Climate makes money move in mysterious ways

The British Government has been pouring millions of pounds into ‘climate-related’ projects all over the world, says Christopher Booker

Christopher Booker
Published: 6:14PM GMT 06 Feb 2010Comments 195 | Comment on this article

Dr Rajendra Pachauri embraces Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, at a meeting in New Delhi Photo: MANISH SWARUP/AP

In all the coverage lately given to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its embattled chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, one rather important part of the story has largely been missed. This is the way in which, in its obsession with climate change, different branches of the UK Government have in recent years been pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into a bewildering array of “climate-related” projects, often throwing a veil of mystery over how much is being paid, to whom and why.

To begin with a small example.  Everyone has now heard of “Glaciergate”, the inclusion in the IPCC’s 2007 report of a wild claim it was recently forced to disown, that by 2035 all Himalayan glaciers will have melted. In 2001 the Department for International Development (DfID) spent £315,277 commissioning a team of British scientists to investigate this prediction. After co-opting its Indian originator, Dr Syed Hasnain, they reported in 2004 that his claim was just a scare story.  Some glaciers were retreating, others were not.  There was no way they could disappear in a time-span shorter than many centuries.

Three years later, however, when the IPCC produced its 2007 report, it endorsed Dr Hasnain’s claim without any mention of the careful UK-funded study which had shown it to be false. What made this particularly shocking was that in 2008 another British ministry, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) announced that it had paid £1,436,000 to fund all the support needed to run the same IPCC working group which, as we now know from a senior IPCC author, had included the bogus claim in its report.

But the story did not stop there.  In a report to Parliament the same year, Defra stated that its funding of the IPCC working group had been not £1.4 million but only £543,816.  It was also in 2008 that Dr Hasnain was recruited by Dr Pachauri to work in his Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), where his spurious claim was used to win Teri a share in two lucrative studies of the effects of the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers.

The trail into this tangled undergrowth began last December, when Dr Richard North and I were trying to track down 11 payments made by four separate government departments for projects involving Teri Europe, the London-based branch of Dr Pachauri’s institute.  We were struck by how reluctant the ministries often seemed to be to reveal how much they had paid under these contracts. What’s more, why was UK taxpayers’ money being used to fund these projects in the first place?

Why in 2005, for instance, did Defra pay Teri for a study designed to help the Indian insurance industry make money out of the risks of global warming? Why was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) sponsoring a study into how Indian industry could make billions out of “carbon credits”, paid by Western firms under the bizarre UN scheme known as the Clean Development Mechanism?

Typical of this curiously opaque world was a payment by Defra to fund the work of an unnamed “head of unit” on something called the IPCC Synthesis Report, of which Dr Pachauri was co-editor. This money was paid to Cambridge University (department unnamed), to be forwarded to Teri Europe, then sent on to the anonymous recipient in Delhi, whose email address was Teri India.   On one part of the Defra website this payment was given as £30,417.  However, the same Defra report to Parliament which had under-declared the payment to the IPCC’s working group now gave this payment as only £5,800. (The IPCC itself meanwhile paid Teri a further £400,000 for its work on the Synthesis Report, although it was only 52 pages.)

The same Defra report to Parliament includes a whole string of other climate-change-related projects, covering three pages, many just as mysterious.

Why, for instance, have UK taxpayers shelled out £239,538 to unnamed recipients for a study of “Climate change impacts on Chinese agriculture”?   Or £230,895 for a “research programme on climate change impacts in India”?   Or £57,500 on the “Brazilian proposal support group”?

The largest single payment on Defra’s list, and almost the only recipient identified, was
£13,315,168  given to the Hadley Centre itself for its Climate Predictions Programme.   This is just a tiny part of the money UK taxpayers have been contributing for years to assist the work of the IPCC: the Hadley Centre alone has been handed £179 million.

A key player in the setting up of the IPCC in 1988 was Dr John Houghton, then head of the Met Office.   He persuaded Mrs Thatcher to fund him in launching the Hadley Centre in 1990, which has played a central role in the IPCC ever since.   Part of the price we pay for Hadley exercising such disproportionate influence in the IPCC is that Britain has made a similarly disproportionate contribution to the cost of running the panel’s operations.

Then why should DfID have paid £30 million to assist “climate change adaptation in Africa”; or £2.5 million for the same in China?   Why in 2002 should UK taxpayers have given £200,000 to pay for delegates from developing nations to attend a “Rio Earth Summit” conference in Johannesburg, and another £120,000 for green activists to attend the same shindig – let alone £10,000 for a “workshop on women as ’sacred custodians’ of the Earth”, to “explore the spiritual, religious and philosophical views concerning women and ecology and the policy implications of these belief systems”?

Only rarely do the government departments funding all these shadowy activities shout pubiicly about how they are spending our money – as when last September DfID’s Douglas Alexander was happy to get publicity for flying to Delhi to give Dr Pachauri £10 million to pay for his institute to examine how India’s poverty could be reduced by “sustainable development”.

Similarly, in 2008, our then energy minister Malcolm Wicks flew to Japan to boast that the UK was “the world’s largest donor” to the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership, pledging another £2.5 million of taxpayers’ money, on top of £9 million Britain had already paid into this scheme since its launch in 2003. Again, more than one ministry is responsible for funding this programme, as when DfID pays for a “research agenda on climate change and development”, while the FCO sponsors yet another study into “clean development mechanisms”.

Contemplating the impenetrable maze of payments made by various ministries to the UN, the EU, banks, research institutes, teams of academics, NGOs, environmental and industrial lobby groups and “charitable foundations” – often through chains of “funding vehicles” which may give only the most nebulous idea of their purpose – we can get little idea what is the total amount of taxpayers’ money flooding out from all our different branches of officialdom.

The ministries involved have not seemed exactly keen to help sort out all these mysteries and confusions. What does seem clear is that our Government doesn’t really want us to know all the sums involved, who many of the recipients are or why most of these payments are being made in the first place.

Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs publishes an interesting note on the Money Laundering Regulations.  This lists 26 “suspicious indications” which should attract attention to the possibility that a financial transaction might need investigating. These range from “checking identity is proving difficult” or “reluctance to provide information requested” to “unnecessary routing of funds through third parties” and “transactions having no purpose” or “which seem to involve unnecessary complexity”. Any such “suspicious indications”, we are told, should prompt the filling in of a “101 form” to report dubious financial dealings to the authorities. But a good many of them would seem to apply only too neatly to the veil of obscurity our Government draws over the astronomical sums it is paying out in support of its religious belief in “climate change”.

John Terry: a scandal to shame us all, the model of the modern footballer, caught in a financial scam

I have excerpted 3 articles from today’s Telegraph, 3 different points of view about a scandal.

John Terry: a scandal to shame us all

The kind of sordid behaviour that cost John Terry the England captaincy last week is now so common among so-called leaders that we have lost the ability to feel shocked, says children’s author Anthony Horowitz.

By Anthony Horowitz
Published: 7:00AM GMT 07 Feb 2010

Comments 80 | Comment on this article

England manager Fabio Capello flew in from Rome to remove John Terry from the captaincy of the England team Photo: AP

Things have come to a pretty pass, you might say, when it takes an Italian to lecture the English on sexual mores. But that was more or less what happened on Friday when the England manager Fabio Capello flew in from Rome to remove John Terry from the captaincy of the England team. Terry, it seems, had refused to quit and had to be pushed – and although the FA insists that any decision would have been made on “footballing grounds”, it’s clear that this affair stretches way beyond the playing field.

A quick recap for those Sunday Telegraph readers who have managed to keep their noses out of this pile of effluvium.

 

Chelsea defender and England captain John Terry is 29,  earns £170,000 a week, and is married to a full-time WAG, Toni Poole. Recently voted Dad of the Year, by Daddies Sauce no less, he has three-year-old twins. However, he has been caught playing away with a gorgeous underwear model, Vanessa Perroncel, a friend of Ms Poole and, if the rumours are correct, the ex-lover of quite a large number of Premier League footballers.

She was also once the partner of Wayne Bridge, who was once one of Terry’s teammates. Perhaps inevitably, she is now a client of Max Clifford. Meanwhile, Toni Poole has fled to Dubai, where she relinquished some of our natural sympathy by being photographed wearing “a skimpy black and pink bikini with pink frill” and by going on a shopping spree to cheer herself up.

The explosion in the media has been considerable. On Question Time, columnist Melanie Phillips quivered as she described how Terry had once been caught urinating into a beer glass. And yet the audience seemed less perturbed. Around half of them thought he should be left to get on with the game – football, that is. Even the Sun could only muster 46 per cent of its readers to say he should resign. Some 39 per cent were opposed, and the rest didn’t know.

All of which leaves a number of questions being dribbled adroitly from columnist to columnist. Should Terry have resigned?  Does being a role model, particularly for young people, go with the job description of England captain? Whatever happened to shame?  What has happened to moral standards in this country?

The last question is perhaps easiest to answer. They have gone so far down the plug hole that we can no longer even hear the gurgle. What John Terry did was no worse than what Iris Robinson was revealed to have done last month, or Tiger Woods the month before that. There are so many sex scandals that sex no longer has the power to scandalise, unless it involves children or animals, and even then the main impulse seems to be to protect the guilty. Look at the Catholic Church.

Where did it start, this downhill rush, the end of propriety (and how very old-fashioned that word sounds now), this explosion of prurience? It’s impossible to measure, but one can perhaps connect a few dots.

Those dots are Bill Grundy encouraging the first four-letter expletive on television in December 1976, and Jonathan Ross casually asking the Leader of the Opposition if he ever masturbated in front of a picture of Margaret Thatcher 30 years later. (What really shocked about this incident was that David Cameron actually answered the question. He didn’t walk out.)

The author then gives a short history of morale degradation Brit style, getting to other footballers.

Against this background, it’s not John Terry’s sex life that troubles us – it’s all the razzmatazz that surrounds it. The £130,000 Bentley that he drives. The £4 million home. The Elysium club in central London where, we are told, he met Vanessa Perroncel and where he and his friends would regularly spend £15,000 a night on Cristal champagne. It’s Vanessa’s visit to Baden-Baden, where she allegedly managed to spend £4,000 in under an hour. It’s Toni’s flight to a five-star beach resort in Dubai, of all places.

And, while we’re at it, it’s all the others: Rooney and his prostitutes; Ferdinand and Lampard at a “booze-fuelled orgy”; Mutu’s cocaine.

There was a time when we tolerated the bad behaviour of our footballers when, in fact, like pop singers trashing their hotel rooms, we almost expected it. But now, it’s simply inappropriate and the anger that is being directed at bankers and expense-ridden MPs is being directed at them.

Except that it isn’t even anger any more. With endless repetition, for all the tawdry variation, it’s become a sort of ennui. And maybe there’s a sadness, too. There are so few occasions when we’re allowed to be patriotic. To come together and to support our country. Heaven knows, there’s even a chance we might do well in South Africa this June.

But watching players like Terry, there could be a certain bitterness to the chant “England! England!” It will remind us what a shabby and sordid little country we’ve become.

John Terry is the model of the modern footballer

Simon Heffer finds it hard to see why anyone was shocked or surprised by the England captain’s behaviour.

 I suspect my take on John Terry is not usual, and for that I apologise in advance. I know nothing about his prowess as a footballer, or of his indispensability to the England team. However good or bad he is, I cannot see that that is affected by his decision to have carnal knowledge of an underwear model who happened to be the girlfriend of one of his team-mates. The episode has given a lot of people who are interested in this sordid sport an enormous amount of cheap entertainment, and I suppose we should all be grateful for that.I struggle, though, to see why anyone should be shocked or surprised by it. I thought that fornicating with underwear models was precisely what professional footballers at that level do as a matter of routine – indeed, almost as a contractual obligation. If it affects their game, it would seem a bit late in the day to come to that conclusion.

Then there was the “Premier League boss in brothel” shock to follow – though again, why we should be shocked is anyone’s guess. Had I been asked to name three qualities of people who manage football clubs, I would have replied that (a) they drive those nasty new vulgar Rolls-Royces that look like they’ve eaten too much, (b) they wear sheepskin coats (though I am told that particular facet may be out of date) and (c) they spend much of their recreational time in brothels. Indeed, when one looks at some of the types who own soccer clubs, one might legitimately conclude that they could well own brothels, too.

His point is that soccer has always been scruffy and real gents don’t play it so why be surprised, ending with…

I live in hope. You will forgive me if every time I hear a soccer club is going broke, I cheer, but I rather fear I do. Just think, football lovers, of all the things you could be doing instead: reading books, listening to Wagner, tending your roses. There is a whole world out there: go and find it!

John Terry’s corporate sponsors are no moral guardians

John Terry’s misdemeanours aren’t a sex scandal but a financial scam – the Premiership is all about greed, says George Pitcher.

By George Pitcher
Published: 7:11AM GMT 08 Feb 2010

Underclothes horse: Vanessa Perroncel Photo: Reuters (In this instance with clothes on)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Poor John Terry.   As it happens, I do think the disgraced Chelsea soccer ace and alleged super-swordsman, now stripped of the England captaincy, deserves some sympathy.   If only because he’s obviously a simple lad, who has had Croesus-like riches and gladiatorial glamour thrust upon him and now stands to lose much of it because he didn’t wear a chastity belt instead of a jockstrap under his shorts.

I want to invite you to consider a poor John Terry. Imagine him as a pre-war England skipper, cycling to the stadium to clean his own boots and earning just a few bob, from which he might afford a beer with the lads after the Saturday game.

He would have still enjoyed the respect of the nation as England’s captain, but he wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to pull a lingerie mannequin, as underwear models may have been called in those days. Because, frankly, he is no matinee idol and he wouldn’t have been able to satisfy a woman who was out of his league.

Mr Terry’s problems are all about money and very little to do with sex.   Admittedly, those two are often to be found in bed together, but the point is that without money he could have been a great footballer and poor philanderer.  Just look at how much dosh he has had to throw at his indiscretion. The original super-injunction to suppress the story can’t have come cheap and now he has had to buy the scanty-model’s silence with a sum said to be somewhere between £400,000 and £800,000.

This isn’t so much a sex scandal as a financial scam. That’s appropriate enough, because the Premier League is all about greed. It’s about making large sums of money for a very limited number of people. It’s what banking would be if bankers were attractive.

So who are the moral arbiters in this sordid tale?  The media made quite an issue at the outset about the dangers of a creeping, backdoor threat to the public interest as a consequence of the gagging injunction that Terry initially won. But I very much doubt that privacy law was ever likely to feature more in Max Clifford’s briefings on behalf of the underclothes-horse, Vanessa Perroncel, than photos of her at work. And, anyway, now he’s secured around half a million for her, she has to shut up. I think we’ve established what we all are in this scenario, we’ve just been discussing the price.

Then there are lawyers. “Celebrity divorce lawyer” Ambi Sitham, whose extraordinary website describes her as “making business more entertaining”, chimed in when the story broke: “This is a betrayal of the highest order. [Mrs Terry] will be entitled to half his fortune and half his future earnings for the rest of his career.” Charming. Some of us might see that more as making business out of entertainment.

My real fear is that the true moral arbiters here are Terry’s big corporate sponsors, which are reckoned to boost his earnings by as much as £5 million a year. They are being watched closely for signs that they don’t now want to be associated with his dirty linen. In other words, they’ll restrict his gluttony in punishment of his lust, a sort of contra-deal in deadly sins.

These are the men in suits who apparently have “morality clauses” in their contracts with celebrities, the same people who dissociated themselves smartish from golf supremo Tiger Woods when we learnt that he wasn’t exactly living like a monk. In that case, hilariously, Gillette, a major sponsor, said it was respecting Mr Woods’s request for privacy by leaving him out of its marketing campaigns.

There are two very big problems with these corporates being the guardians of sporting morality.  The first is that Terry’s sponsors, such as Umbro, Samsung and Nationwide, may very well be staffed by paragons of moral rectitude, but will be employing Terry to appeal to their lucrative 18- to 35-year-old male and single customers, in whose estimation I imagine Terry’s appeal has just skyrocketed.

That sort of conflict of interest doesn’t make for the highest ethical decisions. Let me put it another way: I don’t believe there isn’t an advertising agency somewhere that hasn’t just pitched Terry as the new face of a brand of contraceptives.

And the second big problem is that Terry’s contractual decisions will ultimately be made by institutional shareholders in the City of London. I can think of nowhere, with its Flaming-Ferrari fantasists and bonus-bloated, self-satisfied spongers off the state, less appropriate for a dodgy footballer’s morality to be judged. I don’t want bankers ruling on morality. And if you hadn’t noticed, it’s called the Barclays Premier League. That says it all.

Voters are madder than ever at the current policies of the federal government says Rasmussen.

Voters are madder than ever at the current policies of the federal government says Rasmussen.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 75% of likely voters now say they are at least somewhat angry at the government’s current policies, up four points from late November and up nine points since September. The overall figures include 45% who are Very Angry, also a nine-point increase since September.

Just 19% now say they’re not very or not at all angry at the government’s policies, down eight points from the previous survey and down 11 from September. That 19% includes only eight percent (8%) who say they’re not angry at all and 11% who are not very angry.

Part of the frustration is likely due to the belief of 60% of voters that neither Republican political leaders nor Democratic political leaders have a good understanding of what is needed today. That finding is identical to the view last September, just after the tumultuous congressional town hall meetings the month before. But only 52% felt this way in November.

Americans are united in the belief “that the political system is broken, that most politicians are corrupt, and that neither major political party has the answers,” Scott Rasmussen explains in his new book, In Search of Self-Governance.

Male voters are definitely angrier than women. Voters earning $60,000 to $100,000 per year are more frustrated than those in any other income group.

Eighty-nine percent (89%) of Republicans are angry with the government’s current policies, which is perhaps not surprising with the White House and Congress both in Democratic hands. But 78% of voters not affiliated with either major party agree.

Sixty-one percent (61%) of Democrats share that anger, but Republicans are three times as likely as Democrats to be Very Angry.

The divide between the Political Class and Mainstream voters, however, is remarkable.   Eighty-eight percent (88%) of Mainstream voters are angry, but 84% of the Political Class are not. Those numbers include 57% of Mainstream voters who are Very Angry and 51% of the Political Class who are not angry at all.

But then 68% of Mainstream voters don’t think the leaders of either major political party have a good understanding of what the country needs today. Sixty-one percent (61%) of the Political Class disagree.

By comparison, the majority of Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliateds don’t believe the current political leaders have a good handle on what is needed today.

Older voters and higher-income voters share that belief most strongly.

Democratic Senate candidates are struggling in a number of states in part because of unhappiness with the government’s policies, including the controversial national health care plan. Opposition to that plan played a key part in the GOP upset Senate win last month in Massachusetts.

Most voters oppose the now-seemingly-derailed health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats for months. They continue to have very mixed feelings about the $787-billion economic stimulus plan approved by Congress last February.

Looking back, most voters still don’t approve of the multi-billion-dollar government bailouts of the financial industry and troubled automakers General Motors and Chrysler.

Forty-nine percent (49%) worry the government will try to do too much to help the economy, while 39% fear it won’t do enough.

As the economy continues to stumble along, 59% of voters believe cutting taxes is better than increasing government spending as a job-creation tool, but 72% expect the nation’s elected politicians to increase spending instead.

Eighty-three percent (83%) of Americans say the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes.

Voters have consistently said for months that they have more confidence in their own economic judgment than that of either the president or Congress.

Climate Change Strategy on the Road to Nowhere

Bjorn Lomborg

From Monday’s Globe and Mail Published on Friday, Feb. 05, 2010 6:23PM EST Last updated on Monday, Feb. 08, 2010 8:11AM EST

Like many countries, Canada has grappled with how to respond effectively to climate change. The federal government has reportedly contemplated both a cap-and-trade carbon emission reduction scheme and a carbon tax, while attracting environmentalist scorn for allowing the development of the oil sands production industry. This month, it announced it would match U.S. greenhouse-gas emission reduction targets – but has yet to establish how it will reach those targets.

The way forward will be clear if politicians pay attention to the clear lessons from the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in December. Negotiations to create a binding agreement on international carbon emission reductions fell apart amid chaos. Faced with the prospect of going home empty-handed, leaders agreed at the last minute on a non-binding political deal that promised nothing meaningful in the fight against climate change.

It is important to understand the two key reasons why the Copenhagen summit broke down.

First, developing nations have no intention of letting the developed world force them to stop using carbon-emitting fuels. Nations such as China and India are understandably wary of any policy that might curtail the domestic economic growth that is allowing their populations to clamber out of poverty. That is precisely what drastically reducing their carbon emissions would do.

Second, even for developed economies such as Canada, trying to force drastic cuts in carbon emissions makes no economic sense. All the major climate economic models show that, to achieve the much discussed goal of keeping temperature increases under two degrees, we would need a global tax on carbon emissions that would start at $106 per ton (or about 25 cents per litre of gasoline) – and increase to $4,200 per ton (or $9.83 per litre of gasoline) by the end of the century.

In all, this would cost the world $42-trillion a year. Most mainstream calculations conclude that, all in all, this spending would be 50 times more expensive than the climate damage it seeks to prevent.

For two decades, we have steadfastly ignored these economic realities. The result is that we have not gotten anywhere. Leaders from wealthy countries met in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and promised to cut emissions by 2000. Those promises were broken. Politicians met again in Kyoto in 1997 and vowed to make stronger reductions. As Canadian experience bears out, despite the well-meaning promises made 13 years ago, global carbon emissions have continued to climb virtually unabated.

It is time, finally, to learn from our mistakes. While global leaders focused single-mindedly on cutting fossil fuel use by promising to cut carbon emissions, they have failed to invest anywhere enough money into ensuring that alternative technologies are ready to take up the slack. Keep in mind that global energy demand will double by 2050. Based on our current progress, it is clear that alternative technologies will not be ready to play a significant role.

Consider the most hyped alternative technologies: Together, wind and solar energy supply less than 0.6 per cent of the world’s entire energy needs. They are not only much more expensive than fossil fuels, but there are massive technological hurdles to overcome to make them efficient: direct-current lines need to be constructed to carry energy from the areas of highest sunshine and wind speeds to the areas where most people live, and storage technology needs to be invented so that when the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow, the world still gets power.

A significant increase in research and development investments a year is needed to produce a real technological revolution. Spending 0.2 per cent of global GDP product – roughly $100-billion a year – on green energy R&D would produce the kind of game-changing breakthroughs needed to fuel a carbon-free future.

Economists Chris Green and Isabel Galiana of McGill University calculated the benefits – from reduced warming and greater prosperity – of this sort of investment, and conservatively concluded that each dollar spent on this approach would avoid about $11 of climate damage. This compares starkly with other analyses showing that each dollar spent on strong and immediate carbon cuts would achieve as little as $0.02 of avoided climate damage.

Not only would this be a much less expensive policy than trying to cut carbon emissions, it would also reduce global warming far more quickly.

Canada could play a key role in the response to climate change by developing a policy based around the development of a research and development fund. This would be an effective way to show leadership on climate change, and to unleash Canadian entrepreneurship and creativity.

Public funds are needed because we cannot rely on private enterprise alone. As with medical research, early innovations will not reap significant financial rewards, so there is no strong incentive for private investment today. Carbon taxes could play an important supplementary role in funding research and development, but they are not the primary fix.

Indeed, putting a high price on carbon first, then hoping that alternative technology will catch up, is not a sound policy. Until the technology is ready to compete on its merits, carbon taxes will simply bleed the economy, while providing no real benefit to the climate.

After 20 years of wasted effort, we can no longer afford to squander more time continuing on this road to nowhere. We can only hope that December’s failure will be the jolt we need to once and for all drop the Rio-Kyoto-Copenhagen approach and start tackling climate change effectively.

Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center at Copenhagen Business School and the author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.

Toward a Different Fiscal Future: Tax increases can’t plausibly address the coming entitlement crisis.

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Toward a Different Fiscal Future

Tax increases can’t plausibly address the coming entitlement crisis.

By R. Glenn Hubbard

Moody’s Investors Service’s warning last week that the AAA credit rating of the United States is in jeopardy raises fresh concern about the nation’s fiscal health. The question to ask about the president’s eye-popping budget, also rolled out last week, is whether it prepares the country for its future—or shackles it to past decisions that our leaders would rather not confront.

President Obama’s blueprint gave us a federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2010 of $1.6 trillion, about 10.6% of GDP.   While one expects bigger budget deficits in a downturn, the administration expects the deficit and debt buildup to persist.   By 2013, it forecasts that deficits will bring about a debt-to-GDP ratio of 72%, unprecedented in our experience except during a major war.

The problem is spending. Despite Mr. Obama’s words about restraint, the new budget proposes more spending—1.8% of GDP for 2011 to be precise—and a higher level, roughly one percentage point of GDP higher, in subsequent years.

Debates about the budget traditionally revolve around these numbers.   There is another way to look at the federal budget, however, and that is to focus on its effect on our economic health, not just the government’s fiscal health.  Focusing on economic health means setting our sights on productivity growth—our future living standards.

To understand what this means, consider the famous “kitchen debates” between Soviet President Nikita Khruschev and Vice President Richard Nixon in 1959 about the merits of capitalism and socialism.  Nixon famously pointed to color television as a milestone in American innovation.  The Soviet leader replied by trumpeting his nation’s lead in rocket thrust. The issue resurfaced in the televised 1960 presidential debates, when Sen. John F. Kennedy attacked Nixon for wanting to lead a nation No. 1 in color TV, but not in rockets.

Nixon’s response was essentially nothing.  But the correct response was obvious: The nation with the higher present and future productivity growth—the U.S.—could lead in both color TV and rockets.

Today our productivity growth is imperiled by the anti-investment tilt of the president’s budget plan for escalating federal debt.   Even conservative estimates of effects of federal debt on interest rates (by Eric Engen of the Federal Reserve and me in the 2004 National Bureau of Economic Research Macroeconomics Annual) suggest that the last Obama budget blueprint would lead to a one-percentage-point rise in Treasury interest rates as the economic recovery takes hold.  The consequence—lower business investment and real GDP 4% lower than it would otherwise be by the next presidential election—compromises our future.

But there is more bad news. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that, without policy changes, by 2050 spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone would be 10 percentage points of GDP more than today.  Total federal spending would exceed 30% of GDP. ObamaCare would only exacerbate the problem. This means government spending for national defense, education, research and other priorities would be dramatically constrained.

This brings us to the reason we need a real budget debate today: Tax increases cannot plausibly make these problems go away. If taxes were increased sufficiently to accommodate the CBO’s projected increase in entitlement spending, long-term U.S. GDP growth rates would be reduced between a half and a full percentage point (an estimate derived from widely cited research by Mr. Engen and Jonathan Skinner of Dartmouth), unacceptably lowering our future living standards. This would be equivalent to erasing all the “growth dividend” gains of the great productivity boom of the 1990s.

There is a better way forward. In the present economic situation, attempting to reduce the deficit drastically could spell another economic contraction. One can even make cogent arguments for cutting taxes on business investment and corporate profits, given the importance of an improved investment climate for the recovery.

Rather, the president and the Congress need to present a credible path toward lower deficits and more effective government. Such a plan should have three elements.

First, introduce specific targets for reducing discretionary spending. The administration has set too easy a goal for a putative President’s Fiscal Commission, likely requiring deficit reduction of only 1% of GDP by 2015, to stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio at more than 70%. But this level is even higher than in 1950, when we were paying off debt from World War II.

The discretionary spending binge in both the Bush and Obama years offer many opportunities for further cuts. Indeed, holding growth in the nondefense discretionary spending to 2% per year, well under present levels, is achievable and would free up funds for our future priorities.

Second, slow the growth of entitlement spending on Social Security and Medicare. A good way would be to shave 1% per year from projected entitlement growth.

It is possible to do so progressively, lowering the growth in benefits for middle- and upper-income households, while strengthening support for lower-income households. Expanded saving incentives and health saving accounts can be used to help more affluent households prepare for retirement. Taken together, these changes offer the greatest chance for reducing long-term spending while holding fast to government’s legitimate social insurance role.

Third, if the administration wants to maintain the spending path on which its budget blueprint places us, it must confront and propose significant, broad-based tax increases. Let’s be clear what this means.

Our present income tax already relies very heavily on revenue from high earners; the top 1% pay well over one-third of federal income taxes. Mr. Obama’s budget increases the reliance. But we cannot count “taxes on the rich” for deficit reduction, health-care expansion and funding entitlements while ignoring the effect of those tax increases on investment, innovation and growth.

To raise the revenue for the president’s welfare-state ambitions, the tax increases must necessarily be broad-based, as, for example, with a broad-based consumption tax. A useful start would be to calculate—and present to the public each year—the broad-based consumption tax required to pay for higher spending.

In the end, the reason to get the nation’s fiscal house in order is less about deficits or debt as percentage points of GDP than about our future. We need a healthy, dynamic and innovative economy. We need a safety net for those buffeted by change. And we need the flexibility to increase support for national defense and other new domestic priorities.

Mr. Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush.

There are over thirty Lobbyists in the Obama Administration. How’s that for transparency!

 

Enough of Me talking About Me. What Do You Think….Of Me? The Incredible Ego.

You might think he would have a little more self-awareness.  Does he not realize what a egotistical jerk this makes him look like.  A lady is buried in one of his campaign t-shirts!

Get a blinking Life, Obama

Unsustainability and a Metacognitive Failure.

February 6, 2010 7:00 A.M.

Unsustainable
We are incentivizing financial unsustainability.

 

At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or as the president called him, “Corpseman Bouchard.” Twice.

Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander-in-chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there’s no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it’s revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don’t know that he doesn’t know that kinda stuff, or they don’t know it either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don’t know what they don’t know.

Which is embarrassingly true.  Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally.  The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they’re the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they’re having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of The West Wing they can only conceive of the public — and, indeed, the world — as crowd-scene extras in The Barack Obama Show:  They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor-manager tells you to, but the notion that in return he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.

But, since Obama’s mispronunciation is a pithier summation of the State of the Union than any of the dreary 90-minute sludge he paid his speechwriters for, let us consider it: Is America a Corpseman walking?

Well, we’re getting there.  National Review’s Jim Geraghty sums up Obama’s America thus: “Unsustainable is the new normal.”  Indeed.   The other day, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as “unsustainable.”

So let’s make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in Spaceballs (which seems the appropriate comparison) called “Ludicrous Speed.”

Obama’s spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001–2008, and double it, all the way to 2020.  To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long.  And that’s according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses.  By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won’t be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP average 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

But, if they’re “unsustainable,” what happens when they can no longer be sustained?  A failure of bond auctions?   A downgraded government debt rating?  Reduced GDP growth?  Total societal collapse?  Mad Max on the New Jersey Turnpike?

Testifying to the House Budget Committee, Director Elmendorf attempted to pull back from the wilder shores of “unsustainable”: “I think most observers expect that the government will act, that the unsustainability will be resolved through action, not through witnessing some collapse down the road,” he said. “If literally nothing is done, then eventually something very, very bad happens. But I think the widespread view is that you and your colleagues will take action.”

Dream on, you kinky fantasist.  The one thing that can be guaranteed is that a political class led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, a handful of reach-across-the-aisle Republican accommodationists, and an economically illiterate narcissist in the Oval Office is never going to rein in unsustainable spending in any meaningful sense.  That leaves Director Elmendorf’s alternative scenario.  What was it again? Oh, yeah: “Some collapse down the road.”

Speaking of roads, I see that, according to USA Today, when the economic downturn began, the U.S. Department of Transportation had just one employee making over $170,000. A year and a half later, it has 1,690.

Happy days are here again!

Did you get your pay raise this year?  What’s that, you don’t work for the government?  Yes, you do, one way or another.  Good luck relying on Obama, Pelosi, Frank, and the other Emirs of Kleptocristan “taking action” to “resolve” that. In the last month, the cost of insuring Greece’s sovereign debt against default has doubled. Spain and Portugal are headed the same way. When you binge-spend at the Greek level in a democratic state, there aren’t many easy roads back. The government has introduced an austerity package to rein in spending. In response, Greek tax collectors have walked off the job.

Read that again slowly: To protest government cuts, striking tax collectors are refusing to collect taxes. In a sane world, this would be a hilarious TV comedy sketch. But most of the Western world is no longer sane. It’s tough enough to persuade the town drunk to sober up, but when everyone’s face down in the moonshine, maybe it’s best just to head for the hills. But where to flee? America is choosing to embrace Greece’s future when even the Greeks have figured out you can’t make it add up. Consider the opening paragraph of Martin Crutsinger, “AP Economics Writer”: “WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.”

What language is that written in? How can a $3.83 trillion budget “freeze spending”? And where’s the president getting all this money to “pour” into his “fight” against high unemployment? Would it perchance be from the same small businesses that might be hiring new workers if the president didn’t need so much money to “pour” away? Heigh-ho. Maybe we can all be striking tax collectors. It seems a comfortable life . . . 

If unsustainable is the new normal, it should also be the new national anthem. Take it away, Natalie Cole:

 

“Unsustainable
That’s what you are
Unsustainable
Though near or far
Like a ton of debt you’ve dropped on us
How the thought of you has flopped on us
Never before
Has someone spent more . . . ”

It’s not the “debt” or the “deficit,” it’s the spending.   And the only way to reduce that is with fewer government agencies, fewer government programs, fewer government employees, lower government salaries.

Instead, all four are rocketing up: We are incentivizing unsustainability, and, when it comes to “some collapse down the road,” you’ll be surprised how short that road is.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist

The Post State of the Union Address Bounce is Fading Fast

As you can see here, Obama’s approval rating jumped up several points after his State of the Union address, but now it has fallen back to where it was before the address.  Very short-lived bounce.

 

Clinton Reveals Hollowness of Iran Engagement

 

 

Jennifer Rubin - 02.07.2010 – 1:24 PM

In a rather devastating interview with Candy Crowley on CNN, Hillary Clinton she reveals the misguided premise at the heart of the Obami’s Iran engagement policy and the disastrous results that have flowed from it. This sequence sums up the failure of engagement:

CROWLEY: I want to bring your attention to something that President Obama said in his inaugural a little more than a year ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CROWLEY: Has Iran unclenched its fist?

CLINTON: No. But…

CROWLEY: How about North Korea?

CLINTON: No. Not to the extent we would like to see them. But I think that’s — that is not all — all to the story.  Engagement has brought us a lot in the last year.  Let’s take North Korea first, and then we’ll go to Iran.  In North Korea when we said that we were willing to work with North Korea if they were serious about returning to the six party talks, and about denuclearizing in an irreversible way, they basically did not respond in the first instance. But because we were willing to engage, we ended up getting a very strong sanctions regime against North Korea that China signed on to and Russia signed on to. And right now is being enforced around the world.

CROWLEY: Did the extended hand of the U.S. help in any way that you point to?

(CROSSTALK)

CLINTON: It did, because — because we extended it a neighbor like China knew we were going the extra mile. And all of a sudden said, “You know, you’re not just standing there hurling insults at them. You’ve said, ‘All right. Fine. We’re — we’re willing to work with them.’ They haven’t responded. So we’re going to sign on to these very tough measures.” Similarly in Iran — I don’t know what the outcome would have been if the Iranian government hadn’t made the decision it made following the elections to become so repressive.

But the fact is because we engaged, the rest of the world has really begun to see Iran the way we see it. When we started last year talking about the threats that Iran’s nuclear programs posed, Russia and other countries said, “Well we don’t see it that way.” But through very slow and steady diplomacy plus the fact that we had a two track process. Yes we reached out on engagement to Iran, but we always had the second track which is that we would have to try to get the world community to take stronger measures if they didn’t respond on the engagement front.

So let’s unpack that. For starters, even Clinton admits that the policy has failed.   No unclenched hands in North Korea and Iran.  And her justification — that our Iran policy was justified because “the world has really begun to see Iran the way we see it” — is simply preposterous.   She would have us believe the world would not have seen the nature of the regime by its own actions (constructing the Qom enrichment site in violation of international agreements, stealing an election, and brutalizing its own people), but only now has begun to understand the nature of the regime because we have engaged in a futile Kabuki dance with the mullahs?  It boggles the mind.    And where is the evidence that Russia and China see it our way?   When last we heard from them, the Russians were supplying missiles to Tehran, and the Chinese were rejecting sanctions.

There is no flicker of recognition that the president might have used his vaunted charisma and eloquence to get the world to “see Iran the way we see it” — that is, as an illegitimate and tyrannical regime.   Indeed, she doesn’t even mention the democracy protestors other than to observe that she doesn’t know ”what the outcome would have been if the Iranian government hadn’t made the decision it made following the elections to become so repressive.”   Not even a rhetorical bouquet to throw their way. Perhaps we are not even “bearing witness” these days.   She seems oblivious to the notion that world opinion might be rallied to the cause of displacing, rather than soliciting the attention of, the despotic regime. And she gives no indication that the engagement policy has bestowed legitimacy upon the regime at the very time its citizens are seeking to overthrow it.

She also makes the bizarre claim that Iran really is not the greatest threat we face:

But I think that most of us believe the greater threats are the trans-national non-state networks. Primarily the extremists — the fundamentalist Islamic extremists who are connected Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula. Al Qaeda in — in Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Al Qaida in the Maghreb. I mean the — the kind of connectivity that exists. And they continue to try to increase the sophistication of their capacity. The attacks that they’re going to make. And the, you know, the biggest nightmare that any of us have is that one of these terrorist member organizations within this syndicate of terror will get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction. So that’s really the — the most threatening prospect we see.

Where to begin? She seems to suggest that we shouldn’t be so concerned about an Iranian regime with a full-blown nuclear-weapons program because there are also non-state terrorists (some of whom are supported by none other than Iran) who pose a similar threat.   But wait.   Isn’t this further reason to do what is necessary to prevent the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons?   After all, they might be supplying those very same groups with nuclear materials.

In one short interview, Clinton has pulled back the curtain on the intellectual and moral hollowness and abject confusion at he heart of Obama’s engagement policy. The Iranian people, the West, and history will judge Clinton and the president for whom she spins — however ineptly.

Yesterday Was Reagan’s 99th Birthday Anniversay. Here is a good, typical Reagan anecdote.

Ronald Reagan at 99

February 6, 2010 Posted by Scott at 11:56 AM

Today is the ninety-ninth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. At NRO’s Corner, Paul Kengor relates the following anecdote provided by Bill Clark, “Reagan’s close friend and most significant adviser.” Kengor writes:

Clark was serving as Reagan’s national-security adviser. He had previously been deputy secretary of state, and would later be appointed secretary of the interior. His driver all this time was a man named Joe Bullock, a Georgia native who had moved to Washington during the Great Depression. Joe was a victim of the cruel Jim Crow laws that afflicted the South. He went to Washington for a better life.

Joe first found employment as a mule driver. He eventually began chauffeuring various senior people in the federal government, some of whom, including a high-level figure in the Carter administration, didn’t treat him well; in fact, that previous cabinet secretary didn’t speak a word to Joe in three years.

Thus, Joe was taken aback when Bill Clark not only talked to him, asking questions about his life and family, but also asked whether he could sit up front. Clark rode shotgun with Joe, drawing more than a few stares and safety concerns as well, since Clark, given his influence in national security, was a target of America’s enemies.

One morning, Clark’s father visited Washington. He hit it off with Joe. Clark’s father was a rancher, a man of the West. He gave Joe a gift: a Western-style belt, with a kind of “John Wayne belt buckle,” as Clark described it. Joe loved it, proudly displaying it by always leaving his blue suit-jacket unbuttoned.

That belt soon assumed a life of its own. A state visit by England’s Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip was upcoming, and protocol demanded that the White House provide gifts. Clark, Reagan, and a few others brainstormed following a morning briefing. For Philip, Clark suggested a “Western belt.” He had one in mind, made by Si Jenkins, a Santa Barbara friend of both Clark and the president. (Reagan, too, was a California rancher.)

“Well, what does it look like?” asked Reagan. Clark noted he had a model in the car: Joe, who was wearing the belt. “Send him up,” ordered the president. They called for Joe, who entered via the door of Reagan’s secretary.

Joe had worked for the federal government for half a century, but had never been within 50 yards of the Oval Office. He walked in. He saw Clark, Vice President Bush, the senior aides, and the president of the United States.  He was in awe, overcome.  Suddenly, this tough six-foot-four man began weeping: He had come so far since Jim Crow and the Great Depression. He was choked up.

No one in the room was prepared for that reaction. They were dead silent, uncomfortable, unable to respond — except for Ronald Reagan. The president rose, walked over to the driver, extended his hand, breathed in, and said matter-of-factly, “Mr. Bullock, I understand you have a belt to show me?”

It was an “everyman” touch.  And it put old Joe immediately at ease.  Business-like, Joe showed the belt, and then he and Reagan began swapping stories, chatting away like old friends.

“The rest of us just faded away,” said Bill Clark, “as the two got along famously.” President and driver, remembering the old days.

Welll, let’s not leave it at that sweet remembrance. At Big Government, Professor Burt Folsom considers why Reagan was the twentieth century’s greatest president. Folsom makes a good case.

From Powerlineblog.com

73 percent of Britons don’t buy the anthropogenic global warming theory. Would a poll in the US generate similar numbers?

73 percent of Britons don’t buy the anthropogenic global warming theory. Would a poll in the US generate similar numbers?

 

BTW, 

February 7, 2010

I thought of killing myself, says climate scandal professor Phil Jones

He should have thought about doing his job correctly and not hiding his data!  What a wimp!

The Left will never, ever discover anything as wonderful as Horizontal Fracking. They can’t. They are too reactionary, too stuck in the past with old Karl Marx.

 

February 07, 2010

Fracking the Academic Left

By James Lewis

Two seemingly unrelated stories this week came together in my mind:

• a. Howard Zinn is dead.
• b. “Horizontal fracking” will produce much larger than expected amounts of clean, inexpensive natural gas over the coming decades.

What do those headlines mean?   

Well, Howard Zinn was the mendacious professor whose Marxist “People’s History of the United States” is now a principal indoctrination tool of the college Left — our  ”progressives” — in order to turn out the likes of Barack Hussein Obama, people who think the United States is a malign force that should go around apologizing. 

Howard Zinn, who just gave up the ghost, was the Barack Hussein Obama of American historians, at least in the Audacity of his Mendacity. His book The People’s History of the United States has been assigned to tens of millions of students, making him a wealthy man.

Once upon a time, historians used to try to tell the truth.   Professor Zinn was more the medieval kind of moral fabulist, whose self-appointed role it was to collect the mortal sins of the people — or at least the American people — and turn the entire history of America into one long catechism of grievances. Oh, well, whatever floats your boat.

The trouble is not so much the existence of obsessive grievance-mongers like Howard Zinn as it is his enormous popularity among the towering intellects of the Left, his enthusiastic adoption by thousands of mind-molding pseudo-historians on the campuses of America, in order to crank out even more thousands of PC-washed young minds, ready to be guilt-tripped by the national Organs of Propaganda for the rest of their lives. The Democrats then give more money to the campus  indoctrination machine so that even more tenured professors can cut and paste more prefab Leftie fantasies onto the brains of their helpless subjects.   It’s a sort of perpetual motion scheme, except that nothing productive comes out. Howard Zinn industrialized the anti-American propaganda machine, like some colony of national brain parasites living off its host.

The result is visible on all our campuses, where free speech has now gone up in smoke.   If you are caught saying a Politically Incorrect thought out loud you may find yourself witch-hunted and fired — just as Larry Summers was driven out of his job by the harridans of Harvard University before Obama picked him up. If they can destroy the president of Harvard for saying an Evil Thought out loud, they can get anybody. That’s why they did it, to scare all the other Incorrect Thinkers at Harvard.

 

I sometimes talk with friends who teach in such places, and rumor has it that the well-oiled PC apparatus is bigger today than ever.   Every once in a while there is another public witch hunt; the evil non-PC meanies are punished or humiliated, or they just leave.   Everybody is now thoroughly guilt-tripped, far more than any old-fashioned Catholic peasant going to weekly confession with the parish priest.   At least Catholics would receive absolution for their sins.   There is no absolution for the sins of whiteness, or maleness, heterosexuality — just a lifetime of taxes and mental drudgery.

The Indoctrination Campus is a reactionary and regressive institution, something the Saudi King would love.   That is why Islamism is making such strides on the PC Campus — it has exactly the same sort of dogmatic medieval outlook, it’s just as historically ignorant, it’s just as self-indulgent, and above all, it blames the same “enemy” — America and the West, which are directly responsible for the prosperity and well-being of their reactionary parasites.

Indoctrination should have no role on a university campus.   But the last jihadi suicide bomber to nearly make it to Paradise flying over Detroit was a big man on campus at University College, London, where he headed the Muslim Student Association.   Panty bomber was a pure product of the modern university, with a little AQ thrown in.   He could learn all his basic ideas just by listening to the BBC; and now even Bin Laden is blaming the West for … Global Warming.    At his college campus the Christmas Day bomber certainly learned nothing positive about Western civilization — such as the idea that we don’t wantonly kill innocent men, women, and children for the greater glory of Allah.   Somehow he never got that basic point in his expensive education.

We can see from twenty years of Global Warming Fraud in our “educated media” how the most basic principles of science and scholarship have suffered on campus.    No one is more ignorant and mentally fixated than the old media gatekeepers.    No one has less basic education in science, the humanities, mathematics, or real history.   No one is less capable of elementary reasoning. Our media peasants are just as mind-numbed as their millions of placid victims.

Some time ago David Brooks, the rumored conservative at the New York Times, said that “the educated class” was at odds with the regular folks of the United States — the vulgar mob, in other words.    But Brooks has it exactly backwards, as you might expect from someone who has to spend his waking hours in durance vile on 42^nd Street.   The “educated class” is just the indoctrinated class today, the mass of PC-whipped, totally predictable minds.  If you want to see individualism, if you want to see courage, creativity, and original thought, don’t look at the college-educated class. They all march in mental lockstep, even as the WaPo marches to the drum and fife corps of those brainiacs at the NYT.

On the PC campus science and scholarship have withered right along with education.   I’ve spent decades trying to teach college students, and I think I can say after all these years that I’ve never succeeded in educating anyone.  Not even one.   Occasionally education has been seen to happen in my classes, or at least I would like to believe so.  But education always comes from within.  Students bring their eagerness to learn with them; you can’t make them educated any more than a parent can “grow” a child.  People aren’t carrots.  You can’t “grow” them.  They either grow due to some fortunate concatenation of circumstances, or they don’t.  Education happens, sometimes, and you can stand by and cheer when you see it, but you can’t take the credit.  That’s why our colleges don’t turn out people who are better educated than their parents who never went to college.  The dreary procession of years sitting in a school room does not an education make.  College-trained Americans are so easily suckered that most of them voted for the last Democratic candidate for president. Can you believe that? I still can’t. The election of 2008 proves the utter failure of our “education” system.

A Politically Correct campus is incapable of educating students because it suffocates free thought.  The kids know that.  They get their real education elsewhere, or they just allow themselves to be brain-stomped. Indoctrination is not education.  The only kids to be really educated on the PC campus are the young  conservatives, because all that brainwashing forces them to think for themselves.  The others just end up reciting the catechism.

A college student I know boasted that he voted for Obama “because Hillary was just too white.”    Years of “education” have taught him to be a racist, if even only a reverse racist.   For that we have to thank the Howard Zinns of this world.   Thank you, Howie, and don’t let the door slam on your way out.  You left the United States worse than you found it.

If Howard Zinn is reason to despair, horizontal fracking is a reason for hope.  Because HF is a wonderful new technology, a genuine step forward in recovering natural gas bubbles embedded in hydrocarbon-bearing shale.  It’s a way of drilling horizontally into carbon-rich rock, and using high-pressure water to dissolve the rock so the natural gas can be collected in trillions of cubic feet.

HF going to save our cookies, even with all the mendacious eco-madness we see from the Politically Correct meatheads of our media.  Natural gas is the cleanest hydrocarbon fuel.  It can be utilized for all the same purposes as oil, and it is many times more efficient than the scientifically whacky “green energy” schemes that Barack Obama seems to love.   That means we can manufacture aspirin tablets from it as well as fuel to keep the world alive.   And because vast reserves of clean natural gas are available in Canada and the United States, we stand a chance of surviving the mad oil monopoly of the Saudis and the Twelver Suicide Cult in Tehran.

That is honest progress. The Left will never, ever discover anything as wonderful as Horizontal Fracking.  They can’t.   They are too reactionary, too stuck in the past with old Karl Marx.  

All the preening “progressives” are Zinnian reactionaries, and all the engineers, chemists, and honest scientists — there still are a few left — are just keeping the world moving toward a happier and healthier future. If only there were some way to drill into the layer of left wing intellectuals spread over higher education, and frack it to release the academic gas that has been trapped therein.

 

//

Retarded Reaction, Fire Retardants

 

February 06, 2010

What’s Wrong with ‘Retarded’?

By Paul Shlichta

I wanted to write about this subject. I am annoyed by the constant abrogation of freedom of specch, and the tiresome distortion of the meaning of words by the PC crowd, be they left, or in this case, right.  But I have been busier than a one-armed paperhanger (handicapped!), and fortunately found this article which I hope you will enjoy and consider carefully!

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.
 -Confucius, Analects

I admit that it’s fun watching an adroit manipulator of political correctness get hoisted with his own petard and be forced to meekly eat his words.   But to be fair, Rahm Emanuel’s use of the word “retarded,” and the general use of that word for someone who is (in P.C.-ese) “intellectually challenged,” is inoffensive and honest.

First of all, the context shows that Emanuel used the word in a reasonable way.  He was dismissing a proposal that the administration attack moderate Democrats in public ads.  He was simply pointing out the stupidity of publicly offending people you want as future allies — which is in fact a stupid thing to do.  And he said it privately, not as a public insult.  It took a backstairs gossip to make a public issue of it.

Next, his use of the “f-word” is lamentable but common in the debased milieu of politics, especially Chicago/White House politics. Nowadays, as someone once explained about the British use of “bloody,” the f-word merely means that a noun or adjective will follow. I was brought up to believe that it should be avoided as being offensive to ladies. However, NOW does not seem to have complained — perhaps because, as Judge Craig put it a century ago, they have ceased to be ladies but not yet learned to be gentlemen, and they probably use the word themselves. So let’s give a reluctant pass to the f-word.

Now let’s consider “retarded” carefully.  According to my dictionary, it comes from the Latin word for “slow” and means “hindered from a typical or expected rate of change.”  For example, the term “retarded potential” is frequently used in physics, and no electromagnetic wave has ever complained about it.

This sounds pretty inoffensive.  The connotation is that a “retarded” person will take a little longer to get where he is going, but that he will get there — which sounds to me like a fair and hopeful statement of the situation.  The alternative use of “slow,” as uttered in hushed tones by teachers to parents, is a bit precious, but it really means the same thing.  And so, from a logical point of view, there doesn’t seem to any justification for complaining about the use of “retarded.”  And certainly there would be much less domestic abuse if we had retarded anger!

Unfortunately, reason has nothing to do with the decrees of P.C.  Like the story of Al Smith at Sing Sing, P.C.ers have a ludicrous talent for replacing a fair term with a worse one. Consider “handicapped,” a word once used for people with a deficiency in physical ability.   It was a good word, honest and yet optimistic.   As in its popular racetrack use, it implied that someone had a difficulty that others didn’t have, but that with courage and perseverance, he could overcome it and win.   But P.C. decreed that it could cause discrimination (another useful word that was exiled to verbal Siberia) and demanded that it be replaced by “disabled” — a much more  pejorative word that, as used in modern electronics, implies total incapacity.  But then “disabled” was proscribed and replaced with “challenged,” a condescendingly hypocritical euphemism that has become the butt of countless jokes.

In the same Pecksniffian spirit, “retarded” — now called (I’m not making this up) “the r-word” — is has been declared offensive.   You may visit a website where you can sign a pledge to eliminate this word from your vocabulary.   (A chastened Emanuel has already done so.)   Attempts are being made to obliterate the word from all federal laws.   I assume that this also means that thousands of physics and engineering texts will have to be recalled and reprinted.

What is the excuse for this idiotic lack of acumen?   It’s the fact that the word is used as a common insult.   According to Special Olympics Chief Executive Tim Shriver:

Every day our community hears this word — in schools and workplaces, in print and in movies, on radio and television. And every day they suffer its dehumanizing effects — mockery, stigma, ridicule. This is a word that is incredibly damaging — not only to the seven million people with intellectual disabilities in the United States, but also their friends, family and to all of us.

This distress is commendable but futile.   I envy Mr. Shiver and his colleagues their miraculously sheltered childhoods.   They seem to be blissfully unaware that we live in a harsh and unfair world in which any word they choose to use for the mentally handicapped will be used as a popular insult. If they insist on replacing the r-word with, say, “gungulous,” then bullies will shout “gungulous” in schools and playgrounds and turn it into an insult.

This has already happened. Mr. Shiver’s organization chose to replace the r-word with “special.”  This is an interesting choice because “special” is an auto-antonym that, like “sanction,” has two opposite meanings.   The term “special students” has been used for both ends of the I.Q. spectrum.   But that ambiguity has not stopped “special” from becoming a nasty joke, used by the Church Lady in “Saturday Night Live” and, I fear, by many others.   And Mr. Shiver himself has used “disabilities,” which, as already mentioned, means something much worse than “retarded” or “handicapped.”

The best you can do, Mr. Shiver, is follow the advice of Confucius and use the most honest and accurate word you can find — perhaps a technical term.   Above all, avoid circumlocutions, which make the user look silly, and euphemisms, which always smell of hypocrisy.   You cannot stop bullies and louts from mocking your charges any more than we conservatives can stop liberals from unjustly jeering at us.  

In any case, thank you for humbling Rahm Emanuel and making him grovel. You made my day.

Another Example of How Teachers’ Unions Stifle Innovation and Progress

Death of D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program Would be “A Tragedy and an Outrage”

by Vicki E. Murray, Ph.D
February 4, 2010, 8:01pm

(This post was co-authored by Evelyn B. Stacey, Education Studies Policy Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in Sacramento, California)

President Obama recently insisted, “I am not an ideologue.”  But as Hamlet might say, methinks the president protesteth too much.   Contrary to his pledge last year to follow a “whether-it-works” approach to education reform, the president’s budget effectively kills the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (DC OSP). It reduces funding by nearly $4 million this year, with no future funding for current scholarship students after that.

The Opportunity Scholarship Program has helped 3,300 low-income D.C. students in recent years improve their academic performance and escape one of the country’s most expensive, dysfunctional, and dangerous public schooling systems. Thanks to this program, thousands of low-income children can go to the same high-quality schools children of presidents and members of Congress do.

Experts like Kevin P. Chavous, a former Democratic member of the D.C. Council and member of the Obama Presidential Campaign’s Education Policy Committee, know first-hand what that kind of opportunity means to D.C. schoolchildren. He notes that the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program is a success and “has become the most studied program reviewed by the [U.S.] Education Department.” (See here at 1.51 and 21.25, too).

As the Washington Post reports, the president’s budget now leaves the futures of about 1,300 Opportunity Scholarship students in limbo. “Indeed, one has to wonder whether the administration is banking on the possibility that students will drop out of the program,” the Post speculates, adding:

What easier way to get rid of this pesky program that’s so despised by the teachers unions and other traditional allies of the Democrats? It’s troubling that an administration that supposedly prides itself on supporting “what works” is so willing to pull the plug on a program that, according to a rigorous scientific study, has proven to be effective.

Thankfully, Senators Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) held a press conference this morning to fight for reauthorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. “At a time when our country is seeking ways to improve education results, we are unfortunately forced to fight to keep alive a program that has proven results,” declared Sen. Lieberman. “That is a tragedy and an outrage.” 

With leaders like these, the tale of deserving D.C. schoolchildren may get a brighter epilogue than the one “President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress” have drafted.

Holder: a lawyer who is prone to making the kind of mistakes a “first-year lawyer would get fired for”

Saturday, Feb 06

Holder Under the Bus?

Jennifer Rubin – 02.06.2010 – 9:00 AM

Andy McCarthy and I have both been looking at Attorney General Eric Holder’s latest effort to defend in a letter to Mitch McConnell the administration’s handling of the Christmas Day bomber. McCarthy sums it up:

The fundamental problem with the attorney general’s line of argument is that it unfolds as though there were no war and no president. Abdulmutallab, Holder believes, is just like any other person arrested in the United States: When an arrest happens, government officials automatically employ “long-established and publicly known policies and practices.”  It does not matter who sent the person or what he was arrested trying to do.  Miranda warnings are given, lawyers are interposed, charges are filed, and trials are conducted.  Even if the nation is at war, we don’t inquire into whether the arrested person is an operative dispatched here by hostile forces to commit mass murder.

Aside from the sloppy legal work by Holder (including citing cases that have been since overturned by the Supreme Court), it is curious to see that the Obami are now retreating to the defense that “Bush did the same thing” (ignoring the instances in which Bush designated terrorists as enemy combatants).   None of this seems to be working to shore up support for the criminal-justice model, which the Obami have insisted on employing, in part because the legal arguments are weak (e.g., disregarding the military-commission system, now in place to handle these cases) and in part because neither the public nor members of Obama’s own party think it makes sense to try KSM in a civilian court, Mirandize a terrorist, or ship Guantanamo detainees to the U.S.   Joining the chorus of other mainstream critics of the Obama approach, Stuart Taylor calls Holder’s decisions to Mirandize the Christmas Day bomber and to try KSM in a civilian court “two glaring mistakes” that require a serious course correction by Obama in his anti-terrorism policies.

In a piece in the New Yorker, which aptly describes the gathering storm of opposition, Holder doubles-down (”What we did is totally consistent with what has happened in every similar case”) and lashes out at former Vice President Dick Cheney (”On some level, and I’m not sure why, he lacks confidence in the American system of justice”).   But Holder seems to be on thin ice and the White House might now view him as a liability.   The New Yorker quotes a source close to the White House:

“The White House doesn’t trust his judgment, and doesn’t think he’s mindful enough of all the things he should be,” such as protecting the President from political fallout. “They think he wants to protect his own image, and to make himself untouchable politically, the way Reno did, by doing the righteous thing.”

Even more ominous for Holder: Rahm Emanuel is making it clear to all those concerned that he disagreed with a string of highly controversial and politically disastrous decisions by Holder.   We learn: “Emanuel adamantly opposed a number of Holder’s decisions, including one that widened the scope of a special counsel who had begun investigating the C.I.A.’s interrogation program.   Bush had appointed the special counsel, John Durham, to assess whether the C.I.A. had obstructed justice when it destroyed videotapes documenting waterboarding sessions.” And then there is the KSM trial:

At the White House, Emanuel, who is not a lawyer, opposed Holder’s position on the 9/11 cases. He argued that the Administration needed the support of key Republicans to help close Guantánamo, and that a fight over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could alienate them. “There was a lot of drama,” the informed source said. . . .  “Rahm felt very, very strongly that it was a mistake to prosecute the 9/11 people in the federal courts, and that it was picking an unnecessary fight with the military-commission people,” the informed source said. “Rahm had a good relationship with [Sen. Lindsay] Graham, and believed Graham when he said that if you don’t prosecute these people in military commissions I won’t support the closing of Guantánamo. . . . Rahm said, ‘If we don’t have Graham, we can’t close Guantánamo, and it’s on Eric!’ ”

Interesting that Emanuel and his spinners are now distancing the White House from their attorney general. One wonders where Obama stands in this drama. Isn’t he, after all, the commander in chief? Either the president was content to go along with Holder’s decisions until they went south or he subcontracted, with no oversight, some of the most critical decisions of his presidency to a lawyer who is prone to making the kind of mistakes a “first-year lawyer would get fired for“.

Either way, Obama now must suffer the results of Holder’s ill-advised decisions. There will be much speculation, given Emanuel’s comments, as to whether the White House is getting ready to throw Holder under that proverbial bus. Now, as the Democrats join the Republicans to block the KSM trial and to deny funds for moving detainees to Illinois, it would be as good a time as any.

As a play on words, “hold her under the bus” could be either romantic or an extreme form of waterboarding!

England manager Fabio Capello sacked John Terry for betraying team unity: This is CRAP!!

England manager Fabio Capello sacked John Terry for betraying team unity

Fabio Capello stripped John Terry of the England captaincy to preserve the unity of the dressing room ahead of the World Cup in South Africa.  Frankly this is disgusting, vile, ridiculous and I am very annoyed!!

By Paul Kelso and Jason Burt
Published: 10:30PM GMT 05 Feb 2010

 

Code breaker: John Terry has paid the price for upsetting Fabio Capello’s strict gameplan in the run-up to the World Cup Photo: AP

Rio Ferdinand will now lead England into the tournament after Terry was dismissed in a brief face-to-face meeting at Wembley that underlined the Italian’s authority.

Terry’s position had been in doubt since it emerged a week ago that he had conducted a four-month affair with Vanessa Perroncel, former girlfriend of Terry’s England team-mate Wayne Bridge.

Having spent a week considering the situation from Switzerland, where he was recovering from knee surgery, Capello returned to London on Thursday having decided that Terry’s position was untenable.

In a meeting that lasted no longer than half an hour, Terry was not offered the opportunity to resign or argue for his retention as captain. Instead Capello told him he was removing the armband in the interests of the squad.

Capello is understood to have reached the view that the betrayal of trust demonstrated by Terry’s affair with Perroncel, and the distracting publicity it has attracted, risked destabilising the team.

In a carefully-worded statement issued after the meeting, Capello said: “After much thought, I have made the decision that it will be best for me to take the captaincy away from John Terry.  As a captain with the team, John Terry has displayed extremely positive behaviour.  However, I have to take into account other considerations and what is best for all of the England squad.  What is best for all of the England team has inspired my choice.”

Capello did not name Terry’s successor but he said he would promote the vice-captain, Rio Ferdinand, and that the designated “No 3″, Steven Gerrard, would step up to become deputy.

Terry said he accepted Capello’s verdict: “I fully respect Fabio Capello’s decision and I will continue to give everything for England.”

The moment that brought a fraught week for English football to an abrupt end came shortly after 2pm at the National Stadium. in a meeting, described as “business-like” by one source, Terry was shown into Capello’s office, where the England manager was joined by his right-hand man Franco Baldini, who has spent the last week gauging reaction among the players to Terry’s indiscretions, as well as talking to his club manager, Carlo Ancelotti.

Terry was given the chance to speak, and told Capello that he realised he had put him in a difficult position and would accept whatever decision he reached.  He also said he was completely focused on playing for England.

Capello thanked Terry for his service and made it clear that he had no complaints about his on-field conduct or attitude when on England duty.  He said he was removing the armband, and taking Terry’s position out of the media spotlight, because it was “best for the team”.

Capello did not mention Terry’s off-field behaviour specifically, but he made it clear that it risked damaging the squad.

Terry thanked Capello and Baldini, restated his intention to do his best, and left.   On his way out he spoke briefly with FA chief executive Ian Watmore, who thanked him for his contribution.

Terry’s dismissal brings to an end a three-and-a-half year tenure as captain and caps a dismal few months dogged by regular indiscretions.

In November last year he was revealed to have offered undercover reporters a tour of the Chelsea training ground in exchange for a £10,000 cash payment, paid to an associate that he said would go to charity.

Earlier this week Telegraph Sport revealed that Terry is in dispute with his former agent Aaron Lincoln over a six-figure commission payment on his £4 million Umbro boot deal.

It has also emerged that Terry had tried to get out of a £120,000 contract for a box at Wembley, telling executives at the National Stadium that he could no longer afford it.

On Friday it was alleged that the box had been offered to undercover reporters by a third party for £4,000 for an England match.

There was one sliver of respite for Terry after Perroncel announced, via her publicist Max Clifford, that she would not be selling her story to any media outlet.

Capello’s statement

“After much thought, I have made the decision that it will be best for me to take the captaincy away from John Terry.

“As a captain with the team, John Terry has displayed extremely positive behaviour. However, I have to take into account other considerations and what is best for all of the England squad.

“What is best for all of the England team has inspired my choice.

“John Terry was notified first.  When I chose John Terry as captain, I also selected a vice-captain and also named a third choice.  There is no reason to change this decision.

“I would like to take this opportunity to thank the FA, particularly (chairman) Lord David Triesman and (chief executive) Ian Watmore, for allowing me to make this decision in my own time and in the best interest of the team.”

Terry

“I fully respect Fabio Capello’s decision,” Terry said. “I will continue to give everything for England.”

The key issue is that he was doing an excellent job as Captain.  His off-field activities should not have received as much attention as they did: the guy has a right to his private life.  Did over-zealous reporters damage Terry?  Did the Tiger Woods blow-up create an atmosphere of stud bashing?  Pretty bad. Frankly, I hope England loses a few critical matches now, to punish Capello for his stupidity!

In Montgomery County, the teachers union and its toxic influence

Friday, February 5, 2010

MOST CANDIDATES for local office in Montgomery County covet the endorsement of the county teachers union more than any other, and all of them know the drill: Appear at union events, fill out the union questionnaire, submit to the union interview. The union, representing 11,000 teachers, helpfully provides a road map to candidates seeking its blessing, including 11 criteria spelled out in painstaking detail online. Just one thing is missing from this handy guide: Candidates who receive the union’s stamp of approval are also then expected to pay.

As far as we know, this arrangement is unique; in elections elsewhere, unions and other special interests contribute to candidates, not vice versa. But such is the overweening power of the teachers union in Montgomery that the usual rules are turned upside down. And it’s no coincidence that the union’s toxic influence in local elections is matched by its success in squeezing unaffordable concessions from the county in contract negotiations — at taxpayers’ expense.

In the latest elections for the Montgomery County Council, in 2006, most candidates on the union-approved (and trademarked) “Apple Ballot” coughed up the maximum contribution allowed by state law, $6,000, to a PAC run by the Montgomery County Education Association, as the teachers union is known. Union-backed candidates for the Board of Education also paid handsomely. Supposedly, these funds covered the cost of the union’s mailings to constituents and other activities on behalf of its anointed candidates — although there is no real accounting on a campaign-by-campaign basis. In theory, these contributions are voluntary. In fact, several sources told us that the MCEA’s chief political strategist, Jon Gerson, made it clear that he expected candidates, once endorsed, to pay what they “owed” for the union’s campaign on their behalf. One candidate, asked to explain the decision to pay, answered concisely: “Fear.”

This distorts and perverts the political process.   A case in point is Nancy Floreen, the current County Council president, who suggested, during a budget crunch in 2003, that the union make some concessions on compensation. That probably cost her the MCEA endorsement in the 2006 primaries, in which she barely managed to retain her council seat. This year, facing reelection and even more dire budgetary circumstances, Ms. Floreen has been quiet as a mouse on the subject of union concessions, even though negotiations on a new contract for teachers are underway.

And no wonder. In addition to its multiple and targeted mailings in the last elections, the MCEA planted yard signs, bought advertising on the radio and at Metro stations and deployed teachers to every key county polling station, where they handed voters sample “Apple Ballots” of endorsed candidates bearing the words “Teacher Recommended.” Of the 47 “Apple Ballot” candidates in 2006, 42 won their races for county and state legislative offices.

Some MCEA-backed candidates, and the union, portray this as a win-win arrangement whereby teachers and the candidates who support them help one another out.   As Mr. Gerson put it to us:  ”Everybody would like to do this, and others have said they’d like to try, but what you have to have is a product that someone says they’d like to invest in.”

Teachers are a bedrock of any community, and they deserve good salaries and benefits for doing a tough and important job.  The problem in Montgomery is not its teachers. Rather, it is that the MCEA, the largest union in the county, is in effect hiring its own bosses — members of the school board, who vote on the teachers’ contract, and County Council members, who approve the overall county budget — and is getting paid for it in the bargain. This twisted system has fueled skyrocketing payroll costs — including a 23 percent pay raise for a typical teacher over the past three years, plus extraordinary health and retirement benefits — even as private-sector wages have stagnated.

Most elected officials, too fearful of the union to object, rubber-stamp the teachers’ contract and the county budget, thereby repaying the union for its backing. Other big public employees unions in the county, jealous at the terms extracted by the MCEA, use the teachers’ contract as a benchmark for their own negotiations, creating a self-perpetuating spiral of unaffordable concessions by the county.   Little wonder that the county is facing staggering deficits — $600 million on a budget of $4.3 billion in the fiscal year starting this summer. And it’s no surprise either that despite the county’s severe budget problems, the MCEA is still demanding raises in the current contract negotiations.  As the teachers union gears up to make endorsements in this fall’s elections, county taxpayers should clutch their wallets tightly.

 

Why are liberals so condescending?

 

By Gerard Alexander

Sunday, February 7, 2010  

 Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots.   But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration.  Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

 

It’s an odd time for liberals to feel smug.

But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation — as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a “Bolshevik plot” — and the country’s failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. “We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview.

The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government — and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever. 

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling’s 1950 remark that conservatives do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”   During the 1950s and ’60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement.   Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival.   In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to “the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind.” 

This sense of liberal intellectual superiority dropped off during the economic woes of the 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s. (Jimmy Carter’s presidency, buffeted by economic and national security challenges, generated perhaps the clearest episode of liberal self-doubt.)   But these days, liberal confidence and its companion disdain for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in politicians’ speeches, top-selling books, historical works and the blogosphere. This attitude comes in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function. 

The first is the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public.   Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush’s presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors. 

This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel.  For example, Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science” argues that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly shielding the world from modernity.  In this interpretation, conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically. Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies. 

This worldview was on display in the popular liberal reaction to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.   Rather than engage in a discussion about the complexities of free speech in politics, liberals have largely argued that the decision will “open the floodgates for special interests” to influence American elections, as the president warned in his State of the Union address.   In other words, it was all part of the conspiracy to support conservative candidates for their nefarious, self-serving ends. 

It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies.   Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years’ worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: “What do these people really believe? I mean, they’re not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?” 

In Krugman’s world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of “these people” — only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives. 

But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst.
This is the second variety of liberal condescension, exemplified in Thomas Frank’s best-selling 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”

Frank argued that working-class voters were so distracted by issues such as abortion that they were induced into voting against their own economic interests. Then-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, later chairman of the Democratic National Committee, echoed that theme in his 2004 presidential run, when he said Republicans had succeeded in getting Southern whites to focus on “guns, God and gays” instead of economic redistribution.

And speaking to a roomful of Democratic donors in 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama offered a similar (and infamous) analysis when he suggested that residents of Rust Belt towns “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” about job losses. When his comments became public, Obama backed away from their tenor but insisted that “I said something that everybody knows is true.” 

In this view, we should pay attention to conservative voters’ underlying problems but disregard the policy demands they voice; these are illusory, devoid of reason or evidence. This form of liberal condescension implies that conservative masses are in the grip of false consciousness. When they express their views at town hall meetings or “tea party” gatherings, it might be politically prudent for liberals to hear them out, but there is no reason to actually listen.

The third version of liberal condescension points to something more sinister.  

In his 2008 book, “Nixonland,” progressive writer Rick Perlstein argued that Richard Nixon created an enduring Republican strategy of mobilizing the ethnic and other resentments of some Americans against others.   Similarly, in their 1992 book, “Chain Reaction,” Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall argued that Nixon and Reagan talked up crime control, low taxes and welfare reform to cloak racial animus and help make it mainstream. It is now an article of faith among many liberals that Republicans win elections because they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants.

Race doubtless played a significant role in the shift of Deep South whites to the Republican Party during and after the 1960s. But the liberal narrative has gone essentially unchanged since then — recall former president Carter’s recent assertion that opposition to Obama reflects racism — even though survey research has shown a dramatic decline in prejudiced attitudes among white Americans in the intervening decades. Moreover, the candidates and agendas of both parties demonstrate an unfortunate willingness to play on prejudices, whether based on race, region, class, income, or other factors.

Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety — including fear of change — whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic.   Former vice president Al Gore made this case in his 2007 book, “The Assault on Reason,” in which he expressed fear that American politics was under siege from a coalition of religious fundamentalists, foreign policy extremists and industry groups opposed to “any reasoning process that threatens their economic goals.” This right-wing politics involves a gradual “abandonment of concern for reason or evidence” and relies on propaganda to maintain public support, he wrote.

Prominent liberal academics also propagate these beliefs.   George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant to Democratic candidates, says flatly that liberals, unlike conservatives, “still believe in Enlightenment reason,” while Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist and Democratic consultant, argues that the GOP has done a better job of mastering the emotional side of campaigns because Democrats, alas, are just too intellectual. “They like to read and think,” Westen wrote. “They thrive on policy debates, arguments, statistics, and getting the facts right.”

Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the influential progressive Web site Daily Kos, commissioned a poll, which he released this month, designed to show how many rank-and-file Republicans hold odd or conspiratorial beliefs — including 23 percent who purportedly believe that their states should secede from the Union.   Moulitsas concluded that Republicans are “divorced from reality” and that the results show why “it is impossible for elected Republicans to work with Democrats to improve our country.”   His condescension is superlative: Of the respondents who favored secession, he wonders, “Can we cram them all into the Texas Panhandle, create the state of Dumb-[expletive]-istan, and build a wall around them to keep them from coming into America illegally?”

I doubt it would take long to design a survey questionnaire that revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average Democrats.   Or does Moulitsas think Jay Leno talked only to conservatives for his “Jaywalking” interviews?

These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant — they insist on it.   By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking.   Indeed, when the president met with House Republicans in Baltimore recently, he assured them that he considers their ideas, but he then rejected their motives in virtually the same breath.

“There may be other ideas that you guys have,” Obama said. “I am happy to look at them, and I’m happy to embrace them. . . . But the question I think we’re going to have to ask ourselves is, as we move forward, are we going to be examining each of these issues based on what’s good for the country, what the evidence tells us, or are we going to be trying to position ourselves so that come November, we’re able to say, ‘The other party, it’s their fault’?”

Of course, plenty of conservatives are hardly above feeling superior.   But the closest they come to portraying liberals as systematically mistaken in their worldview is when they try to identify ideological dogmatism in a narrow slice of the left (say, among Ivy League faculty members), in a particular moment (during the health-care debate, for instance) or in specific individuals (such as Obama or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom some conservatives accuse of being stealth ideologues).   A few conservative voices may say that all liberals are always wrong, but these tend to be relatively marginal figures or media gadflies such as Glenn Beck.

In contrast, an extraordinary range of liberal writers, commentators and leaders — from Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” to Obama’s White House, with many stops in between — have developed or articulated narratives that apply to virtually all conservatives at all times.

To many liberals, this worldview may be appealing, but it severely limits our national conversation on critical policy issues. Perhaps most painfully, liberal condescension has distorted debates over American poverty for nearly two generations.

Starting in the 1960s, the original neoconservative critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed distress about the breakdown of inner-city families, only to be maligned as racist and ignored for decades — until appalling statistics forced critics to recognize their views as relevant.   Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as insincere and mean-spirited — until public opinion insisted they be addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the 1996 welfare reform law.   But in the meantime, welfare policies that discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in place, with devastating effects.

Ignoring conservative cautions and insights is no less costly today.   Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush’s aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin’s college-hopping and the occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals.   But alongside that, the fact is that conservative-leaning scholars, economists, jurists and legal theorists have never produced as much detailed analysis and commentary on American life and policy as they do today.

Perhaps the most important conservative insight being depreciated is the durable warning from free-marketeers that government programs often fail to yield what their architects intend.   Democrats have been busy expanding, enacting or proposing major state interventions in financial markets, energy and health care. Supporters of such efforts want to ensure that key decisions will be made in the public interest and be informed, for example, by sound science, the best new medical research or prudent standards of private-sector competition. But public-choice economists have long warned that when decisions are made in large, centralized government programs, political priorities almost always trump other goals.

Even liberals should think twice about the prospect of decisions on innovative surgeries, light bulbs and carbon quotas being directed by legislators grandstanding for the cameras. Of course, thinking twice would be easier if more of them were listening to conservatives at all.

 galexander16@gmail.com

Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

They Just Don’t Understand Massachusetts!

February 5, 2010

The Electorate vs. Obama’s Agenda

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON — “I am not an ideologue,” protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.

Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier.   The consistency is remarkable.   In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society — health care, education and energy.

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking “in the plain words of plain folks,” because the people are “suspicious of complexity.” Counseled Blow: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are “a nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive.”

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself “for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people.” The subject, he noted, was “complex.” The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the people’s anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.

That brings us to Part 2 of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama’s social democratic agenda — which couldn’t get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts — is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush — from Iraq to Social Security reform — constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is “one of the truest expressions of patriotism.”

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. “They made a decision,” explained David Axelrod, “they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed” — a perfect expression of liberals’ conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country’s, that their idea of the public good is the public’s, that their failure is therefore the nation’s.

Then comes Massachusetts, an election Obama himself helped nationalize, to shatter this most self-congratulatory of illusions.

For liberals, the observation that “the peasants are revolting” is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.

The ankle-dwelling populace pushes back. It re-centers. It renormalizes. Even in Massachusetts.