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.

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."

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.

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.

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!

The Battle of Trenton

I've forgotten how I got going on this, but I was reading all about George Washington's military leadership on Wikipedia the other day, and since it's the anniversary of the battle, it's especially worth your time.

The secret attack started with the crossing of the Delaware River, captured for the ages in the famous painting from Emanuel Leutze's, "Washington Crossing the Delaware."

Mark Steyn on Breakdown in America

A great interview, with Michael Coren:

CBS News This Morning Broadcast From the House Ways and Means Committee Chamber

When I turned on CBS, I thought they were at the Supreme Court talking about the homosexual agenda. But upon closer look it didn't look like the Supreme Court at all. But then, near the end of the show, Norah O'Donnell came back on with this segment, "Ways and Means Committee: A look back in time."

The discussion of Wilbur Mills reminded me of my Congress seminar in graduate school. They used to call the powerful committee chairmen the "Old Bulls" of Congress, and none were more powerful than Mills. Folklore had it that even President Johnson and to grovel before the Ways and Means Chairman in order to get anything passed on Capitol Hill, including Medicare.

Reader Comment

I get some comments on Blogger for some reason, despite having moved to Disqus. I publish if they're not troll spammers:

My dad, Sgt. George W. Engram, Jr. Enlisted at the age of 34 and was assigned to the 320th. He never talked much about his active duty until I pinned him down and asked about it so I could fill out that section in the family bible. I'm glad I did. He died in 1995, but I know he would be glad to know that their contributions are appreciated.

-- Michellle on "The 320th Antiaircraft Barrage Balloon Battalion on D-Day."

Hitchcock's Blondes

Here's MoDo, at NYT, "Spellbound by Blondes, Hot and Icy":

Certainly, the master of the dark side had “a murderous fascination with blondes,” as the British Film Institute once noted in a tribute.

And now comes Hollywood’s murderous fascination with Hitchcock’s murderous fascination.

HBO’s “The Girl” depicts the making of “The Birds” and “Marnie,” with Toby Jones playing Hitch and Sienna Miller playing Tippi Hedren, fighting off rapacious birds and rapacious director at the same time.

In theaters, “Hitchcock,” with Anthony Hopkins as the auteur and Helen Mirren as his wife and collaborator, Alma Reville, depicts the making of “Psycho,” with Scarlett Johansson taking Janet Leigh’s place in the shower to be stabbed by that crazed mama’s boy Norman Bates. (The long-suffering Alma at one point erupts at her husband about his glittering fixation, snapping that she is “not one of the contract blondes you badger and torment with your oh-so specific direction.”)

Next spring, A&E will run “Bates Motel,” a prequel series to “Psycho,” featuring a young, creepy Norman, with Vera Farmiga as his (blond) mother.

Why the fresh fascination with the man with the famous profile? Perhaps the more Hollywood churns out rancid movies, the more it appreciates Hitch, who never got an Oscar. (“They take sadistic pleasure in denying me that one little moment,” Hopkins’s Hitchcock says.)

When he was asked about plot construction, the martini-dry director would echo the advice of the 19th-century playwright Victorien Sardou: “Torture the women!” And the Brit would slyly observe: “Blondes make the best victims.”

Well, it's a nice start at the essay, but collapses after that in some post-modern cultural psycho-babble that's not very well related to Alfred Hitchcock. Keep reading at that top link if you're not bothered by Ms. Dowd.

What the heck? A good chance to post the video trailer. The movie looks good, in any case.

Lincoln's Language and its Legacy

A lengthy review article from Adam Gopnik, at the New Yorker, "ANNALS OF BIOGRAPHY: ANGELS AND AGES":

The tendency to obsess over single words and phrases reflects, in part, the semi-divine status of Lincoln in American history. But it also reflects a desire to show that rhetoric and writing were as essential to his career as acts and orders and elections. In the past twenty-five years, and particularly since the publication of Garry Wills’s “Lincoln at Gettysburg” (1992), language and its uses has become a central Lincoln subject. Two prominent strains of rhetoric run through the period—the Biblical and the classical—and political ideas tend to get tinted by whichever of them the speaker uses. Reading Edward Everett’s Gettysburg address, the two-hour set speech that preceded Lincoln’s and was meant to be the real event of the Gettysburg commemoration, one is startled to see how relentlessly classical it is in tone and analogy: Everett goes on and on about Marathon and the Greeks and the Persian invasions, in order to “elevate” Gettysburg and the Union soldiers. Lincoln’s rhetoric is, instead, deliberately Biblical. (It is difficult to find a single obviously classical reference in all of his speeches.) Lincoln had mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in Biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of Genesis.

What strikes a newcomer to Lincoln’s speeches, however, is how rare those famous cadences are; their simple, resonant language—“with malice towards none, with charity for all”; the concluding and opening lines of the Gettysburg Address—is memorable in part because there isn’t much of it. The majority of Lincoln’s public utterances are narrowly, sometimes brilliantly, lawyerly—even, on occasion, crafted to give an appearance of inevitability to oratorical conclusions that are not well supported by the chain of reasoning that precedes them. The undramatic, small-print language in which Lincoln offered the Emancipation Proclamation is the most famous instance of his mastery of anti-heroic rhetoric. (Karl Marx said that it reminded him of “ordinary summonses sent by one lawyer to another.”)

But Lincoln believed in legalism. One of his first public speeches, the Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum, in Springfield in 1837, declared a radical insistence on “reason” to be the only acceptable form of public discourse; the cure for the prevalence and epidemic of violence in American life would be “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason”: “Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.” Lincoln tempered but never really abandoned that conviction. His rhetorical genius lay in making closely reasoned argument ring with the sound of religious necessity...

Grab a cup of coffe and read it all. It's well done.

Patriotic Thanksgiving Wreath

I came home from work on Wednesday and my wife had mounted this wreath on the front door.

Stuff like this makes up for some of that "dwindling optimism" I mentioned earlier:

Dwindling Optimism This Thanksgiving

I'll be enjoying some tasty leftovers today, grading papers and watching football. I'll also be blogging the holiday. I noted last night that I'm thankful that we have our wonderful U.S. Constitution to safeguard against tyranny, and right now boy do we need all the protection we can get. But notice how I argued that the current progressive ascendancy is "brief." Sure, we'll always have the idiot big government types who think their ideology has an answer for every public problem through more statism, but ideological trends run in cycles, and when things get bad enough there'll be a shift back to markets and federalism to invigorate our economy and polity. We may have a long way to fall before that happens, and literally millions of American lives could be harmed, if not destroyed by leftist failures, but in time the economy simply won't be able sustain all that the left imposes on it. California is America's Greece. Prop. 30 is just a breather to a fiscal reckoning that won't be long in coming. The national government's going to have its own reckoning, but alas it won't be during the second half of the Obama interregnum. We'll have to wait for a resurgence of pro-American values in our national political leadership. It will come. The hardships will be in enduring the interim.

In any case, I was inclined to riff further on this by Alan Caruba and his essay, "Memories of Thanksgiving's Past":

I have always been an optimistic person, but that optimism has been drained by four years of Obama’s regime and the prospect of four more. It is compounded by a Congress that has steadily marched toward turning America into a European socialist economy now on the brink of financial collapse and, worse, by a nation that has abandoned many of the values and shared beliefs that made it great; a beacon of freedom for those who chose to come here, a superpower following World War II, a compassionate and largely tolerant nation.

Continue reading.

I'll have more throughout the day.

Thanksgiving Dinner 2012

My wife's working Thanksgiving, in the afternoon, so we thought it'd be easier to have a full dinner tonight and then the family can have leftovers tomorrow. I tweeted out a message as well.

I am first and foremost thankful for my family. But I feel this year more thankful than ever for my --- and our nation's --- liberty. I see huge chunks of that eroding as government becomes more expansive and progressive ideology enjoys its brief ascendance. But thank goodness especially for the U.S. Constitution, for in that document is enshrined the principles of limited government and the protection of private property. If Americans preserve and protect that document, even amid dramatic social change, I'm confident that our historic emphasis on personal independence and self-sufficiency will continue to keep the greedy clutches of the Democrat Party away.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my loyal readers as well.

I'll continue plugging away. And I hope you'll join me for the ride.

Mary Breckinridge Treks Across the High Sierra

This piece at the Los Angeles Times came out before the election. The woman makes an annual trek across the Sierra Nevada, a way for her to keep alive the spirit of American exceptionalism and rugged individualism ---- traditions that are fading fast in the hardening regime of the Obama dependency state. She's getting too old for the expedition, but she was able to do it again this year with the companionship of an old mountain packer she used to work with.

An amazing piece, "A High Sierra state of mind":

MONO PASS TRAIL — Mary Breckenridge crosses the High Sierra every year, with only her horse and two mules for company.

She always leaves in September, when heat still tents the Central Valley but cool mountain breezes stir silvery-green aspen leaves.

Higher up, the nights could be so cold that the water in her coffee pot turned rock-hard. It's happened. She kept going. Packing and unpacking 300 pounds of gear daily, making and breaking camp, starting her fire from twigs.

It made her feel thrillingly self-reliant. A true Western woman.

Except, now she's 64, and she's not sure she can do it anymore. Not alone.

Bucko Davis had sworn he was done with packing. He'd had enough of being so tired that he would unload a pile of gear from a mule, plop down on top of it and have people walk by without realizing there was a limp body beneath the cowboy hat pulled over his face.

Then Mary tracked him down. They've been friends for 30 years, since he was a packer and she was a cook on commercial High Sierra trips. She needs him as backup.

Once long ago, Bucko said he would never tell her "no." He agrees to the trip.

He's spent his whole life in these mountains. He loves how the junipers line up for sentry duty along the ridges, the way edible mushrooms pop out amid the damp undergrowth.

Maybe now he can know if they will ever let him leave in peace.

Read it all at the link.

Newsweek Cover Features Re-Elected Barack Obama as Napoleon Bonaparte

Seems to me this wasn't the brightest idea, but it's Newsweek we're talking about. This magazine has less than two more months of hard-copy publication remaining --- out with a whimper, as they say.

In any case, Napoleon's successes were phenomenally grand but eventually overreaching --- in both 1813 and 1815 France was defeated by superior coalitions of great powers. Napoleon, by then a criminal outcast, died an ignoble death a short six years later while exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic. Perhaps such an inglorious dénouement will befall Barack Obama at some future date, hopefully sooner rather than later, God willing.

And of course Newsweek compounds its errors with a hack piece of journalism from turncoat David Frum, "How the GOP Got Stuck in the Past."

This juvenile reporting explains why such dead-tree magazines are on the way out. Seriously. This wasn't even a half-decent job of progressive demoralization.

The cover story, from Daniel Klaidman, is here, FWIW: "Fortunate One."

2012 Election Marks a Political Realignment

Here's more along the lines I argued the other day, at the Los Angeles Times, "Nonwhite voters and cultural shifts make 2012 election pivotal":

The 2012 election marked the point at which a new American electoral coalition solidified its hold on politics, one built on the country's growing nonwhite population and on cultural changes that have given younger voters of all races a far different outlook on political issues from that of their elders.

The impact could be seen not just in Obama's reelection and Democratic successes in the Senate, but also in statewide referendums on same-sex marriage in which advocates of equal rights for gays and lesbians unexpectedly won four out of four. In 2004, conservatives put marriage referendums on the ballot in hopes of boosting their prospects; just eight years later, the political impact had completely reversed.

If the new coalition holds, future historians will look back at this campaign as one, like Franklin D. Roosevelt's in 1936 and Richard M. Nixon's in 1972, that marked a long-term realignment of the nation's politics.

If it holds. One enormous difference separates Obama's reelection from Roosevelt's and Nixon's: Those were landslides; Obama won narrowly. Millions of votes remain uncounted, but the president's victory margin probably will be about 2.5 percentage points. Nor did he succeed in carrying large numbers of House candidates into office with him.

That difference measures the enormous weight of a poor economy, which pulled down Obama's prospects and imperils the support he assembled.

"One way to interpret this involves changing cultural values and demographics. When those things come together, you get these pivot elections, and that's what this was," said UCLA political science professor Lynn Vavreck.

But "the economy is a huge thing here," she added. The economy this year grew just fast enough for a candidate with the advantage of incumbency to win. "If it doesn't grow more quickly, the Republicans will win in 2016," she said.

As noted, the thing about realignments is that the evidence for them is in future elections. If the GOP takes back the presidency in 2016, or even 2020, the current Democrat resurgence will look like a function of a particular time and a particular candidate --- not a long term secular trend toward large-state progressive governance. It sure does look like something deeper and structural, no doubt. But Republicans still control the governorships in a majority of the states, and they retained control of the U.S. House of Representatives. We won't be seeing Democrat Party hegemony in government, which is the true hallmark of realignment. And we're still too polarized around competing conceptions of the role of government in society. That's quite different from the years of the New Deal realignment, where government continued to expand even during the 1950s under President Eishenhower.

Kenneth Turan Reviews 'Lincoln'

At the Los Angeles Times, "Review: Steven Spielberg's 'Lincoln' a towering achievement":

Hollywood's most successful director turns on a dime and delivers his most restrained, interior film. A celebrated playwright shines an illuminating light on no more than a sliver of a great man's life. A brilliant actor surpasses even himself and makes us see a celebrated figure in ways we hadn't anticipated. This is the power and the surprise of "Lincoln."

Directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Tony Kushner and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president of the United States, "Lincoln" unfolds during the final four months of the chief executive's life as he focuses his energies on a dramatic struggle that has not previously loomed large in political mythology: his determination to get the House of Representatives to pass the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery.

This narrow focus has paradoxically enabled us to see Lincoln whole in a way a more broad-ranging film might have been unable to match. It has also made for a movie whose pleasures are subtle ones, that knows how to reveal the considerable drama inherent in the overarching battle of big ideas over the amendment as well as the small-bore skirmishes of political strategy and the nitty-gritty scramble for congressional votes.

Continue reading.

Democracy's Feast

From Timothy Dale, at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, "Elections are celebrations of the American way":

In the United States, our patriotism is rooted in the democratic principle that we participate in the decisions that affect our lives. The symbols of our patriotism - the flag, the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance - represent underlying ideals of liberty, equality and self-determination. We unite around these symbols because we agree about the fundamental values they represent. On election day, we should unite around voting because it is more than a symbol of these values. Voting is the actual practice of living out the ideals of democracy.

An election, and all that comes with it, is a celebration of democracy. Voting is the practice and commemoration of the spirit of a government that is founded and renewed on the principle that we are the source of political power. As we vote Tuesday, enthusiasm and pride should overtake our fatigue, knowing that our trip to the ballot box is the lifeblood of democratic governance. Election day is a day to honor democracy.

I like to think of it like that. Indeed, this is what I teach my students.

Read it all at the link.

Decision Day in America

At the Wall Street Journal, "Obama and Romney Battle Down to Wire":

After more than one million television ads, countless appearances and three contentious debates, the 2012 presidential election remained on a knife's edge with both candidates seeking to shore up support in states crucial to their chances Tuesday.

President Barack Obama cheered on backers in Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa on Monday, evidence that his campaign aimed to build a firewall in the Midwest to try to block his Republican rival. He plans to await the election returns at his base in Chicago.

Mitt Romney swooped through four battleground states—Virginia, Florida, Ohio and New Hampshire—where the Republican needs to do well to secure a win. His campaign organized two additional stops on Election Day, at campaign offices in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Mr. Romney is hedging his bets with a last-minute push in Pennsylvania before he returns to Boston to monitor the returns.

National polls are essentially tied while polls in some battleground states showed Mr. Obama with narrow leads. Both campaigns said their internal data show their candidate would win.

Voters are set to determine whether $6 billion in advertising and other campaign spending would bring a new era to Washington—with a Republican White House and administration—or extend the status quo of a Democratic White House and split Congress.

The result will answer some questions that have lingered since Mr. Obama's historic 2008 victory. The president was sent to the White House by a coalition comprising segments of the electorate—African-Americans, Hispanics and young voters—as well as women. The president's aides spent much of the past four years working to keep that group together, one that if it remains viable could be a lasting strength for Democrats.

With the margin of victory for the winner expected to be narrow, a likely outcome is a political system as split as the country. It isn't clear either party would be positioned to emerge Wednesday with a clear mandate for tackling some the nation's biggest problems—including the looming tax increases and spending cuts known as the fiscal cliff.

The tightness of the race sparked speculation about the possibility of unusual outcomes, such as an Electoral College tie or the winner failing to capture a majority of the popular vote.