RIP Andrew Breitbart

RIP Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012)

Collapsed walking near his home, survived by a wife and four young children.

My condolences to the family, friends, co-workers and those who loved this Happy Warrior.

That, my son, THAT was a man.

The three factions of the Republican Party today

I'm using my prior break-out of the factions within the Republican Party from back in 2008 to look at where things stand today with the candidates in the field.  I will be doing some re-posting of material from that and not going into the over-view of them within the current atmosphere of the pre-election cycle.

As they have broken out these three groups stand out, and they do have sub-groups within them but gain factional affiliation by their positions as sub-groups.

I)  First is the SecCons or Security Conservatives.  The strong position of the US to wage war in her defense was a vital concern during the Cold War and this faction was in ascendance then.  By putting military concerns first they were able to back a strong and final build-up against the USSR that covered decades and put the Soviet system which was always on the ropes down and out for the count.  These were the backers that won the equivalent of a World War without bringing on true nuclear conflict.  Their problems are in the realms of Fiscal, Social and Domestic policy outside of the military realm and with the draw-down from Iraq, the ongoing relatively low-level conflict against the Talibe in AFPAK and helping out a few other Nations in COIN (Philippines, Colombia, Kenya, Yemen) they are losing a strong position within the Republican Party.  While some of the candidates will support a continued level of military affairs, this faction has no backer who is first and foremost for the military.  Without the Soviets and with China now having its economy implode in bad debt, the lower threat of terrorism going nuclear is not one that pushes people to actively support the old style military structure.  The military, for its part, understands this and is adapting to the modern world, but it is a world with a lower need for capital intensive defense systems and without a large economic need the SecCons are being marginalized.

Part of the marginalization is the comfort to social moderates and liberals, plus a willingness to spend heaven and earth for the latest equipment.  Our times are no longer ones that allow for such extravagance and socially the pendulum that started swinging in the 1890's with Progressivism has, apparently, reached as far as it can go on the other end of the cycle.

II)  Second are the FiCons or Fiscal Conservatives.  This part of the Republican Party has been part and parcel of the 'Rockefeller Republican' brand for decades.  It is this section of the party that is now breaking up due to the Tea Party movement that hadn't even been thought of in 2008.  Today there are two branches within the FiCons and they are currently the ones on the internal battle-lines for the party, itself.  Thus I will go into a bit of detail here.

1) Rockefeller Republicans - These are the 'Establishment Republicans', the guys with the money and many of the reigns via the control of the party leadership and their influence has withstood the Reagan Revolution with its SoCon underpinnings.  These are generally seen as the Big Business supporters for earmarks, subsidies, tax breaks and so on via budgetary work in DC.  It is this segment that overwhelming benefits from the K Street lobbyists who use their outside money and revolving door connections to get inside influence on the federal budget.  This is mirrored in the Democratic Party, to be sure, but in the Republican Party when anyone spoke of 'fiscal conservative' between 1950 and 1980, it was this cohort that was being referenced.  Do note that they are FOR tax breaks but not FOR cutting the size of government, therefore any short-term gain in political advantage from tax breaks is off-set by further erosion of personal liberty of the individual due to larger and more officious government.  While it was this faction that called out the problem of SSA and M&Ms, they are also the ones most notable for being unable or unwilling to get these programs reduced or on a road to being abolished as fiscally unsound.  At least two of the current candidates come from this faction (Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich) or are affiliated with it via their business and political outlooks, and while they are (apparently) at odds with each other on the campaign trail, they are both unwilling to do any wholesale revision of the US government.  Abolishing programs still leaves the apparatus to regenerate them in place, thus removing 'welfare' has allowed for other programs to flourish where there was once that single program and done at higher cost and less accountability.  No one who believes that individual liberty is the basis for society, the Nation, government and the State would ever espouse 'mandates' for anything upon individuals in the name of fiscal conservatism.

2) Tea Party FiCons - The largest faction of the Tea Party is in this sub-group within the FiCons.  Unlike the older cohort, this cohort sees small business and smaller government as the course to go for fiscal conservatism.  The argument that government is doing things it was never designed nor meant to do and not doing those things well or efficiently for the citizenry and, in fact, is infringing on individual fiscal concerns is one that is a 'Fusion' concept, of which I will talk more about later.  Unlike the RR-FiCons, the TP-FiCons are building a fundamental ECONOMIC case for the power of personal liberty to guide the economy that is not a RR-FiCon one.  Where the RR-FiCons are inherently Hamiltonian or Progressive in their outlook, the TP-FiCons are inherently Jacksonian and Traditionalist in their positions.  The inherent nature of an economy being made up of individual transactions at the lowest level seeking the most efficient means to enable such transactions and then allowing for a larger emergent phenomena  to take root based on those transactions is one that is immediately identifiable to TP-FiCons: it is not just Hayek but the nature of human liberty and its source that argues for this and argues against the intermediation of government in any meaningful positive (that is to say in the realm of positive liberty) way and only that it needs to exercise its negative powers granted by the people to safeguard the economy from aberrant actors who will not play by the set of rules for economic exchanges.  Government cannot make such low level decisions without huge negative impact on the overall economy and, no matter what other 'good' is generated, the lost value of human liberty to fully flourish is something that impoverishes rich and poor alike and makes it harder for the poor to advance.  This sub-group is aiming to remove the Establishment RR-FiCon death grip on the party via campaign donations: members directly donate to individuals running for office, not to the party.  This has only been going on, in a real sense, for less than 2 years and due to the economic times we are in and the failure of government to adapt to them (indeed it continues being the problem to the Nation, economically) the more the TP-FiCons will shift the RR-FiCons out of control of the party funds and the party system.

III) Social Conservatives -  In the prior work I broke this category up into the Christian Conservatives and the Traditionalist Conservatives, each with their own outlook on society and the role of government and the church in people's lives.  While not at logger-heads, they have not always marched to the same tune and it was only for a few short years under Ronald Reagan that both sub-groups had time together in-step and in-formation.  Today these two sub-groups are now getting a new blend via a third group made up of parts of each of them and the TP-FiCons: the Fusionists.

1) Christian Conservatives - Here the prior break-out of religious observation and moral law guidance that was the bastion of the Christian Conservatives is now finding that it can make an economic case, as well, which is uncharted waters for many Christian Conservatives.  Moral Law guidance is, itself, only secondarily economic and primarily about the duty of man to god and society to make both moral so as to get good government.  Thus, until the last 2-3 years, the idea that government could be used to promote a moral 'good' was an idea taken up by some candidates (Mike Huckabee in 2008, Newt Gingrich in this go around).  Yet this is fundamentally against moral teachings as government is the last, least and worst place to receive any moral teachings.  Anything that gets between you and God should be disdained, and yet the Progressive Era had slowly shifted Christian Conservative SoCons into this idea that government is the last refuge for the poor and needy to go... not to the actual people who make up the Nation as caring for the poor and needy is a directive to individuals, not to States nor Nations.  The idea that government can tell you when you can work, how long you can work, if you are worthy of 'retirement' benefits, and on and on have been a slow and steady erosion of the moral fiber of the Nation by assaulting the moral fiber of individuals inside and, increasingly, outside the realm of religiously observant Americans.  The moral line in the sand against abortion was the first sign that this erosion had gone too far, but that Christian Conservatives could only do this small portion of the work of protecting society and could not grasp the larger threat to the entire society on a moral basis that government was pushing.  The awakening of Christian Conservatives to the much, much deeper teaching of our rights being vested in us took over three decades to finally filter into this sub-group of SoCons, and the re-identification of not just Life but Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness being prime movers granted by God is now spreading amongst the Christian Conservative SoCons who used to just stick to their faction knitting but now find a way to express a much deeper moral and religious belief for society via economics.  Being conservative it is a slow to move group, but once in motion little will stop it, and if the line in the sand is but a starting line for repeal of the Progressive Era, then it will be the individual who couple God, Faith, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as a continuous whole that will be the major part of the Fusionist sub-group.

2) Traditional Conservatives - These are the followers of Federalism, a society that treats its fellow citizens with respect, the builders of hearth and home (not just those who purchase one) and while religious to a large extent, it is the religion of conviction at home by the fireside with one's children and the role of man to build a good society for not just himself but for his fellow man, as well, as a great good and duty of man.  While this is the quietest faction of the SoCons they have been a part of the party since Lincoln, and have always understood respecting government but questioning its extent and growth.  For Traditionalists there is always an economic point to be made and it is centered on the family check book and how one spends money for oneself.  These are the individuals who uphold thrift, of neither a borrow nor lender be, paying back one's debts not just promptly but ending them as soon as possible, and for supporting the notion that a man cannot be free if he is in debt to any other man or institution via his finances.  This sub-group may be the first to fully Fuse with the TP FiCons as there are direct parallels (indeed very deep parallels) between household accounting and government accounting, and that if you owe someone then you are in their power due to your debt.  The case that man who is in debt is living on borrowed time and that his works are prone to failure and collapse (no matter if they last) is one that is understood deeply within the Traditionalist Community.   It is this community that is closest to the old Democratic Jacsksonian community (that left the Democrats in the late 1960's) and the amount of cross-over between the old trail blazers (Jacksonians) and the old first settlers (Traditionalists) have always made them able to get along on a social level.

IV) Fusionist Conservatives - Fiscal Conservatism has deep roots in not only societal good but the teachings from the Judeo-Christian heritage about duty to God and one's fellow man.  Unlike libertarians the Fusionists recognize that not all of man's liberties and rights are positive, as Nature gives us both equally (although not in equal amounts), so that the necessity of society to generate organs to watch over and stop the exercise of negative liberties and rights within society requires government.  Man is not wholly good nor evil, but has positive and negative rights and liberties which we can bias via moral teachings to curb the negative rights and liberties and enshrine the positive ones worthy of protection.  Government is to recognize that these positive liberties and rights are to be protected, not infringed upon, and the case for this comes not from legal proceedings but from moral teachings, upholding society, and holding government accountable for the negative powers we grant it to safeguard society and the individual.  This is a deeply libertarian approach, yes, but it is not made by modern libertarian channels but through ones of religious observance, religious teachings and understanding man's duty to God and his fellow man.  Fusionist Conservatism is, at once, deeply conservative and extremely expansive in this day and age as it is the naturally recognized antidote to tyrannical or despotic government.  When Barack Obama chided the people of Pennsylvania as grasping on to their guns, god and bible, he was mocking the very basis of what is the enemy of Progressivism and Socialism in all its forms.  These three, together, give the basis for personal liberty (guns), the originator of our liberty (God) and the written moral teachings of God (the Holy Bible) all in one swoop.  Throw in Gold and you have the result of protected personal liberty able to prosper with obedience to God and upholding moral teachings.  Gold is a result of these things, not a cause of them, and it is garnered through liberty ONLY.  Unwittingly Barack Obama named the Fusionist Awakening in these concepts and knows not the history of a debauched, debased and decadent society that adheres as leeches to government is dissolved by a devout people willing to undergo martyrdom for eternal salvation.  One laughs at these things at their peril, and in speaking of them the seeds that were already planted over decades were given final fertilizer and water to grow again.

At the rate of change for the Republican Party and Conservatism as a whole, the next decade is one that will be fraught with danger and great promise.

Government will need to climb down from its Himalayan Mountain Range of debt.  It can be tossed off, with great social turmoil, or it can climb down by jettisoning the infringement of positive liberties and rights in the way of retirement, medical aid and the million and one other things done in the name of 'good' from environment to energy to agriculture to 'the humanities' to education, either via slow phase-out or wholesale cut-off.  Government so large, so officious and, at the same time, so incompetent creates a Law of Rules in which any person is probably in violation of some rule or regulation at any given moment in the day.  The Rule of Law is simple and easy to understand laws that are clearly defined and enforced without favor nor fervor, while the Law of Rules is all about favoritism and payoffs.  To do this requires and understanding of our fellow citizens that we, as man, have been living over the margin and near the edge of the abyss waiting for one ill moment to topple us into despotism or worse.  To get back from that edge the argument that our personal liberties, rights and freedom are our own salvation in this life and the next, and that passing them off to others (which is so very easy) means that we, as individuals, become cold and cruel to our fellow man because we refuse to recognize his circumstances and help him out of them.  Government cannot do that, indeed it MUST NOT do that as that is not its place as a part of society.  It is just an organ of society, and one that processes the identified problems and waste material and gets rid of them... which is not the brain, in case this has been missed.  No better argument for chasing appetites to constipation of debt can be rendered than is shown by our current government which has been eating so much in the way of the positive it can no longer accomplish its duties to us, as citizens, via its negative powers and responsibilities.

This is a hard argument to make as the Deadly Sin of Sloth is one that guides this age as no other.  Yet the problems of our fellow man are not for someone else to attend to, but for us, as individuals, to ameliorate.  One cannot sit back and let others take care of things, because becoming glued to one's sofa soon means that you can no longer remember how to move from it and become the very sort of problem you were unwilling to deal with in the first place.  The heart of charity is not taxation, which is the negative liberty of theft who's power we lend for government in a limited area of commerce, but in the heart of man who is willing to give time, effort, though, a helping hand and last and least is cash to his fellow man to create a better society.  To get a more cohesive society (albeit with stark and fun differences for that is the essence of liberty on the positive side) we cannot entrust government as a caretaker or the builder of a safety net as it is not only prone to corruption but inefficient and will seek to grant favor to the few via funds that are not available, so as to expand power over the many.  Government granted positive outlook is tyrannical at its core because it can couple the whip with the reward and break man to it.  To stop that require accountability on the fiscal side, first, so as to get rid of the unnecessary appendages of government that threaten liberty in the first place.  When there is no safety net, no tax breaks, no subsidies, we are then left to our own devices to find a good way to live without the costly help of tyranny.

The current field of candidates reflects those trying to grasp on to the old, and dying, those trying to muddle through and a few trying to chart a path to a better future with smaller government and enhanced liberty for man.

Four years will not alter the fundamentals changing America.  We may crash off the mountains into debt, but that is not oblivion as we then get to the end state in a few days, and with next to no government, to boot.

The trends cannot be changed.

What can be altered is the outlook of individual to embrace what is coming and help soften it and explain it, so that we can get to a better place as a society and a nation.

If you dare to, that is.

Same planet, different worlds

Reading a recent column by David Ignatius at RealClearPolitics I am struck by something that has begun to change in America due to the Tea Party movement.  It is a strong, very strong, sense that those who once had a great capability to describe the world as it was have not adapted to the world as it is.

The last time I had a similar feeling was at the end of the 1980's and heading into the 1990's.  The collapse of the Soviet Bloc (in general Eastern European Communist regimes) and the final fall of the USSR itself, by dissolving out of existence, then left an entire class of the pundit class at sea.  They were the ones who could only see the USSR lasting at least to 2030 if not longer, and saw no structural problems within the Soviet system or amongst its outlying satellite states.  This was the grim and gruesome crowd that knew we would 'always have the USSR to kick around'.  Mind you, the ever ready CIA agreed with that position, too.

Then came Solidarity and Gorbie and soon the entire edifice was crumbling.  Poland 10 years, Hungary 10 months, Czechoslovakia 10 weeks, Romania 10 days and East Germany 10 hours.  One decade a mighty USSR that is everlasting and a decade later 'where the hell did it get to?'  It was the seemingly impossible snowballing to take out all previous assumptions and constructions with it and those who were hardest hit were minorities... just kidding!  No the hardest hit were the Kremlinologists who had their 'sources' to 'know' what was 'going on' in the Kremlin.  Or at least that small bar off the square near the hotel where the double-agents hung out.  Their credibility went from supremo-maximo, must consult before any decision so as to not get global thermonuclear war over a minor trade dispute, to 'what a bunch of morons'!

You know, the over-educated elite punditry?  Those were the morons.

Really, morons need lessons.

Fast-forward to a massive lending crisis involving a few institutions (Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Citibank) and a huge government over-response (throw tons of cash at everyone, force secret deals, keep the system going!!!) that has made things worse by stifling the market and upsetting the normal rule of law and the course of bankruptcies.  Pulled into that were two automakers that deserved to be taken down a few million notches: GM and Chrysler.  Actually GM is a lending institution (GMAC) that makes cars as a side-show, and the government wanted to get its fingers into GMAC as did the head of GM.  Gotta love that 'government getting into bed with industry' sort of deal that made Mussolini a household name back in the late 1920's early 1930's.

The reaction to all of this has been the sudden appearance of the Tea Party movement, foreshadowed by the Porkbusters movement during the later Bush years.  From 'trimming the pork' and 'finding the waste' to 'Taxed Enough Already' in only a couple of years, going from a concerted group of the interested to involving their friends, relatives and neighbors in a few massive federal bailouts.  Change is in the air and it isn't of the 'hope & change' variety, either.  Thus reading David Ignatius has that ever so eerie feeling of Kremlinologists spouting off about the durability of the USSR, and 'certain ways things will always be done' and, generally, missing the fact that the Eastern Bloc was crumbling wasn't really happening at all, just some 'minor adjustments' to the USSR.  The world could use some minor adjustments like that in Old Europe, which David Ignatius points out. 

What he misses, though, is the entire tone of what needs to be done. Consider these two opening paragraphs and I will highlight the things that really get to me:

WASHINGTON -- At the risk of taking contrarianism to extremes, let me offer this suggestion: The global economy needs a "tea party" movement in Europe to lobby for fiscal conservatism there.

Many "mainstream" analysts deride the tea party agitators as a right-wing fringe group, and in many respects, that label is deserved. I wouldn't want them running the Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve.

The last part, first: I don't want eggheads like Little Timmy "The Smartest Guy In The Room Who Can't Figure Out TurboTax" Geithner running the Treasury.  From that experience of the tax code did Lil Timmy figure out the tax code was too damned complex for an egghead like himself?  Nope.  BTW he was in charge of the NY Fed and a major source of our financial problems and regulatory enforcement and pushing for different regulations.  So I would, actually, like someone who has been on the pointy end of the financial system and who can learn their lessons to be the head of the Treasury... and I don't see why we need the Federal Reserve as it is very convenient to politicians and turns out to be quite costly to the people as it makes the exact same mistakes of the 1920's all over again in the 1990's to 2008 era.  Save that we have Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie and a much more massive government presence in markets than it ever had in the 1920's.

But its that first part that really lets me know that a pundit is about to find out that although he is on the same planet as I am, we are living in different worlds.  The code words 'fiscal conservatism' have a definite meaning in DC:  conservatives who want to restrain the growth of government.  They want to manage government growth.  The underlying concept is that they want more government not less of it.  This is conservatism of a Progressive venue in that it never, not once, asks: 'Are all these things government does justified and supportable under the US Constitution?'

These are the folks derided by the Left when they want to 'restrain growth' as the Left claims those are 'cutting government'?  But that is not the case as the responsibilities and costs of what has been done before continue onwards.  What the Left complains about is that government is not growing fast enough for their liking.  This is what happens when Progressives remain unchallenged for decades: they so twist the meaning of words and concepts that black becomes white and they get killed at the next Zebra crossing (as per Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).  Thus not growing is shrinking, growing slowly is stifling and only when there is robust government growth do they complain about the slow rate of government growth.  By casting no growth as 'cuts' the Left 'wins' the important kudos of 'providing more of taxpayers money to non-taxpayers as such swell Congresscritters' Award.

Now the commentariate, the modern day Kremlinologists of the two party system who have 'fiscal conservatives' pegged as slow-growth Republicans are seeing their ideas being left way out on muddy expanses and wondering 'what the hell is that wall of water across the entire horizon?'  That, as was found out in 2004, is a tsunami.  If my feeling on this is right (and I've only had it one other time beyond the USSR era when Bill Gates famously said that '640K was enough for anyone') then that old idea of 'fiscal conservatism' for Europe (i.e. slow growth conservatism) is about to find that the only place that might make sense is inside Europe.  As Mr. Ignatius points out, Europe can no more get a Tea Party together than it can figure out that all these unassimilated Muslims really aren't Europeans.

This concept of 'fiscal conservatives' is cemented in the next paragraph:

But these conservative populists do perform the useful function of focusing American political attention on the need for fiscal responsibility. They make a good point, for example, in arguing that we shouldn't add a major new entitlement program for health care until we've figured out how to pay for the entitlement programs we've already got.

Hell even the NYT/CBS group that had a poll last week understands that a majority of Americans would take a cut in services to reduce spending.  That goes beyond the WaPo/ABC poll and Rasmussen Reports poll where 63% want smaller government.  This is slowly becoming something that isn't about health care but about the current entitlement system which is broken beyond political repair.  This is not old-time Republican 'fiscal conservatism' that is brewing in America, but something that hasn't been around since the 1830's - a disgust for powerful government.  The Tea Partiers are representative of those Americans who not only want 'fiscal conservatism' but to start addressing the entitlement programs we have, and not figure out how to pay for them... just reduce or eliminate them.  Smaller government and fewer services doesn't mean paying for what we have, but reducing the outlays, powers and taxing power of the government simultaneously.

Like I said, I'm getting that Kremlinologist/Bill Gates feeling going on here and it won't be pretty for the indentured servitude party pundits who can't imagine what liberty and freedom are like because they have read their own material for too long.  That feeling of life-time service to a way of thought comes through clearly in the last paragraph:

I wouldn't really wish the tea party movement on anyone, but the Europeans could use some of its passion about fiscal responsibility. And while we're thinking contrarian thoughts, how about a "conspicuous consumer" movement in high-saving Asia to push for greater domestic spending there?

No, he really can't understand the Tea Party movement as his fellow Americans take up the banner of liberty and freedom which clearly states: Don't Tread On Me.

And while we are on authoritarian ideals, why don't we just wish governments would tell people what to do, tax the hell out of them to do it, restrain their liberty and freedom and make them servants to government because government 'knows best'.

So while I'm thinking contrarian thoughts, wouldn't it be great if the punditcrats got out of their cubicles, their cushy brie and chardonnay get togethers, their damned echo chambers and actually went out into neighborhoods and just talked with folks instead of talking at them?  Luckily we have the internet for that.

Yet another thing Bill Gates didn't expect to catch on...

Why don't young conservatives trust Nobel prize economists?

This is a quickie.

Really!

Spurred on by Ramesh Ponnuru at NRO, talking about generalities in Mark Lilla's recent column on conservatism:

The rest of Lilla's column abounds with gross generalizations—"younger conservative intellectuals" apparently all, without exception, "mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders." This from a guy complaining about a lack of intellectual rigor. Physician heal thyself.

Ok, I will give it a shot.

Both from UCLA: Harold L. Cole, not a Nobel Prize Winner; Lee E. Ohanian, not a Nobel Prize Winner.

Their work, just published, demonstrates that FDR's policies prolonged the Great Depression by 7 years.

And all the grand and glorious Nobel Prize winning economists haven't bothered to do this work.  It is simple, basic, work.

If they can't get *this* right, and have had the data for over 60 years, then why should they be trusted on *any* other topic?

Remember, if Nobel Prize Winning Economists can't figure out that FDR's policies LENGTHENED the Great Depression, then why should they be trusted on something like, say, Free Trade?

Doing work, demonstrating basic understanding of the world, and then analyzing the outcomes... those are 'conservative' ideals, no?

That grand lot of Nobel Price Winning Economists haven't done the most basic work on Progressivist/Liberal Economic theory to show their effects.

I have an extreme problem with that.

But then I do believe in doing the work, showing the numbers and understanding the subject.  And that doesn't require a Nobel Prize to understand.

Yeah, I got a dose of healing to hand out... just gimme the cluebat.

Easing out the Conservative Elite

Looking at Ramesh Ponnuru at The Corner at NRO today got me thinking that most conservatives and Republicans don't know what they hell they are saying as he looks at Ross Douthat's piece on where conservatism should go, and I will put the short piece in full as follows, and bold those parts of interest:

In developing an agenda, Republicans and conservatives need to figure out what the top challenges facing the country are and how to meet them. But it would be pointless to devise an agenda that could not possibly win over a majority of the voters. And of course the same type of politics that might attract one group of voters will repel another. To generalize wildly: Upper-middle-class, college-educated voters tend to find the Republican party's economics attractive and its social positions less so; vice versa for lower-middle-class voters without college degrees. Which group should the builders of a center-right coalition try hardest to get? I largely agree with Ross Douthat's take on this question, but I would make an additional point.

I don't think many people are arguing that if Republicans just emphasized their social conservatism more, they would attract enough additional lower-middle-class voters to win a majority. The argument that Douthat, his co-author Reihan Salam, and I (among others!) are making is that it is possible to craft conservative economic policies that would serve the interests of this group. These policies need not drive away upper-middle-class voters. The Democrats' promises to help downscale voters have been compatible with an increased appeal to upper-middle-class voters, after all.

And if Republicans can appeal to lower-middle-class voters on domestic policy—health care, taxes, etc.—then they will have less need to make the type of cultural appeals to these voters (we disdain arugula, wave the flag a lot, etc.) that seem to drive some upper-middle-class voters batty. Such an economic agenda might thus help the party directly with the lower middle and indirectly with the upper middle. So I think the party's best bet is to keep, while doubtless modifying in some respects, its social conservatism while searching for free-market economic policies that would help lower-middle-class voters. I am doubtless biased by the fact that this approach would also be best for the country.

So the first paragraph is telling us that the Elite Conservatives are pushing a conservative economic agenda and that this isn't appealing to the working class. They are?

From the party that wanted 4 day work weeks in Congress during its time in the majority? And then signed on for a 3 day work week under Democrats? This is an ECONOMIC CONSERVATIVE AGENDA?

Hold your horses right there, what ever happened to a good old 'work ethic' and showing up 5 days a week, 8 hours a day and putting in over-time? What the hell ever happened to THAT? Because that *is* as econmically conservative as you can get and just where is the Republican Party in Congress? On FOUR DAY WEEKENDS!

Now look at the 'conservatives' pushing the 'social conservatism' agenda. See the lovely degrees by their names. They are over-educated and under-worked. Those social conservatives who do have degrees will have to put forward in common, every day terms *why* their ideas on social conservatism are good. And then try to explain a party that doesn't have a work ethic at its highest levels.

Lotsa luck on that, I tell you.

I am sorry that Mr. Ponnuru is missing the point: a good set of ethical values that you actually LIVE THROUGH and demonstrate day-in and day-out is far, far more appealing than just campaigning for this or that cause. He sees where the appeals need to go but then does not correctly formulate that the Party does not hold the basic and underpinning values to sustain them. How do we know that? Take a look at the party leadership, particularly in Congress. Any group as money grabbing and willing to roll over on issues like that group, and then not even bother to have a full work week is not 'Conservative' by any stretch of anyone's imagination: it is Elitist, putting itself above other groups to try and dictate down to others what their agenda should be.

So lets flip this around, a bit, and see what comes from this formulation of the Republican party and see if it better serves to define what is going on: the Conservative Economic and Social Elite is disconnected with everyday Americans and prescribes ideas that are not connected to daily lives, do not reinforce basic ethical concerns, and then uses 'hot button' issues and 'litmus tests' to remove those that disagree with the Elite from the party.

Hey, not too bad, as it pretty much describes how such a group of slackers can utilize a minimal set of agenda topics to slowly cut themselves off from a voting base. The Elite enforces no working class ethics, enforces all sorts of strange social ethics that have little to do with politics and then wants to run on that mess? Why should anyone vote for people who are unwilling to treat public service as a job, who are willing to fill the coffers of their supporters and brown-nosers with federal funds, always pushing at topics that have little chance of succeeding in the way they have been formulated on the social side and then decide to eviscerate their own party when members who have committed no crimes are drummed out because they had problems of fidelity with their home lives? Can't you folks realize that we have that in everyday life, out here in America, and people going through messy divorces don't QUIT THEIR JOBS, by and large, because they can still *work* while having to take care of that mess at home? So a member is found out to be gay and married straight. So what? Can the person do his job? Yeah, if its too much of a distraction in public service, then do leave, but if the member can still demonstrate that he or she holds basic concepts of governance to be their guiding light and that they have failures as an individual, then guess what? They are 'normal'.

I refuse to vote for Angels.

And even *they* had a falling out.

Ok, now I'm going to tackle a 'social conservative' topic that has been a loser as it has been formulated. It doesn't get votes. It hasn't gone anywhere for decades. Those 'leading the charge' are not flexible enough to try something else and the old arguments just aren't doing it. Here's the lovely thing about America - you can try a different approach to reach ultimate ends and still keep conflicts in society down! And as I've written on this before, I will extract from that piece as a demonstration on how to do this, which is not a backing for the idea but a demonstration that a different approach can yield valid outcomes:

In looking at Freedoms, Rights and the People I started looking at the actual framework of the issues involved and then a whole lot more in When do your rights start? Now in this I do *not* try to figure out when someone is or is not a human but *when* there is a passing point *into* Citizenship. Now why did I do that? Because it is imperfect, of course! Far, far less than ideal but... it does head towards the common ideal of Citizenship and upholding all rights and all responsibilities. Citizenship is a damned important thing in this Nation and the Supreme Court has created a two-tier system of 'Due Process' that actually violates the outlook of the Constitution for one form of justice for All of the People. Here is what it boils down to:

1) The SCOTUS has put a 'viability test' on when an abortion may be performed,
2) What does 'viability' measure? It measures the ability to be sustained outside of the mother or host.
3) What happens when an Individual is outside the mother or host and sustainable? They are 'born'.
4) Being born of Citizens of the United States within a State of the United States or within limits set externally by Congress for such things under its Immigration and Naturalization powers makes one a Citizen.

Short, sweet and to the point: viability is a measure of Citizenship.

Yes, very reductio ad absurdum and all of that, but it does point out the thing about working with imperfect law: one can use its imperfection to achieve things that locking horns forevermore will not do. And in this extremely imperfect ruling the SCOTUS has now set up a 'two tier' system upon fetuses based on positional sustainability outside the mother or host. If a fetus is born prematurely, it gets full Citizenship Rights and coverage. At that exact same gestation point for another fetus going through normal gestation that is NOT the case. Say, that just can't be right, can it? Imperfect law, imperfect ruling leading to a non-Due Process procedure for Equal Protection. Pure idiocy, when you come right down to it. If a 'viability' test is put in place then the requirement, since it is viability to become a Citizen is being measured, then ALL such fetuses at that same point in gestation should get Equal Coverage and Due Process under the Law.

Painful, isn't it?

Enacting State-based legislation on that would *then* require *proof* that a fetus was not in the viability stage and appropriate developmental buffer zone to afford protections to unequal development due to circumstances beyond control of mother or fetus. Under this regime one can, indeed, get an abortion, but only with *proof* that the fetus was not in the gestational viability period. What that then requires is *record keeping* of sexual activity! Yes, more Red Tape! Sworn affidavits, medical exam and post-abortion exam to determine status would then be *required* so that anyone that LIES about their history in this regard can be prosecuted for murder. On the other side society, at that point in time, must afford full minor citizenship rights to such children who are gestating normally and ensure that these new Citizens are properly tracked and accounted for until their full 'birth date' or emergence from the mother or host. This infringes upon no existing set of Rights and applies responsibility to sexual activity because of its paramount importance to Citizenship. And various doctors can be appointed by the State to perform dual exams upon an individual that did NOT keep such records, and then they would attest to gestational period and abortion made available for the non-viable fetus.

This provides full rights to the unborn at the point of viability. Anything *else* then gets one looking at 'when does life begin' which really isn't a question society is set up to deal with. What society *is* set up to deal with is when an individual becomes a Citizen, so using that is not only perfectly reasonable, but then sets new standards of conduct and accountability for sexually mature individuals. That knife cuts across *both sides* of the debate as it is neutral to the debate and looks to uphold society and *not* find some sort of perfect solution. Totalitarian governments are very good at perfect solutions and their eponymous 'Final Solution'. Really, if life 'begins at conception' then it is not the abortion clinics that are mass murder facilities but In Vitro Fertilization clinics that have large numbers of fertilized eggs from generally infertile couples that need to destroy such after a period of time as they become non-viable for *anything* after a couple of years in the deep freeze. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of fertilized eggs are destroyed via that route and yet I see very little protesting around those places for doing so. Somehow that 'perfect' viewpoint needs to be adjusted to the actual, real world of a common society held by the overwhelming majority of Citizens.

What can be done, however, is to find better ways to sustain premature infants, identify better ways to identify developmental stages of gestating fetuses, and afford a bit better help to expectant mothers or hosts so as to get children that are better cared for, generally healthy and, perhaps, have some early intervention for treatment of genetic illnesses and deformities. If all the money that had been funneled into this glacially locked 'debate' had been put to something *useful* for the commonly held public society, then we might have fewer premature births, a better understanding of genetic disease and pre-born deformities and actually hold life to be a bit more sacred than we do now as an entire society.

Yes, why don't you actually SUPPORT the SCOTUS on abortion, use its own damned test at the State level to determine Citizenship and then *dare* the Court to throw that out and explain *why* their original argument is invalid in one area and valid in the other? You know? Actually hit the opposition by undercutting it and then putting in the mechanism to finally allow all of those citizens interested in ending abortions a valid way of doing so that is civil and DOESN'T require protests. Like the Left does on so many things? And notice that the outcomes, of actually making ADULTS responsible for their SEXUAL ACTIVITY is a perfectly valid outcome as the State has a vested interest in citizenship. Plus note that there is more than a bit of hypocrisy on the 'pro-life' side of things: someone hasn't thought these positions out to reconcile fertilized eggs as having 'souls' and then doing nothing at IVF clinics. Perhaps we should leave this 'soul' business up to the Creator and figure out how to deal with it as best we can in the imperfect world that is the Creation? You know, civil discussion about what is and is not valid for all of society and taking in the widest possible set of social input so as to draft good laws.

Like we agreed to do in the Constitution, in the Preamble.

Whenever you get a 'litmus' test from social conservatives, it means they want their view of the world absolutely upheld across all of society. That has been losing voters and now elections.

On the economic side there needs to be some fundamental education going *both ways* in the Republican Party. Yeah, 'free trade' and all that. I have some deep problems with the nostrums for 'free trade' and the non-alignment of outcomes with those self-same nostrums. All that wonderful 'free trade' in NAFTA was supposed to *help* Mexico. Instead it uprooted its workforce, killed its agriculture sector, made it dependent upon the US and derivative jobs, saw jobs go away to the Far East and factories close, then food prices skyrocket and then had a major slow down turn its people that had been flowing northwards into criminal concerns. This will now leave President-elect Obama with a budding criminal insurgency in Mexico that is even now spreading over into Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and other States even further inside the US seeing MS-13 in such places as Nebraska. Good job on that 'free trade' stuff! Didn't know it meant expanding the criminal sector inside the US freely. And those self-same free traderites don't want to shut down the border and control it as that would *ruin* economic efficiency... which has lost jobs in the US and increased foreign criminal and terrorist organizations in the US.

Have to love how that plays out, no? I wish the Democratic Party would own up for their part in this idiocy as President CLINTON signed this junk into being via treaty.

Say, just why do those in favor of 'free trade' just support holding Mexico to its TREATY OBLIGATIONS towards the US?

Oh, it might hurt the economy... can't do that! Economy uber alles.

But that is not the Law of Nations: we agree that as a Nation we will have some inefficient areas, economically, so as to protect the whole of the Nation. And, yes, I've read Adam Smith and actually have a disagreement or two with his basic arguments. But even HE recognized the economic necessity of protecting a Nation REQUIRES that some inefficiency develop so as to better insure the survival of the overall Nation. The radical 'free trade' folks don't seem to recognize this, and yet it is a bread-and-butter blue collar worker issue, when important and vital jobs go overseas and the Nation loses internal productive capacity for some vital goods and, even worse, war material production.

Both Economic and Social Conservatism have gone way too far in their interpretation of some things over others, and both refuse to hold to the basic concepts that make our Nation and allow us to interact with other Nations in a manner that will not open our Nation up to being weakened, perhaps critically, during wartime. We have already had some overseas concerns not wanting to continue supplying us with vital war components due to Iraq. Things like the ruggedized equipment interfaces in aircraft... you know the stuff that allows you to actually know and program in what you want to target with 'smart bombs'? That doesn't even begin to address things like bullets and batteries...

Understanding the working class culture means that you have some 'bread and butter' issues, some jobs issues, and a number of other concerns at a social level that grow out of wanting to raise a family and keep food on the table and a roof over your heads. These folks also want to see the country protected, are willing to sacrifice some increased wealth to have security and want the rule of law enforced and *don't* want people from any government telling you *what* to do all the time. These are the people hit by 'regulations' in the way of lost jobs, lost productivity and having to face the ladder they were on pulled out from under them whenever good jobs go overseas. Yes, in 5 years they *might* make more, but they have to get through 5 years of lower income, lower living standards and still keep a family together. And deal with foreign criminal and terrorist organizations starting to bring lawlessness to the heartland.

Suddenly that promise of a better job doesn't carry the promise of a better tomorrow with it.

Whatever happened to the 'law and order' Republican Party?

I would vote and happily on those issues, so long as you keep the laws few and prosecutions high and even across all strata of life.

You know: equal protection under the law?

That is, apparently, too much to expect out of the Economic and Social Elite in the Republican Party.

Maybe it is time for the party to ease those losers and slackers out.

Skidmarks where rhetoric meets the road

You may have heard about the 47 US Congressmen that refused to leave the House on 01 AUG 2008.  It was the teapotted tempest with rhetoric that sounds most impressive.  The topic was drilling for oil so that the US can find a path towards an energy future, instead of being mired in its present controlled by overseas oil groups and speculators beyond the realm of Congressional reach.  From the WSJ blog post by Patrick Yoest on this, the Democrats looked to crack down on speculators, but how they will go after foreign speculators is something they don't realize they cannot do:

“Republicans are too scared to go home to face their constituents after voting against bills to force Big Oil companies to use it or lose it, demand that the President free our oil from the government stockpile and crack down on speculators,” said Nadeam Elshami, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.

Yes that 'government stockpile' is the strategic petroleum reserve that serves as an emergency stockpile of oil kept safe in underground storage areas that can allow the US Armed Forces to operate if we suddenly lose all access to foreign oil.  It is a defensive measure, not the government sitting on a vast reserve of oil for no reason at all.  And speculators are the people who try to figure out what the actual price of oil and other commodities will be, and then put their future bids on those prices.  They win if they are right in the direction and minimal amount of change, and wrong if they get the amount or direction wrong.  We have speculators in wheat, corn, pork bellies, oranges, cotton, soy beans, nickel, cadmium, zinc, lead, platinum, gold... yes the world is rife with them.  Imagine what a sudden run up in copper prices would do to the semi-conductor industry or, even worse, gallium used in the actual semi-conductors themselves.  Silica is damned cheap for the processing, and your beach and glass recycling center can gets you tons of it.  Something like uranium is a bit harder to come by, which is why sitting on the vast reserve that is untapped in VA is a bit strange.  Seventh largest deposit on the planet that is safer to mine than coal, and less toxic.  We once had uranium mining in the Grand Canyon and witness the desolate vastness of that region because of worries over it?

These other commodities have speculators, and if you forgot the gold run-up in the 1970's, you missed the dizzying bonanza of what people would pay based on speculation that soon crashed back almost to where it started.  That did start up a whole lot of gold miners, many organizations continuing operations to this day: industry was spurred on.  Cracking down on speculators who are not under your legal control, say those in London, Paris, Bahrain, India, China, Japan... these cretins Upon the Hill do realize that they can't do that without staging a major conflict to actually take these places over, right?

Right?

And where, exactly, were these INCUMBENTS when economic war was being waged against our domestic producers in the late 1990's run by speculators paid off by a tyrant to hurt US future oil production and bring more of the market under his control?  You remember those guys?  Hailing from the UK, France, Canada, Russia, Switzerland... Oil For Food?

Where in the hell was the worry about speculation on the LOW SIDE damaging this Nation?

Those that complain today about the US not even having the capacity to get deep sea drilling rigs in place forget that they are the cause of those same capabilities disappearing from our National capability via our private concerns.  You do remember the 1990's, right?  Blue dress with stain on it?  Rip-roaring economy due to the rise in tech stocks and the Internet Bubble, along with the Telecom Bubble?  Primed by low taxes in the 1980's, remember that?

A bunch of speculators?

Now for the words of those that were in the House on 01 AUG 2008, once the recess was called, this from the WSJ blog article above:

“How many of you remember the Boston Tea Party?” Republican Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona asked the raucous crowd. “This is the Boston Tea Party!”

Texas Republican Rep. John Culberson and Michigan Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra sent play-by-play dispatches about the pep rally via Twitter, an online messaging service. Indiana Republican Rep. Mike Pence, a former radio talk show host, called in to one of his brethren, Rush Limbaugh, to apprise nationwide listeners of the details. Another Texas Republican Rep. Kevin Brady came to the House floor with suitcase in hand, saying that he’d walked out of his scheduled flight home to join the rally.

A veritable Boston Tea Party?  'No Taxation Without Representation'?  I could get behind that sort of thing, actually, but I have seen far too much go on Upon the Hill to put my money down at the start of anything there.  From the CQ Politics site, an article by Edward Epstein who covered this:

“Madame Speaker, Where art thou?’’ Ted Poe , R-Texas, shouted from the well of the House. “This room is vacant of most members of Congress. Where, oh where, has Congress gone?” he yelled to about a dozen other Republicans, tourists in the gallery, some House pages, and Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio, the lone Democrat who witnessed the unusual proceeding.

This from John Gizzi at Human Events on what was going on there [bolding is mine here]:

The same lawmakers said they agreed with Pence that the President should call Congress back from its five-week respite to deal with the energy crisis. Rep. Wally Herger (R.-CA) told me outside the House floor that “We’re doing everything we can” to get President Bush to bring Congress back. As to the White House’s attitude on making this rare-but-constitutional step, Herger said, “I’d say that right now, it’s rising on his [Bush’s] agenda.”

Rep. Don Manzullo (R.Ill.) told me he would be willing to come back even though his August schedule is “packed.. . .I even have a trip to Alaska to see ANWR.”

Rep. John Carter (R.Tex.) said that the message of the angry lawmakers who kept speaking and refusing to adjourn was “the spontaneity—we all showed up on the floor [and said] ‘Give us our country back.’”

Perhaps the happiest lawmaker I spoke to today was Rep. Thad McCotter (R.-Mich.), who has long urged Republican to capture traditional conservative theory and unite with strong tactics based on issues. Using the language of the rock ‘n’roll guitarist that he sometimes is, McCotter described the day’s remarkable events as “Republican riff on Yippie Street Theater on Pelosi.”

What?  The Republicans stand for traditional conservative theory?

Since when?

I haven't seen much of that since the military was gutted in the 1990's, the government grew quite large, requiring tax cuts so that people had some money to invest, thus increasing the size of government in the 2000's, realizing that this standing up to tyrants business is not a low cost affair, wishing they hadn't gutted the military in the 1990's, bemoaning the base corruption of earmarks which they have been happily signing off upon for decades, and generally acting like a 'Democratic Lite' party, with much talk on taxes and not much action on doing any other damned thing except restricting the rights of Americans on the internet, in areas of political speech, acting like they have some say in areas wholly given to the States and the people, and generally taking high moral stances that their own members can't live up to.

Conservative Republicans?  Those who actually KEEP TO THEIR WORD?

You know, a basic conservative value of doing what you say you will do?

From Politico's Patrick O'Connor on the happenings:

Republicans shouted their remarks from the well of the House until Arizona Rep. John B. Shadegg fumbled with the public address system and finally found the correct access code allowing him to turn on the microphone.

When he did, members cheered.

In fact, members did a lot of cheering Friday.

They cheered when the lights came on. They cheered when the lights went off again. They even cheered when the crowd in the galleries applauded their remarks.

In between, they shouted, “Work! Work! Work!”

Hey! Cheering to get things working!  I mean, 'work' is a conservative value, right?  But maybe they are a bit at sea on this 'working' business.  Perhaps they don't have time to ponder their work on 4 day weekends and 5 week recesses.  Under the Republicans it was only 3 day weekends and 4 week recesses.  Such 'conservative values' this working business.  Why don't they just be 'progressive' and pare that down to a 1 day work week and a 51 week recess?

Mr. O'Connor then sums up the proceedings of what happened at the press conference:

During the press conference, at least three members announced their intent to stay in Washington — if not on the floor — until Pelosi brought lawmakers back from break to vote on an energy package. Pence even asked President Bush to command Congress to return to session.

But minutes later, this band of partisan pranksters went back to the floor, where Price told the crowd that the Republicans were wrapping up their protest to end an afternoon of rarities in the Capitol.

He and his band high-fived and exchanged hugs as they left the floor to chants of “USA! USA! USA!”

So three members staying in DC... I wish them luck, even with a powerless, silenced House.

If any of these people had those 'conservative values' and stuck to them for the last 20 years or so, they wouldn't have to stage a prank like this, now.  The members of the Boston Tea Party knew their lives were on the line and couldn't count on any outcome, save that they would make their actions known and why they were taken.  Even if they wound up six feet under or in Davy Jones' Locker.  Those men put their lives on the line to start a principled attack on a Nation that no longer respected them as citizens and deprived them of their rightful say in government.

'No Taxation Without Representation'

If they don't like Pelosi's Politboro, perhaps it is time they told their party they will do what is right with or without their party.  Because this Politboro has gotten a lot of help from their fellow members in their party who like 3 day work weeks and 5 week paid vacations.  To do *that* requires guts, dedication and much, much more work than has been done by lackluster members of the Emirate of Incumbistan, lo these many years stretching into decades.

The job is voluntary, no one pushed them to their seats.

It requires much from those that want these positions.

Long hours.

Long days.

Little if any vacation time.

Families missed.

The Nation put first.

Speaking your values.

Commitment to your values.

And working to bring those values to fruition.

Hard work.

Work.

Work.

Work.

And this form of conservatism is...?

Jonathan Rauch in the MAY 2008 Atlantic Monthly has an interesting concept of what conservatism is, and I thought it was worth looking at as he is saying that Sen. McCain, by the standards he puts forward, is conservative. So lets look at the basics of Mr. Rauch's view, and I will do it step-wise.

Step 1

Burke is the father of modern conservatism, and still its wisest oracle. Tradition-minded but (contrary to stereotype) far from reactionary, he believed in balancing individual rights with social order. The best way to do that, for Burke, was by respecting long-standing customs and institutions while advancing toward liberty and equality. Society’s traditions, after all, embody an evolved collective wisdom that even (or especially) the smartest of individuals cannot hope to understand comprehensively, much less reinvent successfully.

So, this boils down to: stick what's been put in place and don't rock the boat and balance liberty with 'social order'. Call it the 'stable and orderly' rule.

Step 2

The Burkean outlook takes individual rights seriously, and understands that civic order serves no purpose if its result is oppression or misery. It also understands that social stability, far from being endangered by institutional change, positively depends upon it. Burkeans no more believe in a golden past than they do in a perfect future. For them, the question is not whether society should change, but how.

This one is a bit harder to figure out, as it posits taking individual rights seriously, but then puts forward that institutional change is necessary to secure those rights. Call it the 'Bigger is better' rule for institutions.

Step 3

Burke himself was an advocate of change; he sympathized with the American revolution (while famously denouncing the much more radical French one), proposed curtailing the slave trade, and fought tirelessly to reform the corrupt and monopolistic British East India Company. But he believed change should take a measured pace and should try to follow well-worn social grooves rather than cutting across them. Above all, he abhorred utopian reformers, who, by disdaining real-world constraints and overestimating their own intelligence, invariably worsen what they seek to improve.

Pretty easy this 'slow and steady wins the race' rule, with the 'change in the direction things are going' rule.

These are not just 'conservative' values, they are also ones of minimalized change. Unfortunately, from there, Mr Rauch does lose me, as he then addresses the conservative movement of Goldwater as a 'revolutionary movement'. The railing against government institutions that started with Goldwater and continued on have been a main theme of the conservative movement as the various additions to government during the Progressive era through the FDR era and to the 'Great Society' were seen as the greatest threat to individual liberty by removing the ability of individuals to make sound and prudent decisions on their own and invest those decisions at the highest and most distant institution possible: the federal government. Apparently, in putting things into the terms of human liberty and freedom being *endangered* by governmental institutions, one becomes an outcast to the kind of 'conservatism' Mr. Rauch is talking about.

Mr. Rauch then takes the case of the two current Democratic contenders as follows:

Burke would have wondered at this. And in 2008 he might have noticed that, if conservatism is as much a temperament as it is any particular set of policies, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both Democrats, have sounded more conservative than many Republicans. Both have agreed, for instance, on the need for health-care reform, but Clinton has emphasized her hard-learned lesson that change needs to be incremental, and Obama has said that a single-payer system would make sense if we were starting from scratch but that getting there from here would be “impractical”—a Burkean way to talk about change.

An actual conservative position is put forward by John Stossel in Bad Medicine which I had looked at elsewhere:

America's health-care problem is not that some people lack insurance, it is that 250 million Americans do have it.

You have to understand something right from the start. We Americans got hooked on health insurance because the government did the insurance companies a favor during World War II. Wartime wage controls prohibited cash raises, so employers started giving noncash benefits like health insurance to attract workers. The tax code helped this along by treating employer-based health insurance more favorably than coverage you buy yourself. And state governments have made things worse by mandating coverage many people would never buy for themselves.

Competition also pushed companies to offer ever-more attractive policies, such as first-dollar coverage for routine ailments like ear infections and colds, and coverage for things that are not even illnesses, like pregnancy. We came to expect insurance to cover everything.

[..]

Steering people to buy lots of health insurance is bad policy. Insurance is a necessary evil. We need it to protect us from the big risks--things most of us can't afford to pay for, like a serious illness, a major car accident, or a house fire.

But insurance is a lousy way to pay for things. You premiums go not just to pay for medical care, but also for fraud, paperwork, and insurance company employee salaries. This is bad for you, and bad for doctors.

By positing that either Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama by wishing to get 'health-care reform' by EXPANDING the insurance based system is 'conservative' misses the point that subsidized health care insurance is distorting the health care system and costing everyone who needs health care much more than it would WITHOUT the subsidies. By expanding that system people are losing hard earned dollars and their liberty to choose their own physicians and treatment plans, plus learning how to care for themselves. When the 'insurance company' pays for every visit, then the perceived value of the visit decreases taking care of minor ailments that can be readily self-diagnosed. That takes up physician time better spent with people who have harder to diagnose and treat conditions. Further, as the 'insurance company' pays for things, it engenders fraud and requires over-use of the medical test system so as to ensure that doctors demonstrate that they have eliminated all other possible ailments before settling on a correct diagnosis done in the first few tests. Subsidies remove individuals paying for their treatment from the equation so that *they* can manage their own expectations and understand the risks of going forward with a treatment on a diagnosis that may have only an 85-95% chance of being correct and require extremely expensive or lengthy or multiple tests to pin down to the 95-97% range.

There is no 'wisdom' in a system that lessens individual input from their own health care treatment and anyone trying to expand that system to further remove individual cost and oversight then removes liberty of seeking treatment on one's own. If we complain about not getting the doctor you like *now* what happens when the doctors have no effective time to meet with the increase in patients due to increased paperwork and overhead? Increasing the insurance system isn't conservative in any light and it is hard to see how ANY conservative wants there to be greater pay to middlemen, greater incitement to fraud, less return on value and more costly healthcare as a result. A subscription based model or one of accumulated credits might fit individuals over their entire life than 'insurance' but conservatives wouldn't have anything to do with *that* now, would they? That would mean individual payment, management of expectations, involvement in one's own health outlook, managing risk and, yes, some form of thrift and investment.

Not allowed, apparently, because the 'conservative' way is to remove those things, according to Mr. Rauch.

Then Mr. Rauch demonstrates how Sen. McCain is a true 'conservative' by his definition:

And then there is McCain. As eclectic a reformer as he has been in the Senate, he has been consistent in his incrementalism. Though he was known to sound hot-headed on campaign-finance reform, his legislative work produced a reform that was mostly modest in its aims and that mostly attained them. He has been an old-fashioned budget balancer, not a newfangled supply-sider. He defends his global-warming efforts as gradualist and as modeled on emissions-trading systems that have already been tested. In the presidential primaries, he showed little interest in grandiose promises.

Strange, I thought that the budget cuts and incentives in the supply-side era had yielded a large economic boom in the 1990's that President Clinton took the credit for. That 'old-fashioned budget balancer' approach was derided because it looked at the economic pie in liberal terms: static. Supply-side economics posited that trusting individuals with their own wealth would garner growth and expand the whole pie and help to pay for government. Of course when the new funds appeared then Congress quickly looked to spend those funds in BOTH PARTIES. What was also posited was that government, itself, needed to restrained as to size and actually start to decrease so as to get out of people's bedrooms and lives. The explosive growth of regulations since 1972, with half of all regulations occurring since then, needed to be slowed, ended and reversed so as to remove government institutions from trying to manage the lives of individuals. I do believe that when Burke was looking at institutions he was looking at private ones based on industry, society and religion, not public ones under control of the government.

Now here is a question for Mr. Rauch: if a trading system is so great for something nebulous like 'global warming' why isn't it so good for health care?

Global warming due to human caused greenhouse gases has an extreme problem as a hypothesis: the evidence does not back it up. Not only is the world not getting warmer, the entirety of the world's oceans are actually declining in temperature. The science is not only 'out' on global warming but may never arrive as it does not appear to be a sensible view based on the data or even the hypothetical models that result from them. When atmospheric scientists start to recognize that their models can't even reflect the past, their ability to demonstrate a future is, effectively, null. Additionally, the science on the history of the Earth indicates that carbon dioxide is a non correlation in the long-term to global temperature beyond keeping the planet from being a snowball. And as the Carboniferous had far higher levels of carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor in the atmosphere, all of them 'greenhouse gases' we can attest to the planet not having undergone a 'runaway greenhouse effect' by our present as living beings on the planet. Apparently such things as the position of the continental plates and a direct global water flow has much more to do with global climate than does 'greenhouse gases' beyond keeping the planet from being an iceball.

What kind of 'conservative' is it, exactly, that proposes any sort of scheme to forestall something that has no demonstrable proof that it is: A) happening and, B) human caused? How about trading Maiden credits with regards to an upcoming Dragon infestation? When the scientific evidence cannot point to the actuality of a thing happening, its direction, timing nor causes, then what worldly sense does it make to do anything about it? Perhaps we could start trading in Indulgences, instead, and at least get some peace of mind as to spending a shorter time in purgatory? Really, those latter two make just as much sense as that of trading in carbon dioxide emissions when the US, after not having signed the Kyoto Protocols, is far closer to reaching them than any other industrialized nation, save Russia which underwent such a steep decline in industrial output it is hard for anyone to replicate them. By 'going it alone' the US is in a far better position to toot its horn vis-a-vis cleaner industries than China, say, which now has the top spot for sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide emissions on a global basis... with far lower per capita output. Wouldn't the 'conservative' just say 'stay the course' instead of doing ANYTHING?

But then Mr. Rauch backs off his own analysis in the other area of 'conservatism' he mentions: personal liberty.

I took a rather wide-ranging view on Sen. McCain's tax outlook, past and present, and it is interesting that many conservatives consider the Ronald Reagan based view of taxation and the economy to be the new norm as of Sen. McCain's 2000 run for the Presidency. When the National Review did a quick look on Sen. McCain's tax views on 07 FEB 2007, they pointed out that he had, basically, taken the liberal view of 'closing loopholes' to garner revenue which has the net effect of raising tax burden:

His rhetoric, meanwhile, has been worse than his proposal. He suggests that Bush's tax cut is so large that it endangers Social Security-as though the government could possibly tax its way into solvency for that program. When McCain said that Bush's tax cut was "unfair"-i.e., too generous to the rich-he should have known that no tax cut could be "fair" by the liberal definition he was using.

Really, of all the artifacts of the FDR era, Social Security is the one as the major problem for the government having taken up commitments that it cannot meet. That was identified during the 'revolutionary' term of Ronald Reagan (as Mr. Rauch would call it) and not a damned thing has been done to lessen that commitment or set up a system that would see an end-date for the program and allow individuals to find their own way to a good retirement depending on far better performers than the federal government. As a retirement guarantor, the federal government is the least solvent, least capable, most officious and least financially wise vehicle to utilize for this. It has gotten to the point where most Gen-X and Gen-Y have zero expectation of Social Security *existing* when they retire and are planning accordingly. Wouldn't that self-responsibility towards one's own liberty applied to personal happiness and freedom be a good social movement for conservatives to support? That would require phasing out a government bureaucracy which Mr. Rauch and Sen. McCain would see as 'revolutionary' even if it happened over a decade while ensuring all those invested in the system either get their guaranteed support or a lump sum on retirement. Something like that is 'radical' for all the fact it is fiscally wise.

What is interesting is that back in 2000, Sen. McCain wanted to go far further in not returning surplus government funds to individuals. This from Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review on 07 FEB 2000:

The Bush-McCain dispute concerns the non-Social Security surplus, projected (like the Social Security surplus) to be $2 trillion over the next decade. Bush wants to return much of this surplus to taxpayers. His campaign estimates that his tax-cut plan would reduce federal revenues by $483 billion over five years (assuming it doesn't increase economic growth, which would add back some revenue). McCain describes this as "fiscally irresponsible." He wants a smaller, $237 billion tax cut, partially offset by tax increases on corporations. But he wants to spend 5 percent of the non-Social Security surplus to reduce the national debt, and to save 62 percent of it for Social Security. Since the saving has to be done through debt reduction, McCain's policy amounts to using two- thirds of the non-Social Security surplus to reduce the debt.

Why 62 percent? McCain says he's making good on President Clinton's 1999 promise to devote 62 percent of the surplus to Social Security. Actually, McCain's going much further than Clinton: The president was referring to 62 percent of the total surplus of $4 trillion. McCain's talking about using the entire $2 trillion Social Security surplus, plus 62 percent of the $2 trillion non-Social Se curity surplus: a whopping $760 billion difference.

Clinton's promise was widely seen as a ploy to block tax cuts, and House Republicans might be expected to side with Bush rather than Clinton or McCain-with tax cuts rather than debt reduction. Yet in early January, House Speaker Denny Hastert announced that paying down the debt would be a priority for Republicans this year. He also made a long-term commitment: "We are putting together a plan to pay off all of our nation's debt so that our children will inherit a debt-free country." Only small tax cuts- relief from the marriage penalty and expanded educational savings accounts-are on the agenda.

Yes, Sen. McCain is in the 'fiscal responsibility' area to the point where reducing the debt is more important than getting money back to the citizenry. That is the part of economics that the supply-siders got right: increase the amount individuals can retain and the economy grows faster than the debt burden *if* you can reign in government spending. That logic had worked to the point of getting a *surplus* even when Congressional Republicans (they were in charge then) went on a spending binge that made Democrats green with envy. Even though I applaud Sen. McCain's going after the corrupting influence of earmarks, the larger problem of rampant REGULAR government spending is something he has never addressed... or even worse, if he has done so he has been incapable of swaying members of Congress from *either party* on his views.

Then there is Sen. McCain's support of big business and the MSM over the individual as seen during the attempts to de-regulate low power FM broadcasters for local communities and neighborhoods. On 26 APR 1999 TV Digest with Consumer Electronics published this view from the Senator:

Other legislators at convention said there was little support in Congress for raising TV ownership caps. McCain addressed NAB via satellite, staying in Washington to introduce Senate resolution calling for use of necessary force in Kosovo. In his taped comments, McCain said he will hold hearings next month on broadcast ownership rules and on how to create "a new Y2K ownership diversity program" that will include new tax certificates --- policy advocated by FCC Comr. Powell, who was McCain's choice for Commission. In speech dominated by discussion of Kosovo policy, McCain criticized FCC for trying for 30 years to remove barriers to entry in broadcasting "with great vigor and a resounding lack of success." He said Commission should "work with entrepreneurial and market forces, not against them," and should use "private sector initiatives in a creative way that will benefit industry participants as well as new entrants." Republican Congress eliminated tax certificate program in one of its first acts after taking over in 1995, although minority ownership levels hadn't risen appreciably when program was in place.

[..]

McCain criticized FCC for failing to acknowledge that "the best entrepreneurial opportunities in the telecom industry aren't in broadcasting any more," and for coming up with microradio proposal. He denounced microradio policy, asking: "What possible diversity interest is advanced, what kind of opportunity is created, by manufacturing thousands of tiny new radio stations in an already overpopulated, transitional market?" He said that if FCC wants to enable more people to share their views, then Web or cable access channels work better.

The point is not to let the federal government determine what is and is not viable for individuals to do. Entrepreneurship utilizing the common airways could offer untold services to local communities beyond music, weather, and advertising, but the extent of what *could* be done requires government to get out of the way of individuals. Yes, personal liberty given a chance to move into new areas of expression can seek their own return, and monetary may not be the only thing driving them as community service channels could be offered by those individuals donating time and energy to support their community in this realm. But you can't get Sen. McCain to sign on to something that just might hurt the large media organizations which can be so easily regulated and pampered via subsidies, grants and tax favors. That is what the final bill reflected (Source: 20 SEP 1999 TV Digest with Consumer Electronics), led forward by Sen. McCain.

And Sen. McCain as a 'reformer' of election finance had troubles with McCain-Feingold long before it got approved. When he started in 1998, he ran into all sorts of opposition that was trying to point out that his bill was an infringement in the 1st Amendment Civil Rights guarantees on the freedom of speech. On 01 MAY 1998 Human Events featured a Capital Briefs article on just this bill:

ONLY THE LONELY: The voice of the late Roy Orbison ought to be echoing in the ears of Sen. John McCain (R.Ariz.) these days. One of McCain's Republican Senate colleagues told HUMAN EVENTS last week that McCain is now"the loneliest man in town"-increasingly shunned by other Republican senators for his promotion of a campaign "reform" bill that would deny conservative groups their 1st Amendment right to communicate with voters during federal election campaigns, and, also, for his attempt to enact a tobacco deal that would result in more than $500 billion in new taxes.

Nonetheless, McCain is still seriously considering running for President in 2000. Says GOP pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, "I still can't figure out what country McCain is positioning himself to run in."

CFR has become the Civil Rights Albatross around the neck of Sen. McCain and has proven to be an impossible thing to do without deeply violating the 1st Amendment. Apparently, supporting the violation of the 1st Amendment isn't worthy of Mr. Rauch's discussion of 'conservatism' with regards to Sen. McCain, which is very strange as supporting of liberty and individual rights were such a cornerstone of that review.

Sen. McCain hasn't had any problems with increasing 'sin taxes'! And has used dishonest figures to bolster that, as seen in a 03 JUL 1998 Human Events article The Myth of the 3,000 kids:

Washington is a city of statistics--and in the battle about tobacco, one statistic has been pounded home above all others: the "3,000 kids" who start smoking every day, presumably at the bidding of Joe Camel. This dreadful image was the oft-cited basis for Sen. John McCain's (R.Ariz.) sweeping, costly tax bill.

McCain himself has used this number incessantly in floor debate and comment to the press: "This has got to do with 3,000 kids every day starting to smoke," "every day, another 3,000 kids will start smoking," and so on. President Clinton, Sen. John Chafee (R.-R.I.) and countless other politicians have used the same statistic, in virtually the same phrasing.

[..]

However, if we check the basis for Kessler's numbers, we find the truth is not what is suggested by such statements. In 1996, for instance, he used the 3,000 figure in a piece that he and others at the FDA submitted to The New England Journal of Medicine. This is a well-respected scientific journal where one has to be more careful about what he says than in slapdash political forums, press interviews or debates in Congress.

In this we do indeed discover that "about 3,000 new smokers each day" come from the ranks of "young persons." So far, so good. If we keep going, however, we also read the following: "For purposes of this analysis, only persons aged 20 years and older are included, as information was not collected on younger persons in any consistent fashion over this time period." (Emphasis added.) Such is the ultimate basis for all the statements about "kids"!

Thus, through the statistical-verbal magic of Kessler and his friends, findings in which no one younger than age 20 was included morph into something dramatically different: From "young people" (in a science journal) to "kids"(in public forums), to subteens with cigarettes dangling from their lips in advertising pictures. The effect and purpose of these changes don't require much comment.

[..]

One cannot doubt that Sen. McCain has used this formula in good faith, assuming the data passed on by such as Kessler are valid. The fact remains that the entire uproar about "3,000 kids" is based on an intellectual con game.

Apparently Sen. McCain is willing to play fast'n'loose with scientific data to bolster his cause du jour, and then it was 'for the children' to get huge taxes on Big Tobacco. That would serve as the basis for the $885 billion Tobacco Tax (Source: Human Events, 12 JUN 1998 ) which would be the single, largest tax hike in history up to that point in time. Sen. McCain pushed that bill even when there was bipartisan opposition to it ( Source: Human Events, 12 JUN 1998 ) due to the fact that getting associated with the single largest tax hike in history makes one look greedy.

The Franks-McCain bill would interpose the federal government in local schools and libraries to censor internet access ( Source: Insight on the News, 05 APR 1999 ). This was not only decried as the federal government trying to censor free speech in contravention to the 1st Amendment and would be struck down by the Supreme Court ( Source: Online Newsletter, 01 NOV 1998). Mind you, it was pushed as 'for the children', like anything one wants to ram through that would limit the civil rights of adults.

Why is it that Mr. Rauch doesn't take a look at the wider issues that Sen. McCain has not only NOT been conservative on, but has been more than liberal on over the course of his career? Is it because of the form of 'conservative' that supports expansion of government at the cost of civil rights under that 'conservative' rubric has a name to it?

It does.

Big Government Conservatism - it holds the 'social values' the liberals have put in place to invest more power in government and increase it continually with less and less capability but much higher cost over time. That is the kind of 'conservative' that Sen. McCain is, and he has been true to that throughout his entire career. Well, perhaps Mr. Rauch hasn't heard of that kind of 'conservative', that really sees nothing that government can't take over in a helpful way, of course.

Just like liberals, only slower.

Brainwashing by the media

There are times when I wonder if Conservatives and Republicans can even bother to read the history of the Nation or the Republican Party. It existed long before Reagan, Nixon and Eisenhower, and yet the post-WWII disease of blithely forgetting the past has gotten in so deeply that there are some statements that are just absolutely not only factually inaccurate but absolutely *wrong* that Conservatives and Republicans hold, along with the rest of America, apparently.

Here is the lead-in paragraph to an article at National Review Online:

One non-Protestant has been elected president in our history. Mitt Romney is being urged to follow John F. Kennedy’s example and make a speech taking the “Mormon issue” head on. It is bad advice. Kennedy sought to defuse anti-Catholicism by essentially saying that for purposes of public life he wouldn’t be a Catholic. If Romney follows suit, he will be calling his integrity into question. A man so frequently accused of flip-flopping cannot flip-flop about his religion.

-The Editors, National Review, 16 NOV 2007

Sounds great, doesn't it? All backed by research and history and such, right? Take a gander at this:

"The Methodist Episcopal Church has been agitating the proposition in many quarters that no man who considers himself a Christian could vote for Mr. Taft. The Evangelical Alliance of Cincinnati, with which all bu the Episcopal and liberal churches are connected, has been the means of promulgating like doctrine. The Presbyterian Alliance is emphasizing the line of demarcation between the orthodox church people and those who are liberal in their views.

"Now all of this would be very amusing were it not so serious. We are living in the twentieth century, but the flames of religious bigotry have not been extinguished, and toleration to-day is for those on the inside and not for those on the outside of the orthodox church."

That is referring to a candidate who would go on to become President, and the Methodist Episcopal Church of that era was actually counseling to not vote for someone due to religion. And if memory serves, and it can be quite faulty, but I do remember something about Methodists being an off-shoot of the Protestant form of Christianity, as are the Episcopalians coming from the C of E. So who is the author of that quote? Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Unitarian Church of the Messiah, at Easth 34th St. and Park Ave., 26 OCT 1908, NYT.

And the man being targeted is the Unitarian William Howard Taft who would go on to become President of the United States.

President Taft was a Republican.

I have some news for the NRO: if they can't remember this stuff, and complain that CNN just can't google things, then how am I supposed to take the Editorial staff of NRO seriously?

Want ANOTHER non-Protestant President?

John Adams.

John Quincy Adams.

Heard of those?

Both Unitarians.

Want another?

Thomas Jefferson.

Unitarian, also.

Have we been so brainwashed by the MSM and 'Camelot' and trying to give such high place to President Kennedy that even Conservatives have forgotten the religious diversity of this Nation since the founding? If the Editors at NRO can spout that opening paragraph with a straight face and NOT remember some of the bitterness between churches in the 20th century, then, really, what kind of conservatives are they? Amnesiacs, mayhap?

I really, and for true, do wonder about those that put 'christian' down for America and assume 'orthodox' for all of them: that is not the case at all. And don't even get me started on the Deists and others around at the founding...

I have zero problems with Mitt Romney's religion: zilch.

Problems with him as an executive and governor of Taxechussettes? Yup.

If Republicans can't remember that Teddy Roosevelt would attend church with William Taft to show his support of him, then, really, the Republican Party needs to start remembering their history of supporting the multitude of beliefs that have come to them and *stop* the idiotic litmus testing via religion. Not even all social conservatives are orthodox christian, and it is time to get over that, or face being no longer considered conservative, but archaic and spiteful towards other religions seeking to make common cause with you... or are we going to be hearing about the Monophysite Heresy next?