Posted by Harcamone

My prayer (or, shall we say, hope) for these children is that they won’t develop excessively abstract minds or grow into “activists” who see the purpose of their lives as fighting and screaming (“struggling”) against things, or throwing themselves in front of bulldozers, feeling like they don’t have a right to happiness because workers in miserable shit-holes are being mistreated. I hope nobody weights their childhoods with debilitating moral burdens that are not justifiably theirs (say, of the sort found in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte).

I hope they do not ever come to see the pursuit of Quixotic goals (such as tearing down the State) as a good thing to do with their lives. I hope they come to see that what happens in our lives is OUR doing, not Capitalism’s doing. In other words, RESPONSIBILITY rather than blaming Bush or colonialism.

I hope these children are naturally blessed with superb senses of humor, and are not amused by political satire or the kind of little insider-jokes you hear at poetry readings.

I hope — oh boy, I really really hope — that none of them develops a nervous laugh. I hate nervous laughter more than almost anything else in the world.

I hope these children are not encouraged to (nor have the desire to) sit around all day like blobs reading books, and that they become naturally athletic people, and that they learn, and take joy from, work of the hand at a high level of competence — such as welding, carpentry, tailoring, animal husbandry, model airplane building, gardening …

I hope they don’t develop odd sexualities (no matter what the equivalencers of sexual oddness theorize or say).

I hope there’s enough coherent and meaningful spirituality in their lives — because if there isn’t, and if their souls should experience a spiritual questing, then there’ll be a vacuum, and Islam is waiting to fill it. This is a grim spiritual fact that is not going away. The poignancy of our children’s sweetness is almost too much to bear. But they don’t look so sweet when they come home from Pakistan with a Moslem beard dyed red.

I also hope you don’t think I’m kidding about any of this stuff, not even one word, comma or parenthesis.

Love,
j.

PS, If I were Kurt Vonnegut saying these things, you might print them out and stick them to your refrigerator door with a magnet. But as it is, I don’t hope for anything more than an indulgent, pitying chuckle, and probably not even that.

PS.2, You are all very, very blessed people.

Presidents of the United States are arguably the most powerful individuals on Earth, not only now, but ever. On the other hand, their actions are perforce contained within a comparatively narrow band of policy boundaries. Caught between the multiple Charybdis’s and Kharybdis’s of the U.S. Congress, public opinion, world opinion, physical and civil reality, and Wall Street, among others, Presidents are limited in the exercise of their relatively awesome poower.

The policy difference gap between a Manchurian candidate President whose goal is the destruction of the United States of America, and a President whose desire it is to make the greatest nation on Earth even greater, is not all that wide. There is only so much a U.S. President can get away with, in any direction, regardless of his or her motives. The Founders purposely constructed the executive, and other branches of our government, to be so constrained.

If we really ever were to have a President who secretly hated this country and wished to destroy it from within (just for the sake of argument, for example, a multi-racial man, carefully positioned to appeal to a majority of the nation’s demographic and interest groups, with a vague resume and equally vague policy proposals), the danger would not necessarily be all that obvious.

What might be the policies of a devious, fifth column, POTUS? Maybe distancing the United States from our closest allies, Britain, Israel, India, France, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Possibly reaching out to our worst enemies, Iran, North Korea, and the radical Islamic world?

Perhaps creating an unsustainable national debt by shoveling borrowed money to public employee unions and his party’s other constituents. Then ensuring unsustainability by putting in place a huge new entitlement program? Nationalizing (in all but name) the domestic automobile, banking, and health care industries? Stopping work on the fence on our Southern border?

Such policies may not be good for the country. They may be unpopular. But they stop well short of schemes to unilaterally give up all of our nuclear weapons, withdraw all troops and aid from Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and abolish the free market altogether, radical policies that even Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid might not stand for, and which would be far too unpopular to be practicable.

No, the path for the Manchurian candidate would be to push the destroy America strategy right up against the asymptote of popular outrage. Take it as far as you possibly can before the overwhelming Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate begin to buckle as they see their reelection prospects recede into the distance.

That’s the best you could do in the service of your revolutionary ideals.

I’m just sayin’.

I wonder, you decide.

There is polite society, there is the left wing nutty extreme, and there is the right wing nutty extreme. Naturally, most of us wish to be regarded as belonging to polite society. We never utter the word nigger or faggot. We never compare the President to Hitler, unless he’s a Republican, and even then only in moderation.

We don’t question Obama’s birth certificate or who were the real perpetrators of 9/11. We are reasonable, civilized, moderate people. You can even be a Republican and still be grudgingly accepted, as long as you are a David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, Christopher Buckley kind of Republican who reluctantly voted for Barack Obama.

Staying within the boundaries of polite society, David Brooks-like, may be a cowardly denial of the obvious, but we are social animals and nobody wants to be sent into exile. I am constantly surprised at the strength of this evolutionary imperative. Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly necessary to deny more and more obvious facts, in order to remain a member of the nice people club.

There are, regrettably, strong correlations between race and IQ.

It is lamentable that the Koran calls for the extermination of the Jews, and the subjugation of all non-Muslims. It’s a shame, but Al Qaeda is right about that.

It is unfortunately true that, for the most part, people don’t like to associate with those of a different race or culture. This is especially true of all cultures and races other than white, Christian, middle class Americans, the most tolerant people in human history.

It’s a bummer, but war is, always has been, and will be for the foreseeable future, endemic to human nature.

A nation unwilling or unable to wage war, is a dying nation.

A nation unwilling or unable to control its borders is a dying nation.

A nation unwilling to allow its citizens to participate in the free capitalist market is a dying nation.

A nation that denies its citizens the right to free speech and freedom of religion is a dying nation.

A nation whose people expect their government to provide them with free health care, free education, free retirement, free housing, free food, or free anything, is a dying nation.

You can be for this or against that. The real debate is not about expanding or shrinking government at the margins. It is about whether the current size of government is grossly, brutishly, thuggishly, blatantly, way, way too large, or whether it needs to grow massively more. Whether the free enterprise, capitalist system has gotten out of hand and needs to be drastically reined in, or whether it has been so egregiously suppressed that it can barely function. These are statements of extreme views. They are also the real polarities of our current political debate.

The federal government, and some of the larger state governments like New York and California, are bloated, gorged, parasites feeding on the fear of being seen as extreme, and the desire to be absolved of personal responsibility.

Last year, our public federal servants spent $13 billion, billion with a “b”, on trips that doubled as vacation junkets. They flew first class. Where did you go on vacation this year? Is there any question in anyone’s mind whether or not these trips, that we (the 53% percent of us who still pay federal income tax) paid for, served the public good?

There is a current attempt by the Democratic Party to smear dissenters who object to Obamacare, as violent racists. Obama is black. He was black before he was elected. He was elected by a majority of voters. He is now disapproved of by a majority of voters. Did they suddenly become racists? Violent? Most of the charges of violence have no evidence. Andrew Beitbart offers a $100,000 prize to anyone who can give video proof of even one of the 15 allegations of someone hollering, ‘nigger’, that was claimed. Even without video proof, he or she wins the prize if they can pass a lie detector test.

I am hereby announcing my going over to the dark side. This is no longer the usual give and take of the two party system of our republic. There is a confrontation looming between those who wish to progress, as quickly as possible, beyond the Constitution and those who wish to redeem it.

Tomorrow is supposedly the big vote on the big government health care bill. Everybody knows it’s a horrible bill, Republicans, Democrats, lefties and righties, not to mention the public at large. Even Obama knows it’s a horrible bill.

The thing is, the content of this particular bill is not the point. The point is that the bill, no matter how horrible, regardless of what kind of garbage is in it, establishes the principle that the federal government is responsible for our health care.

Once that principle is installed into the law, and into the expectations of the citizenry, it is only a matter of time before we have what is euphemistically referred to as “the public option”, and from there it is a hop, skip, and a jump to single payer.

President Obama and a lot of Democrats believe that would be a good thing, good for the country, good for the people. And they perceive that the current bill is pretty much the only possible first step on that road towards the ultimate goal.

Myself, I think the goal is wrong, bad for the country, bad for the people. So I see the horrible bill as horrible in root and branch. There needs to be some amount of government interference in the health care market, to cover those that are not covered in any other way, but most of the problems with health care are the result of way too much government interference, not too little.

If insurance companies were allowed to compete across state lines, and the buyers and sellers of insurance were free to decide what is covered, without any government dictates, and individuals and employees were treated the same for tax purposes, and something was done about the cost of defensive medicine and malpractice insurance, then we could see what remains to be done to cover those who wish to be covered, but are unable to afford it.

The less government interference and control, the better. That is the principle that really needs to be established.

Al Gore has an op-ed in the New York Times. Here are a few excerpts to give you the flavor of Al’s call for human redemption or else.

…unimaginable calamity…

…what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Churchillian rhetoric. Were it not for the complete and utter collapse of the certainty and precision of the climate science “consensus” at the IPCC, CRU, NASA, and MSM, a collapse which Al Gore, the world’s first carbon billionaire, conveniently ignores, one could almost be inspired.

In an article by Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post, he states:

Sarah Palin has a suggestion for how Barack Obama can save his Presidency. “Say he decided to declare war on Iran,” she said on Fox News this month. “I think people would perhaps shift their thinking a little bit and decide, well, maybe he’s tougher than we think he is today.” Such talk is in the air again. Palin was picking up the idea from Daniel Pipes, a neoconservative Middle East expert who suggested a strike would reverse Obama’s political fortunes. (Actually, Palin attributed the idea to Patrick Buchanan, but she obviously entirely misread Buchanan’s column, which opposed Pipes’s suggestion. It’s getting tiresome to keep pointing out her serial gaffes, but Palin does appear to be running for President.)

Having actually read Pat Buchanan’s column, it is clear that he is against going to war with Iran, which Sarah Palin never denied. It is equally clear that he believes that it would indeed, as Sarah Palin averrs, raise Obama’s standing with the public. Here is a quote from Buchanan’s column:

And should war come, that would be the end of GOP dreams of adding three-dozen seats in the House and half a dozen in the Senate.

Harry Reid is surely aware a U.S. clash with Iran, with him at the President’s side, could assure his re-election. Last week, Reid whistled through the Senate, by voice vote, a bill to put us on that escalator.

Read the whole thing, as apparently Fareed Zakaria has not.

You may believe that Buchanan’s assertion about the prospective increase in Obama’s popularity, due to war with Iran, is dubious. You may agree with Buchanan that war with Iran is inadvisable. You may not like Sarah Palin. Regardless of all of that, it is clear that Governor Palin did not misunderstand or misrepresent Pat’s column, or confuse Buchanan with Daniel Pipes.

It is Fareed Zakaria that has committed a gaffe, not Sarah Palin.

We are besieged with domestic crises. The health care crisis, the deficit crisis, the Social Security and Medicare crises, last, but far from least, the unemployment crisis. If we keep going on as we are, the consequences will be dire.

We are told that these crises are insoluble, the U.S. has become ungovernable, Washington is broken. Actually though, it wouldn’t take all that much to fix them, and Washington is quite capable, theoretically, of doing so. Things just haven’t gotten bad enough yet.

Here are a few modest proposals. The first five of them are currently being proposed in the United States Congress by Wisconsin Republican Representative Paul Ryan.

1. Make Medicare and Social Security solvent by doing some means testing and gradually raising the age of eligibility for Social Security.

2. Give taxpayers the option of a simple 10% flat tax with no deductions.

3. Medical savings accounts, tort reform, allowing health insurance to be sold across state lines, and the same health insurance tax treatment for individuals as for employees.

4. Make U.S. corporations competitive with the rest of the world by bringing their taxes in line with other countries. Currently, the average combined federal and state corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 39.3 percent, second among OECD countries to Japan’s combined rate of 39.5 percent. Lowering the federal rate to 30.5 percent would only lower the U.S.’s ranking to fifth highest among industrialized countries.

5. Eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains, dividends, and death.

6. Eliminate unnecessary federal government departments and programs.
    a. Farm subsidies
    b. Department of Education
    c. National Endowment for the Arts
    d. support for NPR and public television
    e. etc., etc., etc. – this is a long list

7. Finally (and this is the real kicker) abolish public employee unions.

For the first time in American history, a majority of union members are government workers rather than private-sector employees. 7.2 percent of private-sector workers are union members. 37.4 percent of government workers are union members.

Union membership in the private sector has been declining for a long time, because it makes companies less competitive and workers don’t want unions anymore. The reforms that unions came into being to institute, have been instituted.

Private sector unions are adverserial. The union negotiates with management and they hammer out a deal. Public sector unions and management are collusive. The union facilitates the election of management. Management becomes an advocate for the union. This makes no sense whatsoever.

Public employee union benefits, pensions, and salaries are bankrupting government at the local, state, and federal levels, as is the extreme difficulty of firing or laying off government employees.

None of these proposals would be difficult to implement procedurally, and they just seem like common sense to me. All of the crises mentioned above, except, maybe, unemployment, would be solved. I believe that these measures would be such a relief to the real economy, the entrepreneurs and professionals and workers, that we would see a turn-around that would greatly lower the rate of unemployment as well, but that is speculation. Others may demur.

The difficulty is not procedural but political, except for eliminating public employee unions. That would take some doing. But none of these ideas are even being considered by the current Congress and President. That’s why there is a tea party movement.

These are the things that need to be done. Whether or not they will be done will be determined by the elections in November of 2010 and 2012. And by whether or not it has gotten bad enough yet.

I was the Technical Director of sfgate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, pretty much from its inception, from 1997 until 2003. I still have sfgate.com as my home page even though I moved from San Francisco to Tennessee over five years ago. I’m still interested in what’s going on in San Francisco and I check it out daily.

Reading articles and comments on SFgate I often see the argument that California only gets back 80 cents on the dollar from its contributions to the federal government, and that therefore it’s everybody else’s fault that the state is bankrupt. The implication being that the federal government, i.e., all of us non-Californians, owe the California government billions of dollars.

Well, yeah, there are a lot of rich people in California. If you want to live in the beautiful parts of California, you pretty much have to be rich. Because they are rich, they pay a lot of taxes. Rich people pay most of the taxes in the U.S. And they don’t get a lot of money back from the federal government. They’re not on welfare. They’re not in jail. They don’t need food stamps or medicaid. They’re rich.

When people talk about this unfair deal that California is getting from the rest of us, they imply that somehow the state government of California is sending all this money to Washington and only getting some of it back. But it is not the California state government that is sending money to D.C., it’s individual taxpayers in California.

Not only are they sending lots of money to Washington, they are also sending lots of money to Sacramento. California is one of the very highest tax states in the union, and these taxes mostly come from rich people, income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and various exorbitant fees.

So if anyone deserves a better shake from the federal government, it is not the state government of California, it is the individual tax payers of California, primarily the rich individual tax payers of California.

Once the bankrupt state of California succeeds in driving out enough businesses and prosperous people, they will then begin to receive more money from Washington than is sent, just like Mississippi and Louisiana. Then all will be well.