A Second Hand Conjecture

Over the past sixty days, Harry Reid has been the most vocal person in the congressional record. The top two words he has used are “Republican” and “Republicans.” Republican Jeff Sessions has been the second most vocal person, using the words “oil” and “energy” most. On the basis of this, a visiting alien might be confused about which party was actually in power in the congress.

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Delighted with the American election result for whatever reason, Kurdish villagers in Cavustepe, Turkey have sacrificed 44 sheep to honor Barack Obama. They also smeared the blood of the offering on Obama campaign posters, purportedly for good luck. Now there’s a weekend project for the press corps.

On a similar note, here’s another reminder that conservatives desperately need a new commentariat in addition to new leadership in the congress. Krauthammer sees Obama as the next Reagan striding across the globe, and Mary Katharine Ham reminds us of David Brooks in October, confessing to being warm quivering goo in the hands of the giant. One should always demand more than surrogacy from the opposition. One might even insist on opposition.

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It occurs to me that the sequence of cocktails is the best political indicator I know of on election night. In 2004 I was attending a Democratic election party and early on everyone was drinking wine and martinis in stemware, or beer and soda in tall glasses. The ambiance befit the beverages: general levity and young merriment. Sporty coquettish girls with wide white toothy smiles dominated all conversations.

But when it became clear that the exit polls predicting a Kerry victory were wildly mistaken, and field reports were coming in on cell phones of Karl Rove’s successful mobilization effort, it wasn’t long before the assembled Democrats had exchanged their drinks for short glasses filled with dark brown fluids. To match the new taste for scotch and bourbon whiskey, the sporty girls seemed to disappear and old men began to dominate conversations.

(more…)

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Could a liberal lesbian rights activist actually win South Carolina’s 1st congressional district? Sure looks possible, as Linda Ketner has closed to within 5 in her aggressive challenge to incumbent Rep. Henry Brown. Of interest, Ketner is also a member of  “the Cabinet” which Time just published an interesting piece on. It’s an informal group of gay tech and hereditary millionaires, who have been investing large sums toward a systematic defeat of social conservative Republicans nationwide.

The success of Ketner and other socially liberal Democrats running on explicitly pro-gay rights platforms in traditionally social conservative friendly districts, would certainly tend to complete the trinity of broader Republican political decline. Not only are economic and national security focused conservatives losing on their traditional strong suit thanks to economic woes and Iraq, but the cultural debate may be shifting substantially leftward as well.

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I was not in favor of the Paulson plan if you haven’t caught that yet. Still, the pitiful display from our congress today set a recent low.

First, faced with an unpopular and contentious bill which she feels for the good of the nation must be passed, we get a partisan and divisive speech from Nancy Pelosi:

Pelosi had said that the $700 billion price tag of the measure “is a number that is staggering, but tells us only the costs of the Bush Administration’s failed economic policies — policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system.”

Pure horse hockey. More importantly, if Pelosi believes her rhetoric about the importance of this bill the poor judgment, lack of leadership and inability to understand the importance of statesmanship in a crisis should be grounds for immediate dismissal from her post.

Then, we get this pathetic response from the Republican leadership:

“I do believe that we could have gotten there today had it not been for this partisan speech that the speaker gave on the floor of the House,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said, adding that Pelosi “poisoned” the GOP conference.

Deputy Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) held up a copy of Pelosi’s floor speech at a press conference and said she had “failed to listen and to lead” on the issue.

The Speaker had blasted the Bush administration in her speech and Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) asserted that some GOP lawmakers, who had reluctantly agreed to support the bill, might have changed their minds following Pelosi’s remarks.

“Might” have effected them? What whining. If it is false it shows the same tin ear that Pelosi demonstrated. If it is true it is even worse. Either way, did it not occur to them how petty it would look in a moment of crisis?

If these congressman or women really didn’t support the bill and were going to vote for it anyway, the idea that they would change their votes because Pelosi was her normal clueless self is enough to deprive them of my vote forever.  It is even more damning if they thought the bill was necessary and voted against it due to her behavior.

This is a disgrace.

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doesn’t look like it’s going to pass the House floor.

Update: It failed.

The vote was 207-226 against the measure, with one member not voting, half an hour after voting began. Voting remains open even though the “official” time has expired for casting a ballot.

There was broad bipartisan opposition to the measure, with 95 Democrats and 133 Republicans voting against the bill. Republicans voted more than 2-1 to oppose the bill.

Update 2x: The gavel hasn’t fallen yet and already 2 people have changed their vote to ‘yes’, possibly feeling pressure from the large losses in the DOW after the rejection. Supposedly the Dems are trying to get 4-10 R’s to switch their vote to ‘yes’ and then a huge number of Dem’s will change theirs to ‘yes’ as well. Similar to the strategy that the GOP had with NAFTA in the 90s of getting a good number of Democrats to vote for it to cover themselves politically against any populist blowback.

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Panic grips the Hill, with Democrats planning to distance themselves from Obama and/or abandon criticism of McCain. Geez. Snap out of it guys. You have the most compelling presidential candidate you’ve had since perhaps John F. Kennedy. Almost every conditional variable in the election is heavily slanted in your favor. If you can’t win this one, you can’t win a presidential election.

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I was searching for an image on my backup drive today and came across a cache of header graphics I’d thrown together for posts over the years. The diversity of subjects was kind of interesting as a gallery. Here’s a few rather random selections:

The HIV Epidemic:

Eurabia:

Slobodan Milosevic:

(more…)

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Michael F. Cannon at Cato blogs about a NYTimes article on the rife fraud found and covered up at Medicare. A confidential draft of a federal inspector general’s report claimed that the behavior they found at the Medicare Administration was rife with irregularities.

Medicare reported to Congress that, for the fiscal year of 2006, AdvanceMed’s investigations had found that only 7.5 percent of claims paid by Medicare were not supported by appropriate documentation. But the inspector general’s review indicated that the actual error rate was closer to 31.5 percent.

Law makers called it “tantamount to corruption”. Michael ends his piece with some great quotes:

[One] congressional watchdog had seen it all before:

“This report doesn’t surprise me,” said Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California and a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee. He has pushed to cut improper Medicare spending. “To look better to the public, you cook the books,” he said. “This agency is incompetent.”

Of course, Pete Stark’s solution for Medicare’s incompetence is to force you to enroll:

There is a road map laid out for us…Medicare. Medicare has lower administrative costs than any private plan on the market…Medicare has shown us the power of simplicity; we need only expand its promise to the rest of our population.

Medifraud for all!

heh, indeed.

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When you’re Speaker of the House, I guess that, in addition to all your other powers, you can make language mean whatever you wish it to mean.

PELOSI: I’m never certain of anything. Today, I would be certain. I just think that it is the opportunity for our country to move away from Washington.  You know, I’m the Speaker of the House. I’m an outsider in Washington, D.C. .  Business as usual in Washington is not in the people’s interests. It there’s for the special interests.

KING: You would be the ultimate insider, wouldn’t you?

PELOSI: Well, I — you would think. But I…

KING: The speaker of the House isn’t an insider?

PELOSI: Well, they didn’t want me to be Speaker of the House.

KING: But you are.

PELOSI: I had to fight these special interests. And now to make the change, we have to have a Democratic president. And Barack Obama has done more than anyone in terms of passing the toughest ethical bill — ethics bill in Congress, to shed the bright light on transparency on the link between special interests and legislation in Washington.

Even Larry King is incredulous at the notion that a chosen Speaker of the House would not be the ultimate insider!

The amazing thing is that these politicians can get on national TV and make ludicrous statements with a straight face.

Ah, well.  They have got lots of practice at it.

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Money in a freezer.  Sex scandals on either side of the aisle.  Cozy relations with developers, lobbyists and businessmen.  Someone call the Ethics Committee!

Done.

Here’s why.

No wonder it’s difficult to find almost any profession with ratings lower than those of Congress.

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The Club for Growth has a clip of Mitch McConnell’s struggles to find a price for gasoline which is high enough to persuade congressional Democrats to authorize expanded oil drilling. A bit of a theatrical exercise of course, but there is a certain discomfort in seeing Ken Salazar casually reject $10 a gallon as insufficient.

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Now that Lance is back with a vengeance I’m almost motivated to not be such a deadbeat. So here’s a neat little story I found. It’s apparently been a long tough few months of 3-4 day work weeks for Congress so they’re taking their August vacation. This is convenient for Pelosi and the Dems because they can further avoid debate on the increasingly popular offshore drilling topic. So at the end of the workday today (11:23 a.m of course), they leave and turn out the lights and microphones.

The half dozen or so GOP representatives however don’t leave. They stay and continue on with their debate in the dark with no microphones. Democrat aids have called the Republicans staying “morons” and are trying to shoo the press out and keep them from covering it after shutting off CSPAN cameras. Republican aids are in turn calling for all members still in Washington to come back and join them. Now a phrase thrown about in instances like these is “cheap political stunt” but it would be wrong to describe this as such. This is an “effective political stunt“, showing the clear divide between the two parties on this issue, while also highlighting the lax work ethic of Congress and contrasting it with their own (new found) desire to stay and debate.

At one point ASHC favorite Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) managed to get the microphones back on. The how is possibly my favorite part of the story

Also, Republicans can thank Shadegg for turning on the microphones the first time. Apparently, the fiesty(sic) Arizona conservative started typing random codes into the chamber’s public address system and accidentally typed the correct code, allowing Republicans brief access to the microphone before it was turned off again.

“I love this,” Shadegg told reporters up in the press gallery afterward. “Congress can be so boring…This is a kick.”

And it’s getting better.

Rep Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) just pretended to be a Democrat. He stood on the other side  of the chaber and listed all of the GOP bills that the Dems killed.

He then said “I am a Democrat and here is my energy plan” and he held up a picture of an old VW Bug with a sail attached to it. He paraded around he house floor with the sign while the crowd cheered.

Check back at politico for more updates.

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Certainly not one our Congress can’t make worse. We have a market where housing prices are in free fall, where the last thing we want shaky institutions to have more exposure to is mortgages that are almost guaranteed to be at risk.

How shaky an institution? How about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which operate at stratospheric levels of leverage, 40 to 1.

Think about that. The most important financial institutions in our country operate at levels above those that brought Long Term Capital to its knees as a matter of course. That means the slightest mismatch between their assets and liabilities results in massive losses. So, faced with this crisis and the massive, shaky, highly levered institutions which undergird it, what do our leaders do? Let the lovely Megan McCardle take it from here:

The GSEs got into an enormous mess because their special status allowed them to take an unsafe chunk of the market, its executives were rewarded for risk-taking, and its management was excessively entangled with the government, which made it hard for them to say no when the regulators asked them to take on even more loans.  Congress’s plan is . . . more of the same.  Instead of moving to put FM/FM into a more easily understood model–either nationalizing them, or privatising–they’re making the GSEs even weirder, and of course, piling on more debt.

It’s time for Congress to bite the bullet:  nationalize them, or take them private.  But keeping pet companies on a leash so that you can use them as a sort of housing market slush fund, while pretending that the liabilities you thereby create don’t really affect the government, is the kind of thing one expects to see in a banana republic, not a free and prosperous nation.

How prosperous we will stay with leadership like this is open to question. Note, while House Democrats are decrying the high risk idiocy of our financial leaders (and I won’t argue with them) they are telling the GSE’s to do the exact kinds of things they have been decrying. In fact, they wanted to give them more leeway to increase risk and debt:

The deal includes several compromises. It would allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase loans of as much as $625,000 in high-cost areas of the country, a lower number than many House Democrats wanted but higher than some Senate lawmakers originally envisioned.

The enormous implications of encouraging the kind of behavior that got us into this in the first place, with government guarantees to stiffen their resolve when they go into the maw of the housing crisis, boggles the mind.

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Today, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight heard testimony from Sheikh Khalaf al-Ulayyan of the Sunni Accordance Front and Nadim al-Jaberi of the Shiite (and anti-Moqtada, anti-Maliki) Fadhila Party. Both oppose a long-term presence in their country, but what was even more interesting, as Spencer Ackerman notes, is what they said about the occupation, the invasion, and the Surge.

For starters, Jaberi accused the U.S. of putting the Iraqi government “in a difficult situation” by insisting on the long-term presence of U.S. troops. al-Ulayyan, through a translator, cautioned that a reckless withdrawal would be catastrophic, but that a long-term presence would be counterproductive.

When Rep. Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, tried to pry out some good quotes supporting the Surge, al-Ulayyan demurred:

“Increasing the number of forces didn’t affect the level of violence in Iraq. Because the war there is a war against gangs and they are like ghosts. They hit and run. What led to the reduction of terrorist acts and violence are the forces of the Awakening. They are from the tribes of the area where terrorists are more [in number]. And those forces managed to eliminate the other party, the terrorists, because they know them and know the tactics. We suggested that a long time ago for our government and the American government but nobody listened.

“I believe the reduction in the level of violence is due mainly to the efforts of the volunteers. The thing that will reduce the violence more is not military force but having realistic solutions to convince others to join the political process. I believe the best method to achieve that is a real national reconciliation. We need real reconciliation, not only slogans as is being done now. And reconcilition should involve all the Iraqis, whether they are involved right now in the political process or not.”

“As soon as the troops have withdrawn, it doesn’t make sense for these groups to exist,” Jabari added. “It is my belief that when troops withdraw these groups will not bear arms any longer. For as long as we have foreign troops on our land, these gangs will increase in number, they will hold onto their goals even longer… So I say the presence of foreign troops are actually serving these groups.”

Of course, such thinking would lead one to think that maybe Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a phantom threat and the real problem comes from deeper (or perhaps shallower) societal issues, rather than the dark puppetmaster of an enemy we can barely define, much less count. Remember that time the Congressional Research Service indicated that AQI was less than 2% (pdf) of the attacks in Iraq? That is because most of the insurgents—the vast majority—are not AQI, but rather nationalists fighting a foreign occupier. The Iraqis know this. But we have a hard time thinking that our mere presence somewhere can spark hatred.

After all, many Iraqis feel our invasion led to the destruction of Iraq, and kind of resent that. While these two Parliamentarians may not speak for the entirety of Iraq (the Kurds surely have a different opinion of us), their opinions are not wildly out of the ordinary, and represent a large and persistent strain within the mainstream of Iraqi society. Our deep unpopularity is our worst enemy.

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Buy a second house in Sacramento with no money down for 535k even as housing is going down in price. Run for congress. Need money for campaign, but can’t do that and make mortgage payments on a house losing value. Answer to this dilemma?

Let the house go into foreclosure, loan your campaign a bunch of money, neglect the property, win the seat and use contributions to pay yourself back. Uh, House becomes an eyesore and Washington Mutual looks stupid for making the loan.

I think this story pretty much sums up our political class, the stupidity of the mortgage lending market and why California’s housing market is in free fall.

Update: She claims the story is incorrect.

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From Congress and the unintended consequences of their actions. Bruce over at QandO has a post discussing an excellent piece by Walter Williams.

Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place. Politicians and much of the public lose sight of the unavoidable fact that for every created benefit, there’s also a created cost or, as Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman said, “There’s no free lunch.”

Congress, doing the bidding of environmental extremists, created our energy supply problem. Oil and gas exploration in a tiny portion of the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would, according to a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey’s estimate, increase our proven domestic oil reserves by about 50 percent.

The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and eastern Gulf of Mexico offshore areas have enormous reserves of oil and natural gas. Congress has also placed these energy sources of oil off-limits. Because of onerous regulations, it has been 30-plus years since a new refinery has been built. Similar regulations also explain why the U.S. nuclear energy production is a fraction of what it might be.

Congress’ solution to our energy supply problems is not to relax supply restrictions but to enact the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that mandates that oil companies mix more ethanol with their gasoline. Anyone with an ounce of brains would have realized that diverting crops from food to fuel use would raise the prices of a host of corn-related foods, such as corn-fed meat and dairy products.

Wheat and soybeans prices have also risen as a result of fewer acres being planted in favor of corn. A Purdue University study found the ethanol program has cost consumers $15 billion in higher food costs in 2007 and that it will be considerably higher in 2008.

This is in addition to Congress blocking use of our oil shale reserves and blocking importing of oil from Alberta’s tar sands.

So what will be done about these problems congress has created?

On May 1, Sen. Charles Schumer, New York Democrat and chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, convened a hearing on rising food prices saying, “The anxiety felt over higher food prices is going to be just as widespread, and will equal or surpass, the anger and frustrations so many Americans have about higher gas prices.” Congress’ proposed “solutions” to the energy and food mess it created include a windfall profits tax on oil companies, a gasoline tax holiday for the summer, increases in the food stamp program and foreign food aid. These measures will not solve the problem but will create new problems.

Now some people I’ve talked with like the higher gas prices as they spead up alternative energy development and make it more attractive to use right now. That’s a perfectly valid, and logical opinion to have I say. However that’s not the view of the people in congress. They can’t push for alternative energy and then decry high gas prices that they’ve helped to create. They’re either ignorant or pandering, or both. I’m not sure which is worse.

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Congress is behaving atrociously: cutting assistance to hungry children abroad right when food prices are spiking, and preventing competition amongst our sugar producers. There’s more, of course.

I normally scoff at the talk of “lobbyists” and “special interest groups.” I know several lobbyists, and the only thing that makes them special is they’ve learned how to play the game. And that’s fine to a certain degree—going back at least to the Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers understood there would be groups passionately arguing their case before Congress. But this is moving well beyond the pale.

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For a couple of years now, Porkbusters has been on the warpath against wasteful spending in Congress, and although it has had some notable successes (e.g. the “Bridge to Nowhere”), it’s mostly been treading water. The latest battle, dubbed a “Blogger Revolt” by the Club for Growth (via Instapundit) was ignited by the appointment of Rep. Jo Bonner (R-AL) to the Appropriations Committee, passing over Porkbuster hero, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ). For Redstate, Robert Bluey writes:

Bonner may talk a good game when it comes to earmark reform. However, his record is abysmal. The three-term Republican scored just 2% on the Club for Growth’s 2007 RePORK Card, meaning he voted for just one of the 50 anti-pork amendments offered by conservatives. Andy Roth notes that’s the same score as liberal Reps. Steny Hoyer, Bill Jefferson and James Moran. Flake, on the other hand, not only supported all 50, but he introduced many himself.

The National Taxpayers Union scorecard paints an even worse picture. While Flake was earning A’s consistently, Bonner was receiving B’s and C’s. Flake scored 92% in 2006, whereas Bonner had a pathetic 55% on NTU’s scorecard for all tax, spending, trade and regulatory votes.

Clearly the Republican leadership is not any more interested in controlling pork spending than the Democrats. Of course, one of the fundamental reasons for the reluctance is summed up in this statement from Rep. Bonner (my emphasis):

One of my many goals in Congress is to ensure the people of south Alabama get a significant return on their investment in the federal government (taxes). I am here to offer assistance in helping — where appropriate — to return to the people of the First District the tax dollars they send to Washington.

Bonner’s goal is quite common in Congress, a fact noted not just by N.Z. Bear (who cited the quote above), but also by the man who appointed Bonner and sent N.Z. Bear this hypocritical email regarding the announcement (my emphasis):

Jo Bonner fully supports the GOP efforts to put a moratorium on earmarking and the reforms Republicans have unilaterally adopted.

This announcement contrasts sharply with some stunning comments appearing today in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch made by a Missouri Democrat who is apparently stuck in the 1990s. “I intend on asking for more and a higher dollar amount,” said Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis. “This is a return on the taxpayers’ investment,” added Clay, expressing a view widely shared in the Capitol.

And there’s the rub. No matter how much politicians say they want to cut pork, the vast majority of them will never follow through, for to do so means political suicide. They are sent to Washington to get back the money paid by taxing their constituents. In essence, the federal government sucks up as much money as it can through taxes, and then congressmen duke it out on the floor, in committees, and in back-room dealing to see who gets the biggest piece of the pie. It’s rather like a giant game of Hungry Hungry Hippos where the taxpayers feed the trough, and their elected officials are the hippos eagerly gulping down as many marbles of largess as they can. That’s how the game is played. That’s the way the system is designed. Until it’s changed, there is little that can be or will be effective in changing the spending behavior of our congressmen.

Considering the above, would Jeff Flake have been a better choice for the Appropriations Committee? Of course! But with so many marbles rolling around the Congressional trough, how likely is it that someone against manning the hippos will be given control of the game? I guess another way of saying this is that pork-barrel spending is not a personnel problem, it’s s structural problem. Change the structure, and then you’ll be able to solve the problem.

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Sen. Arlen Specter says so. Though, why the US Senate is investigating the NFL about this is beyond me. I’m willing to forgo that discussion because the Patriots are evil. Evil cheaters! I’m just glad the country doesn’t have more pressing problems, so the Senator has the extra time on his schedule to investigate them.

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-goodell-specter&prov=ap&type=lgns

Bill Belichick has been illegally taping opponents’ defensive signals since he became the New England Patriots’ coach in 2000, according to Sen. Arlen Specter, who said NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told him that during a meeting Wednesday.

And in case you were wondering the following pictures show what a 9mm Jacketed Hollowpoint does to the book “Patriot Reign: Bill Belichick, the Coaches, and the Players Who Built a Champion”

Why would I do that, because a fellow Colts fan asked me to do it…

And because shooting inanimate objects is fun (as long as it is also legal.)

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I seem to have caused some confusion with my previous post, “Putting the Question to the Bishop,” by an inartful use of the term “small-government libertarian.” The more I think about, the clearer it becomes to me that this term is redundant — libertarians are, by definition, in favor of small government. To me, the term has always been a way to distinguish between the minarchist (such as Hayek or Friedman styled libertarians) and anarcho-capitalist (such as fans of Murray Rothbard or Robert Nozick) flavors of libertarianism. Minarchists find value in some minimal level of government, whereas anarcho-capitalists are usually anti-state in nearly every form. However, when the term “small-government libertarian” is used in any other context it just becomes confusing. Frankly, I was simply wrong to employ it the way I did.

The intended point of my previous post was to highlight the choice being forced on the Democratic Party by the netroots crowd — those who support the war vs. those who don’t — and to suggest an alternate choice: the anti-war left vs. the pro-small government electorate. The choice I envision does not involve the war, but instead hinges on how one views the State. Of course, anti-war views are well represented amongst those who prefer small government, and that’s fine. A good argument can (and has been) made that if Congress and the Executive branches were filled with small-government types, there would be no War in Iraq. But, in my view, the Democratic Party needs to focus less on netroots voters who would hold their support of the war against them, and more on voters who are (justifiably) wary of the Democrats’ propensity for big government. The latter have been abandoned by the Republican Party. If the Democrats decided to occupy that small-government ground that the Republicans vacated, such small-government voters could easily be swayed to vote Democratic.

In short, instead of “small-government libertarian” I should have simply said “small-government voters.” My underlying premise is this: as the two major parties continue to cater their policies of governance to increasingly smaller and divisive, albeit increasingly more vocal, special interest groups, they are creating an ever-growing swath of independent voters.

If you think about it, don’t you hear more and more people claiming to be libertarians today, despite their seemingly disparate views? I surely do. I believe this is the natural result of the Democrats and Republicans being more concerned with single-issue voters (e.g., pro-choice vs. pro-life; homosexual rights vs. anti-gay marriage; anti-war vs. pro-strong defense; etc.), than with broad policy measures. Eventually all you have left are moneyed special-interests who promise to get out the vote. Left in the wake of this rush to divvy up the battleground into pro and anti groups are those who feel the government is foisting itself too much on ordinary citizens. Most people just want to be left alone, even though they gladly take free goodies when they are a member of a favored interest group (which is, of course, quite rational). In my opinion, a significant number of voters are out there who will choose small-government policies over single-issue candidates (such as pro-defense/anti-war). I only wish one of the two parties would act on that.

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