Finding the Words to Say Goodbye (or Not)

I spent time with my dad when he was in a hospice in 2004, and he died there on December 20th of that year. We never had a final "goodbye" conversion. I new he was near the end, although I thought I'd have a chance to go visit him again. But I got the call from the social worker saying he'd passed. Weird, that. It wasn't my sister who called me. It was his social worker.

Anyway, my advice is not to wait too long to say goodbyes if you think things are coming to the end for a loved one. But some people don't even tell their friends and family that they're dying.

See this piece at the New York Times, "Exit Lines."

Woman Charged With Hate-Crime in Queens Subway-Push Murder

She hadn't been charged at the time of my earlier report, "Thirty-One Year Old Homeless Woman in Custody in Queens Subway-Push Death."

But now the New York Times reports, "Woman Accused of Hate-Crime Murder in Subway Push."

Robert Stacy McCain relates this story to the left's depraved gun control exploitation, "New York City Needs Subway Control."

And the sickening ghouls of the radical left fever swamps bubbled up to blame Pamela Geller for the murder, "WOMAN CHARGED WITH MURDER IN NY SUBWAY SHOVE DEATH, CLAIMS 9/11/01 WAS HER MOTIVE." (Via Memeorandum.)

It never ends with these scumbags.

Piers Morgan Threatens to Self-Deport

My dad always had guns in the house, most memorably a WWII-era M1 carbine, with a small-capacity clip kept in his top dresser drawer in the master bedroom. And he was a die-hard Cold War Democrat. He's gone now, but I doubt he'd be pleased with the left's ignominious child-death exploitation and its depraved push for extreme gun control measures. In his last few years, when he was in his 80's and 90's, my dad kept a small handgun on the pillow next to him while he slept. He had it just sitting right there. He felt safer with it.

Anyway, I'm just thinking about this while reading Piers Morgan's commentary at London's Daily Mail, "Deport me? If America won't change its crazy gun laws... I may deport myself says Piers Morgan" (at Memeorandum):

I have fired guns only once in my life, on a stag party to the Czech capital Prague a few years ago when part of the itinerary included a trip to an indoor shooting range. For three hours, our group were let loose on everything from Magnum 45 handguns and Glock pistols, to high-powered ‘sniper’ rifles and pump-action shotguns.

It was controlled, legal, safe and undeniably exciting. But it also showed me, quite demonstrably, that guns are killing machines.

Rarely has the hideous effect of a gun been more acutely laid bare than at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, two weeks ago – when a deranged young man called Adam Lanza murdered 20 schoolchildren aged six and seven, as well as six adults, in a sickening rampage.

He gets all whiney and admits that losing his cool with gun rights advocate Larry Pratt triggered the massive public relations campaign against him. Boo hoo. What a freakin' baby. A baby who wants to confiscate guns:

President Obama seems to agree it’s time for action. After four years of doing precisely nothing about gun control in America, he finally snapped after Sandy Hook and said he’s keen to pursue a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. And he wants a closure of the absurd loopholes that mean 40 per cent of all gun sales in America currently have no background checks whatsoever – meaning any crackpot or criminal can get their hands on whatever they want.

These measures, which will be resisted every step of the way, won’t stop all gun crime. Nor all mass shootings. There are too many guns out there, and too many criminals and mentally deranged people keen to use them. But the measures will at least make a start. And they will signal an intent to tackle this deadly scourge on American life.

Obama should follow up by launching a Government buy-back for all existing assault weapons in circulation (as worked successfully in Los Angeles last week). I would go further, confiscating the rest and enforcing tough prison sentences on those who still insist on keeping one.

Either you ban these assault weapons completely, and really mean it, or you don’t.

It won't be just "assault" weapons, but progressives won't tell you that.

Continue reading.

At the essay's last line Morgan declares that he'd consider deporting himself if the laws don't change to reflect his decidedly un-American outlook.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out, brother.

BONUS: A must-see entry at This Ain't Hell, "OK, CNN, you’re disqualified from the gun discussion."

UPDATE: EBL links, "Remember Piers Morgan is laughing all the way to the bank by making money off the blood of children." Thanks!

Laws Are for Little People

From Mark Steyn, at National Review (at Memeorandum):

A week ago on NBC’s Meet the Press, David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double issue of Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.

It's classic Steyn. More at the link.

And commenting is AoSHQ:

Does Howard Kurtz embrace that understanding of gun laws? Does Glenn Thrush? Do the various other know-nothings in the media -- who know both nothing about law and nothing about guns, but opine with great force and velocity on gun laws -- embrace this conception of gun laws, that gun laws should never target simple possession but only possession during the commission of a crime or possession with intent to commit a crime?

If not -- if they are less the right-wing gun nut than Ted Nugent (and even the Nuge might find this position too "extremist" for his taste -- then they are duty-bound to demand David Gregory's prosecution, as they would demand that any other Citizen Not On Television would be prosecuted.

They are endeavoring to explicitly create a High Caste with greater privileges than the lower castes, and immunities to the laws the lower castes suffer under, and that is a blood anathema to any real American -- and will be treated as such.

Also at Althouse, Ed Driscoll, Jawa Report, and Twitchy.

The Fiscal Cliff and Congressional Dysfunction

From David Boaz, at Cato:

Annual federal spending rose by a trillion dollars when Republicans controlled the government from 2001 to 2007. It has risen another trillion during the Bush-Obama response to the financial crisis. So spending every year is now twice what it was when Bill Clinton left office, and the national debt is three times as high. Republicans and Democrats alike should be able to find wasteful, extravagant, and unnecessary programs to cut back or eliminate. And yet many voters, especially Tea Partiers, know that both parties have been responsible. Most Republicans, including today’s House leaders, voted for the No Child Left Behind Act, the Iraq war, the prescription drug entitlement, and the TARP bailout during the Bush years. That’s why fiscal conservatives should look very skeptically at the “fiscal cliff” and “grand bargain” proposals, most of which promise to cut spending some day—not this year, not next year, but swear to God some time in the next 10 years. As the White Queen said to Alice, ”Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.” Cuts tomorrow and cuts in the out-years—but never cuts today.

If the “dysfunctional” fight that has sent us to the edge of the fiscal cliff finally results in some constraint on out-of-control spending, then it will have been well worth all the hand-wringing headlines. But that doesn’t seem likely. The problem is not a temporary mess on Capitol Hill and not a mythical default; it’s spending, deficits, and debt.

The entire political class is the problem, but again, the first order of business is getting the Democrats out of power.

The Los Feliz Eatery

A restaurant feature, at the Los Angeles Times, "Counter Intelligence: Storefront Deli in Los Feliz":

Have you ever had the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich at the new Storefront Deli in Los Feliz? Because that sandwich, less made from scratch than reverse-engineered from a meat lover's fondest late-summer daydreams, is at the heart of one of the strongest culinary movements in the country at the moment: the radical reinvention of everyday dishes by deconstructing them and rebuilding them to the tiniest detail.

Stop. My mouth is watering already. Sheesh.

I could go for a corned beef on rye right now, come to think of it. Yum!

'If you are not illiterate, you can use civilization, monarchy, dominance, correspond, emphasize, opposition, chlorine, commotion, medicinal, irresponsible, and succession in one sentence...'

Via Mellow Jihadi:

Too Much Wishful Thinking on Middle-Class Tax Rates

From Greg Mankiw, at the New York Times, "Wishful Thinking and Middle-Class Taxes":

IN the continuing fiscal negotiations between President Obama and House Republicans, both sides have, from the very beginning, agreed on one point: Taxes on the middle class must not rise. But maybe it’s time to reconsider this premise. An unwavering commitment to keep middle-class taxes low could be one reason the political process has become so deeply dysfunctional.

Let’s start with the problem: the budget deficit. Under current policy, the federal government is spending vastly more than it is collecting in tax revenue. And that will be true for the next several decades, thanks largely to the growth in entitlement spending that will occur automatically as the population ages and health care costs increase. As a result, the ratio of government debt to the nation’s gross domestic product is projected to rise, substantially and without an end in sight.

That can happen for a while, or even a long while, but not forever. At some point, investors at home and abroad will start questioning our ability to service our debts without creating steep inflation. It’s hard to say precisely when this shift in investor sentiment will occur, and even whether it will strike in this president’s term or the next, but when it does, it won’t be pretty. The United States will find itself at the brink of an unprecedented financial crisis.

Republicans and Democrats agree on the nature of the problem, but they embrace very different solutions. My fear is that both sides are engaged in an excess of wishful thinking, with a dash of mendacity.

If Republicans had their way, they would focus the entire solution on the spending side. They say that reform of the entitlement programs can reduce their cost. The so-called premium-support plan for Medicare, from Paul D. Ryan, the 2012 Republican vice-presidential candidate, would let older Americans use their health care dollars to buy insurance from competing private plans. (Interestingly, it’s similar to the system envisioned for the nonelderly by President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.) The hope is that competition and choice would keep health care costs down without sacrificing quality.

The premium-support model may well be better than the current Medicare system, but its supporters oversell what it would be likely to accomplish. The primary driver of increasing health care costs over time is new technology, which extends and improves the quality of life, but often at high cost. Unless the pace or nature of medical innovation changes, this trend is likely to continue, regardless of structural reforms we enact for Medicare.

Democrats, meanwhile, want to preserve the social safety net pretty much as is. They balk at any attempt to reduce this spending, including even modest changes like altering the price index used to calculate Social Security benefits. They focus their attention on raising taxes on the most financially successful Americans, contending that the rich are not paying their “fair share.”

Fairness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Unfortunately, people’s judgment is often based on anecdotes that distort rather than illuminate. The story of the undertaxed Warren Buffett and his overtaxed secretary looms larger in the public’s mind than it should.

Here are some facts, so you can judge for yourself....

Even if President Obama wins all the tax increases on the rich that he is asking for, the long-term fiscal picture will still look grim. Perhaps we can stabilize the situation for a few years just by taxing the rich, but as greater numbers of baby boomers retire and start collecting Social Security and Medicare, more will need to be done.

Continue reading (via Memeorandum).

RELATED: I'm for shrinking government, so this is the bottom line for me, at The Lonely Conservative, "People Should Pay For the Government They Voted For." Raise taxes. Go over the cliff.  I guarantee you that Obama won't get off cost-free. The real cost of the election will start biting people in the ass.

Thirty-One Year Old Homeless Woman in Custody in Queens Subway-Push Death

At the New York Post, "Cops nab suspect in Queens subway-push death":

A suspect in the subway-pushing death of a Queens immigrant is in custody, police said.

Cops picked up a 31-year-old homeless woman in Brooklyn early this morning after spotting her wearing the same jacket seen in surveillance video the night that Sunando Sen, 46, was fatally shoved into the path of the 7 train at the elevated 40th Street-Lowery stop in Sunnyside, law-enforcement sources said.

The woman, who has not been charged yet, was grabbed around 5 a.m. on the corner of Empire Boulevard and Bedford Avenue in Crown Heights, the sources said.
The incoherent suspect was mumbling as cops questioned her, and at one point asked where the R train was, the sources added.

Her relatives called cops last night after seeing her on the news, law-enforcement sources said.

More at that top link.

'I think the idea is to enjoy life to its fullest...'

Johnny Rotten on death and mourning.

RELATED: "John Lydon Says 'Sons of Norway' Film Quashes Idea that 'Punk Is All Negative'."

Honda Z

This old Honda's been at the dealership in Huntington Beach for awhile now, so I finally took some pictures when I went back in this week to get a new battery for the Odyssey.

Called a "Z 600" commonly, it's technically an AZ 600, probably a 1972 (check Wikipedia for the background). This one had up-to-date vehicle registration until 2010:

MORE: "1972 Honda AZ 600 coupe" and "Honda 600 Source."

Consitutional Checks on Mob Rule

I was re-reading Federalist No. 10 and No. 51 the other day.

I think it was this post at Maggie's Farm that got me going, "Crawled out of a snowbank":

American exceptionalism contains the notion that government is a necessary evil, requiring containment and strict limitations by a virtuous people and a muscular Constitution to handcuff the state. The state is the enemy of individual freedom. GW: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

RTWT at the link.

Fiscal Cliff: $536 Billion Tax Hikes Over the Edge; Recession Risk

At IBD, "Fiscal Cliff: $536 Billion In Tax Hikes Over the Edge":

Even for those who aren't afraid of heights, peering over the fiscal cliff may be dizzying. The plunge in after-tax income that would occur in a worst-case scenario likely would put the economy back in a deep recession.

Yet a peek over the edge now seems unavoidable, at least according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

"It looks like that's where we're headed," Reid said in a Senate floor speech on Thursday.

So here's what the view looks like. The fiscal cliff is composed of $536 billion in 2013 tax hikes, the Tax Policy Center says.

The biggest tax hikes would be an end to President Bush's 2001 and 2003 income and investment tax cuts and President Obama's 2 percentage point payroll tax cut.

But that's just the beginning. Nearly 90% of households would face an average tax increase close to $3,500.

The fiscal cliff also would trigger roughly $115 billion in automatic spending cuts.

More at the link.

And at Instapundit, "COMMENT OF THE DAY":

“For ten years we have been told that the Bush tax cuts applied mostly to the rich. Now it is imperative that we extend them further or the middle class is going to take a big hit.”

Progressives suck.

Germans Say Afghan Forces Unready for West's Withdrawal

At Der Spiegel, "Ineffective and Unsustainable: Failure Threatens Afghan Police Training Mission":

German officials have been training police in Afghanistan for a decade, but a visit to their training center in Mazar-e-Sharif creates major doubts about the effectiveness of the mission. Afghan police remain poorly prepared to tackle the mighty challenges they will face as Western forces withdraw.

The Afghan national sport is called buzkashi. It's a game in which horsemen battle over a goat carcass. There are no established teams.

During a match, the competitors forge brief, continuously shifting alliances. They only work together until they have gained a short-term advantage. The game can last for hours, even days. The winner is the rider who manages to carry the carcass to the goal. Buzkashi is a mirror of Afghan society.
By contrast, the German police officers who train local recruits in Afghanistan have brought soccer balls and nets to their base in Mazar-e-Sharif. Football is all about teamwork and team spirit. The goal is to form a team and achieve an objective together.

In a corner of the training center, on a patch of parched earth, there is now a soccer field where the next generation of Afghan police officers is learning the game.

"What we want to achieve with the recruits is a change in mentality," says a German instructor. More team spirit, a better sense of community, more loyalty. More soccer, less buzkashi.

Over the past 10 years, Germany has instructed some 56,000 Afghan police officers at four training centers in the region. The training is part of Germany's responsibility as a member of NATO, and so far the project has cost some €380 million ($503 million). As many as 200 German police officers are regularly stationed in Afghanistan, most of them in Mazar-e-Sharif.

But anyone who accompanies the German security aid workers for a few days is bound to doubt the mission's effectiveness after observing the mood among the officers and reading between the lines of official statements. Even now, when Western security forces have entered their 11th year of training, the police in Afghanistan don't stand for public order and security -- but rather for helplessness, arbitrariness and corruption.

Oh boy.

This won't be good, as I reported on Thursday: "An Uneasy Separation in Afghanistan."

In any case, an interesting role the Germans have played as part of the NATO contingent. Continue reading at the link.

Senate Leaders to Work on Agreement

At LAT, "Obama 'modestly optimistic' that 'fiscal cliff' can be avoided":

WASHINGTON – President Obama said he was “modestly optimistic” that Senate leaders could reach an agreement to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, but he said that if the effort fails, he’ll demand a vote on his basic proposal to protect middle-class taxpayers from seeing their taxes rise.

Speaking to reporters in the White House on Friday evening, a stern Obama tried to ramp up the pressure on lawmakers as they cobble together a deal before a potentially growth-crippling combination of tax increases and spending cuts take effect in the new year.

“The hour for immediate action is here. It is now,” Obama said.

Obama spoke shortly after meeting with top congressional leaders at the White House, during which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) agreed try to come up with a proposal before the Dec. 31 deadline.

The president called the meeting “good and constructive” and suggested there was still time to reach a compromise. But if lawmakers failed to find common ground, Obama said, he has asked Reid to bring up a vote on a scaled-back version of his original proposal.

“If members of House or the Senate want to vote no, they can,” Obama said. “But we should let everybody vote. That’s the way this is supposed to work.”

Lots more at Memeorandum.

Obama's Zero-Sum Universe

From P.J. O'Rourke, at the Wall Street Journal, "Dear Mr. President, Zero-Sum Doesn't Add Up":

Given that hypocrisy is an important part of diplomacy, and diplomacy is necessary to foreign policy, allow me to congratulate you on winning a second term.

I wish I could also congratulate you on your conduct of international affairs. I do thank you for killing Osama bin Laden. It was a creditable action for which you deserve some of the credit you've been given. Of course the intelligence was gathered, and the mission was undertaken, by men and women who, although they answer to your command, answer to duty first. And it is difficult to imagine any president of the United States who, under the circumstances, wouldn't have ordered the strike against bin Laden. Although there is Jimmy Carter. Thank you for not being Jimmy Carter.

But even though it violates the insincere amity that creates a period of calm following national elections, no thank you for the following, and it is only a partial list...

Continue reading.

In Ireland, Carbon Taxes Demonstrate Global Left's Radical Environmentalism in Action

This is a mind-boggling story, particularly since it's like a Twilight Zone preview of our Dystopian future, at the New York Times, "Carbon Taxes Make Ireland Even Greener":

DUBLIN — Over the last three years, with its economy in tatters, Ireland embraced a novel strategy to help reduce its staggering deficit: charging households and businesses for the environmental damage they cause.

The government imposed taxes on most of the fossil fuels used by homes, offices, vehicles and farms, based on each fuel’s carbon dioxide emissions, a move that immediately drove up prices for oil, natural gas and kerosene. Household trash is weighed at the curb, and residents are billed for anything that is not being recycled.

The Irish now pay purchase taxes on new cars and yearly registration fees that rise steeply in proportion to the vehicle’s emissions.

Environmentally and economically, the new taxes have delivered results. Long one of Europe’s highest per-capita producers of greenhouse gases, with levels nearing those of the United States, Ireland has seen its emissions drop more than 15 percent since 2008.

Although much of that decline can be attributed to a recession, changes in behavior also played a major role, experts say, noting that the country’s emissions dropped 6.7 percent in 2011 even as the economy grew slightly.

“We are not saints like those Scandinavians — we were lapping up fossil fuels, buying bigger cars and homes, very American,” said Eamon Ryan, who was Ireland’s energy minister from 2007 to 2011. “We just set up a price signal that raised significant revenue and changed behavior. Now, we’re smashing through the environmental targets we set for ourselves.”

By contrast, carbon taxes are viewed as politically toxic in the United States. Republican leaders in Congress have pledged to block any proposal for such a tax, and President Obama has not advocated one, although the idea has drawn support from economists of varying ideologies.

Of course they're politically toxic. Can political elites be more stupid?

It turns out that all is not well in Ireland:

Not everyone is happy. The prices of basic commodities like gasoline and heating oil have risen 5 to 10 percent. This is particularly hard on the poor, although the government has provided subsidies for low-income families to better insulate homes, for example. And industries complain that the higher prices have made it harder for them to compete outside Ireland.

“Prices just keep going up, and a lot of people think it’s a scam,” said Imelda Lyons, 45, as she filled her car at a gas station here. “You call it a carbon tax, but what good is being done with it to help the environment?”

The coalition government that enacted the taxes was voted out of office last year. “Just imagine President Obama saying in the debate, ‘I’ve got this great idea, but it’s going to increase your gasoline price,’ ” said Mr. Ryan, who lost his seat in the last election and now leads the Green Party. “People didn’t exactly cheer us on.”

Keep reading.

Taxes are added by as much as 36 percent of a car's market price at the point of sale, factored into the sticker price. And additional taxes are billed directly to drivers, often adding thousands of dollars to annual vehicle operating costs. And because people at lower incomes are less able to afford newer cars with all the latest "green" technologies, the tax system is heavily regressive. But read the whole thing. You can bet Ireland's experience will be touted as a model for radical environmentalists here at home, and folks in Washington (the progressive political class) have been talking about all kinds of alternative taxes systems, such as value added systems. Unless Americans start turning back toward freedom and free markets, such schemes will be increasingly a part of our lives as well, with the least well-off bearing the brunt of the impoverishment and with our overall standard of living imperiled.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio Deploying 'Armed Posse' to Schools

At Fox News, "Arizona Sheriff Arpaio: Armed Volunteer Posse Should Guard Schools."

Video Credit: Nice Deb, "Sheriff Arpaio to Deploy Armed Posse to Guard Phoenix Schools (Video)."

Fiscal Cliff Reveals Long-Term Partisan Divide

Following up on my report yesterday, "America's Crisis of Big Government Cronyism and Corruption."

Here's Ronald Brownstein, at National Journal, "The Fiscal Cliff's Greatest Threat Is to American Unity":

The real issue in the frantic final flailing over the fiscal cliff isn’t whether Washington can balance its books. It’s whether blue America and red America are capable of, or even interested in, mediating their differences. The evidence is growing more discouraging.

Across almost every front, the process of pulling apart that has reshaped the political landscape over the past generation appears to be accelerating.

At the national level, President Obama and Mitt Romney mobilized almost mirror-image coalitions. Over 40 percent of Obama’s votes came from minorities; nearly 90 percent of Romney’s votes came from whites. Obama won three-fifths of voters under 30; Romney won more than three-fifths of white seniors.

Compared with Democrats, Republicans since the 1980s have been a more ideologically homogenous party that is more resistant to compromise—as last week’s rejection of House Speaker John Boehner’s fiscal “Plan B” demonstrated. (Electoral incentives help explain that imbalance: Because self-identified conservatives outnumber liberals among voters, Democrats in most places need to carry more moderates to win than Republicans do, and that creates greater pressure on Democrats to compromise.) But after an election in which Obama won despite historic deficits among the blue-collar and older whites that once anchored the conservative end of his party’s coalition, ideological cohesion is rising among Democrats too.

Consider the profile of Obama and Romney voters that Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz traces in an upcoming paper. In the Election Day exit poll, three-fourths of Obama voters said that government should be doing more to solve problems, while over four-fifths of Romney voters said that it is already doing too much. More than four-fifths of Obama voters wanted to maintain or expand his health care law, while nearly nine-in-10 Romney voters backed its repeal. Three times as many Obama voters as Romney voters supported legalizing gay marriage.

This same pulling apart is evident in the states. Eighteen states—what I’ve called the “blue wall”—have voted Democratic in at least the past six presidential elections. After November’s ballot victories in Maine, Maryland, and Washington, seven of them have now authorized gay marriage and six others have approved civil unions or broad domestic partnership rights for same-sex couples. Depending on how legislative or court fights unfold, it’s conceivable that California and New Jersey, two blue-wall states, could approve same-sex-marriage ballot initiatives by 2016. Meanwhile, virtually every Republican-leaning state has barred gay marriage.

Similarly, 14 governors have agreed to join the expansion of Medicaid that represents one pillar of the Obama plan to cover the uninsured; Nevada’s Brian Sandoval is the only Republican among them. Almost all Republican governors also let the deadline pass earlier this month without establishing the online exchanges that comprise the other big coverage expansion. Even after Obama’s victory eliminated the possibility that his health reform bill would be repealed, Republican governors are continuing what amounts to a sit-down strike against it.

This centrifugal tendency is now embedded in Congress’s DNA. As split-ticket voting has declined, fewer legislators in each party are elected, in effect, behind enemy lines (by voters who usually prefer the other party for the White House).

Michael Franc, vice president for government studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, correctly observes that because of that dynamic, during a confrontation like the fiscal cliff, most legislators are more likely to face demands to stand firm than complaints about inflexibility. “When everybody goes back home, I don’t think they are feeling the heat from their constituents” for failing to reach agreement, Franc says. “If anything, they are hearing the opposite. So ... there’s no rational political incentive to back down.”

There's more at that top link. Brownstein concludes by lamenting the nation's "fraying sense of common purpose." Actually, that's not what the data are telling us. All those constituents back home in the red districts don't want America moving further into the socialist orbit, becoming a Sweden, or worse, a Cuba. The Democrats cling to power with a coalition of dependents. The Democrats welcome all manner of hard-line socialists and collectivists into their midst. And the president himself leads the morally bankrupt intransigence in government. It's all about punishing the successful demographics in the name of fairness. Screw these people. Republicans need to stay strong against the onslaught.

PHOTO: The White House Flickr page.

Homeless Woman Set on fire at Van Nuys Bus Stop

She's in critical condition.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Police identify suspect in attack on homeless woman in Van Nuys," and "Suspect in homeless woman's burning is mentally ill, police say."

The mental illness thing's a ruse. This is an unspeakable crime. When chased by witnesses the suspect pulled a knife.

Deportee Returns to the United States After More Than Year in Mexico

I have nothing to add on this one. The Times just makes heroic the illegals flooding over our borders.

See, "A risky return to the U.S.":

Luis Luna returned to his hometown of South Gate in May. His arms and legs were scraped raw from cactus needles and his eyes kept blinking, still starved of moisture from his eight-day journey through the Arizona desert the week before.

His friend, Julio Cortez, said it was hard to believe that this gaunt young man with patches of missing hair was the same person he knew at Southeast Middle School.

"I was in shock to see him back and see all he had gone through," Cortez said. "It made me sad and angry."

Cortez, a 22-year-old Cal State Long Beach student, took Luis to buy some clothes. Another former classmate gave Luis a cellphone. Luis slept on couches and in spare bedrooms and spent his days passing out resumes filled with the jobs of his teen years: flipping burgers, waiting tables at I-Hop. He fudged the dates to account for the 15 months he spent in Mexico after he was deported for being in the country illegally.

Luis had been pulled over three years ago for a broken headlight in Pasco, Wash., where he and his mother lived. He was cited for driving without a license, jailed and ordered out of the country in February 2011.

He had a wife back in Washington, but she had left him, in part because of the long separation. Luis decided to build a new life in Southern California, where he had grown up and where he still had friends

Weeks after arriving, he was still jobless and borrowing money to eat when he decided his future might lie in his past. He started retracing the route he took as a boy selling chocolates at warehouses and factories. The assembly line workers, truck drivers and managers knew him as Anthony, the name his mother told him to use to hide his identity.

They could vouch for his strong work ethic — that he'd been working for a living since he was 5 years old.

He eventually found the barrilero job, and a place to live. A swap meet vendor who picked through the bins of cast-offs looking for vintage garments told Luis he had extra space at his house.

Luis goes home to a converted two-car garage with no address in a middle-class neighborhood with trim lawns and streets lined with late-model cars. Much of his clothing is stuffed in a battered dark green suitcase that sits at the foot of his bed. The only other furniture is a mini refrigerator and two lawn chairs.

In some ways, he's a typical youngster with edgy tastes. He has a sleeve tattoo, wears skinny jeans and earrings, and is part of a deejay crew that plays at house parties. He cheers his beloved Los Angeles Lakers and hangs out in hookah bars, and is constantly texting flirty messages.

But his future is dimmer than most. Many of his friends are planning for life after college. Some are applying for work permits and temporary reprieves from deportation, taking advantage of an Obama administration program, announced in June, to help young people who were brought into the country as children.

Continue reading.

The Obama administration's "program."

Yeah, illegal immigrant voter registration program. Again, another massive fraud on our supposed system of rule of law. The Democrats certainly don't care.

That's all.

Gun-Grabbing Democrats Exploit Tragedy to Push Radical Agenda

A great segment from Hannity's last night:

Stay with that video until the 6:00 minute mark or so, with the brutal discussion of Sam Donaldson and the progressive elite.

Also at Power Line, "Democrats Seek the Holy Grail of Gun Control." (Via Memeorandum.)

Fiscal Cliff Talks Down to the Wire

At the clip, Charles Krauthammer praises Obama for his "ruthless" partisanship.

And at the Wall Street Journal, "Both Sides to Meet at White House; Any Deal Likely to Be Limited":

Congress and the White House took small steps toward breaking the budget impasse Thursday, but Democrats and Republicans grew increasingly fearful they won't be able to avert the tax increases and spending cuts known as the fiscal cliff, a prospect that is unnerving consumers and investors.

President Barack Obama invited congressional leaders to the White House on Friday afternoon for a last-ditch effort to broker a deal, as the Senate returned to Washington on Thursday. House GOP leaders said in a Thursday conference call with Republicans, who are growing nervous about their party being blamed for the deadlock, that the House will reconvene Sunday evening.

It is still possible the two sides can reach a deal, especially with the leaders meeting Friday. Any resolution would be a scaled-back version of the package Mr. Obama and congressional leaders had anticipated passing after the November election. The White House is pressing for the Senate to extend current tax rates for income up to $250,000, extend unemployment benefits, keep the alternative minimum tax from hitting millions of additional taxpayers and delay spending cuts set to take effect in January.

The 11th-hour strategy carries enormous risk because it leaves no margin for error in Congress's balky legislative machinery. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) said the prospects for passage of a bill before the last day of the year are fading rapidly. "I have to be very honest," he said. "I don't know time-wise how it can happen now."

Anxiety about Washington's ability to resolve its budget battles is roiling the economy. Conference Board figures showed that consumer confidence fell in December to its lowest level since August, driven by a pessimistic outlook for economic activity next year.

Stocks have swung on the latest news from Washington. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply on Mr. Reid's pessimistic comments before recouping most of a 151-point drop on news the House would reconvene this weekend.

At best, leaders are looking at a narrow bill that could be passed at the last minute. At the meeting Friday, Mr. Obama will outline the elements he thinks should be in a deal and could get majority support in both chambers of Congress, according to a person familiar with the matter. He won't put forward a specific bill or legislative language, the person added.

Continue reading.

And at Telegraph UK, "Barack Obama will meet congressional leaders today at the White House for last-minute talks on a "fiscal cliff" deal to avoid automatic tax increases and broad spending cuts that threaten the US economy's recovery."

PREVIOUSLY: "America's Crisis of Big Government Cronyism and Corruption."

The Year the Dreams Died

From Victor Davis Hanson, at National Review (via BCF and Memeorandum):

Barack Obama in 2008 won an election on an upbeat message of change amid hopes that the first black president would mark a redemptive moment in American history. Four years later, the fantasies are gone. In continuing dismal economic times, Obama ran for reelection neither on his first-term achievements — Obamacare, bailouts, financial stimuli, and Keynesian mega-deficits — nor on more utopian promises.

Instead, Obama’s campaign systematically reduced his rival, Wall Street financier Mitt Romney, to a conniving, felonious financial pirate who did dastardly things, from letting the uninsured die to putting his pet dog Seamus in a cage on top of the family car.

Obama once had mused that he wished to be the mirror image of Ronald Reagan — successfully coaxing America to the left as the folksy Reagan had to the right. Instead, 2012 taught us that a calculating Obama is more a canny Richard Nixon, who likewise used any means necessary to be reelected on the premise that his rival would be even worse. But we know what eventually happened to the triumphant, pre-Watergate Nixon after November 1972; what will be the second-term wages of Obama’s winning ugly?

Well, it won't be impeachment, that's for sure. The Democrat-Media Complex has got Barack's back.

Continue reading.

Reason's New Los Angeles Headquarters

This is interesting.

I'd like to go to one of those Reason parties. See: "Check out Reason's New LA Headquarters!"

And a sample from the magazine, featuring Jacob Sullum, "The Rioter’s Veto: Can violence in the Middle East justify censorship in the United States?"

That's also the left's veto. So far the only person arrested or jailed following the Benghazi scandal is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the director of "Innocence of Muslims."

'Into You Like a Train'

This is fascinating.

At the clip, the band's opening their concert with this song, just like they opened in 1982 when I saw them at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

PREVIOUSLY: "If You Believe That Anyone Like Me Within a Song..."

They were scheduled to play the House of Blues in Anaheim on New Year's Eve, but their tour's been cancelled temporarily due to an injury (singer Richard Butler is recovering from spinal surgery).

Progressives Viciously Attack Deceased Ret. General Norman Schwarzkopf on Twitter

At The Blaze, "Twitter Users Viciously Attack Deceased War Hero Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf: 'Eat Sh*t in Hell for Eternity'."

And then compare the deranged, malevolent leftists to the thoughtful conservatives at Twitchy, "Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf dies in Tampa, Fla., at 78; Remembered as American patriot."

And see the obituary at the New York Times, "Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, US Commander in Gulf War, Dies at 78." (Via Memeorandum.)

Death come in threes sometimes, although knock on wood considering former President George H.W. Bush, who sent Schwarzkopf into battle. At the Los Angeles Times, "Officials mute on George H.W. Bush's condition, cite family privacy."

Holiday Rule 5

Via Theo Spark, "Bedtime Totty..."

Also, "Bonus Totty..."

Also at El Opinador Compusivo, "You Gotta Look Sharp," and "Topless Christmas."

More at Dustbury, "Paloma Herrera."

And from Daley Gator, "Gena Lee Nolin."

Now at Randy's Roundtable, "Thursday Nite Tart: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders."

Also at Knuckledragging, "a.k.a. Skull Cracker."

And the Last Tradition, "Rule 5 Sunday – Belinda Lee, Voluptuous Temptress of British and Italian Films of 1950s."

And Soylent Green, "Adrienne Overnight."

More at the Pirate's Cove, "If All You See ... is wine which could become extinct because someone (else) charged their iPhone, you might just be a Warmist." And "If All You See ... is evil CO2 infused beer, you might just be a Warmist."

Also from Reaganite, "Highlights from Miss Universe 2012."

And at Linkiest, "Maxim: Girls of the UFC."

BONUS: At TrogloPundit, "Why does the Pentagon average 666 rolls of toilet paper a day?"

That's it for now. If you've been left off just add your links in the comments and I'll update. This is an art more than a science. Cheers.

Looking Great! Jessica Simpson Posts Revealing Photo on Twitter Days After Confirming She's Expecting Second Child

I don't know.

Perhaps she's looking to generate a little media buzz after all the latest news on the extension of her Weight Watchers' gig. Either way, who's complaining?

At US Weekly, "Jessica Simpson Flashes Major Cleavage, Toned Legs in Revealing Twitter Picture" (via WeSmirch).

She's a big, curvy woman. Very happy as well.

More on Twitter.

PREVIOUSLY: "Weight Watchers Extends Endorsement Deal With Jessica Simpson."

Women Pose With Assault Rifles They Got For Christmas

At Instapundit, "A HEARTWARMING PHOTO GALLERY."

America's Crisis of Big Government Cronyism and Corruption

The January/February issue of Foreign Affairs is now available online. I just finished reading Fareed Zakaria's marquee essay, "Can America Be Fixed? The New Crisis of Democracy." While I disagree little on the problems we face, I differ substantially on the remedies he identifies. (And my respect for the man has plummeted over the years amid his increasingly predictable progressive sensibilities, but especially of late because of the allegations against him this year of plagiarism, for which he acknowledged and apologized for publicly, with permanent damage to his reputation.)

The article is gated but a quick summary and block quotes are sufficient for the purposes here. Zakaria sees the fiscal cliff stalemate as a signal of our political immobility. The gridlock we're facing means that the political establishment once again is delaying needed reforms on some of the biggest problems facing the country, most notably for Zakaria infrastructure and entitlements. The fatal flaw of the piece is that Zakaria's a hopeless advocate for expanding the size and scope of government. He actually offers an excellent discussion of the entitlement problem, but he refuses to see any role for markets and for the possibility of scaling back government commitments. His biggest problem is on infrastructure. Again, while he puts his finger on the problem quite deftly, he ignores some facts that make his case problematic --- one of the biggest being the fact that the U.S. spent nearly $1 trillion in "infrastructure" and "investment" in the Obama administration's 2009 stimulus legislation, and the country has virtually nothing to show for it in terms of long-term economic growth. Indeed, the administration's stimulus was a crony capitalist boondoggle that will likely be repeated again and again if the so-called investments Zakaria proposes are to indeed become public policy. In any case, some key block quotes. Here's a bit on the problems identified in the paper:

As the United States continues its slow but steady recovery from the depths of the financial crisis, nobody actually wants a massive austerity package to shock the economy back into recession, and so the odds have always been high that the game of budgetary chicken will stop short of disaster. Looming past the cliff, however, is a deep chasm that poses a much greater challenge -- the retooling of the country's economy, society, and government necessary for the United States to perform effectively in the twenty-first century. The focus in Washington now is on taxing and cutting; it should be on reforming and investing. The United States needs serious change in its fiscal, entitlement, infrastructure, immigration, and education policies, among others. And yet a polarized and often paralyzed Washington has pushed dealing with these problems off into the future, which will only make them more difficult and expensive to solve....

Is there a new crisis of democracy? Certainly, the American public seems to think so. Anger with politicians and institutions of government is much greater than it was in 1975. According to American National Election Studies polls, in 1964, 76 percent of Americans agreed with the statement "You can trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time." By the late 1970s, that number had dropped to the high 40s. In 2008, it was 30 percent. In January 2010, it had fallen to 19 percent.

Commentators are prone to seeing the challenges of the moment in unnecessarily apocalyptic terms. It is possible that these problems, too, will pass, that the West will muddle through somehow until it faces yet another set of challenges a generation down the road, which will again be described in an overly dramatic fashion. But it is also possible that the public is onto something. The crisis of democracy, from this perspective, never really went away; it was just papered over with temporary solutions and obscured by a series of lucky breaks. Today, the problems have mounted, and yet American democracy is more dysfunctional and commands less authority than ever -- and it has fewer levers to pull in a globalized economy. This time, the pessimists might be right.

And here's the key bit on "infrastructure investment":

If the case for reform is important, the case for investment is more urgent. In its annual study of competitiveness, the World Economic Forum consistently gives the United States poor marks for its tax and regulatory policies, ranking it 76th in 2012, for example, on the "burden of government regulations." But for all its complications, the American economy remains one of the world's most competitive, ranking seventh overall -- only a modest slippage from five years ago. In contrast, the United States has dropped dramatically in its investments in human and physical capital. The WEF ranked American infrastructure fifth in the world a decade ago but now ranks it 25th and falling. The country used to lead the world in percentage of college graduates; it is now ranked 14th. U.S. federal funding for research and development as a percentage of GDP has fallen to half the level it was in 1960 -- while it is rising in countries such as China, Singapore, and South Korea. The public university system in the United States -- once the crown jewel of American public education -- is being gutted by budget cuts.

The modern history of the United States suggests a correlation between investment and growth. In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government spent over five percent of GDP annually on investment, and the economy boomed. Over the last 30 years, the government has been cutting back; federal spending on investment is now around three percent of GDP annually, and growth has been tepid. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence has noted, the United States escaped from the Great Depression not only by spending massively on World War II but also by slashing consumption and ramping up investment. Americans reduced their spending, increased their savings, and purchased war bonds. That boost in public and private investment led to a generation of postwar growth. Another generation of growth will require comparable investments.

The problems of reform and investment come together in the case of infrastructure. In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country's infrastructure a grade of D and calculated that repairing and renovating it would cost $2 trillion. The specific number might be an exaggeration (engineers have a vested interest in the subject), but every study shows what any traveler can plainly see: the United States is falling badly behind. This is partly a matter of crumbling bridges and highways, but it goes well beyond that. The U.S. air traffic control system is outdated and in need of a $25 billion upgrade. The U.S. energy grid is antique, and it malfunctions often enough that many households are acquiring that classic symbol of status in the developing world: a private electrical generator. The country's drinking water is carried through a network of old and leaky pipes, and its cellular and broadband systems are slow compared with those of many other advanced countries. All this translates into slower growth. And if it takes longer to fix, it will cost more, as deferred maintenance usually does.

Spending on infrastructure is hardly a panacea, however, because without careful planning and oversight, it can be inefficient and ineffective. Congress allocates money to infrastructure projects based on politics, not need or bang for the buck. The elegant solution to the problem would be to have a national infrastructure bank that is funded by a combination of government money and private capital. Such a bank would minimize waste and redundancy by having projects chosen by technocrats on merit rather than by politicians for pork. Naturally, this very idea is languishing in Congress, despite some support from prominent figures on both sides of the aisle.

The same is the case with financial reforms: the problem is not a lack of good ideas or technical feasibility but politics. The politicians who sit on the committees overseeing the current alphabet soup of ineffective agencies are happy primarily because they can raise money for their campaigns from the financial industry. The current system works better as a mechanism for campaign fundraising than it does as an instrument for financial oversight.

In 1979, the social scientist Ezra Vogel published a book titled Japan as Number One, predicting a rosy future for the then-rising Asian power. When The Washington Post asked him recently why his prediction had been so far off the mark, he pointed out that the Japanese economy was highly sophisticated and advanced, but, he confessed, he had never anticipated that its political system would seize up the way it did and allow the country to spiral downward.

Vogel was right to note that the problem was politics rather than economics. All the advanced industrial economies have weaknesses, but they also all have considerable strengths, particularly the United States. They have reached a stage of development, however, at which outmoded policies, structures, and practices have to be changed or abandoned. The problem, as the economist Mancur Olson pointed out, is that the existing policies benefit interest groups that zealously protect the status quo. Reform requires governments to assert the national interest over such parochial interests, something that is increasingly difficult to do in a democracy.

Every now and then we see a new story on some collapsed bridge tragedy or massive urban flooding from busted water mains or broken levees, and on cue progressives start wagging their fingers about how we've got to start spending on infrastructure. I don't research this area but my regular reading on the politics of the stimulus isn't very reassuring. The administration's push for "investments" was mostly about the Democrat politics of job creation, and that didn't turn out so well. Conn Carroll has a good example, "$787 Billion in Stimulus, Zero Jobs “Created or Saved”." And while Zakaria's obsessed with government spending as "investmnent," there's little in the record of the last couple years that recommends doubling-down on it. See Romina Boccia, "New Stimulus Plan Same as the Old: Spend, Spend, Spend." And notice while Zakaria minimizes the corruption inherent in "infrastructure" spending as possibly "inefficient and ineffective," the facts of the past few years are devastating to his case. See Veronique de Rugy, "Stimulus Cronyism." And Michelle Malkin, "Obama's $50 Billion Union Infrastructure Boondoggle."

The United States is not some developing country that's going to be eviscerated by "draconian" spending cuts or devastated by some horrible "austerity package" that leaves the poor to fend for themselves. That's Krugmanite scare-mongering. We need to unleash the natural dynamism of the American economy. To put it as plainly as possible: We need robust and sustained economic growth, in the 4 or 5 percent range. We need to increase incentives for private investment. We need to reduce regulations and taxes on business job creators. And we need to rely on the system of federalism to shift real infrastructure investment from the federal to state governments. This isn't rocket science. The solutions to America's economic problems are self-evident. And the political crisis is largely one of a dramatically changed American electoral and political demographic. As the population base of the Democrat Party comes to increasingly favor policies of dependency, the productive, working sectors of the economy are required to bear a heavier load to keep everything afloat. Tea party Republicans, bless them, are resisting higher taxes because they know that'll be more of the same. As noted here yesterday, President Obama's not interested in fixing our politics or avoiding a recession should we go over the fiscal cliff. He's obsessed with punishing the most productive members of society in furtherance of his class warfare agenda of reducing inequality and promoting social justice. As long as we have one party that is objectively uninterested in growing the economy to create a rising tide that lifts all boats we will continue to have a crisis of political immobility. The electorate can fix the problem by choosing a government not fatally infected with cronyism and corruption. Both parties are implicated, although getting the Democrats out of power is the first order of business. We need to restore our faith in liberty and markets and unleash the innate innovation and dynamism of the individual. Our crisis is one of big government. Obama hasn't even been sworn in for a second term and its already clear that the public was duped in November. We must keep on with the hard work of real reform, which is what the tea party has represented, smaller government and fiscal responsibility. Without that we'll continue to stagnate and ultimately perish like the beached whale on the sand at Barbra Streisand's oceanfront estate.

BONUS: Zakaria dismisses the late Samuel Huntington's work in this report from the '70s-era Trilateral Commission: "The Crisis of Democracy." But our prospects for reform would be immeasurably greater if had more voices like Huntington's a less of those like Zakaria's.

ADDED: Linked at Blazing Cat Fur and Lonely Conservative. Thanks!

Rebirth of a Nation: Reflections, Ruminations, and Reactions

What follows are points of praise and criticism of Jackson Lears' Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. I refuse to call this a review because that implies a smooth narrative of reflection. Creating that narrative requires more time than I have today. Plus, that kind of piece isn't needed. This book has been positively reviewed, in narrative form, in a multitude of prominent, top-notch newspapers and magazines. In addition the end pages of Lears' book are littered with quotes of praise from superstars in the history profession: Richard White, Andrew Bacevich, Michael Kazin, Todd Gitlin, and Edward L. Ayers. Finally, as noted on the cover of my paperback copy, Rebirth of a Nation was declared "Best Book of the Year" (2009) by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Although we have discussed Lears and his works at USIH on several occasions, none of us have prominently posted anything on Rebirth of a Nation (it did come up in the comments of one discussion).

So what's left to say? I don't know in an absolute sense. I haven't read all the reviews noted above, but only skimmed them (I loved the last line of Summers' write-up). All I know is what I feel compelled to pass along--to reflect upon. Here's what I have, in bullet point form:

- I love the synthetic nature of the book. Lears blends primary texts with the best analysis from secondary sources accumulated over the past forty to fifty years. Through the latter you see how the progressive building of medium-sized ideas about the era (e.g. force, heroism, manliness, rebirth) come together to, in Richard White's words, change the metaphor. If White is right, neither Wiebe's Search for Order nor Hofstadter's Age of Reform contain the dominant heuristic thought tools for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It's now the capacious idea of rebirth (or regeneration), which has subsumed order and reform in it. Because of this I predict that Rebirth of a Nation will now be required reading in any upper-level undergraduate or graduate course dealing with the post-Reconstruction to World War I era. And if those students attend to to Lears' notes, the book is worth at least half of a graduate education in the fields of social, cultural, and intellectual history. You could add political history to that list if that subfield weren't so neglected. In any case, this book should be on the shelf of every single historian who proclaims to study or teach post-Civil War history. It will reward reference thumbing or close reading.

- If you're in a bad mood, the alliteration and belletristic nature of Lears' writing can become tiresome fairly quickly. I grew tired of it halfway through chapter one. In the second half of the book, however, the alliteration is either toned down or less noticeable. I confess that this is a bit of carping on my part. Perhaps I'm jealous. Then again, I received a lot of criticism for too much alliteration in my early writing, so maybe I'm over-sensitive to the issue. Anyway, when it's not tiring Lears' style makes the work easy to read. This is no small thing in relation to the fact that gender analysis---one of Lears' strengths---is not my primary analytical mode. [Aside: My title is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Lears' alliteration.]

- In my pre-reading of Rebirth (wherein I thoroughly study the TOC, Notes, and Index), I had identified chapter five as the pivotal part of the book. I do not mean, in any way, that chapters one through four are less valuable. All four are absolutely necessary to the story. But chapter five met my expectation of importance. It stirs militarism, violence, market culture, white male supremacy, and urban-rural tensions into a hot cauldron of 1890s crises. In this cauldron, crises were dissolved into a new language of reform, order, and regeneration, manifest in market consumption, the idea of a cooperative commonwealth, and empire. Every major character of the age appears in the chapter: Addams, Adams, Beveridge, Bryan, Burnham, Coxey, Darwin, Debs, Gompers, Herron, James, Morgan, Pullman, Roosevelt, Strong, Twain, and Willard. Lears shows how misunderstandings about Darwin were put to both good and evil uses (p. 204). The introductory discussion of  empire in this chapter (pp. 200-221) is first rate, supplanted only by the contents of chapter seven, titled "Empire as a Way of Life." Lears' discussion of civil religion in the chapter compared favorably, in terms of themes, to the contents of Ray Haberski's God and War---though the later focuses on the post-World War II period and, to my knowledge, doesn't reference Lears.

- In the first 100 pages of the book I became annoyed with Lears' slight tendency to look for the erotic when its presence was questionable (pp. 61, 63, 64). At some point the search says more about the author than the material. Intemperance comes in forms other than sex--e.g. anger, verbal abuse, alcohol, etc.

- Although Lears does not seem highly sympathetic to pragmatism, based on his framing of Randolph Bourne's criticisms of John Dewey later in the book (pp. 237, 344-345), William James is a clear hero in the text. Even if Lears disapproved of James' experimentalist pragmatism (he didn't, p. 225), that disapproval would have been drowned in relation to praise for James' anti-imperialism (pp. 22, 217, 219-220), his capacious spiritualism (pp. 238-239), and his desire to subvert militarism to "more humane" ends (pp. 22, 49, 329-330). Lears' perspective on James corresponds with mine, but I think the reader should know that James is a hero in the text. Despite our agreement and Lears' praise of James, I still think that Lears offers a somewhat shallow reading of James' famous essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1906). I'm not sure that James "idealized war's revitalizing force" as much as he sought to deeply subvert the language of his period (i.e. the discipline, order, and physical fitness inherent in militarism are not exclusive to it). But maybe I need to reread the essay.

This is probably enough for today. I'll gather up more reflections to pass along next week. In the meantime, have you read the book? Do any of your thoughts correspond with mine? - TL

Zero Dark Feinstein

At the Wall Street Journal, "When a Hollywood script is more accurate than Senate Intelligence":

'Zero Dark Thirty," the film from director Kathryn Bigelow that opened this month, is garnering rave reviews for its unblinking portrayal of what it took the United States to track and kill Osama bin Laden. But a trio of Beltway critics are all thumbs down.

They would be Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican Senator John McCain of John McCain. "We write to express our deep disappointment with the movie Zero Dark Thirty," the three wrote in a recent letter to Sony Pictures. "We believe the film is grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden."

You know it's a bad day in America when Hollywood seems to have a better grip on intelligence issues than the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the top two Members at Armed Services. The film depicts the "enhanced interrogation techniques," or EITs, used on the detainees held at the CIA's so-called black sites, and hints that the interrogations provided at least some of the information that led to bin Laden's killing.

What Ms. Bigelow intended by depicting the EITs is not for us to explain: This is an action flick, not a Ken Burns documentary. Yet the mere suggestion that such techniques paid crucial intelligence dividends—as attested by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former CIA Director Michael Hayden, among many others—has sent Mrs. Feinstein and her colleagues into paroxysms of indignation. They even have a 5,000-plus-page study that purports to prove her case.

We say "purports" because, so far, hardly anyone outside the Senate Intelligence Committee has laid eyes on this white whale. The report began four years ago as a largely bipartisan effort to examine the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation programs....

As for the report's methods, we got a taste of them in April when Sens. Feinstein and Levin issued a statement denouncing claims by former senior officer Jose Rodriguez that coercive interrogation techniques were in fact effective.

"CIA did not first learn about the existence of the UBL courier [Ahmed al-Kuwaiti] from detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques," they write in one characteristically slippery passage. Yet there's no small difference between knowing some piece of information and knowing why that piece may be significant.

"In the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, waterboarding produced misinformation," journalist Mark Bowden noted in an interview with the Daily Caller about the hunt for al-Kuwaiti, whose discovery ultimately led the CIA to bin Laden's Abbottabad hideaway. But Mr. Bowden also notes that "in this case the lie, contrasting so sharply with other detainee statements, actually proved helpful."

Mr. Bowden, by the way, is an opponent of coercive interrogations and a sympathetic observer of the Obama Administration who nonetheless can distinguish a moral objection from a practical one....

One day, perhaps, some of our liberal friends will acknowledge that the real world is stuffed with the kinds of hard moral choices that "Zero Dark Thirty" so effectively depicts. Until then, they can bask in the easy certitudes of a report that, whatever it contains, deserves never to be read.

Right. And compare that to the excitable Andrew Sullivan, "The Zero Dark Debate, Ctd."

A Weaker Tea Party?

Here's the headline from yesterday's New York Times front page: "Sidestepping Fiscal Showdown, Weaker Tea Party Narrows Focus."

The main thrust of the piece is to brush off the tea party as an irrelevant "fringe" movement following Obama's reelection and internal divisions among prominent organizations. There are indeed problems, but by no means is the tea party finished as a movement. The congressional elections saw some significant tea party victories and the tea partiers will no doubt have a strong voice in 2013, as their bread-and-butter issues of limited government and fiscal restraint prove more relevant than ever.

Note too that the tea party isn't so much a protest movement any more as it is a political tendency seeking to place activists into positions of power at all levels of government. I love the protests, but that energy has been increasingly channeled into electoral activities and organization. Leslie Eastman comments on that, at Legal Insurrection, "Tea Party tidal surge, not tsunami." And a local example is conservative activist Mike Munzing, who I first met at tea party rallies in 2009. He was elected to the Aliso Viejo City Council in November. A number of other local tea partiers either ran or were elected to the Orange County GOP Central Committee in recent years. Basically, the movement helped generate a mass of activists moving into formal political organizations.

Having said all that, the latest high profile conflicts at FreedomWorks are like catnip to the liberty-haters on the left. The Other McCain has the story with lots of links, "The Bloody Mess at FreedomWorks."

Either way, it's best not fall for the Democrat Media Complex's operation demoralize narrative. Taking back the country will require lots more activists to redouble their efforts at all the forms of grassroots participation. There's going to be ups and downs. Ignore these stupid memes about a "weaker tea party."

China's National People's Congress May Boast More Millionaires and Billionaires Than Any Other Legislative Body on Earth

An amazing piece, at the Wall Street Journal, "Defying Mao, Rich Chinese Crash the Communist Party":

When the Communist Party elite gathered last month to anoint China's new leaders, seven of the nation's richest people occupied coveted seats in Beijing's Great Hall of the People.

Wang Jianlin of Dalian Wanda Group, worth an estimated $10.3 billion and the recent buyer of U.S. cinema chain AMC Entertainment Holdings, took one of the chairs. So did Liang Wengen, with an estimated fortune of $7.3 billion, whose construction-equipment maker Sany Heavy Industry Co. competes with Caterpillar Inc. Zhou Haijiang, a clothing mogul with an estimated $1.3 billion family fortune, also had a seat. As members of the Communist Party Congress, all three had helped endorse the new leadership.

For years the Communist Party in China filled key political and state bodies with loyal servants: proletarian workers, pliant scholars and military officers. Now the door is wide open to another group: millionaires and billionaires.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal, using data from Shanghai research firm Hurun Report, identified 160 of China's 1,024 richest people, with a collective family net worth of $221 billion, who were seated in the Communist Party Congress, the legislature and a prominent advisory group called the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

For years the Communist Party in China filled key political and state bodies with loyal servants: proletarian workers, pliant scholars and military officers. Now the door is wide open to another group: millionaires and billionaires.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal, using data from Shanghai research firm Hurun Report, identified 160 of China's 1,024 richest people, with a collective family net worth of $221 billion, who were seated in the Communist Party Congress, the legislature and a prominent advisory group called the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

China has been grappling of late with political and social tension over its murky policy-making process and its growing income disparity. The party has been especially sensitive this year during the leadership change about revelations about fortunes amassed by the offspring of political leaders, known as "princelings," by leaders of state businesses and by other politically connected people. Many ordinary Chinese blame high prices, poor quality food and pollution on guanshang guojie—meaning, roughly, officials in bed with businessmen.

As political families move into business, private tycoons are entering the political sphere—although precisely what is driving that isn't clear. Other Chinese business leaders have cultivated relationships with party chiefs without entering politics themselves. But the Journal's analysis showed that people appearing on Hurun's rich list who also served in the legislature increased their wealth more quickly than the average member of the list.

Seventy-five people who appeared on the rich list from 2007 to 2012 served in China's legislature during that period. Their fortunes grew by 81%, on average, during that period, according to Hurun. The 324 list members with no national political positions over that period saw their wealth grow by 47%, on average, according to an analysis the firm ran for the Journal.

The contradictions of communism. The Chinese political system is one of the world's biggest ideological frauds going. It's all about keeping the elite in power and suppressing the slightest bit of opposition to the regime.

'If Charles Dickens were writing A Christmas Carol today, surely he would have replaced Ebenezer Scrooge with the figure of the joyless, rage-fuelled Dawkins spitting out ‘Bah, humbug!’ at families sitting down to the Christmas turkey...'

I wish I'd posted this on Christmas Eve, but definitely better late than never.

From Melanie Phillips, "Raising a child as Christian worse than sex abuse? Oh, do put a sock in it, you atheist Scrooge":

It is not just [Richard] Dawkins and his followers, however, who are dancing prematurely on Christianity’s grave.

In the eyes of just about the entire governing class, cultural milieu and intelligentsia, belief in Christianity is viewed at best as an embarrassment, and at worst as proof positive of imbecility.

Indeed, Christianity has long been the target of sneering comedians, blasphemous artists and the entire human rights industry — all determined to turn it into a despised activity to be pursued only by consenting adults in private.

As it happens, I myself am not a Christian; I am a Jew. And Jews have suffered terribly under Christianity in the past.

Yet I passionately believe that if Britain and the West are to continue to be civilised places, it is imperative that the decline in Christianity be reversed.

For it is the Judeo-Christian ethic which gave us belief in the innate equality of all human beings, the need to put others’ welfare before your own and the understanding of absolute truth. Without this particular religious underpinning, our society will lose the moral bonds that instil respect and care for other human beings. Without a belief in absolute truth, it will succumb to the dominance of lies.

Melanie Phillips is freakin' awesome.

'Breathe'

A woman to make your heart flutter. Just breathe.

Song background at Wikipedia. I'd forgotten how big it was.

Real World Intrudes Into Gamers' Universe

At the New York Times, "Game Theory: A Year When Real-World Violence Crept Into Play":

It’s hard to talk about video games and 2012 without addressing the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and the inevitable debate over violent games that emerged from the entirely predictable discovery that Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old gunman, played Call of Duty games. (Perhaps he also ate Big Macs; he’s in that core demographic too.) There’s no evidence that video games cause — or even correlate with — violence, and that can’t be stated often enough. And one of the most pleasurable aspects of playing in 2012 was how many tremendous games had nothing to do with shooting people in the face.

Progressives Lose the Gun Control Narrative

From Kurt Schlichter, at Townhall, "Liberals Panic As They Lose the Gun Narrative":

When you argue for a living, you can tell how an argument is going for you. The evidence and my gut both tell me that the liberals have lost control of the gun control narrative.

Not for lack of trying – it was almost as if they were poised to leap into action across the political, media and cultural spectrum the second the next semi-human creep shot up another “gun free zone.” This was their big opening to shift the debate and now it’s closing. They’ve lost, and they are going nuts.

The evidence is all around that this is not going to be the moment where America begins a slide into disarmed submission through an endless series of ever-harsher “reasonable restrictions” on our fundamental rights. You just have to look past the shrieking media harpies to see what’s really happening.

Let’s start with the most obvious omen that this tsunami has peaked...

Continue reading.

Democrats might get something on semi-automatic weapons and large capacity clips. Beyond that, bupkes.

Still, take a look at this piece at The Economist for an idea of how dramatic the impact of Newtown has been on the gun control narrative, "Newtown’s horror."

An Uneasy Separation in Afghanistan

It seems weird that we're approaching the full withdrawal date for the Afghanistan war, and I personally don't think it's going to go well when we're gone. But Barack Hussein will get all kinds of kudos for bringing another war to an end, and because he's all about scoring political capital in national security policy (compared to actually making Americans safer), it's all to be expected.

More on this throughout the next year. Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Times, "Hard feelings on both sides as U.S. winds down its Afghan role":

SUROBI, Afghanistan — Col. Babagul Aamal is a proud veteran of 28 years in the Afghan National Army. Short and fit, with a thick black beard, he's a leader who blurts out exactly what he's thinking.

"I don't talk politics — I talk facts," Aamal said, wearing a sweater beneath his uniform in his unheated command office on a dusty base 40 miles east of Kabul.

It shames him, Aamal said, that he is not allowed to wear his pistol when he enters the fortified gate of the new American military base next door. Though he's a brigade commander, he's required to stand before an airport-type scanner with his arms raised, almost in surrender.

Yet when Americans visit Aamal's base, they are not searched. They are offered chai tea. And they bring half a dozen soldiers armed with M-16s, so-called Guardian Angels on the lookout for "insider attacks" by Afghan soldiers.

"Afghan generals get searched by low-ranking foreign soldiers," Aamal said. "Our soldiers see this, and they feel insulted."

As American troops shift from combat to advising, the ominous specter of insider attacks has strained the relationship between the two armies.

Sixty-two Western coalition troops have been killed this year in 46 such attacks, leaving many American soldiers deeply suspicious of their erstwhile allies.

At the same time, some Afghan officers and soldiers say they feel abandoned and patronized. After 11 years, they say, certain Americans still don't respect Afghan customs.

Moreover, they complain that the United States is pulling out without providing the weapons and equipment needed to hold off the Taliban.

"The Americans have the weapons, so they go wherever they want. It's like this is their country," the brigade's public affairs officer, Maj. Ghulam Ali, said with a weary shrug.

RTWT.

RELATED: At the New York Times, "Motive Unclear in Killing by Woman in Afghan Force."

'Where Is the Harmony? Sweet Harmony...'

And so I'm listening to Elvis Costello at the clip and about halfway through I realized that's the Peterson sisters and Susanna Hoffs (the Bangles) up there on the stage dancing. Love the song. Hate Costello's politics, but what can you do?

Ellis Cooper

From Zoo Today:

More at Egotastic, "Ellis Cooper Screencaps for Zoo Magazine November 2012."