EJ Perspective

RealClearPolitics - After Setback, Dems Must Not Retreat

First, here is something that EJ and I mostly agree on:

The most politically potent attack on the health care effort was not on the plan itself. It was the argument that Democrats should have spent less time on this bill and more on job creation. Every moment the Republicans devote to destroying this year's reform opens them up to exactly the same criticism.

Republicans have to focus on JOBS FIRST and only repeal the most onerous aspects of the health bill -- fines to people not buying health insurance, reporting of every transaction over $600. Meet with chamber of commerce and business leaders and try to remove the most job killing aspects of the bill. Don't give in to just "kill it all" without having specific reasons for the parts killed and solutions that are better than the parts that are potentially salvaged.

Execute on a reasonable plan, be prepared to deal with even unfair charges of "ideology over people". Some will be unavoidable -- there really isn't any free lunch, and we can't have all that we might like. But be VERY clear -- on some of the aspects, "Would you rather have unemployment under 6% or would you rather have a lot of health care goodies"? Your job or provisions x, y and z? The persistence of high unemployment should be enough to clue in all but the true left ideologues on what the real trade-off is.

In 2008, the largest number of voters in American history gave the Democrats their largest share of the presidential vote in 44 years and big majorities in the House and Senate. 

How did Republicans react? They held their ideological ground, refused to give an inch to the new president, and insisted that persistent opposition would eventually yield them victory. And on Nov. 2, it did.

"Yes BUT" ... Democrats NEVER said what they were going to do. People voted for "Hope, Change, Yes we Can" and if you REALLY believe in fairy tales, "the end of Business As Usual politics". In some ways, the last was more true than many realized -- BO governed as "compromise is you doing it my way, otherwise, you are obstructionist". So the electorate was handed the hardest left turn since Johnson and told it was moderate. The electorates view and answer to guys like EJ was fortunately "Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining".
Now on to EJ's summary:

Give Republicans credit for this: They don't chase the center, they try to move it. Democrats can play a loser's game of scrambling after a center being pushed ever rightward. Or they can stand their ground and show how far their opponents are from moderate, problem-solving governance. Why should Democrats take Republican advice that Republicans themselves would never be foolish enough to follow?

Egads. Bush was completely progressive rather than conservative. Remember prescription drug? remember the deficit spending? remember "uniter not divider"? The stupid thing is that he actually tried, where BO gave some options for some RINOS to sign on to exactly what he wanted and when none were available, he went to stiff arming the few remaining near-left vs far left Democrats to fall on their swords and go his way. Bush lost control of the Senate in his first term and barely eeked out a majority in '02 that held until '06. His administration was an orgy of compromise -- with his own party and recalcitrant Republicans, where BO's to date was an absolute fascist "my way or the highway" (although cleverly disguised with Nancy and Harry being the "bad cops" to BO's good act).
The "middle"? Where would that be? Germany? I think EJ sees the options as left of Sweden being desirable -- if not Cuba, Germany being "middle" and maybe Ireland  being "far right". What a difference perspective makes.

Judicial Independence

Political Judges - Thomas Sowell - Townhall Conservative


Solid column by Thomas -- worthy of full read, but this is the core.

As for judicial "independence," that does not mean being independent of the laws. Being a judge does not mean being given arbitrary powers to enact the liberal agenda from the bench, which means depriving the citizens of their most basic rights that define a free and self-governing peop

I'll Take Kevin

Kevin Rubs It In - NYTimes.com

I regularly (painfully) read Mareen. She often laments of the HORROR of having come from an unwashed conservative family that remains unenlightened. I chuckle as largely I remain the reverse black sheep of my unrepentant lefty clan (with slight apology to my brother ... who maybe sensibly seems to kind of go with the current general tide).

While Mareen nearly never has anything that I much agree with to say, I gotta admit that she has great taste in brothers. I do strongly compliment her for never rising to levels of snobbery where her poor family had to be "Un-familied.

The whole thing is good, but "France without the food" is an excellent description of what the liberal target America is:

The voters left no doubt about their feeling for his super-nanny state where the government controls all aspects of their lives and freedoms. Warning signs were up in the three elections held in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey and with the noisy birth of the Tea Party. But the president, swathed in the protective cocoon of adulation and affirmation from the media and his own sycophants, soldiered on in his determination to turn our country into just another member of the failed European union — France without the food.

Poor Mareen ... a bad election loss for her makes T-day a real test. I'm pretty sure that 2004 was one of her saddest laments. Perhaps there is more news from what I'm sure I would find to be her wonderful family to share with us!

If only the NYT would pick up Kevin and fire her! I think she could produce a column almost as good as Kevin once or twice a year.

Defending BO

How Obama Saved Capitalism and Lost the Midterms - NYTimes.com

I think this guy has done a fairly reasonable left view of the "unfairness of BO treatment". Let me cover where I disagree with him:

1. Saving capitalism is like saving gravity -- it just shows you don't understand how the universe works. Even in the old USSR and China, the market continued to function. It was often "black", but it can't be removed. To think that someone "saved capitalism" shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the way things work.
   
2. POTENTIALLY, the TARP (which would have been W and Democrat congress fault), and/or the Stmulus MAY have HURT the economy. Note, I did not say that "I know", because I don't believe that anyone really does.  In my model, tax cuts are a better stimulus because they allow millions of people to decide where the "right place to spend money is". The BO stimulus assumes that some folks in Washington make better decisions on where to spend the money to get the best job growth. My view is that  it is impossible in anything like an economy for centralized intelligence to be as smart as distributed intelligence, and huge amounts of money put into the wrong things may well crowd out the right things for growth being done, and actually HARM the economy. To not at least believe that is POSSIBLE is again to not understand that in the human universe, there is no such thing as "unalloyed good".
   
3. The idea that "health care is a positive" is a similar world view issue. Whatever one thinks of the system we had, it was a system that American business understood and knew how to work with. We now have 3k pages of "the unknown", and for people that have to invest their own money, "unknown" is a gigantic disincentive. Again, there is NOTHING that man can do (other than seek redemption from Christ) that is an "unalloyed good" -- but take heart, we are very capable of doing pure evil!
4. The idea of voting by your stock market is quite odd for a liberal and disingenuous -- Reagan would have been a GREAT president by that metric, but I'm pretty sure that this guy isn't going for that. Markets are about "sentiment of future earnings" and "alternative returns". The markets really tanked AFTER BO was elected, so much of the "worst President" relative to markets is based on how bad the markets felt about the NEXT president, the glorious BO!!! When McCain picked Palin and Republicans had some false hope in Sept '08, the markets went up to 11,300 ... they were at 11,500 when W took office -- WAY different from "worst president ever" -- assuming that one wanted to use such a measure for anything.

Is it POSSIBLE that BO has done great and Americans have treated him unfairly? Sure, I think W was treated EXTREMELY unfairly after say "Katrina". My view of the major BO failings are 1). He doesn't realize he was elected president of an EXCEPTIONAL nation 2). Much of what he has done has INCREASED  business uncertainly 3). He appears to have no understanding that economic growth comes exclusively from THE PRIVATE SECTOR -- he keeps maligning the very people he needs to get the economy moving. I guess I'll stop there ... the list is long.

Liberals and American Exceptionalism

What’s So Great About America | The Weekly Standard

One of the areas that conservatives have a hard time communicating with liberals on is American exceptionalism.  My view on "why" is that the conservative vision is pretty much "One nation, under GOD, bequeathed by our founders and creator with a unique and superior position (broad fertile landmass between two oceans), superior people (self selected to be risk takers, willing to put independence and opportunity beyond safety and relative comfort), and superior government (designed to be LIMITED, not able to infringe on the people -- including allow them to bear arms as a final check against such infringement).

My view is that as we have moved away from the pioneer / emigrant ethos and into the misconception that "progress" (largely technical) somehow equates to "wisdom", we have lost our way, with BO being proof -- a PRESIDENT that no longer believes that America is any more exceptional than say "England or Greece".

Good column, read it all, I found this to be the core.

First, the idea of American exceptionalism has the benefit of being true. The United States is fundamentally and demonstrably different from other countries. It is bound together by a founding proposition, and properly applied the proposition has brought freedom and prosperity to more people, and more kinds of people, than any other. Second, a large majority of Americans believe American exceptionalism to be true. And third, it drives Democrats right around the bend.

It’s not clear why. Maybe liberal polemicists don’t quite understand what the phrase means, and so they pummel it into a caricature. In Politico last week, under the oddly truncated headline “U.S. Is Not Greatest Country Ever,” the columnist Michael Kinsley wrote that exceptionalism is “the theory that Americans are better than everybody else.” The next day, on a well-trafficked liberal website, another columnist said much the same thing—they tend to run in packs, these guys. Other countries, this columnist wrote, are “investing in infrastructure,” unlike the United States, which apparently just spent $780 billion in stimulus on chopped liver. At the same time, he went on, “the Republicans have taken refuge in an antigovernment ideology premised on the lunatic notion that America is the only truly free and successful country in the world.”

A Will Must Read

George F. Will - A recoil against liberalism

Odd syntax is sometimes correct. Just go read it all ... cogent, correct, well crafted. Being a reader of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", I can tell you that liberals can change those as well as a leopard can change his spots, or Randy Moss can become a docile, always hustling wide receiver.

"These ideas," Boudreaux says, "are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else's contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments." Liberalism's ideas are "about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of 'Big Ideas' that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people."

Welcome Tea Party Conservatives

Jim DeMint: Welcome, Senate Conservatives - WSJ.com

Good honest appraisal of the temptations of Washington. The Republicans gave in to temptation sometime after 2K, their majority will be as short lived as the Democrats if they give in again!

"When you are in Washington, remember what the voters back home want—less government and more freedom. Millions of people are out of work, the government is going bankrupt and the country is trillions in debt. Americans have watched in disgust as billions of their tax dollars have been wasted on failed jobs plans, bailouts and takeovers. It's up to us to stop the spending spree and make sure we have a government that benefits America instead of being a burden to it."

A New Republican Face

Colonel and Candidate by Jay Nordlinger - National Review Online:

Read the whole thing, well worth it. I only quoted one great paragraph, but there were a bunch. I think West is a great example of the right kind or Republican. The left is determined to demonize him because he is a free thinking Black that has left the "Thought Plantation". As we see with Sarah Palin, in the left world view, everyone has their assigned role, and they ARE NOT allowed to leave it. Women need to be "pro-choice, anti-war and pro-government support of anything to take the kids off mom's hands" -- or they can stay home, back cookies and shut up. Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin? THEATS! Big time threats -- diversity of thought in the groups bought and paid for by Democrat policy is DANGEROUS.

Likewise Allen West. Were he a Democrat and had committed any sort of crime and got off, he would have "an appealing life story". Being a Col in the military and firing a gun in the vicinity of a hostage to find out critical information that saved lives? HORRIBLE!!! Pretty much anything that a Black Democrat does is completely fine ... he was just re-elected again in the face of ethics violations of which the MSM has no concern about.

I expect to see a lot of good stuff out of Allen West!

"There are two things that could lose us our country if we’re not careful,” says West. One is the relinquishment of individual responsibility; the other is political correctness. He points to the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood, and who was not sidelined before that, despite his obvious Islamist predilections. “What can we say when political correctness has so seeped into our military that people are afraid to identify a problem situation because they don’t want to experience repercussions?” After Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood, Army chief of staff George Casey said, “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” West finds this repulsive."

Guess Who?

RealClearPolitics - Guess Who?

Cute little column by Sowell ... ground that has been covered in my blog before, but considering how many times many have heard the MISinformation about FDR "getting us out of the depression", it is likely impossible to repeat the facts too often!

MSM Setup in AK on Miller

Power Line - Plot still thickening in Alaska, cont'd

We've had "Jurnolist", we've had Rathergate, we've had a bunch more of them, but how long does it take for folks to figure out that the MSM is ACTIVELY seeking ways to get Tea Party and or conservative Republican people?

Do we really need to look any farther than the difference in the MSM coverage of BO vs Palin? Now we have this!

The CBS affiliate calls the candidate, gets the answering machine, fails to hang up, and we get treated to a scheme to "identify a child molester" at a Miller rally -- no doubt in some sort of a smear.

MSM coverage? Zilch, nada. Imagine if Fox or Limbaugh could be caught in something similar? Oh wait, we don't have to wonder! Limbaugh as "caught" with Viagra in an airport screen and even that was worth days of national news. When you are a conservative, NOTHING is off limits, but of course BJs at work if you are a Democrat ala Slick Willie are "private".

Strange Man In the WH

A Crossroads Election - Thomas Sowell - Townhall Conservative

Great article! I love the Democrat and MSM flip flop on "full disclosure" of bills going through congress and funding for ads. When BO ran, even when Democrats had controlled congress for 2 years already, braying about "putting bills on the internet so EVERYONE could comment and discuss them before they were signed" was somehow worthy of repeating over and over without the MSM laughing. The Democrats ALREADY controlled congress! Now? Disclosure? Not so much ... need to "pass it to find out what is in it"!

Blanketing the air waves with MoveOn.org ads funded by George Soros and other shadowy folks? No problem, and no need to "name names" in '06 and '08. When the Democrats were rolling in the dough, A-OK!

Read it all ... but here is the punch line:

We have a strange man in the White House. This election is a crossroads, because either his power will be curbed by depriving him of his huge Congressional majorities or he will continue on a road that jeopardizes both our freedom and our survival.

The SEIU, Harry Reid, And Voting Problems�|�NetRight Daily

The SEIU, Harry Reid, And Voting Problems�|�NetRight Daily

Interesting that there is zero MSM coverage of this that I can find. Remember Diebold?? I think EVERYONE knew that Diebold built voting machines and at least somebody in the company made contributions to some Republican sometime, therefore their voting machines could not be trusted. In '00, '02, and '04, ANY hint of any electronic voting problems was all over CNN and NPR.

Now we have voting machines under the control of a union that has actually been involved in vote fraud in more than one place -- Houston being a big one, and the local papers/media in Nevada reporting machines actually changing votes, but the MSM seems to think it is a "non-story".

Of course, we know they are unbiased -- and ONLY Fox has any bias!!

Electronic Voting Irregularities

Voter reports problem with ballot machine | machine, screen, voter - Local - Sun Journal

I've been concerned the last couple of elections because the MSM quit complaining about electronic voting. It was a HUGE problem in 2000,2002 and 2004 -- in fact, a number of Democrats were pushing to hold up the results because of the "potential of electronic vote fraud in Ohio" as late as 2004.

We know that ACORN and other groups manufactured millions of votes in '06 and '08, which I thought they had calculated was "enough" for their purposes, and indeed it was -- for those elections. Now we are in the midst of a new election and I remain concerned about the left's lack of concern for electronic voting. So what happened? What was the technical, procedural or other change in electronic voting that very suddenly made it completely disappear as an issue?

My explanation is the following, based somewhat on an excellent book by John Fund, "Stealing Elections".

1. Most of government is staffed by Democrats because of the number of lawyers and Government Union workers involved.
2. So most of the poll workers, people doing the contracts for the voting machines, handling of ballots, watchers, creators of procedures, etc are Democrats. 
3. It is well known that wide scale voter fraud has been going on for a very long time in many locales -- Chicago is only one of the most commonly pointed out with the Daly Machine. 
4. The "big problem" with electronic voting was the fact that the Democrats well known techniques for stealing elections needed to be "updated", and they were actually concerned that they could not figure out how to subvert the vote.
5. Now, I suspect that they have -- thus the MSM silence on the issue. 

If the numbers in the linked article are correct -- only 1 out of 5 Republican votes being counted, it seems that they have gone over the top. One of the problems with voter fraud has always been "too much success". One finds out that there were more Democrat votes from an area than there were voters -- this is amazingly common, it was one of the things that showed up in a solid Democrat precinct near the UofM during the last MN Senate race. Turned out there were a couple hundred more Franken votes than there were voters -- so of course, this being MN, and the votes being for Franken, the answer MUST have been that "the machine had the wrong voter count". Minnesota media of course had no problem with that at all -- "obvious". And of course a machine that can't count the number of votes is TOTALLY reliable in registering the direction of the vote!!! (as long as they were for Franken).

National Liberal Radio, Juan Williams

Power Line - The Williams Syndrome

Juan feels less secure about Arabs in full garb coming on a plane, so he gets fired. Here is a nice comment by an NPR Reporter that DID NOT get them fired:

"The man is on the Court. You know, I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease. Well, that’s how I feel. He is an absolutely reprehensible person."
-- USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, November 4, 1994 PBS To the Contrary.

Ah yes, the ever civil left. If only we nasty righties could learn from their kindness.Isn't it cool how the left is always about "feelings", but of course they don't mean REAL feelings, they mean "approved feelings". I suspect that something like 90% of Americans have at least a bit of concern when they see a full dress Muslim come on a plane. I mean, don't Democrats have some bad feelings as soon as they find out someone is a "Republican" -- oh wait, that's right. Feeling animosity to Republicans is "approved".

Are people with psych problems now less protected than Muslims? What is up with that? I thought psych problems was an excuse for everything up to and including mass murder for Democrats.

The only potential "meanings" I can get from Schiller's comment about "Williams and his psychiatrist" are:
1). Thinking that people that blew up planes in the past might blow up planes in the future is "insane" -- in a liberal world view sort of way.

2). People that disagree with the approved State Radio view of the world are "insane"

3). She happens to have looked at Juan's personnel record, knows he sees a psychiatrist and wanted to "get in a dig"

In any case, isn't lumping Juan in with "those people that see psychiatrists" kind of making the statement that those "people that see psychiatrists" are somehow "sub standard"? The next thing you know, one might start WORRYING about "people that see psychiatrists". But I guess that a sterotype about Muslims is a firing offense -- statements about folks that see psychiatrists is not.

Oh, and BTW -- NPR is "unbiased" -- because their standards are too high for Juan WIlliams, but just fine for Julianne Malveaux or Vivian Schiller for that matter. Fox on the other hand is "biased" -- Juan Williams said that "The Tea Party uses Timothy McVeigh imagery" on a Fox show when talking about the revolutionary war "Don't Tread on Me" snake flag. Fox is so biased that they hired him for $3million to continue to provide liberal comentary.

Path Between the Seas

The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914, By David McCullough

Interesting book for a couple unique reasons beyond the fact that it is a very well written book, first, I read the book just preceding and during our 14 day cruise that included passage through the canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and secondly, because it was the first book that I read on the newest Amazon Kindle. There will be other blogs on those two elements for any that are interested.

The book covers the sweep of the history of the dream to span both the Suez and Panama barriers to global trade that went back to the time of Columbus. Also covered in sometimes maybe too much detail is Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Frenchman who was seen as the force behind the successful completion of the Suez Canal, and who became the primary driver of the ill fated French attempt at Panama. As in all great human stories, personalities play an often greater role than the technical and physical “facts”, and the canal is certainly not an exception.

What de Lesseps had was a vision, and a charm and force of personality to infect others with that vision, which he did for thousands of Frenchmen, costing many many thousands their fortunes, and some 22 thousand their lives in the jungles of Panama. His vision was for a sea level canal as was created at Suez, and he completely ignored the opinion of a well known (but not much liked) French engineer, Godin deLepinay, that the “obvious solution was” an “artificial Nicaragua”.

Nicaragua was the other competing route where the much longer 181 miles (vs 50 at Panama) would be shortened by large lakes and the use of rivers that were at least partially navigable, and could be dredged and damed to be of even more assistance. For de Lessups, the fact that the length and lake structure would be prohibitive of a sea level canal, made Panama the “only choice”.

The dreams of a sea level canal at Panama largely ignored two physical facts of the route – one being the Chagres river, and the other being the amount of earth that needed to be removed to get to sea level at the Culebra Cut. Putting a large dam at Gatun and creating one of the larges artificial lakes in the world 85' above sea level allowed the unruly Chagres to become an asset by providing the water required to operate the canal (in it's current form, 50 million gallons per ship) , and to reducing the depth of the cut at Culebra by that 85'.

The French ran out of money and ran out of lives – given the times, if more money could have been found, the lives would no doubt have been sacrificed, but as it was they lost something around 22 thousand to Yellow Fever, Malaria, Plague, Pneumonia and a host of other tropical ailments. There was also massive graft and corruption involved in their efforts, as well as innumerable technical difficulties. In any case, they fought long, hard, and expensively during most of the 20 years from 1870-1890, ending in a failure that was monumentally costly to their nation and of course many individual investors and participants in the venture.

We Americans tend to think that Teddy Roosevelt pretty much dug the canal single handedly, but while his role was key, the story is naturally much more complicated. The US had favored the Nicaragua route from the beginning, and when we started to get serious about actually doing the canal, that route was all but assumed, and but for a number of special circumstances would likely have been selected. One of the leading “circumstances” was Philippe Buanu-Varilla, the main lobbyist for the US purchase of the abandoned French assets. To make a very long and very complex story short – he helped get the price dropped by 60%, worked with the Colombians, played a major role in the revolution that created the Nation of Panama, and many other elements of politics, finance and intrigue that caused the current route to come about.

TR had a lot to do with the drive that made both the selection of the route and the selection of the men that would make the canal a reality. Two of the keys were Dr William Gorgas and John Stevens. Gorgas understood the detailed relationship between both Yellow Fever and Malaria and mosquitoes, and even better, he was able to push the techniques of the day to nearly eradicate those diseases in the canal zone, a feat without which it is fairly likely the US population would have turned against the loss of life that would have been required to complete the canal.

Stevens was considered the greatest railroad man of the day, and he was able to see that the canal was primarily a railroad problem – constructing a railroad with the equipment, placement and flexibility to move the massive amounts of dirt from the Culebra to where it was required. He also created the infrastructure to support the work effort, instituted planning and procedures and eventually forced the decision on the lock vs the sea level canal – a dream that bedevilled the Americans as it had the French.

Stevens left his post under slightly mysterious circumstances, although I find it quite likely he simply decided that there were other things he would rather do. His replacement was George Goethals, who was an organizational genius and tireless worker that saw the project through to completion.

Having now seen the canal I can say that like all well executed constructions, it “looks easy”. Being familiar with the Soo Locks as well as having gone through a number of different large locks on the Mississippi, it is hard to go back to the early 20^th century and put the canal in the perspective. The locks are roughly the same size as the Soo locks , although I believe the Soo locks are narrower – the Panama locks are 1000 x 100'. Somehow, riding in a cruise ship over the route seems to very much belie the difficulties of the creation. Sitting on our balcony as a downpour arrived, but completely dry because I was tucked under the massive overhang of deck 10 above me made it hard to appreciate men toiling in heat, bugs, mud, and the constant threat of painful death by disease as the French had experienced.

One might be traveling on the lower Mississippi in the US with the jungles visible on the shore being no doubt more dense and with less example of human impact in Panama than back home. When we passed by the bridge over the Chagras, it was hard to imagine that sleepy looking little inlet being any sort of a threat to the project, but 50'+ of dam will really change the complexion of a river.

All in all it was a fine book, if possibly a bit TOO long and detailed in some aspects – as with the Gettysburg trip, there is something special about reading a book on the subject of a current travel destination.