Quotulatiousness

September 16, 2011

How not to run an election campaign

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:21

I’ve been referring to Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak as “McGuinty Lite” for a few months now. Christina Blizzard has the same nickname for him:

He wants all-day kindergarten, has no problem with Muslim prayer in schools — and won’t talk about a greater role for the private sector in health care.

Dalton McGuinty?

Nope. It’s Dalton Light — aka Tim Hudak.

The beleaguered PC leader seems stuck.

The wheels on his campaign bus just don’t have any traction.

He went into the campaign 12 points ahead in the polls. Now, nine days into the campaign, he’s fighting to stay even with McGuinty.

Yet even this, “me-too,” campaign, has been branded as “Tea Party North,” by the Liberals.

Hudak has failed Politics 101.

I have two theories to account for this (neither of which is particularly convincing). First theory: there is some really nasty surprise waiting to be sprung on the premier soon after the election, and Hudak wants to avoid being the patsy. Second theory: Hudak has become really comfortable as leader of the opposition and doesn’t want to risk becoming premier.

Either of those, or perhaps Hudak is really a sleeper agent of the Liberal Party. That might account for it . . . he’s being called a “Tea Party” candidate, but it must be homeopathic tea, as there’s no strength to it at all. It’s been diluted down to nothingness.

Ontario’s clean energy Potemkin village

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

John Ivison reports on a recent photo op by Premier Dalton McGuinty:

The solar energy company touted this week by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty as a flagship of the province’s clean energy economy has halted production because of slow demand.

Mr. McGuinty was flanked by Eclipsall Energy Corp.’s workforce when he visited its Scarborough solar panel plant Tuesday, but there was no mention that the production line is temporarily shut down. When my colleague Tamsin McMahon visited the plant she found the reception desk was empty, the cafeteria was closed and only a handful of employees milling around inside the sparsely furnished building.

Leo Mednik, Eclipsall’s chief financial officer, said the production line halt is because the company has already completed its current order book. “It’s no secret that the market is slow and there have been delays. That’s part of it — part of it is logistics. Our production team went through our purchased inventory a lot quicker than expected,” he said.

Not only is the plant not working to capacity: it’s only working at all because of government subsidies:

The Liberal government’s efforts have created jobs — though the 20,000 number touted by Mr. McGuinty seems highly questionable, far less the 50,000 he says will be created by the end of next year. In addition, they are hardly high wage, high skilled jobs the Premier claims (Eclipsall pays 20% over minimum wage to its workers, who assemble glass and solar cells imported from Asia, thereby qualifying for the Liberal Green Energy Act’s 60% domestic content rule).

The question is: how sustainable are these jobs? Mr. Mednik admitted that if the domestic content rule was removed, Eclipsall and other Ontario manufacturers would not be able to survive. “Frankly, it would be very difficult for any start-up to compete” against cheaper Chinese producers, he said.

He said it is a question of when, rather than if, the 60% threshold is removed. Both the European Union and Japan have taken the FIT program to the World Trade Organization and want the local content requirements removed. They claim this Buy Ontario provision is a prohibited subsidy. The FIT program might also soon become subject to a NAFTA dispute case, after American renewable company Mesa Power Group said it would file a complaint.

September 15, 2011

Belgium “without a government may be remembered as an economic and political golden age”

Filed under: Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Doug Saunders looks at the situation in Belgium, which has gone without a government for over 450 days so far:

To look around the elegant city of Antwerp, you wouldn’t know that Belgium has now gone longer without a government than any country in modern history.

The trains still run on time, the teachers show up in their classrooms, museums are packed, taxes are collected, welfare is paid, and the country’s F-16 fighter jets are dropping bombs in Libya — even though Belgium has now gone a year and a quarter without a federal government, after the June 13, 2010 elections produced no majority and the feuding parties became locked in perpetual disagreement over coalition plans.

[. . .]

For some, this might sound like a libertarian’s idea of utopia: A country with nobody to raise taxes, or to slash spending, or to introduce major new government programs.

And indeed, Belgium has just managed, despite having only a largely powerless caretaker government, to post second-quarter economic growth rates — of 0.7 per cent — that exceeded neighbouring Germany, France and Britain. The country’s world-leading beer industry, analysts say, has remained aloft as the world drinks away its financial sorrows. And the government deficit has even been cut somewhat.

Well, it’s rather short of an anarchist’s utopia, but it’s a bit closer to a minarchist’s version. The “government” in question is, of course, the political one: the bureaucracy is still ticking over as before (one wonders if they’ve noticed the lack of politicians and their sometimes malign influence over the everyday activities of the bureaucracy).

It should be no surprise that the lack of new political initiatives has had a moderating influence on the business environment: it has reduced some of the “normal” instability of government activity. The European market and the world markets are still providing sufficient distortion and uncertainty, of course, but at least for some businesses they are not having to make business decisions with a wary eye on the current prime minister’s whim.

September 14, 2011

Solyndra’s $500m deal pushed through against OMB concerns

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

The need for President Obama to get a good press outcome may have trumped the official concerns of the Office of Management and Budget in loaning half a billion dollars to now-bankrupt Solyndra:

The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s factory, newly obtained e-mails show.

The Silicon Valley company, a centerpiece in President Obama’s initiative to develop clean energy technologies, had been tentatively approved for the loan by the Energy Department but was awaiting a final financial review by the Office of Management and Budget.

The August 2009 e-mails, released exclusively to The Washington Post, show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal. In response, OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company’s project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to information provided by Republican congressional investigators.

A response to the chefs’ open letter

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Politics, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:42

A group of well-known chefs recently issued an open letter about the relationship of cooking to the wider world. Rob Lyons would prefer them to stick to what they do so well and avoid being pawns for dietary puritans and scolds who want us to live poorer lives:

Dear chefs,

I would like to be a great admirer of your collective works. However, I’ve never had enough money to eat in your elite restaurants, so I’ll just have to trust that you really are the best in the business. I read with interest your recent Open Letter to the Chefs of Tomorrow. It clearly expresses your views on the way you think cooking should be done and how the restaurant business can interact with the rest of the world. But what you are suggesting is just nonsense. You should stop talking to your well-off customers and the food industry’s dreadful hangers on, and get a sense of perspective.

[. . .]

Please, stop now. St Jamie of Oliver is doing quite enough on behalf of chefs to scare us about what we eat without you lot joining in. Authoritarian busybodies have spent the past two or three decades lecturing us about our eating habits. They now want to exploit your reputations as chefs to justify their prescriptions. You may be flattered by the attention, but those miserable puritans have nothing in common with you.

Good food — especially restaurant food — is about pleasure and excess. It’s about oodles of butter, oil, salt and vino. It’s about staggering away from the table stuffed but happy. The petty puritans of the health lobby want low-fat, low-salt and no booze, in mean and miserable portions. If you go along with that health agenda, it will only prove you’re not the sharpest knives in the cutlery drawer.

[. . .]

Face it, guys. What you do isn’t about food at all. You’re an expensive and exclusive branch of the entertainment industry; you have more in common with high opera than family dinners. And in that respect, I wouldn’t want you to change a thing (except, perhaps, those prices). But please don’t use your success and reputation to parrot the sickly prejudices of the foodie crowd.

September 10, 2011

Opposing the EDL as a way of expressing class hatred?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:50

The English Defence League (EDL) has come in for a lot of criticism for its provocative approach to expressing their concerns about issues like immigration. The critics, however, are not all pure in their opposition, however:

This video, currently causing a stink on Twitter, rather confirms what draws many young middle-class liberals towards anti-English Defence League campaigning: it provides them with a semi-legit cover for expressing their fear and loathing of the white working classes.

In the video, two well-bred kids say things about working-class EDL supporters that could have been lifted straight from the pages of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, that exposé of early twentieth-century snobs’ disdain for vulgar little people. The anti-EDL campaigners describe a female supporter of the EDL as “the most tattooed, horrible scrote of a woman” they have ever seen and then laugh as they talk about how she was “kicked up the arse” by a left-wing protester. It’s not normally okay to hit women, they admit, but you can make an exception when it comes to female EDL supporters because “they aren’t women — they’re dogs”.

The video has proved enormously embarrassing for Left-wing campaigners against the EDL, who are desperately trying to distance themselves from the naked class hatred expressed by these two twits. Yet the fact is that a great deal of anti-EDL protesting is driven by a barely disguised hatred for that apparently ugly, uncouth, un-PC blob of white flesh that inhabits inner-city council estates. The two guys in the video have only stated it in a more explicit fashion.

September 7, 2011

The Perry-Paul pie-fight

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

The Ron Paul campaign released a new video, pointing out the fact that Paul had been one of a small group that originally supported Ronald Reagan for president (on the basis of Reagan’s professed desire for small government and lower taxes). Rick Perry, on the other hand, worked for Al Gore’s first presidential bid:

As Michael Suede says, it’s amazing that the Perry campaign’s response actually highlights Paul’s consistency and principles:

The Perry campaign released this statement in response to the pummeling:

     “Rep. Paul’s letter is a broadside attack on every element of President Reagan’s record and philosophy. Paul thought President Reagan was so bad, he left the GOP,” said [Perry spokesman Mark] Miner. “It will be interesting to hear Rep. Paul explain why Reagan drove him from the party at tomorrow’s debate on the grounds of the Reagan Library.”

     In one part of the letter, Paul wrote, “There is no credibility left for the Republican Party as a force to reduce the size of government. That is the message of the Reagan years.”

     Paul continued, “Thanks to the President and Republican Party, we have lost the chance to reduce the deficit and the spending in a non-crisis fashion. Even worse, big government has been legitimized in a way the Democrats never could have accomplished.”

     Paul even went so far as to call Reaganomics, “warmed-over Keynesianism.”

In other words, Paul initially supported Reagan because Reagan talked a great game on issues that Paul supported: reducing the size of government and lowering taxes. Reagan was elected, continued talking the talk, but failing to actually do anything — in fact, government continued to grow during his presidency (even if you discount the military build-up). Paul broke with Reagan because Reagan hadn’t done what he was elected to do. And the Perry campaign thinks this is a negative?

You can say a lot of positive things about Reagan, but his actual record was not what his Republican hagiographers pretend that it was.

In the letter, Ron Paul explains that spending under Reagan exploded and that the administration didn’t live up to its promises to keep the debt under control. Then Ron goes on to PREDICT THE FUTURE as he explains the dangers behind exploding deficits. So in essence, the Perry campaign is saying Ron Paul is bad because HE IS TOO CONSERVATIVE.

September 4, 2011

Scottish Conservative party too tainted to survive, claims leadership candidate

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:10

Scotland has not been kind to the Conservative party for the last few decades, and a candidate for the leadership thinks the solution is to destroy the party in order to save it:

The Scottish Tory party could be scrapped and replaced by a new centre-right party, under radical reform proposals drafted by the favourite to become its next leader.

Murdo Fraser, deputy leader of the Scottish Conservatives, will launch his campaign to head the party on Monday by claiming that its only hope to attract greater popular support would be to split off from the UK party led by David Cameron.

Fraser, a former chairman of the Scottish Young Conservatives, will argue that creating a new Scottish centre-right, tax-cutting party would allow it to build up a fresh political mandate and attract voters disenchanted by the current party, which has failed to recover significantly from 25 years of decline.

After losing every Scottish seat at the 1997 Westminster election, the party now has only one MP at Westminster, David Mundell, the Scotland Office minister. It won just 15 out of 129 seats for the Scottish parliament at the last Holyrood elections and has failed to benefit from the collapse in Liberal Democrat support in Scotland.

September 3, 2011

Surge in “escort” ads in cities hosting political conventions

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:46

It should be no surprise that the cities hosting the Democratic or Republican party conventions have a brief spike of activity in certain businesses:

The sex workers of Tampa, Florida, and Charlotte, North Carolina, can get ready for a spike in business at the end of next summer: the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, respectively, are coming to town. In the last electoral cycle, the political jamborees were held in Denver and Minneapolis — and there seems to have been a coincidental surge in the local market for sex.

The economists Scott Cunningham and Todd Kendall discovered this by examining advertisements in the “adult services” section on Craigslist, the online ad service. (Craigslist has since closed down this section.)

Using postings in Seattle and Philadelphia as a control group — these cities did not have almost 50,000 visitors descending on them for a few days — the economists estimated that advertisements selling sexual services increased by 29-44 per cent in Minneapolis during the Republican visit and 47-77 per cent in Denver when the Democrats arrived. I’m not going to make jokes about oversexed politicians, largely because the majority of visitors appear to have been journalists.

An even more amusing letter was posted to The Economist on the same general topic:

SIR – You note that call girls are being drawn from far and wide to service America’s political conventions (“On the trail”, July 3rd). While standing in line to register for an American Economic Association annual meeting some years ago, I overheard someone remark that the prostitutes of New Orleans look forward to the arrival of economists in town. While glancing at my colleagues in their ill-fitting suits and dragging cardboard suitcases, I heard the following clarification: “It’s their opportunity to take a week off.”
Robin Watson
Berlin

September 2, 2011

US flood insurance is “a veritable bucket of fail”

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

Felix Salmon on the state of US flood insurance:

Ben Berkowitz has a big report on the the National Flood Insurance Program — something which is a veritable bucket of fail. In a nutshell, it undercuts private insurers and therefore is the only game in town; it insures only a small minority of homeowners; and it loses gobs of money. In September 2005, the NFIP was $1.5 billion in hock to the federal government; that number has now ballooned to $21 billion, and is certain to rise further.

There’s a simple answer to all these problems: let the NFIP raise its rates. And I don’t understand why it’s not being allowed to do so. If the rates rose, then that might allow private insurers into the flood-insurance game, giving consumers a choice and helping to get the word out about how insuring your home against flood damage is a really good idea. The NFIP could become profitable, and thereby start paying back all the money it owes. And while homeowners are quite price sensitive when it comes to flood insurance, the fact is that so few homeowners take out flood insurance right now that the number would be unlikely to fall dramatically if rates went up to a reasonable level.

August 30, 2011

Trivializing rape

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:23

Wendy McElroy points out how the underlying messages of the SlutWalkers have overwhelmed the original intent:

One message: It is fabulous for women to publicly flaunt their sexuality but an intolerable offense if men respond nonviolently. Wolf-whistles are taken as an attack. Disapproving or overly approving comments from men are an assault. But isn’t provoking a response the entire purpose of wearing fishnet stockings topped by a leather bustier?

Another message, as pointed out by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail: “Slutwalks are what you get when graduate students in feminist studies run out of things to do.” In other words, SlutWalks are an expression of privileged women who mistake a costume party for a political cause. While Iranian women fight for the right to pursue an education, North American feminists fight to reclaim pride in the word “slut.” SlutWalk is an extreme expression of mainstream feminism’s political impoverishment.

Yet SlutWalkers proclaim they are performing a political service by protesting the trivialization of rape. Nonsense. They are using the ill-considered words of one ignorant policeman as a reason to throw a street party.

I do not begrudge anyone having a good time but as a woman who has experienced rape, I object to the political agenda being attached to a costume party. I object to the posters and attitudes that vilify men as predators. I do so because I was attacked by one man, not by mankind, and when I was helped, it was by men. I object to the notion that women do not bear any responsibility for controlling their circumstances, such as attire. I object to rape being trivialized by associating it with sluttiness and making it part of a celebration.

August 29, 2011

Kaus: Ten things Obama should have done differently

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

Mickey Kaus thinks the President would have been much better off (and the US economy too) if he’d done several things differently:

Excessively well-sourced Obama boosters are now channeling, not just White House spin but White House self-pity. Both Ezra Klein and Jonathan Alter wonder aloud why our intelligent, conscientious, well-meaning, data-driven President is taking a “pummeling.” ”What could Obama have done?” (Klein) “What, specifically, has he done wrong .. .?” (Alter)

They’re kidding, right? There are plenty of things Obama could have done differently. Most of these mistakes were called out at the time. Here, off the top of my head, are ten things Obama could have done:

[. . .]

3. Made the UAW take a pay cut. Whoever else is to blame, the UAW’s demands for pay and work rules clearly contributed to the need for a taxpayer-subsidized auto bailout. To make sure that future unions were deterred from driving their industries into bankruptcy, Obama demanded cuts in basic pay of … exactly zero. UAW workers gave up their Easter holiday but didn’t suffer any reduction in their $28/hour base wage. Wouldn’t a lot of taxpayers like $28 hour jobs? Even $24 an hour jobs?

[. . .]

5. Not pursued a zombie agenda of “card check” and “comprehensive immigration reform”–two misguided pieces of legislation that Obama must have known had no chance of passage but that he had to pretend to care about to keep key Democratic constituencies on board. What was the harm? The harm was that these issues a) sucked up space in the liberal media, b) made Obama look feckless at best, delusional at worst, when they went nowhere; c) made him look even weaker because it was clear he was willing to suffer consequence (b) in order to keep big Democratic constituencies (labor, Latinos) on board.

6. Dispelled legitimate fears of “corporatism” — that is, fears that he was creating a more Putin-style economy in which big businesses depend on the government for favors (and are granted semi-permanent status if they go along with the program). I don’t think Obama is a corporatist, but he hasn’t done a lot to puncture the accusations. What did electric carmaker Tesla have to promise to get its Dept. of Energy subsidies? Why raid GOP-donor Gibson’s guitars and not Martin guitars? We don’t know. At this point, you have to think the president kind of likes the ambiguity–the vague, implicit macho threat that if you want to play ball in this economy, you’re better off on Team Obama. That’s a good way to guarantee Team Obama will be gone in 2013.

Oh, and for a bonus bit of unwelcome news for President Obama, his uncle has just been arrested for drunk driving. His illegal alien uncle, who now faces deportation.

August 27, 2011

Fulford: NDP offers “alternative to reality” to supporters

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:11

Robert Fulford will win no friends on the left with this article:

Jack Layton led the NDP more successfully than anyone else but what he led was as much a fantasy as a political party. Over five decades, under half a dozen different leaders, the NDP has evolved into a dream, a means of escape from ordinary life for those who feel the need of it. Layton’s successor will be required to embrace an elaborate and much-loved fiction.

The way it’s worked out, the central function of the NDP is to help members and supporters pretend that they are not living in a society built on capitalism. Democratic socialism is a fairy tale that they tell themselves as consolation for having to exist in a distressingly grubby, money-driven world. New Democrats don’t like business, even if they happen to work for corporations. They know and have always known that the profit motive is not a good thing. Many of them are prosperous, many take pride in their expensive houses, exotic vacations and pensions administered on Bay Street. Some have inherited large sums of money. Even so, they don’t care to be reminded that corporations make the comfort and convenience of their lives possible. They love their electronic devices but they don’t wish to dwell on the fact that computers and iPads exist (and reach us at low prices) because of the burning desire to maximize profit. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), out of which the NDP grew in 1961, stated its principles as the Regina Manifesto of 1933. It advocated many ideas still dear to Canadians but made one point absolutely explicit: “No CCF Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism.”

QotD: Consistency

Filed under: Africa, Middle East, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:58

We are all glad that the Gadhafi regime is purportedly on its last legs. When I visited Libya in 2006, tragedy was what I saw—and a friendly population under the yoke of a psychopath. But I don’t think we have had much idea of what we were doing in Libya—a sort of diplomatic pastime secondary to presidential jet-setting and golfing. Moreover, I don’t see any hypocrisy in critiquing our confusion over Libya, as a supporter of the removal of Saddam Hussein. Wanting to use American power and influence to its fullest extent when going to war is preferable to not wanting to use all our power and influence when going to war. The hypocrisy is rather on the Left, which once damned the principle of intervention against an Arab Middle East oil-exporting nation that had not recently attacked us, only to support intervention against an Arab Middle East oil exporting nation that had not recently attacked us. In the Left’s defense, one could argue their consistency is that it’s OK if you have a UN vote, but irrelevant whether you have consent of the U.S. Congress.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the object of 23 different Congressional authorizations (one should go back and read that October 2002 long list of “whereas”es), had been in hot and cold wars with us since 1991, attacked four neighbors, and in the heart of the ancient caliphate was hosting all sorts of terrorists. In a post-911 climate it made sense to reckon with him. Indeed, I think one of the great untold stories of Iraq was the carnage of Islamic terrorists who by volition promised that Iraq would be the central theater in jihad, flocked there, were killed and wounded in droves, and lost—and vastly weakened their cause. But in contrast, the West was apparently in the middle of a weird charm offensive with Gadhafi (one advanced by bought-and-paid-for American academics, European oil companies, and multicultural elites), and the result by 2010 was that Libya was considered no longer the 1986 Libya that Reagan had bombed.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Middle East Mess”, Works and Days, 2011-08-24

August 25, 2011

Interesting new Gary Johnson ad

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:24

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