The Bosque Boys

There are no windows in any casino I've ever seen. No clocks either. Casino managment wants to control the game-room enviroment absolutely, so as to separate the player from external reality. Cut-off from any external reference, plied with alcohol, over-stimulated with electronic lights and sounds, given enough wins to sustain the illusion of beating the house, the player becomes a Pavlovian animal with a twist: when the bells ring the players feed the house.

In American politics, if the media do not maintain an objective independence, the voters can lose touch with any external reality, and be manipulated by whomever controls the house. The media infatuation with Obama frightens me. May it end soon.

Brits at their Best reminds us to celebrate the Magna Carta, an important early step in the development of British Liberty, which put limits on the power of the king. The post contains links to the full text and other information. Some rights protected in the Magna Carta:

The right to trial by jury.

The right to habeas corpus. —We cannot be arrested and kept in prison without trial.

The right to own property, which cannot be taken from us without due payment or process of law.

Too bad that many of these basic rights in Britain are in jeopardy today because of membership in the European Union in which too much power is given to unelected bureacrats.

Our own liberties in the U.S. are a development of British Liberty, or, The Liberty of Englishmen. We would do well to guard them jealously from encroaching government power.

We have criticized the National Organization of Women on this blog before. We worry that they are more concerned with promoting a political agenda than speaking out for the general well being of all women. However, they deserve kudos for their response to the Letterman-Palin abomination.

This trenchant statement from their website is a welcome condemnation:

NOW Analysis: After two nights of "jokes" at the expense of Palin and her family, Letterman tried to explain himself and offer something of an apology. On his June 10 show, Letterman said he was referring to Palin's 18-year-old daughter, Bristol -- not the 14-year-old daughter who actually accompanied Palin on her New York trip. Letterman said "I recognize that these are ugly" jokes. NOW agrees. Comedians in search of a laugh should really know better than to snicker about men having sex with teenage girls (or young women) less than half their age.

The sexualization of girls and women in the media is reaching new lows these days -- it is exploitative and has a negative effect on how all women and girls are perceived and how they view themselves. Letterman also joked about what he called Palin's "slutty flight attendant look" -- yet another example of how the media love to focus on a woman politician's appearance, especially as it relates to her sexual appeal to men. Someone of Letterman's stature, who appears on what used to be known as "the Tiffany Network" (CBS), should be above wallowing in the juvenile, sexist mud that other comedians and broadcasters seem to prefer.

I associate myself with these remarks.

David Brooks, the rational voice of the NYT, articulates his version of "the party is over."

It is a near flawless concise history and analysis of where we are, how we got here, and our dilemma:

"Over the next many years, Americans will have to save more and borrow less. The American economy will have to transition from an economy based on consumption and imports to an economy with a greater balance of business investment and production. A country that has become accustomed to reasonably fast growth and frothy affluence will probably have to adjust to slower growth and less retail fizz."

"The economic challenges will be hard...But it’s the political challenges that will be most hellacious. Basically, everything that a politician might do to make voters happier in the near term will have horrible long-term consequences."

Amen. Read it all here.

However, there is one massive head-scratcher in the otherwise brilliant piece.

Brooks writes:

"The members of the Obama administration fully understand this and are brimming with good ideas about how to move from a bubble economy to an investment economy. Finding a political strategy to accomplish this, however, is proving to be very difficult. And getting Congress to move in this direction might be impossible."

Huh? Of course, true enough, getting Congress to face our perilous circumstances with integrity and courage is the impossible dream. But the sentence about the Obama administration's willingness to grapple with reality just drops down from outer space. It is so January 20th. I would love to know what gives Brooks hope, at this late date, that anyone affiliated with President Obama has any inclination toward making the politically inexpedient choices and speaking the cold hard truth to the American people (and, more importantly, the Democratic Party interest groups). From what I have seen so far, I expect the President to keep telling those constituencies exactly what they want to hear.

The latest uncomfortable encounter between the media and Barney Frank (view here via RCP video) illustrates an ongoing challenge in American politics: how to speak civilly to one another.

This post (reissued below) from last November seems to me quite relevant still--maybe even more so today:

19 November 2008

I heard a fairly cantankerous interview with Barney Frank this morning.

In response to a request for clarification from the interviewer, Frank testily responded: "Right, I'm trying to explain to you how it works." Congressman Frank went on to chastise the reporter on several more occasions, continued to interrupt and talk over him incessantly, and then began his concluding statement by declaring: "you seem determined to kind of distort this."

Another encounter with Bill O'Reilly? No. This was an NPR segment with Steve Inskeep.

Barney Frank is a man so combative that he cannot even seem civil with NPR.

What are we going to do with this fellow now that he is in charge of overseeing our financial system?

The cranky exchange this morning concerned Frank's insistence that we bail out our struggling domestic automobile companies.

Frank is not bashful about telling you what he thinks:

--the car companies should be rescued to save workers and remedy the "white collar/blue collar divide,” fight against the rampant and systemic "anti-union activity," and attempt to address "income inequality in this country."

--we seem to be willing to spend "hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions for a war that we never should have been in [Iraq], but we don't save an important industry and protect workers from having gains that they fought hard for taken away."

--we live in "a wealthy country. If we spend things well, we can spend them."

With the fundamental problems with labor and health care costs, is any of this even spending on the Big Three likely to help?

--the x factor seems to be health care. "if they have to stay with health care the way it is now, yeah, that's bleak. But what I am hoping is that we will get a change in the health care system that will reduce the burden that we put not just on the American auto industry, where it's more expensive to build a car in America than in Canada because of health care."

The Frank Plan:

1. Save the UAW at taxpayer expense.

2. Ditch Iraq and spend the peace dividend on reducing inequities.

3. Universal healthcare.

The Okie Gardener asserted earlier today that Barney Frank presents a real obstacle to Barack Obama's success as president. Finding a way to keep Barney in his cage will be an ongoing problem for the new administration. I wish them well.

I agree with the Gardener, the way the Auto Bail Out shakes out will tell us a lot.

JUNE 2009 ADDENDUM: I no longer believe that this president actually has any substantive policy disagreements with Barney Frank; therefore, an Obama-Frank conflict does not actually present many problems for the administration.

The more exposure I have to Barak Obama, the more I dislike him, and the more I distrust him as a person. To my somewhat trained eye, he sends out disturbing signals. I have been contemplating a post on my thoughts, but instead, for now at least, direct you to Powerline and this guest post from history professor Paul Rahe.

In the first of the autobiographies that he claims to have written, Barack Obama frequently speaks of himself as being in the grips of rage. We would do well to take him at his word.

As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear. The execution of these maxims belongs to your representatives, but it is necessary that public opinion should co-operate. To facilitate to them the performance of their duty, it is essential that you should practically bear in mind that towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant; that the intrinsic embarrassment, inseparable from the selection of the proper objects (which is always a choice of difficulties), ought to be a decisive motive for a candid construction of the conduct of the government in making it, and for a spirit of acquiescence in the measures for obtaining revenue, which the public exigencies may at any time dictate.


Classic Republican Simplicity.

1. Public Credit is essential.

2. Spend public money frugally--but don't be penny wise and pound foolish. Spend it when you must (to ensure national security).

3. Pay your own way. Don't mortgage the future. Don't burden future generations with your profligacy.

4. Elective government is responsible for holding the line on spending, but, ultimately, expenditures will reflect the popular will.

5. To pay down debt, government must tax. Taxes are inconvenient and unpleasant--but necessary.

6. Good government is responsible government. Government must be worthy of our taxes.

Back to Basics. The Party is Over. While this may be contemporary GOP heresy, it is time to reclaim Classic Republican good sense.

We need to get serious about taxes--for two reasons:

1. We desperately need the money. We are amassing a national debt that poses an existential threat to American independence. The only way to protect our liberty is to RAISE REVENUE and CUT EXPENSES--and do both of those things in a meaningful way.

Brace yourselves: this is going to sting.

2. We need to tax everyone until it hurts. We need to tax George Soros, Warren Buffet, Steven Spielberg, AND YOU AND ME until we all feel the pain of taxation and cry out for a more responsible government.

The tax burden ought to be such that even rich liberals come to understand that there is a price to pay for a government that aspires to be all things to all people. Most importantly, we must tax all citizens of all socioeconomic ranks so that all Americans are invested in good stewardship. For those who pay no taxes, every government program is a good one.

We must face reality. Our current president won election promising 98 percent of America a tax cut. We must overcome the sophistry that the masses will benefit from a tax structure that only "inconveniences" the fortunate few. Those numbers do not add up--and we should disabuse ourselves of such foolish notions. They defy common sense.

The Party is Over. Twentieth century "tax and spend" liberalism yielded the stagflation, systemic insolvencies, and malaise of the 1970s. As a well-intentioned alternative to over-taxation, the market conservatives offered what tragically amounted to "borrow and spend," which produced a generation of high times but ultimately led us to this desperate moment of reckoning. Let us return to our Classical Republican roots.

Let us commit ourselves to frugality and moderation. Let us understand that sustainability, living within our means, is our primary national priority. But first we must take drastic measures to meet this moment of crisis. The transition back to fiscal health will not be pleasant--but it is time to change our indulgent habits forever--or die.

Acknowledgement: this is not especially original thinking on my part. Among other influences, the Okie Gardener offered a compelling essay on this subject last Octber.

...it's sustainability.

Unemployment is high. The Recession has not abated. The Stimulus is a failure.

This is good news for Republicans, right? We all know that a bad economy (although inconvenient for some) is the proverbial silver lining for an opposition party.

Not so fast. It is election season on the other side of the Atlantic--but not in the good old USA.

By the fall of 2012, NOBODY is going to remember the unemployment numbers for June 2009. We are quite possibly at the nadir of this recession. Digging in and making our case against this president on a momentary economic indicator is tantamount to building our house on sand. It is much MORE LIKELY THAN NOT that the landscape will have shifted completely beneath our feet in three years.

An Aside: political tides can turn in a lot less time than that. Does anybody remember last summer when "drill here, drill now" emerged as the surefire recipe for our electoral success in the fall? We had good reason to be optimistic. The longtime hostility of the Democratic Party toward oil exploration, drilling, and refining suddenly looked like a lethal liability. But all that vanished in the blink of an eye when the bottom fell out of the oil market, and prices at the pump nosedived seemingly overnight.

We are foolish to predict that a trillion-dollar stimulus (no matter how wasteful and lacking in focus) is NOT going to contribute to, or at least coincide with, a revived economy.

We stand up NOW and say the stimulus hasn't worked--and we know this because the economy is flat. However, when the economy finally turns around--as economies almost always do--the President will look out across the land and laugh his hearty laugh and point in our direction and say, "oh ye of little faith...why hast thou doubted the wisdom of the New Day?" And the mainstream media will dutifully report the most amazing and most ingeniously engineered recovery in the whole of American history.

DOH!!!!!

EVEN WORSE. MUCH MUCH WORSE

Much more detrimental, we are enabling the President's dangerous mischaracterization of the REAL PROBLEM. The President too often intimates that overcoming the current recession provides the key to continued prosperity. This is a perilous and disingenuous conflation of the actual threats to our general welfare and, perhaps, over time, even our very survival as a nation.

The FACTS: the President inherited three distinct (although not unrelated) economic challenges. One is discomfiting but manageable. Two is super scary but seemingly under control presently. Three is Armageddon.

1. Recession. While recessions can be hazardous to the political health of presidents, in the big scheme of things, they are not so unusual or daunting--and not an existential threat to life as we know it. Recessions come and go. At the end of every downturn is an upturn.

Nevertheless, in ordinary times, a deep recession would be the top priority for any chief executive. In the face of a downturn, modern presidents must act (and act quickly). Graded on the recession alone, I give the President "passing marks" (with reservations) on his response. He acted quickly, yes, but his trillion-dollar stimulus was unprecedented overkill as well as embarrassingly revealing in its sloppiness. He also used the "crisis" to accomplish some political goals--but abuses of that sort are so commonplace as to be almost forgivable.

2. Banking Crisis. Much more serious. The potential meltdown of the financial sector portended catastrophe. We have all weathered multiple recessions (I have lived through nine of them)--but most of us have never experienced a bank panic. The collapse of the financial sector would have precipitated Great Depression 2.0.

Happily, we may well have averted this instrument of RUINATION. We are not out of the woods yet, but, if we make it, thanks be to Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, George Bush, and Barack Obama. I include the President in this list for having enough sense NOT to get in the way of an unfolding plan already in place that offered our best chance for reprieve in the face of looming disaster.

3. Structural Unsustainability. On this count, however, the president is courting a massive calamity. On this count, the President insists on doubling down on a gamble in Keynesian theory that may very well cost us our hard-earned American inheritance.

The President seeks to borrow more money than we can ever hope to pay back--and he wants to provide more government services to more citizens than we can ever afford. This president, as well-intentioned as he may be, intends to be everything to everyone with no concrete plan to pay the bills.

He possesses a fundamental misunderstanding of economic reality. If he is somehow right, frankly, conservatives are obsolete (and good riddance). If President Obama can actually do what he promises, we will all walk hand-in-hand to that golden shore of Progressive Kingdom Come happily singing songs of praise for an American Messiah.

If he is wrong, however, we need to be firmly rooted in reality and there to pick up the pieces. We need to be thinking ahead--and not just to the next election. Most importantly, we ought not to fall into the trap of arguing over this transitory recession. Whether we arise from this particular downturn in our economy (and chances are we will--just in time for the Election of 2012), we need to be fighting the good fight everyday in terms of fiscal sustainability.

Conservative Solutions must include a plan to financial solvency and independence. Leave discussion of the unemployment rate to the screaming heads.

Stuart Rothenberg writes today:

"Like most of the evening programming on MSNBC and the Fox News Channel, Hardball has become a partisan, heavily ideological sledgehammer clearly intended to beat up one party and one point of view."

"I don't mean to single out Matthews for criticism because he actually understands politics and I believe that he would prefer to do a serious political show. Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and the newest addition to MSNBC's unfortunate lineup, Ed Schultz, are far worse than Hardball."

"When I surf the channels and pause for a moment on O'Reilly or Hannity [FOX News], I rarely see guests who aren't openly partisan. But MSNBC's left-leaning shows do use political reporters and columnists who would bridle at the notion that they are ideologues or favor one party over the other."

Read it all here via RCP.

I agree with Rothenberg. These shows are fun, but they are also addictive and poisonous (and, for the record, I include Hannity and O'Reilly in that assessment).

Looking for the first trenchant political satire of the Age of Obama at the expense of Obama?

Look no more: read this PARODY OF NEWSWEEK from NRO.

It is brilliant and laugh-out-loud funny. It is what Jon Stewart and SNL should have been doing for months. Hats off to NRO.

Please report back on whether you laughed out loud.