The Alan and Paul Show

Stalinism come round

2006-02-21T20:51:00.000-06:00

This article, arguing that the failure of the West to adequately deal with--or even understand--the current Islamist movement is a result of our failure to deal with the ideological offspring of Communism, makes a strong case. I think it's maybe a bit oversold as far as laying too much of the blame on Stalin, in that some of the ideas were circulating in early 20th century America as the result of different historical moments. Still, Stalin's not a bad place to start.

Via Instanpundit.

A new strategy

2006-02-20T20:48:00.000-06:00

I think the Isalamists have hit on a more successful means to their insane ends--instead of just one big murderous attack every six months or so, they'll just be outwardly crazy all the time. That way, people will start to ignore them and miss stories like this. So far, it's working:

A Jew Is Tortured and Killed in Paris...But Is it Anti-Semitism? Mais, non!

For whom the bell tolls...

2006-02-18T18:23:00.000-06:00

The New York Times has run one editorial so far (from what I can tell) on arguably the biggest story of the month, possibly the year: the massive protests, murders, violence, and destruction following the publishing 5 months ago of some cartoons depicting the prohpet Mohammed. Following standard journalistic practice, I'll pause here to point out that "Muslims consider depictions of Mohammed blasphemous." That statement is a bit incomplete, which most news outlets have never taken the time to point out. The truth: Mulsims of the increasingly, radical, fundamentalist bent that have come to form the broad mass of Islam as it exists today around the world consider depictions of the prophet blasphemous. Mulsims of the more enlightened, scholarly, academic nature that existed several hundred years ago had no such hang ups. That in and of itself might be an interesting story, but despite looking, I haven't seen it anywhere. Probably people are afraid to write it out of the not unreasonable fear of being murdered.

The story is a crucial one about how a significant percentage of the world's population views the freedom of the press. As reported in the AP story about the latest flare up of murders over the cartoon, Grand Imam Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of al-Azhar University, the world's highest Sunni Muslim seat of learning, said, no, actually, demanded "that the world's religious leaders, including him and Pope Benedict XVI, should meet to write a law that ''condemns insulting any religion, including the Holy Scriptures and the prophets.'' He said the United Nations should then impose the law on all countries." (inside the little quotes are direct quotes, inside the double quotes is text from the AP story).

Let's be crystal clear about the political position of the murderers and their accomplices. 1) Freedom of speech does not extend to the realm of religious statement, or even political statement about religion. 2) Religious pride should be treated as personal property, something to be guarded by the state with the threat of force. 3) The violation of religious pride should be pereceived in the same way as an attack on one's property or life, appropriate to be met with violent force in defense.

This is a radical notion. It certainly stands in opposition to the great majority of Western thought over the past several hundred years and the founding principles of democracy in the West. You would think that the NYT, whose very existence is made possible by those prinicples being challenged, would want to mount a spirited defense? They made a comment about it in an editorial today, I kid you not, here's the direct quote: "Who needs sophomoric cartoons to inflame the Muslim world when you've got the Bush administration's prison system? One reason the White House is so helpless against the violence spawned by those Danish cartoons is that it has squandered so much of its moral standing at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib." A few questions: How is it that Bush is helpless? He's not the target of the violence, nor is it his responsibility to try and stop it. I agree with the criticism concerning Abu Ghraib and G-bay, but this sounds quite obviously like a two wrongs make a right comment. Second question: the cartoons didn't spawn the violence. The cartoons were published five months ago. The violence was spawned by a failed ideology being employed by fascist imams trying to exert ever more control over an uneducated, impoverished and easily manipulated people. That the people are so easily manipulated is the latest symptom of the ongoing corruption of Muslim society.

Unfortunately, the one editorial the NYT did write directly on this point is behind the Timesselect wall, but maybe we can glean a bit from the title and first sentence you are allowed to see. The title is: "Censoring Truth." Oops, actually that strongly worded title is actually a tirade about Bush and some NASA thing. The real title is "Those Danish Cartoons." As if the cartoons, and not the murderous anger of the world's Muslims is the real story. The first line is: "Cartoons making fun of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in a Danish newspaper last September are suddenly one of the hottest issues in international politics." Hottest issues? It makes it sound like Capri pants..."Man, have you seen the latest? Burning down embassies because your fragile religious sensibilities have been tweaked? Everybody's doing it!?" Other reports on the editorial include the following quote:
"The easy points to make about the continuing crisis are that (a) people are bound to be offended if their religion is publicly mocked, and (b) the proper response is not to go on a rampage and burn down buildings. If Muslim organizations want to stage peaceful marches or organize boycotts of Danish goods, they're certainly within their rights." Wow, the very existence of the worldview in which the NYT is allowed to exist is under attack, and they make there defense in part (b) of a spineless two part summary of events.

Remember Piss Christ? That's the federally funded work of art showing a crucifix in a jar of urine. Boy, how those Christians went nuts! All those buildings that got burned down, people that got murdered, that was mayhem. What...that didn't happen? And yet the NYT still editorialized against people who would rather not have their tax dollars directed towards a mocking of their values? Yes.

Remember that portrait of Mary (the mother of Jesus) covered in feces? Remember the riots, fires and murders? What!? Not even one murder? What about the NYT, what did they say? "Gratuitous assaults on religious symbols"-- "sounds juvenile." No, that's what they said about the cartoons (really). The cartoons were gratuitous. Covering a (peaceful) symbol of a religion in shit--this is the response: "cultural experimentation and transgression are not threats to civility but part of the texture and meaning of daily life."

Actually, they're right--the only true threat to civility is violence. The greatest threat to a democratic civilization is when speech is restricted in the face of fear of reprisal. The NYT, in their weak and anemic defense, have cast their lot with their own opponents, the agents of their own destruction. This is a big deal...it would be nice if the paper of record would notice.

Pop Quiz!

2006-02-14T22:20:00.000-06:00

Which of the following best describes the above picture?

(a) Radical left-wing college students (mostly unemployed, unhygenic, and easily manipulated young men) demonstrating - at some IMF/World Bank meeting or something - against the secular capitalist culture of the West, especially that of the United States

OR

(b) Radical fundamentalist Muslims (mostly unemployed, unhygenic, and easily manipulated young men) demonstrating against the secular capitalist culture of the West, especially that of the United States

OR

(c) Both of the above

Odds and ends

2006-02-07T21:57:00.000-06:00

Scientific experiments usually test a very narrow set of conditions. Dietary studies are often the most narrow because they can't vary too much with the sample sizes they are dealing with. Hence, I get very frustrated with the reports about dietary studies such as this one which claims that low-fat diets have absolutely no effect on breast cancer, colon cancer or heart disease. What the study actually shows is that this particular form of low-fat diet had no effect on the rates of those diseases in a statistically significant way during the 8-year period they looked in. Now, you think scientists would be somewhat cautious about how to interpret that result, instead we get people like Julie Hirsch from Rockefeller saying "These studies are revolutionary" or Dr. Michael Thun calling them "the Rolls-Royce of studies." Asses.

First of all, cancer takes a bit of time to develop. I think they teach this in high school now, which maybe our Dr.'s didn't attend, but a cancer cell accumulates several "hits" over time which leads to it becoming malignant. Because you changed the environment of the cancer cell for 8 years, a pretty short period of time, you can't really make many claims about how a diet taken on over a lifetime affects health outcomes. You can only say that changing your diet for 8 years when you are 50 isn't going to do much and I think we all could've guessed that anyway without all this hubaloo. It is true that doing a study over a lifetime would be impossible and would involve children. We do have large correlational, population studies, which have the problem that they are merely correlational, but they do suggest that there are powerful effects of diet. Certainly, given the breadth of correlational studies that show dietary effects, even with their weaknesses it should give one pause when deciding to throw them out because of a very narrow eight-year study. I'm not impressed, but the NYT has run a few stories recently of this sensationalistic nature that diet is not important after all. It's poor journalism and poor science. I hope these doctors were quoted out of context.

On a quick note, a pat on the back should go to Wal-Mart Watch and Wake-Up Walmart and the United Auto Workers union. Today we see the fruits of their tireless labors: Wal-Mart has opened up more stores in January than in any month in its history and plans another 1500 (get that FIFTEEN HUNDRED) some of which will be urban, multi-story and more "fashionable." Boy that Wal-mart movie and all the protests: have they worked or what! Wal-mart's back is up against the wall now!

Meanwhile, largely non-union Toyota is expected to report its most profitable year ever, while GM lost more money than most other countries GDP. You'd think eventually people would catch on to this efficiency/capitalism/everyone in a company benefits thing, but I guess it takes time....

Posner and Paul

2006-01-30T19:40:00.000-06:00

I'm not suggesting that Judge Richard Posner, one of Alan's idols, is reading the blog, but he does seem to be in agreement with my latest post on the Palestinian elections. He also makes the point, which the news stories leave out, that the popularity of Hamas has as much to do with their humanitarian efforts as any resistance to Israel. Sure, the images on TV are always people rioting in the streets or cheering some suicide bomber, but the day-to-day living in the occupied territories is no cake walk and for many people the only source of food or medicine is Hamas. Again, if you've read this blog, you know I'm a big supporter of Israel and am not offering any support for Hamas's terrorist activities, but to Joe Palestinian going to the voting booth, the issues that matter most to you are going to be ones of competency and services. Everyone talks about the "surprise" of the election, but if you've ever talked to someone from the region about the role Hamas plays, it wasn't such a shock. They are a lot of unknowns at this point, but I think plenty of room for hope. From the Posner piece:

So democracy itself is not a panacea for the world's political ills and dangers. But if the Palestinians are able to develop a genuinely republican government and move rapidly toward embourgeoisement, there is some hope for the eventual emergence of a peaceful Palestinian state.

Why the filibuster is a good idea for the Democrats and the Hamas victory might not be so bad after all

2006-01-27T09:33:00.000-06:00

Here at the Show, we tend to be wary of media "certainties." Sure, sometimes the media is accurate (they usually nail that "time of sunrise" and "time of sunset") but generally, whenever the media conventional wisdom coalesces around a conclusion, like how George W. Bush couldn't win re-election with his poll numbers and how John Kerry made people feel "safe", you should put your money somewhere else (George Bush was easily re-elected. John Kerry made most people "annoyed" and seemed "creepy").

Today we have the seemingly bizarre development that John Kerry and Ted Kennedy are going to try and filibuster Samuel Alito for confirmation to the Supreme Court. The media is already pronouncing this a foolish and destined-to-fail maneuver. And it is probably destined to fail (most other Democrats are not supporting it). But I don't think it's so foolish...the reason why starts with the following table:

Age of Supreme Court Justices:

1) Stevens-85
2) Ginsberg-72
3) Scalia-69
4) Kennedy-69
5) Breyer-68
6) Souter-66
7) Thomas-57
8) Alito-55
9) Roberts-50

Now, anything can happen, but it seems that the judge likely to retire next is John Paul Stevens, certainly among the most liberal if not THE most liberal judge on the bench (a Ford appointee, strangely enough). A Stevens replacement, much more so than Alito replacing O'Connor, has the potential to shake up the court. When O'Connor first announced her retirement (and Roberts was first nominated to replace her), most media reports accurately noted that major decisions such as Roe v. Wade were safe, as they were supported by a 6-3 majority. For some reason, during the Alito hearings, I was unable to find one single media story that mentioned that fact. Instead, they were all about how Roe is in "danger." The remaining five justices in favor of Roe are Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, Kennedy and Stevens. An Alito confirmation keeps Roe safe and sound, assuming Kennedy stays with the majority. While Kennedy swings sometimes, he mainly does whatever keeps himself in the limelight, which in the case of abortion, now more than ever, means siding with the liberals. That means that Roe will not be overturned and we will all be forced to read more Kennedy decisions. Seriously, whatever your politics, reading a Kennedy decision is cringe-inducing--it's like reading earnest 7th grade poetry.

But if Stevens were to retire, then there would be a solid, 5-person conservative majority if Bush gets to appoint the successor. Assuming he nominates someone like Roberts or Alito, it would be extremely solid, not like the wishy-washy conservative majority that relied on the whim of Kennedy or O'Connor (and as a added perk, Kennedy would become far less powerful and hopefully would write less...or at least be less inclined to his "soaring" language, as the media usually refers to it).

Which brings me to why the filibuster is smart politics. The Democrats let the Roberts nomination through with, for them, a minimum of whining (though oodles more than the Republicans ever whined about Clinton's nominees). They have given Alito hell, but have not threatened a serious filibuster. But by putting the word "filibuster" out there, and letting it fail, they set the stage for a real filibuster the next time around. It doesn't seem as unprecedented if they try to use it for Stevens replacement, because, hey, they did it once before (even if it didn't work). And they, and the friendly media, will go all out explaining what the real stakes are in a Bush-appointed Stevens replacement. Overall, I'd say the Democrats have played their hand pretty well, slowly ratcheting up the stakes so that the nuclear histrionics they are planning on pulling seem like merely the next logical step.

A quickie comment on Hamas winning in the Palestinian elections: if the new Hamas leaders are serious about a stable Palestinian state, which is in their interest if they want to hold on to their power, then they will make some kind of peace with Israel. A poll released this morning says that approximately 50% of Israelis think their government should negotiate with Hamas. Like Nixon going to China and Clinton signing welfare reform, a Hamas-negotiated settlement would have an authority the Fatah government could never muster. It's also worth noting that while Hamas is a terrorist organization and last I heard is chartered for the destruction of Israel, they have a massive humanitarian relief program on the local level within Palestine. Many Palestinians that support Hamas do so for the very practical reason that Hamas helps them out, getting food, services etc. It in no way excuses their terrorist activities, but it helps explain why they garner so much popular support (again, I think the media here has been tremendously lax in reporting the full scope of Hamas activities). Hamas has a real opportunity to break with the past, make peace, and reform the Palestinian government and security forces from a corruption that was institutional within the Fatah movement. It may not seem like an ideal situation, but it may be the best chance the region has.

It's "The System," Man

2006-01-22T23:35:00.000-06:00

So the party of big government and (though the distinction is entirely redundant) the party of big government corruption has decided to go after the GOP over lobbyist financing of “fact-finding” trips.

But Jack Abramoff is far from the only lobbyist in Washington, and the GOP far from the only party that gets lobbyist money.

Fortunately, we have a handy-dandy website—called “Power Trips”—run by America RadioWorks, some entity which produces programs largely for National Public Radio. This nifty website lists how many “fact finding” trips each person in Congress took from January 2000 to September 2004, where to, how much was spent, and who financed it.

Let’s take a quick fact-finding trip ourselves, shall we?

All told, between 2000 and January 2004 four of the top five lobbyist-financed trip takers were Democrats. 14 of the top 20 were Democrats. 59 of the top 100 were Democrats. And all this during a period in which the Democrats had far fewer people in Congress than the GOP.

In case the general pattern is not yet clear, “Power Trips” offers a stunning tour of the aggregate numbers:

Democratic Party: Number of trips for party members: 3674Total spent on party members: $10,471,578.35Percentage of total spent on party: 54.0%
Independent Party: Number of trips for party members: 95Total spent on party members: $178,281.50Percentage of total spent on party: 0.9%
Republican Party: Number of trips for party members: 2802Total spent on party members: $8,759,848.27Percentage of total spent on party: 45.1%

Again, this was all during a period in which the Democrats had far fewer people in Congress than did the GOP.

So—the unfairly singled out, unfairly maligned, unfairly hunted-down, and unfairly destroyed Jack Abramoff notwithstanding—let’s just remember which party has the far worse addiction to lobbyist-financed vacations.

And let’s remember which party has done the most to try and mend the present system. Back in the 90’s it was a Republican Congress that passed line item veto legislation (which was supported and signed into law by President Clinton):

On April 10, President Bill Clinton signed the line-item veto into law. A historic transfer of power, the move greatly increases the power that the president has over bills passed by the United States Congress.
Rather than signing or vetoing a bill in its entirety, the president can strike specific expenditures from the bill. The veto may be overridden by a two-thirds majority in Congress. The law, to go into effect this January with the next presidential term, presents a tremendous departure from the traditional separation of powers.
The line-item veto, one of the most significant parts of the GOP's Contract with America [emphasis added], has long been sought by presidents. Already law in 43 states, it aids in cutting wasteful spending and balancing the budget. […]
A vast majority of federal spending is for Social Security, Medicare, or other existing entitlement programs, interest on the debt and other items that are unaffected by the new law. Many argue that a line-item veto would target only discretionary spending, which represents a small, and shrinking, part of the budget. This largely unnecessary "pork spending" is under the greatest threat from the law.
The law, thus, is more of an acknowledgment that Congress itself cannot control unnecessary spending. In allowing the law to pass Congress has chosen to give away a certain amount of power for the greater good of the country.

Guess who immediately filed a lawsuit to stop the Line Item Veto Act? Democratic Senators Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y) Carl Levin (D-Mich) and Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.); and Representatives David Skaggs (D-Colo), Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).

Please note the party affiliations involved—and also please note that Senator Hatfield, the only Republican on the list, was widely regarded as a liberal Republican. He was, you know, a Senator from Oregon.

The Supreme Court threw out the first lawsuit on procedural grounds, observing that pork-loving liberal Congressmen do not have standing to sue in federal court whenever Congress and the President pass a law contrary to the political interests of pork-loving liberal Congressmen.

But then New York City (note—not Salt Lake City or Dallas or Wichita) sued to stop the law. This case stuck procedurally, and the federal courts found the Line Item Veto Act unconstitutional.

I suppose that I agree that it was unconstitutional. (Sniff.)

But, you know what? Had no one filed any lawsuits, we could have all just gone along with the Line Item Veto Act! Pretty much everyone except pork-loving liberal Congressmen thought it was a good policy decision. That’s the thing about unconstitutional laws; all we have to do is all agree that no one file suit! The qestion of constitutionality never comes up unless someone makes a challenge in court. But noooo, the Democrats just had to go and start firing off lawsuits.

But placing blame on individuals or small groups of individuals or entire political parties only overlooks the real proble--which is the system itself.

So long as Congress has virtually unlimited power to regulate any action we take, so long as there are no limits to governmental power, the lobbyists, special interest groups, and pressure groups are going to circle Washington like buzzards, all hoping to snatch up their share of the government-seized handouts and trying to influence the tens of thousands of pages of legislation Congress enacts each year (not to mention the hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations federal agencies enact each month).

To borrow the language of more than one right-wing diva, in 1937, when the liberals gave Congress unlimited power, our democracy was inevitably transformed into a kleptocracy, a nightmare system in which every pressure group is forced to do whatever it can to gain control of the state so as to loot whatever money it from the other pressure groups and then pass the loot on to its own supporters.

In other words, the same demise that has met every great civilization in history.

And the looters and their ignorant, barely-conscious followers may well succeed in destroying this country. To a large extent, they already have.

But America is a concept, not a place or a people. And it is a concept that will not, so long as men and women are free to talk and write, perish from this earth.

And whenever and on whatever continent the next American Revolution occurs—We Americans will know what went wrong, and next time We will know how to get it right.

U.S. continues to subsidize the health of the world

2006-01-18T11:56:00.000-06:00

From a CNN report today:

"It appears they are going to get well over $1.9 billion," The Associated Press quoted Nancy Powell, the U.S. coordinator for health, science and the environment, telling reporters in Beijing.

The United States has promised more than $334 million to fight bird flu, the largest pledged by any country.

The EU on Tuesday raised its pledge to $121 million. The 25-nation bloc, which is co-hosting the conference along with China and the World Bank, initially announced a pledge of $100 million."

This isn't anything new, the U.S. is always the largest giver to similar international causes. Granted, Americans have a vested interest in preventing the spread of virus that could infect them, but no more so than the 300 million+ member EU. What is the EU only giving about a third? Well, the short answer is, they don't have much money. The EU is your friend who never leaves a tip, who always forgets the tax; you look the other way because you know things are kind of tight. Well, actually, the EU is that friend, only they constantly berate you for being too rich and greedy and think you should be ashamed of your money (not to mention never acknowledging that you've picked up the bill for their security system for the last 60 years). They try and make you feel guilty for being successful, yet whenever trouble pops up they are first in line asking for some of that "success." They talk about how "compassionate" they are vs. the greedy Americans. For instance, Canada and the EU impose certain price controls on prescription drugs (that's the mystery to why "Canadian drugs are cheaper"). The governments dictate to the drug companies what prices are acceptable and unacceptable--in response, the drug companies charge whatever they can in the one place they are allowed to (America)in order to finance their large research budgets (you know, so we can get new drugs). So Americans subsidize the drug bill for the rest of the world. The next time a Canadian starts bragging to you about his health care, just tell him a simple "thank you" will suffice.

America quietly goes along, $300 million here, several new blockbuster drugs on the cheap there. Thank goodness we're not as "compassionate" as the Europeans or the world would be in real trouble.

A quick link...

2006-01-16T14:34:00.000-06:00

to Christopher Hitchens's latest column on Iraq. Well-worth the read.

Form a prediction-s for 2006 (and beyond)

2006-01-04T00:24:00.000-06:00

Even though I’ve been busy moving, I keep running into these 2006 prediction lists. So I thought I’d make my own list of political predictions.

(1) The now-blossoming Abramoff “scandal” will go the way of Plame-gate—that is, nowhere. To be sure, we’ll be subjected to months of over-the-top left-wing hysterics, full with shrill calls for the resignation and/or impeachment of all the usual suspects (Rove, Delay, Bush, etc.). Ariana Huffington will blather about it non-stop and in a manner suggesting that she actually has a clue as to what’s going on.

But suddenly one morning liberals will wake up and come to terms with the fact that there’s no scandal there, and (just like the Plame thing), they will promptly drop it like a hot potato. (Approximately three weeks later, Ariana will drop it as well.) And none of them will provide any comment or explanation for their sudden silence on the subject.

No one in Congress will go to jail in the Abramoff “scandal.”

(2) Similarly, Tom Delay will be fully exonerated. He might be a son-of-a-bitch, but—and to paraphrase the great Barry Goldwater—at least he’s a son-of-a-bitch who’s on my side! Either way, he didn’t break any laws. On those remaining Travis County indictments (assuming they’re not thrown of court beforehand), Delay will be found innocent by a jury of his peers.

(3) Alito will be easily confirmed to the Supreme Court. Some extremist elements within the Democratic Party will try to Bork him, but most of the Party realizes that the socio-politico-media landscape is vastly different than it was in 1987.

That is, with the rise of talk-radio, cable news, and the internet, most liberals realize that they can’t simply stage press conferences and issue press releases claiming that Alito hates women, gays, and enjoys sipping the blood of minority children from jeweled goblets with the expectation that the New York Times and CBS/ABC/NBC will dutifully print the headline “Alito hates women, gays, and enjoys sipping the blood of minority children from jeweled goblets” or that, even if they did, anyone would take their word for it.

After all, it’s a flat world now.

(4) The “flat world” (as Thomas Friedman calls it) will continue to wreak havoc on the left. Unionized firms in various industries will continue to lose market share to technologically and logistically superior non-union firms. In the airline industry, unionized firms United, Delta, and U.S. will continue to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy while Jet Blue, Air Tran, and Southwest prosper. In the grocery industry, unionized Safeway, Giant, and Albertson’s will continue to struggle against non-union Whole Foods and Wal-Mart. Unionized General Motors and Ford will continue to shutter US plants—even while non-union Toyota and Honda continue to open new plants all across the American South.

All of this will continue to take a toll on funding for Democratic politicians.

By the same token, did I mention that the new forms of political communication—talk radio, cable news, and the internet—will continue to erode the power of the New York Times and CBS/ABC/NBC?

(5) This recently revealed NSA spy controversy will—hopefully—result in vigorous Congressional hearings. And just like the 9-11 Commission hearings, various Democratic politicians will make total idiots out of themselves on national television. And the entire ghastly spectacle will help Bush and the Republicans. Tremendously.

The Democrats will not gain seats in either house of Congress in the 2006 mid-terms. [You heard it here first!] They will lose seats in both houses—and mostly as a direct result of the way they are behaving (and the way they will continue to behave for the next year) regarding the secret spy program.

Also, for some strange reason, they keep having funding problems.

If you’ll recall, everyone was predicting that the Dem’s would gain seats in 2002. Opposite happened. If you’ll recall, everyone predicted that the Dem’s would gain seats in 2004. Opposite happened. Fool me once, fool me twice, fool me thrice??

(7) Within the Democratic Party, Feingold will emerge as the rank-and-file favorite and (like Howard Dean) quickly become a media darling. And based almost solely on the premise that everyone under the age of 25 is associated with Moveon.org, we almost certainly will hear a great deal about how good Feingold is with “young people.”

(8) Consequently, before the year is out Hillary will take a reluctant turn to the left, a full year and a half before she’d planned to. And if Hillary goes left too early, it doesn’t bode well for the Dem’s in 2008.

(9) “Brokeback Mountain” will win the Oscar for best picture.

(10) Republicans and Democrats alike will continue to agree that Oliver North is completely insane and that his Sunday evening program War Stories on Fox News is far and away the most unwatchable hour on all of cable news.

(11) If, for some strange reason “Good Night, and Good Luck” wins the Oscar for best picture, Ann Coulter will be inconsolable for months.

(12) By the end of 2006, the US and England will have removed more than one-third of their troops from Iraq (about 60,000 out of 180,000)—with the expectation that they will remove another third by the end of 2008.

By the end of the year, I predict, we’ll start to see more comparisons of Bush to Reagan—more comparisons of Bush’s handling of the war on terror to Reagan’s handling of the global war against the Soviet Union.

And, as with the Reagan administration, in twenty years the left will be acting like they weren’t trying to throw wrench after wrench into Bush’s efforts.

Kyoto Shmyoto

2005-12-27T13:37:00.000-06:00

The Independent has a not very informative story about how the EU is failing in meeting their Kyoto benchmarks. They don't provide many hard numbers, except for Britain, where emissions have increased 15% since 1999 (remember Kyoto set benchmarks of cuts based on 1990 levels). As much as this article doesn't give much info, at least its a start of pointing out the giant hoax that Kyoto has been. According to the article, France will only meet its benchmark if they enforce extremely strict controls in the upcoming year. France, with the drowning economy and the racial uprisings--this is the perfect time to put more restrictions on economic growth! The article fails to point out the impressive gains the US has made in the control of greenhouse gases, using a capitalist based "trade" system created by the Bush administration. If you actually care about the environment, if you are a sincere supporter of the environmental movement, you should be outraged that your leaders have been screaming in support of this failed, ridiculous "Protocol" and skewering the, so far, only reasonably successful policy, which has been the U.S.'s. Instead, the give tearful and impassioned speeches about the failures of the US at giant conferences that are a waste of time and money. How do these people even still have a job? Can you imagine being this stupendously wrong in your career and still being allowed to work?
For more numbers, see my previous post here.

All the news that's fit to print...eventually

2005-12-22T12:12:00.000-06:00

There's so much we at the Show would like to say about the NYC transit workers strike, but unfortunately I only have time for one post. One thing that has frustrated me about the coverage is that it has focused so much on personalities and name calling and not so much on the actual sticking point. As most of you probably know by now, the official sticking point was "pensions". Now, while it was reported fairly heavily early on, none of the current stories bother to mention what the MTA's and union's original positions were on pensions. The MTA wanted to raise the retirement age for NEW workers to 62. The union wanted it lowered to 50 (it is currently at 55). Remember, this is for new workers. I bet most of you out in Alan and Paul land would never conceive of having a job where you could retire at 55. 62 is young even. But 50? Doesn't that offend your sensibilities? I think that's part of the reason the press doesn't report it so much; it's too blatantly ridiculous and in trying to be unbiased, or, as is more likely the case, put a good face on what the union is doing, the press can't actually present the facts or discuss them too much because the average person would see the strike for what it is: a shakedown.

Now the "final" MTA offer that initiated the strike lowered the age back to 55, but required NEW workers to start contributing 6% instead of 2% into the pension fund. Again, put the thought of a young 20 year old starting work and having a pre-set retirement at 55 in this day of life expectancy around 80. Let's focus on this issue of 2% vs. 6%...is it fair? Is it even worthwhile? Who can help us resolve this question. Why, the New York Times.

For the cover story on the strike yesterday, the NYT ran the headline "In Final Hours, MTA Took Big Pension Risk." Let's look at the first few paragraphs.

On the final day of intense negotiations, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, it turns out, greatly altered what it had called its final offer, to address many of the objections of the transit workers' union. The authority improved its earlier wage proposals, dropped its demand for concessions on health benefits and stopped calling for an increase in the retirement age, to 62 from 55.

Already, let's note they didn't mention the crazy-ass union demand of lowering the age to 50, which is shoddy reporting in my book and a hint to where this reporter's bias lies. Okay, next two paragraphs (it's worth it, keep reading):

But then, just hours before the strike deadline, the authority's chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, put forward a surprise demand that stunned the union. Seeking to rein in the authority's soaring pension costs, he asked that all new transit workers contribute 6 percent of their wages toward their pensions, up from the 2 percent that current workers pay. The union balked, and then shut down the nation's largest transit system for the first time in a quarter-century.

Yet for all the rage and bluster that followed, this war was declared over a pension proposal that would have saved the transit authority less than $20 million over the next three years.

What!? The MTA caused all this trouble for $20 million dollars? Case closed, the MTA is being petty. Thanks NYTimes! As Stephen Greenhouse, the author, helpfully points out in the next sentence: "It seemed a small figure, considering that the city says that every day of the strike will cost its businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues."

If you stopped there, you might think the MTA was, as suggested, insane. The next few paragraphs are strike boilerplate stuff, followed by this statement, confirming the readers' suspicions that the MTA was in the wrong:

"Indeed, not just Mr. Toussaint but some other New Yorkers are questioning whether it was worthwhile for the authority to go to war over the issue when the authority's pension demands would apparently save less over the next three years than what the New York City Police Department will spend on extra overtime during the first two days of the strike."

To support this claim that people OTHER than Mr. Toussaint, the union boss, felt the offer was misguided, the reporter quotes...get ready for it, wait for it:

Mr. Toussaint.

Now, I only took journalism in 9th grade, but something seems off about that. According to Mr. Toussaint "What they'd be saving on pensions is a pittance." The next quote after that suggests that the MTA strategy was off, but not that the money was not worthwhile. In fact, there is absolutely no support in the article for the claim that anyone other than Mr. Toussaint, whose bias should even be obvious to a NYT reporter, thought that the MTA did not have a real financial stake in this offer. But so far, all the evidence suggests that they don't, doesn't it? Only 20 million?

Well, only in the first three years. If you get through all the unsupported editoralizing and make it through 17 paragraphs, to the second page on the weblink, you'd find out:

John J. Murphy, a pension expert and former executive director of the New York City Employees' Retirement System, said he computed that the authority's pension proposal would have a modest saving at first: $2.25 million in the first year, $4.8 million in the second year and $7.8 million in the third year.

But he said the plan would achieve significant savings, more than $160 million in the first 10 years, with some officials estimating that it would save more than $80 million a year after 20 years.

That's some pretty relevant information, for a whole story ostensibly about the motivation for the MTA to ask for a change in pension contributions. In fact, I think it would be the key piece of information, certainly more important than the unsupported musings of the reporter that got prominence several paragraphs up.

A couple more paragraphs down we find out:"Mr. Dellaverson said it was important for the authority to try to control its pension outlays even in a year when it had a surplus. The authority's pension outlays for the transit workers have soared to $453 million this year, triple the amount in 2002." The MTA also apparently predicts a deficit of $1 billion in pensions by 2009. See, it's that kind of info that I think should be front and center and not the ramblings of Mr. Toussaint. Or at least side by side with the ramblings and not some 20 paragraphs down. It's this kind of reporting that makes people suspicious of the NYT to begin with and suggest that there is a liberal media bias. I always thought conservatives sounded paranoid when they said things like that and, to the reporter's credit, eventually the key facts were presented in the story. But the order of facts matters, because often times people don't turn the page and they assume the important facts are presented first (we learned that in 9th grade too). Apparently Greenhouse and his editors thought the important part of this story was: MTA to save small amount in first three years, union boss righteously angry. The same facts could be arranged: MTA tries to dramatically improve the solvency of its pensions; union boss continues to offer no legitimate alternative.

The Show—Evening Edition

2005-12-16T01:27:00.000-06:00

Well, I’ve been sitting here trying to think of things to do besides packing, which, basically, ranks as one of my least favorite activities. For goodness sake, I’d rather eat cucumbers (a vegetable the existence of which, I believe, constitutes the best argument yet against intelligent design).

So I decided I’d put in a late-night appearance here on the Show.

We have a story from the Cybercast News Service—a right-wing news service—that you’re probably not going to see anywhere in the “mainstream” media:

Statistics released by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals suggest that fewer than half of the victims of Hurricane Katrina were black, and that whites died at the highest rate of all races in New Orleans.

Liberals in the aftermath of the storm were quick to allege that the Bush administration delayed its response to the catastrophe because most of the victims were black. Damu Smith, founder of the National Black Environmental Justice Network, in September said that the federal government "ignored us, they forgot about us ... because we look like we look."

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in October said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency wasn't fit to help the storm's victims because "there are not enough blacks high up in FEMA" and added that, "certainly the Red Cross is the same."

Rapper Kanye West used his time on NBC's telethon for the hurricane victims to charge that, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

But the state's demographic information suggests that whites in New Orleans died at a higher rate than minorities. According to the 2000 census, whites make up 28 percent of the city's population, but the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals indicates that whites constitute 36.6 percent of the storm's fatalities in the city.African-Americans make up 67.25 percent of the population and 59.1 percent of the deceased. Other minorities constitute approximately 5 percent of the population and represented 4.3 percent of the storm's fatalities.

Hmm… In and of itself, the statistical disparity is difficult to explain. I suspect that, maybe, the white population in the city had a high percentage of helpless elderly people (think: dreadful, disgusting semi-governmental nursing homes) compared to the black population.

Or it could just be that the white people living in New Orleans were living there because they wanted to, whereas many of the black people were living there because they had to—meaning that a higher percentage of blacks were fine with heading over to the superdome as opposed to barricading themselves in their homes.

Either way, the more interesting question is how this statistical reality—the fact that per capita more whites died in New Orleans than blacks—fits into the on-going “national dialogue” (i.e. bizarre, racial conspiracy theory created and fostered by the left and the mainstream media) regarding the governmental response to hurricane Katrina.

Now, blaming the federal government for what happened in New Orleans is a bit ridiculous in itself. At the best, the federal government is to blame only for its failure to foresee such a spectacular failure—indeed, complete disintegration—of city and state government in the days after the hurricane. But blaming President Bush personally goes beyond ridiculous and falls squarely in the realm of sheer lunacy.

But the left has been more than willing to traffic in such premises and, so, assuming that the federal government and President Bush are to blame, what are we to make of the fact that a white person in New Orleans was more likely to die than a black person?

Even in the week after the hurricane struck, I was struck by how much media attention the black people in New Orleans were getting, compared to the media’s near indifference to the plight of white people in the city—not to mention the media’s complete and utter indifference to the plight of the rural whites all across Louisiana and Mississippi who were hit just as hard by the hurricane.

As hysterical left-wing commentators rightly pointed out, the media only showed images of black people looting; what they ignored, though, was that the media showed only images of black people, whether they be images of looting or suffering.

As I have noted before on the Show, the mainstream media/the left tends to ignore the plight of disadvantaged groups that do not vote largely Democratic. Only the pet groups get the attention.

As another example, the meth epidemic that has struck rural whites in the last decade has, until very recently, been virtually ignored by the major opinion makers. Contrast that with the crack epidemic that struck inner city black communities in the 1980’s—and how much media attention the crack problem received.

As a rough yardstick, a google search for the exact phrase “meth epedimic” gets 68,200 returns, while a search for the exact phrase “crack epedimic” yields 176,000 returns.

The difference in media attention is as clear as, well, night and day.

So, essentially, if something awful happens to you, it very much behooves you to look like a lot of other people who vote Democratic. Generally speaking, if you want the world to hear about your suffering, it’s best to be black or gay. It used to be helpful to be Jewish or non-Cuban Hispanic or Catholic—but that’s rapidly changing as voting patterns change.

It also helps if you live in or near a major urban center. Not only is it easier for the reporters and journalists to get there, but also they can enjoy the far superior restaurants and nightlife while in town. And, you make think I’m just joking, but I don’t think the location factor can be discounted. Reporters are human beings too; they hate packing just as much as the rest of us. And it’s way more convenient to cover a story in the Bronx or Compton or Roxbury (or New Orleans) than it is to cover a tragic story unfolding out in the largely white hinterlands.

Apology

2005-12-13T11:36:00.000-06:00

David Aaronovitch at the Times (UK) has an excellent column, linked to by Andrew Sullivan today. It's an honest admission of the mistakes of the war and an equally honest assesment of the alternative, as best we can make that assessment at this point in history. The whole thing is worth reading, but here is the summary:

There is, on parts of the Left, a long and ignoble tradition of trashing democracy. This week one ultra-Left group was arguing for the slogan, “Troops out now! The main enemy is imperialism!” It is a slogan that seems, psychologically at least, to unite many diverse objectors to the war. But the groupuscule’s argument then went something like this. It understood that the insurgency wanted to oppress Kurds, suppress the Shia and “physically exterminate” trade unions and feminist groups. However, communists, it said, “recognise that an imperialist defeat would objectively open up possibilities for the working class, and we would therefore welcome it even if it came at the hands of reactionary anti-imperialists”. And sod the Iraqis.

And something similar can happen on the far more reasonable Right. In February 2003 Matthew wrote that he would be against a war in Iraq even if there was WMD, even if it was authorised by the UN, even if a liberated Iraq was then stable, and concluded: “I’m against war because it will antagonise moderate Arab opinion.” And the Iraqi people? To be massacred, shredded, gassed, beheaded, suppressed, starved, immiserated, terrorised and tortured because all of that would be less bad than antagonising moderate Arab opinion. An Iraqi democrat stands in front of an armchair anti- interventionist, and is invisible.

I do apologise. For Abu Ghraib and Donald Rumsfeld. For not understanding the insurgents. For the looting. For the dire planning. I apologise to the election workers assassinated, the police trainees blown up, the parents of children caught in crossfire and everyone else that the planners and executors of the invasion that I supported, and still support, may have let down by neglect or stupidity. I recognise their bravery and their determination to succeed despite everything.

But a disaster compared with what? Compared with Saddam and sanctions or Saddam and cyanide. And that — the thing that Matthew presumably preferred — was not a disaster?

Conservative Paper criticizes objective poll

2005-12-09T09:44:00.000-06:00

The Washington Times has an op-ed about the latest union attack on Wal-Mart, that being the hiring of an "objective" pollster to come to the conclusion that Americans think Wal-mart "is bad for America." Wal-mart's tremendous sales this season notwithstanding.

I used the title I did because while the mainstream media makes every effort to inform people of the biases and agendas of conservative groups, their investigation skills flag a little when a liberal group has a dog in the fight. True, in the Reuters story about the poll that many outlets picked up, they did point out that the poll was funded by WakeUpWalmart and even pointed out that WakeUpWalMart is really just a union front and not the "grass-roots effort" they claim to be, but they didn't point out that Zogby, the pollster who did the poll, had received tens of thousands of dollars to testify against Wal-mart in a number of cases. For those of you who don't follow polling, Zogby is a media darling, I think largely as a result his relatively accurate call in the 2000 presidential race. Though of course, he remained a media darling as a result of his "Kerry in a landslide" prediction before the 2004 race. While many members of the media go to sleep with that well-worn prediction under their pillows, you think it, and several HUGE errors in the 2002 and 04 elections would make people start to question his quality as a pollster.

The Times article does a fair job pointing out that a pollster can still be accurate even if they are on the take, but it should be incumbent upon the pollster to point out that they may have a perceived conflict. Also, an "objective" pollster might not let the viscously partisan union hacks that ordered the poll also report the results by writing the press release, but that is exactly what Zogby did.

"Most Americans" probably don't care, as evidenced by the success Wal-mart has had at the register these past few weeks. How ironic is it that in the press release the union boss talks about Wal-mart being in a "tailspin"...dizzy though I'm sure he is, the tailspin isn't Wal-mart's, it's the unions own declining membership (12.5% and falling). The imminent bankruptcy of Ford and GM should bring that number under 10% once the dust has settled. Mickey Kaus has an excellent analysis of what the unions have done to GM, how they scuttled the success of the one successful GM division (Saturn) because the union contract there was more efficient. Here's the key passage (search for "Spring Hill" on his blog to see the whole thing, no direct link is available):

Why didn't GM build on [Saturn's] success? Because the Saturn workers' very competence threatened the continued existence of other, less competent parts of General Motors--and there were more people working there than at Spring Hill. ... I suppose this tension--between productive and unproductive divisions--exists at every large organization, but it's surely exacerbated by the presence of a powerful union, especially a powerful small-d democratic union. The UAW, you could argue, was legally obligated to represent the interests of the majority of its members--and the majority worked in the unproductive parts of GM that Spring Hill threatened.

Unions today are essentially involved in one activity--leveling. Sure, they'd like it if everyone were leveled at a high productivity rate and a good economy, but since that's impossible, they'll take stagnation and bankruptcy just as well.

What the unions did to GM they would now like to do to Wal-mart (being that GM won't be around much longer). It's a simple economics game. Wal-mart makes a certain amount of money--let's call that the pie. The vast majority of the pie goes to buying the things Wal-mart sells, meaning that Wal-mart works on an extremely low margin of profit. So that's what they use to pay employees and build stores. Now the unions are setting up front organizations to force Wal-mart to organize so they can get part of the pie, via union dues. But the remaining pie is finite and rather small relative to Wal-mart's total size (that's why the prices are so low). If the unions and union bosses like Andy Stern get their pie slice, there is less for someone. There's not much fat at Wal-mart, as we all know, it's the most "ruthlessly" efficient company in America--so whose pie slice is ultimately given to the unions? Look at the unemployment lines, the gutted pensions, and the empty factories of GM for your answer.

Kyoto update

2005-11-30T09:50:00.000-06:00

As some of you might recall, I raised the issue of the Kyoto protocol awhile back to point out what the press rarely does: the countries that have signed the Kyoto Protocol are no where close to achieving their goals. In fact, that's one of the reasons President Bush doesn't want to sign on to another agreement that no one adheres to--he sees them as colossal wastes of time. Also, while he knows that no one will come even close to their "binding" targets of emission reductions, he knows that if America were to sign such a treaty and miss their goal by .001% the press would go nuts over it. For the record, since Bush took office, greenhouse emissions have been reduced 0.8%, which is pretty impressive (as it means we haven't INCREASED over that time) and in line with the European gains over that time.

CNN.com committed a grave error yesterday in actually reporting the truth of the failure of the Kyoto protocols. Of course, they buried it near the end of the story under an irrelevant headline, so they probably won't get in too much trouble. Their story today has no mention of these facts, so I'll reprint them for your edification:

Here are the targets, according to CNN:

The targets vary by region: The European Union initially committed to cutting emissions to 8 percent below 1990 levels; the United States agreed to a 7 percent reduction before Bush denounced the pact in 2001, saying it would cost too much and exacerbate a bothersome energy problem for the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels.

And how are we all doing?

Canada is up there with Spain, Ireland, Greece and five other nations as having the biggest increases in gas emissions. According to the United Nations, Spain is the worst, with a nearly 42 percent increase in emissions between 1990 and 2003; Canada stands at 24 percent and the United States experienced an increase of 13 percent [which had to happen under Clinton if the 0.8% reduction number is right].

What's this? Without magically signing the enchanted piece of paper known as "Kyoto" we're doing better than CANADA? But we don't have any of the magical fairy dust that is dispensed when you sign the protocol!

The rest of the story is how the environmentalists are hysterical over the fact that the US won't sign on to more imaginary goals. On says: "We cannot do without the Americans because they represent 25 percent of emissions, and an even greater percentage of the [imaginary] solution." How infuriating it must be to be the U.S. representative at one of these things to be constantly berated by hypocrisy on such a global scale. The EU is calling for an even greater percentage reduction beyond the reduction it already won't meet and has made no effort to meet. When will the press finally point out the stark fact that we were all supposed to learn as children: saying something is different than doing something.

The "Humanitarian Crisis" in North Korea

2005-11-27T22:50:00.000-06:00

Forget the fact that Pyongyang has nukes. The greatest social, political, and humanitarian crisis of our time is occurring within the immense, nightmarish prison that is North Korea. Since virtually no one is let in or out of that so-called country, it’s hard to determine what precisely is happening inside—but reports from escapees can only be described as breathtaking.

And, for whatever reason, no one except for a few lonely voices on the American right and a small handful of private international rights organizations seems to care. (Regarding the latter, I have in mind Amnesty International—an organization of which I am normally no fan—which has consistently responded to the long-unfolding disaster in North Korea in a remarkably impartial and commendable manner.)

Normally, American leftists are the folks we can count on to quickly alert us to any major problem (real or imagined) occurring anywhere in the universe (but most often—and for obvious domestic purposes—those occurring in Africa) and to demand that we spend untold billions trying to solve it.

However, our liberal friends have been uncharacteristically reticent regarding the colossal and nearly unimaginable catastrophe in North Korea. A search of the liberal website Alternet.org turns up 37 hits for the word “Darfur” but only 2 hits for the phrase “North Korean famine.” Over at Slate.com, another left-leaning website, a search for articles containing all the words “North Korean famine” gets 15 returns, for stories containing all the words “North Korea Amnesty International,” it’s 5 returns; for “North Korea human rights violations” it’s 7 returns. For a search of the word “Darfur,” it’s 65 returns.

To the extent that left-wing commentators have mentioned the humanitarian crisis (not that the sterile bureaucratic-United-Nations-style jingle “humanitarian crisis” could possibly capture the full magnitude of what’s happening in North Korea), it has been to blame the whole thing on U.S. sanctions or to violently assert that North Korea doesn’t represent “true socialism.”

Others have reacted with that brand of leftist-fantasy-land denial that was commonplace throughout the Cold War. Liberal writer Jeff Feffer optimistically notes, “Though North Korea's thriving new restaurant scene may seem like trivial news, this new trend is actually a key economic and social indicator of change.” No, unfortunately, this isn’t an item from The Onion.

Jeff’s article only gets worse:

By the summer of 2003, it was also clear that an “adjustment” had taken place in Pyongyang's restaurant world. In July 2003, UN workers Sofia Malmqvist, Olof Nunez and Roberto Christen put out a guide to Pyongyang restaurants. Printed rivately and distributed to friends and colleagues, the guide rates 50 restaurants in Pyongyang according to price and quality. […]

Restaurant choices have proliferated over the last two years. The Choson Sinbo, a pro-North Korean newspaper from Japan, estimates that there are now 500 restaurants in Pyongyang—a far cry from the estimated 30,000 restaurants of New York but a respectable number nonetheless. It is not clear who owns these new restaurants, but ethnic Koreans from Japan and China are responsible for the start up capital behind at least some of them [emphasis added].

A few hip new restaurants—which are frequented by UN diplomats and the ownership of which is “not clear” - in greater Pyongyang notwithstanding, in the last ten years, nearly 4 million North Koreans (or nearly 20 percent of the country’s 22 million people) have perished from starvation—making the North Korean famine the worst since the Ukrainian famine of the 1920’s. Per capita, it may well be the worst famine in all of human history. A July 2005 story from the Los Angeles Times story contained the following:

The miner is a pleasant man with a broad, welcoming smile, handsome despite a missing bottom tooth. He seems cheerfulby disposition, but when he talks about the famine, a scowl spreads across his face.The miner estimated that four or five of his housing block's 30 residents, and half of his 3,500 co-workers at the Poam coal mine, had died of starvation and related illnesses since the mid-1990s. […]

The children were the first to start dying, then the elderly. Next to perish were men, who seemed to need more calories to survive than women.
Chongjin residents learned to recognize the stages of starvation.First, the victims become listless and too weak to work. Their vision grows blurry. They become bone thin, then startlingly, their torsos bloat.Toward the end, they just lie still, sometimes people seem to fade away, others die in agony, their intestines blocked when they can't digest substitute foods, such as corn powder and oak leaves. Particularly lethal to children's digestive systems are ersatz rice cakes — molded out of a paste made from the inner bark of pine trees
Among the victims was the miner's 60-year-old father, an otherwise strong and robust man who had never been ill as long as he could remember. The miner's best friend, a co-worker and childhood buddy, dragged himself out to the mountains to look for food and never returned.

The miner also vividly recalled his daughter running home screaming because her best friend, the 5-year-old boy next door, had died of a blockage."He died on his father's back while he was carrying him home from the hospital. My daughter saw his body and came home crying. She said Myong Chol was lying still and not moving," the miner said. "Five or six of her friends died after that. We just had to tell her they moved away to another neighborhood."

Now, back to our buddy Jeff:

The new North Korea, full of swank restaurants and bustling private markets, is an even more stratified society. The [incredibly minor] economic reforms have widened the gap between rich and poor [say, where have I heard that phrase before?] by privileging all those who can get hard currency. A new “red capitalist” elite is emerging, just as it did in the former Soviet bloc: those with connections and power under the old system are trying to carve out privileged positions under the new dispensation. Some of these red capitalists, according to North Korea analysts, have decided to make money by opening restaurants.

Gaps are emerging outside Pyongyang as well. The new agricultural system is increasing the wealth of certain farmers. . . . It's a harsh "trickle-down" process that, in providing opportunity to the few and neglecting the many, owes more to eaganomics than Marxist economics.

After a ten-year famine which continues unabated to this day, North Korea allegedly allows some free market activity (i.e. allows people to openly buy and sell goods and services without fear of being sent to a prison camp) in the Pyongyang area, a move which has supposedly paved the way for some people in metro Pyongyang to be not-as-starving as other people—and Jeff is already off and bitching about the North’s growing income “gap” and “trickle-down Reaganomics”?

Jeff, you are almost too absurd to parody.

By some estimates, 90 percent of the real food (as opposed to grass, dirt, and roaches) consumed in North Korea comes from foreign aid. Most of this, of course, comes from the United States. What little food is produced in North Korea is grown in a pre-industrial fashion, without the aid of machines, completely by hand.

Just as the late Soviet Union was never able to feed its people and relied on American food aid from beginning to end, so North Korea would implode immediately if it weren’t for the seemingly endless generosity of the American people.

This new and growing Reaganomical “gap” in North Korea between the merely malnourished and the eating-tree-bark-to-stay-alive is, without question, a good thing. I mean (assuming it's true), I think I’d okay with the idea that, thanks to minor reforms in metro Pyongyang, a few hundred people in North Korea are rising above the following:

We started seeing cannibalism. You probably won't understand.When one is very hungry, one can go crazy. One woman in my town killed her 7-month-old baby and ate the baby with another woman. ... I can't condemn cannibalism. Not that I wanted to eat human meat, but we were so hungry. It was common that people went to a fresh grave and dug up a body to eat meat.

I mean, my neighbor was lucky enough to have a corpse to eat, but I was reduced to slaughtering and eating my newborn—how fair is that? This “growing gap” between the have’s and have-not’s is really out of control.

According to a Voice of America item:

On another occasion during North Korea's tour for the American media, a woman was seen crouching in one of Pyongyang's many public parks, pulling grass and placing it onto a handkerchief. A foreign aid worker who has spent time in North Korea calls it a common scene: She says people forage the city parks for edible grasses and plants to supplement their diets. The worker says it happens even in this showcase city where the shelves appear well stocked and where only those especially loyal to the Communist Party are allowed to live.

Aside from the 20 percent starvation rate, North Korea also manages, as you may well imagine, to rack up some human rights violations here and there. As reported by Amnesty International:

Opposition of any kind is not tolerated in North Korea. According to reports, any person who expresses an opinion contrary to the position of the ruling party faces severe punishment. In many cases whole families (often a number of generations) are subjected to punishment. Very few people have access to information from the outside world and the media is strictly censored. Any unauthorised assembly or association is regarded as a 'collective disturbance' which is punishable. […]

Amnesty International has received reports of public executions carried out in front of large crowds, with advance notice given to schools, enterprises and farms. Some prisoners have reportedly been executed in front of their families. Executions are carried out by hanging or firing-squad. Children were witness to these public executions. […] There are reports that people have been executed in public for famine-related crimes such as stealing crops or livestock…

But, man, America has hungry people too. How can we go around criticizing other countries when we have so many kids going to bed hungry every night in America? You think everything is perfect here? Also, there was the Patriot Act. And, you think we don’t have poverty here—I can show you some poverty in any American city.. 40 million Americans go without health insurance…

And then there’s the widespread practice in North Korea of picking through feces—whether of human or animal origin—to find undigested bits of protein. Only when reading about North Korea do you understand the true, gruesome meaning of the phrase eat shit or die.

In his nightmarish autobiographical account of his childhood in North Korea, Aquariums of Pyongyang (a book everyone—especially every “it-isn’t-real-socialism”-leftist—should read) escapee Kang Chol-Hwan, perhaps out of good taste or just plain embarrassment, never mentions cannibalism, but notes that his “main” source of protein for twelve years consisted of rats and insects.

Chol-Hwan also describes severe beatings for not being enthusiastic enough when it comes to praising North Korea’s leadership, and labor and “re-education” camps where political prisoners are, from they moment they arrive, forced to labor 24 hours a day without any food or sleep until they die a week or two later.

Dude, and we think we’re so “free” here and have it so great here in America, but there’s so many people without health insurance, and the Patriot Act taking away the Bill of Rights - and the oil companies and Wal-Mart… Like, it’s barely all I can do to pay my rent and car insurance and internet bill each month. I might have to move back in with my parents or get a roommate or something. The middle class is, you know, shrinking. Ever since Reagan, the middle class has been shrinking. It’s the corporations and BushcoBurton. Things are really going wrong in America. And then hurricane Katrina. And then we criticize other countries. Who are we to invade a sovereign nation – when we can’t even take care of our own people?

Make no mistake about it, if a similar, or even comparable, “humanitarian crisis” were occurring under a right-wing dictatorship on any planet in the galaxy—we would never hear the end of it. The left would be calling for immediate intervention. There would be documentaries, staged vigils, national “days of action,” bracelets, poetry readings, and fundraising concerts the world over.

For instance, just consider the number of Hollywood films and documentaries you’ve witnessed in your life regarding the horrors of Nazi Germany, a so-called right-wing dictatorship. Now consider how many films or documentaries you’ve witnessed regarding the equally appalling horrors of the Soviet Union or Maoist China or Communist Cambodia or modern North Korea—all left-wing dictatorships (a.k.a. countries who “had good intentions”).

If you can think of even one besides Oliver Stone’s The Killing Fields, you outdid me.

Nazi Germany intentionally exterminated roughly 8 million civilians in non-military campaigns; since 1917 the Communist nations have intentionally exterminated in excess of 100 million civilians in non-military campaigns. And that’s not even counting the tens of millions more who have died of starvation due to—shall we say—the “inefficiencies” of non-market based systems.

I’m not sure why the self-proclaimed “humanitarians” have turned such a blind eye to the “humanitarian crisis” in North Korea, but, if I had to guess, there are two main factors:

(1) North Korea is a left-wing dictatorship. From its inception and to this day, it is left-wing ideology—the bromides of economic equality, brotherhood, the evils of money, anti-Imperialism, anti-Americanism—that animates the North Korean regime. Everyday citizens in North Korea are regularly beaten, raped, or simply shot in the head for so much as engaging in trade with their neighbors or otherwise displaying a “capitalist attitude.”

As noted above, if such a “humanitarian crisis” were occurring under the auspices of a right-wing dictatorship, we’d have heard much more about it.

In addition, given the incredible economic disparities between North and South Korea—with South Korea being one of the richest countries in the world, and North Korea one of the absolute poorest—we may well imagine that the American left wouldn’t want too much discussion of what’s happening in the North.

I mean, it’s a near flawless social experiment. In the 1950’s one country was divided in two. Same people, same culture, same background, same level of economic development. (Although, I will concede, the South has more and better farm land.) Both had been victims of colonization from the West and from Japan. Yet, one went socialist, and one went capitalist. While the North outlawed all free trade and banned the use of any form of currency, the South embraced American-style capitalism.

Now look at the results 50 years later! No one knows for sure what the North’s total economic output is—but it’s at best 1/50 of the South’s economic output. At best. More realistically, it’s 1/100 of the economic output of the South.

North Korea is a complete embarrassment to the left and a barely-living refutation of their fanatical anti-market, socialist theories, and they know it. And they simply would rather not discuss it.

(2) The people dying in North Korea are Asian—not Black. The leftist establishment in America is obviously, unduly, and quite disgracefully concerned with highlighting international atrocities affecting those ethno-religious groups that constitute a major constituency of the Democratic Party in the United States.

Hence, we hear about the Holocaust every 3.4 seconds, and we hear endlessly about every minor calamity to strike any rural tribe anywhere in Africa—in Ethiopia, Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda, Darfur, Uganda, etc—and, each and every time, they explain to us that the “Western democracies” aren’t “doing enough” to stop the atrocities. And we’re never “doing enough,” liberals explain, because we’re racist and don’t care about what happens in Africa.

The one exception is Zimbabwe, where a left-wing dictator is wrecking the country and starving thousands of people. In fact, Zimbabwe is witnessing the worse “humanitarian crisis” to strike Africa in well over a decade—but Mugabe is a dye in the wool leftist, and, curiously, the left has been practically silent about that famine. (Yet gain, “Party trumps race”!)

But no “humanitarian crisis” to hit any African nation in at least the last 50 years, if ever, even compares to what’s presently occurring in North Korea. Nothing compares to it. And the left keeps sweeping North Korea under the rug.

It’s just not that important for the leftist establishment to display a condescending, paternalistic concern for the plight of East Asian people living in far off lands—as they do when it comes to most African famines. After all, East Asians living in the U.S. have higher incomes and score better than whites on standardized tests—and they don’t vote 90 percent Democratic. So, you know, who cares?

--

If leftists could get themselves even half—or even one tenth—as worked up over what’s happening in North Korea as they are over, say, Wal-Mart or Diebold or displays of the Ten Commandments in public parks in small Southern towns, I might consider them decent people.

As it is though…

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To find out more about the plight of the North Koreans and how you can help them, visit http://www.nkfreedom.org

MOVIE REVIEW: “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices”

2005-11-20T15:52:00.000-06:00

Not counting a funeral or two, I hadn’t “been to church” in over a decade.

Occasionally during my early teens, my parents would—on Sunday mornings when they were feeling particularly cruel—force me into this or that local church. These brief forays into the land of organized religion never panned out. Some nosey lady sitting nearby would spot me pecking away at my Gameboy during the sermon and kindly harass my parents about it for the next several Sundays. Or some obviously unstable Sunday school teacher would blow up at my casual dismissal of the possibility of God’s existence. As far as I was concerned, the pot luck dinners were the only spiritually uplifting part of it. But, and I'll just put it out there - dude, those rural white Protestants could cook.

Finally, though, it all became too unbearable, and, pulling a Jimi Hendrix, I strongly and in few uncertain terms hinted to my mother that I was gay and that the preacher’s “hateful tirades” about “certain minority groups” made me quite upset. My mother, mordified about what she’d done to me, flirted with eternal damnation and insisted on no more church for our family.

Thank goodness there were none of those gay-friendly "mainstream Protestant" churches in rural Arkansas, else we'd have wound up there.

But my nearly-forgotten church experiences suddenly resurfaced Tuesday evening as I and my roommate crept timorously into the Lucy Parson Bookshop (which, as noted previously on this page, calls itself a “radical and independent” bookstore and doubles as a dumping ground for aging hippies, environmentalists, and drug addicts) to view a premier screening of "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices," the new anti-Wal-Mart documentary directed by far left filmmaker and Michael Moore wannabe Robert Greenwald.

All the old fears returned: What if we’re not dressed right? What if there’s a group discussion afterwards and I say something wrong? What if during the preaching I accidentally snicker or role my eyes and someone notices?

And when we got to Lucy Parsons we found that, yes, everyone was dressed to kill—or, more accurately, to beg. In that way of appearing peculiar to young left-wing fanatics, it was a race to the bottom to see who could appear most like a homeless person. Tattered jeans, puke-green 1970’s sweaters, filthy brush skirts, purposely disheveled hair, faded t-shirts in need of several ironings, and other fashions from the fall Vow of Poverty line abounded.

In hopes of blending in—and maybe even impressing—I wore a nasty old pair of rubber sandals with my signature jeans and button-down, sandals that I happily purchased at Wal-Mart a couple of years ago for 99 cents. My roommate, though, didn’t need to dress up much; her nose is pierced.

There was, of course, the expected inspirational sayings and “informational materials” plastered everywhere—the “fight globalization” signs, the giant picture of President George Bush captioned with “The real terrorist!” (in German, no less), the rack of t-shirts depicting the great revolutionary and internationally acclaimed mass murderer Che Guevara, a counter of brochures for every conceivable cause under the sun, the felt wall of patches, pins, and other “revolutionary” keepsakes, three for $1.

As with most religious gatherings, the sermon—or, pardon me, “film”—was a great bore. Rather, it was the horror show of left-wing fundamentalists that made the event mildly interesting.

Just as every fundamentalist Protestant church worth its salt has some senile old woman who lingers in the lobby before the sermon, enthusiastically proclaiming things like “Jesus saves!” and “We’re about to make Satan tremble in fear!” so the Lucy Parson Bookshop sported some old guy—in all likelihood a genuine homeless person—who had parked himself in a lime orange recliner off to the side and insisted on subjecting everyone within earshot, i.e. everyone in the room, to his personal reaction to certain images appearing on the screen.

During the pre-film montage of scenes from the film, for instance, at a point when the screen was suddenly filled with the oversized American flag that flies unapologetically outside Wal-Mart’s Arkansas headquarters, the crotchety old fart—without so much as missing a beat—huffed, “Someone needs to burn that rag.”

I 'bout came up out of my chair at that.

No, in actuality, someone needed to burn whatever that was he was wearing and buy him a clean set of clothes.

Then there are the posers, the ones who are there just because their friends are or because it’s the trendy, urban hipster thing to do. This was the woman sitting up front who, decked out in brown corduroy and thick rimmed glasses, initially appeared quite enthusiastic about making Wal-Mart tremble in fear. During the latter moments of the sermon (I mean, film) it became obvious, though, that she was suffering from an intolerable boredom—a point she demonstrated repeatedly with prolonged excursions to the bookstore’s proudly unisex restroom and leisurely browsing of the bookstore’s inventory as she made her way to and from the proudly unisex restroom.

At most non-Catholic services, particularly poignant points in the sermon are likely to induce an “amen!” from at least someone in the audience. At Lucy Parson’s, though, it was a visceral “bastards!” or “pigs!” whenever the film’s mindless spouting off about the evils of Wal-Mart reached any type of crescendo. When a clip of Jon Stewart making some formulaic joke about Wal-Mart came on the screen, a young man in the back of the room actually shouted “F*** yeah! F*** yeah! F*** yeah!” for a solid fifteen seconds. (In all fairness, though, they might have been still fired up over the Democratic Party’s breathtaking victory in the 2005 “midterms,” where, as we keep hearing, they totally cleaned house in the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board elections.)

Oh, and also there was the film itself. First off, Greenwald is no Moore. In addition to having no structure, no point, and no treasonous display of the charred, disfigured bodies of American soldiers being strung up in a public square in Iraq, the "High Cost of Low Prices" has no narrator. So, for me, there was no one person to focus my anger on—an arrangement I found most frustrating.

The so-called documentary is just a piebald montage of meandering, vindictive rants from disgruntled former employees, environmental activists, and small town merchants standing outside their million-dollar homes and complaining about Wal-Mart wrecking their 45 percent profit margins. Some of them refer to Wal-Mart as a “million dollar company,” suggesting either that they don’t know anything about Wal-Mart, the very topic under discussion, or that they cannot grasp the not-so-subtle distinction between a million and a billion.

One of the expert laymen offhandedly asserts that if the Walton family were to sell off even $10 billion dollars of their Wal-Mart stock it would generate enough cash to purchase health insurance, retirement plans, and “livable wages” for the company’s 1.4 million employees. Now, doing a few rudimentary calculations in your head unmasks this assertion as pure nonsense. $10 billion dollars divided among Wal-Mart’s 1.4 million employees works out to $7,200 per worker, which means that $10 billion would be enough to provide health insurance, retirement plans, and a $4 an hour raise for Wal-Mart’s employees for, oh, maybe four months.

Most of the commentators (if you could call them that) don’t even bother trying to put a price tag on their irrational demands. They just flat out assert that “surely a company as big as Wal-Mart can afford health insurance and high wages for every employee.” "Really?" one is pressed to ask. Are you quite sure about that?

As with most religious fanatics, these people aren’t going to let facts, numbers, or commonsense disrupt their delusions. Wal-Mart's profits are less than 10 billion a year. If tomorrow the company gave in to even half of the left's bizarre demands, it would be in bankruptcy proceedings by early March. Yet, to hear them tell it, Wal-Mart can "somehow" afford to buy health insurance for all its employees, lavish them with union-style retirement benefits, and give them a 4 dollar an hour raise - that, and Jesus literally walked on water.

They never get around to discussing precisely how Wal-Mart is supposed to accomplish this; it's always a vague "somehow."

Johnny Faenza, some employee at a hardware store in Ohio and noted economist, elucidated, “They busted up Standard Oil, and they busted up Ma Bell,” but “nobody seems to be paying attention” to Wal-Mart. Well, and as any semi-informed person could tell you, Standard Oil controlled upwards of 90 percent of the nation’s oil market when it fell prey to antitrust regulators, but Wal-Mart controls at most 12 percent of the nation’s retail market. So, you know, that’s the major difference.

The documentary consists solely of angry, rambling, unthinking, uninformed assertions from angry people off the street, all of whom have obvious axes to grind with Wal-Mart. They wail endlessly—like desperate prayers to some dark unknown—about how awful their own lives are, how Wal-Mart is somehow to blame for all the injustices of the universe, and mindlessly regurgitate the silly, propagandistic slogans they’ve seen every day for the last two years in the pages of the New York Times and its sundry puppet papers across the nation. It is 95 minutes utterly devoid of any thoughtful commentary, intelligent analysis, or, for that matter, even one original thought.

Also, it's hard not to notice that the expert laymen and laywomen griping that they "had" to choose between health insurance for they and their eight children clearly went with the food. Yes, and tell me if you notice otherwise, but all of them clearly went with the food.

And this is a genuine problem with on camera depiction of those who claim to be at the point of starvation because of Wal-Mart - not one of the expert witnesses appears to be in any way starving. In fact, they appear to be, shall we say, taking full advantage of Wal-Mart's low grocery prices.

I know I do. If you like to eat, Wal-Mart's grocery stores are a dream come true. Whenever I go on a diet, my first vow is to stay away from Wal-Mart. Not in any civilization in all of history has it been so easy for poor people to buy all the high quality food they want at extremely low prices.

In fact, I'd like to see some organ of the University of California (since once of them comes out with some anti-Wal-Mart study every week or so) investigate the link between Wal-Mart's grocery departments and obesity. Obersity, of course, isn't a good thing, but it's at least a sign of prosperity.

In place of a narrator, each segment of "The High Cost of Low Prices" is introduced with some word or phrase flashing onto the screen, usually accompanied with foreboding music. The various fonts were poorly chosen, and sometimes the words fly onto the screen from odd angles, giving the film an overall cheesy, PowerPoint-created feel.

Several times, the words start rolling across the screen displaying all sorts of anecdotal evidence:

In addition to these complaints, there also seems to be a problem with security in Wal-Mart parking lots. After interviews with victims and their families, a seemingly endless list of crimes committed in store lots rolls like film credits. Then a message appears onscreen: those were only the ones from the first seven months of 2005.

The same thing happens near the end when the sermon—I mean, film—delves into what’s meant to be an empowering and inspirational discussion of the various cities and localities where special interest groups have managed to block a Wal-Mart from going up. Except, though, towards the beginning of this rolling list you notice “Manhattan, Kansas.” It just sorta sticks out, you know, because it’s odd to see the word “Manhattan” paired with the word “Kansas.” Then about ten seconds later, you notice “Manhattan, Kansas” again, and then a third time, and a forth—and then you realize that they’re running the same damn list of twenty or thirty towns over and over. And then several flags go up in your mind. If they were trying to deceive me by rolling this list over and over—what about the other lists earlier in the film? Were they also the same twenty or thirty store locations rolled over and over? Did I just not notice it before?

To persuade someone, you have to establish a certain amount of credibility in their mind, to gain their intellectual trust. Mostly, this consists of showing that you are being genuine and that you are, at the very least, not knowingly or intentionally trying to mislead them. Well, the “Manhattan, Kansas” bit pretty much sealed it for me. Why even bother to give a fair hearing to someone who’s so blatantly trying to mislead you?

Much of the documentary’s effect relies on the average viewer’s inability to wrap his head around Wal-Mart’s immense size. If Wal-Mart were a country, its total gross domestic product (“GDP”) would be the thirty first largest in the world, greater than that of Saudi Arabia or Sweden. Sometimes in human enterprise of that size, things go wrong. You know, shit happens. Wal-Mart has almost one and a half million employees, so even if a small percentage of them are bad apples, you’re talking about thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of bad apples.

So, yes, sometimes somewhere an unthinking or over-zealous Wal-Mart manager might tell an employee who has already clocked out to straighten up the underwear aisle on his way out (headline: “Wal-Mart Racks Up Labor Violations!”). Yes, sometimes somebody will accidentally let a 17-year-old operate a forklift (headline: “Wal-Mart Violates Child Labor Laws”). Yes, sometimes an employee will direct a racist comment at another employee, and store management will fail to follow up with a thorough and proper investigation into the racial incident (headline: “Wal-Mart Accused of Racism!”).

A million is a thousand times a thousand, so if in a given year, there are, say, one thousand sexual harassment lawsuits against Wal-Mart, and even assuming every single suit has merit, it still only means that less than one out of a thousand of Wal-Mart’s employees are guilty of saying something sexually inappropriate—and illegal—to one of their coworkers. That’s a pretty low number. But, of course, the misleading, out-of-context headline is “One Thousand Sexual Harassment Suits Against Wal-Mart!”

Where an individual manager or employee violates the law, Wal-Mart should be held legally liable for any damages done to the victim. But to act like the entire company is at fault, to insinuate that, based on nothing more than a few hundred or even a few thousand instances, that it says something about the whole company—which has almost a million and a half employees—is not only slandering the good names of many innocent people who make up Wal-Mart but also an incredible example of intellectual sloppiness.

But that’s precisely what Greenwald does throughout his film. It's a disgraceful effort (disgraceful on many counts, not the least of which is his disregard for the IQ level of his audience). He shows one or two examples of sex discrimination or one or two instances of race discrimination or one or two third-world factories with bad working conditions—and then proceeds to suggest unwarranted generalizations about the company as a whole, a company, mind you, that is bigger than many countries.

Greenwald also ignores Wal-Mart’s sheer size when he discusses the number of crimes that occur in Wal-Mart parking lots (which, by some inexplicable line of reasoning, are supposed to be Wal-Mart’s fault). He gives a fairly long list of cities where there have been such crimes, but, you know, Wal-Mart does have thousands of stores. So is it 1 out of 100 stores that have had a violent crime in the parking lot or 1 out of 5? The film doesn’t say. How does the crime rate in Wal-Mart parking lots compare to the crime rate in the parking lots of other stores? Again, the film doesn’t say. The film then reveals that some Wal-Mart parking lots have around-the-clock security guards who drive around in golf carts, but "not all" Wal-Mart's have these. Well, Mr. Greenwald, tell us how many do and how many don't!!!

These are very basic questions any rational mind asks when confronted with the claim that Wal-Mart allows crime to occur in its parking lots—and a failure to give so much as a bare response to such obvious questions suggests that Greenwald is interested only in producing pure propaganda, and nothing of intellectual value.

Utilizing a technique originally developed by the New York Times, Greenwald also asserts that Wal-Mart has, say, 3000 employees in this or that state who are on Medicaid, which is almost always “more than any other employer in the state.” What he conveniently omits is that in many states Wal-Mart is far and away the largest employer. I mean, if 20 percent of a state’s workforce is employed at Wal-Mart and the next largest employer only has 5 percent, then NO DUH Wal-Mart is going to have more workers on Medicaid than any other employer.

The fact remains that less than 5 percent of Wal-Mart’s workers are on Medicaid, which is about average for the retail sector—on par with Target, K-Mart, Best Buy, Home Depot, Whole Foods, etc. Further, a 2004 study concluded that, while on average less than 5 percent of Wal-Mart’s employees are on state Medicaid programs, 6 or 7 percent were on Medicaid before they came to work at Wal-Mart, which means that Wal-Mart actually reduces the number of people on Medicaid. Chew on that one for a while. (This is common sense, of course; it's not like Wal-Mart employees would somehow be lawyers or investment bankers if not for the fact that they're stuck working at Wal-Mart.)

Of course, Business Week is the only media outlet anywhere to ever report on that study.

Sometimes, Greenwald stoops so low as to merely describe some completely innocuous Wal-Mart practice in a tone suggesting that we should all be shocked and scandalized by it—yet another technique borrowed from the New York Times. For instance, one commentator, babbling incoherently about how much he hates Wal-Mart, suddenly stops and breathlessly whispers “and they lock their janitors inside the building over night.”

Well, yeah. Wal-Mart doesn’t want its cleaning staff to roll a U-Haul up to the side of the building at 3am, fill it with jewelry and stereo systems, and drive off. Wal-Mart doesn’t want members of its cleaning staff inviting non-employee friends into the store—to party or vandalize or rape female members of the cleaning crew. (Can you imagine the lawsuits that would stem from that?)

So, you know, LIKE EVERY COMPANY IN THE WHOLE COUNTRY, Wal-Mart locks up its facilities at night, with the cleaning crew inside. And they’re not trapped inside the building. There are emergency exits every fifty feet or so around the building’s periphery, and if there’s any kind of emergency situation, workers can easily leave through the emergency exits.

I mean, am I missing something here?

But just as the New York Times has been doing at least once every two months for the last two years, Greenwald’s film reports that Wal-Mart has an extremely commonsense policy of locking the doors of its facilities at night—but states this in a tone suggesting that the practice is in some way dangerous or outrageous or illegal.

And it certainly had the desired effect on the brave gathering at Lucy Parson’s Tuesday night. When the bit about locked doors came up, there were gasps across the room. And Saaaay-tahn walks among us!!!

"The High Cost of Low Prices" is, like most sermons, unconvincing, based on emotions such as rage and fear rather than facts and reason, and a reiteration of the same inane things the audience/congregation already believes to be true. It’s excruciatingly boring for everyone involved.

When the New York Times glowingly compared Greenwald’s film to "Fahrenheit 911," it made a statement that was far more revealing than anyone at the Times probably realized:

But it's impossible not to remember what happened with Michael Moore's “Fahrenheit 9/11”: it outraged many Americans, made White House decisions look ridiculously dishonest and/or inept, and President Bush was re-elected anyway.

Well, actually, what happened was that Fahrenheit 911 “outraged” only those people who were already “outraged” over President Bush, and “made White House decisions look ridiculously dishonest and/or inept” only to those people who already believed that everything the White House does is ridiculously dishonest and/or inept, which is why "Fahrenheit 911" had little or no effect on the 2004 elections. And, by the same token, "The High Cost of Low Prices" will only raise the ire of people who already hate Wal-Mart—and, realistically speaking, that’s a very narrow and secluded segment of the population.

When are the New York Times and other papers of its ilk going to realize that not everyone thinks like the rich, white left-wing professionals in Boston, San Francisco, and Manhattan? When are they going wake up to the fact that there’s a whole continent out there—and that everyone out in the hinterlands shops at Wal-Mart and that most know at least one person who works—or has worked—at Wal-Mart?

For most of us, Wal-Mart isn’t some alien, abstract entity. We know the people who work at—who constitute—Wal-Mart; they are our relatives, friends, and neighbors. And we know they are not evil or sexist or racist. We also know that almost all of them have health insurance, that none of them are starving, and that they benefit from Wal-Mart’s low prices just as much as the rest of us.

Wal-Mart is the best thing ever to happen to low-income America. Wal-Mart has no hidden clauses, no one calling us up in the middle of the night and telling us to pay some hidden fee; Wal-Mart refuses to engage in usury, cashing our paychecks for $3, not 15 percent. We know that Wal-Mart is the exact opposite of the fat and lazy local retailer who’s boo-hoo’ing on the national stage that, because of Wal-Mart, he’s no longer the richest man in his town. We know that Wal-Mart is not some criminal organization, or some sleazy used car dealer or rent-to-own company taking advantage of the poor and ignorant. We know that Wal-Mart is one of the finest enterprises Americans have ever created—and we are rapidly losing patience with the powerful special interest groups and their brain dead followers who are bent on destroying this country's greatest company.

Even in New York City, a left-wing bastion, when trade magazine Retail Merchandiser asked New York City residents whether they would welcome a Wal-Mart store in the city, nearly two-thirds said that they would welcome Wal-Mart. The extremist anti-Wal-Mart left is completely outside the mainstream, even in New York City.

Listening to the New York Times wondering aloud about how and why left-wing propaganda films like "Fahrenheit 911" and "The High Cost of Low Prices" don’t have a bigger effect, one finds it impossible not to recall Pauline Kael, a writer for the New Yorker, who, in 1972 after Nixon was reelected by 49 out 50 states, famously and quite hilariously commented, “I don’t understand how Nixon won; I don’t know a soul who voted for him.”

Exactly.

Crafty Republicans trying to injure Americans

2005-11-17T09:48:00.000-06:00

The Associated Press put out a story today picked up by the Huffington Post and CNN which begins with the lead: "People injured by a vaccine against bird flu or anthrax would have to prove willful misconduct to bring a claim for damages against drug manufacturers or distributors, according to legislation being drafted behind the scenes by Republicans." Oh, my.

The article does a remarkably poor job of stating the alternative: that the U.S. will lag farther and farther behind in the development and preparations for pandemic flu. Not only is there a lack of incentive to make a vaccine from a profit/investment/return point of view, there's a huge discentive because if the vaccine is widespread, somebody, probably Robert Kennedy, will start a class action lawsuit claiming that the vaccine made him stupid. The company will go bankrupt and everyone will be flu-free (this time around), self-satisfied, and $10.98 richer due to the dissolution of another great corporation.

The details of the proposed bill being drafted in the dimly lit smoky backrooms of the Capitol where the Republicans sit around laughing heartily while chewing on cigars are a bit difficult to discern from the article, but here at the Show we strive for clarity. The bill would only protect the companies and institutes involved in making the vaccine if the Secretary of Health and Human services declared a national emergency. Which is what a massive highly pathogenic flu outbreak would be. In fact, it's not just drug companies that would be protected by this bill (a major point the article misses)--it's any private entity, including non-public universities and research institutes that will probably be the ones that develop the vaccine and then give it to a company to produce. Normally, we spend 10-15 years testing and refining vaccine formulations--if a pandemic flu broke out, we'd have a substantially shorter period to test a specific vaccine formulation though we would have data on the vaccines currently under development.

In truth, no one at a vaccine company or in research honestly believes that any of the flu vaccines under consideration could cause serious harm. There's no scientific basis for that (it happens to be my field so I feel confident making such claims). The people in these places have devoted their lives to just this kind of research and they have no interest in foisting a defective product on the American people, and really no concern that any significant injury would occur. What the companies and these institutes are worried about are the trial lawyers who will just be itching to sign up the first person who stubs his toe on the way out of his doctor's office so they can decry this "dangerous" vaccine that was "rushed" to market. To put it another way, if the vaccine is actually dangerous, indemnity or not, the company and researches will be ruined by reputation and public outcry alone. Of course, the vaccine is not actually dangerous. The real danger, as in many arenas of modern American life, is the Kennedy family.

So, if you hear someone sounding off about the greedy drug companies and the Republican cronies in Congress, they aren't going to make much money, if any, off of a pandemic flu vaccine. They are simply asking not to be destroyed for saving the world. It sounds silly, but that's the Show.

The Low Cost of Mindless Propaganda

2005-11-11T16:23:00.000-06:00

Well, is everyone excited about the release of “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices,” Robert Greenwald’s new propaganda flick?

In the old days—like before Michael Moore came along—a documentary was expected to at least aspire to fairness and objectivity, a documentation of reality. Now they’re little more than 90-minute political ads.

In the build up to the film’s release this Sunday, there’s been a great deal of cross-promotion going on. Consider Andrew O’Hehir’s analysis today at Salon.com:

By my count, stories casting Wal-Mart in a dubious light (at the very least) have appeared in the New York Times five of the past seven days, most of them on either the front page or the front of the business section. While Greenwald's film didn't prompt all these stories, it's mentioned in all of them, and Wal-Mart now has a "war room" full of skilled political operatives principally devoted to countering the accusations it raises.

So you have Salon.com promoting the Times’ incredibly anti-Wal-Mart “newstories,” which shamefully promote Greenwald’s propagandistic film. The film, for its part, seems to be nothing more than a reiteration of everything the New York Times has been saying about Wal-Mart for the last two years. One has to admire their knack for synergy.

As for myself, I’ve already signed up to view a premier screening of the movie at the Lucy Parson’s bookshop, a self-proclaimed “radical and independent” store which doubles as a dumping ground for hippies, environmentalists, and drug addicts, which, handily enough, is just across the street from my apartment.

Actually, I’m still trying to decide between actually watching the film or staging a protest outside. Or, depending on my mood, I might just sit inside and watch TV.

Senator Levin Admits(?) that Saddam Had Nuclear Weapons!

2005-11-09T22:58:00.000-06:00

There are those times in life when an event of great enormity occurs so suddenly and so unexpectedly that one’s mind simply cannot process it, let alone analyze it, where one is left with a confusion so arresting as to border on unconsciousness—like, for instance, as occurred Monday night on MSNBC’s Hardball when Senator Carl Levin, the second ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, uttered the following twenty-five words:

“There was plenty of evidence that Saddam had nuclear weapons, by the way. That is not in dispute. There is plenty of evidence of that.”

If you’re still sitting upright, take a few deep breaths, and then read it again, this time slowly.

Where to begin?

Well, to start off with, let’s talk about my favorite part: the “by the way” clause that rounds out the first sentence. For thought experiment purposes, which of the following seems to stick out:

(A) By the way, I picked up some non-dairy creamer on my way home from work.
(B) I sent that Fed-Ex, by the way, so it will definitely get there before 11:00.
(C) There was plenty of evidence that Saddam had nuclear weapons, by the way.

In addition to being the second ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee (the committee investigating the government intelligence that led to the Iraq War), Senator Levin (D-Mich.) is also, by the way, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the ranking Democrat of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

So, you know, it’s not as if Senator Levin is ignorant about issues of foreign policy, such as evidence as to whether or not Saddam’s regime had nuclear weapons.

By the way, can we get that quote again. Oh, here it is:

“There was plenty of evidence that Saddam had nuclear weapons, by the way. That is not in dispute. There is plenty of evidence of that.”

Even more perplexing is that Senator Levin has long criticized the Bush administration regarding the Iraq War. For example, on the October 7, 2004, episode of PBS’s Newshour with Jim Lehrer Senator Levin stated the following:

I think they clearly exaggerated the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction. They stated with great certainty that he had weapons of mass destruction. They said with certainty that he had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program. They said that he had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. They stated things with certainty which even the intelligence community were not certain of.

What to make of it then? Well, the full implications of the good Senator’s Hardball statement would be, all told, impossible to document, but a few things have to jump out at any reasonable person.

(1) Was Senator Levin asserting that he believes—based on the evidence at the time—that Saddam’s regime actually had nuclear weapons, or was he asserting that there was at least strong evidence to support such a conclusion (even if, as it turned out, the available evidence pointed to the wrong conclusion)?

I mean, based on the evidence available at the time, the Ptolemiac conclusion that the universe revolved around the Earth made a great deal of sense—even if it turned out that Ptolemy was wrong.

So, was Senator Levin asserting that a great deal of evidence suggested that Saddam had nuclear weapons but that we now know that the suggested conclusion of all this evidence was false—or did he accidentally throw out information known only known to Senators on the Intelligence Committee, solid evidence, recently gathered, evidence verifying that there actually were nuclear weapons?

Not that the distinction matters that much. If the available evidence at the time prior to invasion suggested that Saddam’s regime had nuclear weapons (even if he really didn’t), then that alone was reason enough to invade immediately—regardless of whether or not Saddam actually had such weapons, or “stockpiles” of such weapons. The question of whether a madman like Saddam had nuclear weapons at his disposal is not something to debate for long. It’s not the sort of gamble one takes. (Maybe Tel Aviv will get nuked tomorrow, maybe it won’t.)

Either way, Senator Levin needs to explain what he meant when he said Monday that there was plenty of evidence that Saddam had nuclear weapons.

(2) If Senator Levin meant that there were actually nuclear weapons found, then, oh goodness, the anti-war left just found itself up a creek without a paddle. They were so quickly so confident (in fact, they may even have twisted the evidence) that no WMD’s were found in Iraq that they went around repeating the “Bush lied, kid’s died” mantra to such an extent that, at this point, your average deaf-blind 5-year-old can recite in his sleep the constantly-repeated phrases about the “non-existent WMD’s” and about how the “Bush administration misled the American people.”

And forget the left, just consider the media in general. If I had a penny for everytime I've heard a phrase along the lines of "President Bush's assertion that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction, which has proved false" stated in run-of-the-mill news stories (as opposed to opinion pieces) put out by Rueters or the Associated Press or the New York Times, I'd have an estate in the Hamptons by now. An estate with a pool and water slides, I might add.

(3) If Senator Levin’s statement was completely false—both as to the evidence of nuclear weapons and as to the actuality of nuclear weapons—then he’s a total idiot (or, in the alternative, a total crack addict) who has no business in a leadership position in the federal government. Again, Senator Levin is a leading Democrat on numerous Senate committees that constitute a vital component of national security...

Senator Levin's committee... These are the elected officials who are supposed to be overseeing the executive branch, supposed to be reviewing and overseeing the various intelligence branches of the US government. If he' s confused or crazy or whatever, he needs to go.

Also, if we assume that Senator Levin was speaking the truth, then it means that he leaked what must have been classified information (and, if it weren’t classified, I honestly couldn’t imagine why we haven’t heard something about it prior to now). And, if he leaked classified information, then, well, you know the drill—grand jury, indictment, trial, prison... And, I bet Levin and ol’ Scooter would make great bunkmates.

(4) Most importantly, why was it that I randomly stumbled upon Senator Levin’s statement today when, totally bored, I was clicking on random links on realclearpolitics.com? From what I’ve been able to unearth online, the Weekly Standard, Newsmax.com (both of which are solidly right-wing) and two or three obscure right-wing blogs are the only media entities anywhere on the planet to comment on Senator Levin’s incredible statements Monday.

Honestly, Google it. Google it till you’re ready to pass out. All you’ll find is the Hardball transcript at MSNBC, the Weekly Standard story, the Newsmax.com story, and a link to the Weekly Standard story linked to by Realclearpolitics.com. And that’s it.

I mean, what’s happening here? The Democratic Senator who, by the way, probably knows more about pre-war intelligence than any other Democrat in the Senate, states on national television that the pre-war evidence strongly supported the conclusion that Saddam had nuclear weapons—and we haven’t heard a damn word about it except for a couple of right-wing websites and bloggers?

---

And, in case you don't believe me or suspect that I'm taking Senator Levin out of context, here’s a fuller transcript of Senator Levin’s statement when he appeared on Harball (with words of interest in bold and my commentary in brackets and bold):

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Who got America, attacked by Islamic religious zealots, to go to war with Iraq, a secular state who had no detectable role in the attack on us? And how did they manipulate the media to do it? Let‘s play HARDBALL.
Good evening, I‘m Chris Matthews. Welcome to the first in our series of special reports this week on the CIA leak investigation. Tonight, how the White House led America to war. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said that Scooter Libby‘s indictment is not about the war. But the fact remains, circumstances which led to his indictment were indeed very much about the case being made for the war at that time and how the administration sold it. Three years ago, the White House persuaded the media, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and a majority of the American people to accept their case for military action in Iraq. Largely based on a very powerful image, a nuclear mushroom cloud. [Alan: I don't recall any images of a mushroom cloud. I guess images associated with Bush's case for war and those associated with LBJ's disgraceful media campaign against the great Barry Goldwater back in 1964 are melting together in Mr. Mathew's mind.] The president, the vice president and others repeatedly warned of the looming threat of a nuclear weapon in Saddam Hussein‘s arsenal that could be used against the territory of the United States.
Recent polls show that a majority of you, the American people, now believe the Bush administration misled the country into war. [Heh, wonder why everyone thinks that?] And for the first time in his presidency, a majority of the American people question President Bush‘s honesty and integrity. So tonight, we look in depth at how the case for war for sold to send the American military into Iraq. Here is my interview with Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a member of the Intelligence Committee.
[…]
MATTHEWS: Senator Levin, from what I can figure, our audience on HARDBALL is a pretty mixed bag of conservatives, liberals and middle-of-the-roaders. That shifts of course. But, there are a lot of people out there who have different views than you, or me, or anybody else on this war.
I just wondered, analytically, how would you best describe the manner in which the vice president and his people and others in the administration looked at this intel? That you‘ve just described. What was it, selective use? Was it a skewed use of it? Was it a worst-case scenario? Was it deliberate lying? [Or, do they still beat their wives?]
LEVIN: They ignored the intelligence that did not support their decision to go to war, basically. They were looking for those snippets of intelligence that would support their decision to go to war. That is basically what their signal was. I believe the intelligence community. The intelligence community then provided some distorted intelligence on a lot of things. But, that‘s not what the issue is that I raise this weekend.
This is where the intelligence community was right and they ignored the intelligence community. Not where the intelligence community was wrong, which was plenty of times. There are instance after instance after instance where the intelligence community was right or divided, where the administration, for reasons to, obvious to create an impression that they wanted the American people to believe, where they did not use what the intelligence community had found or decided.
MATTHEWS: What came first do you believe, Senator? Their desire to go to war or the way they looked at the evidence?
LEVIN: I think basically they decided immediately after 9/11 to go after Saddam. They began to—look there was plenty of evidence that Saddam had nuclear weapons, by the way. That is not in dispute. There is plenty of evidence of that. [!!!] Where they fell short, the administration fell short, was getting intelligence from the intelligence community about a link, alleged link between the people who attacked us, al Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein. That‘s one of the important declassified sentences from the Defense Intelligence Agency over this weekend, which I released.
Listen to this sentence and how different [?] it is from what the administration was saying. Here is what the Defense Intelligence community in this declassified document says. Saddam‘s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control. That‘s what the Defense Intelligence Agency said before the war. Yet you have the president before the war saying there is—this is President Bush, quote, you can‘t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk on the war on terror. His own intelligence community was distinguishing between the two.
MATTHEWS: He still persists in that terminology. He talk about a war on terrorism centered in Baghdad. Why you do think he keeps saying it like that?
LEVIN: Because it is now. It wasn‘t then, but it is now. Clearly, it is the center place, the central place in terms of the war.
MATTHEWS: You mean we drew those foreign fighters into that country?

Oh, words...they don't mean anything anyway

2005-11-04T08:32:00.000-06:00

One of the problems with the slow-down in our posting rate is that it makes it harder to decide when to post. Hopefully the spirit will move us to pick up the pace. I thought I'd post a little snippet today that follows nicely on Alan's manifesto below. It comes from the NYT, in a front page article about the increasingly ideological nature of Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The piece is poorly written and while it mentions many of the "high points" of what got us to the situation today in passing, it obscures the fundamental issues.

The first issue the article fails to make explicit is the difference between politics and legal theory. Now, in many cases, a particular politics may be associated with a particular legal theory, but I would not call a nominee an "ideologue" unless the flow went the wrong way, that is, unless his or her politics determined his or her legal theory. As a for example, the NYT and the left love assuming that the "conservatives" on the court are political conservatives who have adopted originalism as a means to their evil Republican ends. Relying so heavily on this theory, they were shocked (shocked!) when it was the "conservatives" on the court who tried to allow medical marijuana to be grown in California and tried to prevent the state from seizing a woman's home. With the lamentable exception of Scalia, their theoretical view trumped what was probably their political view (at least in the marijuana case).

The first half of the article today goes on and on with quotes and analysis of Democratic senators who are saying that Alito is well-qualified, but that they will probably vote against him based on ideology. This has the effect of making everyone think it is "just politics", but I think that is a nasty charge to level at a judge, conservative or liberal. It makes the whole process just fashion--"Oh, he likes abortion and the color red, I can't vote for him!" Instead, if a senator honestly disagrees with someone's interpretation, they should question and debate the value of that legal interpretation, without regard to specific cases. I have yet to hear any interesting discussion about why one form of legal theory might be superior to another without focusing on the ends of that theory. The justification for a theory should not just be the way a small subset (usually one) case is decided.

The next thing the article fails to make explicit is that this "ends-testing" of nominees is wholly and directly a creation of the Democrats over the last 20 years. That sentence is not as partisan or as it sounds--it's an obvious conclusion from an honest reading of the facts. The Democrats were a permanent majority for much of the last half of the last century in the legislature. This didn't lead to difficult court nominations by Republican presidents (even Scalia was overwhelmingly approved)until Robert Bork, which the article rightly notes as the first nominee in modern times to be thrown out purely on ideological grounds--it even spawned a verb, getting "borked." After this, it stayed nasty, culminating in the Thomas hearing under Bush I. Then, under Clinton, the Republicans took control of the Senate. Even thought they could have made life hell for Clinton on his Supreme Court nominees, they overwhelmingly approved both of his candidates. Ginsburg even worked in a high position at the ACLU--imagine Bush nominating someone who worked for the Family Research Council. Would any Democrats vote for him or her?

The principle that guided the Republicans then was that the president should have deference in his Supreme Court nominees. His party had won the White House and the appointment of the Supreme Court was an executive privilege granted by the Constitution, with the advice and consent only of the Senate. Which bring us to the current situation--the Democrats have lost the House, the Senate and the presidency for several elections running and yet they keep claiming more responsibility and power in this process. To put it another way, even when the Republicans were in power they didn't shoot down a Democratic nominee. The Democrats are overwhelmingly OUT of power and they think they should be able to shoot down a nominee that even they admit is qualified. The Democrats have made the process about whatever they want it to be about to get the end result they desire--they don't trust the system and they don't trust the political decisions of the electorate.

The NYTs article mentions these various facts but then tries to contradict them, pointing out that "at least two senators" who weren't in Congress when Ginsburg and Breyer were confirmed would vote against them now. 1) Apparently, that is how the new game is played, thanks to the Democrats but 2) Even with a two-vote loss, Ginsburg and Souter would still be overwhelmingly confirmed by a vast majority of Repbulicans. The author in no way makes a convincing case that Republicans would behave as poorly with a Democratic nominee as the Democrats have with a Republican one. Thus far, it it has still only been a Democratic ploy.

My final point is one that disturbs me the most. A new talking point among liberal legal "scholars" is that it is really the conservatives who are the judicial activists, because they want to overturn certain precedents (really just Roe v. Wade) and isn't that more "activist" than "restrained"? And since that is the case, doesn't the word mean nothing? Well, the fact that these people have some kind of degree and are teaching our next generation of judges and lawyers should put the fear of God into you. Lee Epstein is the one quoted in this article, but it must have gone out in an e-mail because it's popping up all over. It's a perfect strategy for the Democrats because it fits nicely in with other deny-that-words-have-any-meaning approaches they have taken in the past and is fully consistent with a legal doctrine that focuses only on serving a constituents desires and ignoring the letter of the law.

To clarify, for those of you out there that have succumbed to the mumblings of Professor Epstein, legal conservatives believe that the Constitution gives Congress very limited powers; they believe also that the words in the Constitution have meanings and we can know what those meanings are and they are fairly straightforward. Thus, since the Constitution says NOTHING about abortion, or anything remotely related to abortion, forcing it to say something about it via Supreme Court ruling is activist. To be clear and this is a point that is often lost in the debate, true legal conservatives do not believe abortion should be outlawed by the court. Overturning Roe v. Wade would not make abortion illegal. It would make it a matter for the states, which is what the Constitution says to do with issues of personal rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution. Activist, then, would be to read something into the Constitution that is not there. Precedent has very little to do with it. One example might be the civil rights rulings of the 50s--these were not activist, they were merely finally reading the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments as they were meant (written by Republicans, opposed by Democrats, you know). So the word has a meaning...deep down, I hope Professor Epstein knows this and is just twisting it to serve his political ends. That would just make him a Democrat, rather than ignorant.

Post-Miers, Post-Constitution, Post-Everything.

2005-10-27T20:56:00.000-05:00

Well, so, in my spare moments I had been working on a blog entry on Harriet Miers and her nomination to the Supreme Court, but, given today’s news that Ms. Miers has honorably asked the President to withdraw her nomination, it seems that the moment has passed me by. Eh, fine.

On a human level, I genuinely feel sorry for Ms. Miers—sorry for what she has had to endure these last few weeks. As a small-time, amateur member of the chattering class, I strongly believe that when we, as public chatterers, start chattering at length about a specific, real individual, that we should take into consideration the feelings of the person we are chattering about. It’s one thing to talk about the stupidity of “liberals” as a group or “conservatives” as a group; it’s quite another thing to refer to any individual liberal or any individual conservative as irredeemably stupid.

Ms. Miers is not just an image on monitors and television screens. She’s a real human being. And I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for a human being to go through what she has gone through these last few weeks. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

This was vicious politics.

And the politicization of the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, is the underlying problem here. As happened to Athens and Rome in their later years, politics is gradually taking over all aspects of the American system. Every institution, every realm of human existence in the United States, is struggling to maintain its independence, gasping to stay afloat in the tide of politicization. Do you buy your underwear at Wal-Mart? That’s a political issue. Do you smoke? That’s a political issue. What do you teach in your eighth-grade science class? That’s a political issue.

What happened to Miers underscores more than ever that we must try to reverse the politicization of our court system. The Constitution was and is a contract, terms “we the people” agreed to. Yes, we should abide by the words and intended meaning of those Americans who wrote and ratified the original document and its meaning. Just like any legal document—whether a contract, a will, a deed, etc.—if we abandon the plain meaning and intentions of those who created the document, we are left with nothing but a blind—and infinitely cruel—contest of political wills.

Ms. Miers, who has struck me as perfectly wonderful and innocent person, was a victim of the blood-thirsty political battles which have come to characterize our legal system.

Of course, the Founding Fathers understood that circumstances change and that we needed a “living” Constitution—and that’s why they clearly provided a process for amending the basic document. If you think the Constitution needs to “change with the times,” well, by golly, there’s a whole process already in place for amending it.

But that’s not what the left did, from the 1930’s to the present. Rather than amending the Constitution, they just made crap up, and all over the place. Because liberals controlled the Supreme Court, for example, they decided that Congress’s enumerated power to regulate “commerce among the states” (which was originally meant to stop trade wars among the states) meant that Congress could create Social Security, tell a farmer how much wheat he could grow on his land to feed his cattle, and whether or not a tiny barbeque joint in Alabama could discriminate on the basis of race. Liberals also came to the rather bizarre conclusion that the phrase “no state shall deprive . . . any citizen of the due process of law” in the 14th-Amendment meant that no state shall make any law outlawing abortion. More recently and much more hilariously, the liberal wing of the Court has ruled that Constitution’s delegation of power to Congress to regulate “commerce among the states” means that Congress has the power to tell a Californian dying of an horrendisly physically painful disease that she is not allowed to grow marijuana on her on land for her own private consumption, despite the fact that California voters chose to allow her to soften her pain with plants grown on her property.

Stated otherwise, the liberals have twisted a purely legal document, the Constitution, to further their own political goals. And now, in a world where the arbitrary whims of political appointees determine everything, appointing a new Supreme Court justice is just as contentious and political as, say, choosing a new president.

It’s fair to say that, as this point, WE HAVE NO CONSTITUTION, no stable, unchanging and fundamental document to resolve disputes. Rather, we have two federal legislatures—Congress, which makes most of the decisions, and the Supreme Court, which intervenes whenever it feels like it, haphazardly vetoing Congress and, by the same token, randomly endowing Congress with powers it was never supposed to have, etc.

The parties involved have chosen to ignore the original contract, the original agreement. They are now fighting each other by whatever means they can, trying to advance their interests with no rules or guidelines, using propaganda and cruel personal attacks to advance their position. At risk of sounding overly dramatic, we have abandoned the Constitution and have resorted to anarchy.

But that's what happens when parties violate their original agreement; anything goes.

Like all great civilizations, we had our Apollonian age—an age of rules, reason, and unbounded brightness, and we have slowly fallen into a dying Dionysian era—where a drunken orgy of whims, desires, and attacks decide everything. Coasting on the momentum of a much grander past, we are still the richest and best functioning society on the planet.

But we are marked, and it was we did the branding. Our days are numbered. Are you counting them?

--

The modern conservative (or neo-con) movement has, since the 1960’s, tried to turn back time, to limit governmental and political power, to save America from complete politicization.

By the 1960’s, it became apparent that the left—the political class—was trying to increase its power by going after the two main challenges to its authority: the power of big business and the power of organized religion. As a result, in the 1960’s, big business and organized religion came together under the GOP umbrella, all in an attempt to save themselves from complete politicization.

It’s a defensive alliance that was worked out quite well.

--

Since we have an apparent clean slate when it comes who President Bush will nominate to the Supreme Court, I think I’ll put in my two cents by noting that my pick, were I president, would be Judge Janice Rogers Brown.

Well, with the possible exception of Judge Posner, Judge Brown is my favorite federal appellate judge.

She had a few problems when President Bush nominated her to the D.C. Circuit, and a blog entry from the time (on my old Friendster blog) is, I think worth repeating in its entirety:

I 'm not sure what it is, but there' s something about black conservatives that makes liberals' heads spin. Oh wait, I know what it is! It's that they are (1) black and (2) conservative. For liberals, the concept of a right-wing black is as patently laughable as, say, a right-wing Hispanic or a right-wing homo. For Democrats, it's like something being both X and non-X at the same time and in the same way, like a sandwich being both a sandwich and a space station at the same time. It's just logically impossible for a black to be both black and right-wing.
In other words, it's the same impenetrably circular logic that animates all racism and bigotry. (Why can't blacks do math? Well, because blacks can't do math! Duh.) Or, stated otherwise, Democrats see right-wing blacks as "unnatural."
As to how and why so many people have come to view blacks blindly voting Democratic as the "natural" state of black people, no one is quite sure. Personally, I can't think of one damn thing the Democrats have done for black people in the last thirty years, unless I count welfare or racial quotas (but that would be racist of me to suggest, wouldn't it?). But if it's not welfare or racial quotas, then what is it?
Democrats usually point to the various civil rights acts of the 1960's as unquestionable proof of the Democratic Party's pro-black credentials. Even if it were true that Democrats were the driving force behind civil rights (which it's not), it is hard to overlook: that was forty years ago. And, Jesse Jackson's mindless ranting notwithstanding, the problems that face black Americans today are much different than the problems blacks faced forty years ago. But don't tell left-wing black political "leaders" this. They seem to think that the tools of the civil rights movement -rallies, protests, media appearances, and lawsuits - are all that's needed to solve the problems that face black Americans today.
Even so, the whole theory that Democrats created civil rights is a gross historical inaccuracy, an ad hoc flight of fancy created only to bolster the political configuration of the present. Most of the people who opposed civil rights were Democrats, and in Congress a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the various civil rights acts of the 1960's. Of course, liberals have a ready-made response to this... In the span of just a few years (something like a 6 month period in the latter part of 1972, right before Nixon was elected), so the liberal myth goes, the two parties suddenly "switched," did a complete and utter flip-flop, such that the Republicans became the "conservative" party, and the Democrats became the "liberal" party.
This retarded revisionist nonsense is supported by very little, if any, historical evidence and never fails to crack me up. It's just too convenient. When confronted with historical reality, Democrats just shrug it off and claim that those Democrats who fought civil rights were, in reality, closet Republicans. I mean, come on.
By the same token, liberals also claim that although it was the Republican Party that ended slavery, those Republicans were somehow "different" from today's infinitely bigoted Republicans. The Radical Republicans of the 1860's, it seems, were really the ideological brothers of today's liberal Democrats. Again, how totally convenient for liberal Democrats! While we're at it, why not go ahead and claim that every great thing that has ever happened in all of history was the doing of liberals.
The parties didn't "switch" or "flip-flop" during or after the civil rights era. The fact remains: Most of the politicians who opposed civil rights were dye in the wool liberal Democrats. They were yellow dogs such as the late, disgraceful Senator Fulbright of Arkansas. And, for every anti-civil rights Democrat who later abandoned their party for the Republicans (such as Strom Thurmond), there was one who stayed with the Democrats (such as Senator and former Klansman Robert Byrd of West Viriginia).
Besides, the vast majority of black Americans had already started voting Democratic decades before the mythical great realignment of the late 1960's/early 1970's. If the parties didn't "switch" until after the civil rights era, then why were 80 percent or more of blacks voting for Democrats as early as the late 1930's? Were they stupid? (My god, are liberals calling those black people stupid???)So we're back at the
original question: What have the Democrats ever done for black people (aside from picking them up with busses and dropping them off at the nearest polling station?). In my estimation, nothing but produced a bunch of scalding hot air.
Which brings me to Judge Janice Rogers Brown. Brown's life story is hard to ignore. Brown was born in the 1940's the daughter of black Alabama sharecroppers, and she grew up in a world of dire poverty, segregation, and violence. Her parents split up when she was still young, and she was sent off to be raised by her grandmother. Later she moved to Sacramento, where she worked at the state Department of Corrections to pay her way through college and where she met her first husband. Her husband soon died of cancer, leaving her to finish college, take care of their young son, and make her way through law school on her own.
Somehow, though, Brown overcame the bad hand life had dealt her and rose to occupy a seat on the Supreme Court of California, arguably the nation's most influential state court. At one point, she was reelected to that court with more than 70 percent of the California vote.
One problem, however. Brown is a right-wing Republican with a feisty libertarian streak. If not for this inconvenient fact, she would be hailed as a feminist hero by the "mainstream" media. Already, we would have been subjected to endless comparisons to Hillary Clinton, Joan of Arc, and, yes, the leftist establishment's idea of the greatest saint who ever lived: Jacklyn Kennedy. Heck, by now Lifetime would have made several movies about her.
As it is, though, her nomination by President Bush to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has been held up and filibustered by Senate Democrats for nearly two years. She has been denounced as an "extremist" and an "ideologue" by every major newspaped.
From the New York Times to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Every word of every judicial opinion she has ever written and every speech she has ever delivered has been searched and analyzed, with the hopes of finding something to take out of context and to use against her. She has been maligned, vilified, and outright slandered. To no one's surprise, the black press has repeatedly called her a "traitor," an "Uncle Tom," and a "lawn jockey," as well as run a number of cartoons highlighting several of her more salient physical characteristics.
Noticeably, none of Brown's critics attack her intelligence or her ability to make sound legal decisions, but only because that would be impossible to do. By all accounts, she is brilliant. Her judicial opinions are filled with wit, smart quips, and the quotes of everyone from Fredrick Hayek to Thucydides, from Ayn Rand to Edmund Burke. For the most part, her left-wing critics merely quote a line from one of her judicial decisions or speeches with the expectation that readers will be just as shocked and scandalized by the quote as Manhattan liberals are (such as when the New York Times revealed Brown's heat-stopping assertion that in a welfare state, where "we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is inevitably transformed into a kleptocracy - a license to steal, a warrant for oppression.") In the alternative, they just call her foul names.
Basically, the same ol' same ol' for right-wing blacks. People usually react to gay Republicans with disbelief and a few chuckles. I can't even imagine what it must be like to face the sort of nationwide, absolutist hatred that Judge Brown has faced these last two years. What would it be like to find oneself in an alternate reality created by the leftist intelligensia, orchestrated from the dimly lit confines of the chattering class's Manhattan newsrooms, college lecture halls, and beach front haciendas, an inverted reality in which tens of millions of people are suddenly convinced that you are pure evil? (Maybe Judge Brown can get some guidance from Wal-Mart's executives on how to deal with this.) It remains to be seen whether Judge Brown will react as Justice Clarence Thomas has reacted, by quietly and somewhat tragically tuning out the world and reacting to everything - praise, criticism, and legal arguments - with silence.
But Judge Brown has been through a great deal in her life, and if anyone can take it in stride she can. Besides, she does have a few powerful allies, namely President Bush, who has stood by her side for the last two years, even when it appeared that Congressional Republicans were ready to abandon her. And yesterday, over the noisy objections of a number of Democratic Senators who see her, to quote he New York Times, as the "most objectionable of President Bush's more than 200 judicial nominees," the United States Senate confirmed Brown's appointment to the D.C. ircuit, by a vote of 56 to 43, thereby sealing Judge Brown's position as the most prominent and powerful black woman in American legal history.

Fame!

2005-10-18T09:33:00.000-05:00

Quick note: We are now the number one result on google when you search alan and paul. Not even in quotes! Just Alan and Paul. Not that a lot of people are likely to search that way, but still, I'm excited.

The UCC vs. Wal-Mart

2005-10-18T09:01:00.000-05:00

My Show post today has to do with the United Church of Christ, the denomination of which I am a member. As part of their social justice ministry they have taken on Wal-Mart for the standard litany of crimes...poor health-care coverage, low wages, etc. etc. I've not been too pleased with that, as you might imagine, but now they have thrown their support behind a partisan hack filmmaker, supporting him before ever seeing the film. His primary qualification seems to be that he also made "Outfoxed", an expose of the Fox News Channel, which was riddled with falsehood and errors. I'm all for an honest discussion of Wal-Mart, but to put it in the hands of someone clearly so politically driven, who seems to have an agenda more than a well-thought opinion, is perplexing and small-minded. This man is a propagandist in the style of Michael Moore and for some reason the church I belong to wants to support the cheapening of debate and sloganization of discourse.

Evidence that the people in the UCC home office haven't thought this through comes from their own statements. Ron Stief, who heads the UCC Justice and Witness Ministry, compares the benefits and treatment of workers by General Motors to that of Wal-Mart. As a side note, he fails to mention that General Motors merely appeared generous as a result of the extortion of unions, so I'm not sure how much credit they should get. Stief summarizes by saying, "People need to compare Wal-Mart with General Motors and ask, 'Where is our nation going?"

Well, let's pray to God they are going with Wal-Mart and not with General Motors. It seems to be happening already. In today's NYT, as General Motors veers ever closer to bankruptcy and irrelevance, we find that General Motors is slashing their health insurance coverage. Ford and Chrysler are sure to follow. The alternative, Wal-mart becoming like General Motors, would mean massive layoffs, poverty, a reduced standard of living between generations for the first time ever in the history of the country...essentially all of America looking like Flint, Michigan.

The article points out that Toyota, the Wal-Mart of the auto industry, pays about $1000/vehicle made in health insurance charges than GM. Of course, Toyota isn't unionized, which is how they can do it. Where's the boycott of Toyota? How many liberal pundits and spokesman drive around in brand new Camry's? Who actually wants to buy American anymore? The reason the UCC and others don't boycott Toyota is because many among them prefer to drive the quality, inexpensive vehicles the non-union shops such as Honda and Toyota have to offer. The reason they boycott Wal-Mart is because they don't want to shop there and would prefer to shop elsewhere. By extension then, they don't want anyone to shop at Wal-Mart and they feel good and righteous making other people feel bad about their decision to shop there. Selectively applying your morality to suit your taste and preferences without regard to the facts, without regard to the reality of economics, is certainly not social justice and sounds an awful lot like hypocrisy.

Thank You, Andy Stern, for a Wonderful Evening!

2005-10-10T21:59:00.000-05:00

Ooo’s, this “sliced bread” thing is a hoot. It’s a left-wing horror show! I think it’s time to pass out some awards:

*The Show bears no responsibility for errors of grammar or spelling.*

Most Cliché was a tough category, extremely fierce competition here. But the winner is “Prioritize Public Wealth” by “Eric T. in Illinois”:

Prioritize public wealth. Deprioritize private wealth. The distinction here is between what’s good for the many and what’s good for the few. Currently, our economy is designed to benefit the few. At no time in our history has the difference between the rich and the poor been so great as it is now. People are working longer hours for less pay and fewer benefits. Yet the economy has still grown by an average of 3% every year since 1980. Many Americans are doing quite well, but many more (and more each year) aren’t. Examples of public wealth that aren’t currently wealthy but should be: 1.) Education. Better facilities, better teacher pay, rational standards, avoid the coming brain drain. 2.) Healthcare. 45 million without, a national shame, cut out the middleman (insurance companies) 3.) Civic projects. Infrastructure improvements, energy independence—creates jobs, invests in tomorrow. This will require not bigger government, or smaller government, but better government, smarter government, from top on down. Unlike private wealth, everybody inherits a better future, not just a few.

Best Conspiracy Theory (also Most Ironic, given the writer’s deriding of religion as mere “fairytale”) goes to “Christian Influence” submitted by Doug J. in Georgia:

Stop letting religious people make decisions. Government decisions should be based on logic and facts, not fairy tales. Also, something needs to be done about the pharmacutical and oil industires. Too many good ideas are shot down becasue these industries would loose money. It is much more profitable to "treat" cancer than to cure it. That, my friends, is bullshit.

And in the Least Helpful category, which was also very competitive, top honors go to “DO THE RIGHT THING REGARDLESS,” by “Ronald V. in Oregon”:

LOOK AT THE ITEM UNDER CONSIDERATION. DOES IT PASS THE "DO THE RIGHT THING TEST'? PORK IS NOT THE RIGHT THING GET IT OUT OF THERE. IF THE POLITICIANS HAVE A BETTER RETIREMENT, HEALTH CARE AND PAY PACKAGE THAN THEIR CONSTITUENTS CAN AFFORT IT IS NOT THE "RIGHT THING". STEALING FROM OUR GRANDCHILDREN TO PAY FOR OUR EXCESSES IS NOT THE RIGHT THING. VOTES THAT GIVE TO CORPORATIONS THOSE THING THAT TRASH OUR ECOLOGY NOT THE "RIGHT THING." USE YOUR COMMON SENSE AND DO THE RIGHT THING.

Moving right along…

Next up, the Insane Micro-Management award goes to “IDEA TO HELP FIND THE MISSING,” brought to us by “anonymous in Pennsylvania”:

ISSUE: WHEN THERE IS A SITUATION THAT A PERSON IS MISSING, SEARCH GROUPS NEED A FAST AND EZ PLAN...TO HELP MY IDEA IS AS SIMPLE AS PLACING HELPERS INTO TO GROUPS THE FIRST ON THE SEEN WILL BE THE "MARKER PLACERS" A COMMOM CLOTHS PIN THAT IS PAINTED A BRIGHT COLOR...AND THEN THE SECOND GROUP "THE RETRIVERS" SHALL GOTO THE PLACES WITH THE "MARKER" AND LOOK AT THE SITUATION FROM THERE POINT OF VIEW AND THEN WRITE A DECRIPTION OF WHERE THE MARKER WAS FOUND...I HOPE THAT IN THE LONG RUN THAT IF THIS IDEA WILL HELP SAVE TIME, AND STRESS FOR ALL THAT ARE INVOLVED.

The coveted Khmer Rouge Medal honors that one special idea which seems most likely to result in anarchy, widespread violence, and mass starvation. I happily bestow the Khmer Rouge Medal on “Fire the President” by “Jilbert A. in New York”:

- Dissolve the present government.
- Instore a collective system where grouped local citizens take their own decisions.
- Abolish all taxe-eating vultures. (Halliburton)
- Stop those useless wars that eat-up billions of taxe dollars.
- Keep jobs locally instead of exploiting kids in China, India....
- Have true hard-working americans take ownership of their own countrey by activly deciding what is good for their families and children.

The Biggest Rip-Off of President Bush’s Plan to Privatize Social Security goes to “Eliminate Poverty in One Generation,” submitted by “Rick O. in Illinois”:

The Problem is POVERTY and the growing gap between the have’s and have-nots. I’d take Lincoln’s formula, replace “land” with “capital assets,” and declare a 21st century Capital Homesteading Act designed to democratize the free market in three steps. 1. I’d instruct the Federal Reserve to activate the discount powers given it by section 13 in its original charter and to provide every American citizen with an annual $3,000 line of credit to buy (only) wealth producing capital assets (i.e. stock). 2. Then I’d instruct Congress to pass legislation making the paid out dividends from that asset purchase tax deductible to the corporation, payable by the individual after the line of credit is paid down by the pre-tax dividends (not by wages, salaries, or savings) from their investments, which takes an average of nine years.
3. The effect on ALL CITIZENS would be, by age 20 they’d have a $60,000, by age 30 a $90,000, and by age 65 a $200,000 asset portfolio with which to rescue themselves from poverty and systematically imposed wage slavery.

The Most Terrifyingly Orwellian award is presented to “Use a wiki to enact legislation,” the brainchild of “Brenda V. in Minnesota”:

What I want to do is to put and end to politics, or more accuratly, polititians. I want to use internet technology like perhaps a wiki, to propose, debate and to finally enact legislation into law . Begining at the local county level and going through city, state and right up to the federal level. In the future, I want politics as we know it today, to cease to exist. Everyone will participate through a structure and the only one I know that might work is a wiki.

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for… (Drum roll.) The Best Overall Idea goes to “Cut back on University spending,” thought up by “Jamil M. in California”:

Here's the issue: Too much money is wasted on U.S. Universities that don't benefit me or my family at all. Aren't most of the top students at U.S. Universities foreigners anyway. No one I know ever got accepted or went to college so why do me and my friends have to pay for it? Ordinary Americans like us can see the truth, just because I didn't get a high enough score on some exam, U.S. Universities don't want us and never will. Isn't it outragous? Here's the solution: Let's cut spending on wasteful U.S. Universities and build more sports arenas.
How fixing it will benefit working families: Sports arenas are something we can ALL enjoy, especially working families! Personally, my family and I like watching our favorite team compete.

With friends like these

2005-10-10T09:44:00.000-05:00

Labor superstar Andy Stern, the guy who broke away from the AFL-CIO and started the "Change for Good" coalition, the one who the New York Times profiles every few weeks in loving hagiographies, has started a new website called "Since Sliced Bread." It's a competition for the best "new idea" from the "common" man or woman. Unfortunately, thus far at least, even Ayn Rand wouldn't have portrayed the "common" man or woman this cruelly. The ideas are a bit, well--imagine an ideas contest among an unmotivated remedial 8th grade after school class. Then take it down a notch. But there is a $100,000 cash prize, so I'm sure once the word spreads, the ideas will get better. Here at the Show, we are doing our part to spread the word. Who said we were anti-labor?

Checks and Balances

2005-10-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

Well, loyal Show readers, Alan's job currently precludes him from internet access during the day. I have had various scattered things to deal with and we have missed a rather newsworthy week. So I will quickly try to cover a lot of ground:

1) The Miers nomination: The more I read about this story, the more my stomach had a sinking, souring feeling. As you might guess from many of the posts, I have been generally sympathetic to Bush's decisions in a wide arena. This included his selection of John Roberts, certain aspects of the Iraq policy, even the hurricane response--but he's lost me on this one. Like many others, I was hoping for a major debate over this nominee, not for the spectacle, but to actually have an honest debate about legal interpretation, the role of the Supreme Court and the role of Congress in advising and consenting. Instead, Bush has fractured his supporters between those who will blindly support whatever he does (and anyone who claims to be an evangelical Christian) and those who believed in Bush's political philosophy. Miers is not qualified, by most any standard of qualification. To put it another way, there are literally dozens of people, of every sex and race who have stronger credentials. I know this might upset some Show readers, but I am going to quote Ann Coulter...her whole piece this week is good and the latest in a long line where she has broken with the Bush team.

Second, even if you take seriously William F. Buckley's line about preferring to be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston telephone book than by the Harvard faculty, the Supreme Court is not supposed to govern us. Being a Supreme Court justice ought to be a mind-numbingly tedious job suitable only for super-nerds trained in legal reasoning like John Roberts. Being on the Supreme Court isn't like winning a "Best Employee of the Month" award. It's a real job.

It is a real job and Bush's smug "Trust me" moment in the Rose Garden yesterday displayed his worst tendencies towards arrogance and smugness. I cringed today when reading the NYT story on Miers and her meeting with various senators. Mike DeWine, doing his best to carry water for the administration offered this as his defense of Miers: "She is somebody who has gone out late at night to get someone out of jail." What? Seriously? This is a qualification for the Supreme Court? I've gone out late at night to get beer, ice cream sandwiches and fake chicken--can I get a Appeals Court gig at least?

Randy Barnett from Cato has an excellent piece in the WSJ on Miers. He quotes Federalist 76, where Alexander Hamilton says the following:

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularityÂ He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

I'll leave it at that.

2) The torture rules. In the second major splinter for Bush and the Republican party, the Senate passed 90-9 an appropriations bill for the Defense Department explicitly detailing the treatment of enemy prisoners, from any type of conflict. This is an effort spearheaded by John McCain, with the support and information of army Captain Fishback. Andrew Sullivan has been following this extensively, including a letter-writing support campaign for Capt. Fishback. The House bill doesn't have the rules and it will be interesting to see if the bill could pass there with a similar veto proof margin as Bush has threatened his (first) veto. What an ass. His explanation is that it would "limit the president's authority and flexibility in war" according to the Washington Post. Apparently, this is another "trust me" moment, but after the past couple years of photos and allegations, I think we are going to need something more specific. How, exactly would it limit your flexibility, Mr. President? Give us a hypothetical of what you would want to do in a case that this law would prevent you from doing? I hope the House Republicans stay behind this (the Democrats certainly will)--it would be a major rebuke to the Bush administration and may finally awake the Republican Congress to its important role as something more than pork-spending and Bush policy enactor. Of course, it's also the right thing to do.

The combination of the Katrina response and relief ($200 billion and all), the Miers nomination and these torture rules has exposed the strategic error in the Republican party giving Bush free reign. Most of the true, small-government principles that are the intellectual core of the Republican party are on the table. If they don't step up now, and I have a feeling they won't, they deserve the punishment from the voters that is coming their way. I'm thinking that the best development we could have politically would be for the Republicans to lose at least one house in 2006.

3) A quick note to follow-up on Alan's excellent Delay post below. In case you wanted more evidence of the political motivation of this prosecution (and I am NO Delay fan...actually, I'm very much an anti-fan), see this story. Key passage:

In a written statement Tuesday, Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle acknowledged that prosecutors presented their case to three grand juries Â not just the two they had discussed Â and one grand jury refused to indict DeLay. When questions arose about whether the state's conspiracy statute applied to the first indictment returned last Wednesday, prosecutors presented a new money-laundering charge to second grand jury on Friday because the term of the initial grand jury had expired.

Sketchy. That's all for now.

Prosecutorial Indiscretion

2005-09-28T22:09:00.000-05:00

Oh, Tom Delay is in deep. Not because he violated any law, but because the left is harnessing all its immense social and media forces against him. Katrina blew over without scoring the left any political points (despite a great deal of effort), and now they’re onto something new. One need merely consider two of today’s news stories regarding Congressman Tom Delay’s criminal indictment by a Texas grand jury:

(1) The headline over at the New York Times referred to Travis County Prosecutor Ronnie Earl (a Democrat) as—and I quote—“A Texas Prosecutor with a Reputation for Challenging the Powerful.” Oh, spare me. The article includes Earl’s statements, a statement from a left-wing pressure group, a statement from a left-wing political science professor, and a synopsis of Delay’s response to the indictment. No right-wing views are displayed. The NYT’s article also includes a glowing biography of Ronnie Earl, which fails to mention that he is a joke of a prosecutor—who in 1993 went after Republican Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison with a “series of trumped-up charges, including that the demure Hutchison had physically assaulted an employee. Earle dropped the case during the trial.”

(2) Over at the BBC it was this: “But Mr Earle is also brave - and in fact he has indicted two-to-three times more Democrats than Republicans during his tenure, according to Dallas Morning News political correspondent Wayne Slater.” To no one’s surprise, the BBC article made no mention of Earle’s history as a prosecutor.

In fact, the “Prosecutor Earle has gone after more Democrats than Republicans” bit has been everywhere. I won’t even bother to document all the places where I saw that line today. But it’s pure and utter spin. Up until ten to fifteen years ago, Texas was a one-party state. Like most of the South, Texas was completely controlled by the Democratic Party. All of the politicians were Democrats. (It wasn’t until 2002 that the Republicans gained control of the Texas legislature for the first time since the Civil War. The legislatures of states like Arkansas and Louisiana are still upwards of 70 percent Democratic.) Back in the one-party days in Texas, the only conflict was between “yellow dog Democrats” (the liberal ones) and “blue dog Democrats” (the conservative ones).

And, incidentally, back when all Texas politicians were Democrats, Earle only went after the blue dogs.

For the BBC (or any other news agency) to mention that Earle has gone after more Democratic politicians than Republican politicians without mentioning the fact that just a few years ago most of the politicians in Texas were Democrats is half-truth and distortion bordering on flat-out lying. The fact is that Earle has consistently used his office to go after his political enemies, regardless of his enemies’ party affiliation.

---
You will find very little discussion of Delay’s alleged crime and the alleged facts supporting it in the MSM. There’s a reason for this.

At issue seems to be a Texas statute prohibiting corporations from donating money to political candidates—which, even on its face, is a rather silly statute, and mostly because such a law is impossible to enforce.

Let’s say I’m a statewide party and that I have collected, say, $1 million in donations from individuals (not corporations). Under the statute, I can spend this money however I wish, on paying my staff, leasing offices, pro-party advertising, so-called “get out the vote” drives, OR I can give that money to party candidates running in particularly important districts.

But if a corporation comes along and donates another $1 million, I cannot give THAT million to my party candidates. So what do I do? Well, no duh, I spend the corporate-raised million on staffing, advertising, and get-out-the-vote drives, and send the $1 million raised from individuals out to my candidates.

It’s like getting a $20 Barnes and Nobles gift certificate to buy a book you had planned on buying anyway. Provided you were already going to spend $20 on the book, the certificate is (despite the fact that you can only spend it at a certain store) as good as cash. The certificate frees up $20 in cash—which you can then spend anywhere you want.

Practically speaking, the Texas statute accomplishes absolutely nothing. National and state-wide party organizations are always going to send a great deal of money to specific, key candidates. So, under such a law, the parties will simply spend corporate-raised money on “other” expenses, which frees up more of the money raised from individuals, which they will send to key candidates.

This isn’t rocket science. Your average high school student could see that the Texas statute is little more than a few words printed on pieces of paper in various law libraries across the country.

I don’t know anything about the statute’s legislative history, but it appears to be one of those ill-conceived laws passed by a legislature so as to satisfy certain anti-corporate special interest groups—one of those laws, like 90 percent of the laws on the books, that were never even MEANT to be enforced, that responsible prosecutors never enforce because enforcing them is impossible—one of those laws that are so ridiculous that God Himself couldn’t even begin to enforce them.

In Tom Delay’s case, it seems that he raised a bunch of money from corporations operating in Texas. Since, legally, he couldn’t give that corporate-raised money to Republican candidates in Texas, he sent that money to the Republican National Party to use for other expenses. In return, the Republican Party sent the same amount of money—money raised from individuals—to Republican candidates in Texas.

Taking advantage of an obvious loophole in the law is NOT the same thing as breaking the law. If it were, every accountant and tax lawyer in the nation would be behind bars and everyone would consider H & R Block a renegade organization.
Although, merely taking advantage of a loophole seems to be what Delay has been charged with. Here’s the UK’s Gaurdian’s stylized version:

The charge against Mr DeLay relates to a committee he set up in his home state of Texas. It is alleged that the committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, took illegal corporate donations and laundered the money before passing it to Republican candidates in the 2002 elections for the Texas legislature. The move helped the Republicans win control of the state legislature for the first time since the civil war. Mr DeLay, it is alleged, then engineered legislation that resulted in more Texas Republicans being elected to the US House of Representatives.

--

While we’re on the topic, it appears that a number of Democratic politicians (who represent districts with rational and/or Democratic prosecutors) have “laundered” corporate money to Democratic politicians:

The only problem is that similar transactions are conducted by both parties in many states, including Texas. In fact, on October 31, 2002, the Texas Democratic Party sent the Democratic National Committee (DNC) $75,000, and on the same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $75,000. On July 19, 2001, the Texas Democratic Party sent the DNC $50,000 and, again on the same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $60,000. On June 8, 2001, the Texas Democratic Party sent the DNC $50,000. That very same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $60,000.

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Much like the Valerie Plame issue, all I ask is that you keep your memory on this. When this indictment is thrown out of court (or when Earle once again gives up in the middle of a trial), remember all the things being said right now by the left and the mainstream media.

The left only survives because most people have such short memories when it comes to politics and economics. The more they hear all the left-wing lies and propaganda, the longer they live, the more conservative they get. That’s why young people tend to be liberals, while older people tend to be more conservative. As the great conservative Winston Churchill put it, “Any man who is under 30 and is not a liberal has not heart; and any man who is over 30 and is not a conservative has no brains.”

Media manipulation quiz

2005-09-26T10:53:00.000-05:00

Today at the Show we have a little quiz for you so you can see first hand how the hysterical media manipulates your perceptions of the severity of events. Before reading any further in this post, close your eyes, think back to the coverage of hurricane Katrina and estimate in your head how many people died in both the Superdome and Convention Center. Also, think about how many of those deaths were murders, as a result of the armed gangs.

While you are thinking of numbers (just ballpark them), I'll take this opportunity to say that there were plenty of horrific stories surrounding the hurricane and plenty of things done wrong to blame various government officials for. To repeat, I am in no way trying to claim that it wasn't a terrible tragedy or that much of that tragedy couldn't have been averted. My point in this is to show how the media generated an image in people's minds of a certain, horrific fact, and how they will now do little to correct that perception.

Okay.

Have you thought of your numbers?

The actual number of people found dead in the Superdome: 6. In the convention center: 4. 4 of the deaths at the dome were from natural causes. One person jumped to his or her death. One person overdosed on drugs. At the convention center, 3 of the deaths were "natural", while one was an actual murder.

Now, one murder was too many, but what were your perceptions of the death toll? (Incidentally, the murder rate following the storm was inline with the murder rate throughout the year). There were stories of rooms full of piled bodies, reporters weeping into the camera about the stench of bodies upon bodies and it appears that that was all a massive exaggeration. What I find appalling is that there was plenty of horror and terror and sadness to discuss; there was no need for this exaggeration, which actually just served to dilute the impact of the true stories. One murder is too many, but in light of what we were told, it sounds like JUST one murder.

The original reports of the overall death toll were equally exaggerated. Both in the national and international press, the number 10,000 was thrown around so many times, most people think it was true (and that was supposedly just for New Orleans). The actual number, for the entire storm, looks to be 10-fold less.

In general, in any sort of disaster/crisis/emergency, the "10-fold" rule is a pretty good one to apply. It will usually be about 10-times less bad than the media suggests. Most people have an intuitive sense of this, which is why their were so many people who had the means to leave New Orleans and wanted to ride it out (of course, there were many who just couldn't leave). The pitch of media hysteria is maxed out--when there is an actual emergency they can't shout any louder.

Krugman called out

2005-09-25T17:08:00.000-05:00

As regular Show readers know, I have had various criticisms of Paul Krugman's columns in the past, but the one I have written the most about was his characterization of the 2000 Presidential vote recount (here and here). Basically, Krugman made a sweeping claim about the outcome of various ballot recounts that was tremendously misleading if not patently false. He also made a ridiculous assertion about voter turnout in an Ohio county that was rather crucial to his whole argument, which was indeed completely false (and was corrected). He never really corrected his statements about the recount though, which we pointed out.

Now, the public editor of the NYT, "the reader's representative", who is a staff member of the times is spending a lot of time on this issue. There are two posts on this page, which is his "web journal" as well as a mention in his regular column. From the published column he says:

Meanwhile, in the opinion section of The Times, the corrections policy of Gail Collins, the editor of the editorial page, is not being fully enforced. As I have written on my Web journal, Paul Krugman has not been required to correct, in the paper, recent acknowledged factual errors in his column about the 2000 election in Florida.

And on the web log:

All Mr. Krugman has offered so far is a faux correction. Each Op-Ed columnist has a page in nytimes.com that includes his or her past columns and biographical information. Mr. Krugman has been allowed to post a note on his page that acknowledges his initial error, but doesn't explain that his initial correction of that error was also wrong. Since it hasn't been officially published, that posting doesn't cause the correction to be appended to any of the relevant columns.

If the problem is that Mr. Krugman doesn't want to give up precious space in his column for a correction, there are alternatives. Perhaps some space could be found elsewhere on the Op-Ed page so that readersÂespecially those using electronic versions of his pieces -- could get the accurate information they deserve.

A bottom-line question: Does a corrections policy not enforced damage The Times's credibility more than having no policy at all?

You can link to the web log for details, but, I think our "Show" posting actually gives more info (if I may humbly say).

This is just the sort of thing that the NYT doesn't need right now (as Andrew Sullivan points out). Krugman's columns are now behind the "TimesSelect" paid subscriber wall, an experiment which appears to be going very badly, based upon a number of standards (the Times won't tell anyone how good it's going, the columnists have all dropped off the "most-e-mailed" list, which they used to dominate). My guess is that the top name columnists are going to start fleeing en masse, or the policy will be revised substantially.

More Davis-Bacon

2005-09-23T11:31:00.000-05:00

Mickey Kaus has a wonderful deconstruction of arguments for the Davis-Bacon act here. We mentioned it on the Show here.

WEMA

2005-09-23T07:44:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the new TimesSelect subscription required over at the NYT, you have to pay $50 a year to access their opinion columnists. A couple of columns in the first few days of the service got printed elsewhere, through wire services, but I've heard that they are getting much stricter about that. I thought about subscribing, but I don't know how much of them I could reprint here without technically violating the law...thoughts Alan? I'll probably just start reading the Washington Post more.

However, as one of the columns that got reprinted in those first few days is quite relevant to the Show, I thought I'd mention it. John Tierney published a piece in the NYT comparing the responses of Wal-Mart and federal government to Katrina and suggesting that federal humanitarian emergency relief be privatized and turned over to Wal-Mart--hence, WEMA. Now, I know several people stopped reading after the word "privatized", but he quotes one local person who said "[Wal-Mart] was the only place we could find water those first days" and "I still haven't managed to get through to FEMA. It's hard to say, but you get more justice at Wal-Mart."

I think there is real merit to the federal government turning over some of its relief efforts to the much better distribution infrastructure available to the large retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Target and the like. The government then could focus on keeping law and order, repairing the roads, levees, etc. Much of the confusion those first days after Katrina seemed to result from FEMA not having a clue on how to allocate its resources and the efforts of the National Guard--bring water or police the streets? Obviously however they decided, it was a poor choice. Think of how much more efficient it would be to have a distribution powerhouse like Wal-Mart saying "This is where the people are, this is what we need to bring them, we need this road cleared and protection for these trucks" to the federal government rather than "We didn't know people were at the convention center." While terrible mistakes were made, it's a fact of government that even with more oversight and a re-shuffled deck in terms of staff, there are still probably going to be screw ups and they aren't going to get investigated properly. But with a private group in charge, the political pressures to "sweep things under the rug" would be much reduced. And I'm SURE the NYT and the rest of the press would be on Wal-Mart's ass like never before to account for every penny.

As a brief Wal-Mart tangent, I was reading the various bankruptcy stories at the airlines and wondering where the massive liberal protest against JetBlue and Southwest are. These airlines are employing "Wal-mart tactics" that are breaking up unions at the legacy airlines and forcing benefit and pension cuts that Wal-mart could only dream of. Same with that evil empire of a grocery store Whole Foods, which is equally union-averse and uses much the same rhetoric as Wal-mart, describing store employees as associates and partners in the business. The lack of any protest, even by unions themselves against these non-union powerhouses suggests that the unions know that liberals like these places too much to protest. Who doesn't love DirecTV when they are flying coast-to-coast? Or the plentiful cheese selections at your local Whole Foods? There are some efforts against these corporations (actually I couldn't find anything serious against JetBlue), but have you ever heard about them? Wal-mart is a target only because certain classes of people don't like to shop there. I think there is disdain and disgust among one group of people for the lifestyle and taste of the lower and middle classes in this country, but instead of coming out and saying "You are tacky and crass and I hate you for your clothes and food" the left says "You don't support unions and the living wage." If it were really about unions and the living wage, JetBlue flights would be empty and Whole Foods parking lots would only have "Bush/Cheney" stickers.

Wal-Mart Credited With Yet Another Technological Revolution

2005-09-22T00:06:00.000-05:00

“While the world waits for Wal-Mart to collapse under its own weight, Wal-Mart waits for no one, demonstrating a remarkable capacity to manage the retail lifecycle and keep right on rolling.” - Retail Forward, Retail Consultant, 2004.

Have you heard of Radio Frequency Identification (“RFID”) technology? Probably not. But in coming decades RFID technology will change your life. And RFID is practically Wal-Mart’s baby:

During a roundtable discussion of RFID at AMR Research’s [a Boston-based firm] Spring Conference, analysts took an informal poll of the 40 participants seated around the table. The assemblage, representing a cross section of retailers, CPG players and high-tech electronics manufacturers, was asked to indicate if their companies would be exploring RFID were it not for the Wal-Mart mandate. Only three of the 40 people raised their hands.

Arm-twisting aside, the much-hyped technology continues to progress, particularly in supply chain applications, and experts predict that RFID will become a multi-billion dollar growth opportunity over the next 10 years, seeping into numerous industries and reinventing processes. Item-level pilot programs are already under way at some retailers.

That Wal-Mart is using its immense size to force RFID on American industry should come as little surprise. This was the company, after all, that—even way back when it was still a small Arkansas chain—almost single-handily made the bar code and scanner ubiquitous in American retailing.

Yes, even as we speak, while the left busies itself with trying to wreck Wal-Mart’s business model, the company is forging ahead with RFID technology, again threatening to “ransack” the American economy with yet another technological revolution. Giving some suppliers “the surprise of their lives,” in Summer 2003 Linda Dillman, chief information officer for Wal-Mart, announced that by January 2005, “Wal-Mart's top-100 suppliers must tag the cases and pallets of goods that go to certain stores with RFID.” As the Chicago Tribune noted, Dillman’s edict was the “equivalent of a big bang” for RFID technology. According to the New York Times, after Wal-Mart fired the first shot, Target, Albertson’s and Best Buy also announced RFID initiatives.

RFID is a relatively simple concept, but the potential consequences for retailing are enormous:

RFID tags would replace the bar code—the little 28-digit strip of stock-keeping unit numbers read by laser scanners. Smaller than a pinhead and thinner than a greeting card, the more sophisticated 128-bit computer chips come attached to a small antenna. Glued to a product, the transmitter broadcasts a signal that identifies each item plus its color, size, maker and date of manufacture. That means its path can be traced in real time from manufacturer to truck, warehouse and store down to the exact shelf until a customer takes it out the door. (spt’s)

But, as Dillman has pointed out, “this is not about tags, it’s about using them to re-engineer the whole supply process.” Specifically, Wal-Mart employees “will spend more time loading freight and less time figuring out where and when to move it.”

According to the National Retail Federation, the “retail industry . . . loses more than 1 percent of its sales annually, or more than $50 billion, to theft, paperwork errors and vendor fraud,” and tech consultant Accenture estimates that RFID could cut that figure by 15 percent to 30 percent. That will mean at least $7.5 billion in savings for the American economy—thanks largely to Wal-Mart’s arrogant insistence that the industry adopt RFID technology. Billions more will be saved because RFID will improve profit margins and lower costs for manufacturers and retailers by streamlining operating efficiency and supply chain management. Even though RFID will ultimately save the American economy billions of dollars annually, the New York Times is obsessed with the fact that “Wal-Mart employees without company insurance are costing California's state health care programs an estimated $32 million a year.” For those of you unclear on the difference between a million and a billion, a billion is a thousand times a million.

Although Wal-Mart’s store format—which puts food, auto parts, fabrics, toys, electronics under one roof—already saves the average consumer an incredible amount of time, RFID will help us save even more time. If a shopper is having a trouble locating a book, he need only walk to a nearby kiosk, “key in the title of book and a ceiling spotlight leads [the] shopper to the book's position on the shelf.” The shopper can do the same thing if he’s looking for a certain size of pants or brand of shampoo or make of light bulb. The moment a shopper picks a sweater off a shelf, “the inventory on a shelf display drops by one,” and “a clerk—the computers can summon one if they're around—could quickly track down a sweater misplaced in the wrong pile.”
As reported by Management Today, “a tag attached to a container of frozen meat could keep track of where the container came from and the temperature at which it has been stored and transported.” Moreover, “if it hasn't been kept properly chilled all the way down the line, the customer can reject it.” The check out counter of the “not-so-distant future has no register. No clerk. Not even a laser scanner.” Rather, “just wheel your cart past an antenna hidden in the door frame that tallies the bill and charges your account.” The Christian Science Monitor explained, “The goal for retailers is to eliminate the most frustrating moments—such as spending too much time at checkout or discovering that a wanted item is out of stock after a drive to the mall.” RFID technology will make shopping ever more convenient. We will spend less time hunting for a particular book and more time at home reading that book. We will spend less time waiting in check-out lines and more time with loved ones.

As Wal-Mart’s suppliers and competitors invest more capital in RFID research, the technology will continue to mature—and most likely will lead to benefits outside retailing. The technology is by no means “limited to tracking crates of crackers or boxes of boxer shorts as they enter and leave warehouses.” For instance, schoolchildren’s identification cards could be equipped with an RFID chip, meaning that school officials could immediately pinpoint the location of a missing child. Similarly, emergency room personnel in large hospitals could quickly locate needed hospital staff, from nurses to trauma doctors.

A Scottish newspaper gave an especially moving glimpse of what RFID technology may mean for the future:

In an age where worlds collide and connect, a global business movement is under way that is set to revolutionise the shape and pace of transnational commerce. A relentless international surge into the future designed to deliver total savings of up to $ 1.8 trillion every year, it is a project of breathtaking ambition and almost infinite possibilities…

In this brave new world replacement parts will always be in the right place at the right time; airline baggage will never be lost, stolen or misdirected; and companies will maintain an almost infinite level of control over every asset and resource. An environment where manufacturers have the potential to monitor their products from production line to shop shelf and even beyond, it is a near-future scenario that resembles a capitalist Utopia. (SH).

Wal-Mart’s announcement that its top suppliers must begin using RFID sent tremors through the tech world. David Adams, “strategy and technology senior vice president at TrenStar, which manages containers for companies such as Kraft Foods Inc.,” says that “there are so many people jumping up and down in that Wal-Mart cloud of confusion, it’s really created a technology feeding frenzy.” “Consumer goods manufacturers are scrambling to figure out how to meet Wal-Mart's deadlines and how to pay for expensive systems that are still evolving,” while “tech companies are jockeying for business and leadership positions.” Wal-Mart’s suppliers—as well as the suppliers of other retailers following Wal-Mart’s lead—“are turning to companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems to set up RFID systems for them.” In Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Silicon Valley technology firms related to RFID are expanding and new ones sprouting. In North Texas, RFID is “fueling a mini-industry of start-ups and big technology companies that are helping clients with Wal-Mart's project and other RFID work.” Shahram Moradpour, senior director for market development at Sun Microsystems, says, “There's the same kind of buzz around Dallas with RFID as there was around Silicon Valley when the Internet was coming.” In clear contrast to left-wing mandates, which tend to have a chilling effect on economic activity, Wal-Mart’s mandates appear to spur economic growth across vast sectors of the American economy.

Not surprisingly, some people are greeting the new technology with skepticism. As the January 1 deadline for Wal-Mart’s top-100 suppliers approached, the New York Times was practically praying for failure. In late December, the Times ran a story with the headline “Despite Wal-Mart’s Edict, Radio Tags Will Take Time” - as if Wal-Mart had promised that the world would change at the stroke of midnight on January 1. Further, the Times airily philosophized that “while it may still be true, as the saying goes, that the best way to predict the future is to create it, Wal-Mart's experience so far has served as a reminder that creating the future is not all that easy.”

Yes, creating the future is never easy, but I would imagine that it’s particularly difficult when, in addition to creating the future, you’ve also got the United Food and Commercial Workers, the New York Times, ACORN, the University of California system, and much of the Democratic Party attacking from every direction. Cheerfully noting that “with Jan. 1 just days away, the technology is not yet ready to meet the needs of either Wal-Mart or its suppliers,” the Times hypothesized that most of the company’s suppliers must be “cooperating with Wal-Mart out of fear of offending the retailer” and not—it would seem to follow—because the new technology would accomplish anything.

A few weeks later, at the National Retail Federation in New York City, Wal-Mart CIO Linda Dillman proudly reported that “Wal-Mart was ‘live’ with three distribution centers, 104 Wal-Mart stores, and 36 Sam's Clubs reading radio frequency tags on pallets shipped by 57 suppliers.” She also “stressed that RFID implementation is still in its early stages,” but “impressive accomplishments have been made in the two years since Wal-Mart first set a 2005 target date for implementation to begin.” She also announced that all of the company’s top 100 suppliers as well as a few dozen other suppliers would be “live” by the end of January.

Moreover, Dillman warned other retailers attending the conference that (in addition to ignoring the New York Times’ gloomy predictions) they must begin investing in RFID now—or risk falling further behind. Because “RFID cannot be implemented overnight,” Dillman cautioned, retailers must begin updating their business processes immediately.

Despite Wal-Mart’s warnings to its rivals, much of the company’s competition remains complacent. As reported by the St. Petersburg Times, only “about 11 percent of U.S. retail companies plan to spend something on RFID in 2005, up from about 5 percent last year.” That is, “most retailers are sitting this one out,” and “most big retailers are letting rivals do the heavy lifting on RFID experiments.” As Terry Lundgren, chairman and CEO of Federated Department Stores sniffed, “We aren’t going out there on the bleeding edge of technology." Let’s take bets on whether or not Federated Department Stores is still around in ten years.

As is happening right now, in ten years when Wal-Mart crushes these lazy retailers with its technological superiority, leftists will denounce Wal-Mart as a ruthless “predatory and monopolistic” monster and accuse the company of “cannibalizing” itself and the American economy.

Thanks largely to Wal-Mart’s efforts, RFID technology is coming quickly, and it will push the American economy to ever higher levels of efficiency. Thanks in no small part to Wal-Mart—and the pressures it places on its suppliers and competitors to constantly update their systems—America already has the most productive workforce on earth, and the RFID revolution will allow this country to produce more goods and services per worker than ever before. Our standard of living will continue to improve, while much of the rest of the world will fall further behind.

We will continue to evolve into an efficient, mechanized, technological utopia, and our foreign enemies and their treasonous allies within our borders will hate us all the more for it. In a hundred years the left will still be griping about America being so much richer than the rest of the world, and simultaneously claiming that it was left-wing programs--Social Security, Medicaid, the unions, funding for the arts, and various other forms of "spending"--that made America so rich in the first place.

Just as they did after the the Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age, and the roaring 20's, they, the left, will claim that in the 1990's and early 00's evil corporations like Wal-Mart nearly destroyed America's standard of living, just before the great heroic liberals intervened and saved everyone with their government programs.

Well, on second thought, I don't think they will get away with it again. This time there's too much documentation about what's really happening; some of it is on your computer screen right now.

They won't get away with doing to Wal-Mart what they did to the so-called "Robber Barons" a century ago. They won't get away with denouncing Wal-Mart and, at the same time, taking credit for Wal-Mart's economic accomplishments, taking credit for making this the richest country on the planet. That's your Show.

Left-Wing Terrorism

2005-09-21T10:50:00.000-05:00

A Daily Kos member, who goes by calipygian, recently related the following:

I am deeply concerned. Every day, there is something that makes me concerned that there is going to be a wave of right-wing violence unleashed in this country. […]

How many more warnings do we need? Pat Robertson and his assassination call, Rush Limbaugh and his insistance of questioning the patriotism of dissenters, Michelle Malkin and her pro-detention apologetics, the raid of a Utah rave, the mowing down of memorial crosses at the Crawford vigil, the list goes on and on. I cannot think of one instance of left wing violence or calls for it. [Emphasis added.] How long is it going to be until the first war protester is shot and killed? How are we going to respond? I fear that blood will run in the streets, and soon and I dont know what I personally will do. Do you fight back, an eye for an eye? Or do you make the "mainstream right" repudiate the acts of the violent minority and repudiate the words of hatemongers like Rush and Pat and Hannity and Ann (you cant spell Ann Coulter without the letters T-U-N-C) Coulter? Do you vandalize the "W" sticker on your neighbor's Hummer H3?

The writer forgot to mention Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph—two actual right-wing terrorists—but, in the interest of fairness, I thought I’d go ahead and point them out.

Now, anyone who has not heard about left-wing violence is, per force, either delusional or poorly informed. Just consider Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, who used mail bombs to murder three people and maim 29 others. If you doubt Kaczynski’s left-wing credentials, just consider that he was Harvard educated and that the opening paragraph of his “manifesto” reads as follows:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries

These words could have come from pretty much any left-winger or, for that matter, from almost any of what pass as “textbooks” in undergraduate political science courses.

In fact, according to Wikipedia there are several major environmental organizations in the United States that openly advocate terrorism to save the environment:

The three organizations most commonly labeled as “eco terrorists” within the United States are the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), and Earth First!. Their websites all openly advocate tactics including arson, graffiti, vandalism and property destruction, but publicly disavow harm to humans or animals. Despite their claims of non-harm, however, millions of dollars of homes, equipment, and research (including medical research) have been willfully destroyed by ALF and ELF operations, causing indirect harm. This has gained such groups the label of "fundamentalist" by some, however ALF, ELF, and Earth First! generally target only large corporations. This led the FBI in 2001 to name ELF as "one of the most active extremist elements [in the] United States", and a "terrorist threat".

If this isn’t left-wing violence, then I don’t know what is.

There’s also a great deal of non-eco related left-wing violence. Restless hordes of hooligan hippies and leftist anarchists show up at every G8 summit, every meeting of the IMF, every Republican National Convention—where they promptly “clash” with local police and start looking for a Starbucks to bust up.

Fall 2004 saw the left engaging in a great deal of election-related violence, including the sacking and vandalizing of a GOP campaign office in Raleigh, NC:

A police officer reported earlier in the night Friday that about 100 people wearing masks and gloves were walking down a street near the headquarters, Raleigh Police Capt. D.S. Overman said. Officers responding to that call discovered a second group at GOP headquarters. The vandalism was a "planned and orchestrated event," police spokesman Jim Sughrue said. "This is not a political statement,'' Sughrue said. "This is a crime."

Further, this was no minor vandalizing:

The officers found several spent fireworks, poster boards with slogans and spray painted expletives on the walls. At least two windows were broken and police said it appeared that the vandals tried to put incendiary devices inside the building.

The Raleigh break-in was not an isolated incident. In October of 2004 the Seattle Times reported:

President Bush's campaign office in Spokane was broken into and vandalized last night, the latest in a string of crimes at Bush offices across the country…Last week computers were stolen in a burglary at the campaign's Bellevue headquarters. Bush campaign officials believe the break ins are part of a broader attack on the president's re-election offices around the country, including a burglary in Canton, Ohio, last night, gun shots fired in West Virginia, Florida and Tennessee and union protestors storming offices in three Florida cities and Minneapolis.

Indeed, the storming of the Orlando, Florida, office resulted in physical injury:

Last week, in Orlando, Fla., approximately 60 union protestors stormed and ransacked the local Bush-Cheney headquarters causing considerable damage and injuring one campaign staffer, who suffered a broken wrist.

Even more shocking, the AFL-CIO seemed to take full credit for the break-ins:

Orlando's fracas was mirrored in Miami, where police reported that more than 100 union protestors stormed the Bush-Cheney office and shoved volunteers aside. No one was charged because most of the protestors left before the police arrived. In Tampa, about 35 protestors filled the local GOP office and intimidated the elderly volunteers working there.
The AFL-CIO took credit on its Web site for similar demonstrations—apparently all coordinated—in Independence, Mo., Kansas City, Mo., Dearborn, Mich., St. Paul, Minn., and West Allis, Wis. In what could be a related incident, the Bush-Cheney office in Knoxville, Tenn., had its plate-glass windows shattered by gunfire on Tuesday morning before volunteers showed up for work. Another Republican office, in Seattle, was broken into and had computer files stolen.

Of course, when confronted, the AFL-CIO dismissively noted that the GOP was simply trying to “politicize and exaggerate” the break-ins.

Lord almighty, can you even imagine what would have happened had it been the other way around? If it had been right-wing pressure groups invading Democratic offices and breaking bones? We would never hear the end of it. Heck, the Republicans do nothing wrong and the left still blathers on and on about “voter intimidation” and “disenfranchisement.” Can you imagine if the Republicans really did start engaging in voter intimidation (that is, started acting like the Democrats)?

Also in October, Bob Fannin, Arizona Republican Party chairman, told the Arizona Republic, "Our signs have been vandalized and stolen, our offices broken into and just today, one of our Arizona Republican county headquarters received a bomb threat." In Wisconsin, the sons of two prominent Democratic lawmakers and three others—young men with names like “Sowande Omokunde” and “Lavelle Mohammad”—were arrested for slashing the tires of 30 vans the GOP had rented to take voters to the polls on Election Day.

In fairness to the rank-and-file leftists who engage in such tacts, they are simply victims of left-wing propaganda. They are so fully convinced that Republicans are liars, cheaters, and election-stealers that, in their minds, they’re just fighting fire with fire.

And, of course, the anti-big box crazies are rather prone to threats and violence. Wal-Mart and other big box stores are regular targets of bomb threats and, on occassion, actual bombings. Why, it happened just the other day in Framingham, Mass., a Boston suburb:

Police are investigating a gasoline can rigged as a bomb found underneath a pickup truck in Kohl's parking lot yesterday, the second day in a row a potentially explosive device has been found in or near a major retail store.

On Sunday, Wal-Mart employees found a device that appeared to be a pipe bomb on one of the store shelves, but it was later found to be inactive. There had also been bomb threats called in about the same Wal-Mart the last two Saturdays, Lt. Vincent Alfano said.

While we’re on the topic, a Google search for the words “Wal-Mart bomb threats” gets 216,000 returns. Most of them are news stories from various localities about this or that bomb threat against this or that Wal-Mart, including a whole string of threats made against Wal-Mart stores in Quebec after the company shuttered a Canadian store that had succumbed to the union interests. One left-wing blogger said that the Canadian bomb threats were "not at all suprising," given "Wal-Mart's boldness and lack of respect towards workers."

Of course, there are some on the far right who engage in violent tactics, especially certain elements in the pro-life movement. But if you start following the news, you’ll see that left-wing violence is much more common and widespread. That’s the Show, amigos.

Throwing a gantlet

2005-09-21T06:12:00.000-05:00

In a shocking turn of events, Harry Reid has decided not to support Roberts for confirmation. His reasons? Something about the respective sizes of Roberts' "heart" and "head" and the fact that 20 years ago, Roberts used the word "amigos" in a way that might be taken as derogatory.

This is a interesting new bar the Democrats have set for approval. Mind you, Ginsburg and Breyer, Clinton's two nominees were approved with 96 and 87 votes, respectively. That means that the Republicans decided not to vote against someone just because of ideology, as they surely would have had grounds to do against Ginsburg, a former ACLU lawyer. What is the standard by which Democrats are allowed to vote against someone on ideology but Republicans aren't? I think it's a disturbing notion that most Democrats have of how completely right they are; that is, it's okay for them to vote against a Republican nominee, because they, as Democrats, are in the right and for the same reason, it is only logical that Republicans are voting for the Democrats' nominees. It at least suggests a fundamental distrust of democracy as well as revealing the scam the left has been pulling on America the last twenty years or so.

The scam is this: by taking many legislative issues an turning them into judicial ones, the left has effectively subverted our little r-republican form of government, at least as regards many hot-topic debates. This has ignited a huge backlash both on specific issues and on general principle. In fact, I would hazard that some if not much of the Republican success over the last ten years is a direct result of these judicial maneuvers, that the country is not quite as right as we appear. With Reid's opposition to Roberts, that plan is now completely exposed-a qualified candidate, by all accounts, who does not profess a "radical" ideology by any standard, is being done-in by the ACLU, NOW and the NAACP.

As much as there is reason to be critical of Bush, this is why I currently like the Democrats even less. The outright cravenness, the insulting "heart not as big as head" explanations, the complete and utter sell out of any coherent ideology to identity politics-if it weren't on some level terrifying, being that they do represent about 50% of the country, it would merely be pitiful.

I'm at a conference, more regular posting when I return.

Tony Blair: A Conservative, Functionally Speaking

2005-09-20T22:46:00.000-05:00

One has to ponder what goes on in Tony Blair’s mind these days. Why, it was just a few short years ago that everyone who was anyone considered Prime Minister Blair a political wonder boy, a widely-lauded political genius, the second smartest man to have ever lived (right behind the ever-brilliant Bill Clinton, of course). In 1997 he did, after all, bring an end to the dark and terrifying 18 years of conservative rule in Britain.

In December 1997 the BBC casually referred to the Labour Party’s resurgence as a “triumph for the party leader, Tony Blair, and the Labour politicians who share his vision of a modern and successful Britain.” Good times, good times.

But then—and for some mysterious reason—in 2003 major opinion-makers on both sides of the Atlantic suddenly turned on the good Minister.

Any ol’ post-2003 news article will do, but I randomly picked an April 2005 headline from the UK’s Independent, largely because it came up first on my Google search: “Don’t Let the Warmonger Off the Hook: The voters should seize their opportunity to punish Blair for his breach of international law.”

Ah, the way Blair was been treated by the international press and the international chattering class in general. Seemingly overnight, public perception of Blair went from left-leaning-boy-wonder-political-genius to crazy-sinister-international-law-violating-Bush-crony. Not hell hath fury like the international cosmopolitan elite scorned.

Blair fall from grace has been like a political reality show: This Fall see what happens when a left-wing politician adored by the media elites in London and New York is forced to play a conservative for THREE years! Will he survive or get voted out? Will he go crazy and resign? What outlandish, off-the-record revelations will he make?

And much like that, it appears that last week in New York, Blair commented to right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdock that the BBC’s coverage of the hurricane Katrina catastrophe was “just full of hatred of America and gloating at [America’s] troubles.”

Well, that’s along the lines of what most of the media around the world were doing, including much of the American media. What’s interesting, though, is that Prime Minister Blair recognizes it and talks about it, albeit in private conversation.

An internationally despised “warmonger,” schmoozing with Rupert Murdock, complaining about anti-American bias in the British media—why, for all practical purposes, Blair is now a conservative.

Two More Airlines Seek Ch. 11 Protection

2005-09-13T21:37:00.000-05:00

Unionized airlines Delta and Northwest are both expected to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection within the next 24 hours, the NYT's is reporting. Both companies have been caught up for years in a constant battle with unions to maintain profitability.

After this, four of the seven largest airlines will be operating under court bankruptcy protection.

Unionize Wal-Mart now - and maybe by December, when the company files for bankruptcy, we can all get some super low prices!

Wal-Martization Hits the Unions

2005-09-13T15:50:00.000-05:00

Drudge has a link today to a great little ditty from Las Vegas Weekly about the unions hiring people to stand around waving anti-Wal-Mart signs in front of Vegas area stores.

If ever there were a clear demonstration of what the war against Wal-Mart is really about, then this is it:

They're walking five-hour shifts on this corner at Stephanie Street and American Pacific Drive in Henderson—anti-Wal-Mart signs propped lazily on their shoulders, deep suntans on their faces and arms—with two 15-minute breaks to run across the street and use the washroom at a gas station. […]

They're not union members; they're temp workers employed through Allied Forces/Labor Express by the union—United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). They're making $6 an hour, with no benefits; it's 104 F, and they're protesting the working conditions inside the new Wal-Mart grocery store.

Classic. It just sums it up so well. Classic.

The left’s war against Wal-Mart has nothing to do with working conditions or workers rights; it has everything to do with union power and union influence and union money. All the left’s claptrap about wages and social responsibility is subterfuge, mere propaganda, in what is really a contest for political power.

Wal-Mart is about to bankrupt several large, unionized grocers—Safeway, Kroger’s, Albertson’s—and thereby destroy a number of left-wing political careers. Wal-Mart’s success in the grocery business represents the grocery market correcting itself, the elimination of an alien, political parasite that for decades has been siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars from consumers and forking it over to Democratic politicians. That’s what the war against Wal-Mart is really about.

According to the Vegas Weekly article, at least one of the “protestors” was a former Wal-Mart employee:

But standing with a union-supplied sign on his shoulder that reads, Don't Shop WalMart: Below Area Standards, picketer and former Wal-Mart employee Sal Rivera says about the notorious working conditions of his former big-box employer: "I can't complain. It wasn't bad. They started paying me at $6.75, and after three months I was already getting $7, then I got Employee of the Month, and by the time I left (in less than one year), I was making $8.63 an hour." Rivera worked in maintenance and quit four years ago for personal reasons, he says. He would consider reapplying.

In one of the most incredible instances of self-delusion I have ever heard of, “line foreman” James Greer noted the following: "We're just trying to help the women that get discriminated against in Wal-Mart. We're out here suffering a lot for these people." At that precise moment, Vegas Weekly reported, “[Greer] pauses, moves his sign so that it blocks the scorching sun on his leathery face, and considers the working conditions of his colleagues out here working for the union.”

Wal-Mart is so evil that, as Greer further related, "We had one gal out here in her 40s, and she had a heat stroke. I kept making her sit down, I noticed she was stepping (staggering), and I made her sit in the shade. She went home sick after her shift and didn't ever return to work.” Wal-Mart should be ashamed of itself.

Greer further noted: “The group has no transportation to go elsewhere—they are dropped off by a union van and picked up later. On weekends, they have to find their own transportation, Greer said.”

So, lemme get this straight, the unions have hundreds of millions to spend on propping up the decaying corpse of the Democratic Party, but not enough to provide these “protestors” with transportation, decent wages, or health insurance.

Of course, left-wing hallucinations to the contrary notwithstanding, Wal-Mart does offer health insurance:

Inside, the store manager at the Stephanie Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market says he's perfectly happy with his job, and that his insurance is fine.
"The average rate of pay for Nevada Wal-Mart workers is $10.17 an hour. We have a good insurance program, and every associate—even part-timers—are eligible for the 401k," says Mark Dyson. "There's actually different levels of insurance, dental and medical—I have a $500 deductible, but there's no cap on it. Some other companies' plans have a $1 million cap, but here there's no cap. For example, not long ago we had an associate whose husband needed a liver transplant, and that alone was $600,000; but they didn't have to worry about a cap."
For the least comprehensive medical coverage, Wal-Mart workers pay from $17.50 for individual coverage and $70.50 for family coverage biweekly, according to the company website.

The entire time I was growing up both of my parents worked for Wal-Mart as hourly workers. We were never rich, mind you, but we always had health insurance.

And then there was this particularly hilarious bit:

Rivera removes his watch to show the dark tan his arm has gotten working in the sun; he talks about how he takes three buses to get to this work site on weekends; it takes two hours to get there and two hours to get home—a nine-hour day including that transportation for a gross pay of $35.
"I asked him (union organizer Hornbrook), I said, 'How come we're working here for $6 an hour? I need you to help us find a better job. I want information on the union,'" Rivera said.
He was told, he says, to secure his own job with a grocery store, and then the union would help him to be sure the store paid him appropriate wages.

That’s how it works, eh?

***
In other anti-Wal-Mart news, the company is facing yet another class action lawsuit, and this one may—if it’s not immediately dismissed—shape up to be a real doozie:

Workers in six countries filed a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on uesday, claiming the world's largest retailer overlooks sweatshop conditions at toy and clothing factories from China to Nicaragua.
The suit, filed in California state court in Los Angeles, lists as plaintiffs 15 workers in Bangladesh, Swaziland, Indonesia, China and Nicaragua. They claim they were paid below minimum wage, forced to work unpaid overtime and in some cases even endured beatings by supervisors. The lawsuit also lists four California plaintiffs, including two unionized workers at Kroger Co. unit Ralph's and Safeway Ind. grocery stores, who claim Wal-Mart's entry into Southern California forced their employers to reduce pay and benefits. [Emphasis added].
The suit could cover anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 workers, according to attorney Terry Collingsworth of the International Labor Rights Fund, which represents the plaintiffs. Wal-Mart's potential liability could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, he said.

Interestingly, the International Labor Rights Fund website sports the following headline: “ILRF files landmark lawsuit against Wal-Mart, the largest corporation in the world.”

I ask you, why put “largest corporation in the world” in the headline? Does size have anything to do with guilt or innocence?

In yet another example of the “corporate media” at work, the Reuter’s story on the class action suit contained the following background info on Wal-Mart: “Wal-Mart became the world's largest retailer by buying cheap, foreign-made goods and selling them to consumers at rock-bottom prices every day.”

Every retailer today sells nothing but foreign-made goods. Wal-Mart didn't invent the practice. The difference is that Wal-Mart sells that umbrella made in Bangladesh for $1 whereas CVS and Target sell the exact same umbrella for $12. Wal-Mart sells that dress shirt made in Nicaragua for $12, but the Gap sells the same exact shirt for $50

Wal-Mart became the largest retailer in the world not from purchasing foreign goods but from its amazing use of technology.

This is precious

2005-09-13T14:01:00.000-05:00

I have a post planned for later today, but this is just precious. Apparently the UFCW, one the unions that is particularly upset over Wal-Mart, has hired protesters to place outside Wal-Mart stores in Las Vegas. They get paid $6 an hour with no benefits. One of the women they hired had a heat stroke. Key quote:

"This is an informational picket line only," Hornbrook said. "We're paying these people. They were out of work before (joining their picket lines). This is an in-between-jobs stop. Picketing isn't a career. But we did hire one of the picketers, she's now working for us for $11 an hour (as a driver) and we pay for gasoline."

For fun, imagine if, somehow, this was a Wal-Mart job and a Wal-mart administrator had said the same thing. Of course it wouldn't ever be a Wal-mart job; it takes a completely corrupted ideology to treat someone THAT badly.

How the New York Times manipulates you (also, they're racist)

2005-09-10T14:57:00.000-05:00

I can't tell you the number of pitying or scared looks I've gotten whenever the topic of media manipulation comes up. I've even met some people who claim that the media is quite conservative and are shocked when I disagree with them. However liberals take the media in a general way, the New York Times is sacrosanct. Occasionally, they will admit, it strays, like when Judith Miller published story after story about all those WMDs in Iraq. But on a regular day, e-mail inboxes across the country light up with NYTs editorials and columnists forwarded with messages such as "I'm glad someone is saying it!" and "Dowd is really hot today! How does she stay so fresh?"

When you suggest that there might be a point of view that the paper neglected, people respond as if you handed them a forwarding address card for Montana, crazy manifesto to arrive shortly thereafter. You are being paranoid, they say. If the NYTs was so wrong about things, they wouldn't be so popular and someone would point it out. Well, thankfully, now you have the Show.

Let's go to today's editorial: A Shameful Proclamation. The always-sunny editorial page is upset about a recent executive order rescinding the Davis-Bacon Act in certain parts of the country, the ones hardest hit by the hurricane. The Davis-Bacon Act requires federal and state contractors to pay the "prevailing wage" in an area where they hire contractors. So, what is the NYTs upset about, specifically? Let's see:

By any standard of human decency, condemning many already poor and now bereft people to subpar wages - thus perpetuating their poverty - is unacceptable. It is also bad for the economy. Without the law, called the Davis-Bacon Act, contractors will be able to pay less, but they'll also get less, as lower wages invariably mean lower productivity.

That is such a choice paragraph. Without me telling you anything else about the act, we can still have some fun. The crack economics team at the NYTs apparently wrote this one, employing the irrefutable truth that lower wages INVARIABLY means lower productivity. Like how Wal-Mart workers are really unproductive compared to say, unionized grocery store people (they're not? But the NYTs told me so!). Or how French workers are so much more productive than American workers (similar productivities? Why would the NYTs lie to me!?)

But still, they are making a point. Why is Bush rescinding this law? Well, according to the NYTs:

The ostensible rationale for suspending the law is to reduce taxpayers' costs. Does Mr. Bush really believe it is the will of the American people to deny the prevailing wage to construction workers in New Orleans, Biloxi and other hard-hit areas?

What is wrong with Bush? Honestly, hasn't he learned his lesson about bungling this hurricane yet? What's that you say? There's another explanation? The law doesn't do what it says it does? What?

You won't find any of what I'm about to share in the NYTs editorial, even though it's a pretty long one. Not even a mention of it. The Davis-Bacon act originated in an effort to keep black workers out of federal construction jobs. Before you accuse me of being crazy, it's actually in the Congressional Record. Here are some quotes:
Rep. John Cochran of Missouri said he had "received numerous complaints in recent months about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South."Alabama Rep. Clayton Allgood complained: "Reference has been made to a contractor from Alabama who went to New York with bootleg labor. This is a fact. That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country." Rep. William Upshaw complained of the "superabundance or large aggregation of negro labor," which is a real problem "you are confronted with in any community." In the spirit of full disclosure, I got these quotes from a libertarian website, but it's what you have to do when the mainstream media won't report the whole story.

The Davis-Bacon act is a darling of the unions because it basically forces the federal government to hire union laborers. In the areas affected by the hurricane, the areas where Bush has temporarily rescinded the law, it preferentially requires the hiring of white unionized workers over poorer, black unskilled labor. Thus, for the NYTs to call Bush to account and suggest that he is doing this to punish the poor, on top of all the various claims recently that the government's entire response to the hurricane was somehow an indication that Bush is racist, is breathtaking in its deviousness. The title of the piece "A Shameful Proclamation", invoking the only other proclamation American's are likely to think of, The Emancipation Proclamation, is a further bit of race-baiting. All Bush has done is said that in these places, at this time, we are not going to pretend that the union mafias are the best way for us to rebuild. Sure, during a non-disaster situation we all look the other way and pay our tithes to the organized crime units that the unions have become, but, people, this is a crisis. Let's stop pretending.

The net result of this maneuver by Bush will be that lots of displaced, poor, blacks will get a chance to rebuild their hometown. They will get a job, and maybe some experience that may help to lift them out of the crushing poverty that this storm revealed to the rest of the country. As part of the recovery, the nation should be looking for ways to do things better, to extract some good out of disaster. Instead, the NYTs, and I'm sure prominent Democrats in short order, will use it as a chance to give another big payoff to the union bosses. Now that's my definition of shameful.

Finally, regardless of whether or not you accept the point of view that the Davis-Bacon act is a racist ploy by union bosses to maintain control over federal projects, don't you think it is worth mentioning in the paper of record? Shouldn't it at least be addressed in your argument, rather than setting up a strawman position for Bush (which they still didn't even take down effectively)? Doesn't it worry you how many people rely upon the NYTs as their only source of news?

I have to give credit to the Cato Institute for raising this issue in the first place. This has been a bugaboo of theirs for years and if you are interested in a very thorough economic analysis of the effects of this bill, you should check them out.

Court speculation-you heard it here first

2005-09-08T08:13:00.000-05:00

Astute Show readers might remember the predictions I made about Bush's plan for the Supreme Court some time ago. Here was the main point:

So I think they picked someone [Roberts] who would be more likely to assuage the left, just to avoid the fight. This may indicate that Bush is worse off politically than he would like, as some are suggesting, but may also indicate that he just found the guy to be personable and they are saving the big conservative for Rehnquist's seat. That will probably be someone like Luttig, or more likely now a Brown or Owen, so that he can say he's putting a woman back. At that point, if Roberts appears to be paying off in terms of his conservative cred while also getting along with everyone well since he is supposed to be the most likeable guy EVER, Roberts gets elevated to Chief. This has the effect of sort of wooing people into thinking Bush hasn't done anything too crazy...he'll have appointed a more middle of the road guy for O'Connor's seat. He'll have appointed a conservative for Rehnquist's seat. But then, if Roberts is sufficiently conservative he'll "reverse the seats" and promote Roberts to Rehnquist's (as Chief) and have a woman in O'Connor's, conservatives in both. He does all of that without having the knockdown fight over O'Connor's that would have just been tiresome.

Rehnquist had probably been expected to serve out at least part of this term...from all accounts his rapid decline was not expected at this time. Now, people are associating Roberts with Rehnquist's seat and not with O'Connor's, but I do think the plan all along had been to promote Roberts to Chief. Mickey Kaus on Slate has similar ruminations on this, in terms of this being a plan all along, but comes to the conclusion that it was a plan in order to trick the conservatives into a more moderate court. That seems pretty unlikely, considering Bush doesn't give much evidence of a "closet moderate". I still predict the White House will try and spin the next nomination as a replacement for Rehnquist, trying to buy "conservative" leeway. Given the pressure to go ethnic or female, my money is on Garza, as the most conservative of those choices who won't raise serious flags (as Brown or Owen might).

Reason, science, Katrina and the government

2005-09-07T21:35:00.000-05:00

All in one post! Here at the Show, I had been struggling with something to post over the past few days. No topic really struck my fancy and the Show producers were grumbling about "renegotiating my contract" and "looking for some other Paul." Luckily, today this week's "Nature" was published and with it a priceless editorial just ripe for some Show analysis. Just to remind everyone, "Nature" is among the most prestigious journals in science. It covers all fields, is published in Britain and has a great deal of influence. Let's get to the editorial.

To start out, it's entitled Small-minded government. It's free content so you can link to it to read the whole thing if you think, but I must warn you, the "tagline" is: "Last week's debacle in New Orleans highlights failings not just in the Bush administration, but in how the United States chooses to govern itself." Now, if one were being petty, one might point out the hilarity of the country with the oldest written Constitution on Earth, a model of reason and enlightenment, being given a government lecture by subjects of a country who still subsidize, glorify and place on money a bunch of inbred Germans. But my complaints with this editorial are a bit more substantive.

In addition to the usual criticisms of the Bush administration (a few of which I do agree with) the thesis paragraph of this piece is:

Yet as criticism rains down on the administration, it should be pointed out that several contributory factors that led up to this fiasco preceded Bush's arrival in the White House. These include rampant poverty among African-Americans in New Orleans and other US cities; a systematic failure to build public infrastructure commensurate with America's vast wealth; the habitual creation of dysfunctional government agencies by congressional fiat; and the failure of scientists to successfully convey their concerns to policy-makers.

So the individual claims of what's-wrong-with-the-US-gov't: 1) In some big cities, there are concentrated populations of poor African-Americans. 2) A public infrastructure "incommensurate" with our vast wealth. 3) Dysfunctional government agencies created by congressional fiat. 4) Scientists failing to convey their concerns.

As for point 1) the article doesn't ever really go on to address this. The implication of the title and everything in the article though is that the plight of poor African-Americans is somehow the fault of our "small-minded government." Presumably then, the solution would be with a large-minded government. I'm not sure how this would work exactly, but something makes me think a welfare state would be just the ticket. Of course, that sort of big-minded government thinking is what led to the concentrations of poor blacks in the inner cities in the first place, but who's to say it wouldn't work this time around! Point 1) can serve as lesson 1) about science and society: many scientists don't learn much besides science-they don't learn economics, they don't learn history and they sure as hell don't learn philosophy (why should they? Isn't "science" a philosophy?) Historically speaking, the decline of the black middle class correlates perfectly with the expansion of Johnson's Great Society. The successful integration of other minority groups (Latinos, Asian-Americans) into the American middle class is correlated with factors in direct opposition to government programs--strong private communities, business associations, the private sector being employed to lift whole generations of people up to another class. After welfare reform in the 90s and the various focuses on reinvigorating the inner cities and African-American neighborhoods in particular, there is progress being made. Certainly, as countries go, America does a pretty good job of integrating its various minority groups in peaceful and meaningful ways. For all the disaffection and distrust between blacks and whites in this country, that relationship is far more mature and integrated than, say, Arab Muslims and whites in Britain.

Point 2) also isn't spelled out in terms of what the solution is. Given the reference to our vast wealth (makes me think we have a number one dime stored away in a vault somewhere), I'm thinking that means raising taxes to spend on a bunch of crap. There were two ways that public infrastructure failed in this disaster. a) The levee broke and b) the evacuation before the storm and the relief after the storm sucked. As for b), I think Alan makes an excellent argument in the Wal-mart post below. Private entities by and large did a much better job with every aspect of the relief effort. While the government should be left to dealing with law and order, outsourcing relief to a private entity would most likely produce much more efficient results. It would also be much easier to hold people accountable for negligence in such situations and it would relieve the government of trying to figure out how to balance law and order with relief efforts, something that caused them a great deal of trouble in the first days after the hurricane. As for a), the levee breaking, here too I think the federal government should play less of a role. Not so much in levee building, but in not underwriting flood insurance. See, by letting insurance companies off the hook for flood damage, there's no strong market incentive to avoid flooding. Flood insurance is expensive, don't get me wrong; but if people had to deal with private insurers, private insurers would make honest, objective assessments of what the risk of flooding in an area was. The rational market would force them too. If the levees really were poorly maintained, then the private sector would determine this and the public outcry would be enormous. If the levee system remained public, the state and federal governments would be forced by all the constituents that couldn't get any flood insurance, or outrageously expensive flood insurance to do something to lower the costs. Or, a private levee system would be faced with similar pressures and be much more likely to be held accountable by BOTH insurance companies and the government. With all the cards in the government's hand, it's all reduced to politics. So I think the Nature editor's identified a good point, the problem of the levees, but the solution is to limit government and let the market, that engine of our vast wealth, do the work.

I'm not going to spend too much time on 3) because I do agree that Congress creates lots of dysfunctional federal agencies. The article mentions and perhaps people recall that Bush originally opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which now seems like a pretty reasonable idea. The opposition to it at the time took the form that, much like the centralization of private industry into government is a bad idea, the centralization of agencies WITHIN government can also lead to inefficiencies. Curiously, the article criticizes Bush for opposing "the incorporation of the intelligence agencies" which the editors think was the most important aspect of the design of the new department. Of course, a little healthy competition among our intelligence agencies is probably preferable to one doctrinaire position in the same way that the independence of specifically tasked agencies, like FEMA, is more conducive to productive output than a giant top-down bureaucracy.

As for 4), the problem scientists are having with "conveying their concerns" is partially wrapped up with the various inefficiencies of government mentioned above. The US government had rightly identified a hurricane striking New Orleans as one of the three most devastating disasters they were planning for; the scientists were heard, but the bureaucracy failed to respond. They answer is not a more bloated and unaccountable bureaucracy.

My final point has to do with the propensity for scientists to be liberal/socialist/supporters of the bureaucracy. My colleague Alan would suggest that this in part stems from scientists generally subsisting on federal money for their work; I'm sure this is part of it, but I don't believe it's a sufficient explanation. Scientists generally work, on a day to day basis, somewhat independently with a large amount of control over their individual projects. The idea of centralized and absolute control perhaps seems rational after working in such circumstances. On average, scientists work with like-minded people who seem rational...a government full of those people should be able to make rational decisions and lead a perfect society. They have a dream of being something like the philosopher-kings from Plato, tending to the unreflective appetitive classes in order to make the world a better place. A lot of history and philosophy has occurred addressing such views, but I find a general resistance among most scientists to care about such things...it's too abstract, doesn't seem verifiable, not worth the time. Their particular brand of scientific insight should serve as a common reason they assume to be absolute truth, and it will set them free, once they control everything. If they had just gotten past Plato to some Aristotle though, they would have found a devastating critique of such idealism. It's lovely on paper but, as Aristotle rightly noted, it's the path towards dictatorship and fascism, which has been born out time and time again by history. Nietzsche saved some of his most withering critiques for those that worship at the altars of science, as I'm sure the "Nature" editors do, worse than the critiques he leveled at the devoutly religious. He considered them brothers and sisters in the same unreflective faith. The narrow worldivew espoused in this week's editorial is part and parcel of a mindset of control and regulation. Without a more comprehensive worldview, a broader education, scientists will continually be relegated to a technical class, staggering around in the historical and theoretical dark.

In Katrina’s Wake, Wal-Mart becomes “an unexpected lifeline for much of the Southeast.”

2005-09-07T20:04:00.000-05:00

The Show wishes to thank Kevin, a contributor over at Always Low Prices—Always?, a rather agreeable website devoted to the “best and worst about Wal-Mart,” for notifying us that Costco has finally made a major cash contribution to hurricane relief, a $1 million donation to the American Red Cross.

Better than nothing, I suppose.

While we are on the topic, I’d like to direct our readers to a Washington Post article from a few days back detailing Wal-Mart’s extraordinary response to hurricane Katrina:

At 8 a.m. on Wednesday, as New Orleans filled with water, Wal-Mart chief executive H. Lee Scott Jr. called an emergency meeting of his top lieutenants and warned them he did not want a "measured response" to the hurricane. "I want us to respond in a way appropriate to our size and the impact we can have," he said, according to an executive who attended the meeting. At the time, Wal-Mart had pledged $2 million to the relief efforts. "Should it be $10 million?" Scott asked.
Over the next few days, Wal-Mart's response to Katrina—an unrivaled $20 million in cash donations, 1,500 truckloads of free merchandise, food for 100,000 meals and the promise of a job for every one of its displaced workers—has turned the chain into an unexpected lifeline for much of the Southeast and earned it near-universal praise at a time when the company is struggling to burnish its image.
While state and federal officials have come under harsh criticism for their handling of the storm's aftermath, Wal-Mart is being held up as a model for logistical efficiency and nimble disaster planning, which have allowed it to quickly deliver staples such as water, fuel and toilet paper to thousands of evacuees.”

This was Wal-Mart doing what it does best: coordinating the movement of tens of thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of products across vast cross sections of the earth. The federal government, being a government, has many times more resources at its disposal than Wal-Mart has, but Wal-Mart has something that almost all government sorely lacks: efficiency.

One idea that will never float (but is nevertheless a great idea)—is having the government contract out emergency relief to private firms, especially companies like Wal-Mart which specialize in logistics. Imagine if the government paid for the relief effort—but let Wal-Mart coordinate the entire process. (Of course, it would still be the government’s job to establish law and order by threat of force.)

Sound like a crazy idea? Consider that “during a tearful interview on ‘Meet the Press’ on Sunday, Aaron F. Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in the New Orleans suburbs, told host Tim Russert that if “the American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis.”

Or, as Cliff Brumfield, executive vice president of the Brookhaven-Lincoln County Chamber of Commerce, related to the Post, “They were ready before FEMA was.”

Or consider that President Clinton expressed hope that Wal-Mart's model of hurricane relief "will give some guidance to our members of Congress."

Hate Wal-Mart or not, you have to admit that the company could have done a far better job coordinating the entire relief effort than (local, state, and federal) government was able to muster.

Socialized disaster relief doesn’t work well for the same reasons—and because of the same exact problems—that socialized medicine (or, for that matter, socialism in general) doesn’t work.

Of course, the Washington Post article still threw in the usual anti-Wal-Mart boilerplate, noting that “The praise comes at a time when the chain faces a series of lawsuits over allegations of wage-and-hour-law violations and gender discrimination.” Yawn.

Pretty much every news story on Wal-Mart mentions the ongoing class action gender discrimination suit. Meanwhile, the same lawyer leading the Wal-Mart suit is leading a similar suit against the blessed Costco, but, oddly enough, that’s never reported (For two quick examples, see here and here.)

All the same, it was nice to see something positive about Wal-Mart in the MSM.

For updates from Wal-Mart regarding the company’s hurricane relief efforts, check here. That’s the Show.

Wal-Mart Q&A

2005-09-04T00:10:00.000-05:00

We at the Show always welcome questions and comments, and I wish to thank Mr. “jay yellowed this snow” (or “Jay,” for short) for his response to my recent blog regarding Costco, Target, and Wal-Mart and their respective contributions to hurricane relief.

Let’s get straight to it, then, shall we?

I'm wondering why you chose just to highlight those three corporations. (Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco) Why the skew? There thousands of corporations that could pony up $1m+ or more but where are they?

Well, Jay, I wasn’t trying to “skew” anything. I very intentionally picked those three companies.

You might have noticed—unless you’ve been trapped in, say, a small wooden shed in rural North Korea for the last two years—that Wal-Mart has become rather unpopular among a certain class of Americans.

Now, Jay, I hate to generalize, but, generally speaking, the anti-Wal-Mart crowd is composed of well-educated affluent white liberals who reside in secluded urban enclaves and have never stepped foot inside a Wal-Mart. And—if you’ll permit another gross generalization—most of these people think nothing of shopping at Target and Costco, even though Target and Costco are guilty of most of the same “evils” for which Wal-Mart is constantly criticized.

This urbane elite considers Costco and Target hip and cool and trendy (“cheap chic,” if you will) but sees Wal-Mart as crass, offensive, and altogether white trash. For instance, rich white liberals went ape when Wal-Mart tried to build a store in impoverished Brooklyn, calling Wal-Mart an evil company. But they seem just fine with that Target in Manhattan.

That’s why I enjoy comparing Wal-Mart to Target and Costco. It helps to illustrate the extent to which the anti-Wal-Mart crowd is unthinking, hypocritical, and ill-informed.

And really... I think it's too early to say these corporations won't donate. While I commend Wal-Mart for being so compassionate and donating (I've only seen your numbers not the actually numbers) so quickly, can you tell me why you think it is so important to just shovel all this money out right now?

Well, Jay, it’s been almost a week and Costco has yet to announce any major financial donations for hurricane relief. They do appear to have announced some program to match dollar for dollar donations made by Costco customers through Costco (which, to me, sounds more like a ploy to get people into the stores than anything else). But, so far, no major cash donations directly from the company.

I don’t necessarily think it’s important to “shovel” out a bunch of money right now, but it has been almost a week. For one, I hope Costco does make a major cash donation. If or when they do, it will be reported here. But, nevertheless, they haven’t yet…

I know the money is needed, but where is it going?

Well I know that Wal-Mart donated $1 million to the Salvation Army (one of those terribly awful faith-based organizations) and another $15 million to the relief fund being headed by Presidents Bush, Sr., and Clinton. I’m not sure about the other million.

I’m assuming that right now the money is going to purchase food, water, baby formula, clothes, bug spray and other badly need supplies for people across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Over the next few months, it will probably go mostly to building new homes for people without home insurance and people whose insurance companies went belly up as result of the storm.

In the grand scheme of things, all the donations will be a tax write-off for these companies.

I’m not sure what your point is, but, yes, if a company donates, say, $17 million to charity it does not have to pay taxes on that $17 million. But they still, you know, gave $17 million to charity.

They will get great PR for their efforts…

Will they? The next time you read some story on Wal-Mart in the New York Times or the LA Times or the San Francisco Chronicle—or any other major newspaper—look for any mention of Wal-Mart’s donations to hurricane relief. See if you can locate, somewhere in the midst of inane quotes from union bosses, sleazy plaintiffs lawyers, environmentalists, and left-wing college professors, any mention of Wal-Mart’s $17 million donation. In fact, try hopping on Google in a few weeks and scanning dozens of newspaper articles about Wal-Mart. See if you can find even one that mentions Wal-Mart’s $17 million donation.

You won’t find it. It doesn’t happen.

My blog entry was an attempt to get the word out.

… and be able to get insurance money for their losses.

Maybe, unless the insurance companies go bankrupt. That tends to happen in the aftermath of even much smaller hurricanes. Again, though, I’m not sure what your point is.

Don't kid yourself into thinking Wal-Mart's donations thus far makes them the greatest company in the world.

I agree, that’s not what makes them the greatest company in the world.

If they were so great, why don't they support their own employees during non-crisis times by paying better than average wages or better health care?

Because if they paid higher wages and gave out free health insurance, the company would be forced to raise its prices—by a bunch. This would not only hurt Wal-Mart’s employees (who shop there for most things) but also the millions of low income Americans who shop there each week.

I mean, what good is getting paid $200 more a month if you’re paying $200 more a month for groceries and other necessities? What good is having free health insurance if (because the cost of food and other necessities is higher) you can’t make rent this month? 20 percent of Wal-Mart’s costumers don’t even have a checking account. You realize what that means, right? They move so often and switch jobs so often that they don’t even have a banking account. Health insurance isn’t even on the radar for those people; they’re most concerned about how they’re going to get their next meal. And Wal-Mart has the cheapest prices around…

It’s funny how the people who are always wanting “affordable” health care and “affordable” housing and “affordable” tuition and “affordable” this or that tend to be the same people who hate Wal-Mart. FINALLY, a company comes along that does everything it can to squeeze the profits of giant companies and pass it on to everyday Americans—and liberals turn their noses up at it.

Also, Wal-Mart does offer health insurance for its employees. Not all of them, but more than you think.

Personally, I'm anti-Wal-Mart…

Well, good for you. Way to think outside the box. You're such a rebel.

…but I do have to give them a big up for their generosity. I just wished they truly supported America buy selling more American made products in their stores versus the aisles and aisles of cheap plastic imported garbage.

Well, I’m not sure about the “plastic” thing. You want vacuum cleaners and storage containers made out of, what, pig iron? The quality of goods at Wal-Mart is on par with Target, K-Mart, Costco, BJ’s, Best Buy, etc. In fact, it’s usually the same exact brands made in the same exact factories.

Pretty much every store is filled with imports. You walk through Pier One or the Gap or Kohl’s or Circuit City or ANYWHERE, and the merchandise is all imported. We don’t hardly manufacture consumer goods in the US anymore. And there’d be something wrong if we did; that’s the sort of stuff we produced a hundred years ago. We’ve moved past that.

I suppose we could have all our t-shirts made in this country rather than importing them. Only then each t-shirt would cost $12 instead of $3, and we’d all buy a lot less t-shirts. So we’d still have a major lack of manufacturing in this country—and a much lower standard of living.

Wal-Mart, Target, or Costco—Who’s the Best Neighbor?

2005-09-02T16:43:00.000-05:00

Here’s a notable something about the hurricane relief effort you're not likely to hear anywhere else:

Costco: If various Google.com searches are any indication, as of Friday afternoon Costco has yet to pledge or donate one cent to relief efforts for the victims of hurricane Katrina.

Target: On Thursday Target announced a $1.5 million donation to the American Red Cross. The company promised other action.

In addition to cash contributions, Target is offering much-needed real estate in Louisiana to the Red Cross to establish a central command center supporting the most heavily impacted areas of the storm. Target is also looking into real estate availability in Alabama and Mississippi. Target is coordinating large-scale distribution of essential products requested by the Red Cross, including such items as water, ice, energy bars and bug spray. Stores in the affected areas have been given additional funds to provide in-kind product donations and grants to local nonprofit organizations.

Wal-Mart: Earlier in the week, Wal-Mart "donated $2 million in cash to aid emergency relief efforts and [began] collecting contributions at its 3,800 stores and CLUBS, and through its web sites” [emphasis added]. On Thursday Wal-Mart announced the following:

Following President Bush's announcement today that former Presidents Bush and Clinton will lead a nationwide fundraising effort to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Wal-Mart President and CEO Lee Scott contacted President Clinton and the White House and committed $15 million from Wal-Mart to jump-start the effort.
As part of this commitment, Wal-Mart will establish mini-Wal-Mart stores in areas impacted by the hurricane. Items such as clothing, diapers, baby wipes, food, formula, toothbrushes, bedding and water will be given out free of charge to those with a demonstrated need.”

Let’s recap real quick: Costco $0, Target $1.5 million (plus other aid), Wal-Mart $17 million (plus other aid). Of course, Wal-Mart is much bigger than Target, but it’s not twelve times as big. Of course, Wal-Mart is much bigger than Costco, but it’s not infinitely bigger.

To those of us who do not rely on the New York Times or word of mouth for all our opinions, this should come as no surprise. According to Business Week, in 2003 (the latest year for which data is available) Wal-Mart was the top corporate donor in the world, outdistancing number-two Ford Motor, Co., $176 million to $120 million. In fact, in 2003 Wal-mart donated far more than various automobile and oil companies sporting much higher profits. Neither Target nor Costco made Business Week’s top-180 list.

To be fair, the retail industry operates on razor thin profit margins. Nevertheless, May Department Stores somehow managed to make BW's list - ringing in at number 52. Now, I know that if lil ol' May Dept. Stores made the top 180, then Costco or Target easily could have. Home Depot (no. 38) and Best Buy (no. 62) also made the rankings.

Are Costco and Target really the moral antithesis of Wal-Mart? Are Costco and Target actually “good neighbors”? Or is it that they are just hip and trendy with the elites, the opinion-makers, the powerful? That's the Show, and your conclusion is yours.

Katrina Charities

2005-09-01T16:11:00.000-05:00

I've added Instapundit to our sidebar links...Glenn Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and his blog is often a good source for insightful analysis. However, he also has the best collection of links to charities soliciting funds for the Hurricane Katrina recovery. Thought people might find it useful.

Famous and dangerous

2005-09-01T14:39:00.000-05:00

I apologize for my poor blogging rate these past two days. We got the tail end of Katrina here in Memphis and I have been without an internet connection at home for three days now. Reports of a BellSouth truck in the area suggest that I might have access soon, but I'll try to get a quick one in from work.

"Form a" stole my thunder a bit yesterday with his posting on RFK, as I had been deliciously awaiting the opportunity to write again about how RFK is a political hack that manipulates evidence in a blatantly appalling manner. His distortions are exceedlingly simplistic, but therein lies some of their danger. They are so over-the-top ridiculous that I think people are more prone to believe them. You might guess that a politician is shading things one way or another, but it's rare that you expect a schizophrenic disconnect from reality that is the signature style of RFK's writing.

Just to recap what RFK wrote, he accused the Bush administration of bearing responsibility for Katrina (along with Haley Barbour, who is now the governor of Miss.) because of their rape and pillage of the environment. Now, as the comments Alan has posted below attest, this is just the sort of thing the left in this country loves to hear...major disaster...Bush in power...must be his fault. This logic is overly simplistic and you would expect most people to not be taken in by it. But as we talk about frequently on the Show, when in logical trouble, the oldest trick in the book is to beat and abuse language until people don't know what's going on anymore and appeal to raw emotion. There's plenty of raw emotion going around, which is how political vultures on the left survive (they have counterparts on the right, but they have different tricks. We'll get to them below). Sometimes, the left will carefully nurture and develop a phrase until it really only means something emotional; the original meaning of the words, if they ever had any are gone and the left can play them like a trump card to simply tap into people's general sadness and frustration and turn it into a raging anger against the left's political enemies. "Halliburton" is one of these words and various folks have been throwing it around in this instance. But the real ace in this hand is a far grander, far more powerful incantation. I hesitate to repeat it here, but you have been forewarned. It is:

KYOTO PROTOCOL

(shivers)

The premise of the RFK article is that if Bush had signed the Kyoto protocol, hurricane Katrina would not have happened. I'm going to unpack all of the premises that this conclusion is based on.
1) Bush has the power to make treaties for the United States.
2) Global warming is responsible for hurricane Katrina.
3) Following the provisions of the Kyoto protocol would lead to a dramatic difference in environmental conditions.
4) Signing the Kyoto protocol entails following its provisions.

These are the four basic premises of RFKs little syllogism. I think are both sufficient and necessary for his argument. All four are, of course, wrong.

1) Bush can negotiate treaties, he can lobby for them, he can talk about them, but he can't sign them. That's the Senate's job. The Senate did consider the main provisions of Kyoto a few years back and passed a resolution saying that they would NOT ratify an agreement that contained such provisions. "Right", you are saying, "I bet the Republicans were responsible." I will admit, a lot of Republicans voted against the Kyoto provisions. But so did some Democrats...how many? Well, the vote was 95-0. So a few. 95-0 AGAINST supporting Kyoto. So, the fact that Bush pulled the US out of talks was really an acknowledgment that it was never going to pass here. EVER. With Democrats or Republicans in power. Standing around talking about something that is never going to happen doesn't make you "tough" on the environment, it makes you ineffectual and useless. RFK and a lot of people on the left fail to make that distinction.

2) This is being debated all over the internet today, but the scientific consensus is that global warming had nothing to do with Katrina. See this NYT story. Some have cited a recent Nature article arguing that global warming might increase the intensity of storms, but those data have been met with a lot of controversy and the author of the study himself declared that he thought the effects he was seeing had nothing to do with Katrina (see NYT story again).

3) The Kyoto protocol doesn't come into effect really at all until 2008, so while we may have started reducing emissions, to meet the initial caps, it is unlikely anything much would be different environmentally now even if we had signed it. Most of the estimates I've seen, and I haven't been able to verify this, suggest that in 50 years or so, if Kyoto were fully implemented and obeyed, the effect would be about a .5 degree C reduction on temperature.

4) Of course, 3) assumes that signing Kyoto means obeying Kyoto. How's it going over in Europe, where they frequently scold us for not signing Kyoto (and where a German government official made a similar claim to RFK, along the lines that Katrina is our fault for not signing Kyoto). Well, this is also difficult to find info on, which is kind of surprising given how much the mainstream media talks about Kyoto. You'd think they'd put some effort into reporting how well its working. The best report I could find, the link to which is here, was done by a pro-environment group (just so you know its not an anti-environment see-we-told-you report). Using the current state of reductions (current for the report is a couple years ago) and the BEST case scenario predictions about where the countries of the EU will be when the first caps come into force in 2008, the report finds that the EU will miss their goal of 8% reduction by 2008. By how much? By 7.5%. That is, instead of an 8% reduction, they're maybe going to hit a 0.5% reduction. I've seen scattered reports that the reduction in the US over the same time period will be better than many EU countries, but the reporting on this is so bad and so partisan, I can't confirm that. Either way, Europe is like the class floozy who signs the virginity pledge. She goes around bragging about her morality but everyone knows where to find her on Friday night.

So every element of RFKs argument is false. I'm not sure why the Huffinton Post even bothers; to me, he is more of an embarrassment that Deepak Chopra. At least some of Chopra's claims are not verifiably false (they are simply just not verifiable).

When people start making false claims for political ends it is bad enough. When they start using science, you had better be scared. Junk science is historically your most effective tool of totalitarian repression. Slavery, the Nazis, the submission of woman....all of it uses crap-ass science to convince reasonable people that they are doing the right thing.

Now the right has their own false-language purveyors, but currently most of them are the religious fanatics. In the right culture, they can be extremely dangerous (see Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia), but in America currently they are more side-show farce. America is a religious country, but with a materialist viewpoint. We might vote on moral issues based on religion, but issues of fact are usually left to scientists (evolution being the primary exception (I'll discuss why that might be some other time)). So, Pat Robertson or another of his ilk that preaches fire and brimstone are met with laughter or resistance. At this point in time, on non-moral issues, they are not dangerous (and the more they make fools of themselves on these types of things, the less dangerous they became). The real danger then is from those who claim, like a fundamentalist, that science is on their side, despite all evidence to the contrary. Liberals are more likely to get away with it because most scientists are liberal and may let the details slip here and there. It's a dangerous path and RFK, from vaccines to hurricanes, is leading us down it.

The Best and the Worst

2005-09-01T11:43:00.000-05:00

On NBC’s Today show Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour noted, “The truth is, a terrible tragedy like this brings out the best in most people, brings out the worst in some people”

On that note, more quotes from our buddies over at Daily Kos... (Particularly interesting specimens are in bold.)

“US won’t let Canada help Katrina victims” – Kos

“I’m beginning to think they want people to die.” – xeju

“The GOP has crap all over their faces over this one. They know it, so just hide the facts as always. With the Canadians there a body count gets out. This is almost as sick as cancelling search and rescue to stop looting. Where's Rumsfeld when you need him with his ‘redistribution of wealth’ theory.” – Yankee in exile

“Expect them to attack the people who are pointing out their incompetency. That is something that can be done by an angry, ignorant, anti-social incompetent of the type who today runs the Republican Party.” – Rick B

“Besides, most of the White (i.e., Rethug) people got out in time. I'm sure Onkel Karl is tallying Dem votes lost to drowning.” – Moltar

“I’ll tell you where Rummy is…He's sitting in his office trying to figure out how to pin Katrina on Iran so he can justify bombing them.” – democracy inaction

“This is as incompetent as the occupation of Iraq. Is the Democratic Leadership going to continue to be timid and quiet? This isn't a war. Maybe they can be convinced to get on the angry-at-incompetence bandwagon without being afraid of sounding too strident or looking unpatriotic. I can't wait for the DLC to let us know what the Republican talking points are.” – Rick B

“I can't believe that Bush will escape accountability here.” – lofistew

“Should we call for congressional hearings on the diversion of emergency preparedness funds to the war in Iraq?” – Hopeful in AZ

“I guess putting gays back in the closet was more important than having a competent leader who could make proper budget choices and policy decisions.” – khyber9000

“It may seem trite right now, but if we're going to talk about politics, I can't help but think about where all of those wonderfully loyal Democratic voters in New Orleans will go, and what this means politically if they are about to scatter to some extent throughout the country.” – betterdonkeys

"After a game, 100,000 people can be outta there in a couple hours. Yet, they are talking about it taking days to get everyone out. They are not thinking big enough yet! Oh, yeah, most of the people in the Superdome are jus' po' folk.” - jcrit

“Too many righties would be talking about Sodom and Gamorrah if the hurricane hadn't hit dozens of towns down there.” – Webster

“The people of Louisiana knew what Bush wanted to do in a second term and voted to re-elect him overwhelmingly. I'll bet even today, Bush is still relatively popular in the state…” – khyper900

“Right now Rove is trying to figure out how to link NOLA with Social Security cuts.” – Darksyde

“Does anyone here doubt that if we were in a Kerry Administration the right wingnuts would be in full blame fever? Limbaugh, Hannity, and the rest would be blasting blame at Kerry every five minutes. We owe them nothing less.” - Calprof

“The thing about Republicans is that they have no shame. They don't stop. There could be - hell, THERE ARE - a pile of bodies at Barbour's feet, and his agenda remains the same.” – escapee

*

“We have thousands of Americans in serious trouble. I see many progressives trying trying to make this a political issue. Is this what we have become? This silly blame game will do nothing to help our fellow Americans. This is not Iraq, this is America. We have just experienced a major dissaster. We should be Americans and work toward helping other Americans survive this tragedy.” – Strike Z

And It Starts...

2005-09-01T09:44:00.000-05:00

We're going to be hearing about this FOREVER. It's going to be one of those smug jingles that certain people throw around in place of rational argument ("Well, you know, the US gave money to Saddam Hussein..."). You don't believe in global warming? Tell that to the people who lost their lives in New Orleans..

Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal. -New York Times, Editorial

If I Had the Words...

2005-08-31T23:17:00.000-05:00

The internet reveals awful things about certain people and certain types of people in an extremely raw and up-close sort of way. More quotes from our fellow “Americans” at Daily Kos:

“The trail of dots from Exxon and Haliburton to Iraq and now New Orleans is an oil slick covered in blood.” – UNCmark

“Now that we have the anti-government government that is in office and gets paid by tax dollars for the sole purpose (in their own minds) of dismantling the infrastructure of this country to create a fertile environment for greedy, souless Capitalism, I guess we shouldn't be surprised at how little infrastruture there is in place to help our people in times of extreme hardship.” – super simian

“Destroy the whole US infrastructure except for the corporate jets for the elite to flee disasters. That's GWB's idea of an America with its priorities on straight.” - Marie

“The interstate system saved untold lives.” - Addison

“I fear that the losses in the bayou parishes are going to be shocking; one of America's most unique, distinct and enduring communities and cultures may have just been obliterated with a single blow.” - Dancing Larry

“What a fucking tragedy. Slow and painful. Who knows how long before we know the true scope? There's so much speculation. This won't stick to Bush by a longshot. More fuel for our own personal fires.” – The Blooog

“The people of New Orleans were casualties in Bush's class war. To see how, see: “New Orleans Pays Death Tax.” - Avenging Angel

“Is anyone in the MSM talking in this way at all? Are any Democrats? (In fact, I haven't heard much at all from the Dems). Is Bush going to get another pass?” – LiberalFromPA

“And where’s #2? Sure, Chimpy is going to go bananas. But where's Darth Cheney, his counterpoint? My money's on the ICU - or the morgue.” - diamondpen

“Halliburton Puts Its Hand Out for Katrina.” - SusanHu

“If Bill Clinton was impeached over 'Monicagate'—then surely Bush should be removed from office over ‘Katrinagate’.” - pHr33z.

“He FLEW OVER IN AIR FORCE ONE...they said he went low enough to see the devastation and remarked it was bad. WTF? He flys over at 20,000 feet and that is it? Rat bastard...hate him.” - Barbara

“I can just imagine a great FLASH video of Bush, being ‘AWOL again’, set to the tune of ‘Alone again’.” - Greyhawk

“When McDonald's starts adjusting the cost of it's value meals (or whatever they're called now, I haven't had Mickey D's since I was in high school), then you'll know how screwed we all are.” – DWCG

“So when people said that the year 2000 was the end of the world...they were right after all. Give or take a few years.” – topshelf

“Meanwhile, Rove sits in The Slime Room, plotting how the neo-cons can use this disaster to their best advantage. It's just a game.” - UNCmark

*

If I had the words to describe all this, I’d gladly use them. No matter, it describes itself.

Quotes from Daily Kos Members

2005-08-31T18:32:00.000-05:00

The following are quotes from members of Daily Kos, a left-wing blog/opinion site:

“The devastation on the gulf coast offers the GOP nothing to advance its cause. Therefore, they officially ignore it.” – Kos

“While the President continued with his schedule these past couple days, declaring that he and Laura were having a "fabulous" time, Americans gasped for their last breaths as the water overtook them. They clung to trees. They grasped at debris. They swam with alligators in their streets. They watched as the water inched up their necks and listened as it filled their ears. Fabulous, indeed.” - Georgia10

“It's remarkable, isn't it? That we made such a swift race to Baghdad, but our military is being deployed to New Orleans like dough through a sieve. It's funny, isn't it, that President Bush took to the airwaves to reassure us during his "Shock & Awe" campaign, but now, when it is US who are shocked and awed as our nation crumbles around us, he has remained silent.” - Georgia10

“Lake New Orleans is Bush’s fault & I can prove it.” - DWCG

“Couldn't pay for levy repairs but can pass out bonuses to Halliburton, even when they lost $9 Billion, and can't armor the $7,000 a month HumVees they lease to the US military.” – antirove

“They have wrested control of the ship of state. They are sailing us into a state of permanent resource wars. Their agenda is not our agenda. Their agenda is on track. They are deaf to what they care not about. Yes this is a Darfur of sorts. The indifference to the destruction and loss of life in pursuit of the PNAC plan for global hegemony via control of oil is what makes Katrina our Darfur.” – Halcyon

“This is exactly what happens when taxes are cut; Americans die. . . In fact, we should be posting pictures of the devastation under the heading ‘Your tax cuts at work.’” - Bob Love

“What about the disabled? I did not hear about any plans for them to be evacuated. We are a leaderless country…” – Mattes

“If I read one more time how Bush cut his vacation short to return to Washington and deal with the tragedy, I'm going to puke.” – wintergreen

“This is what happens when you give tax cuts to the rich in a time of war. The rich get richer and the poor get flooded out of their homes. Tell me the GOP cares..” – txbirdman

“We can just rename New Orleans lake Dubya. This guy never ceases to amaze. I mean, this must be why they righties laugh when people would say that, due to climate change, in 50 years, New Orleans could be under water.” – akapensensei

“The fact of his derliction of duty while in office pales beside the callous disregard of the warnings he recieved , warnings that described in detail exactly what's playing out before out eyes today. As for the big FU he's been sending to the rest of the world, I don't know what sort of help we're going to be recieving..short of Hugo Chavez who's proving to be a better human being than Pat Robertson.” – sula

“Gambled and lost. Bush is responsible.” - jabbausaf

“George the Rapist… wanted Armageddon all along. For the first time in his bubble life, he can honestly claim mission accomplished. Such a fucking disaster he is.” - Anglico

“Since Bush doesn’t seem seem to want to mobilize the needed resources—or bring them back from Iraq--I think the mayor of NO, or maybe the LA governor ought to appeal for international assistance, clearly stating that the US government is unable to help. . . Most countries won't risk a diplomatic row with Bush by actually replying, but it would sure embarass the hell out of him. Particularly after Castro and Chavez send help.” – Mad Dog Rackham

“As is apparent from coverage on CNN we can expect that Bush will make restoring "law and order" his priority. So, the people of New Orleans can expect to have US military enter the city with an order to shoot to kill.” – padraig pearse

“pathetic...disgusting...simple....greedy...smirking...fucking BASTARD!! I HATE watching him...I just hate it. I really should just stop doing it. What an absolutely USELESS human being he is! 100% USELESS!! I'm fucking pissed...I'm so full of rage right now. I don't think I've ever been THIS angry...I feel like punching through walls. Fuck that fucking fucker! Worst President (person) EVER!” – Elise

Go Away RFK!

2005-08-31T11:48:00.000-05:00

I try not write or talk about the Kennedy family. In fact, if I could go the rest of my natural life without hearing another thing about the Kennedys, I would die a happy man. Unfortunately, certain elements in the media seem bound and determined never to let us forget—not even for a few moments—of the greatness of the Cape Cod Olympians.

Every now and then Robert Kennedy, Jr., environmentalist and notable spoiled brat, manages to squirm his way into my life—onto my television screen or my computer monitor or in some random magazine article. “Pleeeeze!” I beg “Just go away!” I try to change the channel or flip past him or close the window or whatever. But he always comes back. Just when you think he’s gone, he flares back up.

Take, for instance, this morning. I was minding my own business, sipping coffee and trying to watch cable news. Guess who they started talking about? The second I heard his name I flipped to a different channel. A few peaceful minutes go by—just me and my coffee. Guess what name comes up again? You got it. By the end of it, I was reduced to viewing a “secret crushes” episode of Maury.

Then my coffee and I relocate to the vicinity immediately surrounding my computer, and I begin my usual morning internet news sweep, starting with Drudge. And then there’s that name—you-know-who. Drats! Foiled again!

My gut instinct was to lunge for my mouse, but I did find the Drudge headline intriguing: “RFK JR: MISSISSIPPI GOVERNOR TO BLAME FOR KATRINA…” It took a few seconds for my brain to digest the enormity of it. When it did, I was left snickering. I mean, WTF?

Giving Kennedy the benefit of the doubt (which, you know, goes against my best instincts), I speculated that perhaps Drudge had grossly misrepresented Kennedy. So I click the link, which takes me to Kenney’s blog on the Huffington Post.

Sure enough, Kennedy was blaming the governor of Mississippi for hurricane Katrina:

Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and—now—Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

I’m not even going to bother arguing about the merit of the argument that Gov. Halley Barbour caused hurricane Katrina except to say that it is about as grounded in fact as James Dobson’s claim that 9-11 was God punishing the United States for our immorality.

You know, the left keeps accusing Bush of being “divisive” and “polarizing,” but I just don’t see it. In fact, Bush seems to repeatedly go out of his way to please left-wing hysterics. (Remember that retarded “religion of peace” speech Bush delivered in the aftermath of 9-11?) In fact, most of the “divisive” and “polarizing” voices in our political culture are on the left.

Personally, I can’t imagine what sort of hateful “divisive” person would—while the bloated corpses of hundreds of Americans float through the streets of New Orleans—try to use the situation for partisan gain.

I mean, blaming the Republicans?

I know RFK hates Bush, his “corporate cronies,” and Republican fat cats like Halley Barbour, but I had no idea it was that kind of hatred. We’re dealing with scary people.

More Than You Wanted To Know About the Bidding War Over British Safeway

2005-08-30T21:09:00.000-05:00

We at the Show always welcome comments and give them the utmost attention and thoughtful consideration. I wish to thank Normal Mouth for his commentary regarding my last posting and invite our readers to peruse his insightful and eclectic blog.

That being said, I was left somewhat confounded by some of NM’s assertions. To start with, he claims that Wal-Mart was not in fact the highest bidder for British Safeway and that it “was offering some £0.9 billion less than successful bidder Morrison’s.” Now, I’m not sure where NM unearthed this information. When I researched this very topic last evening, I encountered a number of sources, and, all told, they left me with the strong impression that Wal-Mart subsidiary Asda was the leading bidder. I duly weighed NM’s assertion, but I have yet to find any evidence to support it.

In the original posting I condensed all of the following for the sake of the Show’s readers. I hate to put everybody through it, but the details of the 2003 bidding war for British Safeway seem to be as follows (yet even this is a somewhat streamlined timeline):

January 9, 2003: The BBC reports that “Morrisons, a medium-sized but fast-growing British supermarket chain, is to take over UK rival Safeway, in a deal worth £2.9bn.”

January 13: We find out from the BBC that “Supermarket chain J Sainsbury has said it is considering a bid for rival Safeway, in an attempt to scupper last week's bid by Morrisons.” More importantly, “Sainsbury said its offer would value Safeway at about £3.2bn ($5.15bn) and would be a mix of cash and shares.”

So, you see, Morrisons was offering a share buyout, whereas Sainsbury was offering a mixture of cash and shares. Under a share buyout, Morrisons “pays” for Safeway not by paying Safeway shareholders in cash (as would be expected) but by simply issuing them shares in the new company in exchange for their old Safeway shares. This is not exactly the best deal for the Safeway shareholders, since cash is better than shares. (Anything could have happened to Morrisons shares, esp. since it was a tiny company acquiring a company many times its size.) In fact, according to the BBC the value of Morrisons bid dropped in the days after the bid was made because of a fall in the value of Morrisons shares.

Later on January 13: Jeff Randall, business editor at the BBC, notes that “Wal-Mart's average weekly takings are about £3.5bn; and that's all would be required to buy Safeway,” meaning that Asda could jump in and trump both Morrisons and Sainsbury with a “blockbusting all-cash offer.” You got it. No guessing about what the stock value will be in a few days; Wal-Mart had the ability to make Safeway’s shareholders a full cash offer. This, of course, made Wal-Mart the front runner.

By March, British bookkeepers were betting that Wal-Mart would be the successful bidder—of course, they were looking at rational and predictable factors—such as which company could offer the most cash to the shareholders and which company could best run the Safeway stores—and not betting on the completely unpredictable whims of unelected government bureaucrats.

September 26: British antitrust officials—for reasons really known only to themselves—announced that some vague entity known as the “public interest” required that neither Tesco nor Sainsbury nor Asda (Wal-Mart) be allowed to bid for Safeway. This left Morrisons as the only serious bidder.

Also on September 26: The BBC reports that Morrisons' original bid had “expired” but that the government had blocked the other potential bidders. Moreover, “Some analysts suggested that Morrisons' original £2.9bn all-share offer was not overly generous, and shareholders may feel they are being left short-changed.”

In other words, Safeway’s shareholders got screwed. After the unelected government bureaucrats intervened, only Morrisons measly offer was left. (Wait, didn’t somebody with the initials “New Mouth” suggest that Morrisons was the highest bidder? Huh?)

December 15: The BBC reports that the Safeway “saga” has finally come to a close, with Morrisons making a £3 billion bid. Further, “unlike the earlier deal, Morrisons' latest offer comes with a cash element - 60p per share - designed to appease stockholders disappointed that the original offer was made entirely in shares.” This was, after all, the least Morrisons could do for Safeway’s shareholders, given that the government had intervened to halt three better offers.

[For those of you still with us, we at the Show apologize for going through all those details. We felt it necessary to vindicate our earlier assertions.]

NM, if by “highest bidder” you mean “the only bidder the British government would allow,” then you’re dead on, and, yes, Morrisons was the highest bidder. Otherwise, the available evidence suggests that Wal-Mart was willing and able to make the best offer to Safeway’s shareholders. Not to make too much of myself, but that’s precisely why I earlier referred to Wal-Mart has the “highest bidder.”

Under a truly free market Wal-Mart would have purchased Safeway. Obviously, Wal-Mart’s executives are still reeling from the fact that Britain’s economic planners stepped in and took away what should have been their purchase.

Moving on…

NM also says that at issue in the British government’s decision to block the three highest bidders from bidding for Safeway was not the total market share of any individual firm but rather the total number of “big players” in the British grocery market.

We are, of course, talking about private firms that are (metaphorically speaking) trying to kill each other on the open market, so I’m not sure about the importance of having three “big players” instead of four “big players.” After all, if you’re interested in enshrining vicious competition, it’s best to have just two roughly equal players. Having two roughly equal players ensures a perfect zero-sum game, such that any loss by one player results in a benefit to the other player and vice versa.

I’m not sure if they have the board game Risk in the UK, but if you’ve ever played it you are well aware that the nastiest competition comes at the end of a game in which two roughly equal players are left standing. It's the sort of back and forth can go on for weeks.

It’s sad to see how far our British friends have fallen. Wasn’t this the nation of Hobbes—that great exponent of game theory? And I'll refrain from bringing up anything about Adam Smith beyond the mere mention of his name.

Regardless, I couldn’t hope to improve on the infinite wisdom of Her Majesty's antitrust regulators, who—if NM’s excerpt from their 300-page report is any indication—appear to be right on par with antitrust regulators in the United States, with all that that distinction implies.

I will, however, point out that neither in 2003 nor today are there four “big players” in the British grocery industry. In 2003 and today Tesco—with around 30 percent of the market—is the “big player.” Meanwhile, Asda and Sailsbury, with around 15 percent of the market each, are not “big players.” They are medium-sized players.

And given the stiff rules against building new buildings in Britain (which, all said, seem to be even worse than California’s prohibitions on economic development), Asda and Sailsbury cannot expand (so as to compete on an equal footing with Tesco) by building new stores. Their primary option for achieving parity with Tesco’s food buying power was to buy Safeway. Britain’s government thought it knew better than the market and intervened so as to leave Tesco as the only truly “big player” in the British food market.

(Of course, on a truly free market, Wal-Mart would have been able to buy Safeway and thereby give Tesco the competition it needs.)

Wal-Mart and Sailsbury were only asking that they have the right to court Safeway’s shareholders, that they have the right to purchase Safeway from Safeway’s shareholders on the open market—such that they might compete with Tesco’s much larger market power. They were only asking that they be allowed to hold a 25+ percent share like Tesco. British regulators said “no” to both companies.

I didn’t come out and say it in my earlier post, but, in reality we all know what Lee Scott was thinking when he made those comments over the weekend: Why are the British regulators protecting Tesco? Why did they block Wal-Mart?

Well, Tesco is a homegrown British company. I know it’s a difficult mindset for us free-market oriented Americans to understand, but I think economic xenophobia is the best explanation for that 2003 decision by British regulators. They want to keep Wal-Mart half the size of Tesco because they’re afraid that on a truly free market Wal-Mart would wipe out Tesco. I hate to say it, but the nation that first discovered the free market has now succumbed to the economic philosophy of those who reside across the channel.

Well, Adam Smith might have been born British, but I think he was an American at heart.

Wal-Mart is, you know, the company that almost single-handily instigated the American economy’s productivity revolution in the late 1990’s. It did, you know, build the world’s largest privately-owned satellite system back in the 1980’s. It does, you know, own the world’s largest database (more than twice the size of the internet), which it uses to streamline every minute detail of its operations.

Bureaucratic bull about the so-called “public interest” notwithstanding, it probably would benefit the British public if Wal-Mart were allowed to acquire the market share necessary to compete with Tesco effectively. (Again, in the US, Wal-Mart is allowed to build new stores; in the UK expansion can come only from acquiring existing buildings.) I quote from John Blundell, a writer for the New Scotsman:

I'm writing this column in West Virginia, USA having just come back from shopping in Wal-Mart, the extraordinarily successful supermarket chain that makes our own look slow and tiny—not to mention expensive! I had to keep blinking at the price labels. With my notion of prices tied to British expectations, Wal-Mart's just look as though the staff can't do their sums.

As a resident of Boston (where they don’t allow Wal-Mart because it would immediately shut down the unionized grocery chains, which would immediately destroy the Democratic Party in Massachusetts), I do the same thing whenever I visit one of Wal-Mart’s grocery stores up in New Hampshire. I just keep blinking at those price labels. That same exact box of 12 turkey burgers was $6.99 at Shaw’s in Boston, but only $3.49 at Wal-Mart. That same exact umbrella was $8.00 at CVS in Boston, but only $1.00 at Wal-Mart. For a box of macaroni and cheese it’s 99 cents versus 33 cents. As a suffering resident of Boston, I can identify with the British. Yes, neither of our governments will allow Wal-Mart to work its magic.

It’s Not Wal-Mart’s CEO Who Has the Pie on His Face

2005-08-29T23:26:00.000-05:00

In a weekend interview with a British newspaper, Wal-Mart’s CEO, Lee Scott, called on British Trade and Industry officials to investigate the growing market share of Tesco, the chief competitor of Wal-Mart’s British subsidiary, Asda. It appears that Tesco’s share of the British food market has increased to 30.5 percent in recent months—while Asda, Britains’s number-two supermarket, only has 16.7 percent market share

Not surprisingly, by Monday evening the left-wing anti-Wal-Mart crowd had reached the general consensus that this was a genuine “gotcha!” moment. The spirited mood swept through leftist enclaves like wildfire.

Leading the charge was the Huffington Post, where Charlie Cray hastily threw together a piece entitled “Wal-Mart’s CEO starts food fight with pie on his face,” which itself was a complete rip off of a piece posted by “Brendan” on WakeUpWal-Mart.com’s blog, which, for its part, claimed that Lee Scott had “achieved a new level of global irony.”

Central to Wake-Up Wal-Mart.com’s blog entry was, incidentally, comments made by Paul Blank, campaign director for WakeUpWal-Mart.com, who said: “Scott criticizing TESCO for its market dominance is like Enron criticizing Arthur Anderson for its accounting practices… The question for Wal-Mart should be when will Wal-Mart demand an investigation of itself?”

You get the picture. Yes, it was one of the clearest cases of delicious irony in recent memory, the pot calling the kettle black, glass houses , blah, blah, blah.

If you take a few moments to look at the history of Wal-Mart’s relationship with British antitrust regulators—rather than launching into some feverish anti-Wal-Mart diatribe—you’ll see that there’s much more to Lee Scott’s call for a Tesco investigation than was reported in the British press or, for that matter, than Scott himself let on.

It appears that back in 2003, Wal-Mart’s subsidiary Asda controlled 16.9 percent of the British grocery market (slightly more than it has now), when it became the highest bidder to purchase British Safeway, a struggling chain with 12.4 percent of the grocery market.

If Wal-Mart had been allowed to purchase British Safeway, it would have controlled 29.3 percent of the grocery market. This level of market share, it turns out, was completely unpalatable to British Trade and Industry officials, who stepped in and proclaimed that it would be illegal for Wal-Mart to have that large a share of the grocery business. Fair enough, I suppose.

But now Euro retailer Tesco has achieved a 30.5 percent market share. Why is it that Wal-Mart having 29.3 percent of the market constitutes an illegal monopoly—but Tesco having an even larger share is just fine? And that, of course, was the obvious question on Lee Scott’s mind when he directed those comments at British antitrust regulators over the weekend.

We can safely assume that in reality Wal-Mart’s executives wish there were no such thing as antitrust regulations (or any other arbitrary, government-backed restraints on trade). Scott was merely noting that if antitrust laws are going to exist, they should at least be applied fairly and consistently.

Wal-Mart was standing up for fair competition and the rule of law. It was in no way being hypocritical. It was merely saying that Tesco should have to abide by the same rules that are forced on Wal-Mart.

No, I’m sorry, there was no pie on Lee Scott’s face. I do, however, seem to detect some creamy filling dripping from the noses of more than a few anti-Wal-Mart commentators who failed to investigate the matter and jumped to conclusions.

Some Monday reading

2005-08-29T11:48:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens makes his most cogent case for the war yet. I wish he had spent a bit more time on the annoying "Iraq didn't attack us on 9-11" argument which is probably the most popular claim I hear and read. Frank Rich relies on it again for this week's column. For all the ridicule conservatives endure of not being nuanced, I can't imagine a more literal reading of world history. Technically, the 19 people who attacked us on 9-11 died in the planes. Technically, the Japanese attacked us on December 7, yet we decided to fight the war against Germany first. Certainly, Japan and Germany had a formal alliance, but it's not as if they fought together. What allied them was an ideology and it is by and large the same ideology that united Hussein and al-Qaeda. Throw in various geopolitical considerations and as Hitchens makes clear, the anti-war side should be making a defense of why we should NOT have invaded Iraq.

Friday favorites

2005-08-26T08:17:00.000-05:00

Two stories to comment on from the NYT today. The first has to do with that favorite topic of mine, eminent domain. A small neighborhood near Newark New Jersey was forced to leave their homes, by the power of the eminent domain law. New Jersey had a grand plan to build schools all over the state in order to equalize educational options and the central planners in New Jersey's School Construction Corporation (doesn't it just sound corrupt?) decided to build on what was apparently the one nice street (Dewey Street) in the whole area. The story suggests that there was extensive land in the area that would have qualified as more blighted and the story does not offer any suggestion as to why that particular land was taken. Pretty bad, huh? But how's the school working out you ask? Oh, they ran out of money and couldn't build it...so instead now the street is full of hookers and crack dealers. That's progress, brought to you by the Democratic Party! The story contains depressing story after depressing story about people that were forced to move as well as the one guy that is still living on the street, surrounded by his new friends, the criminals. Up until last week, the city had refused to buy him out, citing that whole "we ran out of money" business. So, let's review: the state undertakes to seize private property (at least for a public purpose, a school), plans poorly, picks a successful neighborhood to ruin, fills it with slums and druglords, and then, after promising to buy the last neighbor out, goes back on the deal leaving him to live a terrified existence. Where exactly in the Constitution of the US Government or New Jersey is this little plan allowable? Last week, the state informed the remaining resident that they would buy him out (I imagine after the NYT called) but they haven't told him when.

It does not appear anyone has been fired for this, nor has any one been charged with a crime. The state oversight agency has apparently found extensive misconduct, lavish bonuses and terrible mismanagement. I think somebody should have to go to jail if any of that is true. Certainly several people should be fired and prevented from working anywhere near state government. The commission's response is priceless: Gerald Murphy, chief operating officer, says that Dewey street is "a lesson learned." Well I'm glad something good could come out of ruining dozens of lives! Gerald Murphy can sleep well at night because he learned something today. I'm sure that is a great comfort to everyone who lost a home. This is pretty much the same principle Soviet Russia worked under..."lesson learned, greater good, purge the leftovers."

The second story is another Krugman column. This one is called "Summer of our Discontent." Count on the professor for a cheery morning message. Imagine if the titles of his columns were all songs...he'd be like some economics blues singer. The main text of the article is not his worst. He does have a point that perceptions of the growth of the economy seem to be lagging the growth of the economy. I think it's a little overblown though and he too quickly discounts the power of the media in swaying peoples' opinions of their own situation. As Krugman does in this column and as the media constantly bleats, things aren't as good as they were in the 90s (or more specifically, under Clinton). People take that sort of constant reminder to heart, even if their own situation is actually better.

Anyhow, my main point has to do with a correction he puts in at the end. It's actually TWO corrections. First, in his unhinged the Republicans-steal-every-election article from last Friday, he declared that there was a 98% voter turnout in one of Ohio's most Republican counties, which is indeed awfully suspicious, if it were true. The actual number is 72%, which destroys one of his main arguments. The wrong number came from the Conyers Report. Conyers is a Democratic Congressman from Michigan who makes a habit of saying outlandish, incendiary and blatantly untrue things. He is a demagogue and paid for that report that is utterly worthless with your tax-payer money. Krugman's two sources for that piece were the Conyers report and a report by the Democratic National Committee...do you see now why people go nuts saying that the NYT is biased? What kind of crap piece uses two totally biased sources? When one of those sources proves to contain data that is blatantly false, might you spend some time reevaluating your argument? Not if you are the NYT editorial page.

He also corrects a point about the whole recount thing I posted on below. Not his main error, in misleading people into thinking that the recounts underway would have favored Gore. Rather, he misstated the results from one of the consortiums, the smaller one. It had Gore winning two of three statewide recounts depending on the standard, rather than the three of three Krugman dreamed of. He takes pains to note that the larger consortium, the results of which I posted below, had Gore winning SIX OF SIX statewide recounts. He fails to mention the THREE OF THREE realistic recounts (the ones actually being considered) Bush would have won. Or the fact that the "statewide" recounts involved recounting ballots that had been recounted multiple times already, the accuracy of which would be highly questionable.

That's all for now. Hope everyone had a nice week.

The Exit Iraq Exam

2005-08-24T19:08:00.000-05:00

Listening to the Democrats and the “mainstream” media, one might form the impression that the situation in Iraq could not possibly get any worse—that we have, in a sense, hit rock bottom. Incidentally, were such an impression an accurate reflection of reality, it would necessarily follow that giving up—or “bringing our troops home,” as some are so inclined to put it—would be the only rational course of action.

I’m not sure, then, if the far left is intentionally pushing an insane idea on the nation or if they’ve fallen for their own propaganda and are merely working out the implications in their own heads.

The situation in Iraq is not that bad, and when I use the phrase “not that bad,” I use it in its literal, commonsense meaning. I mean that the situation in Iraq could be much, much worse. Monsignor Rabban al Qas, a Chaldean Bishop in Iraq, recently related the following to a foreign journalist:

What the media portray is true: explosions, killings, attacks. But if you see how much order, discipline, transport, displacements, and work have improved, there is a change for the better compared to one or two years ago. Now people understand there is a government, the structure of a new state. Thousands and thousands of allied and Iraqi soldiers are present. There is a constitution which is being drawn up, laws are being enacted. . . . The presence of authority is recognised. This was not the case before.

But foreign military power is still necessary to keep order:

Foreign troops are still necessary to guarantee security, order and peace. Local troops are still not expert enough. Let’s not forget that the enemies of this government – former Baathists and foreign fundamentalists – want precisely to eradicate all peace in Iraq. Come to Iraq and see for yourselves the daily arrests of these foreign fundamentalists.

Moreover, the Economist recently estimated that the Iraqi economy grew by nearly 50 percent last year. Of course, Iraq is still plagued by exorbitantly high unemployment (even more so than France and Germany), inflation, and food rationing. Nevertheless, economic activity requires stability (as Ayn Rand once famously noted, “Trade does not flourish on a battlefield.”), and the fact that the Iraqi economy expanded by 50 percent in one year is, all told, the single best indicator that Iraq is stabilizing at a swift pace.

Economic growth is essential to ending the so-called “insurgency” in Iraq. As with anti-war protestors, anti-Wal-Mart protestors, and anti-IMF/World Bank protestors in the Western countries, the best and quickest way to rid Iraq of young radical suicide bombers is to reduce the number of unemployed young men.

Yet, now certain people—who, curiously, tend to be the same people who were against the war from the beginning—are now throwing around completely unfounded comparisons to Vietnam, proclaiming that it’s high time America admit defeat and withdraw its troops. With any luck, the surrender lobby will allow us to wave good luck to the Iraqis on our way out.

It doesn’t take much imagination to grasp the consequences of immediate troop withdrawal. Iraqi civil society, just now waking from its decades-long slumber, would almost certainly descend into all-out, bloody civil war. Instead of several hundred innocent Iraqis dying each month, the numbers would soon reach several thousand, maybe even several hundred thousand. Of course, according to Chicago Sun-Times columnist Andrew Greeley, we shouldn’t worry about the Iraqis fighting a civil war because—and I quote—“they already are.”

Come to think of it, pulling out now would almost be worth it, just so that the sheltered ninnies proclaiming Iraq to be “a disaster” could get a better view of what a disaster really looks like.

I am not, of course, calling all Democrats crazy. There are plenty of centrist Democrats in the US Senate who are committed to completing the mission in Iraq, namely Senator Clinton who in February 2005 told CBS News that “if we were to artificially set a deadline of some sort, that would be like a green light to the terrorists, and we can't afford to do that.” In other words, the enemy is not going to back down if you say to him “here’s the date on which we will give up and not fight any longer.”

Of course, Senator Clinton is part of a small circle of Democratic leaders who, to quote the Nation, are part of the Democrat Party’s “insulated, timid, unaccountable DC elite.” In other words, the wing of the Party that’s not advocating some insane course of action, the wing of the party that is not equating Iraq to Vietnam, the wing of the party that resembles Roosevelt and Truman, the wing of the party that’s actually prepared to lead this country.

Consider also that the far-left miscreants advocating full and immediate withdrawal (and leaving the Iraqis to their own devices) are the same people who for two years have been spinning in circles—like a lunatic granny in a motorized wheelchair—spouting on and on about how damn upset they are over the deaths of innocent Iraqis. Oh, how quickly their concerns change.

For two years the Iraqis were their main concern, but then when that poll came out in June showing strong public support for “bringing our troops home,” the self-proclaimed humanitarians quickly shifted gears and began advocating full and immediate withdrawal—and to hell with what happens to the Iraqis.

Call me cynical, but I had my suspicions all along. Whenever they started up with their cursed boohooing about innocent Iraqis dying I wanted to roll my eyes and say, “Bullshit. You just hate Bush.” Feigned concern for the deaths of innocents is almost as transparent as it is revolting.

The long-term goal of the left should now be apparent. They want a full withdrawal so that when Iraq breaks up in a horrendous civil war—a real civil war—they can then blame George Bush and his “war for oil” for the civil war. Nothing would give them more satisfaction than to see the Tigris and the Euphrates running red with the blood of innocent Iraqis. How else can you explain the fact that they are advocating a course of action—full and immediate withdrawal of all US troops—that is almost perfectly calibrated to maximize the deaths of Iraqis?

Mark my words. If there’s premature withdrawal, and instead of several thousand dead Iraqis we have several million dead Iraqis, our liberal friends will be running around foaming at the mouth, proclaiming the whole calamity to be Bush’s fault, even though it was they who spent two years tugging at the public’s heart strings with desperate calls to “bring our troops home.”

There’s more than a little precedent for this. Left-wing “humanitarians” were the reason why we couldn’t fight a real war in the first place. Left-wing “humanitarians” are the reason why we can’t do what really needs to be done right now to establish security in Iraq. As with Vietnam, the left-wing “humanitarians” are major reason why we are fighting this war as a silly half-war, and, aside from the actual killers, the “humanitarians” are the major reason why innocent Iraqis continue to get blown up each day.

If from the outbreak we had been allowed to wipe all remnants of the former regime out of existence, if we had been allowed to terrify the entire Sunni population into absolute submission, if our military had been allowed to do to Iraq what the Union did to the South during the Civil War or what the Allied Powers did to the Axis Powers during World War II, if the “humanitarians” had allowed us to fight a real war, the present situation in Iraq would be much better. All the political, religious, and social power structures of the former society would have been torn to shreds, and we could have set to work rebuilding Iraq from the ground up, just as the Union had a clean slate to rebuild the South after the Civil War and just as the Allied Powers had a clean slate to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II.

Or are you stammering to yourself that it was wrong for the United States to utterly destroy Germany and Japan and remodel those countries after our country? Fine. Are you also saying that it was wrong for the Union to utterly destroy the Old South and remodel the South after the North? Are you prepared to go that far?

What was needed in Iraq was the "scorched earth" policy General Sherman adopted as his army tore through Georgia at the end of the Civil War, the same policy Truman used against Japan to end World War II. Utterly humiliate the enemy, leave them begging for existence. Only then can you create a new society.

However, to please the left-wing “humanitarians,” we minimized the death toll, minimized the fighting, minimized the destruction of infrastructure, minimized everything. And we continue to minimize all our actions—all in some pointless effort to keep people like Michael Moore from calling us baby killers. Even when we catch people in Iraq plotting roadside bombings, the left insists on their immediate release, unless we have evidence against them sufficient to convict an American citizen in an American court of law. Even when we catch hundreds of people in Iraq planning roadside bombings and ship them off to Gitmo, the left insists upon their immediate release. Even when we capture thousands of people in Iraq plotting roadside bombings, the “humanitarians” insist that we let them all go—in some strange and never-ending quest to atone for Abu Ghraib.

We have fought the type of minimal, politically correct war the left-wing “humanitarians” insisted upon. Granted, the left did not want a war in the first place (they never do), but, nevertheless, we fought the only type of war they will permit, a self-defeating, politically correct, “humanitarian” war. And now American soldiers and innocent Iraqis are paying for it in blood and bodily limbs.

I do not believe that we are losing in Iraq, but if we are losing, the major share of the blame lies with the left and their wimpy friends who infest the capitols of Europe. For two years, they have been doing everything within their power to hamstring the American military—destroying morale, calling the war illegal, demanding that we release suspected roadside bombers, going ballistic over every alleged mishandling of the Koran, letting the insurgents believe that they are winning. Heck, in just the last few days, the left—from the New York Times editorial board on down—has been calling the draft Iraqi Constitution a complete failure. First they said a constitution would never happen; now they’re saying it sucks. Thanks for the encouragement, guys!

And, of course, the left blames Bush—for his alleged “failure to provide security” or, even more hilariously, for “not having a plan.”

I must say, however, that Bush is somewhat to blame, though not for the reasons that most leftists have in mind. Bush and the rest of the Republicans are to blame for acquiescing to the left—for caving in and fighting this stupid minimal half-war. From the beginning, we should have fought a real war.

By the same token, if the US withdraws its troops prematurely, Bush will be to blame for the resulting civil war, but only insofar as he once again gave in to the left’s irrational demands.

Now it makes sense...sort of

2005-08-23T08:26:00.000-05:00

I have to give some credit today to Professor Krugman. His article yesterday sought to correct the blatant error in last week's column where he declared that Gore would have won the Florida statewide recount in 2000 if the Supreme Court had not intervened. I discussed it here. Many people noticed his error which, Krugman says, was met by "outraged reaction".

Of course it's not that easy...he doesn't just say "I was wrong and I got caught." Or "Can't fool you!" No, instead, we get a convoluted obfuscation of what the results actually were in an attempt to salvage his original claim. And then it all is brought home to Iraq. (I'm a little worried about the prof, when people link all sorts of disparate events together, it's a sign they are going looney).

Let's take a look, shall we? Krugman acknowledges that Bush would have won under the standard underway when the Supreme Court ruled. Of course he says the presiding judge could have "revised his order", which, is just one of many ridiculous asides. The presiding judge could have "declared Paul Thomas emperor" but that seemed equally unlikely (and woefully unfortunate); in case people don't recall, there was many a fight about the standards used to count the ballots...both sides seemed pretty pleased with the conservative standards in place at the time of the last recount. The fact that Krugman includes it reveals his already thinly veiled thesis: even though legally Bush won, if anything, ANYTHING had been different, Gore would have won. ANYTHING. I mean it. It boggles the mind that Bush won. That's pretty much the whole article. Is it true?

Krugman likes to throw around numbers to impress people but he rarely explains them--here as well. He covers the results of both consortium, but I'm mainly going to focus on the big consortium, which looked at NINE standards. Krugman's kind of like the Count ("Nine, NINE standards!"). Three, only three would have given the election to Bush. Of course, they were the three "most widely discussed during the battle of Florida, including the partial recount requested by the Gore campaign and two interpretations of the Florida Supreme Court order, would have given the vote to Mr. Bush." Krugman does acknowledge that. Another way of putting it. Here in the real world, Bush would have won. No matter how you look at it (note the TWO standards of the Florida Supreme Court...seems unlikely a magical third standard would have appeared during that time).

BUT..."But the six hypothetical manual recounts that would have covered the whole state - including both loose and strict standards - would have given the election to Mr. Gore. And other evidence makes it clear that many intended votes for Mr. Gore were frustrated." SIX! SIX recounts for Gore. Six is bigger than THREE. Are you people following this!? Gore won the recount! Also, what's this bit about the recounts "covering the whole state"? Well, the three standards under consideration when the counting was stopped accepted some recounts that had already taken place, instead of recounting the recounts. The potential for error in all of this is mind-boggling (in terms of just the repeated handling of the ballots) so keep in mind that any of these results are going to be within the margin of error.

Now, here at the 'Show, we like to give our readers that little extra touch of love and explanation. What were the NINE standards you ask? Krugman links directly to the homepage of the project, which happens to be one of the worst designed pages I've browsed through. Also, the pdf article that describes the results is >50 MB. And it's not anything special. I'm not sure why it's so big, but I had time to go tend to my roses while it downloaded.

So, I've captured the key chart.

The paper I got this from sourced the Chicago Tribune, but the paper itself is found at http://www.amstat.org/misc/PresidentialElectionBallots.pdf. As you can see from the chart, it's really a hodge podge of standards that produce any of a wide variety of results. As I acknowledged in the previous post, probably more people intended to vote for Gore, especially with the butterfly ballot issue taken into account. But, really, on the face of it, it's not clear which one was the winner. Using this particular hodge podge, Gore did win SIX of the standards. But both of them were clearly within the margin of error, the limit of resolution of the whole measurement process. So it becomes somewhat pointless to try and pick post facto which standard you would have used--they are equally irresolute.

Another way of putting it comes from something my boss always warns me about: the six-shooter fallacy. This is where you shoot a gun at a barn and go up afterwards and draw the target. You have perfect aim every time. The way that Krugman out of hand dismisses the "partial" recounts that were underway at the time to favor the non-realistic "total" recounts suggests a partisan agenda. The way the Bush loyalists will defend to the death the legitimacy of the standards that gave the election to him is equally telling--they are both drawing their targets now that the results are in. Poetically, the "Bush standard" gave the election to Gore and the "Gore standard" gave the election to Bush. My favorite solution at the time is still I think the best. It would require a change to the Constitution, but I think that if the election is within a certain margin, the electoral votes should be split down the middle. No recount necessary. We already determine what a "too close too call" margin is that triggers a recount; I think instead of having the recount, which will generally do nothing but prove we can't really know for sure, we should do the best in terms of the will of the people--50/50. Now, in some states (with odd numbers of electors), this will mean half an elector. I haven't figured out what do there, but we could just double the number of electors so that every state has an even number. Comments welcome.

In case you were wondering, my proposal would have given the election to Gore.

Peace, love and understanding

2005-08-22T17:53:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has been reading the stories about the Gaza pullout over the past week has to be a little concerned about what the aftermath will be like. Already the major Palestinian groups are grappling for control in the newly abandoned Gaza and have made it very clear that they will resort to violence (against other Palestinians) in order to make sure they have their share. The rhetoric also states very clearly that violence was the root cause of their "success" against the Israelis and they need to expand the violence further to win more successes.
1) Under what twisted definition is this a "success"? Success implies some kind of accomplishment, some positive contribution. Instead, what is really happening here is that Israel, quite unnecessarily from a military viewpoint, is trying to play the peace game and withdraw, when there is really no pressing strategic need for them to. There may be moral or political reasons that they should do it, but it is not a "retreat" in the sense that Israel was sustaining a number of losses. The corruption of Islamofascism, like most fascisms, view magnanimity as weakness. Again, note the distortion of language to further violent and coercive ends.
2) The groups that constantly paint Israel as the sole aggressor, what is their response to this rhetoric? I don't mean that smarmily, I'm honestly curious. I've always taken the argument against the Israelis to imply that the Palestinians are at heart quite peace-loving and could form a stable government given the space and the removal of the Israeli troops. I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of peace-loving Palestinians, but they don't appear to be in power. It doesn't look like a peaceful stable government is going to emerge...it doesn't look like a government consistent with ANY of the ideals of the Western liberal tradition that the pro-Palestinian people are steeped in will emerge. If this situation degenerates into a Palestinian civil war, should Israel step in? If not, who should?

I think the situation makes Iraq look like the new enlightenment. At least the three factions talk to each other and repudiate violence as a means of power accumulation.

Has he read the Constitution?

2005-08-22T15:45:00.000-05:00

A quickie this Monday afternoon: during a "blistering" speech Kerry delivered Saturday, he criticized the Republicans for all sorts of things, including, apparently, abiding by the Constitution. In a strange digression that suggests Kerry has forgotten we live in a federal republic, he said:

The states are now the laboratories, much more than before, because of the refusal of Washington to do what's important and necessary. You're forced to spend too much time cleaning up what Washington either messes up or leaves undone altogether

Senator Kerry: that whole "states are the laboratories" thing is kind of the whole point, from the very beginning. I just think the Democrats sound silly when they deliver an emotional point that they think people should get very upset about, but that actually turns out to be a reasonable statement. As in, "Can you believe it!? The STATES are becoming LABORATORIES instead of the federal government doing EVERYTHING!!! The HORROR!" This is how the Democrats lose elections. Initially people might cheer along thinking "Well, he's awfully upset about this, it must be a problem." Then they consider the alternative...see health care 1993 and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.

The Daily Show's Latent Homophobia

2005-08-19T23:05:00.000-05:00

I try whenever I can to catch Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, mostly because I like to keep tabs on the nation’s major opinion-makers, and Stewart’s show is the primary source of news and information for millions of young liberals. In doing so, I have found it difficult not to notice The Daily Show’s constant parade of jokes insulting gay men.

Browsing an online archive of Daily Show clips, it takes just a few seconds to locate a few stellar examples. Consider this one from March 2, 2004: “I want to talk to you a little bit about gay marriage… [Chuckles from the New York City audience.] We’ve got this mayor up in New Paltz, and he’s been marrying gay couples and yesterday was charged with a crime, but the crime is something I hadn’t quite heard of, and I’ve heard of quite a few crimes. The crime he was charged with is called illegally solemnizing a marriage, which I think means sticking something in the wrong marriage’s [bleep].”

Note the connection between gay marriage and sodomy. The mere fact that the words “sodomizing” and “solemnizing” sound similar is not what’s funny. Rather, it’s the connection between gay marriage and sodomy that’s meant to induce childish giggling.

Stewart continues in a similar vein: “I don’t know what it means… solemnizing… It’s incredible to me that solemnizing a marriage could sound so dirty… [The mayor] has said, and I quote him, ‘I just love to solemnize’.”

Right-wing bigots often equate gay marriage to anal intercourse in an attempt to gross people out; Stewart links gay marriage to anal intercourse in an attempt to score a cheap laugh. Which is more offensive?

Regarding the opening of the Harvey Milk high school (a school for gay and lesbian students) in New York City, Stewart suggested a sports mascot: “Go fightin’ flamers!” he hee-hawed. This one actually provoked a few boo’s from members of the audience, to which Stewart shrugged and said, “Come on, it’s a comedy program.”

Oh, okay, it’s a comedy program. Nice.

The term “flamer” is a play on the word “flamboyant.” Within the gay community the term “flamer” is used to designate gay men who are more stereotypically gay—as opposed to those who are less stereotypically gay. The stereotype is, of course, that exaggerated cartoon-like figure which appears repeatedly in American pop culture—that sassy, catty, gossipy, fashion-obsessed, promiscuous creature swishing around the Upper East Side.

To utter “Go fightin’ flamers!” in regard to a high school for gay high school students brings up all the worst and most hurtful cultural images of gay men—the allegedly hilarious spectacle of a bunch of “flaming” sissies trying to play sports, i.e., a bunch of girly guys trying to be real men.

Yes, fags trying to play football. What a joke, eh? We’re not real living, breathing human beings. We are inconsequential beings. Our existence is a joke.

I have offered only two examples from the Daily Show, but there are, mind you, many more. Just start watching, and you’ll see that it’s a regular thing for Jon Stewart.

Explicit hatred is easy to deal with. The mind immediately dismisses and ignores the TV preacher who denounces homosexuality in religious or metaphysical terms. But contempt and disgust disguised as everyday humor have a more subtle effect. The joke—all the repeated jokes, from grade school to retirement, from adolescence to death—is heard, absorbed, and inexorably lodged in the subconscious, where it is slowly digested across a lifetime, where it grows like a cancer or a tumor on one’s psyche. You’re not a real person. You’re just a damn good laugh.

Oh, but how easily I forget that it’s just a “comedy show”!

Speaking of shows on Comedy Central (which, everything considered, probably should be renamed “gay joke central”), a gay friend of mine recently told me of a situation in which he and another gay guy were watching a DVD of the Chappelle Show and where, in a standup segment, Mr. Chappelle made the well-worn joke about gay sex being “disgusting” but sex between two women being hot.

That old knee-slapper about “two chicks being hot” (but two guys foul!) wasn’t all that funny the first time I heard it (in about the fifth grade), and, I must confess, it’s not any funnier the hundredth time.

The more important fact is that, as my friend related, the other gay guy laughed. That’s what happens, though. The abused deal with the marginalization by becoming abusers themselves.

Just consider the magnitude of it. Chappelle called gay sex “disgusting.” Imagine that you’re a gay man and in love. Imagine further that the thing you want to do with the man you love, that physical contact you desire with his body—penetration, that incredibly intimate thing you dream of doing with him—is casually dismissed as “disgusting.” And, for whatever reason, it’s funny. It’s not love. It’s just a damn good laugh.

Can you even imagine a more terrible insult than to suggest that the way in which one has sex is gross, akin to a bathroom function? Do these people have any idea what they are doing to gay men? Could they even begin to understand what it does to us—how it affects us deep down?

Most infuriating, though, is that The Daily Show and The Chappelle Show are both upheld as great—and, heh, intelligent—left-wing entertainment. (I'll note that many liberals think that Jon Stewart is "insightful" only because they do not read political and social commentary from anywhere else.) Both shows regularly depict Republicans as hateful, bigoted crazies. Uh-huh. Yeah, blame the Republicans. They’re the problem.

One searches the internet in vain for any mention of the latent homophobia at The Daily Show. Best I can tell, no news story, column, opinion piece, or blog, has ever dared broach the subject. But it’s not as if the left is incapable of detecting this brand of homophobia. For instance, right-wing humorist Ann Coulter writes “you cannot imagine [Dick Cheney] losing his temper, which I find extremely sexy. Men who get upset and lose their tempers and claim to be sensitive males: talk about girly boys. No, there's a reason hurricanes are named after women and homosexual men, it's one of our little methods of social control. We're supposed to fly off the handle.”

Now, this is the sort of caricature of gay men—of gay men as overly emotional, as womanly, etc—that regularly graces left-leaning television shows like The Daily Show, but, all the same, the person who maintains anticoulter.com calls the above quote “typical” right-wing “homophobia.” Sometimes the left’s homophobia radar is on, and sometimes it’s conveniently off.

I’ll offer another example from the Daily Show. Ask yourself how this one compares to Ann Coulter’s alleged “homophobia”:

Jon Stewart: Why suddenly all this media focus on sexuality and what people do behind closed doors?

Steven Cobair: Simple, Jon, there’s been a gay-splosion.

Stewart: Uh, I’m sorry.

Cobair: An explosion of gayness, out of no where, suddenly gay people are everywhere doing everything with everyone. Remember the Latin music explosion? It’s just like that but with sodomy. Gay is the new straight, and the anus is the in orifice.

You see, it’s basically impossible to mention gays and lesbians without an anatomy lesson in gay sex.

Can you even imagine what would happen if a right-wing humorist made these types of jokes about gay sex? The anus is the new in orifice. If only Jon Stewart’s show were subjected to the same rigorous review to which Ann Coulter is subjected. If only left-wing commentators were subjected to the same scrutiny, the same exacting standards, rules, and guidelines to which right-wing commentators are subjected. If only Jon Stewart were criticized, even a little, for his hateful gay jokes.

Does the left expect us not to notice the double standard? Or—and this is almost certainly closer to the truth—do they expect us to notice it and just put up with it?

Oh, but, are you thinking, in some foggy stupor, that left-wingers should get away with anti-gay humor just because they support gay rights in the abstract? That’s a good one. Should they get away with anything just because they parrot the usual left-wing bromides about rights and equality for gay people? Or you saying to yourself "well, these shows make pot shots at everybody"? Do they? If we have jokes about anal sex when it comes to gay men, where are the jokes about fried chicken and watermelon when it comes to black people? Or is that where you draw the line?

You can preach all you want about political equality, but if you still degrade gay people socially—in your jokes, on your television programs, in your speech—you are part of the problem. Political band-aids are meaningless if you’re running around cutting more wounds.

Oh, and then in March 2005 the gay rights organization GLAAD—for reasons best known to GLAAD’s leadership—bestowed Jon Stewart with an award. “Special Recognition” was the title of the award. Yes, he has done so much.

It’s like the NAACP handing out an award to Quaker Oats for the contribution the company made to African American rights when it came up with that whole Aunt Jemima concept.

Maybe GLAAD is taking the “any publicity is good publicity” approach. I guess we’re just supposed to lap up any attention we can get, even if the attention is accompanied with degrading jokes about orifices.

Krugman getting sloppy

2005-08-19T08:43:00.000-05:00

Well, usually when Krugman distorts or lies, he does it about something that most people might not have all the facts about. It's part of his charm. I guess he was rushing for a deadline when he wrote this:

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore.

Now, I think most people might remember the results of those consortiums, since they were sort of big news. And most people might be thinking, "Really? I thought they found that Bush won. Hmmm....." And they'd be right. He's a key quote from CNN, one of the members of the consortium:

A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.

What if Gore had prevailed in his legal challenges and just had a recount in the liberal-leaning counties (which somehow people try to defend as "fair"):

Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted -- a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election -- by a 225-vote margin statewide.

Oops! Wait, so what the hell is Krugman talking about? In a spirit of fairness and objectivity (a spirit which Krugman forsook for good in January of 2001), there are two standards under which Gore would have won:

Out of Palm Beach County emerged one of the least restrictive standards for determining a valid punch-card ballot. The county elections board determined that a chad hanging by up to two corners was valid and that a dimple or a chad detached in only one corner could also count if there were similar marks in other races on the same ballot. If that standard had been adopted statewide, the study shows a slim, 42-vote margin for Gore.

In addition to undervotes, thousands of ballots in the Florida presidential election were invalidated because they had too many marks. This happened, for example, when a voter correctly marked a candidate and also wrote in that candidate's name. The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes.

Further, it appears that there were more people who intended to vote for Gore, but misread the instructions on that famous butterfly ballot. The whole article with other links on CNN is here.

Importantly, though, under no standard that anyone was actually suggesting, or that was being used when the Supreme Court stopped the recount, would Gore have won. So under no standard relevant to history would Gore have won. This provides an excellent opportunity to have a lesson in statistics. At the resolution of vote-counting that we had available, there was no statistically significant difference between Gore and Bush. It is not surprising then, that by varying the methods, either one of them could win. Because with the measures available, they aren't any different.

I do acknowledge that more people may have wanted to vote for Gore. But as in all things legal, stupidity is not a defense. Nor is it one I would think a political party would want to employ: our constituents are morons, we should have won.

So Krugman's statement is misleading at best. A full manual recount using standards that no one (including Gore) was suggesting and that several believed to be illegal would have given the election to Gore. The recount that was in reality underway would have given the election to Bush. At worst, Krugman is lying to inflame the passions of readers, in a ham-handed, jingoistic manner that has become the signature style of so many NYT columnists. Incidentally, the NYT was a member of the consortium along with CNN so you would think the fact-checking on this one would have been slightly more rigorous. Krugman is spinning further and further into an alternate reality where the past is malleable to his whims and none of his editors seem to have noticed.

Common ground

2005-08-17T12:10:00.000-05:00

We have received literally thousands of complaints about the low-rate of posting over the past few days, so here I am. Alan has been dispatched on a secret mission, the details of which he could not reveal but may involve funions. I thought I would comment on a couple Iraq stories/columns.

I'll start with Frank Rich's column from the NYT on Sunday, which has been lighting up the blogosphere with links and discussion. Most of it is coming from anti-war blogs who are quite happy with the drastic tone of Rich's column. Rich declared in the article that we have lost the war, that the American people have accepted the loss and that we should pull out the troops immediately. I don't think there is much support or reason behind that last comment, but that's pretty typical for Rich. As seems to be the trend, Rich spends most of the article comparing where we are now to something about Vietnam. I find this strategy pretty tiresome, as the comparison seems pretty thin to me. Let's start with the notion of having lost the war...in Vietnam, we never controlled, by any definition the whole country. We never had a government, however tenuous, in place that commanded the broad support of the people. We have both of those things in Iraq. Yes, this is horrific and seemingly unrelenting violence. Yes, the administration seemed unprepared to deal with it initially and face the depth and length of the campaign ahead, after the overthrow. But to chalk it up as a simple-category "lost war" seems juvenile and not terribly thoughtful.

This is a trend in Rich's pieces of late--he makes overly simplistic statements but wraps them up in overwritten language so that it sounds thoughtful. People get swept up because they don't like Bush and they don't like the war and it sounds like someone smart is saying something thoughtful about it. Rich makes other bizarre comparisons that seem to be meaningless (I wonder if he even has a editor anymore). For instance, he claims "But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor, Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army." He's referring to Johnson. This is a minor point, but it's characteristic of Rich's overall writing style--it seems like he's getting another dig in at Bush about the difficulty the Army is having recruiting. I think he's trying to say, "look this is worse than Vietnam, look how much trouble we are having getting soldiers." See, I feel stupid even writing less, but of course we had a draft in Vietnam, which was far less popular than our current all volunteer Army. I think the fact that we are able to fight two wars with an all volunteer Army suggests that things are going substantially better than Vietnam. This is the kind of weak non-argument that you would think an editor would pick out.

Maureen Dowd, another Times columnist has similar problems. A couple weeks ago she was commenting on Cindy Sheehan. She starts off with this premise: "The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute." Now let me put in my qualifiers that I'm not criticizing Cindy Sheehan, I will not even comment on whether Bush should meet with her. But Dowd's statement is just not true. At least if you believe in the principle of non-contradiction, as there are plenty of parents of killed soldiers who disagree with Ms. Sheehan. How can they both have absolute authority? More generally, you can't get ought from is. The tragedy that befell Ms. Sheehan and her son demands that we give her our sympathy, our aid, and any and all comfort. It does not require we give her our submission on all things moral. Her capability for moral reason I would imagine has not changed substantially since before her son died. I say this because it's important how the debate is framed...by starting off with an illegitimate premise, the conclusions drawn are meaningless. There may be plenty of room to criticize Bush's actions in Iraq, or towards Ms. Sheehan specifically, but by going off the rhetorical deep-end, as Rich and Dowd do, the debate reaches the point of hysteria and there is nothing of substance actually said. For a further critique of the Dowd piece, see Christopher Hitchens' pretty well done piece in Slate. I will say that I think Hitchens' using Lincoln as a comparison throughout the piece was also a little unfair (though there are some excellent comparisons to be made between this war and the Civil War...maybe I'll write those up later).

I bring up these two columnists because they have had a lot of influence in setting the tone of the debate. And their tone is decidedly victorious. You can see them grinning with delight at the trouble of the war and the latest bombing each time a column comes out. The evidence for this is that the tone remains unchanged from the first day of the war through now; it cannot be that the state of the war has not changed at all; it cannot be that on some level, there hasn't been one thing Bush has done that they may have thought was reasonable. Instead, what we have is two gravediggers hoping for the next tragedy. It poisons the culture and it poisons the political process. Rich and Dowd have their counterparts on the right as well, who advance the decline of the debate further.

The alternative, I think, is a search for some common ground from which we can move to a more rational debate. We should all agree that Saddam was a homicidal tyrant. We should all agree that whether or not he was an immediate danger to the world, that he funded terrorism (in Israel), that he regularly massacred his own people and that he ran non-stop torture rooms that surpass imagining.
We can also agree that we didn't have enough troops for the aftermath. That we were not prepared for the terror that would grow and try and take advantage of the disorder and that the people who failed to heed those warning should be held accountable.

We have accomplished much and failed at much. Without acknowledging the complete picture, further debate will be useless. We should acknowledge the incredible hope that exists now for the Middle East, a hope that has never existed before and that has borne some fruit. The evacuation of Gaza is a direct result of Bush's Iraq policy. Hussein was actively supporting and encouraging Palestinian terrorism and with his removal, Sharon has the political cover to take this historic step. The seemingly quickly forgotten victory for democracy in Lebanon is also a tremendous step, a removal of a thorn that had continually thwarted progress in Israel and Palestine.

We should agree that we can't settle for anything less than a total victory in Iraq. There's a broad range of what I allow for as a total victory and we must accept that even an Islamic state, while less than ideal, would be a qualitative revolution for good beyond what had existed.

Returning to elementary school rules, I think columnists from now on should have to say something nice about the other side, something critical about their own. These are serious issues and editorial pages on both sides of it are treating it like a sixth-grade school president election in terms of the quality of analysis they are providing. We deserve better.

Update on Kennedy

2005-08-14T14:20:00.000-05:00

Well, Robert Kennedy has published some of his anti-thimerosal theories in a slightly more prominent place, "The Huffington Post". It's a short little entry, so I'll post the whole thing:

Vaccines and Autism: Looking for the Truth? Study the Amish
On Sunday morning's Meet the Press, Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, debated New York Times reporter and author David Kirby about the strength of the science linking the current epidemic of neurological disorders among American children to the mercury-based vaccine preservative Thimerosal. The Institute of Medicine as well as the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration base their defense of Thimerosal on four flimsy studies ginned up by the pharmaceutical industry and federal regulators who green-lighted the use of Thimerosal in the first place. Those fraudulent studies deliberately targeted European populations which were exposed to a fraction of the Thimerosal given to American children.

If Dr. Fineberg genuinely wants to test his assertions about Thimerosal safety with epidemiological data, he should commission a study comparing American children who were exposed to vaccines to the Amish, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists or others, who, for religious reasons, did not receive Thimerosal-laced vaccines.

A recent survey by United Press found that autism is virtually unknown among Pennsylvania's large Amish populations -- a strong indication that vaccines are indeed a principal culprit of the epidemic. Despite the repeated urgings of independent scientists and the families of autistic children, the federal agencies involved have refused to commission such a study and have closed federal vaccine files in order to derail the creation of those studies by outside scientists.

Luckily, the comments are OVERWHELMINGLY negative (I counted two positives out of a few dozen). But let's just make two points that are typical of Kennedy's rants about this.
1) His critique of the studies showing no link between autism and thimerosal consists of no data, no analysis, only the claim that they are flimsy and, more interestingly, fraudulent. I reiterate my statement from an earlier post that I would think this amounts to libel. My understanding is that you have to prove damages in the US to sue (is that right Alan?) but that the standard is much lower in Britain. It would be wonderful if a British scientist would take him to court, just so that he could be exposed in a public, objective manner.
2) "A recent survey by United Press found that autism is virtually unknown among Pennsylvania's large Amish populations -- a strong indication that vaccines are indeed a principal culprit of the epidemic." Oh man, it is so rich when someone exposes his ignorance so flagrantly. This statement would have earned a failing grand in any of my high school, much less college classes. It would have failed even if the word "principal" had been replaced with the word "potential." I feel stupid even typing this out, since I'm sure the lunacy and complete wrong-ness of this comment is obvious. The Amish lead, shall we say, different lives in many aspects. They are somewhat inbred. They don't eat the same food, live in the same kind of houses, wear the same kind of clothes, engage in the same kind of activities. A retrospective study with them as your comparison group is pretty much useless, as you could never select an appropriate control group. Of course, even a sophisticated child could figure that out.

I'll post on the Rich column from the NYT later or tomorrow. Please though, if you hear someone talking about Robert Kennedy's noble fight against thimerosal, point out to whoever is talking that Kennedy is a moron. It could be a national campaign (no need to limit it just to Kennedy and thimerosal, we can include other topics): Stop the idiocy now.

More on intelligent design

2005-08-12T12:19:00.000-05:00

Reihan in "The American Scene" has an excellent post about the intelligent design argument, along the lines of what I posted a couple days ago. He raises an interesting issue though, in that opponents of intelligent design have taken the opportunity to smear not on the science of the intelligent designists, but also the ethics. With a broad stroke, they have included anyone who might inform his or her views with Christian teaching along with the anti-evolutionists; since anti-evolutionists are simple-minded and wrong, the people who rely on Christian teaching as a whole must be simple-minded and wrong. I think Reihan is right here, that this is what's happened and it's become nearly impossible to "take a stand" for science and at the same time show some reluctance for stem-cell cloning and the other various emanations of stem-cell technology. My own bias, as a scientist, in the stem-cell debate is to proceed cautiously: cautious with the research but even more cautious with the rhetoric.

I am continually amazed with the promises and hints of promises (that are taken as promises when regurgitated by the press) by eminent, distinguished scientists who would never tolerate such hand-waving in their classrooms or their papers. The truth is, there are a lot of obstacles to be overcome before stem cells cure anything. Right now, the most exciting research involves techniques that the general public would probably be shocked at in terms of their simplicity. For instance, recent work that got a lot of press on how stem cells can repair heart damage literally involved the injection of stem cells into the heart. Nothing fancy, just throw them in there and see what happens. Turns out, it seemed to help a bit, but there were some complications and the studies' own authors are advising restraint in terms of the interpretation of their results. We aren't to the stage yet where we can do what the scientists who testify before Congress seem to be claiming we can do, or will be able to do very shortly. It's going to be difficult and some of the hopes may not materialize, at least for a very, very long time.

Similarly great ideas have bombed in practice. One example is monoclonal antibodies, which I remember reading an article about in the 80s...they were going to cure cancer, all cancer. They didn't, quite disappointingly so. They have had some success in treating some cancers, after various modification and developments of the technology. There are also great successes with monoclonal antibody treatment in autoimmune disorders. I imagine stem cells will provide us with some stunning successes and some rather disappointing failures. I think scientists should be honest about that and honest about what we don't know.

Given the overselling of the science (in my opinion) at this stage, I think it's perfectly reasonable for people to express some qualms about where it might be going. The fact that they are using a Christian understanding of humanness and humanity doesn't negate their ability to make reasonalbe claims just because some people with other understandings of Christianity make claims that are false. If science started using the standard of "made some claims that are false" as a way to eliminate a whole group of people, or area of thought, we wouldn't have any scientists working today. The conflation is worse than that though...the anti-evolutionists are making a scientific claim, which can be judged on the basis of scientific principles; the anti-stem-cell forces are making a MORAL claim and scientists love talking about how science doesn't answer moral questions. So really, the conflation of creationists with anti-stem-cellers is wrong on two counts.

This brings me to the question of whether or not I "support" stem cell research. At this stage, I would say that I do. Yet, I understand and even partially support Bush's decision to restrict federal funding. Bush, from what I can tell, "supports stem cell research" too, but as President, he understands that a lot of people (you know, who he technically works for) don't and we shouldn't force them to give money to a cause they really, really don't support. (As a footnote, Bush did not limit ALL research with his stem cell policy, just publicly funded research. People make that mistake a lot). Taxes are the forcible seizure and redistribution of property...why, when we have all these drug companies flush with cash do we need to take people's hard-earned money to pay for research they despise? If the research is so promising, won't the rewards be so great to induce private investment? Importantly, why waste all the effort in pissing people off? Overall, I think the government should apply the usefulness/piss people off test as often as possible. Is it necessary? If so, how necessary and can someone else do it? This is another conflation that the pro-stem cell forces have been making--just because something should be done, doesn't mean the government should do it.

In summary, the pro-stem cell forces have made three major conflations that have obscured the important points of debate:

1) Anti-evolution people are Christian, and are wrong, so Christians must be wrong about all things science.
2) Included in "all things science" are moral judgments about the consequences and value of a particular scientific inquiry.
3) Since "we the scientists" are right about the science, and ergo about the morality of an inquiry, the Christians are wrong, and we-the-scientists should be allowed to take their money to fund our science.

Stupid Union Tricks

2005-08-11T17:17:00.000-05:00

Here is the latest in a series of brilliant tactical moves by union leaders, evidenced by their continued success in racking up new members and earning the respect of the public. So "Gate Gourmet" which apparently provides some kind of airline food service for British Airways, fired 350 workers who went on strike to protest the company hiring "seasonal" workers. My guess is that this strike was mainly a despearate power grab for pathetic union leaders who were worried that the seasonal workers might not want to waste their hard-earned money on union dues. It can't be based in reality, because a rational person would be able to note that the airline busines is, indeed, seasonal. So like every other service/retail company, they might need to hire a few extra people at Christmas.
In response to the firing of the striking workers, more workers went on strike, including several from unions that are necessary for the running of British Airways, which has now had to close operations at Heathrow, it's hub, and the world's busiest airport. No sympathy for the many people, some quoted in the article, who they are royally screwing over. The fact that someone paid for their services is no reason not to refuse them in the playbook of the unions. No, the most important thing is more power for union bosses. I mean, for the WORKER, right, this all helps the worker. The airline industry is going through a boom time; British Airways can afford to lose it's hub for a day. Can't it? Perhaps the bankruptcy filing after bankruptcy filing of the US airlines has failed to filter over to the BBC, or maybe their news "analysis" hasn't pointed it out, but it is the unions that are crippling the US airlines (JetBlue--non-union and extremely profitable...United--heavily union and bankrupt). Now it looks like they are using their cracker-jack economic plans on British Airways...how is costing the airline a small fortune going to help Gate Gourmet? Oh right, it's going to make them lose a bunch of business...wait, how does this work again? An executive from Gate Gourmet stated that this could ruin the company. Chalk up another "win" for unions.

A few quick notes

2005-08-10T21:32:00.000-05:00

Today I thought I would make a brief post about language. I've mentioned it before, but the exploitation of language is usually 1) a sign of a weak argument and 2) a prelude to violence.

The first story I'll call attention to is about the library preferences of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Turns out, they mostly enjoy Harry Potter and Agatha Christie. Now, I haven't read any of the little wizard books myself, but was a huge Agatha fan back in the day, so I can see why many of the prisoners might enjoy them. Plus, there's a guaranteed murder and at least some of them are into that (I'm just saying). I mention this story because of the recent Amnesty International report that Guantanamo Bay is the "gulag" of our times. To refresh everyone's memories, Stalin's slave and death camps didn't have libraries where you could get Ms. Christie's latest. Stalin also didn't provide free copies of the Bible (as the US provides every inmate with a copy of the Koran)...in fact, the Bible was overall a no-no. So when the word "gulag" is used, it's clearly being used inappropriately. In the original statement, there was really no qualification...the qualifications that appeared in later days were weak and defensive. Various Amnesty officials accused people of trying to distract from the real problems that exist at Guantanamo. But this is language abuse-you can't say something that's patently false and when someone points it out, claim that they are trying to distract from the truth. It's no wonder people of every side of every debate are so defensive; when people begin their arguments with patent lies and distortion, the discussion isn't going anywhere.

Point 2: Why are the Europeans negotiating with Iran? Why does anyone still think the UN is worthwhile? For the last two days we have be reading story after story about the careful diplomatic crafting of the UN's rebuke of the fact that Iran is starting to enrich uranium again. Apparently, at this stage, Iran will not be referred to the Security Council, because that might actually produce some results, which the UN generally tries to avoid. But everyone tip-toes around what is really going on and keeps paying lip service to the idea that Iran may want a reactor for "peaceful" purposes. They are a peace-loving nation, so we should readily accept that explanation. Wait, what's this? Did Iran actually make threats today? I believe they did...punish us for trying to go nuclear and we will drive up the price of oil and fund some more of those insurgents in Iraq. 1) I think we should embargo their oil, accept the enormous price increase of oil and let them wither on the vine. It will be a great day when we are oil-independent and the Middle East can go back to irrelevancy. 2) Can anyone seriously believe they are a legitimate negotiating partner at this point? They know they have a choice window right now...America doesn't want another war in the Middle East and America's the only one who would do anything anyway, so they better get that bomb built.

My third point is brief, concerning the intelligent design vs. evolution debate. Teach both if you like, but don't treat intelligent design as science. That's not a value judgment, it's a statement of fact. A reasonable scientific theory is one that can withstand the scrutiny and criticism of the field as a whole. While you can find the occasional degreed "scientist" who will try and defend intelligent design from a scientific viewpoint, the arguments do not withstand scrutiny and are not accepted by the field. Maybe that will change, though it seems unlikely. Until it does, it is not appropriate to teach in a scientific classroom. I'm sure in this internet age I could get enough people to re-sign on to the theory of the aether and demand it be taught in physics. But as long as the vast majority of scientists disagree with me and provide refutation of my claims, my claims aren't science. That's not saying ID is not true, it's saying it's not accepted by the standards of science. Teach it philosophy or religion, which is where it still currently belongs.

The US Constituion: The First FTA?

2005-08-09T23:58:00.000-05:00

In a column on the demise of organized labor (at least in the rapidly shrinking non-governmental sector of the economy) Newsweek columnist George Will notes that “New York City, which has about the same size population it had 40 years ago, has 30 percent more city employees.” As result, has overall quality of life in NYC increased by 30 percent?

If not, what are all those new city employees doing? That's likely one of those things that best left to the imagination.

Just consider all the time-saving (and, therefore, productivity-increasing) devices of the last 40 years. Today’s clerical worker—armed with copy machines, computers, word processors, Excel, the internet, cell phones, fax machines, etc.—can accomplish in twenty minutes what took a full day to accomplish 40 years ago. Can you even imagine what record keeping was like before copy machines? Or legal research before on-line law libraries? Or shipping without global positioning technology?

40 years ago, sending a simple message to, say, 100 other offices meant 100 separate phone calls or typing up 100 letters and sending them via snail mail. Today, with email or a fax machine one can accomplish that same task in just a few minutes.

So, given the repeated productivity revolutions of the last 40 years, why is it that NYC has 30 percent more city employees? Taking productivity into account, I’m estimating that—in terms of potential work product—NYC’s city government has at least doubled in size in the last 40 years, maybe tripled.

Consider what would happen to a private firm that increased its workforce by 30 percent during a time when it gained no new customers.

Ah, but that’s right, governments can’t go out of business. They just get bigger, raise taxes, and threaten to put you in jail if you don’t pay up.

--

Governments are inefficient because they have a monopoly. It’s not as if NYC residents have several city governments to choose from. They have a choice as to cell phone provider, landlord, grocery store, electronics store, etc., but no choice as to government.

Hence, government has no incentive to act rationally. That’s why government costs so much—because “consumers” can’t simply pick the government that offers the best service for the lowest price.

Or can they?

At root, democracy is an attempt to protect against the monopolistic nature of government. You get to vote for the government, and various factions and parties compete—in a manner similar to private firms—for your vote.

America’s decentralized, federalist system takes this “free market” approach to government even further, offering 50 separate states. If you don’t like the way your state government is operating, you have the option of moving to a different state.

Of course, not everyone has the option of packing up and moving out of state. (Governments are, in a sense, one of those cell phone plans that are very difficult to get out of.) Nevertheless, many people do have the option of moving, and this tends to keep state governments on their toes. No one likes to lose customers.

--

Dani Rodrick, professor of political economy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, notes in a recent opinion-piece that “since NAFTA was signed in December 1992, Mexico’s economy has grown at an average annual rate of barely over 1% in per capita terms.”

Poor Mexico. By comparison, the US economy has grown by an average of at least 3 percent annually since NAFTA was signed. And, a percent of growth for us is much, much bigger than a percent of growth for them.

It stands to reason, though. If, thanks to copy machines, internet access, cell phones, fax machines, etc, an American worker can produce tens times as much as a Mexican worker, it’s the American worker that’s going to benefit most from free and open trade. It’s not accident that, at least since the industrial revolution, the most advanced economies are the ones most in favor of international free trade. In the late 1700’s and 1800’s, Britain was the especially inclined towards promoting free trade across the globe. Not accidentally, so the United States has been since the early 1900’s.

This is not to say that free trade only benefits the more advanced economy. It benefits both.

Since Mexican workers can make t-shirts just as well as we can, we should focus more of our effort on building computers and conducting biomedical research—and, by all means, we should leave it to the Mexican workers to make the cheap t-shirts that fill our Wal-Mart shelves.

All said, free trade benefits the more advanced economy—by which I mean, the economy with the more productive workforce—more. That’s why Mexico’s economy is growing, but ours is growing faster.

Of course, many on the left have pronounced NAFTA a failure for the US economy. But didn’t most voters stop listening to them a long time ago? Thank goodness we live in a democracy, where we can choose between political parties. That darn choice thing gets in the way every time.

--

As originally designed, the American system was setup as a giant free trade zone. Each state was sovereign as to policy, but a federal government—or umbrella organization—existed so as to preserve competition between the states.

Under Article I, Section 8, of the US Constitution, Congress only had the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” The people who agreed to this phrasing thought that they were agreeing to a provision that would allow Congress to prevent trade wars, tariffs, and protectionist measures between the states. The people who signed on to this (and, I hasten to mention, it’s never been amended—at least by the formal amendment process), thought that it would only be used by the federal government to protect complete free trade between the states.

Again, the idea was to create as big a zone of free trade as possible. The people who signed off on the document never dreamed that the phrase “regulate Commerce…. Among the several States,” would someday (i.e. in 1937) be interpreted by activist federal judges to mean that Congress has the power to create a socialist state at the federal level.

I mean, if Social Security is such a damn brilliant idea, why not leave the federal government out of it and let individual states create such programs? If the “safety net” is so desirable, why not let people decide if they want to live in a Social Security state or a non-Social Security state? People and capital will flow to whichever system works best, right?

It didn’t happen because no state would create something like Social Security—because of competition from other states.

But now Social Security—as well as various other socialist programs that were originally prohibited by the US Constitution—are coming undone by threat of international competition.

The Federal Government was originally designed to protect free trade among the states. You could sign up with different “cell phone companies,” but the Federal Government was there to protect competition among the companies. The Federal Government has long ceased to do this—which is why Delaware took up the slack.

Most major corporations are incorporated in Delaware. Delaware corporate law is like the NAFTA or CAFTA of the United States.

It should be the Federal Government that does what Delaware does. In the 1930’s it was the “protectionists” (who wanted to prevent competition between the states) who destroyed the American system by creating nation-wide economic policies.

But, increasingly, it’s the original American system that’s getting the last laugh.

With every passing day, the entire world is coming to resemble the American system—at least the American system as it was originally designed. People, capital, talent, and commerce are flowing right across petty governmental borders and right to the places where they will be best put to use.

New York City might proclaim itself the “capitol of the world,” and it might still be at present, but it won’t be for long if its city government keeps behaving so irrationally. I mean, a 30 percent jump in the size of its workforce?

Terribly pithy

2005-08-09T14:03:00.000-05:00

I apologize for my low posting rate the past few days, but I am back in Memphis and will try to resume at least one a day. I was going to do a news round-up for my first day back, but all the interesting stuff people will probably have heard (like the Shuttle landing) and I couldn't find very much other stuff...
I'm not sure where Alan has run-off to. No doubt he is busy sleuthing new stories for "The Alan and Paul Show", perhaps traveling to North Korea or meeting with the newly elected President in Iran. Hopefully he'll update us soon.

My post for the day then, will be a response to a James Carroll piece from the Boston Globe on August 2. It's free registration, I recommend reading the whole article. James Carroll is an ex-Catholic priest (he's still Catholic, just not a priest) and has written several books, including "An American Requiem."

Here's the crux of the piece:

Truman's secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, knew more of the horrors of the bomb than any other senior figure, but he too downplayed its terrible character. ''This deliberate, premeditated destruction was our least abhorrent choice," he wrote later. He saluted the atomic bomb for putting an end to the firebombing of Japanese cities, as if that murderous operation were carried out by some other force than his own. ''Thank God for the atomic bomb," the critic and war veteran Paul Fussell wrote. Only an American consensus that the bomb was a good thing -- not terrible at all -- allowed the nation's succeeding generations to pour treasure and moral value into the nuclear abyss.

The bomb remains the source of transcendent political power, which is why other nations maneuver to obtain it, even now. Arriviste nuclear terrorists want to play with the fire that Washington not only lit, but keeps burning. The United States has yet to reckon with the evil forces it set loose 60 years ago, a refusal that keeps those forces rampant today.

Carroll gave a talk at my church in Boston when I lived there and was kind enough to stay and answer questions afterwards. I respected the answers he gave to his questions but found both his talk, his book and the most recent article extremely frustrating. Carroll is a master at presenting the small view. This is a particular kind of writing strategy where you set up a principle and discuss a case of how that principle was violated. He's a good writer, so it comes off as much more compelling than it should be. It's a manipulative style of writing because if you try to critique it, the author just points to "The Principle" again as the premise that the argument must rotate around. Let's see how it works:

In this article, "the Principle" is: nuclear war is bad. I'm not simplifying, that's really it. Carroll says "The men responsible insisted, in the face of shocking devastation, that the bombs were not so terrible." They have violated the principle! How can ANYONE say nuclear war is "not so terrible." To enter into discussion with Carroll he wants you to either outright say that nuclear war is a bad thing or a good thing, knowing that no one is comfortable saying "I LOVE nuclear war, I wish we had some more of it." And then he smugly declares victory, scolds us all and can sleep the sleep of the self-righteous.

The problem with all of this is the lack of context. Context is itself a tricky thing...if someone makes an argument without context they will claim to be forthright, honest, direct. They may also be simple-minded, closed-minded or foolish. Alternatively, embracing "context" can open the door to all kinds of relativism and the horrors that ensue. So I'm not for fundamentalism in one way or the other. When someone claims they have access to absolute truth and it can be summarized in a simple sentence like "nuclear war is bad", they are on the same page as the pure relativists who claim that there is no bad or good, right or wrong. Incidentally, both of them are reading from the same book as all fundamentalists, which historically has always led to violence (more on that later).

Carroll faults the logic that the atomic bombs stopped the fire bombing of all the Japanese cities. I assume he would also fault the logic that the atomic bombs prevented a land invasion that would have devastated both sides. Carroll claims he is not a pacifist, but all he offers in argument is pacifism. What would he have had us do? I'm not even arguing for one course or the other, I'm wondering what Carroll suggests the right course would have been? The only course I can see him supporting (and this seems to be the tendency of a lot of mainstream Protestant thought these days (which Carroll often fits in with)) is that we should have done nothing. Nothing is certainly what he proposes. In order to avoid a moral relativism and stick with his principle, he fails to mention, anywhere, ever that I've read, the horrors the Japanese empire inflicted on the Chinese, the MILLIONS raped and murdered and enslaved in the course of a few short years. Some reports place the final death toll far higher than the millions killed by Hitler. It would indeed be moral relativism to say "well, look what they did, anything we do is excusable" and so I do not suggest that. I do suggest though that we had to do SOMETHING. Please Mr. Carroll, if you are going to criticize offer some alternative. People were being murdered and suffering...offer something other than a negative response ("Well we shouldn't have...."). The murdered millions deserve more than that and with the hindsight of history you would think that for all the wrong things he's sure we did he might be able to come up with the right thing we could have done.

The same applies for Carroll's discussion of Iraq (in this article and in other places). Criticism of the administration is of course more than appropriate, but the better part of criticism is again the positive. I don't remember Carroll's scathing critiques of Hussein's rape rooms and his exploitation of the oil for food program to keep his people poor and desperate while building his network of palaces and torture chambers. But maybe Carroll did criticize Hussein then; if he did what would he have had us done? What would have been the RIGHT thing to do? What would anyone against the war have had us done? What should we do now? Pithy asides and scathing attacks are only worthwhile if they lead us to a more productive end. It's easy to point out where everyone is wrong...in fact Christianity has a few things to say about those people. It's a lot harder to know, or to do, what is right.