Opinions and more

Newt Gingrich's resignation as Speaker

2012-01-29T15:51:00.000-05:00

There was a column I saw today that took to task the writer of a Romney ad in Florida for coupling the ethics problems that Newt Gingrich had in the House of Representatives with a reference to Gingrich's resigning the Speakership in disgrace a couple of years later. The columnist pointed out that the occasion for Gingrich's resignation was not a development in the ethics problems, but rather, poor GOP showing in the elections for Congress. But even so, does not this make this a bad sign for Gingrich? The Republicans made a bad showing in an election that should have been their year — Bill Clinton was President, and in off-year elections, the President's party usually does badly. And Clinton was hardly a dream President — his ethical problems were legion. The fact is that Bill Clinton got reelected by campaigning, not against Bob Dole, his actual opponent, but against Gingrich. Do the Republicans want to nominate someone who is so unpopular that he can single-handedly lose them an election? I certainly hope not.

Will Florida decide it?

2012-01-28T20:46:00.000-05:00

For a while, Newt Gingrich was leading in some of the Florida polls. But the most recent ones show Mitt Romney with a substantial lead. If Romney wins in Florida, many are saying that he has the nomination sewed up.

And, of course, anyone who is anybody in the GOP wants Romney to be the nominee. People like Bob Dole and John McCain, who were past nominees. People like Tim Pawlenty and Chris Christie, who might have been a lot of people's choices themselves. And George H. W. Bush, who has actually served in the White House. Also, almost nobody who served in the Congress when Gingrich was Speaker seems to want him — and a lot of them have come out for Romney. Among non-politicians, people like Ann Coulter have declared themselves — certainly not for Gingrich. So hopefully, Gingrich will, after Florida, realize his is a lost cause and fall in line behind Romney — as Romney fell in line behind John McCain when his cause was lost, four years ago.

Let us face it. The only thing that really matters is defeating Barack Obama in November. And clearly, Romney has the best chance in November — all polls show that. So let's get this business over with.

Noemie Emery, Chris Christie, and wishful thinking

2012-01-26T09:04:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I opened my copy of the Washington Examiner to see a column by Noemie Emery entitled “Why they still pine for Christie.” I will not post the entire column here, but you can read it by following the link. And her main thrust is that Chris Christie would be a better nominee for the GOP than any of the current contenders.

Well, I'm not going to say anything negative about Christie here. Those of you who have read my earlier posts know I like him, and would happily support him — even in preference to Mitt Romney — if he chose to run. But he does not want to run for the Presidency this year!

So it is simply wishful thinking for Emery to build up Christie as the best candidate. The day is long past when a candidate could be nominated without seeking the nomination and getting delegates pledged to him elected by the primary voters. This could be done in 1940 for Wendell Willkie. It cannot in 2012. So, writing about how great a nominee Christie would be is a waste of effort. Sorry, Noemie Emery!

And another old corporate name dies: Goodbye, Eastman Kodak

2012-01-24T07:34:00.000-05:00

And now, another long-famous corporate name has filed for bankruptcy. One far older than Borders, or Blockbuster, or Syms, or any of the other companies that have filed in the past few years. Sad to say, it seems that Eastman Kodak can no longer continue its existence and has filed. And while some people might say that Kodak was the equivalent of a buggy-whip company after the rise of the automobile, this really was not true. In fact, one of the few assets that Kodak brings to the bankruptcy proceedings to pay off its creditors is a collection of digital imaging patents that have substantial value.

So what did Kodak do wrong? For one thing, it did not, apparently, fully exploit those patents it had. Many of the Japanese camera makers, such as Nikon and Canon, seem to have made the transition to digital cameras work. (So did Fuji, whose background is in film, the other major product for which Kodak was known.) Was it poor management? Or the weak Obama economy? We will never, I fear, know for certain. But it's sad to see an old name like Eastman Kodak go.

After South Carolina, where do we stand?

2012-01-22T08:46:00.000-05:00

It is clear that Newt Gingrich has won the South Carolina primary — not a surprise that he won it, but really surprising that he won it so big. But there are special factors. Apparently, there was a debate just before the primary in which Mitt Romney didn't do very well, and South Carolina is a hotbed of Tea Party sentiment, and those factors both counted for a lot. Gingrich won't do as well in Florida, the next state, though. Mitt Romney is leading the polls there by more than 20 percentage points. And so the effect of this primary will only be to make things a bit more exciting, and less predictable. It is getting more and more a two-man race, but neither Rick Santorum nor Ron Pail is quitting, and that makes for a very complicated picture.

Things are moving fast and furious

2012-01-21T00:20:00.033-05:00

Yesterday, two new developments occurred in the race for the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination. First, the Iowa results were recounted; it seems that Rick Santorum actually won by 34 votes (but this will yet change; eight precincts haven't been heard from), instead of Mitt Romney winning by 8. But this is not an actual vote that decides the Presidency (or even the nomination) the way a few votes gave Florida (and ultimately the White House) to George W. Bush in 2000. It's basically a tie, and Santorum and Romney will probably both get about the same number of delegates from Iowa that they would have gotten if the original result stood. All that means is that Santorum can now claim to have won Iowa — a state where he had campaigned hard for months, and which Romney had essentially ignored until two weeks before the caucuses. If Santorum points to this and minimizes Romney's win in New Hampshire (which he is doing now, on the grounds that Romney “almost lives there”), the real comparison is this. Romney won New Hampshire decisively, as he was expected to; Santorum, by contrast, got what was really a tie in Iowa, a state where Romney was given little chance.

The second development was Rick Perry's departure from the contest, endorsing Newt Gingrich. This probably means that Gingrich will win South Carolina today. But how keen will the “values voters,” who support Perry, be for a man who cheated on his first wife with the woman who then became his second, and then cheated on his second wife with the woman who then became his third? I think this stalls Romney's quest for the Presidency a bit, but it will resume.

And tomorrow it is South Carolina

2012-01-20T07:55:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow, it is South Carolina's turn to hold its primary — one of the few cases in this country where any election, primary or general, is held on anything other than a Tuesday. The polls in the most recent days are mixed; they show Newt Gingrich ahead in some and Mitt Romney in others. (Rick Santorum, who was ahead of Gingrich just a short while ago, seems to be fading; the latest polls show him fighting Ron Paul for third place, a long way behind the top two.) The polls are so indecisive that it looks as though we will have to await the actual results tomorrow night or Sunday.

And this is closer to what I might have thought — Gingrich should be very popular in South Carolina, given that his political career was made in neighboring Georgia, and his Southern type of conservatism should resonate there. Of all the non-Romney candidates, he has the best qualifications — but yet, so much controversy surrounds him that I cannot see him winning in November; and, of course, the puropse of these primaries is to pick a nominee who has the best chance to win, against President Barack Obama, in November. So I still feel the party has to pick Mitt Romney.

Some people are using Romney's wealth as a reason not to support him. Surprisingly, nobody seems to think that John F. Kennedy or Franklin D. Roosevelt could not do right by the “little man,” yet they cannot visualize Mitt Romney as understanding people who don't have a lot of money. I don't think that the fact that someone is rich should be held against him, but apparently some people do. But fortunately, this argument is coming out now, in January, so that President Obama cannot suddenly spring it in the heat of a general election campaign. It will, by the time of the conventions, be old hat.

So, as I said, now we need to wait till South Carolina's votes come in.

The Wikipedia strike

2012-01-19T08:34:00.000-05:00

Anyone who wanted to look up something on Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia, yesterday, was out of luck. The powers-that-be had shut it down (and several other sites such as Reddit had done likewise, but Wikipedia is the most important of the bunch) as a protest against a couple of intellectual-property-rights bills being considered in the Congress. I have not looked closely enough at these bills to say how I feel about them — I suspect that I agree with the people who shut Wikipedia down on the substance of the bills, but I cannot be certain — but I think it was a sublimely silly thing to do.

Usually, a strike is an action by one party to exert pressure on another, where the second directly benefits by the activity of the first and is harmed by the first party's failure to perform. But in this case, the “second party” that they are trying to influence — Congress — can function very well without Wikipedia. They have their own research organization — the Library of Congress — which has direct access to a lot of the material which anyone might have gone to Wikipedia to look up. So shutting Wikipedia down for a day does little to advance their cause. In fact, the public that uses Wikipedia billions of times a month can only become angry at its not being there, and rather than petitioning Congress, they are more likely to turn against Wikipedia.

Several other Internet-related entities — in particular, Google and Yahoo! — have taken the more conventional step of lobbying Congress. And they appear to be — at least, to some extent — successful. Even before the Wikipedia shutdown, key Senators and Representatives had moved into opposition. Even Senator Ben Cardin (from my home state, Maryland), who had sponsored legislation of this type in the past, has moved into opposition.

So did they really need to shut Wikipedia down? I believe not.

Rick Santorum, gay marriage, love, and hate

2012-01-18T07:26:00.006-05:00

Looking around the Web, I spotted this posting on a blog, with reference to candidate (and former Senator) Rick Santorum:

At a campaign stop in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina today, a woman told Rick and Karen Santorum that she's trying to reconcile her support for him with the fact that her son is gay and he and his friends react poorly at the mention of Santorum's name because they think he hates gay people.

Replied Karen Santorum: “I think it's very sad what the gay activists have done out there. They've vilified him and it's so wrong. Rick does not hate anyone. He loves them. What he has simply said is marriage shouldn't happen. But as far as hating, it's very unfortunate that that has happened. And a lot of it is backyard bullying.”

Said Rick: “This is a public policy difference. And the problem is that some see that as a personal assault.”

He went on to reply that children deserve a mother and father and unless that is promoted there will be less of it, adding: “… There's all sorts of other relationships that people have, and they are valuable relationships — whether they are amorous relationships or friendship relationships or familial relationships — they're all important, they all have value they all should be affirmed. But that does not mean that we should change the laws to order — to create an atmosphere where children and families are not being promoted.”

Karen Santorum's saying “He loves them,” I suppose, is consistent with the Catholic Church's policy (and that of many other Christians, but I mention the Catholic Church because that is Santorum's religion) of "love the sinner, hate the sin." But I, for one, find it ridiculous. A person is the sum total of his beliefs and actions, nothing more, nothing less. I cannot love someone who does hateful things — at least fully; I can certainly love the person in those aspects that are not hateful to me. But in any case, to put myself in the position of those “gay activists” to which Karen Santorum referred, I would rather be hated, but left alone without interference, than loved, but prevented from doing something that I feel necessary to my life's fulfillment.

The position that “children deserve a mother and father and unless that is promoted there will be less of it” fails to consider what children without “a mother and father” would have instead. A child with two parents, even if both the same sex, is still better off than one with one, or even none, because they have been abandoned. Nobody is advocating that one (or both) parents of a child who has “a mother and father” should abandon that child, so what point is Santorum trying to make?

I strongly believe that laws should prevent something only if somebody would be harmed by the act they would prevent — and nobody has pointed out to me anybody who would be hurt by allowing two men, or two women, to assume the status of a married couple. So the only harm that anyone can argue is to God's order — if one assumes that marrying someone of the same sex is a sin. And violations of God's order should be left to God — not the State — to punish. The Catholic Church may believe homosexual activity is a sin; certainly there are religious communities that do not. (The Episcopal Church has chosen a homosexual bishop — though this has led to a split within the church.) In the spirit of the First Amendment, if something is considered wrong by one religious group, but not by another, the Government has no business banning it.

One more candidate drops out in favor of Mitt Romney

2012-01-17T00:39:00.018-05:00

And now, the Republican field has narrowed again. As some other people who might have been candidates, but decided to stay out (namely, Tim Pawlenty and Chris Christie) have already done, Jon Huntsman has decided that the way to win this year is to unite behind Mitt Romney. And yesterday, he withdrew as a candidate.

As one of his aides told CNN,“Governor Huntsman did not want to stand in the way of the candidate best prepared to beat Barack Obama and turn our economy around. That's Mitt Romney.” Or in Huntsman's own words, as reported by Fox News, “Today, I am suspending my campaign for the presidency. I believe it is now time for our party to unite around the candidate best equipped to defeat Barack Obama. Despite our differences and the space between us on some of the issues, I believe that candidate is Gov. Mitt Romney.”

Now, what is necessary is for the rest of the candidates to realize that this is so.

On Martin Luther King, Jr.

2012-01-16T14:23:00.000-05:00

Today is being celebrated as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. Now, I understand that the African-American community feels the need to commemorate one of their own, but I have to say that King is hardly one that I would want to honor with a national holiday. (And this doesn't make me a racist, though opponents of the King's birthday holiday seem to get automatically tagged as such.) While, in the early days of his adult life, he was a positive force for civil rights, he eventually ended up taking a position that I cannot call honorable: while he spent so much of his life trying to gain rights for his own fellow African-Americans, he stood in the way of this country's effort to gain freedom for people in Vietnam. Certainly not a person worth honoring.

I suppose that African-Americans should get to choose their hero, but wouldn't Thurgood Marshall have been a better choice? Marshall was the primary advocate for the side trying (successfully) to end segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case, and argued for civil rights in a number of other cases, and eventually ended up as the first African-American Supreme Court justice. I don't know when Martshall's birthday was, but I'd sooner make that a national holiday than King's.

And the polling continues

2012-01-14T08:37:00.000-05:00

I have looked again at the Real Clear Politics polling data in South Carolina, the next state to have its primary. Mitt Romney is still holding on to a narrow lead, but second place is back in the hands of Newt Gingrich, who I might have thought more likely than Rick Santorum to carry the bulk of the anti-Romney sentiment. And the surprising strength of Ron Paul is continuing — he is now in a virtual tie with Santorum for third. (Though each has only about half Romney's support.) Meanwhile, Rick Perry is far back in the pack; with just over 5%, it looks likely that if these numbers hold up, he will follow Michele Bachmann's lead and fold up his campaign after the South Carolina primary.

Gingrich is someone who built his political career in the South — in fact, in Georgia, the state neighboring South Carolina — so he should get the “favorite son” vote that Romney got in New Hampshire. If the polls hold up, he will simply come in a fairly close second, unlike Romney's decisive win in New Hampshire. And this will solidify the Romney claim to the 2012 nomination.

And now... South Carolina

2012-01-12T00:21:00.018-05:00

Mitt Romney has now won Iowa (barely) and New Hampshire (rather decisively). Now the scene shifts to South Carolina.

I would have thought South Carolina a bad place for the Romney candidacy. It's Southern and conservative, so it might be Perry or Gingrich country. But I just looked at the polls on the Real Clear Politics site, and all the polls listed there have Romney in first place — in one case, only by three points, but in another, by 18. And — surprise! — neither Perry nor Gingrich is in second place, but rather Rick Santorum — who, until Iowa, tended to be an ignored candidate. But he is a candidate strongly aligned with the Religious Right, which I suppose makes his cause resonate with a lot of South Carolinians.

If the polls hold up, and Romney comes in first even in South Carolina, nobody can stop his nomination. And that is a good sign. If Romney can win as decisively as this, he can devote his energies to the fight against Barack Obama, which is where they need to be directed. We need someone who can defear President Obama this November. And more and more, that “someone” is Mitt Romney.

And now, New Hampshire has spoken

2012-01-11T09:21:00.000-05:00

New Hampshire has spoken — a lot more decisively than Iowa last week. Some people said that (because Mitt Romney had been a Governor of next-door Massachusetts, and had a residence in New Hampshire) if Romney won less than 40% in New Hampshire, it would not be a convincing victory: his percentage was just short of 40%, but that seems to have been close enough for the analysts, considering that second place went to Ron Paul with less than 30%. And since neither second-place Paul nor third-place Jon Huntsman is considered a major threat to the nomination, and people like Newt Gingrich (despite his endorsement by New Hampshire's most influential newspaper) could not even make 20%, this has to be considered a significant win for Romney.

What this means, of course, is that Republicans want someone who can run a credible campaign against Barack Obama, who will of course, as a sitting first-term President, get his own party's nomination. Even self-identified conservatives (and they form a majority of New Hampshire Republicans, according to polls) realize that a Romney, impure conservative that he is, will be better for conservative ideas in the White House than a far-left Obama, and this is governing their votes.

As Rick Santorum almost won Iowa by staking out there and campaigning in one state while the others traveled about, Jon Huntsman did the same in New Hampshire. And this got him, as I said earlier, third place, with a lot bigger share of the votes than he is likely to get in any other state. But New Hampshire has only a small number of delegates, and he will only get a fraction of those. So, though this is likely to be the high water mark of his campaign, I suspect that in a month or two, Huntsman will withdraw. Ron Paul, the second-place finisher, is likely to soldier on till the convention. He may actually be the second-place candidate on Convention Day. But no matter how devoted his supporters may be, they do not represent the bulk of Republican identifiers, and he has no chance at the nomination. And Paul and Huntsman are the only two (other than Romney) who can call the result in New Hampshire positive for them.

Rick Perry, of course, wrote off New Hampshire, so his low finish is not surprising. He is staking everything on South Carolina. And he might do well in that bastion of Southern conseervatism. But the November election will not be fought in places like South Carolina, and Republicans in general know that, which is why most of the party is going to fall in line behind Romney.

New Hampshire does not always pick the eventual nominee. And it tends to pick Massachusetts people even when, like Henry Cabot Lodge or Paul Tsongas, they have no chance at their party's nomination. But combined with Iowa, the results point to a Romney candidacy. And I am happy to support that candidacy.

And now, New Hampshire

2012-01-10T08:06:00.000-05:00

Today, folks in New Hampshire are voting in the first primary of 2012. Like the Iowa caucus, if it has any effect it will only be to winnow the field down. Mitt Romney is expected to win, so even if he wins big, nobody will concede him the nomination; after all, they know him well in New Hampshire; he was Governor of next-door Massachusetts, and has a residence in New Hampshire. Rick Perry, who had decided to rethink his options after losing big in Iowa, decided not to try in New Hampshire. His appeal is to Southerners, not New Englanders, so he's putting his eggs in a basket called South Carolina, whose primary is later this month. But this may be the end of the line for Jon Huntsman. He did not bother to compete in Iowa, preferring to try in New Hampshire, which he perceived as more akin to his brand of politics. Unless he does well in New Hampshire, he'll probably give up.

Another person who will have to make a decision is Newt Gingrich. The most influential newspaper in the state endorsed him, but his star started to fall when he came out below Rick Santorum and Ron Paul in Iowa. Unless he does well in New Hampshire, I think he's out of it.

Unlike Iowa's caucus, New Hampshire has a real primary. It's very hard to vote in a caucus; you have to be at the right place at just the right time, but in a primary, you have hours to cast your vote. So New Hampshire, proportionately to population, should have a much bigger turnout. But it's still a very small state. It does not have a lot of people, so it will not have a lot of voters, and so it still cannot have a big effect on the result, except by convincing some candidates to drop out.

Well, let us see what happens. Tomorrow we will know.

President Obama's "recess appointment" trick

2012-01-07T08:56:00.000-05:00

There are some provisions in our Constitution that made sense in 1787, when it was first written, but do not in today's world; yet, it is unlikely that there will ever be an amendment to change them, because there are no people around who feel it in their interest to change them. In particular, there are two provisions that made sense when, back in the eighteenth century, it took many days for a Congressman from Georgia to get to the capital and back home, so when Congress adjourned, it would adjourn for months, and could not easily be reconvened. Today, when even Hawaii is only a few hours away by jet flight, and anyone can be summoned back to Washington by a telephone call, neither of these two provisions really makes sense. The first of these two is the “pocket veto” provision, where a President who does not sign a bill in 10 days (actually, a little more, because Sundays are not counted in the time) normally lets it become law, but, if Congress has adjourned, so that he could not send it back with a veto message, it is deemed to be vetoed. (Today, if he really wanted to veto the bill, he could send a message to the Speaker of the House and the Vice-President, as President of the Senate, asking them to reconvene their chambers, and they could do so in a day or two!) The other one of these anachronistic provisions is the “recess appointment” provision, whereby, if the Senate has recessed, the President can make a temporary appointment without getting Senate approval. The appointment expires after the Senate reconvenes and adjourns for the session without considering it, but this could last over a year.

This “recess appointment” provision rarely makes much difference, but President Obama has chosen to abuse this power in order to skirt the Senate confirmation powers and appoint a consumer affairs chief and fill some vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board, the latter, not surprisingly, with people who will solidify labor unions' control over the board. He has claimed that the Senate was in recess, giving him the right to utilize this provision; some Senators maintain that this was not the case, and I have seen, in the Washington Examiner, columns pointing out that up to now, it has been understood that the Senate had to adjourn for at least three days to trigger this provision. I am sure that other columnists besides the Examiner's are making this claim; I just have not seen other papers discussing it. (The “three days” comes from another provision of the Constitution, that says that neither house can adjourn for more than three days without the other's consent.)

The only problem is, who can challenge the President here? Columnists say the Courts will find these appointments unconstitutional, but in the federal court system, you can only bring a suit if you have “standing,” and who would have standing to sue? These appointments will undoubtedly stand, though it sets a bad precedent. We will see Presidents, in the future, wait to make other appointments that they know could never survive a Senate vote until something they can claim is a Senate recess has occurred.

The Constitution really does not define what constitutes a “recess” for this purpose. And nobody, as I said, will have standing to challenge these appointments. So I have to concede that a case can be made that the President is constitutionally permitted to make the appointments. But it is clear that he was extremely unwise to do so. And one day they will come back to haunt the Democrats, when a Republican president does likewise.

2012: a repeat of 2008 with new characters?

2012-01-06T00:02:00.034-05:00

On the Republican side (but not the Democratic side, where the presence of a sitting president makes things totally different), this year's nomination campaign seems like a repeat of what occurred four years ago, but with different characters playing the same roles.

This year's Mike Huckabee is Rick Santorum, the darling of the Religious Right (though Catholic, not Evangelical Protestant). Huckabee won Iowa, but faded when things went to states which were less dominated by the Religious Right; Santorum didn't quite win Iowa, but came pretty close, and will probably not so as well as Huckabee all around, but he's clearly fitting into the same role.

This year's Rudy Giuliani is Chris Christie, a candidate who would suit a lot of us (including me) very well, but who simply does not accord with enough of the Republican electorate to win the nomination. Giuliani actually tried to run, but after a few primaries bowed out and threw his support to John McCain, Christie saw the situation from the beginning and strongly backed Mitt Romney.

And as the previous paragraph hints, Mitt Romney is this year's John McCain. So much of the "conservative" part of the party does not consider him conservative enough, though he's about as conservative as the nation will vote for, in fact. McCain could have beaten Obama except that the economy took a dive just a few weeks before Election Day; he was leading in the polls, actually. But this year, the weaknesses in the economy will help the GOP, not the Democrats, because the sitting President is not George W. Bush, but Barack Obama.

McCain and Romney do not really like each other, but when Romney saw he could not get the nomination four years ago, he conceded to McCain; McCain has just rewarded Romney, in turn, by endorsing him for this year's nomination.

The only candidate from four years ago who has no corresponding one this year, interestingly, is Mitt Romney. Since he's playing John McCain's role this year, he obviously can't play himself!

But if this is really 2008 with new characters, clearly the nominee will be Mitt Romney — and perhaps this time our November will see the Republicans (with “change” on their side this time!) recapturing the White House. I certainly hope so.

We don't need to be Canada, or Belgium

2012-01-05T01:11:00.042-05:00

Yesterday, my wife went down into the District of Columbia to straighten out some problems involving her unemployment insurance benefits, and I accompanied her at her request. (There had been some problems that could not be handled by phone or online, and she was advised to come in and take care of the situation in person.) After we found the correct office, we waited while a clerk there dealt with the two persons ahead of us, in Spanish, which was evidently a language she was fluent in. When it got to my wife, we went in and it was absolutely clear that she was somewhat short of fluent in English. There were a number of points in the discussion where my wife had difficulty in communicating some point to her; fortunately, perhaps because I have had somewhat more experience trying to communicate with people whose English was weak, I was able to facilitate the communication, and my wife, afterward, thanked me effusively for making things work so she got the benefits due her. (The problem was not the usual bureaucratic problem of someone who insists that if you don't follow the letter of the procedures, you're out of luck; this clerk genuinely seemed willing to help once we could get across the information we were trying to provide.)

But then I was surprised to hear my wife complain that an employee of the Government of the District of Columbia, a subdivision of the United States, ought to be able to work with clients in English. She didn't like the idea that she might have lost money she was entitled to just because she could not express herself in Spanish, making her feel like a foreigner in her own native country. I could hardly disagree with her. She was expressing opinions I have held for decades, but which she had tended to disagree with — she had, for example, not agreed with my support for the group, started by S. I. Hayakawa many decades ago, called “U. S. English,” which advocated making English our official language.

I guess it took exposure to the consequences of U. S. English's not accomplishing their program to make her see why we need to do something. Seeing what has gone on in countries like Belgium and Canada brought me to these beliefs, but it took the fear of loss of money she was entitled to to make her see the point.

Iowans have spoken, but what did they say?

2012-01-04T09:07:00.004-05:00

The Iowa caucuses were held yesterday, and the results bore out the recent polls that pointed to Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul as the leaders. Between Romney and Santorum, the results were a near-tie: Romney's margin over Santorum, according to the results I saw on the Web, was only 8 out of over 60,000 that the two candidates got. And the top three candidates together got over 70% of the total, so it is likely that some of the others will drop out soon. (It has been reported that Rick Perry, for example, is going back home to Texas to consider his options.)

The biggest winner might be said to be Santorum, who was at the bottom of the pack a few weeks ago, and yet got almost as many votes as Romney did. But this is Iowa. Four years ago, Mike Huckabee won Iowa, getting nearly half the vote. Iowa is a state with a lot of right-wing evangelical Christians, who might be even more up for this one since Iowa became the first Midwestern state to legalize gay marriage. (And who more clearly symbolizes the anti-gay position than Rick Santorum, whose position so angered Dan Savage — see my previous posting)? So Santorum might have been expected to win Iowa; the fact that he only essentially tied Romney — after campaigning harder in Iowa than any other candidate, while Romney mostly ignored Iowa until very recently — really means that Santorum did not meet expectations. But it does mean that the evangelical religious Right has settled on him as their candidate. (And if anything makes me more hostile to him than any of the other contenders.)

Ron Paul has to be happy about his third-place finish, though some polls had him winning Iowa. But in fact, most of his support came from independents, not Republicans, and he will not be able to transfer this strong Iowa showing to the nationwide party.

So I think that the result of the Iowa caucuses points to Mitt Romney being the 2012 nominee. (One anti-Romney blog I read denigrates Romney as the 2012 McCain. Perhaps he is, and that, despite that guy's comment, is a good thing. Who, after all, did the GOP nominate in 2008?) And I'm not complaining.

Happy new year -- and get ready for the start of the election process!

2012-01-02T10:24:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was New Year's Day — the start of the year 2012. And, as every year that is a multiple of four, the beginning of both a leap year and a Presidential election year in the United States. (Yes, 1900 was not, and 2100 will not be, a leap year. But I doubt that any of the people reading this blog was alive in 1900, and I suspect very few, if any, will live to see 2100.) And tomorrow, the first event that actually does something in the 2012 election process, the Iowa caucus, takes place. Up until now, there have been polls, but all they have done is recording opinions, and not actually affecting the result except in that other people have been relying on them to decide who they want to support.

I've seen polls saying that Mitt Romney will win in Iowa tomorrow, others saying Ron Paul will win, and yet others pointing to Rick Santorum — who was an also-ran so very recently. Obviously, Romney's supporters have the good of the Republican Party (and I think the nation!) in mind — only he, it would appear, can possibly defeat President Obama in November, and this is the real goal. Santorum's supporters are mostly “social conservatives” (who are taking down the Republican Party because of their stupid ideas) plus a few bigots who can't support a Mormon for the Presidency (and the less said about them, the better). These people started off backing Michele Bachmann, then switched, when her craziness came out, to Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and more recently Newt Gingrich. Each in turn showed their flaws, so now they turn to Rick Santorum, who comes off as a somewhat smarter and saner version of Bachmann, but so similar that gay-rights advocate and columnist Dan Savage decided to use his name to denote a certain unpleasant bodily exudation that I choose not to describe more fully here.

Santorum cannot win the Presidency, even if he wins in Iowa, and even if he does win Iowa, he probably will be unable to win the nomination, but then, most recent Iowa caucus winners have failed to win the nomination. So enough said about him. But what of Ron Paul? Well, as one out of 435 in the House of Representatives, I think he serves a useful purpose. He brings libertarian ideas to the American people. And that is a good thing. But he goes so far in his libertarianism as to make a caricature, and in the Presidency he would be a disaster. (Not to mention his anti-Semitism, about which I commented a few days ago)

So I'll be awaiting tomorrow's Iowa caucus results, of course, hoping that Romney wins. But since Iowa is not the final answer (as I said, Iowa winners do not usually go on to the nomination), I won't lose too much sleep if Santorum or Paul wins.

The mischief that open primaries bring

2011-12-27T19:37:00.000-05:00

There are a number of “centrist” bloggers, such as Solomon Kleinsmith (whose blog I generally like), who believe that our political system would be improved by opening up primaries to non-members of the party involved. I've never agreed with this, and a column in today's Washington Examiner by Byron York, entitled “‘Mischief’ voters push Paul to front of GOP race” caught my eye, making it clear that my reasons are correct. Now I know that when I cite one of York's columns in this blog (as I did very recently), it is usually to disagree with an opinion of his. But this time, he is not so much expressing an opinion as reporting facts. And his facts give me cause for concern:

Ron Paul is surging in the Republican presidential race. Just not among Republicans.

The Texas congressman is leading some polls in Iowa and is in a tie for second in New Hampshire. A candidacy once dismissed as sideshow is now being taken very seriously; the front page of Monday's Des Moines Register featured a huge spread under the headline “COULD RON PAUL WIN?”

Given Paul's views on the Fed, the gold standard and social issues, not to mention his isolationist foreign policy, the polls have left some politicos wondering whether Republican voters have somehow swerved off the rails. But there's another question that should be asked first: Who are Ron Paul's supporters? Are they, in fact, Republicans?

In an analysis accompanying his most recent survey in Iowa, pollster Scott Rasmussen noted, “Romney leads, with Gingrich in second, among those who consider themselves Republicans. Paul has a wide lead among non-Republicans who are likely to participate in the caucus.”

The same is true in New Hampshire. A poll released Monday by the Boston Globe and the University of New Hampshire shows Paul leading among Democrats and independents who plan to vote in the January 10 primary. But among Republicans, Paul is a distant third -- 33 points behind leader Mitt Romney.

In South Carolina, “Paul's support is higher among those who usually don't vote in GOP primary elections,” notes David Woodard, who runs the Palmetto Poll at Clemson University.

In a hotly-contested Republican race, it appears that only about half of Paul's supporters are Republicans. In Iowa, according to Rasmussen, just 51 percent of Paul supporters consider themselves Republicans. In New Hampshire, the number is 56 percent, according to Andrew Smith, head of the University of New Hampshire poll.

The same New Hampshire survey found that 87 percent of the people who support Romney consider themselves Republicans. For Newt Gingrich, it's 85 percent.

So who is supporting Paul? In New Hampshire, Paul is the choice of just 13 percent of Republicans, according to the new poll, while he is the favorite of 36 percent of independents and 26 percent of Democrats who intend to vote in the primary. Paul leads in both non-Republican categories.

”Paul is doing the best job of getting those people who aren't really Republicans but say they're going to vote in the Republican primary,” explains Smith. Among that group are libertarians, dissatisfied independents and Democrats who are “trying to throw a monkey wrench in the campaign by voting for someone who is more philosophically extreme,” says Smith.

Paul tops the field when pollsters ask Republicans which candidate they are certain not to support. “When you ask people which candidate they are least likely to vote for, Ron Paul is pretty high, because most Republicans here really don't want to vote for him,” says Smith. “His support is not coming, by and large, from Republican voters.”

What's true in New Hampshire is also the case in South Carolina, where Paul is 28 points behind Gingrich in the most recent Palmetto Poll. “The economic positions of libertarians are popular here, but Paul's positions on gay marriage, abortion, illegal immigration, and national defense are all antithetical to South Carolina's conservative culture,” says Woodard. “About 13 percent of the GOP primary electorate are military veterans, and they don't want to bring everyone home. We have a strong pro-life network, and it is knit into the Republican Party at its roots, and the amendment declaring marriage to be something between a man and a woman won with over 70 percent of the vote in South Carolina.”

Non-Republicans are sure to vote in all three early GOP contests. Iowa requires that caucus participants be registered Republicans, but anyone can show up on caucus night, register, and vote. In New Hampshire, so-called “undeclared” voters of any stripe can participate in the GOP primary. And South Carolina's GOP contest is open to all. Wherever Paul's final total, it will reflect lots of non-Republican votes.

Of course, next November's general election is open, too, and the Republican nominee will needs significant non-GOP support. But if Paul were the nominee, he would likely lose lots of Republicans, along with independents, and all of the Democrats who cast mischief votes on his behalf. Even his own supporters don't view him as having the best chance to beat Barack Obama.

There will be a lot written in coming weeks about Paul's role in the Republican Party. It's important to remember that a large part of his support isn't coming from Republicans.

This shows what can happen with open primaries or caucuses. And that's why I favor the kind of closed primaries we have in my current state of residence, Maryland and had in the state I grew up in, New York.

And now, I suppose, the Iowa home stretch

2011-12-25T22:47:00.001-05:00

Though Christmas is a “nothing” event to me, I suppose that to the majority of Iowa voters it is. So between now and the caucus day (just over a week away!) the candidates will probably be working hard to convince last-minute deciders in Iowa to choose them — since they have finished concentrating on getting ready for Christmas. It's going to be a concentrated campaign for all of them.

A couple of days ago, Byron York wrote a column in the Examiner blaming Florida for this crazy schedule. Florida moved its primary up to the end of January, so Iowa and New Hampshire had to move theirs up even earlier to be sure they were first. I disagree with Byron York. Who says that Iowa has a right to be the first state to vote on a nominee? Or that New Hampshire has the right to have the first primary? If they weren't so insistent on being first, Florida could move their primary up and Iowa and New Hampshire would just stay at the dates they'd originally chosen. No, don't blame Florida — the real culprits are the people in Iowa and New Hampshire that refuse to let anyone hold a primary before their choices are made.

Obama is good at one thing: propaganda

2011-12-23T19:54:00.000-05:00

You have to hand it to President Obama. He managed to convince enough people that the Republicans (or at least the ones in the House of Representatives) were opposed to keeping down the Social Security payroll tax deduction, despite the facts — that the Democrats were insisting on a two-month extension of the tax reduction, while the House Republicans were pushing to extend the cuts for a whole year. Such is the Obama/Reid/Pelosi propaganda machine.

In the end, of course, the House Republicans had to cave: it was two months or no extension at all, and the Democrats had the upper hand. But I find it amazing that the public fell for this. The majority of the people seemed to accept President Obama's characterization of the Republicans. It just goes to show how good his propaganda machine is. I just hope that the people can be led to see through this propaganda haze next year, and reject the Obama administration and replace it with someone like Mitt Romney, who might be able to fix what's wrong with the economy.

Even good guys can do bad things

2011-12-22T10:15:00.000-05:00

The motto “Don't Be Evil” of Google is well known. And in general, I think that Google is a good company. I use their Gmail mail service, and I'm impressed with their excellent spam-filtering and I enjoy the fact that since they introduced large amounts of storage, others, like Yahoo!, have had to follow suit. But even good guys like Google can do bad things.

Recently, the fellows at Google seem to have decided that they want Gmail to look better, and they upgraded their interface. The new version does not work with older versions of the web browsers people use to access the Internet. I suppose that the folks at Google figured that the newest versions of most major browsers are free, so there is no barrier to installing them. What they did not allow for is that not everyone uses their own computer to access Gmail.

Most of the time, I read Gmail on my own computer, which has on it the latest version of Internet Explorer. (I will not get into the discussion as to the merits of IE versus other browsers like Firefox, Chrome, etc. I have IE on my machine as my only browser because I've gotten used to it, and none of the alternatives is enough better for me to bother downloading it and learning to live with its quirks — and no piece of software is without its quirks that anyone needs to learn about.) But there are times when I will want to read my e-mail on a computer that is not mine — at a public library, for example. And in my county, the libraries are hurting for money. Many branches only open their doors, on some days, at 1:00 PM, and all branches have shorter hours than they did a couple of years ago. They just don't have the money to pay someone to install the latest versions of software such as IE, especially since most sites work just fine with the version they have. Some people have to use library computers as a matter of necessity, as they can't afford their own. In either case, whether it's just because I don't want to wait till I get home to read my e-mail or because someone has no alternative, I think cutting them off from the ability to access the latest version of the mail system is not a good thing. And this is why I have a bone to pick with Google.

Cal Thomas and Christopher Hitchens' death

2011-12-21T20:09:00.000-05:00

Yesterday there appeared a column in the Washington Examiner by Cal Thomas, on the death of Christopher Hitchens. The first words in this column were “Perhaps not since Madalyn Murray O'Hair and Carl Sagan has there been such an ‘evangelical’ atheist as Christopher Hitchens, the writer and social commentator who died last week after a long and public battle with esophageal cancer.” I suppose Thomas has not heard of Richard Dawkins, certainly at least as ‘evangelical’ an atheist as Hitchens. But the bigger problem I have with Thomas' column is that he seems to be trying to convince Hitchens, who is obviously incapable of reading Thomas' column.

It might make sense for Thomas to explain his beliefs, and why he holds them. Bur when he quotes Biblical passages as if they are likely to convince the atheists among us, he seems to be totally unaware of the unlikeliness that they will do so. For his column to contain statements like:

To object to God is to create morality from a Gallup Poll. In Gallup We Trust doesn't have the same authority.

Hitchens was a gifted writer, but who gave him the gift? Why was he not a gifted actor, surgeon or athlete? Why was he not talentless? Was it an evolutionary accident, which would mean his gift and his life were meaningless and merely a “chasing after the wind”? (See Ecclesiastes.) Apparently he thought so.

An atheist will tell you he doesn't need God in order to be good, or perform good works. Maybe not, but the very notion of “good” must have both a definition and a definer. “Only God is good,” said Jesus. (Mark 10:18)

clearly assumes that quotes from the Bible alone will convince someone. But an atheist like Hitchens clearly considers the Bible to be simply the work of men, with no more authority than “Das Kapital” or any other propaganda piece.

Now I write this as a believer in God, who however (as a Jew) rejects the Divine origin of such works as the Book of Mark, which Thomas quotes. (Ecclesiastes, of course, is a different story.) But I certainly cannot see a thing that Thomas says in his whole column that is likely to change the view of a convinced atheist. I am certain that Hitchens would maintain that his talent was “an evolutionary accident.”

No, I think that the world shows the hand of a Divine Guide. But I also believe that it is impossible, by any means I can imagine, to change the mind of someone who believes otherwise. So I will explain my beliefs, and my reasons for holding them, to anyone who inquires. But I cannot condemn those who come up with different ones, based on what they see in this world. And I think Cal Thomas is totally wrong to say what he does about Hitchens.

Another person realizes Romney is our best hope.

2011-12-20T07:13:00.001-05:00

Tom Bowler writes a blog called “Libertarian Leanings,” in which he describes himself as “a New Hampshire Republican with decidedly libertarian leanings.” As one might guess, many of his posts strike a responsive chord with this “Maryland Republican with decidedly libertarian leanings” (though not all). And particularly, Tom Bowler's blog post, dated December 15^th, entitled “Another ‘Not Romney’ Begins To Fade” is worth reprinting — at least this part:

I think what we've been witnessing over the last several months — what with a new front runner every few weeks — is the hope in Republican hearts for more substantial reform succumbing to the dread that Barack Obama will be re-elected. Each “not Romney” front runner stokes the fires of our hope. But then there is the fatal gaffe or a past indiscretion comes to light and fear takes over. Fear that we won't be able to stop Obama from dragging America into stagnation and mediocrity. Fear that the American way of life will be crushed under the weight of an ever more intrusive federal government, a government whose resources are devoted more and more to insulating the governing class from the voters who put them in office.

I'm settling in behind Mitt. This is no time for Republican or Libertarian purity and no time for tossing away the good in a futile quest for the perfect. Mitt Romney isn't perfect, but he will be very good for America. But most important, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid must be stopped.

This is an important point. Perfection is not the goal. Getting someone in the White House that will take us in a different direction from the one charted by President Obama is. Like Tom Bowler, I am certain that that “someone” is Mitt Romney.

Anti-Semites: Ron Paul, and Pat Buchanan -- does the GOP want their kind?

2011-12-19T20:35:00.000-05:00

The Washington Examiner has formally endorsed Mitt Romney, but clearly some of its columnists have different ideas. Today I saw a column by Timothy P. Carney, a columnist who has a twice-weekly column in that paper, and who seems to be favoring Ron Paul. Carney refers to Paul as “[t]he principled, antiwar, Constitution-obeying, Fed-hating, libertarian Republican congressman from Texas,” and while his libertarianism has much to recommend him (though it goes to a far-too-extreme degree, by my standards), there is one particular aspect of Ron Paul that Carney seems to deny: Ron Paul's anti-Semitism.

Of course, in that same column, Carney seems to deny that Pat Buchanan was anti-Semitic. And Buchanan has made some statements that cannot be construed any other way. For example,

Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.

Is this the Democrats' idea of diversity?

But while leaders in the black community may be upset, the folks who look more like the real targets of liberal bias are white Protestants and Catholics, who still constitute well over half of the U.S. population.

And there is quite a number of other quotes by Pat Buchanan that can be found, such as (in 1990):

After denouncing a group of commentators with Jewish names, including Abe Rosenthal, Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger, Buchanan wrote: “If it comes to war, it will not be the civilized world humping up that bloody road to Baghdad, it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown."

And, (in 2007):

“If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where the real power is at…"

If Buchanan is not an anti-Semite, Hitler was a rabbi! But we are really talking about Ron Paul. And it doesn't take much digging to find quotes by him that demonstrate his anti-Semitism. In fact, the same Examiner that featured Carney's column recently carried a column by Philip Klein, with such notes as:

Nearly three years ago, Israel launched a counterattack on Palestinian terrorists in Gaza who had been firing thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians. In early January 2009, Paul released a web video in which he charged that Israel was launching a “pre-emptive war,” that Palestinians were living in a “concentration camp” and that they merely had “a few small missiles.”

He then repeated this claim on Press TV — the state-owned propaganda channel of Iran's Islamist government. “To me, I look at it like a concentration camp, and people are making homemade bombs,” he said of the situation in Gaza, adding sarcastically, “like they're they aggressors?”

Not only did Paul inaccurately portray Israel as the aggressor, and ignore the Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks, but he also played into the global propaganda campaign to delegitimize Israel. Israel's enemies think that Jews have exploited global sympathy for the Holocaust, so they routinely liken Israelis to Nazis with phrases like “concentration camp.” That isn't an isolated instance of Paul employing the term. He also used it in 2010, when the Israeli navy blocked a flotilla funded by a group with terrorist ties as it attempted to break the blockade of Gaza — a blockade designed to prevent weapons from reaching Gaza terrorists. Nine of the “activists” aboard one ship were killed in the act of attacking the Israeli commandos who intercepted them — an event well documented on video. In response, Paul again condemned Israel, reiterating his claim that Palestinians were living in “concentration camps” in Gaza.

One can accept Paul's desire to avoid foreign wars as a product of his desire to reduce the role of government in general. But his desire in particular to avoid wars in support of Israel is not just that. It is clearly a sign of an underlying anti-Semitism.

An endorsement that makes sense

2011-12-16T00:06:00.028-05:00

I don't always agree with the positions taken by The Washington Examiner, and many of my posts on here have documented my disagreements, but I was very happy to see yesterday's paper, with a headline proclaiming their strong endorsement of Mitt Romney's bid for the GOP presidential nomination, and, on page 2, the whole page taken up with an editorial explaining their reasons for their support.

Their primary reason, of course, is my own as well. It is simply that Romney has the best chance to beat Barack Obama in the election next November. And whatever the flaws that Romney has (and in enumerating these, the Examiner and I certainly differ: some things they consider bad, I'd favor, and vice versa), they cannot compare to the flaws of our sitting President. The Examiner's editorial states that:

…our country simply cannot afford four more years of Obama's record-setting deficits, willy-nilly spending and soaring national debt. His re-election would mean continuing the policies that have brought economic stagnation and high unemployment, and putting federal bureaucrats between Americans and their doctors under Obamacare.

So on this point, the Examiner and I certainly concur, and just because of this need to replace the man in the White House, we must all pull together for Mitt Romney's nomination.

A tale of two predatory companies: Please excuse the rant, but I need to vent

2011-12-15T08:48:00.000-05:00

For this post, I guess I should apologize to those of my readers who read this blog with the expectation that I'll be discussing “important” things like the 2012 Presidential campaign. For once, I'm mostly venting about my own frustrations. It just seems that once upon a time, retailers took pride in the things they sold, and manufacturers took pride in the things they made, but those days are gone forever, and people like me have to suffer.

The two culprits in this story are a retail chain called FYE (For Your Entertainment) and a manufacturing company called Digital Products International (DPI, Inc.) making MP3 players (and other devices) under the brand name of GPX. The story actually begins a couple of years ago when I bought an MP3 player from FYE — not a GPX device, but someone else's — and got burned in the racket called “mail-in rebates.” (I wish those would be made illegal — but that won't happen. I sent in the coupon, and in due course got a check for $5. Since that was too small an amount to make a special trip to the bank to deposit, I put it aside, and only discovered it again months later — after it had become stale, so I was simply out the $5. I'm sure the company made lots of money from people like me that never got around to cashing or depositing those rebate checks!) But the MP3 player was a nice thing to have, and when I misplaced it I wanted to get another, so I went to FYE again. (Actually, a different FYE store; the one I had bought the first MP3 player from had closed.) I saw one there, marked down from $19.99 to $12.99 (no “mail-in rebate”! Just marked down, so I was sure to get the reduction.) that actually had a couple of features that made it better for me than the old one, so even if I found the old one, this one would still be worth having. I bought it, and at first I found it seemed to work OK, so there was no reason to hold on to the receipt — as it turned out, a big mistake!

After a couple of days, however, some things weren't working quite right. I couldn't put the device into “random” mode, so I wrote an e-mail to DPI to find out if I'd read the instruction sheet wrong, but this I could live with. But then the machine locked up; it wouldn't play past a particular song, and when it got to that point, I couldn't even turn it off — except by opening it up and taking out the battery! So I wrote another e-mail to DPI.

As it happened, the second one was the first one that got answered. The guy at customer service wrote me a nice friendly note, advising me to reformat the device, and even reminded me to copy the data to a backup so I didn't lose the files. I thought I was dealing with a good company in terms of having professional customer service people, but after following his instructions and reformatting the device, it turned out that it still locked up, only at a different song. So I wrote yet another e-mail. And this one was not answered, so two weeks later I wrote my fourth e-mail (the third on this particular problem — remember that my very first e-mail, about putting the device into “random” mode, hadn't yet been answered!) reminding them of my problem. I got back an e-mail, suggesting I call the company up and saying that this way we could get to the bottom of the problem. Well, as I've said before, I don't like using the telephone, but he gave me a free 800-number, so I made the call, and got to speak to two people — the one who originally answered the call and, as it turned out, the man who had sent me the e-mails — and it was decided that the particular MP3 player I had was defective, so I was advised to return it to the store where I got it for an exchange. I said I no longer had the receipt, so they might not replace it, and they said, “You have a 30-day warranty. They will replace it.”

So off I went, the next time I was in the shopping mall that had that FYE store, to that store, only to be told that without the receipt they could not do a thing. The store manager called another manager, who verified that she could not even give me store credit. Finally she called a general manager, who said that she could replace the device, but only if they had another of the same model in the store. Guess what! They'd sold them all, so there wasn't a single one. So I was out the $13 plus tax, with no recompense! I threw the MP3 player and all the packaging material on the counter, told them they could dispose of it anyway they chose, and left.

Last night, I finally got an e-mail from DPI responding to my first e-mail. Interestingly, the solution was the same as the earlier one: reformat the device. I responded that by this point, this advice was useless. I no longer had the device, and explained what had happened, and told the responder that I would never buy another DPI product again!

I'm still out the money, of course. And I'm no closer to having an MP3 player than I was three and a half weeks ago. But all I can do is make this posting, to warn my readers about predatory companies I've dealt with, so you can avoid them.

Newt Gingrich - my evaluation

2011-12-13T09:17:00.003-05:00

Since Newt Gingrich is now leading some polls on the GOP nomination race, I think he deserves a longer discussion of what I believe is good and what I believe is bad about him.

One of the things that puzzles me is that many of the people who have problems with Mitt Romney because he changed his mind on so many things have flocked to Gingrich's cause. One thing that cannot be denied about Newt Gingrich is that his own reversals on the issues have been as big as Romney's. (Actually, although I have frequently remarked that nobody's religion should be held against him, I might be faulted for pointing out that Gingrich is a fairly recent convert to Catholicism. But it points out another inconsistency in Newt Gingrich's thoughts. In 2008, Gingrich decided that he wanted to be a Roman Catholic, being officially received into that church in 2009.) I cannot imagine anyone, after reaching his sixties, to decide that the religion he has believed in all his life was wrong and that he belonged in a different one. (Actually, this is his second change — in college he converted from Lutheranism to the Baptist church. Now frankly I find Roman Catholicism an extremely unappealing religion — anyone who can accept that one person is infallible on matters of faith, surrendering his own judgment to that of one man in Rome — or anywhere else — seems to me to be denying his own ability to think straight. But I am not holding his Catholicism against him; it is that, after attaining an age of over 65, he suddenly decided to change his religion.)

Of course, it surprises me that “family-values conservatives” would prefer a twice-divorced, three-times-married man over a man like Romney who has been married to one woman for all his adult life — over 40 years — but this is not really something that matters to me, although I don't see why it doesn't matter to people who keep proclaiming the importance of the family.

My biggest gripe with Gingrich is that — while, on some issues, like the Middle East, I agree with him — he seems to be advocating some strange, even unconstitutional, ideas on other issues, like changing the terms of federal judges so as no longer to be lifetime. (Note: while I firmly agree with Gingrich's position on the Middle East, in a discussion I had with my wife yesterday, she said her position would make her less likely to vote for him — she believes a president who is so firmly on one side of the issue cannot serve as a broker between the two sides. I concede that, but I feel that no American President or anyone else, can achieve peace in the Middle East at this time — the parties are so far apart that compromise seems impossible.)

I do need to say that, if next November I find myself in a voting booth with the names of Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama in front of me, I would have no qualms about voting for Gingrich. Obama's presidency has been so bad that I cannot imagine Gingrich being any worse. In this, Gingrich differs from such as Michele Bachmann, who could not get my vote — not that I would vote for Obama, but Bachmann on the ballot would drive me to vote for a third-party candidate in protest.

Newt has it right in one place, the Middle East

2011-12-10T09:44:00.004-05:00

Well, I have to say one thing good anout Newt Gingrich: he has the facts right on the Middle East. A posting by Muriel Kane says:

In an interview with The Jewish Channel released on Friday, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich called the Palestinians an “invented” people and suggested they have no right to a state of their own.

“I believe that the Jewish people have a right to a state,” Gingrich told the interviewer. “Remember, there was no Palestine existing as a state. Part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs … and they had a chance to go many places. And for a variety of political reasons, we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s.”

Reuters points out that Gingrich’s remarks run counter to official United States policy, which does view the Palestinians as a people with the right to a state of their own.

Gingrich, who said his worldview was “pretty close” to that of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also described the Obama administration’s Middle East diplomacy as “out of touch with reality.” He inisted that Obama and his aides “lie to themselves” about the conflict, which he portrayed as one “between a civilian democracy that obeys the rule of law and a group of terrorists that are firing missiles every day.”

I don't like a lot of what Newt Gingrich has been saying, but on this issue, I agree completely.

One person's take on the GOP nomination prospects

2011-12-09T21:40:00.000-05:00

My wife is nominally a Democrat. In fact, she's better described as an independent, though she is enrolled in the Democratic Party, and rarely votes in Democratic primaries. She is significantly to my left, though well to the right of much of the Democratic Party; she voted for McCain in the most recent election. (Though she considered him somewhat too right-wing, she considered Obama too left-wing, and mostly made the decision based on character. She'd found out about Obama's early history, especially the business about Alice Palmer, and she remembered that in the Dole-Clinton election, she thought Dole too right-wing, voted for Clinton, and was sorry about her decision.) At one point, because the economy soured, she had considered Obama's “change” agenda somewhat attractive, and considered voting for him, but character won out in the end. But her attitude has always been more generous toward Obama's attempts to fix the economy than my own attitude. (For more about her, see my earlier post dated November 7.)

She had been employed by Borders for 12½ years, and they closed her particular store in April; since then, she's been looking unsuccessfully for a new job. Finally, last week, she got a “yes”— from Target, for a part-time seasonal job. This week she started, and celebrated, by having a little fancier dinner than she normally considered affordable. And afterward she authorized me to quote her in this blog: “It's a sign how bad this economy is, when getting a part-time seasonal job is cause for celebration.”

She is probably willing to vote for Mitt Romney, if he is the Republican nominee. She is somewhat less likely to vote for Newt Gingrich, though she's looking more favorably at him than she had been. None of the other GOP candidates is likely to get her vote against Obama.

It's people like that that the GOP needs to win next year. One more reason I think Mitt Romney is the only nominee the GOP can choose, if they want any chance at taking over the White House.

What planet is she on?

2011-12-07T00:18:00.026-05:00

In yesterday's Washington Examiner I read a column by Janine Turner that blew my mind. She wrote

Warning: I am going to write something radical.

Merry Christmas.

There I did it.

During the holiday season whether I am at work, at school, at a mall or the grocery store, I am reduced to feeling like a zealot when I utter those two words. As I scurry out the door, I have to resist the impulse to hide like a prairie dog before I am caught by the holiday Political Correctness police.

Though, who needs the police? The look of fear in the eyes of the clerks and other patrons speaks volumes. It's as if at any moment the emergency alarm will be pulled and pandemonium will ensue.

Like a siren in a nuclear power plant, I am exposed. I am a traitor to the New American Way. What is the New American Way? Intimidation. Conformity. Muzzling of free speech. Denial of religion.

As I journey home and put up a Christmas tree, my traditional warm and fuzzy religious experience is disturbed by an annoying angst that a Christmas tree is offensive. If I am a comrade to the cause and following the New American Way, my Christmas tree will now be a "Holiday tree."

As I stand back and admire the twinkling lights, I experience a nagging guilt that I am somehow a religious extremist.

Christmas is under attack. Christians are being silenced by the code of Saul Alinsky, an insidious intimidation creates a new pattern of thought, like a river creates a canyon.

Liberals have perverted the First Amendment to meet their agenda denying others the true intent of its meaning. It's no wonder that they consider the Constitution an ugly word. The Constitution holds them accountable. The New American Way works only by denying it or distorting it.

The First Amendment restricts the government from mandating a religion but it also guarantees the free exercise of religion, not to mention, freedom of speech. Does this only apply to atheistic liberals?

Christians are being denied freedoms to experience Christmas. This is the black and white of the issue.

If children are caught mentioning Christmas in school, they become outcasts, a disturbance, an obstacle to the New American Way. Children who are Christians are being shamed into submission.

Yet, the liberal elite has it all wrong. We are not a country of clones. We are a country of individualism and independence and uniqueness.

Is this not the true intent of the First Amendment? The liberal elite is getting away with blatant attacks on individual freedoms.

The irony is that the liberals pride themselves on their right to provocative uses of freedom such as immersing a cross in urine. Yet Christians can't say, "Merry Christmas" and children can't hand out Christmas cards in school.

All children of all faiths should be allowed to exchange greeting cards that honor their religion. It is the restriction of this freedom, or the mandating of one religion over another, that is wrong.

Things are frighteningly askew in American culture. This has occurred because by nature conservatives are reserved, respectful. Meanwhile, the loud, liberal and loquacious Left have dominated the dialogue.

Christians, and anyone else who holds religious freedom sacred, need to step up to the Christmas tree this year and embrace it for what it is: an expression of the Christian religion. This act does not deny other religions. It merely is an expression of one of many. Should we not be tolerant and respectful of all religions in America?

Christians, or any religion, should not be denied this right anywhere - in the workplace, in the school, in the mall, in the town square.

As Christians uphold their constitutional rights, they also honor other religions. It is our distinguishing quality that make us America. It is our acceptance of these that makes us Americans.

Merry Christmas.

When I read it I thought, “What planet is she on? She can't wish people ‘Merry Christmas’?” I can't get away from Christmas stuff. Yesterday I went into Barnes and Noble and the overhead speakers were playing “Oh come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord.” Who is preventing her from doing Christmas things — while I want to have them put out of my life completely, and I can't avoid them? Really!

Romney's Mormonism

2011-12-06T00:06:00.039-05:00

Sunday, I was in a Panera or Starbucks (I forget which) having a tea and pastry, and talking to a young student who was becoming interested in politics after having been mostly indifferent. He'd asked me my opinions, and I was explaining that I really wanted to replace President Obama with someone like Mitt Romney, and when he asked why, I started to give my reasons — beginning with the fact that Obama has shown no leadership (allowing Congress to write the health care law, for example) while Romney showed that he could even get his proposals through, even when he had to work with a Massachusetts legislature heavily dominated by the opposite party. The student listened to me and agreed that this was an important point, and a nearby woman interrupted to say, “You know, I totally disagree with you. Isn't he a Mormon?” I said, certainly he was, and then she railed about how only a Christian could have the necessary morality to be President.

Well, first of all, being non-Christian myself, that comment was exactly not the sort of thing that I could accept, and I told her so, adding that the writers of our Constitution were smart enough to put into Article VI the prohibition against any religious test for any public office under the Constitution. As I put it to her, “I don't care whether a Presidential candidate is a Moslem, a Hindu, or even an atheist: and we have a Constitution that says the same thing.” She kept insisting, and I pointed out that probably the most convinced Christian we ever had in the Presidency was Jimmy Carter, but he was not a very competent President. (And at this time, the student commented that Obama was in some ways like Carter, someone who seemed like a nice person, but unable to handle the Presidency.)

Actually, of course, as far as I am concerned, Mormons are Christians: the name of their church is the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” and any church that claims to follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and calls him the Christ is, according to my definition, Christian. I have seen too many cases of Protestants and Catholics each denying the other the right to the term “Christian” to say that anyone who claims to be a Christian has to be accepted on his word as one, despite the claims of any other Christian that he is not. But, as it was clear that this woman had her own ideas as to what constitutes a Christian, there was no sense arguing that point with her.

Another one bites the dust

2011-12-05T10:06:00.000-05:00

Well, now Herman Cain has withdrawn from the race for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. Whether the allegations of sexual harassment lodged against Cain are true or not, enough people will believe him that it is clear his presidential hopes have been shot down. And though some sites say that Cain will endorse Newt Gingrich, the person most helped, of course, is Mitt Romney.

The more conservative elements in the GOP seem to be trying to find someone they like better than Romney. And then one after another either gives up, or botches things so badly that nobody can picture them in the Presidency. It is clear that whatever Romney's flaws (and I admit he has some; I would perhaps have preferred Chris Christie, but he doesn't want to run!) he is the best hope of the Republican Party. And does anyone think that those right-wingers would, faced with a choice between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, vote for anyone but Romney?

Let's face it. Mitt Romney will be the nominee. And those who are trying to push anyone else, deal with it.

A blog post that surprised me

2011-11-29T07:20:00.000-05:00

We are familiar with the Obama administration's push to raise taxes on “the wealthy,” and specifically his insistence on repealing some of the income tax cuts instituted in George W. Bush's Presidency. So I was surprised, in the process of looking at other blogs this morning and following links from blog to blog, to find a blog called “SayAnythingBlog.com,” on which a posting, by Rob Port, appeared today called “Social Security And Medicare Doing More To Promote Income Inequality Than The Bush Tax Cuts.” In it I read that:

…House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in a 17-page paper based largely on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of income trends between 1979 and 2007, has [made the case that the Republican proposals would better address income inequality than the Democrats'].

Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, makes the point that the government redistributes income not only through taxes but also through transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and unemployment benefits. The CBO study helpfully measures income, adjusted for inflation, after taxes and after such transfer payments.

Many may find the results of the CBO study surprising. It turns out, Ryan reports, that federal income taxes (including the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit) actually decreased income inequality slightly between 1979 and 2007, while the federal payroll taxes that supposedly fund Social Security and Medicare slightly increased income inequality. That’s despite the fact that income tax rates are lower than in 1979 and payroll taxes higher.

Perhaps even more surprising, federal transfer payments have done much more to increase income inequality than federal taxes. That’s because, in Ryan’s words, “the distribution of government transfers has moved away from households in the lower part of the income scale. For instance, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers.”

In fact, the blog post summarizes this effect:

In effect, Social Security and Medicare have been transferring money from low-earning young people (who don’t pay income taxes but are hit by the payroll tax) to increasingly affluent old people.

Interesting. Now I am one of those “old people,” receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits, though I am hardly affluent. (The Clinton presidency impoverished me — he canceled the Strategic Defense Initiative, alias “Star Wars,” which funded the job I was working at in 1994; from 1994 to 1998 I was unemployed, unable to get a job, and since then I've never had the kind of good jobs I'd had in the years prior to 1994, though I've managed to get out of total poverty into a more “normal” existence.) But I imagine there are “affluent” Social Security and Medicare benefit recipients, so I cannot argue with Port's posting. Do you think anyone can enlighten those Democrats who insist that “the ‘Bush tax cuts’ must go”?

A continuation of yesterday's post

2011-11-28T00:15:00.027-05:00

Yesterday I made a post that left out one point that I meant to make, but forgot when I entered it into the system.

Certainly one person who has been given license to do “Christian things” is S. Truett Cathy. To those who do not know the name, he is the founder, and still in charge, of Chick-fil-A restaurants. He has steadfastly maintained a policy that not only the locations he owns, but all his franchisees, close on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. His company's web site says it is because “He believes that all franchised Chick-fil-A Operators and their Restaurant employees should have an opportunity to rest, spend time with family and friends, and worship if they choose to do so.” But what if one of his franchisees is Jewish, and worships on Saturday? Mr. Cathy does not contemplate this.

Since Mr. Cathy is a private citizen, of course, he has every right to impose such a condition on his franchisees. And I, in turn, have every right to personally boycott Chick-fil-A. As I do.

What threat?

2011-11-27T08:23:00.001-05:00

My blog, for some reason, gets very few comments posted, though I certainly would be happy to see more of my readers comment on my posts. One person who has commented in the past uses the pseudonym Asclepius, and he recently posted a comment on my recent post on separation of “church and state.” You can read his entire comment, but the most important point I think to consider in his comment was the following:

So your experience justifies what most Christians would contend: there should be no compulsion to participate in x, y, or z; but at the same time, that acknowledgment should not serve as a threat to those who do wish, in some way, to participate in Christian things, public or otherwise.

I wrote a reply to his comment, but I thought it really ought to be expanded upon, and this post is intended as a follow-up to my reply to Asclepius' comment as well as an extension of the ideas I expressed in my original posting.

I would not challenge Asclepius' statement that “there should be no compulsion to participate in x, y, or z; but at the same time, that acknowledgment should not serve as a threat to those who do wish, in some way, to participate in Christian things,” but I do not see where any such threat exists. In fact, if anything, “those who do wish… to participate in Christian things” are granted more license than necessary. Many public ceremonies begin with an invocation, generally given by a Christian clergyman. Our coinage and currency bears the motto “In God we trust,” which I as a Jew find acceptable, but which offends my atheistic friends. Back when I was in grade school, they added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance; again, I as a Jew have no problem with these words, but my atheistic friends have different thoughts on the matter. We have elected a black President, but we have never elected a Jewish (or Muslim, Hindu, or atheist) President.

Whenever a court has blocked “participat[ion] in Christian things” it has been because these “Christian things” would involve non-Christians as well, and would involve “compulsion to participate in x, y, or z,” which Asclepius admits is undesirable. School prayer, for example, has been abolished, a good thing because even if some students were able to opt out, the peer pressure against “being different” is great in school-age children. Sitting down when everyone in class is standing up (or leaving the room) calls uninvited attention to the child, and this alone serves as “compulsion to participate in x, y, or z.”

So I wonder what Asclepius really meant by his comment. Perhaps he sees some of these things differently from me, but I'd love to see where.

It is just not going to happen!

2011-11-25T16:04:00.000-05:00

Although the post was made ten days ago, I just read it today. Michael Medved wrote a posting on The Daily Beast blog, entitled “Obama Should Name Unity Government to Tackle Financial Crisis.” Really, what he advocates is that President Obama should replace Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner by someone who might be respected by the Republicans, someone like Steve Forbes or former New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg (who was actually offered a Cabinet post by Obama, but at the far less prestigious Commerce Department). Well, Mr. Medved might be right in that such appointment would signify that President Obama would be willing to abandon hyper-partisanship in favor of problem solving. But the reason that won't happen is that this is not true: President Obama is not at all willing to abandon hyper-partisanship. It is his stock in trade. It would be the equivalent of Nancy Pelosi, two years ago, offering to share some of the Speaker's prerogatives with John Boehner. It has about as much likelihood as that of Obama resigning as President, or declining to be nominated in favor of Hillary Clinton, even though I've actually seen suggestions that he do the latter.

Barack Obama is the most egotistical President we have had in my lifetime, probably the most egotistical President we have ever had. He simply believes he is certain to find, on his own, the solution to all our money problems, and he is not about to show a trace of compromise here. Michael Medved obviously does not understand what makes Barack Obama tick, if he makes a proposal like the one he made.

A personal story, to explain my vehemence on the "separation" issue

2011-11-24T00:55:00.005-05:00

One thing I consider very important, and which colors a lot of my attitudes toward specific politicians, is the issue of “separation of church and state” eapecially in its relationship to “freedom of religion.” And behind this is my own experience, so I think I should supply a personal self-portrait as this issue relates to me.

At the age of nine, I moved to a new home in New York City, at the opposite end of the Borough of Manhattan from where I had been living for the preceding few years. I had to start in a new school, of course, and there were two factors that affected my situation at that school for the three years that I went there.

First, I was something of a “brain” — I was nine, but I was in sixth grade, among mostly 11-year-olds. And second, I was a good singer. I had a boy soprano voice, and I sang well enough that I was in demand at the school to sing before other classes than my own. Perhaps if YouTube had existed in those days, I might have become the Justin Bieber of the 1950s (though, actually, years younger than Bieber was when he was discovered!), but in those days, I was only a celebrity at Public School #7 in the Bronx. (Yes, I lived in Manhattan, but so far north that my local school was over the line in the Bronx.) My singing made me an instant favorite of the school's music teacher, and in seventh grade a year later, I was in her official class and she took a special interest in me, teaching me a number of songs on a one-to-one basis.

Then, along came Christmas. I balked at singing songs with words like “Oh come let us adore him, Christ the Lord.” And this got me in trouble with my official-and-music teacher, an Irish Catholic who failed to see that, to a Jewish boy like me, these words were blasphemy. (I don't know if, at age 10, I knew the word “blasphemy,” but you get the idea.)

From that point on, I went from being a favorite of my teacher to being dirt. She and my eighth-grade official teacher actually conspired, in my eighth-grade year, to try to keep me from graduating! (The problem with the eighth-grade teacher didn't involve religion. I simply didn't like history, and history was her favorite subject!)

With this kind of background, I almost became strongly prejudiced against Irish Catholics. The only thing that prevented that was another teacher, clearly just as Irish (his name was McCarthy!) who I had for science in seventh grade. He was really not a science teacher: he was a gym teacher who was also pressed into service as a science teacher. And he knew that I actually knew more science than he did, so the classes were usually something like Mr. McCarthy starting the class with a general mention of the topic, and then I was pitched questions and really this 10-year-old, whose voice hadn't changed yet, conducted the class! It was Mr. McCarthy who suggested I apply to a special scientific high school when I was in eighth grade, and when I did, my eighth-grade official teacher ridiculed me. She conducted special sessions for the kids in her class who had applied to the specialized high schools, and I was not permitted to attend. But I got my revenge. I was the only person in her entire class who passed the entrance examination!

But that is a digression. The point is that my refusal to sing Christmas carols jeopardized my graduation. And so my sympathies automatically lie with those who would challenge Christian domination of the rest of us. I hope this explains my stance on this issue.

David Frum's interesting ideas

2011-11-23T07:09:00.011-05:00

I often read David Frum's FrumForum blog. AS lot (not all, mind you) of his ideas, I share, and so I have marked his blog on this one as one warranting your reading. But the latest posting by Frum is not on his blog. It is on the New York magazine website.

The article is too long to quote, so I suggest you read it via the link I put here. I certainly no more agree with everything he says than I do with everything he posts on his blog (or everything posted on his blog, since he uses a number of guest writers as well as himself to post there). But I think it is certainly a worthwhile read, and very thought-provoking, and I really think all who read this blog should read his posting.

Another “front runner”?

2011-11-22T18:57:00.001-05:00

Well, now there are polls that say that the #1 contender for the 2012 GOP nomination, at least in Iowa and some other States, is Newt Gingrich. Will he bite the dust, now that Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain have, each in his/her turn, crashed?

Gingrich is rather too conservative for me — but so were Ronald Reagan and the younger President Bush. And yet, both of those Presidents had pretty good presidencies, I have to admit. So Gingrich might fill the bill.

I've already posted some comments on Gingrich, so you know how I feel. I would say, however, that of all the candidates, he ranks #2 to Mitt Romney. But four years ago, I considered John McCain as ranking #2 to Rudy Giuliani. And yet there's a difference. Yes, I rated Giuliani higher than McCain, but I liked a lot about McCain, so he was a close #2. Gingrich is currently #2 on my list behind Romney, but far, far back behind him in my estimation. I would happily vote for Gingrich over Barack Obama a year from now, if it came to that. But that is not because Gingrich is so good — rather, it is because Obama is so bad. I don't like Bachmann at all, for example, but I'd probably even vote for her over Obama.

The supercommittee fails

2011-11-21T09:27:00.001-05:00

It looks as though the debt-reduction supercommittee has failed to reach an agreement. And the reason is clearly this: Nobody is willing to compromise. The Democrats insist on a “soak-the-rich” policy. They cannot realize that in a recession, raising taxes is not going to help. And the Republicans, not surprisingly, are not going to accept a Democratic insistence that new taxes are a sine qua non of the deal.

The Republicans, of course, have the better of the argument. But with a Democratic President in a position to veto any pure Republican bill, they probably needed to accept some revenue enhancements.

I don't know how this will end. The automatic across-the-board budget cuts which will follow this are sure to get some negative responses from those whose pet areas are going to be cut. The question is, will the across-the-board cuts trigger some real efforts to look at where money is needed and where it is just somebody's pet project? The answer to this question is the key.

One county's war against rich pre-teen kids?

2011-11-20T20:17:00.000-05:00

This summer, I saw a story about an unbelievable action taken by the county in which I live. The United States Open golf tournament was held in this county. A group of pre-teen kids operated a lemonade stand near the tournament grounds. Because the kids had not gotten a permit from the county, their parents were fined $500!

I just received some more unbelievable information about this case. (Though, I suppose, one might say that it means that money can't buy special treatment.) It turns out that these kids were the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the CEO's of Marriott and Lockheed Martin, the largest private employers in the county! So the Marriott and Augustine families had kids who wanted to open a lemonade stand to raise money for charity, and the county would not let them. Strange!

And obviously, the county didn't care who they offended. Can you imagine what these families must think of this county's government?

An interesting coincidence

2011-11-18T00:15:00.037-05:00

After posting yesterday's post, I read a post on Dennis Sanders' “Big Tent Revue” blog entitled, “Losing Our Way.” And, though he posted it before I posted mine, I hadn't yet read it until afterward. So it is interesting to see the overlaps between our posts.

I think that both of us are concerned that, in the name of conservatism, the Republican Party is in danger of moving so far rightward that it jeopardizes its hopes of winning the votes of the majority of the American people. It's even interesting that we both (although, in Sanders' case, he was quoting another writer, Ramesh Ponnuru) cited the same issue, the Medicare prescription drug plan!

It might be noted that Ponnuru, as described on the Bloomberg News site where his post occurs, is a senior editor at National Review, which should eminently qualify him as a conservative. So the fact that a moderate like me should find a Ponnuru column (even if quoted by an ideological ally of mine like Dennis Sanders) striking a responsive chord makes it seem like there is something there.

Conservatism: what is it?

2011-11-17T08:20:00.000-05:00

Recently I saw another column in the Washington Examiner that I thought a bit puzzling. This one was written by Gene Healy and entitled “Newt Gingrich is no conservative.” Among the things that Healy uses to characterize Gingrich as “no conservative” include his support for the Medicare drug plan. I suppose Healy favors a cruel, extreme-libertarian kind of conservatism that decrees that if you can't afford to pay for your prescription drugs, you should just die and leave the world to the next generation! For to my way of thinking, the way the Medicare drug plan is structured, it's a good way of introducing conservative ideas into a Medicare-type program.

Rather than a one-size-fits-all sort of “insurance” plan, it fosters competition. Different private insurers (and I emphasize private) compete for the senior citizen's premium. When I got my booklet, it gave me choices between insurers who had lower monthly premiums and higher co-payments and others who had higher monthly premiums and lower co-payments. And various in-between combinations as well. I think this is a good idea. The government helps the insurers provide their plans at an affordable rate, but it doesn't, as “Obamacare” does with basic health care costs, force identical coverage by all companies. It seems to me this is exactly what a conservative wants. But I wonder what Gene Healy would require of someone to be called a “conservative.”

It is now official! The Supreme Court will hear arguments on the health care law

2011-11-15T00:15:00.010-05:00

The Supreme Court has finally agreed to something that most of us have known for some time: The “Obamacare” health care law raises serious constitutional questions, important enough for the Court to decide. Yesterday,
the Court agreed to take up three cases challenging the Constitutionality of the law.

The Court has allocated five and one-half hours for discussion, far more than usual; in recent years the Court has limited arguments to one hour on most occasions, and never more than four (on the campaign finance law in 2003) in quite a long time.

There is a blog post by Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, entitled “How ‘Obamacare’ Could Lose in the Supreme Court.” And this makes it clear that the big issue is Does Congress have any limits on what the Commerce Clause of the Constitution empowers it to do? And Winkler feels that the Court may well find that these limits exclude such things as the “individual mandate,” which would invalidate ‘Obamacare.’

The Court will take up these arguments in March, and probably issue its ruling in June, right in the middle of the Presidential election campaign. It will be very interesting to see what they decide, and how the candidates respond.

The most annoying time of the year

2011-11-14T08:15:00.000-05:00

Two songwriters, Edward Pola and George Wyle, once wrote a song entitled "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," about the Xmas season. To me it is better described as "the Most Annoying Time of the Year." As I've actually said in a number of posts, I hate it.

Normally I would wait to post this until it got closer to that day. (Although one of my earlier postings was also in early November.) But as it happened, over this past night, I had a dream. Now I don't usually put out my dreams on this blog for the whole world to see, but in the dream I was telling a friend (and, strangely, this friend was one who, in real life, passed away over 10 years ago!) that I wished that Christmas were treated, in this country, like Purim, a Jewish holiday that usually is celebrated in late February or March. And that's about how I feel for real.

Nobody who wants to celebrate Purim has any difficulty. There are stores where you can buy noisemakers and the other things one uses to celebrate the holiday. And it probably gets a mention in the newspapers a day or so before the actual date. But we are hardly bombarded with Purim songs, Purim cards, Purim decorations, and the like for the entire months of January and February! Anyone who wanted to ignore Purim would find it as easy to do so as anyone who wanted to celebrate it.

Contrast this with Christmas. It is impossible, beginning in late October or early November, to get away from Christmas decorations, Christmas music on the overhead speakers in department stores, and the like, and on the day itself, everything is closed. (Except, in the more urbanized areas, a few Chinese restaurants!) The Smithsonian museums (one of the few places one can go for an enjoyable time that don't cost a lot of money) are open every day of the year — except Christmas. One year I was in graduate school in a relatively small city — Charlottesville, Virginia. I could not find a single open restaurant — the only way I could get anything to eat (I was living in a single room without kitchen facilities) was by getting candy bars out of vending machines. I would gladly ignore the fact that December 25^th is a holiday for many people — but I simply can't. There is simply no way to lead a normal day's existence on that day.

Now, this will put me at odds with such as Rush Limbaugh, who believe this country should be a Christian theocracy. But so be it!

Musical chairs for second place?

2011-11-13T07:16:00.000-05:00

First there was Michele Bachmann. Next came Rick Perry. Then Herman Cain. Then, briefly, Perry seized the headlines again, but mostly because of a negative incident, his not being able to remember his own plan to eliminate the Energy Department! Most recently, the name of Newt Gingrich has surfaced — and, as I posted earlier, in a sense he's the best of the choices of those who would nominate “anyone but Mitt Romney.” It looks like a game of musical chairs for the 2012 nomination — or rather, for second place, because most people are pretty certain that Romney will be the nominee.

One of the interesting things that happened recently is that Gingrich, invited to criticize Romney in a recent debate, refused to do so. I think that this is a sign that he, the most intelligent of the anti-Romney candidates, realizes that Romney will be the nominee, and the best that anyone else can do is use his second place to get the Vice-Presidential nomination. This actually worked well for George H. W. Bush, who finished second to Ronald Reagan, became Reagan's VP, and moved into the Presidency after Reagan was term-limited!

Meanwhile, of course, the Democrats are stuck with President Barack Obama. Nobody wants to challenge a sitting President in his own party. And unless the economy improves, particularly the unemployment situation, in slightly less than a year from today, we may yet see Mitt Romney elected President. But who as Vice-President? Perhaps Gingrich. And I think that at least Gingrich is looking for that slot!

You have to understand the rules!

2011-11-11T08:08:00.084-05:00

As I mentioned yesterday, the centrist blogger Solomon Kleinsmith is starting a new website called “Uniters.org,”. One of the things that I saw when I looked at that site Tuesday is a plug for the hopeless organization called Americans Elect, a group of centrists who are following in the footsteps of the Unity '08 group who tried to produce a centrist ticket for the last Presidential election. And the fact is, people who want to advance the centrist cause and try to do it in that way do not understand how our system works.

Over two hundred years ago, in 1800, Anthony Lispenard was a Presidential elector from New York State. In those days, the electors did not, as they do today, cast a differentiated vote for President and Vice-President. Instead they simply cast two votes, ostensibly for the Presidency; the candidate with the largest number, if it was at least a majority of the number of electors, got the Presidency, while the candidate with the second-largest number got the Vice-Presidency. So supporters of the Democratic-Republican ticket of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr simply voted for both. In previous elections, and among the rival Federalist Party even in 1800, a small number of electors (even just one!) would vote for the party's Presidential candidate, but vote for someone else, who was not a real candidate, with their second vote, so as to assure that their Presidential candidate got more electoral votes than their Vice-Presidential candidate. (In 1796, however, too many Federalist electors did this, so that Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic-Republican candidate for the Presidency, outpolled the Federalists' Vice-Presidential candidate and became the Vice-President!)

Lispenard, in fact, preferred Aaron Burr, the Democratic-Republican candidate for the Vice-Presidency, to Thomas Jefferson, who was again the Democratic-Republican candidate for the Presidency, and tried to accomplish this by voting for Burr but not for Jefferson. But he didn't understand the system! He cast two votes for Burr. Now if he had voted for Burr and someone else as long as that someone else was not a New York State resident (the rules stated that an elector's two votes had to include one who was not a resident of his own State), Lispenard could have elected Burr President, with 73 votes to Jefferson's 72. Anthony Lispenard was one of the few people in history who could have, by one act, changed the course of history! But he didn't understand what he needed to do, and voted twice for Burr. Now this would not work. An elector could not vote for one person twice. And certainly if he was a resident of your own State, as Burr was in Lispenard's case, even if an elector could vote for one person twice, he could not vote for that person twice because one of the votes had to be for a candidate from a different State! So Lispenard's vote was changed to a vote for Jefferson and Burr, and he did not get his wish simply because he didn't realize how simply he could have assured Burr the Presidency!

What does this have to do with Americans Elect? Simply, in the system we have, which is Plurality Voting, any candidate other than the top two simply hurts the candidate who is closer to him. If a “centrist” candidate appeals to more Republicans than Democrats, he is likely to cause the Democrat to be elected. And if he appeals to more Democrats than Republicans, he is likely to cause the Republican to be elected. So unless he is truly dead center, which is pretty unlikely, he's going to have the effect that the people who voted for him will feel they've shot themselves in the foot. (Probably the reason that Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992 was that more Republicans were impressed with Ross Perot than Democrats were.)

As I have previously said, the way to get centrists and moderates elected, which is what Uniters.org ostensibly wishes to accomplish, is to change the voting system, not start a quixotic third candidacy.

Uniters.org

2011-11-10T09:08:00.042-05:00

There is a blogger named Solomon Kleinsmith who hosts a "centrist" blog and is starting a new site called “Uniters.org,” intended as a forum for “centrists and moderates,” to which I recently received an invitation. Now I suppose that the fact that I received this invitation qualifies me as one of those “centrists and moderates.” Yet I am not so sure. A moderate I think I am, but I can't really consider myself a centrist, as I think Kleinsmith defines it. As I've stated it, my positions include some that are generally considered “left” and others that are generally considered “right”: my position is that it is not whether a position is “right” or “left,” but rather whether it furthers the best interest of all of us (meaning maximal freedom, subject to not infringing on others' freedoms), that governs my attitude toward the idea. When I read Kleinsmith's blog, or Rick Bayan's (another “centrist” blog) I don't always find myself agreeing with them; yes, sometimes I do, but sometimes I agree with people like Rush Limbaugh! I certainly will look at Uniters.org, and when I find myself in agreement I will applaud, but I don't guarantee that I will agree with most of the positions it takes.

What about Gingrich?

2011-11-09T04:24:00.038-05:00

Readers of this blog know that I get a lot of my material from columns I read in the Washington Examiner. This post is no exception.

Yesterday's Examiner had a column by Byron York entitled “Gingrich's wonkish, unconventional campaign.” The main burden of York's column is that “If either of the current frontrunners, Herman Cain or Mitt Romney, were to falter, Gingrich is in a position to benefit greatly.” And I think this really means that York is saying that, with all the missteps made by first Michele Bachmann, then Rick Perry, and more lately Herman Cain, Gingrich may well be the one for Republicans who cannot reconcile themselves to Mitt Romney.

Well, I have to say this about Gingrich: He is, I believe, a lot more intelligent than Bachmann or Perry, and he certainly has Government experience, unlike Cain. So he makes a lot more sense as a candidate than any of those three. (Disclaimer: I still think Romney is a better choice!)

One point that could be made against Gingrich is that he has been rejected by his own party in the past. But after the 1962 California Gubernatorial llection, everyone thought Richard M. Nixon was finished. Even Nixon did — after all, he said on that occasion, “You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore…” But this was not so. Six years later, Nixon was elected President. (Another disclaimer: As far as I am concerned, despite a lot of negative opinion by others, Nixon was still the best President, in my opinion, in the past fifty years!)

So maybe Gingrich deserves looking at. As I said, Romney is still my #1 choice among those actually running. But Gingrich isn't a bad alternative, in my opinion.

Herman Cain's defects

2011-11-08T00:46:00.023-05:00

Yesterday's Washington Examiner contains an interesting column by Ken Klukowski entitled, “Four 'Cs' of why Cain is unelectable”:

Catchy alliterations — starting with the same letter or number — are popular in politics. Herman Cain's “9-9-9” is a perfect example. Republicans need to consider another alliteration involving Herman Cain, however. One that could give Barack Obama a second term.

Many men learn the four “Cs” when they buy a diamond ring to propose marriage: carat, color, cut, clarity. Another four “Cs” could mean a short marriage between Republicans and Cain: competency, consistency, character, crisis management.

First, competency. We already elected one president with a scant record of public service, allowing him to base his candidacy on rhetoric. Once elected, his rhetoric was miles removed from his policies.

Instead of a short record, Cain has no public record. Although he's a very successful businessman, you can expect Obama to point out that this nation has never elected a president without any record of serving as a government officer (since Army generals are officers of the United States, and we've only elected commanding generals who saved this nation in war).

Cain's unawareness that China has had nuclear weapons for decades makes easy attack ads. Millions of Americans who don't know much about foreign policy know China has nukes.

The fact that Cain didn't will worry “security moms” and veterans. While jobs are important, any president's highest responsibility is as commander in chief.

A Palestinian right of return would destroy Israel as a Jewish nation. Cain voiced support, then later reversed, explaining that he knew nothing about this basic Middle-East issue and instead supports Israel. In other words, he bluffed his way through the interview to hide his lack of knowledge.

This is also an example of the second “C,” consistency.

His 180-reversal on abortion raises eyebrows. Last month he said it was a woman's choice, which is what pro-choice politicians say. John Kerry said he was personally pro-life, but didn't think government should impose his view on others.

To undo this damage, Cain made passionate pro-life statements, with no exceptions for rape and incest. Expect those video clips in Obama attack ads next fall targeted at suburban and single women.

Cain's 9-9-9 plan was supposed to be simple. Now he says for some people it would be 9-0-9, that there will be economic development zones with different tax structures, and that all this is a transition to a 30 percent national sales tax.

Third, character. Even baseless sex-harassment allegations can sink candidates. Cain's accusers are now free to speak, but eschewing public attention for the moment.

Don't speculate on nameless, faceless allegations. Cain deserves the presumption of innocence. No facts have been publicly revealed to suggest otherwise.

But if these women support Obama, they could drop a bomb on Cain before the general election if he wins the nomination. Assuming the accusations are false, with enough money and press attention they could cost Cain millions of moderate votes by raising serious doubts about his character right before Election Day, capitalizing on the fact that Cain hasn't been vetted through years of public service.

Fourth, crisis management. Presidents are beset with crises, one after another. Effectively responding in a disciplined manner is critical to maintaining public confidence and marshaling support to respond.

Cain's unfocused and now flailing response to the sex-harassment scandal is painful to watch, especially since he knew this was coming. His whipsaw reversal on abortion confuses people. And his unawareness on basic issues like China and Israel could slow and muddle situations requiring quick and decisive action. He's failed the test of deftly handling bad news.

Cain might beat back all these issues in the primaries. But each of them costs him votes with swing voters, making him less electable. Is Cain becoming the candidate President Obama wants to face next year?

Many of Klukowski's comments are points I share. And I worry that too many people, because they have problems with Mitt Romney, may push the party into nominating Cain, which, for the reasons Klukowski gives, would be a disaster for the party. Let us remember that the goal is to defeat President Obama's re-election campaign in 2012, not to nominate the purest conservative. And this is why we need to unite behind Romney

Change who can believe in?

2011-11-07T07:44:00.000-05:00

My wife and I do not live together any more, but we are still on friendly terms. Politically, she and I are quite distinct: she is at least nominally a Democrat, though she has, on a few occasions, voted for Republicans, including the 2008 Presidential election, when she felt that John McCain's experience was helpful, and thought he was far more honorable than Barack Obama. (The information about Obama's treatment of Alice Palmer, which I had read and posted in this blog, had helped her make this decision, and the experience of 1996, when she had thought that Bob Dole was too far to the political right and had voted for Bill Clinton, only to be treated to the spectacle of an embarrassing President, has convinced her that character counts even more than political orientation.) Anyway, the shambles that the economy has turned into (she had worked for Borders, and when her store closed in April had to start looking for work; she still has not found it) makes her very critical of Pres. Obama's “changes,” and she'd been remarking about his “change you can believe in” slogan. In fact, she said to me yesterday that if Mitt Romney is the GOP nominee next year, he could use that slogan! (Though, of course, he's not likely to.)

It looks as though Romney could possibly get her vote, though she's not sure — she wants to look more closely at him. But none of the other GOP hopefuls has a chance at it: she sees Perry (much as I do) as a medieval anti-science type, and we agree that Cain's total lack of political experience ill equips him for the Presidency; though either of the two might get my vote against Obama, it looks as though they would drive her to vote for Obama.

This is why we need to nominate a Mitt Romney type. Romney can get the moderate independents' vote; none of the others can.

What is right, is right, even if Obama does it

2011-11-04T15:20:00.000-04:00

Ever since Barack Obama became President, I've been saying that whenever he does something right, I'll accept it. I can't condemn something just because Obama does it. And so, I have to differ with Gregory Kane, who wrote a column that appeared in Wednesday's Washington Examiner entitled “Obama becomes 'Silent Cal' on Libya, sharia.”

President Obama has been backing (I think not forcefully enough!) the rebels who deposed Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. And now that they have won, they want to put forth a constitution that recognizes Sharia (Islamic law) as the “basic source of Libyan legislation.” Now, there are certain aspects of Sharia that I don't like — cutting off the hand of a thief, for example. But Libya is a majority-Moslem country, and if the majority wants their laws to be compatible with Sharia, that is only democracy. The question is, will the rights of non-Moslems be respected? So far, we don't know. Until we do, we cannot condemn Libya, or Obama's support for the Libyan rebels.

This stance is particularly galling coming from Gregory Kane. He has sometimes written things that seem, in my eyes, to favor a Christian theocracy in this country. Certainly, he wants to make the Catholic Church's teachings on abortion into law. And he ridicules the concept of separation of church and state regularly. Apparently, it's ok for the majority religion to impose its views on the minority if that group is Christian, but not if it is Moslem. As a member of a non-Christian, non-Moslem religious group, I can say that neither is anything different from the other. Both Christians and Moslems have, at different times, had horrible human rights records regarding nonmembers of their own religious groups.

So don't trash Obama for this position. This time he is right. Getting rid of Qaddafi was a service to the world.

Why should anyone care about the "birthers"?

2011-10-27T21:35:00.000-04:00

Recently Rick Perry made some statements that seemed to put him in the camp of the “birthers” (people who don't believe that President Barack Obama was born in the United States). There's been enough evidence that he was born in Honolulu that one would think nobody could doubt it, but suppose he really were not? What difference do you think this would make? Does anyone believe that the Supreme Court would invalidate the laws that Obama signed in his capacity of the Presidency? Perhaps Joe Biden might serve out the last few months of the term Obama was elected to. But would this in any way change the current dynamic of a Republican House of Representatives and a Senate which has a narrow Democratic plurality, with enough Republican votes to prevent action on anything they unanimously oppose?

Those who feel President Obama has been a bad President, and I count myself among them, need to concentrate all efforts on nominating a Republican who can defeat him November next year. Trying to attack him on the “legitimacy” issue won't really accomplish a thing.

Why there is no credible "social conservative" Presidential candidate

2011-10-26T09:25:00.000-04:00

I've been getting some amusement from the machinations of “social conservatives” trying to come up with a candidate this year. They've had a really hard time, because it's just not possible to find a credible Presidential candidate who is also a “social conservative.”

First, there was Michele Bachmann. A member of Congress, a former state treasurer, and certainly a “social conservative.” But when she began to campaign for the Presidency, it became obvious that she was only a slightly more intelligent version of last year's Christine O'Donnell. She had never given much thought to some of the major issues confronting the country, and was positively crazy when it came to some matters. The “social conservatives” abandoned her in droves as this came out.

So next, they turned to Rick Perry. The problem with Rick Perry is that he isn't really a traditional Republican, but rather an unreconstructed Dixiecrat. The Dixiecrats, for over a century, stayed in the Democratic Party, not because they agreed with the rest of the Democrats on any important issues, but because Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and they had never conceded that the Civil War was won by the North under his leadership. When the Supreme Court decisions of the 1950s and 1960s made it clear that the Dixiecrats would never prevail, they looked at the fact that, on many economic issues, they had more in common with the Republicans than the Democrats and gradually moved into the Republican Party — Perry did so only in the 1990s! But Perry got tripped up on the “Niggerhead” issue — to him (as I said, really a Dixiecrat), a camp with a name like that was not particularly offensive, so he never considered that, once he put his political ambitions on a national stage, there are people out there who would find it so.

Now, the current “flavor of the month” is Herman Cain, who would obviously never be caught up on the “Niggerhead” issue. But while Cain has certainly been a competent executive (with a substantial record in the pizza business) he is not a politician. He got himself tripped up on the issue of the “Palestinian ‘right to return’” because he never understood that this really meant the extermination of Israel — he'd never been concerned with issues like that. And his credentials with the “social conservatives” have been seriously compromised by his waffling stand on abortion, the issue that “social conservatives” live and die for. He has proclaimed himself “pro-life,” but basically he is a “laissez-faire” businessman and opposed to government intervention in people's private lives, and this is exactly what the “pro-lifers” want. And so he's finding himself forced to contradict himself.

I believe it is truly impossible for an intelligent person to believe in the premises of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States and also be a “social conservative.” They are simply incompatible. And it is in this that the “social conservatives” have their problems. How can one believe in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and interfere with others' liberty to live as they choose, in the pursuit of what makes them happy? And imposing one's own religious beliefs on others is certainly incompatible with the First Amendment to the Constitution. This is why anyone intelligent enough to be a credible Presidential candidate is bound to reject the “social conservative” doctrine. And it is why the “social conservatives” have found it such tough going to find their candidate.

The myth of “medical marijuana”

2011-10-25T08:49:00.000-04:00

I should note that this post was inspired by reading a column by Joseph Summerill in yesterday's Washington Examiner, but it is not simply a repost of his column, because I have been thinking along similar lines for a long time. Some of the facts, however, are taken directly from the column, since I do not want to have to spend the effort digging up the primary sources.

Marijuana is a dangerous drug. It has been classified as a Schedule I drug inder the Controlled Substances Act, a classification which applies to substances that “exhibit a high potential for abuse or dependency, have no accepted medical value, and are unsafe to use, even under medical supervision.” Note the last two of these. They imply that there is really no such thing as “medical marijuana,” despite the propaganda by drugheads who have succeeded in getting sixteen states and the District of Columbia to pass laws purporting to legalize marijuana for medical purposes. It might additionally be noted that the Food and Drug Administration has definitively stated that there has not been a single scientifically valid study that has supported the medicinal value of marijuana, and FDA's statement confirms the ridiculousness of the term “medical marijuana.”

Some people point to the fact that the FDA has approved a drug called dronabinol (sold under the proprietary name Marinol), which contains synthetic tetrahydrocannabinol, the main psychoactive substance found in the cannabis plant. Dronabinol is prescribed for the relief of the adverse side effects of chemotherapy and as an appetite stimulant for AIDS sufferers. It is available legally in pill form, and accepted by the medical community. But marijuana, as smoked, contains more than four hundred chemicals, including some of the same carcinogens found in tobacco smoke. It is not a pure substance, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (a unit of the National Institutes of Health) has stated that marijuana in smoked or vaporized form is unlikely to be used as a medicine because of its lack of purity and often unpredictable side effects, pointing out that it may cause cognitive defects that reduce its usefulness.

Years ago, people used to point out that marijuana is a “gateway drug,” opening the way to more dangerous drugs. A lot of pro-marijuana people have propagandized extensively to the point that you do not hear this much now. And yet, scientific studies show this to be true. The Harm Reduction Journal has published a study of 3000 “medical marijuana” users and found that, of the Caucasian subjects in the study, nearly 75% have used cocaine and over 50% have used methamphetamine. Another study, of teenagers who smoke marijuana, done at Columbia University, found that teen-age marijuana smokers are 85 times as likely to use cocaine than non-marijuana smokers.

And the psychoactive properties of marijuana are known. Washington state has legalized “medical marijuana,” and a study in that state showed that about one in every eight fatally injured drivers tested positive for marijuana. There is more evidence, but this is the most prominent study.

So, clearly, “medical marijuana” is a myth.

An example of unions' extortion of the public

2011-10-24T06:07:00.000-04:00

This posting, on the FrumForum blog, by Howard Foster, caught my eye. It's another example of contemptible behavior by the labor unions of this country.:

Last year I moved my law firm from one high-rise building in downtown Chicago to another one a few blocks away. Because the move was a short one, I shopped around for a mover who could get the job done for under $500. And there were small movers in the suburbs willing to do the job at that cost.

Yet I discovered a problem when I attempted to obtain permission from my new landlord for the suburban mover to use the loading dock. The mover was non-union, and the building would not allow any non-union contractor or subcontractor into the building.

I checked my lease to see if there was any such restriction on my ability to hire independent contractors of my choosing. And sure enough, there was. The lease requires tenants to obtain permission from management for any independent contractor.

It does not expressly provide that such permission shall only be given to unionized contractors, but the building manager made it quite clear to me that indeed was the unwritten policy. If someone tries to bring in a non-union electrician, the building owner will order the electrician to leave, and if that doesn’t work, the building staff will walk off their jobs, effectively shutting the 40 story structure down.

So the building is colluding with the union to keep out non-union workers even though the result of that conspiracy is to jack up the price of labor for the building’s tenants. Why would the building agree to enforce this rule? At first blush, it would seem not to be in the building’s interests. It wants to keep its tenants happy.

The reason is big cities operate under union control. Union members tend to live in these cities. They are rewarded with vastly supra-competitive (overpriced) wages in exchange for which they pay hefty union dues. These dues flow to politicians who pressure big businesses to pay extortionate wage rates in exchange for barriers to competition. So a big employer in Chicago’s Loop will have to pay enormous labor costs, $30-70/hour for contractors plus generous benefits, but the City will steer contracts to that company. Additionally, sky-high labor costs keep out competitors. So big landlords and big construction firms and big hotel chains and big restaurant chains tend to dominate the downtown market. We consumers lose at every turn.

So I was compelled to hire a union mover on the “approved list” maintained by my new building at a cost of $1200, an act of extortion. In labor law terms I was the victim of a “secondary boycott,” the threat of a work stoppage by the building employees. Labor law allows employees to boycott or strike their own employer but not anyone else. They can’t take action against me in order to coerce me to keep non-union contractors out of the building. This is an “unfair labor practice” under the National Labor Relations Act (and it’s also an antitrust violation if done with the approval of the employer, here the building, which it was).

But the only remedy Congress provided for such a violation is a federal suit for money damages. So I could sue the union for $700 in federal court. But no rational litigant would sue for such a small sum even if the prospect of an award of attorney’s fees is promised to the winner, which the law provides to the victims of unfair labor practices. A more appropriate remedy would be a quick action for an injunction prohibiting the union and my building from excluding the non-union mover before my move so the damages could have been avoided. But the law does not provide for injunctions in such cases.

What happened to me is not unique to Chicago. Unions dominate virtually every construction job in every major city in the North and the West. (The South, which has historically been anti-union, is more competitive.) Union labor is significantly more expensive than non-union labor. Non-union workers would do the same jobs just as well (although the unions dispute this), for at least 30% less. One unintended consequence is that the unionized contractors will by necessity hire fewer workers, thereby increasing unemployment.

Let’s hope Mitt Romney will become president and propose long-needed labor law reform. Quicker relief from secondary boycotts by unions and their management collaborators (like my building) is long overdue. Ideally, the National Labor Relations Board should be able to hear such cases and issue injunctions against such boycotts, which are already illegal, before the damage is done, in a matter of a few weeks.

And in the case of a someone with a big construction job, the damages, the difference between union and non-union wages, can be enormous. Secondly, we need to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires the federal government to pay union wages for construction projects. The result is that federal highway and construction jobs always go to unionized employers. This costs the taxpayers billions of dollars per year. If our high level of unemployment and low growth persist into 2013, and a Republican is elected president (presumably Romney), then there will be propitious time for labor law reform.

This is why we need laws to take out these greedy unions. Once upon a time, they served a useful purpose. Now, they don't.

The trouble with Herman Cain

2011-10-23T07:46:00.001-04:00

There are two groups whose allegiance to the Democratic Party has been overwhelming: my own group (American Jews) and, in the last few decades, and even more monolithically, African-Americans. So it is heartening to see a few Jewish Republicans coming into prominence (like Eric Cantor, the #2 Republican in the House of Representatives), and the same can be said of African-Americans like Herman Cain. But Cain poses one big problem.

Yes, it would be nice to have an African-American candidate opposing President Barack Obama to take the "racism" accusations off the table. And unlike President Obama, Mr. Cain has excellent credentials as a businessman in the real world, having been the CEO of a well-known corporation making pizzas for the public. Being a businessman is something that teaches you a lot about economics, which will be a major issue, perhaps the major issue, in next year's Presidential election.

But Mr. Cain has one major problem. He has never held any political office. And this means he has never had to engage in the give and take that a President (or any politician) needs to immerse himself in. No President, no Governor, no mayor, ever gets his way 100% — he has political opposition to work with (even the Mayor of Chicago has some, though it's pretty weak!) and this matters. We have just seen how practical politics is making Herman Cain rethink his catchy-slogan "9-9-9" taxation plan. One of his talking points has been the simplicity of his plan. No exemptions — all people are treated alike and all income is treated alike. Well, when he sees the real world, he sees you can't do that. All of a sudden, his plan has grown exemptions.

Had he some political experience, he probably could have seen from the beginning that his original 9-9-9 plan would never fly.

One of the problems we've had with President Obama is his need for "on-the-job training." He has had some political experience, but not enough (before becoming President, he had a couple of years in the Senate and a few more as an Illinois State Senator). Can we really afford to have a President with none at all? (Even if he has the business experience that President Obama lacks!) I don't think so.

We need a President with both experience running a business and experience in a high political office. That is why Mitt Romney is such an attractive candidate.

A good idea, which is unfortunately not likely to come about right away

2011-10-21T06:40:00.007-04:00

Although the bill was introduced back in August, it was only yesterday (as a result of an editorial in the Washington Examiner) that I found out that Senator Orrin Hatch and Representative Tim Scott introduced a bill, under the name of the Employee Rights Act, to make fairer the process of determining whether workers are represented by unions or not.

If enacted, the bill would:

• Mandate a secret-ballot vote in every union representation election, regardless of whether an employer opts to voluntarily recognize the union.

• Require union representation to be recertified via a secret ballot election every three years following initial certification.

• Allow employees to collect any lost wages or unlawfully collected union dues resulting from a union’s interference with their rights under the National Labor Relations Act, including the right to petition for union decertification.

• Impose a procedural penalty on unions that unlawfully interfere with an employee’s filing of a decertification petition.

• Prevent the National Labor Relations Board from implementing its proposed “quickie elections” rule change in order to ensure that employees are able to have full and complete information before deciding whether to join a union.

• Conform and make equal the definition of an unfair labor practice on the part of union with that of an employer under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

• Prevent a union from ordering a strike unless they first obtain the consent of a majority of the workforce via a secret ballot election.

• Allow all applicable employees — union members and non-members alike — to have the same rights as union members to vote to ratify a collective bargaining agreement or to engage in a work stoppage.

• Prevent an employee’s union dues or fees from being used for purposes unrelated to the union’s collective bargaining functions — including political contributions and expenditures — without that employee’s written consent.

• Strengthen prohibitions against extortion and the use of force or violence or threat thereof for achieving objectives relating to union representation, compensation, or conditions of employment.

Right now, the playing field is tilted in favor of organized labor — if the employees vote once to certify a union, it remains certified for all time; the workers have no chance to reconsider this decision, ever! This bill would create a more level playing field.

Unfortunately, it has little chance of passing the Senate — because the Democrats control that body and most Democrats are the stooges of organized labor — and would certainly be vetoed by President Obama even if it passed, again because the Democratic Party is totally beholden to organized labor and Obama has never shown any desire to offend those union bosses. Right now, all we can hope for is a debate that will bring out the issues, but perhaps after the 2012 election, the political balance will have changed so as to make passage more likely. As should be clear, this blog is 100% behind the Hatch-Scott bill. Too bad there is no hope of passing it right now, but let us work to get a bill like this in the future.

Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and church-state separation

2011-10-20T01:22:00.004-04:00

I have not been watching the debates among the GOP hopefuls, mainly because my mind is pretty much made up already, but also because there are too many candidates that haven't got a chance included in the field to be able to concentrate on the significant ones, because I don't have the time, and because I'll find out if anything important came out of them from newspaper or blog articles anyway. And the last point was borne out by my seeing a post by David Frum in his FrumForum blog:

On the Las Vegas stage, Anderson Cooper asked the candidates about the role of faith generally and then specifically to the disparaging comments about Romney’s Mormonism by the pastor who introduced Rick Perry at the Values Voters Summit.

Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich used the opportunity to describe religious faith as a bona fide job qualification for the presidency.

Gingrich: “And how can I trust you with power if you don’t pray?”

Perry unpleasantly tried to play it both ways, both edging away from the disparaging remarks while refusing to criticize the pastor for making them.

I have said I didn’t agree with that individual’s statement. And our founding fathers truly understood and had an understanding of — of freedom of religion.

And this country is based on, as — as Newt talked about, these values that are so important as we go forward. And the idea that we should not have our freedom of — of religion to be taken away by any means, but we also are a country that is free to express our opinions. That individual expressed an opinion. I didn’t agree with it, Mitt, and I said so. But the fact is, Americans understand faith. And what they’ve lost faith in is the current resident of the White House…I have. I said I did not agree with the — Pastor Jeffress’s remarks. I don’t agree with them. I — I can’t apologize any more than that.

Now Romney:

What I actually found was most troubling in what the reverend said in the introduction was he said, in choosing our nominee, we should inspect his religion. And someone who is a good moral person is not someone who we should select; instead, we should choose someone who subscribes to our religious belief.

That — that idea that we should choose people based upon their religion for public office is what I find to be most troubling, because the founders of this country went to great length to make sure — and even put it in the Constitution — that we would not choose people who represent us in government based upon their religion, that this would be a nation that recognized and respected other faiths, where there’s a plurality of faiths, where there was tolerance for other people and faiths. That’s a bedrock principle.

And it was that principle, Governor, that I wanted you to be able to [say], “no, no, that’s wrong, Reverend Jeffress.” Instead of saying as you did, “Boy, that introduction knocked the ball out of the park,” I’d have said, “Reverend Jeffress, you got that wrong. We should select people not based upon their faith.” Even though — and I don’t suggest you distance yourself from your faith any more than I would. But the concept that we select people based on the church or the synagogue they go to, I think, is a very dangerous and — and enormous departure from the principles of our — of our Constitution.

That may have been the most full-throated defense of religious separation on a Republican platform these past 30 years – and we owe it to Rick Perry’s weasely attempt to “disagree” with Rev. Jeffress’ anti-Mormon animus while still profiting politically from that animus.

More reason to support Mitt Romney. He actually knows the content of the portion of Article VI, ¶ 3 of the Constitution that says:

no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

Is Pres. Obama already a lame duck?

2011-10-19T08:15:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, as I look around the blogosphere, by following links I come to some relatively old posts that I think deserve reading. In particular, the FrumForum blog has a number of people besides David Frum who post there, and usually when you look at a post, there are links to other posts by the same person, some of which may be months old. With that by way of explanation, I saw this posting by Zac Morgan, dated this past August 4. It makes fascinating reading.

Romney a "Rockefeller Republican"?

2011-10-17T19:27:00.000-04:00

Newt Gingrich recently called Mitt Romney a “Rockefeller Republican.” And I suppose, to Gingrich, this is bad. To me, this is a good reason to support Romney. For, I'm proud to say, I'm also a Rockefeller Republican. Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller was one of the two people whose handling of an executive position inspired me to become a Republican — I was too young to vote, of course, but as soon as I turned 21 (the minimum voting age back in those days) I registered as a Republican, coming from a strong Democratic family. (The other person, besides Rockefeller, was President Dwight D. Eisenhower.)

Of course, I think what Gingrich was trying to say is that Romney could not be nominated because he is too moderate. This may have hurt Rockefeller, but it will not hurt Romney. The fact is that most Republicans are more interested in defeating Barack Obama than in ideological purity this year. And a moderate is exactly what the GOP needs to do this.

Can we do something to advance the moderate cause? Yes!

2011-10-16T07:30:00.000-04:00

Regular readers of this blog know that I generally take positions that can basically be described as right-of-center, and many of my posts have been in advocacy of moderate Republican candidates. But I think that the cause I am about to put forth in this post is one that moderates of both parties and independent centrists should embrace, however we might differ on individual candidates. The thing is: we need to change the way we elect people to office.

The system we use for nearly all elections is called plurality. You can vote for only one candidate, and the one with the most votes wins. If there are three acceptable candidates, you need to pick one, and if some of your allies pick a different one, the vote for the good candidates is split, so that a candidate that you really don’t want gets elected. Because of the results of such a split, we need primary elections to pick one candidate of each party, and it is in these primaries that moderates are getting crushed by extremists of both the left (in the Democratic party) and the right (in the Republican party).

We have seen this over and over. Arlen Specter, who had served with distinction in the Senate as a moderate Republican representing the state of Pennsylvania for many years, figured he could not win a Republican primary – the last time he had run, he came perilously close to defeat at the hands of Pat Toomey, who was going to run in the primary again. So he switched to the Democratic party, where he thought his chances might be better. That did not help; he was beaten by a left-wing Democrat, Joseph Sestak, in that party’s primary. Polls showed that Specter might have won an election in which all Pennsylvanians could vote, but at the primary level, Toomey would beat him among Republicans and Sestak among Democrats. So the Senate was deprived of a voice for moderation.

Last year, at least two Democrats, Chris Coons in Delaware and Harry Reid in Nevada, were elected although the polls showed that both could be defeated if the Republicans had put forth moderate candidates. And there were available candidates: Mike Castle in Delaware, a very popular member of the House of Representatives, who had had to run statewide since Delaware had only one Representative, and Sue Lowden in Nevada, a State Senator and former state Republican chairwoman. But Tea Party extremists in the Republican primaries forced the nomination of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada, both of whom were guilty of such political gaffes as to make them objects of ridicule by the time of the November election.

Some have said that the solution to this is opening up primaries to voters who are not members of the party in question. But that would be a case where the cure might be worse than the disease. Democrats might vote in a Republican primary to pick the candidate who would most easily lose to a Democrat. So a better solution is needed. And that is to have a better voting system. There are two broad types of solution. One is to have proportional representation, where a party that gets 25% of the votes in an election gets 25% of the seats in the body being elected. This is, of course, not possible in an election for an office like a mayor, governor, or president, so for such offices it is necessary to have a system where vote splitting cannot hurt a candidate as it does in plurality voting.

Some people say that proportional representation leads to instability, because it leads the way to the representation of lots of third parties that cannot form majorities; it has in such cases as France and Italy shortly after World War II and Israel more recently. But there are ways of setting up proportional representation that do not lead to this instability; in Germany and, in recent years, New Zealand, a system has been adopted that works and allows third parties to exist without the unstable governments that were seen in those other countries.

But as stated before, there are offices like mayor, governor, or president, which cannot be divided proportionally. So single winner methods need to be devised where a voter can vote his conscience without worrying that splitting the vote would elect his worst choice. There are systems that will do this. A site, which I created, that compares voting systems is available at http://important-information.net78.net/vote/. There is an excellent book by William Poundstone called Gaming the Vote, which also discusses this problem. And Poundstone, as well as I, has concluded that the best system to use is one called “range” or “score” voting, in which you rate all the candidates, so you can (in one version) give a 10 to the candidate(s) you like best, a 1 to the one(s) you like least, and intermediate values to others. So conservatives might give 10s to the most conservative candidates, 1s to the most liberal, and 4s, 5s, or 6s to moderates. Liberals would do the reverse, and moderates might give 1s to the extremists and 9s and 10s to moderate candidates. You would not need primaries, because if there were five Republicans in an election, they would not split the Republican vote, but Republicans could give high ratings to all of them. And the winning candidates would be the ones who got the most support all along the spectrum, leading to many more moderate victories.

An alternative system, known as Instant Runoff Voting, has been proposed by a group known as FairVote. It is essentially the system that has been used in Australia for many years, and proponents of this system have actually gotten it adopted in places like San Francisco; Aspen, Colorado; and Burlington, Vermont. In a few of those places, it was adopted, and has since been rejected, because it can lead to such bizarre results as in the Burlington, Vt. mayoralty election of 2009, where the candidate who might have been a good compromise, receiving support from nearly all the voters, was actually eliminated in the course of the counting, because he was the first choice of comparatively few. In such an election, some candidates who might be the most acceptable to the voters at large get eliminated, and usually the result is as much polarization between extreme candidates as the worst cases we have seen in plurality voting, so moderates, particularly, should resist the propaganda for instant-runoff voting.

You can read more about range/score voting at http://rangevoting.org – a very useful site.

Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and qualifications for the Presidency

2011-10-15T02:51:00.031-04:00

The Washington Examiner carries a regular column by Byron York, who, like many of the Examiner's columnists, tends to be a little more right-wing than me, so sometimes I agree and sometimes I disagree. In yesterday's paper I read York's column, which read:

What's wrong with Rick Perry? How did the successful, well-liked, long-term governor of one of America's largest states enter the Republican presidential primary race with great fanfare, zoom to the top of the polls, and then slide almost as quickly back into the pack?

Blaming the Texas governor's problems on a lackluster debating style — as Perry himself has done after a number of poor performances — answers only part of the question. Yes, debates are particularly important this campaign season. But debates are more than just style and popularity contests. They reveal deeper things about candidates; voters watching debates can learn not only how a candidate handles tough questions but whether he is really, truly prepared to run for the White House.

Early in Perry's candidacy, there was a spate of stories suggesting he's not smart enough to be president. They weren't subtle; one was headlined “Is Rick Perry Dumb?” But even Perry's critics could look at those stories and say: Here is a man who has successfully governed a large and complex state, presided over prosperity and growth, dealt with the political challenges that go with it all, and won re-election repeatedly. Successful governorships don't just happen by accident; Perry's results in Texas show he is a smart, competent executive.

But the debates have revealed a different problem. The Rick Perry who has taken the stage in four Republican debates so far is a man who, for all his governing success in Texas, appears not to have thought enough about why he wants to be president of the United States and what he would do if he achieved his goal. When critics gently say that Perry's presentations have been “light on details,” they're really saying Perry doesn't seem to have thought things through.

More than anything else, a lot of thinking should precede a run for president. There's no time to think about much of anything once the campaign begins, and there's no way a candidate can collect and organize a lifetime of experiences into a coherent approach to national issues once he's flying from stop to stop. A candidate has to have done his thinking long before he hits the road or steps on a debate stage.

Think back to a different example from a different time. In 2005, President George W. Bush nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Miers was a perfectly fine White House counsel, but she clearly had not spent a lifetime doing the kind of legal thinking that prepares one for the highest court. The White House assured doubters that Miers planned to study really, really hard in preparation for her confirmation hearings.

But it doesn't work that way. Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito didn't have to cram at the last minute for their hearings. Each had a lifetime of experience and thinking at the highest levels of the law, and their task was to organize the knowledge they already had to prepare for confirmation questioning. But the important thing was, the knowledge was there. The thinking had already been done. Miers, on the other hand, wasn't prepared and finally dropped out.

There's no doubt former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has thought a long, long time about being president. Romney can tell you, at any level of generality or detail you want, why he is running and what he would do if he won. He adjusts to new issues and questions by building on all the preparation he's already done.

For Romney, debate preparation involves taking all the things he has already thought through and finding the most effective way to present them in one-minute answers. For Perry, debate preparation is trying to learn new stuff about national issues that he should have been thinking about a long time ago.

It's often pointed out that since Perry entered the Republican race late, on Aug. 13, he had little time to build a campaign organization and hone a campaign pitch. That's true, but the fact is, if Perry wanted to be president, he should have been thinking seriously about the substance of national issues — not just money-raising and state chairmen — years before he declared his candidacy.

Now Perry is paying the price for that lack of preparation. And if that, in fact, is the real problem behind his poor debate performances, then he's not going to improve as a candidate in the next few weeks. It's far too late for that.

I don't think York goes quite far enough. When he says that “[t]here's no doubt former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has thought a long, long time about being president. Romney can tell you, at any level of generality or detail you want, why he is running and what he would do if he won. He adjusts to new issues and questions by building on all the preparation he's already done,” he's conceding, as well, that Romney, if he is elected in November 2012, will be able, right on Jan. 20, 2013, to move into the Presidency, knowing what he wants to do and how and why he wants to do it. Contrast the current occupant of the White House, who let Congress write his health care bill because he wasn't quite sure what he wanted, and who has in general been pretty slow on the uptake in just about any way you can imagine. This is a good reason to elect Romney, not just a reason he will win debates — whether with Perry now or with Obama in 2012.

"Occupy Wall Street" vs. the "Tea Party"

2011-10-14T14:50:00.002-04:00

There is a man up in New Hampshire who does a blog called “Libertarian Leanings.” I don't always agree with him, but it usually makes good reading. And yesterday, he posted this comparison between the two movements called “Occupy Wall Street” and the “Tea Party.”

For some time now Democrats have wanted their own version of the Tea Party, and now they think they have it with Occupy Wall Street. Good luck with that. As Karl Rove observes, there are differences between the two.

The tea party is a middle-class movement of people who want limited government, less spending, less debt, low taxes, and the repeal of ObamaCare. Occupy Wall Street isn't a movement. It's a series of events populated by a weird cast of disaffected characters, ranging from anarchists and anti-Semites to socialists and LaRouchies. What they have in common is an amorphous anger aimed at banks, investors, rich people and bourgeois values.

The tea party reveres the Constitution and wants to change laws to restore the country to prosperity. Occupy Wall Street started by occupying a New York City park and then blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, sparking the arrest of hundreds.

The tea party files for permits for its rallies and picks up its trash afterwards. Occupy Wall Street tolerates protesters who defecate on police cars, allows the open sale of drugs at protests, and features women walking around rallies topless.

Somehow differences like that haven't registered with progressives like Nancy Pelosi.

“God bless them,” Pelosi said, “for their spontaneity. It's independent ... it's young, it's spontaneous, and it's focused. And it's going to be effective.”

Effective? Yes, if the plan is to destroy any chance for Democrats to hold the White House and the Senate in 2012. Their embrace of the Occupy Wall Street movement will prove toxic to Democrats, especially in light of Barack Obama raking in near record setting amounts of Wall Street campaign money. Which raises one notable similarity between the Tea Party and OWS. Both will effectively drive Democrats from office in 2012. Go team, go!

This time, I think he's hit the nail on the head, so I quote his post in its entirety.

Religious fervor about political issues

2011-10-14T08:58:00.000-04:00

In Dennis Sanders' blog, “Big Tent Revue,” he references a column by New York Times columnist David Brooks, and makes the valid point that policy has become subordinate to symbolism, causing our political system to founder. I advise people to read both posts, and I think Sanders has a lot of truth in what he says. Certainly, whether it's taxes, gun control, or any of a number of issues, it looks like just what he talks about has happened.

The only question is, how can we change this trend? I'm not certain this can be done without great changes in our political establishment. Sanders seems to think that there was hope that Barack Obama might be the one, and he seems to be disappointed that he wasn't. I never saw Obama in that light, and my posts prior to the 2008 election should make that clear. But who can be the one?

A senior living facility that should be ashamed of itself

2011-10-13T15:58:00.001-04:00

It seems that in Reston, Va., just outside Washington, D. C., there is a living facility for senior citizens called Hunters Woods Fellowship House. Its site proclaims: “Hunters Woods Fellowship House is a government–assisted apartment complex, located in Reston VA, designed for individuals of limited income who are over age 62 or are handicapped or disabled.” Note the words “government-assisted.” Therefore, it ought to be a non-discriminatory facility. But the facts, as opposed to the “ought to be”s, are quite different. According to an article in today's Washington Examiner, a group of Jewish seniors wishing to have a Rosh Hashanah celebration party were denied the opportunity. They were refused the option of renting a common room that is available for activities, and when they took some chairs outside for the party, the Hunters Woods management called the police (who determined that no law was violated, and left without making any arrests). Apparently a similar occurrence happened last year at Chanukah, when residents were told that they could not have their party and should consider a Christmas party as enough.

If this doesn't confirm Hunters Woods as grossly anti-Semitic, I don't know what it is. They, according to the Examiner article, deny being discriminatory. Of course, on their Web site, the organization says it operates “out of an abiding sense of Christian mission.” So are they a religious organization, which figures they're like a church and have no need to accomodate non-Christians, or a Government-funded charitable organization, with an obligation to serve all regardless of religious preference? They can't be both.

A follow-up to yesterday's post

2011-10-12T21:04:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, I made a posting on this blog in which I referred to sources that predicted that Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey would officially endorse the candidacy of Mitt Romney for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination. It has now happened. And what a ringing endorsement it was. Gov. Christie went up to New Hampshire, where former Gov. Romney was preparing for the debate, to stand beside him and proclaim:

“I'm here in New Hampshire for one simple reason: America cannot survive another four years of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney's the man to lead America and we need him now.”

This is no wishy-washy, half-hearted endorsement. Chris Christie is a man who speaks his mind, and this shows it. And I heartily concur with Gov. Christie's words. That is why I put them on this blog, larger than normal. Romney has shown he can manage a business, and also manage a state. None of the other candidates (except Jon Huntsman) can claim this experience. And Romney has done it in a state dominated by the opposite party, which Huntsman cannot claim. Romney also, unlike such extremists as Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, has the appeal to moderates that is needed to prevent their going to Obama. For all these reasons, I, along with Gov. Christie, believe that “Mitt Romney's the man to lead America.”

An endorsement that makes a lot of sense

2011-10-11T15:16:00.001-04:00

Since Chris Christie has decided he's not running for next year's GOP Presidential nomination, a lot of his supporters are going to look to him as to where to go. His biggest backer, Kenneth Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot, has already said he's going with Mitt Romney. So will Christie himself endorse Romney? Some news sources say he will, today.

It makes sense. Chris Christie is a Republican governor of a normally-Democratic state who has shown he can get his program through a Democratic state legislature. Both he and Romney are relatively moderate conservatives who eschew the craziness of the extremists. So I am sure that he sees a kindred spirit in Romney. And I certainly think it's appropriate. Readers of this blog may have figured out that my position for some time has been "I really would prefer Christie, but of those who are actually interested in running, Romney is clearly the best." So I applaud Christie's decision to endorse Romney now, before all the jockeying for position. It will help Romney get support from others besides just Langone who have been in the "draft Christie" camp.

I think this proves once more that Christie is the kind of person who does things that make sense. And it confirms my good feelings about both men. Just as, three years ago, when Romney saw he was not going to win the nomination, he buried the hatchet with John McCain for what was obviously the good of the Republican Party, Christie is doing what he (and I) believe is the best thing for the Republican Party and for the USA: encouraging us all to unite behind Romney as clearly the best hope to end the Obama Presidency.

What's wrong with deflation?

2011-10-07T07:42:00.038-04:00

Lately I have been seeing posts and articles in which the writer gets all hot under the collar about the threat of deflation. Frankly, after living my whole life under inflation, worrying about whether my savings, even with interest, will be worth less than when I put the money away, I welcome deflation — if it will really occur. I've seen the 3¢ stamp of my youth go to 44¢ — and it's probably going to go even higher. I don't ever go to the movies — $10 a pop seems fantastic when, as a kid, I paid 25¢, and adults paid 40¢ — and got to see two movies for the price! Yes, my first job paid $6500 a year, and I had a Master's degree; and now even the guy at McDonald's makes a heck of a lot more than that. But I think I'd rather make the wages I made in the 1960s and 1970s — if prices were also at that level — so I knew that if I put away the money in savings I'd still have its value when I needed it.

People argue that, with deflation, people would never buy anything — they'd forever be waiting for prices to come further down. But you have to eat every day, and things wear out, so you'd need to replace them. And look at the one part of our economy that has been deflationary: electronics. The Commodore 64 I bought in the 1980s cost more in current dollars (not inflation-adjusted dollars!) than the laptop I bought in 2008. And the laptop is vastly more powerful! And even a calculator that I can buy for $10 does as much (or more) than the one I paid $80 for in 1973. Yet people buy computers, and calculators, and don't wait for prices to come further down. They want the items now, and will upgrade in the future. So this is a fallacy.

So, I repeat, what's wrong with deflation? I would be happy to see it!

The passing of Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T06:43:00.000-04:00

At least three of the blogs I look at had posts about Steve Jobs, who passed away yesterday, so I guess I ought to put in my own 2¢.

Jobs was, like Howard Schultz at Starbucks, the man who made his company go. In both cases, when they left their companies, the companies tanked, and only when they came back, their companies revived again. Perhaps Jobs' successor as Apple CEO, Tim Cook, can keep the company going, but at one time before, Jobs left and Apple foundered, so we have to see.

But there are some misconceptions as to what Jobs actually did. Some people believe that Jobs invented the easy interface, sometimes called the WIMP interface (Window/Icon/Mouse/Pointer). But in fact it was developed by the Xerox Corporation at its Palo Alto Research Center. The thing Jobs (together with another Steve, Wozniak, who seems to be forgotten these days) did at Apple was to make it a marketable product. Xerox never figured out how to market, or at least how to market anything but the copiers they grew famous on. That was Jobs' real contribution: making computers something that anyone could use was part of it, but making computers something that everyone wanted was the bigger part. And later on, he continued with these products that caught people's fancy: the various “i-P's” (iPod, iPad, iPhone). (I must admit, I have none of these three, though this makes me a distinct minority!)

Unlike Bill Gates, Jobs never made lots of enemies. He found a way to make you want his products without resenting it — while Gates made people feel that he was bullying people into buying his products. And this was Jobs' real genius.

The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki

2011-10-05T09:12:00.000-04:00

President Obama has been criticized for ordering the killing of al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki. In my book, however, the President did right.

Awlaki was born in the U. S., and under the 14^th Amendment is a citizen of the U. S. So in theory, this is the assassination of a U. S. citizen. But in fact, Awlaki, by his words and deeds, renounced his citizenship. In exactly the same way that my grandfather, when he became a citizen of the U. S., renounced his Russian citizenship. Unfortunately, the 14^th Amendment does not address the issue of renunciation of citizenship, so it could be argued that "once a U. S. citizen, always a U. S. citizen," under the terms of that amendment. But in that case, if Awlaki was still a citizen, his actions constitute treason, a capital offense. And his killing is simply an act of punishment that fits the crime.

But then, some might argue that he deserved a fair trial. My response is, what is the purpose of a trial? It is to afford the prosecution a chance to prove its case. Is there any person who can deny that Awlaki's actions, if he was still a citizen, constituted treason, while if he was not, he was an enemy soldier and his killing was simply a normal act of war?

In either case, the killing of Awlaki was justified. This time, Obama did the right thing.

Chris Christie won't run

2011-10-04T23:18:00.000-04:00

Apparently New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has decided he won't run. Too bad. He would have made a great President, I think. But, as it said in the New York Times:

After a kinetic month in which some of the biggest names in American industry and Republican politics urged him to run for president, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey spent a quiet weekend at home, coming to a sobering conclusion on Tuesday: “Now is not my time.”

“New Jersey, whether you like it or not, you’re stuck with me,” Mr. Christie said at an afternoon news briefing in Trenton in which he appeared to be reveling in the national attention his deliberations had drawn, while at the same time showing relief.

And so ended what Mr. Christie’s closest aides and associates described as a heady roller-coaster ride during which he discussed the perils of a national campaign with former President George W. Bush during a Sept. 11 Jets-Cowboys game, received a private hourlong foreign policy briefing from former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, and dined with Nancy Reagan.

But he found himself dreading the prospect of winter in Iowa, conjuring an image of campaign misery at a forum two weeks ago as he imagined himself at a hotel room in Des Moines, “and its 5:30 in the morning and it’s 15 below, and it’s time for me to get up and go shake hands at the meatpacking plant.”

Mr. Christie’s decision — reached Monday night — means the Republican field is now essentially set, forcing the party to focus on those already in the race and give up on the idea that an ideal candidate continues to sit on the sidelines.

And it gave Mitt Romney in particular an opportunity to win over donors and
other potential supporters who have been waiting to see how the race takes
shape. Within hours of Mr. Christie’s announcement, Mr. Romney, the perceived front-runner, had won a commitment from Kenneth Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. Mr. Langone, a high-profile donor, had taken a leading role in urging Mr. Christie to run.

It was just three weeks ago that Mr. Christie’s wife, Mary Pat, gave him the green light for a presidential bid. But as he consulted with his top aides, his wife, and his longtime confidant, William Palatucci, the stark realities of a national campaign were coming in to sharp relief: An unsuccessful bid could make a re-election campaign for governor that much harder.

Getting a campaign together relatively late in the election season was made even tougher when Florida announced last week that it was moving its primary up to Jan. 31, prompting Iowa and New Hampshire to likely leapfrog ahead of it. That meant even less time to prepare for the first contests. But Mr. Christie’s top political aide, Michael Duhaime, was said to be confident that a campaign could be set in motion overnight and was not daunted by the logistical challenges.

And aides and friends said, beyond the challenges of a national run, the
governor was simply unable to abide all the unfinished business he would have to leave behind after less than two years in office.

As Mr. Christie said Tuesday, “I could not get by, in my mind, in my heart, the idea that I was going to leave here 20 months into my term. I just couldn’t get by that.”

The high-level campaign to persuade Mr. Christie to run came to typify the
unease that the party’s establishment and donor wings still have with the slate of candidates in the running. And Mr. Christie’s quasi-public deliberations had frozen many of the Republican Party’s most important financiers as they waited to see if he would get in.

As he deliberated, there were emotional pleas from captains of industry and
finance such as Mr. Langone and the investor Carl Icahn, as well as from voters, like a farmer from Nebraska who sent a FedEx to Mr. Christie’s home over the weekend, addressed to his children, the youngest of whom is 8. It contained a letter telling them to urge their father to make a bid and that doing so would give them a place in history, Mr. Christie said.

Mr. Langone had been among the leaders of the effort to get Mr. Christie to
enter the race, holding a meeting with the governor and dozens of other major party donors at the New York Health and Racquet Club in the summer at which Mr. Christie was said to have been taken aback by the passion of their pleas.

Aside from doubts about the Republican field of candidates, they were impressed with Mr. Christie’s public tangles with Democrats, teachers and state workers as he sought to cut state spending, not to mention his theatrical approach at public events.

But aides said the campaign to enlist him started its climb to fever pitch after former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota announced in mid-August that he was dropping out of the race, and then more so after Gov. Rick Perry of Texas received poor reviews at a Sept. 22 debate in Orlando, Fla.

But it appears she was ahead of Mr. Christie himself. Three people close to Meg Whitman, the new chief executive of Hewlett Packard, said that when she spoke with the governor in early September about holding a fund-raiser for the New Jersey Republicans in California — which she did last week — she received assurances from him that he was not running for president. Mr. Christie’s assurances to Ms. Whitman were first reported in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

Bob Teeven, a friend from Mr. Christie’s student government days as an
undergraduate at the University of Delaware, said the governor had not indicated he was leaning toward a White House bid when he saw him in Wilmington on Sept. 20, when Mr. Christie received the Freedom Award from former Gov. Pete du Pont.

Mr. Perry’s poorly received debate performance came two days later, and
afterward Mr. Christie and his aides were deluged with new requests, from
powerhouse donors and voters alike, to enter the nominating battle.

His polite responses to their calls left some with the impression that he was leaning toward a run. And while his representatives denied that to reporters, it is clear that his resistance to the idea was, at the very least, softening.

Already scheduled to speak at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in
California last week, his address there — in which he called President Obama “a bystander in the Oval Office” — took on new resonance. Combined with a series of fund-raisers across the country, the trip — and the boisterous reception he received from crowds — made an impression on him, and caused him to begin reassessing his denials one last time, aides acknowledged in interviews.

As Mr. Christie said on Tuesday, “When you have serious people from across the spectrum, not to mention from all across the country, passionately calling on you to do something as consequential as running for president of the United States, I felt an obligation to earnestly consider their advice.”

Also, friends said, he no longer seemed to have the same misgivings about his own readiness for the Oval Office. Jerry Zaro, a friend of Mr. Christie’s, said that a half-term on the job, and one legislative victory after another, “It’s taught him — it’s shown him — that he’s got the goods.”

Yet even now, there are no reports that Mr. Christie ever came very close to deciding to plunge in. During a fund-raising event in Louisiana on Thursday with Gov. Bobby Jindal, he made it clear that he did not have an appetite for the long stretches of time on the road that would take him away from his children, said Jason P. Doré, the executive director of the Louisiana Republican Party. He said Mr. Christie spoke about “his son missing him after being gone for the three days on the road, and that he needed to get back.”

Mr. Christie said his family was prepared to support a White House bid and
insisted on Tuesday that the decision was his alone. “I came back to the same place that I was in the whole last year when everyone was asking me, which was I don’t want to leave this job,” he said. “And it’s just never felt right to me to leave. And so I didn’t.”

As I said, too bad.

More on Governor Christie

2011-10-02T08:32:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I said that if he ran for the Presidency, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie would be my first choice. So it is an interesting coincidence that on the same date, Dennis Sanders' "Big Tent Revue" blog also discussed Christie, but in the context of another opinion, a September 29 column in The Washington Post by Eugene Robinson, and a rebuttal in The New York Times by Frank Bruni.

Dennis Sanders agrees with Bruni that just because Christie is seriously overweight, that does not make him any less qualified to be President. And I certainly agree. If being unable to control one's appetite is a sign of inability as a leader, what about President Obama's inability to control his tobacco habit?

I think Robinson just doesn't like Christie, and has found a convenient excuse.

Another candidate?

2011-10-01T07:42:00.005-04:00

Right now, of those declared candidates for the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination, my favorite, as I've stated on this blog before, is Mitt Romney. He's the best of the ones who have said they want to run, for a lot of reasons — he's not the extreme right-winger that most of his competitors are, he's proved that he can run both a business and a state, and other things. But it's clear that many Republicans are uncomfortable with him. Why else would Herman Cain — politically inexperienced, and all along running only a few percent in the polls — suddenly vault to the top in the Florida straw poll? And even to me, Romney has his flaws — the main one being his reversing his positions on a number of issues. In this respect, though I hate to admit it, Texas Governor Rick Perry was right. But although Perry is more consistent on the issues, he's more consistently on the wrong side as far as I'm concerned, so I certainly wouldn't prefer him to Romney!

There are two men who, if they decided to run for the nomination, would easily get my support for the office. One is Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels — the man who put the "social conservatives" in their place by saying that in these hard economic times there needs to be a setting aside of the social issues. The other — my absolute first choice if he ever chooses to change his mind and run — is New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has taken on powerful teachers' unions and won, who has resisted the effort to make “social conservatism” a badge of the party, and has worked with a Democratic legislature to get his programs through. This last shows his superior leadership abilities.

Of course, both Daniels and Christie have said they aren't running. So I'm stuck with Romney for the time being, given the alternatives. But sometimes I just wish that Christie, particularly, would change his mind. (Latest flash: A report on Fox News says Christie is "reconsidering" his decision not to run, and may decide to change his mind. I hope he does.)

Barry Goldwater, racism, and the Republican Party

2011-09-30T08:44:00.004-04:00

About fifty years ago, a Republican senator, Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona, voted against a civil rights bill. I don't agree with Goldwater's position, and (as most Republicans at the time) I supported the bill, but it is a mistake to say that Goldwater was a racist because he opposed the bill. In fact, Goldwater believed, as many libertarians do even today, that it was Government interference in something that should be left alone. (Last year, then-candidate, now Senator, Rand Paul got into political trouble for expressing similar opinions.) But it led to a number of unfortunate results: first, Southern conservative white people, who had been Democrats, flocked to the Republican Party, which in itself was not bad because it made the party bigger and viable in an area where it had not been, but also moved the party rightward (and meant that the party became associated with some real racists like Strom Thurmond), and second, the exodus of African-Americans from the Republicans, which began in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt because many of the African-American citizens were poor and perceived FDR's policies as helpful to them, accelerated and became almost total — with the African-American vote for President being in some years around 90%. Only a few African-Americans remained in the GOP — the party can boast of such names as Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and more recently we have seen Herman Cain. Recently we have even seen people claiming that the Republican Party (or its economically conservative, "Tea Party" wing) are institutionally racist, and three years ago people were insisting that anyone who opposed Barack Obama's bid for the presidency were "racist." (My wife, a nominal Democrat who was supporting McCain, but who before she met me had even had African-American boyfriends, heard such criticism!) It isn't racism to oppose a President, who just happens to be African American, because his policies seem to be wrecking this country's economy. It isn't racism to oppose a President, who just happens to be African American, because he does things like forcing through a healthcare bill that most Americans oppose. It isn't racism to oppose a President, who just happens to be African American, because he does things that scare our only sure ally in the Middle East, Israel.

One might think that a party who has elected officeholders like Allen West (and decades ago elected the first African-American Senator since Reconstruction, Edward Brooke), that chose a President who appointed the first two African-American Secretaries of State, and which now has a candidate for nomination for the President, Herman Cain, who is considered a serious contender, could be considered immune from accusations of racism. But the world doesn't seem to work this way.

The hypocrisy of the Congressional Black Caucus

2011-09-29T07:02:00.003-04:00

Allen West is an African-American member of the United States House of Representatives who happens to be a conservative Republican — more conservative than I am, in fact. Herman Cain is an African-American candidate for the Presidency of the United States, who recently won a straw poll for the Republican nomination in Florida. The Congressional Black Caucus claims to be representative of African-Americans trying to get a “piece of the pie.” So you'd think that Allen West and Herman Cain would be shining examples to the CBC. But clearly, they are not.

Obviously, the CBC's approval goes only to liberal Democrats. Even African-Americans, if they happen to be Tea Party conservatives, are considered examples of white racism.

Of course, the CBC isn't racist — yeah. Stephen Cohen, a white Congressman who tried to join the group in 2007 because he sympathized with their goals was refused membership. But this isn't racism. Yet the Tea Party, which supported Herman Cain, is racist. Please explain this to me.

How left-wing is Obama, really?

2011-09-27T07:50:00.047-04:00

On Sunday, David Frum posted on his blog the question "How Left-Wing is Obama?" He points out that the far Right has been categorizing President Obama as a socialist, even a Maoist, while the far Left has been criticizing him for selling out. Yet Frum fails to answer his own question, so I think I ought to do so.

President Obama is a man who starts out on the far left on most issues. He was talking about pulling out of Iraq when he was not yet President, and he was for a "public option" on health care, as well as positions that can be considered "left" (even though I agree with them, at least to an extent) on such issues as gun control and abortion. But when push comes to shove, he has one agenda: the centralization of power in Barack Obama. So he gives in to Republicans when he has to, in order to get a bill passed, and the Left thinks he's selling out. He doesn't know how to create jobs, so he lets the Democrats in Congress write a jobs bill; he doesn't have the votes to pass a public option on health care, so he lets the Democrats in Congress write a health bill (and ends up with one that neither the Left nor the Right can abide!); and now that the Republicans control the House of Representatives and the Democrats control the Senate, he finds himself unable to do anything because he is totally unable to lead and both houses of Congress are pulling in opposite directions. If Hillary Clinton (at least as far left in spirit, but with a pragmatic streak) were President, she'd probably be able to achieve a consensus in the Congress and get bills to do something — Obama doesn't know how to do anything, and is simply concerned with making himself look good while Congress tears itself to bits.

So the answer is: Obama is very far to the left in his thoughts, but the Obama presidency is ending up with a relatively centrist record. Not because Obama wants to be a centrist, but because he is devoid of leadership skills.

When "Right Wing" really meant it

2011-09-26T08:20:00.054-04:00

Reading Dennis Sanders' excellent blog, my attention was called to a blog by Walter Russell Mead called “Via Meadia,” in which a post appeared (dated September 20, 2011) called “The ‘Christianist’ Nightmare: It’s Just A Bad Dream.”

The gist of this article was that if it looks as though the Bachmanns, Perrys, and Santorums of today's Republican Party are leading to a “Christianist” take-over of the country, one needs to realize that over the past 60 or more years, there has been so much improvement in people's freedom that the worst of the things that they advocate is still so much milder than what things actually were like in his (and my) youth. The post is so long that, rather than quote it here, I recommend that you read it on his blog. But it reminds us not to worry so much.

Mead, according to his post, attended a segregated school — I did not, because I grew up in New York City. But I was certainly aware of segregation in our Southern States. And back in 1952, a music teacher that I had considered friendly to me turned viciously hostile — because I refused to sing carols with words like “O come let us adore him, Christ the lord.” (She actually conspired with another teacher to try to keep me out of my own graduation ceremony — which, thankfully, failed.)

Mead is responding to other, younger, bloggers who are afraid of the future; his point is that the trends toward freedom are so strong that we shouldn't worry about “Christianism” taking over. I share his memories; I suspect we are about the same age. And I thank him for reminding us of these facts.

What do moderates want?

2011-09-25T05:39:00.017-04:00

What do moderates want? An interesting posting by that name appeared in a blog run by Rick Bayan called "The New Moderate." I don't necessarily agree with everything he says in this post, but I think it's worth reading. I commend it to you, though careful readers will note that Bayan is probably a bit to the left of my own positions. And I do recommend his blog in general, if you aren't reading it.

On the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

2011-09-24T05:15:00.025-04:00

While my previous post was critical of the position taken by Dennis Sanders on his blog, I certainly concur with him in his celebrating the end of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Of course, as a publicly declared gay man, Sanders has more reason to celebrate it than many other people, but I think that all people who believe in the concept of equal rights should be happy in this — but yet it is not quite a total victory for equal rights. As long as the ironically mistitled "Defense of Marriage Act" is still on the books, gay military personnel cannot provide their spouses with the same benefits that straight ones can. However, that bill will hopefully be declared unconstitutional — the Obama administration has refused to defend it, one of the few things this president has done right.

It is a good feeling to see pictures like the Navy lieutenant who went up to Vermont to marry his partner. It will be interesting to see the outcome of legal cases where expelled gay ex-servicemen and -women are suing to get equal treatment (they were only granted half the standard severance pay, for example).

I can't really see the point of view of people who want to be in the military — I did everything I could to ensure I was not drafted, back when I was called! — but certainly, if someone wants to be there, a simple concern for equality has to say that this is a positive step.

On the death penalty

2011-09-23T17:12:00.002-04:00

Dennis Sanders is a blogger I often agree with — probably, in fact, one I usually agree with. But in two recent posts he takes a position I really cannot accept: perhaps because he is a Christian minister I can understand it (after all, their Bible has "turn the other cheek" in it, as mine does not).

In a posting entitled "Death Penalty PR", Sanders says, regarding recently executed murderer Lawrence Brewer:

But the fact is, most of the folks that come before the electric chair or lethal injection are more than likely guilty as sin like Brewer was. Davis makes people wonder about the legitamacy of the policy. Brewer confirms in the minds of many that this is the right thing to do.

In the end, I still can’t support the death penalty. One reason is that we can never be totally certain that someone is guilty. But another reason is that I think killing by the state is something that has to be done sparingly (such as war or law enforcement). I would rather take away someone’s liberty than take their life even if they are reprehensible.

And in an earlier post entitled "On Troy Davis" he writes:

Clive Crook sums up my view:

The strongest case against the death penalty, I have always thought, is simply that it is irreversible, and criminal justice is prone to error. The thought that an innocent man might be put to death is appalling. I don’t know whether Troy Davis, scheduled to be executed tonight, is innocent, but according to what I read about recanted testimony and questionable physical evidence it I cannot believe he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt–let alone beyond all doubt, which is the standard that ought to pertain in death-penalty cases. In 2007 the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles appeared to uphold that more demanding standard. Nonetheless yesterday it ruled the execution should go ahead.

And it did go ahead tonight.

Well, in these posts, Sanders clearly puts forth his opposition to the death penalty. but I certainly cannot agree. Allowing a convicted murderer to live, even as an incarcerated prisoner, cheapens the lives of the victims of murder. These lives are deemed to be worth less than the life of the murderer. And for this reason alone, I firmly support the death penalty — but only for murder or those other crimes that cause the death of innocent people. Making other crimes, like rape, capital is not something I would support. But I firmly believe in "eye for eye, tooth for tooth," and thus, "life for life."

Well, my previous post is confirmed

2011-09-21T00:55:00.025-04:00

As I said two days ago, It appears that President Obama doesn't seriously want a bill to reduce the deficit; he merely wants a campaign issue. His comment that he will veto a bill unless it raises taxes proves that. Even liberals seem to see this, as the cited blog post (from Mother Jones, about as liberal a source as one can imagine) shows.

The problem is, as a result we will have gridlock, and nothing will be accomplished unless a new President is elected, and that won't happen for more than a year, or a new Congress is elected, which will take just as long.

Unfortunately, Obama does not care about the economy as much as he does about scoring political points and fomenting class struggle — his socialistic point of view is quite clear now. Too bad people, who seemed to take him for a centrist, elected him in 2008, but we are stuck with him until January 2013.

Again -- please not Rick Perry!

2011-09-20T00:14:00.010-04:00

Rick Perry is now a front-runner in the race for the 2012 GOP nomination for the Presidency. Such a nomination would be, as Stephen Richer posted in the FrumForum blog, anathema to many more Jews than simply me.

Please read the post; I'm not going to reproduce it here, but it makes great reading.

Is Pres. Obama looking for a bill? Or a campaign issue?

2011-09-19T20:01:00.000-04:00

“Politics is the art of the possible.” So said Otto von Bismarck over a century ago. And to a great extent, this is true. But it looks as though President Barack Obama doesn't believe so.

He is still insisting that a bill to improve our economic situation must raise taxes, though he has been told by Speaker of the House John Boehner that such a bill cannot pass the House of Representatives. In fact, even the Democrats in the Senate are not united behind it, so the Senate, no less than the House, will reject his plan.

The only possible motive for Obama's making this proposal is that he's not really looking to get a bill through the Congress that he can sign, but instead he is hoping that he can harness class warfare to ensure his re-election, since there are more poor voters than rich. But hopefully, even those who are not rich will realize that those “rich people”that Obama wants to strangle financially are the people who create the jobs we need. Obama wants to kill the golden goose. And he's encouraged by such as Warren Buffett, who have so much money that they can easily spare the tax money Obama would take from them. But a lot of people are not in Warren Buffett's class, and will not be so eager to support Obama's programs with their money.

President Obama's bill is dead on arrival at the House, and I'm sure he knows it. So unless he's only building up a campaign issue, what is the sense of proposing such a bill?

Was the New York Congressional vote a referendum on Obama?

2011-09-17T01:59:00.012-04:00

Some people are claiming that the election Tuesday which elected Republican Bob Turner to Congress was not a referendum on President Obama's administration. Well, listen to the comments of 61-year-old Linda Goldberg after she cast her ballot in New York City's borough of Queens: “I am a registered Democrat, I have always been a registered Democrat, I come from a family of Democrats — and I hate to say this, I voted Republican. I need to send a message to the president that he’s not doing a very good job. Our economy is horrible. People are scared.” Anyone who would say she “hate[d] to say” that she voted for a Republican is a pretty firm Democrat. When people like Linda Goldberg vote as she did — and say that the President is “not doing a very good job,” that is a pretty bad sign for the President.

In this election, even a Democratic colleague of losing candidate David Weprin's in the New York assembly, Dov Hikind, endorsed Turner. When fellow partisans in office back your opponent, that says something. Assemblyman Hikind suggested that the deciding factor in the race was the economy. “People want to go back to work,” he said. “They're sick and tired of speeches.”

The arrogance of… Barack Obama

2011-09-16T07:13:00.034-04:00

Some years ago, now-President Barack Obama wrote a book entitled "The Audacity of Hope." Well, I don't know about how much audacity hope may possess, but President Obama's audacity is so great as to be better described as arrogance, to a seemingly unbounded degree.

The President submitted a request to Congress during the debt ceiling debates to raise certain taxes. (Robin-Hood-like, he seemed to think that taxing "rich people" more would get support from the American people.) The Republicans, quite naturally, balked. They also were very unhappy with the "stimulus that didn't stimulate," which Obama pushed through when the Congress was in Democratic hands. So what did the President propose for his "jobs" plan? A rehash of the "stimulus," to be paid for by the very tax increases which he could not get the GOP members of Congress to sign on to. And he has the gall — the audacity — to accuse the Republicans of excess partisanship, and beseech them to cooperate!

If he wants a less partisan response from Republicans in Congress, it is up to him to come up with a less partisan program — no repeat of the "stimulus that didn't stimulate," no more "robbing from the 'rich' to give to the poor," and at least some concession to Republican ideas like lowering business taxes and deregulating those businesses.

A referendum on Obama?

2011-09-15T02:22:00.020-04:00

Tuesday, a special election was held in New York City to fill the seat vacated by Anthony Weiner, the discredited member of the House of Representatives. And guess what? In a district with ¾ of its registered voters enrolled as Democrats, an area that has not had a Republican Representative since the days when Calvin Coolidge was President, the winner was Bob Turner, a 70-year-old retiree. Turner has never been elected to public office; his opponent was a sitting member of the New York State Assembly (lower house of the legislature). Turner ran, and lost to Weiner last year.

This is as big news as Scott Brown winning Ted Kennedy's Senate seat when Kennedy died. It means one thing: Voters, even in a strongly Democratic district spreading through two of New York City's five boroughs (it is mostly in Queens, with a piece in Brooklyn), are so fed up with President Barack Obama that they have elected a Republican to fill their seat in the House. Given that on the same day, six Democratic state legislators also won special elections, this had to be nothing less than a referendum on Obama.

Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end of the Obama administration.

Maryland's DREAM Act fixation

2011-09-14T14:14:00.000-04:00

One of the editors of the local Washington Examiner, Barbara Hollingsworth, writes a column with which I often disagree. (Among other things, she is bitterly opposed to mass transit, except possibly buses, and I've personally exchanged e-mail with her over this.) But today, she wrote a great column, which I will happily quote:

Montgomery Circuit Court Judge Marielsa Bernard's abrupt dismissal last month of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch against Montgomery College's Board of Trustees for granting discounted tuition to illegal immigrants is not the end of the discussion. Judicial Watch plans to appeal the ruling, which could spark the beginning of a re-examination of sanctuary policies nationwide.
The Judicial Watch case was not even on Bernard's docket when she inappropriately intervened and took it away from another judge to whom it had been assigned. A founding member of the Hispanic Bar Association with close ties to CASA de Maryland, a tax-funded advocacy group for illegal immigrants, Bernard ruled that the three plaintiffs — all Montgomery County taxpayers — had no legal standing to sue the college because financial aid is supposedly the sole province of the Maryland Higher Education Commission.

And how's this for unintended irony?

In order to qualify for the in-county rate, students must prove they either live in Montgomery County or that they graduated from one of the county's public high schools within the past three years. In other words, the tax-supported community college imposes its own residency test to determine how much tuition to charge students — but somehow feels free to ignore legal residency requirements under existing federal and Maryland state law.

The community college allows illegal immigrants to enroll at the in-county rate of $107 per credit, about half of the $219 per credit charged for in-state Maryland residents and a third of the $299 paid by out-of-state students. All else being equal, an undocumented Guatemalan living in Silver Spring would pay half as much tuition as a U.S. citizen from Upper Marlboro.

Maryland Del. Patrick L. McDonough, R-Baltimore County, agreed to audit the college when Montgomery state legislators and County Council members refused a request to do so from their constituents. The audit found that the college's long-standing policy, which has apparently been in place for at least a decade, may have cost Maryland taxpayers as much as $10 million, McDonough told The Examiner. "Maryland taxpayers must pay for this deficit."

"They know they're wrong," said McDonough — who helped spearhead a successful citizens petition drive to suspend implementation of the controversial Maryland Dream Act, which grants in-state tuition to illegal immigrants statewide, until a 2012 voter referendum. "Public officials do not have the right to violate the law and use tax funds — including the $147 million Montgomery College gets from the state — any way they want. If that right already existed, why was the General Assembly required to pass SB 167, the Dream Act, which would have allowed it?"

In Montgomery County, the law has been twisted so far that it is now used as a vehicle to reward and protect illegal immigrants while law-abiding citizen taxpayers are forbidden from challenging the misuse of their own money in court. This is supposed to be "fair."

"It's unbelievable that the biggest community college in Maryland is proudly and publicly admitting that it is misusing tax dollars, that members of the County Council and the county executive all think this is a good idea, and that a judge has now inappropriately issued a decision that upends 150 years of legal tradition and says that Maryland taxpayers do not have the right to sue public officials. This will not be tolerated or ignored," McDonough vowed.

If he's right, and this sanctuary college in a sanctuary county in a sanctuary state is finally held accountable for its illegal use of tax dollars, there's no telling how far this could spread.

Now, this time, I think Hollingsworth is right, and I applaud her raising these points.

An interesting comment on organized labor

2011-09-13T03:25:00.001-04:00

I don't always agree with Bill O'Reilly, especially when he writes on issues like separation of church and state. But he wrote a column, which I read in the Washington Examiner, which I like enough to reproduce here. (I can't find it on the Examiner's site, but only on O'Reilly's own, so I do not give a link.)

There's lots of angst in the air after Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa called Tea Party people SOB's and urged voters to "take them out." Immediately, voter registration jumped among members of the Gambino family. Apparently, Mr. Hoffa is angry that some Americans want to put a lid on public sector pensions and perks which are bankrupting municipalities all over the country. Old Jimmy believes this is "taking the bread out of the mouths" of American workers.

For decades, union power has intimidated politicians in both parties. I mean, if you were running for office, would you want big union money flowing into your opponent's campaign? Would you want organized demonstrations at your rallies? How about work slowdowns, sudden mass worker illness, or anti-you phone campaigns? Unions have power and power rules.

Thus, many American unions have secured lucrative benefits for their members—benefits that have drained treasuries. The Post Office, for example, is on the verge of bankruptcy, not able to repay $5.5 billion in loans from the Treasury Department. The huge cost of postal retirement benefits is one of the main reasons an American institution may collapse.

All of this is not the fault of the workers. They did their jobs and are entitled to what was negotiated. But public money has run out, and going forward, big changes will have to be made if the American economy is to expand. Jimmy Hoffa can huff and puff all day long, but if he succeeds in blocking economic reform, he will indeed blow the entire house down.

President Obama needs union votes to win reelection. Therefore, he did not condemn Hoffa's over-the-top rhetoric even though he campaigned for verbal restraint in his Arizona speech. Mr. Obama will also not go up against the unions and demand fiscal reform. He will position himself as the champion of the working stiff, even if it means more disasters like the Post Office.

Previously in this space, I discussed my membership in AFTRA, a union that represents TV and radio people. When some greedy suits tried to con me and my colleagues at the syndicated program "Inside Edition" out of pension money, AFTRA fought them and won. So, unions are needed, but they should be optional. No American worker should be forced to pay union dues. Employees must weigh self-reliance against union protections.

With union power in decline, Jimmy Hoffa needs an enemy to rail against, and the Tea Party provides him that. But if he were honest, Hoffa would see the Tea folks simply want financial responsibility and fairness in the public sector. Living within your means is a key to economic success. Gaming the system through intimidation and threats is not.

Hoffa's not looking out for his country on this one.

This time, O'Reilly has it exactly right. I fully agree.

Social Security -- a Ponzi scheme?

2011-09-11T15:11:00.000-04:00

Governor Rick Perry of Texas, one of the candidates for the Republican nomination for the Presidency, recently called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. He's been criticized for this. But the real point is not whether Social Security is or is not properly described as a Ponzi scheme. It is, according to the definition, much like a Ponzi scheme because money from later "investors" is being used to pay off earlier ones. But unlike a true Ponzi scheme, there doesn't seem to be any plan by the U. S. Government to take the money and run. Rather, it is able to use its taxing power to force people to put money into it, which Carlo Ponzi could not do.

The real question is what to do about it? Canceling it is out of the question — so many people have paid into it all the money that might have gone into retirement savings, so canceling it would make it a Ponzi scheme, complete with the "take the money and run" aspect. It might be true that the program should not have been started in the 1930s on the basis it was, but it's too late to change that aspect of it. What we need to know is what Perry would put in its place. Anything that replaces Social Security has to take care of current retirees — people who didn't get a chance to invest that money in a better alternative — as well as current workers, many of which have already put in much of the money that could have been invested. Perhaps new workers could be put into a better program, more like what an IRA is, but anyone who has already been working and put money into Social Security needs somehow to be helped to compensate for his lost opportunity to invest that money. Perhaps the only fair thing would be to keep all retirees receiving money on the current plan and return, with interest, all money that current workers have paid into Social Security. But where would that money come from?

Ponzi scheme or not, the real question is how Social Security will be changed, and what it means to current retirees and current workers. Perry's criticism of the program does not serve a valid purpose, unless he presents his alternative.

Where has moderation gone?

2011-08-29T07:31:00.000-04:00

When I was growing up (I'm in my late 60s now) both of our two political parties had liberals, conservatives, and moderates. It was common for votes in Congress to have large numbers of both Republicans and Democrats on both sides of the question. But in recent years, this is becoming less and less the case. Why?

Some people cite the McGovern-Fraser reforms of the Democrats' selection of delegates to their national conventions, or the rise of Presidential primaries as the near-exclusive mode of picking delegates (as opposed to political bosses and elected officials, who used to pick a lot of the delegates). But this only affects the choice of Presidential candidates, not the hundreds of members of the two houses of Congress or the thousands of members of the fifty State legislatures. So it cannot be that.

One thing that has had an effect is the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Certainly the Southern political situation has greatly changed because of that. African-American Southerners, newly able to exercise their votes, joined the Democratic Party, pulling it leftward, while former conservative Democrats have moved into the Republican Party, jettisoning a hatred of that party that went back to the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, because the Democratic Party's Kennedy and Johnson were instrumental in pushing through those civil rights laws. (Examples of this abound. Strom Thurmond, the most obvious example, started political life as a Democrat, leading a revolt in 1948, but his States Rights Party still ran as the "true" Democratic Party in those Southern states where it won. By the end of his political career, he was very definitely a Republican. But the clearest example of this influx of conservative Democrats to the Republican party is probably little known. When I was in graduate school, the governor of Virginia was a Democrat named Mills Godwin. Governors of Virginia cannot be re-elected, but they can, it seems, run again after an interval out of office, so I was surprised to find out, years later and long after I had moved far away from Virginia, that the governor of Virginia was again Mills Godwin, but that he was now a Republican.) This has pulled the Republican Party rightward.

But this only affects the South. Most of the liberal-to-moderate Republicans were in the Northeast (and the few that still exist, like Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts, still are). Nothing has happened to Northeastern politics like the civil rights revolution in the South. African-Americans could, and did, vote in the Northeast. They even elected officials, like Representative Adam Clayton Powell of New York. I cannot see what has changed.

Perhaps, the association of particular issues with liberalism and conservatism has. Prohibition used to be a liberal issue, if you look at the past (though liberals like Franklin Roosevelt were also responsible for its repeal). Certainly religious fundamentalism used to go with economic liberalism (if you don't believe that, think of William Jennings Bryan, the most outstanding example of both.) That does seem to have some connection with it, but it cannot account for it all — for one thing, this is a much more recent phenomenon than Bryan.

I wish I knew. I'd love to see a revival of "Rockefeller Republicanism." It was Nelson Rockefeller (and Dwight Eisenhower) that made me choose to be a Republican. By contrast, people like Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Michele Bachmann make me ashamed to be one. But the absence of moderates in the Democratic Party makes it even more unattractive to me. So I'm really unhappy this year.

Classification can be treacherous

2011-08-28T06:13:00.000-04:00

As I have said more than once on this blog, sometimes political classification can be treacherous. On economic matters, I tend toward the conservative end — for lower taxes and lower spending, in general, though I have my causes that I think deserve spending. On social matters, I'm probably very much a liberal. But again, if "liberal" means anti-Israel, as it's coming to be these days, I go back to the right on this issue.

I recently saw a posting on the FrumForum blog by Noah Kristula-Green referring to Jon Huntsman as "More Conservative Than You Think." It bears some quoting:

Ever since Jon Huntsman declared on Twitter that he thinks evolution and climate change are real, he has been identified as the “moderate” candidate in the GOP field, the candidate whose goal seems to be to antagonize the Republican base. Charles Krauthammer described him as “a liberal’s idea of what a Republican ought to be.”

But what if the real Jon Huntsman is actually a candidate with an incredibly conservative record? This is the argument in The American Conservative’s new piece on Huntsman by Michael Brendan Dougherty.

-In spite of his support for civil unions, Huntsman is very socially conservative. His pro-life record is very substantive. Dougherty calls him “the pro-life cause’s most accomplished executive.” In Utah, second trimester abortions are banned and third trimester abortions are a felony because of Huntsman. His gun record includes making it possible to carry concealed guns in Utah.

“In Jon Huntsman’s America, once a child survives the first trimester, he’s well on the way to having a rifle in his small hands and extra money in his pockets,” Dougherty says.

-His economic record is very conservative: $110 million in tax cuts and a flat tax rate state wide. On healthcare, the article refers to Health Exchanges in Utah that he approved, adding that, “Unlike Romney, Huntsman’s state healthcare reform achieved more insurance coverage for residents without resorting to an individual mandate.” Left unmentioned in the piece is that Huntsman is also a strong advocate for the Ryan budget and has made multiple calls for it to be signed into law.

-His foreign policy at times can hit similar to Ron Paul sounding notes without being isolationist. In addition to questioning America’s role in Libya, Huntsman also asks, “why do we have so many military bases in Japan, we’re half a century after World War II? Why so many in Germany? Does it make sense for America to remain in these places?” He wants counter-terrorism in Afghanistan, not counter-insurgency or nation-building, and he wants the US to return to focusing on its long-term growth before going abroad.

Despite this, Huntsman isn’t seen as a conservative at all. He has some of the lowest poll numbers of anyone in the GOP field — he only barely qualified for the upcoming NBC-Politico debate. Rick Perry gets more traction just by calling Ben Bernanke’s actions treasonous and by calling Washington DC a “seedy place”.

Speculating what any of this can mean for Republican presidential nominee, Jon Huntsman is very premature. But during the next debate, it will be important to listen to Huntsman’s answers and keep in the back of your mind this piece of knowledge: whatever Huntsman is, he is not as moderate as you think.

On some of these issues, I'm in agreement with Huntsman. On others, of course, like abortion and guns, I'm not. But this posting deserves some attention.

Another voice on the health care law, for the perusal of our readers

2011-08-27T15:49:00.000-04:00

The following column by Marc Kilmer, originally published in the Baltimore Sun, was included in an e-mail I received from my local county Republican Party:

MPPI: Make Health Insurance Affordable by Choice, not Mandate

Do you need a mandate to force you to buy something you want or need? This question isn't asked by those who support a health insurance mandate, such as Dr. Edward Miller and Scott A. Berkowitz of Johns Hopkins ("Hopkins leaders support health insurance mandate," Aug. 9). The reason we have so many uninsured Marylanders is that health insurance is either too unaffordable or it doesn't offer a good value to those who can afford it. A mandate won't solve either of those problems.

Responding to self-interested lobbying groups, well-meaning legislators have mandated that any health insurance sold in Maryland must cover over 60 procedures, something that has dramatically raised the cost of insurance in this state. If you want insurance that doesn't cover, say, in vitro fertilization, you can't purchase it. There are also a number of restrictions on the price and type of health insurance that can be sold in the state.

If you want to escape Maryland's tough regulations, too bad. If you live in the Eastern Shore town of Delmar and want to purchase a cheaper policy from a broker across the street in Delmar, Del., you are legally prohibited from doing so. Now, with the passage of the so-called "Affordable Care Act," restrictions like Maryland are in place at the national level. This legislation will increase the cost of health insurance and then use tax dollars to subsidize its purchase for some people.

If we allowed health insurance to be bought and sold like other goods there would be no need for a health insurance mandate. If people could tailor the health insurance policy to meet their needs and desires and if they could buy health insurance across state lines, the vast majority of people could afford a policy giving them what they want. While some people would not have enough income to afford a policy, that's why we have safety net programs like Medicaid.

Instead of supporting a mandate forcing people to buy a product that is too expensive and doesn't offer people what they want, Dr. Miller and Mr. Berkowitz should advocate giving health insurance consumers more power. These consumers, not government bureaucrats, know what they can afford and what type of insurance is best for them.

A very good column, with which I heartily concur.

Rick Perry? Oh, no!

2011-08-25T19:41:00.000-04:00

Some polls I've seen lately show a surge in the numbers for Rick Perry, putting him in #1 position among Republican candidates for the nomination. I hope that it's just a case of people supporting him because he's a fresh face, the newest entry into the race.

It's clear that Perry is the kind of Republican that Democrats like to paint all Republicans as — pretty stupid. His remarks on creationism, for one, bear this out. And he's taken to comparing himself to George W. Bush by saying "Bush went to Yale, I went to Texas A&M." Nominating Perry almost concedes the race to Obama, unless people are so fed up with Obama's handling of the economy that they'll vote for anyone running against him, and I don't see this yet.

There are certainly problems with Mitt Romney, but so far he seems the best choice. I've seen some mention of former New York State Governor George Pataki as a candidate, and I would — as far as I can tell — be able to support him, but I haven't seen that he was interested in the nomination. I might have really liked New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and had a favorable view of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, but both of them have made it clear that they aren't interested. My favorite blog owner, Dennis Sanders, keeps advocating Jon Huntsman, who is probably closer to me politically than Romney, but can he get the nomination in a party where he's polling about 2%? And if he manages to get that nomination, will he be able to make himself known to enough people to get their vote in Nomember 2012 against an incumbent President Obama? So with all these factors, I have to go for Romney.

I really don't understand

2011-08-21T07:51:00.000-04:00

In just about a month, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in our military services will end. What I cannot understand was the point in continuing it in place once it was decided that it would go. Why should a gay serviceman or -woman be subject to discharge for revealing, now, something which would have no effect if he/she reveals it about him/herself in another month?

I understand that the service chiefs wanted time to educate people about the new rules — but it still would make more sense to begin this education and immediately state that no further discharges of service personnel who revealed that they were gay would take place, both, upon the decision to end DADT.

If anyone can tell me the justification for continuing DADT once the decision to end it was made, I'd like to know it.

Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and the real reason to oppose them

2011-08-19T15:05:00.000-04:00

Two days ago, Cal Thomas posted a column in the Washington Examiner which took "liberals" to task for supposed "bigotry" toward the likes of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, or "evangelicals" in general, with the following words:

In contemporary culture, those who claim to tolerate everything are intolerant of ideas that come from perspectives other than their own, especially when those ideas are rooted in conservative politics or evangelical faith.

Though anti-Semitism and anti-Catholic bigotry sadly are still with us, the new and "accepted" bigotry among some on the left is for those who call themselves -- or are sometimes mislabeled by people who don't know the difference between born-again and born yesterday -- evangelical Christians.

With two evangelicals running for president, the opening salvo in what is likely to be a God vs. government battle has already been launched. A June 22 article in Rolling Stone magazine gives bigots permission for more bigotry. The illustration by Victor Juhasz, which accompanies it, reveals where the writer is headed.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., is dressed as Joan of Arc with a Bible in one hand, a bloody sword in the other, a cross on her chest, and the "finger of God" pointing at her from heaven.

In the background, people are being burned at the stake. Father Charles Coughlin at his worst would have had trouble topping this on his bigoted radio broadcasts in the 1930s.

Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi says Bachmann is "a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions." One of many examples he cites is her assertion that China is "plotting to replace the dollar bill."

Recently, China's official Xinhua News Agency editorialized in favor of a new global reserve currency, replacing the dollar. Don't look for a retraction.

There's plenty more in "Michele Bachmann's Holy War" on which the bigots can feast. This is the argument of anyone who has little or no faith in God. They attack people who believe the Supreme Being does not sit in the Oval Office.

The secular left is also going after Gov. Rick Perry's faith. Writing in the New York Times, Timothy Egan refers to the Texas governor as a "biblical bully" and asks, "Is God listening to Rick Perry?"

Ideas that come from the minds of secular liberals are considered right and good, no matter their track record. Ideas from conservatives, be they secular or especially evangelical, are "bat sh*t crazy," according to Taibbi's scatology.

There is a way to blunt this coming tidal wave of anti-evangelical bigotry. Bachmann and Perry -- and any other Republican who wishes to join in -- should not play on the territory of their opponents.

Instead, they should focus on what works and whose lives have been transformed by embracing similar faith and similar attitudes.

When I read this column, I felt like commenting, but while the Examiner used to print letters to the editor from me routinely, they haven't always done so. So I held off. And I was glad to see in today's Examiner, a letter to the editor by David Lampo, which could almost have been written by me. The letter was so good, I want to reprint it as a guest editorial in this blog:

Re: "A new wave of liberal bigotry," Aug. 18

Cal Thomas should receive a chutzpah award for his piece charging "the left" with religious bigotry simply because they are exposing the scary records and statements of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Anyone who studies these two candidates will find a long list of examples of religious and anti-gay bigotry, particularly in the case of Bachmann, whose long-held religious belief in the views of the radical theologian Francis Schaeffer make her the most extreme major party presidential candidate in generations.

Millions of Republicans, independents and libertarians are deeply worried about the records of these two candidates. They are not being attacked simply for having religious faith, as Thomas states. They are being attacked because their beliefs and statements are so extreme that most Americans will repudiate them at the polls if the country is unfortunate enough to have either one of them as the Republican presidential candidate.

If that happens, the many virtues of divided government will become readily apparent.

David Lampo

Alexandria

Well written, Mr. Lampo!

Do we really need them all?

2011-08-18T16:40:00.001-04:00

I'm not one of those anti-military types who want us to limit our military to homeland defense, but sometimes I wonder, Do we really need to have an Army, a Navy, an Air Force, and a Marine Corps as separate services?

The Army is supposedly land-based, the Navy sea-based, and the Air Force air-based. But the Army has airborne troops, the Navy has its SEALs (who often, as in the action that got Osama bin Laden, operate on land), the Navy and Air Force quarrel over the specifications for planes they will both have to use, and the Marine Corps, though technically a part of the Navy, seems to be more a land force than anything else.

Some time ago, Canada merged all its services into Canadian Forces. I think that, just because we're a bigger country with a much bigger military, this doesn't mean we can't do the same. It should be much more efficient to eliminate duplication.

Back in 1947 the Defense Department was created, and the Army and Navy no longer had separate Cabinet secretaries to report to. Yet it was only this year that the two services' Washington-area hospitals were merged. More than sixty years later!

I think Canada did it right. Let's do the same!