I feel so funky

2012-02-14T00:17:00.002-05:00

Observations and predictions regarding the Middle East, from Daniel Pipes.

2012-02-13T23:20:00.001-05:00

From Yuval Levin, an excellent, bleak post on Obama's budget proposal.

2012-02-02T00:24:00.001-05:00

[T]here needs to be some understanding of the reckless accusations that have become part of the all-out attempt to destroy Newt Gingrich, as so many other political figures have been destroyed, by non-stop smears in the media. . . .

[T]he poisonous practice of irresponsible smears is an issue that is bigger than Gingrich, Romney, or any other candidate of either party.

There have long been reports of people who decline to be nominated for federal judicial appointments because that means going before the Senate Judiciary Committee to have lies about their past spread nationwide, and the good reputation built up over a lifetime destroyed by politicians who could not care less about the truth.

The same practices may well have something to do with the public’s dissatisfaction with the current crop of candidates in this year’s primaries — and in previous years’ primaries. Character assassination is just another form of voter fraud.

There is no law against it, so it is up to the voters, not only in Florida but in other states, to punish it at the ballot box — the only place where punishment is likely to stop the practice.

2012-01-30T10:25:00.001-05:00

From Jim Geraghty, a call for realism in assessing candidates.

2012-01-27T04:09:00.002-05:00

Mark Krikorian:

Mexico’s successful evolution into a modern industrialized democracy is the most vital foreign-policy interest we have — way, way more important than which gang of goat-herding barbarians rules the Hindu Kush or anything that happens in Syria or Yemen or Libya or Belarus or Burma or Uganda or even Iran. And yet Mexico’s an afterthought, both for the media and for policymakers, unless someone’s head gets chopped off — the president didn’t even mention it once on Tuesday [in the SOTU].

2012-01-20T16:27:00.009-05:00

Jonah Goldberg* on "this 'national conversation about race' liberals keep clamoring for":

As I've written a million times now, the pattern goes like this. Liberals insist that we must talk openly and honestly about race. A conservative says something open and honest about race. Liberals scream "Racist!" and try to destroy him for saying what liberals hoped he would say.

And it will never end.

*No link; in his free newsletter; subscribe here.

2012-01-19T07:30:00.000-05:00

Theodore Dalrymple on courage, culture and the Concordia.

2012-01-13T04:29:00.000-05:00

I'm glad I don't have to fly.

2012-01-10T17:23:00.004-05:00

I've started a Twitter feed as a means to point to music I wish more people could hear. I’ll aim to add a track each day until I run out of material.

As Dave Edmunds (I think) once said, every musician is a frustrated dj, so it’ll serve a purpose even if no one listens. But who knows, maybe someone somewhere will.

2012-01-02T04:21:00.004-05:00

Dave Barry's "Year in Review" is up, and very funny, as always.

2012-01-01T07:53:00.004-05:00

Mark Steyn's column this weekend, on our fiscal profligacy, is one of his best. Two passages among many worth quoting:

Public debt has increased by 67 percent over the last three years, and too many Americans refuse even to see it as a problem. . . . Look into the eyes of Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Barney Frank, and you realize that, even as they’re borrowing all this money, they have no serious intention of paying any of it back. That’s to say, there is no politically plausible scenario under which the 16.4 trillion is reduced to 13.7 trillion, and then 7.9 trillion, and eventually 173 dollars and 48 cents. At the deepest levels within our governing structures, we are committed to living beyond our means on a scale no civilization has ever done.

* * *

At this stage in a critical election cycle, we ought to be arguing about how many government departments to close, how many government programs to end, how many millions of government regulations to do away with. Instead, one party remains committed to encrusting even more barnacles to America’s rusting hulk, while the other is far too wary of harshing the electorate’s mellow.

2011-12-31T04:16:00.003-05:00

Diana West:

Freedom of speech no longer exists in Austria, as definitively proven by the Vienna high court. This week, a judge upheld the conviction against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff on the following charge: "denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion." In simplest terms, this means that Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff speaks the truth about Islam, and in Austria, as in other nations across the Western world currently transitioning to sharia (Islamic law), speaking the truth about Islam is not tolerated, and, more and more, is against the law. . . .

Where, exactly, does this leave all of the rest of us in that community of nations whose calendars, despite the press of Islamization, still culminate in Christmas? I offer in response a clarifying quotation . . . from Afshin Ellian, a Dutch columnist, law professor, and professor . . . who in 1983 fled Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran.

In early 2010, Ellian, commenting on the trial of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders for allegedly anti-Islamic statements, had this to say:

"If you cannot say that Islam is a backward religion and that Muhammad is a criminal, then you are living in an Islamic country, my friend, because there you also cannot say such things. I may say Christ was a fag and Mary was a whore, but apparently I should stay off of Muhammad."

Merry Christmas.

2011-12-28T22:18:00.001-05:00

Nice understatement from Max Boot, on Obama's use of drone attacks:

The fact that a liberal Democratic commander-in-chief is ordering such strikes gives them political and legal insulation that they may not necessarily enjoy in future administrations.

2011-12-26T08:40:00.007-05:00

From where he stood he could see the girl plainly, and she was, he tells me, the absolute ultimate word, the last bubbling cry. She could not have looked better to him if he had drawn up the specifications personally.

P. G. Wodehouse, "Trouble Down at Tudsleigh" (in Young Men in Spats)

2011-12-24T10:00:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas.

2011-12-19T05:21:00.007-05:00

Excellent short post from Frederick Kagan on Iraq:

“End this war” was never a policy, still less a strategy. The president has accomplished that campaign promise. Now he must face an even harder question: What is our strategy for pursuing and achieving our vital national security interests and objectives in Iraq in the absence of a military presence? So far, the silence from the White House on that issue—apart from bromides about economic activities and friendship—has been deafening.

One immediate concern voiced by Charles Krauthammer:

[W]e are now going to have 16,000 people in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. . . . And without our own military for protection, do we really want that many Americans out there relying on protection of others? I think they’re going to be sitting ducks.

Let's hope he's wrong.

2011-12-19T01:57:00.004-05:00

Definitely worth bragging about:

Hamas celebrated its 24^th anniversary this week, and like any organization, it used the occasion to issue a press release detailing its achievements. So here, according to its own press release, are what Hamas considers its most notable achievements: It has killed 1,365 Israelis and wounded 6,411 since 1987. It has carried out 1,117 attacks on Israel, including 87 suicide bombings, and fired 11,093 rockets at Israel.

2011-12-16T07:54:00.003-05:00

From the introduction to "Dave Barry’s Gift Guide" for 2011:

The holiday season is a time of traditions. Here in America, the most popular holiday tradition, observed by millions, is to celebrate the birth of Jesus by going to a Walmart at 4 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving and getting into fistfights over steeply discounted TV sets.
But many other nations around the world have equally colorful holiday traditions of their own. For example:

In Spain, on Christmas Eve, children traditionally fill their parents’ best shoes with yogurt, then hide in the woods for two to three weeks.

In Austria, instead of Santa Claus they have “Father Wurmwerfer” — a man dressed in a duck costume who rides a unicycle around tossing earthworms to everyone he sees. Legend has it that if you catch one, you will soon wash your hands.

2011-12-11T03:22:00.005-05:00

"11 Anachronistic Photos From Behind The Scenes." My favorite:

(Via Neatorama.)

2011-12-10T17:38:00.002-05:00

Charles Krauthammer:

In Kansas, Obama lamented that millions “are now forced to take their children to food banks.” You have to admire the audacity. That’s the kind of damning observation the opposition brings up when you’ve been in office three years. Yet Obama summoned it to make the case for his reelection!

2011-12-10T01:25:00.019-05:00

This week's Goldberg File (named for its author, Jonah "Goldberg" File)* is exceptionally good. I'll post a long excerpt from it because 1) the excerpted passage deserves wide distribution, 2) it might induce readers to subscribe (free) to Goldberg's newsletter, and 3) it's way better than anything I could write.

The reviews from Obama's Kansas speech are in. People who heard what they wanted to hear loved it. Everyone else . . . eh, not so much.

The consensus among those who loved it was that Obama has finally "found his voice." Here's the Newark Star Ledger: "In Kansas, Obama finally found his voice to make that case." By the way, the "case" the editors are referring to is the same case we've heard for a long time: spend piles more money on education, infrastructure, etc., and tax the wealthy to pay for it. You know, the same "new ideas" liberals have been touting for more than ten decades now.

Howard Gleckman -- yes, that Howard Gleckman! -- of the Urban Institute agrees that Obama has found his voice. He tells Politico, "It is hard for me to believe Republicans are still making a fight of this. This is a total political loser for them. President Obama has finally found his voice on this. It is even hard for Democrats to screw this up."

Yes, absolutely! Now that Obama has found his voice, it's like he's found the One Ring to Rule Them All and nothing can stand in his way!

Tom Brokaw -- who, as we all know, spends his days slipping sawbucks to his vast network of shoeshine boys, newspaper hawkers, drifters down at the docks, soda jerks, and other snitches to keep his finger on the nation's pulse -- saw all this coming. He said on Meet the Press way back on October 30, "I think he's beginning to find his voice. For the last nine months or so we have not known which Obama would show up from week to week. Now they seem to be on track to what the campaign strategy is going to be." So that was it. After all, Brokaw is always the first to spot a political trend. I believe it was just days after the Tet Offensive that he was saying how public opinion was moving against the Vietnam War.

But . . . whoah, what's this? U.S. News on September 20, 2011: "Obama appears to have finally found his voice in terms of dealing forcefully with the Republicans."

And it appears that U.S. News was simply echoing the Washington Blade, which proclaimed in a headline five days earlier: "President Obama finally finds his voice." That blade cuts deep!

Now, hold on, this is strange. Margaret Carlson announced in Businessweek in April that "Obama Finds His Voice on Cuts That Matter."

April? Feh! Historian H. W. Brands noted that Obama had located his political chi back in January, after his speech in Tucson. "Barack Obama has found his voice again," he announced on CNN.com.

This is getting ridiculous. Maybe Michelle should pin Obama's voice to his sleeves like a little kid's mittens, because that guy apparently loses his voice more than Jon Corzine loses billions of dollars.

On October 26, 2010, the Washington Post, reported that "in the final weeks leading up to Election Day, Obama has found his voice." This voice was going to turn around the midterms -- you know, the ones that turned out to be an electoral hot-tea enema that psephologists are still marveling at and which even Obama conceded was a "shellacking." Ah, yes, but as Alec Baldwin might say, "Imagine how much worse the shellacking would have been if he hadn't found his voice."

More than a month earlier, Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute was sure that Obama had already found his voice. On September 24, 2010, he proclaimed: "Obama Finds His Voice -- And America's." Twelve days earlier, the St. Petersburg Times spotted the same trend. "President Barack Obama found his voice last week," the editors insisted. "In a speech in Cleveland and at a news conference Friday, he fought back against Republican demands to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts and resisted election-year pandering to antsy voters."

I mean, who among us can forget Obama's famous Cleveland Speech? Barely an hour passes on cable news without someone referencing that watershed moment in American politics.

But that's not where the trail begins in the hunt for Obama's voice. "So Julie," NPR host Jackie Lyden began a conversation with health-care reporter Julie Rovner, "a lot of people are saying Barack Obama has found his voice on [Obamacare], quite a shift in strategy."

Who was saying that? Susan Estrich, for one! "Democrats like me steeled ourselves for the bloodbath to come, wondering only how truly bad it would be," Estrich wrote twelve days earlier. "But something seems to be happening on the way to disaster: Barack Obama has found his voice again."

Okay, you get it already. All this represents a fraction of a fraction of the times the press and liberal pundits have proclaimed Obama has "found his voice." (I didn't even include David Gergen's bold proclamations in this regard!) It's amazing how hearing what you want to hear amounts to proclaiming everyone else has heard the same thing.

*Yes, I borrowed that joke from Dave Barry. I have excellent taste and little shame.

2011-12-09T08:10:00.000-05:00

John Derbyshire:

A liberal is always a totalitarian at heart, though half of them don’t know it.

2011-12-07T13:55:00.001-05:00

Mark Steyn:

In 1975, Milton Friedman said this: “I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”

Just so. Every time Barack Obama stands at his teleprompter and is forced to pretend that he’s interested in deficit reduction, we have taken a step toward that Milton Friedman reality. You have to create the conditions, as the Tea Party and the town hall meetings did, whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right things.

2011-12-05T08:33:00.004-05:00

Jim Geraghty on the GOP field, in today's Morning Jolt:

[I]t seems as if there are a lot of voters who are adamant that somebody in this field has to be a grade-A candidate, and . . . if they have to ignore certain flaws to feel that passion and enthusiasm, they'll do so.

. . . I can't begrudge any Republican for wanting that euphoria of finding the ideal candidate, and if somebody in this field stirs your heart and mind, good for you. But don't fume at those who aren't as quick to fall hard as you are.

2011-12-05T07:20:00.002-05:00

Mark Steyn:

We have got used to the fact that Egypt is now a land without Jews. Soon it will be a land without Copts. We’ll get used to that, too.

2011-12-05T06:43:00.000-05:00

Andrew Ferguson:

Reporters and columnists who cover business may be the most ideologically motivated journalists in any large newsroom. Various explanations have been advanced for why this is so. One possibility is envy: If you’re of a certain cast of mind, few experiences are more embittering than watching people who are dumber and less sophisticated than you make a lot more money. Whatever its cause, we shouldn’t question the hostility that most business reporters express toward buying, selling, marketing, investing, and every other underregulated activity that a businessman uses to create wealth that the reporters can’t get their hands on.

2011-12-03T23:22:00.012-05:00

From Amazon's page for Tyler Cowen's short book The Great Stagnation:

"Tyler Cowen may very well turn out to be this decade's Thomas Friedman."
-Kelly Evans, The Wall Street Journal

Ouch. Was that really called for? (Okay, she was referring to Cowen's potential for "framing the dialogue" on the economy, but still.)

2011-11-30T04:05:00.004-05:00

From an article on the orchestral conductor George Szell:

When assured that Szell was “his own worst enemy,” Rudolf Bing, then the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, promptly retorted, “Not while I’m alive.”

2011-11-18T21:18:00.001-05:00

Theodore Dalrymple:

How many times nowadays does one see in cafés or restaurants people talking not to people present, but text-messaging to people absent? Even I, who am no technophile, begin to feel anxious if I am separated too long from my e-mail or my mobile phone. Yet earlier in my life I was perfectly content to go months in remote locations without any possible contact with my friends, certain in the knowledge that the friendships would persist through the silence. Technology (as well, perhaps, as time) changes character, but not necessarily in the direction of depth.

2011-11-18T16:55:00.002-05:00

I feared Obama's tenure would be disastrous; I didn't expect his political shamelessness. Foolish of me.

2011-11-18T16:49:00.000-05:00

Glenn Reynolds:

NPR, as a reader emailed and as I noticed myself, has been all over the Occupy movement in the most charitable of ways. The contrast with the Tea Party — both in terms of the behavior of the participants, and the tone of the media coverage — is stunning, even to those of us jaded by past performances.

2011-11-18T16:38:00.003-05:00

This is what jihadists call "respecting women." (And I bet some ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews would agree.) We should call it by its true name: slavery.

(Second link via Yourish.com.)

2011-11-17T02:43:00.003-05:00

Excellent interview of David P. Goldman, aka Spengler. Two quotes:

In the great scheme of things the Muslim world is of minor importance to America, and its disintegration will make that plain over time. Far more important are our relationships with India and China. And these depend on the perception that America is the undisputed world hyperpower, such that it is pointless to test our patience. That means more military spending, not less. . . .

* * *

There will be occasions when our national security interests require us to stir up troubles rather than mitigate them.

2011-11-16T23:38:00.007-05:00

Jonah Goldberg on the idea of Gingrich debating Obama:

Talk to rank-and-file conservatives about such a matchup and they grow giddy, like nerds asked if they’d like to see a battle between Darth Vader and Gandalf the wizard.

One of the all-time great lines in punditry.

2011-11-04T22:59:00.003-04:00

Politico, whose mission statement includes support for “facts over ideology,” has since Sunday published more than 90 stories related to the accusations against Cain. (Via Drudge.)

2011-11-04T05:54:00.026-04:00

Courtesy of the Weekly Standard blog, the cover of the issue of Charlie Hebdo that provoked the bombing of the magazine's offices:

Translation of the text (via Google): "100 lashes if you don't die of laughter!"

At The Corner, Michael Walsh quotes the Paris bureau chief for TIME asking Charlie Hebdo's editors (my paraphrase), "Happy now? Was it worth it?" Think he'd have written similarly had Tea Partyers destroyed TIME's headquarters over this cover?

Preposterous hypothetical, obvious answer.

(Edited since originally posted.)

Later: More on the bombing and the reaction to it.

2011-11-03T04:11:00.002-04:00

Ramesh Ponnuru, who I wish were wrong, explains why a flat tax fails politically:

[R]eplacing a progressive income tax with a flat tax necessarily means slashing revenues, raising middle-class taxes or both.

Set the new flat rate at a level that can raise as much money as the current tax code and the middle class will pay more. People in the middle of the income spectrum, that is, will have to make up for the sharp fall in rates on high earners. Set it low enough that middle-class taxpayers pay the same as they do now and revenues drop. The only way around this dilemma is to assume that the flat tax will cause an implausibly large boost to economic growth. . . .

The flat tax may seem simple, efficient and appealing, but it’s the fool’s gold of conservative politics.

2011-11-03T01:01:00.008-04:00

Mark Steyn on why “pessimism is the way to bet” regarding government spending. His bleakness is justified. We need to put Republicans in charge of Congress and the White House, and then pressure them ceaselessly to eliminate the deficit. The Democrats will spend us into oblivion. With Republicans there's a little hope. But not much.

2011-11-02T17:47:00.003-04:00

William Jacobson on tactics the leftist media are using against Cain.

2011-10-30T02:17:00.001-04:00

John Derbyshire:

I need to pause here to explain my utter failure as a consumer. I am totally the wrong person to be living in a consumer society. I buy things only when I need them and cannot get them otherwise. Then I use them until they disintegrate. My car is a 1993 Mercury. My TV is a 1992 Sony Trinitron, humongous old glass tube in wooden cabinet: it needs two healthy adult males to lift it. My bicycle was given to me by a neighbor who moved house seven years ago; it had been at the back of his garage so long he'd forgotten he owned it.

. . . I tell you, if my habits of consumption were the norm among Americans, our economy — not to mention China's — would have collapsed long since even without the attentions of Messrs. Obama, Geithner, and Bernanke.

2011-10-22T18:04:00.008-04:00

There's an old joke whose punch line is "So men will talk to them." Women used to find it offensive. Do they still? I ask because if this is any indication, the message has gone mainstream.

2011-10-16T22:59:00.008-04:00

Daniel Pipes:

Those who want a genuine counterterrorism policy must work to remove the Left and the multiculturalists from government.

He's right. We on the Right make plenty of mistakes as to national security, but those mistakes tend to involve tactics or strategy, not overall purpose. Leftists are wrong at their core.

A relevant thought from military strategist Edward Luttwak:

The paradoxical logic of strategy contradicts the logic of everyday life, it goes against all normal definitions of intelligence we have. It only makes sense if you understand the dialectic. If you want peace, prepare for war. If you actively want war, disarm yourself, and then you’ll get war. Virile and martial elites understand that kind of thinking instinctively.

(Second link via John Derbyshire.)

2011-10-14T06:00:00.006-04:00

Somewhere, Sarah Connor is stockpiling ammunition:

An interdisciplinary team of scientists . . . [has demonstrated] that a computer can analyze raw experimental data from a biological system and derive the basic mathematical equations that describe the way the system operates. . . .

One of Eureqa's initial achievements was identifying the basic laws of motion by analyzing the motion of a double pendulum. What took Sir Isaac Newton years to discover, Eureqa did in a few hours when running on a personal computer.

Skynet nears.

(Edited since originally posted.)

2011-10-13T01:14:00.006-04:00

From an excerpt of a book about British mathematical genius Simon Phillips Norton:

In mathematics [classes], of course, Simon understood everything he was taught, and divined the rest. In Greek and Latin (as so often with mathematicians) he was a vacuum cleaner. It's the subjects that Simon couldn't do that are interesting. It barely needs saying: sport was Simon's worst subject. "During a game of cricket, he spends his time counting blades of grass or calculating angles," said one report. But in history, a subject you'd think would appeal to his excellent memory and obsession with fact-gathering and numbers, Simon was at sea. "I could never understand what history was about," says Simon. "Why were they always fighting over a field?"

(Via Newmark's Door.)

2011-10-07T07:59:00.000-04:00

She implies he’s sleazy, he implies she’s homely. Seems even to me.

2011-10-06T10:35:00.004-04:00

A humbling question from talk-show host Cam Edwards:

Steve Jobs changed the world in less than 56 years. What are you going to do with the time you have left?

And this post from Kevin Williamson, reflecting on Jobs's accomplishments, is great:

I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.

And to the kids camped out down on Wall Street: Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the rat-infested subway. Visit the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, then visit a housing project in the South Bronx. Which world do you want to live in?

(First link via Jim Geraghty in today's Morning Jolt.)

2011-10-04T16:48:00.007-04:00

Terry Teachout on why people still write plays.

Also, two good quotes from playwright Alan Bennett.

2011-10-02T16:18:00.011-04:00

From an article about director Michael Bay:

[Producer Jennifer] Klein: There's this scene [in the movie Bad Boys] where Will Smith runs down a street, and at the first test screening in Lakewood, California, women were screaming because Smith's shirt is flying open. That was it. He was a star. [. . .]

Smith: That was the moment for me where I learned how important single images are. That single image took me from a comedic television actor to a potential movie star. The scripts that I started to get offered changed dramatically. It was the first time that I heard women react to me with an audible gasp. There was a transformation from the cute guy next door who could make you laugh to a guy who might be able to handle himself in a bar fight and a bedroom.

(Via Newmark's Door.)

2011-10-02T03:07:00.002-04:00

Andrew Ferguson, in a review of Dick Cheney’s memoir:

[Cheney] learned how to “work the press,” as he puts it, from the masters of the art. He watched with amusement the duel that played out between Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry Kissinger in James Reston’s New York Times column. (The weapon of choice was blind quotes at twenty paces.) He noticed the haplessness of much of the national press—the short attention span imposed by the news cycle, the susceptibility to manipulation, the craving for superficiality, the professional solipsism—but accepted it as an occupational hazard, to be endured or, if possible, deployed to his own advantage.

In campaigns, he discovered, if your side is being hit by a damaging story, “the press will get off one negative story for another one,” so you provide reporters with a new, less damaging, though still negative, diversion. In domestic politics the journalistic appetite, as Cheney describes it, isn’t necessarily ideological: he gives examples of Republican manipulation of the campaign press, too. It’s simply a taste for troublemaking.

But as secretary of defense under the first President Bush, Cheney began to see that the press’s heedlessness was no longer a minor irritant when national security was involved. At several pivotal moments it became actively harmful to American military interests and imperiled the lives of American soldiers. During the 1989 invasion of Panama, to cite one often overlooked event, a group of American journalists who had entered the country on their own were trapped by Panamanian troops in the basement of a hotel. Journalists traveling with the U.S. military turned the plight of their fellow hacks into the invasion’s top story. “There were thirty-five thousand American civilians in Panama,” Cheney writes, “but the journalists at the Marriott became the center of attention.” The reporting made “it seem as if the military operation, which was generally going well, was somehow not succeeding.” Military units were diverted to rescue the trapped journalists—not because the reporters’ lives were in danger but to remove the distraction and put the press’s attention back on the invasion. Three soldiers were wounded in the rescue.

The experience in Panama and later during the Gulf War, Cheney writes, “deepened my conviction that the press ought not to be the final arbiter of whether we have won or lost a war”—or of how to fight it. Yet the final arbiter is precisely what today’s press yearns to be. It is a larger role than the press has traditionally filled, but the conceit is in keeping with a general process of self-aggrandizement. And it explains why Cheney, upon becoming vice president, resolved to speak with reporters as seldom as possible.

2011-09-30T16:38:00.012-04:00

Jonah Goldberg* on the false claim that Hoover cut spending in the early days of the Depression (i.e., before "FDR, the Tony the Tiger of liberalism," made the Depression "Grrrrrrrrrrreaaat!"):

Perhaps because I am so cynical, I'm no longer shocked that liberal historians and Democratic politicians still cling to the Hoover myth, but what is amazing to me is how liberal economists who swear they are empiricists and fact-finders propagate it as well. . . .

The Hoover myth endures for a simple reason -- it has to. Because otherwise the FDR myth will tip over.

*No link; subscribe to his free newsletter here.

2011-09-30T06:36:00.006-04:00

Among the winners of this year's Ig Nobel prizes ("For achievements that first make people LAUGH[,] then make them THINK"), four scientists "for their study 'No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise." (Via Inside Higher Ed.)

2011-09-28T23:00:00.000-04:00

He'd have made a memorable product spokesman.

2011-09-28T22:38:00.010-04:00

When government becomes a tawdry mess.

Two side notes:

The complaint of one of those suing includes the description, “Plaintiff Deborah Edgerly is an African-American woman. . . .” But she alleges gender discrimination, not racial discrimination. How is her ethnicity relevant? Would her position be weaker were she not black?

The story, especially the difficulty of firing a government bureaucrat and the claim of discrimination, reminded me of this 2007 item from John Derbyshire about a Long Island high-school principal:

Some parents and school board members recently tried to dislodge Ms. Leonardi, apparently believing that she showed interest in, and concern for, only the Hispanic students. The pot boiled over when Ms. Leonardi began providing translation services into Spanish at parents' meetings. Fighting against dismissal, Ms. Leonardi played the race card, threatening litigation via federal "discrimination" laws. The school board backed down. A big fat federal lawsuit would be a disaster for a small school district like this one, so it looks as though we're stuck with Ms. Leonardi. . . .

Thus federal laws originally passed in a spirit of atonement for slavery and Jim Crow are used as weapons in a conflict that has nothing to do with either issue. . . . Thus do our freedoms—freedoms to work out our own problems at the local level, citizen to citizen—disappear into the insatiable maw of federal government power, all under the banner of "fairness," "diversity," and "anti-racism," against which none dares stand.

(First link via Newmark's Door.)

2011-09-28T00:59:00.004-04:00

I haven't followed the Amanda Knox trial, but if Carol Iannone's analysis is accurate, a terrible miscarriage of justice is occurring in Italy. (Background on the case here.)

2011-09-27T16:48:00.001-04:00

From 2005, "Silence," a lovely short poem by Billy Collins.

2011-09-22T02:31:00.008-04:00

Heather Mac Donald on single-parent households, "overwhelmingly the largest predictor of child and family poverty":

[T]he single mother has become the cornerstone of Democratic politics. She provides the justification for the continuous expansion of the welfare state. . . . [Single mothers] provide the largest constituency for every means-tested government poverty program in the country, and they are a growing constituency. . . .

Public policy’s ability to restore the expectation that children be raised by both their parents is undoubtedly limited. But it is better to try than to do nothing. And making child poverty a political issue without mentioning father absence is worse than doing nothing.

Worth reading in full.

2011-09-21T02:45:00.013-04:00

Jeff Jacoby:

Last week, to kick off its campaign seeking UN recognition as a state, the Palestinian Authority staged a highly publicized march to the UN offices in Ramallah. . . . Officials named Latifa Abu Hmeid to lead the procession and hand over the letter. "She was chosen," reported the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam, "because she is a symbol of Palestinian suffering as a result of the occupation."

What the paper did not mention is that Abu Hmeid is the mother of four murderers, whose sons are serving a total of 18 life sentences for their involvement in multiple terrorist attacks. According to Palestinian Media Watch, this is not the first time Abu Hmeid has been honored. Last year, the Palestinian Authority awarded her "the Plaque of Resoluteness and Giving," and a government minister publicly extolled her virtues: "It is she who gave birth to the fighters, and she deserves that we bow to her in salute and in honor."

A hideous, insane culture. I hope Spengler's right that demographics, especially the graying of the Palestinians ("one of the fastest-aging populations in the [world]"), will lead them to seek peace with Israel within twenty or thirty years.

(Edited since originally posted.)

2011-09-20T07:01:00.010-04:00

"And they all have the vote, God help us" looks likely to become a theme of this blog. It seems the right commentary on, for instance, this story from late August:

While Republicans have pushed to cast the sputtering economy as Obama’s fault, Americans place their blame elsewhere. Fifty-one percent say that George W. Bush is most to blame for the down economy, while 31 percent say it’s Obama.

At the same time, 44 percent of Americans say that “a lot” or “most” of the blame should be put on the shoulders of congressional Republicans, while 36 percent say the same of congressional Democrats.

Via Alana Goodman, who notes that a Quinnipiac poll in July found that "Americans blamed Bush [on the economy] over Obama by 54 to 27 percent."

The Earth is doomed.

2011-09-20T06:49:00.001-04:00

Great post title from Craig Newmark.

2011-09-19T06:59:00.009-04:00

The software available to home musicians these days is amazing. If you're curious, go here, click "Demos," and listen to some of the tracks. (I'd recommend "Morning Adventure," "String Quartet," "Touch" and "The Planets - Venus" to start.) For less than $500 (while the sale lasts) you can buy an almost-totally-convincing simulation of a concert orchestra. The recordings are so realistic and complex I have to remind myself that all the "instruments" and effects, especially reverb, exist only within a computer.

2011-09-19T01:37:00.023-04:00

Glenn Reynolds points to an article on Jon Stewart. This paragraph is simultaneously instructive and baffling:

"When I tell people that I used to work for Jon, the thing they ask, all the time, is 'Oh, is he nice?'" says Stacey Grenrock Woods, a former Daily Show correspondent who is now Esquire's venerable sex columnist. "Now, I would never think of Jon Stewart as 'nice.' He's a comedian, and comedians aren't always particularly nice people. But these people look so hopeful, and it's obviously really important to them. So I always say, 'Yes, he's very nice.' And they always say, 'Oh, thank God. I don't know what I'd do if he wasn't.' "

First, I can believe there are many such people, God help us. Second, what’s wrong with them? Why do they care whether he’s “nice,” and how do they not see he isn't? It’s one of the most obvious facts in television—Laura Mennell is beautiful, Michael Westen is resourceful, Jon Stewart is a jerk. How have they missed it all this time?

And they have the vote.

(Amended since originally posted and since originally amended.)

2011-09-10T09:39:00.008-04:00

I am over sixty years old now. And when just the other day I heard Richard Frederick and Anna Moffo do a medley from Show Boat, Jerry Kern's wonderful melodies, I pulled over to the side of the road, parked, and cried like a young boy.

I sit here in California, writing these reminiscences in a heavy rain, thinking of the fires and the mud slides, and it does seem as if the magic sunny land I knew has been "struck," like the movie sets it built, and has disappeared overnight, all its genies gone back into bottles, leaving skyscrapers where the orange blossoms used to scent the wind.

Johnny Mercer, c. 1971 (quoted in Portrait of Johnny)

2011-09-08T07:03:00.002-04:00

James Lileks (sub. req.) on why we need to reduce federal spending:

Because that old world is over. . . .

A half-century experiment in draping steamship anchors around the necks of the productive class and expecting them to run a four-minute mile has ended in failure. The confiscation of rights and property, the moral impoverishment of generations caused by the state’s usurpation of parental obligations, the elevation of a credentialed elite that believes academia’s fashions are a worthy substitute for knowledge of history and human nature, and above all the faith in a weightless cipher whose oratorical panache now consists of looking from one teleprompter screen to the other with the enthusiasm of a man watching someone else’s kids play tennis–it’s over, whether you believe in it or not. It cannot be sustained without reducing everyone to penurious equality, crippling the power of the United States, and subsuming the economy to a no-growth future that rations energy.

To which some progressives respond: You say that like it’s a bad thing.

2011-09-05T20:17:00.003-04:00

Joseph Epstein, in an essay on Saul Bellow: "[O]ne of the unacknowledged blessings in life is not to have a famous father."

2011-09-05T19:19:00.006-04:00

Recommended, though not to all: Spencer Reece's "Margaret." Beautifully written, terribly sad.

2011-09-05T02:59:00.005-04:00

David Pryce-Jones on Turkey's expulsion of the Israeli ambassador:

What’s been happening is worth studying as a prime example of values within the Muslim world that compel foolish and dangerous behavior . . . the calculus of shame and honor that runs throughout the Muslim world.

2011-09-05T02:19:00.011-04:00

A five-star review at Amazon of Harry Stein's book I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous:

Don't judge by the cover. This book is not funny. I spent 40 years of my life living in Communist Poland. Now Communism is long gone, and I am U.S. citizen. And I am figuring it out that in today USA presenting myself as Republican is actually more dangerous and is creating more problems that presenting myself as anti-communist when living under Communist regime. It is OK to be on a party and make jokes about Bush, Palin, McCain and such. Actually, this is mandatory. It is NOT OK to make jokes about Biden and Obama. Once, for such jokes, I was requested to leave. Requested by my good friends.

I believe that this book is not funny. It is tragic. As tragic as what is going on in this country

Google has an extensive excerpt of the book.

2011-09-04T23:34:00.004-04:00

Excellent post from Rob Long on the success of Indiana's school-voucher program and the resistance it's provoked from the education establishment:

The message should be: do better, reform the system, fire bad teachers, win back parent confidence. The message the education monopolists seem to have received is: hire lawyers; sue the governor.

And that says everything you need to know about the state of public education.

2011-09-03T03:11:00.001-04:00

Spengler:

Large corporations who already have health care plans, and have serried ranks of lawyers to deal with the regulators, are doing very well, in fact. S&P 500 corporations increased employment by 10% over the past year while overall employment was flat. Start-ups who have to deal with Obamacare and the rest of the Washington regulatory burden can’t get over the threshold. Remove the obstacles and let Americans do what they do best and the economy will recover.

Makes sense to me.

2011-09-03T02:34:00.003-04:00

John Derbyshire:

My ~~princess~~ daughter Nellie started college in New York City at the end of August.

Back home (she’s commuting) from the first day, she reported that the very first words spoken to her by a classmate (male, South Asian) were: “Hi! Say, you’re mixed, aren’t you?”

Back when I was starting college 48 years ago, we all assumed that matters of race and ethnicity would melt away as the world opened up and we all got to know each other. How naïve we were!

2011-08-28T02:59:00.005-04:00

At this moment, with New York City enduring a tropical storm that may yet become a hurricane, I'm grateful that Mayor Bloomberg didn't waste his energy working to strengthen the city's seawall, but chose instead to fight the true dangers, such as trans fats and smoking in public parks.

2011-08-26T07:43:00.004-04:00

From the second part of Jay Nordlinger's "Salzburg Journal":

Being a student abroad had a great impact on me — because of the anti-Americanism of the Americans around me. It wasn’t “self-hating Americanism,” as people often say. These people did not hate themselves, trust me. Quite the opposite. What they hated was you, so to speak. Man, were they ashamed of their country — especially when governed by that yahoo Reagan. . . .

A German tells a joke, which the Americans soak up — because it plays to the image they have of their compatriots as contemptible, ignorant boobs. An American tourist passes a statue of Schiller. He says, “Look, Goethe! Mozart! Eine kleine Nachtmusik!” Then he sings the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

My question: Why does the tourist have to be an American, as opposed to a tourist from any other country in the world? You and I know why: sheer envy and resentment — and, possibly, lurking somewhere, shame.

Since at least the 1930s, America has been, arguably, the music capital of the world: the leader in orchestras, opera companies, choruses, chamber ensembles, conservatories, and so on. Musicians from all over the world have sought to study in America, have their careers in America, pursue their destinies.

How did this start? You know why: because Germans and other Europeans pushed the best among them out, across the sea — when they couldn’t kill them first.

Not many people mention that, do they? Instead they joke about Americans’ alleged lack of culture — a stereotype that has not been true in eons, if it ever was.

2011-08-25T05:57:00.018-04:00

Theodore Dalrymple (sub. req.) in July on the protests in Greece and Spain against "austerity measures":

[W]hat drove [the protesters] onto the streets was the realization that the whole system of subsidized employment was coming to an end just as they were joining the labor market. They were demonstrating for a continuation of the subsidies that would allow them to rob their children as they themselves had been robbed by their parents and grandparents.

Similar emotions are at work in the Wisconsin unruliness and public-union agitation more generally: "It's supposed to be our turn. Why should we get nothing? It isn't fair." An understandable but childish attitude. The structure is rotten, and has to fail sometime; the sooner the better.

2011-08-25T05:25:00.016-04:00

In National Review (subscriber-only), Mary Eberstadt reviews Paul Hollander's book Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America:

Hollander is surely correct in observing that the language of the marketplace, of selling oneself, has come to litter modern love — even in precincts whose inhabitants consider themselves to be free of any taint of commerce, such as that of the readers of and personals advertisers in The New York Review of Books. Noting how often women describe themselves as “stunning,” “attractive,” “very attractive,” and so on, for example, Hollander asks: “How many ‘stunning’ women such as those described . . . could be out there awaiting eager partners?” Such is not to focus unfairly on women; “men too,” he notes with the dry wit frequently on display in the book, “are capable of implausible self-presentations.”

. . . Hollander believes that there is something peculiarly American about the “extravagant expectations” of those and other souls. In a particularly fascinating passage comparing ads in The New York Review of Books with their counterparts in the London Review of Books, he depicts the contrast between the societies as mirrored in their personals ads. Unlike the Americans, he observes, the Brits aren’t even trying to sell themselves — at least not in the same way; there, irony and self-deprecation rule instead. Witness as exemplary, “Bald, short, fat, and ugly male, 53, seeks shortsighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite.”

How did Americans come to this difficult romantic pass? Modernity, observes Hollander alongside his fellow sociologists, has frayed the bonds that once joined individuals to clan and communities quite beyond any ability to knit them back together. One consequence has been an increased reliance on the bonds to others that do remain in the hands of modern men and women — primarily, romantic bonds. And so romantic love is made to pull more weight than it ever had to before, or indeed than wiser souls ever would have assigned it. . . .

To understand the way we live now is to see, yes, that modernity has shredded the ties that once bound us to one another. But it is also to see that that shredding has been different for the different sexes. . . .

Are women who are surrounded by children and grandchildren in middle and old age as likely to feel lonely and shut out as some other women — namely, those who bought the revolution’s promises and ultimately denied themselves the rewards of family; and who are now aging coquettes embittered by their competitive disadvantages against any woman years or decades younger?

The questions seem to answer themselves.

Slightly later: Hollander in an interview at FrontPage Magazine:

I think the whole idea of a self-conscious pursuit of happiness is very American and modern (of course it goes back to the Founders and the 18th century and the French Enlightenment as well).

The very idea that human beings have a capacity for happiness, combined with the fuzziness of what happiness entails, is very American and it creates difficulties. The belief that we all have this capacity to be happy is highly dubious. It would be far more realistic to propose – and American society and culture provide endless examples – that human wants endlessly expand, that we have a huge capacity for dissatisfaction.

* * *

[Answering the question, "What are some of the consequences of our extravagant expectations?"] Disappointment, floundering relationships, marital instability, confusion.

Mind you, I am not suggesting that people were happier in the highly unromantic traditional societies where their families made the choices for them. Of course in those societies life for most people in general was far more difficult and survival itself was an accomplishment – ideas of happiness cannot flourish under such conditions.

* * *

I don’t think I can offer anything very original by way of advice. People looking for a durable and emotionally satisfactory relationship ought to know themselves, including their own limitations. Also, people should try to determine what human qualities really matter in the long run. I would not rank looks, money and popularity too high, not that these things are unimportant. The love life of celebrities ought to give us a pause.

Romantic love is a very good thing while it lasts but by definition it involves the idealization of one’s partner. It is not realistic to expect one person to meet all our emotional, psychological needs but it sometimes may happen. Intimacy and compatibility are certainly worthy ideals but difficult to combine with the mundane, routinized aspects of daily life.

Also, individualistic impulses have to be curbed; fantasies of self-realization are often dubious as are conceptions in our uniqueness.

2011-08-21T21:38:00.001-04:00

David Pryce-Jones on Obama's frightening ineffectualness in foreign policy.

2011-08-20T18:41:00.002-04:00

Mark Steyn on the London riots:

This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want” to be accomplished by “co-operation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life’s vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. . . .

Big Government means small citizens: It corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. When you’re imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.

2011-08-20T18:06:00.010-04:00

Two items (both subscriber-only) on philosophy and religion from recent issues of National Review.

Michael Knox Beran:

Peter Gay said of [philosopher Denis] Diderot that atheism “repelled him even though he accepted it as true,” while Catholicism “moved him even though he rejected it as false.” Writing to his mistress, Sophie Volland, Diderot “cursed the philosophy — his own — that reduced their love to a blind encounter of atoms. ‘I am furious at being entangled in a confounded philosophy which my mind cannot refrain from approving and my heart from denying.’”

Daniel J. Mahoney:

[Reinhold] Niebuhr argued with great conviction, and no little eloquence, that Christianity offered a more truthful or “empirical” account of the nature of man than the secular alternatives, ancient, modern, and contemporary. His apologia for Christianity had the added attraction of being rooted in reflection on human nature and thus not depending on revelation per se.

In Niebuhr’s view, Christianity put forward a compellingly paradoxical view of humankind as existing at the “juncture” of nature and spirit, “perilously caught,” in [John Patrick] Diggins’s paraphrase, “between its freedom and its finitude.” . . . Diggins pungently summarizes Niebuhr’s position: “The law of love is normative, but the fact of sin is universal.”

2011-08-17T06:57:00.002-04:00

This made me laugh a lot.

2011-08-08T14:44:00.003-04:00

Life in the music industry, 1980s edition. For all I know it may still be that way, at the high (so to speak) end of the business.

2011-08-06T18:29:00.010-04:00

Peter Berkowitz, reflecting on leftists' harsh rhetoric during the debt-limit debate:

The evident panic of the progressive mind stems from a paradox as old as progressivism in America. Progressives see themselves as the only legitimate representatives of ordinary people. Yet their vision of what democracy requires frequently conflicts with what majorities believe and how they choose to live.

Add to this the progressive belief that human beings can be perfected through the rule of experts, and you have a recipe—when the people make choices contrary to progressive dictates—for generating contempt among the experts for the people whose interests they claim to alone represent. And not just contempt, but even disgust at diversity of opinion, which from the progressive's perspective distracts the people from the policies demanded by impartial reason.

The progressive mind is on a collision course with itself. The clash between its democratic pretensions and its authoritarian predilections has generated within its ranks seething resentment for, and rage at, conservatives. Unless progressives cultivate the enlightened virtues they publicly profess and free themselves from the dogmatic beliefs that undergird their political ambitions, we can expect even more harrowing outbursts to come.

Leftists (my preferred term) won't ever relinquish any of their beliefs. Conservatives and libertarians will need to fight them with equal relentlessness, as long as American civilization exists to be defended.

(Edited since originally posted.)

(Via Instapundit.)

2011-08-05T03:29:00.004-04:00

In his manifesto, Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik listed Theodore Dalrymple among those whose writings inspired last month's massacre. Dalrymple here, here and here reflects on Breivik, the thinker's culpability and morality more generally. All worth reading. I very much liked this, from the second link, an interview of Dalrymple:

[I]f we understood each other perfectly, "we'd know exactly what each other are thinking—and that would be horrific," he insists. "At least if my thoughts are anything to go by."

2011-07-26T04:19:00.001-04:00

Practically all artists and writers are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences—nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I am going to die soon.

Eric Hoffer (notebook, 1977)

2011-07-25T03:14:00.002-04:00

What did the crowd of young people shout to Jacques Chirac in 2004, during the first visit by a French president to Algeria since decolonization? "Visas, visas." A malicious wit might say: they drove us out and now they all want to come live with us! That does not cast doubt on the legitimacy of their independence, but it does explain this disturbing truth: Europe got over the loss of its colonies much more quickly than the colonies got over their loss of Europe.

Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (translated by Steven Rendall)

2011-07-23T03:13:00.002-04:00

Today's "Impromptus" by Jay Nordlinger is an especially good entry in that always-worth-reading series. The anecdote that closes it is charming, with excellent advice. Highly recommended, the whole piece.

2011-07-11T15:14:00.002-04:00

Laura Ingraham, diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, describes one effect of having children:

They’ve slowed me down. It’s like, we’re going to sit here and make strawberry shortcake and that’s going to be our night. ‘What’d you do tonight, Laura?’ ‘Er, I made strawberry shortcake.’ I used to go out a lot, but that’s how life changes. Right now I’m just hoping and praying I make it through the kids’ teenage years.

A lot of parents say they're hoping and praying to survive their kids' adolescences. It means something different when she says it.

2011-07-09T02:27:00.001-04:00

Prediction: Andrew Cuomo will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

2011-07-08T18:12:00.003-04:00

Sometimes a man survives a considerable time from an era in which he had his place into one which is strange to him, and then the curious are offered one of the most singular spectacles in the human comedy. Who now, for example, thinks of George Crabbe? He was a famous poet in his day, and the world recognised his genius with a unanimity which the greater complexity of modern life has rendered infrequent. He had learnt his craft at the school of Alexander Pope, and he wrote moral stories in rhymed couplets. Then came the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the poets sang new songs. Mr. Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. I think he must have read the verse of these young men who were making so great a stir in the world, and I fancy he found it poor stuff. Of course, much of it was. But the odes of Keats and of Wordsworth, a poem or two by Coleridge, a few more by Shelley, discovered vast realms of the spirit that none had explored before. Mr. Crabbe was as dead as mutton, but Mr. Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. I have read desultorily the writings of the younger generation. It may be that among them a more fervid Keats, a more ethereal Shelley, has already published numbers the world will willingly remember. I cannot tell. I admire their polish—their youth is already so accomplished that it seems absurd to speak of promise—I marvel at the felicity of their style; but with all their copiousness (their vocabulary suggests that they fingered Roget's Thesaurus in their cradles) they say nothing to me: to my mind they know too much and feel too obviously; I cannot stomach the heartiness with which they slap me on the back or the emotion with which they hurl themselves on my bosom; their passion seems to me a little anaemic and their dreams a trifle dull. I do not like them. I am on the shelf. I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (1919)

2011-07-07T03:18:00.007-04:00

Jim Geraghty in Wednesday's Morning Jolt:

I suspect the default of a lot of conservatives is that they might, someday, be willing to entertain the notion of tax increases if they genuinely believed that lawmakers had made a sustained effort to trim the fat from the federal budget. . . .

In the vein of Jeff Foxworthy, you know Republicans will be willing to vote for tax hikes:
When Planned Parenthood is entirely privately funded.
When any president stops getting the taxpayers to pay for half of his Air Force One travel costs because he throws a "town-hall meeting" stop onto his fundraising tour of another state.
When Congress accepts a pay cut.
When former members like Anthony Weiner lose access to the Congressional gym and pay for their own d*mn gym memberships.
When we tell foreign governments that future deliveries of U.S. aid will be conditional upon their efforts to refute -- not shut down or ban, but refute -- anti-American propaganda in their country.
When you cannot find a single bike path in America that is being built with the assistance of the U.S. taxpayer.
When we stop paying farmers to not farm their land.
When NPR and PBS are entirely funded by donors, merchandising, and their already-considerable corporate sponsors.
When federal employees with significant unpaid tax bills have their continued employment contingent upon paying those tax bills.
I'm sure you can come up with many, many more. Also, I think we on the right would want some sort of ironclad, if-we-break-this-pledge-hunt-us-down-with-hounds guarantee in writing that all additional tax revenues would be used to pay down the debt. Over the years, we've enacted plenty of tax hikes. We've never made a serious effort to control or reduce spending.

(Note: I initially quoted more from Geraghty.)

2011-07-04T12:37:00.003-04:00

Happy Independence Day.

2011-07-01T02:03:00.000-04:00

He could see that his father had reverted to his military personality again. His father was still a marvel to him. At various points in Richard's life he had been prompted to ask himself what the hell the navy did to people in four short years to change them so much. His father had been an Oklahoma farm boy until he went in the navy, and he had come out like this, and stayed this way for forty years.

Thomas Perry, Runner

2011-06-25T05:15:00.002-04:00

Earlier this week New York Times reporter Jose Antonio Vargas revealed that he's an illegal alien. Jack Shafer, editor at large of Slate, responded to the news:

[R]eporter-editor relationships are based on trust. A news organization can’t function if editors must constantly cross-examine their reporters in search of deliberate lies. I’m more disturbed with Vargas for lying to the Washington Post Co. (which—disclosure alert!—employs me) than I am about him breaking immigration law. His lies to the Post violated the compact that makes journalism possible.

Mark Krikorian is rightly scornful:

So, apparently the employer-employee relationship is not “based on trust.” Or the police-citizen relationship. Apparently, journalism is special, a place where trust and truth are more important because journalism is more important. Shafer doesn’t mind if illegal aliens lie to the police, lie to their employers, lie to the DMV, lie to immigration authorities, lie to Social Security, lie to the Secret Service, lie to their schools, landlords, banks, etc., etc., etc. But lying to the Fourth Estate? The Guarantors of Democracy? The bulwark against greedy capitalists and fascistic police? Who does Vargas think he is?

2011-06-25T01:56:00.003-04:00

David Pryce-Jones:

Russian foreign policy at the moment is every bit as misguided as it was in Soviet days, principally designed to recover its lost superpower status by playing the anti-American card. The power maniacs in the Kremlin are consistent spoilers. Building on Syria’s sovietised past, they have become the leading supporters of Bashar Assad, and make it plain that Russia will use its full influence to oppose any international measures against him. In other words, the Syrian people can go hang. And next week, a Russian minister will be in Iran attending the inauguration of the nuclear plant at Bushehr, the work of Russian engineers and a step in the ayatollahs’ nuclear ambitions that the West tried hard to prevent and Russia will one day regret. The ayatollahs’ missiles have Moscow in range.

2011-06-22T01:11:00.001-04:00

Mark Steyn on the fake-lesbian-bloggers story:

A century ago, a British Army officer went to the Levant and reinvented himself as Lawrence of Arabia. Now a middle-aged American male college student goes to the Internet and reinvents himself as Florence of Arabia.

2011-06-19T00:30:00.002-04:00

An observation that caught my eye, from theater director Joshua Logan:

A musical is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery. You can have all the elements, the right songs, the right book, the right cast, the right director, the right costume designer—and the lighting man can screw it up.

(In Portrait of Johnny, a biography of songwriter Johnny Mercer, by Gene Lees.)

2011-06-16T18:57:00.002-04:00

Kathryn Jean Lopez on the prospect (now the fact) of Anthony Weiner's resignation:

Our long national tweet is over.

2011-06-05T03:14:00.001-04:00

The text of a commencement address by Terry Teachout.

2011-06-04T01:32:00.009-04:00

Most people who mock Sarah Palin for apparent-but-not-actual errors hold the following unstated assumption: "I didn't know it, so she can't have known it." Have such people read this piece, from 2008? If they haven't, they should read it now. Here's the first paragraph:

It's difficult not to froth when one reads, as I did again and again this week, doubts about Sarah Palin's “intelligence,” coming especially from women such as PBS's Bonnie Erbe, who, as near as I recall, has not herself heretofore been burdened with the Susan Sontag of Journalism moniker. As Fred Barnes—God help me, I'm agreeing with Fred Barnes—suggests in the Weekly Standard, these high toned and authoritative dismissals come from people who have never met or spoken with Sarah Palin. Those who know her, love her or hate her, offer no such criticism. They know what I know, and I learned it from spending just a little time traveling on the cramped campaign plane this week: Sarah Palin is very smart.

Just as one may smile, and smile, and be a villain, so one may be intelligent without talking like an Ivy Leaguer.

(First link via Glenn Reynolds. Second link too, probably.)

2011-06-01T20:47:00.028-04:00

Paul Ryan isn't a good choice for the GOP presidential nomination. Three reasons:

1) As Congressman he can devote himself entirely to the crucial work of taming the federal budget. A president can't be so single-minded.

2) He'd be a far-from-flawless candidate. As Ramesh Ponnuru wrote,

Right now, conservatives think of Congressman Ryan as a bold, free-market visionary. Within weeks of his entering the race, he would be redefined as the longtime Washington fixture who voted for TARP, the prescription-drug benefit, the auto bailout and other bills hated by Republican primary voters.

3) We don't need another commander-in-chief for whom national security is of less than primary importance. Here's the headline of a story from the NYT's front page on 9/11:

KEY LEADERS TALK OF POSSIBLE DEALS TO REVIVE ECONOMY

Urgent stuff at the time, and by the afternoon no one was thinking about it; the world had changed. Ryan's natural focus, like Obama's, appears to be overwhelmingly on domestic policy. That's not the kind of president we can afford anymore.

Ryan seems a very good man, and I'll vote for him if he's nominated, but we're better off if he stays where he is.

2011-06-01T02:36:00.004-04:00

Bully for Texas, and federalism:

In a unanimous vote last week, the Texas senate adopted ‘loser pays’ tort-reform legislation, which says that a plaintiff must pay the winning party’s legal fees if their complaint is judged to be groundless. On Wednesday, the Texas house concurred. Governor Perry, who had championed the legislation from its inception, signed it Monday night.

2011-05-29T09:24:00.005-04:00

Is it possible the president is unwell? What else could explain this? While I oppose almost all his policies, I want him healthy, and not just because the alternative is President Biden. Here's hoping that nothing's amiss, and it was only a brief, bizarre lapse of attention.