That racial tinge

 Bash the Messenger  No Responses »
Oct 072008
 

Earlier today I saw the AP stories about Sarah Palin’s accusations that Barak Obama was palling around with Bill Ayers — the one that said “racially tinged” in the headline. I did a quick read and didn’t see in what sense it was supposed to be a racial comment. My reaction was, “So Ayers is a black guy?”

I didn’t know anything about his race any more than I knew that Willie Horton was a black guy when I heard about him during the 1988 campaign. I didn’t learn until after that election that he was African American. Not that the guy’s race should make a difference in either case.

Now I learn that there really were no possible racial overtones to Sarah Palin’s comments, period. Somebody in a high position at the Associated Press was making it up. Rich Galen at townhall.com explains here.

And Ayers’ race? It’s irrelevant. But somebody at the Associated Press has the topic of race on his mind.

Patience for us but not for them

 Free markets, Regulation  No Responses »
Oct 072008
 

Bush says we need to be patient. “It’s going to take a while.”

So why was he so impatient last week? Why the big hurry to pass something, anything, even if it was all larded up with more of the same poison that sickened the economy in the first place? Why couldn’t we have taken a while to examine the causes of the financial crisis and come up with measures that would actually address it?

How about a recession for Congress

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Oct 062008
 

How about if we rescind the Big Bailout from last week as a positive step toward restoring confidence in the economy? Who could possibly have confidence in the government’s Hair of the Dog method of handling it, given that they gave us more of what led us to crisis in the first place?

Headline from today’s WSJ: “Markets Fall on Rescue Doubts; Dow Closes Below 10000”

Markets around the world tumbled, reflecting investors’ lack of confidence despite stepped up relief efforts by the Fed and European governments. The Dow industrials fell below 10000 and European stocks fell to 20-year lows, a stark sign that the crisis may be outpacing policy makers’ ability to contain it.

You betcha feel your pain

 electoral politics  No Responses »
Oct 052008
 

Jimmy Orr at The Christian Science Monitor gives a catalog of media criticism of Sarah Palin’s “You betcha, darn right, heckuva lot” kind of talk. What I keep waiting for in all of this is a comparison to Bill Clinton’s way of biting his lower lip and “feeling your pain.”

So I’ll have to do it myself. I can’t say I like one of these techniques a lot more than the other. I would probably like them even less if I had ever seen or heard them myself. But I say that those who criticize Palin need to show their anti-Clinton credentials. Did they criticize him for his faux-folksy-empathy? If not, they should shut up. If they did, they should feel free to criticize Palin, too.

And the conservative commentators who made fun of Clinton’s schtick might want to watch their step in defending Palin on this topic.

The fifties are back!

 electoral politics  3 Responses »
Oct 052008
 

Nostalgia is in the air. The presidential campaign is reminding those of us of a certain age of our youth, when McCarthyism roamed the earth.

“Senator Obama, is it true that terrorist Bill Ayers is a fellow traveler of yours?”

“Governor Palin, are you now or have you ever been a member of a traitorous secessionist party in Alaska? ” (This was an accusation being flung around in the comments section of Strangemaps.)

“Senator Obama’s health care plan is socialism.”

“The Big Bailout is socialism.”

These are all good topics of discussion, but to reduce them to labels and guilt-by-association is not exactly discussion.

Instead of just crying “socialism!” Obama’s opponents ought to explain that his health care plan is bad for the same reasons that socialism is bad. And they should tell us what those reasons are. The same for the big bailout. It’s more work that way, but it’s necessary work.

Palin’s association with a secessionist party is certainly worth asking about. Maybe some good discussion would come of it. Andrew Jackson hung around with secessionists when he was a Tennessee politician, before he became president and eventually became a strong supporter of union, as was revealed at the 1830 Jefferson Day dinner. (“Our Federal Union! It must be preserved!“) Maybe an inquiry into the topic would lead to a discussion of secessionist movements in Chechyna and Georgia, and of just what it is that makes a unified nation.

And if it turns out that Obama had friends and acquaintance from all walks of live and all ideologies, including terrorist Bill Ayers and Pat Robertson’s fan club, that would actually make me more respectful of him. I would hope he would have done more to influence them to moderate their ways than vice versa, but mere association wouldn’t be a reason to oppose him.

But for now it looks like we won’t get into those interesting discussions. We’ll have to settle for nostalgia for the good old days of the HUAC.

Stop Obama: Defeat McCain

 electoral politics, Limits on government power  No Responses »
Oct 052008
 

For a few weeks I thought I might vote for John McCain despite McCain-Feingold. But his behavior on the Big Bailout makes that unlikely.

One thing I’ve never liked about McCain is his adoption of Theodore Roosevelt as a role model. I consider Roosevelt an attractive personality but a terrible president.

I’ve read several biographies of TR and have some of them on my bookshelf. But George Will tells a few things about him that I hadn’t known before. Somehow I had not known that his ideology was so collectivist. Will describes it thusly:

TR wanted the body politic to be one body, whose head was the president. He disregarded civil society — the institutions that mediate between individuals and the state, insulating them from dependence and coercion. He had a Rousseauan notion that the individual could become free only through immersion in the collective.

He doesn’t use the word “fascist,” but one can see that proto-fascism was already in the air in the decades before the actual thing arrived.

Will points out that one thing that might save McCain from being as bad as TR is his lack of brain wattage:

He is a kindred spirit of the impulsive Rough Rider, but the visceral McCain is rescued from some of TR’s excesses by not having TR’s overflowing cupboard of ideas.

It’s not that Obama isn’t even worse than McCain. But here’s what will be better than electing Obama’s opponent:

Let Obama become president, but also work to defeat those Republicans in Congress who would be likely to vote with him. Republicans can do more to stop his brand of fascism by standing firm and united in saying no. The left will not enact sweeping collectivist proposals if they don’t have bipartisan support. They know their ideas will fail, and they need Republican sponsors so they will have someone on whom to blame those failures (as is now happening with the failures of the financial system). A principled, committed minority — selected in large part from those who stood firm against the Big Bailout — will do more to stop our country’s descent into oppression than would the election of McCain as a mild alternative to Obama’s extremism.

Don’t believe it? Then look at what a minority of Congresspersons did to stop Hillary’s health care plan.

The problem with actually reading the article

 Science and politics  2 Responses »
Oct 042008
 

I was going to bash Paul Driessen’s article about malaria and DDT at townhall.com. Good thing I went back and actually read it first.

I was going to complain about my fellow conservatives who rightly complain about, say, fixing education by throwing money at it, but who then turn around and want to fix malaria by indiscriminantly throwing DDT at it. And that they don’t take into account the issue of mosquito resistance, which can develop faster under indiscriminate spraying.

That would not have been fair to Driessen, who seems not to advocate blanket spraying. Whether he would agree with the Integrated Pest Management people, I don’t know, but he seems not to be one of those who wants to spray mindlessly. And he did mention the issue of resistance.

Normally the thing would be to keep quiet about having jumped to conclusions before reading. But while thinking about a reply, I found a good article in Bug Girls’ Blog that I want to link here for future reference: DDT, Junk Science, and insecticide resistance.

And there’s an item I found several days ago when discussing this issue in another forum. Dreissen’s article said that except on rare occasions, researchers aren’t looking into how mosquito bednets are actually working. I presume this is one of the rare exceptions. (I happen to know one of the researchers on this study.)

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