Elections have consequences, and what’s going on in Wisconsin right now is one of them

The New Neo Posted on by

The spotlight in Wisconsin has been mostly on the demonstrators and the governor, Republican Scott Walker, who has been trying to get the state’s fiscal house in order by seeking more of a contribution from the state’s public service workers, and also asking them to give up collective bargaining except in matters of salary, and to vote on union membership every year.

It’s the latter parts that have created most of the furor. For them he’s been given the epithet “union-buster” and far worse. There’s no question that Walker is spearheading the drive, but he could never do so with such confidence unless he felt he had the support of the legislature.

November of 2010 was a mid-term election that featured a huge reversal in the US Congress, with the House being taken over by Republicans, and the Senate remaining in Democratic hands but barely so. This was the big news. But the fine print described an even more startling reversal on the state level in much of the country, and Wisconsin was one of the epicenters of the quake.

I described it here shortly after the election, and pointed out that Wisconsin had gone from 52[D] and 46[R] to 38[D] and 60[R] in the House, and 18[D] and 15[R] to 14[D] and 19[R] in the Senate. Expressed in terms of percentages, which makes the switch easier to see, the Wisconsin House went from 53% Democratic to 61% Republican, and the Wisconsin Senate from 54% Democrat to 57% Republican.

Recently, when the Wisconsin Democratic legislators responded to Walker’s proposals by running and hiding, they did it because they knew they didn’t have the numbers to do anything else about it but stonewall. In Wisconsin, 3/5 of Senate members are required to be present in order to pass fiscal legislation. So a disappearance seemed like a fabulous idea; perhaps the only idea..

But Governor Walker has a plan:

Though the Wisconsin constitution requires three-fifths of the senate to be present to pass fiscal legislation, a simple majority of 17 members constitutes a quorum for other bills in the 33-seat state senate. So the 19 GOP senators who remain in Madison can pass any number of bills while their Democratic colleagues are on the lam, and Republicans are a majority in the assembly, too. “They can hold off, but there is a whole legislative agenda that Republicans in the senate and assembly can start acting on that only requires simple majorities,” Walker warns.“If they want to do their jobs, and have a say, they better show up.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. In Walker, the Democrats have a formidable adversary. But he would be able to do nothing without his fellow Republicans in the legislature.

Speaking of those fellow Republicans, the Wall Street Journal reports that some of the more moderate ones have a plan, too:

The proposal, written by Sen. Dale Schultz and first floated in the Republican caucus early last week, calls for most collective bargaining rights of public-employee unions to be eliminated””per Mr. Walker’s bill””but then reinstated in 2013, said Mr. Schultz’s chief of staff Todd Allbaugh.

Governor Walker says it won’t fly. And Democrats are insisting on removal of the collective bargaining issue altogether. The stakes appear way too high for either side to give in.

Egypt’s Khomeini comes home?

The New Neo Posted on by

I observed a while back that:

One very large difference between Egypt and Iran is that Iran had a ready-made charismatic figure in Khomeini, who was ruthless in his drive to power. Egypt seems to lack a similar figure””so far.

Well, Bryan Preston points out that:

Muslim Brotherhood mastermind Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi returned to Egypt, from which he had been banned for decades, and gave a speech before hundreds of thousands. As Andrew McCarthy and Big Peace’s al-Mutarjim note, here’s a portion of what the cleric said:

“A message to our brothers in Palestine: I have hope that Almighty Allah, as I have been pleased with the victory in Egypt, that He will also please me with the conquest of the al-Aqsa Mosque, to prepare the way for me to preach in the al-Aqsa Mosque. May Allah prepare the way for us to (preach) in the al-Aqsa Mosque in safety”“not in fear, not in haste. May Allah achieve this clear conquest for us. O sons of Palestine, I am confident that you will be victorious.”

For the leader of a religion of peace, Qaradawi sure talks an awful lot about war. This call for conquest, in particular, should disturb everyone: The Al-Aqsa mosque stands on the Temple Mount in the heart of Jerusalem. Qaradawi’s call for conquest of that mosque is a call to destroy Israel.

This all might seem like so much bluster, but for the Egyptian army’s role in allowing Qaradawi in, and providing security for his speech while keeping non-Islamists off the stage. The Egyptian revolution now has its Khomeini, come home to roost.

Whenever I hear this sort of thing, I think of Churchill’s quote about the return of Lenin to Russia: that he was “transported…in a sealed train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.”

More from Nir Rosen, expert on Mideast sexual assault

The New Neo Posted on by

It turns out that the Lara Logan incident was not the first time journalist Nir Rosen had opined on the subject of female journalists being assaulted in the Middle East. On August 2, 2010, during an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review about Wikileaks, Rosen had offered another nugget of trenchant observation on the topic:

[Q]Women have an easier time getting around?

[A]In general in the Muslim world, non-Muslim women are at an advantage. There’s like a force field around them, people don’t want to come too close. Jill Carroll maybe was an exception, but there haven’t been that many women who I know of that have been attacked. Maybe groped here and there. Men are just maybe more uncomfortable around women, or don’t even see them.

The anti-American, anti-Israel Nir Rosen, and the MSM

The New Neo Posted on by

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 New Neo Posted on by

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.

Trouble in Wisconsin—and elsewhere

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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.