George W. Bush exhibits his paintings

The New Neo Posted on by

I would love to see this exhibit.

And what a great interview. Note the reference to Churchill, the humor, and the relaxed and affectionate interplay between the family members, as well as Bush’s articulate and fluid manner of speaking. Gone is his studied carefulness, the fear of making an error that his enemies could pounce on that (IMHO) caused some disfluency during Bush’s presidency. Of course, it probably helps that he’s speaking to family members, and about his love of painting.

Laura looks great, too. What’s her secret?

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My favorite quote from the interview:

“As you know, our dear dog Barney, who had a special place in my heart ”” Putin dissed him and said, ”˜You call it a dog?’” Bush recalled. “A year later, your mom and I go to visit and Vladimir says, ”˜Would you like to meet my dog?’ Out bounds this huge hound, obviously much bigger than a Scottish terrier, and Putin looks at me and says, ”˜Bigger, stronger and faster than Barney.’

“I just took it in. I didn’t react,” Bush continued. “I just said, ‘Wow. Anybody who thinks ‘my dog is bigger than your dog’ is an interesting character.’ And that painting kind of reflects that.”

Here’s a close-up of Bush’s portrait of Putin (the NBC logo is not part of the painting), which I think is quite fine, as well as revealing of Putin’s character:

bushputin

[NOTE: There’s a gallery of Bush’s portraits here.]

More on Eich’s “resignation”

The New Neo Posted on by

If you want to read two wonderful pieces on the subject of Eich’s resignation and the movement that led to it, start with this one, from whence comes this excerpt:

This is NOT about Prop 8, gay marriage and religion. That is just the context in which this latest abuse has come to be. It is about the freedom — in your personal life — to believe as you do, support the candidates and issues you want, and to be left in peace to do so without fear of recrimination at the place where you make your livelihood.

If competent individuals can be fired at work for their personal stances on issues that they do not bring into the workplace, then we are no longer in a free and open society, but a very tightly closed one where fear reigns and keeps us all under control–where our beliefs must yield to pre-set political and religious dogma we are force fed.

Not only is it hard to swallow that something like this could happen in our country, it is hard to fathom how anyone can be so self-righteous, so emboldened, to think it a perfectly good idea to socially engineer society with the same iron fists as history’s liberty-crushing despots. All of that talk about equality, justice, liberty, tolerance and diversity, is just talk. It’s a one way street leading to oppression. And so frenzied are they with their viewpoints — so intent on crushing any opposing ideas– that they are blinded to their own bigotry.

And then read The Anchoress on the subject. She’s really really angry, as you can tell from the uncharacteristic headline (for her, that is: “A Gay CEO with Balls Needs to Hire Eich and Halt this Crap”). Here’s an excerpt:

If the headline strikes some as offensive, it will nevertheless remain, because that’s the case I’m making, and I’m sticking with it: a gay CEO with a pair of brass ones needs to step up and speak truth to a growing, and most illiberal new power. He or she needs to hire Brendan Eich in some sort of corporate leadership capacity for the sake of the most fundamental of freedoms ”” the freedom to think what you want to think, even if your thinking is unpopular or deemed “mistaken” ”” and in so doing boldly declare that our society has no truck with inquisitions…

Let me be clear: I hold out absolutely no hope that this chill wind will be checked or reversed ”” too many people with money and influence and no individual courage at all find totalitarianism an alluring idea. Nevertheless, though everything is part illusion, I’ll still resist and say, as Tom McDonald so succinctly puts it, “this shit has to stop.”

Indeed; it is an execrable, detestable trend that, if unchecked, will affect every facet of our lives as “correct” thoughts and “correct” ways become ever-narrower and trap more and more people in its stinking and miserable gullies…

I would ask my gay friends to openly reject this movement to oppress so-called “wrong” thinking ”” suffocate it right now, as it is being born ”” because eventually it will grow into a monster that will consume anyone, indiscriminately.]

I have one disagreement with the Anchoress, though: this movement is hardly “being born.” Our social engineers of the left have been crusading against various thought-crimes for a long, long time, and establishing the idea of the need to stamp out thought-crime against the righteous PC wisdom du jour. The only thing that’s different now is that it’s reached critical mass, on this issues and many others.

Brendan Eich and the gay marriage zealots

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: In my earlier post today on the Charles Koch piece at the WSJ, I mentioned that I couldn’t get through the firewall to the article. Since then, the WSJ has kindly removed it from behind the wall, and this link will take you there successfully. Many thanks to all the readers who emailed me with either the text of the piece, or the news that the link was working.]

Charles Koch, who knows a bit about being criticized and even lied about for his beliefs, wrote this today in the WSJ:

Instead of encouraging free and open debate, collectivists strive to discredit and intimidate opponents. They engage in character assassination. (I should know, as the almost daily target of their attacks.) This is the approach that Arthur Schopenhauer described in the 19th century, that Saul Alinsky famously advocated in the 20th, and that so many despots have infamously practiced. Such tactics are the antithesis of what is required for a free society””and a telltale sign that the collectivists do not have good answers.

People have the right to engage in such tactics against someone like Koch, unless guilty of libel—and the bar to proving libel of a public figure is very very high. But should they? Especially when, as in the recent case of Brendan Eich, who resigned today as CEO of Mozilla, the thoughtcrime committed by the targeted person was in taking a position that until very recently was considered completely mainstream.

You may have missed the case of Eich, but it is extraordinarily chilling. Eich was found to have made a donation in 2008 to a group supporting California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8. For this horrific offense he has been pressured to resign, and that pressure succeeded despite his attempts at recantation and reassurance. Apparently, his mea culpa wasn’t maxima enough.

Ace of Spades has been covering the Eich story quite thoroughly, so I direct you to his posts here and here. Note, also, that even gay marriage proponent Andrew Sullivan has been made pretty queasy by the Eich persecution. In a column titled “The hounding of a heretic,” Sullivan writes:

Will Eich now be forced to walk through the streets in shame? Why not the stocks? The whole episode disgusts me ”“ as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today ”“ hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else ”“ then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.

Note, also, that the mechanism by which Eich’s contribution was outed was a leak by none other than our old friends at the IRS, who gave “a copy of the National Organization for Marriage’s 2008 tax return to a gay-advocacy group.” So although Eich was probably not the special target (there probably was no one individual target; rather, the potential targets were all the names on the list), the whole thing has unfolded exactly as planned. This was no accident, and it required the cooperation of someone or several someones at the IRS.

Unfortunately, we have become used to this level of outrageous, illegal, and yes, un-American behavior. And that’s probably most dangerous of all.

[ADDENDUM: Allahpundit at Hot Air says the leak was not by the IRS and that the mechanism was actually a disclosure through the LA Times, acting in accord with a California law allowing it. He also explains why such a law doesn’t seem to make sense except as a mechanism to hound people for their beliefs.

Here’s the history of the law. Interesting:

California’s Political Reform Act of 1974, and laws like it across the country, sought to cast disinfecting sunlight on the political process by requiring contributions of more than $100 to be made public.

[Some activist websites take] that data, formerly of interest mainly to social scientists, pollsters and journalists, and publishes it in a way not foreseen when the open-government laws were passed. As a result, donors are exposed to a wide audience and, in some cases, to harassment or worse…

Joseph Clare, a San Francisco accountant who donated $500 to supporters of Proposition 8, said he had received several e-mail messages accusing him of “donating to hate.” Mr. Clare said the site perverts the meaning of disclosure laws that were originally intended to expose large corporate donors who might be seeking to influence big state projects.

“I don’t think the law was designed to identify people for direct feedback to them from others on the other side,” Mr. Clare said. “I think it’s been misused.”

Many civil liberties advocates, including those who disagree with his views on marriage, say he has a point. They wonder if open-government rules intended to protect political influence of the individual voter, combined with the power of the Internet, might be having the opposite effect on citizens.

“These are very small donations given by individuals, and now they are subject to harassment that ultimately makes them less able to engage in democratic decision making,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California.

It sounds as though even some liberals are perturbed by this. I bet not many, though. And I don’t see anything being done about changing the law, at least not so far.]

Understanding the significance of McCutcheon: campaign finance and the history of free speech protection

The New Neo Posted on by

I must confess that the McCutcheon case that was decided by SCOTUS yesterday rested on an area of law with which I wasn’t all that familiar. One of the big questions yesterday’s ruling raised for me was: if campaign contributions are Bill of Rights-protected speech, then under what rationale can they be regulated and limited? Is the mere temptation to government corruption or possibility of corruption enough? Shouldn’t the standard be higher than that, since freedom of speech is such an important liberty? And what would the legal argument be behind an answer of “no”?

The articles I read yesterday did not answer my question. But today I struck pay dirt in this offering at Volokh by David Bernstein. It goes into the background of the Progressive (i.e. leftist) attitude towards freedom of speech and the entire doctrine of natural rights embedded in the Constitution.

Here’s an excerpt, but it’s well worth reading the whole thing [emphasis mine]:

Progressives identified freedom of speech as a civil liberty to differentiate it from what Progressive understood to be the obsolete, individualist, natural-rights based liberties of the American past. While activist government was inimical to such rights as liberty of contract and property rights, it arguably buttressed a Progressive case for freedom of speech. According to Progressive advocates of constitutional protection for freedom of expression, the more active a role played by government, the more important it is to ensure that public policy is subject to vigorous and uninhibited debate. Such debate not only could bring important considerations to light, but also could serve as a check on those who would use public power for private gain, which in turn would lead to better public policy, which in turn would create a welcome demand for even more government.

In 1927, Justice Brandeis penned an extraordinarily influential concurrence supporting constitutional protection for freedom of speech in Whitney v. California. Consistent with his Progressivism, Brandeis defended freedom of speech primarily on the instrumental ground that it promoted free and rational public discussion, essential for the American people to govern themselves. By focusing on the social interest in democratic self-government, Brandeis attempted to differentiate freedom of speech from individualist rights such as liberty of contract and other traditional assertions of natural rights against the government.

Later on, freedom of speech was of special interest to the left because in the 60s it protected radical speech from infringements and helped the left to promulgate its message. But when it is in the left’s interest to restrict freedom of speech, that idea of general social interest can be used to limit speech.

And that’s what Justice Breyer—joined by the other liberal justices—tried to do in his McCutcheon dissent. Here’s Bernstein again:

…[In recent years] opposition to First Amendment protection of campaign donations has become a significant “cause” on the liberal left. It’s not hard to see why: the legacy mainstream media, Hollywood, academia, publishing, the legal profession, the mainline churches, and the arts, i.e., almost all of the leading opinion-making areas of American life, are dominated by liberals (though conservatives dominate talk radio, evangelical churches, and have Fox News). The one place where the playing field is more or less level is in campaign spending. Limit campaign spending, and left-leaning opinion-makers utterly dominate American political discourse.

But how can liberals, who so expansively interpret other constitutional provisions, narrow the First Amendment so that campaign finance no longer gets protection?

Justice Breyer’s dissent today shows the way, as he revives the old Progressive conception of freedom of speech as serving instrumental purposes (which he calls “First Amendment interests”), rather than protecting individual rights or reining in potential government abuses. And once we identify those “First Amendment interests,” we must limit freedom of speech to ensure that they are advanced…

Just to make sure he’s not being too subtle, Breyer goes back to the source, Justice Brandeis, citing his opinion in Whitney for the proposition that freedom of speech is protected because it’s ”essential to effective democracy.”

Further showing off his affinity for the Progressive statism of a century ago…, Breyer turns constitutional history on its head, by declaring that the purpose of the First Amendment was not to prevent government abuses, but to ensure ”public opinion could be channeled into effective governmental action.”

A more stark demonstration of the difference between left and right could hardly be devised. And we are just one justice away from having Breyer’s vision realized.

Reid: hey, it worked the first time, so why not?

The New Neo Posted on by

There Reid goes again:

Senate majority leader Harry Reid has a whole page on his official Senate.gov website devoted to revealing “THE FACTS ABOUT THE KOCH BROTHERS.” One of the alleged facts promoted on Reid’s website is that the Kochs do not pay any corporate taxes…

The claim that the Koch brothers don’t pay corporate income taxes was first made by former White House official Austan Goolsbee, but Koch Industries lawyer Mark Holden disputed the accusation and raised the question of whether someone in the Obama administration illegally accessed the Kochs’ tax returns. Goolsbee’s comments led to a federal investigation–the results of which have never been released.

In October 2010, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Goolsbee’s claim “was wrong.” But that hasn’t stopped the Senate majority leader from promoting the claim four years later.

Of course it hasn’t. Because nothing stopped him when he asserted a similar lie about Romney during the 2012 campaign (adding, for good measure, “His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son”). One thing of which I’m pretty sure: Reid himself is beyond such petty emotions as embarrassment.

That’s what happens when the MSM does nothing to challenge a lie.

Supreme Court strikes down limits on amount of total campaign donations by individuals

The New Neo Posted on by

Not the ceiling on each campaign contribution, mind you, but their total. The vote was the very familiar 5-4:

Wednesday’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission…did not affect familiar base limits on contributions from individuals to candidates, currently $2,600 per candidate in primary and general elections. But it said that overall limits of $48,600 by individuals every two years for contributions to all federal candidates violated the First Amendment, as did separate aggregate limits on contributions to political party committees, currently $74,600…

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for four justices in the controlling opinion, said the First Amendment required striking down the limits. “There is no right in our democracy more basic,” he wrote, “than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.”

…The decision chipped away at the central distinction drawn by the Supreme Court in its seminal 1976 campaign finance decision, Buckley v. Valeo. Independent spending, the court said in Buckley, is political speech protected by the First Amendment. But contributions may be capped, the court said then, in the name of preventing corruption. The court added that aggregate contribution limits were a “quite modest restraint upon protected political activity” that “serves to prevent evasion” of the base limits.

Wednesday’s decision concerned only contributions from individuals. Federal law continues to ban contributions by corporations and unions.

Seems to me that the lines that are drawn are quite arbitrary. Leaving aside for a moment the dubiousness of asserting that the capping of campaign contributions actually “prevents corruption” (I maintain that where there’s a will to be corrupt, there’s a way), it seems just as arbitrary to limit those contributions to $2,600 per candidate as to limit them to $48,600 total every two years.

Why one party versus another would be squawking (Democrats) about this decision I don’t know—except of course as all-important theater (“we’re for the little guy, and against corruption”), because there are plenty of rich and mega-rich individuals on both sides that will take advantage of it. Corruption and the buying of candidates for favors will continue apace—as it probably always has, laws or no.

Corruption and power go hand and hand, and the best we can do to prevent the combination in our elected officials is to have an educated and aware populace willing to reject the corrupt (good luck, you say). The other way to reduce corruption would be to limit the power of those elected officials, which would involve limiting the power of government itself. Even that doesn’t stop corruption, of course; the most it probably does is to reduce it in the public sphere a bit and leave it more to the private sphere. Perhaps it merely shifts the balance, which leaves us with the following question: which is worse, public or private corruption? I maintain it’s the former, because the power of the government is greater. On the other hand, we can (at least theoretically) vote the bums out.

What are the previously uninsured doing about Obamacare?

The New Neo Posted on by

How many uninsured people there were in America prior to Obamacare has been a mystery wrapped in an enigma (see this for an analysis of the misleading figures), ready to be exploited for propaganda purposes. That confusion was not just limited to how many uninsured people there were, but included their demographics and reasons for remaining so, although all of it was continually estimated and discussed and analyzed.

One thing that was clear was that the ACA was supposedly designed to reduce this group’s numbers. You might say that was its stated raison d’éªtre, one that has since been almost lost in the shuffle of doublespeak that constitutes the left’s pep talks about the Obamacare signups.

Another thing that is clear is that, even if you take the administration’s propaganda at face value and put the most pro-Obamacare spin on it, the administration’s figures about the numbers of pre-ACA uninsured as compared to reported signup figures indicate that only a tiny fraction of those previously uninsured are now insured.

Bookworm writes:

As of yesterday [March 31, 2014], based upon the limited data the Obama administration has reluctantly released, only 1.7% of the previously uninsured have enrolled in Obamacare.

I’m not sure the number isn’t at least somewhat higher than 1.7%*, but it certainly is nowhere near the numbers originally predicted or supposedly desired (see the chart here, as well).

Bookworm also offers a reasonable-seeming explanation for the reluctance of at least some of those on the Obamacare fence:

I was speaking to my friend just yesterday about her healthcare and she offered a very interesting observation: She and her husband, the only middle class people in a sea of poverty, are the only people she knows, amongst both friends and acquaintances, who have signed up for Obamacare. The others have no interest in getting health insurance. Even with a subsidy, they don’t want to pay a monthly bill for health insurance. Even a subsidized rate is too onerous when they can get all the free health care they need just by showing up at the local emergency room. Additionally, the ER docs are usually better than any doc who’s willing to belong to whatever plan they can afford. Nor are these people worried about the penalties for refusing to buy Obamacare, since none of them pay taxes.

Not only are the people in my friend’s world refusing to buy Obamacare, they resent it. According to my friend, someone she knows abruptly announced that she’s getting involved in local politics, something she’s never done before. Until recently, this gal was one of those people who just floated along, getting by. Now, though, she’s fired up.

The reason for the sudden passion is unexpected: She’s deeply offended by a law that forces people to buy a product they don’t need ”” never mind that she might benefit from the product, that she would pay far below market value for the product, or that she’s too poor to be penalized for ignoring this government diktat. The mere fact that the diktat exists runs counter to her notion of individual liberty. Her view of government is that, while it’s fine if it hands out welfare checks and food stamps, it goes beyond the pale when the government uses its power and wealth to coerce activity.

Now that is interesting. I don’t know how many people are going as far as this newly-minted although quite compartmentalized libertarian. But it does seem that even with generous subsidies, Obamacare is too much for a lot of people to whom every single dollar counts, and who know that they can get absolutely free care in the hospital emergency rooms.

[NOTE: *For example, the numbers don’t seem to include the previously-uninsured who are newly signed up for Medicaid. Those are very hard-to-estimate numbers, too, because to do so one would need to separate out those new Medicaid enrollees who were only eligible because of Obamacare from the usual new enrollments that regularly occur anyway.

Of course, Medicaid enrollment does not mean a doctor will take the patient. But that’s another—although important and related—problem. Health insurance de jure is not the same as healthcare de facto.]

Department of no surprise at all: Israel/Palestine talks stall

The New Neo Posted on by

Surprise, surprise:

The Middle East peace talks verged on a breakdown Tuesday night, after President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority defied the United States and Israel by taking concrete steps to join 15 international agencies ”” a move to gain the benefits of statehood outside the negotiations process.

Mr. Abbas’s actions, which appeared to catch American and Israeli officials by surprise, prompted Secretary of State John Kerry to cancel a planned return to the region on Wednesday, in which he had expected to complete an agreement extending negotiations through 2015.

The whole thing seems to be a stupid charade. Why wouldn’t the Palestinians defy the US at this point? Why not take advantage of weakness?