If it was the Bush Education Department, I think that this would be a bigger deal. But what’s important, of course, is for the children to think about how they can help the Leader, not that old-school stuff like grammar.
[Update a few minutes later]
I think that they also need to teach them to go away from the light, not toward it.
[Late afternoon update]
Let’s keep our kids home that day.
Is Sarah Palin the Republicans’ Ted Kennedy?
In the case of Lincoln, Kennedy, the two Roosevelts and Reagan they are, long dead, still motivating Americans in one direction or another. Teddy Kennedy’s entire career derived from the initial push he received as JFK’s little brother. The latter fact is particularly telling, since JFK died in 1963. Only Teddy himself could have carved out the rest of his career, the political careers of relatives of famous presidents frequently having a short shelf life. Theodore Roosevelt’s famous son Ted Jr. fizzled in politics, as did Franklin Roosevelt’s namesake son Franklin Jr. The name can get you in the door. After that it’s up to you.
This is what really drives Sarah Palin’s critics nuts. She sits up there in Alaska with Todd and the kids, taps out a few words on her Facebook page — and presto! ObamaCare has a torpedo amidships! Without doubt this causes Palin’s rivals, just as it once did with Churchill’s and Teddy Kennedy’s, to fret and fume if not foam.
Can you imagine how you must feel if you are an in-state rival like Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski? Who? Exactly. No one in Washington much less the rest of the country is huddled in a corner whispering — “what did Lisa say?” Nor does America take much notice of Palin’s potential 2012 rivals like Romney, Huckabee or Minnesota Governor Pawlenty. The New York Times isn’t wasting ink being catty about Ms. Murkowski because, with no disrespect intended to Senator Murkowski, like most of her Senate colleagues her “head of the table” factor is exactly zero. There are no thundering editorials of disapproval for Romney, no Maureen Dowd snipes at Huckabee, no Keith Olbermann tirades about Pawlenty. It’s Sarah Palin they can’t stand, and it’s visceral — an immediate tip off to her Kennedy-like “head of the table” status.
A long but interesting analysis.
Frank J. says that we should train politicians the way we train dogs. The problem is, dogs are smarter, and more trainable.
Dana Blankenhorn misinterprets history:
The problem here for Republicans is their own past success. President Clinton failed to get a health bill through in 1993 and Democrats were hammered the next year, especially their more conservative members. It took them over a decade to win back the majorities they had then.
This may make threats to wreck the careers of those voting “aye” less potent, with conservative Democrats figuring that if they can’t win they might as well stand for something.
The bottom line. If Democrats can’t agree on a proposal given their substantial majorities in both Houses of Congress, they face a generation’s exile in the political wilderness, no matter how many crazy pills some Republicans take.
Emphasis mine. If the last graf is true, then they’re damned either way, because if they ram through a bill that all the polls show is very unpopular, they’ll be hammered like they were in 1994 by angry voters. The key that Dems (and I think that the Blue Dogs) understand it is in the false causation implied in the highlighted statement. Yes, the Dems failed to pass health care in 1993 and yes, they got hammered in 1994. But one didn’t cause the other. What happened in 1994 was due to several things — “don’t ask, don’t tell” as one of the first things out of the box, the mishandling of health care, with Hillary (the most brilliant woman in the world) sent off to draft a big-government bill behind closed doors, passing the “assault weapons” ban, a failure to pass the promised “middle-class tax cuts.” Failing to pass the health-care monstrosity wasn’t the cause of them losing the Congress — it was the very attempt to pass it. Actually passing this bill will be disastrous.
Oh, and the fact that “conservative Democrats” lost seats disproportionately simply means that they were in marginal, unsafe districts. It certainly wasn’t because they failed to vote for a big-government bill. The Dems don’t have any good choices at this point, but passing a Dem-only bill will be Armageddon at the polls for them next year.
Anybody else see what’s missing in this editorial in the Houston Chronicle by several “NASA astronauts,” asking for more money to “stay the course”?
That’s right. No mention of the fact that the vast majority are former astronauts, now working for ATK, Boeing, Lockmart, etc. This is just a special pleading for more taxpayer money for their employers, and their phony baloney jobs.
People with such conflicts of interest certainly have a right to plead their case, but I think that the paper has a duty to make us aware of their affiliations, and not just describe them as “astronauts.”
And that’s a separate issue, of course from whether or not it’s a good idea for people, and particularly people who want to see large-scale human spaceflight activities for all people, and not just a “program” to send a few government employees at a billion dollars a flight, to take advice from astronauts. There’s nothing in the resume of an astronaut that renders them more qualified than others to provide wise judgement on space policy. It makes no more sense than it does to ask a “scientist,” as reporters often do.
[Update a while later]
There’s something else missing from the piece — it’s real big on flight safety (never mind that it’s not at all obvious that Ares was going to be safer than Shuttle) but says nothing about cost, or the fact that every flight is going to cost over a billion dollars. Apparently they think their lives have infinite value.
The good news is that the editorial board at the WaPo seems to recognize the potential for commercial space in addressing NASA’s needs, much more so than NASA has to date. The bad news is that they remain incoherent on the purpose of sending people into space. They also (like FL Today) seem to think that the problem is simply not enough money:
If the committee’s public comments are any indication, its findings will be grim: NASA’s recent budget cuts render the current manned mission plan impossible. This is not the first time NASA’s plans have suffered from lack of fiscal foresight: Once the international space station is completed next year, the current budget calls for deorbiting it by 2016. Maybe it’s time to take a step back to assess the right role for a manned space program that requires billions of dollars annually — and for what? Certainly, boldly going where no man has gone before is an American creed. But with the advent of increasingly complex and precise instruments, science in space requires less and less input from astronauts. Groundbreaking research can occur without humans — witness the Mars Rover and Hubble telescope. NASA should not have to sacrifice programs that are truly ground-breaking — researching dark matter, black holes and gravitational fields of space objects — to keep the international space station manned and supplied.
So they have a recommendation:
Now that the station is nearly complete, this might be an optimal time to open space to entrepreneurs. Many companies claim they possess the capacity to transport humans and payloads into space; the review committee found their reports convincing enough to suggest that these space entrepreneurs could take over the transport of astronauts and supplies to the space station after the shuttle program ends.
The problem is that they seem to have no vision for space beyond LEO, or a commercial role in it. Partly because they fall into the standard mental trap of thinking the primary purpose of human spaceflight is science. So we still have a lot of persuasion to do. But hey, even if it’s for the wrong reasons, if they have some good advice, why complain? After all, when government occasionally makes a good decision, it’s often for the wrong reasons. You take what you can get.
[Update mid afternoon]
The Commercial Spaceflight Federation piles on. Is Congress listening?
At The Corner:
As for the argument that, well, for a rich and powerful man Ted sure did a lot for da liddle guy, include me out. Benign paternalism and droit du seigneur are two halves of the same coin: The former has excused the latter in monarchical societies through the ages. It’s distressing to see so many alleged “democrats” embrace it here.
And the so-called feminists go along with it. It’s OK to abuse women, as long as you allow them to kill their babies.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related thoughts from Matt Welch.
[Update early afternoon]
A commenter over at Matt Welch’s post notes something that I neglected to earlier, on the timing:
They didn’t call the cops for something like 10 hours.
More precisely, Ted Kennedy didn’t tell the cops about driving his car into the water until after he personally saw that Ms. Kopechne’s body had been discovered in his car.
Gee, isn’t that an interesting sequence?
David Brooks describes the president’s (well earned) plight:
The number of Americans who trust President Obama to make the right decisions has fallen by roughly 17 percentage points. Obama’s job approval is down to about 50 percent. All presidents fall from their honeymoon highs, but in the history of polling, no newly elected American president has fallen this far this fast.
Anxiety is now pervasive. Trust in government rose when Obama took office. It has fallen back to historic lows. Fifty-nine percent of Americans now think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
What he doesn’t describe is the fact that he was one of the people who had deluded himself, and was telling us a year ago that this guy was a “moderate.” He’s part of the problem, and it will be hard for me to take him seriously until I see some explanation and contrition (not that I’ve ever paid much attention to him).
And then there’s this:
President Obama is now firmly between a rock and a hard place. Democrats want a strong healthcare reform bill with a public option. Republicans and more conservative Democrats do not agree. If Obama fails to get a bill that his base supporters want, the entire Democratic Party risks alienating them; especially 18-29-year-old First GlobalsTM, who could very quickly become disenchanted with politics. Obama needs to enter the fray in a very public way, which may mean knocking heads with both wings of his own party.
Just where I want him, and just where he deserves to be.
[Update late morning]
Jonah Goldberg isn’t impressed with Brooks’ analysis, either:
According to Brooks, the reason why Obama is falling apart is that he’s married himself to the very liberal Democratic leadership. Brooks thinks this was a horrible tactical and strategic mistake and, he’s right! But why did he make it? Brooks ends his column with this partial explanation: “Events have pushed Barack Obama off to the left. Time to rebalance.”
Oh those horrible events! They make criminals rob liquor stores. John Edwards cheated on his cancer-stricken wife even as he was using her as a campaign issue because of “events.” Larry Craig was driven to that bathroom stall by “events.” I am overserved at open bars because those pernicious events won’t leave me alone.
Maybe, just maybe, Barack Obama wasn’t driven to the left by events but, rather, he was driving them thataway?
Brooks, it seems to me, is still holding out hope for the possibility that if we “let Obama be Obama” he’ll tack to the center because he really is that bipartisan, moderate, Niebuhr-grocking 21st century man that caused so many otherwise sensible conservatives to go off their feed.
That seems highly implausible to me. Obama has been Obama, and that’s why he’s in the predicament he’s in. He is the author of these events, not a victim of them.
Exactly. And David Brooks remains a naif.
[Update a few minutes later]
Camille Paglia remains deluded about and in love with (for all that she’s a lesbian) Obama as well:
Paglia has compiled a veritable not-to-do list, providing convincing reasons to cashier this president ASAP. And yet, as we have seen, she does not suffer “buyer’s remorse,” and indeed claims at the outset that she “will continue to support him.” How to make even a modicum of sense of this species of cognitive dissonance?
Like Dershowitz, Paglia cannot give up on her man, who has clearly charmed the gold threads from her moonbeamish access of adoration. Even though she states that Obama is implicated in the moral collapse of the Democratic Party, the drift of her article adroitly suggests that he is really not to blame for the debacle. It is the “White House apparatus” that she craftily targets. Obama is “surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bungling mediocrities, and crass bully boys,” who are obviously responsible for the ethical morass in which he finds himself.
The fact that Obama himself chose this gang of mountebanks — Timothy Geithner, Van Jones, David Axelrod, John Holdren, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, George Mitchell, John Brennan, James Messina, Linda Douglass, Robert Gibbs, Cass Sunstein, Kenneth Feinberg, Steven Chu, the Emanuelim (Rahm and Ezekiel), and the rest of, to use a phrase from Thomas Pynchon, “the whole sick crew” — does not for a moment impinge upon her waking consciousness. They are one and all either professional incompetents, ambitious parvenus, or moral defectives, yet Paglia cannot admit that each of these impostors has been vetted, approved, and anointed by The One.
Moreover, it is the Obama administration and not Obama himself that solicited the American people to report on fishy, casual conversations, as if Barack Obama was too busy soberly and deliberatively carrying out his foreign policy initiatives to pay attention. Similarly, it is Congress that is doing the dirty work, throwing the American people “to the wolves.” Obama’s error is one of omission rather than commission, residing in his leniency, presumably, for permitting Congress to sabotage the public welfare when he should have been more hands-on, better at managing the congressional process. Has Paglia not listened to the president’s speeches on radio and television or twigged to his town hall marching orders? Has she not picked up on the spirit of aggression that exudes from many of his pronouncements? But she stubbornly refuses to be disabused.
I recall coming across a wonderful New Yorker cartoon some years ago, depicting a buxom young princess in the afterglow of satisfaction lying against the bolster of an elegant, richly ornamented bed. Beside her reclines a frog, his little hands clasped snugly behind his head, his legs crossed at the knee, an expression of roguish triumph on his face. “I lied,” he says. But people like Camille Paglia will persist in seeing a prince when they are presented with nothing more than a canny amphibian. There was never a transformation, only a deception.
Just more of those darned “events.”
One of the nutty myths of the left is that the “right” reveres Herbert Hoover because he was pro-business, and didn’t interfere in the economy. They fantasize that these supposed policies caused the Great Depression, which was rectified by their savior, Franklin Roosevelt. Well, they’re wrong on both counts. I don’t know any conservative or libertarian who defends Hoover, and the reason is that they agree that he caused the depression. The nutty part is that he did it with statist policies, not just by signing Smoot-Hawley and raising taxes, but by indulging in devastating pro-labor interference in the market:
“These findings suggest that the recession was three times worse — at a minimum — than it would otherwise have been, because of Hoover,” said Lee E. Ohanian, a UCLA professor of economics.
The policies, which included both propping up wages and encouraging job-sharing, also accounted for more than two-thirds of the precipitous decline in hours worked in the manufacturing sector, which was much harder hit initially than the agricultural sector, according to Ohanian.
“By keeping industrial wages too high, Hoover sharply depressed employment beyond where it otherwise would have been, and that act drove down the overall gross national product,” Ohanian said. “His policy was the single most important event in precipitating the Great Depression.”
Expect the leftist myths to continue, though. They have decades of intellectual and emotional investment in them.
…for Jim Manzi. An interesting interview over at the Economist:
The current UN IPCC consensus forecast is that, under fairly reasonable assumptions for world population and economic growth, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is expected to cause economic costs of about 3% global GDP in a much wealthier world more than 100 years from now. This is pretty far from the rhetoric of imminent global destruction.
Because (not “though”) the science is uncertain, the rational concern is that impacts could be worse than expected. This has been the subject of intense scientific research for decades, and the IPCC has published probability distributions for various levels of projected warming over the next century. There is no such projected level of warming with materially non-zero probability for typical economic scenarios that would justify what I would estimate to be the actual costs of an emissions mitigation regime, and there is certainly no odds-adjusted case (ie, in which we handicap the odds of more and less severe possible impacts) which could justify such costs.
The only real argument for rapid, aggressive emissions abatement boils down to the point that you can’t prove a negative. If it turns out that even the outer edge of the probability distribution of our predictions for global-warming impacts is enormously conservative, and disaster looms if we don’t change our ways radically and this instant, then we really should start shutting down power plants and confiscating cars tomorrow morning. We have no good evidence that such a disaster scenario is imminent, but nobody can conceivably prove it to be impossible. Once you get past the table-pounding, any rationale for rapid emissions abatement that confronts the facts in evidence is really a more or less sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle: the somewhat grandiosely named idea that the downside possibilities are so bad that we should pay almost any price to avoid almost any chance of their occurrence.
But if you want to use this rationale to justify large economic costs, what non-arbitrary stopping condition will you choose for how much we should limit emissions? Assume for the moment that we could have a perfectly implemented global carbon tax. If we introduced a tax high enough to keep atmospheric carbon concentration to no more than 1.5x its current level (assuming we could get the whole world to go along), we would expect to spend about $17 trillion more than the benefits that we would achieve in the expected case. That’s a heck of an insurance premium for an event so low-probability that it is literally outside of a probability distribution. Of course, I can find scientists who say that level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is too dangerous. Al Gore has a more aggressive proposal that if implemented through an optimal carbon tax (again, assuming we can get the whole word to go along) would cost more like $23 trillion in excess of benefits in the expected case. Of course, this wouldn’t eliminate all uncertainty, and I can find scientists who say we need to reduce emissions even faster. Once we leave the world of odds and handicapping and enter the world of the precautionary principle, there is really no principled stopping point. We would be chasing an endlessly receding horizon of zero risk.
To put a fine point on it, replace “global warming” in your question with “planet-killing asteroid impact”. Earth-impact asteroids are a non-imaginary threat, and there is already significant government expenditure devoted to this problem. They hold the potential to all but exterminate the human species. By the logic of your question, why would you not invest, say, 2% of global GDP per year into perpetuity (roughly equal to about $1 trillion, or the total annual collections from the US income tax), to develop and deploy an interdiction system for earth-impact asteroids? If not, how do you distinguish between your fear of climate change impacts beyond the consensus scientific forecast, and a fear of asteroids?
In fact, we face lots of other unquantifiable threats of at least comparable realism and severity. In addition to asteroids, a regional nuclear war in Central Asia, a global pandemic triggered by a modified version of HIV, or a rogue state weaponising genetic-engineering technology all come immediately to mind. Any of these could kill hundreds of millions of people. In the face of massive uncertainty on multiple fronts the best strategy is almost always to hedge your bets and keep your options open. Wealth and technology are raw materials for options. The loss of economic and technological development that would be required to eliminate all hypothetical climate change risk would cripple our ability to deal with virtually every other foreseeable and unforeseeable risk, not to mention our ability to lead productive and interesting lives in the meantime. The precautionary principle is a bottomless well of anxieties, but our resources are finite—it’s possible to buy so much flood insurance that you can’t afford fire insurance.
Bold emphasis mine. It’s crazy to pauperize ourselves now for potential economic benefits decades from now. Particularly when the actions don’t even address the problem (e.g., the current cap’n’tax bill that passed the House).
This is really an issue that cries out for a rational, regret analysis.