Post-election musings

The New Neo Posted on by

It was a good night for the Republicans, a bad night for Obama and liberal Democrats. Especially in New Jersey.

Obama will never admit it. But will he take it to heart? I doubt it. It will be full steam ahead on the agenda, and the same for Pelosi (and to a lesser extent Reid), who will attempt to twist the resistant Blue Dog arms (or is it legs?) ever more forcibly. Should be interesting.

If same sex marriage can’t win in places like California and now Maine, then its day hasn’t quite come. However, I do think that, with the next generation coming up, it’s just a matter of time.

If Republicans want to win, they should nominate Republicans in the first place, not RINOs who will be challenged by Conservatives and end up splitting the vote.

A lot can happen between now and 2010.

Election 2009

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’ll be adding comments as the night goes on.]

So far McDonnell is projected the winner by a longshot in Virginia. New Jersey is unknown, and New York 23 likewise.

Random observations:

(1) I was watching CNN for a while and saw James Carville and Mary Matlin, and marveled once again that this particular pair is still married. Love, ain’t it wonderful?

(2) On Fox, there was a report that one of Obama’s aides (can’t remember who—Axelrod? Emanuel?) said the President won’t be watching the election returns tonight, he’ll be looking at the basketball game. Besides being extremely difficult to believe, it strikes me that at this point such a statement doesn’t convey cool confidence, it displays either arrogance or almost pathological disinterest.

Let me repeat: I don’t really think it’s the truth. But does Obama really want to conjure up the idea that he’s either (a) lying (b) smug (c) asleep at the wheel; or (d) some combination of a-c?

(3) If Hoffman ends up beating Owens, you’d have to say that Sarah Palin has shown more political savvy and leadership than many people give her credit for. Wasn’t she the first big Repubican name to make the leap and endorse him?

(4) And speaking of political savvy, if the results tonight continue to trend in a strong Republican direction, I guess it wasn’t such a smart move to call the town hall attendees and the Tea Party participants crazy haters.

(5) Wow. Christie wins in New Jersey. That’s seismic.

(6) “Change” can cut both ways. Exit polls indicate that the desire for change was a big motivator in the New Jersey results. And young people can be fickle. They stayed home in New Jersey.

(7) Christie’s victory speech sounds sincere. Of course, I’m predisposed to like him. It will be very interesting to see if he can actually improve things in New Jersey. If so, it certainly would be a great advertisement for a more fiscally conservative approach to crises. Take back New Jersey!

(8) Good one!

(9) Gay marriage in Maine is in a dead heat.

(10) Owens won; not a good thing. Republicans need to nominate good candidates in the first place so this sort of party-splitting doesn’t happen in the future.

Help neo-neocon! Buy Amazon!

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that I’ve become a rapacious capitalist self-promoter, I want to point out that I’ve added an Amazon button to the right sidebar, underneath the PayPal button. Call that area the neo-neocon mini-mall.

This means that, whenever you want to go to Amazon to order something, if you come here and click on that button instead, you pay exactly what you would have paid anyway but I get a tiny percentage (4%, to be exact) of whatever you order.

Sounds like a win-win proposition to me. And even better, Christmas and Chanuka are almost breathing down our necks.

I plan to update the Amazon button in the not-too distant future with more compelling graphics, adding some book recommendations as well. But for the moment I went for simplicity.

[NOTE: Although some people have reported ordering items from Amazon through my blog (thanks!), nothing’s showing up on the account yet. Perhaps there’s a time lag, or perhaps there’s a glitch. I’ll try to reach them and report back.]

[ADDENDUM: I got some clarification from Amazon. Purchases made through the blog don’t show up on my Amazon account till the next day. Also, if the items were previously in your cart and you purchase them through the click-through on my blog, it doesn’t count as a purchase made through me. Has to be a new item.

Hope that helps. I’ll add any further information I can find.]

[ADDENDUM II: So far no transactions have gone through. I expect some to show up by Wednesday. If nothing shows up by Thursday, I’ll give them another call and let you know what’s what.]

Off-year elections

The New Neo Posted on by

It may be an off year, but it’s a potentially exciting one. I plan to tune in tonight and write something—hope the news is good. Here’s a thread where you can discuss things till then.

The morning after: Iowa regrets its Obama decision

The New Neo Posted on by

Too little, too late, many Independent and Republican voters who voted for Obama have woken up with a splitting headache:

Pauline McAreavy voted for President Obama. From the moment she first saw him two years ago, she was smitten by his speeches and sold on his promise of change. She switched parties to support him in the Iowa caucuses, donated money and opened her home to a pair of young campaign workers…

“I’m afraid I wasn’t realistic,” Ms. McAreavy, 76, a retired school nurse, said on a recent morning on the deck of her home here in east-central Iowa.

“I really thought there would be immediate change,” she said. “Sometimes the Republicans are just as bad as Democrats. But it’s politics as usual, and that’s what I voted against.”

I hate to insult a senior citizen, but how did Ms. McAreavy ever manage to reach the ripe old age of seventy-six while remaining naive enough to believe that Obama could have actually overhauled “politics as usual,” even if he’d wanted to?

Not too realistic—she’s got that right. But here’s the money quote:

“All my Republican friends ”” and independents ”” are sitting back saying, ”˜Oh, what did we do?” Ms. McAreavy said.

I can answer that question: you fell in love with a con artist. What’s more, you and other Americans were so angry at the Republicans in Congress that you threw them out and elected the only thing that’s worse: an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress with a virtually filibuster-proof majority and a couple of leaders who are from the Left wing of the party.

Good going, folks. But:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Obama’s souffle words in Berlin go pouf!

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a wonderful piece by Rich Lowry about Obama’s failure to visit Berlin for the anniversary of the fall of Communism. In it he calls the snub “the most telling nonevent of the Obama Presidency.”

The excuse Obama has given—that he’s too busy—is a transparent absurdity (maybe that’s what Obama meant by “transparency?”). Somehow he’s got plenty of time to accept his Nobel Peace Prize. First things first, right?

As Lowry puts it:

John F. Kennedy famously told Berliners, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” On the 20th anniversary of the last century’s most stirring triumph of freedom, Obama is telling them, “Ich bin besché¤ftigt” – i.e., I’m busy. It doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?

No, not quite. And whatever ring it does have (narcissim comes to mind, for starters), it’s not the ring of freedom.

Here’s more from Lowry:

Obama famously made a speech in Berlin during last year’s campaign, but at an event devoted to celebrating himself as the apotheosis of world hopefulness. He said of 1989, “a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

The line was typical Obama verbal soufflé, soaring but vulnerable to collapse upon the slightest jostling from logic or historical fact. The wall came down only after the free world resolutely stood against the Communist bloc. Rather than a warm-and-fuzzy exercise in global understanding, the Cold War was another iteration of the 20th century’s long war between totalitarianism and Western liberalism. The West prevailed on the back of American strength.

But Obama doesn’t think in such antiquated, triumphalist terms. Given to apologizing for his nation abroad, he resolutely downplays American leadership.

Read the whole thing.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s another take on Obama’s foreign policy that’s well worth reading.]

Republican rebirth in New England?

The New Neo Posted on by

New England used to be fairly solidly Republican, with the exception of Massachusetts, and even Massachusetts retained a periodic tendency to vote for Republican governors. But the New England brand of Republican was always a combination of fiscal conservative and social—well, if not liberal exactly, then at least moderate. The New England strain was really more libertarian than traditionally conservative; rugged individualism was at its core.

Back in 2006, when the Democrats were starting the ascendance that continued with their 2008 Congressional landslide, the NY Times described the fade of New England Republicans, calling them an endangered species. But politics is a fickle thing, and trends can reverse themselves, as today’s Boston Globe demonstrates by headlining the tentative return of the rock-ribbed New England Republican. And if you read the piece, you’ll see that New England may be poised for a series of New York District 23-type confrontations between the conservative and moderate wings of the Party.

My guess is that this is a portent of things to come, and not just in New England. But a year can be an awfully long time in politics.

Decoding Pelosi’s health care reform bill

The New Neo Posted on by

The Wall Street Journal tackles the 1990-page wonder, and comes up with this.

Summary:

Mr. Obama rode into office on a wave of “change,” but we doubt most voters realized that the change Democrats had in mind was making health care even more expensive and rigid than the status quo. Critics will say we are exaggerating, but we believe it is no stretch to say that Mrs. Pelosi’s handiwork ranks with the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act as among the worst bills Congress has ever seriously contemplated.

Read it and weep, if you’re not already doing so.

The NY 23 race: does Joe Biden really think…

The New Neo Posted on by

…he speaks to rank and file upstate New York Republicans when he asks them to show conservatives a lesson by voting for Owen? I’m not a Biden fan, but I thought he had a little more political savvy then that after all these years.

This Biden quote’s a lulu:

We are just saying join us in teaching a lesson to those absolutists who say no dissent is permitted within your own party.

It would be even more ironic if Biden had eliminated the words “within your own party,” because the Obama administration has made itself notorious for stifling dissent, especially outside its own party.

Meanwhile, RINO extraordinaire Dede Scozzafava, in a fit of understandable pique (and after being heavily courted by influential Democrats), continues to campaign for her previous Democrat opponent, Bill Owens, as well as to contemplate a change of party for herself.

The only problem is, Hoffman appears to be opening up his lead.

Let’s sit back and watch the sausage being made.

We don’t need no steenking tort reform?

The New Neo Posted on by

It comes as no surprise that, as the monster health care reform [sic] bill is slowly digested by those with stomachs strong enough to bear it, we discover what it has to say about tort reform:

Not only will there be no meaningful tort reform, but the bill will provide economic incentives to make sure that no states attempt it.

A pretty sweet deal for the trial lawyers, and it once again demonstrates that their large, collective payments to the Democratic Party were a worthwhile investment…

[I]f you already put something on the books to try to deal with [tort reform], you are immediately ineligible for the federal payments as long as it remains on the books.

So there actually appears to be a disincentive for tort reform.

[NOTE: see the comments section here for more discussion of the finer legal points.]

The hubris of the incompetent: the Dunning-Kruger effect could explain quite a lot

The New Neo Posted on by

Take a look:

The Dunning”“Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than relatively more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

You may mock social science research and claim it’s riddled with flaws inherent to the study of human beings, and I would agree with you. But it’s not worthless, and every now and then it comes up with something exceedingly interesting.

[NOTE: See this and this for other research of special note in the social sciences.]

Conclusion: the Democratic Party does not want to make private health care insurance work

The New Neo Posted on by

I find it difficult to believe that the Democrats (with the possible exception of the Blue Dogs) have any interest in reforming the health care insurance business so that private insurance works better.

It would be relatively easy to pass a bipartisan bill that actually made a bona fide attempt to do this. No, it wouldn’t get all the Republican votes, and it might lose some of the most stubbornly ultra-liberal Democrats who want to make a pro-public-option protest. But if Obama (and Pelosi and Reid) were to push a bill that focused on the private sector and actually tried to improve it, I have little doubt that most Democrats and Republicans would work together and it would be passed.

But if—after all the problems they’ve had with the public option so far—the Democratic leadership in Congress has not abandoned it and embraced reform of the private system, and if Obama has not offered leadership in that direction, it is because they are uninterested in doing so. After all, if they were to actually improve the system of private health care insurance, make it more affordable and transportable, and even extend coverage to the poverty-stricken citizens who need it and can’t afford it, America might find it works fairly well.

What would be wrong with that? Nothing, in my book. Quite a lot, in the Pelosi/Reid/Obama one. It would annoy their Left wing (the one they belong to). And it would vindicate the idea of private sector (albeit government-guided) solutions over public ones.

That would mean abandoning the real dream, which is not to make private health insurance more affordable and reasonable (crossing state lines, for example, and catastrophic insurance being available), but to create a government-run system with greater and greater government control over our lives, as well as one that spreads the wealth.

[NOTE: Michael C. Burgess, MD, member of the House from Texas, has this to say about the process by which the present bill came to be:

Furthermore, the process leading up to today in the House of Representatives has been the most secretive and opaque since I was elected to Congress in 2002. House Republicans, including the thirteen of us who are medical professionals, were denied the opportunity to participate in the legislative process from the beginning, despite our continued efforts to provide real ideas for meaningful reform based on our years of experience. Democrats have completely ignored the millions of Americans who voiced their strong opposition to a government takeover of America’s health care system by pushing ahead with a ”˜public option’ and a drastic expansion of Medicaid.

“I will continue my efforts to help enact pro-patient reforms to America’s health care system that will increase choice and access to health insurance and health care, lower costs, encourage patient involvement, and ensure that the world’s best health care system remains intact. House Republicans, including myself, have introduced no fewer than 100 bills that would accomplish these goals, fixing what is broken in our health care system without allowing the federal government to completely take over. I look forward to reading all 1,990 pages of this bill over the next few days and doing the work North Texans sent me to Washington to do. I will continue to fight on behalf of responsible health care solutions Americans support.”

Anybody listening?]