Murdo Fraser by only 566 votes in the bad-tempered contest after he argued the Tory brand was too mistrusted north of the Border for the party ever to succeed.

But Miss Davidson, who is openly gay and a kick boxer, said she will unite the deeply-divided party and attract new support from sections of Scottish society that have stopped listening to the Conservatives.

The result marks the culmination of a remarkably rapid political ascent. She joined the party two years ago and only won election as a Glasgow MSP in May after the Tories’ first-choice candidate was forced to stand down over his financial history.

She won the endorsement of only two other MSPs during the campaign, with the largest group backing Mr Fraser and his plan to replace the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party with a new organisation.

November 10, 2011

Delingpole’s word of the day: monotesticularity

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

He’s talking about Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party:

‘Farage has only got one ball.’ The last time I made reference to the Ukip leader’s monotesticular status, I got a rocket from an outraged reader. But the reader had missed the point entirely. Nigel Farage’s handicap is a strength, not a weakness. He’s open about it, he’s unembarrassed by it and he’s a better man for it. Yes, Farage may have lost a bollock to cancer, but by God he’s got more cojones than almost any Conservative you could name.

Our Nigel is a Conservative himself, of course. Just one who has been temporarily dispossessed by the mainstream party. When you talk to Farage he’s perfectly upfront about what he considers to be Ukip’s role: to act as the Tory party’s conscience. The moment the Conservatives start behaving like proper Conservatives again — Eurosceptical, small government, low tax, etc — that’ll be it. Most of the 7 per cent of voters who are currently Ukip’s will be straight back into the Tory fold and we’ll have a proper, Thatcherite government again doing the Lord’s work.

Seven per cent! That figure — from the latest YouGov poll — is pretty amazing, isn’t it? It puts Ukip only one point away from the ailing Lib Dems, meaning it’s on track to become Britain’s third largest political party. Yet you’d scarcely be aware of this development, the way it has been ignored by most of our mainstream media.

Peter Oborne nailed it in a recent Telegraph column: ‘If a left-wing party had reached Ukip’s size and consequence, the media would be fascinated. But, because of its old-fashioned and decidedly provincial approach, it has been practically ignored. In the 2004 European elections, the party gained a sensational 16 per cent of the vote. Had it been the Greens or the communists that had pulled off this feat, the BBC would have gone crazy. Instead it chose not to mention this event, coolly classifying Ukip as “other”.’

November 7, 2011

Occupy Winter Park!

Filed under: Business, Football, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:35

Minnesota is blessed with some particularly colourful legislators, but all of them must take second place to State Representative Phyllis Kahn. She has a long history of, shall we say, “imaginative” legislative proposals, and this one is a doozy:

Throw in one more idea for a new Minnesota Vikings stadium: Have the public buy shares in the team, enabling them to own a piece of the Vikings and help finance a stadium.

The community ownership idea has been floated before but Rep. Phyllis Kahn, DFL-Minneapolis, said Monday she would introduce legislation to require Gov. Mark Dayton and the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission to work with the National Football League to make it happen. The commission owns the downtown Minneapolis Metrodome, the team’s home for nearly 30 years.

“Dayton asked for all ideas to be put on the table and that’s exactly what I’m doing here,” said Kahn. “No single idea [for funding a new stadium] has gained enough traction to pass the Legislature.”

The Vikings are hoping to get a new stadium built, and the state legislature has been doing what they can to kick the issue down the road every time it’s come up. I don’t have a say in the matter, as I’m not located in Minnesota and I’d probably still cheer for the team even if it moved elsewhere (though it would be a sad thing to see it move after half a century in Minnesota).

In general, I don’t think governments should build stadiums for professional sports teams, as it’s using tax money to subsidize private profits. If a new stadium is going to generate a profit, the team’s ownership should bear the costs themselves. The fact that they generally don’t — mostly because politicians don’t want to deal with angry sports fans after the team leaves town — doesn’t make it right.

However, Rep. Kahn’s proposal won’t fly because the NFL itself forbids public ownership of teams (the grandfathered-in exception being the Green Bay Packers). What’s even more interesting about her plan is that the proceeds of selling shares in the team would be put directly towards building a new stadium:

The funds from selling stock in the Vikings, said Kahn, could go toward helping the team build a new stadium. She added that, under her plan, Vikings owner Zygi Wilf and his family could retain a 30 percent controlling interest in the team.

So the Wilfs will be allowed to retain a minority share, but wouldn’t be compensated for the proportion of the stock that was being sold? Isn’t that just expropriation? I didn’t realize the DFL was a modern-day successor to Mussolini’s Fascist Party.

November 6, 2011

QotD: The Occupy movement

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:01

There are lessons in this history for the leftist protester. The Occupy movement is bristling with changes it wants made (I’m told we’re not supposed to call them “demands”); these changes won’t, and shouldn’t, happen outside the ballot box. The goal of protest in a liberal-democratic society must therefore be to advance one’s pet issue further ahead on the agenda of the sympathetic, for when they do attain power, and to weaken the morale of moderates on the other side. One must locate specific injustices rather than nebulous cosmic ones, confronting them and defying their perpetrators directly. Deeds will accomplish more than any amount of eloquence. And it should not be necessary to claim to be a majority (let alone a majority of 99-to-one); one individual suffices, where he has a true claim to our attention.

It’s not really clear, anyway, how an “Occupation” that is meeting no serious resistance from authorities anywhere is supposed to elicit sympathy. The main effect of the movement so far seems to have been an elaborate proof-by-demonstration that Canadian municipalities are incredibly respectful of political protest and fawningly deferential to the Charter of Rights. So . . . hooray?

Colby Cosh, “Want political change? Talk to a farmer”, Maclean’s, 2011-11-06

The profile of the “angry college student”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Victor Davis Hanson diagnoses some of the underlying issues that are motivating the student component of the Occupy movement:

Then there is a wider, global phenomenon of the angry college student. In the Middle East, much of the unrest, whether Islamist, liberal, or hard-core leftist, is fueled by young unemployed college graduates. Ditto Europe in general, and Greece in particular: The state subsidizes college loans and the popular culture accepts an even longer period between adolescence and adulthood, say between 18 and 30 something. Students emerge “aware,” but poorly educated, highly politicized, and with unreal expectations about their market worth in an ossifying society, often highly regulated and statist.

The decision has been made long ago not to marry at 23, have two or three kids by 27, and go to work in the private sector in hopes of moving up the ladder by 30. Perhaps at 35, a European expects that a job opens up in the Ministry of Culture or the elderly occupant of a coveted rent-controlled flat dies.

Students rarely graduate in four years, but scrape together parental support and, in the bargain, often bed, laundry, and breakfast, federal and state loans and grants, and part-time minimum wage jobs to “go to college.” By traditional rubrics — living at home, having the car insurance paid by dad and mom, meals cooked by someone else — many are still youths. But by our new standards — sexually active, familiar with drugs or alcohol, widely traveled and experienced — many are said to be adults.

Debt mounts. Jobs are few. For the vast majority who are not business majors, engineers, or vocational technicians, there are few jobs or opportunities other than more debt in grad or law school. In the old days, an English or history degree was a certificate of inductive thinking, broad knowledge, writing skills, and a good background for business, teaching, or professionalism. Not now. The watered down curriculum and politically-correct instruction ensure a certain glibness without real skills, thought, or judgment. Most employers are no longer impressed.

Students with such high opinions of themselves are angry that others less aware — young bond traders, computer geeks, even skilled truck drivers — make far more money. Does a music degree from Brown, a sociology BA in progress from San Francisco State, two years of anthropology at UC Riverside count for anything? They are angry at themselves and furious at their own like class that they think betrayed them. After all, if a man knows about the construction of gender or a young woman has read Rigoberta Menchu, or both have formed opinions about Hiroshima, the so-called Native American genocide, and gay history, why is that not rewarded in a way that derivatives or root canal work surely are?

Class — family pedigree, accent, clothes, schooling — now mean nothing. You can meet your Dartmouth roommate working in Wall Street at Starbucks, and seem for all appearances his identical twin. But when you walk out the door with your environmental studies degree, you reenter the world of debt and joblessness, he back into the world of good money. Soooo unfair for those of like class.

November 4, 2011

Reason profiles Gary Johnson

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

I took the “scientific* survey” at the Reason web site and it matched me up with Gary Johnson as the GOP candidate who most closely matched my interests:

Aliases: Gov. Johnson, Iron Man, that libertarianish guy who’s not Ron Paul

Experience: Johnson founded his construction company Big-J Enterprises in 1976 and ran it for nearly two decades before becoming the Republican governor of the overwhelmingly Democratic state of New Mexico in 1995. Big-J, which Johnson sold in 1999, remains a leading construction firm in the Land of Enchantment. Johnson was re-elected governor in 1999, his tenure marked by a record number of vetoes, a winning struggle against tax increases, and prosperity in the state.

Hangups: low name recognition, severe soundbite challenges, Ron Paul’s prior claim on the uncoveted “mild-mannered libertarian” position

Spending/size of government/entitlement reform: Along with Ron Paul, Johnson is part of a fairly recent phenomenon: Republican candidates who take their small-government rhetoric seriously. In the New Mexico statehouse, he vetoed 750 bills, fired 1,200 state employees and left the state with a billion-dollar budget surplus. His presidential platform includes cutting Medicare and Medicaid by 43 percent and turning them into block grant programs. His budget cutting plans extend even to the bipartisan sacred cow of defense, which would also come in for a 43 percent cut. Tells ConcordPatch, “I believe that less government is the best government.”

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