Katrina v Sandy: Measuring The Dollars

I was listening to the radio this afternoon, hearing lots of talk about the big "Hurricane Sandy" concert last night. I wasn't surprised to learn that, so far, Americans have donated $250M to the cause, but I was surprised to learn that by the equivalent time in Sept. 2005, Americans had donated nearly a billion dollars to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. Why might that be?

Back in 2005, in George Bush's America, people had a lot more money in their pockets, and were happily willing to donate some of that bounty to people they saw as being in genuine need.

The devastation in New Orleans was in our faces, thanks to relentless media hype.

Back in 2005, no one was trying to say that the gov't would do everything. My recollection is that the Bush Administration was actively encouraging people to donate money, and was working with private sector firms that could offer relevant services. Nowadays? All we're hearing is how Obama is getting out the Big Federal Checkbook.

This next bit is hard to explain, and may sound self-serving, but here it goes.  We have never stopped hearing about how the Bush Years were a cruel, laissez faire era, when people were "on their own." (pause for bitter, sarcastic laughter). That's as compared to now when, supposedly, Americans are expanding the safety net, providing "free" health care to all, and "spreading the wealth around." Yet, over and over again in the Bush years, we saw incredible bursts of charitable giving whether after 9/11, Katrina, the Asian Tsunami, and a dozen other lesser disasters. We just don't see that level of charitable giving -- whether of money, time or resources -- now, do we? I do think that was partially a reflection of better economic times, but it's also a reflection of the man at the top. George Bush may have had a lot of problems, but he was a genuinely good man with a true Christian conscience. Even if he and the gov't couldn't solve every problem that came howling into the Oval Office, he always made sure to make these heartful pleas for donations and was always full of praise for the first-responders and others who were cleaning up after disaster. It was infectious and, I think, made people want to contribute something, even if it was a little pocket money. Even though there wasn't a gov't organizing the $$, there was still a national communal feeling out there that sent donations pouring in. Now? Without getting into finger-pointing over who is or is not damned, I will simply say that the current president's professed Christianity is neither as deep or as charitable as that of his predecessors. And, for all his talk of post-partisan unity (more bitter sarcastic laughter), it's sadly obvious that Obama cannot inspire people to act out of the goodness of their hearts in the way his predecessors could. He's made it clear (as have NY & NJ's politicos) that the gov't is on the case and that's that. Perfunctory calls to donate to the Red Cross, are just that - perfunctory calls (and how appropriate that Dems prefer the semi-corrupt quasi-governmental Red Cross, to the thousands of churches that were active in the Bush days). The fact is that Obama's efforts to divide Americans by class, race, etc., and to castigate the sort of people who were opening their wallets for disaster relief efforts just a half-decade ago, have resulted in a society with less charity, less communal feeling, and less hope. Heckuva job.

Breaking News: Actual Experts Discuss Nuclear Power On Local News

Here's a news report that ran on the local ABC news, featuring the Free Will Brother In Law, who is a post-doc at UC Berkeley's Department of Nuclear Engineering. Turns out there's been a lot of misinformation out there RE: possible radiation leaks from the stricken Japanese nuclear reactors. Who knew!

UC Berkeley's Department of Nuclear Engineering continues to collect air samples for any sign of radiation. On Friday, they also collected rain to see if any radioactive particles fell from the sky.

Air samples collected on Thursday night on the roof of UC Berkeley's Department of Nuclear Engineering failed to show any significant levels of radioactivity, and then came the rain.

"The rain is a very efficient way to wash out activity in the atmosphere and get the potential activity down to us. So this is actually a much more sensitive and efficient way for sampling," Professor Professor Kai Vetter from the UC Berkeley Department of Nuclear Engineering said.

The levels may be slightly higher. According Vetter, there again he sees nothing to worry about. UC Berkeley nuclear engineers also demonstrated why it's impossible for the fuel rods in Japan to catch on fire. They exposed a piece of cladding, just like the ones found in the Japanese reactor cores to 2,000 degrees Celsius. If the cladding burnt, the nuclear fuel inside would send huge amounts of radioactive particles into the atmosphere.

"It's worse, much worse to have it on fire. The fire and the smoke become a way to spread the material that's inside," Professor Charles Yeamans from the UC Berkeley Department of Nuclear Engineering said.

The test proved the rods, while they would suffer some damage, would not catch on fire. The Japanese reactors have another layer of protection, pools of water that act as moderators unlike Chernobyl which had graphite.

American journalists have had a week to put something like that on the air, but instead we've been treated to a steady drumbeat of scare headlines about "sharply rising" radiation levels, plus nuclear experts whose jobs seem more PT Barnum than Robert Oppenheimer. But, since we've never heard any apologies for the "cannibalism at the Superdome" stories, it's probably too much to expect sober commentary on nukes, at least not while people are paying attention.

I've seen a lot of critical commentary out there about how Japanese officials have not been forthcoming enough about the extent of the danger from a possible meltdown. Yeah, it's so much better to have a lot of hysteria and bad information out there whether from Ed Markey trying to score cheap Green points, the surgeon general suggesting people stockpile iodine, CNN trying to scare the Depends off of its aging audience, or good old fashioned nonsense about irradiated spinich. Could it be that the Japanese put a premium on putting out correct information while Americans apparently prefer to just have a huge out-pouring of "facts," the majority of which are wrong or exaggerated? Perish the thought.

This is the point when I will wax philosophical about how this shows how fundamentally different Japanese and American society is. While Japanese media and politics is buttoned up ("inscrutable" is the formulation), America's lets it all hang out. And that works for all concerned. But, I'll bet Japan will still have a robust nuclear industry after all this, while America's is going to be set back for another 20 years, mostly based on opportunistic fear mongering. While Luddite American Greens can always find screen-time on national broadcasts, the sober engineers and scientists who know what they are talking about sit around their labs talking to themselves.

Loose Lips, Loose Nukes

We have reached the stage of the "Japanese nuclear meltdown" emergency where the off-hand comments of obscure government officials are enough to set off panic. In this case, the Surgeon General of the United States (do you even know their name?) has suggested that people stock up on iodine as a "precaution" even as other parts of the government say don't bother. Well, it's one or the other.

The fear that a nuclear cloud could float from the shores of Japan to the shores of California has some people making a run on iodine tablets. Pharmacists across California report being flooded with requests.

State and county officials spent much of Tuesday trying to keep people calm by saying that getting the pills wasn't necessary, but then the United States surgeon general supported the idea as a worthy "precaution."

U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin is in the Bay Area touring a peninsula hospital. NBC Bay Area reporter Damian Trujillo asked her about the run on tablets and Dr. Benjamin said although she wasn't aware of people stocking up, she did not think that would be an overreaction. She said it was right to be prepared.

On the other side of the issue is Kelly Huston of the California Emergency Management Agency. Huston said state officials, along with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the California Energy Commission, were monitoring the situation and said people don't need to buy the pills.

Does anyone remember back in the early days of the post-9/11 color coded alert system when there was a Code Orange for a nerve gas alert, or some such? A reporter asked Tom Ridge what people could do to prepare for an emergency and he made some off-hand comment about buying duct tape? There was a run on hardware stores! One guy even covered his house with plastic sheeting and duct tape! That doesn't mean Ridge's information was bad, but it didn't take much for him to set off a round of panic buying.

For whatever reason, American media and politics are inordinately focused on Japan's damaged nuclear reactors, which have yet to kill anyone yet. Not saying the situation is dangerous and in flux, but is there any doubt the Japanese are going all out to prevent a catastrophic meltdown?Meanwhile the tens of thousands of dead and displaced are already fading to the background, at least in major American media.

I have no idea whether the Japanese reactors are going to kill us all, or not. The Free Will brother in law is a nuclear engineer, and he has so far been pretty sanguine. I'll take that over anti-nuke hysteria any day.

Wind & Wave: the Japan Tsunami

The scenes of destruction in Japan are almost too much to blog about. It's a disaster that hit close to home here at Free Will HQ. The Free Will wife is Japanese. I was born in Tokyo and lived there for several years. The Free Will mother still has a lot of friends there. It's true that earthquakes are common, and that the Japanese are fanatics about earthquake drills and safety prep. Everyone understands from birth that the country could be hit with a massive quake, followed by tsunami, but when it actually happens, it's still a shock.

Still, once the waters recede, and the fires go out, and the nukes are back in their coolant, we all know what will happen next: the Japanese will rebuild, and rebuild quickly. My mother used to say that if you told three Americans to walk across a field, they would each make their own way over. But, if you told three Japanese to walk across a field, they would do it shoulder to shoulder. I think that says a lot about how Japanese society faces adversity of the sort it is facing now.

Some things I think we all know will not happen:

The Japanese won't shut down their nuclear power industry because one plant is experiencing a semi-meltdown brought on by an apocalyptic natural disaster.

There won't be any crazy rumors about survivors resorting to cannibalism.

There won't be any wide-scale looting. (I would actually bet on no looting)

No one will wonder if this disaster is good for Obama

A Japanese rapper (yes, there are some) won't go on television and announce that Prime Minister Kan "hates" Sendai

First responders will not be dragged away from their jobs to attend press conferences

Media figures will not use this disaster as an opportunity to emote for the cameras.

No one will blame global warming.

You get the idea.

As bad as this was, it could have been much much worse. But Japan is one of the wealthiest, technologically sophisticated countries in the world. From the early alerts to the seismic upgrades to the years of drills and preparation, people and buildings survived a disaster that would have utterly destroyed other nations. No doubt many would wonder if this is fair. Why should a Turk or a Chinese or a Haitian or Indonesian die in an earthquake that a Japanese had a much better chance of surviving? Well, if you haven't learned that life isn't fair by now, I don't know when you ever will.

Americans , Europeans, and Japanese should wake up everyday and thank God that they were born within the borders of an advanced civilization. Instead, we have millions of people, up to and including the president himself, who seem to think that the Developed World has somehow use more than its fair share of resources. But, it's the use of these resources that gives us the resilience to survive disasters that would lay low a nation in the Developing World or the Third World. It's a basic fact of life. You either protect yourself as a society, or you leave yourself at the mercy of the elements. Fair's got nothing to do with it.

Rent Boys - The B.P. Oil Spill and the Democratic Establishment

Via Instapundit, Iron Man at The Next Right has the blog post of the month, as he unravels the connections between BP and the Democratic Party. Be Prepared to be amazed: BP's Strange Democrat Bedfellows

Here's something you probably don't know about the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

One of the top media consultants for British Petroleum gave free rent to a politician who became White House Chief of Staff.

And, no, this was not Karl Rove giving a freebie to Andy Card.

No, the recipient of the favor was Rahm Emanuel and the benefactor was Stanley Greenberg.

That's the teaser, but it gets worse. Greenberg is also married to Rep. Rosa DeLauro. If you watched the Obamacare signing ceremony and wondered who the lesbian standing next to Nancy Pelosi was; well that was DeLauro. Greenberg is also behind those lame "BP = Green" ads that have been running the last couple years, and which now seem like a bad joke.

Remember, Democrats are supposed to be the smart guys in American governance. And, certainly the joke is on anyone who actually believes that their Party of the Common Man/"Boot on the Throat"/"People v Powerful" rhetoric is anything other than a Hollywood fantasy. Really they are little more than Dollar-crats; people who have learned how to make a buck off of the intersection between Big Government and Big Business. They get by on cheap sentiment about "Mother Earth" and neo-Ludditism disguised as sophistication about energy's place in a modern economy. But, magically, everything is still Sarah Palin's fault.

That's probably the best reason to be a Democrat: never having to say you're sorry.

(Don't) Question Authority

Uber-conventional media hack Joe Klein asks "Who's To Blame For The Gulf Oil Spill?" What a stupid question. As if there is a list of people you could draw up and point to as being at fault as a result of some nefarious purpose. And Klein's answer is as dumb as his question: Gulf Oil Blame Game

The Republican Party seemed an especially fat target for Mother Earth's satiric vengeance. It was, after all, the party that had branded itself with the slogan "Drill, baby, drill" during the 2008 presidential campaign, a party that busily denied the mass of scientific evidence about global carbon pollution. Rush Limbaugh first speculated that the spill might have been the work of environmental terrorists but then settled on this remarkable formulation: "The ocean will take care of this on its own." The oil was "natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is." Thus Rush upended several millenniums of "oil and water" adages. Less foolish but no less feckless was Rand Paul — the Tea Party's Kentucky tribune and hero to high school libertarians everywhere — who dismissed the disaster with a blithe "Accidents happen." This echoed Donald Rumsfeld's famous line after the anarchic looting broke out in Baghdad: "Stuff happens." But this sort of stuff is more likely to happen when government refuses to plan and regulate for worst-case scenarios.

The more predictable Republican response to an event so inconvenient to the party's ideology was to blame Barack Obama. Sarah Palin accused Obama of being in bed with Big Oil — an accusation that, like oil itself, was rich and crude, given her own and her party's close ties to the petroleum industry. Sean Hannity called the spill "Obama's Katrina," but it was actually George W. Bush's second Katrina. Vice President Dick Cheney, fresh from his days at Halliburton, had presided over the weakening of drilling regulations, including the exclusion of remote-shut-off switches (commonly used in the North Sea oil fields), which might have prevented the disaster. The Bush Administration's petro-bias and antigovernment sensibility soiled the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency charged with regulating offshore drilling.

BushCheneyBurton, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh? It's the Unholy Trintity! Never mind that BushCheneyBurton have been out of office since Jan. 2009, Palin was a hard-ass on oil companies in Alaska, and Limbaugh has as much personal control over BP and the federal government as I do. Also, never mind that there's are exponential differences between drilling in shallow water versus drilling a mile down. This is not a rebuke of "Drill, Baby, Drill." If BP had been drilling in shallow water, that damned hole would have been plugged weeks ago.

How about trying this on for size, Joe? Maybe I can't assign blame as happily as you do, but I think this explanation comes closer to the truth:

The United States is the most technologically and socially advanced nation on the planet. For many decades, its energy needs have been supplied by fossil fuels. While alternatives exist, none can match the power and efficiency of a barrel of oil or a chunk of coal. The United States also has vast untapped reserves of oil, both on land and close to shore. BP undoubtedly flew/sailed over millions of barrels of untapped reserves in order to get to its doomed rig.

However, there are certain elements in US society that don't like the idea of actually seeing oil wells, so drilling has been pushed far off-shore, where oil companies drill a mile deep into the ocean to extract oil that they could just as easily reach on land. As disaster and error are as much a part of the human condition as tragedy and comedy, an accident is inevitable. It becomes doubly inevitable when you have corporate malfeasance as has been on display by BP, which was cavalier about the inherent dangers in deep water drilling and then had no plan in place for dealing with the inevitable accident.

The one entity that was supposed to have a plan in place was the federal government, but it didn't implement those plans. It didn't even have the oil booms it would need to keep oil off-shore. And, when a Republican governor asked the Army Corps of Engineers, which ought to have zero-credibility in any matters related to Louisiana, for permission to build sand berms, the Corps engaged in a deliberative environmental review, never mind that the berms were intended to prevent an even worse environmental disaster.

And, of course, the federal government has also claimed to itself increasingly exclusive power to regulate every aspect of the economy, yet has also been oddly passive in the face of what it admits is a disaster. Everyone wants to help, but no one seems to know what to do. The same political figures who rode "George Bush hates white people" into congressional majorities and then the White House are even slower and more flat-footed than Michael Brown, who at least was on the ground in Louisiana when Hurricane Katrina hit shore. Wisdom and leadership do not come standard issue when there is a (D) after your name, no matter how many Time columnists would like to believe otherwise.

An oil spill somewhere in the world is inevitable so long as we are drilling for the stuff. And, we will keep drilling for it, so long as the world is powered by oil. Seeing oil spills as "Mother Earth's satiric vengeance" may be good as a progressive rallying cry, but it doesn't address the fact that the elites who are at the helms of our government and our corporation seem to lack even the most basic problem-solving skills, although their blame-casting skills are well-honed.

11 men are dead and the Gulf of Mexico is filling with oil, and all anyone seems to want to do is either make fun of Sarah Palin, or castigate Barack Obama, as if that does a damn bit of difference. Disaster has been politicized to no good end.

Land of 1010 Dances

I spent most of the morning in the car listening to the radio, and all anyone wanted to talk about was illegal aliens. Shut off the radio at around 11 AM. One hour later, the internets were screaming about a 1000-point drop in the Dow. Even if I wanted to sell into that, it happened so fast there was no time: Dow Takes a Harrowing 1010 Point Journey

A bad day in the financial markets was made worse by an apparent trading glitch, leaving traders and investors nervous and scratching their heads over how a mistake could send the Dow Jones Industrial Average into a 1,000-point tailspin.

At its afternoon low, the Dow had plummeted 998.50 points, its biggest intraday point drop ever. The swing from its intraday high was 1,010.14 points.

The Dow eventually rebounded to close down 347.80 points, or 3.2%, at 10520.32, its worst percentage decline since April 2009. Stocks from Dow components Procter & Gamble and 3Msuffered precipitous declines. At one point shares of P&G tumbled 37%.

Everyone's blaming this on some sort of computer glitch leading to cascading sell orders from the dreaded High Frequency Traders, but lets not kid ourselves. For all the talk of a nascent recovery in the US (and things do feel a little more prosperous, at least in SF), there is still a lot of uncertainty out there, almost all of it directed not at banks, but at nations:

All this fogginess about botched trades came as the market was already on edge about Greece and the European debt crisis.

Just before the panic started, which was around 2:30pm ET, Mohamed El-Erian said on CNBC that the Greek crisis is about to spread.

"We've seen a crisis start in a country—Greece—become regional, impact the whole of the Euro zone and is on the verge of truly going global," said El-Erian, CEO of the world's biggest bond fund.

Rochdale analyst Dick Bove said the riots in Greece, which escalated after theGreek austerity bill was passed, are also a telling sign.

"There is simply a growing recognition that Greece has got to default, said Rochdale banking analyst Dick Bove. "The riots in the streets showed the decision to repay the debt was not going to be made by the people in Germany, France and Switzerland, it's going to be made by people in Greece and they're not going to repay it," he said. "Anyone seeing the riots is going to recognize that this government is going to be thrown out and anything replacing this government is going to be far more leftist leaning and they're going to repudiate."

The developed world is living through a crisis of Big Government, as nation-states as varied as Greece, Britain, Japan, Spain, California, and the US grapple with unsustainable public expenditures made worse by political climates that have been paralyzed into inaction. The violent riots in Greece are a warning that the Left will not hesitate to protect its prerogatives. The (typically) muddled election results in Britain, which might result in Gordon Brown remaining in office as Prime Minister (!), indicate that no one will have a mandate to make serious efforts at scaling back government until there is absolutely no other alternative. And, the continued spending in California (high speed rail!) and the US (Obamacare) show that some politicians simply can't imagine a world where they can't appropriate billions of dollars for ephemeral gains. Appropriately, our normally loquacious President was strikingly quiet this afternoon. There's no emergency if the president isn't involved, right?

The Little Depression lurks, for now...

Disaster Politics

You'll pardon me if I'm not spouting flames from my fanny over the federal government's "slow response" to the BP oil spill, or Eight Days In April as Legal Insurrection has dubbed it. Sure you can criticize the Obama Administration's slow response. You can make fun of the "regime." You can note that the progressive loudmouths who castigated the Bush Administration for its failures during Hurricane Katrina have suddenly gotten nervous and circumspect about politicizing disaster. All fair game.

But trying to turn this into "Obama's Katrina" is a step too far for my taste. The media and political attacks on President Bush in the days after Katrina hit land were outrageous, of course, and a perfect example of the poisonous black heart of the Left. American citizens were stranded on rooftops and in the Superdome, and all some people could do was complain about Michael Brown's horse farm, among other trivia. It was "Queen of All Media" Oprah Winfrey's show that broadcast the outrageous claim - from the chief of New Orleans police - that there was cannibalism at the Superdome. It was Kanye West who said, in the middle of a fund raiser, that "George Bush hates black people." It was beneath contempt and was all done in lieu of helping recover from a disaster that had affecting an area of land the size of Great Britain. Among other things, Bush was criticized for not doing a fly-over of the scene, so he could furrow his brow for the nightly news, as if that would have made a damn bit of difference. Maybe noblesse oblige works for some people, but I can't think of a single life such a stunt would have saved. For his part, Obama will visit the Gulf Coast this weekend. Happy, now? I doubt it.

The way this stuff used to be resolved is the person one step down the totem pole took the hit, while the president acquired a reputation for inaction without the media beating people over the head about it. Napolitano, for one, seems completely out of her depth here, and may not even realize that the Coast Guard, among other things, is part of her department. But, since 9/11, the new pattern is: "everything is the fault of the other guy because of his politics, and the only person who gets fired is some low-level grunt who might have taken a coffee break at the wrong time." The only people in leadership positions who are at fault are always in the other political party and no one can ever lose their job because they are "indispensable." If President Romney takes office in 2012, I'm hoping San Francisco doesn't experience any 7.0 earthquakes during his term (unless there's a special "gathering place" for registered Republicans...)

For too long, Americans have been conditioned to believe that disasters have a "narrative" or "meaning," as part of a media spectacle that can only be resolved by political action. We have lost touch with a fundamental aspect of the human condition: that life is filled with tragedy and that disasters are ... disastrous! If you politicize disaster, you will politicize the relief effort, too. Are we really going to become a country where the scope of federal aid depends on how your precinct voted in the last presidential election? I hope not.

Anyway, I'm going to be too busy hitting "Refresh" on Drudge to better follow the Obama Cheating Scandal.

UPDATE: I've corrected a mistake noted in the comments.

Breeding Contempt

The scale of the tragedy in Haiti is only now becoming clear, but there are already plenty of folks in the sophisticated commentariat lining up to place whatever blame they can find on ... the US? This bit from Naked Capitalism - a blog I normally like to read - is typical:

Clash over Haiti aid flights: French blame US over medical delays. This is THE lead story in the Financial Times. Per the Greg Palast link provided yesterday, Iceland and China both got some help to Haiti before the US did. The US, by contrast, sends an aircraft carrier three days into the crisis, with no emergency supplies of any kind. And we have this as the lead story in the New York Times: Rescues Beat Dimming Odds in Haiti when this story Looters roam Port-au-Prince as earthquake death toll estimate climbs Guardian (hat tip reader Michael T) seems a much more accurate take of the state of affairs. Now perhaps somewhere in the US, the MSM is providing coverage of our shades-of-Katrina operations in Haiti, but it looks as if that story is instead being told abroad, while here, we are getting heartwarming stories of rescues.

Pardon me, but since when did Haiti become the 51st state? The US has absolutely no moral or legal obligation to Haiti beyond the simple desire to assist a shattered nation in a time of need. Iceland got there before the US?Hey, good for them, but I don't think that makes Iceland a "better" country or the US worse. And, as long as we're comparing records, I feel pretty comfortable stacking the US's record in alleviating post-disaster misery over that of anyone else you could name.

A lot of these complaints seem to be coming from European (or Euro-phile) sources, so I think now is the time to mention that the Belgian doctors who ran away from a triage center because of "security concerns" displayed the sort of redoubtable bravery that sophisticated "citizens of the world" have become know for. The fact is that, when the time came to help a desperate people, it was the progressives like the French who felt that this was the perfect time to declare that the US was "occupying" Haiti, rather than shut up and get to work.

Also beneath contempt are the journalists making a big show of "helping" by schlepping water for the cameras, and the like, while complaining loudly about the lack of a supply chain to bring relief supplies to people in need. I turned on (and kept turning off) Fox the other night because it seemed to be broadcasting an endless loop of Geraldo bitching about relief supplies. Yes, a human tragedy is unfolding; but it wasn't so tragic that Geraldo couldn't spend hours on end talking about himself, in between ads for dietary supplements. Disaster coverage is often repetitive since the individual journalists often have no idea what's going on a mile away, or even right before their eyes, but this was painfully unwatchable.

As George Bush learned, there are a lot of people out there who can't turn off politics even when there are bodies decomposing in the streets and thousands dying in crumpled buildings. What good that is supposed to do I have no idea.

War and Decision

Arnold Kling observes Veterans Day with some thoughts on the political leaders who started and waged WWI, the source of the original Veterans Day: The Great War

The first World War is one of the topics in history that interests me the most. I really think that if more people focused on leadership during that war, the concerns over "market failure" and the faith in political leadership would decline. I challenge anyone to come up with a group of business villains who caused as much death and suffering as the "legitimate" political leaders of 1914.

WWI is fascinating because the post-war world was so different from that of the pre-1914 world. No less than 4 empires (German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman) fell as a result of the war. The British and French empires were fatally weakened. What we still think of as Old Europe - a world of minor aristocrats, glittering balls, spa holidays in Baden-Baden, etc - came to a crashing halt. And the fascists and communists who came in its wake proved to be worse than the bumbling aristocrats they replaced in the halls of power. Sadly, everyone entered WWI enthusiastically and with eyes wide shut.

No Time For The Niceties

Supposedly there will be a vote on the 1,990 page long House bill at some point this weekend. It'd be nice if we could all have a chance to have a calm, rational national "debate" over this, but that is the last thing Dems want, so instead we have a peremptory vote on a humongous bill that is literally impossible to read before the vote. Not enough time for the niceties here; given the way the scheduling has been set, there isn't even time for talk radio blow-hards to sink their teeth into this. No, we have to rely on Sarah Palin's Facebook page and a Saturday morning Betsy McCaughey opinion piece in the W$J. She goes through the usual commentary on insurance mandates and Medicare cuts. But, what's really striking is the left-wing identity politics that infiltrates even this supposed effort to "reform" health care: What the Pelosi Health Care Bill Really Says

.While the bill will slash Medicare funding, it will also direct billions of dollars to numerous inner-city social work and diversity programs with vague standards of accountability.

• Sec. 399V (p. 1422) provides for grants to community "entities" with no required qualifications except having "documented community activity and experience with community healthcare workers" to "educate, guide, and provide experiential learning opportunities" aimed at drug abuse, poor nutrition, smoking and obesity. "Each community health worker program receiving funds under the grant will provide services in the cultural context most appropriate for the individual served by the program."

These programs will "enhance the capacity of individuals to utilize health services and health related social services under Federal, State and local programs by assisting individuals in establishing eligibility . . . and in receiving services and other benefits" including transportation and translation services.

• Sec. 222 (p. 617) provides reimbursement for culturally and linguistically appropriate services. This program will train health-care workers to inform Medicare beneficiaries of their "right" to have an interpreter at all times and with no co-pays for language services.

• Secs. 2521 and 2533 (pp. 1379 and 1437) establishes racial and ethnic preferences in awarding grants for training nurses and creating secondary-school health science programs. For example, grants for nursing schools should "give preference to programs that provide for improving the diversity of new nurse graduates to reflect changes in the demographics of the patient population." And secondary-school grants should go to schools "graduating students from disadvantaged backgrounds including racial and ethnic minorities.""

That last bit about creating incentives for schools to graduate more minority and disadvantaged health care workers is just pitiful. Is the health care system "failing" because medical and nursing schools are not graduating students from disadvantaged backgrounds who can address "changing demographics?" Maybe if we weren't creating so many wards of the state in minority communities, this wouldn't be an issue. McCaughey's essay provides important information that is simply impossible to find in the mainstream media, or in the congressional debate over the bill. We really are standing at the precipice.

You can go here to see the bills and some more McCaughey commentary on them.

UPDATE: there's some kind of crazy formatting problem with my block quote from the W$J, so I took it out for now

UPDATE 2: It passed with just 220 votes, which means there was no bi-partisan support (the Republican from "Dollar Bill's" district doesn't count), and really not even the full support of the Democratic caucus. The Destructive Generation continues with its work...

The Dead Vote in the Graveyard of Empires

I'm not ready to join George Will in the Coalition of the Unsteady, but if the Afghans are going to engage in voter fraud, we really should get out of there. Not one American life should be lost just so Hamid Karzai can hold on to power in the manner of a two-bit Chicago Alderman handing out frozen turkeys at Thanksgiving: Fake Afghan Poll Sites Favored Karzai

Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here.

The fake sites, as many as 800, existed only on paper, said a senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the vote. Local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Mr. Karzai in the election last month came from each of those places. That pattern was confirmed by another Western official based in Afghanistan.

“We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day,” the senior Western diplomat said. “But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.”

The Smart Power Set has been telling us for 6 years that "stoopid" Bush took his eye off the ball by invading Iraq and "neglecting" Afghanistan. But, the numbers don't lie. Combat deaths are way up this year, and the Afghans obviously feel comfortable engaging in open voter fraud in a manner that they never dared to under W. Rather than neglecting Afghanistan, the Bush method of keeping a light footprint that kept the Taliban bottled up in Pakistan was far more appropriate to a place like Afghanistan, rather than trying to do an Iraq-style Surge. Actually, the only thing that let the Taliban survive in the Bush era was their practice of retreating to Pakistan, where the US could not follow - again, thanks to the Smart Power crowd that deplores anything smacking of "cowboy" (i.e. victorious) tactics.

Joe Biden has said, in effect, forget Afghanistan; the real problem is Pakistan. Maybe. It's always amazing to me that, when confronted with a war, liberals always manage to find some "other place" where we should really be concentrating our efforts. And, I guarantee that if we find ourselves focusing on Pakistan, we will start hearing about how we need to solve the impasse in the Kashmir (Joe Biden ca. 2011: "Kashmir, that's the 'real' problem"), or some such, rather than just going in and gettting the job done.

Democracy in America

Steven Malaga looks at the state of play in post-TARP America and asks a simple question: Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic?

What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today? In place of thrift, they would find a nation of debtors, staggering beneath loans obtained under false pretenses. In place of a steady, patient accumulation of wealth, they would find bankers and financiers with such a short-term perspective that they never pause to consider the consequences or risks of selling securities they don’t understand. In place of a country where all a man asks of government is “not to be disturbed in his toil,” as Tocqueville put it, they would find a nation of rent-seekers demanding government subsidies to purchase homes, start new ventures, or bail out old ones. They would find what Tocqueville described as the “fatal circle” of materialism—the cycle of acquisition and gratification that drives people back to ever more frenetic acquisition and that ultimately undermines prosperous democracies.

And they would understand why. After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, from business, from popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue.

There's been a lot of talk in the air that the bailout last fall "worked" and that we averted a catastrophe thanks to the quick work of Ben Bernanke (note how GW Bush has once again been left out of the loop in being given credit for something that happened under his watch). I am not sure "averted" is the right word to use, as an actual catastrophe ensued before and after the TARP bailouts. Not only that, the moral hazard that has resulted, not to mention the inversion of social risk - America's prudent middle class is simultaneously bailing out the Masters of the Universe on the one hand, and the subprime borrowers on the other - has already made a hash of many of the unwritten rules of the social contract with the decline of the work ethic being just the beginning.

The history of the bailouts is already being rewritten to make them seem more palatable and the sole course of action available as of September 2008. We seem to already be forgetting that Bernanke and Paulson spent the better part of 2007-2008 assuring us that they had things under control, before suddenly appeared before Congress and announced that they needed $700 billion by the end of the week or the world would come to an end. People had been warning for years that the likes of Fannie/Freddie, AIG and Lehman Brothers were racing towards insolvency and yet everyone stood around looking surprised when they failed. Some "rescue." Worst of all, the bailed out have not suffered all that much. Many of the people running the firms that were bailed out are still on the job - a notable exception being GM's Rick Wagoner. Forget business sense. What kind of values are we instilling in society when a man can't lose his job when he destroys his company?

Elizabeth Warren put it best: if you think our world is comprised of a handful of banks that are "too big to fail," then of course the bailouts were justified. But if you think our world is comprised of 115 million households, then the bailout's efficacy is an open question. And it will remain open because of the too big to fail mentality that has been, essentially, foisted on us over our objections. If you are too big to fail, does that mean you will never go away? Will there always be a Citibank, just like there is always a State Department. Thanks to the abilouts, we now have "private" institutions like AIG, Citibank, GM, Fannie/Freddie, and Bank Of America that have been trapped in amber and are about as bouyant. We do not know yet what the endgame is: are we always going to own stock in GM? Are Freddie/Fannie ever going to exit their receiverships? Will AIG ever be able to stand on its own?

Most important, do we have any assurance that the sort of managerial abuses that brought these firms down will not happen again? I don't think so. Instead, the Bailed Out show every sign of returning to their old ways of generating asset bubbles to fuel short term growth at the expense of long term prosperity. As for the government, it has gotten too comfortable with the practice of passing hugely complex and expensive pieces of legislation without conducting hearings or even "reading the bill." This has been a corrosive experience for America's private and public sectors. That the rust has not become immediately apparent does not mean that we are being weakened from within.

I'm Sorry, You Must Have Mistaken Me For Someone Who Gives A S***

Here's something I don't care about: CIA Said To Use Outsideres To Put Bombs On Drones.

From a secret division at its North Carolina headquarters, the company formerly known as Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington’s most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda’s leaders, according to government officials and current and former employees

The division’s operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.

The role of the company in the Predator program highlights the degree to which the C.I.A. now depends on outside contractors to perform some of the agency’s most important assignments. And it illustrates the resilience of Blackwater, now known as Xe (pronounced Zee) Services, though most people in and outside the company still refer to it as Blackwater. It has grown through government work, even as it attracted criticism and allegations of brutality in Iraq.

My guess is that, since Risen is using such scary codewords as "secret division," "hidden bases," and "Blackwater," we are supposed to be outraged by this scoop. Look, girls, the CIA can't do basic stuff like this. Rather than being a pack of ruff 'n' ready swashbucklers, the modern CIA is made up of bureaucratic time servers who are reluctant to leave Northern Virginia because it might interfere with their kids' soccer schedules. They couldn't even assassinate themselves if they were facing off in front of a mirror. Hiring someone else to do a job better than you can is known as "acknowledging your limits."

Now that yet another secret intelligence program has been exposed, we can expect the outrageously outraged Pelosi press conference to begin promptly at noon, EST.

The Last Pictureshow

The folks who made the new GI Joe movie have not made their masterwork available for critic's screenings. Movie buffs love to chuckle over such naked displays of authorial guilt - hey, they must know it sucks, too, right? - but, frankly what's the point of having the W$J's movie critic spend 2 hours watching a movie inspired by a toy line? The review practically writes itself, and the W$J's readers are not likely to have watched the movie anyway. Still, the W$J's Joe Morganstern cares enough to try to write a review based on nothing more than the trailer: GI Joe The Rise of Cobra

The first thing that happens in the trailer involves the Eiffel Tower, which is hit by a missile and makes a splash by falling into the Seine. I don’t like movies that trash the Eiffel Tower, although I loved “The Lavender Hill Mob,” in which Alec Guinness’s mild-mannered bank clerk smuggles gold bars out of England by turning them into Eiffel Tower paperweights.

The second thing involves an ­actor intoning, voice-over: “We have never faced a threat like this. A team is being assembled. They’re the best operatives in the world. When all else fails, we don’t.” Even apart from the actor pronouncing “assembled” as “assimbled,” the speech suggests a sound clip from an early rehearsal of a junior-high-school pageant. I don’t like movies with bad actors reading dumb lines.

Like, I said, the review practically writes itself. A better focus may have been to ask why the producers of "GI Joe," the original "real American hero," felt compelled to assemble "the best operatives in the world," rather than an all-American crew of stock archetypes and ethnic stereotypes like Hollywood used to do for B-17 bomber crews.

Morganstern likes to declare that movies based on toys are a sign of cultural decline, but surely the de-patriating of an American icon - even if in toy form - is a much more potent symbol of such decline.

Gilligan's Island

To add insult to injury, Detroit is losing not just its status as the "Motor City," it is also losing some of the basic accoutrements of urban living, like grocery stores: Retailers Head For Exits In Detroit

They call this the Motor City, but you have to leave town to buy a Chrysler or a Jeep.

Borders Inc. was founded 40 miles away, but the only one of the chain's bookstores here closed this month. And Starbucks Corp., famous for saturating U.S. cities with its storefronts, has only four left in this city of 900,000 after closures last summer.

There was a time early in the decade when downtown Detroit was sprouting new cafes and shops, and residents began to nurture hopes of a rebound. But lately, they are finding it increasingly tough to buy groceries or get a cup of fresh-roast coffee as the 11th largest U.S. city struggles with the recession and the auto-industry crisis.

No national grocery chain operates a store here. A lack of outlets that sell fresh produce and meat has led the United Food and Commercial Workers union and a community group to think about building a grocery store of its own.

Frankly, a union based solution is hardly what Detroit needs. Unions have dominated Detroit's politics and economy since the Thirties. While there might have been short term benefits for a couple lucky generations of workers, the host has been sucked dry, leaving a dry husk.

Detroit's woes are largely rooted in the collapse of the auto industry. General Motors Corp., one of downtown's largest employers and the last of the Big Three auto makers with its headquarters here, has drastically cut white-collar workers and been offered incentives to move to the suburbs. Other local businesses that serviced the auto maker, from ad agencies and accounting firms to newsstands and shoe-shine outlets, also have been hurt.

The city's 22.8% unemployment rate is among the highest in the U.S.; 30% of residents are on food stamps

Those are not what you would call Demographics of Destiny

While all of southeast Michigan is hurting because of the auto-industry's troubles, Detroit's problems are compounded by decades of flight to the suburbs.

Hundreds of buildings were left vacant by the nearly one million residents who have left. Thousands of businesses have closed since the city's population peaked six decades ago.

Navigating zoning rules and other red tape to develop land for big-box stores that might cater to a low-income clientele is daunting.

I have it on good authority that journalistic trade craft requires that any reporter writing about Detroit must mention "decades of flight to the suburbs" - the dreaded "White Flight" - as if people left for the suburbs in a dastardly plot to destroy Detroit. It is apparently journalistically incorrect to mention decades of inner-city dysfunction, which reached its apogee with the corrupt "hip-hop mayor" Kwame Kilpatrick, in searching for the source of Detroit's ills.

In fact, there is very little effort to look at what really killed Detroit and other formerly prosperous cities in the Rust Belt. These were Democratic strongholds, dominated by corrupt Machine politics, overweening unions, and tax-happy politicians. They are beset with welfare dependents, drugs, slums, and crime. This did not happen overnight. But, slowly but surely, the economically productive portions of the economy funded all of government inertia that ruined the manufacturing heartland of the US until the money-makers were finally bled dry.

If the stock market falls, then there is a rush to the podium to declare the failure of the free market and an end to "illusory GOP growth." But when government policy fails, it seems there is never anyone wlling to demand less government, rather than more, as a solution to the destruction of a once-vibrant economic region. That last bit about retailers having difficulty navigating red tape might be the most ridiculous symbol of uselessly destructive government. What is the point of zoning laws and red tape when the city has been economically decimated? Where is the condemnation when a political philosophy ruins a region like this? Who is left to lift the shackles off of Detroit and its brethren?

Who Holds the Proxy?

The great divide in American political life was on display during the dueling Cheney-Obama speeches. The Left was in raptures over Obama's rhetoric and "nuance." The Right was delighted that someone had finally issued a comprehensive defense of Bush-era War on Terror policy, complete with attacks on the NY Times (where was this 4 years ago?). Michael Ledeen is the lonely voice saying "You're both wrong." Cheney and Obama: The Great Evasion

For some years now, I have been concerned that the great national debate over the terror war has been systematically misguided. Instead of a discussion of the strategic issue, our leaders and pundits have dealt with tactical questions. And so it goes, most recently in Thursday’s speeches from former Vice President Dick Cheney and President Barack Obama. The strategic questions are finessed in favor of single pieces of the issue.

Ledeen is, of course, correct, not that this will do him any good.

American politics has always had a tendency towards reducing the great issues of the day to heated controversies over seemingly minor points, whether over the guilt of Alger Hiss, the propriety of Iran-Contra, or the definition of "is."

Thus, the "Guantanamo Question" is not really about civil liberties or the "tragic fall" of American morality. It has become a proxy battle for Leftist resentments against the Bush Administration, which reacted to 9/11 by repudiating the Left's carefully constructed civil liberties regime, after it had proven a deadly millstone around our national security. Rather than attack the Bush policies themselves (which were popular and necessary in the wake of 9/11), the Left has attacked them indirectly through wild claims about flushed Korans, "torture," and Abu Ghraib. Like a defense attorney chipping away at a beat cop's credibility on the witness stand, these attacks have been effective, but that doesn't change the fact that their clients are guilty as hell.

The problem with these proxy battles is the way in which they obscure the big picture issues for which they are a substitute. And, Republicans enable this by playing along, trying to match wits with Leftists arguing in bad faith, rather than keeping things on the simple plain level that the Cheney speech managed. But, even Cheney nods:

Neither asked, let alone answered, the big question: what are we facing? Who is our enemy? So neither had an answer: what should our overall strategy be? How will we win? How do we measure our progress?

From the beginning we have dealt with each theatre—whether Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Europe, the homeland—as a thing in itself, something requiring its own distinct approach. At no time, save for some general statements shortly after the 9/11 attacks, has any leader discussed the fact that we are involved in a big war, in which specific enemies are engaged against us. We have debated military tactics, ideological imperatives (from winning hearts and minds to challenging radical Islam, todeconstructing Islam itself), nation building, methods of interrogation, the use of one sort of court or another. But we have yet to face the central fact of the broad war, the big war, what I insist is the real war, the one that has been waged against us for decades, in which our enemies aim at our domination or destruction.

The problem for Ledeen is that no one really wants to confront a world-wide conspiracy. And yet, no one - especially on the Left - wants to be the one to say to the American public that he intends to stand down from the War on Terror. Thus, we are left with these proxy battles until the real one is joined again.

The Spirit of 1851

Lots of commentary from outsiders regarding the defeat of the budget propositions on Tuesday. "Ungovernable" comes up a lot, but I consider the phrase "feckless Big Government political class refusing to put the state on a politically or fiscally sustainable path" to be a better descriptor.

There's also a lot of commentary supporting the convening of a constitutional convention to reform or amend the many procedural hoops that make CA governance so unwieldy. This article in The Economist is typical: California: the Ungovernable State

Many others, however, now believe that California needs to start from scratch, with a fully-fledged constitutional convention. California’s current constitution rivals India’s and Alabama’s for being the longest and most convoluted in the world, and is several times longer than America’s. It has been amended or revised more than 500 times and now, with the cumulative dross of past voter initiatives incorporated, is a document that assures chaos.

Calls for a new constitution have resurfaced throughout the past century, but never went far. That changed last August, as the budget negotiations were once again going off the rails, when Mr Wunderman of the Bay Area Council renewed the call for a convention and received an astonishing outpouring of support. Mr Schwarzenegger has called a constitutional convention “a brilliant idea” and thinks it is “the right way to go”. (The new constitution would take effect well after he leaves office.) Most encouragingly, says Mr Wunderman, nobody, not even the so-called special interests, has yet come out against a convention

This may or may not be a good idea, but I have to say I am not aware of any popular groundswell for a state consitutional convention, Mr. Wunderman's claims notwithstanding. The problem with a constitutional convention is that it could just as easily become yet another staging ground for progressive activists to capture favors and $$. Wunderman has some convuluted scheme whereby the conventioneers would be drawn from county jury pools, but that would do no more good than convening a Frank Luntz focus group. No, this is an initiative that needs to start with a narrowly focused political movement similar to the one that gave us the Recall Election. It started, you will remember, with wealthy political pro Darrell Issa funding a petition drive and directing the campaign message, not a "let a 100 flowers bloom"style direct democracy. A constitutonal convention requires leadership, not political buck passing to The People.

Just as a thought experiment, we have convened the Free Will California Constitutional Convention in an effort to work through some of the issues presented. While we were not able do a comprehensive job (we lost our quorum when the Senate Pro Tem became fussy from gas), we did get a good start:

1. just as a preliminary matter, cancellation of the last, say, 5 years worth of boondoggles, starting with the $75 billion high speed rail project. We can't afford them. If CA is going to get a new Constitution, it should also free itself from as much budget weight as possible.

2. take the drawing of legislative districts away from the Legislature.

3. end the use of propositions to pass bonds and spending measures. Those are properly the subject of our representatives. Let them vote on this stuff.

4. Make it a lot harder to get propositions on the ballot. No more legislative propositions, for one thing. And increase the signature requirement for petitions to 2 million. Any proposition that passes can be voided by the legislature. Any proposition requiring any public expenditures must contain sunset clauses.

5. In fact, make the following trade: in exchange for giving up the 2/3 rule for passing tax increases and budgets, create mandatory sunset provisions 10 years out for everything.

6. return CA to its core competence: education, law enforcement, prisons, running elections, etc. no more duplicating the work of the feds. That means, for example, no more Air Resources Board.

7. Protect Prop. 13, but also take away all of the things that cause property values to artificially skyrocket - overly restrictive zoning rules, environmental set asides, rent control, etc.