I suggest you read the whole thing—but here’s what I take away from this article on NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts to ban large sugary drinks, as well as previous health efforts to protect the Big Apple’s citizens from their own rapacious appetites:
There is little available data showing the cost of the programs, the number of participants or the results.
It’s taken as a matter of faith that this sort of thing works, though. Some of the people interviewed for the article seem to know better, such as Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr.:
“Ultimately people need to be responsible for their own actions,” Mr. Diaz said, explaining that “if they’re of a certain mind-set, they’re going to continue to have poor eating habits, and we’re still going to have the same problem.”
But in the following quotes, we have an academic at Yale, and Bloomberg himself, perfectly elucidating the liberal mindset—it’s health vs. liberty in opposition to each other, with the former taking priority over the latter:
Kelly D. Brownell, the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, said that while education and incentives were popular with the public, those programs tended to reach relatively small numbers because of their limited funds. He said he supported the use of regulations like the city’s proposed ban on large sodas as a necessary step toward curbing obesity.
“It completely makes more sense to make the environment healthier rather than to just do pure education,” he said.
In defending his proposal, Mr. Bloomberg said at Montefiore that the ban was not intended to tread on anyone’s rights, and he noted that more than individual liberties were at stake. “We are absolutely committed to doing everything in our power to help you get on track and stay on track to maintain a healthy lifestyle,” he said. “Because this isn’t your crisis alone ”” it is a crisis for our city and our entire country.”
And yet, even if you forget about the compromise to liberty—which is a huge and vitally important issue—there is no evidence that such programs work. We really know very little about how to successfully and permanently control obesity even in well-motivated people, and we also know little about the health effects of being slightly overweight, the most common type of problem.
And before some of you tell me in the comments section that I’m missing the point, because for far leftists the compromise of liberty is the point—a feature, not a bug—I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the more numerous well-meaning (oh, save us from the well-meaning!) liberals who think sacrificing their liberty to buy a supersized Coke is a very small price to pay for increased health, and don’t see the dangerous slippery slope they’re on—and don’t much care until they found we’ve slid quite a bit further down that hill.
…here’s the question of the day: what do you think of Sarah Palin’s new eyeglasses?
When I first saw them, I was shocked that I was shocked to see that her eyeglass frames were new. It’s odd how a person’s eyeglasses can become such a familiar part of his/her face that the viewer experiences any change as a jarring jolt.
Palin had signature thin rims and now she’s got thick ones, a much stronger eyeglass statement. Did she want to look more authoritative? More of a mental heavyweight? DId she succeed? Or was she just tired of the old look?
I like them. But of course, Palin would look good in almost anything.
Jewish support for Obama has declined 10% from 2008.
That’s a not insignificant amount, although it may seem small. But it only seems small if you don’t realize how deeply ingrained Jewish Democratic affiliation is. Also, compared to Obama’s drop among other groups that support him, this exceeds the average decline.
It was sociographer and Commentary writer Milton Himmelfarb who famously said “Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans.” That was back in the non-PC 1950s, when you could get away with saying something like that without offending Puerto Ricans too deeply (no one cares about offending Episcopalians). But it turns out that these days Jews vote more like Puerto Ricans used to than Puerto Ricans do today.
…Mr. Obama beat Mr. McCain among Jewish voters by a staggering 57 points. Except for African Americans, who gave him 95% of their vote, Mr. Obama did far better with Jews than with any other ethnic or religious group. Thus the Jewish vote for him was 25 points higher than the 53% he scored with the electorate as a whole; 35 points higher than the 43% he scored with whites; 11 points higher than the 67% he scored with Hispanics; 33 points higher than the 45% he scored with Protestants; and 24 points higher than the 54% he scored with Catholics…
Most American Jews sincerely believe that their liberalism, together with their commitment to the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle, stems from the teachings of Judaism and reflects the heritage of “Jewish values.” But if this theory were valid, the Orthodox would be the most liberal sector of the Jewish community. After all, it is they who are most familiar with the Jewish religious tradition and who shape their lives around its commandments.
Yet the Orthodox enclaves are the only Jewish neighborhoods where Republican candidates get any votes to speak of…The upshot is that in virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.
All this applies most fully to Jews who are Jewish only in an ethnic sense. Indeed, many such secular Jews, when asked how they would define “a good Jew,” reply that it is equivalent to being a good liberal.
But avowed secularists are not the only Jews who confuse Judaism with liberalism; so do many non-Orthodox Jews who practice this or that traditional observance. It is not for nothing that a cruel wag has described the Reform movement””the largest of the religious denominations within the American Jewish community””as “the Democratic Party with holidays thrown in,” and the services in a Reform temple as “the Democratic Party at prayer.”
I haven’t yet read this book by Podhoretz, a longer treatment of the same question. But it’s on my “to-do” list.
For many more years than most people have been alive, they tried hard to make it work. And at least as far as all outside observers could tell, they succeeded.
No arguments, although neither was exactly the talkative sort. Companionate and tranquil would be two good words to describe this marriage. They didn’t move in the fast lane, but in the great race of life they got the job done.
But now, now—well let’s just say that this is not a a story that will warm the cockles of your heart. Although no one’s certain why the falling out occurred—and the two main protagonists aren’t telling—it’s bad, and it’s public:
“We get the feeling they can’t stand the sight of each other any more,” Zoo boss Helga Happ said.
Bibi and Poldi have happily rubbed along at the Austrian zoo in Klagenfurt for 36 years, having moved together from Basel zoo in Switzerland.
Both 115 years old, the pair grew up together – and eventually became an item.
However, you men may not be surprised to hear that the first overt act of aggression was initiated by the female tortoise—although who knows what terrible and secret provocation on the part of Poldi may have caused her to initiate such a desperate act?:
Staff at the zoo realised all was not well when Bibi attacked Poldi, biting off a chunk of his shell. She launched further attacks on her partner until he was moved to a different location.
Of course, at the ripe old age of 115, it could be senility.
I’ve been trying to figure this one out ever since it happened.
At first I assumed Obama’s remark that the private sector is “doing fine” was a truncated quote. But no, he really did say that, even in context. This video gives the entire statement, which was an ad lib answer to a reporter’s question rather than a scripted remark. Ad libs tend to be either careless errors, or especially revealing, or sometimes both:
So it becomes a matter of what he meant. Now, even if he meant something perfectly reasonable and yet said the above, it counts—as Romney said—as an “extraordinary miscalculation,” if only in the political sense, although it’s probably one in the mathematical and economic sense as well (which I believe is what Romney meant by using the phrase, although we can’t be too sure of that, either.) Some of the numbers are crunched here.
When I watch the video of Obama, I get the impression that he was first and foremost being strategic—that is, he was focused on the last part of his statement rather than the first, racing ahead in his mind to get to the “let’s blame the Republicans” part. And Wisconsin loomed large in his mind. So he didn’t stop to think what that first part sounded like to most Americans, in his rush to get out a message to undo the Wisconsin results and focus on how much we need to take care of public sector employees.
I think Powerline’s John Hinderaker has it just about right*, as well:
…I think there is more going on here then merely another instance of Obama’s cluelessness. Rather, I think the belief that the private sector is rich and the public sector is poor, so that transfers of wealth from private sector to public sector are endlessly justified, is embedded deeply in Obama’s ideology.
Another thing that’s very deeply embedded is that public sector employees and especially their unions are Obama’s natural constituency compared to private sector employees. Of course, exceptions to that rule are massive, but there’s nevertheless a strong tendency in that direction. Right now Obama is all about his own re-election and shoring up his base as well as appealing to those in the middle, which gives us another reason for his seemingly clueless remark: he’s trying to spin his record and say it’s not really so bad, and he hasn’t caught onto the fact that most Americans simply don’t and won’t believe him.
Defenses have come fast and furious from Obama supporters. They range from Andrew Sullivan’s predictable “he was taken out of context” (no, he wasn’t), to more convoluted responses such as this, which seem to rely on essentially ignoring the private sector remark and focusing on how it is that the mean old Republicans are stiffing the public sector.
Even Obama got into the defensive act this time, rather than just relying on surrogates, which showed that he’s at least aware that he may have wounded himself with his earlier remarks:
It is absolutely clear that the economy is not doing fine,” Obama said in his correction. “That’s the reason I had a press conference.
Fair enough. He never said the economy as a whole was doing fine. He continued:
I think if you look at what I said this morning and what I’ve been saying consistently over the last year, we’ve actually seen some good momentum in the private sector. There’s been 4.3 million jobs created, 800,000 this year alone, record corporate profits. And so that has not been the biggest drag on the economy.
That may have been what he meant, but it’s not what he said. He didn’t say that even though the private sector is still hurting, it’s doing a bit better than the public sector. He still it was doing fine. So it’s not that he was misunderstood. He was disagreed with: it depends what the meaning of fine is.
And it also depends on whether you’re looking at this chart. You can see that the private sector has taken an upswing lately compared to the relative flatness of the public sector line. But you can also see that the private sector is not doing fine compared to the public sector:
“Tone deaf” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
*I said Hinderaker had it right when he wrote that Obama’s remark rested on principles embedded in Obama’s philosophy. We can see that Obama is hardly not alone in this, as the following video of Harry Reid from October of 2011 attests:
Back then, Reid’s remarks got some press, although nothing like Obama’s recent coverage. There was even some discussion of what Reid meant, and an attempt at ascertaining the facts:
Republican staff from the Senate Finance Committee also said it would be difficult for Reid “to be more wrong” since as a percentage, more jobs have been lost in the private sector than in government since the start of the recession in December 2007.
“Bottom line: Private sector jobs have been greater both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the pre-recession base than government sector jobs,” the aides said.
Asked about the senator’s statement, Reid’s spokesman defended it as accurate.
“All he was doing was pointing out that most job losses in recent months have been coming from the public sector,” said Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson, noting that the president’s jobs bill “contains tons of provisions to encourage private sector hiring,” including tax credits for small businesses and write-offs for expenses.
“The bill currently on the floor is about cops and firefighters, and that was what he was talking about. (Reid), of course, thinks we need to spur hiring in the private sector,” Jentleson added.
It’s not usually a great idea to take a leaf out of Harry Reid’s book. But I think Obama arrived at the formulation independently, and for the same reasons and reflecting the same mindset. It’s sort of like the simultaneous development of the theory of evolution by Darwin and Wallace—only not quite so smart.
[ADDENDUM: John Podhoretz has a good analysis in the NY Post.]
Yesterday’s PJ article and its comments yielded a couple of further thoughts. One was this comment at PJ, which I think succinctly sums up some of the problems in inherent in the presentation of war photos or indeed any other emotionally explosive news:
Pictures like this serve two purposes: One is to tell people that it’s OK to stop thinking about a complex matter…Another is to reinforce the idea that America…is always the bad guy.
And further, I think that “not thinking about a complex matter” is endemic to the press. As I wrote here, before I saw the comment above that I’ve highlighted:
Sometimes the facts were reported wrong regarding the photo. But sometimes they were merely omitted, or important parts omitted. Sometimes (I would guess) that omission was done purposely and strategically, but sometimes it was done ignorantly and without even realizing the importance of the deeper context.
So some members of the press report correctly, given their space limitations. But some press members knowingly mislead, either through actual lies or strategic omissions. And sometimes it’s the members of the press who are thinking too simply about a complex issue, and don’t even understand what it is that they’ve left out.
Today is a National Day of Blogger Silence (a sort of oxymoron?). The purpose is explained in this post by Ace, and Michelle Malkin has much more to say here, including contact information (Malkin is nothing if not thorough):
Free speech is under fire. Online thugs are targeting bloggers (mostly conservative, but not all) who have dared to expose a convicted bomber and perjuring vexatious litigant now enjoying a comfy life as a liberally-subsidized social justice operative. Where do your elected representatives stand on this threat to our founding principles?
And if you follow this link, you’ll find what a lot of other bloggers have written on the matter.
Fortunately, I’ve written a piece for PJ that appears today, so you even have something of mine to read and comment on, despite the (relative) silence.
Blogging is an alternative and complement to the MSM that’s come to mean a great deal to a lot of people. It certainly does to me. I bet it does to most of you, too.
Perhaps he should have asked, “could Obama be more like LBJ?” But either way the answer is (drum roll please): NO, because the question is absurd.
This is like asking should (or could) a cat be more like a dog. Or water more like fire. Or a planet more like an atom. Or whatever strange combination of dissimilar things one could think of. Because like both LBJ and Obama or hate them both, or like just one and hate the other (doesn’t matter which, for the purposes of this discussion), or think it would be a good thing if Obama resembled LBJ or think it really doesn’t matter much (the latter seems to be Drum’s take), it’s hard to think of two more dissimilar people in temperament, skill set, or experience than Lyndon Baines Johnson and Barack Obama.
Obama couldn’t be like LBJ if he read every book ever written on him, interviewed all the living people who’d ever encountered him, took classes in how to resemble him, and listened to all the tapes in the LBJ library with that purpose in mind.
LBJ was probably the nation’s foremost authority on how Congress operates. Obama is not. LBJ knew exactly how to work people. Obama does not. LBJ knew how to wield power most effectively on the personal level and to strategize. Obama does not. LBJ had a ribald, over-the-top sense of humor and an inexhaustible fund of earthy stories (and earthy behavior, too). Obama does not. LBJ was hot; Obama cool. And on and on and on.
Similarities? They both were tall, they both were president, they both were Democrats, they both were married to one person (although LBJ was famously unfaithful, in his heart it was Ladybird all the way), and they both had two daughters.
Walter Russell Mead reflects on the same topic I talked about yesterday, when I discussed a piece by John Nichols in The Nation and spoke of the left’s reaction to its drubbing in Wisconsin. Mead zeros in on one in the WaPo by Katrina vanden Heuvel, who’s (not coincidentally) the editor and publisher of The Nation.
The Nation is a perfect example of the thinking of the movement that likes to call itself “progressive”—which is the large segment of the left that doesn’t overtly call itself something scary like “socialist” or “communist” but is still quite far out there. The Nation has a long and proud—and paradoxical—history. Founded right after the Civil War by abolitionists, it was for the rest of the 19th century a vehicle for classical liberal thought, which is closer to what we now call conservatism. But in 1900 a new owner (son of the previous one) took a new editorial direction, in fact a 180 turn:
[New owner] Oswald Villard welcomed the New Deal and supported the nationalization of industries ”“ thus reversing the meaning of “liberalism” as the founders of “The Nation” would have understood the term, from a belief in a smaller and more restricted government to a belief in a larger and less restricted government. Villard’s takeover prompted the FBI to monitor the magazine for roughly 50 years. The FBI had a file on Villard from 1915. Villard sold the magazine in 1935. It became a nonprofit in 1943.
Almost every editor of The Nation from Villard’s time to the 1970s was looked at for “subversive” activities and ties.
So it’s no surprise that, as Mead points out, current editor vander Heuvel is taking the long view, and asking her simpatico readers to do likewise. She seems to be aware that the blow landed in Wisconsin was a powerful one, although she voices the oft-repeated remedy—more money (a funny thing for a leftist to empathize, but hey, that filthy lucre’s being used in a good cause, right?).
I have the urge to quote almost all of Mead’s article. Although it’s pretty much what I was writing yesterday, Mead’s an excellent and insightful writer, so he probably says it better than I did (and here I go, quoting the bulk of it):
The left’s analysis of its loss in Wisconsin resorts to some classic tropes: it is despair masked as defiance in order to avoid deep introspection. The rhetoric of resistance is employed to describe the substance of collapse in an effort to insulate conventional pieties and beloved assumptions from withering critiques…
Contemplating the imminent defeat in Wisconsin, [Nation editor vander Heuvel] titled her article “Wisconsin gives progressives something to build on.” She is clear about the nature of the threat:
By attacking labor unions, flooding Wisconsin with outside cash and trying to cleanse the electorate of people who don’t look, earn or think like him, Walker has taken aim at more than a single campaign cycle or a series of policies; his real targets are the pillars of American progressivism itself.
But contemplating the likelihood of defeat, she calls on her allies to take the long view. The very long view. They must contemplate history with the eyes of faith.
Elections are over in a matter of hours, but movements are made of weeks, months and years. The Declaration of Sentiments was issued at Seneca Falls in 1848, yet women did not gain the right to vote until seven decades later. The Civil War ended with a Union victory in 1865, yet the Voting Rights Act was not passed until a century later. Auto workers held the historic Flint sit-down strike in 1936-37, yet the fight for a fair, unionized workforce persists 75 years later.
Victory is inevitable, though perhaps not for another two generations. Build the movement; fight the fight. The message at once consoles the faithful and acknowledges the scale of a historic defeat. When she tries to sound positive about what the long, expensive, draining, bitter, losing fight in Wisconsin accomplished, she waxes eloquent but not, I think, convincing:
Just as the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt motivated people around the world, including in Wisconsin, the occupation of the Madison statehouse helped inspire the occupation of Wall Street a few months later.
This seems at once grandiose and hollow…And the fight in Wisconsin gives us an example, she enthuses:
”¦in the last 15 months, Wisconsin’s progressives have shown us that the battle against bankrolled austerity can be bravely waged by an army of dedicated people committed to protecting working families. They’ve reminded us that good organizing is our only chance to withstand the blitzkrieg of corporate funded advertising ”” and better yet, leave a lasting mark. Their movement, with thousands of new Wisconsin activists mobilized, energized and educated, can be permanent ”” and it can keep growing.
Yes, they can do all that, and they can lose. Big time. They can fail to get their favorite candidate nominated by the Democratic voters, they can fail to move public opinion on the core question of the Walker labor reforms, and they can fail to move the state or the country towards their point of view.
Vanden Heuvel’s analysis of why the left lost in Wisconsin is simple, and if it is true, the left looks doomed. The answer is money, she says, reflecting a very widespread line of analysis. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the right is able to outspend the left ten to one, ensuring that the left can never win.
If the argument is correct, then this really is a “Seneca Falls” movement ”” and the left is doomed to generations of marginalization or, as The Nation would more optimistically put it, “struggle.” If the right can “flood the zone” with dough, the left will never be able to win enough presidential and senatorial contests to reverse the Supreme Court’s trajectory. If the American people are really so stupid and clueless that they docilely follow the big bucks and the deceptive campaign ads of their clever class enemies on the right, then the right is pretty much set for a long spell of power.
The reality is more complicated. For one thing, the left had more money on its side in Wisconsin than many reports acknowledge; $20 million from labor groups, according to this estimate. More importantly, money does matter in politics, but money alone is rarely enough, especially on an issue which voters care deeply about. When the left ”” or the right ”” can summon popular passion and energy to its side, it can not only put up a noble fight. It can win. This actually happens quite a lot in American politics: poorly funded campaigns with charismatic candidates tap into some deep reservoir of popular sentiment and they deal out bitter defeats to the pallid, colorless but well-moneyed Establishment candidates. This has been happening relatively frequently in Republican politics of late. There have been times in American history when it happened also on the left. Milwaukee, Wisconsin has had Socialist mayors.
The left’s problem in Wisconsin wasn’t that the right had too much money. The left’s problem is that the left’s agenda didn’t have enough support from the public. Poll after poll after poll showed that the public didn’t share the left’s estimation of the Walker reforms. Many thought they were a pretty good idea; many others didn’t much like the reforms but didn’t think they were bad enough or important enough to justify a year of turmoil and a recall election.
The left lost this election because it failed to persuade the people that its analysis was correct. The people weren’t a herd of sheep dazzled by big money campaign ads on TV; the Wisconsin electorate chewed over the issues at leisure, debated them extensively, considered both points of view ”” and then handed the left a humiliating, stinging and strategic defeat.
But although I admire Mead tremendously, and obviously agree with a lot of what he says here—since I’d written much the same yesterday, before I’d even read it—I have a caveat. I think he is being too sanguine.
I could sum up my attitude in one sentence: Do not underestimate the seductive power of the left. Not only does the left take the long view, but in the long term it may win (at least for a while, and perhaps even longer) if the right is not eternally vigilant.
There are many ways this could happen. One is demographics. Another is the decline of education; if the left continues to hold the reins of academia they can shape minds, and then those minds go on to shape other minds. Same for media. Another is the slippery slide down the increasing entitlement slope, and the growth of that segment of the population that depends on handouts. Yes, all that can’t go on forever (as Europe and the Soviet Union have both proven, in different ways). But it can still go on for quite some time.
So although I think some joy is definitely in order after Wisconsin, the danger is in the right’s letting down its guard. Rest assured that the left never will.
