Mark Byron

Obama's Greatest Hit

Interesting news out of Yemen, where an US-born al Qaeda teleterrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed by US forces, likely a Predator drone aircraft. al-Awlaki was able to use his native English to spread his cause over the Web and inspired more than one American jihadi, including the Fort Hood shooter.

I don't have a problem with unmanned drone aircraft doing the shooting; it does make things a bit antiseptic for our side and a bit less gallant, but if the pilot can be doing the job from an office complex in Nevada, more power to 'em.

What is novel is that we've essentially put out a extrajudicial hit on Anwar al-Awlaki. There doesn't seem to be much doubt that he'd be up for either life in prison or a trip to Jack the Dripper had he been hauled to justice. It's not something that is good for a country that thrives on the rule of law to be shelving such principles on a global battlefield.

However, it is a battlefield, albeit an unconventional one. A missile strike delivered some rough justice without putting US or Yemeni troops at harm's way; if you're more of a pacifist or more of a legal purist, that is too rough, but a constitutional law prof turned president signed off on the policy.

It will be interesting to see if this gets anyone into the Democratic nomination race.

How Much for that Aircraft Carrier? Do the Jets Come With it?

This Mark Steyn post got in my craw, going after a fellow Corner poster who was backing Rick Perry's stand on treatment of children of illegal immigrants-"...if that’s the – or even a – 'conservative' position, the republic might as well hold its going-out-of-business sale this weekend."

It appears that Steyn has written anyone who is the least bit centrist on the issue out of his movement. Am I a free-market supporting, traditional-morals-backing, strong-military liberal? I guess so, since compassion is a dirty word in this brave new conservative world.

A few semi-related thoughts

• Conservatives are on the verge of defining themselves out of existance if they're not careful. It reminds me a bit of some churches who split over the smallest of doctrinal disagreements, since if you have it right, the other side is preaching a false gospel even if they are in 99.99% agreement with you.
• I'm not a big Rick Perry fan, but he seems to be an improvement over Mitt Romney if the choice boils down to those two.
• Illegal immigrants aren't "the enemy." Not all of them are Zeta gunmen or an advanced guard for the reconquista. Most are just trying to make a living.
• Their kids are definately not the enemy. A little grace is an order for folks who didn't ask to be put in that spot.
• We're in far better shape as a country than the nay-sayers on either side of the aisle let on. We're over-leveraged as a country and have let government get a few notches too cumbersome, but the basic core that makes it go is still there and chuggling along.

My speen feels much better after a good venting.

 

 

Tuesday Musings

The basketball offseason has been interesting, as various semi-pickup games involving NBA and soon-to-be-if-they-get-things-solved ones have gotten ten times the press that such outings have gotten in the press. The latest of these is a charity outing sponsored by the Miami Trio, which has more firepower than most NBA games.

Could there be a way to channel this into some sort of barnstorming league that would supplant the NBA? What would stop the players of setting up a dozen ad-hoc teams and creating a tournament/league? It would bring cash in for the lesser players who might need money during the lockout, give the stars something to do and give David Stern an atomic wedgie.

___________

At the end of the Lions-Vikings game, as the ref was announcing that the winning OT field go was good, you heard an audible voice hollering "Learn the f---ing rules!" in the background. I wondered who that jerk was; it happened to be Lion coach Jim Schwartz. Remind me not to have him teaching English anytime soon.

The refs might have been double-checking that the playoff overtime rules were not in effect, where a first-drive field goal would have allowed a countering drive from the other team. I wasn't sure about that as OT started, so it could have easily been the case that one or more of the refs wanted to double check that that was indeed the case.

As much as it was good for Lion fans, the idea of kicking a winning field goal once you get into point-blank range for your kicker seems a bit wimpy, but that is how the rules work, since a score is a score.

____________

Ozzie Guillen has done about as awkward of an exit as I've seen in a while. He had been lobbying for a contract extension, as he had but a year left on his deal with the White Sox and didn't want to be a lame duck next year. However, he had a year and three games left, as the Pale Hose still had to play ou the rest of 2011.

The Sox have let him go, allowing him to sign on with Miami for next year; yes, the Florida Marlins are going to go to a Miami surname. Ozzie's always given good quote, sometimes to the detriment of things, but he at least keeps your team in the news. For a team working to get noticed in a town now owned by the Heat, Guillen seems to be a good ad, although as a Tiger fan, his over-the-topness will be missed in the AL Central.

______________

Interesting USA Today piece on chewing tobacco in baseball; the powers that be are close to a ban if they can get the union to go along. I'm surprised it's taken this long.

______________

Here's an urban legend in the making. A guy booed a Googled question from a gay soldier at the last GOP debate, and it's now being made out as the whole GOP is that way. At least there was at least one guy who did so; other legends of racist taunts done by Tea Partiers are often made up of whole cloth.

______________

Speaking of racist taunts, we have an interesting twist in hockey. A few days back, a Wings fan in London, ON ran out of octopi and threw a banana on the ice at a black Flyer taking a shootout shot in a preseason game. Well, I assume he was a Wings fan, but I'd rather not claim him as one.

Now the young Flyer, Wayne Simmonds, is in trouble for supposedly saying some anti-gay pejorative at Rangers goon Sean Avery. He and Avery had exchanged physical pleasantries earlier in the game and the trash-talking got heated as well.

Avery's definitely heterosexual, having previously gotten in trouble with some R-rated commentary at other players dating his ex-girlfriends, but he's been a vocal supporter of same-sex marriage. Does that make him an honorary gay?

Monday Moanin'

It's a weird world when Coke thinks China has a better business environment than the US. Are they drinking the product or snorting it? Or do they have a germ of truth that Communists have a better handle on economics that social democrats?

____________

Gold bugs took a hit when the Chicago Merc raised the margin deposit requirements on gold futures contracts, causing gold to take a 10% hit. That would indicate that a lot of the rise in the price of gold was due to a lot of speculative long positions in gold futures; when they had to cash out some positions due to lack of margin, it drove prices down.

If the market is neutral towards gold, you could see a margin change not effecting price, but the small-fry money was on the long side. That's not surprising, since you see gold bugs advertising on Fox News incessantly; in other avenues, you'll often see gold futures being plugged for their leveraged abilities. However, leverage works both ways, and the folks who were long gold futures got hammered.

____________

Not a bad time to be a sports fan. The Tigers are doing well, the Lions are 3-0 for the first time since I was a teenager, and the Pistons.... are mercifully locked out. Even UofM is off to a 4-0 start, albeit with a schedule of Notre Dame and three cupcakes.

___________________

A Chris Christie boomlet is getting suppression fire from the American Spectator; Christie has said some unconservative things on global warming, which makes him unwelcome in the knee-jerk right crowd. Everyone has something that isn't 200-proof to the right.

60NS Over the Speed Limit

You've probably seen the T-shirt with police officer Einstein-"186000 miles per second. It's not just a good idea, it's the law."

Well, just like you and I have likely fudged at least the 5MPH above the posted speed limit, it seems that neutrinos are a bit of a subatomic leadfoot. As best as folks from the CERN atom-smasher can figure, they were clocked at 60 nanoseconds over the speed of light. They've run as many double-checks as they know how, but the results still have the neutrinos coming in statistically significantly faster than light. Yes, they are that precise that 60NS can be significant and measurable.

Chances are there was something the folks that gave us the Web missed, since there are a lot of critics that are doing a lot of dis-CERN-ing. Messing with Einstein usually ends up like the jerks in the jerky ad messin' with Bigfoot; the scientist usually gets his research drop-kicked into the next area code.

However, might the neutrino be a smidge faster than an electron? It's a smidge lighter, if I recall my physics (a year's worth back in high school where I don't recall covering neutrinos, so take it with multiple grains of salt), so it may well be a smidge faster.

The Political Night Owl-9.25

A bit of straw-polling over the weekend. Herman Cain won a Florida poll of Republican folks while Mitt Romney won a poll of Michigan GOP insiders on Mackinac Island.

That might give Cain some second wind, but probably not enough to overhaul the Perry machine. Straw polls aren't great indicators, since they have very low turnout and can be gamed either by a good ground game getting your folks there or by the nature of the crowd. Cain seemed to win the Florida crowd with his message, which plays well when he's on his game; Cain has been gaffe-prone in the campaign in the past, but is faster on his feet than Perry, to be sure.

Romney winning the Somewhere in Time straw poll is almost a non-issue. The son of a former MI governor and 2012's Mr. Inside is an easy sell to the folks who took the ferry over to the Grand Hotel; it's not a Perry or Bachmann crowd and the Paulistas would be left on the mainland.

________________________________

Chris Christie as the anti-Mitt? Possibly, if he can talk himself into a run. He has enough budget-cutting chops to keep the Tea Party happy and is a native of the Acella corridor, placating the insiders on the East Coast uneasy about some evangelical folks from flyover country getting the nomination.

He's likely be good in a debate, but I'm not sure how he would sell outside of the northeast and how he would fare on social issues. With Perry underperforming in debates and in general election polls, folks are looking for an alternative not-Mitt.

 

Hand Shavings

We've been in a series in Jeremiah at church, and the notes in the bulletin (or BIPOP for Big Important Piece of Paper, as it goes by at our church) had an interesting typo. Verse 1:16 in the NIV goes as follows-

I will pronounce my judgments on my people
   because of their wickedness in forsaking me,
in burning incense to other gods
   and in worshiping what their hands have made.

The commentary in the BIPOP slipped on that last part and had "worshiping what their hand shave made."

Hand shave? What do you get from a hand shave? If your a hirsute fellow like myself, some hair and maybe some dead skin, good for a nice, yucky hairball.

Pause. Get out your best basketball jeer voice and say "Hair-Ball! Hair-Ball!"

We have a tendency to throw up quite a few hairballs in worship, playing up the hairballs that our hand shaves made. I'll leave the details of those furry spheres up to the Peanut Gallery to ponder.

Twist and Shout

I'm not a big fan of this Operation Twist 2.0 that the Fed is trying. They have shot their monetary policy wad a while back when they drove short term interest rates down to zero (or at least under 0.25%), putting themselves in a classic liquidity trap, where the economy fails to respond to any additional money pumped into the system.

Usually, the Fed has short-term debt, mostly from the US Treasury, in the mix. Here, they're redoing their portfolio, selling off some of their short-term stuff and buying long-term debt in its place. In theory, this should lower long-term interest rates, as a reduced supply of longer-term T-notes and T-bonds will raise their price and (since price and yield go teeter-tottering in opposite directions) lower interest rates. That would then lower the cost of raising money for both individuals and businesses, making mortgages more affordable and making marginal projects that might not pass present-value muster at higher costs of capital doable at a lower cost of raising funds.

There are two main problems with that premise. The first is that it leaves the Fed vulnerable to a hike in interest rates. Since the value of a dollar is largely backed up by the Fed's stash of investments, getting a portfolio with a longer duration leaves it more sensitive to changes in interest rates; the longer a bond has to go, the more you have to suffer the lower rate you're now stuck with and the bigger the hit its price takes if you sell it early. Much as banks suffered in 2008-9 when their mortgage portfolios took it in the neck, the Fed might suffer if their twisted portfolio goes down in value.

Secondly, the problem is not as much with interest rates but with confidence in the future. The feeble European economy coming to grips with too much government debt in the Eurozone has markets queasy, and the increased scope of government, with business and their owners getting hit with more regulation (including a looming mandate to cover health insurance for employees) and possibly higher taxes, has expansion plans for businesses frozen in many cases.

That uncertainty will be on the table through November of next year, when markets will see if they have to deal with the Obama team through 2016 or not. The president kept saying that we can't afford to wait 14 months, but unless he and VP Biden are willing to resign now and cut to the chase, we're likely to have things stay sluggish until then.

The Fed is in "do something!" mode. The Twist 2.0 is like giving a dead man an enema; it can't hurt. It could hurt if interest rates rise and the Fed takes a hit, but for now, it's doing something.

 

 

No Slick Willies Here

I wasn't all that impressed with last night's debate. I was working online with the debate in the background for part of it. Rick Perry seemed better prepared for things than in the past, but not prepared enough. I was especially uneased by the "have you been to the border" meme between he and Santorum (Santorum deserved better treatment, but he was seemingly a bit off-kilter in his approach to Perry) and also troubled that Perry didn't have a good answer to the illegal immigrant student issue.

As I understand it, the plan Texas has is to give good Texas high school students extra tuition help; since children of illegal immigrants are welcome at schools without having to show legal status, a lot of youth will have graduated while being here without getting normalized.

Such youngsters, once they turn 18, should normalize themselves, but I don't think it is wrong to treat them as part of the community, especially when they didn't have the option of not being brought into the country. I think they should get a student visa to go to college, but since they've been here a while, they should be treated much like the children of legal immigrants who will often get resident status at state-run colleges.

Perry also needs to talk about Social Security in a better manner. If you just focus on the problems and start talking "failure" and "Ponzi scheme", it scares people. You need to follow that up with ways to make it more actuarially sound rather than use Tea Party bumper sticker rhetoric.

I don't trust Romney's policy sense. It's not that he's dishonest per se; I would trust him with my teenage niece and he's too rich to be going at this for the cash. He doesn't seem to have a firm of a ideological core for me to be comfortable and I fear that he'll be prone to flowing wherever his aides or circumstances dictate.

Perry isn't all that slick, but he at least brings that Texas stripped-down government meme into play. It's not a great place to be if you need government help, but that lack of taxes and regulation also makes it easier to get ahead once you get into the job market. That Texas economic meme predates Perry by quite a while; it was that way in the mid-80s when I lived briefly in San Antonio, back when Perry and I were both Democrats.

None of the candidates is perfect; even Palin, who usually has a good nose for policy, was on the wrong side of the vaccination issue, falling prey to the vaccination-causes-autism meme that has been refutiated in the last few years. However, one of these folks will likely be up against Obama.

_________

P.S. we'd be better off doing a smaller number of candidates; it's hard to do that this early in the race, but a 8-way split of time doesn't work all that well. I'd prefer something that would put two or three of them alone with a moderator for an hour and have at a handful of issues in depth.

 

Wednesday Musings

Here's some delayed justice; it was 13 years ago when a black Texan named James Byrd was tied up and dragged behind a car, killing him. If memory serves, black liberal groups tried to link that to then-Gov. Bush in the 2000 campaign, as if he liked the idea of drawing and quartering black folks for sport.

One of the guys behind that killing for racist sport is due to be executed tonight. You don't see quite the hue and cry over this execution nor see many calls for Gov. Perry to stall (he can't pardon as TX governor) his visit to Jack the Dripper.

____________

It's a bit dated, but the incoming PM in Denmark, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, has hard-left British Labour leader Neil Kinnock as her father-in-law; Kinnock made Margaret Thatcher look moderate in comparison in Labour's pre-Blair era. Her Social Democrats are poised to head up a leftist coalition, replacing a conservative coaltion with a strong anti-immigrant faction that has helped keep Denmark out of the Euro to this point.

If you want hope and change in Denmark, you can go to Helle.

_______________

Another interesting story that I haven't seen follow-up on from earlier in the week was a series of raids in Ohio and Indiana, where an IHOP was a bit too international with its staff; the FBI and ICE were looking at a number of IHOPs centered on Toledo with an Arab-American owner.

________________

Another old story that was in my blog-story bucket was a proposed PA law to have their Electoral College vote done by congressional district a la Maine and Nebraska. That would give the Republicans about 10 electoral votes and save the Republicans from having to get a smaller state like Iowa or Colorado to put them over the top.

If PA goes through with its plan, getting Ohio, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina and Indiana would be enough to get an Electoral College majority, as the McCain states plus those gets you to 265, with 270 being the magic number.

Of course, Democrats don't like it, but Republicans have both the legislature and the governorship and could make it so barring a mass road trip to Youngstown by the left wing of the legislature.

Red River Straddlers not Welcome in PAC-12

It looks like we'll have the PAC-12 as an acronym for a while longer; they've passed on expansion. That renders my previous post somewhat moot, except that the SEC has some more interesting partners to work with. Oklahoma, OSU and Texas might be good ads to the SEC if they were interested, which would then leave the Fly-Over Conference largely intact with Texas Tech swapping out for Memphis.

The status quo seems unlikely to hold, since the Big East is rather shaky in its current football form. If UConn and Rutgers go to the ACC as rumored, then the Fly-Over Conference in some form is the path of least resistance for the Big 12-Big East survivors.

Coed Nekkid Musical Chairs

Here is where things seem to be ending up once the balls stop bouncing in the college sports game. It looks like five major conferences will emerge, the ACC, Big 10, SEC, PAC-16 and what I'm christening the Fly-Over Conference scopping up the Big12 and Big East refugees.

PAC 16
Inland	Coastal
Texas	USC
Texas Tech	UCLA
Oklahoma	Standford
Oklahoma State	Cal
Arizona	Oregon
Arizona State	Oregon State
Utah	Washington
Colorado	Washington State

That makes a nice neat break, with the old PAC8 getting back together again.

ACC
North	South
BC	UNC
Uconn	NC State
Syracuse	Duke
Pittsburgh	Wake Forest
Rutgers	Clemson
Maryland	Georgia Tech
Virginia	Florida State
Virginia Tech	Miami

Once again, if the rumors of Rutgers and UConn are true, you get a nice north-south break, rather than the awkward one we have at present.

SEC
West	East
Texas A&M	Florida
LSU	Georgia
Arkansas	South Carolina
Missouri	Alabama
Mississippi St.	Auburn
Ole Miss	Tennessee
Kentucky	Vanderbilt

My friends in Lexington won't like getting UK sent west, but the other alternatives would either send Vandy west or break up the Alabama-Auburn Iron Bowl. This seems to be the most stable package for the SEC. One could see the Oklahoma schools coming in, but the inertia seems to have them pointing west.

Big Ten
North (Legends)	South (Leaders)
Michigan	Penn State
Michigan State	Ohio State
Nebraska	Indiana
Northwestern	Purdue
Minnesota	Illinois
Iowa	Wisconsin

There isn't anyone left in the region that would be a good fit. Notre Dame might work here, but you'd need a dance partner, which is in short supply among the available free agents. Missouri would be a good option; Iowa State would make sense geographically but not economically, as it doesn't add many eyeballs. However, if Mizzou heads to the SEC, the Big 10 seems set, with the exception of changing those funky division names.

Fly-Overs
West	East
Baylor	South Florida
Kansas	Cincinnati
Kansas St	Louisville
TCU	West Virgina
Iowa State	Notre Dame
BYU	Memphis

This is very flexible. I see 12 teams, for it gets you to a playoff. You could do this with nine teams, leaving Notre Dame, BYU and Memphis out; Memphis is a C-USA school, but would round out this conference rather well.

The Big East would get taken down to a smaller, basketball-centric core, shorn of its football schools, but the core of mainly Catholic big-city Rust Belt schools makes more sense.

I'm not sure how coherent 16-team conferences are. You'd likely play teams in the other division once every four years in football, if you go with a nine-game, round robin with in the division format. The WAC tried that back in the 90s and had the original ganstas go off and form the MWC. It makes more sense from a TV contract basis than it does from an academic basis.

In Uncle Sam We Trust

Baylor U might be the ugly stepsister when it comes to college sports' game of musical conference chairs, but they seem to live up to their goal of blending faith and serious research here. Their 2011 Baylor Religious Survey's third volume was just released, and had an interesting set of findings on faith and economics.

Economic conservatives tend to think God helps guide the economy, while economic liberals tend not to see such a hands-on God and trust more in government to help them out. Here's a few key passages from a USA Today piece on the report-

About one in five Americans combine a view of God as actively engaged in daily workings of the world with an economic conservative view that opposes government regulation and champions the free market as a matter of faith.

"They say the invisible hand of the free market is really God at work," says sociologist Paul Froese, co-author of the Baylor Religion Survey, released today by Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

...

At the opposite pole, another one in five Americans don't see God stepping in to their daily lives and favor reducing wealth and inequality through taxation.

"So they're less likely to see God controlling the economy. Liberal economic perspectives are synonymous with the belief that there is no one 'ultimate truth,'" Froese says.

One wag has the first group down as "worshiping Milton Friedman and calling him Jesus." At least he used Friedman, who at least was a secular Jew, rather than the athiest Ayn Rand, as the faux-Messiah. Rand has been the whipping girl for the religious left as they try and counter the nexus of economic and religous conservatism in modern political thought.

The second group seems to need something to have hope in, and in the absense of a hand-on God, government becomes the benefactor to turn to. If the folks on the right are doing a Gospel of Milton Friedman, the left comes close to having a Gospel of Thomas Friedman along side their shrine to FDR.

The scary part is that the two factions almost add up to a majority. The right 20% is essentially the religious part of the Tea Party; a large secular-libertarian faction is in play there as well. When you have 1/5th of the population wanting smaller government and letting God handle the details and 1/5 wanting government to handle those details, we're close to an impass.

Looking at the Real Clear Politics page this week, you saw a slew of conservative commentators raining scorn on the Obama tax increase proposals, as well as an equal slew of liberal commentators calling upon Obama to hang tough and get that extra revenue from the rich. There's a 60% or so middle ground or so, but that is hard to get together when both sides are getting pulled to the poles.

Eating the Seed Corn

The idea of a tax increase on the well-off is in play courtesy of the president. He's looking to get about $150 billion a year out of the pockets of folks making more than $250K a year.

I've been asking the question "what size of government do we want and how do we pay for it." Obama answered the first question "about what we have on the books now." The plan has very few 'real' cuts save counting the money not spent on Iraq/Afghanistan as a credit to the plan; most of that would happen regardless of any deficit fighting.

He answered the second part largely with "tax the rich", the near-immortal battle cry of the left. Can you be pro-little-guy and be against diverting money from the comfortable and putting it to better use in more meaningful ways than another summer home or an extra ski trip to Vail?

If you put it that way, it's hard to say so. But one of the places the excess money will go is into starting and expanding businesses. This does a double-whammy on investment; the first is that of that $150 billion, a good $30 billion would likely come out of decreased investments. That will, all else being equal, slow the economy, as there will be less money available for borrowing or stock investment.

On top of that, the higher tax rates will discourage some projects from getting started in the first place. Business finance looks at the present value of expected cash flows from a project and compares it to how much it costs today. When tax rates go up, that decreases the cash flows since Uncle Sam gets a bigger cut; that makes the project less worth doing. Thus, marginal projects that would be worth doing otherwise might not get done.

We need to factor in the loss of those businesses and jobs that are discouraged from a tax increase along with any pain the rich guy feels from having his wallet lighted by the government and add that to the scale of "is the government spending worth doing?"

Easier said than done, and far easier to talk about in theory. Conservatives tend to undervalue the good government does and liberals tend to undervalue the effects of taxes on the economy.

Thursday Musings

Here's an interesting observation; the big European banks blend investment banking and commercial banking, while the US banks were banned from the investment banking side until recently and had to keep the two functions walled off after things were relaxed in the last few decades. That leaves the big foreign banks liable for big losses if things go wrong.

UBS, who has Phil Gramm on the payroll, got burned to the tune of $2b by a "rouge trader" making bad stock trades. A few thoughts come to mind

(1) A $2B hit only means a bad third quarter. That's how big UBS is; if not too big to fail, at least too big for one bad set of trades to do it in. The Greek mess might test that, but not one bad trader.

(2) Had the rouge trader made $2B for UBS, would we have heard about it? Probably not; if you make money, you're a maverick, not a rogue.

(3) The trader in question looks like he could play the Eddie Murphy part in Trading Places.

_________________

Here's an interesting piece on bottled water; it seems that a lot of places are now adding bottle-filling "hydration stations" alongside water fountains for the BYOPB crowd. One school covered by USA Today, St. Benedict's in MN, has gone as far as to stop selling bottled water on campus to encourage the more frugal and greener approach.

Of course, we have to have the College Republicans playing the libertarian foil; nothing quite says sophomoric quite like those folks. If you like your store-bought bottled water, stick it in your backpack before coming to campus. Or do like other good red-blooded American conservatives do- drink pop.

________________

The NBA talks are starting to get interesting. As we get close to the point where the season will be put into question, it seems like the pattern we saw with the NFL coming into play, where people get away from their rigid proposals and start meeting in the middle somewhere.

A Kinder, Gentler Perry?

There are a couple of issues where Rick Perry was getting flak last night that may help him in the general election; his HPV vaccine faux pas and his moderate stance on immigration issues.

There are three problems with the HPV vaccine case; the impression that the vaccine was still a bit buggy at the time, the unilateral manner in which Perry made the decision and the idea that good girls don't need a vaccine against STDs. Michelle Bachmann played that latter card indirectly last night, having "innocent girls" being forced to get the vaccine.

On that last point, Bristol Palin comes to mind; as a middle-schooler, she'd clearly be in that "innocent girl" but that didn't last. A lot of good girls wind up slipping on that front, as much as their parents would like to avoid it. "My daughter wouldn't do that!", the mom roars, but a certain percentage of those daughers do. You can give them a vaccine that covers them from one aspect of that bad choice while continuing to make it clear that it is a bad choice.

That's going to help shield Perry from some of the "anti-science" flak that he's gotten.

The immigration issue will help Perry in the general; there is a bit immigration-hawk contingent in the modern GOP, but none of the candidates have that as a main plank in their platform. In 2008, Tom Tancredo was running as the uber-hawk and people were leaning to the hawkish side to cover that part of the political ecosystem. There's no Tancredo in 2012 and a lot of the hawkish part of the Tea Party is more ticked at economic issues to get too hot and bothered about a somewhat moderate Perry being the nominee.

Bachmann might be able to run to Perry's right on both issues, but she may not have enough traction there to make much of a dent. I don't see Romney being able to make much hay on those two issues, either.

These two give Perry a bit of a moderate sheen; not much, but the immigration issue might allow him to get an extra 5-10% of the Latino vote, which might make the difference in places like Florida and New Mexico.

The Ten-Year War

As I mentioned in the last post, over 2 million people die in the US each year. Something on the order of 23 million have perished in various ways in the last decade.

However, it is the 3000 or so that perished ten years ago today that get the press. One one hand, it seems a bit... obsessive... to focus on this quartet of terror attacks.

That being said, those were preventable deaths without good reason, and the underlying cause of those attacks aren't quite dead yet. EJ Dionne would like to leave 9/11 behind, but there is still a block of Islamic militants who want to have their theo-ideological view imposed on the world, by force if needed. That grouping has been crippled somewhat in the last decade, but it is far from dead.

The "war on terror" is unwinnable, since you can't kill off a concept, but one can work on making militant Islam unattractive and work on keeping violence from happening in its name. The "Arab Spring" that is quickly shifting though into fall shows some promise for giving alternatives to radicalism, but also gives the scary prospect of a militant Islamic party from grabbing hold in one of the newly-freed companies.

However, just because it is on its heels doesn't mean that the effort stops. We've had a "war on poverty" for the better part of a half-century and poverty is still with us, albeit in less toxic forms than in the past. Even in poor-unfriendly places like Texas, a safety net is still in place to look after the needy, far better than before another guy from Texas took a whack at helping the least of these in the mid-60s.

We'll need to keep up discouraging radical versions of Islam (or any other religion, including a few millita groups with Christian trappings) for the long haul, just as we need to keep looking after the needy. Neither will fully go away, but we need to keep whacking at it.

 

The Fear of God ... and/or al Qaeda

Here's an interesting flyer making the rounds of Midland promoting an guy named Kamal Saleem. What raised some red flags to me was that the outfit promoting the evening at our Center for the Arts was a "Citizens Concerned for our Nation" rather than one of our local churches or parachurch groups.

When I Googled for that outfit, the only hits for the group were a non-profit corporation filing in June. There are a lot of good organizations out there without much of a Web presence, but when you have a Yahoo e-mail address and no web site, it stands out in this day and age.

That looked a bit fishy. A quick Google on Saleem seems a bit fishy as well, as his back-story of being a PLO terrorist before coming to Jesus is questioned by quite a few folks. How much of that flak is from being an evangelical and how much of it is overplaying a fear of Islam for fun, evangelism and profit is a good question.

The anti-Saleem lit on the Web tends to flow from Muslim and Arab Christian quarters, so it needs some grains of salt applied, but he wouldn't be the first evangelist to fudge his resume. Mike Warnke comes quickly to mind as an evangelist/comedian who developed a bit following in the 80s from a fabricated Satanist-drug-dealer past.

Saleem seems to have been making the rounds of various right-leaning groups, which isn't disqualifying, but he does play to a quadrant who likes to think the worst of Islam as a whole. I know some secular Tea Party types who wouldn't go to a garden-variety revival meeting but might go to hear an avowed ex-terrorist speak on the problems with radical Islam; it plays nicely into a lot of fears people have, especially as we have the 9/11 +10 going down today and a vague alert of bombers on the loose in play.

Can you use that fear to bring people to Christ? Yes, but such conversions have a tendency not to be all that strong. We have over two million people dying each year, of which even in 2001, the 9/11 attacks made up less than a percent of those. Spread out over a decade of even fewer casualties to radical Islam, it makes it a bit of a low-probability event to get worried about.

[Update 9/23- The Citizens Concerned for our Nation group has placed a couple of editorials in the Midland Daily News in the last week. It seems that they flowed from a prayer group of parents at Midland Christian School. I almost feel called out by this passage

For those who choose to get their "facts" about Kamal Saleem by "Googling" his name, I point out that anyone can put anything on the Internet, and merely because something is on the Internet does not necessarily make it the truth.

That much is true; you have to judge spin and motive for people posting bad things about a public person. Discerning the spirit of a blog post or web site is important.]

Crony Macaroni

Sarah Palin gave an interesting speech today out in Iowa. I have no good clue if she's running or not, but she'd have my vote right now if she did. Emphasis on right now; I still don't know enough of Rick Perry to give a yea-or-nay as of yet. 

She had a few interesting malaprops, like "John FK," that the usual suspects on the left will snicker at, but gave a good right-populist speech. Her theme of Crony Capitalism as a beneficiary of establishment Washington will play well to the Tea Party wing of the party and give inroads to independents and moderate Democrats were she to get the nomination. She also did it with humor and a smile, which works better than just straight bile.

By the way, I thought she was aiming more at Boehner and McConnell rather than Rick Perry, unlike what the CNN folks were saying post-speech (strangely, Fox News ignored the speech); there might be grounds for friction between the two, but this was more a shot at K Street and the politician who cater to it than anyone in Austin.

Does she have an avenue to the nomination? Possibly. There's about a third of the party that won't vote for her; a good hunk of moderates would vote for anyone but her and another hunk of establishment conservatives will be wedded to anyone who wasn't a Tea Party type. The stormin' Mormons have that vote, with Huntsmann appealing to the former and Romney appealing to the latter.

Ron Paul has his 10%. The Paulistas might vote for her on a second ballot at the convention, but they're an a-Pauling bunch until then.

That leaves about 55% that's open to Palin. Once things boil down and the second-tier candidates gracefully drop out after South Carolina or sooner, we'll have Romney, Perry, Bachmann and Palin fighting over that group. Romney is a tough sell to the non-establishment conservatives, and Bachmann may have her niche stomped on by both Perry and Palin.

Folks looking for executive experience will lean towards Perry. Palin did 2/3rds of a term as governor, but Perry has done two and 2/3s of a term to date. That's not a total trumping stat, but it is a selling point among a lot of conservative voters. Also, Palin's bug-out of the governor's spot, albeit for good reasons to let Alaska have a governor who wasn't dodging media fire 24/7, didn't sit well with a lot of folks.

Folks uncomfortable with women and Mormons in the White House will lean towards Perry. I don't know what percentage of the electorate that is, but it's a non-trivial one. A lot of conservative voters, if presented with a conservative guy and a conservative gal with roughly the same platform, will vote for the guy. Some of it is sexism, some of it is the media being far harsher on conservative women then conservative men and damaging Palin and Bachmann, some of it will be complementarianism extended into politics, but quite a few good-ol'-boys (and girls) will lean towards wanting a guy in charge.

Folks looking for angry will lean towards Perry (and Bachmann to a lesser extent). His book Fed Up fits the mood of a lot of Tea Party voters. I don't like angry much in my leaders; I prefer my rhetoric done with a sense of humor and grace. However, angry is selling well this cycle, and Perry plays into that.

Is being an Angry Male with gubernatorial experience enough to get Perry the nomination? If he performs well in the next few months (especially in the next two debates, one next week in California and the one in two weeks in Orlando), Perry could well corner a majority of that 55% that is open to Palin. If Perry performs well there, the avenue for Palin might not be there this go-round and her sometime-during-September decision will be to pass on a run and keep being the free-lance political celebrity/writer/campaigner hybrid she's been doing since leaving Juneau.

If Perry lays an egg at the Reagan Library and in Orlando, becoming the Fred Thompson of the 2012 cycle, then Palin has a avenue to become the un-Mitt and get the nomination. Yes, she has negatives galore, but she has a rhetorical line of attack that can reach swing voters in ways that Mitt Romney could never pull off. If Romney were to call for zeroing out the corporate tax rate, it would look self-serving; as a more blue-collar gal, Palin can pull that off and still be a populist.

However, it looks like the nomination could be nearly sewn up this month by a good Perry performance; if he sells himself as the un-Mitt well, Palin will be hitting up the cable networks for more wilderness TV series and working on a third book rather than running for president. If he doesn't... it will be fun to see the usual suspects have a multi-month conniption fit.

Sweet 16s

It's an odd day for sports, when Michigan gets a football game rained out and the Big 12 is going from being just numerically challenged to being on life support in the last week.

I can picture Alan chiming in and declaring the folks in Ann Arbor wusses for calling the remainder of the game with WMU off, but there was little need to have Michigan run out the clock and keep having the 100K+ fans in the Big House dodging thunderstorms. A 34-10 lead and marching for more late in the 3rd would be on the verge of a TKO if they did football like boxing, so it seemed to make some sense, especially when a fiesta-colored radar all the way west to South Bend (where Notre Dame was also getting delayed and getting shut out by USF; nothing says Schadenfreude like the Irish taking it in the neck at home) was showing on the Jumbotron.

Not bad for the first go-round of the Hoke era. The Broncos scored first but couldn't hang with Michigan for the long haul. However, we did have at least one I-AA scalp in Sacramento State downing Oregon State, going for two in OT and making it.

__________

Oregon State-Oklahoma State could become a conference game in the near future; that's one that OSU is bound to win. There was talk last year of a PAC-16 with a big hunk of the Big 12 going west; as is, just Colorado bolted west and joined Utah in expanding the PAC-10 into the PAC-12, with Nebraska leaving to join the Big 10.

Now, Texas A&M is lusting after the SEC and has given the Big 12 notice of leaving, and Oklahoma has talked of leaving as well. The new talk of the day is to have OU, Oklahoma State, Texas and Texas Tech join the PAC-12 to become the PAC-16.

That would make some sense. You would have natural divisions of the old PAC-8 being the West division and the Arizona schools joining the newbies in an East division; of course, Arizona and ASU won't like that, since California is the recruiting prize, but Texas isn't exactly chopped liver.

What this would leave is a gutted Big 12 down to five teams; Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri. If A&M does go to the SEC, either Missouri or Kansas might make a good add if the SEC wants to go to 16 teams as well; the problem there is that neither of those schools would seem a good cultural fit with the SEC. The Big 10 might be interested in Missouri and Kansas if the MO became going big or going home.

It could well happen that the Big 12 could disappear. We could see Baylor, Kansas State and Iowa State left without a home and look to Conference USA or the Mountain West as options; if travel costs were not an object, the Big East might work.

One route the Big 12 might go is to absorb some mid-major schools from the area. Memphis would be  a good ad, as might Tulsa. SMU would like to join, and might get the chance if they want to keep a solid Texas footprint. BYU might be an interesting pickup as well. This might create some problems in keeping its BCS qualifier status, since it would be the weakest of the big-six conferences. Northern Iowa might be an interesting ad if it could move up from I-AA.

Interesting times.