American Fascism or Treading Water?

The President threatened the Supreme Court today. The carrion stink of fascism never wafts far from the Obama kitchen. It was already there during his campaign (and I wrote about it). So, he may be laying the groundwork for a constitutional coup:

“This constitution is too old. We need something better suited to our times. Anyone who does not see this is a racist.”   That’s on the one hand.

On the other hand, this speculation is not in line with most of what I have been saying on this blog: This is a man out of his depth.

It’s difficult to reconcile the cold cynicism required for a coup with Mr Obama’s practice of telling big lies that he has no chance of getting away with. This is a man who declared recently in stentorian tones that a vote of 219 to 214 is a “big” margin (or a ‘wide” margin, same thing). He does not realize that if five Democrats had had the flu that day and stayed home, Obamacare would have failed in the House. Or that if three Representatives had switched sides, the same thing would have happened.

I don’t see how that could have been a lie, I mean a deliberate distortion of the facts. I am guessing he is just treading water.What do you think?

A Fucking Liar? (Updated Again)

Almost four weeks after the alleged episode, no evidence has surfaced that anyone called any member of the Congressional Black Caucus a “nigger” on Obamacare Sunday. None will surface although any visual and auditory evidence would be worth hundreds of thousands to the media. I watch the media and listen to it carefully, including NPR. No one has pointed out the lack of validation of the allegation, I think. The main media are dishonest to the core, the New York Times first of all.  Please, tell me if I missed something. (4/16/10)

To Representative John Lewis of Georgia:

Dear Mr Congressman:

This letter is more about the “L” word than it is about the “N”word. Over ten days ago, you claimed that a health bill protester called you a “nigger.” You can be completely sure I will not call you that hurtful name nor any of its derivatives or synonyms. In fact, now and in the future, I will call you whatever your want. I believe that calling people what they wish to be called is matter of courtesy, be it “pink rabbits” or whatever.

Your report, of course, took its place in a preemptive concert of stern media warnings about right-wing extremism immediately following the signing of the so-called “health care” bill into law. The concert was intended to give some backbone to media liberals who dimly understand how much disgust the law has created and who are frightened of what they have wrought. It was intended also, preemptively and childishly, to intimidate the majority of the American people who want to resist a law that will increase the cost of health care, decrease its quality, put their children in debt for a lifetime, and mandate that government agencies meddle in their most private affairs.

The fact that the dire warnings about extremism referred to a handful of episodes, some of them imaginary, did not escape the attention of well-informed, alert, mature people. I can’t say the same about the young, fed from childhood on the theme that America is an incurably racist country that ought to take itself to the woodshed frequently. You are not just anyone, you are an elected representative of the people. You have stared real racism in the eye. You should know better. Your accusation gave the silly chorus of scared liberals the measure of gravitas it lacked, almost some credibility.

In the long lapse of time since your reported the alleged abuse, not a single item of evidence has surfaced to support your claim. Zero evidence has been produced although there must have been dozens of television mikes around the demonstrators, and thousands of cell-phone cameras. No evidence, although the ineffable and terminally-ill New York Times chose to place the alleged racial insult on its front page the day following your report!

It does not help that Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for such evidence, to go to the United Negro College Fund, and that no one, not one person, not a counter-demonstrator, not a cop, no one in your entourage stepped forward to accomplish this double good deed. (It would be a double good deed because it would contribute to sullying the honor of all opponents of the so-called “health care” law while benefiting a worthy cause.)

You personally confirmed my worst suspicions by continuing to decline the open invitation from Bill O’Reilly to repeat the charge on his nightly show. I believe you don’t want to to go there because O’Reilly, with all his limitations, is a bulldog when it comes to exposing dissembling, beating around the bush, and simple lying.

Speaking of the O’Reilly show, on the March 29^th, self-styled black activist and self-styled “Reverend” Sharpton whom he was hosting, asserted that he had “heard the tape” with the racial insult against you. Bill O’Reilly lit into Sharpton who retreated with his tails between his legs. No one came to the good Reverend’s defense, it seems. Incidentally, this is not some rumor I picked up on the Internet but something I saw on television with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, together with millions of others. Sharpton was straightforwardly lying about a non-existent tape. Anyway, you are not responsible for current black activists’ irresponsibility. And anyway, strangely, I don’t dislike Sharpton, most of the time. There is something attractively candid about him again, most of the time.

You had a good, constructive life, Mr Congressman. You were once a brave young fighter against segregation, a shame on this country that the white majority was not remedying quickly enough. You occupied many useful and honorable positions. For 26 years, you had a normal if ordinary career in Congress, like many elected by nearly automatic vote from safe districts.

You have been an honorable man. This forces me to ask if you have become delusional. I have to ask: Has senility crept in? Are you confusing in your mind, Washington 2010, with its affirmative action but fairly elected, supposedly “black” President, and Tennessee’s segregated lunch counters, 1960? If you do, it’s time to go, to let other men or women wrestle over the seat you held for so long. (Personally, I would like to see another African-American win your seat, a black female conservative, for example.)

And, referring again to the allegation that a health law protester called you a “nigger,” if you are not delusional:

Are you a fucking liar?

It would be a relief to me personally if you simply stated that the media, and Associated Press, in particular, misquoted you. It’ would also be easy to accept. AP is guilty of daily misrepresentation. If you do, I will immediately put up your denial on this modest blog, announce it on my local radio show, and otherwise do anything in my power to propagate the good news. If you don’t say anything along these lines, my question stands

Let me sign this letter:

Of course, I am an angry white man, and armed. I also drive a pick-up truck (to tow my sailboat). But I live on the Left Coast, not in Alabama. I never go to church and I never open the Bible, except to locate some erudite citation to confound others. I am an immigrant. I am married to a “woman of color” to use the grotesque jargon in favor among your white liberal allies. We have two grown children, also “of color.” My doctorate is from a good university and I enjoyed a pretty good academic career. My scholarly production was in the social sciences. In fact, I am a good enough social scientist that I recognize the warning signs of fascism when I see them: “Big lies….” (Google “Joseph Goebbels” for an exact quote.)

PS : In one of the next Tea Party demonstrations, there will almost certainly be a progressive plant shouting “nigger!” and worse.

04/0510. Here is the best audiovisual evidence of the relevant short period. It shows members of the Congressional Black Caucus walking through a hostile crowd. It’s difficult to understand how one could confuse the many “boo” and “kill that bill,” with the word “nigger.” Again, there is a fortune to be made showing the media that this video was edited or cut to take out the offensive word. (The video link is off my friend Nadir’s Facebook. I thank him.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SCs6pSE8

The Health Disaster: What’s Next. What to do.

The magnitude and the complexity of the disaster of Obamacare are such that the normal thinking person has trouble keeping them all in mind, much less, thinking rationally about them. For me, it’s been like herding cats. I have decided to focus on the essentials with respect to the main next stage for health care in this country and with respect to what we can do about it as individuals. What I describe below is modest enough to understand, remember, and act on, I think.

The road to single-payer destination

I still don’t know how much duplicity exists in Pres. Obama’s heart and I don’t know how capable of scheming Nancy Pelosi is. (He has limited understanding of anything, I keep saying. I think she is on happy pills all the time.) However, the miracle they wrought had predictable consequences irrespective of intent.

On the one hand, as I have said before, I can’t imagine any American jury punishing Americans for refusing to purchase something. On the other hand, overall, the automatic fines for not purchasing health insurance are overall, smaller than the cost of purchasing health insurance. That’s true for companies and for individuals. The rational course of action is to pay the fine and see what happens. For individuals, there will be no personal risk beyond the fine in refraining from carrying health insurance. Insurance companies will not be able to refuse anyone with a re-existing condition: As soon as the doctor informs me I have any serious illness, I will purchase insurance. I will also leave a check with someone close to me to do the same on my behalf in case I have an accident and I am unable to do it for myself.

There are two solutions to this problem, both very unpleasant. First, the authorities, aided by court decisions, can admit that forced purchase of insurance cannot be implemented and then, turn to taxation. A tax on everyone would abolish the dual obstacle of superficial voluntariness and of unconstitutionality of the dispositions now in the law.

It’s possible to convict people and companies for not paying a tax, especially a nearly universal tax. It happens all the time. If he is still President, Barack Obama will say: “Very sorry, I tried to keep my campaign promise that no one earning less than $250,000 would see a tax increase. The lack of civic spirit of too many of our citizens and companies forced me to do it.” Keep in mind that he did much worse recently as far as betraying solemn promises is concerned.

But there is another solution that is even more palatable to the leftists who have taken over this country. They can simply preside over a massive die-off of private (non-government) insurance companies. Such an event would be precipitated by a broader coverage mandate accompanied by a loss of clients as many, or most, turn to fines as the better option. Leftists could thus passively create a new situation with government, single-payer coverage as the only solution left. Single-payer, in turn, would be financed with a combination of obligatory payroll taxes, co-payments, and other miscellaneous taxes as is the case in most of Europe today. Faced with the prospect of no coverage for most of the population even a conservative majority in both houses would probably cave in.

Apologists for single-payer health coverage delude themselves that if it works in Finland and in France, it would work here too. I have written before about this, based on experience and study. I think they are dreaming. I see no prospect that the US can do as well as France in that area. It’s a long story; let me summarize it: French trains are fast, comfortable and they run on time, all the time. Think Amtrack!

What is to be done?

The airwaves are currently full of speculation about whether or not it is possible to reverse or even to limit the damage of Obamacare. Much of the speculation is above my pay grade. Even if it were not, it would leave me deeply dissatisfied because I need to act now, or at least, to have a plan for action immediately. The implementation of the plan has to depend entirely or mostly on factors under my control. At the very least, I want to be able to make a resolution for my behavior right tomorrow that I will be able to keep. Here are two in one.

1 I will vote punitively in every election. In federal elections, I will find out who voted for the Obamacare and who said anything positive about it. I will vote against any candidate that did either. I will do so even if the alternative candidate is a yellow dog. (That’s where the term comes from, incidentally.) In primaries, I will vote for the candidate who will say the worst things about Obamacare. Lacking such information, I will chose the candidate most opposed to government enlargement. In other elections, I will ferret out candidates’ position with respect to Obamacare and about public intervention in health care and in the economy in general. I will vote for the candidate who sounds most opposed even if he is running for dog-catcher. I will not miss an opportunity to trumpet my electoral choices and the reasons for my choices.

2 I will make it my foremost goal to draw one another person to this viewpoint and I will make sure this person vote in November. My conquest, my single conquest, may be an independent, a comparatively easy achievement. Secondly, there are millions of young people who don’t register to vote or who don’t vote. Many abstain because they think they don’t know enough to do any good. It’s fairly easy to capture the attention of one of those abstainers and to hold his hand until he registers and votes (the right way). But I may even be able to cause a Democrat to vote against his party just this one time. It’s not as unlikely as it sounds. Many registered Democrats are disgusted by the process through with Obamacare was voted and signed into law. They are repelled for much the same reasons I am: It was obscene. You don’t have to be a Republican or a conservative to recognize obscenity. Second, Democrats in rising numbers are going to discover that the law does not accomplish many of the things they were promised and that it deprives them of some of what they have.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t know what the immediate future holds for the legal and practical status of Obamacare. However, I can’t think of any future where a larger number of non-Democrat elected officials would not help repair or compensate for the ravage.

This two-pronged strategy will meet with uneven success, depending on locale. In my district, there is scant chance of preventing the re-election of silly Congressman Sam Farr. Yet, it’s worth doing for two reasons. First good behavior is no less contagious than bad behavior. Your good behaviors might, in the aggregate, move to action voters in districts where a change of representation is possible. Just remember that a majority is half plus one (unity, un, uno). Second, at the very least, pursuing this strategy is going to make me feel better.

One last thing: I am contemplating designing a flag for the “Party of  No.” I am thinking of the silhouette of a shapely woman with a beehive hairdo and a hunting rifle across her back. What do you think?

PLEASE, TRY TO CIRCULATE THIS PEACEFUL CALL TO ARMS. (I have to emphasize “peaceful” because I don’t trust our Executive anymore.)

Health Care Reform: Paradise Lost

I have been struggling for three days to swim back to the surface and breathe again. Since the monstrous health care bill reform passed on Sunday, furor and something approaching despair have made me numb and mute. As people begin actually reading the 2700 pages, bad news cascade after bad news. I have been looking for the silver lining and found only one: It looks like the portability of health insurance will become a fact. That’s good. It was intolerable that people stayed in jobs they hated and refrained from entrepreneurship because they were too afraid to lose their health coverage. I think that’s all.

The rest of it is a disaster for our future. Note that every other political defeat does not make me feel the way I do now. Alternance in power is a good thing. When the other guys get their way with something I don’t want, I figure it’s the price I pay for stable and peaceful government. Certainly, I don’t want to live in a country where the losers routinely stage coups or start revolutions.

I don’t like most of what I know is in the law. I fear what else is in there that I will only discover later. I am sure the cost of the programs the law creates will undermine severely our future economic development. I suspect hardly anyone one will benefit. Instead, the overall quality of health care will decline. Most of all, I am aggrieved by the process by which the law became law, against clearly expressed majorities of opinion. The process smells of fascism and of the twisted parliamentary (ostensibly legal) methods by which the Communist Party gained control of Czechoslovakia in 1948.

My near-despair is rooted in two stream of personal experience: First, I saw it coming because I have inside track information, not secret information, mind you. President Obama is a second-rate academic. I know such people well. I have known them for more than thirty years. Improvements in our national health care delivery system based on market mechanisms were never in the cards. Few academics except economists know much about the market. Hardly a handful has read Adam Smith. They learn early in their careers that the idea of a market is a tricky myth designed to deceive the great unwashed masses. Then, they never give is another thought.

Academics in general are both intellectually limited and presumptuous. They know what they know and they don’t know what they don’t know. Successful academics, the minority who play the scholarship game, often become cured in time of heir presumptuousness. Anonymous scholarly peer review takes care of it. There is nothing like seeing the work of several years trashed from three different sides by strangers, and realizing that they are mostly right, to teach you humility. Barack Obama never had this salutatory experience. He never published anything scholarly, even when he was superbly placed to do so. Barack Obama had never accomplished anything in his life until last Sunday. He knows less about markets than a good undergraduate with three economics courses under his belt. Naturally, he and his ilk can only think of bureaucratic, and therefore, coercive and wasteful solutions.

The second root of my near-despair is the also the deepest: I have been there before. In 1981, Francois Mitterand, the head of the Socialist Party was elected President of France. His election inaugurated fifteen years of French decline and missed growth. After a decade of brisk economic development under conservative leadership, the country slowed down to very little. Nothing increased except government employment. The country went from one kind of decline to another. Unemployment remained around 10% , much of it long term and very long term unemployment. A whole generation of young French people grew up without the notion that work is normal. The bulk of the French educational system dropped from fairly good to quite bad. (Nearly everyone agree it’s bad now.)

The most interesting aspects of French decline under socialist administration are almost intangible, difficult to describe. Fortunately, I can depict them a little, even if in subjective terms because I knew the country well before and after. (I was born and reared in France. I know the language perfectly. I have spent much time in my native country before and after the Mitterrand regnum. )The public mood and the mood of ordinary people in the street became universally sullen. Socialist rulers claimed they gave he French more security but they killed their joie de vivre. Even more curiously, the advent of Socialist Party rule coincided with a massive dying-off of French cultural creativity. Things have improved some in the Sarkozy years but if you had visited France ten years ago, you would have found a cultural desert. There was no painting except hackneyed, inferior copies of 100-year old Impressionists. There was little fiction and it comprised mostly thin dry near-stories, stuff I had to force myself to read because it was boring. During the period, the French motion pictures industry went from one of the most productive in the world (though behind the American and the Indian) to one that turned out one or two good movies in five years at best. Most strikingly, there was no music of any interest produced in France except that of immigrants from North Africa, rai. (Of course, I joked that the French had become so lazy that they let immigrant workers do not only the menial work and the manufacturing work but even their popular music work!) In the socialist period, the French acquired many so-called “rights” and they lost their taste for living.

What we are facing in this country is worse than anything the Socialists were able to dish out in France. Mitterand had to govern most of the time without a majority in parliament. He had to compose and compromise with political coalitions opposed to his programs. Also, the powers of a French Presidents are somewhat less broad than those of an American President.

I think I have lost the country to which I emigrated forty years ago. I am in mourning for the vigorous, creative, free America I loved. I have never hoped to be wrong more than I am today. I hope someone will write and point out the errors of my analogy.

Watch this blog for more analysis and for calls to action.

Breast Cancer and Political Idiocy

A Federal Government health panel announces sweeping changes in breast cancer detection practices. All the changes seem to imply savings, spending less health care money upfront. It looks for all the world like a trial balloon for health care rationing: Choose a topic known to be an emotional one for the 52% of the population that seem to care the most about health, women; tell them the corresponding care will be cut; wait for reactions. Then, plan for future rationing on the basis of what you learned on this occasion. Assume that private insurance companies, daily if covertly threatened with nationalization, will comply with whatever the Federal Government decides.

It does look like a trial balloon but I am not joining in the paranoia the announcement triggered. I am taking another path, in line with what I have been saying about President Obama and his camarilla, on this blog and on my radio show (“Facts Matter” ksco Santa Cruz, 1080 AM, Sundays 11a.m to 1p.m.) They are not Machiavellian; they are mindless, in their own peculiar way.

First, I would not be surprised at all if independent audits demonstrated that current practice, in force for at least 20 years , are economically wasteful, or very wasteful. Much preventive care is. (48 hours after the announcement, I have not heard a single argument to the effect that changing the standards will improve, or adversely affect, anyone’s health.) The hard fact is that we cannot, as a society, with current methods, afford to test every person for diseases that occur only once in ten million people, to make up an example. That’s a hard fact Americans are not used to. Health care, including and especially preventive care, has to be rationed and it has always been rationed. It’s only now coming out into the open, which is what all freedom-loving conservatives should want.

The issue is whether government experts should make the crucial decisions. I don’t trust government to act competently; I don’t trust left-wingers in government to act without regard to their political advantage. I prefer any other method of rationing but I want it transparent. If it’s not, people of conscience have no chance to influence the criteria used. To give an example of why transparency matters: I am angry to have learned after the fact that Guantanamo inmates received the swine flu vaccine before millions of American babies. True, I don’t know which ones are guilty; I just know for a fact none of them is a baby.

Second, private advocacy organizations, impelled by feminists, have made breast cancer a politically favorite illness, almost on par with HIV. In fact, of one hundred American women who died last year, fewer than three died of breast cancer. This is not to deny the particular horror this disease inspires in women. Yet, in reality, American women die of the same things as their husbands and brothers, mostly of heart disease. (based on Center for Disease Control figures for 2006).The politicization of illness in the past twenty or thirty years is not helping honest reformers. Instead, it creates a perceptual fog that facilitates the task of those who would implement changes that the population would reject if it understood them.

It seems to me that the sudden proclamation by the Federal Government of the rolling back of standards, on a sensitive and emotional matter, at a time when the party in power is trying to pass a difficult, much despised health care reform bill, is not a trial balloon. I think it’s another formidable demonstration of incompetence, of political incompetence, specifically.

The Obama administration never listened to anyone because it feels invested with a historical mission. It never listened to most of those who voted for the President because the top-echelons frankly believe there is nothing to be gained by listening. I hear an echo of the Communist notion of “dictatorship of the proletariat.” It says that the people don’t know what’s good for them, that if “we” let them make their own decisions, they will screw up almost for sure. I am familiar with this way of thinking because it used to be common, among European Communists, of course, but also among their social-democrat cousins. That would have included some of my close friends.

The Administration fucked up royally on this one, and in ways that were predictable. Same scenario with the decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohamed in New York City. As soon as it was announced, that decision raised a storm of protests, including in the liberal media. The President is an idiot, the way many college professors are idiots. He is sure he knows better; he does not know what he does not know.

Remain attentive; there are going to be more monumental mistakes because the President and his collaborators are incapable of listening. The question is whether they will self-destruct before they destroy our country.

PS Don’t be shy about linking this blog, or this particular posting, to your Facebook.

Sixtieth Anniversary of the People’s Republic; Obama’s String of Victories.

To celebrate our country’s birthday, we fly the flag, we put on fireworks (only in some places, not in my town of Santa Cruz where the authorities are afraid the sand of the beach might catch on fire!) Mostly, we eat grilled meat saturated with saturated fat to mark this anniversary. The red Chinese also do fireworks (really good ones). They also march 10,000 people under arms. That’s a basic difference.

The parade of heavy weapons and tanks took place on Tienanmen Square, the same place where brave unarmed young people were crushed by tanks twenty years ago.

The Chinese Communist Party is the most successful mafia in the history of the world. It has succeeded in raising the Chinese from abject poverty to moderate poverty while maintaining its corrupt, totalitarian rule. It now ranks 133 out of 229 countries in GDP per capita, right behind Albania. Its GDP/capita of $6,000 is almost one fifth that of Taiwan, all Chinese, and less than one eighth that of Singapore, which is 90% Chinese. You might say, the Chinese are prosperous everywhere in the world except under Communist rule.

(Figures from CIA World Factbook on-line 10/1/09.)

What corrupt rule? I don’t mean small time business grease like la mordita in Mexico, or other small bribes. I mean real horrors. The Weekly Standard published a long article several month ago about the execution of imprisoned regime opponents for the purpose of selling their organs. Normally, I don’t pay attention to this sort of stories. I think of them as urban legends. One thing caught my attention in this case: Several reports of thorough medical examinations given to young healthy prisoners and never followed by treatment of any sort, a sort of blood-curdling inventory. Furthermore, I don’t discount the Weekly Standard. It’s a very serious periodicals that checks its facts thoroughly. (Report is in the Nov. 24^th 2008 issue).

The UN urged the Chinese government to look into it. You bet!

Speaking of inventory: Almost nine months since the inauguration. Soon the Obama presidency gestation will be over. Here is an informal inventory. Tell me where I am wrong.

Here is his most successful initiative: “Cash for Clunkers.” It’s successful because the money allocated was actually spent and spent quickly. Let me give you the ethical summary of this achievement:

The President took money from my wife, who cannot afford a new car of any sort, to give it to people who could afford to put down $20,000, but maybe not $25,000. Those are very happy with the transaction; no kidding? Also fairly happy are car dealers, whose function is increasingly questionable because of the Internet. (Sorry, I call them as I see them.)

Even happier are GM workers, high-school graduates with 1940 skills, who earn $ 30 an hour (according to UAW, $75 according to Republican Congressional critics) and large fringe benefits, making cars Americans don’t want in large numbers. Unhappy, are the people who would have bought the used cars sent to be destroyed. Many of those people are undoubtedly among the poorest Americans. I wonder how many lost their jobs because they couldn’t find a used car in their price range.

“Cash for clunkers” was clearly a transfer of income. It transferred income from the poor to the moderately well-off.

I don’t hate liberals because of their misguided economic ideas; I only deplore those and I try to combat them. Hypocrisy is hard to forgive though, even if it’s rooted only in stubborn disregard for basic facts and for elementary logic.

On the domestic economic front, three things did not happen:

The stimulus package did not work. It wasn’t supposed to. You can’t reduce unemployment next month by building a rail line between Disneyland and Las Vegas the permits for which will take five, six, or five years. Federal employment is growing though.

Foreclosures have hardly slowed down.

The so-called “public option” on health care reform has vanished, for practical purposes. The final bill will have something called “public option,” no doubt. It will have nothing in common with the program the President wanted as a Trojan Horse to turn American health care into a single payer.

Digression: A couple of days ago, the French Ministry of Health announced the size of the unfunded cost of the French single-payer system. It’s expected to be about $700 per man, woman and child. (Le Figaro10/02/09.) That’s not the total cost but the amount for which money will have to be found elsewhere. Look at it this way: on the average, in 2010, a French family of four will spending $2,800 more on health care than the national budget allows.

In foreign affairs, same progress. As far as Afghanistan is concerned, the President is pausing to ruminate about the strategy he chose himself by appointing a general who is its foremost exponent. That’s about the “war of necessity” he said we had to win.

He wants to revert to waging war with long range missiles. It’s the unworkable wimp’s option of course. That’s the opinion of all who study counterinsurgency.

On October 1^st, the President made a moving speech on the result of negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran regarding its unlawful nuclear program. He said he told Iran, “Allow inspection, or else.” The “else” was left to the mullahs’ imagination. They must be crapping their pants. Those are the same mullahs who smile benignly when the president they hand-picked tells the world he wants to annihilate a neighbor.

Oops! I almost forgot: “Cap and Trade” is dormant and Guantanamo will stay open. I like the latter; it’s he best solution but that’s not what he told those who voted or him.

Some of the President’s supporters are beginning to say, “Give him time.” Point well taken but the Republicans were not the ones who told him to rush, to triple the federal deficit in nine months, nor to direct the largest tax increase since the Korean War (Boston.com – The Boston Globe 9/2/09). No conservative demanded that he cram a 1,000-page plan to recast 15% of the economy in a couple of weeks (health care reform). (Data: The NYT on June 19^th said 885 pages. I am just guessing it had grown to more than 1,000 by August.)

It’s also true that the President inherited a big economic crisis, that the bulk o the crisis was not of his making. Well, we hired him to drive the truck, not to change the wheels. When your motor starts burning, you don’t rush to take out the jack. Rigidity of purpose is nearly a crime for a senior executive. Don’t implement costly programs when the economy is much worse than you expected. Got it?

I think it’s fair to take people at their word. When I tell my wife I will paint the living room, that’s how she judges me. That’s one reason I am careful not to announce that I will paint the whole house in one day. President Obama declared he would do X,Y, and Z. He has not done any, has not even come close. If I had voted for him, I would be displeased.

With all this, I still don’t think the man is evil though I am more and more inclined to see him as a puppet. Conservatives who describe the President as evil are losing track of the obvious. He is a handsome man with a good diction who had never achieved anything in his life besides get elected. He can’t even select literate speech-writers. Here is what he said recently disdainfully a propos of his critics on Iran:

“Some invoked the picture of Hiro Ito signing the articles of capitulation.”

Mr President: It’s not “invoke” it’s “evoke,” and Emperor Hiro Hito did not sign the articles of capitulation. He was cowering in his palace.

That’s two mistakes in one sentence, worse than George Bush!

The President shows himself to be a fool. He will fall. I fear what comes next. Some of his followers are fascists, the real thing. Who will come after they throw him under the bus because he is unable to deliver even with majorities in both houses?

I have an exit plan for the President though. Actually, he found it himself in Copenhagen.

It’s true that he did not get the Olympics Games for Chicago. That’s the easiest failure to excuse. One, Rio was hard to beat. Brazilians are more fun than Chicagoans anytime. (I, for one, don’t want to see any Chicagoans in a string bathing suit.) Two, he was up against another political machine, the International Olympic Committee. It’s a machine as corrupt as Chicago’s but he had not had time to learn its ways.

In spite of this failure, I think President Obama would make a good international relations representative for the Greater Chicago Chamber of Commerce. He speaks well from a text if the text is well written. He looks better in a suit than just about any other public figures. He looks “multicultural.” I don’t know what that means but I know it’s a good thing.

A Real Town Meeting in the People’s Green Republic of Santa Cruz.

Tuesday night, I took in, in person, two and a half hours of town hall meeting with the same congressman, Sam Farr, in my own town of Santa Cruz, this time. Now, it’s important to understand that Santa Cruz is, overall, a seventies throwback, left-liberal to communist anti-American. To give you an idea, on my long street, downtown, there are only three American flags, two of which belong to me. When I make conservative noises in public, in spite of my considerable expressive talents, people think I am kidding.

I went to the meeting with my wife, under my own power. The only prompt I got is that one local radio station gave the time and place of the meeting on the air. It did so several times. It’s seen as a conservative station. (Full disclosure: I have a talk-show program on that station, KSCO 1080 AM, every Sunday 11AM-1PM.) Rush Limbaugh did not send me. The local Republican Party was pathetically absent in every respect. If there was any conservative or right-wing organization present, it escaped my attention and I was looking for one. There were no right-wing thugs in sight, with the possible exception of myself, and especially, my wife, Krishna. My wife is in very good shape indeed but, she is slight of built. She has never really divulged her age too me but her hair is all white. The only humans she has ever physically threatened were our children, when they were teen-agers, and me, of course. I can’t tell you why she threatened my because I don’t like to brag.

I insist on the unorganized nature of the event in a spirit of helpfulness. The main problem most Democrats, including Congressman Farr and including the President face, is that they cannot conceive of a genuine grass-root movement of revulsion. George Beck, the Fox News-appointed liberal, of all things, said on television that he does not believe that the opposition to Obamacare is “spontaneous.” He is not a dumb man. He is associated in some fashion with George Washington University. I have heard him before and never caught him even in a white lie. Those people can’t conceive of spontaneous political action because it seldom happens on their side. Instead, they rely on tax-subsidized ACORN, and on a variety of radical front organizations.

The Obama supporters seemed only a little more organized than the opponents. They had better signs and many seemed to know each other. They occupied most of the first three rows but I suspect there was no ploy involved. I could have sat in the second row if I had wanted to. One woman standing at the door was handing out three-page leaflets in support. She was careful to say she was not representing anything, that the document only expressed her own views. She tried to scrutinize my face before handing me a leaflet, no doubt to figure which side I am on. I gave her a big marble smile providing no information at all. I had also been careful to dress in a non-revelatory way. I don’t mean revelatory of my enviable physique, but of my political leanings. I was attempting stealth, the better to observe.

Naturally, I didn’t wear my brown shirt and I left my swastika at home. I did it to confuse Nancy Pelosi , a woman who becomes easily confused, it’s true.

The woman’s brochure had a lot of facts and it seemed carefully referenced. However, a number of the websites to which she referred the reader were clearly partisan. Overall, her argumentation was coherent. Yet it stood zero chance of persuading anyone not already in support of Obamacare. She made no effort to address the abundantly expressed concerns of opponents. (More on this later.) I think she was trying, ineffectually, to hand out ammunition to the weaklings on her side before the meeting. There were a variety of signs in the audience, fewer than fifty in all. The anti (conservative) signs were all hand-made. The pro signs were a mixture of hand-made and carefully printed slogans.

I estimated there were 500 people at the beginning of the meeting plus 200 in an overflow space. 700 is a large number in Santa Cruz for anything other than a movie. (There might be as many people at a religious service. I wouldn’t know. ) The main venue, in a church, was half-full an hour before the announced beginning of the meeting. It was packed when the Congressman arrived, pretty much on time.

He was introduced by one of the pastors, a woman with politically signaletic short hair. Then, the Mayor of Santa Cruz briefly took over. She is a leftie, of course, but rather well-liked by all. I felt that we were in mildly inimical territory. The Congressman is a jovial man with a sense of humor. He is also brave and hard-working.

Representative Farr began in Santa Cruz with the same rehearsed speech he had given the night before in Monterey. I felt he was on the wrong track from the beginning: not helpful to his side, the pro-Obamacare side, and startlingly incapable of addressing the views of the people opposed to Obama care.

Then people, about one hundred of them, lined up to deliver their two minute- speech and/or question. There is not much reason to repeat any of the audience’s addresses but I want to report on the tenor of the meeting. Only about 4/5 got to the mike. The queuing process was orderly and fair.

There was no intimidation on either side. There were catcalls and loud boos, from conservatives mostly. One, who was sitting next to me, was very loud indeed. I believe though not one sound was an attempt to drown out the Congressman, as we see regularly on college campuses, for example. It never even came close to that. There were also many rather effeminate hisses coming from pro partisans and directed at conservative speakers.

Conservatives, the con camp, and liberal/progressives, the pro Obamacare crowd, differ significantly both in appearance and in the content of their speech. Liberals are more flashy and they look better overall. The only speaker with a hat (a white straw hat) over his long hair, gave a little pro-Obamacare address and concluded that the overall solution to any health care crisis was to legalize and tax marijuana. (Disclosure: I agree that it’s a good idea. I don’t think it would make a dent, nationally.) Conservatives dress in a less interesting manner. Many are energetic sharp-spoken middle-aged women. The young among them tend to dress simply and soberly. More of the conservatives are seniors than are on the other side. This is interesting because you would assume Medicare beneficiaries did not have much of a dog in that fight. There were two black men in the audience. One did not get to speak; the other gave one of the best, most coherent anti-Obamacare arguments.

As usual, what did not happen matters most. Contrary to stupid, lazy press reports, the meeting did not look at all like a battle between well-dressed conservatives on the one side and the hard-working poor in work boots on the other side. Although Santa Cruz County is probably one third Hispanic, with Hispanics doing most of the ill-paid work, I observed no Hispanic presence at all. There were several large, white-on-white families I would classify, with my unusual sociological acumen, as “Oakies” here (“hillbillies” elsewhere in America). They were obviously there to a protest against Obama care. The town hall meeting in Santa Cruz was a solidly middle-class affair. All the people present could have mixed, matched, and possibly mated, at a neighborhood barbecue.

The spectacle rejoiced my heart because it was in the very best tradition of American democracy in action. Yet, I think the meeting was useless for its announced purpose. The two sides spent two hours speaking past each other. I don’t attribute the responsibility for this equally to both sides. (The truth is never in the middle.) The Congressman and supporters of Obamacare came wholly unprepared to address either the economic arguments of their opponents, nor even less, their constitutional concerns. The conservatives gave better speeches because they actually gave speeches while the liberals wasted a lot of time whining, as usual.

Striking ignorance of basic facts was evident on both sides. Ignorance has multiple causes. Mistrust is one of them. Congress could dissipate 90% of the mistrust on the conservative side with a single sentence: Members of Congress will have exactly the same access to health care as every other American.

The disjunction between the two discourses became clear within the first half-hour. The pro camp argued for the human necessity of government-directed, and in some case of single-payer, health care, shored up by horror stories. Many liberal speakers only gave horror stories, often about their own needs and the injustice of their destiny. The old stereotype was confirmed to an astounding degree: Liberals think of Government as an infinitely wise milch cow with teats that never dry up. They resist discussing the cost of good things, of any good things. Many have a singular talent for irrelevancy: By the end of the meeting, there were catcalls offering “no war” as the best solution to the alleged health care crisis health. Liberals are overwhelmingly childish.

Liberals and progressives came ready to counter only the crudest conservative slogans, such as the accusation of “socialism.” They painted their opponents in primitive colors, again, like children. I think they only know slogans and their slogans are mostly boring.

Obamacare opponents included only a small number of anti-abortion speakers. There was no hysteria about government-ordered euthanasia though concerns were expressed about the possibility government rationing might lead there. Conservative arguments were comparatively sophisticated and free of heart-wrenching personal narratives. They focused on disbelief regarding the announced costs of Obamacare. (They were thus joining he Congressional Budget Office, currently directed by a Democrat), and on constitutionality. Libertarian sentiment dominated. The financial consequences of Obama care were the tying principle as you would expect from people worried about economics and equally from people who dislike government growth.

Congressman Farr – a man easy to like, as I said – inspired pity. He came equipped with simplistic bullet-points and was confronted by a barrage of sophisticated questions and arguments. I believe he did not honestly understand most of them. I think he is out of his depth defending health care reform Obama-style. In part it’s because he is ill-informed, superficial, and living in a liberal intellectual ghetto. In part it’s because he, his party, and the President, did not come close to expecting the strong opposition that emerged quickly. They seem to believe their own gross propaganda describing opponents of Obamacare as a handful of ignorant thugs paid by insurance companies and teleguided by Rush Limbaugh.

Missing in the congressman’s handling of his opposition:

The crucial distinction between health insurance and health care. (He pointed out repeatedly that obligatory health insurance would be just like obligatory car insurance. Of course, I am unlikely to have a car accident and I am a hundred per cent likely to become sick.)

A grasp on the real nature of the “40 million uninsured” he kept using a a final argument that should close the matter for good. (They are largely a myth, though the figure is real, in a superficial sense.)

Any mature comprehension at all of the constitutional and historical fears expressed by opponents of Obamacare. (Listening to him was like listening to a French politician who would not know who Thomas Jefferson was and who would have never read the Declaration of Independence.)

Practical, personal familiarity with conservative rank-and-file, with conservatives who are not politicians or figments of left-wing journalists imagination. (I suspect he would be astounded, in full disbelief, if I talked to him freely over a beer.)

Elementary comprehension of economic objections to Obamacare. (After the meeting, I would have bet he did not understand even the summary of the Congressional Budget Office’s report on the topic.)

The defining moment of the town meeting occurred when a conservative asked him a pointed but simple question about the projected final cost of the proposed national health program. Congressman Farr, always the honest man, replied:

“I don’t know.”

The local newspaper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, gave a fair report of the event the next morning with a breath-takingly dishonest heading. Perhaps it was torn between fair and factual reporting and trying to align itself on the rest of the liberal press representation of such town meetings as being taking over by thugs.

For the record: I believe we need health care reform. This, for several reasons. Our costs are twice higher than those of the French and we don’t live as long. It’s intolerable that Americans should be forced to keep a job they hate because they cannot afford to lose the health care that’s tied to it. The propensity of insurance companies to turn down people with pre-existing conditions is a real problem so long as we are in an insurance regime.

I also think health insurance is a terrible idea. I place less confidence in our government to administer any complicated, national-level plan than I would in most West-European governments. I fear creeping, soft fascism, using nationalized health care as its main vehicle.

PS  Mr President: If you didn’t plant the alarming story about white extremist militia, don’t worry about them. They include only 37 middle-age guys spread over ten states. They have trouble finding their size in camouflage fatigues. They have to walk up hills in the forest because they smoke two packs a day.

Incidentally, tell your whiny Democrat Congressmen who complain about imaginary militias that its’ “supremacist,” no “supremist.”

Mr President: Worry instead about a massive tax revolt that will peacefully paralyze government. That’s the American way, didn’t you know?

Conservatives Unfair to Obama

Conservative commentators, led by Rush Limbaugh, keep referring to the President as a person with evil intentions, bent on implementing evil designs. What precipitated the torrent of right-wing invectives is the fact that it’s become obvious that every one of the President’s extravagant initiatives has failed or is failing.

Note that nothing I wrote above tells you anything about what I think the administration should have done, if anything. I usual, I am taking power at its own word. The President announced repeatedly that the many measures he pushed or tried to push through Congress would accomplish X,Y and Z. The so-called stimulus package is only one of those, of course. As I speak, his health care reform plan is half-dead and it has triggered open rebellion among “the masses.” (Yes, I know the President never actually used those words in public. I am just reading his mind.)

The only bright exception to the disaster that has met the Obama initiatives is the “cash for clunkers” programs. It turns out to be both a boondoggle and a demonstration of the validity of conservative approaches to economic problems: Give people their money back, they change their behavior. Rush Limbaugh reports that the beneficiaries are buying more Toyotas and Hondas than GM or Chrysler. I have not checked this assertion. It’s what the liberal press calls a rumor “too good to check.” Besides, Fox News said the same thing today at noon.

I believe the President is not very evil, much less than some past presidents, at any rate. The problem, as I have said several times on this blog, is that he is a man who has never accomplished anything in his life. He did nothing as a state legislator, nothing in the US Senate, nothing as a law school professor, and nothing he wishes to brag about as a “community organizer.” By the way, we still don’t know his grades.

Think of Mr Obama as a mediocre academic, a breed I know well. He never had to face the real world as long as enough of his students liked him. University administrators liked him too, as they like anyone with a black face who is not an object of embarrassment or of scandal. He was never tested, either in the real world or in the academic world.

Like many academics, including good ones, he knows what he knows and he does not know what he does not know. He views every problem as something that can be thought through, experience be damned, hard facts are secondary.

His entourage is something else. He did have very bad friends, and not only the race-baiting pastor and the aging, unrepentant terrorist. That’s what happens if you really love power and you have no particular talent. You have to try to chum up with all kinds of people, including scum.

Two things place the President at odds with many of the ordinary citizens whose compliance he seeks. They are his vision of how the world works and basic values.

Because I have known so many of his kind in my thirty years in academia, I think the President does not fundamentally understand the counterintuitive idea of the market. It’s not obvious he ever took a single economics course and if he did, whether he passed. It’s not that he is stupid; rather he dismissed the idea when he was young and has never given it another thought. He did not have to because he was surrounded by authoritarian collectivists. He is narrow-minded for the same reason many conservatives don’t know what they are talking about when they say, “socialist,” or “Marxist.”

His moral values also differ from those of I don’t know how many Americans, and they are inconsistent with the tradition embodied by the US Constitution, for example. I am pretty sure he dismisses the preamble to the Declaration of Independence as an interesting historical document of little contemporary relevance. So, he prefers equality to fairness, and comfort to liberty. He finds redneck vulgarity distasteful and the vulgarity of self-made rich men even worse. Culturally, he is barely American. (And I don’t care where he was born; that’s a dead horse, as far as I am concerned.)

There, you have it, irreconcilable differences with many of us! That’s serious enough. We don’t have to add evil. To do so is unfair.

Why No Racial Profiling? (and the President’s Shrewdness on Health Reform.)

The Gates ‘arrest episode: It does not matter but it’s symptomatic of a certain mood. I suspect it’s also further proof of the President’s presence of mind. Several comments.

A Harvard Professor who is black, Henry Louis Gates, tries to force his front door open because it’s stuck. His taxi driver, also black, is helping him. This is all happening in a tony Cambridge neighborhood. A white neighbor calls the police because she suspects a burglary in progress.

The cops arrive. The white cop in charge asks to see an ID. The professor first refuses, then he shows the cop an ID without an address, or maybe, one with an address; reports vary. Words are exchanged. The professor accuses the cop of racial profiling. The cop arrests the professor for “disorderly conduct.”

It seems to me most commentators are missing the boat, usually in revealing ways. First things first.

Conservatives who will not admit that there are pushy, abusive law enforcement officers with a quick-trigger temper are denying the obvious. They are likely in bad faith. The charge under which the professor was arrested tells it all. “Disorderly contact” is a b.s. charge. I will bet it almost never sticks before a jury of twelve peers, unless the accused is actually drunk in court, or really ugly. That’s the charge police officers use when they are really pissed off and don’t know what else to do.

I had an encounter with a pushy law enforcement officer myself a few months ago. Read about it in my essay on this blog, “Yosemite Enema.”

Some conservatives add gratuitously that the professor was “rude” to the cop. So? Since when is it illegal to be rude to cops? That’s exactly the day I fear, as a conservative, when rudeness to police becomes a crime. Police are our servants who happen to be doing a difficult job. Being rude to a cop is uncivil, like being rude to a cab driver. Period.

A couple of days later, several police officers’ associations held a nearly hour-long press conference to protest the President’s statement on the mini-event. (See below.) That’s ridiculous. Sensitive cops! Just what we need! Next thing you know, a couple of them will be sobbing on camera at the verbal injustice done to one of them.

It appears that the professor accused the cop of “profiling.” I don’t care that the second arresting officer, in the foreground of the best photograph of the event, was black. Why wouldn’t the cops be racially profiling?

People who are called upon to intervene on a possible crime scene, of necessity rely on appearances. In particular, they must ask themselves what’s out of place: a butcher’s knife on a playground, a man with a set of tools in a large parking lot, a woman screaming at a man who tries to restrain her. If they did not, we would fault them, and rightly so.

When using appearances, they must engage in split-second probabilistic calculation. There might be an innocent explanation for the knife. The man with the tools might be about to do a quick fix on his own car. The woman might be screaming in grief because she just received bad news on her cell phone. Nevertheless, many cops will chose to intervene because they decide, in a split-second, that the probability of mischief is not negligible. In most case, we will think they are doing their job properly. Would they not intervene, they would often be punished, professionally.

It turns out, Americans of African appearance commit proportionately many more non-white collar crimes than do Americans of European appearance. It turns out, wealthy areas of Cambridge are overwhelmingly white. Had the thought not crossed the cop’s mind that he was witnessing a burglary in progress, he would have been a dolt.

Here is a digression: The question of whether cops are more readily hostile to black than to white citizens for reasons other than visceral racism is a taboo topic. There is a simple sociological study crying out to be done. It won’t be. Here it is: Do African-American police officers respond differently to black and white suspects? Do they consider them with greater suspicion than they do white people?

“ Racial profiling” is frowned upon and, in some areas and for some purposes, it’s illegal. This must cause tremendous waste of police resources. When you waste police resources, you enable additional crime, including homicide. If you don’t believe me, conduct the following mental experiment:

The police in your town is hot on the tracks of serial killer, or killers. Acting on a tip, they focus on a group of older, church-going black ladies. What’s your reaction, focusing on the judicious employment of law enforcement resources? Below, here is mine.

Serial killers who have been captured are overwhelmingly white. They have been nearly all males. With a few exceptions, they have been between 16 and 35 years of age. They are almost all loners.

I believe the police is probably wasting its time and worse, letting a dangerous person free to kill again. This police behavior is bordering on criminally negligent in this case. What’s wrong with the police strategy? In a word, it’s not profiling. In particular, it’s not engaging in the sort of racial profiling the situation reasonably demands. The serial killer is very likely to be white. The police is also at fault for not engaging in sex profiling. The killer is probably male. And so forth.

The probability of someone black, female, old, and gregarious (belonging to a church group) being a serial killer is so low, people of that description should go right down to the bottom of the list of suspects. Police strategies that don’t comply to this set of probabilities are irrational and irresponsible.

So, it’s racial profiling against blacks specifically that is banned because of past racist actions by police at some times, in some places. That is still irrational from a crime-fighting perspective. The solution is not to prohibit any sort of racial profiling but to establish the appropriate reward structure for cops such that any profiling that does not pay dividends in convictions becomes a visible, embarrassing and punishable waste of their time.

Incidentally, the victims of black crime are mostly black. We are not doing anyone a favor, except fading civil rights organizations, by failing to protect black people against black predators.

Here is another facet of this tiny event: The professor’s profile. (Oops, that was bad!). First, he is clearly a professional, academic African-American (not an African-American professional; that’s something else). He has a good number of publications as befits a Harvard professor. Those are almost all books. This is legitimate but I have to note that books escape the harsh censure of blind-refereed scholarly journals. If there is a pro-black bias anywhere in academia, it’s much more likely to manifest itself with respect to the publication of books than with respect to the acceptance of scholarly article in refereed journals. In addition, his books are about various aspects of being black in America. If there were (conditional), a mutual aid society in American academia, Black Studies, broadly defined would be a good place for it. It would be one of the good places for it as opposed to, say, civil engineering, or English. Still no book is easy to write, I readily admit.

In case, you are wondering, I am displaying no sour grapes here. When I was an academic, I played unambiguously with the big guys. Professor Gates chose not to, maybe, or perhaps not. No one dictated to him the ambiguous career course he chose. He did not have to be professionally black. Our most useful economists,a great teacher, is Thomas Sowell. He is ablack man but he is not professionally black.

Harvard has been good to Professor Gates. That’s why he lives in a ritzie white suburb instead of among the people for whom he poses as an intellectual spokesman. A couple of days after the non-event, he sent a communication to the press from his other home, on Martha’s Vineyard. No desperate, exploited ghetto kid, the professor! Yet, he could not have made the same living had he not been actively black. I mean, as opposed to a bus driver who happens to be black, or as opposed to an African-American brain surgeon, for example. I figure he had no choice but to confront the white officer in the vituperative manner he did. To have done otherwise would have been a denial of his whole life and career.

Of course, the only important facet of this tiny near-non-event remains the President’s seemingly impromptu comment about it. Commentators, including some on the Left, criticize him for criticizing the Cambridge police actions without sufficient evidence. They say it shows a troubling lack of judgment. I am not so sure.

President Obama was once an academic himself ( a mediocre one; i explain this judgment in a previous posting). Certainly, he must have known that Cambridge Mass. is not Cambridge, Miss. Besides, he is aware that 2009 is not 1909. He must have known also that the said police department, in that liberal town serving that liberal university, must not shelter many closet racists. (It turns out the arresting officer once kissed a black male athlete on the mouth in public. Well, he gave him mouth-to-mouth, anyway.)

The President delivered himself of his summary judgment about the Cambridge police near the end of a press conference on health care reform. The conference gave absolutely no new information. Even the lazy, ass-kissing Washington press corp was uncomfortable. The health care plan was already tanking in Congress because of a report from the independent Congressional Budget Office. Health care is the Democratic issue par excellence. The President’s entourage has been know to plant questions at press conferences. The distracting question about the professor incident saved the President from having to squirm to avoid more possible embarrassing questions on the official topic of the conference, health care. Semi-apologizing a couple of days later was a small price to pay for this respite.