There’s an entertaining article at the New York Daily News about how Fox refugee Paula Zahn is not earning her keep at CNN. Apparently, her show is an expensive ratings disaster. I particularly liked the caption on the picture:
Paula Zahn: Provocative, supersmart and, oh yeah, just a little bit overpaid.
Instantman, in reference to an article about women and the sexual revolution, says:
This kind of stuff, by the way, is the reason why a lot of Democrats who are basically in agreement with the Republican party are still afraid to vote for Republicans.
This seems to be a common attitude among many libertarians (and to the degree that labels apply, I think that one fits Glenn about as well as any), particularly the ones who approached that philosophy from the left (i.e., former Democrats). I once had an extended email discussion (back during the election) with another libertarian friend (who’s also a blogger, but shall remain nameless) about how as much as he disliked the socialism of the Democrats, he felt more culturally comfortable with them. Again, this is a prevalent attitude of products of the sixties. You know, Republicans were uptight fascists, and Democrats were idealistic, free-living, and hip.
While I’m not a conservative, my own sexual and drug-taking values (and life style) tend to be. I just don’t think that the government should be involved in either of these areas. But my voting pattern is that I’ll occasionally vote Republican (I voted for Dole over Clinton, the only time I’ve ever voted for a Republican for President), but I never vote for a Democrat for any office. The last time I did so was in 1976, and I’d like that one back.
There are at least two reasons for this.
First, I’ve found many Republicans who are sympathetic to libertarian arguments, and in fact are often libertarians at heart, but see the Republican Party as the most practical means of achieving the goals. There may be some Democrats out there like that, but I’ve never run into them. That’s the least important reason (partly because I may be mistaken, and have simply suffered from a limited sample space). But fundamentally, the Democratic Party, at least in its current form, seems to me to be utterly antithetical to free markets.
But the most important reason is this–while I find the anti-freedom strains of both parties equally dismaying, the Democrats are a lot better at implementing their government intrusions, and there’s good reason to think that this will be the case even if the Republicans get full control of the government.
This is because many of the Democratic Party positions are superficially appealing, if you’re ignorant of economics and have never been taught critical thinking.
Who can be against a “living wage”? What’s so bad about making sure that everyone, of every skin hue, gets a fair chance at a job? Why shouldn’t rich people pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes?–they can afford it. Are you opposed to clean air and water? What’s wrong with you? How can you be against social security–do you want old folks to live on Kibbles and Bits?
To fight these kinds of encroachments on liberty requires a lot of effort and argument and, in the end, it often loses anyway. Consider for example, the latest assault on the First Amendment that passed the Senate today, sixty to forty. Many Republicans voted against it. I don’t think any Democrats did.
[Thursday morning update: Best of the Web notes that two Democrats did vote against it–John Breaux and Ben Nelson. Good for them. They also have a hall of shame for the Republicans who voted for it.]
On the other hand, the things that libertarians like Glenn and Nameless fear that conservatives will do (e.g., in matters sexual), are so repugnant to most Americans that they’ll never get made into law, and if they do, the legislators who do so will quickly get turned out of office. So, you have to ask yourself, even if you dislike the attitude of people who are uncomfortable with the sexual revolution, just what is it, realistically, that you think they’d actually do about it if you voted for them?
The bottom line for me is that Democrats have been slow-boiling the frog for decades now, and they’re very good at it. I tend to favor Republicans, not because I necessarily agree with their views on morality, but because I see them as the only force that can turn down the heat on the kettle, and that they’re very unlikely to get some of the more extreme policies that they may want, because the public, by and large, views them as extreme.
Sixty Senators blithely ignored their oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution, and passed McCain’s execrable Campaign Finance Deform bill.
I hope that the President remembers his oath, but I’m not optimistic.
Neely Tucker and Sue Schmidt inform us via headline that “Ray Concludes There Was No Wrongdoing on Part of Clintons.”
This is not just misleading–it’s a lie. Ray concluded no such thing. His report did not absolve the First Felons–it simply said that there was insufficient evidence to convict.
This is no doubt true because:
a) much of it was shredded, or witnesses were intimidated or paid off, and
b) it would have been difficult to find a jury that wouldn’t have one or two die-hard supporters, resulting in a hung panel (as happened with Susan McDougal).
There was never any way to get the goods on that gang without an all-out RICO prosecution, and Janet Reno’s Department of Injustice was never going to allow that.
And before I get a lot of nonsense about innocence until proven guilty, that applies only to courts of law, not courts of public (or private) opinion.
[Update at 2PM PST]
Compare and contrast the Washington Post headline with this (accurate) one from Fox:
Final Report Shows Clintons Benefited from Criminal Transactions
Whether this is a good summary of the report is, of course, disputable, but unlike the WaPo headline, at least it’s true.
[Update at 3:20PM PST]
Down the ol’ memory hole…
Now the subhead on the Tucker/Schmidt article has been changed from the above to Ray Criticizes Comments by Former President Clinton. You’ll just have to take my word for it as to what the subhead was originally.
I wonder if they got a lot of angry email and calls, or if some editor just noticed it on his own. Thanks to The Sanity Inspector for pointing out the instant rewriting of history.
This kind of stuff really makes me angry, because it was ongoing throughout the entire eight years of the Administration. Clinton spinners and defenders would continually equate “insufficient evidence to convict” with “proof of innocence.” So the public, who didn’t necessarily actually read the underlying reports (whether Pillsbury, Starr, or whatever) would come away with the vague impression that the Clintons never did anything wrong, but were simply always under attack by the evil VRWC.
Foxnews is apparently rotating guest bloggers on Wednesdays. Ye Olde Blogger Andrea Harris is up to bat today, and she competently expands on my own deepening disgust with Harry Browne.
I found an interesting post about the Afghan situation over at Brink Lindsey’s web site today, which I mostly agreed with, but I found one sentence somewhat discomforting.
Specifically, we have to use our power to keep warlordism in check while the fledgling national government gets established, builds an army, and otherwise develops the capacity to project authority nationwide.
As someone (Harry Browne aside) who considers himself a libertarian, this grated. The purpose of an “army” is not to be used against a nation’s own people. If there are warlords in Afghanistan to be quelled, and said entity is a nation, keeping down “warlords” is a job for the police, not an army. Armies (where they are justifiably used at all) are to be used against outside agressors–not against internal subversives.
I have no objection to Acting-President Karzai building up a force to pacify the Afghan nation, but to call it an “army” is to confuse terms, and potentially lay the foundation for a future police state.
I found an interesting post about the Afghan situation over at Brink Lindsey’s web site today, which I mostly agreed with, but I found one sentence somewhat discomforting.
Specifically, we have to use our power to keep warlordism in check while the fledgling national government gets established, builds an army, and otherwise develops the capacity to project authority nationwide.
As someone (Harry Browne aside) who considers himself a libertarian, this grated. The purpose of an “army” is not to be used against a nation’s own people. If there are warlords in Afghanistan to be quelled, and said entity is a nation, keeping down “warlords” is a job for the police, not an army. Armies (where they are justifiably used at all) are to be used against outside agressors–not against internal subversives.
I have no objection to Acting-President Karzai building up a force to pacify the Afghan nation, but to call it an “army” is to confuse terms, and potentially lay the foundation for a future police state.
I found an interesting post about the Afghan situation over at Brink Lindsey’s web site today, which I mostly agreed with, but I found one sentence somewhat discomforting.
Specifically, we have to use our power to keep warlordism in check while the fledgling national government gets established, builds an army, and otherwise develops the capacity to project authority nationwide.
As someone (Harry Browne aside) who considers himself a libertarian, this grated. The purpose of an “army” is not to be used against a nation’s own people. If there are warlords in Afghanistan to be quelled, and said entity is a nation, keeping down “warlords” is a job for the police, not an army. Armies (where they are justifiably used at all) are to be used against outside agressors–not against internal subversives.
I have no objection to Acting-President Karzai building up a force to pacify the Afghan nation, but to call it an “army” is to confuse terms, and potentially lay the foundation for a future police state.
Scientists have come up with material that has the properties of a thermal diode (that is, it allows heat to pass in one direction, but not the other). At first glance, this seems to violate at least one of the laws of thermodynamics, but I’ll have to read more and think about it more to have a firm opinion.
We had another (cosmologically speaking) close call the other day; a piece of cosmic debris passed within half a million kilometers of the planet, a little farther than the distance to the Moon. It was previously uncatalogued, and approached us from the direction of the sun–our blind side.
If it had hit, it would have been at least as devastating as the Tonguska explosion in Siberia early last century, in which trees were leveled for miles around. Such a strike in a populated area could kill thousands, or millions.
Current estimates of the probability of such an event are one in ten million. I’ve previously discussed the desirability of at least doing a good sky survey to get a handle on the problem, but I’d like to talk again about a little different aspect of it.
Suppose that, after multiplying the probability times the potential damage, and getting some kind of expected value of avoidance, we do decide that this is a problem to which we should devote societal resources. Who should take care of the problem?
Many would reflexively say NASA, just because (unfortunately) NASA remains synonymous with space in many people’s minds (though I’m working daily and weekly to change that perception). But NASA is an agency set up for research, development, and science–not deflecting wayward space rocks.
Well, it’s a threat, so maybe we should put the Pentagon in charge. This actually makes sense, until you think about the problem a little more. If we were being attacked by ET, or Marvin the Martian or his Martian buddies, then sure, let’s send the Space Patrol up there to kick some scrawny Martian butt.
But this is a natural phenomenon, not a smite from heaven at the behest of some malign intelligence (at least as far as we know). It’s more like a forest fire, or a tsunami, or an earthquake, or a…flood.
A flood–yeah, that’s the ticket.
It’s basically just a problem of managing the whims of nature, and to the limited degree that we are capable of doing that, we have an agency in charge of such things. They build dams, and levees, and suchlike, and take preventive measures against future disastrous natural events. They’re called the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE).
In addition to the fact that it seems like a natural (so to speak) role for them, the other thing that I like about the idea of using the ACE is that they could take fresh approaches–they wouldn’t be bound by the institutional inertia of NASA and the Air Force Space Command in how they’d tackle the problem.
They’d have to take new approaches, because it would require different capabilities than any other space activity to date–moving minor planets. And the technology that allows us to divert asteroids to prevent them from pulverizing the neighborhood is the same technology that will allow us to utilize many of the abundant resources available in the solar system.
Finally, it would set up some competition in government space activities, which is sorely needed, and best of all, it might give them something else to do so they won’t have time to build any more of those dam…err…darn dams.
[Update at 7 PM PST]
Jay Manifold has a nice report direct from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference with the latest thoughts of planetary researchers on the subject.