Mark Byron

Cruel, Cruel Summers

Here's a piece I ran into on the Journal of Commerce, a good transportation/logistics web site that's part of my new news crawl. It's a piece on infrastructure politics, but it's more politics than infrastructure, so I'll put my $0.02 here rather than over on the Momentum board.

The piece has the House Transportation Committee chair ripping the president a new one-

Rep. James L. Oberstar, D-Minn., said Friday that President Obama was “massively uninformed” when the president told conferees at the White House jobs summit on Thursday that “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects may not provide the quick boost for jobs needed to stimulate American economic recovery.

“It was absolutely stunning to me,” Oberstar told The Journal of Commerce. Oberstar is the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. On Wednesday he took part in a press conference in which highway and transit officials presented a list of more than 9,500 infrastructure repair projects that could be started in 120 days or less.

He's right in that construction jobs like these have good multiplier effects and deliver about as good a bang for the stimulus buck as government spending goes. However, I'm not sure if I'm on board as he continues to rant-

Oberstar blamed Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council, for the president’s opposition.

“This is the Larry Summers Effect at the White House,” Oberstar said. “This person does not understand, nor believe in, nor read figures of success in the infrastructure program.”

I'm not sure who made Summers the whipping boy; there's even a Fire Summers blog going. News that Harvard's endowment fund got trashed when Summers had them long on stocks when the market crashed has made him look not so good, but that's a solid strategy to have for the long haul.

If anything, Summers is getting both barrels from some quarters because he understands economics; they don't hand out PhD's in econ to doofuses. The problem for liberals is that he is rather pragmatic and moderate, being more of a deficit hawk than most Democrats.

Darth Vader isn't Interested?

Draft Dick Cheney? They tried that in the 60s and he used a educational deferment.

A Moral Majority?

Bene noted this Manhattan Declaration which seems to unite a broad swath of center-right Christian thought to defend the sanctity of life, the family and of religious liberty. There is much more of an ecumenical feel to this document. It reads far more Catholic than it does evangelical, but not in a way that is non-evangelical.

It seems a bit more than "the usual suspects of of the US religious right" although many of the suspects are there; Chuck Colson was one of three lead authors as well as Christian politicos James Dobson, Gary Bauer and Tony Perkins. In addition, conservative culture warriors Al Mohler, Richard Land, Maggie Gallagher and William Donohue are in the mix.

To balance out the warriors, You have a number of Catholic Bishops, quite a few ex-Episcopal Anglicans (and a parachuting-in Peter J. Akinola who is a bit out of the North American mix) and quite a few apolitical evalgelicals like Ravi Zacharias, J.I. Packer, Wayne Grudem and Tim Keller. 

The writers were Colson, Timothy George and Robert George (no relation, Timothy's Baptist and Robert is Catholic), but it seems like Robert George did a lot of the heavy lifting. He's one of the key folks behind the National Organization for Marriage who has come to the fore in the last few years, although author/pundit Maggie Gallagher is the president.

Timothy George isn't a theocon; he heads up the Beeson seminary in Alabama, which provided theological cover for a center-left tax overhaul championed by GOP Gov Bob Riley in 2003, which probably doesn't endear him to the free-market mavens of the theocon right. He was also on board the Evangelical climate change document, as were Manhattan Declaration signers Ron Sider, the NAE's Leith Anderson and Christianity Today's David Neff. People who were shouting at each other over that document are making common cause with this one.

So, this is a pretty broad coalition that can get into pissing matches on the environment and economics but agree on the other issues that orthodox Christianity (by the way, they do also have a few capital-O Orthodox folks as well as signers) should inform our culture.

Here's one thing that might make Bene breathe a bit more easily; you don't have a big presence of NAR neocharismatics on this bunch; Kay Arthur is the one name that flows from the Trinity Broadcasting quadrant

Here's one passage that seems to have been overtaken by events; it was drafted on 10/20 and just issued yesterday (11/21)-

Although public sentiment has moved in a pro-life direction, we note with sadness that pro-abortion ideology prevails today in our government.  The present administration is led and staffed by those who want to make abortions legal at any stage of fetal development, and who want to provide abortions at taxpayer expense.  Majorities in both houses of Congress hold pro-abortion views. 

That last sentence doesn't ring true in the House after the Stupak Amendment passed, barring abortion coverage from being a required part of health insurance plans. That was passed with some strong lobbying from the Catholic Church, as pro-life Democrats joined with Republicans to have something of a pro-life majority in the House. The senate may be another matter.

How to live this out is a good question; one of the interesting fallouts of the Stupak Amendment was that you had a sizable block of morally-conservative Democrats who can create a moral majority (Oh, yes, Jerry's kid Jonathan Falwell's on board; he's actually a pretty good preacher from what I've seen of him) in Washington, one that had very little input from the normal theocon suspects. In this case, it was Catholic religious leaders who put the squeeze on their more dutiful members to vote their faith rather than their party.

Are We Not Men? No, We Are Rhino.

Here's an interesting passage from a Dana Milbank WaPo piece on Newt Gingrich from last week. Here's what the Newt's eye is on-

"I believe the most important question in the United States for the next decade is: 'Who are we?' Are we in fact a people who claim that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights?" Or, are we "just randomly gathered protoplasm -- and lucky for us we're not rhinoceroses -- but that in the end our power is defined by politicians and their appointees? Once you decide on this, almost everything else gets easier."

That choice of animal, rhinoceros, is interesting, especially when Newt was on the wrong end of a intra-Republican dustup in the NY-23 bi-election, where he backed the center-left "RINO" (conservative pejorative for Republican in Name Only- pronounced "Rhino") Republican nominee rather than the Conservative Party upstart. The RINO dropped out as she fell into third place and endorsed her Democratic challenger, who has won a squeaker pending a count of absentee votes.

However, lets talk about Rhinos rather than RINOs.

I'm still coming around to a coherent reply to the Patrol piece dancing on the Evangelical grave that Michael Spencer has commended. Strangely, I find this Gingrich paragraph a good starting point to get an edge to approach things.

The Patrol editorial castigated modern Evangelicals as being "[c]onfined to the paramaters (sic) of liberal rationalism" and "blinded by its symbiotic relationship with the Enlightenment." I'll hit the theology of the piece a bit later, God willing, but we are talking some form of "rationalism" if we talk truth.

The Wikipedia for Rationalism states that "the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive." If there is a capital T-Truth, it isn't left up to what we feel physically or mentally. Jefferson was no theological conservative, but even he had a vision of a set of moral truths that weren't up for modification.

If that Enlightenment rationality that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution is founded on gets tossed out the window, so do Jefferson's unalienable rights that Gingrich references. If we're ruled by the emotion of the day rather than timeless truth that can be found, all bets are off, both politically and theologically.

The post-modern doesn't buy the concept of Truth and especially don't like it when other people think they have it; if I have the idea right, truth is not fully knowable and we can only talk and observe our way towards something resembling it. 

That's a dangerous place to be.

Eye'n Rand

OK, now that I gave C. Merwin Grayson III's resume a once-over, let's look at his main foe for the nomination, Dr. Randal Paul.

C. Merwin's Google ad blurb goes for "Fifth-generation Kentuckian for U.S. Senate." Rand Paul is first generation, albeit one who has spent as much adult life in the state as Grayson, having set up a eye surgery practice in Bowling Green in 1993 while Grayson was off at Harvard getting his BA.

To be fair to Trey, both have nice backgrounds, for Paul got sent through Duke's MD program on dad's dime; how much of that was avoiding those libertarian-dreaded government-backed student loans and how much was Ron being able to afford to is open to debate.

Rand didn't waste much time getting active in local politics, setting up an anti-tax (no, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree) group Kentucky Taxpayers United a year later and has kept his hand in the political process since then.

Is he Ron Paul 2.0? Just about, which is as much bug as feature. If you want someone tugging at the other end of the rope from Obama and Pelosi with gusto, Paul would be a good choice.

One thing to point out to contrast a prospective Senator Rand Paul from a prospective President Ron Paul is that Rand will need to get at least 49 other Senators to agree with him to put any policies into action, which will limit his more radical policies from getting enacted.

However, that libertarian streak might have him tugging against conservative Republican orthodoxy as well from time to time. He has his dad's dislike of the Federal Reserve and is opposed to being part of the WTO and the IMF. That will make Rand Paul a no vote on a lot of trade policies that might be beneficial to the US on balance but require making binding agreements with other countries, putting him in league with Pat Buchanan and the anti-globalization left.

While his policy papers don't address this, the paleolibertarian tendency towards a minimalist military might come into play down the line as well. That might keep Obama and crew from "spending on unnecessary programs and unconstitutional operations" but might also keep a Jindal or Romney Pentagon of the mid 2010s from functioning well, since the winner of this race will be there through the end of the next presidential term.

This race may boil down to how much of a "loose cannon" Rand Paul is and whether it would be safer for Kentucky's GOP electorate to send a more button-downed, establishmentarian Trey Grayson up as their nominee. Grayson doesn't quite fit the Tea Party vibe, but Paul might fit it a bit too well, using the Tea Party metaphor before it became cliche.

Shooting the Trey

I'm getting a bit of coverage for my Kindred Heathcare piece from earlier in the day, including some linkage from a Paulista Trey Grayson bashing web site.

Who is this young man, Charles Merwin Grayson III? Well, he's from the northernmost part of Kentucky near Cincinnati in the nice suburb of Edgewood, befitting the blue-blood monicker.  Harvard undergrad, then a UK JD/MBA combo.

He then hopped across the Ohio to work for the law firm of Keating Muething & Klekamp. Is that Keating Five Keating? Yes, it is. One of the firms founders was Charles Keating, who (after leaving the firm) played access politics by donating to four Democrats and John McCain and got them to go to bat with financial regulators to go easy on his failing Lincoln Savings and Loan.

His brother, William Keating, got elected to Congress from the Cincinnati area in the 1970s and went on to be the publisher of the Cincy Inquirer. Former senator Mike DeWine is now on the KMK payroll after losing his seat in 2007 as is his son Pat.

From that perch, Grayson won the Secretary of State post in 2003 at the tender age of 31 and managed to get reelected in 2007 despite having GOP governor Fletcher go down amid a patronage scandal.

He seems to be a down-the-line conservative on the issues at hand, but hasn't had to work on those issues too much in his policy-lite post as Secretary of State. There doesn't seem to be a lot of nuance to his stands, just standard conservative boilerplate, especially on hot-button issues like immigration and health care.

Does he have a blue-blood RINOey side to him given the crowd he ran with as a young man? He backed Romney in the 2008 primaries, which would make sense for an establishment conservative; had he gone McCain like a lot of the KMK folks did, you could make more of a case against him.

However, Romney evolved quickly when he moved to a national stage and away from a more moderate persona needed to win statewide in MA. Could Grayson be making the same move in order to win a more-ideological Senate primary race.

He did vote for Clinton in 1992, but I recall voting for Carter in 1980 when I was a 19-year-old. Grayson reminds me a bit of a Republican Bill Clinton (resume only, please no wise cracks), except he got an MBA along with the JD, focused on corporate rather than constitutional law and got his foot in the door as SoS rather than AG. 

Grayson seems to be straight out of the Chamber of Commerce wing of the GOP, but that's a style that leaves me a bit cold. Mitch Junior, anyone?

Haunted by Kindred Spirits

I was looking at the contributor data for the Kentucky Senate race on the Open Secrets web site and saw an interesting tidbit; Republican Trey Grayson's leading contributor was Kindred Healthcare. Interestingly, they are also #5 on Democrat Jack Conway's donor list.

I next did a once-over for Kindred donors. Many of them play both sides of the aisle.

Chief Operating Officer Frank Battafarano gave to both Conway and Grayson with a Republican lean. He gave $2400 to both Grayson and SD's John Thune and $1000 each to Conway and Louisville Democratic congressman John Yarmuth.

John Cowgil gave $1000 each to Conway and Grayson.

CEO Paul Diaz is a Democrat first, giving $30,400 to the Democratic Senatorial campaign committee along with $2000+ worth of donations to Steny Hoyer, Ben Cardin and Maria Cantwell. However, he also gave money to Thune and Grayson.

Four other officials (Richard Lechleiter , Steve Monaghan, Susan Moss and James Novak) did the split-donation route, giving to both Conway and Grayson.

Note that those donations didn't go to Grayson's GOP foe Rand Paul or LG Dan Mongiardo, who is Conway's main foe for the Democratic nomination and who nearly beat Jim Bunning for this seat in 2004.

Could it be that Grayson and Conway play the political game too well, getting donations from folks who want access rather than beacause they back the candidate?

The League of Extraordinary Criminals

Mr. Erickson has some company; Rudy doesn't like trying KSM and company in NYC either.

The Obama administration's decision Friday to bring the alleged conspirators to New York has triggered a backlash from those who say a civilian trial affords the defendants rights they do not deserve, treats them as ordinary criminals and could be used as a platform to spew anti-American rhetoric as well as critique the actions of the Bush administration.

Yes, criminals get rights they don't deserve. That's why they're called rights. If you get stuff that can be taken away, we call those privileges. 

They get treated as ordinary criminals. Do we want to give them the dignity of being POWs?

Oh, if you want to cut down on platforms "to spew anti-American rhetoric as well as critique the actions of the Bush administration" in Nuevo York, you might want to start down the road at the UN and ask them to set up shop in Geneva or somewhere else.

Giuliani said the biggest problem is that the United States is treating terrorists as it did after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was followed by a string of other terrorist attacks on Americans overseas and finally by the Sept. 11 massacre. 

That has two flaws. One is that had he recommended military tribunals in the mid-90s, he would have been laughed out of the room. Pre-9/11 and pre-Afghanistan, that would have sounded exceedingly reactionary. Now, with some 20-20 hindsight, it sounds only debatably reactionary.

What has changed is that we are looking at these militant Islamics as a military threat as well as a law-enforcement issue. The Obama team leans a bit more away from the military side than the Bush team did, at least in tone, but the Bush team was cutting quite a few corners in erring on the military side.

As long as the FBI and others are working on keeping US-based terror cells from functioning and the CIA and the military are working on striking at foreign-based actors, I can comfortably live with bringing cases into our normal court system rather than treating the jihadis as POWs. They don't deserve the fair treatment they are getting, but that's a feature of our system, not a bug, for it makes sure that everyone gets fair treatment.

Robert E. Grayson?

Here's an interesting piece on Trey Grayson, Kentucky's Secretary of State, whose in a mano-a-mano US GOP Senate primary race with Rand Paul, a eye doctor and son of noted libertarian Ron Paul.

Grayson opposes cap-and-trade legislation, and said the Obama administration and Democratic leaders “have declared war on coal, and when they do that I think they’re declaring war on Kentucky.” If elected, Grayson said he, like Bunning, would seek a spot on the Senate Energy Committee.

That's some dangerous rhetoric, especially when coupled with a lot of Tea Party resentment that casts Washington as colonial England. It's almost begging to start a civil war.

He also took a jab at the media and at recent polls that show him running even with opponent Rand Paul of Bowling Green: “The press is going to try to define this race in their own terms, but let me assure you, this campaign is going to be build about people, and that’s the only thing that matters,” Grayson said. “I will always put Kentucky first.”

When coupled with the first paragraph, that sounds strangely like Robert E. Lee, who had his choice of armies to lead at the start of the Civil War and chose Virginia rather than the US.

The job title of the gig he's after is United States Senator. Not the Kentucky senate, the United States Senate. However, part of Grayson's shtick is to be a Kentucky guy rather than a relative newcomer who's dad is Texas-based and who gets 75% of his campaign funding from outside of the state.

There is more to the US than coal, bourbon, tobacco and race horses and I want a senator who represents more than bankers, lawyers and parochial Bluegrass interests. I'm not a great fan of Rand Paul, but he seems to be willing to look at a bigger picture than Grayson at this point.

Al Davis Conservatives

One of the news items of the day was Al Qaida biggie Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three assistants are going to be put on trial in New York in civilian court; KSM is deemed to be the mastermind behind 9/11.

A military tribunal would be a bit cleaner, as things could be done a notch more secretly and possibly include waterboard-induced testimony that would likely not pass constitutional muster in a civilian court. However, we're a country that likes to have the moral high ground where possible, and using legal short-cuts to get these people locked up for good will be detrimental in the long term.

I got this e-mail from Red State's Erick Erickson earlier today; he don't like the idea. He posted on it earlier but his e-mail was more vitriolic

In that trial, the terrorist will get all the rights afforded an American citizen in a criminal trial, including the right to a fair trial, the right to a taxpayer funded attorney, the right to review all the evidence against him, potentially including classified intelligence matters, the right to exclude evidence against him including, potentially, any confession obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, etc.

OK. Most of those aren't bugs, those are features. You want an unfair trial where he has to defend himself, can't question his accusers and can't call BS on torture?

Yes, we may have have to bring some classified material to the party, stuff that we might not want publicly seen. However, we've busted spies in the past and had to get sanitized versions of our intel into the public record in those cases.

At best, this will be a show trial fit not for the American Republic, but a third world kleptocratic totalitarian regime.

Them's fighting words, sir; it borders on false witness. I'm reminded of that one photo from the Vietnam War where a suspected Viet Cong was summarily executed by an officer with a bullet to the head on the street. That's efficient, but it isn't how we do things.

Doing away with those legal niceties is the mark of a banana republic, not abiding by them. We have something called the rule of law in the United States of America. Even if you are dead set on destroying the country, you still get your day in court where the prosecution has to prove its case and have its allegations double-checked by the defense. Even Mr. Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, will get better treatment than he deserves, but that's how the system works; even the nasty guys have to have the proscecution prove their guilt.

What you're proposing is Al Davis geopolitics, "Just win, baby." Torture and constitutional shortcuts are just fine as long as it gets you a victory in the War on Terror. However, that attitude can come back to bite you in the long run; check out how Davis' Raders have done lately.

We can do better.

A Generic Donkey is an Ass

Some interesting polling from Gallop; their generic Dem-versus-GOP congressional question favors the Republicans 48-44. That's within the margin of error, as I would tell my Managerial Econ students were my voice up to it, but given the fact that Republicans tend to underpoll in those generic questions, it means bad juju is coming for Democrats next year if the current mood holds.

The Republican brand got hammered in the second Bush term, but the Democratic brand is not faring so well in 2009, as Will Rogers again proves prophetic when he answered "I don't belong to an organized political party... I'm a Democrat." Nancy Pelosi would rather be a cat-herder right now, since any House majorities are made out of radiocative materials and have a half-life measured in hours.

Curiouser and Curiouser

We actually have a few elections tomorrow, with governorships in Virginia and New Jersey up for votes, but the one that has the right juiced is the bi-election for New York's 23rd district, where a liberal Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, dropped out after falling into third place behind Democrat Bill Owens and Conservative Doug Hoffman.

The news of the weekend is that Dede decided to endorse Owens. Expect her to change parties in short order, for she is probably persona non grata in many Republican circles and endorsing a Democrat isn't a great career move for even a liberal Republican; in her case, she was running to Owens' left on a number of issues, so crediting her as a liberal isn't just conservative hyperbole.

One of the interesting things in the NY-23 race is that we have a real prospect of having a Conservative Party nominee getting elected to Congress for the first time in almost four decades; William Buckley's brother James got elected on the Conservative ticket in 1970 as a liberal Republican and Democrat split the center-left vote, alowing Buckley a 38% plurality. However, that was back when there were still liberal Republicans in the land and the political parties hadn't distilled down to center-right Republicans and center-left Democrats.

In New York, you can represent more than one party on the ballot, and it is common for the Republican nominee to also get the Conservative nod. However, in the NY-23 case, the Conservatives opted to go with an alternative who might just win.

...We're Just Negotiating the Price

I was thumbing through CNN's website while proctoring an exam and saw the Reators^© running an ad: "Tell Congress: Extent the Homebuyer Tax Credit Now."

OK. $8000 tax credit, of which about half will go into the Realtor^©'s pocket, given a 5%-or-so commission. You would normally thing that the real estate folks would be fans of limited government, but like most folks trolling K Street, the punchline of the old joke "We know what you are... we're just negotiating the price" seems fitting; that's why hearing that Steve Largent is now on the wireless-lobby dime is disturbing.

Your tax dollars at work. Yes, tell Congress to get that McMansion-Monger^© a $5000 commission at your expense NOW.

Those Who Can't Teach, Research Teaching

It's a good thing my blood pressure was low when I went to the doctor yesterday, for this article started to raise it. I'm not a Tea Partier, but this is Exhibit A in why the Department of Education could be best made to disappear; here's some planned statements from department boss Arne Duncan-

"Schools of education have been renowned for being cash cows for universities," Duncan will say, according to his released remarks. "The large enrollment in education schools and their relatively low overhead have made them profit centers."

Duncan will say that universities divert the profits from education schools to other departments while doing little to invest in educational research and clinical training.

Most teacher colleges are in second-tier colleges that focus on teaching students rather than on research. It is true that you don't need a lot of extra equipment to teach education classes, but the same holds true for business and social science classes; when I was teaching at Warner U, their adult-ed business programs were major cash cows, supporting their traditional bible-college day students.

If we follow Duncan's logic, he wants college education to be more expensive. If the school of education has to plow any "profits" back into research, that will mean that tuition across the board will need to be raised or unprofitable departments cut in order to make room for the new education research.

OK, everyone at Central State U pays extra tuition and the Physics and Anatomy programs get downsized to pay for more education research. Remember to thank Arne for the increase in your student loan.

Duncan has been surrounded by researchers for years, both as Chicago school superintendent and now as Ed Secretary; his cohort is going to be research buffs who got to school district HQ or Washington primarily as education research experts rather than day-to-day teachers. That crowd will be biased towards more research, since that's the air they breathe.

Mundane Interests

I was reading an ESPN piece where Steve Largent was commenting on former Seahawk teammate Jim Zorn's travails as Redskins' head coach; the news of the week was that meddling owner Dan Snyder stripped him of offensive play-calling duties.

However, it wasn't the NFL minutia that pulled my chatty-ring; it was this line that describes what the former congressman from Oklahoma is doing these days- "Largent is currently president and CEO for CTIA, a wireless communications lobbying group."

Largent took a stab at running for governor in 2002 and lost, so he decided to go back to Washington where he can use his connections (and fame as a Hall-of-Fame wide receiver) to nudge legislation in the way his paymasters would like. That's a bit disappointing to me, since we have far too many smart people trying to nudge legislation their way.

However, as Willie Sutton use to say about why he robbed banks, Washington is where the money is. 

Frankfort, too.

We have some nasty Kentucky state politics going over gambling; the Democrats want to let the racetracks here in the state have casinos, which brings some Republican-leading horsemen over to the Democratic side of the fence. Gov. Beshear ran on a pledge to put a casino measure on the ballot, but instead has tried and failed to get a bill out of the legislature; he got it past the House earlier this year, but a Republican-majority Senate has blocked the measure.

Now the Republicans are talking about putting it on the ballot. Democrats are becrying it as a stall tactic, as such a vote would happen next November and would bring extra voters out for an off-year election that would more likely be anti-casino conservatives.

Both parties are in interesting boxes. The Democrats have increasing horse-racing money coming in from apolitical folks who want the extra money in a declining industry. That will make it harder for Republicans to get elected as long as casinos are a live issue in the legislature; the anti-casino folks are either theocons who are pro-GOP already or goo-goos on the religious left who might contribute to an anti-casino referrendum campaign but not switch sides of the aisle on this issue.

By taking the topic off the table until Nov 2010, it takes the pro-casino money away from Democrats and into the pro-casino referrendum campaign. That's why Democrats might want the issue to hang around the legislative agenda and get extra horsey money.

The Liberal Art of Bumper Stickers

We were out TV-shopping today, bagging a 22" digital TV; it's odd to be lugging a TV in one hand and four two-liters of pop in the other and have the TV be lighter.

However, it was a car in front of me as we were heading to HH Gregg that got me thinking. It had about ten bumper stickers on the back, one supporting a funky music store downtown, a couple promoting bicycling, a couple promoting native American stuff, one proclaiming "I'm already against the next war" and one on the bottom right which just said "Liberal"; gosh, I think I figured that out already.

I'm not sure if there is any scientific way to quantify this, but it seems like a liberal activist's car is more likely to be stickered-up than a conservative or libertarian one. It may be that there are a wider array of causes that get a liberal juiced than conservative do. Or, since I'm living in a college town, I see more folks on the port side of the aisle.

What Have You Done for US Lately?

Not that President Obama is Jesus, but one of His sayings fits him-a prophet is without honor in his home town... or home country. Here's Nick Kristof, a thinking liberal (yes, they do exist) who will say nice things about evangelical efforts oversees and be critical of The One where warranted.

Well, not quite, but he's being critical of the Nobel committee-

So what do you think of President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize? I’m nonplussed — I admire his efforts toward Middle East peace, but the prize still seems very premature. What has he done?

Even the most famous denizen of the Saginaw Valley took time away from bashing AIG to critique Obama from the left; "Congratulations President Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize -- Now Please Earn it!" Of course, what MM wants to see and what I would like to see are two different things (did you just equate Washington, Castro and Ortega? ... yes, you did), but at least he knows that this was given on potential rather than actual deeds.

Even SNL gave him both barrels last week on not doing much to date. NPR's Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me satired the Norwegians today by accepting their Emmy for the TV show they will do in the future. However, I guess actually doing something other than making good speeches will do for a Nobel.

This isn't the first time that good intentions won a Nobel. Algore won it two years ago and others who talked a good game but failed to deliver the goods, like Oscar Arias and the anti-landmine movement, have gotten the award. The committee seems to veer between people who have actually made life better around the world, like microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus in 2005 or Doctors Without Borders in 1999 or even Jimmy Carter in 2002 (yes, I hear the right wing of the Peanut Gallery wince, but he has done quite a bit of good in many countries over the years even as he's an occasional pain-in-the-butt domestically) to believing-the-right (or should that be left)-thing picks like Obama and Gore.

The Nobel committee is essentially praising Obama for not being Dubya. That's a fairly low bar.

Let's hope Obama earns it, but not at the expense of him being a yes-man for the European elites.

Under Pressure

I had to chuckle on my way back from running errands when an NPR broadcast talked about "mounting pressure" coming from gay activists to get President Obama to move on their issues; he'll be speaking to the Human Rights Campaign this evening. That's an interesting choice of words; any mounting pressure will happen after the meeting.

Speaking of mounting pressure, Barney Frank lived up to his name, questioning the effectiviness of the big march/rally planned for Sunday.

Frank said in an interview with The Associated Press that he considers such demonstrations to be "an emotional release" that does little to pressure Congress.

"The only thing they're going to be putting pressure on is the grass," the Massachusetts Democrat said Friday.

That ranks up with Coleman Young's "he hasn't run anything but his mouth" takedown of Jesse Jackson for a modern political one-liner. Well, Palin's convention line about mayors being community organizers with actually responsibility is good, but it takes a bit more time to set up.

Captian Kirk

Some interesting shenanigans in Taxachusettes; their state legislature gave the governor back his authority to name interim Senators after taking it away from Mitt Romney for fear of his appointing a Republican to President Kerry's seat in 2004. Now that the governor is a fellow Democrat, Deval Patrick, they gave it back.

Signs of being  a political junkie. When I saw the name Paul Kirk as St. Patrick's pick, my memory bank came up with "Democratic chair." I scan down the piece, and yes, he was the DNC chair in the late 80s. Now he gets a gig as Senator until the replacement election in January, getting the title "former senator" as the lead of his obit and giving the Democrats a 60th vote (60 votes invokes cloture and kills a filibuster) in the Senate, counting the two liberal independents.

Catanomics

I haven't blogged on the President's speech yet, but here's a lolcat for the occasion-




There are a number of things we need to think of about the proposed law and what it will do to both businesses and people. Getting Manuel Lebour emergency health care isn't high on my worry list, but I'll discuss what is when I'm more awake.

Four Sigma Phelps

I was looking at a 2002 post where I described gay-basher Fred Phelps as a "Four-sigma conservative." My footnote at the time, before Phelps became a household word, for "Four-sigma" was "Four standard deviations from the mean-to the right of 99.997 of the population. OK, maybe he's only 2.5σ."

As we've gone forward through the decades, that first tongue-in-cheek estimate may well be right. If we had a town of 40,000 like my hometown of Midland, would we have someone who is more kick-the-cat homophobic than Phelps? As Descartes said before he disappeared, "I think not." If we do 1/(1-99.997%) we'll have 33,333, which is within hailing distance of Midland's population.

An anti-abortion protester, James Pouillon, got killed in Owosso (about an hour south of Midland) on Friday ; the shooter seemingly blew his top and killed a gravel-company owner after killing the in-your-face protester, who was across the street from Owosso Hight before school started in the morning.

Owosso has about 15,000 folks, and one could argue that Pouillon would be a four-sigma pro-lifer. I don't recall anyone in Midland who had his verve on abortion, and we're a rather conservative town. Phelps makes him look tame, so four sigma might be a low estimate.

So, I might not have been too far off on Phelps. Do I hear five Sigma? Going once... going twice...or are there more hard-core bigots than I think

"Socialism is an evil, and it can't stop regulating"

Flint's most famous human product, Michael Moore, has turned his cameras toward Wall Street in his latest big-screen foray, Capitalism: A Love Story. That's a colon in the title, and we know what the colon produces.

Anyway, the money quote from this piece is this

"Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil," the two-hour movie concludes.

"You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy."

The bad guys in Moore's mind are big banks and hedge funds which "gambled" investors' money in complex derivatives that few, if any, really understood and which belonged in the casino.

Let's tackle the low-hanging fruit first from front to back. I'm one of those few folks who understands most of those derivatives, although I'm rather green on credit default swaps. Those were designed to help people hedge risks, essentially credit insurance, but the models were ill-equipped to handle the meltdown in the housing market.

Even people who understand things can get burned badly by them. For instance, the two gentlemen who won the Nobel Econ price for their work on option pricing theory, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes (the Black-Scholes formula is the standard option pricing model; Fisher Black died before the Nobel folks came a'calling), were on the payroll of Long Term Capital Management, the first hedge fund most people had ever heard of. LTCM got totaled by faulty modeling of foreign currency options during the 1998 "Asian Contagion" that rocked many developing country currencies. 

Capitalism and democracy can co-exist nicely; while there have been big-business friendly goons autocrats of the right in the past, the left tends to be more autocratic.  I can trot out another film subject as People's Exhibit A, Caesar Chavez I of Venezuela, who (put on the hasmat gear) Oliver Stone has done a documentary on. "Stone film says U.S. demonises Chavez." Nay, he does a decent job of that himself, closing any radio and TV station that disagrees with him.

However, Moore is right in part, that capitalism is evil in that it stems from greed. People should be more generous with their money. However, that greed doesn't go away in a socialist state; it just gets turned to less healthy endeavors, like political power seeking, theft and laziness ("they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work"). Give Hedrick Smith's The Russians a read to see how those issues played out in the USSR of the 1970s.

At least in a market economy, people have a healthy outlet for their greed by making stuff or selling services that people can use; the creativity that gets spent in unproductive activities in a command economy can be used to make new things that people like, like movies bashing AIG.

If I can borrow Churchill's line on democracy, a free market broadly defined (our friends on the libertarian right would argue it isn't free enough, but we'll ignore them for the moment) is the worst form of economy... with the exception of everything else we tried. Economy democracy is where 51% of the voters can rape and pillage the other 49%; People's Exhibit B is Bobby Mugabe; well, he only claimed to have a majority, but give me some poetic license.

Neither are pure; Capitalism is good at creating wealth while government intervention/socialism is good at getting wealth to people who have problems getting enough to get by. You need a blend.

By the way, Mike. If you hate Capitalism so much, why not put your love story in the public domain rather than sell tickets? People invest money in your projects and get nice returns. Let's do our best Church Lady and say "Could it be..... Capitalism?"

One Order of Church, Hold the Hate

One car in my apartment parking lot this morning (not a regular if memory serves, so they might be visiting) was festooned with a lot of progressive stickerage, some for some of the funkier music stores favored by the college crowd and some getting various digs in on Bush and the right. One attempted witticism was "I support the separation of church and hate."

Yes, you probably stay far away from church and are good at hating, or at least dissing, folks who you don't agree with.

I see more hatred from your typical lefty than I do from the church-goers they rag on. Do those conservative church-goers disapprove of homosexual behavior, for instance? Yes. But I bet that Barney Frank would have a more pleasant time speaking with a bunch of Baptist churchgoers than Sarah Palin would have speaking with a bunch of progressive activists.

Would a few anti-homosexual pejoratives fly at that church? Possibly, but I bet Palin would be cursed at more than Frank would. I'll put my money on Palin getting words that rhyme with witch and glut and boor overFrank getting called words that rhyme with rear and rag.

Not everyone in a church is a Fred Phelps four-sigma outlier on the right and are usually far more polite. The left's two-sigmas (2.5%ers) are seemingly more hateful than the right's two-sigmas.

No Professional Courtesy for Shark Jr.

The old joke is "Why don't sharks attack lawyers? Professional courtesy." It's also true that sharks aren't bottom feeders.

However, one Shark is ready to take on a lawyer-turned-Senator; Danny Tarkanian, son of legendary UNLV coach Jerry (Tark the Shark) Tarkanian is set to take on Harry Reid for his Nevada seat. Shark Jr. is beating Dirty Harry 49-38 in a Mason-Dixon poll.

That would be the second time in recent years a sitting Democratic majority leader was taken down; Tom Daschel was ousted in 2004. Red state Democrats are prime targets, although Nevada is leaning a bit more to the center in recent years.

I'm feeling old; Jerry's kid is already in his mid-40s and running for the Senate. It was already a quarter-century ago that he played point guard for his dad. Point guard... get one Wasilla High point in there to campaign and you'd have to clear the pool with a Shark and a Barracuda.

Squaring the Circle

It's beginning to look a lot like 1993, the last time Democrats had control of Congress and the White House. Will Rodgers had the one-liner "I don't belong to an organized political party, I'm a Democrat."

The inside-politics of the early Clinton years had the Republicans voting no on most everything (NAFTA and the WTO were two exceptions, where a center-right coalition carried the day), leaving Clinton to patch together a majority with little room to spare. If the Blue Dogs liked a bill, it was too moderate for the Black Caucus, and if Clinton moved left to appease his progressive flank, the Blue Dogs balked.

Fast forward to the summer of 2009, and Obama is stuck having to square that same circle, albeit with a larger majority. The sticking point is the "public option" of letting folks buy into the government-employee health plan; the Blue Dogs are opposed and the left wing of the party is insisting on it. Obama needs both of them on board if he is to pass a bill without any significant GOP help.

Personally, I have more problems with individual mandates, mandating coverages that will raise the cost of private insurance, and employer mandates than letting people buy into the federal-employee plan; if they provide it at cost, there shouldn't be that much of a problem. The insurance co-ops that have been proposed as an alternative seem fairly unobtrusive except for the meme that makes the health insurance industry the villain of the piece.

Do we need non-profits to "keep the insurers honest"? No, that's what competition does. It may not keep prices as low as people would like, but that's a different issue than competitive honesty. Life insurance has a mix of co-ops (if it has Mutual in the title, it's a version of a co-op) and for-profits and credit unions are tough competitions for for-profit banks, but I don't see the left shilling for either.

What the left seems to want isn't competition but control, gradually phasing out the private sector that they don't control. The problem is that a private sector is what keeps government honest in many cases. For instance, I work at a for-profit university that gives folks an option to the state-run colleges in the area; liberals look askance at such critters, but we manage to deliver a good education at a reasonable cost without cutting corners like I would have expected before coming on board at Sullivan.

The Blue Dogs get that. The left wing of the Democrats don't. Not yet, at least. It will be interesting to see if the grudgingly do get it eventually.

You Mean "'No', 'No Way' and 'Hell, No!'" Aren't Diverse Answers?

Here's an interesting passage at the end of a Sally Jenkins piece on the South and George Voinovich's RINOey dissing of southern control of the GOP. I'm adding italics on the line that caught my attention-

Voinovich's view of Southerners is the one that is unrepresentative and regionally isolated. He ignores the fluidity of American society, that great river of movement that brought the blues from the Delta to Detroit and Cleveland, and back again. If his party has a problem, maybe he should blame Republicans' lack of a broad spectrum of answers. Perhaps the problem lies less in Dixie than in the fact that an Ohioan who is the ranking Republican on a Senate transportation and infrastructure subcommittee doesn't seem aware of these basic interchanges and currents in American life.

Part of the nature of conservatism is that it generally doesn't want government to do much. For instance, there are a number of ways of doing health care policy from the left. You can make people buy insurance, you can make employers buy insurance, or you can provide it to everyone in a single-payer plan. On the Republican side, other than free-market based ideas like health insurance plans, the Republicans have any answer you want as long as it's "no."

There are a number of ways that government can try to solve a problem, but only one way to not try to solve it. There are multiple ways to do birth control but one way to do abstinence. There are multiple ways to fight CO2 emissions but one way to ignore the issue.

There are some policy areas where, as Joshua put it in War Games, "the only winning move is not to play." Unlike DL Moody's quip on evangelism, we might like the way the our government doesn't do something better than the other guy's government does do something.

That's not going to sound sexy inside the beltway, but sometimes "No" is the best answer.

Hair of the Dog that Bit You

Politicians can often get into trouble for badly-chosen words, like Steve Largent's use of an unabbreviated BS sullying a solid Christan image in his OK governor's run to George Allen's death-by-YouTube macaca incident.

We've got a miniature version of that here in Kentucky, where a summer political tradition, the Fancy Farm picnic, went on this weekend. Political junkies converge for good food and speeches from whoever's running for office in the next election. State AG Jack Conway might have been invoking the chorus of Nazareth's Hair of the Dog in his speech; I bowdlerized the offending line, putting the common acronym in brackets.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jack Conway misquoted former U.S. Sen. Wendell Ford when he uttered a profanity at last weekend’s Fancy Farm political picnic.

Mark Riddle, Conway’s campaign consultant, acknowledged the misquote Tuesday and said Conway had apologized to Ford and Fancy Farm officials.

Riddle had declined to discuss the Ford issue Monday with the Lexington Herald-Leader after Conway, the state’s attorney general, reversed himself and apologized for using profanity in his speech at the picnic sponsored by St. Jerome Catholic Church in Graves County.

Conway said in his speech on Saturday that he had a tough hide and was “one tough [SOB].” He said Ford had used the same line, though Ford actually had said “one tough son of a gun.”

Kim Geveden, a campaign consultant for Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo, Conway’s chief opponent in the May 2010 Democratic primary election, said Tuesday that Conway’s “attempt to drag Wendell Ford into the gutter with him to defend his inexcusable conduct should appall all Kentucky Democrats.”

You have a generation gap between Conway and Ford, two to be exact, since Conway just turned 40 and Ford is 84. A WWII vet wouldn't use SOB in polite company, especially on a church grounds. He may well have used it in private (I don't know how earthy his vocabulary is in private), but not on the stump to be sure.

"Son of a gun" was often used as a polite version of SOB; I'm reminded of Roger Miller's Dang Me where he has a bon mot of "My pappy's a pistol, I'm a son of a gun." I always thought he said mother rather than pappy for some reason.

It may not have too much effect, but there is a meme brewing of a rural-city divide, with Mongiardo, who's from eastern KY coal country, playing Conway as a tree-hugging city slicker who doesn't understand rural Kentucky. This won't help Conway with more centrist Democrats who might prefer quoting a son-of-a-gun than Guns n' Roses (note-link not work-friendly).

The Unprofitable Prophet

Here's what I wrote about Rick Joyner and other self-styled prophets back in 2005.

At this point, there doesn't seem to be a coherent political agenda to this group of prophets. The Elijah List site has an ad up to "Pray for our president and ALL in authority." It tends to strongly lean towards your garden-variety conservative stance on things, but the prophecy crowd isn't overly politically active.

What folks like Bene might want to keep an eye on is if this prophecy crowd starts to get political. The fans/followers of Joyner and the other prophets are a minority within charismatic circles, but they tend to be well-placed within their churches. If that Morningstar/Elijah List circle starts to make pronouncements that move people in a particular direction, it could have a surprising influence in charismatic and Pentecostal circles and then out into general evangelical circles.

It's not a problem now. It could be in the future. I'm not seeing anything sinister beyond a strong theocon view of things, but the strong followership of "the prophets" could make that circle worth keeping an eye on.

Well, that day has arrived... in spades.

In a statement issued today, prophetic minister Rick Joyner—founder of MorningStar Ministries in Fort Mill, S.C., and a member of the newly formed Freedom Federation—called the health care plan "sinister." He said the bill is "obviously designed to put the authority to determine who lives and dies in America in the hands of government bureaucrats."

He said the House measure, H.R. 3200, has the potential for "totalitarian control to be imposed on America to a degree that Hitler and Stalin could not have even imagined," pointing to provisions in the bill that he says would require government access to personal information, including banks accounts.

"Call me an alarmist and I will agree with you—I am going to do my best to sound the alarm against evil in every way that I can," Joyner wrote.

He called on Christians to stop the legislation by lobbying against it and then voting out of office any Congressional leaders who support it. "We can expect persecution for standing against such a bold and obvious attack of the spirit of death, but no Christian should fear death, and no Christian will want to live in the world that is now taking shape," Joyner said.

I'm not thrilled with the legislation as it is presently taking shape, but I don't share Joyner's snarling opposition. It will be contractionary to the economy, as employers who either aren't providing health care or aren't quite meeting the specs of what will be required will see their costs increase. That will mean higher prices, lower take-home pay and some businesses that will either close altogether or cut hours, creating higher unemployment.

If you want an example of what this might look like, think of the stagflation of the late 70s; however, this supply shock will come from added health insurance rather than higher oil prices and have the positive externality of the working poor getting better health care. Growth in other sectors in the economy might have us do far better than the stagflation era (recall that we grew despite the Clinton tax increases thanks to added technology, added logistically savvy and a level-headed monetary policy) , but this should have a contractionary effect to the economy.

However, I don't see this as demonic nor on the level of Hitler or Stalin. FDR or LBJ, maybe, but not the heavy artillery of historical bad guys. To be honest, I see more of the demonic in Joyner's overreaction to this bill than in the bill itself.

Yes, that may get me some flamage from the prophetphiles on the web, but this effort isn't doing the cause of Christ any favors. Going to the mat on mandating abortion coverage might be justified, but the plan as a whole seems more theologically benign.

I don't see any scripture that says "Thou shall not the king pay for all the doctors and hospitals" nor anything mandating such treatment, thus I am inclined to pull my theological punches on economic issues.

Going to the Bullpen

Jim Bunning pitched a pair of no-hitters as a major-league pitcher, including a perfect game, which got him some ink last week, when Mark Beuhrle became only the fifth of the 18 perfect-game pitchers to have both a mundane no-no and a perfect game in their careers.

However, he's now slated to end his second career as a US Senator, as he's opted to not seek reelection next year. He's gotten some flak from less conservative Republicans about his staunch stands against last year's financial bailouts and has had a chilly relationship with fellow KY senator Mitch McConnell.

At 78, Bunning seems to have gone past his freshness date, appearing more than a bit curmudgeonly in his older years. That rhetorical style might win you kudos from the tea-party crowd, but doesn't help you to shape legislation in a center-left universe that is modern Washington. Current Democratic LG Daniel Mongiardo came out of nowhere as an obscure state senator in 2004 to give Bunning all he wanted (51%-49%) in his last reelection bid, and Mongiardo was poised to reverse the order next year if Bunning ran again.

We may have a proxy fight between different styles of conservative; the front-runner is Trey Grayson, the Secretary of State, who has a political-animal resume; government BA from Harvard, MBA and JD from UK and a stint as a corporate lawyer before getting his SoS gig in 2003. He's only 37, so he could be there for five or six terms if he keeps his nose clean and doesn't try to move up yet another level.

Grayson might be the rep of the Mitch McConnell-style conservative establishment, while Rand Paul might be Bunning 2.0. He's at least Ron Paul 2.0. as he's everyone's favorite libertarian's son; like his doctor dad, he is a doctor as well (opthamologist) and has a political style that is like Bunning and his father.

I'm not sure who I'll be voting for next year. Grayson seems a bit too slick and too much a man-on-the-make at first glance; AG Jack Conway could go mano-a-mano with Grayson on that front, as both have Most Likely to be Elected Governor or Senator Someday on their resumes. However, people can have politically-oriented resume (if I ran for office, my BS in PoliSci might be held against me) and be decent folks; Eileen did a stint in the AG office last week as a receptionist temp and seemed to like what she saw of Conway in passing.

Paul, on the otherhand, will have to live down the ... er... more radical... stances of his father. If Dubya had to live down his dad's RINOey side in 2000's primary, Rand Paul may have to place some distance from some of his father's less-advised positions. If he's running as Ron Paul 2.0, it's 74-26 Grayson in the primary. If he brings something a bit more nuanced to the party, it might be a lot closer.

Cutting off the Low Rungs

One thing to consider as we go about contemplating (or dreading, if you're a denizen of Teapartyburgh) a health care overhaul is that we have an increase in the minimum wage kicking in today, taking the floor for workers up to $7.25 an hour.

If we tack on a $400/month health insurance policy (at least that's what I had to pay to COBRA my Warner Southern coverage) on to that, as would likely happen if an employer-mandate is passed, we'd add an extra $2.50 an hour to the effective wage rate, since a 160-hour work month (40/week *4 weeks) would give us ($400/month)/(160 hours/month)=$2.50/hour; the basic mandated plan might not be that nice, but it's a ballpark number that we can use for discussion. That makes the entry-level wage $9.75 an hour.

What if the job isn't worth $9.75/hour to the employer? Might the grocery store add another self-check-out lane, where one supervisor-cashier can hold court over a half-dozen U-scan lanes? Might the neighborhood McDonalds add a ordering kiosk (they had one in Winter Haven circa 2004), where you can order your Big Mac value meal electronically without a teenager or AARP-eligible gal asking if you want an apple pie with it? Might some store that are barely making ends meet with the current wage structure be pushed out of business and other start-ups get stillborn as business plan numbers show negative NPVs with the higher wages?

This will make it harder for teens to get their first job and be somewhat inflationary for places who use low-wage work. Better-paying jobs will be lesser effected, although higher insurance costs on employers will result in lower wages.

One of the problems of the social "Safety Net" is that you often make it hard to get out of the net once you fall into it. By improving the net via employer-mandates, you also cut off the bottom rungs of the ladder getting you out of the net. One has to make a good jump to catch the newly-raised bottom rung, and not everyone is going to make that jump.

We'd be better off by raising taxes to pay for the insurance rather than make employers provide it. However, the Democrats know that's a non-starter and would prefer the unfunded-mandate approach to stick businesses with the cost.