Susan Collins is very surprised

The New Neo Posted on by

Republican moderates in the Senate such as Susan Collins of Maine have gotten used to augmenting their own power by being the great compromisers and go-betweens, part of this or that “gang.” But this time the Democrats don’t seem as interested, and Collins seems surprised:

Sen. Susan Collins, who offered a potential compromise to end the government shutdown and raise the nation’s debt ceiling, said Sunday that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was too quick to dismiss it when lawmakers are still struggling to break a fiscal stalemate on Capitol Hill.

“I was very surprised that Sen. Reid said that,” Collins said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I don’t think it was very constructive.”

Reid pats her on the head and throws her a fish that indicates he may ultimately play ball with her if she’s patient and good enough:

Susan Collins is one of my favorite senators, Democrat or Republican,” Reid told reporters. “I appreciate her efforts ”” as always ”” to find a consensus. But the plan that I’ve seen in writing is not going to go any place at this stage.”

Reid knows the value to him of Republicans such as Collins. And before you start screaming “Primary her!!”, there’s virtually no question that if she leaves the political scene, she will be replaced by a liberal Democrat. Faced with this prospect, you might say, “better a real Democrat than a Republican Democrat,” but I disagree because RINOs like Collins at least give Republicans a shot at changing the leadership of the Senate and getting rid of Reid. A real Democrat would not.

Chuck Schumer knows how to turn a phrase:

“We are not overplaying our hand,” Schumer told reporters. “We are open to discussion in every way, and I think our Republican colleagues are moving in our direction.”

Open to discussion “in every way”—as long as all the important compromise is on the Republican side. And no, he doesn’t think the Democrats have overplayed their hand, because he’s convinced the hand they’re holding is a royal flush.

[NOTE: More here and here.]

Even the NY Times can’t hide…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the debacle that was the Obamacare website launch:

For the past 12 days, a system costing more than $400 million and billed as a one-stop click-and-go hub for citizens seeking health insurance has thwarted the efforts of millions to simply log in. The growing national outcry has deeply embarrassed the White House, which has refused to say how many people have enrolled through the federal exchange.

Even some supporters of the Affordable Care Act worry that the flaws in the system, if not quickly fixed, could threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative, which depends on throngs of customers to spread the risk and keep prices low…

By early this year, people inside and outside the federal bureaucracy were raising red flags. “We foresee a train wreck,” an insurance executive working on information technology said in a February interview. “We don’t have the I.T. specifications. The level of angst in health plans is growing by leaps and bounds. The political people in the administration do not understand how far behind they are.”

It’s interesting that the Times is still capable of writing hard-hitting pieces when it wants to. Usually, however, it only wants to against Republicans. In this piece, despite a few pro forma jabs at Republicans and the shutdown, it’s pretty much open season on the web’s designers and those in the administration who oversaw the debacle.

What is it about the Obamacare rollout that caused the Times to stop carrying Obama’s water, if only for a minute? The first thing might be that they don’t have to blame Obama, who most likely did not oversee the design of the website. The second is that it is, indeed, deeply embarrassing—perhaps even to the Times, which has been cheerleading Obama and Obamacare for so long. And the third reason might be that it is more than ordinarily difficult to hide or disguise or spin this particular story, when so many citizens have actually interacted with the website and experienced major troubles, and then told their friends and family. This screw-up is more immediately up-close and personal than most.

But over it all looms the fear that the mess implicates Big Government and its efficiency as a whole, and bolsters the conservative narrative. So the Times may be warning those responsible in the Obama administration that if they are too glaringly incompetent, even their friends in the liberal press might actually call them on it, because that high a level of ineptitude potentially endangers the entire liberal enterprise.

The liberation of the WWII Memorial

The New Neo Posted on by

Go to Legal Insurrection for some good coverage of today’s events in DC, with demonstrations by vets and truckers.

Also via Legal Insurrection, take a look at this from the NY Times, about the Obamacare website:

These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works. “The extent of the problems is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ”˜It’s awful, just awful.’ ”

It’s awful, all right, and not just in the way they mean. The level of fear this administration has engendered is—yes, I’ll use the word—unprecedented, in this country, at least. And it’s getting harder to tell what part of the sycophancy of the MSM is ideological mind-melding and what part is fear.

Nixon had an enemies list, but how many people were truly afraid of him? And the people who were afraid of him actually were his enemies. With Obama, it seems that quite a few of the people who are afraid of him are his admirers and supporters, fellow-liberals and Democrats in the press and elsewhere. They’re afraid to tell the truth, afraid they’ll be punished for not sucking up fast enough and furiously enough.

But hey, that’s the way Obama got his start in politics. Remember the Alice Palmer incident? In Obama’s very first political campaign he managed to get all his Democratic primary opponents (mostly black, I might add, and including his mentor Alice Palmer) knocked off the ballot on technicalities, making him the only choice left standing. His reputation preceded him to the Illinois Senate as a man to be feared and thus “respected” by fellow-Democrats. Later, when the party became the majority, new Illinois Senate President Emil Jones cleared the way for Obama to take credit for the legislative work of others, and to ride the crest of those “achievements” all the way to the US Senate, and ultimately the US presidency.

Separated at birth?

The New Neo Posted on by

[See ADDENDUM below.]

They were high school buddies. Both were children of divorce, and both were famous at a young age.

The first two photos are one person, the second two another.

COO3

COO1-001

COO2-001

V2-001

ADDENDUM and CORRECTION: Mea culpa. I was so fooled by the resemblance between these two women that I accidentally posted three from column A and only one from column B. That is, the first three photos in the post above are of person number one, and only the fourth and last photo is of person number two. I still think that the third photo looks more like the person in the fourth photo than it does the person in the first two. Weird.

However, I’m rectifying the error by adding two more photos of the woman who appears in the fourth and last photo above. That way there will be three photos of each woman in the entire post.

V6-001

V1-001

[HINT: If you want the instant gratification of the answer, it’s here. Don’t peek if you don’t want to know.]

“Talks” break down

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s where it stands at the moment:

There is no agreement, Boehner said in a room in the Capitol Saturday, and there are no negotiations between House Republicans and the White House, since Obama rejected the speaker’s effort to lift the debt ceiling for six weeks and reopen government while setting up a budget negotiating process.

Harry Reid starts putting the screws on:

“I was happy to see the Republicans engaged in talks with the president, the House Republicans. That’s over with. It’s done. They’re not talking anymore,” Reid said. “I say to my friends on the Republican side of this Senate, time is running out.”

Methinks the Democrats believe they have a very, very strong hand here. Their buddies in the media have drummed it into the public that this is the Republicans’ fault, and will continue to reliably deliver that message. Polls are a bit unclear, but so far the gist of them seem to indicate that the public blames the Republicans far more than Democrats.

But I really wonder how many are really paying attention, even at this point. I think for most people this is just background noise, buzzing and annoying but in the distance. What will really matter is how their lives play out in the next year, just as Nate Silver says (yes, that Nate Silver—who, by the way, I have long had a lot of respect for, even though I didn’t like the news he was delivering back in 2012):

…[P]residential elections are more the exception than the rule. As I discuss in my book, the more common tendency instead is that people (and especially the “experts” who write about the issues for a living) overestimate the degree of predictability in complex systems. There are some other exceptions besides presidential elections ”” sports, in many respects; and weather prediction, which has become much better in recent years. But for the most part, the experts you see on television are much too sure of themselves.

That’s been my impression of the coverage of the shutdown: The folks you see on TV are much too sure of themselves. They’ve been making too much of thin slices of polling and thinner historical precedents that might not apply this time around.

There’s been plenty of bullshit, in other words. We really don’t know all that much about how the shutdown is going to be resolved, or how the long-term political consequences are going to play out.

Please read the whole thing.

And I wonder if the same isn’t true for the debt ceiling negotiations, a fight which is predicted to potentially have far greater ramifications, although no one is quite certain what they would be.

[ADDENDUM: Some suggestion to the GOP from DrewM at Ace’s.]

Who is John Boehner, and would you like to be in his shoes?

The New Neo Posted on by

Some conservatives are predictably lashing out in frustration at John Boehner, whom they already neither liked nor trusted.

Sellout. RINO. Wuss. You know the drill.

But I don’t see it quite that way.

Before there’s any misunderstanding (although as Popper said, misunderstanding’s gonna happen no matter how you try to head it off), let me say I’m not a Boehner fan. He’s uninspiring, seems naive, and exhibits nothing especially superior in either the brains or the rhetoric or the spine department.

But I don’t think he’s dumb, nor do I think he’s all that naive. It’s been my observation over time that people don’t get to be head of a party (either party) in Congress without having some smarts in at least the strategy and tactics department. Or without being somewhat good at playing political poker.

Now, Boehner may be one of the worst of recent political party leaders at that. Or he may be one of the better ones, given the not-so-great hand he’s been dealt. I don’t know; I can’t really tell because I sense that most of what goes on in Congress right now (or ever) is hidden from view. But I’m willing to at least entertain the idea that Boehner may (as this American Thinker piece by Fisher Adams claims) be playing a smarter game than is immediately apparent.

As commenter “T” (who linked to Adams’ article) wrote:

I am reminded of Henry Kissinger’s comment about foreign affairs: he said that there are always two chess games being played, the one on the table that everyone watches and a second game under the table that no one sees. Could that be the case here?

Could be. Fervently hope so, anyway. Because the alternative is pretty grim.

Boehner has a rather interesting history that at least indicates the possibility of a considerable amount more toughness than is apparent on the surface, as well as more devotion to conservative principles than many people credit him with. For example, he had a hardscrabble childhood and young manhood and managed to work his way up from it:

[Boehner] grew up in modest circumstances, having shared one bathroom with his eleven siblings in a two-bedroom house in Cincinnati. His parents slept on a pull-out couch. He started working at his family’s bar at age 8, a business founded by their grandfather Andy Boehner in 1938…All but two of his siblings still live within a few miles of each other; two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.

Boehner attended Cincinnati’s Moeller High School and was a linebacker on the school’s football team, where he was coached by future Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust…[Boehner was] the first person in his family to attend college, taking seven years as he held several jobs to pay for his education.[

If Boehner’s a RINO now, he certainly wasn’t at the outset. Or, if he was a RINO even back then, he certainly managed to keep it pretty quiet:

Boehner, along with Newt Gingrich and several other Republican lawmakers, was one of the engineers of the Contract with America in 1994 that politically helped Republicans during the 1994 congressional elections during which they won the majority in Congress for the first time in four decades.

By 1997, when Gingrich was perceived by the others as a political liability, Boehner was also one of a group of Republicans that tried to get Gingrich to resign as Speaker. But when Boehner ran for Majority Leader in 2006, he “campaigned as a reform candidate who wanted to reform the so-called ‘earmark’ process and rein in government spending.” Of course, because Republicans lost in the House in 2006, he was demoted to Minority Leader and it wasn’t until 2010 that he got to be Speaker.

For the most part, Boehner’s political positions have been conservative. So if he’s actually a RINO, he’s a very odd one indeed. What he is, however, is a guy who’s been in Congress and in some position of party power for a long, long time, which would officially make him an “establishment Republican.”

As for naivete, there’s very good evidence that Boehner knows at least some of what he’s up against in Obama and Pelosi, et al. He may not know exactly what to do about it, given that the Senate is in Democratic hands. But he knows the intent of today’s Democratic leaders:

House Speaker John Boehner told a group of Republicans the day after President Barack Obama’s [2012] inaugural ceremony that the president’s focus was to “annihilate the Republican Party.”

In remarks to Republicans attending a closed luncheon sponsored by the Ripon Society, Boehner pointed to the president’s speech as evidence Obama recognizes he can’t achieve his agenda because of the GOP-led House of Representatives.

“Given what we heard yesterday about the president’s vision for his second term, it’s pretty clear to me that he knows he can’t do any of that as long as the House is controlled by Republicans. So we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party,” the House speaker said.

Boehner underlined his point, adding, “And let me just tell you, I do believe that is their goal ”“ to just shove us into the dustbin of history.”

My only disagreement with what he says would be that it’s not merely “the Republican Party” they want to “annihilate.” It’s the whole idea of small government and conservatism which they wish to discredit and demonize. They are well on their way to doing so, with the help of a compliant MSM, and unfortunately events such as the shutdown and the debt ceiling negotiations have the paradoxical effect of helping them in that endeavor with a large segment of the American public.

Republicans face a dilemma. The Congressional elections of 2014 are of the utmost importance. They have a chance to take the Senate (although even if they manage to do so—and to keep the House, which they must also do—Obama will retain veto power). But the conservative wing of the Republican Party is clamoring (and understandably so) for more action now, and threatening to defect if more isn’t done to stop the Democrats in their tracks. Boehner is in the position of having to weigh approaches that could backfire, knowing he will be reviled if he fails, and knowing it is very late in the day and the stakes are incredibly high.

But that’s the role he asked for.

The public is dissatisfied with Washington

The New Neo Posted on by

The public’s mad at Obama, Democrats, and Republicans–really, at just about everybody in Washington. They hate Republicans the most, but they’re not happy with anybody:

The AP-GfK poll finds few people approve of the way the president is handling most major issues and most people say he’s not decisive, strong, honest, reasonable or inspiring.

In the midst of the government shutdown and Washington gridlock, the president is faring much better than his party, with large majorities of those surveyed finding little positive to say about Democrats. The negatives are even higher for the Republicans across the board, with 4 out of 5 people describing the GOP as unlikeable and dishonest and not compassionate, refreshing, inspiring or innovative.

Negativity historically hurts the party in power ”” particularly when it occurs in the second term of a presidency ”” but this round seems to be hitting everyone. More people now say they see bigger differences between the two parties than before Obama was elected, yet few like what either side is offering.

Well, I’ve generally not liked politicians and I’ve not been keen on many presidents either, so for me this is nothing new. And of course many of those people mad at Republicans for being “unlikeable and dishonest,” as well as not “refreshing, inspiring or innovative” are in fact conservative and/or Republicans.

But if one of the reasons a lot of people are down on both Democrats and Republicans in Congress is that the parties are further apart than ever, I think many of those people might do well to look in the mirror. Because I think it only reflects the fact that Americans themselves are more politically polarized than ever. Sometimes I wonder which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

My best guess is that it’s an escalating feedback loop, where greater polarization of politicians helps feed greater polarization of the public, and vice versa. And of course let’s not discount the MSM’s contribution, as well as talk-radio, the 24-hour cable news networks and news cycle, the growth of opinion journalism masquerading as news journalism, and the decline of politeness and respect in public life (helped by President Obama himself, whose rhetoric has been increasingly inflammatory).

If we really have become a population that’s more and more divided into polarized factions, you might say “so be it.” But one of the strengths of the US used to be that the parties were composed of a greater proportion of moderates, and were much more able to pull together for the common good, especially in wartime or other crises. I fear we’ve lost that ability.

Pathological altruism

The New Neo Posted on by

Interesting article:

The left derives its sense of moral authority from the supposition that its intentions are altruistic and its opponents’ are selfish. That sense of moral superiority makes it easy to justify immoral behavior, like slandering critics of President Obama as racist–or using the power of the Internal Revenue Service to suppress them. It seems entirely plausible that the Internal Revenue Service officials who targeted and harassed conservative groups thought they were doing their patriotic duty. If so, what a perfect example of pathological altruism.

Oakley concludes by noting that “during the twentieth century, tens of millions [of] individuals were killed under despotic regimes that rose to power through appeals to altruism.” An understanding that altruism can produce great evil as well as good is crucial to the defense of human freedom and dignity.

Dr. Who: what, where??

The New Neo Posted on by

When I first saw the headline I thought for sure that this was a joke.

Had to be, with a title like “The Time Hoard: Missing episodes of Doctor Who from 1960s found gathering dust in a cupboard in Nigeria.” Had to be the Onion or April Fools’ Day or something like that.

I’m still not certain that’s not the case. But the Telegraph seems utterly serious:

Nine long-lost episodes of Doctor Who, which have not been seen since the 1960s, have been recovered after they were tracked down gathering dust in a store room in Nigeria.

The discovery will cause much excitement for devotees of the long-running series, for which there are dozens of missing episodes dating back to its early years

The previously lost nine shows were among 11 traced to a television relay station and the find brings back to life an entire six-episode story, while another is almost complete…

Mr Morris said: ‘I remember wiping the dust off the masking tape on the canisters and my heart missed a beat as I saw the words Doctor Who. When I read the story code, I realised I’d found something pretty special.’

Ninety-seven episodes are still unaccounted for. Time for a search of the spam capitals of the world?

By the way, Nigeria isn’t really the mother of all spam in terms of where it’s actually sent from; that honor is shared by India, Brazil, and Vietnam. But much of it does indeed come from Nigeria. At least, it gives the appearance of that; spammers are clever enough to be able to hide their actual origins if they so choose.

So, what’s going on now with the Republicans, the shutdown, and the debt limit?

The New Neo Posted on by

I have always thought that the Republicans simply don’t have the power to win this battle in the conventional sense, anyway. As long as Obama is president and the Senate is in the hands of Harry Reid, they don’t have the votes to do it.

And so the news that there are compromises afoot is not exactly “news” at all.

A faction of the conservative wing of the party is livid at the prospect. That’s no surprise, either. You may be among them.

I have a very busy day today and can’t do my own long post about it right now, but you probably have quite a bit to say. Here’s a good analysis of the situation and the party’s ongoing civil war; and here’s another point of view.

One point, though: I’m thinking that those who said “let people experience Obamacare and they will reject it” (a situation I didn’t really agree would pan out that way) might have a point after all, if the abysmal rollout is any indication.

What’s going on with the National Park Service? And the country?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Ymarsakar” puts his finger on one of the more disturbing developments that has come to light because of the shutdown:

…[T]he park service [used to be] your friendly friends at parks.

Until Obama ordered them to put the rod down on the peasants, and many of them obeyed, though not all.

It has struck me that this is an indication of both human nature (see Milgram’s research on obedience to authority) and what our country has become in recent years. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Greatest Generation would have been nearly as compliant.

Unhappy Anniversary: it’s almost 50 years since the JFK assassination

The New Neo Posted on by

This essay by George F. Will reminds me that in about six weeks we’re going to be commemorating the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination.

I’ve been dreading it for quite some time, in no small measure because the usual trickle of essays on the subject is going to become a tsunami. The occasion will undoubtedly bring all the conspiracy theorists out of the woodwork to parade their pet notions of whodunit and why and how.

I’ve written a few pieces myself on the subject of the assassination, and I probably will recycle some of them as the day comes around. But right now, prompted by the Will essay, I’m wondering about something in particular: how many people in this country today would be able to correctly identify the political affiliation of Lee Harvey Oswald as Communist? My guess is: not so many.

Will points out that the story of the Kennedy assassination started to be rewritten almost from the moment it occurred, and that even after Oswald was captured and known to be a dedicated leftist, the killing of JFK was often described as a story of the effects of right-wing hatred. That serves the approved narrative much better than the truth.

Although conspiracy theorists have their own manifold and sundry motivations for believing all the things they believe, part of the effect of the cacophony of possibilities is to absolve the true culprit—the far left—of responsibility, and to assign guilt to almost anyone other than the person who actually did it. The need is to blame the right, the government, the CIA, the FBI, the Vice President, the Mafia, the Jews (we couldn’t leave them out, could we?), Castro (at least he’s on the left), and even Officer Tippit, one of Oswald’s victims. And that’s just the tip of the conspiracy iceberg.

It’s not innocuous, and it boggles the mind that even now, when the evidence of Oswald’s sole guilt is so clear and compelling that it is virtually a certainty, polls show that the majority of Americans still doubt it. In fact, belief in his guilt was never very high at any point:

According to the AP-GfK survey, conducted in mid-April, 59 percent of Americans think multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president, while 24 percent think Oswald acted alone, and 16 percent are unsure. A 2003 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans felt there was a conspiracy.

The Oswald-acted-alone results, meanwhile, are the highest since the period three years after the assassination, when 36 percent said one man was responsible for Kennedy’s death.

A pathetic lack of critical thinking, I’m afraid.

[NOTE: I fully expect an outcry of disagreement from people coming to this blog in order to spout their favorite conspiracy theories. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel, so I’ll just refer them to some previous posts I’ve written on the subject (including comments): this, this, and this. Also please see the text of the Vincent Bugliosi tome about the assassination, Reclaiming History, the text of which is online and searchable. Read it, or at least selected parts of it, and you’ll learn a great deal.]