Chance favors the prepared mind - Louis Pasteur

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Tipped by Cafe Hayek, I come across this exercise in dumb-ass reporting from Caracas:

Tucked into a corner on Plaza Bolívar is Café Venezuela, part of a chain of open-air restaurants established by the government this year. The cafe serves Venezuela-grown coffee and Venezuelan snacks like cassava bread at so-called solidarity prices, half or less than what customers would pay elsewhere.

Ideology is also on the menu. The cafes were created by Comerso, a state holding company for socialist enterprises, which also manages stores that sell everything from subsidized arepas, the crispy corn cakes that are the staple of the Venezuelan diet, to inexpensive Chinese cars. The branch in Plaza Bolívar replaced a clothing store that once occupied the same spot and was expropriated live on television by Mr. Chávez

...

The prices are intended to offer a respite from the country’s rampant inflation and may help deflect heat from a recent scandal in the government’s food-distribution network in which thousands of tons of imported food were found rotting in ports.

As Don Boudreaux points out at Cafe Hayek—which must count as some sort of anti-matter to Cafe Venezuela—the cheap coffee is the reason inflation is rampant in Venezuela.  The funds for that coffee have to come from somewhere and they are likely coming from printing money.  As P.J. O’Rourke always said, the law of supply and demand tells us what happens when you set the price of something below market value.  Pretty soon, you run out of it.

It gets better.  The NYT, not content to uncritically report on the cafes, interviews a couple of ... well, back in the 80’s, they were called Sandalistas—stupid people from the US who went to Nicaragua to support the brutal Sandanista regime.  Apparently, America is plum out of stupid people, so these are cheap Italian knock-offs.

“We’re Chavistas, too, of course,” said Maria Consuelo Togni, 66, who was bedecked in gold jewelry, adding that most of the members of her family were “escuálidos,” or squalid ones, the term commonly used to deride the president’s critics. She said she and her husband, Ettore Togni, an Italian immigrant, frequented the cafe to absorb the atmosphere and relax.

“People say the crime in Caracas is bad, but clearly they don’t know what Rome was like in the ’70s when we lived there and the city was terrorized by thieves and the Red Brigades,” she said.

Mr. Togni, 74, a retired economist in a blazer and a tie, said that Caracas still had its share of problems but that life had improved under Mr. Chávez. He attributed his support to the care he recently received at a clinic here run by Cuban doctors.

“The Cuban physician treated me like a human being, and I was impressed by that civility and professionalism,” he said.

I’ll wait while you bury the desire to punch these moronic seniors in the face.  Yes, socialism can be nice when you’re rich and it keeps the masses down.  But it’s not so nice for the masses when Venezuela is more violent than Iraq and most people wind up getting terrible healthcare from the government, as noted in the next interview with a woman who couldn’t get care for her 12-year-old daughter.

You have to feel sorry for leftist bastions like the NYT.  Communism has become such a joke that even Fidel Castro is admitting it doesn’t work.  Hugo and Lil’ Kim are all they’ve got left.  They can’t get into North Korea, but Hugo is more than happy to let reporters wander around his country and talk about the spirit of the cafes.

I realize this is just a breezy slice of life piece from the NYT, but I have a raw nerve where pieces like this are concerned.  News outlets frequently do “ain’t it cute” stories like this about communists and their sympathizers, usually complete with framed pictures of murderers like Chavez, Castro, Che, Mao and/or Stalin.

I don’t think it’s funny or cute.  People in Venezuela are dying.  Their economy is crumbling despite sitting on one of the largest troves of natural resources in the world.  Any reporting on these cafes that does not expose them for the horrible economy-crushing joke that they are deserves all the scorn it can get.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Who would have thought that a Tory-Lib Dem coalition would produce this:

One hundred and seventy-seven taxpayer-funded bodies are to be abolished under Coalition plans seen by The Daily Telegraph.

A further 94 are still under threat of being scrapped, four will be privatised and 129 will be merged, according to a Cabinet Office list compiled this week, while 350 other bodies have won a reprieve.

The list discloses for the first time the extent of David Cameron’s plans for the “bonfire of the quangos”, designed to save the taxpayer billions of pounds. Thousands of jobs will go as part of the reforms.

Under the Labour Party, the number of quasi-non-governmental organizations soared to over a thousand, with over 100,000 employees and 65 billion pounds of expense.  The coalition has already dumped 80 of them.  If they go all the way, that means 40% of these bodies would be abolished within the first year or so of the Coalition.  And almost all of them will claim that they serve some legitimate purpose and help the greater British public.  None of them will admit to being useless or redundant.

This is what budget cuts look like, my friends.  Get familiar with it.  One day, it will have to come here.  The question is whether it will be before or after we drive into a fiscal brick wall.

While I am not happy with the UK government’s plan to have paychecks funneled through government for taxation (see Alex’s earlier post), I am really liking the coalition in the UK in most other respects.  National ID cards are being dumped, the surveillance state is being rolled back, civil liberties are on the mend and the government is serious about cutting spending (although rumors that they plan to gut science budgets are bit alarming).  The GOP isn’t where the Tories are, yet.  But there’s hope.

Daily Kos defends his comparison of American conservatives to the Taliban in a post that somehow manages to be both dumber and more offensive than his stupid book:

But look what I wrote, and what Serwer highlights—the American Taliban and Islamic jihadists share a litany of mores, values, and tactics. The only valid counterargument would be that they don’t share that litany of mores, values and tactics.

On the issue of homosexuality, there is undisputedly a shared hostility toward gays and lesbians. HOW they express that hostility is a function of our respective societies. In the Arab world, anti-gay sentiment is more freely expressed. In this country, the American Taliban is constrained by our legal and cultural norms (like the leader of the Montana tea party crowd found out).

But the core value remains—the belief that homosexuality is a perversion that shouldn’t be tolerated by society. It’s shared. Both sides have it. So to pretend the American Taliban doesn’t share that value, merely because they go to jail when they string up their Matthew Shepperd’s, is to wear blinders as to the true motivations and goals of our homegrown extremists. Right-wing reactionaries will always push to the limits created by their respective societies. We certainly know what our right-wing extremists will do when given the chance. We don’t even have to go that far back in our history to see it in action:

You know, I’ve been to a number of right-wing events and have yet to see anyone “stringing up their Matthew Shepperd’s”.  The use of that comparison is massively offensive because there was, in no way, a political aspect of Shepperd’s murder, which was condemned by everyone except the Westboro Baptist Church.  There was some debate about hate crime laws.  But there are valid reasons to oppose hate crime laws—that they are really thought crime laws—that have nothing to do with hating gays.

Moreover, Kos’s basic premise is faulty here.  His logic is that conservatives and the Taliban share “mores, values and tactics”.  First of all, as he himself acknowledges, they don’t share tactics.  He thinks this is only because our system of government holds them back; ignoring that the same system jailed and punished gays for centuries.  Apparently, if it weren’t for our laws, Newt Gingrich would be rampaging through Dupont Circle, burning gays at the stake. That’s a fairly dim view of human nature.  But not unexpected from someone who thinks the Republicans are also secret racists.

But the “mores and values” thing is a bigger problem.  His argument is that since conservatives think homosexuality is immoral and the Taliban thinks so, that makes them equivalent.  But that’s bullshit.  Many liberals share “mores and values” with ecoterrorists.  Does that make them equivalent?  Many share “mores and values” with various communist dictators who think they are doing everything that’s right for “the people”.  Does that make them equivalent?  Kos and the liberals have spent the last couple of months defending American Muslims and assuring us, on the Ground Zero Mosque question, that moderate Muslims do not share the Taliban’s values.  But moderate Muslims do share “mores and values” with the Taliban.  In fact, they draw their inspiration from the same book. Many moderate Muslims have traditional views of gender roles and prefer women to wear headscarves.  They do not eat pork or drink alcohol and they take a dim view of homosexuality.  Where they differ is in degree and on the subject of oppressing and terrorizing the non-Muslim world.

Religion is a well from which people can draw many things—extremism or moderation, oppression or tolerance, ignorance or wisdom.  Kos thinks that because the Taliban and the conservatives draw from similar wells, that makes them equal.  But that’s garbage.  The well isn’t the problem; the people drawing from it are.

It’s good for people to have strong moral views.  Where it becomes dangerous is when they want those moral views enforced by law.  And where it becomes really dangerous is when they want them enforced with the gun and the rope.  Kos wouldn’t dream of saying that moderate Muslims (or orthodox Jews or Mormons) are like the Taliban because some of their moral views overlap.  But it becomes acceptable when talking about conservative Christians.

Then there’s this:

The American Taliban also seeks to subvert democracy—not by cutting off fingers, but by caging and other voter suppression efforts. So what if the method is different? The end goal is the same—to subvert the democratic will of the people in order to impose their regressive mores on the rest of us.

These would be the mythical “voter suppression” efforts that Michael Moore has been harping on for years and that the Left has yet to present any real evidence in support of.  The only argument they can make is that bans on letting felons vote “subverts democracy”.  Because the one thing democracy needs is more criminals in control.  The argument that we have too many people in prison has some weight.  But again, we are a nation of laws.  People aren’t put in prison for no reason.  If you don’t like the drugs laws, change them.

And once again, we get the “tactics don’t matter” line that allows Kos to make this odious comparison.  But tactics are everything!  Tactics—which most people call “politics”—is how we resolve issues peacefully instead of violently.  Intentions and sub-conscious desire means nothing; process is everything.

(I do share one concern with Kos—the erosion of civil liberties during the War on Terror.  Once those go, they’re gone.  We should never trust government with our freedom.  But then again, Obama has been pursuing those violations with equal enthusiasm.  And it’s much easier to control and oppress people’s civil liberties when you also control their retirement, their education, their healthcare and their job.)

Then there’s this stretch:

But ultimately, the “direct comparison” argument is a straw man. The issue here is of clear shared values—hatred for gays, opposition to women equality, the creation of an ideological bubble to keep out facts and science, bizarre sex hangups, and a propensity to resort to violence.

I could just as easily say that the Left and violent Marxist guerrillas share the same values—hatred of wealth, opposition to economic liberty, worship of the state.  The creation of an ideological bubble?  Have you seen the composition of Obama’s cabinet?  Or been on a college campus lately?

For the “propensity to resort to violence”, he goes to the recent surge in firearms purchases and a spate of supposed “right wing” violence.  But the latter, as we have shown numerous times, is wildly exaggerated while the former has more to do with the fear that new gun controls laws will be imposed.  The Left Wing has been beating this violence drum ever since Obama was elected, even trying to cast the supposed murder of a census worker and the attack on the Discovery Channel as expressions of Right Wing hate.  They tried to make the “Oath Keepers” into a violent group, ignoring that the group was simply promising to refuse to enforce oppressive laws.  Where is this surge of Right Wing violence?  It exists only in the minds of such as Kos.  The Tea Party isn’t calling for a revolution.  They’re voting.  But, to the likes of Kos, every right wing vote is really an act of violence.

(As an aside, the liberals really need to get it through their heads that there really isn’t a conservative “movement” as such.  Last week, I linked up Jonathan Rauch’s article about how disorganized the Tea Party really is.  The Tea Party represents a broad spectrum of ideological views only vaguely unified by their opposition to big government.  Yes, there are some crazy Right Wing religious nuts in the movement.  But there are a lot more who aren’t in that wagon.  And the issue of gays has really not come up at all, except in passing.  Vast majorities of conservatives support a repeal of DADT—despite this week’s fiasco—and even the likes of Glenn Beck are moderating on the subject of gay marriage.

Conservatives are leery of societal change, in general, because we understand that maintaining a society is more important than “fixing it”.  We’re nervous about making big changes to a system that works, however imperfectly.  But we do come around—as we have on women’s rights, civil rights and a number of gay issues.  That the Republican leadership is still in anti-gay mode is yet another illustration of how out of touch they are with the electorate.  But then again, the Democractic leadership has almost identical positions on the issues.)

As I’ve said many times, attempts to probe the underlying psychology of politicians is stupid.  I’ve attacked the amateur psychologists who are trying to get into Obama’s head.  And I’ll attack the armchair Freudians who try to get into the GOP’s.  Who cares what they’re thinking?  Who knows that they think it all?  What matters is what the do.  Oppose that and leave the historical comparisons to pot-smoking poli-sci majors.

This is not a serious commentary on American politics.  This is simply a desperate attempt to smear a political opponent.  It is an attempt to terrorize and motivate the liberal base because their party is on the verge of a political catastrophe.  Kos really thought that he had changed the game—that the Nutroots had opened the door to a permanent liberal government.  Now that this isn’t happening, now that his beloved Democratic party is on the verge of getting swept out, he’s losing it.  He can’t believe that liberals are losing in the arena of ideas.  It has to be something—anything—besides the fundamental conservative nature of the American public.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

The GOP released their “Pledge to America” yesterday.  Full text is here.

Once you get past the frilly language and bastardized excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, there are parts to like, such as requiring every bill to identify its Constitutional authority, reforming Fannie/Freddie and requiring Congressional approval of big regulations.  There are parts that have no chance in hell while Obama is in the White House, such as repealing healthcare reform.  There’s stuff that’s already being done, such as sanctions on Iran.  And there are parts that should be in but aren’t, such as a commitment to free trade, an overhaul of the tax system and emphasizing major medical coverage as a way to fix health care.

There’s some bad stuff, too.  As I feared, the want to eliminate the insurance mandate but keep the pre-existing coverage provisions.  This is a recipe for disaster.  And there’s the usual screaming hysteria over trying terror suspects.  I guess I should be relieved that they didn’t put “restore torture” as a provision.

But the fiscal side—the most important side—is pure hokum.

The second section of the pledge promises budget restraint. Domestic discretionary spending would be cut back to “pre-bailout, pre-stimulus” levels, and then its growth would be capped — generating hundreds of billions in savings. The legislative budget, which has grown unjustifiably in recent years, would also be pruned back: Republicans know they cannot cut spending elsewhere if they will not cut spending on themselves. TARP would be ended, as would the federal entanglement with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A federal hiring freeze would be instituted. And Congress would make “a full accounting of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”

NRO does not mention that the pledge specifically exempts Medicare, Social Security and defense spending while promising to extend the Bush tax cuts.  Even worse, they promise to reverse Obama’s planned Medicare cuts, adding half a trillion to the budget.  Now I don’t expect the GOP, on the verge of an electoral victory, to announce they will make unpopular cuts.  But I’m very concerned that this indicates they still don’t fucking get it.  Rolling back discretionary spending to “pre-stimulus, pre-TARP” levels is already happening as those two programs expire.  Are they going to cut education?  Or highway funding?  Or farm subsidies?  They never did before.  I suspect they’ll cut foreign aide and science funding and call it quits.

This is pablum.  It’s a market-tested, focus-group approved grab bag of phrases and buzzwords.  It doesn’t propose anything new or interesting.  The only affect it has on me is to raise my concern that the GOP, once in office, will go back to their bad habits.  I guess that’s an improvement over Obama and a Democratic Congress.  But Obama and a Congress consisting entirely of hamsters would be an improvement on that.  We need something better and bolder if we’re to get out of this mess.

(More from the indispensable Nick Gillespie here, although I disagree with him on the Contract With America.  Not many voters knew about it, but not many have to know to have an impact on an election.)

Nothing serious here from the Onion.  It just cracked me up:

According to a poll released Tuesday, nearly 20 percent of U.S. citizens now believe Barack Obama is a cactus, the most Americans to identify the president as a water- retaining desert plant since he took office.

The poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center, found a sharp rise in the number of Americans who say they firmly believe Obama was either born a cactus, became a cactus during his youth, or has questionable links to the Cactaceae family.

“We asked people of varying races, ages, and backgrounds the same question: ‘What is President Barack Obama?’” Pew spokeswoman Jodi Miller told reporters. “And a fifth of them responded, ‘A cactus.’”

According to the poll, Obama has lost favor among many voters who supported his candidacy in 2008 but have since come to doubt he is a mammal. While these Americans concede Obama may not specifically be a cactus, most believe he is a plant of some kind, with 18 percent saying the president is a ficus, 37 percent believing him to be a grain such as wheat or millet, and 12 percent convinced he is an old-growth forest in Northern California.

You know that if Research 2000/Daily Kos said this, it would be taken as gospel.

Personally, I always pegged Obama as a laburnum.  Decorative, but dangerous:

All parts of the plant are poisonous and can be lethal if consumed in excess. Symptoms of laburnum poisoning may include intense sleepiness, vomiting, convulsive movements, coma, slight frothing at the mouth and unequally dilated pupils. In some cases, diarrhea is very severe and at times the convulsions are markedly tetanic.

Foaming at the mouth, wild eyes, vomiting and shitting your pants.  Yeah, that’s about the reaction he induces in a lot of us.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

"It would have been worse!”

This is the constant clarion call of Obama’s remaining defenders.  When it comes to the economy, they look at steady unemployment, sluggish growth, a poor business environment, ongoing foreclosures, etc. and tell us that’s it’s only this good because of the stimulus and Obama’s other economic policies.  Had the stimulus not been passed, we would have plunged into the deepest depression since the Great One.  It would have been complete economic meltdown.

This is nonsense, of course.  Matt Welch takes apart America’s favorite blogger/obstetrician on this subject in a must-read post.  But you don’t need to listen to libertarian bloggers.  Just take a gander at the infamous graph the administration showed of how unemployment would play out with and without the stimulus.  The “do nothing” projection showed higher unemployment but no meltdown.  This puts the Administration in the position of saying they saved us from a Depression they didn’t see coming.

Really, they’re one step away from claiming the stimulus saved us from the Boogeyman.

But John Merline points out something even more damning in recent economic data, specifically a re-evaluation of the economic numbers that shows we were technically out of recession last June.

You’d think the news that the Great Recession is officially over would be something to cheer about. On Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research—the official recession scorekeeper—said the downturn that began in December 2007 ended way back in June 2009.

Anyone feel like celebrating?

The news is particularly unhelpful to the Obama administration right now.

First, it undermines the case for the economic stimulus. President Barack Obama has often claimed that the $800-plus billion stimulus package helped prevent the recession from becoming another Great Depression.

The trouble is that we now know the recession ended just as the stimulus money started to get spent. According to the White House’s own 100-day stimulus report, issued at the end of May 2009, only $45.6 billion in spending and tax relief had gone out the door by then. In other words, less than 6 percent of the stimulus money [Hal—about 1% of what Paul Krugman thinks we should have spent] was in the economy as the recession ended, making its role in stopping the downward spiral somewhat murky.

This news also makes it harder for Obama to blame President Bush for the nation’s current economic troubles.

Obama rightly notes that he was handed a terrible economy. But now we learn that the recession he inherited was just five months away from being over when he took office. So while Obama doesn’t own the recession in any way, shape or form, he certainly owns the recovery, which is now well into its 15th month.

I think that’s a motto for the GOP: Obama may not own the recession, but he certainly owns the “recovery”.

Merline goes on to compare the Reagan recovery to the Obama “recovery”.  This is, in my opinion, a bit unfair.  Even if Obama were following good economic policies, this recovery would be weaker.  Reagan inherited a worse situation, but one with more obvious solutions.  Industries were more regulated, the tax code was a nightmare, the marginal tax rate was 70% and price controls were in place.  All of these were imminently fixable.  Reagan also had more room to maneuver as we had less debt, a younger population and less fiscal pressure from Social Security/Medicare.  Finally, as Merline notes, the causes of the Reagan Recession and the Bush Recession were different.  The former was a hangover after a decade of Keynesian economic mismanagement; the latter was a result of an asset bubble combined with a decade of well, quasi-Keynesian economic mismanagement in the form of demand-side tax cuts and increased regulation.  No matter what economic policies we choose, there’s a surplus of housing a crushing burden of inflated mortgage debt to work through.  It’s going to take time for the ship to right itself.

But the point remains.  We broke the bank on the premise that a stimulus would create an economic recovery and ... it didn’t.  And the more data we get, the more and more damning the picture gets.

(Although stand by for Obama’s defenders to claim we would have a double-dip recession-depression plus an invasion by Martians had it not been for his “economic plan”.  At this point, defending his economic record is a matter of religious faith, not analysis.)

It would be proof positive of how dumb he was! But when Obama says: ”Long before America was even an idea, this land of plenty was home to many peoples. The British and French, the Dutch and Spanish, to Mexicans, to countless Indian tribes. We all shared the same land,”, President Obama told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

I am sure this Ivy League educated community organizer meant to stop at Spanish, but since this would simply be more Euro centricity when the left wants to do away with that, and kind of put them in a quandary, considering that the Spaniards treated the natives of America far worse than any other European power save maybe the French, he resorted to adding of Mexicans. Except, Mexico did not push off the Spanish Yoke until September 16th, 1810. The old US of A was already around for 40 years by then. No biggy. After all, Obama believes most people are dumber than he is, including the people in the MSM that will ignore this gaffe, so they wouldn’t have a clue he fooked up anyway. Who knows? Maybe these Mexicans of his were living in the mystery 7 of the 57 states Obama claimed the US had, and we morons just didn’t know?

Meh, Stupid is as stupid does.

Oh, this is shocking:

Some of the country’s most prominent health insurance companies have decided to stop offering new child-only plans, rather than comply with rules in the new health-care law that will require such plans to start accepting children with preexisting medical conditions after Sept. 23.

The companies will continue to cover children who already have child-only policies. They will also accept children with preexisting conditions in new family policies.

Nonetheless, supporters of the new health-care law complain that the change amounts to an end run around one of the most prized consumer protections.

The liberals are aghast and surprised.  But every libertarian and conservative critic of Obamacare is, right now, saying, “I fucking told you so!” The Obama bill mandates coverage of children with pre-existing conditions but does not mandate that parents buy insurance for children.  So they can literally wait until their child is sick before buying insurance.  What did Obamacare’s supporters think was going to happen?

Actually, as Nancy Pelosi told us, they didn’t think about because they didn’t know what was in the bill before they passed it.  So now they’re scrambling around, foaming at the mouth and blaming the insurance companies for doing what they are supposed to do, which is protect the bottom line.  Private insurance ain’t no hippie commune.  Wait, that’s a bad comparison.  Even a hippie commune wouldn’t deliberately lose money.  Better example: private insurance ain’t no Fannie and Freddie.  They are answerable—to their investors and ultimately to the law.  They’ll allow people to enroll children in their family plans (and raise the rates to account for it).  But they’re not going to be issuing free healthcare passes.  Reality doesn’t work that way.

The big news today is Bob Woodward’s book, which doesn’t paint a very rosy picture about Obama and Afghanistan. Woodward, surprisingly, paints a brutal picture of a terribly dysfunctional administration. I am left wondering how much worse things really were if the WH actually thought giving Woodward access to the discussions about Afghanistan would help them out as I read these teasers. There isn’t much that can be spun in a positive way here, despite the WaPo’s best attempt to do so. We now get confirmation that Obama didn’t mean it when he said we took our eye off the ball in the only good fight – Afghanistan – when we went to Iraq:

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Because what we have here is some serious slight of hand. Depending on whom you get it from, Obama yesterday tried to have it both ways by first pretending that he was on board with the Tea Party movement, but that the problem was with the Tea Party not identifying the real reason for all our economic hardships correctly, while then attacking them for their beliefs anyway. Seriously, November must be coming soon, and they are getting desperate in the WH.

The Tea Partiers have identified the problem perfectly Mr. President. It is the massive government that thinks they are just not big enough, think they do not take enough money from the productive citizens, and thinks it isn’t both controlling the economy – choosing the winners and the losers - and thinking it is, or needs to be, the main engine behind said economy, because the free market is just not “socially just” enough to do a good job. At least our crooks have not come clean and told us what all these big government collectivists really believe about our money, like the ones in the UK have. It’s not our money: it’s theirs, and they will decide how much we are allowed to keep.

I guess what we are seeing here is the worst possible implementation of the “If you can’t beat them, join them” axiom by the WH, as they get more and more of this. In this day and age where even Fidel, likely in an unguarded moment, admitted that Marxism is a failure writ large, one wonders why we have these wealth redistribution worshippers still thinking they are going to make this stuff work. More COWBELL!

Monday, September 20, 2010

It’s pretty amazing that, after all the BS, Zero Tolerance policies are still being used in school districts around the nation.  Last week brought the ridiculous story of a kid being suspended for suspected drug use because his eyes were bloodshot a few days after his dad died. The week before that had a kid going to juvie school for a year because he has a Swiss Army Knife.

But this.  This takes the cake:

Samuel Burgos has fond memories of his friends at school, but he only gets to see them in pictures now.

The 8-year-old boy hasn’t been in school for a year and will likely miss another year if the Broward County School Board has its way.

Burgos was suspended from school in November after a teacher found a toy gun in his backpack. But when the boy went to register to go back to Pembroke Pines Charter School, he was told he will be expelled for this school year, too, as part of the county’s zero tolerance weapons policy.

...

School board officials said the rules are quite clear and that the toy gun constituted a weapon. A school board report on the incident mentions that Samuel showed the toy gun to another student and it was capable of firing projectiles.

That’s all it takes for it to be considered a weapon.

This is what is called doubling down on a dumb decision.  The kid should not have been suspended for a year to begin with.  And now, refusing to acknowledge that they were stupid, the school wants to suspend him indefinitely.  Had he beaten the shit out of another kid, he wouldn’t be punished this badly.

I propose a zero tolerance policy on zero tolerances policies.  From now on, anyone who enforces one like this should be booted out of their school and employed by one of the schools for problem students.  Maybe if they see actual problem kids who actually do bad things, they’ll get some fucking perspective on Swiss Army knives, bloodshot eyes and toy guns.

(All of these stories come from Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids blog, which is a must-bookmark.)

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Hmm.  Is it just me or does this sound like the dumbest couple in America:

A scientist and his wife who both once worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory were arrested Friday after an FBI sting operation and charged with conspiring to help develop a nuclear weapon for Venezuela.

After their arrest, the two appeared in federal court in Albuquerque, N.M.

They were accused of dealing with an FBI undercover agent posing as a Venezuelan agent. The government did not allege that Venezuela or anyone working for it sought U.S. secrets.

The pair were indicted for allegedly communicating classified nuclear weapons data to a person they believed to be a Venezuelan government official.

The basic story is that Mascheroni, age 75, and his wife, age 67, met with the agent and eventually gave him a document that would start Venezuela’s nuclear program. He was supposed to get $800,000.

We’ll see what comes out of this, but this sounds really dumb.  Say what you want about the Rosenbergs or Pollard.  At least they sold nuclear secrets to the right guys.  They didn’t just lay them out for the first guy who rolled up claiming to be from Venezuela.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Brace yourselves.  I’m going to defense Christine O’Donnell.  There’s plenty to criticize her for, including her apparent paranoia about political opponents spying on her.  But I actually think this one is a little overblown:

Appearing on the “Politically Incorrect” show in 1998, anti-wanking GOP creationist Christine O’Donnell was asked by Eddie Izzard, “What if someone comes to you in the middle of the Second World War and says, ‘do you have any Jewish people in your house?’ and you do have them. That would be a lie. That would be disrespectful to Hitler.”

O’Donnell’s reply: “I believe if I were in that situation, God would provide a way to do the right thing righteously. I believe that! … You never have to practice deception. God always provides a way out.”

What she said is stupid and somewhat offensive, no question.  I’m not going to defend it or her.  Good and moral people lie when necessary and lying in a good cause is a good thing. There is tons of Judeo-Christian biblical commentary on this point.

But I will point out that the clip is from 1998 and is a side remark made by a 29-year-old on a TV show know for people saying stupid ideological crap.  It doesn’t sound anti-semetic to me—it sounds like the sort of dumb thing people say when they’re still added by ideology and have yet to realize that the world is much more complicated and gray than it is in college dorm rooms and think tanks (and churches).  And on the scale of Offensive Things Said About the Holocaust, this ranks far below anything Pat Buchanan has said.  Or anything Mohandas Gandhi said, for that matter.

Now if O’Donnell, when asked, maintains that she would still tell the Nazis about Anne Frank in the attic, then we can jump all over her.  If she’s said similar things recently, have fun.  But I’m grown tired of this business of digging through everyone’s past for anything stupid or embarrassing they’ve said.  There has to be a Statute of Limitations on verbal diarrhea, no?  I mean, were told we can’t even hold Democrats accountable for things they said two years ago, least of all 12.

I don’t put up with this when it comes to politicians I like and I won’t put up with it for politicians I don’t.  I don’t care what Christine O’Donnell said on TV 12 years ago.  I care what she thinks now.

Update: O’Donnell is asking than any embarrassing past utterances be ignored, claiming her faith has matured.  Make what you will of that.  She’s also apparently refusing to debate unless provided questions in advance.  And her website only solicits donations without expressing any of her views.

I am not down with this.  She should be questioned about her past views, including the statement on Politically Incorrect.  She has to make it clear exactly where she stand on the issues (and that she knows what they are).  But our judgement should be based on how she responds to such questions and whether we believe she has honestly changed her views.  Citing a clip from 1998 just doesn’t do it for me.  Certainly not for an accusation as inflammatory as “you would turn over Jews to the Nazis”.

Update: Now we’re turning the wayback machine all the way back to 1997.  O’Donnell said we should spend less on AIDS to support other healthcare research and that distributing condoms would increase AIDS distribution.  This wasn’t even that far out of the mainstream in 1997.  I heard a lot of conservatives say this.  In fact, I probably thought something similar up until the early 90’s.  The condom paranoia turned out to be bullshit—condom distribution in the US has helped to massively cut our teen pregnancy rate and the spread of venereal diseases.  But this is much more obvious in hindsight than it was in foresight.

Again, if she still thinks making condoms available is bad, that’s a legitimate issue.  But she has to have said it more recently than when Men in Black was #1 in the box office.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Rauch has a really interesting article up about the Tea Party.  He is essentially arguing that it is a movement without leaders:

The tea party began as a network, not an organization, and that is what it mostly remains. Disillusioned with President Bush’s Republicans and disheartened by President Obama’s election, in late 2008 several dozen conservatives began chattering on social-networking sites such as Top Conservatives on Twitter and Smart Girl Politics. Using those resources and frequent conference calls (the movement probably could not have arisen before the advent of free conference calling), they began to talk about doing something. What they didn’t realize was that they were already doing something. In the very act of networking, they were printing the circuitry for a national jolt of electricity.

The spark came on February 19, 2009, when a CNBC journalist named Rick Santelli aired a diatribe against the bank bailout. “That,” Meckler says, “was our source code.” The next day, the networkers held a conference call and decided to stage protests in a few cities just a week later. No one was more astonished than the organizers when the network produced rallies in about 50 cities, organized virtually overnight by amateurs. Realizing that they had opened a vein, they launched a second round of rallies that April, this time turning out perhaps 600,000 people at more than 600 events.

Experienced political operatives were blown away. “It was inconceivable in the past” to stage so many rallies so quickly, in so many places, without big budgets for organizers and entertainment, says Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and a longtime political organizer. Without a hook such as a musical show, he says, “I can’t think of anything on the right or the left that mimics those numbers on a local level.”

By the summer of 2009, tea parties were springing up all over. Multitudes of activists, operatives, and groups were claiming the tea party mantle, many of them at odds with or suspicious of each other. Believing that coordination was needed, an ad hoc committee emerged from among the core group and, by August of last year, had opened a bank account under the spontaneously chosen name of the Tea Party Patriots.

This is one of the unique things about the Tea Party.  As much as the Left tries to pretend that it is comprised of “astroturf” organizations, as much as they try to pretend that idiots like Dale Robertson are the real “leaders” of the movement, the movement really has no leadership as such.  In fact, I would hesitate to even say it has a coherent agenda.  While opposition to government spending and bailouts are the key issues, the main agenda is involvement.  The main issue is getting people involved in the political process who haven’t been before.  Notice the number of Tea Party candidates who are not lawyers.  Notice the booming attendance at town hall meetings, including by many people who are well-informed and motivated.  What I think is happening—what I hope is happening—is that Americans have realized that we have been asleep at the switch too long.  We have listened too often to the placating tones of our politicians and the soothing mantra of our pundits.  And while we have been asleep, the country has moved to the brink of a cliff.

The Tea Party’s big triumph this week was getting Christine O’Donnell the Delaware senate nomination.  O’Donnell is hardly a typical Tea Party candidate—her most clearly articulated views are on cultural issues like outlawing all abortions and curing gays.  In the comments below, I made it clear that I’m not happy with the choice (see more here). But having slept on it and thought some more, I think her selection is of a piece with what the Tea Party has been doing—ousting as many establishment Republicans as Democrats.  I’m not opposed to that, per se.  I just wish they’d found a less fundamentalist and more electable alternative (see also Angle, Sharron).

A number of people—including America’s foremost gynecologist Andrew Sullivan—are saying that recent Tea Party victories mean that Sarah Palin is the de facto leader of the movement and the GOP.  But that view is mistaken, in my opinion.  The Tea Party will be more than happy to chuck Palin into the bin if she proves useless (as I’m convinced she will).  The Tea Partiers I know are more excited about guys like Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie—who are establishing clear records of controlling the growth of government.  In the end, anyone supported by the Tea Party is going to be on a very short leash.  If they think they can ride this wave into office and act like idiots again, they are sorely mistaken.

I’m not completely happy with some of the view percolating in the Tea Party movement—on terrorism and immigration, in particular.  But, as I said when this movement first began, it’s still early.  Many of the Tea Party’s ideas are in flux.  The disorganized nature of the Tea Party means that ideas still have a chance to simmer and evolve and be debated.  The real test of their mettle will be after this election, when we see if the Tea Party will accept the drastic spending cuts and possible tax increases needed to erase our debt.  Maybe the Tea Party will fizzle or turn down an intellectual cul-de-sac.  But for now, it’s got the political establishment nervous.  This is not a bad thing.

It kind of went unnoticed last week, but the President made another back to school address last week.  You may remember the furor over last year’s speech.  What was not understood then—and is not understood now—is that the discomfort many American feels with this is not some crazy Tea Party racist paranoia Glenn Beck hokum.  It’s actually quite reasonable:

More disheartening is the “annual” part of all this, because it seems the nation has quietly resigned itself to yet another chip being taken out of federalism. It doesn’t matter that the president has no constitutional authority to kick off each new school year with an address to the nation’s kids, or that it opens up the very real possibility of serious politicization as the address becomes increasingly ensconsed. Right now the speech seems to do no harm, so no one wants to fight it.

There is one final reason this is discouraging. As a writer over at Pileus Blog laments, the speech is yet further evidence of “the way in which politics creeps into every nook and cranny of our world, leaving little space for us to breathe the fresh air of private life.” Indeed, now not even our children are able to breathe free.

There is something disquieting to many Americans about a President who has a need to be everywhere, saying everything.  Seriously, I sometimes expect to pour out my breakfast cereal and hear his voice emerge from the box: “This is part of a nutritious breakfast!”

(In other education news, Fenty went down in defeat in Washington, which may spell the end for Michelle Rhee.  While there’s a lot to like about Rhee, some recent pronouncements, including sympathy toward Warren Buffet’s bonehead idea of outlawing private schools, make me nervous.)