Palin Withdrawal - Attacking Backmann

The Washington Post crew took a pledge that they would not mention Sarah Palin until March. Writing a "Post Partisan" column, Johnathan Capehart bends the rules by referring to Palin without naming her. But he has to kick some conservative woman so he moved on to Michele Bachmann and her "amazing view of history". He takes issue with this quote:

I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly -- men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.

There is nothing factually wrong with this statement. If you look up Wikipedia's entry for John Quincy Adams you find that he was a life-long opponent of slavery. He was also the attorney successfully representing the prisoners of the slave ship the Amistad in their suit to be freed instead of sold as slaves. What could Capehart possibly find to argue with? A lot as it turns out.

Talking Points Memo corrected Bachmann's history lesson by pointing out that Adams wasn't one of the founders and that he died 15 years before the Emancipation Proclamation. Perhaps she was thinking of John Adams, the second president of the United States, who is different from John Quincy Adams, the new nation's sixth president. And let's just forget about that whole three-fifths compromise thing in Article 1, Section 2, paragraph 3 of the Constitution that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of figuring out how many representatives would be apportioned to each state.

This is a confused mess. Yes, Adams died before the Emancipation Proclamation. So what? Bachmann did not say that Adams ended slavery, only that he opposed it.

Bachman used the term "forbearers" which is a gender neutral version of "forefathers" - the people who came before us. It does not mean "founders". Capehart pulled a rhetorical trick and substituted "founders" for "forbearers". That let him claim that she meant John Adams instead of his son, John Quincy Adams. John Adams was no fan of slavery but his son was the stronger voice on the subject. There is nothing in the quote he provided to indicate that she confused the two. He did that himself and hoped that we would not notice.

John Adams was party to the 3/5s compromise which proves absolutely nothing in this context. The compromise was instituted to limit the number of congressional seats that the slave states would have (i.e. it was an anti-slavery measure). Regardless, Bachmann was talking about John Quincy Adams who was a Boston lawyer during the Constitutional Convention.

So, Bachmann made a factual statement but Capehart deliberately misstated it in order to characterize her as an idiot. Amazing what a little Palin withdrawal will drive you to do.

Obama at Two Years

President Obama passed the half-way mark of his first(?) term last week. When he took office two years ago we was a largely unknown quantity. He had gone from state senator to President in an amazing four years. He deliberately left his views a blank slate. He was a scary figure to conservatives. He had an extremely liberal voting record, identified himself as being a progressive instead of a liberal, and had made frequent use of communist and fascist symbolism during his campaign. His supporters saw him as everything from a pragmatic moderate to the second coming of FDR.

Two years in we are still getting a handle on exactly who Obama is and what he believes. Part of this is because he takes a hands-off approach to polices that do not interest him. Unfortunately, these include Defense and the economy. Other things that we know are that he has trouble minding his tongue, a problem he shares with his vice-president. Several times Obama has made off-the-cuff remarks that caused him problems. The most recent was in December when he called the Republicans "hostage takers", transforming what should have been a triumph into a defeat. We also know that he hates Washington DC. He takes every opportunity to leave it, something he manages to do once or twice a week.

I'm going to start at the outside and work my in on the President's interests. Ironically, the one he has shown the least interest in is what made him President - Bush's War on Terror. Obama ran against the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, and nearly every other aspect of Bush's policies. The fact that Clinton and Edwards had voted in favor of the Iraq invasion gave Obama his first real break in the primaries. He promised to pull the troops out of Iraq within months of taking office. Guantanamo would be closed and its inmates would be tried in civilian courts. Once in office, Obama did an about face. He retained Bush's team and continued nearly all of his policies. It helped that, by that point, Bush had essentially won Iraq so any major changes by Obama risked turning victory into defeat. In Afghanistan, Obama's only consideration was balancing the needs of the military against his own party. The result of all this was been a vindication for the Republicans and a disappointment for the anti-war activists.

Obama has shown an amazing disinterest in the economy. Immediately after taking office he allowed Congress to write an unfocused, pork-laden "stimulus" bill. As soon as it passed he lost interest in actually helping the economy (although he keeps trying to take credit for any improvements). The actual running of the economy was passed to a couple of Wall Street insiders, Summers and Geithner. In the last few weeks Obama has shown interest in the economy but this came months later than it should have. Had he started concentrating on the economy in the Summer of 2009 instead of January 2011 the Democrats would have done better in the 2010 election. Obama has taken credit for saving the economy by passing the stimulus but economic indicators show that the recession officially ended early in the Summer of 2009, before any significant stimulus had been spent. Obama has also been deaf to complaints that his pet projects will hurt the economy.

Health care reform (or more accurately, health insurance reform) is a subject that Obama was interested in although, as with the stimulus, he allowed Congress to handle the messy details of actually deciding what was in the bill. His main input was to tell Congress what would not be included - tort reform and prescription drugs. While he applied pressure to keep the legislation moving, Nancy Pelosi deserves most of the credit (blame?) for actually getting the bill passed.

Obama's relationship with business is complex. In some areas he outright objects to private industry. When he took office student loans were split with half issued directly by the federal government and half through private institutions who made a profit on the transaction. Obama objected to anyone making a profit from student loans and eliminated the private role. He is not against profit in other areas as long as it is controlled. The health care bill shows Obama's preferences. Insurance companies are being transformed into the equivalent of utility companies. The amount of income that they are allowed to make a profit on is strictly controlled but, with nearly everyone required to carry insurance, profits are guaranteed. What is more, the insurance pools will eliminate the need to compete with other insurance companies. They all get a slice of the pie. This is in keeping with FDR's preferred way of dealing with business.

The environment is one of Obama's real passions. He talks about green energy a lot and has backed this up with billions of subsidies to advance it. His administration bypassed Congress on fleet millage standards and on CO2 emissions by power plants. Instead the Obama EPA has accomplished his goals by fiat. He has also obstructed off-shore oil drilling. His administration has been caught altering studies in order to justify this.

Obama is also passionate about nuclear disarmament. He has actively pursued this and negotiated a new START treaty with Russia. His success is mixed since both North Korea and Iran are still pursuing nuclear weapons.

Will Obama be reelected? This depends on a variety of factors. The biggest is the economy. Presidents tend to lose reelection when the economy is bad. Right now unemployment is higher than when Obama took office and is unlikely to drop much in the next two years. The President's economic team has been trying to fight unemployment by injecting money into the economy. This risks starting ruinous inflation. So far that has not happened but there are inflationary signs. Food and energy prices are up. Raw materials are getting more expensive. The threat of inflation in 2008 and a corresponding rise in interest rates is what brought on the collapse of the housing bubble. A new bout of inflation could end what little recovery we have. High inflation and unemployment led to Jimmy Carter's defeat in 1980. If these trends continue then Obama will be vulnerable in 2012.

2010 Was Warm, Should We Care?

2010 is in a 3-way tie for hottest year on record but there is no panic in the streets. Why?

First, it was only tied with 2003 and 1998. That suggests that warming has plateaued.

Second, if you were paying attention then you know that there was a major el Nino event going on during most of the year. This reversed the cooling of the preceding years. It would be amazing if it was not officially a warm year. Late last Fall the el Nino event ended and a strong la Nina began. I expect to see world temperature for 2011 drop because of this. If it does not then I will start to worry. Otherwise we are seeing normal climate variation.

But the biggest reason that people do not seem to care is the track record of the predictors. It is not enough to cry "global warming". There are three related questions that have to be answered.

1) How much warming are talking about? There is a big difference between one and ten degrees per century. Temperature increases seem to have slowed over the last 10-12 years.

2) How much of it is a natural cycle and how much is caused by humans? We are still fighting about this one.

3) How will it affect us? Global warming believers keep insisting that warming will be terrible. Back around the year 2000 they were predicting that people in England and Washington DC would never see snow by 2010. The oceans were supposed to have risen several feet. Crops were supposed to fail but poison ivy and other pests were supposed to be thriving. All manner of ills were supposed to have happened by now.

The warmists overplayed their hand. People were not taking them seriously enough so they stepped up the rhetoric. Nothing good could come from global warming. Phrases like "save the planet" became common. But here we are, years later, and the world is not much different. In fact, winters have gotten harsher, returning to the type of winter we had in decades ago.

Some (Hopefully) Final Thoughts on the Giffords Shooting

Ten days ago very few people outside of her congressional district had heard of Gabriella Giffords. Now we get daily updates on her condition. She is the latest example of people who became heroes by virtue of being a victim. I have yet to hear anything about her career in Congress. I know that she was a moderate "Blue Dog Democrat" and that she voted with President Bush on at least one important vote but not much else. How about telling us something about her?

The news that we get is exaggerating her condition. There is talk of her going home soon. Yesterday the big news was that she gave her husband a neck massage. If you actually pay attention to what the doctors are saying then the message is completely different. Giffords suffered an injury to her brain and the doctors have been so busy saving her life that they have not spent any time assessing her mental condition. They do not know if she is expressing affection for her beloved husband or if these are random movements. The same thing happened with her husband's wedding ring. She took it off his hand and tried it on different fingers. He interpreted this as her trying to say something about their marriage. Unfortunately it sounds more like a child playing with a shiny object. By glossing over this, the news media is setting the nation up for additional trauma if it turns out that her faculties are affected. To date, no one has talked about possible loss of motor function. At best, Giffords faces years of rehabilitation.

The press focused on Giffords and three of the victims. We know a great deal about the child who was killed and a little bit about the intern and the judge. Next to nothing has been said about the final three, all seniors. Less than nothing was said about the other survivors.

Giffords's husband, Mark Kelly, has said that he would meet with Jared Loughner's parents and tell then that the shooting wasn't their fault. This is the same person who blamed the shooting on inflammatory rhetoric. Has he cooled off or does he still blame the Tea Party?

Despite it being clear that Loughner was not motivated by any heated rhetoric from either side. Regardless, most news accounts about Congress are still covering the rhetoric angle.

It is also clear that any speculation that Sarah Palin inspired the shooting was irresponsible. Even the New York Time admitted that their coverage was over the top. That did not stop pundits from saying that Palin should not have defended herself. In one example, Euegene Robinson justified publishing the Palin-shooting tie because Giffords herself had speculated that such a thing would happen.

In the days since, we have learned that the alleged gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, appears to be an unbalanced young man whose political views are confused and perhaps irrelevant. But at the time, nothing was known about the assailant or his motives. I am confident that at least one of Palin's professors must have taught her that in reporting about a shooting, the fact that the principal target felt threatened is highly relevant information, as is the specific nature of that threat.

In fact, within hours of the shooting information came out that made the Palin tie-in seem dubious. By the time the flood of "Palin did it" columns hit the stands Monday morning we knew that Loughner was either apolitical or loony-left. I suspect that Palin's professors had some warnings about writing a story before the facts were in. I would bet money that journalism professors never advise their students to completely ignore the facts. A column that Robinson wrote the Tuesday after the shooting shows that he was still in complete denial. It begins: We may not be sure that the bloodbath in Tucson had anything to do with politics.

While people wasted time looking for a political motive, the press seems to have missed the obvious - Loughner's attack most resembles a school shooting. In fact, some of his class-mates say that they worried that he would become a school shooter. This is bad news for the nation in general and the political class in specific. A well-publicized school shooting often leads to copy-cat crimes. I worry that other crazies will start shooting politicians.

There seems to be a push-back from mental health advocates. I have seen three different columns saying that we should not blame the shooting on mental illness. I would like to know why not? If Loughner's delusions drove him to shoot twenty people, killing six, then we should be investigating his delusions. Only a few delusional people become violent. How can we spot the right ones in time? This is not a case of the mental health profession failing Loughner. They were never involved. Why not?

At the same time, we have to be careful of civil liberties. It would be all too easy to rush laws into place to deal with the Tucson shooting only to have them used to silence political dissent.

One final thought - usually a shooter like Loughner dies before he can be questioned. That leaves the country wondering why he did it. Apparently capturing the murderer does not help. Nothing has been made public from either Loughner nor the Fort Hood shooter.

Turning a Tragedy into a Political Event

Almost as soon as the press reported that a member of the House of Representatives had been killed in Arizona, an unnamed high-level Democrat was quoted as saying it would be good for them if they could pin it on the right-wing. By the time the press clarified that Giffords had been shot but was not dead, the first of these attacks were out. Paul Krugman led the pack speculating that the attack was almost certainly political - self fulfilling prophecy since he turned an attack by an apolitical loner into a political event. He followed up on Monday writing about how the "Republican eliminationists" had created a hostile environment that led to the attack. (I'll come back to the word eliminationists later). Virtually all of the liberal columnists joined in calling for the Republicans in general and the Tea Party to tone down their rhetoric and singling out Sarah Palin's use of the phrase "Don't retreat, reload" and a map showing Democrats she was targeting for defeat.

All of this is very offensive. Nothing has emerged to link the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, with Palin. To the contrary, friends say that he did not pay attention to politics and had a grudge against her going back to 2007. Palin has not used language any more inflamatory than any other politician. Even President Obama has made statements about "if they to the fight we bring a gun" and "punishing your enemies". At the same time, no one prominent has outright urged the assassination of a politician since Craig Kilbourne superimposed the words "Snipers wanted" over a picture of President George W. Bush.

So we have the liberals telling the conservatives to clean up their act while ignoring their own excesses. (That word eliminationist is interesting in this context but more on that later.) The left used a tragedy to re-enforce a message that they have been peddling for two years, that the right is violent and needs to be feared. Michelle Malkin documents how often baseless accusations of right-wing violence have been made over the last two years.

On Wednesday Sarah Palin finally pushed back against the accusations. This became its own political mini-event. She called the accusations a blood libel. She probably picked up the term from a column that Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, wrote for the Wall Street Journal. No one cared when Reynolds used it but soon after Palin used it, some Jews complained that the word exclusively refers to medieval anti-Semitic propaganda (The belief was that the only way to enter heaven is through the blood of Christ. Since Jews cannot take communion, they substituted the bodies of Christians, killing Christian children and grinding them into matzo bread.) If you look up "blood libel" in Wikipedia, the entry deals exclusively with slanders against Jews. If you check the history of the entry you will find that a section was added on modern use of the term for other subjects than Jews. This was quickly deleted giving the impression that Palin was the first to use it this way and made a horrible blunder. If you search around you find that people including Jews have been using the term for other subjects at least since 2007.

Here is a good time to discuss Krugman's use of Eliminationist in context. The term was created around 1997 in reference to Hitler and the Holocaust. Linking this term with the Republicans is Krugman's subtle way of calling them fascists. No one has called him on that.

The original tragedy was used to discredit the right in general and Sarah Palin in specific. Palin's push-back was used to try to discredit her further. That set the stage for the, hopefully, final act - the memorial service.

Usually a memorial service is a dignified affair. Not this one. It turned into the opening act of Obama's 2012 reelection campaign. 30,000 students attended. They cheered the President. They booed the (Republican) governor. 10,000 of them got free T-shirts.

During his speech, Obama announced that Giffords opened her eyes for the first time since the shooting when he visited her, thus making the memorial all about him instead of the dead. (Actually she opened her eye during a visit by three congressmen just before Obama's visit. He only learned about it from her husband but his speech gives the impression that he had witnessed this personally).

The reviews of Obama's speech made it clear that the pundits took it as a campaign speech.

Other silliness has been added to the tragedy. Lawmakers often want to be seen doing something, no matter how useless. Suggestions include outlawing high-capacity magazines (A friend who has used one says that they make reloading much slower and harder. Loughner was stopped while changing clips. The Fort Hood shooter used ten-round clips and fired more shots.), making it illegal to carry a gun within 1,000 feet of a politician (how many suicidal killers are expected to follow this law?) and making it illegal to place a target on a map relating to a politician.

By treating a tragedy as an opportunity, the left has made ant sort of cooperation that much harder.

The Tucson Shootings, round two

The worst thing about the tragedy in Tucson is the rush to use it for political ends. The first round of this was the immediate and baseless charge that Rep. Giffords was attacked because Sarah Palin had "targeted" her. This was nothing more than a cynical attempt to neutralize Palin. Within hours reports came out that the accused shooter, Jared Loughner, was a crazy pot-head rather than a dedicated Tea Party member.

On to round two. Writing in Slate, Jacob Weisberg tries to blame the Tea Party for creating an atmosphere of hate.

It is appropriate, however, to consider what was swirling outside Loughner's head. To call his crime an attempted assassination is to acknowledge that it appears to have had a political and not merely a personal context. That context wasn't Islamic radicalism, Puerto Rican independence, or anarcho-syndicalism. It was the anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic populism that flourishes in the dry and angry climate of Arizona. Extremist shouters didn't program Loughner, in some mechanistic way, to shoot Gabrielle Giffords. But the Tea Party movement did make it appreciably more likely that a disturbed person like Loughner would react, would be able to react, and would not be prevented from reacting, in the crazy way he did.

At the core of the far right's culpability is its ongoing attack on the legitimacy of U.S. government—a venomous campaign not so different from the backdrop to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Then it was focused on "government bureaucrats" and the ATF. This time it has been more about Obama's birth certificate and health care reform. In either case, it expresses the dangerous idea that the federal government lacks valid authority. It is this, rather than violent rhetoric per se, that is the most dangerous aspect of right-wing extremism.

There is a huge hole in the middle of Weisberg's argument. It lies chronologically between Oklahoma City and the Tea Party - the eight years of the Bush administration. Loughner was five when the Federal office building in Oklahoma City was bombed but in Weisberg's mind, the atmosphere the atmosphere from then still influenced Loughner but the eight years of protest against the Bush administration never happened.

Remember all of the bumper stickers saying "Resident in Chief" and "Not my president"? Remember Michael Moore calling Bush an invalid president during his Oscar acceptance speech? All of the "blood for oil" and "lying us into war" talk? Does Weisberg really think that events from 1995 affected Loughner but events from 2001 through 2008 did not?

One thing that we do know, Loughner fixated on Giffords by 2007, a year before anyone outside of Alaska had heard of Sarah Palin and two years before a tea party meant more than a historical event.

So, where is the remorse about the atmosphere of hate in 2007? Why is it ok for one side to question the government but not the other?

Weisberg continues by complaining about the availability of guns.

Guns are also at the heart of how the right's ideology enabled Loughner.

This is just one of many attacks on gun ownership that makes up the second round. If only guns were harder to buy then maybe Loughner would have given up. Or maybe he would have driven a car into the crowd. That has happened in the UK where guns are tightly controlled. Or maybe he would have created a bomb. No guns were involved in Oklahoma City. The crazed killers at Columbine meant to kill hundreds with a propane bomb and only started shooting people after the bomb failed to go off. It is silly to think that someone who shot twenty people before he was subdued would have been deterred by tougher gun control.

If you really want a root cause, how about drugs? Loughner was a good student until he took up pot and alcohol. Then he started on a downward spiral that led to his passing out in class and dropping out of high school before his senior year. Did the drugs contribute to his paranoia? That is as valid a point as any about gun control but the left supports legalizing pot and outlawing guns so we are not likely to hear that argument.

Regardless, a free society must be able to openly debate the limits and legitimacy of government. The actions of a lone crazed gunman cannot be allowed to shut down that debate.

A Rush to Judgment

On Saturday, a gunman shot 20 people starting with a congresswoman, Gabby Giffords (D-AZ). Because of the "D" after her name and before any details came out many jumped to the conclusion that the shooting was inspired by the right-wing climate of hate. Some went to far as to directly blame Sarah Palin because she had "targeted" Giffords for defeat.

While it seems like a simple jump from Palin to the shooting, there are two major assumptions. The first is that when Palin says "target" she is really sending coded messages to her followers. The second is that the shooter is an avid follower of Palin and is willing to kill for her. The first assumption is ridiculous. Palin never called for outright violence and the terms that she has used are common in politics. Candidates are often targeted, but for defeat, not for assassination.

From the beginning, the facts did not support this interpretation. If this had been a political shooting then the gunman would have stopped after shooting Giffords. Instead he shot 19 other people including a 9-year-old who he killed. The rampage only stopped when he paused to reload and embers of the audience subdued him.

Unproven assumptions and inconvenient facts did not stop people like Paul Krugman from writing about eliminationist rhetoric from the right. To his credit, Keith Olbermann blamed both sides in one of his special commentaries. Both of these were written Saturday before any real facts had emerged.

By Sunday we knew a bit more. The (alleged) shooter, Jared Loughner, was described as a pothead who had created some rambling Youtube videos. No connection surfaced between Loughner and the Tea Party or Palin. That did not stop CNN from suggesting a link to Palin several times on Sunday.

By today a clearer picture has emerged of Jared Loughner. He was disturbed and some classmates worried that he would start shooting a classroom. One classmate said that as soon as she heard about the shooting she expected to hear that if was Loughner.

Loughner believed in many conspiracies. He believed that September 11 was committed by the government and that the space program is faked. He worried about government mind control through grammar and may have targeted Giffords because of a longstanding grudge against her. Three years ago he asked her, "What is government if words have no meaning?" and was upset with her answer.

Loughner is closer to the profile of a disaffected member of the left than of the right but it is unlikely that he acted on anyone's orders.

So, will we see a gushing of remorse and apologies to the right? Of course not. While some on the left were probably talking from their heart, others, like Paul Krugman, must have know better than to start hurling accusations without facts. The point of this was to shut down debate, to create a double standard where the left can continue saying anything it wants and the right has to self-censor. This was a cynical attempt to use a tragedy for political gain.

Rights and the Constitution

In 1991 Reason Magazine interviewed Nadine Strossen, the newly elected president of the ACLU. At one point they asked her about gun rights and the second amendment. She began by talking about the meaning of a "well regulated militia" but then added:

Putting all that aside, I don't want to dwell on constitutional analysis, because our view has never been that civil liberties are necessarily coextensive with constitutional rights. Conversely, I guess the fact that something is mentioned in the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean that it is a fundamental civil liberty.

In other words, the ACLU has its own definition of civil rights. The Bill of Rights and the Constitution are simply tools to be used but they are imperfect. The ACLU would pick and choose the parts that it supported and ignore the parts that it did not agree with.

Does this sound familiar? Is there any chance that this attitude is widespread among the progressives?

That would explain why a simply reading of the Constitution in the House of Representatives would send them into such a tizzy. Dahlia Lithwick of Slate refers to it as a fetish. She in turn links to this piece by Robert Parry which refers to the "Tea Party's myth-based assertions". You would think that a straight reading of the Constitution would dispel any myths about its contents. Instead it is Perry who makes a number of myth-based assertions about the Tea Party and it's goals. The Tea Party has a low regard for George W. Bush but Parry seems to think that he is making a killer argument when he cites (or invents) constitutional abuses by Bush.

The New York Times ran an editorial yesterday complaining the reading:

The empty gestures are officially intended to set a new tone in Washington, to demonstrate — presumably to the Republicans' Tea Party supporters — that things are about to be done very differently. But it is far from clear what message is being sent by, for instance, reading aloud the nation's foundational document. Is this group of Republicans really trying to suggest that they care more deeply about the Constitution than anyone else and will follow it more closely?
In any case, it is a presumptuous and self-righteous act, suggesting that they alone understand the true meaning of a text that the founders wisely left open to generations of reinterpretation. Certainly the Republican leadership is not trying to suggest that African-Americans still be counted as three-fifths of a person.

You would think that critics of the reading would want people reminded of the 3/5s compromise since it showed that the document was not infallible and needed future amendment (note - amendment, not reinterpretation).
But, to answer the first question, yes, this group of Republicans is trying to suggest that they care more deeply about the Constitution. The fact that the Democrats refused to justify the constitutional justification for the individual mandate proves that. It also proves that the modern Democrats care more for advancing their agenda than for working within constitutional constraints.
Like the ACLU, the Democrats have been picking and choosing parts of the Constitution in order to advance their agenda. Now that some Republicans suggest that they should respect the entire document they are screaming bloody murder.


Update: Then there is this from the Washington Post which is just mean.

Lie of the Year

Politifact named their lie of the year but their choice was disappointingly partisan. They classified "government takeover of health care" as a lie based on a definition of "government takeover" so extreme that even England's socialized medicine would not qualify.

I'd like to offer my own lie of the year.

I seriously considered "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan." President Obama said this innumerable times but he neglected to add several caveats. He would have been more accurate to say, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, as long as your plan meets our minimum requirements and you do not change job class, even within your own employer and as long as your employer does not change plans because of government action."

The main reason I am not naming this as the lie of the year is because no one is still saying it. Instead this is the runner up.

"Recovery Summer" gets a special prize for being so wrong that the White House retired the phrase within a few days of starting the Recovery Summer tour.

But, the winner is "Obamacare is a deficit reduction act." This wins not only because it is such a bald faced lie but because it is still being tossed around. Just yesterday Politico quoted Nancy Pelosi as insisting that without Obamacare medical costs would be unsustainable. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post goes further accusing the Republicans of wanting to increase the deficit by $143 billion by repealing Obamacare.

Why is it a lie? When it originally scored the bill the CBO figured that it would bring in $142 billion more in new taxes than it cost. That is where the figure that Milbank used comes from but the CBO figure was not a true estimate. The new taxes are phased in before the most expensive parts of the bill so the CBO figure includes ten years of additional taxes but only six years of increased expenses. The CBO was also forced to use Congress's promise to make 30% cuts in payments to doctors even though Congress made it clear that they will not act on that promise. The Wall Street Journal said

Politicians have deliberately written the ObamaCare rules, as they have for all entitlements, so the real costs are disguised and hard for taxpayers to figure out.

So, Democrats and their supporters are still insisting that their legislation that will decrease both the direct costs of medical care and the government's portion when it will actually cause both to rise. That is why this is the lie of the year.

For more information, see here and here.

American Exceptionalism, the Constitution and the Left

Two subjects keep recurring, especially from left-leaning pundits - American Exceptionalism and the Constitution. What is being said about these subjects reveals a lot about the difference in approach between conservatives and progressives.

There is some confusion about the meaning of American Exceptionalism - does it refer to the country or the citizens and does it somehow reflect God's favor. The definition I am using is that America, by dint of its constitution and its values stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world. I will go into more detail later but a lot of this has to do with the Constitution and the founding principals.

Most conservatives believe in this or a close variant. The progressives and liberals do not. As expressed by President Obama, American Exceptionism is no different than German Exceptionalism, nothing more than an expression of national pride. America has no moral high ground on the rest of the world. This is reflected in State Department policy. The Obama State Department has been reluctant to criticize other countries for abusive governments or human rights violations.

The reason the progressives are reluctant to celebrate America is that they want to make fundamental changes. You cannot say that America is better than Cuba and then try to implement a health care system similar to Cuba's. To them, America is just one among many countries and one that is not accomplished as many progressives goals.

The other subject in this post is the Constitution. This has become a rallying cry among conservative, especially the Tea Party. The new Republican majority in the House will begin this year's session with a public reading of the Constitution and a rule requiring every bill to cite its constitutional authority. Both of these have been soundly mocked by the left. Ezra Klein of The Washington Post says:

the issue of the Constitution is not that people don't read the text and think they're following; the issue with the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done.

E. J. Dionne, also of the Washington Post, says:

From its inception, the Tea Party movement has treated the nation's great founding document not as the collection of shrewd political compromises that it is but as the equivalent of sacred scripture.

Yet as Gordon Wood, the widely admired historian of the Revolutionary era has noted, we "can recognize the extraordinary character of the Founding Fathers while also knowing that those 18th-century political leaders were not outside history. . . . They were as enmeshed in historical circumstances as we are, they had no special divine insight into politics, and their thinking was certainly not free of passion, ignorance, and foolishness."

An examination of the Constitution that views it as something other than the books of Genesis or Leviticus would be good for the country.

These are typical reactions from the left. The Constitution is described as a living document that has to be constantly re-interpreted. It is old and hard to read. It does not have any special insight.

Here is where I am going to insert my own views. The Constitution is a unique document and the product of a unique time. During the mid-to-late 18th century the great thinkers were rejecting the traditional form of government, the monarchy, and debating what the proper form of government should be in order to protect the rights of the governed. The constitution they produced protected these rights by making them part of the document itself. There is a process for making changes but it requires widespread support. Our government also has a distinct separation of powers that prevents any one branch from overstepping its authority. This is in contrast with the parliamentary system that most of the world uses where the majority party has nearly unlimited power. This is the basis for American Exceptionalism. Our system simply does not allow the accumulation of power that led to the Terror in post-revolutionary France or to the Nazis.

But, the Constitution as it stands is an impediment to many of the objectives of the progressives. Their solution is to minimize it. They know that they will never get the support needed to make the changes they need so instead they reinterpret it or ignore it.

This became obvious during the debate about health care reform. Speaker Pelosi was asked what her constitutional authority was for establishing the individual mandate. Her response was, "Are you joking?" During the debate, supporters insisted that the mandate was not a tax. Now, when trying to justify it to the courts, it is now described as a tax. At best, this is sloppy lawmaking. A giant bill was passed which will affect everyone in the country but the justification for it was left to the Justice Department after the bill passed. That is why the new Congress will require the justification to be part of all new legislation.

A common argument in favor of Obamacare often ignores the Constitution completely. It says that the only way to pay for all of the new coverage mandated is through an individual mandate therefore it must be allowed. This boils down to saying that we can ignore the Constitution as long as the desired results are important enough. This opens the way for incredible abuse but the progressives can't see that. They are too focused on their immediate goal to see any further down the road.

The conservative answer to this is that, like it or not, the Constitution is the law of the land. There are procedures in place to amend the Constitution. If you want change then use them. If you cannot get enough support then you do not have the mandate you thought you did.

Obama's Mistakes

This month marks the half-way point of President Obama's first term. While the Democrats are quick to tout the President's accomplishments, he has made some serious mistakes. When I say "mistake", I don't mean "Oops, I'd better fix that!" mistakes. I mean decisions that will haunt the country a decade or more from now.

Obamacare

The big one is, of course, Obamacare, not just because it is a bad piece of legislation, but because of what it doesn't cover. Two years ago the big concerns were the rising cost of medical care and of prescription drugs. Obama himself agreed with the first when he first proposed health care reform. He admitted that Medicare and Medicaid are going to go broke soon unless we "bend the curve" on health care cost.

That was about the last we heard about containing costs. Obamacare extends coverage and encourages check-ups without any mechanism for enlarging the medical care system. Basic economics says that this will make everything cost more. On top of that, part of the funding for Obamacare comes from an excise tax on medical equipment.

From the beginning, Obama and the Democrats decided not to touch malpractice suits. This is because of the influence of trial lawyers. They come in just after unions as the party's biggest donors and malpractice suits are a major source of income for many of them including John Edwards. These suits are a major factor in rising health care prices. Some specialties such as neurosurgery are so risky that specialists can expect half their patients to sue them. To keep these doctors in practice, the costs of their malpractice insurance are spread across all doctors so they are all paying outrageous rates. At the same time, most doctors practice defensive medicine. If a patient complains of a headache for a couple of days then the doctor will order a CAT scan. This is expensive and repeated, unneeded scans can increase the risk of cancer over the patient's lifetime.

Prescription drugs are another area that the Obama White House declared off-limits. This was a straight political deal. Obama agreed to leave the drug companies alone if they pledged to support whatever else the Democrats came up with.

None of these problems have gone away but the fight for Obamacare was so grinding that no politician is likely to try it again over these issues.

The Economy

Obamacare is also a factor in his other mistakes. The next one is the economy. Obama likes to say that when he took office the economy was in free-fall and that he stabilized it with the stimulus. His favorite simile involves the Republicans driving a car into the ditch then asking for the keys back after the Democrats pushed it back out. The economic decline mainly happened between September, 2008 and April of 2010. The stimulus was signed into law on February 17, 2009 with less than $200 billion to be spent in 2009. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the promise of future spending was enough to stabilize the economy by April. Most of the credit has to go to President Bush who pushed through various bailouts and the TARP. Obama continued Bush's policies. To amend Obama's favorite story, after the car went into the ditch, Bush pushed it 2/3s of the way out then Obama pushed it the rest of the way and took full credit.

But unemployment continued to rise after the economy stabilized and remains high today? What happened?

Obamacare is one factor, although a specialized one. It kicks in on companies employing 50 or more workers. That is a strong disincentive for companies to stay small.

There are other factors. Economists often cite "uncertainty". This means that companies are afraid of what the Obama administration will do next. Obama has shown that he puts ideology ahead of American competitiveness. He has made an end run around Congress on fleet mileage and CO2 emissions.

It has been pointed out many times that Obama has yet to appoint a cabinet official who has actually run a business. Instead he has appointed career politicians and academics.

Green Energy

Obama is convinced that global warming is real and that we have to do something about it. He has talked about green energy as being one of the three supports of the new American economy (along with health care and education). Right now, green energy means subsidized energy. We are subsidizing the conversion of food into fuel and the sales of automobiles as well as a long list of other technologies that only exist because of the subsidies.

The new focus on "green" has transformed the meaning of "green". Previously green meant good for the environment. Now it means low-CO2. Environmentalists from 30 years ago would be amazed that chemically inert light bulbs are being phased out in favor of ones containing mercury and other toxic chemicals.

The biggest driver of "green" is electricity generated through wind or solar and stored in high-efficiency batteries. An additional justification is energy independence but we are simply replacing an addiction to fossil fuels with one for lithium and rare earth metals. Most of these come from overseas and China, a major producer, has shown that it will use its exports as a political weapon.

Class Warfare

From the beginning, Obama made it clear that he does not like the wealthy and that he has a very broad definition of wealth. $200,000 ($250,000 joint income) sounds like a lot of money but it does not buy you the lifestyle of Paris Hilton, John Edwards or Al Gore. Obama makes no distinction by region, either. $200,000 buys you a lot more in West Virginia than in New York City.

It is toxic to society for the government to be dividing the population into the deserving poor and the undeserving rich. It also distorts the distinction between people who are really rich from those who are simply well-off.

Ignoring Character Flaws

While on vacation in Hawaii, President Obama said some nice things about Michael Vick's return to the NFL. He cast is as an example of convict-makes-good. There was never any question about Vick's abilities as a football player. What is in question are his qualities as a human being. Remember, he went to jail for dog-fighting. His hobby was watching dogs kill each other and he personally killed under performers. Vick claims to have reformed and has even asked to be allowed to own a dog as part of his recovery. If he has actually learned to form an attachment to dogs then this would be far more worthy of mention than his abilities on the football field.

There is a human tendency to overlook flaws in our heroes. The more we agree with someone the more willing we are to overlook their flaws. President Obama fell victim to this tendency.

Another, more important example is Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and the charges against him. Several celebrities starting with Michael Moore contributed to Assange's bail. They insist that Assange did nothing wrong and that the charges against him are political.

A lot of misinformation was tossed around about the charges, even before they were filed. Basically Assange had sex with two women. Both of them made it very clear that they only consented to sex if he wore a condom. The first woman's complaint was that he eventually put one on but she was convinced that it was torn. Presumably Assange knew if it was or not but he did not let her examine it.

The second woman's complaint is stronger. Again, she insisted on a condom. After sex, the two of them fell asleep. Assange woke up first and decided to have a second go at her without a condom. This would be murky under US law although many colleges would count it as rape. It is better-defined under Swedish law where it took place and is a crime there.

Wikileaks provokes emotional responses. Supporters of the leaks are willing to forgive the leakers almost anything. Glenn Greenwald of Salon has been attacking Wired for revealing details about the actual leaker.

These emotions lead to double-standards. President Obama may slip and say that there are 57 states but the general press does not cover it. Sarah Palin slips and says North Korea instead of South Korea during a live radio show and it is reported for weeks, even though she corrected herself later in the show. The difference - the media admires Obama and hates Palin.

Going back further, many Democrats held that Clarence Thomas was unfit to be a Supreme Court justice because one woman complained that he used crude language around her amounting to sexual harassment. When women came forward and said that Bill Clinton had used his authority as governor to coerce sex from them, there was a stunning silence from these same Democrats. The head of the NOW even offered to give him oral sex because he kept abortion legal.

The point of this is that laws and mores have to apply evenly to everyone. We cannot have exceptions for heroes. The President should not be applauding Vick and Moore should not judge Assange's sexual behavior based on his political actions.

Bad DREAM

The DREAM Act failed the lame duck Congress but it will be back. For those who were not paying attention, the DREAM Act is being pitched as a way for the children of illegal aliens to become citizens by getting a college degree or joining the military. It is described as an act of fairness for children who were brought here without their consent by their parents. Some descriptions of this group make it seem as though they are the smartest kids in America.

Ok, that's the spin. What is really going on?

Foremost, this is an act of pandering by Democrats to the Hispanic voters. The hope is that they will be able to capture the Hispanic vote the same way they did the black vote, eventually leading to a permanent Democratic majority. Citizenship is a serious matter and should not be used in cynical vote mongering.

Not surprisingly, the DREAM Act is not exactly what it is being presented as. (note - I'm working from the summary in Wikipedia and a separate site here.) The act would grant permanent residency and a path to citizenship to people who meet some basic requirements - either serving two years in the military or completing two years of college.

Before I go any further, I would like to clarify that I think that allowing illegal immigrants to earn citizenship through military service is a great idea. As long as their English is good enough for them to communicate effectively they should be allowed into the military. I would, however, prefer a 3-4 year hitch since training in the modern army takes so much time. A two-year hitch does not give enough time for proper training and deployment.

My main complaints are with the college part of the act. Most of the PR talks about minors gaining citizenship but the act would cover anyone between 12 and 35 (Wikipedia says 30). The act gives them six years to complete two years of college so the upper limit would apply to people aged 42. If the act is supposed to help minors then limit to minors with a cut-off of either 18 or 21 for enrollment. Age 21 is consistent with the provision that people applying have to have entered before the age of 16 and have resided here five years (16 + 5 = 21).

Allowing six years to complete two years of college is also too generous. I'd like to see them complete a four-year degree in that time. Someone who takes six years to finish two years of college is not serious about getting a degree. Remember, the education requirement is an alternative to military service and this is being billed as a way of retaining the best and brightest of the illegals. Anything less is nothing but a back door amnesty (what a surprise!).

Something else that I don't like about this act is the financing. Applicants under the DREAM Act cannot qualify for Pell Grants but can get federally-funded student loans. The act would also allow states to grant subsidized resident rates for state schools instead of the higher out-of-state rates.

If it is toughened up the DREAM Act might be useful but the most recent version was more of an effort to pander for votes than a real proposal to provide an educated American workforce.

The Civil War

The 150th anniversary of the Civil War has begun. In some ways, the war is being fought all over again. The latest shot is a column by E. J. Dionne Jr. Dionne's main point is that the war was about slavery instead of states rights and that no one should argue the point.

In the interests of history, I am going to argue the point. I will start out by agreeing that slavery was a root issue. The fight over slavery was a major defining point of 19th century politics up to that point. The Republican party was created mainly around anti-slavery. The only disagreement within the party was how to do it. Many demanded that Congress simply declare slaves freed. Others, including Lincoln, wanted to stop slavery from being allowed in new territories and states with the goal of isolating the slave states and slowly forcing them to give up their slaves. The southern states were well aware of this and succeeded.

The succession did not start the war. Lincoln forced the issue by insisting that the US Government retained ownership and control of forts, even ones in the heart of the South. He provoked South Carolina by resupplying Fort Sumter which controlled access to Charleston, the South's most important port. South Carolina responded by shelling and eventually taking the fort. Lincoln used this to declare the South in a state of rebellion and got authorization to pacify them.

But, while slavery was the root cause, it was not what the armies were fighting for. We know that from recruiting posters and other period records. Soldiers from the North did not sign on to free negroes. They wanted to punish the rebels. Similarly, most southerners did not own slaves. They were fighting against what they saw as northern aggression.

By reducing the war to nothing but a fight over slavery, Dionne and others are also trying to divide it into a simple conflict between good and bad. This has subtle political implications for today.

Keep in mind that the word "state" usually means the government. When the United States was founded it was meant to be a collection of small countries, united for their own defense, much like the European Union is now. That is why we call if the "federal government". In the wake of the Civil War the North felt that the states had been allowed too much authority. This is when federal law started taking president over state law.

Now, many people feel that the federal government has taken too much authority and are calling for a reversal.

That is why Dionne and others are simplifying the Civil War. If the war was a fight between good and evil and the evil side invoked "states' rights" then any modern person who uses those words must be evil and "states' rights" is nothing more than code words for reestablishing slavery. Similarly, any commemoration of the war must be a racist celebration of slavery.

In essence, how we remember the Civil War has become a new battleground in the fight over expanding federal authority. Ironically, the Party of Lincoln is now trying to stop a trend that he began and the party that was willing to accommodate slavery is now invoking the fight against it.

Christmas - War or not?

So, is there actually a war on Christmas or are people who celebrate Christmas simply tone deaf to the new realities of a multicultural America? One way of telling is to look at how generic terms like "happy holidays" are used. Are they really used in an effort to include multiple faiths or are people really trying to suppress any mention of Christmas?

One telling indicator is that there are some items that are exclusive to Christmas. The decorated evergreen is the prime example. It is part of Christmas but it is not part of Christianity. It is not part of Christian faith. It's origins are obscure and may be pagan. So why do governments and businesses refer to them as "holiday trees" or "winter holiday trees"? Who are they fooling?

No one according to Chase Banks. They forbid putting up evergreen trees in their branches no matter what it is called. They still allow the poinsettia which is another plant that is exclusive to Christmas which shows that they are simply confused. Maybe it is because the poinsettia doesn't have "Christ" or "Christmas" in the name?

This works the other way, also. Are any items associated with other December holidays given a generic name? Does anyone sell a "holiday candle holder" instead of a menorah?

There is also the date. Hanukkah moves around. This year it came in early December so there is no way that you can wish someone a happy holiday in late December and include the Jews. The Winter Solstice was December 21 so the same problem applies as of the 22nd. That only leaves Christmas and Kwanzaa. My wife recently saw a sign saying that a business would be closed December 23 and 24 for the Winter Holiday". There is only one holiday that this could apply to so why not say it?

Kwanzaa deserves a special mention. It was invented in 1966 as a holiday that blacks could claim as their own. As this article points out, very few blacks celebrate it. Because of its associations with black nationalism it is pretty much limited to black nationalists.

The real giveaway came from NPR personality Nina Tottenburg who said, "And I was at – forgive the expression – a Christmas party at the Department of Justice". So people from NPR feel the need to apologize in advance if they use the word "Christmas" in any form.

If this isn't a war on Christmas then what is it?

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 

UPDATE: Nina Tottenburg now says that she has not problem with saying Christmas and that her comments were meant as a dig at the DOJ's "Holiday Party" and that they are the ones who refused to use the word "Christmas".

Politifact and the Leak of the Year

PolitiFact, the non-partisan political fact-checking site, has named the Lie of the Year - that Obamacare was a government takeover of health care.

Wow! They admit that the phrase was used more times than they could count so they have just called nearly every conservative including the new Speaker of the House liars. Given PolitiFact's claim to be neutral, they must have a really good case for this, right? Well, not so much. In fact, their whole case rides on semantics and preconceived ideas of what constitutes a government takeover.

Their case is:

"Government takeover" conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the law Congress passed, parts of which have already gone into effect, relies largely on the free market:

• Employers will continue to provide health insurance to the majority of Americans through private insurance companies.

• Contrary to the claim, more people will get private health coverage. The law sets up "exchanges" where private insurers will compete to provide coverage to people who don't have it.

• The government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors.

• The law does not include the public option, a government-run insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers.

• The law gives tax credits to people who have difficulty affording insurance, so they can buy their coverage from private providers on the exchange. But here too, the approach relies on a free market with regulations, not socialized medicine.

The biggest issue here goes unremarked. Obamacare was not health care reform. It was health care insurance reform. It essentially transformed medical insurance from a regulated business into a utility. Granted, Republicans did not make this distinction but neither did the Democrats. Did Obamacare amount to a government takeover of medical insurance? PolitiFact never even considers this.
What they do give is a straw man definition of a government takeover. What they describe is not the approach that most European countries have used. Even in the UK hospitals are government-owned but doctors are still in private practice and able to accept patients who pay for their services (in exchange for preferred treatment). Their description comes closer to Cuba than Europe. Similarly, did anyone making the claim takeover claim ever imply that it would cover everything as PolitiFact claims?

Other points that PolitiFact missed:

• It includes an expansion of the government-run Medicare and Medicaid systems.
• The insurance exchanges may consist of private insurers but the exchanges only exist because of government mandate.
• The law includes incentives to make it less desirable for employers to offer insurance.
• According the to CBO Obamacare represents an unprecedented expansion of government power by requiring the population of purchase something as a condition of citizenship.
  

PolitiFact gives this poll result as evidence of the lie's effectiveness:

By March of this year, when Obama signed the bill into law, 53 percent of respondents in a Bloomberg poll said they agreed that "the current proposal to overhaul health care amounts to a government takeover."

Since all of the details of the plan had been played out in public for months, my take on this is that the general population is using a different standard for government takeover than PolitiFact uses.

PolitiFact did not offer a single contrary opinion. Instead they quoted the editor of the left-of-center-and-proud-of-it site Slate.

To completely jump the shark, they went on to interview former DNC chair Howard Dean about the meaning of their finding.

Naming this the lie of the year will hurt PolitiFact in several ways. The fact that they consider their argument to be iron-clad shows that they are in a political echo-chamber without a dissenting opinion to keep them intellectually honest. Most conservatives really believe that Obamacare represents a government takeover (at least one of medical insurance). Their reaction will not be to apologize for misleading the nation. Instead they will attack PolitiFact's piece, just as I am right now. The long-term damage will be that conservatives will be able to dismiss PolitiFact as being another liberal attack site like Media Matters. Any negative finding from PolitiFact can be waved off as partisan.

This cannot be dismissed as an isolated incident, either. Last year's Lie of the Year was Sarah Palin's prediction of death panels. What she meant was that government health care would lead to panels making life or death decisions based on cost/benefit. The UK already has these. They are ironically named NICE.

A runner-up for this year's award was the claim that Obama's trip to India cost $200 million per day. This figure came from an Indian news service was was quoted by Michele Bachman. PolitiFact attributed it to her because she repeated it directly instead of verifying it first. Hey, Politifact, you guys are in the news. Are you saying that repeating what you tell us counts as lying? The original story gave a number of specifics in how the trip could cost so much. These included sending several navy ships to patrol the area and building a temporary tunnel for the President's car to use. I never saw any of these invesitgated not did the White House ever give a rough figure for what the real costs were. They simply denied that it was $200 million.

Politifact's record on Social Security and global warming is similarly poor. They already know the "truth" so on these issues they quote a single favored authority and rate contrary claims as false.

This does not mean that PolitiFact is totally partisan. On most of their rulings they actually give the person quoted a chance to document the claim. They usually present both sides then rank the claim. If you bother to read the whole piece then you can make your own decision. That said, the final rating on a six-point scale ranging from true to pants-on-fire is a judgment call and often comes down harder on the conservative.

No Labels?

I'm suspicious of any "centrist" movement that is promoted on the Huffington Post. This was true for Jon Stewart's Return to Sanity Rally and it is also true for the new "No Labels" movement. This wariness was enforced by an E, J. Dionne column. Dionne is no centrist. He is a proud liberal. So why is he promoting a movement that claims to be apolitical? The obvious answer is that it is not what it claims to be.

The No Labels group was founded by some Democratic consultants. Most of the people they have attracted have also been left-of-center. The few Republicans associated with them were all defeated in the primaries for being RINOs (Republican in Name Only).

Dionne comforts us that the country has already moved to the right:

The basic difficulty arises from a false equivalence they make between our current "left" and our current "right." The truth is that the American right is much farther from anything that can fairly be described as "the center" than is the left.

Indeed, there is no far left to speak of anymore. Even among socialists - I'm talking about real ones - almost all now acknowledge the benefits of markets, no longer propose state ownership of the means of production, and accept the inevitability of inequalities in wealth and income. What they oppose is the rise of extreme inequalities that are antithetical to both a healthy democracy and a healthy market economy.

I'm glad to know that the socialists have finally given up but I'd like to know when they had this epiphany? Just a couple of years ago they wanted President Obama to nationalize the banks.

In the meantime, large parts of the right have moved to positions that Ronald Reagan didn't dare take, or abandoned in the name of realism: voucherizing Medicare, partially privatizing Social Security, insisting that the New Deal represented an unconstitutional power grab, and eviscerating inheritance taxes and progressive income taxes.

All of these ideas have been floating around Libertarian circles since I first learned about them, back during the Reagan administration. True, Reagan didn't try any of them. By the same token, a large percentage of the Left really, really wanted British-style socialized medicine but settled for what they could accomplish. They are still complaining about it. Does that move the country back to the left?

At its heart the message of the No Labels people is, "Stop your partisan bickering and admit that we are right!" That isn't a new message, just a rebranded one.

What's Wrong With Education

The US scores poorly against other countries in multiple subjects. One response has been to call for more school funding. I have a better idea - let's fire all of the teachers and replace them with people who will actually teach their subjects.

Here is an example of what I am talking about. An english teacher wrote to the Columbus Dispatch in response to a suggestion that teachers should be evaluated according to how their students do in standardized tests.

I will not teach my students the 21st-century skills of working collaboratively, using technology wisely or communicating effectively (except in the short-answer or five-paragraph-essay formats). I will not teach them how to be problem-solvers, how to be innovative or how to work well in a culturally diverse environment. I will not encourage creativity or original thought. My students and I will not discuss how literature connects with and reflects on our lives.

I will teach them the important skill of how to take a test. In class we will scrutinize multiple-choice tests, reading random passages out of context with no relevance to their lives. I will teach them how to bubble in correctly and how to erase completely. They will learn the difference between a No. 2 and a No. 3 pencil.

I will get to school at 7:15 a.m. and leave promptly at 2:45 p.m. I will take nothing home with me. I will stop caring whether my students have enough to eat (except on testing days, of course), whether they are able to sleep between the gunshots or their parents' screams, whether they are depressed or whether they have time or a place to do their homework. I won't ask why they are crying or where those new cuts came from. I will care only about how well they can take a test.

This is part of a common complaint by teachers about "teaching to the test". It is also symptomatic of the teaching profession as a whole. They don't teach their subject any longer. Instead of teaching high school English, this teacher is teaching "problem solving", "using technology wisely", and "working well in a culturally diverse environment".

I suspect that most parents, when they see that their child is taking English, expects that the class will consist of reading an analyzing English literature or will teach proper grammar and word usage. Instead he has gone off on his own.

Schools are redundant. The same basic skills are taught at different levels. If a single high school teacher goes off the tracks and teaches his own curriculum instead of the one in his job description then his students will still have a working set of skills. But what happens when a lot of teachers stop teaching their subjects? Test scores decline against other countries where the teachers still teach what they are supposed to.

That is why standardized tests are so important. We need to see if the teachers are actually imparting any knowledge in relevant subjects. Teachers take this as an affront because it gives them less control over what they can teach. Tough. If they had been teaching their subjects in the first place then this would never have come up.

There are other harmful theories in modern education. Many teachers insist that their job is not to impart knowledge. Instead they feel that their job is to instill a desire for knowledge in their students. This sounds nice but to date no one has found the magic formula to do this. The worst example of this sort of mushy thinking was a math course called "Mathland" which was used briefly in California in the mid-1990s. No actual math was involved. Students were judged on how much effort and reasoning they put into problem solving. Someone who got the right answer would get a lower score than someone who put more effort into getting a wrong answer.

In contrast to this feel-good philosophy, studies have shown that the only way to teach math is the old fashioned way - memorizing tables and doing drills. It works but it is boring and modern teachers hate to make the kids work so hard (to say nothing of having to score all of those worksheets) so few schools do this any longer. They don't even teach long multiplication or long division any longer. Instead they teach the students to use estimates and to depend on calculators.

Then there is the cult of self-esteem. Educators don't want to make the kids feel bad by letting them know that some students are smarter than others. It used to be a joke that the kids at Lake Woebegone were all above average. Now it is the grade curve. How else can you explain students graduating with grade point average of 4.5 on a four point scale? Or a class having multiple valedictorians?

So, we need to purge the schools of anyone who has ever taken a class in education and start over again with teachers who actually teach.

Assange and JFK

Supporters of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks insist that they are preventing government abuses and providing transparency. If so, I wonder how they feel about this real-life example, the Cuban Missile Crisis?

During the Fall of 1962, US intelligence discovered that the USSR was arming communist Cuba with nuclear missiles capable of striking most of the US. JFK demanded that they be removed and blockaded Cuba. The USSR demanded that we lift the blockade and refused to remove their missiles as long as we have missiles in Turkey that could reach the USSR.

Things heated up. The US began planning on bombing the missiles. Castro and Che were all for obliterating New York City. We came closer to a nuclear war than any other time in history.

Then things were settled. The agreement was that the USSR would remove its missiles. In exchange we would lift the embargo on Cuba and promise that we would never invade it. We also agreed to remove our missiles from Turkey but this was kept a strict secret. JFK had campaigned on a platform of military strength. It would have killed him politically if it was known that he backed down from the USSR so this was a deep secret. JFK insisted that if this got out, the deal was off and we were back to the brink of nuclear war. In accordance, it was kept a secret until the fall of the USSR and the release of its archives.

40 years later we have WikiLeaks and it founder, Julian Assange who does not see why any government should be allowed to keep secrets. Right now he only hopes that his leaks will cause the US to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq but what if he had been around in 1962 and had access to JFK's secret deal. Would he still believe that government secrets are bad or would he release the information even if it meant restarting a nuclear confrontation?

Obama, the Democrats, and the Tax Cut Compromise

President Obama's compromise with the Republicans should have been a huge win for the President. He got a re-imposition of the estate tax, extension of unemployment benefits, and a moderate stimulus. True the Bush tax cuts were extended for everyone but only for two years and the estate tax is less than it would have been without the deal. The deal also clears the way for the rest of the Democrats' lame duck agenda (the Dream Act, DADT, STARTetc.) This is the sort of compromise that you expect from a "post-partisan president". You would think that the Congressional Democrats would be celebrating. Instead they are revolting. The story has gone from a triumph for the President to a battle. What happened? This probably relates to the President's disinterest in political compromise and his delegation of control. His previous anti-rich rhetoric didn't help either.

From the first, Obama undercut himself. In the press conference announcing the deal he started talking about negotiating with hostage-takers. He was pissy. It was obvious that Obama personally hated having to compromise with the Republicans. I'm guessing that he delegated the negotiations and only accepted the deal because his economic team told him that his presidency depended on supporting it. Since then the message from the White House has been mixed. The President himself appears to be conflicted but his economic team insist that the compromise is the only thing standing between us and a double-dip recession.

The reaction from the Congressional Democrats is illuminating. Many of them have indicated that they would rather see taxed rise for the entire country than see the "rich" keep the Bush cuts. After two years of complaining that the Republicans will not compromise, they have revealed their own reluctance to compromise. For the record, they did not compromise with the Republicans over health care. They compromised with their own moderates and shut out the Republicans.

The Democrats have only themselves to blame for their dilemma. More specifically, they should blame Nancy Pelosi. President Obama delegated most of his legislative agenda to her. She was the one who delivered health care after Obama seemed to give up in November, 2009. She was also the one who decided that the most controversial elements of the Democratic agenda would be put off until a lame duck session. This gave the Republicans the extra bargaining power they needed to force the compromise. The Democrats stuffed months of work into a few weeks. They do not have time for a significant fight. The Republicans used that to threaten to hold up everything.

So, why did Pelosi put off so much until a lame duck session? Dishonesty. She knew that many of these issues will hurt the Democrats. Don't Ask/Don't Tell (DADT) has been controversial since 1993. The Dream Act is a form of amnesty for illegal aliens.

The tax cuts are the most contentious issue and the one that the left believes most strongly in. Pundits have been calling for Obama to fight hard to raise taxes on the rich. Obama has been pledging to do this since he was a candidate. Pelosi would have had little trouble getting this through Congress a few months ago. Why didn't she?

This was probably a cold-hearted political calculation. The Democrats like to call the Republicans the "party of the rich" but for the last several years people making more than $200,000 have contributed a great deal more to the Democrats than to the Republicans. Many of these people voted for Obama and were shocked to be demonized by him. With a tough election, the last thing the Democrats needed was to alienate this group further and cut off a source of campaign contributions. A lame duck session is as far from an election as is possible and Pelosi probably hoped that by 2012 rich donors would have forgotten and/or forgiven being singled out for a tax hike.

The whole lame duck session is inexcusable. No new emergency happened to make this so urgent and the current Congress lost its mandate in the November election. Everything under consideration could either have been taken up months ago or could wait until Congress's next session. The only reason that so much business is being conducted is that Pelosi wanted the cover of a lame duck session for legislation that would hurt her party. They are more interested in pushing an agenda than in representing the electorate.

That means that they cannot start fighting with the Republicans over principle. The sacrificed those months ago.

Doubling up on Doublethink

I barely finished pointing out the doublethink exhibited by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman before he compounded it in a new column.

Krugman spent the last two years saying that we need to ignore the deficit and spend money like the country did in World War II. He said this a lot. Admittedly he was talking about the government doing the spending instead of allowing individuals to do their own spending but even Krugman admits that there is some stimulus value to tax cuts. More on that later. In the meantime, here is Krugman's new line:

We're talking about almost $4 trillion in lost revenue just over the next decade; over the next 75 years, the revenue loss would be more than three times the entire projected Social Security shortfall. So giving in to Republican demands would mean risking a major fiscal crisis — a crisis that could be resolved only by making savage cuts in federal spending.

And we're not talking about government programs nobody cares about: the only way to cut spending enough to pay for the Bush tax cuts in the long run would be to dismantle large parts of Social Security and Medicare.

In the past Krugman has suggested spending much more that $4 trillion. As recently as September 5 he tossed the figure $30 trillion around when talking about WWII spending that he wants us to emulate. So, we can afford to spend $30 trillion but $4 trillion (actually $3.7 trillion rounded up) will ruin the country. I guess that you have to win a Nobel prize to understand that sort of logic, It somehow escapes me.

The other bit of doublethink come here:

A few months ago, the Congressional Budget Office released a report on the impact of various tax options. A two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts, it estimated, would lower the unemployment rate next year by between 0.1 and 0.3 percentage points compared with what it would be if the tax cuts were allowed to expire; the effect would be about twice as large in 2012. Those are significant numbers, but not huge — certainly not enough to justify the apocalyptic rhetoric one often hears about what will happen if the tax cuts are allowed to end on schedule.

So, he admits that the tax cuts will have some stimulus effect although his discounts it as minor. This is the same guy who, only last week, insisted that freezing the pay on federal workers would hurt the economy.

A couple of final points. One is that you cannot directly compare the cost of not raising taxes with the cost of actual spending. Once money is spent it is spent but tax rates change regularly. President Obama's deficit reduction panel recommended a total overhaul of the tax code, flattening the tax rates and eliminating most deductions. Also, raising the tax rate does not increase revenue in a direct proportion. If you double the tax rate the tax revenues will be less than double because of people sheltering their earnings.

Krugman's real complaint is not the cost of extending the tax cuts. There was no question that the cuts would be extended for most people accounting for $3 trillion. Krugman has not condemned this. He suddenly got anti-deficit religion because the Republicans won the tax argument. Krugman does not want President Obama to compromise with the Republicans. He wants continual war with them. This would ruin the Obama administration since Republicans control the House and have enough votes to block the Senate. Krugman would prefer the pyrrhic victory of seeing all of the Bush tax cuts expire than see Obama and the Republicans reach a compromise.

Liberal Doublethink

The novel 1984 introduced the term "doublethink" which means to believe two contradictory things at once. The last few days have been full of liberal doublethink.

The two hottest issues of the day are President Obama's pay freeze on federal workers and extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone or letting them expire for a portion of the population.

The arguments against the federal pay freeze as given by Paul Krugman are:

The actual savings, about $5 billion over two years, are chump change given the scale of the deficit.

Anyway, slashing federal spending at a time when the economy is depressed is exactly the wrong thing to do.

You know the old expression - a billion here, a billion there and pretty soon we're talking real money.

So, according to Krugman, any cut in federal spending is bad - exactly the wrong thing to do. But hold on a minute. He also wants to raise taxes on the wealthy. If keeping federal workers from getting $2.5 billion in the next year will hurt the economy then what will it do to the economy if we take $70 billion a year from the group that accounts for nearly half of all consumer spending?

Do you see the paradox? Obviously Krugman does not? How do we explain this paradox? Apparently only federal spending stimulates the economy and salaries count as federal spending but only for federal employees.

One wonders about federal employees who make more that $200,000 per year? According to Krugman, they need to keep getting increases in order to keep the economy going but they also need to have their taxes raised because they are wealthy and make too much money.

There are other issues but these are seldom discussed. For the federal workers, there is the fairness issue. A huge number of the population is unemployed or underemployed. Another huge portion has had to cope with pay freezes of actual cuts for the last couple of years. At the same time, the government was giving pay increases to its employees with borrowed money. This shows an arrogance towards the average worker.

An argument against extending the Bush tax cuts for a portion of the population is that it will raise the deficit by $700 billion over the next ten years. Seldom mentioned is that the Bush tax cuts as a whole will cost $3.7 billion over the same period. Liberals concentrate on the $.7 trillion and ignore the $3 trillion.

Are conservatives engaging in their own doublethink? Not really. They are least explain their apparent contradictions.

First, the pay freeze was President Obama's idea. conservatives may applaud it but it was never high on their list of priorities. That only leaves balancing tax breaks against cutting the deficit. There is no major contradiction here, either. Since the days of President Reagan, conservatives have been for lower taxes in order to improve the general prosperity and for cutting the federal deficit by cutting government. Liberals are asking them to abandon their quest for smaller government in order to cut the deficit.

Also, the numbers are not a hard as they sound. People avoid paying taxed. Raise their taxes and the put more effort into avoiding taxes. Back when the highest tax rate was above 70%, no one actually paid this percentage. They put their money into tax shelters. These cost money but the high tax rate made it worth the effort. The liberals want to bring back those days.

Taxes are also  drag on the economy. The government does not spend money, it reallocates it. In takes money that might have been used to buy a new car or invest in a new business and uses it in other ways. One hopes that it is at least spent wisely but often it ens up in earmarks and pork barrel projects. Krugman and company only look at the good that federal spending does without considering the good that private spending can also do.

The Constitution and the States

There is enthusiasm for a new constitutional amendment that would allow the states to nullify a federal law if two thirds of the states voted in favor of nullification. The reaction of Washington Post columnist, Dana Milbank is typical.

The amendment is an obvious reaction to Obamacare which passed with a small, partisan majority. As the Congressional Budget Office pointed out, Obamacare represents a major expansion of government power. Never before has the government required the purchase of a product as a requirement of citizenship. The fact that such an expansion happened without any Republican votes should be a warning to both sides about partisan overreach.

If Milbank was honest, he would have mentioned Obamacare in his column. He did not. Instead he mentioned racism and slavery. Repeatedly. Milbank presents the amendment as a move by the South to restore slavery.

"This repeal amendment gives states a weapon, a tool, an arrow in their quiver," he told a group of state legislators assembled at the Hyatt in downtown Washington. Of course, states have fired similar arrows before, and it led to a Civil War and Jim Crow - but Bishop wasn't going to get into that.

and

Then there's the unfortunate echo of nullification -- the right asserted by states to ignore federal laws they found objectionable - and the "states' rights" argument that was used to justify slavery and segregation.

He is also offended by the idea that just any states should have so much power.

The mechanics of the amendment are also a bit odd. It would allow the repeal of any federal law - from civil rights to health care - if two-thirds of the states say so. But that could mean that the 33 smallest states, which have 33 percent of the population, have the power to overrule the 17 largest states, which have 67 percent of the population.

He must be deeply troubled by the US Senate which also allows a majority of the smaller states to overrule the larger ones. This quickly becomes a numbers game. 25% of the population resides in just three states (California, Texas, and New York). Add in Florida and Illinois and you have a third of the population in 1/10th of the states. How much power does Milbank want to give to those three states?

Milbank also sees a paradox in politicians who value original intent but want to amend the Constitution.

Republicans gained control of the House last month on a promise to "restore the Constitution." So it is no small irony that one of their first orders of business is an attempt to rewrite the Constitution.

and

Several amendments? Would it be easier if they just got some red pens and walked over to the National Archives to do the job?

Let's be clear about how Conservatives want the Constitution to be treated. It was never intended to the the end world on any subject. That is why in includes the process for amending it (which, by the way, also allows smaller states with a minority of the population to override the larger states). Conservatives feel that the Constitution should be accepted as it is. If it needs updating then go ahead and amend it. That fits right in with the writers' original intent.

Instead, for the last several decades, Liberals have insisted that the Constitution should be treated as a "living document" and constantly re-interpreted for the modern world. The 2nd Amendment debate is an example of this. It is true that the Framers had no concept of automatic weaponry when they said that the right to bare arms shall not be abridged but they wrote what they wrote. If you disagree then get an amendment passed. Liberals prefer to short-circuit this process by finding a sympathetic judge or simply ignoring the Constitution.

Another factor in the debate is the way that the relationship between the federal government and the states has changed. Originally the states were assumed to have authority over most things. Congress's authority in the Constitution is actually pretty limited. After the Civil War, the North decided that the states could not be trusted so the federal government was given power over the states. This led to a huge growth in the size and scope of the federal government, eventually leading to Obamacare.

In its entire history, the US government has never before asserted the authority to compel its citizenry to do something. All previous laws were either prohibitions (you will not do this) or conditional (if you do this then you must do it this way). If this stands then eventually the Conservatives will use it in a way that the Liberals do not approve of. Liberals should remember this and support the amendment.

Also keep in mind that getting 2/3s of the states to agree on anything is tough. Look at how few times the Constitution has been amended. If 2/3s vote a particular way then it means widespread dissatisfaction.

Net Neutrality

For many, mainly on the left, net neutrality is an ideological battle akin to free speech. It is the struggle to keep the mega-corporation from strangling the little guy. In practice, it is a replay of the Tragedy of the Commons.

The Tragedy of the Commons is based on the old idea of the commons - land that is held in common by everyone in a village and available to everyone for grazing their sheep. In this example, the commons can only support 100 sheep but there is more demand. Each time a villager adds an extra sheep to the commons he hurts the entire herd a little but profits by an entire sheep. Driven by relentless logic, the villagers keep adding sheep to an overtaxed commons. In this simplistic model, the villagers are unable to cooperate to limit the size of the herd and thus doomed to keep adding sheep until the entire flock starved.

Net neutrality works a lot like this.

Take Netflix and their new web-only version. That sucks up bandwidth. If too many customers start subscribing to Netflix then customers are going to start complaining and demanding action. But they will not be complaining to Netflix. They will be complaining to their internet provider, expecting the provider to increase bandwidth. That's why one of the providers, Comcast, wants Netflix to pay for the bandwidth they are using.

It gets more complicated, though. Comcast has its own streaming movie business that is competing with Netflix.

So, is this an example of Comcast trying to throttle competition? Not really. If Comcast's streaming business eats up so much bandwidth that customers complain then it is Comcast's problem. They will have to pay for the upgrade but the costs will be offset by the profit they made by streaming the movies in the first place. If Netflix causes the same problem then Comcast still has to pay but this time they don't get any of the profits. Netflix is freeloading. It's as simple as that.