Category Archives: News

Palin as Governor

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Palin came to office with some specific goals, some of which she has accomplished outright, others which she has advanced appreciably along the spectrum from inception to completion. The Petroleum Profits Tax revisions were passed in time to help Alaskans reap unprecedented financial gains from our most marketable natural resource, and also in the wake of an ethics scandal that caused some Alaskans to doubt the fundamental integrity of state government.

Read the rest: Palin was successful in her time as governor – Juneau Empire.

I think Libs have convinced themselves that if Palin doesn’t believe in human-caused global warming, it must be true.

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“Yes, she manages to write about the climate change action in Congress without ever mentioning the reason we are doing this in the first place,” Mr. Kerry wrote. “It’s like complaining about the cost of repairing a roof without factoring in the leaks destroying your home.”

via Kerry Spars With Palin Over Climate – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com.

Because it isn’t true, Kerry.  Palin’s silence is less significant than your refusing to mention you want the world to to be forced into permanant third-world poverty in order to get the average global temperature in 2050 to (maybe and, in my opinion, unlikely) get half a degree lower.

Let the courts go where they wish

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I haven’t been tracking anything because it bores me, largely for the reasons mentioned below.  This statement struck me as pretty insightful.

Sotomayor is not going to rend the fabric of the nation. That´s already been done. She´ll probably go along in that muddled way that passes for being a ‘thoughtful´justice.

And that´s as it should be.

I´m all for a period of doing what´s been done. And if the only conservation going on is the conservation of liberal achievements, then so be it. Continuity is still a good thing. The settled law of the land is still the settled law of the land.  We´ve suffered from enough revolution- through- the- courts for me to believe that conservatives should adopt the same judicial activisim in turn.

Libertarians sometimes like to talk about radical capitalism. But to me, capitalism isn´t radical in its essence. It´s conservative. What it conserves is time. The frequent observation that capitalism ¨speeds” up time (you´ll find it in much modern political theory) is true enough at one level. But at another level, capitalism is backward-looking, not just forward looking. It concretizes our past actions, preserves them.

There are many libertarians who like to call  themselves radicals, but I´m not one of them. I like to call myself a tory-bohemian. A traditionalist as to forms. An agnostic and skeptic as to substance.

This makes me fond of style…convention.  Style is not everything, but it´s more than the left realizes. Style is our conversation with the past.

The past is important to me. Very important. And the kind of capitalism that uproots the past and overturns everything in its path is only one face of capitalism — it´s corporatism, gigantism – the out growth of state intervention.

I like to think that  without massive state intervention, capitalism would emerge as something entirely different.

To return to Sotomayor. The court´s been political for decades. Pretending this is something new and not to be tolerated is simply silly. Let the courts go where they wish.

Pat Buchanan gained nothing by opposing Sotomayor for being an activist. I saw him debate Rachel Maddow on her show,  and Maddow cleverly limited her argument to repeating that 108 out of 110 Supreme Court justices had been white males. She knew that one fact was enough.

And she´s right. Demographics have changed, and the court is expected to reflect demographics. Buchanan argued that justices are supposed to be picked for their mastery of legal analysis.  But anyone who´s read case law knows how convoluted the arguments are.  They´re mostly political…and sophistical. And often bogus.

So, arguing for some kind of mastery of bogus ¨legal science¨ isn´t nearly as effective as arguing for what the population wants. And Rachel Maddow is a smart cookie who knows how to argue effectively. It´s as simple as that.

Conservatives would do better to focus on society and forget the court

Read the whole post here.

Obama and the Birth Certificate accusations

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I’ve been recently asked what I think about the birth-certificate-related allegations that have been made regarding President Obama.  Here’s my present take:

  1. I’m afraid the allegations are false and kooky.
  2. I don’t know if one can avoid sounding kooky even if th allegations were true.  So I don’t see any reason to pursue them.
  3. I think the Constitutional crisis that would be involved in enforcing the Constitution against a popularly elected sitting president would far exceed the Constitutional crisis involved in looking the other way.  Just because I hate our present government (and did so before the election) doesn’t mean I don’t think there are far worse things that could happen in North America.  Not interested in blood running in the streets over this one.

So I’m staying away.  Frankly, it frightens me the way some “conservatives” are addressing this.  The principle may be conservative but the results would be anything but.  Don’t see any happy ending that can come from this.

Documenting the gangsterism

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Kenneth Lewis is getting a hard lesson in the new balance of power between Washington and Wall Street.

The Bank of America Corp. chairman and chief executive had agreed to buy brokerage giant Merrill Lynch & Co. in September, possibly saving it from collapse. But by early December, Merrill’s losses were spiraling out of control. Internal calculations showed Merrill had a horrifying pretax loss of $13.3 billion for the previous two months, and December was looking even worse.

Mr. Lewis had had enough. On Wednesday, Dec. 17, he flew to Washington, ready to declare that he was through with Merrill, people close to the executive say.

“I need you to know how bad the picture looks,” Mr. Lewis told then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, according to accounts of the conversation by people inside the government. Mr. Lewis said Bank of America had a legal basis to abandon the deal.

Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke forcefully urged Mr. Lewis not to walk away, praising the bank’s earlier cooperation — but warning that abandoning the deal would be a death sentence for Merrill. They said the move also could undercut confidence in Bank of America, both in the markets and among government officials. Despite the blunt talk, Bank of America executives interpreted the comments as a signal that the government was willing to work out a compromise.

Two days later, in a follow-up conference call, federal officials struck a harder tone. Mr. Bernanke said Bank of America had no justification for ditching Merrill, according to people who heard the remarks. A Federal Reserve official warned that if Mr. Lewis did so and needed more government money down the road, Bank of America could expect regulators to think hard about their confidence in management. Mr. Lewis was told that the government would consider ousting executives and directors, people close to the bank say.

The threats left no doubt: The federal government saw itself as firmly in charge of U.S. financial institutions propped up since October by infusions of taxpayer-funded capital.

Read the rest: In Merrill Deal, U.S. Played Hardball – WSJ.com.

Pravda for the UltraPork Bill

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An unusual aspect of the recent debate in Washington is the lengths that supporters have gone to marginalize anyone who questions the so-called stimulus plan.

Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s labor secretary and member of President Obama’s transition team, claims “almost every economist will tell you the stimulus has to be massive.” Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman accuses skeptics of “making totally non-serious arguments.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, says “economists agree” that doling out large sums to state governments is “effective.” Vice President Joe Biden says that “every economist that I’ve spoken to” believes the spending package “has to be big.”

Perhaps the vice president should broaden his social circles. The truth is that, instead of being uniformly in favor of the massive spending bill, which is being championed by congressional Democrats with Obama’s support, economists remain divided.

You may have heard that respectable economists, including Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, say stimulus spending should be high or higher. But some news organizations have been less than diligent in telling you that other respectable economists are deeply skeptical of the idea, flatly oppose it or favor competing proposals such as additional tax relief.

Read the rest: For Many Economists, Stimulus Falls Flat, Declan McCullagh: Amid Loud Calls For Economic Rescue, Skepticism Abundant – CBS News.

Electric Eye in the Sky (that doesn’t have reliable aim)

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Eight people died when missiles hit a compound near Mir Ali, an al-Qaeda hub in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region. Seven more died when hours later two missiles hit a house in Wana, in South Waziristan. Local officials said the target in Wana was a guest house owned by a pro-Taleban tribesman. One said that as well as three children, the tribesman’s relatives were killed in the blast.

via President Obama ‘orders Pakistan drone attacks’ – Times Online.

COMMENT: This same crime would have been committed by the person I voted for–which is why I felt so bloody guilty voting for McCain.  But McCain would have not started funding abortions overseas.  So the bottom line was that I thought McCain would be less of a monster than Obama.  So far it looks like my guess was accurate.

That being said, I have to admit, even though I tried to prevent it, I find this situation more personally endurable.  At least now the guy ordering murder by robot isn’t the same one claiming to care about “pro-life” issues.  No, Obama is honest that it is all above his paygrade, whether newborns or Pakistani post-borns have a right to not be killed.

William McGurn: Like a Virgin–The Press Take On Teenage Sex – WSJ.com

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The chain reaction was something out of central casting. A medical journal starts it off by announcing a study comparing teens who take a pledge of virginity until marriage with those who don’t. Lo and behold, when they crunch the numbers, they find not much difference between pledgers and nonpledgers: most do not make it to the marriage bed as virgins.

Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in.

“Virginity Pledges Don’t Stop Teen Sex,” screams CBS News. “Virginity pledges don’t mean much,” adds CNN. “Study questions virginity pledges,” says the Chicago Tribune. “Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds,” heralds the Washington Post. “Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data,” reports Bloomberg. And on it goes.

In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the CBS News story: “Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study.”

Here’s the rub: It just isn’t true.

In fact, the only way the study’s author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers. The study is called “Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers,” and it was published in the Jan. 1 edition of Pediatrics.

The first to notice something lost in the translation was Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of both the Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health. Today she serves as health editor for U.S. News & World Report. And in her dispatch on this study, Dr. Healy pointed out that “virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general — a fact that many media reports have missed cold.”

What Dr. Healy was getting at is that the pledge itself is not what distinguishes these kids from most other teenagers. The real difference is their more conservative and religious home and social environment. As she notes, when you compare both groups in this study with teens at large, the behavioral differences are striking. Here are just a few:

– These teens generally have less risky sex, i.e., fewer sexual partners.

– These teens are less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, or to have friends who use drugs.

– These teens have less premarital vaginal sex.

– When these teens lose their virginity they tend to do so at age 21 — compared to 17 for the typical American teen.

– And very much overlooked, one out of four of these teens do in fact keep the pledge to remain chaste — amid much cheap ridicule and just about zero support outside their homes or churches.

Let’s put this another way. The real headline from this study is this: “Religious Teens Differ Little in Sexual Behavior Whether or Not They Take a Pledge.”

via William McGurn: Like a Virgin – The Press Take On Teenage Sex – WSJ.com.

There’s more to the article.  For the record, I was ready to accept the whole thing.  Since I oppose public education on general principles I don’t feel that loyal to a curricullum, even if I happen to adopt the premise in my own teaching.  So it was somewhat difficult to realize I’d been gullible.  Live and learn.