Backing off on the debt ceiling battle

The New Neo Posted on by

I bet a lot of you will disagree, but I think that, on the whole, the GOP is right not to choose this particular hill to die on. Kicking the can down the road may not usually be such a hot idea, but it buys time here and creates at least a sense of being willing to negotiate and compromise on their part.

They were not going to win this battle in any case; as Krauthammer points out, their position post-November 2012 is not strong:

In reality, Republicans have a broad consensus on what they believe, where they want to go and the program to get them there. But they don’t have the power. What divides Republicans today is a straightforward tactical question: Can you govern from one house of Congress? Should you even try?

Can you shrink government, restrain spending, bring a modicum of fiscal sanity to the country when the president and a blocking Senate have no intention of doing so?

One faction feels committed to try. It wishes to carry out its small-government electoral promises and will cast no vote inconsistent with that philosophy. These are the House Republicans who voted no on the “fiscal cliff” deal because it raised taxes without touching spending. Indeed, it increased spending with its crazy-quilt crony-capitalist tax ”credits” ”” for wind power and other indulgences.

They were willing to risk the fiscal cliff. Today they are willing to risk a breach of the debt ceiling and even a government shutdown rather than collaborate with Obama’s tax-and-spend second-term agenda.

The other view is that you cannot govern from the House. The reason Ryan and John Boehner finally voted yes on the lousy fiscal-cliff deal is that by then there was nowhere else to go. Republicans could not afford to bear the blame (however unfair) for a $4.5 trillion across-the-board tax hike and a Pentagon hollowed out by sequester…

The more prudent course would be to find some offer that cannot be refused, a short-term trade-off utterly unassailable and straightforward. For example, offer to extend the debt ceiling through, say, May 1, in exchange for the Senate delivering a budget by that date ”” after four years of lawlessly refusing to produce one.

Not much. But it would (a) highlight the Democrats’ fiscal recklessness, (b) force Senate Democrats to make public their fiscal choices and (c) keep the debt ceiling alive as an ongoing pressure point for future incremental demands.

Republicans should develop a list of such conditions ”” some symbolic, some substantive ”” in return for sequential, short-term raising of the debt ceiling. But the key is: Go small and simple. Forget about forcing tax reform or entitlement cuts or anything major. If Obama wants to recklessly expand government, well, as he says, he won the election.

Republicans should simply block what they can. Further tax hikes, for example. The general rule is: From a single house of Congress you can resist but you cannot impose.

Aren’t you failing the country, say the insurgents? Answer: The country chose Obama. He gets four years.

Want to save the Republic? Win the next election.

Some will call that spineless surrender, typical RINO garbage, and the very reason they hate the GOP. I call it realistic, although I understand those arguments, and hold no brief for most of the Republicans in Congress now. But the most important fight—the one for the hearts and minds of the American people—is going to have to be waged in the institutions about which we’ve spoken: education, media, pop culture. And the bravado of brinksmanship is not going to do a thing for the larger cause.

I have excerpted at length from Krauthammer’s piece because I think it’s easy to misunderstand his argument if you only read part of it. But let me also add that he gives a historic example: Gingrich’s battle with Clinton, which Gingrich lost. It wasn’t lost because Gingrich was a RINO, or because he lacked spine, either. Here’s a summary of what happened back then, when Clinton snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

Now, fire away.

[NOTE: I would add that the House could, and probably should, choose a couple of important fiscal (or other) issues about which to pass bills—bills they know will be defeated in the Senate and/or vetoed—just to go on record as to what they would do if they had more power. As a statement of intent. They can’t do too much of this or they will be accused of frivolously wasting time on bills that will go nowhere, however. But one or two might be good, I think.]

Grass fed organic hamburg

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve never been fond of meat, even as a child, although I do like lamb. When I was little, my parents even had to prod me to eat at least a small amount of steak when we had it for dinner (!).

And you don’t want to hear about the way tongue was served in our house. Let’s just say it was quite recognizable as being—well, a very large tongue.

But I have to say that this hamburg meat is really, really yummy, and it tastes good even without ketchup or any other seasoning.

[NOTE: If you’re interested in a discourse on tongue and why it should not be served whole, take a look. I wish my family had taken heed back in the day.]

Obama, the left, and the bitter clingers

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s fairly apparent that Obama’s recent push for post-Newtown gun control is not reasonably related to the facts of the case, but exploits it instead as an opportunity to use the public’s emotional reaction to it (and some children, in a photo-op) to pass some legislation (or at least issue some executive orders) that serve other ends.

There’s been a lot of speculation on what those ends might be. I think there’s a multitude—but one of them is sticking it to the bitter clingers, and letting the latte crowd know he’s with them, whether the legislation they want gets passed or not.

Remember those bitter clingers, bitterly clinging to their guns and religion? Well, that’s not all they were clinging to, according to Obama. In case you’ve forgotten, here the quote:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Obama was speaking at a fundraiser in San Francisco not long after his swing through Pennsylvania during his 2008 campaign, so it’s not surprising he was talking about that state. But he was speaking less of a state than of a demography: white, blue-collar, rural, Christian. And note how he characterizes their guns and their religion: driven by negative emotions like bitterness, rather than conviction or principle, and co-existing with xenophobia and racism.

Not a pretty picture, but one that’s mild compared to the general San Franciscan attitude towards these people in PA, the Midwest, or especially their brothers and sisters in the South (or in Alaska; see Palin). Although in 2008 Obama saw fit to couch his description in a sort of condescending, seemingly-empathic patronization, that’s really no longer necessary, is it?

And so even though the bitter clingers have become ever more bitter and ever more clingy, he’s going to try to pry some of their weapons from their cold, live, hands.

I was reminded of all of this by this post by Andy at Ace’s. He writes that, in the current push for gun control:

We [gun owners] are now “The Other” who are bent on killing your kids at school by our mere existence. We buy off congressmen to do our evil bidding. We’re like the Nazis and the KKK all rolled into one.

Now, I’m more akin in my own demographics to the San Franciscans than to the bitter clingers. But somehow I never got the memo about the latter. However, I run in circles that trash them enough to make me quite familiar with the prevailing attitude, which is that they are, to put it crassly, cretins out of “Deliverance,” and terrible racists to boot.

It doesn’t escape me that a great deal of the talk on blogs on the left lately is about the heinous “gun culture,” rather than anything more rationally related to murder or mass murder. As for the Second Amendment, it’s often considered an outworn relic of another time, not necessary—and even counterproductive—in this Brave New World of ours, where government is always your friend (unless it’s a conservative government).

What’s the prime of life these days?

The New Neo Posted on by

I got some spam email today that wanted me to read about the “hidden epidemic picking off Baby Boomers in their prime.”

Say what?

Baby boomers were born between 1946 and 1964. As of this moment, that means they (I suppose I should say “we”) range from a high of 67 to a low of 48. Although there could be an argument made that, at the low end, this could be considered one’s “prime,” it’s stretching it. Certainly not in the physical sense, which is what the subject of the email appears to be.

I’m all for thinking age is just a number, you’re as old as you feel, the best is yet to come, yadda yadda yadda. But I’m well aware that it’s at least partly a mind game.

Boomers are an odd bunch. They (we?) seem to like to think that whatever age they happen to be is prime, by definition. When they were teenagers, all of a sudden it was very hip to be a teen, and teens ran the world. The 60s—well, ’nuff said. Now that they’re getting into late-middle-age (or even “old” territory), suddenly it’s “prime?”

[NOTE: I did not click on the spam link, so I can’t enlighten you as to what the “hidden epidemic” might be. But I bet that fixing it involves buying a product or a book, possibly both, perhaps on the installment plan.]

Those paintings in the encyclopedia

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was little, the only reference book we had in the house besides a dictionary, thesaurus, and atlas was the World Book Encyclopedia for children, an official-looking set bound in blue. On rainy and/or boring days I would flip through it, and even when I was very young and not all that interested in the text of the entries I’d look at the photos.

My favorites were two: “geology” and “art” (or was it “painting”? Don’t remember exactly).

The geology entry featured (as best I recall, anyway; those books have long since gone the way of my brother’s baseball cards) maps of the world or maybe the Western Hemisphere through time, showing how it had changed. I was entranced. The idea that solid land was so mutable both enthralled and frightened me.

The “art” category had full color plates featuring about thirty or so well-known paintings (although they certainly weren’t known to me until I looked at them, which probably started when I about was six or seven or so). The following two were my favorites—or at least they made the deepest impression, because I remember them, all these years later.

I didn’t know why I liked them so much. In fact, I was puzzled by it. The first one was a still life, a type of painting that ordinarily was of no interest to me back then (I preferred people or attractive landscapes; my grandmother had a number of these in her apartment that I was familiar with and liked, especially one of well-dressed courtiers of perhaps the eighteenth century, playing some game like checkers or chess, their silken or satin garments and fancy hairdos gleaming to show the painter’s skill).

The still life was by Cezanne, and it was very plain. I think this was the one but it could have been almost any of them:

CezanneStillLife

When I look back and try to explain why it drew me in so much, I have to say that Cezanne’s still lifes are still one of my favorites types of painting. Even as a child, to me the fruit seemed to take on a universal quality, a Platonic Essence of Fruitness, roundness, solidity, and harmony in the world.

Here’s the other one, a Vermeer. At that time I wondered why I was so taken by it. After all, I thought the woman was ugly. She was thick, her dress was dull, the bread looked coarse (I’d never had anything other than white bread at the time). And yet the whole seemed almost inexpressibly beautiful. Timeless, essential, spiritual (although I don’t think I could have identified it that way).

VermeerMaid

Looking back, I think now that these paintings, so dissimilar on the surface, share something. I’m not sure how to describe it, but maybe I’ll just call it serenity and transcendence.

“It’s not the GOP’s fault it’s useless but it’s useless”

The New Neo Posted on by

You may be heartily sick of the topic by now, but I thought this article was a very good treatment of it (although I don’t agree with the next-to-last paragraph).

Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

It’s simply too much to expect a political party to stand up to voters and say, “no”. Politics is a market and voters have become consumers. If the GOP as a whole or an individual candidate won’t give the customer what they want, they will find someone else to do business with. Consumers don’t care about the health of the places they shop, they care that they get what they want. If Brand A doesn’t have it but Brand B does, who cares so long as their needs are met.

What America needs is a movement that will not just tell people “no” but also convince them to stop being a consumer of government and look at themselves as they were meant to”¦an owner of the government. Once you own something your value set shifts. Owners care about efficiency, quality and the long term survival of the organization. Owners invest not simply take out.

No political party is set up to do this.

How are Obama’s gun control proposals a logical response to Sandy Hook?

The New Neo Posted on by

Simple: they’re not.

After a mass shooting, gun controllers push the policies they’ve always supported as if they were a logical response to that particular example of senseless violence. When skeptics say it is hard to see how the proposed measures could have prevented that attack, gun controllers (if they are honest) say that’s beside the point, because the real goal is not preventing the rare mass shootings that get all the attention but curtailing more common forms of gun violence. If so, the horrible event that supposedly makes new legislation urgently necessary does not in fact strengthen the case for that legislation one iota. If the proposed policy was a good idea before the attack, it remains a good idea; if it was a bad idea, the emotionally compelling but logically irrelevant deaths of innocents do not make it suddenly sensible.

Oh logic—thy name is not politics.

Speaking of logic: in his recent address on the subject, Obama said, “We don’t benefit from ignorance.” The context in which he used the phrase was his call for more research into the effects of violent video games. But it strikes me as ironic that the left, and Obama, and those who champion more and more and more gun control above and beyond what we already have do benefit from ignorance, as the earlier part of this post demonstrates.

Another interesting irony is that Obama also said, “Weapons designed for the theater of war have no place in a movie theater.” Think about the content of most movies these days: gun violence, combat, and war, anyone? And that’s the least of the sadistic blood and gore we see. Not that gun violence should be banned from movies—but really, the subject matter in which movie theaters deal, and by which they make the bulk of their money (other than popcorn and sex, that is), is guns, designed for the theater of war and otherwise.

And the whole “designed for the theater of war” thing does not necessarily transfer to the actual weapons Obama wants to ban. It gets very technical, and is not my field of expertise, but those of you who know about weapons understand that the terms are meant to appeal to emotion rather than logic, and some involve mere cosmetics (see this and this).

I have no problem with background checks, and certainly no problem with banning fully automatic weapons (done a long, long time ago). I don’t even think it’s so terrible to ban very high capacity magazines, since it’s possible for a hunter or person defending him/herself to reload quite quickly if necessary. Of course, that last part also makes it very possible for a shooter like Adam Lanza to reload, again and again—which by the way he did, despite having high capacity magazines. A bit mysterious, and a reminder that shooters aren’t always logical:

Lanza stopped shooting between 9:46 a.m. and 9:49 a.m., after firing 50 to 100 rounds. He reloaded frequently during the shooting, sometimes firing only fifteen rounds from a thirty round magazine.

In summary, I don’t see how any of Obama’s proposals could have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre, or could prevent murders by a single future mass murderer intent on destruction in an environment such as a gun-free school. An armed guard, or armed teachers? Now, that might have helped, although we can never be sure.

Hagel convinces Schumer…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that his previous positions on the Middle East had no meaning, earning Schumer’s vote for his confirmation.

Was there ever any doubt that this would happen?:

Schumer said that his support was sown up after Hagel ”” whom Obama formally nominated last week after a month of preparation ”” committed to several positions regarding Iran that met with Schumer’s preference. As a two-term senator, Hagel had been unique in positions calling for direct talks the Iranian regime and opposing unilateral sanctions by the United States against the renegade regime. In a very detailed statement, Schumer said Hagel left no doubt that he would support a very aggressive posture toward Tehran…

chumer had become a key linchpin in the nomination battle, as many senior Republicans have expressed deep doubt about Hagel’s confirmation. If Schumer had opposed Hagel, then a crucial bloc of pro-Israel Democrats might have joined him and made confirmation impossible. Schumer’s announcement follows the public endorsement of Hagel by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), another prominent Jewish Democrat who is also a senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

By supporting Obama himself—which both Schumer and Boxer have done, and will continue to do, of course—they have proven that their support of Israel is just lip service. There’s a lot of lip service in politics. In fact, the greater part of political rhetoric is just that: lip service. When push comes to shove, few stand by their principles.

But I will go on record as predicting Hagel will not fulfill his promises about the Middle East to Schumer, unless of course Obama tells him to. And I don’t think that’s the way Obama’s planning to go.

And I think Schumer and Boxer know that. This is all just posturing—another word for lip service.

The conspiracists tackle Newtown

The New Neo Posted on by

I suppose there have always been conspiracists who believe everything is a plot, perpetrated either by the government or a shadowy band of powerful schemers bent on manipulating us for their own nefarious purposes (are those two groups redundant?).

I’ve written about the phenomenon before, here and here, as well as the fact that I think it really got going with the Kennedy assassination. But I think the tendency has proliferated in recent years, particularly as the internet grows, because now conspiracists have an easier way to disseminate information and feed into each others’ paranoia.

Newtown is a good example:

A man who found six children in his driveway in Newtown, Conn., after their teacher had been shot and killed in last month’s school massacre has become the target of conspiracy theorists who believe the shootings were staged.

“I don’t know what to do,” Gene Rosen told Salon.com. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ”˜How much am I being paid?’”

Rosen, a 69-year-old retired psychologist who lives near Sandy Hook Elementary School where the shootings took place, says his inbox is filled with emails like this one:

How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ”˜shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?

“The quantity of the material is overwhelming,” Rosen said, adding that he’s sought the advice of a retired state police officer and plans to alert the FBI.

Talk to the media and identify yourself at your peril.

Neither right nor left is immune to these conspiracy theorists; I’d be hard-pressed to say which side has less and which more, but both have plenty. They just specialize in different things. In the case of Newtown, my guess is that it’s the fringe of the right who are overrepresented.
As for the “arguments”:

Most revolve around the idea that the shooting was a “false flag” operation, designed to, among other things, dupe Americans into accepting a United Nations weapons treaty that will rob them of their gun rights. Who would want such a thing to pass? Depending on who you believe, it’s the global banking industry, the Freemasons, and Barack Obama (who is also the anti-christ) acting on behalf of “his Illuminati Jewish handlers like Mayor Bloomberg of NY and Dianne Feinstein.” Again, anti-Semitism finds a way in.

In an earlier post about conspiracy theorists, I wrote that a significant driver of anti-Semitism is the conspiracy theory and humans’ propensity for it. I have seen nothing since to change my mind.

[NOTE: This is not to say that conspiracies do not exist. Some do; for example, I believe that this one did and does, as does this one. One of the difficult thing about differentiating between founded and unfounded conspiracy theories is that the crazy far-fetched ones can taint the sane ones, and the sane ones can give credence to the crazy ones.]

So this is the question: was it the same woman?

The New Neo Posted on by

The one who drove 900 miles out of her way when her GPS told her to, despite the fact that she was intending only a 90-mile trip? And the one who stole the train and crashed it into a residential building?

I certainly hope it’s the same woman. I’d hate to think there are two of them running around (excuse me: driving around) loose.

Here’s the first:

The woman only wanted to go about 90 miles from her hometown of Hainault Erquelinnes, Belgium, to pick up a friend at the Brussels train station. Her GPS device sent her about 900 miles to the south before (during the second day of driving) she realized that something was amiss. It’s unclear if she entered the address incorrectly or if the GPS was faulty.

Discovery explains that the driver, Sabine Moreau, stopped twice for gas, slept on the side of the road, and “even suffered a minor car accident” along the way. She told El Mundo that she wasn’t paying attention.

“I was distracted, so I kept driving. I saw all kinds of traffic signs, first in French, then German and finally in Croatian, but I kept driving because I was distracted. Suddenly I appeared in Zagreb and I realized I wasn’t in Belgium anymore.”

Sounds like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” doesn’t she?

And the second:

A woman stole an empty commuter train from a depot Tuesday and drove it to a suburb of Stockholm where it derailed and slammed into an apartment building, officials said.

The woman was seriously injured in the early morning crash and was flown to a Stockholm hospital, police spokesman Lars Bystrom said. No one else was injured.

Bystrom said the woman was arrested on suspicion of endangering the public.

I know, I know: the first was 67, and the second was born in 1990. The first was Belgian, the second Swedish.

But still, a person can hope, can’t she? Gives the expression “woman driver” a whole new meaning (or, is that expression not allowed any more?).