Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year’s tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy — I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.
Camille Paglia, “Too late for Obama to turn it around?”, Salon, 2009-09-09
September 9, 2009
QotD: The Democratic Party’s problem with criticism
September 3, 2009
Alabama belatedly bans “indecent” wine
Three years after it started being sold in the state, Alabama decided that this is indecent:
Slashfood reports:
Wine and scantily clad women may sound like some cad’s idea of a good time, but the combo spells trouble in Alabama, which last week banned the sale of a California-made wine bottle adorned with a naked nymph — helping boost its sales elsewhere in the nation.
Pursuant to the state’s administrative code, the Alabama Beverage Control Board ordered Hahn Family Wines to remove its Cycles Gladiator wines from shelves throughout the state, calling its label “immodest.” According to Hahn president Bill Legion, a small state board in Alabama rejected the artwork last year, but the ruling did not catch Legion’s eye. His apparent defiance of the state’s decision — he claims the paperwork “fell through the cracks” — led to the ban.
“It’s turned out to be a great thing for us,” laughs Legion, who says he’s received calls of support from oenophiles around the world.
I haven’t tried the Cabernet Sauvignon, but I did have a few glasses of their Pinot Noir last week . . . very nice, although rather more full bodied than traditional Pinot (Burgundy, where pinot noir is the primary red wine grape, is a cool climate zone, as are most of the other well known pinot producer regions).
August 28, 2009
Ted Kennedy
Virginia Postrel looks at the differences between the glamour of the JFK and RFK images and the non-glamorous career of Ted Kennedy:
Ted was the Kennedy who lived. He was, as a result, the Kennedy who wasn’t glamorous.
Jack is forever young and forever whatever his adoring fans imagine him to be: the president who would have gotten us out of Vietnam (rather than the one who got us in) or the original supply-sider (rather than a textbook Keynesian), the ideal combination of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. We learned decades ago about Jack’s compulsive womanizing, but it is those selective images of the beautiful family that remain in collective memory. Life recorded no adulteries, no dirty tricks, no secret injections. The JFK of memory is a man of vigor, not an Addison’s patient dependent on steroids, painkillers, and anti-spasmodics. He is the personification of political glamour.
Bobby, too, is glamorous — the tough guy turned symbol of youth and idealism, more photogenic than Gene McCarthy and more mythic. No one wonders how he would have held together the fractious Democratic Party of 1968, because he never had to. Like his brother, RFK is a persona, not a person, all hope and promise and projection.
In an age of cynicism and full disclosure, political glamour is a rarity — not because politicians lack good looks or wealth or celebrity but because we know too much about them. We too easily see their flaws and imagine even more than the flaws we do see.
August 25, 2009
QotD: The Race War that Isn’t
These are indeed “profoundly troubling” charges, which makes one wonder why they’re being bandied about with such flippant regard for historical plausibility.
The “jackboot” analogy, for starters, breaks down at the ankle: The footwear was favored by enforcers for totalitarian governments, not random Ron Paul supporters flashing Thomas Jefferson quotes outside political events. Weimar-era brownshirts were an organized Nazi paramilitary group perpetrating calculated violence against political opponents in a hyperinflationary, recently humiliated country that had never enjoyed liberal democracy; not a dozen-plus scattered gun nuts in one of the world’s oldest democracies peacably (if jarringly) exercising their Second Amendment rights by keeping their guns holstered (not “brandishing” them, as Rich and countless others have claimed). The last actual lynching in America, depending on who you ask, took place in 1981; the atrocious practice had been all but dead since the 1960s.
To fear the Weimarization of America, or the return of lynching, is to fundamentally lack confidence in the very real progress the United States has made over the past several decades. Conditions have improved exponentially even since the post-lynching 1980s, when I was coming of voting age. Back then there was still a politics to be had in bashing Martin Luther King, supporting apartheid South Africa, whipping up fears of black ultra-violence, and otherwise appealing openly to white resentment against blacks. It was gross, it was reckless, it led to terrible policies, and it was the reason I permanently swore off joining the Republican Party. It’s also largely an artifact of the past.
Matt Welch, “The Race War That Isn’t: Media anxieties over ‘lynch mobs’ and ‘brownshirts’ demonstrate a telling lack of faith in contemporary America”, Reason Online, 2009-08-25
Update, 27 August: Matt Welch posted a follow up to the article from which this QotD was abstracted. He writes: “The assertion that the Esquire piece was promoting the “racial-resentment” narrative was inaccurate, and I have corrected the article accordingly.”
August 24, 2009
August 22, 2009
Right wing nutbars, observed
P.J. O’Rourke tries to save readers the effort of reading the Washington Post coverage of recent town hall protests:
So there was Rick Perlstein calling everyone to the right of Nikita Khrushchev a candidate for the state psychiatric ward with Alec MacGillis playing his KGB Bozo sidekick, firing blanks and honking his “End-of-life care eats up a huge slice of spending” airhorn. Then, to add idiocy to insult, the Post sent Robin Givhan to observe the Americans who are taking exception to various expansions of government powers and prerogatives and to make fun of their clothes.
Givhan writes a column called “On Culture,” and this is what passes for culture at the Post: “Of the hundreds of thousands of style guides currently for sale on Amazon, not one . . . was prescient enough to outline the appropriate attire for those public occasions when good citizens decided to behave like raving lunatics and turn lawmakers into punching bags.” Meeting with Givhan’s scorn were “T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm.”
I’ve never seen Robin Givhan. For all I know she dolls herself up like Jackie O. But I have seen other employees of the Washington Post and — with the exception of the elegant and, I dare say, cultured, Roxanne Roberts — they look as if they got dressed in the unlit confines of a Planet Aid clothing-donation bin.
Perlstein, for all the highness of his dudgeon, doesn’t catch the nuts saying anything very nutty. The closest he gets to a lunatic quote is from a “libertarian” wearing a holstered pistol who declares that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots.” And those are the words of lefty icon Thomas Jefferson. I myself could point out the absurdity of protestors’ concerns about government euthanasia committees. Federal bureaucracy has never moved fast enough to get to the ill and elderly before natural causes do. And what’s with those “birthers”? Why their obsession with a nonentity like Obama? How about John Adams with his Alien and Sedition Acts choke-hold on the First Amendment? Or Jefferson? He could tell his Monica Lewinsky, “I own you,” and he wasn’t kidding. Or John Quincy Adams, pulling the original Blagojevich, buying the presidency from Henry Clay? Or that backwoods Bolshevik Andrew Jackson? Or William Henry Harrison, too dumb to come in out of the rain? Not one of these scallywags was born in the United States of America — look it up.
August 20, 2009
Is the US still a racist country?
Matt Welch gets a bit het-up about an academic’s easy characterization of the racism and hatred he feels is still a malignant, powerful force in American politics: “Hate, if it ever truly threatened to leave the political stage, is most definitely back, larger and nastier than ever.”
To get all journalistically theoretical for a moment, what is the definition of journalism? Well, I don’t know, but I do know that one thick chunk of the idea is to write or say (or aim to write and say) things that are unequivocally 100 percent true, and hopefully verified in some way. This is even more true, if such a thing is mathematically possible, for those who deliver lectures on all that should be true and good about journalism.
What, class, do we notice about Davis’ statement above? IT IS DEMONSTRABLY FALSE. We used to have slavery in this country, and Jim Crow laws, and all kinds of officially sanctioned, legalized discrimination against disfavored minorities. And you want to tell me that hate is “larger and nastier than ever”? We had a CIVIL WAR in this country, where people not only brought their legally licensed firearms to townhalls, but they MURDERED THE SHIT OUT OF ONE ANOTHER. How many people died in racially fueled street riots 41 years ago, compared to how many died in racially fueled street riots in 2009? This little couplet, tossed off without evident concern, as if OF COURSE we all know this is true, is blatantly, sophomorically, and insultingly untrue. It’s an advertisement for the author’s fundamental lack of seriousness about the very subject he aims to address.
Testing their hypotheses
Steve Chapman looks at the opportunities to test all the reasons conservatives oppose gay marriage:
Opponents of same-sex marriage reject it on religious and moral grounds but also on practical ones. If we let homosexuals marry, they believe, a parade of horribles will follow — the weakening of marriage as an institution, children at increased risk of broken homes, the eventual legalization of polygamy, and who knows what all.
Well, guess what? We’re about to find out if they’re right. Unlike most public policy debates, this one is the subject of a gigantic experiment, which should definitively answer whether same-sex marriage will have a broad, destructive social impact.
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire have all decided to let gays wed. Most of the remaining 44 states, however, are not likely to follow suit anytime soon. So in the next few years, we will have a chance to compare social trends in the states permitting same-sex marriage against social trends in the others.
Oddly, he was unable to find many of the same outspoken critics who were willing to go on record as to the kind of dire consequences we should start to see in those six states, compared to the rest of the country. I did a bit of googling, and thought I’d found one, but it turned out to be something different:
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
The above is not actually representative of what the critics of same-sex marriage actually said. It’s actually from a transcript of the last Climate Change conference . . .
August 18, 2009
The economic value of high speed passenger trains
Another article pointing out the economic issues with the current US administration’s sudden love for high speed rail:
In April, President Barack Obama claimed “my high speed rail proposal will lead to innovations in the way we travel” and new rail lines “will generate many thousands of construction jobs over several years, as well as permanent jobs for rail employees and increased economic activity in the destinations these trains serve.”
Even House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who voted against the stimulus bill, now wildly praises rail’s job-creation potential, writing, “It is estimated that creating a high-speed railway through Virginia will generate as many as 185,500 jobs, as much as $21.2 billion in economic development, and pull nearly 6.5 million cars off the road annually. Providing a high-speed rail service from Washington, D.C. to Richmond will drive economic development throughout our region for many years to come.”
High speed railways (HSR) work well in certain conditions: in areas of high passenger density over medium-length journeys. HSRs can’t replace regular passenger trains running on joint freight-passenger rail lines because the HSR trains require more expensive dedicated lines with different signalling and control systems. Running an HSR train on unimproved track would merely give you a slightly faster passenger train: it would not allow the much higher running speed required to allow the HSR to show its capabilities.
The need for dedicated lines in high population areas means that no private railway could afford to buy the necessary right of way and additional land for associated station, maintenance, and storage facilities. Inhabited, densely developed land is expensive: governments need to get involved by using their powers of eminent domain to condemn and requisition land from private owners.
The proposed HSR line from Washington to Richmond might be economically feasible, setting aside the costs to the individuals and companies whose property will be taken to build the new line, but it will be politically difficult because the people whose property will be at risk will be highly motivated to oppose the development in any way they can.
Passenger rail currently carries a very small portion of city-to-city travel — the market targeted by high-speed rail — and it’s likely to remain modest well into the future. In 2008, Amtrak carried 28.7 million passengers. By comparison, there were 687 million airline passengers in 2008, in part because air service provides frequent high-speed travel to geographically distant cities. Then there’s our well-developed highway network that makes automobiles very competitive with rail for distances under 200 miles. In most cases, once travel and wait times to train stations are factored in, travelers will spend as much time in route on the train as they will in a car.
That last point is why the “high speed” part of HSR is critical . . . if you’re going to use the train for part of your journey, you need that portion of the trip to be appreciably faster than the other options, or you won’t make the extra effort to use the service. For example, commuting into Toronto using the (non high-speed) GO train service saves me an average of 5-10 minutes per trip, but if I miss the train, I’ll be an hour later getting there. Driving in is more flexible, time-wise, but a bad traffic jam or construction en route can make an already long commute that much more frustrating . . . and I can’t read while driving. It’s a bit of a wash, from my point of view. The costs are slightly in favour of taking the train, counting parking and gas costs (but the GO train fare is subsidized by the provincial government, so I’m only paying half the actual cost of my ticket: everyone else in Ontario pays the other half).
August 17, 2009
eBay now hosting “Sleep with Marilyn Monroe” auction
That is, they’re running an auction for the burial plot immediately above the one occupied by the mortal remains of Marilyn Monroe:
When it comes to sleeping with a bona fide Hollywood sex symbol, death need not necessarily be an impediment. Thanks to Los Angeles widow Elsie Poncher, who is auctioning off a burial plot atop that occupied by Marilyn Monroe, it may even count as an advantage.
Poncher’s advertisment on eBay offers prospective corpses the chance to “spend eternity directly above Marilyn Monroe”. Bidding opened last week at $500,000 (£300,000) and has already topped $4.5m, with more than seven days left to run.
August 16, 2009
August 15, 2009
Would-be assassins
In honour of this news item, I felt it appropriate to buy this (actually, I downloaded it from iTunes).
I always thought it’d have been more appropriate if she’d tried to do this at the Lincoln Centre, just for the symmetry . . .
August 13, 2009
QotD: Interpreting the Fed’s message
After two days of satanic worship, no-safeword BDSM and blackface minstrel performances, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announced today that it will stay the course on currency manipulation. According to the post-meeting press release, the Federal Reserve will maintain its effective negative target range for the federal funds rate. With economic activity “leveling out,” “signs of stabilizing” in household spending, “tight credit,” continued business cutbacks and a “gradual resumption of sustainable economic growth in a context of price stability,” the Fed expects inflation to “remain subdued for some time.” But the Fed is also standing by its plan to discontinue purchases of Treasury debt this fall [. . .]
The plan to phase out Treasury purchases is a bet that inflation will be kicking in by the fall, as Americans gear up for the harvest festival that marks their winter solstice. Will Santa be bringing you a wallet full of degenerated dollars? Some early signs: The greenback spiked right after the FOMC’s announcement, but has been falling against the currencies of countries with adult supervision. Demand for the the 10-year Treasury note followed the same pattern — with the FOMC’s statement triggering a brief flurry after a disappointing auction of $23 billion in new government debt earlier in the day. Maybe the market took the boilerplate about “subdued inflation” seriously. Or maybe it’s easier to believe the economy will heat up when the Fed doesn’t say so.
Tim Cavanaugh, “Fed Thinks It Has Conjured Inflation”, Hit and Run, 2009-08-12
This is a mind-boggling level of debt
As soon as the money being discussed passes a billion dollars, for most people it might as well be imaginary . . . here’s a bit of perspective:
To put some context on a new estimate that puts this year’s federal deficit at $1.8 trillion, consider this: That amount had never been spent by the federal government in a single year until 2000, let alone borrowed.
That’s right. As the decade began, the US government spent $1.8 trillion in a year for the first time. Now it’s poised to spend that much in excess of its tax revenues.
The Treasury released the latest figures Wednesday, showing spending of about $3 trillion in the past 10 months, and revenues of only $1.74 trillion.
With two months to go in the fiscal calendar, the Obama administration is projecting that the imbalance will end up totaling $1.84 trillion, more than four times last year’s record-high. The monthly deficit for July, also reported this week, came in a bit above what economists had expected.
Now all the talk about replacing the US dollar with some other currency as the international reserve makes rather more sense. The US government is going to be a long, long time paying off all that new debt . . . or repudiating it and triggering a world-wide financial melt-down. Either way, prudent investors will be looking at non-US investments for future attention. This will make it that much harder for the US economy to grow its way out of debt.
It will take a lot of political courage to stay the course, pay down the accumulated debt and avoid going for what the domestic audience will see as the easy option (declaring national bankruptcy). It’s hard to imagine any current American politician with the fortitude to take the hard option (cutting government spending and paying off the debt).
