Many of you are probably familiar with Michael Totten, PJ writer and intrepid journalist extraordinaire specializing in the Middle East. He’s got a book coming out, and here’s a sneak preview.
The anti-American, anti-Israel Nir Rosen, and the MSM
I’ve got a new piece up at PJ.
You may ask: why are you giving Nir Rosen more attention than he deserves? My answer: because although his biases were so blatant, so transparently and typically far-left, he has nevertheless managed to be a highly respected member of the mainstream media, trusted to be a fair and honest reporter in the Middle East.
I know the MSM is biased, and I know it leans left. But Rosen is a far left ideologue of the purest kind. So how did he find such a comfy home in the mainstream press (WaPo, NY Times, Time, Atlantic, etc.), not just the far-left press? And not just as an opinion journalist, either—which would have been acceptable—but as an unbiased reporter of what’s going on?
The only thing that tripped him up was that, in the end, he made comments about Lara Logan’s attack that offended leftist sensibilities. Otherwise he would still be going strong. It will be interesting to see whether he will get as many assignments as before.
The bottom line is that his MSM editors must have either been negligent in not knowing who he was long ago; or (far more likely) they knew and did not care, or in fact are on the same page.
Just the tip of the iceberg?
The new, old, states’ rights
The turmoil in Wisconsin, and the Obama/Democratic/union response, has got me thinking about the phenomenon of federalism.
Like so many other concepts on which our country is based, we supposedly learned about it in civics class (or whatever passes—or doesn’t pass—for civics class these days). I wonder whether the younger generations have received the instruction at all, but even for those of us who did, what did it really mean to us? Book learning is nowhere near the same as living it. Now we are getting an education in what it’s really about, and why it’s so important to preserve it.
Our founders lived in a time when states had been more powerful than they are now, and each state had a very distinct identity, with its citizens highly aware of their state allegiance. What’s more, the founders realized that a federal government would have a tendency to want to grow and to swallow up states’ autonomy unless its powers were strictly limited, which they attempted to do.
Over the years the federal government has grown anyway. One of the differences between Democrat and Republican parties in recent decades has been that the first has been behind that growth, and the second has wanted to limit it, although in recent years many Republicans have violated their own principles in that regard. But with the financial crisis and the Obama administration, as well as the influence of the Tea Party, Republicans are now reclaiming at least some of their old mantle.
In that they have been helped rather than hurt by the transparency of Obama and Democrats’ heavy-handedness in attempting to thwart them. It seems a long time ago, but remember Jan Brewer and the feds’ lawsuit against the state of Arizona? Then there’s the lawsuits by over twenty states against Obamacare. And now, in what is perhaps the most visually graphic of the battles, we have Wisconsin and the Democrat-supported (and Democrat-supporting) public employee unions against almost everybody else, particularly the cash-strapped other citizens of these cash-strapped states.
The old image of states’ rights was of Democrat Governor George Wallace standing in the doorway at the University of Alabama, trying to hold back the feds’ insistence on integration. From that, states’ rights got a very bad rap. Now we’re seeing a different picture: governors (so far, Republican) protecting the fiscal integrity of their states against the influence of public service unions that feed the Democratic Party and are fed by it in turn.
Has Tim Geithner…
…suddenly stepped into the Jim Carrey role in the movie “Liar, Liar?” You know, the one where Carrey plays Fletcher Reede, a lawyer whose son makes a wish that his dad will be unable to lie for a day, and it comes true?
Because otherwise there’s no way I can account for this startling exchange:
[Hat tip: Bryan Preston at the Tatler.]
Trouble in Wisconsin—and elsewhere
It’s not just the Arab street that’s boiling over. There’s trouble in the streets of—Wisconsin.
“Trouble in Wisconsin” sounds like an oxymoron. But it’s just a reflection of similar troubles all around the country, and even the world (see Europe, for example Greece).
Sooner or later, in state after state after state, there will be some sort of showdown between state employees who won’t give up the benefits to which they’ve grown accustomed—with the help of their unions, that have become pythons with a stranglehold on state budgets—and the beleaguered states who plead that the crush is killing them.
I purposely used strong language in the above paragraph, because I noticed that President Obama has gotten into the fray and used some strong language himself. He has accused Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker of “assaulting” the unions by backing legislation that would limit the collective bargaining rights of state employees.
What is being proposed by the governor and his supporters? That state public workers—excluding police, firefighters and state troopers—pay half their pension costs and 12% of their health insurance costs, and lose their right to collectively bargain anything but pay.
Doesn’t sound all that onerous to me. But I guess if you’re used to tremendous benefits, it’s very hard to give them up. But for Obama, it is the equivalent of a vicious attack on his most-favored constituency, public employees and public unions.
Note that the public employees we consider most vital and heroic are exempted. That leaves, I would guess, mostly teachers. (not that they’re not vital and heroic, you teachers out there). So it seems roughly parallel to the fight going on in New Jersey for Chris Christie (although firefighters are included there), except that Obama has yet to insinuate himself into that battle, as far as I know. Perhaps the president is loath to take on Christie, and is sticking with Governor Walker as an opponent. Or perhaps Obama feels more proprietary towards Wisconsin, which after all is practically a suburb of Chicago.
Does it surprise me that Obama has taken on this battle, despite its being a state issue? No, not at all. Fine points like state autonomy do not concern him, and in fact they have mostly been troublesome for him. He sees winning this fight as essential to placate his base of support.
[NOTE: See this for plenty more about the fight.]
Listen my children and you will hear: the charge of the light brigade
A couple of weeks ago I had some fun with poetic voices of the past, and in the comments section “Beverly” alerted me to the fact that a recording exists of Alfred Lord Tennyson reading his poem “Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Tennyson seems a figure from the long-distant past, born at the beginning of the nineteenth century in 1809. He was Poet Laureate of England from Wordsworth’s death in 1850 until his own demise in 1892, the longest tenure in that post ever, spanning the bulk of Victoria’s reign. He lived long enough to still be around when Edison developed the phonograph and wax cylinders in the 1880’s, in time for Tennyson to record his famous 1854 poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which commemorated a doomed, error-laden but valiant battle of the Crimean War.
You can listen to the 1890 recording at this link, and follow along with the words as well. Tennyson sounds like he’s “come ‘thro the Jaws of Death” himself, doesn’t he?
And then there’s the following, another astounding Edison wax recording which is fairly self-explanatory, but is explained further here:
It’s a revolutionary thought: teach about conservatism
What a novel idea: to teach a course in conservative thought, at the college level.
In the Ivy League, at Brown.
Astounding:
Conservatives believe they won at least a tiny beachhead in a sea of academic liberalism. With help from the Leadership Institute, similar courses are now offered at American University and the University of Virginia.
And does this sound familiar:?
To George, who also heads Brown’s Republican Club, this most liberal of Ivy League schools can be an intellectually lonely place for conservatives. There are members of the Republican Club who don’t tell fellow students of their affiliation, he said, because their peers think “you can’t be an intelligent and compassionate person’’ if you’re a conservative.
I wonder how many changers these courses will help create.
Truth, lies, and videotape
Peggy Noonan puts her finger on why Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie have been able to make recent speeches on fiscal responsibility that were so compelling:
Everyone knew they meant it. Everyone knew they’d been living it.
She quotes this absolute gem from Christie, as he tells the tale of addressing a convention of firefighters after he’d proposed curtailing some of their benefits and rolling back a 9% pay increase:
As Mr. Chrisie recounted it: “You can imagine how that was received by 7,500 firefighters. As I walked into the room and was introduced. I was booed lustily. I made my way up to the stage, they booed some more. . . . So I said, ‘Come on, you can do better than that,’ and they did!”
He crumpled up his prepared remarks and threw them on the floor. He told them, “Here’s the deal: I understand you’re angry, and I understand you’re frustrated, and I understand you feel deceived and betrayed.” And, he said, they were right: “For 20 years, governors have come into this room and lied to you, promised you benefits that they had no way of paying for, making promises they knew they couldn’t keep, and just hoping that they wouldn’t be the man or women left holding the bag. I understand why you feel angry and betrayed and deceived by those people. Here’s what I don’t understand. Why are you booing the first guy who came in here and told you the truth?”
He told them there was no political advantage in being truthful: “The way we used to think about politics and, unfortunately, the way I fear they’re thinking about politics still in Washington” involves “the old playbook [which] says, “lie, deceive, obfuscate and make it to the next election.”
That last sentence—“lie, deceive, obfuscate and make it to the next election,” is a nice summary of Obama’s fiscal strategy. Charles Krauthammer gives a good description of it here:
…[F]or all its gimmicks, this budget leaves the country at decade’s end saddled with publicly held debt triple what Obama inherited.
A more cynical budget is hard to imagine. This one ignores the looming debt crisis, shifts all responsibility for serious budget-cutting to the Republicans – for which Democrats are ready with a two-year, full-artillery demagogic assault – and sets Obama up perfectly for reelection in 2012.
Let’s hope not.
Popper quotes
I thought you might like to read some quotes from philosopher of science Karl Popper:
You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence “democracy”, and the other “tyranny”.
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle ”” the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.
I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous ”” from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows. For these troubles are the by-products of what is perhaps the greatest of all moral and spiritual revolutions of history, a movement which began three centuries ago. It is the longing of uncounted unknown men to free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority and prejudice. It is their attempt to build up an open society which rejects the absolute authority to preserve, to develop, and to establish traditions, old or new, that measure up to their standards of freedom, of humaneness, and of rational criticism. It is their unwillingness to sit back and leave the entire responsibility for ruling the world to human or superhuman authority,and their readiness to share the burden of responsibility for avoidable suffering, and to work for its avoidance. This revolution has created powers of appalling destructiveness; but they may yet be conquered.
The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. ”” In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.
It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it. Poland fought for freedom as no other country did. The Czech nation was prepared to fight for its freedom in 1938; it was not lack of courage that sealed its fate. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 ”” the work of young people with nothing to lose but their chains ”” triumphed and then ended in failure. … Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things ”” and above all on ourselves.
The NY Times pleads for adult supervision
On the topic of the budget fights, the NY Times becomes unintentionally humorous.
Watson and Jeopardy: computer vs. people
I watched “Jeopardy” last night to see what all the fuss was about Watson, the computer who’s been coolly cleaning the clocks of previous mega-winners Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.
I don’t like Watson. Seems to me that, although his skills (and those of his programmers) are formidable, they are exactly what you’d expect and not so very interesting, and based mostly on his speed. The most exciting thing about him is his ability to respond to human speech with humanoid speech, to decipher some of the meanderings and indirections and come up with an answer based on the voluminous information stored within his huge files.
More interesting to me is what Watson lacks: emotion, humor, and what we might call nuance. Although I’ve read a bit about artificial intelligence, I don’t see how computers can ever come to have wit or creativity or the ability to understand a joke or make a quip. Jennings and Rutter showed Watson up by clowning around at his expense at the very end of the show (fortunately, Watson’s feelings didn’t seem too badly hurt):
PJ Tatler
I keep meaning to call your attention to a new feature at PJ, the Tatler. It’s a forum for a group of journalists, bloggers, and other writers to sound off on whatever happens to catch their interest at any particular moment.
I’m a member, and every now and then I post something like this. If you want to see the list of people participating, go to the link and look at the right sidebar. But just to whet your appetite, among them are Richard Fernandez, Michael Ledeen, Governor Rick Perry, and Michael Totten.