Speaking about the 2012 election…and the weather

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m tired of reading those polls telling us how all the Republicans in the field are doing against each other.

First of all, we may not even have the full field yet. Second of all, the lesser-known names on the list have not built up their constituencies yet. Third of all, all sorts of things will change and change and change. And fourth of all, there are so many entrants that even the so-called front-runners (Romney at present) don’t have anywhere near a majority.

It’s just so much blah-blah-blah at this point, even more than usual. But what else are pundits to do in a slow season?

I’m always kind of glad when the news is slow, even though it gives me less to think about and less to write about. But slow news is good news most of the time, because most news is not of the feel-good variety. What’s more, New England has finally decided to stop pretending it’s Seattle in the winter and has started impersonating North Carolina in the spring. We’ve got a three-day weekend coming; let’s hear it for slow news and fine weather!

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Spambot who clearly has mistaken me for someone else:

Keep posting dude. nice. Therefore do not make any tattoo on your body with any tattoo pictures, you must choose the tattoo that suits you and your body.

I’ll take it under advisement.

Vermont: on the road to single-payer health insurance?

The New Neo Posted on by

Tiny Vermont is probably the most leftist state in the union.

Like many other New England states, it has a mix of old-time residents and their offspring, who tend to be more conservative, and relatively new arrivals (“new” in New England meaning anyone who arrived during the past 70 years) “from away,” who tend to be very liberal.

Like other New England states except for Massachusetts (population 6.6 million; see this for all states) and Connecticut (3.5 million), it has a tiny population. Maine is big in geography but only has about 1.3 million people, as does geographically smallish New Hampshire, and diminuitive Rhode Island has about a million. But Vermont, with about the same square mileage as New Hampshire, has half the people, with a population of about 625,000. That’s only about the size of a medium-large city, although Vermont is decidedly rural. Its biggest city, Burlington, hardly even qualifies for urban designation at all at 42,000 people.

So whatever health care solutions Vermont comes up with, it will be difficult to extrapolate the results to the rest of the country, except perhaps for others of its ilk in the bottom tier of population (although their populations tend to be far more conservative than Vermont’s, such as that of Alaska and Wyoming).

That’s one of the reasons that federalism is a good idea. States are free to experiment with health care insurance systems for their residents. And Vermont has done just that, taking a step described as being on the road to a single-payer system.

I’m not so sure that’s so. Take a look for yourself:

Legislators say the plan, approved by the Democratic controlled House and Senate this spring, aims to extend coverage to all 620,000 residents while containing soaring health care costs.

A key component establishes a state health benefits exchange, as mandated by new federal health care laws, that will offer coverage from private insurers, state-sponsored and multi-state plans. It also will include tax credits to make premiums affordable for uninsured Vermonters.

Private insurers are included there rather than single payer. But the goal is certainly eventual single-payer, and in the next few years rather than later:

The exchange, called Green Mountain Care and managed by a five-member board, will set reimbursement rates for health care providers and streamline administration into a single, unified system…As designed, the goal is an eventual state-funded and operated single-payer system.

There are a number of things that have to happen first, however, and they could represent big speedbumps or even roadblocks along the way. Vermont has to make a good case (the word the article uses is “ensure,” whatever that might involve) that the new plan will be cheaper than the old. Of course, we’ve learned that’s not all that hard to do by making sanguine assumptions that are unproven. The state also must ultimately get a federal waiver from Obamacare in order to institute single payer, assuming Obamacare is still around by 2017.

I mentioned that Vermont is loaded with recent immigrants “from away.” One of them is Dr. Deb Richter, who moved to Vermont from Buffalo NY in 1999 for the express purpose of pushing single payer health insurance. She had found the atmosphere in New York state to be unreceptive, and correctly surmised that the idea might encounter more fertile soil in leftist Vermont.

Certain Vermonters of the Republican persuasion aren’t too happy about that:

John McClaughry, a former Republican state senator who is against the new law, said Dr. Richter meant well but did not understand the “long-term damage” it would wreak. In particular, he said the law would drive away businesses that did not want to help pay for it.

Businesses? Vermont?? The state is not known for its welcoming business atmosphere to begin with. For example, it was ranked as number 45 out of 50 states by Forbes in 2010. For comparison, note that New Hampshire, its more business-friendly twin, was number 19, and behemoth Massachusetts was 16. But Vermont needn’t be ashamed before most of its fellow New England states—Connecticut was 36, and Rhode Island and Maine brought up the rear at numbers 49 and 50, respectively.

Ed Schultz channels Dan Ackroyd

The New Neo Posted on by

There is no question in my mind that, whether Ed Schultz is aware of it or not, that’s what was happening when he called Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut.”

Part of the humor of the old SNL bit was that this sort of insult was so over-the-top at the time. Broadcasters and pundits were far more polite back then, despite whatever seething anger they might be harboring. Nowadays, of course, the seething anger bubbles over freely, and insults such as the one Schultz directed at Ingraham would have been considered mild if they had been directed at Sarah Palin. The surprise is not that Schultz said it in the first place, but that he received any sort of slap on the wrist for it and felt the need to issue an apology.

Dance me to the end of the Leonard Cohen video

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve finally located a certain video, discovered while I was at YouTube engaged in one of my favorite activities: procrastination by chain-viewing.

You know what chain-viewing is. You watch a video, and then plan to click on just one more on the list of related videos to the right, but find yourself clicking on another and another and another. Later, when you finally come to, you discover that several hours have sped by with nothing to show for them but a bunch of tenacious earworms.

I thought I’d share at least one of those earworms with you, dear readers, because what I finally found was the Leonard Cohen video of “Dance Me to the End of Love,” the one that had gone sadly missing around about the time I first discussed it four years ago in this post about my love affair (of the virtual variety) with the singer-songwriter:

[The video] featured Cohen standing in front of a screen showing couples’ wedding pictures from long ago, and then those very same couples, elderly and nearly unrecognizable as themselves but still dancing together slowly as he sang the haunting, beautiful tune.

When you watch it, please do your best to ignore the young yuppie-ish couple who begin the piece and appear intermittently in it, trying to look natural and failing utterly. They’re obviously actors or even (perish the thought!) models, much better suited to the world of advertisements for kitchen appliances and real estate than the lugubrious yearnings of Cohen. The older couples in the video, on the other hand, are quite clearly the real deal, and almost indescribably touching.

And please please please do try to ignore the flying/floating/burning violin (literal images=not a good idea).

As for the “double your pleasure double your fun” brunette singing twins—well, I’m not sure about them, but I’m certain that some viewers (especially of the male persuasion) may like them very much indeed.

Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn…

Learning from the NY-26 special election

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s bad news that Democrat Kathy Hochul defeated Republican Jane Corwin in a special election in a NY district that is traditionally Republican. But let’s be careful not to generalize too much about it—although the MSM certainly will, and all in the direction of Democrat cheerleading and chest-thumping.

The first thing that leapt out at me on reading the results was that Hochul benefited from the presence of a “Tea Party” challenger Jack Davis who got 9% of the vote. I place Davis’s Tea Party designation in quotes because he was apparently one of those astroturf Tea Party candidates, and so it’s not completely clear where his votes came from in the end, but the consensus is that it was Corwin his presence hurt.

Another thing that is apparent is that turnout was low, as is so often the case in special elections. This favors organizational ability and motivation. The Republicans did not get their act together to energize their voters to go to the polls.

In addition, the Democrats capitalized on confusion and a scare campaign of their own about the Republican proposals on Medicare. Expect to see much more of that in 2012, and Republicans had better have a more effective response.

I’m with William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, who notes all of that, and more. And Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway adds this:

It’s also worth noting that Republicans lost a special election in another upstate New York Congressional District in 2009. A year later, they took control of the House of Representatives.

There may be something especially special about New York state special elections that ends up favoring Democrats. But if so, I can’t quite think what it would be.

[ADDENDUM: I found some possible answers here. Take a look at the first few comments, which say, among other things, that the NY Republican Party is “sclerotic,” and that it can’t “find it’s own behind with both hands and a flashlight.”

Perhaps there really is something especially special about NY Republicans—although come to think of it, those descriptions needn’t be confined to Republicans in that state alone.]

Obama: time stopped in 2008

The New Neo Posted on by

Or something like that.

2008 was a mighty big year for him, so perhaps he feels that time stopped then. I must confess that something similar happened to me. For a few years after I gave birth to my son, I had to fight the urge to date checks the year he was born, when life as I had previously known it changed so very much.

But checks are one thing, and signing ceremonial guestbooks at Westminster Abby as President another. Anyone and everyone makes mistakes, but Obama seems to make the oddest ones. Come on: 2008? 57 states? corpse-man?

More on that Republican field vs. Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

So now Giuliani is thinking about entering the race.

Forgive me if I yawn; another big ho-hum. Giuliani’s time was last time, and he lost momentum, partly because he just didn’t seem to want it. If he enters now, it’s an afterthought.

It strikes me that Obama is exceptionally lucky in his opponents. There is no question in my mind that he would be extremely vulnerable in 2012 to a strong candidate, but it’s not at all certain that such a candidate will enter the fray. This has been Obama’s pattern for his entire political career, with a single exception (the only election he ever lost): the primary in which he ran against the popular US Congressman Bobby Rush and was roundly defeated. As Bobby Rush said:

He was blinded by his ambition…Obama has never suffered from a lack of believing that he can accomplish whatever it is he decides to try. Obama believes in Obama.

Yes.

It was the first and only time (except for the presidential race of 2008) that Obama had a bona fide opponent. In his earlier primary race (the Democratic primaries are the real battle in the Chicago districts where Obama first cut his political teeth) he managed to use legal shenanigans to disqualify the entire field and ran unopposed (see this if you’re unfamiliar with the story—it’s a lulu). After the Rush interlude, from which Obama learned how vulnerable he could be, his opponents in his Senate campaign (both Republican and Democrat) mysteriously collapsed in response to the unveiling of previously-sealed records that showed their private lives in a bad light.

I’ve written about this phenomenon previously, but it bears repeating:

…[I]t later came out that Obama’s campaign was directly involved in what the press did to torpedo Hull’s chances (and lest you accuse me of right-wing extremism, please note that the link and quote is from the NY Times):

[Obama’s campaign manager] Axelrod is known for operating in this gray area, part idealist, part hired muscle. It is difficult to discuss Axelrod in certain circles in Chicago without the matter of the Blair Hull divorce papers coming up. As the 2004 Senate primary neared, it was clear that it was a contest between two people: the millionaire liberal, Hull, who was leading in the polls, and Obama, who had built an impressive grass-roots campaign. About a month before the vote, The Chicago Tribune revealed, near the bottom of a long profile of Hull, that during a divorce proceeding, Hull’s second wife filed for an order of protection. In the following few days, the matter erupted into a full-fledged scandal that ended up destroying the Hull campaign and handing Obama an easy primary victory. The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had “worked aggressively behind the scenes” to push the story. But there are those in Chicago who believe that Axelrod had an even more significant role ”” that he leaked the initial story.

And then there’s the matter of Obama’s next opponent, Jack Ryan, to whom the same thing happened. I must be careful here; there is documentation that Obama’s staff pushed and promoted the Hull revelations by the press, but there is no evidence so far of the same involvement occurring with the Ryan outing. However, unless it’s a strange coincidence (always a possibility), it is mighty suspicious; Obama’s staff certainly had the tools, the connections, the motivation, and the experience.

Here’s a discussion of Axelrod’s modus operandi, which may sound familiar:

What kind of campaign can we expect from Axelrod in the general election? Overtly positive themes and public posturing complemented by covertly delievered and mercilessly negative “stiletto” attacks against key people around John McCain that are not directly traceable to Axelrod. The model for this strategy is the previous Obama senatorial campaign in Illinois, where Obama’s two most formidible, centimillionaire, rivals, Democrat Blair Hull and Republican Jack Ryan were personally destroyed in the primaries when salacious details from their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked to the media, which then pressured for their full release, notably in the pages of the Chicago Tribune.

So Obama’s previous good luck seems to have been some combination of dirty tricks on his part and actual good luck. It’s unclear what the ratio of the first to the second was; suffice to say there was a goodly amount of each.

Which brings us to the present. The relative weakness of the Republican field may be an accident. Or it may be fear of the smear machine keeping the stronger candidates away. Everyone has something in his or her past that could lead to trouble if the harsh and partisan spotlight of the media were turned on it. But Obama, who’s got plenty of skeletons in his closet, feels immune. He knows the MSM has always covered for him, doing the opposite of what it does to his opponents.

Get ready, folks. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Obama gets more flak on Israel…

The New Neo Posted on by

…some of it from expected sources, and some of it from unexpected ones.

Harry Reid’s “rebuke” of Obama seems relatively mild to me, however, although the AIPAC crowd seemed to like it. Was Reid merely playing good cop to Obama’s bad?

I continue to think that none of this will hurt Obama with the vast majority of Democratic voters. Nothing seems to.

But one thing everyone on left, right, or in-between needs to realize: all bets are off after Obama is elected to a second term, should that undesirable event occur. Whatever statements, promises, or assurances he has given previously to whatever interest group, no one should feel that his word has any meaning whatsoever. He will have cast off the need to appeal to any constituency save himself.

Hollywood boomers and their inflated sense of political importance

The New Neo Posted on by

Peter Fonda has been generating a little buzz today because of a murky and unclear statement he made at Cannes that seems to be about his training his grandsons to shoot Obama if some sort of class war starts up. As best I can tell, this Hollywood has-been (or never-quite was, with the possible exception of the movie “Easy Rider,” which IMHO was a big yawn) blew his mind quite some time ago with drugs and a few other things and isn’t worth much attention at all.

So why am I giving him some? It’s because of another statement of his that caught my eye. While all the attention was focused on his stupidly incendiary remark about Obama, I noticed the following [emphasis mine]:

It’s more of a thought process than an actuality, but we are heading for a major conflict between the haves and the have nots. I came [to Cannes] many years ago with a biker movie and we stopped a war. Now, it’s about starting the world.

What the movie “Easy Rider” had to do with stopping the Vietnam War I don’t quite know, and I was around at the time. Perhaps Fonda is confusing himself with his sister Jane, who was somewhat more active in that particular cause. But he, like so many boomers from those times, appears to be quite proud of how things turned out.

Hollywood people are funny, and I don’t mean funny ha-ha. The Fondas got a double or maybe a triple dose, having been raised as Hollywood royalty in a home so dysfunctional as to have been deeply traumatic. An inflated sense of their own importance in the world no doubt goes with the territory.

Fonda may be unusual in his personal background, but he’s hardly unusual in his attitude towards the end of the Vietnam War. In fact, I wrote a piece about that in November of 2009, which I think bears repeating here. It was called “Vietnam: they lost the war, but won the battle.”

Who are “they?” The Left.

What war? Vietnam.

What battle? The one that determines who gets to write history.

It’s said that history is written by the winners, and that’s true. But Vietnam just may have been the first war in which those who opposed the conflict “won” in the forum of public opinion by convincing their fellow citizens and government to abandon the war itself, and then got to write most of its chronicles.

Case in point: this piece in the NY Times Magazine, which states the following foregone conclusion [emphasis mine]:

In the decades after Vietnam, despite having been proved right about the war itself, a generation of Democrats who opposed the war nonetheless struggled mightily to find a credible response to armed conflict, to reconcile the breach that separated the antiwar left from the broader swath of Americans who disdained reflexive pacifism.

Proved right? Hardly. But the Left and even most Democrats consider it axiomatic that those who opposed the war have been “proved” right. I’ve spent many hours and many words discussing the proof that exists for the opposite side: that our abandonment of Vietnam in the mid-70s was an unnecessary tragedy and a shame (see the category “Vietnam” on the right sidebar). And I’m hardly the only one.

But word doesn’t seem to have penetrated a huge swath of liberals and the Left that there still might even be another side—much less that it might have some validity, and that it offers arguments that require responses.

I’ve encountered this “everybody knows” attitude about Vietnam many times before, including on the occasion of John Updike’s death. Updike, a liberal Democrat, had angered most of his fellow literati during the 60s by offering a principled and compelling argument that the war may have been a well-intentioned effort by the US to allow the South Vietnamese to maintain their freedom from tyrannical Northern Communists. Updike got much condemnation and little praise for his pains, even after his death, at which time I wrote the following:

Last night…as I was watching a Charlie Rose tribute to John Updike that featured a panel composed of Updike’s editor Judith Jones, former New Yorker editor David Remnick, and New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, the latter casually mentioned, amidst the praise and reminiscence, that “of course, Updike was on the wrong side about the Vietnam War.”

Of course. Everybody who’s anybody knows that.

[NOTE: See this for Updike’s position on the war, in his own inimitable words.]

The Republican field: is it a bed of weeds?

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats are happy. As the Republican field shapes up, it looks either weak or strange, or in some cases both.

Mitch Daniels has now pulled back for whatever reason—perhaps the fact that his family has decided they would be inevitably trashed a la Palin and the prospect does not exactly please them. So in destroying Palin, the left has gotten a twofer (or perhaps a threefer or fourfer or morefer), discouraging most sane people from entering the fray.

At the moment we are left with—according to Michael Barone:

In, in alphabetical order: Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum.

Probably in: Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman.

Probably not in: John Bolton, Sarah Palin.

Out: Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee, Mike Pence, John Thune.

Declared out but still being wooed: Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Paul Ryan.

I think the wooing of the latter three is going to be completely unsuccessful, although nothing would completely surprise me with politicians, who sometimes play hard to get and are not known for reluctance to change their minds. Of the other “outs,” the only one I really liked and am therefore disappointed in is Mike Pence. John Bolton and Sarah Palin, both of whom I think courageous and with whom I often agree, I consider to be polarizing figures who cannot and will not appeal to enough voters to win (I know, I know; many of you differ very strongly, especially about Palin).

As for the rest—at the moment, Pawlenty seems the best bet to me. But none of them are especially familiar to the American people with the single exception of Mitt Romney. And there is still a year and a half before the election.

A long year and a half, I’d say.

The fallout of PC grammar: “he/she” vs. “they”

The New Neo Posted on by

Today’s earlier post presented me with one of my least-favorite grammatical dilemmas: which pronoun to use in concert with a non-gendered word such as “anyone” or “someone.” The sentence in question was, “And anyone who believes his promises deserves what they get: betrayal,” which is grammatically incorrect.

It wasn’t always such a problem. The default position used to be the pronoun “he,” which for centuries had stood in quite nicely for both men and women. But years ago it became a sexist no-no, and that left us with the PC but horribly graceless construction “he/she.”

Those of us who care about words and grammar are faced with a terrible dilemma. Do we go with the old-fashioned “he” or do we choose abominable “he/she,” or do we circumvent both by allowing ourselves the error of using the plural “they,” which does not conform to the singular “anyone,” but at least agrees with it in its lack of gender specificity? Or do we finesse the problem altogether by doing away with the sometimes-useful word “anyone” and go with a plural such as “people,” which allows us to use the gender-neutral “they?” I find myself alternating among the solutions rather randomly, sometimes choosing one and sometimes another, none of them particularly satisfactory.

You may laugh at these archaic little agonies of the grammatically persnickety. But those of us who care are stalwartly manning (that is, manning/womaning) the ramparts against the chaos of a linguistic free-for-all.

[NOTE: As usual when writing about grammar, I have checked and double-checked this post—because it is invariably the case that such essays are fraught with grammatical errors that seem stubbornly uncatchable.]