Political Commentary

Gargantuan

Even brobdingnagian. Lileks comments on the latest federal budget:

You can expect the news stories to fasten on that 5.5 percent cut, since the media seem to operate with three unspoken and largely unexamined assumptions: We don’t spend enough on education; conservatives don’t want to spend anything on education anyway since it leads to godless rational beliefs like “the Earth is round”; and a reduction in the overall rate of increase is tantamount to a reduction in funds.

Really? If you find two $5 bills and lose one, are you $5 ahead or $5 behind? The latter, if you work in Washington.

A reduction in the projected rate of growth is always a cut. Note the headlines about the `07 proposals: “Bush’s $2.77 Trillion Budget Plan Calls for Medicare Cuts,” said The New York Times. The Washington Post had the same idea, and graciously upped the budget total: “Bush’s $2.8T Budget Proposal Cuts Domestic Programs.”

To which Democrats say: But of course. To which Republicans say: If only.

Conservatives will still, for the most part, vote Republican, even if they weep and rend their garments before checking off “R.” Why? Because they see Democrats as the ones more likely to tax everything that isn’t nailed down, levy “gravity user fees” for things that are, take away private health care, strangle school choice and want SpecOps to get a warrant before sabotaging Iranian nuke factories.

Political Commentary

Fake Republican

There are a lot of dim bulbs in the Senate, and there’s a lot of competition for the dimmest (Patty Murray, Babs Boxer, Jim Jeffords, Susan Collins come immediately to mind, and I’m sure that there are others), but my impression from every interview with him that I’ve ever heard is that Lincoln Chafee is not qualified (in Jonah Goldberg’s famous quip) to be a spell checker in an M&M factory. The Conways have a roundup of his political prospects this fall, including some other oatmeal-brained commentary from him:

Laffey described Chafee’s views on the region as “two standard deviations outside of American and Rhode Island thought.” In an effort to make the point, he quoted Chafee’s own words questioning the legitimacy of what the senator termed American “gripes” with Iran’s nuclear program…Chafee, he said, “doesn’t get it at all” that “there are some really bad people in the world.”

They’re upset that the National Republican Senatorial Committee continues to support him against the much more conservative Laffey, presumably on the assumption that he’s the only Republican (to the infinitesimal degree that he is) that can win Rhode Island. But here’s where the dim bulbedness comes into play. According to them, if even with the support of the NRSC, he loses the nomination, he’ll run as an independent.

But that would seem to me to result in a Republican win, because an independent (and liberal) Chafee would split the liberal vote with the Democrat candidate, whereas the Republicans would coalesce around Laffey. So this really is a fight worth waging, and it not only doesn’t necessarily risk a Senate seat for Republicans, but it might be an opportunity to replace Chafee with a real Republican, and provide a lesson to the other RINOs.

Weird

Not Interested

And speaking of Swedes, everyone knows that Swedish women are hot, right?

Well, these guys don’t seem to think so:

Six gay penguins at a German zoo are still refusing to mate with females of the species flown in from Sweden in 2005, the zoo said on Wednesday.

But this was the funniest part:

The initiative to “turn” the penguins and make them mate had prompted a furious response from gay rights groups.

In a statement posted on its Internet website, the zoo on Wednesday sought to defend itself from fresh criticism.

“We will be delighted if the penguins form even one heterosexual couple and manage to produce first an egg, and then a little one,” it said.

“But of course we accept the male couples that have formed and we are not trying to enforce heterosexuality, as we were accused of doing last year.”

Will the oppression of gay penguins, and suppression of their natural orientation, never end?

War Commentary

I Never Imagined

…that I’d live to see (and, well…hear) the day that a news announcer said the words, “…the cartoon death toll is up to nine.”

Only in an Islamist world.

[Wednesday morning update]

Judith Weiss says (yes, yes, I know…I was shocked, too) that these demonstrations are not spontaneous. And here’s more from the WSJ.

While there are people bleeding and dying in Iraq, this is, more than anything, a propaganda war. And unfortunately, our own press is largely, knowingly or not, working on the side of the enemy.

[Another update about 8:30 AM EST]

The problem is spreading to the strife-torn Midwest. Iowahawk (who’s been missing in action since Christmas) has the scoop:

…outside of the Dells and a handful of violent outposts near its western Mississippi River border, Wisconsin remained a relatively calm exception to the Midwestern maelstrom surrounding it — a fact that experts attribute to subtle differences in culture and religion.

“Unlike the ultra-extreme, radical Lutheran sectarians of Iowa and Minnesota, most ethnic Wisconsinites belong to the Wisconsin Lutheran Synod,” said Joseph Killian, a Midwestern Studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “And if you add in three Super Bowl titles, easier access to beer, and walleye fishing, and you’re going to have a much calmer and more stable culture.”

All that would change in November with the publication of four cartoons in a Texas office newsletter — cartoons that today have brought this once happily beer-goggled society to the precipice of all-out culture war.

[One more update]

Amir Tehari writes about the bonfire of the pieties.

[Update late morning]

Meryl Yourish notes some rhetorical slight of hand and subject changing at AP:

Notice how the AP explains why the cartoons are offensive to Muslims. They do not bother to explain a similarly important fact

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!