Happy Free Will Fiscal Cliff New Years Eve

Sorry for the light blogging, but the holidays and a family trip to Santa Barbara took precedence over blogging about the fiscal cliff and other Beltway Kabuki matters.

Still, I want to go on the record (again) by repeating my belief that we should just go over the cliff and deal with what comes after as best we can. The GOP has made its point, I think, that they really really don't want to raise taxes without spending cuts. If you want my opinion, I think the Dems' "plan" to raise taxes and cut defense and then blame both outcomes on intransigent Republicans will not work as well as they think for the simple reason that there is a long paper and video trail of various liberals demanding those very outcomes.

Many on the right worry that a tax increase will split the GOP a la the Bush 1990 budget deal, but I don't see how that will work for the simple reason that the 1990 situation is not the same as that of 2012. Back in 1990, Bush 41 had won re-election* and still entered into a RINO-esque budget compromise that predictably angered the base. Now? Unless I missed something, we don't have any Republican president-elects strutting around negotiating any deals with anybody. Quite the opposite. Obama won on very little, except for his repeated demand that "the rich" pay just "a little bit more" in taxes to make things "fair." That apparently was a winning message ca. 2012 A.D. Why is the GOP going to be blamed for that?

Rather than negotiating another round of secret deals, the House and Senate Republicans should simply let the cliff approach and then pass by, and then begin to treat the Dems as an enemy to be defeated, rather than  lovable opponents who need to be appeased.

*it was Ronald Reagan's third term, remember.

Merry Free Will Christmas!

Truth be told, it's hard to be merry this year. I don't think I'm the only one who feels this. The malls and markets have been noticeably less crowded this holiday season. The senseless deaths of so many children in Connecticut weigh on the mind, as does the grotesque reaction by our supposed betters. (If there's a reason to be thankful, I guess that I'm thankful I'm not the sort of person who reacts to an awful tragedy by blaming the freakin' NRA).

Still, Christmas is supposed to be a time when you remember that your problems are not what's important. There is a broader world out there, and others who are counting on us to help them get through it.

Merry Christmas!

Now It All Makes Sense: Romney Didn't Really Want To Run For President

That, at least, is the word from Tagg Romney, who told the Boston Globe that he and Ann Romney had to work hard to persuade Mitt to run for the 2012 nomination. It was "his turn" after all!

No one wanted to be president less than Mitt Romney, his son said in an interview out Sunday that raises new questions about the candidacy of the losing Republican nominee. 

In an interview with the Boston Globe examining what went wrong with the Romney campaign, his eldest son Tagg explains that his father had been a reluctant candidate from the start. 

After failing to win the 2008 Republican nomination, Romney told his family he would not run again and had to be persuaded to enter the 2012 White House race by his wife Ann and son Tagg. 

"He wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life. He had no desire... to run," Tagg Romney said. "If he could have found someone else to take his place... he would have been ecstatic to step aside." 

Mitt Romney "is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them. He loves his country, but he doesn't love the attention," his son said.

To paraphrase Johnny Rotten, "Ever had the feeling you've just been ripped off?"

I guess now it makes sense how Romney essentially took a dive in the third debate and eased noticeably off of the throttle during the last three weeks of the campaign. He came dangerously close to winning the election - remember how everyone on the left was relieved when Hurricane Sandy hoved into view? - which would not have been an optimal outcome for someone who didn't act like he really wanted the job to begin with.

In a way, we averted disaster of a sort. (trying hard not to diminish the disaster we're living through right now). If Romney couldn't bother to campaign, he certainly wasn't ready to govern in the manner he promised. There would have been no major spending cuts, no tax reform, and, of course, no repeal of Obamacare. It would have been Bush 41 all over again, only without the preceding 8 years of real conservative governance to build on.

Of course, "thanks" to Romney, we had no viable conservative candidate to put up against Obama. While he was not enthusiastic about waging political war against Democrats, he was quite happy to let it rip against his fellow Republicans. Funny how the guy who violated the 11th Commandment didn't really want the job to begin with.

Just What The Hell Is Going On?

I have been going back and forth over how much or how little to write about the horrible events in Connecticut. My reaction has been similar to that during the days after 9/11, and I don't say that lightly. Just as on that day, I keep going back to the same thought, "how could anyone do that?" Maybe the event is too much for a blog post, but I do need to say something about the political reaction, such as it has been.

We are being ruled by fools on both sides of the aisle.

Within an hour of the true scale of that maniac's rampage becoming clear, you began to hear talk about how we would need to Do Something about guns. Those poor children, and the brave handful of women who sacrificed their lives to save so many others, were lying still where they died, and here came Michael Bloomburg, who should rightly be concerned about what's going on in the Five Boroughs, and no further, intoning that "we" must get guns off the street. The words of this former alleged Republican have been repeated ad nauseum, so much so that it is clear that liberal politicians and their media allies saw this awful tragedy - just imagine the last panicked seconds of those children's lives - as a once-in-a-decade chance to "win" a political argument they lost years ago.

Michael Bloomberg? Diane Feinstein? Michael Moore? Everyone on CNN & MSNBC? Go to Hell. Please.

And, they're the compassionate ones, don't you know.

Banning guns may have a certain visceral appeal, especially with its biblical incantations of beating swords into plowshares, but that's not going to solve anything. For one thing, gun bans are unconstitutional. For another, facts and experience tell us that gun bans ultimately result in more guns deaths, not fewer. And, finally, there is not a law you could draft respecting guns that would have stopped that monster from carrying out his evil deeds.

Of course, the fact that liberals can't ban guns doesn't mean they can't do the next best thing, which  it to wave the bloody shirt in the face of those conservative politicians reckless enough to go on cable TV to be hectored about the 2nd Amendment, as if the NRA relishes mass killings.

That doesn't mean the right hasn't had its own moments of jack-assery. You know what's just as pointless as calling for banning guns? How about calls to censor violent movies and video games? That's just as unconstitutional as banning guns, and about as effective. Same with calls to bring back school prayer.

You know what I haven't heard from any of our conservative "leaders?" An idea of how to deal with the actual problems that you readily identify as common to all of these mass shootings:

1. a troubled loner who was obviously a ticking time bomb, and whose dangerous proclivities were undoubtedly well known to those around him, but who could not get him off the streets.  

2. readily available guns that they practically picked up off of the floor  

3. a "soft target" filled with defenseless victims

We knew all of this before last Friday, but everyone's acting like the sun just rose in the East for the first time.

Now I know House Republicans have been very busy watching John Boehner tramp up to the White House to "negotiate," but, in the meantime, don't they have jobs? Aren't they, like, legislators? Hasn't Congress been known to produce legislation on occasion?

Say what you will about Dianne Feinstein, but 48 hours after the massacre began, she was in front of a microphone with draft legislation ready to go. Do you think she and her staff wrote this stuff in a fever pitch on Saturday? Of course not! They had it sitting in a drawer somewhere, ready to go for just this moment when the public could perhaps be railroaded into supporting gun restrictions it would otherwise oppose.

You get the feeling Republicans have draft legislation sitting in a drawer (or on a hard drive)? Me neither.

Where's the federal law making a parent criminally negligent when they leave a god-damned weapon lying around the house, and their kid uses it to kill someone?

Where's the federal concealed-carry legislation?

Where's federal equivalent of the Tarasoff rule?

And where's the federal law making it a lot easier to institutionalize people with dangerous, violent psychoses?

(that last one, btw, would pass with wide majorities while the ostensibly "common sense" guns bans will languish in committee. Let liberals explain why the likes of Seung Cho should be able to just wander the world until they decide it's time to go out in a blaze of infamy.)

Where is all this proposed legislation? You got me. All I see are Republican politicians like Louis Golmert auditioning for the James Watt Memorial Clueless Right-Wing Gaffe Award by, say, going on teevee and saying we should "arm the teachers." Maybe we should, but wouldn't it be better to try and actually pass laws that could address the very real gaps in our laws? And, Rep. Golmert, with all due respect, isn't that your job?

The Adam Lanzas of the world have civil rights that allow them the freedom to plot, and carry out, mass murder. I guarantee that somewhere in Connecticut there is a psychologist who knew exactly what was wrong with his patient and didn't or couldn't do anything about it. Lanza's civil rights trumped the right those children had to be able to go to school and then come home alive. Society has bent over backwards for Adam Lanza and his ilk, offering them freedom where, 50 years ago, they would have been institutionalized. In coddling Lanza, society utterly failed to do anything for those beautiful children, and the women who tried desperately to save them. Arm the teachers? Sure, but why not get the nation's Adam Lanzas - their neighbors and teachers know who they are, more or less - off the streets?

But no, the dread "right wing" would rather gas on about Call of Duty II or school prayer, in between stuttering defenses of the 2nd Amendment under the kleig lights of the cable shows that constitute our god-forsaken public forum.

We've had school shootings before, but this one is historically awful.

Liberals think we must surrender our constitutional rights, and leave ourselves defenseless.

Republicans are willing to defend the 2nd Amendment, but are otherwise cowering in the usual defensive crouch, offering platitudes.

No one wants to take the lead and say what the majority of Americans are thinking: we have been too lenient for too long with the disturbed young men who walk our streets.

As I said, we are being ruled by damn fools.

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.

Going Over The Fiscal Cliff: The Free Will Rationale

A few days after the election, I was grumbling to various Free Will Insiders that the then-incipient "fiscal cliff" negotiations were pointless, and we would be better off letting the Jan. 1 deadline expire without any further drama or delay. Naturally, I didn't write this down, so I can't literally claim to have anticipated the "walk away" position that Rush, Dr. K, and other hard-nosed conservatives have taken up. But, as they haven't expressed the Free Will Rationale, I can at least record that for posterity:

1. everyone involved in the 2011 deal that resulted in the fiscal cliff, except maybe Allen West, was returned to office.

2. When American voters elect a divided gov't, they must know that the results will be these sorts of tortured compromises.

3. the fiscal cliff does involve some (admittedly anodyne) spending cuts

4. To those national security hawks setting their pants on fire over defense spending cuts I will say this:

a. the Pentagon has enjoyed absurdly large budgets, as compared to the rest of the world.  

b. there is nothing oxymoronic about being cheap and being a hawk 

c. the Patraeus scandal has exposed, maybe indirectly, that our officer corps is maybe not living the Spartan life-style that we have all imagined, and that the military could stand to go on a diet.  

d. Ronaldus showed us that defense spending can be increased, and military readiness restored, in very short order

5. To the tax hawks, I will say this:

a. As we have learned over and over again, Democrat tax rates can be cut, and revenues increased, in very short order.  

b. we shouldn't be focusing exclusively on income tax rates. If you want to start a real class war, look to the myriad tax shelters that wealthy liberals like the Kennedies and Warren Buffet use to perpetuate not just their wealth, but also their wealth-destroying causes. 

This is not to say the GOP should simply fold. Republican fingerprints don't need to be on middle class tax increases (you know, all those "rich" people who benefited from the Bush tax rates). Retain the Bush rates for 99%* and let 'em go up for the 1% who (1) mostly live in Blue-states anyway and (2) haven't exactly been loyal GOP voters lately.

This is all unpleasant stuff, but the real problem is spending, and we are not going to solve America's spending problem in two weeks with John Boehner at the helm. Defense cuts and tax hikes have happened before and the GOP has tended to dial these back in relatively short order. But, reducing spending requires a level of commitment and solidarity that the GOP simply cannot rely on in the next three weeks. There is nothing dishonorable in a strategic retreat, so long as we know the commitment is there to fight again another day.

(* isn't it funny how Obama's 1%, which we heard about all through the election, has magically morphed, without comment, into 2%? Fair Warning: I am already hearing the 2% elided into "2 or 3%." We'll be up to 5% by the end of the year.)

Right Wing Book Club: Post-Election Reading

Here's my gloomy post-election reading. Try to see if you discern a pattern:

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang & Jon Halliday. a very good biography that brings together every rotten story about the Great Helmsman in one convenient place. Life under Mao's thumb, whether in CCP controlled territory during the civil war, or in Red China proper, was alternately miserable and terrifying. Too bad when Mao was actually alive there were so many westerners who bought the line about Mao being an "agrarian reformer."

Thaddeus Stevens and the Fight For Negro Rights by Milton Meltzer. we used to have some bad-a** Republicans out there.

The Amateur by Edward Klein: the book that was supposed to turn the electorate off of the Obama Administration, and obviously did not. The best parts are when Michelle dumps on the Kennedies for having tatty furniture.

What You Should Know About Inflation by Henry Hazlitt. written in 1960 (and relying on data from 1930 - 1959), but still depressingly relevant. Quantitative easing, deficit spending and "stimulous" each take their turns under Hazlitt's microscope. As with Hazlitt's other books, the writing is clear and concise. Should (but never will) be required reading in college, if not high school.

Popular Crime by Bill James: an amazing book about infamous crimes from the master of sabremetrics. James is a relentless quantifier, creating 18 types of crimes, assigning percentages to the levels of evidence necessary to convict, etc; while also offering his take on famous murders and murderers. You could literally learn something new on every page. Shock stat: the great American crime wave really started in the 1850's and has remained at elevated levels ever since.

One Is A Crowd; Out of Step by Frank Chodorov. essays from an OG paleo-con who was present at the creation of Human Events, and fought the good fight during the Thirties and Forties. Chodorov was an isolationist who thought Democrats were socialists, and believed people were crazy to buy gov't bonds, positions that probably didn't do much to enhance his popularity at the time.

Machinery Of Freedom by David Friedman. this anrcho-capitalist classic looks more and more like science fiction everyday.

(free pdf.s of the Hazlitt and Chodorov books are available at the Mises Institute website. Friedman has a link to downloads to his books at his very good blog)

A Little Perspective:

Did you know that 182 years passed from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the drafting of the US Constitution in 1789? 182 years from 1789 is --- 1971!

Shakespere was still writing and producing plays when Englishmen sailed up the James River. The colonists couldn't bring the King James Bible with them because it was still in development. And so on.

All of which is to say we've been here for quite a bit longer than most of us realize, and that we've survived worse than arrogant community organizers playing at socialism.

Pressure Point: Revving Up To "Turn" Justice Roberts During The Coming Supreme Court Term

Ann Althouse takes note of the inevitable effort to repeat last year's successful effort to mau-mau Chief Justice Roberts into declaring Obamacare to be constitutional.

if you want to say Roberts is a hypocrite because his writing is equally disingenuous or worse, that's another matter. It's what Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic is doing in an item titled "The Nerve of John Roberts": 

Disappeared the scope? That's Cohen's way of referring to the identification of some limit on the scope of the commerce power, so that it didn't reach a private citizen's failure to purchase insurance. Congress has power under the Commerce Clause to regulate nearly everything else, which to Cohen's eye is no power at all. Unless it's everything, it's nothing. Disappeared! 

Yes, yes, roll out your list of Supreme Court decisions you wish went the other way. That's not in the same category as deceptively stating the facts of a case, which is simply not acceptable in lawyers' briefs. The Solicitor General's office disserved us. The Chief Justice called the lawyer on a deception and — with restraint — said he "found it a little disingenuous." 

What I find disingenuous is the criticism of the Chief Justice. And after all he did for you upholding Obamacare! (He used the tax power instead of the commerce power).
But no thanks will be forthcoming. Pressure must be kept up. This is a big term for the Supreme Court — gay marriage (probably), affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act — and Roberts's vote may be required to reach what the media know are the right results. Roberts needs to know that any love for him is purely contingent. He's being watched.

A little disingenuous. This from a judge who disappeared the scope of the Commerce Clause in the Affordable Care Act case.

This from a judge who gutted decades of First Amendment precedent in the Citizens United case after reaching out, unilaterally, to expand the scope of that campaign finance case.....

All I can say is I hope (but doubt) it's true that Roberts is playing a long-game whereby upholding Obamacare as a tax was actually a poison pill, and that he is trading his Obamcare vote for three decades of hard-nosed conservative opinion writing. Reality is that Roberts has shown weakness in a manner that Renquist never displayed, even when he was dying from cancer.

(as an aside, isn't it it depressing how W's "best" appointments - those being Roberts and Petraeus - have failed us so badly? Republican problems go far beyond SuperPACs, consultants, and moderate presidential candidates).


But still, forget Roberts. What are we supposed to think of the President and his minions aggressively demanding, directly and through their sympathizers in the media, that the Chief Justice vote the "correct" way? What happens if Roberts does uphold Prop. 8? Or strikes down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act? Remember how the media focused so intently on Roberts's young children and his wife during his confirmation hearings? I'll bet he does.

Obama et al. can get away with smilingly threatening the Supreme Court - a supposedly co-equal branch of the federal gov't, believe it or not - because they must know the 50.9% of voters who supported them in November approve of this sort of behavior. Further proof that these are people who must be beaten, not just defeated in an election.

The Broken Chain: What Happens When The Police Stop Arresting Criminals

You'd think the "More Arrests = Less Crime" would be one of those self-evident public policy formulas that resist all but the most blockheaded "cop watch" activist, but you'd be wrong. Witness Oakland, CA, where the City Fathers are expressing bafflement over that city's inexorable rise in crime despite a steep drop-off in arrests.

Oakland police officers made 44 percent fewer arrests last year than they had just three years before, city records show, a plunge in enforcement that extended from armed robbery cases to drug busts to minor crimes like public drunkenness. 

That's 6,410 fewer arrests - an average of 18 fewer per day - in a city that has the highest crime rate in the state and, this year, is grappling with a 23 percent spike in murders, muggings and other major offenses. 

The drop is so steep it has eased a backlog of cases in Alameda County Superior Court and may be contributing to a shrinking county jail population, officials said. 

The arrest figures, obtained under the state's Public Records Act, raise questions about the effectiveness and assertiveness of the Police Department, which is struggling under the weight of job cuts, low morale and the demands of federal court oversight.
... 

Sgt. Chris Bolton, chief of staff to Police Chief Howard Jordan, who took his post in October 2011 following the resignation of Anthony Batts, said arrests were an important tool in crime-fighting but "not the sole answer." 

Bolton said a lot of the proactive work that yields arrests - operations that target gangs and drug dealers, for instance - has fallen off as a result of job cuts. More than ever, he said, officers spend their time hustling from one emergency call to the next. 

Due to layoffs and attrition, the force has 626 officers, a 25 percent decline from a high of 837 in December 2008. By comparison, San Francisco - which has twice the population of Oakland but 20 percent less violent crime - has 2,164 officers. 

"In 2010, we said we needed at least 900 cops to be effective," Bolton said. "The first units to go when we faced staffing reductions were squads that were not tied to calls for service and were designed to address gangs, drugs and guns through proactive enforcement." 

In a written statement, Mayor Jean Quan said, "We need to be taking more criminals off the streets, and tackling the problem requires both immediate and long-term solutions," including partnerships with outside agencies.

All I can say is, thank God I am a stoopid right-winger and not a liberal. Not that I am calling liberal politicians stupid. They know exactly what kind of line they can peddle to try to explain why it is that crime, which has been quiescent since the Willie Horton days, has come rocketing back. OTH, anyone who believes this stuff deserving of the patenting Free Will Glance of Pitying Scorn.


What liberals are desperate that no one notices is that they are the root cause of rising urban crime, and not because of the culture of dependency bred by the welfare state. Oakland started firing cops because the budget got out of control, and city progressives would rather pay pensions to retired bureaucrats, and pay "grants" to dubious non-profits, rather than police the streets. Add to that the state's determined effort to empty the prisons for the same reasons, and it's not hard to make the connection between an influx of criminals meeting a winnowed police force.


"Luckily" for Oakland's politicos, people would rather march in an anti-cop rally, and bitch about the decade-old "Riders" case, instead of giving the police the minimal resources to do their jobs.