Omnibus budget bill: easy come, easy go

The New Neo Posted on by

It seemed to come out of nowhere, as all these mammoth bills have lately—all two thousand pages of it. For a few days it caused a commotion, but now it has vanished as mysteriously as it came.

Or maybe not so mysteriously. The Omnibus funding bill was so earmark-laden that even some business-as-usual Republicans who were initially willing to go along realized their constituents wouldn’t approve, and so they backed away. The 2010 election and the power of the Tea Party appears to have put the fear into a significant number of members of Congress, if only temporarily.

It’s been a travesty that the Democrats could not or would not pass a funding bill while they had the overwhelming power to do so. Now time seems to have run out, and they’re passing the buck (literally) to the next Congress, in which Republicans will have a much greater say. Then we can watch the Old Guard fight with the New.

Here’s David Rogers’s take at Politico:

For the White House this is the worst case scenario because of the potential for another disruptive “shut down the government” veto fight in February, even as the president is trying to roll out his new budget for 2012.

The GOP paid a heavy price when it did the same in 1995 to then President Bill Clinton, but Obama isn’t without risks. The great mistake Republicans made in 1995 was to bring another issue””Medicare””into the appropriations standoff. But if the GOP learns and simply cuts spending, Obama will find it harder to veto the bill for fear he will be accused of shutting down the government himself.

According to Rich Lowry, McConnell and McCain were instrumental in reminding Republicans tempted to vote “yea” of the results of the 2010 election.

As for me, I’m especially pleased because hidden in the vast recesses of the bill was funding for Obamacare. It would be good if a simple and “clean” funding bill could be passed extending present funding to tide over the government until the new Congress can tackle the issues inherent in a budget bill, and give them proper weight. And then we’ll see what Obama will do in response.

Al Megrahi update

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then I check to see how al Megrahi—the convicted Lockerbie bomber released from prison by Scotland a year and a half ago (how time flies!)—is getting along.

When he was allowed to go home to Libya in August of 2009, it was said he had three months or less to live. A week ago there was a report by an unnamed relative that al Megrahi was now in a coma and within days of death, and Gaddafi added that his family plans to sue Scotland for mistreating him while in prison. And yet there was a simultaneous report from East Renfrewshire Council, the Scotland group responsible for monitoring him, that the other report was bogus.

Absolutely no surprise here:

A spokeswoman for the council, whose criminal justice social work staff are charged with monitoring Megrahi, said: “Today’s media speculation regarding Mr Megrahi is just that, and rumours are unfounded.”

She added: “We continue to be in contact with Mr Megrahi regularly and whenever we need to be for the purposes of supervision.”

What I wonder is this: why would reporters believe a thing this man’s family says about him? I know, I know; rhetorical question.

Rumer vs. Carpenter

The New Neo Posted on by

On this recent thread about singing, commenter “Anne” mentioned a contemporary singer named Rumer and compared her to Karen Carpenter.

I’d never heard of Rumer, and so I went to YouTube (never need much urging to take a trip to YouTube, my favorite vice!), and listened. This is what I heard:

I certainly hear—something a bit similar. There’s the obvious fact that both Rumer and Carpenter specialize in languid tunes with a hint of melancholy. Both have a relaxed and easy unforced quality with a harmonic vibration in the lower registers.

But Rumer lacks that special quality I mentioned here—an immediately recognizable uniqueness. Carpenter’s voice has a richness and a resonance in the lower registers that is hers alone.

Simply put, Rumer is a viola, and Carpenter a cello:

Tax bill stalled

The New Neo Posted on by

The sticking point at the moment seems to be something to do with tacking on a raise in the estate tax, but you try to figure it out (see also here).

It should never have come to this, of course; the tax cuts should have been dealt with earlier. But Obama and Congress were obsessed with passing HCR and cap and trade and a host of other goodies on their agenda, and that seemed to take up the bulk of their time while they still had time left; now they’ve run out of it. But more importantly, until now they saw no reason to extend the tax cuts, because they were dominant and they didn’t want to do it.

Their defeat in the election of 2010 changed that, especially for Obama, who suddenly re-connected with his inner bipartisan—you remember, the one who spoke so eloquently in 2004 and then again during the 2008 campaign but who went into hiding while the president was taken over by his evil partisan twin? Now that there is a renewed reason to compromise, lo and behold, we see the first glimmerings of it.

Hiking the estate tax further is apparently irresistible to some, however. Of course, the objection that the money involved has already been taxed during the deceased person’s lifetime is not considered worthwhile by those who believe the rich should not be able to leave their money to their children. After all, isn’t the money’s only temporarily on loan, and doesn’t it really belong to the government, which is just reclaiming a large portion of it?

Most prognosticators seem to be saying that this is merely a little blip, and that the tax cut bill will pass, so that the American people will at least get an idea of what their taxes will be before the next Congress convenes. And that latter event can’t happen a moment too soon, although no illusions should be retained that the new Congress will be significantly more functional than the old.

Nuclear attack? Stay put

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a sense of deja vu for us boomers in reports such as this one that reflect a renewed government interest in telling people what to do in the case of a nuclear blast. Those of us who go back a ways remember a youth punctuated by warnings and drills that fired the imagination and were the stuff of nightmares.

In fourth or fifth grade I made a project for the science fair that involved getting information on how to build a fallout shelter, and constructing a little model. It seemed both futile and strange even then, and I knew no family planning to actually build one. We figured that, living in New York, we’d be goners anyway as a result of the blast, and many of us fully expected that the event would happen before we reached adulthood.

Well, it can be argued that many of us never did reach adulthood. But now that we’re not just middle-aged, but bordering on old, it must be admitted that the expected attack has never—very fortunately—occurred. And now, with the Cold War over, it is unlikely to come at the hands of Russia, the old enemy of our childhood nightmares.

But terrorists exist, as do rogue countries going nuclear that might someday supply them, and the Obama administration has decided to revisit the question of how a person might best survive the fallout if he/she is fortunate enough to survive the blast. And, just as in the 50s, the answer is to take shelter, although specialized buildings with ultra-thick walls need not be built:

The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.

And we’re not talking the many weeks that were suggested for fallout shelters of the past. Even a few hours of shelter afterward confers benefit—at least, according to computer simulations, on which the entire set of recommendations is based.

At any rate, what’s the alternative? I suppose that some people will be unable to resist the urge to go out rubbernecking and viewing the damage. But I’ve always felt that those evacuation plans, whereby it seems inevitable that cars would jam the streets and highways in a massive and unprecedented traffic jam, would be worse than useless.

Here is (pardon the pun) a blast from the past:

Wallis’s panther

The New Neo Posted on by

A little interlude to note that the most expensive bracelet ever sold is pretty beautiful, and what a provenance! This is from a recent auction of Wallis Simpson’s jewels:

pantherdiamond.jpeg

This flamingo pin is pretty fine, too. The Duchess must have liked her bejeweled critters:

flamingodiamond.jpeg

Come to think of it, she was sort of a bejeweled critter herself, as well as a hunter of a different sort.

More about that Obama narrative

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve read over and over in the MSM and from liberal bloggers that Obama needs to take command of the narrative in order to change America’s view of him into something more positive. Here’s a more lighthearted look at the whole thing: Samuel P. Jacobs at The Daily Beast asks a variety of fiction writers to help with that Obama-narrative thing.

The answers in the article that interest me most are Margaret Atwood’s and Alex Berenson’s. Atwood suggests a sci-fi scenario in which “the President has been taken over by the Pod People” (who are different from the iPod people). Spy novelist Berenson goes the sci-fi route, too:

Give him an enemy who is not John Boehner. Maybe he needs an alien invasion. We can all be against invasions.

Not so fast. A generation marinated in Avatar-mania might welcome one.

Atwood’s response makes me wonder whether many former Obamaphiles think he’s already been taken over by a Pod Person. That would explain quite a bit—his odd lack of emotion and/or the offness of some of the emotions he does exhibit, and the contrast between his super-confident campaign demeanor and rhetoric and his present tentative and almost-chaotic style and policies.

At this point, it’s becoming clear even to liberals that the problems with Obama go beyond narrative, and beyond fixing by any sort of transformation by narrative. A presidency requires action, and although rhetoric can help, and inspirational rhetoric can rally the public (see Ronald Reagan) and get them behind a leader, a president still must support policies that people see as beneficial and effective.

That’s not rocket science, it’s common sense. Rhetoric does not work if it’s completely untethered from reality, especially in the current economic climate. Words are mere words, but the bottom line is the bottom line.

Hunting and the heaven of animals

The New Neo Posted on by

This recent thread about Palin and hunting engendered a lively exchange in the comments section, including a discussion of the following comment by a liberal on another blog, “Only arrogant humans think it’s ok to take a life.”

What could this person mean? We all know that hunting is a part of nature among animals: all carnivores hunt, and many herbivores are hunted. But the liberal commenter is correct that only humans can think about it, or choose to do it even though meat is available by other means, and therein lies the rub.

As long as they are part of modern society, even meat-eating liberals can choose not to hunt—which is the same choice I make, although I’m not a liberal. I’m an omnivore rather than a vegetarian, and since I eat meat I obviously partake indirectly (and literally) in the killing of animals, as does every omnivore, and everyone who wears leather.

Liberals can also choose to condemn human hunters as bloodthirsty killers—a point of view in which I do not join. But their logic is strange, because human hunters ordinarily are no more bloodthirsty than animals who kill (the ones the liberal conveniently forget). They just have made the decision to hunt in order to supplement their meat-eating that way—unless they are natives who only hunt or mostly hunt, in which case they get a pass. Liking the activity of hunting doesn’t mean one is bloodthirsty, although it means that one doesn’t shy away from the truth that should be acknowledged by all meat-eaters but can only be denied by those who never hunt—which is that everyone who eats meat is eating an animal that was killed for that purpose (unless you’re into eating roadkill; but that’s a topic I’ll leave alone right now).

Hunting is highly regulated in this country, and often culls the herd in a beneficial way. Deer, for example would be a menace but for hunting. But they’re so cute! Don’t kill them!! And don’t get me started on geese.

I’ll end with a poem by James Dickey, a writer who was far more well-known for another rural idyll, Deliverance and the movie it spawned. The poem gives me chills every time I read it :

The Heaven of Animals

By James L. Dickey

Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.

For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycle’s center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

HCR ruled unconstitutional

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I have a busy busy day today, and don’t have time to discuss this right now, although I plan to later. But it’s so potentially important that I thought I’d put up a quick post and a link so you can talk about it in the comments section.]

A federal district court judge (and Bush appointee) in Virginia has ruled the individual mandate in HCR unconstitutional. However, it’s always been clear that these cases will almost certainly end up in the Supreme Court, which will have the final word (that’s why it’s called “Supreme”).

Volokh has more discussion of the legal issues.