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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Friday, May 23, 2008 :::
Apparently, Bush gets to veto the farm bill twice - the first time he vetoed it, Congress forgot to send him a few dozen pages of the bill. As White House spokesman Dana Perino notes, "they've proved that they can even screw up spending the taxpayers' money unwisely."
::: posted by S at 8:02 AM
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Wednesday, May 21, 2008 :::
A guide to the Libertarian Party presidential race. The national convention this weekend. I've met George Phillies, though I probably haven't seen him in the last decade; he ran for the Senate in '96.
::: posted by S at 11:48 PM
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I haven't decided what I think of this video, but it delivers what it promises. Video of Hitler is Michael Moored to fit the Jeffersons' theme song.
::: posted by S at 11:44 PM
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If I ever refer to something as "the dumbest thing I've ever heard," remind me of this:The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.
The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.
The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.
UPDATE: David Freddoso suggests that we sue Congress.Labels: energy
::: posted by S at 8:21 PM
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008 :::
A comment without a link: if the Obamas want Mrs. Obama to be immune from criticism, her role in the campaign should be limited to standing behind her husband during speeches, clapping at the right times, and embracing him at the end.
I don't think that would put her completely off-limits, but she'd be mostly out of the spotlight. If she wanted to fade into the background, I think she could. She could certainly be a lot less prominent than she is now. But if she's going to be giving her own speeches, as a representative of the campaign, making news of her own accord and offering quotable quotes, she doesn't have much room to complain (nor does her husband) when people hit back.
You can be in the fight, or you can stay (mostly) out of the fight. But if you start throwing punches, you're in the fight.Labels: Obama
::: posted by S at 10:11 PM
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There are times when I don't care for John McCain, but there are definitely times when I do. Let's let David Brooks tell it:Barack Obama talks about taking on the special interests. This farm bill would have been a perfect opportunity to do so. But Obama supported the bill, just as he supported the 2005 energy bill that was a Christmas tree for the oil and gas industries.
Obama's support may help him win Iowa, but it will lead to higher global food prices and more hunger in Africa. Moreover, it raises questions about how exactly he expects to bring about the change that he promises...
John McCain opposed the farm bill. In an impassioned speech on Monday, he declared: "It would be hard to find any single bill that better sums up why so many Americans in both parties are so disappointed in the conduct of their government, and at times so disgusted by it." RtWT.
UPDATE: And good for Bush.Labels: McCain, Obama
::: posted by S at 9:13 PM
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Monday, May 19, 2008 :::
Assuming you haven't been living in a cave on Mars with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears, you've probably heard that my senior Senator, Ted Kennedy, is unwell (though, as far as I can tell, it sounds like there's probably no permanent damage). I've had three chances to vote for him, and - you won't be surprised to hear - have passed each time. But it seems a good time to point out that I don't have an entirely negative impression of him.
He has made friends across the aisle. Long notes that his condolence message "was probably just smart staff work," and I can back up (second-hand) the contention that Kennedy's office is the place to go for a Massachusetts resident looking for constituent service from Congress.
I'll also point out that Kennedy was a good friend of David Brudnoy, who didn't agree with him a lot. Of course, my understanding of Brudnoy is that Kennedy probably didn't have to go too far out of his way to be his friend. But I do think both his constituent service and his friendship with Brudnoy speak to the sincerity of his belief in the power of government to do good. And I believe that government can do good, but is more inclined - even than the private sector - to do harm (more because of ossification than the caliber of its operators). But I think Kennedy really does want to make it work, and has done his best to make it work as well as it can, and I wish him well in his recovery.
You can wish him well at his website.Labels: Ted Kennedy
::: posted by S at 11:10 PM
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There was a Supreme Court decision today implicating the first amendment. If that inspired you to visit Volokh, you're way ahead of me.
If it didn't, hopefully you'll learn.
::: posted by S at 11:00 PM
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Sunday, May 18, 2008 :::
Obama is once again losing his bearings:"What it says is that I'm not very well known in [Kentucky]," Obama said. "Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it's not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle." To be fair, even though Illinois borders Kentucky and Arkansas doesn't, Chicago is almost as far from most people in Kentucky as Little Rock is.
He says Fox News has been "pumping up rumors about my religious beliefs or my patriotism or what have you". I wonder if that's true.Labels: Obama
::: posted by S at 11:08 PM
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Yuval Levin argues that our public institutions are poorly adapted to a changing world, and thatThe left and the right have both largely failed to notice this emerging pattern. For the left, it has been easy these eight years to blame every failure of governance on a failure of execution and to assume that the man in charge of the executive branch is the key to all our troubles. To the extent that they now propose institutional reform--and it is a surprisingly limited extent--leading Democrats have in mind giving government more power and more responsibility: in health care, over the financial markets, in the housing sector. But that is less a response to the emerging decay of our public institutions than an expression of the left's generic approach to great governing problems.
Senators Obama and Clinton, moreover, have almost nothing to say about many of the most prominent institutional crises we face, including immigration, the structure of the military and the intelligence community, and (perhaps most amazingly) entitlements and the looming crisis of our welfare state institutions. Indeed, both have offered health care plans that would import into the private health care market the logic of a Medicare system now facing an $86 trillion unfunded liability.
Republicans, meanwhile, having never been quite at home with the original purposes and ends of some of these institutions, aren't thinking constructively about reforming them (though there are a few exceptions, most notably Newt Gingrich). There has, of course, been debate about the structure of the military and immigration, and Republicans are increasingly thinking creatively about health care as well. But the conservative response to the Bush administration's Medicare prescription drug plan, for instance--a plan that for the first time introduced market incentives into Medicare and quickly proved the power of incentives to reduce costs and improve quality--shows that the right is still fighting the last war and failing to recognize an opportunity to roll back the most egregious elements of the welfare state, by planting conservative principles deep in enemy territory. Conservatives have a chance to fundamentally alter some of the assumptions behind our large public agencies of regulation, governance, and welfare.
The right is well suited to the task of such reform. The overarching lesson of our failing institutions is not that government has failed to reach far enough into American society, but that life in the 21st century is more complex and less predictable than our 20th-century institutions can readily fathom. The answer is not to expand government so it can rescue people from themselves--which is the underlying premise behind just about every plank of Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's platforms--but to make the institutions dynamic and flexible enough to advance the causes of economic growth, cultural vitality, and national security. He argues that McCain is especially suited to bringing such reform, and that a call for such reform would be a good underlying theme for his campaign.Labels: McCain
::: posted by S at 10:31 PM
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Jill Simpson is an unusual woman. A lawyer, she has scratched out an uncertain living in DeKalb County, Alabama. Fellow DeKalb County lawyers describe her as "a very strange person" who "lives in her own world." The daughter of rabid Democrats, she has rarely if ever been known to participate in politics as even a low-level volunteer. Yet today, she is a minor celebrity who is unvaryingly described in the press as a "Republican operative." Those who know her in DeKalb County scoff at the idea that she is a Republican at all.
Recently, Simpson's house and law office were on the auction block. Rumor has it that she is leaving DeKalb County for good and heading for the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Jill Simpson, who barely got by in Alabama, is now toasted by the national Democratic party and featured on network and cable news. All this because she has testified--without a shred of supporting evidence--to a conspiracy so vast as to be not just implausible, but ridiculous.
Simpson claims to have participated in a phone conversation with several Alabama Republicans in which she was made privy to a plot involving the Republican governor of Alabama, Bob Riley, a former justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, a federal judge, two United States attorneys, several assistant United States attorneys, the Air Force, and, apparently 12 jurors, to "railroad" former governor Don Siegelman into his 2006 conviction for bribery and mail fraud. Every person whose name Simpson has invoked has labeled her story a fantasy, including Siegelman; she claimed to have played a key role both in his giving up his unsuccessful contest of the 2002 gubernatorial election and in his defense of the criminal charges against him.
Normally one might expect a person of uncertain mental health who alleged such a comprehensive conspiracy to be ushered quietly offstage. Instead, in late February, CBS's 60 Minutes gave her a starring role. This can be explained only by the fact that Simpson included in her fable, as she related it to CBS, a final conspirator: Karl Rove, who, according to Simpson, orchestrated the plot against Siegelman. The rest is here.
::: posted by S at 9:47 PM
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Friday, May 16, 2008 :::
[T]he polar bear will be the first animal ever listed as endangered on a global warming theory. Normally, species are listed due to harms to their habitat from local factors like logging, farming, or hospital building. So when the Army wants to build a firing range to train troops to protect our country, environmentalists can sue to stop the activity since it will harm local endangered bird populations.
But global warming is just that: global. Virtually every federal government action anywhere in the country can be connected to increased greenhouse gas emissions, which after all, are the cause of the destruction of the polar bear's habitat according to the Interior Department. So you wanna stop the Agriculture Department from sending subsidy checks to millionaire farmers? Claim the increased emissions from transporting the crops to market will harm the polar bears and sue to stop them. Can the right judge be found?
::: posted by S at 9:51 PM
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Our farm policy is an excellent example of what happens when the government gets involved in markets. What began as a humanitarian measure to help a few struggling farmers evolved gradually into a means of keeping unsustainable farming practices in existence, and that evolved into a welfare program for the well-to-do, promoting even more unsustainable practices. Today, decades later, we lack even the political will to abolish the most insane programs we have — such as the one that actually pays non-farmers who live on former farmland.
There is no better argument than the state of farming today for keeping government out of the economy to whatever extent is possible. Well-meaning liberal policies will take every aspect of our economy down this road if we let them. Labels: agriculture
::: posted by S at 8:40 PM
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From the Boston Globe web site: Senator Barack Obama rejected the president's charge he would talk to 'radicals' and asserted Bush's failed policies have made the country less secure. (Globe Staff)
I'm not one to go out looking for media bias, but this raises some questions.- When did Bush charge that Obama would talk to "radicals"? We know it wasn't part of the speech before the Knesset, which never mentioned Obama, and could be referring to any number of people (I think Jimmy Carter is the most obvious possibility).
- Why does Bush's characterization of "radicals" require quotes, while Obama's characterization of Bush's "failed" policies doesn't? I think both characterizations are majority opinions, but they're equally opinions, aren't they? To the extent that either word can be considered sufficiently uncontroversial as to be a fact, it would have to be "radicals", would it not?
Labels: media distortion
::: posted by S at 6:56 PM
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Thursday, May 15, 2008 :::
An Althouse commenter, handle Revenant, speculates:Consider what would be different today if Gore had won [the 2000 presidential] election
Republicans would be whining about how Gore had lied to get us into a war with Iraq, and probably complaining about how he "took his eye off the ball" in Afghanistan. Quite possibly, yes.
::: posted by S at 8:52 PM
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Instapundit:MEMO TO THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN: When somebody condemns appeasement, it doesn't help things to jump up and yell "Hey, he's talking about me!"
::: posted by S at 8:47 PM
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Why don't we declare the bachelor's degree obsolete? No, not education, not colleges and universities, not professors or libraries or students, just the four-year bachelor's degree. He notes that much of college can be learned on one's own, now that the printing press has been invented and books are affordable, and to the extent that college is pre-professional, and those professions can't be learned from books, different professions need different amounts of training.
UPDATE: Okay, it's been pointed out to me that that was what I considered his main point, but I didn't exactly summarize the whole article. I thought the bit about college being increasingly expensive was just a lead-in - an explanation of why it's suddenly more urgent that the inefficiencies in the system be wrung out.
::: posted by S at 12:34 AM
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::: posted by S at 12:26 AM
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Here's an issue that deserves more attention:What if the federal government forced couples to pay 20% of their annual income just to get or stay married? And suppose a couple could avoid this tax if they either got a divorce or never got married in the first place?...
That's more or less what we demand of millions of low-income Americans who receive government welfare benefits. For most couples on welfare, getting married is among the more expensive decisions they will face as newlyweds, because saying "I do" will reduce the benefits they receive, on average, by 10% to 20% of their total income.
We shudder to think what would happen to marriage in America if all of us, and not just the poor, faced such a pernicious incentive system. I think limiting this policy to the poor focuses it where the harm it does is greatest.Labels: poverty
::: posted by S at 12:20 AM
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As Greg Mankiw notes, there are plenty of things to dislike about the farm bill that is almost through Congress. National Review also has this article on how agricultural policy raises food prices, this article about a particularly egregious earmark, and this editorial; they're agin' it. As all right-thinking people are, including about a quarter of Congress.
UPDATE: Jim Lindgren proposes a windfall profits tax on farmers.Labels: agriculture
::: posted by S at 12:10 AM
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