What is with this nut saying God talks to him?
Of course storms will hit the coast. They do every year.
I want him held to account, though, when no tsunami shows up.
Archive for May, 2006
The Cranky Insomniac responds to my response (over at the RCP blog) to his response to my hot-tub libertarians column.
Don’t try to follow all that.
Bottom line: He and I agree. Thus, we’re both reasonable. If he and I disagreed, well, one of us would be unreasonable. And I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be me.
You know, if they find Hoffa, what mysteries will be left? We already know who Deep Throat is.
I guess we still don’t know what the deal is with airplane peanuts. But it’s just not the same.
As a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family can be very testy about being accused of entering into partisan politics.
Naturally, their concern is only with "nurturing the family."
Thus, a letter-writing campaign to Congress:
Dear Ryan,
With the U.S. Senate expected to vote in early June on the Marriage Protection Amendment, the time is now to tell our friends and neighbors why it is vital that we preserve in the Constitution the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Nothing less than the foundation of our society is at stake.
One of the best ways to get out the word about the need to pass the MPA — not to mention one of the best ways to show your senators where constituents stand on the issue — is by writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. We’ve created a special tool that will allow you to compose your own letter in just a minute or two, using some talking points we’ve pulled together.
To create your letter, just click here to give our letter-writing wizard a whirl.
Please also take a moment to visit the CitizenLink Action Center to learn more about what you can do to defend the institution upon which societies have been built for thousands of years.
Blessings,
Gary Schneeberger
Editor
CitizenLink
To be clear: There’s nothing illegal about what Focus is doing here. And if you’re against gay marriage, then the content here makes sense, too. But to claim that the organization’s main purpose is ministering to families as opposed to pushing a Religious Right legislative agenda is more than a little silly.
For fun, take a spin on the letter-writing wizard. I wrote the letter below without ever having read it:
To the Editor:
For centuries now, in every civilized culture, marriage as the union of one man and one woman has been the building block of society. But it may not be true in America for long — unless Congress approves the Marriage Protection Amendment.
It’s important to note that those who support the amendment aren’t trying to deprive homosexuals of any of the legal protections they currently enjoy; gay marriage has never been a constitutional right in America. It is not ‘discriminatory’ to want the law to continue to provide for reasonable limitations on who can marry.
Why is the MPA so essential? Because without it, marriage is at the mercy of judicial activists bent on overriding the will of the people and the role of the legislative branch by creating homosexual marriage — and maybe even legalizing bigamy while they’re at it.
So don’t delay: Contact your senators today and urge them to support the Marriage Protection Amendment when they vote the first week in June.
The Senate must act next month, when a vote is scheduled, to pass such an amendment.
Sincerely,
Ryan Sager
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Now to mail this puppy off.
Fusionism, a quick definition: small government and virtue go together.
That’s the point of Arnold Kling’s column on how big-government encourages bad behavior and, in turn, the dissolution of the family.
Jane Galt, however, takes exception to the notion that, if we’re going to have a welfare state, churches and community groups couldn’t do better. Sounding more than a bit like Marvin Olasky, she argues that nagging and exerting social pressure on those accepting government benefits is at least a start down the road toward smaller government.
When conservatives are debating not how to hold the House and Senate, but why it would be a good thing for the Republican Party to lose both, you know you’ve entered a strange season.
And thus we have Mark Tapscott making a reasoned case for losing:
A far more likely outcome [than the Democrats gaining veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress] is Democrats in control but not quite able to
overcome a Bush veto that is aggressively threatened and mercilessly
delivered. Divided government would be the result. Let’s not forget
that during most of the 90s when the GOP had similarly slim majorities
that forced Bill Clinton to accept things like welfare reform, spending
increased at a dramatically lower rate than has been the case under
Bush and the GOP since 2001.But there is another factor here
and that is the effect on the Moonbat elements of the Democrats of
being out of power for more than a decade but finding themselves
hamstrung by the continued presence of the hated Bush (finally!) using
his veto pen in the White House.There would be lots of talk
about insanities like impeachment, congressional investigations,
repealing the Bush tax cuts and the like. But the lack of actual
results would drive the Moonbats into venegeful desperation and a
general revulsion among independent and conservative voters, with a
bloody and perhaps permanently crippling splintering of the Democrats
to follow.It would in short be the perfect setup for a
stengthened conservative majority to return in Congress in 2008, most
likely with a White House occupant wise enough to recognize that the
"emerging Republican(i.e conservative) majority" had become a reality.
It’s not at all an unreasonable case, certainly not in the face of how united GOP government has functioned.
Yet, it does go straight to the defining question for conservatism today: Can it be a "governing philosophy," as some at the Weekly Standard might ask, with an affirmative agenda? Or is it best in opposition, reining in the excesses of liberals?
Would it be so bad if the answer were the latter?
UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan takes note. Conservatives want to lose this election.
I take on all comers over at the RCP blog, on the topic of hot-tub libertarians.
In the wake of my second RealClearPolitics column, here’s my second batch of letters to the editor. Once again, it’s an engaged bunch of readers over at RCP. Some interesting stuff.
Generally, as I said in the column, libertarians are disaffected with both parties (no surprise) and not optimistic about exerting any political influence whatsoever. Most also seem pretty disgusted with third-party politics — as well they should be.
[All letters reprinted on this blog will be with the permission of the author, and email addresses will always be omitted. There will be no editing of the letters, save any obvious misspellings flagged by my spell-checker.]
If I were the pet’s guardian, I would just bump it off. Of course, that’s why no one’s named me their pet’s guardian.
Over at TKS, Jim Geraghty (why on earth does National Review have so many blogs?) argues essentially that it can never make sense for conservatives to vote against the Republican Party. He does this, in part, by pointing out that the Democrats who would win the House and Senate in 2006 would have lower "conservative" ratings from the American Conservative Union than the Republicans they would defeat.
‘Tis true.
But under this logic, how would a disaffected coalition member within either of the major parties ever express their displeasure with a given nominee or incumbent? It’s true that in one particular election, conservatives staying home could result in the election of a liberal Democrat. But the idea is to make sure that the GOP doesn’t put forward too many insufficiently conservative candidates. Sure, it would be better to win these fights in the primaries, but, yes, sometimes parties have to be "taught a lesson." Nominate someone acceptable to us, or else.
As for whether Republicans could win the House or Senate back in 2008 after having been taught a lesson by their base in 2006 — well, I suspect many conservatives don’t give a rat’s ass. I know I don’t. So long as we don’t have a Democratic supermajority, I’m happy to see utter gridlock reign.
It worked in the ’90s.
UPDATE: Geraghty makes some solid point in this follow-up post.
Donate to people you like, expect politicians to be mixed bags and get involved early in the 2008 GOP primary. All fair enough. But there’s still no reason staying home shouldn’t be a part of the annoyed conservative’s arsenal.
Hot-Tub Libertarians
Published by May 16th, 2006 in Misc. Self Promotion and Misc. Elephantitis. 1 CommentMy column over at RCP today is about libertarians’ relationship with the Republican Party. I start out by noting that libertarians largely stuck by Bush in 2004, despite, well, everything:
That’s no way for an organized voting bloc to behave. If no amount
of sticking yor finger in a constituency’s eye will make them vote
against you, you’re going to poke through until you hit brain. But, of
course, no one ever said that libertarians were organized — or that,
when it comes to politics, they have much in the way of brains.But what if they did? How powerful a voting bloc could they be?
The quick and dirty answer is somewhere between 9 percent and 20 percent of the American electorate. Not the largest voting bloc, but one that — were it organized — should be hard to ignore.
I write this afternoon from the airport in Charleston, S.C., where I have just become engaged to this lovely young woman (in Charleston, not in the airport):
(pictured here on the phone with my mother Friday night, right after it happened)
I’m not sure how many proposals have started out: "Well, I guess you can see where this is going…"
But add one more to the list.
UPDATE: After the jump, read the NY Sun’s gossip item.
Yes, you have nothing to fear unless you’ve done something wrong.
Unless, of course, that is, you are a journalist writing a negative story about the Bush administration that relies on anonymous sources.
And, of course, I’m very sure conservatives would be quite this blase if the current president had the surname Clinton as opposed to Bush.
UPDATE: These aren’t words I use lightly (or often), but Josh Marshall could hardly be more right.
I’ll be away from today to Monday, so expect light, if any, posting.
Have a nice weekend.
McCain: Chicken or Egg
Published by May 12th, 2006 in Misc. Self Promotion and Misc. Elephantitis. 0 CommentsMy column in the Post today is about John McCain’s visit tomorrow to Liberty University:
No one would call Sen. John McCain a chicken (or an
egg for that matter). But in addressing the graduating class at Jerry
Falwell’s Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., this Saturday, he may
well end up solving the greatest poultry-related mystery of all time:
Which came first?McCain’s chicken-and-egg dilemma for the last couple of years, as
he’s prepared for a 2008 run for the presidency, has been this: The
Religious Right won’t get behind him unless his candidacy starts to
look inevitable - but his candidacy won’t start to look inevitable
unless the Religious Right gets behind him.Yet, somehow, a rapprochement seems to be underway.
And the rapprochement makes perfect sense on both sides.
I reply to Mickey Kaus’s reply to my immigration column here, over at the RCP Blog.
I’m not sure why Ramesh feels moved to defend John McCain’s statements on the First Amendment, but over at The Corner, he writes this:
McCAIN AND FREE SPEECH [Ramesh Ponnuru]
Some conservatives are criticizing the senator for saying, on the Imus show two weeks ago, "I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government." I’m no fan of McCain’s campaign-finance regulations, or of his vote several years ago for a constitutional amendment to modify the First Amendment to facilitate such regulations, or his remark a few years ago that he would outlaw negative ads if he could find a constitutional way to do it. And that past colors our reception of this latest quote, as it should. But considered by itself, it doesn’t seem quite so outrageous as it is being described. Presumably the reference to "quote First Amendment rights" was meant to suggest that McCain doesn’t believe that his preferred political reforms implicate real First Amendment rights. He wasn’t expressing disdain for the First Amendment as he understands it, but disagreement about what the First Amendment means. Conservatives (especially in the past) have often advanced narrower readings of the First Amendment’s speech protection than liberals, and would have been annoyed by the charge that they were therefore against the First Amendment.
Ramesh is certainly right to flag McCain’s use of the phrase "quote First Amendment rights." But did many people mistake McCain’s meaning the first time around? The fact that McCain doesn’t consider political speech a core First Amendment right is the nut of the whole problem.
Of course McCain respects the First Amendment as he understands it (whatever the hell it is he thinks it protects). But the fact that the senator doesn’t understand one of the most basic principles of our constitutional order — and seemingly fails to do so because he’s blinded by the perceived rightness of his own views on money and politics — is central to why he should probably never be president.
Take a spin over to www.just6dollars.org for discussion of one of the worst perennial ideas in American politics: full public financing of campaigns.
It’s what we have in New York City. And by God are our elections clean! Squeaky!
Yep! No problems here!
Here’s a fascinating piece on illegal immigration from Reason Contributing Editor and San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carolyn Lochhead. Essentially, she argues, making it harder to cross the border has made more Mexican families decide to stay permanently:
Many experts believe that the current pattern of illegal immigration from
Mexico and Central America was a consequence of the 1986 law’s border
tightening – followed by a tougher crackdown in 1996 that built fences in
San Diego and El Paso."The perverse effect has been to dramatically lower return migration out
of the country," said Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton University sociologist and
co-director of the Mexican Migration Project, a longitudinal survey of more
than 18,000 migrants, the largest of its kind. "So we’ve transformed what was
before 1986 a circular flow of workers into an increasingly settled population
of families. We have actually accelerated the rate of undocumented population
growth in the United States and shifted it from a relatively less costly
population of male workers into a much more costly population of families."The problem, he said, is that by making border crossing "very risky and
unpleasant and increasingly expensive, you prolong the length of the trips, you
reduce the probability of return migration, and you make it more likely that
migrants … just hunker down and stay."The rate of migration from Mexico has actually stayed constant for the
last two decades, Massey found. But the rate of return has fallen by half, from
50 percent to 25 percent.
This makes a lot of sense. Now, making the border completely permeable isn’t much of a solution to this problem — a nation should have control of its borders (though probably not build a wall around itself). But expanding legal immigration and instituting a generous guest-worker program does seem like a pretty reasonable way to let labor flow freely while putting less strain on government services.
This should even be appealing to people worried about the "cultural" impact of so many new immigrants. Plenty of Mexicans, it would seem, would prefer to stay in their own country (unsurprisingly — few people are eager to leave their homeland permanently).
(via Hit & Run)
Toward the end of Frum’s post, he turns to some of my arguments from the other day:
Let me turn last to Ryan Sager’s interesting external commentary. I
focus on the 1990s as the key moment not to excuse President Bush, but
because they really were a unique opportunity.The important
thing to understand about the growth of government is how automatic it
is. The earmarks and pork against which people like Sen. McCain rail
are genuinely obnoxious, but we could eliminate them all tomorrow
without making more than a very small difference to the government
spending trend line. That trend line is powered by promises made to
America’s retirees over the past four decades. Altering the trend
requires bold and imaginative reforms to the way America provides
pensions and health care. It’s not a matter of cutting and trimming;
much less of refraining from new appropriations. To slow the growth of
government, Americans need to reinvent Social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other hugely popular,
hugely complex programs.
Frum’s definitely right here. Not about the 1990s having been a unique opportunity (that’s another discussion), but about pork being relatively unimportant. I’m anti-pork, but I realize it’s a rhetorical battle more than a substantive one. Pork can get the public riled up against wasteful government. It’s easy to understand. But it matters not a whit when it comes to government spending as a portion of GDP.
Frum then goes on to say this:
Unfortunately, the legislative process can only cope with so much
boldness and imagination at any one time. After 9/11, foreign policy
and defense were bound to dominate the national agenda and the
presidential and congressional calendar.Ryan’s claim, “While
9/11 of course pulled focus away from the domestic agenda, if anything
that should have helped the Republicans get things done,” strikes me as
unrealistic in the extreme. Even Franklin Roosevelt, the most powerful
president in American history, jettisoned his domestic program after
Pearl Harbor. It was gutsy in the extreme for George W. Bush to try
both to wage war in Iraq and also reform Social Security at home. If he
failed on that latter point, it surely was not for lack of trying.
Would he have done better had he added Medicare to his to-do list? I
doubt it.
Yes, the Bush administration has overwhelmed our political system with its boldness and imagination.
Why is it that any discussion of domestic policy during the Bush presidency unfailingly comes back to 9/11? Bush’s domestic policy was already well on its way down the wrong path before 9/11. While 9/11 changed our foreign policy and security situation tremendously, I’ve never seen any convincing analysis that it derailed some major effort by Bush to remake the New Deal in his own image.
We hear about an Ownership Society sometimes, but the first Ownership Society-style program was … NCLB, which got underway legislatively well before 9/11. The law has proved an unmitigated disaster, doing nothing to give parents more choice or ownership when it comes to their children’s education and vastly increasing what the federal government spends on a wasteful federal bureaucracy.
Likewise, I’m not so sure the Medicare prescription-drug bill can be blamed on 9/11, either. I don’t think anyone in this discussion sees that bill as anything but a corporate giveaway, a senior-citizen bribe and a missed opportunity. Was there so much waste and so little reform in that bill because 9/11 was dominating the national agenda? Or because Bush’s team is politically craven?
I give Bush enormous credit for pushing Social Security privatization, the one area where I believe he truly believes in free-market reform. But, again, I think it’s more than a stretch to say 9/11 or Iraq had the first thing to do with the Social Security pitch falling apart. I seem to remember something about a third rail…
I’m not saying that I have the answers to the political puzzles the Bush administration has faced. But I do know, from observing this administration, that it doesn’t seem to have even a passing interest in solving the great majority of them itself.
The first step down the road to trying to bring about small-government reforms is finding political leadership that shares that goal. Bush, though he portrayed himself as sympathetic to small government in 2000, is a big-government conservative.
The question for Republicans going forward is this: Is big-government conservatism workable? Is it conservative? Or is it an oxymoron?
The Bush administration, in my opinion, has proved it the latter.
The answer to every question about Bush’s domestic policy is not, "9/11." The sooner we examine his failures on their own terms, the sooner we can start to get to the bottom of why his presidency has been such a failure.
The conversation heats up today at Cato Unbound. Before turning to the more overarching arguments, let me latch on to one somewhat astounding thing Frum buries in the middle of his post (emphasis added):
More generally, the libertarian project of fusing together limited
government on the one hand and open borders, drug legalization, and gay
rights on the other seems to me to be hopelessly intellectually
incoherent. Importing millions of poor people, making dangerous
addictive substances even more readily available than they are today,
and smashing up the traditional family are all bound (as I argued in Dead Right and as Douthat and Salam pungently reaffirm here) to create more need for the services government provides.
First of all, libertarianism (or classical liberalism) is nothing if not coherent. It may not be one’s favored philosophy, but it will be damned if it’s not coherent.
But, more importantly, just how is support for gay rights equivalent to "smashing up the traditional family"? Now, I know social conservatives spout this kind of nonsense all the time, but at least it’s usually couched as "undermining" the traditional family or "weakening" the traditional family — you know, vaguely supportable claims. You show me where gay rights or gay marriage destroys straight people’s families.
Perhaps Frum’s word choice was careless. Or perhaps the line between individual liberty and coercion is that fuzzy to some people.
It turns out comatose patients are often inaccurately portrayed in movies and television.
At least they don’t complain about it. Like some other groups.
Ahem. Albinos.
(via GeekPress)
Fantastic book blurb:
“Although, as a socialist, I find it difficult to accept that roads
should be privatized, as a transport professional I believe that Street Smart is essential reading for those of us struggling with the problems of efficient transportation.”
—Dave Wetzel, Vice Chair, Transport for London
(via Yglesias)
School-choice supporters need to be watching Newark, where a vocally pro-voucher mayor was just elected (along with some of his favored Municipal Council candidates): Cory Booker.
As followers of the changing politics of school-choice might guess, Booker is an African-American Democrat. His main opposition in the election came from — wait, you can get this one, too — the Newark teachers union. Still, he won by a margin of 3-to-1 over the union’s favored candidate, Ronald Rice (great name).
For a further (worrying?) indication of where school-choice politics may or may not be heading, check out this, from Reason’s David Weigel (emphasis added):
The slate’s central ward candidate, Dana Rone, is probably its most vocal advocate of school choice.
…
"Vouchers have been pegged as something negative in the African-American community," Rone says. "When I explain them to people who are skeptical, I say: Look, you get vouchers. Medicare is a voucher. Social Security is a voucher. Welfare is a voucher. This is the same principle; it’s the equalizer that can get your kids into good schools. And when you explain it like that, they understand and they support it."
While support for school vouchers on this basis is better than the alternative (opposition to school choice), it’s also probably not exactly what school reformers are going for. Welfare, Social Security and Medicare are all programs where recipients are essentially passive clients. School choice — both charter schools and vouchers — is about making parents into active, informed consumers.
This will be one to watch. For now, we’ll have to wait until June 13 (runoff election) to see if the school-choice proponents in Newark have a solid majority or an even split with anti-reform candidates.
What was that Amendment? Oh yeah, the First.
Published by May 10th, 2006 in Misc. Miscellany. 4 CommentsLooking over some recent articles for a column, I found something just delightful.
You may have caught Jerry Falwell’s op-ed in the Sunday Times, explaining how his invitation of John McCain to speak at Liberty University this Saturday is not any kind of endorsement (while calling the senator “one of America’s most profound heroes” and “the kind of conservative candidate whom I would have little trouble supporting”).
What I just caught is this charming (really, no sarcasm) barb:
Who better to challenge and inspire a graduating class than a speaker who has served his country as a soldier and a statesman? Who better to remind us that sometimes deep sacrifices for our country are necessary to protect the freedoms — like freedom of speech — that we all enjoy?
Yes, freedom of speech is quite important. Even if the senator doesn’t think so.
Falwell may be working on forgiveness. But he wants McCain to remember that he won’t forget.
Related to Boaz’s entry at Cato Unbound, readers should check out this Jonathan Rauch article, from the Atlantic (also available free to non-subscribers).
In it, Rauch relates some work done by another Cato-ite, William Niskanen. One excuse for running up the deficit during GOP administrations is that it restrains spending. But Niskanen finds that tax cuts actually correlate with spending increases. One possibility is that tax cuts reduce the perceived cost of increasing spending (the public doesn’t "feel" deficits for a long time); and when the perceived cost of something goes down (e.g. government spending) you typically do more of it (e.g. George W. Bush and the GOP Congressettes).
Dan Drezner, however, points out that the theory of Starve the Beast actually says that spending will eventually be forced down, preferably when a Democrat has to do the cutting. He argues Niskanen should look at what happens after, say, a five-year lag.
Interesting questions. I don’t pretend to have the answers. Has anyone seen any more data on this?
David Boaz chimes in at Cato Unbound:
Republicans used to accuse Democrats of setting up a nanny state,
one that would regulate every nook and cranny of our lives. They took
control of Congress in 1994 by declaring that Democrats had given us
“government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the
public’s money.” After 10 years in power, however, the Republicans have
seen the Democrats’ intrusiveness and raised them.So from
the Republicans we get federal money for churches; and congressional
investigations into textbook pricing, the college football bowl system,
the firing of Terrell Owens, video games, the television rating system,
you name it; and huge new fines for indecency on television; and
crackdowns on medical marijuana and steroids and ephedra; and federal
intervention in the sad case of Terri Schiavo; and the No Child Left
Behind Act; and federal subsidies for marriage; and (for less favored
constituencies) a constitutional amendment to override the marriage
laws of the 50 states.
That’s a pretty good summing up of the change we’ve seen between 1994 and 2006 (or, really, 1994 and 1998).
Boaz then takes solace in a host of numbers (emphasis added):
The good news is that lots of Americans don’t like big spending and
nanny statism. In the most recent poll that asked the question, 64
percent of voters said that they prefer smaller government with fewer
services and lower taxes, while only 22 percent would rather see a more
active government with more services and higher taxes. Sure, people may
give this answer to a theoretical question and rather different answers
to questions about specific kinds of spending—but then, those polls
never attach the tax bill to the spending proposal.Ronald
Reagan won two landslide elections on a limited-government platform.
Bush has twice squeaked through with his big-government conservatism.Gallup
polls have consistently found that 20 percent of Americans are neither
liberal nor conservative but libertarian, opposing the use of
government either to "promote traditional values" or to "do too many
things that should be left to individuals and businesses." That’s only
slightly below the percentages for liberals and conservatives. (Some
want government to do it all, and some don’t offer classifiable
responses.)According to the 2004 exit poll, 17 million people
voted for John Kerry but did not think the government should do more to
solve the country’s problems. And 28 million Bush voters support either
gay marriage or civil unions. That’s 45 million who don’t fit the
red-blue model. They seem to have broadly libertarian attitudes.
The problem with many of these factoids, of course (as Boaz acknowledges), is that they don’t represent the reality of how issues are actually presented to voters.
Let’s put this simply: Voters are dumb.
They want lots of services and low taxes. They want cheap socks, but they want Wal-Mart to pay its employees a "living wage." They want to eat lots of ice cream but never get fat.
Right now, Republicans are offering them exactly what they want: more services and less taxes. Is it sustainable? Of course not. But that won’t be George W.’s problem when it all comes crashing down.
UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan comments here.
JPod’s new book is out today: "Can She Be Stopped?: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless . . ."
Ominous title.
Recent Comments