Classy

Wall Street Journal editorial

Political naivete is not a crime, at least not in the West. But Italian Vittorio Arrigoni, a 36-year-old pro-Palestinian activist, was not in the West when he was kidnapped by an al Qaeda offshoot and strangled to death with a plastic cord. He was in the Gaza Strip, where terrorist furies make no exceptions for Western fellow travelers.

Just to pick the most obvious point, note the equation peace activist = terrorist fellow traveller.

The neocon right reacted very differently to the murder in captivity of another Italian a few years ago, Fabrizio Quattrocchi. Can we just say that they were both brave men who shame the evil people that killed them?

Instant Gratification

You could construct a full theory of the last 30 years of American politics around the proposition that the self-indulgent baby boomers of sociological lore have been Republicans since the late 1970s.

What word does aspiring Presidential candidate and veteran Republican Haley Barbour use the most in the above clip?

A bomb is a bomb

National Review's Andrew McCarthy, in a Peter King-like rush to distinguish the IRA from Islamic terrorist groups --

[US] Administration officials wishfully see Hezbollah as analogous to Sinn Fein, the socialist “political wing” of the Irish Republican Army. But the IRA is (sic) a terrorist organization of comparatively modest, parochial ambitions (and far more modest capabilities). It has a single real enemy, Britain, and it wasn’t trying to destroy Britain — just eject it from Ireland.

Above, Maggie Thatcher's bathroom at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984 following the IRA bomb attack on the hotel, in which most of the British Cabinet were staying.

If they're not near the mosques, we should be fine

Wall Street Journal editorial --

But oil traders are already beginning to discount for the risks if the demand for more political freedom also spreads to the Kingdom [Saudi Arabia], which produces 10% of the world's oil. Karen Elliott House's recent piece on these pages explained in persuasive detail why that is not a far-fetched scenario. We hope the Obama Administration is making contingency military plans to protect those oil fields if it comes to that.

It's rarely set out so clearly. If the Saudi people mount a struggle for more political freedom, the US should invade and seize the oil fields.

Guglielmo and Monica

Neocon Michael Ledeen takes the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal to offer an oblique defence of Silvio Berlusconi, essentially that hey, it's Italy, and anyway it's mainly leftists and wimmin who are trying to prosecute him.  Going a step further than Ledeen does in the article, the sub-editor includes in the headline --

Imagine Dick Cheney being judged by three women from the Yale Law faculty.

whereas Ledeen had just focused on the politics of the Italian judiciary and compared it to Yale Law.  Incidentally, the headline writer's thought experiment means that Tiger Mom Amy Chua would be one of the justices.  Which is neither here nor there.

But anyway, noting Silvio's longevity, Ledeen says --

Three G-8 summits have been held in Italy in the last 17 years (1994, 1999 and 2009).

The point being that Silvio has presided for Italy at all of them.  But there's one revealing error here.  Italy didn't host in 1999.  It hosted in 2001, Genoa.  That was the summit where the Italians put up anti-aircraft weapons around the summit site because there was chatter that terrorists might try and crash a plane into the summit venue.

That was July 2001.

2 months later, attendees at that summit were claiming that no one had thought that had a plane could be used a weapon.  So a little weird that Ledeen has his years wrong on that one. 

So he sums up -- 

There are other legal moves available to him and his enemies, as well as purely political operations. The left is, of course, demanding he resign at once.  But they haven't convicted him yet, and the calls for resignation suggest anxiety among his opponents. My guess is that the trial will not be quite as "immediate" as some are hoping, and no savvy Italian is going to bet the villa on a guilty verdict.

There you have it.  The sex scandal is essentially a shrug of the shoulder affair in the land of the Latin lover.

Let's now cast our minds back to when Ledeen was channelling Machiavelli to write about the Clinton-Lewinsky imbroglio --

Ledeen is especially contemptuous of leaders he regards as weak and corrupt, such as Bill Clinton. In a 1999 article in the scholarly journal Society, he warned of dire consequences if Clinton were not impeached. "New leaders with an iron will are required to root out the corruption and either reestablish a virtuous state, or to institute a new one. . .," he wrote. "If we bask in false security and drop our guard, the rot spreads, corrupting the entire society. Once that happens, only violent and extremely unpleasant methods can bring us back to virtue."

Or, as he says in the article --

Leaders must therefore personify the virtues expected of others (or at least be perceived to be virtuous).

The choices therefore appear to be that Italy is rotten state headed for a bad end, or that Michael Ledeen is a political hack.   Must we choose?

Real tie-in, fair and balanced

On Egypt turmoil weekend, the line up on Fox "News" Sunday's flagship political discussion show --

Segment 1:     Roger Goodell, NFL Commissioner

Then, football “Fair and Balanced”, as we’re joined by two Super Bowl heroes from each team’s storied history.

Segment 2: Lynn Swann, Former Steelers Wide Receiver
Jerry Kramer, Former Packers Offensive Lineman

And, our Power Player of the Week takes us into the broadcast booth, as he preps for the big game.

Power Player:  Joe Buck, Fox Sports

Maybe the political content is coming from Lynn Swann.

The Republican junket

Other than Hillary Clinton, it appears that Joe Lieberman, John McCain, and a bunch of Republican Senators including John Cornyn and Jon Kyl were at the Munich Security Conference to speak for America.  Who knew they won the US Senate in November?

Go Packers

Wall Street Journal editorial --

Take the Packers' fleet-footed quarterback Aaron Rodgers. He made $8.6 million in 2009, according to USA Today's database of player salaries. Of that, we calculate he paid roughly $680,000 in state and $3.1 million in federal income and payroll taxes. Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger didn't earn as much, but he got to keep a relatively larger chunk of his haul—$4.6 million of his $7.7 million salary. (This excludes taxes paid to states that tax players visiting on away games.)  Unlike Wisconsin, which has a graduated income tax that charges top earners 7.75% on earnings over $220,000, Pennsylvania has a 3% flat rate. Even football players can behold the merit of a flat tax.

 This is an inadvertent expose of the lunacy of supply side economics.  Does anyone think that Aaron Rodgers puts in less effort or fewer hours because Wisconsin has a progressive state income tax? Indeed, if the Packers lose on Sunday night, will the fans blame the variation in state income tax rates for their loss? Instead, the situation is that both teams have assembled highly talented players who've complemented each other and with a bit of luck, have hit the earnings stratosphere.  And one state has figured out that they have a little bit of that pot without any disincentive effects.  When Vince Lombardi said that winning is the only thing, he didn't have an exception for a 7.75 percent marginal income tax rate.

They never learn

Neocon Catholic pundit George Weigel --

While the current upheaval in Egypt cannot be traced to recent assaults on the Copts there, the safety of this ancient Christian community, which played a major role in the country’s cultural life centuries before Islam (and almost two millennia before Mohammad el-Baradei), would be one important test of whether post-Mubarak Egypt has moved beyond one of the little-remarked but nonetheless odious aspects of Mubarak’s rule: namely, his appeasement of those Muslims who insist that there is no room in their country’s culture or public life for Coptic Christianity or indeed any other form of Christianity.

George Weigel in 2006 --

The Holy See’s opposition to the use of force in Iraq in March 2003 is well known. Perhaps less well known is the widespread conviction in the Vatican today that a precipitous American withdrawal from Iraq would be the worst possible option from every point of view, including that of morality. Senior officials of the Holy See with whom I discussed the issue in May share the view of American analysts who are convinced that a premature American disengagement from Iraq would lead to genocidal violence, Iraq’s collapse into a failed state, chaos throughout the Middle East, and a new haven for international terrorists. That all of this would make life intolerable for Iraq’s remaining Christians is pluperfectly obvious.

Note: Weigel was a strident advocate of the Iraq invasion, from a moral perspective, in 2002-03.

How's that approach of getting rid of the undesirable Arab strongman first and worrying about the Christians later working out in Iraq?

Bonus observation: Wall Street Journal news story ($) --
Coptic Christians Worry About Future Without Mubarak.

It's going to be a long two years

National Review's The Corner

[Fred]  Upton [Republican, Michigan] is also co-sponsor, with Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), of legislation that would allow for the purchase of health insurance across state lines, a key component of the GOP health-care platform. “Why is it that you can buy car insurance across state lines and not health insurance?”

Just because you see that gekko add in every state doesn't mean you're buying car insurance from the same gekko. You can't buy car insurance across US state lines, as a cursory online trawl for insurance regulation will show.  You have to have insurance in the state where you live.  If you try living in one state with insurance from another, it's illegal.  And it's a big mess when there's a crash involving cars with different state-mandated policies.   

In short, in the USA, insurance regulation is a matter for states, not the federal government.  Yet it's the supposedly anti-federal Republicans who want to use federal law to crash, if you will, through state policies.  The Republican vision for healthcare is that everyone could have New Hampshire style auto insurance for healthcare. Meaning, possibly none.

Free falling

The Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom still luvvs Ireland.  Sure we're down a few places to 7 in the global ranking but for an economy that just got an IMF/European Union bailout loan, that's not bad.   Credit to Heritage also for having New Zealand, Australia, and Canada ahead of Ireland and the United States.  People reading Heritage Foundation commentary on the replacement of BoehnerCare by ObamaCare might have concluded that that moving towards a more socialized system of health provision was the death knell of economic freedom in the USA but apparently Anglophone countries are managing just fine with such systems. 

Anyway, some puzzles about Ireland's ranking remain.  We still get the low corruption ranking, on the day the PM Brian Cowen goes to parliament to explain what exactly he talked about during a golf and dinner escapade with the chairman of Anglo-Irish Bank -- the bank that just 2 months after that event, would benefit from the bank guarantee scheme that eventually brought down the country.   This brings us to the financial freedom score --

Ireland’s competitive financial system was compromised by the collapse of a property bubble in which banks were highly exposed. Government action in response to the financial crisis included the establishment of a single fully integrated regulatory institution. The government also restructured the financial sector, creating the National Asset Management Agency to stabilize banking and restore liquidity. Since early 2009, the government has nationalized Anglo Irish Bank, Irish Nationwide, and Allied Irish Bank. The Bank of Ireland has received capital injections and remains partly state-owned.


That's fair enough as a description of events, but it's scored as a 70, which the methodology explains as --

70—Limited government influence. Credit allocation is influenced by the government, and private allocation of credit faces almost no restrictions. Government ownership of financial institutions is sizeable. Foreign financial institutions are subject to few restrictions.


"Limited Government Influence" of a sector that is in slow-motion nationalization by the government and indeed a sector that would have not survived in its current form without massive government support?  Note for instance that fellow Eurozone member Italy gets a lower score, a 60, "significant government influence".
 
If you were a private investor, would you put your money into an Irish or Italian bank?

Back in the saddle

Still on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, now at the interviews with new Republican Senators, here's the one with veteran political insider Roy Blount who rebranded himself as an outsider from Missouri --

With our half-hour up, Mr. Blunt stands in mid-question, claps me on the back without offering a hand in farewell, and says, "See ya."

And remember, that's with a writer from a newspaper that will support him.  Not much time for the hacks when there's a lobbyist meter running somewhere. 

Original Sin

The Wall Street Journal editorial page is upset. 

Specifically, Connecticut voters deserve a more thorough accounting of the votes in Bridgeport, and of the bizarre behavior of Susan Bysiewicz, the secretary of state. 

It's the race for Connecticut governor, which now features weird stuff about ballot papers and a Secretary of State in a rush to certify one party's candidate as the winner.

Which is a replay of Florida 2000, an outcome that the Wall Street Journal had no problem with.

The only question is which is more bizarre: that the Wall Street Journal editorial page doesn't have the self-awareness to see its Bush v Gore position in the context of current elections, or that 10 years later, states seem to have difficulty running transparent elections.  In the greatest country in the world.

The exploitation of the banks

Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-in-Chief, proposes raises the possibility during an interview with Hugh Hewitt that the crash of the financial system was a result of a malign plot by an intrepid band of low-income urban socialists --

[Hewitt] Now let me dive into something. You do have a very provocative theory here embedded. It’s almost a story within the story. It’s the story of ACORN. And it is a question, not a statement, that you lay, whether or not ACORN knew what they were doing when they brought about, through years of effort, the subprime crisis and the panic of 2008. Explain to people, it’s just, I had never considered it before, Stanley. It’s very well done.



[Kurtz]: Well, I appreciate that, Hugh. You know, ACORN, it has been speculated by some people that ACORN was following a kind of Cloward-Piven strategy. This is the famous strategy created by Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward back in the 60s when they tried to flood the welfare system with so many applicants that it would break down. And their notion was that the federal government would then come in with a guaranteed annual income. And some people have suggested that ACORN had a conscious plan like this to provoke the financial crisis. I don’t think it was that concrete. I think that’s going too far. But in a broader sense, I do think that the Cloward-Piven style strategy had been regularized, so to speak, amongst community organizers. And they came to think that any kind of excessive financial demands on the system, even without a very specific plan, would at some point inevitably provoke financial difficulties and crises which could be exploited for socialist ends. And this was, as I show in detail, this was common currency among community organizers.

The revolution may not go better with Coke, but it's helped by a mortgage application form.

I'm angry, gimme gimme gimme

One block from the White House in Washington DC, a large pick-up truck with standard angry tough guy bumper sticker: I'll keep my freedom, my guns, and my money, You keep the change.

That's the same truck from the front, implausibly displaying a disabled parking permit to get free parking in the nation's capital. As the bumper sticker says, he doesn't have any change.

Nitpick Friday

National Review's Daniel Foster on the Wilders verdict --

Good news not just for the Dutch Republic, but for republicanism.

The Netherlands is not a republic.  It's a monarchy.  Above, Queen Beatrix at the swearing-in of the new government.  The overly flowery historyfied language is not needed.

UPDATE: Hilarity ensues as Foster scrambles to get the republic references out of the sentence --

Good news, not just for what was once the Dutch Republic, but for liberty everywhere.

AP Photo/Peter Dejong

The Chilean mine rescue proves that I'm right about everything

Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger --

When a catastrophe like this occurs—others that come to mind are the BP well blowout, Hurricane Katrina, various disasters in China—a government has all its chips pushed to the center of the table. Chile succeeds (it rebuilt after the February earthquake with phenomenal speed). China flounders. Two American administrations left the public agog as they stumbled through the mess. 

Apparently drilling down to a specific spot to save 33 people is the same as ameliorating the consequences of a flood or oil spill affecting thousands of square miles of ocean and land and millions of people.  Good to know.

Also, Chile has just decided to raise taxes on mining companies to pay for that earthquake rebuilding that Henninger says is already done.  This honeymoon might not last long.

That Republican alternative healthcare plan explained

From National Review's account of the House Republican's Pledge to America 2010 election platform dealing with healthcare, with our helpful translation in italics --

expanded health savings accounts
The higher your income, the higher the tax break!

insurance purchase across state lines
Congratulations, New Jersey, some dodgy outfit in Mississippi is your only remaining insurance provider.  Yes, they have e-mail.

state-based high-risk pools
If the legislature funds the program next year, we can pay for the chemo if your cancer comes back. 

tort reform
Don't worry, we'll make the doctor do the surgery right the second time around.

Good luck with that, America.

The blame of those they better

The Washington  DC-based "Center for Security Policy" has put out a report entitled Shariah: The Threat to America.   Apparently the fact that you don't see too many Muslims around and don't see too many courts imposing Shariah is mere proof of the effectiveness of the conspiracy.  Among the bizarre things about the report is that it glories in a self-comparison with the "Team B" analysis commissioned by the CIA about the USSR in the 1970s -- the analysis that got wrong everything about the economy and defence capabilities of the USSR.  Anyway, here's an incidental sentence from the report --

In a civilized society, though, such a “neutral” position amounts actually to taking sides. Treating terrorism with the same even-handedness accorded to competing tax plans, for example, creates an atmosphere that is amoral to a point of immorality ... On some level, such behavior is the latest incarnation of the age-old encounter between the West and the rest – specifically, the non-Western “Other” encountered during various periods of Western exploration, conquest and colonization. Age-of-Exploration Europeans created the image of the Noble Savage, projecting a nobility onto the primitive peoples of the New World that canceled out, or at least compensated for, their obvious savagery. (p126)

This would be comic stuff until one remembers the kind of savagery to which the indigenous people of America (and everywhere else) were subjected.  But the comedy strand continues when one looks into where the Noble Savage concept comes from.  There appear to be no political philosophers among this crew.  Or English lit types.  Because the original usage comes from a John Dryden play with a subplot about a Muslim who turns out to be the son of a Christian but he fights for the Muslims anyway.   That's so meta.

Co-author Andrew McCarthy reveals that at least 3 Republican House representatives are reading the report, including Michele Bachmann.   There'll be more about this.

Minus One

Conservatives have strange counting problems when it comes to 9/11.  George Bush keeping the country safe for eight years and all that.  So here we have Daniel Pipes, doing what 9/11 anniversaries call for -- attacking other people who disagree with his buddies' interpretation of 9/11 --

In contrast to a conventional war, in which objective markers such as control of territory or the output of steel indicate trends, in this new kind of war one must look to subjective factors like understanding the enemy or pride in one’s own civilization. How, on this slippery basis, does the United States stand on the ninth 9/11?

Here's the problem. It's not the ninth 9/11. It's the 10th. The first one counts, when the actual bad things happened.  Incidentally, Pipes also claims that the conservative half of the population has done stuff "like reading the Koran."