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Labor Day Is Only For The Left

It is now a partisan holiday. In Wisconsin, the Democrats tried to ban Republicans from some parades, until they were told that this could only be done if they didn't use any public funds for the festivities.
 
Hoffa was out today blasting the S.O.B.s from the Tea Party. Joe Biden spoke of holding off "barbarians at the gate". Labor should stand up and defend themselves. Really?
 
So, leaving Wsisconsin and hiding out, having State workers "call in sick", take up residence in the Statehouse and chasing after recall elections was not war?
 
This "war" is already a generation old, folks. When the NEA answered their phones in '92, "Teachers for Clinton/Gore, how can we help you", what was that? Union political donations have been 80%+ Democrat for twenty years. What do you call that?
 
But that is beside the point. The Tea Party is about uncontrolled government spending. At the federal level, the biggest problem is entitlements. At the state level, it is the salaries, benegfits and pensions of the public employees. And the most organized and vociferous support of the latter is the public unions.
 
I have a relative in New York who is a public school teacher. He is fond of telling me that the Tea Party has it out for public unions, and he "is not the bogeyman". Here is the answer to both: we are not against unions- just the fiscal problems they are causing right now. And whether he likes it or not, he is part of the problem. The salaries that public teachers earn on Long Island is a significant part of why they have the highest property taxes in the country right now.
 
They drew the lines in the sand. And if one doesn't like where those lines are drawn, you are a "terrorist", or "the new Taliban".
 
If that means I don't get to celebrate Labor Day until this problem is solved, I'll go along with that. You go ahead and have your own private holiday. It won't stop what is coming, but if it makes you feel good for one day, I won't stand in the way.
 
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Obama Runs Into A Wall

I do not pretend to be a psychiatrist, and it is such a subjective science at the individual level that I deign to even guess motivation.
 
But I have learned a little about behavior along the way, and when somebody runs into a wall (is in need of intervention), there are some real similarities and patterns to be observed.
 
Early in August, Obama had scheduled a vacation with the family in Martha's Vineyard. August is a good time for it, because in full French fashion, most of Washington D.C. takes the month off. The funny thing this time was, the round of economic reports coming in before Obama left town was bad enough to merit his announcement that he would be coming out with a shiny new jobs plan- after he came back. Those of you out there that still can't find a job would wait until he got some R&R.
 
Despite the fact that nobody forced him to take this position on, nobody on this end thinks a White House vacation is a sin- it is a pressure cooker of a job, and his briefings and communications follow him wherever he goes. But the announcement of a plan before he left, but only after he was back, smells of burnout.
 
All along, he and his minions have been passing out excuses by the hatful for the bad economy. The economy Bush left us was worse than we thought. It was the Japanese earthquake. It is the Wall Street greedheads, sitting on their cash. It was the BP oil spill. It is the greedy oil companies keeping gas prices up. It is the speculators buying gold (cheered on by Glenn Beck). It is the hurricane season. It is the obstructionist Republicans in Congress. It is all getting to the point where I am listening to John Belushi in the tunnel near the end of "The Blues Brothers", explaining to Carrie Fisher why he left her at the altar. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TuLBa-rgBk )
 
Here is my experience with intervention cases: many managed to maintain employment and relationships despite destructive behavior, but those who ended up in places like A.A. and moved to a better place will tell you about a universal- the last month or so before they hit the wall, they thought they were the unluckiest people on Earth. Nothing went their way. And all their travails were somebody else's fault.
 
Here is your problem, Mr. President. You are fond of starting off speeches by talking about how we should all focus on the problem, act like adults and rise above partisanship. Then a paragraph later, you'll rail on about all the people who are standing in your way and acting in stead of the rich and special interests. It doesn't take a partisan to realize that calling Republicans "hostage takers" poses little incentive for cooperation. There is a reason why you lost many Independents who got you elected, and it all starts with crap like that rolling out of your open mouth.
 
This was all punctuated by your request to Congress last week for a joint session speech time. This all waited a month for you to get back to Washington, and you needed to do it Tuesday- it was only a coincidence that it was the same night as a long scheduled Republican debate? You thought nobody would see through that?
 
So Boehner gave your bull right back to you with his own. Sorry, we are holding our first vote at 6:30 PM, and you know it takes a few hours to security scan the chamber for you, so how about Wednesday? Oh, that's the NFL opener? What a coincidence!
 
I feel for the guy. The right thinks he is a disaster. His supporters think he is a milquetoast who keeps playing chicken and blinking first. And his approval ratings in the low forties show exactly how many independents have left him.
 
Clinton had his head handed to him in the '94 elections, and he changed his methodology. His "triangulation" didn't help him any with his base, but it got him re-elected. Obama and his people are still convinced that they have the right policies, and this is simply a communication problem.
 
Like all intervention cases, he will not look into the mirror to see where his problems are. And there doesn't seem to be anybody around him who will help him with that. Obama's closest advisor is... Obama.
 
There will be nothing new or surprising in this speech. The White House is smart enough to know that their proposals are dead in the Congressional water, and that they are hoping for a boost from the posturing.
 
What does that tell you?
 
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9/11: Ten Years Along

Of all the lodestones and markers of the great culture war I've encountered along the way, 9/11 is the one that cuts the deepest.
 
It cuts that hard because it originated with a true Greek tragedy. Thousands of innocent people died in a very cruel wa, at the hands of a small band of merciless fanatics. That was the origin of the unity we experienced on the issue then.
 
The strongest sign of that unity to me was the observation that the denizens of New York City sprouted American flags along with the rest of us. That is something I never thought I would see happen. And sure enough, six months later, the search was on in the isle of Manhattan for flag bling that wasn't so obviously a flag- I knew normality would soon return.
 
And here we are, ten years along, with a political base that won't even use the word "terrorism" unless you are sure to include home grown fundamentalist Christian terrorists. They call it "man caused disaster". They will not admit that radical Islam is even a problem, much less the central problem. They watch a deranged Major shooting up Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akbar" and avoid his religion like it is not relevant.
 
And if you maintain the focus that we all had back then, you are painted as someone who mindlessly broadbrushes an entire religion. You are a warmonger. A close friend of mine from New York once told me that she once held thoughts of angr after 9/11, but she "grew past it", which directly implied that my own thoughts were A) borne of revenge nd B) were only still there because of my comparative inability to mature.
 
I once thought that occasionally dragging out the video images from that day would do the deed of refocusing by rubbing our noses in it- the human brain always does what it can to heal, including the occasional memory repression. But now we are at the point where I think even that would be futile.
 
One side thinks it is a law enforcement problem, the other a war. One side tries to be constructive, the other thinks we are past that. Like the other cultural touchstones, at the peak of a culture war, there is little connection happening.
 
We are a democracy, and one of the safeguards of democracy is that it is far more likely to go to war unless there is compelling reason. The downside is, until such compelling reason makes itself clear, many dangers build. Winston Churchill railed against the Nazis in Parliament for years, but it took a while for him to go from crackpot to Prime Minister. If Hitle was a different man, Winston may have died a crackpot.
 
And those who lamented after the war about what led to it often would say that they should have stopped Hitler in '36, after Munich. But what he was and what he was doing wasn't obvious to the world then, and we were still a democracy.
 
Those who know me know where I stand on this, and how few words I mince regarding the eventual solution. But this is a democracy, and events have not compelled us yet.
 
That time is coming. The marking of ten years will not speed that, or delay it. Hopefully, it will help us refocus. One can only hope and pray.
 
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The Hurricane Curtain Goes Up

You'll excuse me if this segues into a climate change diatribe, but they are part and parcel of the same problem.
 
Hurricane Irene tore into the entire Eastern Seaboard last weekend. I was spared from it's wrath, but many others still have more water and less electricity than desired. As a political side note, the infrastructure repair in all these localities is not a FEMA responsibility and everybody knows it, so Obama will not fall further into the hole for this- but he will still suffer the effects of the expectations he raised in 2008. This is what happened to him when the BP oil covered the Gulf and he could do little but watch.
 
Anyway, the story here is that Irene's path was because of a couple of factors. The two biggies are a Meridian jet stream (north to south, not along the equator) that failed to push the storm out to sea sooner and Atlantic waters so warm that they provided fuel to feed the beast. These are both established patterns and are cyclical. They are established within a reasonable margin of error by accurate and plentiful measurements. This means that it is likelier than any year since 1954 that a few other storms in the season will follow a similar path, and we should all prepare.
 
The Hurricane Center also tries to add forecasts of storm origin. This is not cyclical but predictive, which carries a greater error margin by definition. Added to this is the fact that their computer models involve large parts of the Atlantic. They model RCM's (regional climate models) in rectangular grids, which they then stitch together into a GCM (general climate model). They will tell you that it is more accurate now because the greater processing power allows them to model each grid with 20+ thermal layers instead of the classic three. The problem? G.I.G.O. Garbage in, garbage out.
 
The Gulf Stream is littered with sensor buoys, because it is properly regarded as a harbinger of North American climate prediction. The rest of the Atlantic is not. The closest thing we have to consistent mid-ocean measurement (outside of the limited scope of satellite readings) is the submarine sonar nets set up by ourselves and the Soviets in the Cold War. The Navy knows that thermal layers are not predictable and do not bother with temp readings there. This all means that the Mister Wizard meteorologists have to provide their own information to the computer models based on their prognosticative skills.
 
That is why the predictions of storm origin and frequency before they happen is so happenstance, while the path of established hurricanes can follow a predictive conical path. It's all about the margin of error. The better error analysis with the path compared to origin is because of the more realistic information that it is based on.
 
Which brings us back to climate change. The continuing explosion of computer processing power we have experienced in our lifetimes seems to have brought many scientists into a romantic haze with being able to model the Troposphere better, because they are feeding more information into it, without bothering to address what the information is based on. A RCM grid in the middle of the ocean today is based on information not much better than what was available in 1970.
 
On top of that, the coreolis effect of the weather patterns intermingles so many grids so quickly that the information changes around you while you work on your model. This is why air traffic controllers can get such accurate weather reports for airports and TRACON paths- they are based on small areas in real time. Predicting metropolitan areas for even three days out involves a much greater margin of error.
 
If you have a margin of error like that for a weather report for a state wide area, where the hell do you get off developing conclusions of Al Gore certainty for the planet? By the way, non-believers to Gore's preachings are now not only "flat earthers", but "racists".
 
I am a climate change skeptic. I don't think it is not happening, I just do not see the scientific process being followed in it's classic form to reach these "established" conclusions. I do not see how this is all "established science". And from that, I certainly do not see changing energy policy and spending my tax money to "fix" it.
 
Environmental science is not science right now. The more likely it is being presented to me as "fact", the more likely I am to be witnessing motivational and appeal to authority arguments, political arguments and (worst of all) scientific "consensus" arguments. This group of scientists agrees that it is happening, so I must? Screw that.
 
Address the margins of error. Show me a computer model that can predict the weather accurately enough to convince me that you have a working analysis of the northern hemisphere. Tell me where you are getting your information from.
 
Absent that, keep working on it and stay the hell out of government policy.
 
 
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Rick Perry Doesn't Change The Game

And the game is, the Republican primary voters refuse to make a choice. The polls keep fluctuating, the candidates are trying to organize and raise money, and nobody seems to be getting a true foothold. By this point in 2007, there were but a few serious players left on both sides- in a wide open election with no incumbent.
 
And what are they looking for? It seems like the voters are all turning over the pols on their political grills in search for Bill Buckley, Jr's "electable conservative". The Tea Party is by far the largest and most organized grassrots coalition in the GOP, and they are happy to hold off making a decision while they watch the players get in (or out), and grunge through a few more debates.
 
This is what Sarah Palin means when she says that the long winnowing process is a healthy thing for the party. She is the kingmaker-in-waiting, the person with veto power over the entire field. Oddly enough, many are looking at her and musing that she is trying to game the system for her own nomination, but she has set herself up as beholden to nobody. It is the cynicism of politics that few want to apply the First Principles of clarity to her and take her at her word.
 
Absent the always possible bolt of fatal lightning, there are only three candidates I see with a chance.
 
Governor Perry is now the true front runner. He is an Executive in one of the largest and economically healthiest states in the union, looking for an Executive position of a country that is getting unhappier with the economy every week. His support team, once lent to Gingrich and back home to roost, is top of the line and his fundraising skills are top notch- which has been one of Romney's claims to his own front runner status. The grassroots waiting game on him is to see if some time on the Presidential trail can smooth out his shoot from the lip style that works much better in Texas than it does elsewhere.
 
Governor Romney still is the most organized and best funded candidate out there, but is still uncomfortable breaking out of the play-it-safe speaking style that is not winning over the Tea Party. He is still the candidate that the GOP D.C. establishment is most familiar with, and he is hoping that Perry will founder in an attrition race.
 
Congressman Bachmann's progress will be impeded in the long run by any lengthy success on Perry's part. I think the election of a non-executive in 2008 was a fluke.
 
Another factor is the renewal of the internecine war between the Tea Party and the GOP establishment. Karl Rove is looking to boost somebody, anybody who can beat Perry. Jeb Bush and John Boehner are presently trying to convince Paul Ryan to run. Ryan is clearly a Tea Party favorite, but they think he is less of a bomb thrower and more amenable to their needs.
 
The two outsiders still crunching their chances and ponering a run are Governor Christie and the ubiquitous Palin.
 
But nobody seems to be in an all fired hurry. It really is fascinating to watch.
 
 
 
 
 
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On Wisconsin

The first batch of recall elections there have passed, and the best efforts of the national union movement (along with a few tons of their money) have not dislodged the new Republican Senate majority in Madison.
 
This was plan D, I think. That is, after the Democrats went AWOL and took up in a motel in a more friendly Illinois, left the union charges to clog up the vacant Statehouse, leave enough litter for a Macy's parade and to take to the television cameras to announce that thier "rights" were all being trampled on.
 
And that is point one here: every homeowner in this country has taken advantage of the home mortgage interest deduction to keep them going when we and our mortgages were still young. This could be taken away at any moment by an act of the same Congress that granted it. I am not one to look at things that have been around long enough to grow whiskers and translate that into it being a new "right". The same is to be said for collective bargaining: it is granted by a legislature. The vote giveth and the vote taketh away. As Obama was fond of saying circa 2009, "Remember, we won the election".
 
The next observation is that Wisconsin is not a swing state by any means. They have been a GOP write off for two decades now. Hell, Madison is right up there with us with San Francisco, Portland and Providence as hostile territory. The unions have screwed the pooch big time to get themselves in the position they are there. Keep in mind that the Republicans did not take the majority there by presenting some abstract agenda. They pointed at the unions and said, "We can fix this".
 
The final point is a bit more obtuse. This is a micro object lesson for 2012. You had a lot of money coming in from the unions to push these recall elections their way, and they got little traction. The lesson is that, in an election season where both ends of the spectrum are dialed in and have all their chips on the table, and the pool of swing voters is unusually low, each convertible vote becomes prohibitively expensive.
 
Flash back to 2008: the swing voter pool, tired of Bush and the Iraq war, and then the financial meltdown, was a much larger batch of targets for Obama and his $3/4 billion bum rush (no matter how he raised the last half). This was made more pronounced by he GOP fractures over immigration and McCain's conservative credentials.
 
Next year, Obama will struggle to raise the same amount, but will find that the swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida are not the bastions of low hanging fruit he found three years ago. He is behind in all of these states and cannot win next year without all of them. There is a reason why his convention will be in Charlotte.
 
When the votes become prohibitively expensive like that, and you are already fighting an uphill battle, your easiest path to victory is to prove that your opponent is a drug dealer or a child molester. I've already predicted that the charges of racism on the campaign trail will set new records in this one, but when that word becomes ubiquitous, it also gets tuned out more (which is probably a good thing). No, I'm talking about Clinton-level opp research, and dragging out everything.
 
It is as predictable as the sunrise, folks. It is one of the last plays in the Alinsky methodology, and Obama is an acolyte. Get a copy of "Rules For Radicals" and thumb through it. Connect the dots to Wisconsin when you do.
 
This administration, like the union movement that left their discarded banners and McDonald's wrappers on the streets of Madison, are as interesting as they are occasionally repulsive, but they are not unpredictable.
 
And they are going to lose. Next year is the conservative's to take everything, if they don't shoot themselves in the foot. The Wisconsin recalls are merely a shot across that bow.
 
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Al Gore Blows Another Breaker

Al Gore speaking at the Aspen Institute, Thursday, August 4th:

The model they innovated in that effort was transported whole cloth into the climate debate. And some of the exact same people — by name, I can go down a list of their names — are involved in this. And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists, to pretend to be scientists, to put out the message: "This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes." Bulls--t! "It may be sun spots." Bulls--t! "It’s not getting warmer." Bulls--t!

And there are about 10 other memes that are out there, and when you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you. The same crap, over and over and over again ... There is no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea! And yet our ability to actually come to a shared reality that emphasizes the best evidence ... It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the g*ddamn word "climate."

They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it.
Al is missing something real simple here. The scientific process is not a "shared" reality. It is reality, or it isn't. You have established truth, or you haven't. And until you do, there is no consensus among scientists. There is no "agreement" until there is scientifically established truth.
When Einstein published his general relativity theories in 1915, the staff at the Cambridge Institute did not take a vote on it. They treated it as theory until four years later, when a timely solar eclipse allowed them to establish that an observed star at it's edge did change position because it's light was bent by the Sun's gravity. Then it was accepted as truth for all of us, until somebody can establish something that supercedes it.
 
And Al, the established cause and effect of anthropomorphic global warming has not been presented beyond the margin of error. No matter how loud and how forcefully you howl about the "flat earthers" (another Al fave), I am not going to give up on that. The scientific process goes back to before Archimedes, even if you and half a generation of Baby Boomers decide you now have a better way.
 
Einstein died trying to finalize his grand Unified Field theories, patching together all the forces known in the universe. In his last years, he used to say that he had it, but "it is in my little finger, I can't figure out yet how to get it on a chalkboard". He passed away with it, and we are all still searching. None of the thousands chasing after the elusive Higgs Boson particle are of the thinking that they own the wisdom of the world, they are trying to prove they are on the right path.
 
So all of you out there who lament the failure to action on global warming: work the process. Make your case. Do the research, and make a scientifically compelling case. All that would help, if you start asking for public money for a solution, don't you think?
 
At least that's how I was brought up. Absent that, who needs a democracy? The one with the biggest gun wins. Is that what you want? If you talk like you own the truth, and are not able to compel me that you are in possession of it, I have no choice but to think it is.
 
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The Tea Party Runs The Show

It's been two years now, and the popular revolt has not lost any momentum. And why should it? The President and his policies are not about to take a Clinton triangulation turn any time soon.
 
The outsider would take note that we have all graduated to a higher plane. We are now "terrorists", "the new Taliban" and that old perennial, "hostage takers". At least the critics have moved on from the derogatory gay sexual references.
 
In the brave new world, where Obama is getting a new re-election hurdle to jump every week, the Tea people are at the top of his long list of excuses for many things. Nearing a double dip recession? Oh, seasonal changes. The Japanese tsunami. The greedheads on Wall Street. Those obstructionist Republicans in the House. The default negotiations. That's right: the only thing the President sees in the mirror is solutions. If we would only spend more on education and infrastructure.
 
The S&P downgrade to AA+? The idiots were off in their calculations by $2 trillion. If we only had reasonable people to negotiate with, we could have raised taxes (er, sorry, 'provided a balanced solution') to get to a $4 trillion package and we would still be top notch. Oh yeah? You could have found a couple of trillion by only taxing the "millionaires and billionaires"? There would have been no political repercussions for that? Are you nuts?
 
Truth be told, I can understand the hard feelings. One side is negotiating with a fallback position- nobody is going to threaten John Kerry's job if he blinks first with us- they'll moan and then vote for him anyway. The seventy-plus Congressional freshmen that arrived in D.C. this year have no such luxury. If they back down from why they were sent there, they have been told in no uncertain terms that in 2012, they will have a primary challenger that is better funded than they are. They don't have a choice.
 
But when it comes down to it, this is all about personal responsibility. All of you out there who have a problem with these elected officials, they are only your secondary problem. Your primary problem is...me.
 
I am one of the crown outside the beltway, looking and and holding the ejection seat button in hand. This is a representative democracy, and they are just the messenger. You don't like this? You had better find a way to shut me up.
 
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How Bad Is Obama? Let's Count The Ways.

There is bad, and there is historically tragic. Jimmy Carter was bad, but the Democrat brand survived him and in four years, we had all but forgotten him, save for his laughable diplomatic outreaches.
 
Richard Nixon was tragic on a Shakespearian level. He tried to have it both ways in Vietnam,, and managed to both help create what became the Khmer Rouge and terminally anger all the war opponents here. When the first OPEC oil embargo hit, he was spending his time dealing with the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. When he finally resigned, he helped create a political riptide that became the Watergate Democrat Congress. That bunch created the Byrd Senate budget rules, cemented in place the baseline budgeting procedures that still calls slowdowns in projected spending "cuts", cut and ran from Southeast Asia in 1975 and fostered a series of Marxist massacres and allowed Senator Church to decimate the future of human intlligence at the CIA, which we are all still paying for. It takes a special talent to create a disaster on that level.
 
I'm watching that talent anew today. Obama came into office because Bush had already fractured a party on immigration reform. As tired of the Iraq war as the Dems were, this all led to the new Dem Congress in 2006. The last factor was the collapse in September,2008- the Presidential race was competitive up until that point.
 
Obama interpreted this boost as not just a mandate, but viewed himself (I think he still does) as a "transformative" figure on the level of FDR and Reagan.
 
He fostered a new health plan that is headed for a full blown Supreme Court challenge- half the country sued him over the Constitutionality of it's purchase mandate. His spending brought about the 2010 elections,which brought the GOP back in the House and in many states, just in time for the new census and control over redistricting- a legacy that will last a decade.
 
He butchered the negotiations with the debt limit increase to the point where the Tea Party faction now holds all the face cards.
 
Whether you agree or not with the cause of these things and his place in it, he has created a new normal in our country. A government that runs $1.5 trillion in deficit every year. 9%+ unemployment. A federal government that hired like crazy for two years and is now the most stable employer in the country. $3.70 per gallon gas prices. Anemic job growth. Businesses that are sitting on a $trillion in cash and refuse to use it. A stubborn war in Afghanistan that nobody knows why we are fighting, a new involvement in Libya that can't be explained well, either.
 
He clearly has some things he still wants to do, but not only does not have the power, but seems compelled to anger anybody who disagrees with him. How could somebody who walked in with a rep of being a smooth talker turn out to be so stubbornly obnoxious?
 
There will be hell to pay for all this. Not only is he not going to get the House back, he is making their majority easier to uphold in 2012. The Senate already had a number of fragile seats they won in '06 that were going to be an uphill battle, his efforts are going to make that worse, too.
 
His only hope of winning re-election is to make his opponent scary enough for him to be the only sane alternative. If said opponent isn't scary to the independent voters, then he will continue losing ground in swing states like Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania (like he has already). There is no way he can ever win without them.
 
He will pass to us a coalition government that will cut spending back to at least 2007 levels, which his base will interpret as the ninth circle of Dante's hell. These are all repercussions that will last for decades.
 
It will be easy to say ten years hence that this was all inevitable. But if you take it apart issue by issue, if he governed within the 40 yard lines instead of doing all the red zone dances he has, none of this had to happen. Reform would have happened slowly, at a speed where we could take things more slowly and chew all the bits before swallowing.
 
He is in the process of bringing about a conservative revolution, and the end result will be another lost decade for the urban areas of our country, who will troll about like Red Sox fans after Bill Buckner showed he couldn't take a knee. That didn't have to be.
 
In ten years, this man wll go from "Yes, we can" to being the image on the writer's conference room dartboard at the Daily Show. Much as I disagree with him, taking the country through all that is something I wish we could all avoid.
 
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"Christian" Terrorism

I think I can now speak comfortably on this subject, having personally progressed from being a Tea Party "extremist" to a Tea Party "terrorist". The phrase "Tea Party Taliban" is now entering the mainstream, I'm definitely moving up in the world.
 
This is just a quick note, referring to the Anders Beivik massacres in Norway recently, which the NY Times thought merited an above-the-fold "Christian Terrorist" headline. Have you read his manifesto? He's about as religious as my cat. His references to Christianity are more comparative condemnations to his target du jour: the European tolerance of Islam and his thoughts on the dangers of such. His religious views are well in line with Western European secularism.
 
That may have been merely a casual observation on the Grey Lady's part, but the speed with which they brought his religion into play is astounding. Two years ago, Major Nidal Hasan, a military psychologist who was in the habot of carrying business cards with fatwa references on them, shot a few dozen people in Fort Hood, shouting "Allahu Akbar" and the media here took pains not to mention his religion unless they had to. One television journalist I saw actually expressed regret that he was Muslim, and they wished they didn't have to mention it.
 
That dichotomy is one of the great bookmarks in the culture war here. One side regards world outreach terrorism as a criminal justice problem that only coincidentally appears in Muslim garb, while the other sees it as a declared war with a real and dangerous radical subset of one particular religion.
 
This latter viewpoint was easier to convey here in the days afte 9/11, but I think that since we made the decision to fight this war on the other side of the planet, it gets easier to relax a bit, stand back and chide the likes of yours truly for profiling and religious intolerance.
 
Well, reality is reality, and my noting that the Wahhabi war on us has not been undeclared and is still going on will still be out there, no matter who here is looking down their nose at my intolerance.
 
This war will get worse before it gets better, and while I think it is lamentable that there is also a war to be fought here on this subject, we can not not let up on it. Not while I still have to present a world for my children to mature in.
 
I didn't think I was going to get any help from the Times anyway.
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The Debt Ceiling Deal (Will Still Happen)

I've been holding off on comment on this one, as it unfolds before us in fits and starts. Well, it only seems that way. There will not be agreement until the last minute, for two big reasons. One, both sides know that it is critical to come to agreement and two, the two sides are too far apart to make it happen sooner. That is to say, neither diametrically opposed side has the power to make it happen alone.
 
The first great narrative of all this is our esteemed President. Obama is a narcissistic fool and loves being at the center of the whirlwind, but he was only allowed to stay there as long as he did because his party was hoping that his assistance could help them overcome those rascally Republicans.
 
He has long since crapped out of negotiating with the Republicans seriously, because when he got through with calling them "hostage takers", he lectured us for months about how we were going to leave old people, children, autistics and the like on their own. That isn't a good lead negotiating position, but nothing much was lost in the process. He and we weren't going on any honeymoons soon.
 
Then last Monday, he got on television and made good on his Reaganesque threat to go to the people with his message. We'll skip over his DailyKos version of the history of the debt (it was Bush's fault, I wasn't even there)- that didn't burn any new bridges, either. No, what destroyed him there was his "demand" that the reps of both parties march like good second graders to the White House the following day and "report" to him what they were going to do about all this.
 
I understand his view of the Constitution was probably matured in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, but the denizens of Capitol Hill take the three equal branches stuff pretty seriously, and you don't treat them like that. That stupidity is likely what drove Harry Reid into his "we're the last train leaving the station" game plan, and Obama has been trying to shoehorn his way back in ever since.
 
On top of that, the President's constant scare tactics with the possible interruption in Medicare and Social Security payments, while it hasn't changed the polling on the issue, has managed to put the worry into quite a few people. They have been calling the offices of many Congressmen and Senators, annoying the hell out of their staffs and this hasn't translated well into a sense of charity for Obama on the Hill.
 
Reid has decided that he is the savior here. He not only pushed Boehner's plan in the same circular file that he dumped "Cut, cap and balance" into, he is presently stonewalling the parliamentary process of his own plan as far as possible (early Sunday morning), in order to whip his own votes into line.
 
Now that it has been shown that Reid doesn't hold any more sway in the House than Boehner has in the Senate, they will finally see that their only way out is a mutual deal, which will involve two stages, the last one being punted to a committee that will either pull up the last $1.4 trillion in cuts by Thanksgiving, or have them forced across the board soon afterward. I'll believe this when I see it, but it evidently has been written with enough teeth in it to satisfy the Tea Party coalition.
 
The Republicans get a deal with no revenues added, and the Democrats get a number that carries them past the 2012 election. This whole thing is likely to annoy their base immensely. I speak confidently of this because I am happy with how it turned out.
 
Why did it turn out this way? Because the Tea Party coalition is still the most stubborn, solid and stable political faction in the country right now. Their power comes from the legions of independents out there still scared witless of the mounting debt.
 
This is not a partnership built on stone, though. It can still be fractured by conservative insistence on using it as a piggy back for social issues. Fortunately, the Tea Party and the Republicans they support are as aware of this as they were in 2010.
 
There is a true sea change coming next year, it probably won't happen before then. The elections next year are going to be a real kick in the teeth to the Democrats, but they earned it with the way they have governed since 2009.
 
After that, there will be a reform of the tax code, which will meet with Wisconsin style anger. And there will be a referndum in the states on a Constitiutional balanced budget amendment, which will make Wisconsin look like Pee Wee's Playhouse.
 
There is a lesson to be learned here. You can't get too far ahead of the people. Obama isn't the first national figure to operate under the umbrella of  'eventually the will see our wisdom', but he managed to use the eco crisis of September 2008 and a favorable election to push things far beyond what the country was willing to handle.
 
There are about 30 million people out there in the electorate who completely agree with that direction, and it will be my job to raise their blood pressure to boiling in about sixteen months. For thoseof you still pleading for civility in the public square, I suggest you tune out. It won't be pretty.
 
But it has to be done.
 
 
 
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The Great Debt Limit Debate

You know, the one with no end. Actually, it has an end. That is seventeen months from now, in a Presidentuial election.
 
The two sides are too far apart, and have radically different directions for the country. And questions this large need to be answered at the ballot box, not in a Congressional caucus negotiation with the President.
 
Obama's problem now is the same problem he had last year. Enough independents were scraed witless of his spending habits to power the Tea Party coalition to do what it did. While that was not enough to carry things past the White House, it is enough to prevent Obama from getting anything. He just doesn't have the votes.
 
Obama's mistake is in at once acting like the only adult in the room and then getting into the mud pit every other day. He is going to pay the price for that, because the Executive is a titular leader and he is expected to close the gap. Worse, he set incredible expectations for himself in 2008.
 
Now, he is like some pansy school administrators I used to know- the school budget fails and facing austerity, they carp about how school sports are going to go under. Faced with impasse, Obama gets in front of a mike and starts threatening that Social Security checks may get held up. Not only will this not work, but it puts to rest the notion about SS fund independence (and Al Gore's "lockbox") for good.
 
And the problem is spending. Past that, it is spending, spending and spending, in that order. To put it another way, we are at the same level of taxation as in 2007. Revenues are down because of recession. In 2007, the deficit was $400 billion. In 2008, it was projected to be slightly higher, until Bush's TARP deal added $750 billion to it overnight. Obama has used that as a baseline and we have run $1.5 trillion deficits since. It's not that we didn't lose the added trillion from unemployment- the government never had anything close to that coming in. That is what leads to my conclusion that it is a spending problem.
 
The Republicans also do not see any impetus to do Obama a favor and solve this problem for two years, so he can campaign for re-election in peace. They will solve this in a series of three or four short term deals, and the Republicans will get what they want because both sides do not want us to default on our obligations and they are the only side at this table who can get the votes to make a smaller deal and hand it to the President to sign off.
 
So, the world will not end in August. We will dance this one a few months at a time, because that is the only possible path, given the wildly varying premises that they approach this with.
 
The big decisions will be made by the people who get sent to D.C. in November 2012, and that is as it should be. I think Obama got handed a bunch of Tea Partiers in 2010 because the people were telling him they were worried about his governing style, and his answer has been to double down. Clinton bent in 1995 because he knew it was his best path to another four years.
 
At this point, I don't know if Obama has any advisors who he defers to. That will be part of his undoing.
 
What comes after that? I'll try to pound that one out tomorrow.
 
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Bonds And Clemens Tell Us All To Stick It

The steroid era is over, thank God. Many players fell to the temptation, and their statistics showed it as well as their forearms did. Of those who were good enough and obvious enough to garner attention, a few (like Jose Canseco) simply admitted it,and many took the non-denial denial choice, followed by a humble plea for mercy, a la Mark McGwire.
 
But not the two giants of our time, Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds. They are daring us all to prove it, and playing it out like Mother Teresa. And thanks to some incredibly stupid prosecutors (Roger) and a trainer team that is willing to do jail time (Barry), they are getting away with it.
 
How bad does their act stink? Go through their numbers. Pitchers are quirkier than hitters, sometimes a thrower learns a new pitch or finds a niche in a bullpen later in life and has a resurgence in their 30's. Clemens was a power pitcher the whole way, though. No real difference in style from beginning to end.
 
The point being, the statistical peak of a player's career is almost always the ages 27-28. Clemens had a consisent streak between 24 and 30. Then he hd the best year of his life in Toronto at the age of 35, and had a very effective streak with the Yanks between the ages of 39 and 43. How does that happen?
 
Same with Bonds. His best season was at the age of 28, his first year with the Giants. He declined slowly (but was far and away the best player in baseball) through the 1990's, and then what? Between the ages of 36 and 39 he puts up numbers that can only be matched by the peak of Babe Ruth. How does that happen?
 
Next year, both become eligible for Cooperstown, and here is where the fun starts. Even without their late rebirths, they both would have been first ballot cinches. Will they be punished? Yes, but for how long? If there weren't a Commisioner edict against Pete Rose, he would have been voted in by now.
 
Then the new debate will be: was the steroid era a contiguous part of the game? The argument goes, the teams either couldn't detect the new substances, didn't have the will to, or didn't have the power to make the Player's Union cave, why punish the players who were, by the letter of the law, still following the rules?
 
I am thankful Bonds started late. He was a glorious example of what steriods do to the most talented player out there. You could make a plausible argument that he was the second best player, ever. In order to do better than that, he would have to step on a pitchers mound and be the best left handed pitcher in the league for three years- something Ruth accomplished at the age of 24.
 
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America, Still Alive And Kicking

America has not blown itself up for another year, and we now have 235 years of uninterrupted, stable transfer of power- something unprecedented in human history.

SSuch a track record is enough for many to take it as a bit of a given, as much abroad as here. It most certainly is not, as the Civil War should still teach us.

Going back further than that, there certainly was no smooth sailing in the process of “creating a new world”, as Ben Franklin would put it.

The negotiations leading up to the Declaration of Independence were fraught with acrimony, and were finally brought to fruition by the belligerence of King George III and the British Parliament.

The public arguments that finally led to the Constitution went on for years, and the divisions that still held after the document was ratified were made obvious in the varying directions of the Adams and Jefferson Presidencies. The first half century of our Republic is historically referred to as “the era of good feeling”, but there were ideological battles between hordes of strong willed men that went on until they died out.

This was our greatest generation, for many reasons. For other reasons, mostly to burnish the idea of the Constitution being a “living, breathing” document (that is, one adjustable to what we need today), our generation has for decades tried to diminish their
efforts. If this were simply a legal argument, it would be in the long tradition of public discourse here. I speak of the efforts to diminish them historically and personally.

Diminution number one: what the Founders did was simply part of the “Rights of Man” movement of the time. Yes,
the works of Locke and Rousseau precede our Revolution, the Founders had more to lose than anybody in the colonies at the time and they knew they were putting it all on the line (and would be targeted for death at British hands) for what they were doing. They managed to create a human experiment in government that we all live under today, and nothing in the musings of philosophy at the time countenanced anything close to that.

Two, they were all flawed men and don’t deserve the reverence. The fact that many of them were slave holders is held up as the biggest flaw of all. Oddly enough, the negotiations leading to the Constitution and the Federalist Papers are remarkably absent of holding slavery as a positive force. It was regarded as an economic reality strong enough to hold off slavery as a front and center issue, in order to further unity on other issues. It was regarded at the time as such a fractious problem that it was deliberately tamped. It can safely be argued that many in the Founder’s generation (including some prominent slave holders) became the core
of the first movement of Absolutism in this country.

In fact, the later decisions that led to slaves being legally regarded as three fifths of a person were not meant to condemn them to less than human status- it was a compromise that persuaded the South to stay with the new nation, but didn’t accord them the population increase that would have granted them a Congressional representative superiority that would have ensured that slavery maintained itself in perpetuity.

The notion that these newly recognized rights, the “inalienable” ones were made immortal by the birth of an assertion that they traveled a new path: not from the Creator to the government (or King) to Man, but from the Creator to Man directly, who would then lend those rights (and power) to the government at their electoral whim.

That got the attention of the Europeans, but we were still regarded by many there as naïve, and eventually we would all realize the way the world worked.

Then George Washington not only turned down the Kingship offer to be simply President, but after having been elected twice practically by acclimation, turned down a third term and walked away from power. I think that was the point that the Old World started taking our concept seriously.









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The Republican Presidential Field

And for your entertainment pleasure, a Daily Racing Form guide to the Republican Presidential field. I will start with the ones that don’t have a ghost’s chance.

Rudy Giuliani: blew it up in 2008 with his failed genius strategy. His executive experience serves him well, but his stance on
terrorism has been shadowed as a side issue by the economy.

Ron Paul: there are some serious libertarians out there who love the guy, but more understand that his foreign policy positions
are global economic suicide.

Jon Huntsman: trying for the gentleman’s niche in a time when the incumbent needs to be beaten about the head and shoulders. Ask Bob Dole how he was treated by the Clinton people in ’96, when he tried the same thing.

Herman Cain: I love the guy, but he’s a little short on his foreign policy convictions. Also, his exec experience is private sector,
at a time when the public sector is more dysfunctional than ever. It’s like a businessman going from running a non-union company to a union shop, he’d end up pulling his own hair out and overdosing on ulcer medicine.

Newt Gingrich: the formaldehyde has not spread completely through his bllod stream yet, so he is still talking.

There are two decent margin candidates still out there, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty. They are aiming for niches that are already traveled by players with more money and better organizations.

The four that own the road:

Mitt Romney: Trying to play the front runner part, which is probably the smartest strategy for him at this point. He has talked
his Massachusetts record to death. He should set himself up so all his press uestions are on why he said something else about Obama. He may be acting the part, but his people know he still has some competition.

Michele Bachmann: enjoying a brief respite from the Palin style chorus about her self evident vapidness, which will return shortly. She knows how to hammer the incumbent, and can raise money. There are many in the party who are not happy with Romney and are seeking a serious alternative. If she can stay focused, she might pull this off.

Rick Perry: same niche as Bachmann, but also Governor of a state with one of the healthiest economies in the recession. He has
another month at most to continue playing Hamlet. If he enters the race, his positions and fund raising abilities could cannibalize Michele’s and pave an easier path for Romney.


The ubuiquitous Sarah Palin:  whatever her chances a year from now, this nomination is still hers for the  asking. She doesn’t have to seek the Tea Party vote (with all the independents  attached)- she owns it. She holds veto power over every name on this list, and  her endorsement could put any of the previous three over the top. She holds that power whether she declares or not.
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