The Razor

Every white person below the age of 50 or so understands why Elizabeth Warren lied about being a minority. Every college applicant forced to tick the “caucasian/white” box on an entrance application, every job applicant forced to do the same knows the cost of that mark, how the color of your skin determines whether or not your application is accepted or you get the interview. It’s hard to fight affirmative action quotas designed to redress racial discrimination decades or even centuries before you were born, so if you can’t beat the system, why not play it?

And that’s exactly what Warren did. Warren became a minority because it benefited her career. It made her stand out from all the other white faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania. More importantly it carried a certain cache important to a monied liberal like herself working with minorities in Philadelphia; a little street cred with her students that perhaps encouraged them to relate more to her. Sure she may have been playing fast and loose with the System, but that’s what everybody does, right? Besides, it was for a worthy cause: the minority students whom she would mentor and lead to better lives.

What Warren never considered was how playing the race card at UPENN may have kept a real minority out of the position. Faculty positions are limited so she beat someone out of the job. Faced with a real minority and a fake one like Warren, it’s possible that she was chosen for the position because she was blonde and blue-eyed and a minority as well. It’s the best of both worlds to some university administrators: a woman they can feel comfortable with who shares their same culture and upbringing yet a minority that they can add to their diversity statistics.

A lot of white people have stretched the truth in the cut throat world of academia. The only difference is that most of them don’t run for the US Senate a quarter century later and get caught.

I’m becoming increasingly amazed at how deluded Obama’s supporters are. They call those of us who oppose him sheep of the Koch brothers or racist troglodytes waging a war on women, and think the “Rethuglicans” are a corrupt party of big business. They pride themselves on how tolerant and open-minded they are even as they wage an ideological war to silence anyone who questions what Obama & crew have done. Honestly I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a blatant display of self-delusion exhibited by a group since the Jonestown Massacre of 1978. These people aren’t just drinking the kool-aid, they are bottling it, advertising it and selling it as champagne.

Obama has always acted in the best interests of the groups he represents. Everything he has done has been to feed one leftist interest group or another. His close friends and golf buddies hail from the largest companies in the country including banks such as Chase and Goldman Sachs. I’ve even stopped thinking of him as a socialist since that would require him to adhere to something bigger than himself and I don’t think he believes anything is. His ego knows no bounds. He’s more in line with 3rd world dictators who take power and immediately set about making their friends and family rich. The only differences between him and Hugo Chavez is that the source of Chavez’s wealth is oil and for Obama it’s taxpayer money, and at least Chavez really believes in socialism whereas Obama only believes in himself.

Does a liberal question his or her beliefs? There isn’t a day that I don’t wonder if I’m wrong, that I’ve somehow gotten caught up in some kind of right-wing hysteria, so I try to be objective. I work hard to recognize my biases and question my assumptions. I try to listen to alternative opinions and not dismiss them without due consideration, thinking critically about facts and opinions regardless of source. I’m just as skeptical about claims by the Right as I am over claims by the Left. It’s the way I was educated, first by a no-nonsense mother and later by the Jesuits. The result of this is that over the years I have changed my opinions on issues. The only consistency I’ve found is I maintain a strong populist streak thanks to my upbringing by extremely poor parents. That’s not an exaggeration; my parents often went without food to feed my siblings until the mid 1950’s, saying they weren’t hungry while the kids ate dinner.

I look at liberals and I’m amazed at how closed minded they are. Instead of thinking of them as “progressive” I’ve begun considering them as “regressive” because that’s how they are increasingly appearing to me.

Take the “war on women” meme that has exploded in the blogosphere. No one is banning birth control. No one is demanding that women be paid less for doing the same job as a man or expecting her to stop working, return home and raise children. It’s all a straw man. The Left knows it can’t win the argument that the Catholic church shouldn’t fund contraceptives. So they start this attack, and the idiot Rick Santorum just makes it all that much easier for them by dancing to their tune.

Some of my liberal friends will shake their heads and say, “Scott, you’ve got this all wrong. There is a war on women and you’re just as blind as you claim we are.” And I’ll ask, where’s the proof of that? They’ll claim Santorum wants to ban contraception. Two points to this. First, where did he say that? Second, you realize you’re ignoring the GOP front runner, a man who has more than double the amount of delegates than Santorum? Regarding the second point, a recent liberal commenter from abroad on this blog thought Rick Santorum was “batsh*T insane” yet made no mention of Romney. Either the commenter wasn’t aware that Romney was the front-runner or didn’t understand the primary process (for this I hold the RNC partly to blame.) Evidently while Santorum is getting the press, Romney is getting the actual delegates. Given my dislike of Santorum that’s just fine by me.

As to the first point, liberals such as Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews have claimed Santorum wants to ban birth control. Okay, so show me where Santorum himself says that. What Santorum actually has said is that the states should decide contraception laws for themselves. I watched the CNN debate where he said that and he was booed by the Republican audience and attacked by the other GOP candidates. His point was a constitutional one, that there is no right to birth control in the constitution and federal laws on the subject are an example of federal overreach. The constitution is clear that powers not outlined in the document fall to the people and the states. It’s a constitutional argument but a narrow one and nowhere near a “ban” that the Left claims.

They could then bring up Sandra Fluke’s testimony in front of Congress and how Georgetown, a Catholic Jesuit-run institution, must offer to offset the cost of contraception for her and other women. A war on women? Seriously, this is the best you’ve got? Fluke’s perjured testimony ignores three fundamental tenets of Roman Catholicism that has been at its core for hundreds of years if not longer. First, only those married should have sex because the purpose of sex is procreation. Second, that procreation is a process controlled by God Himself and should not be interfered with by humans. Third, that life begins at conception and current birth control techniques such as the morning after pill and some IUDs destroy early stage embryos. These three tenets are not negotiable in the eyes of the Church.

Catholics themselves struggle with these tenets and most probably break them, but just because they have sex before marriage or use the Pill doesn’t mean the institution’s foundations need to be rebuilt. No, it means Catholics must strive to live up to their Church’s teachings. If they can’t do this then they must leave it. I understand this because as a man born and raised Roman Catholic and trained by the Jesuits I decided that I could no longer accept the Church as it is, so I left it. It wasn’t an easy decision for me and it’s one that I continue to question at times but I knew that I personally could not accept the Church’s teachings anymore so instead of trying to destroy the Church or undermine it in any way possible, I simply left it in my heart as well as my head. I am not a Catholic, and I have very good reasons for my leaving the Church of Rome. But they are my reasons and even though I am no longer a Catholic I still have a deep respect for Roman Catholicism and those who practice it. They are good people and don’t deserve the hatred that has been flowing their way.

What hatred? This hatred.

Liberals have gone beyond the pale and I have to ask myself, is this what you want? Is this the hope and change you voted for in 2008? Today the “progressive” movement advocates religious intolerance by attacking Catholics and Christians. Progressives are behind efforts to silence opposing voices and points of view through boycotts, legal threats, slurs and even violence. It supports censorship through hate speech laws and anti-pornography crusades. It infantilizes women by turning them into victims that are incapable of defending themselves and who are so weak they swoon like some Victorian Lady of the House over a single word, forcing the State to step forward like some chivalrous knight to defend their honor. And for what? A poorly written health care bill that’s possibly unconstitutional and does nothing to curb health care costs or access?

There is a war on women just not the one progressives think. All over the Middle East and Europe the freedom of women is being curtailed or destroyed completely by Islam, a religion that Progressives have allied themselves with. While they have gone, to quote my liberal commenter “batsh*t crazy” over the Catholic church’s stance on contraception, they have completely ignored the increase of assaults on women in Europe by Muslim immigrants, the rise of honor killings in the West, and the complete rollback of basic human rights throughout the Islamic world. What access to contraception do women have in Pakistan, a place where women are discouraged from walking without a male “minder,” or to pursue a career in post “Arab Spring” Egypt? When people like me raise these issues we are immediately attacked as being “islamophobes” because liberals are blinded in their politically correct belief that all cultures and people are the same, ignoring the comments of a true Progressive nearly two centuries ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson who said ““The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man.”

The progressive movement has become exactly what it fought against. Intolerant of dissenting opinions. Bigoted. Uncompromising. Anti-intellectual. Pro-censorship. Anti-freedom. In fact it’s the same movement I fought against a generation ago when I protested against the Religious Right. Perhaps I haven’t changed as much as I thought. I’m still fighting against dehumanizing forces, only the names of these forces have changed.

Like many Republicans I’m concerned selecting Romney as our standard-bearer guarantees a repeat of McCain’s defeat in 2008. Today the “accepted wisdom” by supporters of Gingrich and Santorum is that McCain was too moderate, and that by selecting another moderate as the 2012 Republican nominee we are doomed to lose in November. In order to better evaluate where Romney stands today it’s necessary to consider McCain’s mistakes during the last election cycle from the November 2008 perspective. Thankfully on election night 2008 Jennifer Rubin posted The Top Thirty Errors That Doomed McCain. I’ve reviewed these and divided them up into the following error types: Attack, Domestic Policy, Internal Campaign, Personal, Media Handling and Sarah Palin.

Rubin points out several reasons for McCain’s defeat  related to Sarah Palin. Rubin recognizes that McCain’s campaign team blew Palin’s rollout, and worse, immediately began trashing her in private. Unfortunately for McCain – and a Sarah Palin thrust into the public eye for the first time – things didn’t stop there. The disparaging remarks about Palin began leaking to the press and became public. Instead of recognizing Palin’s innate charisma with average American voters including independents and rolling her out whenever and wherever possible, McCain’s campaign team hid her and treated her as badly as the liberal mainstream media that lampooned her mercilessly as ignorant, “I can see Russia from my backyard,” and a wild-eyed soccer mom drenched in moose blood. Any decent campaign team would have been able to short circuit this treatment with the truth. For instance, Palin actually said about Russia, “They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska,” which anyone who’s ever looked at a globe or even watched an Alaskan themed show on the Discovery Channel would know is true. As for Palin’s hunting acumen, where I live dead deer carcasses are common in the backs of pickup trucks during hunting season, and anyone who’s ever eaten Bambi knows that deer meat is delicious and one of the healthier meats available. Perhaps maybe that’s why Sarah Palin is even more popular today in these parts than her former running mate ever was.

The handling of Sarah Palin points out other mistakes by McCain and his campaign staff. McCain should have shown some integrity by personally canning the staff responsible  for its handling of Palin. In fact McCain should have exhibited much greater hands-on control with his staff throughout his campaign, preventing other errors Rubin points out such as his failure to better control his team, preventing arguments and in-fighting from going public and exhibiting a campaign in apparent disarray. If he had a better campaign team, McCain wouldn’t have wasted time and resources in Iowa instead of putting those into Virginia, a state with more electoral votes at stake.

Of the 30 errors Rubin describes, these mistakes account for just under a quarter. We’ll throw in “Waiting until the final Saturday Night Live before the election to show self-deprecating humor,” to push it over that mark. We could also add McCain’s failure to find a credible economics adviser at a time when economics was the key issue of the election, made worse by McCain’s response to the financial meltdown where he called off the debates in order to show he was serious about handling the crisis, and his failure to come up with a credible economic plan in the final weeks of the campaign. So over a third of his mistakes are related to the internal machinations of McCain’s staff and the apparent bumbling of an old man out of his depth, resorting to public theater to appear relevant.

Will Romney react similarly? First off Economics happens to be Romney’s strength. McCain seemed uncomfortable with economics, much preferring interest in foreign policy. That’s not surprising since foreign policy is one of the few powers reserved for the executive branch. For a former Cold Warrior and POW like McCain economics must seem pointless. After all, a good conservative would know that sometimes the best  economic action is to do nothing, not that McCain was a good conservative (Rubin’s Reason # 28 “Too much hostility toward conservatives offering smart strategy and policy ideas.”) Romney’s business acumen directly translates to economic matters. Secondly there will be no Sarah Palin repeat this round, unless Sarah Palin appears at the convention and accepts the nomination with Romney as her VP (if so, remember folks you read it here first!) Romney will most likely choose a known quantity, a conservative with credentials that could help seal the deal with his base. Ron Paul would be a solid choice, or to allow me to breathe for the next 4 years Rick Santorum, Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal or Tim Pawlenty. The best VP might be another Rick, Rick Perry from Texas. There’s already precedent for a moderate candidate from Massachusetts selecting a conservative from Texas to be his running mate after all. McCain tried to seal the deal with conservatives with Palin, but only a few conservatives knew about her and the MSM was so shocked, and the McCain response to the Palin attacks so lukewarm, that the Media was able to use McCain’s VP choice as a cudgel to beat his campaign into the ground with.

For being as wise and experienced as McCain is, he also had Media problems as the Palin episode proved. McCain whined about the Media and he didn’t control it the way Gingrich does. Established GOP figures like Gingrich understand that belly-aching about media bias does not make headlines or win votes, but smacking them around sure does. In fact the minute Romney’s camp feels mistreated by the MSM it should take out their frustrations by having Romney chew the head off the first reporter that gets in his way just as Gingrich did to CNN’s John King. Romney’s team must understand that John King and the media loved Gingrich’s response at the January 19th, 2012 debate almost as much as Gingrich’s audience did. At the same time it could learn from Gingrich’s treatment of the media behind the scenes. No one schmoozes the MSM more than Gingrich. He has treated the press well and never blocked their access to him, whereas McCain’s team cut off access the traveling press’s access to McCain and declared war on the MSM without understanding that such actions are like beating the tide back with a broom. Yes the media is liberal, and it holds conservative candidates to a higher standard, but that hasn’t stopped conservatives like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush from reaching the Oval Office.  There are ways to handle the liberal press that allows the conservative message to get out, but it’s not easy and it shouldn’t be left to amateurs as it was in 2008.

Finally, the key to McCain’s failure according to Rubin’s reasons is what I would describe simply as McCain’s failure to go on the offensive and attack Obama and the Democrats at every opportunity. Four years on I am left with the impression that McCain tried to fight a boxing match according to the Marquess of Queensberry Rules but instead the Democrats mugged him before he even got inside the ring. I’ve identified 13 of Rubin’s 30 reasons as resulting directly or indirectly from McCain’s failure to attack Obama and the Democrats. As Rubin points out the McCain team failed miserably at “oppo” research. They failed to attack Biden for his earmarks and lobbying on behalf of the banking industry, the most powerful industry in Biden’s home state of Delaware. They managed only lukewarm attacks on Obama for his cozy ties to Chicago’s Daly Machine and Big Labor, and failed to make an issue of his ties to the racist Rev. Wright, terrorist Bill Ayers, and indicted financier Tony Rezko. McCain failed to explain the Democrat’s role in the financial meltdown including ties to Countrywide’s CEO Angelo Mozilo, proven by the lucrative deals handed to “the friends of Angelo” like Chris Dodd, Nancy Pelosi’s son Paul Pelosi jr, Barbara Boxer, James Clyburn and Donna Shalala. McCain could have created a steady drumbeat of scandal that became a rhythm throughout his campaign, tainting the Democrats and particularly their standard-bearer then Senator Obama, but instead McCain wasted his time talking about bipartisanship, allowing the Democrats to dodge their role in the economic meltdown and blame the crisis on the GOP. I’m not sure why McCain chose this path on these issues. Perhaps it’s because he has never had to fight for his political life as a senator in Arizona, or the shellacking he received by the Bush team in the South Carolina primary in 2000 left him feeling that a scorched-earth attack policy wouldn’t sit well with his conscience. Regardless McCain had the opportunity to not only paint Obama as a tool of corrupt interests but the entire leadership of the Democratic Party. Had he successfully done so he could not only have won the election but employed long “coat-tails,” taking back the Senate and maybe even the House for the GOP.

It is too soon to determine whether Romney has held back attacking the President and the Democrats. Unfortunately the Democrats have already inoculated themselves and their president from the charges that could have damaged them in 2008 but won’t today. Romney has focused Obama during most of the debates, but his team has been mostly busy in putting out the fires caused by the insurgencies of the “not Romney” candidacies of Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich and Santorum. Although I have argued that a brutal vetting of our candidates will create a more effective one to go against Obama and his allies, I’m beginning to have my doubts, although it’s good to remember that by this time four years ago Hillary was still the one to beat for the Democratic nomination. Still I’m getting to the point where I believe the GOP is facing diminishing returns by distracting Romney, forcing him to pour his resources into fighting first Gingrich then Santorum instead of developing a consistent attack strategy against Obama.

Rubin’s article is just one opinion of why McCain lost, but it goes a long way to rebutting the claim that McCain was somehow too moderate or “Obama-lite” to win that floats around conservative circles these days. The problem wasn’t McCain’s ideology or the lack of fervor he inspired among conservatives, it was the fact that his inept campaign failed to punch back twice as hard. The battle for the presidency isn’t just a euphemism. It is a physical fight, one the Democrats understand instinctively how to win and the GOP recoils from. If there is any lesson to be learned from 2008 it’s that the GOP must develop a stomach for the fight and a willingness to take it to their opponents. Romney’s scorched earth tactics against Gingrich in South Carolina prove that he has both. The only questions are will the GOP nominate him, and once nominated, will Romney do what it takes to win?

We’re only one caucus into the election season with New Hampshire on deck, but political junkies like me have been following the GOP field for most of the past year. Intelligent, more balanced people won’t pay much attention to things until the conventions in the Summer. Most won’t until after Labor Day, the traditional start of the campaign season (a tradition that’s gone the way of the day after Thanksgiving being the start of the Christmas season).

But political junkies never quit following politics. Like football fans who begin to consider the off-season draft after their teams fail to make it to the playoffs, some people begin to consider prospects for the next election after the first one’s ballots await certification. Continuing the football analogy, pre-season play has just started with the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire primary. And there have already been injuries that will impact the season, and the crafting of offense plays that could take teams to the Super Bowl.

The Republican Party has already make enough mistakes that we GOP fans are concerned. First, who’s the genius who came up with the idea of holding a bazillion debates, most of which are hosted by key operatives of the opposite party? Take a look at the Debate Schedule. From May 5, 2011 to March 19, 2012 there are a total of 28 intramural debates scheduled. While I cannot find similar statistics for either party prior to this election, it strikes me as a bit much especially when the formats are variants of a question/answer session with the former posed by “moderators.”

Next, check out the sponsors. The majority of the debates were at least partially sponsored by the GOP, i.e. the September 12, 2011 debate sponsored by CNN and the Tea Party Express. But the problem is that these sponsorships consist of a news media organization or a group of them coupled with a political entity. While the political entity may support the GOP, the news media outlet it is paired with may not. Take for example the Sept 7, 2011 debate sponsored by the Reagan Library – a conservative supporting institution – paired with NBC and Politico. A UCLA study found that NBC News was biased to the Left. The website Politico, which in its infancy was accused by the Left for being biased against them has focused almost exclusively on the foibles of the GOP, playing a key role in publishing unsubstantiated rumors about Herman Cain that later led to his exit from the race.

Bias itself isn’t the problem. There is nothing wrong with ABC employing former Clinton strategist and Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos as a journalist. But just because he’s a “journalist” does not mean that his political instincts have been neutered and he lacks prejudices against the Republican Party he actively fought for the majority of his career.

These were displayed in their unalloyed grandeur at the Jan 7, 2012 debate in New Hampshire when he brought up the issue of state control over contraception. It is an issue that is irrelevant today after the 1965 Supreme Court ruling Griswold v. Connecticut which established a right to privacy, setting a precedent cited later by Roe v. Wade. Overturning Roe v. Wade is in the GOP platform, and unites the social conservative wing of the party. But contraception is not an issue. While the Roman Catholic church officially opposes it, various Protestant faiths have no problem with it. Romney’s Mormon faith officially allows contraception, but since having children is an important facet of being Mormon, it is unofficially discouraged.

So why did Stephanopoulos raise the topic? Since it isn’t an issue, he could be sure that whomever he asked the question to would be ill-prepared to answer it. Since Stephanopoulos knew Romney is a Mormon, the chances were good that Romney would respond in a way that damaged his standing with the other candidates (taking a liberal position on it) or more likely, expressed the unofficial Mormon position on the topic thereby painting him as an extremist who wanted to ban the Pill. Romney reacted honestly, thereby catching Stephanopoulos in his own trap. If anything unites conservatives, it is distrust of mainstream journalism.

Is the Republican Party stupid? Of the 28 debates only 8 of them are moderated by media outlets friendly to the GOP.

Again, there is nothing wrong with bias. FoxNews’s “Fair and Balanced” mantra is annoying. It is impossible to be completely fair and balanced. Humans always have biases which is why double blind studies are considered the gold standard in scientific research. Better to recognize this fact and try to temper one’s biases rather then deny they exist altogether. Conservatives know the mainstream media, Hollywood and much of the non-mainstream outlets on the Internet are biased against them. So why are they allowing these outlets that have an agenda celebrating Democrats  as wise and caring people, and Republicans as hateful, frothing-at-the-mouth extremists to control the apparatus the GOP is using to vet their presidential candidate?

It reminds me of kids in a high school lunch room. The Democrats are the cool kids sitting at the “cool” table, and the Republicans are the frumpy-looking kids who are so desperate to appear cool that they will debase themselves in order to sit with the cool kids. Republicans will never be cool with an attitude like that.

The GOP doesn’t need the dinosaur media like the Big 3 Networks. These outfits are shutting down their news gathering operations because no one watches them anymore. Ratings-wise FoxNews crushes MSNBC, CNBC and CNN - so why did CNN get more debates (8) than FoxNews (6)? An argument can be made that exposing the candidates to aggressive questions from left wing journalists helps weed out those who perform poorly and prepares the eventual nominee for the hurricane-force attacks leveled by journalists on behalf of the Democrats. Yet one could counter that this benefit is lost when the candidates attack using themes such as Romney’s job destruction at Bain Capital. In six months or so Republicans will hear every line uttered by Perry, Huntsman and Gingrich criticizing Romney’s tenure at Bain this week.

So why did the GOP sign up with these liberal outlets? For the same reason that the uncool kids make fools of themselves to entertain the cool kids in high school. They think they’re going to be seen as hip.

Republicans will never be hip in the way they want to be. Conservatives by their very nature question Change, understanding that everything new or popular isn’t necessarily better and everything old or out of date isn’t necessarily worthless. What passes for conservatism today would have been considered liberal as recently as the Reagan Administration. In fact the Tea Party was founded as a reaction to this after conservative Republicans began invading countries and spending profligately like liberal Democrats.

28 debates is overkill. That is close to 3 debates a month, and so far it is questionable how much the party as a whole has benefited from this schedule. The next time we have an open field, one a month would suffice – especially if they were held in different formats (Town Halls, Lincoln-Douglas style) – anything except the question/answer/rebuttal style that only political junkies enjoy.

Also, stick to conservative-friendly sponsors. Fox News should host most of the debates, but how about Big Government, Pj Media, American Conservative or other conservative new media outlets? More people read these websites than watch MSNBC or CNBC. More importantly, these venues would handle questions asked by Republicans to help Republicans decide who their Republican presidential candidate will be. The GOP has smart people. It even has cool people. Nick Gillespie wears a leather jacket and has a tattoo! Such action would show that Republicans are confident, and that while we may not be cool, it doesn’t matter as long as we run the world.

This is no surprise. Democrats have been abandoning the white middle class for years. My parents were solid working class stock forged by the Depression. They voted Democrat for generations. My mother doesn’t know what has happened to the party.

Party’s change. It usually takes decades but they aren’t static groups. As society changes, so do they. Parties in a flourishing republic should reflect people’s views, and as they evolve, so should those of the parties.

What’s interesting is that the Democrats seem to want a coalition of two very different groups. Minority voters who tend to be extremely socially conservative, and white liberals who are extremely socially liberal. By jettisoning the white working class, which also tends to be socially conservative, the party will exacerbate the tensions between the two groups. Eventually some are going to feel that the party no longer reflects its values and will move to another. In a two party system, there is only one other “other”: the Republicans.

I’ve written in the past about the Democrats taking the minority vote for granted, and how the GOP was better suited for black and Hispanic voters who tend to be more religious and less accommodating of gay marriage. Politics is a zero sum game, so the changes the Democrats make will facilitate those by the Republicans. The parties will change, or at least what they stand for will, but the battle between the two will continue.

As Congressman Barney Frank exits stage left, I think we must remember his contribution to the economic mess we find ourselves in.

New York Times, September 11, 2003 – The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

.....

“These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. “The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

“I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.

For some reason most of the conservatives I know tend to have more liberal than conservative friends even though statistics show that conservatives outnumber liberals in the US by two to one. My fellow Watcher’s Council colleague Bookworm Room is married to one, and even my wife aligns more to the Left although her recent experiences with Medicaid and other government interference in health care is steering her hard to the Right. The vast majority of my “Facebook Friends” are liberals and regularly post about politics. Being conservative and polite I try to keep my mouth shut, but it takes some serious effort sometimes and every once in a while I just can’t help but open it.

Recently Elizabeth Warren’s little canned speech about taxation “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,”  made the rounds among liberals and sure enough a couple of my friends posted it on their “walls”. I noticed that it originated at a site called “The Other 98%.” I recognized that immediately as a liberal meme that 2% of Americans own the other 98% or something to that effect, and when matched with Warren’s speech it implied that 2% owned factories and broke the social contract which liberals like her were going to rectify by imposing taxes on them. I did a little research then broke my “no posting about politics on Facebook” rule.

“As best as I can figure out the bottom of that 2% is around $200k for a married couple filing jointly (IRS statistics use 1%, 5% etc). I doubt anyone earning that who owns a factory. Even the 1% cutoff of $388k could mean 2 doctors or a pair of lawyers.”Those earners making $200k might be considered bourgeoisie by some making do with $30k a year, but I doubt that Warren Buffett, George “Judenrat” Soros or even Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon would hang out with them after they washed the smell of hippies of themselves (except Moore; by the looks of him I doubt he washes much.) I later wrote, “What concerns me is that the rhetoric is being directed at the top 2% of taxpayers – not solely billionaires. Warren is including people making $200k with the likes of those worth tens of billions of dollars.”

Well that opened me up to friends of my liberal friend. One posted:

“Why? Sorry, but I find it hard to feel terribly concerned that people who are earning “only” 200k per year might have to pay more in taxes. The words “cry me a river” somehow get stuck in my head every time I try to muster up some pity in my heart for folks bringing home only 6 or 7 times my annual income.”

I didn’t know this woman, but a review of her profile found that she was evidently a librarian who got her undergrad degree from one of the best public schools in the country, then went to graduate school at one of the country’s most expensive private schools, albeit one not considered top-tiered. Judging by her photograph she was younger than me, although not by much. For all that education, by her own admission she was making $35k year, max?

Long ago while the Wife was attending preparing for medical school, I invited a salesman from Appleby windows into my house to learn about vinyl replacement windows (big mistake; don’t ever mess with Appleby Products.) The guy was not a salesman, he was a con-artist. I like salespeople; my mother was a saleswoman, and the best never lie or cheat their customers. This guy was a con man. He dodged questions about the price of the windows and instead asked personal questions about our backgrounds, searching for emotional leverage over us. We were honest, but we knew what he was doing. We mentioned the Wife’s graduate degrees from Japan and her continuing study while prepping for med school. He eventually asked, “You care about your baby, don’t you?” We nodded. “You don’t want him to catch cold now do you?”  “I thought viruses cause the common cold,” my wife chirped. The salesman went on for a few minutes until it became clear to him that we weren’t going to by his crappy overpriced windows he went from being pleasant to rude in a heartbeat.  In exasperation he said to my wife, “All that education gone to waste.” It was the first time I’ve ever physically grabbed a guy and threw him out of my house. I didn’t know I had the strength or the body mass to actually throw another man out of my house, but I did heave him through the door.

When I read the librarian’s comment on Facebook I remembered, “All that education gone to waste.” It was true in this librarian’s case. Grad school and making $35k a year? Whose fault is it that? Society’s? Mine? George W. Bush’s?

6 years after I graduated college I was faced with a problem: I was back in the USA, had a wife and a baby to care for, and my political science degree and the experience I had overseas teaching in Japan wasn’t worth anything on the job market. So I took a job working at a help desk in the IT field. It’s not that I loved answering phones and being yelled at by my boss, but it gave me a foot on a path that led to better paying jobs in the IT field. In two years I had parlayed that job into one making more than the librarian does today. I kept learning new skills which lead to better paying jobs. Some of these involved risk. The technology changes quickly in IT, and worse, both India and China had coders that charged 1/10th what American programmers charged. But I stepped from technology to another which netted me a little more money to pay the bills while the wife went to school. I eventually left coding altogether, not because I don’t like it (I do) but because it had become a commodity that had been offshored.

The Wife’s story is even less conventional. After 7 years active duty in the Navy, she went to college and got her undergrad. Then she went to Japan and got her D.Sc in zoology. After we returned to the US, she was accepted in a postbac program and eventually got accepted to medical school. For years she worked hard while piling up a massive student loan debt. Now she’s working 60 hours a week and saving people’s lives. I don’t know any librarians who do either of those.

This brings up an important point: marriage or even cohabitation where the two parties pull their resources together is important. The librarian is evidently single. If she paired up with someone, even another librarian at $35k they together would be making just shy of a third of that 2% $200k figure. She is also a government employees; these tend to have lower dollar salaries but better benefits packages. It is unlikely that she is including those benefits in her “6 or 7 times my annual income” statement. She might think she’s only making $35k but is receiving another $15k in benefits such as pension, health care, etc. I have spent most of my career as a contractor in the IT field, so there are no benefits; the hourly wage I make is all I get.

But with all that education, $35k benefits or no isn’t a lot. At that salary she isn’t even paying income tax, and I’ll leave it to others to decide whether someone who pays nothing should have a say on those who do pay income tax. It sounds to me that she resents her salary, so why doesn’t she change it?

Are librarians worth more? The market seems to think so. The median salary (base pay only) of librarians is $56,749 – so I’m not sure why she’s making much less. Perhaps she’s working part-time, but if so she shouldn’t compare herself to those working full time (and usually many more hours) for more money. If she wants to make more money, what’s to stop her?

I feel like telling her: Change careers. I did, and so did my wife. She started medical school beyond the age of 40; I had to start my career chained to a phone being yelled at by computer illiterates at the age of 31. There are plenty of jobs out there that she could get that pay more. It takes courage and some preparation, but it’s better than resenting others who took the risks, work much longer hours, and reap the rewards – which we should remember by supporting Warren and other limousine liberals she wants the Government to steal.

Our system has its flaws. I have personally lost a job in a futile campaign against offshoring and labor dumping through the government’s meddling in the labor market. I worry about things like the cost of education and the future value of college degrees. Just like many liberals I too resent seeing the same people who caused the financial meltdown still in power instead of the chains they deserve. But for all of its flaws, it’s still the best at providing choice to anyone who demands it.

If you want to become a doctor, you can become one. If you want to start your own business and sell tutus to little girls studying dance, you can. If you want to start a restaurant or cook at one, there is no bureaucrat needing a bribe or law preventing you. Our system excels at providing choices to people whereas other systems provide outcomes. You are a farmer, but you will sell your produce to us at a price we determine. You are a doctor, but we will determine how much you are paid for each patient. You want to sell shoes in my district, you will have to pay me a flat fee every month (that’s how my friend Jan Mohamed was shaken down in Tanzania under socialism).

It takes much more than education and hard work to become a millionaire or a billionaire. To reach those heights one needs luck, family connections – a variety of things that are out of reach to all but a very few. But if you are young and your goal is to make a solid middle class salary of $100k a year, or $200k for the top 2% of households, you have to choose a career that pays well and you have to marry or live with someone with the same goal. There’s nothing magical about that formula, and no reason to resent those who have achieved that goal.

As my late mother-in-law said, usually when I had come home complaining after a rough day at the office or the Wife had a particularly tough night on call, “You chose this path.” And we have, all of us, chosen our paths. The Wife and I could have chosen to forgo having children, moved to a major city and gotten higher paying jobs; but we chose to live in a rural area with our rescued animals and our son. She could make much more money as a dermatologist or cardiologist, but she chose the lower paying specialty of family medicine because she wanted to be an old country doctor.

I almost titled this “Chosen Paths: Why I Don’t Resent Those Who Are Better Off Than I Am,” but that would have undermined the very theme of this essay. I am better off than anyone else, living in a beautiful area of the country, with a woman I adore and a son whose every breath is a miracle to me. Sure people have more money than I do, but I don’t resent them; why should I when what I have means more to me than a figure on a bank account statement? My mother-in-law, crazy as she was, was right; I did choose this path, just as the librarian chose hers. Instead of resenting those who make more than she does, perhaps its time that she changed her path to one that will end in a place where she will feel much the same as I do here, among my family and my misfit pack of dogs in the North Carolina mountains.

UPDATE: As the Occupy Wall St. movement has grown, so has the percentage it claims to represent. The Other 98% has morphed into We Are the 99% – probably after some Lefties realized $200k won’t make you rich enough to steal from, especially in their favorite hangouts in San Francisco and New York City where $200k is almost poverty level.

I’m a white guy and I don’t claim to understand what it means to be black in the United States although I try. I grew up in a house with a father who worked with black people and spoke about them using an assortment of epithets. When I referred to my late father as a bigot, my elderly mother was shocked and defended him saying that he didn’t have a problem with black people just those he worked with. I grew up in a different era after the Civil Rights struggle had been won, raised by a mother who cultivated a conscience within me, one based on the morality of her strong Roman Catholic faith mixed with egalitarianism arising from her German work ethic. My political heroes were men like Martin Luther King Jr., FDR and Abraham Lincoln. My favorite baseball player electrified the diamond whenever he made it to base: Lou Brock. And the music I listened to with my friends as we explored the woods surrounding our suburban neighborhoods: rap pioneers Grandmaster Flash, the Gap Band and Kurtis Blow.

But appreciating black culture doesn’t mean that I understand what it means to be black. Living in Japan I was regularly discriminated against because I was a foreigner, and that gave me an insight into what it must be like. I’d walk into a store and the clerk behind the counter would watch me suspiciously afraid that I would steal something (and afraid I’d speak English to him). Newspapers regularly insinuated that foreigners were behind all crime even though statistically 95% was carried out by native Japanese. Restaurants with empty seats that I entered suddenly became “full.” Landlords refused to rent an apartment to my wife and I, so the rental agent who assisted us resorted to calling prospective landlords and asking them flat out, “Are you willing to rent to Americans?” After 25 or 30 we found one willing to take the $8,000 bribe known euphemistically as “key money” (reikin) and rented to us. At the English Language school I taught at one of the teachers had been warned not to date a Japanese girl. A few days after that warning he was assaulted by a biker gang and nearly killed, spending 3 weeks in the hospital.  For four years there I was a subject of scorn and fascination wherever I went, and it took several years after leaving Japan for me to regain my perspective and love of the Japanese and their culture. But escape from that racist environment was only a plane ticket away, and for a variety of reasons I chose to live there. I recognize that isn’t an option for black Americans.

I lived in a very isolated place in Tanzania for a year and that showed me the limits of skin color. The people I associated with shared the same skin color but were very different. The Tongwe tribe that I lived with had avoided Arab slavers during the 15th-19th centuries by hiding in the mountains. They had been forced off the mountains and their small villages into large towns of mixed tribes during President Nyerere’s socialist collectivization experiment known as Ujamaa. They were very poor and viewed as backward by the other tribes, especially the Chagga, the tribe making up most of Tanzania’s ruling elite. I noticed these differences whenever I traveled up Lake Tanganyika from our research site to Kigoma with some Tongwe I hired as guides and helpers. They were quite uncomfortable in town, and acted in the way you would expect someone from Iowa might after stepping foot for the first time in Manhattan, and relied upon me to deal with government officials and merchants even though my command of Swahili was rudimentary. At the time I was noticing the differences between tribes in Tanzania, I was also exposed to the aftermath of the greatest genocide since the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Outside of Kigoma refugee camps had been set up for the Hutus who escaped to northern Tanzania after the Tutsi took over of Rwanda, ending the Hutu’s slaughter there. There was no difference in skin color between Hutu and Tutsi – but like the Tongwe and Chagga they came from cultures different enough to cause trouble. To the Tongwe that meant a lower standard of living and subservience to the Chagga; to the Tutsis it meant slaughter on a horrific scale.

Skin color hasn’t mattered in other conflicts either. Consider the Troubles in Ireland. There is not a spot of difference in skin tone between the Irish Republicans and the Irish Unionists. You could take DNA from both and find that the two had the same genetic makeup. But that didn’t stop them from killing each other for almost a thousand years. The two groups are culturally distinct however, and that is what matters most to them. The two groups even pronounce the letter “H” differently; simply reciting the alphabet would betray one’s unionist or republican sympathies, a tactic used by the paramilitaries on suspected spies.

So if skin color doesn’t matter in places like Africa, why should it be valued so highly by African-Americans in the United States?

Barack Obama has skin the same color as  African-Americans, but he does not share their culture. Obama was raised by white women and attended schools that weren’t available to most African-Americans. He has lived in a predominantly white culture over his entire professional career, that of liberal white academia, which is why when he tries to sound “black” he sounds as phony as a white guy talking “street.” Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesa, not Detroit and Philadelphia. The only streets he knew were the quiet suburban ones that his grandmother lived on – not the streets alive with the scent of ethnic cooking,  rap music and occasional police sirens.

In 2008 Barack Obama was black and his election to the presidency was a milestone in our history because it was the first time America elected a president having black skin. But America didn’t elect an African-American. It elected a liberal Democrat that happened to have black skin.

To Barack Obama that should be enough to placate the African-American community. He garnered 90+% of the community’s vote in 2008, and expects the same support in 2012. For the past 3 years he has done nothing more for the community. In fact he has put in place policies that make black unemployment worse such as his administration’s refusal to close the border with Mexico. Illegal immigrants don’t compete for jobs held by white people in investment banks; they compete with jobs held by African-Americans at factories and construction sites.

Why? He believes he has the African-American vote in his pocket be he has to compete with the Republicans for the Hispanic vote.

Until the 1960’s Democratic Party was a bastion of unreconstructed racists. Today the party practices the racism of low expectations and the assumption that African-Americans are best served by the culture of liberal whites and too stupid to learn otherwise. Republicans, the party of emancipation, once received the lion-share of the black vote. It receives only a few percent and has written off even attempting to garner support from the community.

That is a shame for both Republicans and African-Americans. Columnist John Hall gives 5 good reasons why African-Americans should reconsider their knee-jerk support of the Democratic Party, including the one I mention above: they are taken for granted. GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain has gone so far as to claim that the Democrats have brainwashed black Americans into voting for them. If true, it’s time for African-Americans to wake up and wield the power they have to control their destiny.

The American Jewish community is waking up to the damage their support has done to one of their most important causes: Israel. The Republican Party supports Israel in such a big way that it scares liberals who believe that peace in the Middle East can only be achieved by Israel giving up more land for Palestinians – to launch rockets and mortars from judging by the Israeli experience after its withdrawal from Gaza. American Jews are questioning whether their socialist economic policies that are anathema to the GOP are more important to them then unwavering GOP support for Israel. Simply by questioning whether they should continue to allow themselves to be taken for granted by a party that appeases Israel’s enemies they improve their status as viewed by both parties. The Jews are now in play for the 2012 whereas the African-American community is not. Yet.

Blacks need to put their votes in play for the 2012 election. They need to honestly reevaluate the GOP and see whether the party will give them more for their support than the Democrats. Merely by doing so they will force the Democrats to respond and improve their status within the political sphere.

African-Americans need to recognize that skin color is shallow, and it is time in the immortal words of Martin Luther King jr. for politicians to “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  The GOP has also been reconsidering its relationship to the black community. Two of its rising stars are Herman Cain and Congressman Alan West. Both men happen to be black, but you wouldn’t know it judging by the support they garner among whites. They symbolize the demise of racism even as white liberals call them racists.

Liberals want to keep black Americans down. They want them to remain dependent on government programs that the liberals can control. The moment African-Americans like Cain, West or even Bill Cosby question this control, the liberals slap the word racist on them. That is the liberal way of dealing with “uppity n———” just as their Democratic forefathers in the South resorted to the lash.

UPDATE: Lloyd Marcus takes O’Donnell to task, “Arrogant White Liberal Tells Cain How To Be Black.”

Two and a half years ago, a Democratic-controlled Congress and Executive formulated a stimulus plan that was supposed to help America through a recession. It was a grand $787 Billion scheme meant to put Americans to work, keep unemployment below 8%, rebuild our infrastructure, and insure our nation’s solvency. Resorting to a Keynesian stimulus was a big risk; the equivalent of an individual maxing out his credit card for a trip to Las Vegas and betting all his money on a single roll of the dice. If the dice land in his favor, he wins big, but if they don’t he loses everything – except for the credit card bill that comes due.

Einstein once said of the universe that “God does not play dice,” but politicians do with the economy – especially with money that is not their own. At the time a number of people opposed the stimulus plan including me. I, along with many others, also opposed the bank bailout and demanded the heads of the banks at least figuratively, if not literally once the Democratic Congress coached by a Republican Treasury secretary pushed that through. Aside from the moral hazard the bailouts caused, the biggest problem was the assumption of debt.

As anyone who is indebted knows, debt limits freedom. If I’m paying the bank $400 a month on a car, I can’t spend that money on something else even more important. Say the car breaks down and I need to repair it; I can’t use that $400 to fix my car. Debt is the last thing you want in times of crisis. If your job situation is precarious or a new mouth is on the way, you need more cash and less debt.

Our government is now realizing the pain of indebtedness. The stimulus has failed; the Vegas dice throw has come up box cars and the $787 billion the politicians put on credit cards must be paid. Even though they could really use that $787 billion right now to calm the markets or stop the economy from moving into another recession, they can’t use it because they don’t have it.

It seemed like a great idea at the time. The trip to Vegas was very exciting. All the Democratic constituencies were purring like kittens in the laps of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama. Had it worked, the Democrats and Obama would be heroes – and the Tea Partiers would truly be at the fringes as tax dodger/Vietnam War hero-pretender Sen. John Kerry imagines them to be today.

But now the Democrats are left with the hangover after the Vegas trip, and the bills are coming due. There’s no room on America’s credit card for another trip to Vegas for “double-or-nothing” and taxpayers like me are tapped out. There is a very good reason, aside from my personal belief that gambling is immoral, that I don’t gamble: I don’t want to lose everything. The Democrats gambled and lost; I hope they feel as bad as they pretend to feel, although I doubt it. While Clinton might be able to feel the pain of others, I doubt Pelosi, Reid, Kerry and the other millionaires in their party, can.

This doesn’t excuse Republicans. When the GOP controlled Congress and the White House government spending ballooned on everything from the Department of Homeland Security to entitlements. In fact the 2006 election which saw the GOP lose control of Congress was in part due to the dissatisfaction of many conservatives and libertarians who felt the party had become a clone of the Democrats, at least when it came to raiding the treasury.

But what spares the GOP some of the blame is the Tea Party within it. The Tea Party has fought for smaller government and reigning in spending since its inception during the government bailouts of 2008 and the stimulus of 2009. If it wasn’t for the Tea Party America would be in even worse shape. Don’t forget that it was the Democrats who demanded last Spring a “clean” debt ceiling bill that would have raised the debt ceiling without any spending cuts whatsoever.

Where is the Tea Party in the Democratic Party? Where are the fiscal conservatives on the Left? There aren’t any. They were purged by the fiscal liberals who took power in 2006 under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Men like Congressman Dick Gephardt and Zell Miller resigned rather than fight for their own seats against left-wing ideologues desperate to push their way to the government trough. Senator Joe Lieberman only survived the purge by leaving the party.

The Democrats looked to the left in Europe and dreamed of a party along the lines of European socialists, and after the 2008 election that landed them the White House, they had it. Margaret Thatcher once said that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money, and reality has reasserted itself. The new era of fiscal conservatism has dawned on America and the Democrats (and a large group of Republicans) are woefully unprepared for it.

Chad the Pirate-King pointed out some statistics to me over the weekend. He noticed that when he plotted the several important milestones for the Democrats against the labor participation rate, what was good for the Democrats was bad for the participation rate. See chart below.

This chart will affirm everything that Republicans believe about Democratic leadership. Democrats will retort that statistics can be twisted to support any point of view and that I’m already on record as being biased against them. This is true.

But other things struck me with this chart.

Note that until July 2008 the labor participation rate was gradually drifting downward – about a full point over 7 1/2 years after the labor rate peaked in 2001 (chart below). So during the “good times” of the Bush presidency, times that weren’t so good in the 2001-02 recession, people were leaving the labor force. Why?

Another observation of the chart is the trough of low unemployment roughly between July 2003 and July 2008. While unemployment varied two points during that time, the labor participation rate fluctuated only half a point. So if unemployment was falling, where were the people coming to fill the jobs?

Similarly when the recession took hold, after the Democrats took control of all three branches of federal government (and a majority of governorships and state legislatures too), the labor participation rate falls and unemployment rises. This makes sense since people who are out of a job aren’t laboring in the economy. But then something odd happens in October 2009: the unemployment rate begins to fall along with the labor participation rate.

The most obvious reason would be those whose unemployment benefits have expired are dropped from the unemployment statistic. If they were included the rate would be 14-17% according to my quick analysis in Excel, meaning that there are a whole lot of people above that wiggly unemployment line that started 2 years ago. That’s roughly 50-90% more than the current unemployment rate is reporting. That’s a lot of people to officially ignore.

Which begs the question: Are they being ignored for political reasons? An unemployment rate of 14-17% hasn’t been seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in office in 1940. While FDR is a progressive icon, the unemployment during his administration is the type of memory progressives like to forget. And it’s easy enough to play with the statistics to get them to say what you want them to say: simply write-off millions as having given up on the job search and presto! an unemployment rate that’s a quarter to half of what it would have been otherwise.

A similar rewrite of the inflation statistics has accomplished the same thing when it comes to prices. Anyone who buys their own food and gas knows that prices have noticeably risen over the past year – yet according to the BLS inflation is running at 3.6%. So either consumers are extremely perceptive to notice a 3.6% increase or the Universe the BLS calculates the CPI in is NOT the same one most consumers inhabit. The price rises I have seen, such as the 25% increase in the price of generic shredded cheese in a fortnight, remind me of the inflation of the 1970s. As it should. The BLS changed the way it calculated the CPI with the result that today’s CPI is artificially lower than it would be if it was calculated using the methodology employed in the 1970s. This makes historical comparisons much harder to make, and provides plausible deniability to those in power. The BLS has only one master to serve, and for the past five years that master – Congress – has been controlled by Democrats.

So if the average person can’t trust statistics, what can they trust? Well, they can trust their own experience. I do all the grocery shopping and the majority of major purchases in our house, and prices have been definitely rising a lot faster than 3.6%. Unemployment is 9.6%, yet I know of several friends and family members who are unemployed including three that are no longer counted as such because they “gave up looking for work” according to the BLS (which is BS according to them.)

Another independent barometer is the price of gold. Gold is at levels not seen since Reagan took office. It is still off its high in current dollars ($2,400/oz) but it is on track to reach it in six months. A government bureaucrat can’t change its price by simply changing the way a troy ounce is calculated – although I’m sure someone would like to try. Gold has always been an indicator of trouble. When gold rises, something is hitting the fan and it’s not hot-air coming out of Washington.

For the past three years we have been living through a very tumultuous time in our history. Although the current Chinese high-handed rhetoric towards Europe and especially the US is overstated (China is a parasite on the world economy; if the host weakens, so does the parasite), it got one thing right: living in interesting times is indeed a curse.

Slate on the current dating scene makes me glad I’m not in it:

As a result, Match began “weighting” variables differently, according to how users behaved. For example, if conservative users were actually looking at profiles of liberals, the algorithm would learn from that and recommend more liberal users to them. Indeed, says Thombre, “the politics one is quite interesting. Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than a liberal is.” That is, when it comes to looking for love, conservatives are more open-minded than liberals.

Waahut? I thought conservatives=closed minded troglodytes and liberals=open minded human beings, at least that’s what I had been lead to believe reading the Huffington Post and Vanity Fair. But here was Amarnath Thombre, the engineer hired by Match.com to update the sites matchmaking algorithm, stating the near opposite: conservatives may still be troglodytes, but they are open minded trog’s at the very least. And liberals might be closed-minded, but they are still human beings and better than their lesser human right-wing counterparts.

What’s interesting is that in my personal experience, Liberal-Liberal pairings predominate. The Wife has a wealthy friend who was horrified to learn that neither Linda nor I voted for Obama in 2008. “But you can’t be Republicans,” she spat. The very idea that the Wife could share the woman’s viewpoint on humanitarian issues like health care in Africa, yet diverge on other issues such as health care and foreign policy simply didn’t make any sense at all to her.

Recently I had the opportunity to meet one of her colleagues and his wife. He is primary care physician with over 35 years of experience and a fundamentalist Christian who believes in Intelligent Design. His wife also does mission work in Nagorno-Karabakh, and seem stunned that I was familiar with the area and its history. Yet both are hard-core Leftists that left me bemused at the dining table for the cognitive dissonance that must exist between their religious and political beliefs. I saw the same situation with a sister of mine and her husband, a retired Lutheran minister who believed in Hope and Change but not Evolution. My son couldn’t believe it and began to challenge him, but a wink and a wry smile from me made him back off.

Although she did vote for McCain, I consider our relationship to be a Liberal-Conservative pairing with either one of us taking the opposite position depending on the issue. For example, I support killing America’s enemies no matter where they hide. This requires international engagement. The Wife thinks America needs to pull out of Afghanistan, Iraq, – and Europe and Asia too. When it comes to gays in the military, I am 100% in support of allowing them to serve openly while the Wife thinks it’s a bad idea that could endanger unit cohesion and soldier’s lives. Being that she served and I didn’t, I weight her opinion significantly although not enough to switch my position.

As for conservative-conservative pairings, I don’t know of any although I don’t doubt their existence. Perhaps its my educational background, but the vast majority of my friends and colleagues are Liberal-Liberal, with a few in Liberal-Conservative relationships. It’s the reason why I avoid discussing politics with all but the best of friends, and avoid it altogether on social media sites like Facebook. I learned that the hard way when an old friend defended Helen Thomas’s comments on Israel. Certain subjects are friendship killers, and the anti-Semitic rant that came out of his mouth reminded me why I was no longer friends with the bigot. Unfortunately his Jew-hatred was generally accepted and condoned by other liberal friends we held in common. The argument was one of the more gut-wrenching experiences that I have had online.

As my experience suggests, people are more complex than the labels used to describe them. I’ve personally never felt comfortable with the label “conservative” that I’ve donned to differentiate me from “liberals” on certain issues like the Global War on Terror over the past 10 years. Conservatives like Mike Huckabee and John Boehner don’t represent me just as liberals like Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid don’t. I hold a leftist position on gay marriage, a rightist position on support of the military, a hard-leftist position on the bankers (I want to see them tarred and feathered – seriously) and a hard-conservative position on the size of the federal government (the 14 Amendment was put there by Satan). Thombre’s algorithm at Match.com would have a heckuva time finding me a mate – which is why I’m grateful and appreciate my luck at finding the Wife when I did.

I have found self-described “liberals” some of the most intolerant folks around. We couldn’t raise the topic of politics around my brother-in-law our last trip to St. Louis for fear that he would blow his top while arguing. The Wife’s wealthy friend admitted to her that she was the only “Republican” friend she had. These are but anecdotal incidents that anyone could refute with their right-wing brother or crazy Republican aunt. And I do have liberal friends who are open-minded. I treasure these friendships because they keep me from the excesses of the extremes, reminding me that while they may have a different opinion on a specific topic, they are still decent human beings.

By I do wonder if Thombre is on to something. On broader issues self-identifying liberals seem as keen on censoring the media and viewpoints they disagree with as much as the Moral Majority did in its heyday in the 1980s. Conservative or libertarian groups are not pushing a “fairness doctrine” to take a popular radio personality off the air the way liberals are with their attempts at silencing Rush Limbaugh. Nor are activists on the Right writing sponsors to avoid advertising on MSNBC the way Leftists are with their DropFox campaign backed by Emperor Palpatine George Soros. People laugh at the “fair and balanced” tag of Fox News, yet I’ve seen just as many Democratic politicians on it as Republicans, watched left wing commentators Bob Beckel, Mara Liasson and Juan Williams hold their own against Charles Krauthammer, Bill Krystol, and Steve Hayes, and seen stories achieve notoriety there long before they appear in the New York Times.

Whereas Ed Meese and other conservative Reagan appointees raised the banner of censorship in the 1980’s, the flag was passed to Tipper Gore and the Left who have carried it through the ‘90s to today. Campus hate speech codes put in place by progressives are nothing more than censorship with a happy face slapped on it. 25 years ago the Religious Right controlled the Conservative agenda. Today the religious right is increasingly irrelevant to the Republican party’s fortunes as the libertarians gain influence and the party becomes open to ideas that were owned by the Left until now.

If true, what could explain the open mindedness of conservatives? Most of the conservatives I know are former liberals, while most of the liberals I know have never changed. It is possible that conservatives who for whatever reason changed their thinking may have not forgotten their previous beliefs and affiliations. During the 1980’s I protested against the Reagan administration and supported Leftist causes. 9-11 changed my worldview but it did not change my core beliefs. I still value human rights; I just don’t support Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch anymore because of their anti-American and anti-Israel biases. I still want to help the less fortunate, but not by replacing personal initiative with entitlement. I want to protect the environment, but not by covering property owners or businesses with red tape. It would be interesting to survey self-described liberals and conservatives to see if they have changed their affiliations over the years. If as I suspect more conservatives are ex-liberals than vice versa, then the change could explain Thrombre’s finding.

I recently heard of a business that is employing illegals and paying them sub-minimum wage. The owners even make them work everyday except one a month and threaten to fire them if they sit down or take a break at any time during the day. It’s an agricultural based business, and like many in rural America it is dependent on cheap labor. As far as I know it doesn’t force the people to work there (I’ve heard that at least one employee quit because of the working conditions and pay), but this information posed a dilemma to me, one that challenged my populist and libertarian instincts.

What is the ethical thing to do? Call ICE? Doing this would guarantee the illegals and their families would get deported. Now I may be a registered Re-thuglican, but I’m not heartless. The vast majority of illegals working here are hard working, honest folk (except for their complete disregard for America’s immigration laws), and alerting Immigration would hurt the workers more than their employer, who would most likely get a small fine if they received any punishment at all. The enterprise is based in one of the poorest counties in the state, and they do employ citizens (although they don’t treat them any better than the illegals.)

Should I do nothing and allow “slavery” to rise again in the South? Funny how that word gets abused almost as much as the “H” word (“Holocaust”) does. This isn’t slavery. Before the Civil War slaves could not leave their jobs; doing so could result in severe punishment and often their death. This business isn’t holding any of its workers behind barbed wire. Each is free to leave, and many do – usually involuntarily when the supervisor fires them. They are then replaced by others. In this area there are tens of thousands of illegals working the tobacco and corn fields with more flooding in daily.

And that’s the problem. Those of us who want to close the border to illegal immigration are often viewed as heartless, even un-American for our views. But those who support open borders and lax immigration rules never discuss who their policies hurt the most: the immigrants already here.

Consider that a worker at the agribusiness is fed up with working 29-30 days a month for $25 a day. His competition isn’t an American citizen; it is another illegal immigrant, perhaps a newly arrived one desperate for any type of wage to survive. If that person was still on the other side of the border, there would be much less competition for his job and the agribusiness would be forced to either improve his wages and working conditions, become more efficient and productive, or go out of business. But lax immigration would mean the continuation of a steady stream of workers willing to replace him, thereby guaranteeing a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions.

This is Adam Smith’s invisible hand at work, and indicative of how progressives who support “immigrants rights” often pave the road to hell with their good intentions. In order to improve the lot of the workers at the agribusiness, a call to ICE won’t do – unless it’s to demand they do their job to secure the border. In fairness to them, it’s not possible because the politics of the issue prevent them from doing that job. Preventing the agribusiness from checking documentation and immigration status of their employees will not help the workers, nor will any laws as long as the supply of workers from abroad continues. “Guest worker programs” may seem good in theory, but the fact that such programs guarantee wages and working conditions (and increase business expenses due to maintenance of records) will always make the option to hire illegal immigrants more attractive. Those guest workers would then find themselves in the same predicament that many low-skilled American citizens find themselves today: not skilled enough to demand better paying jobs, but more expensive than illegal immigrants.

The Left likes to lay claim to the issue of illegal immigration in the hope that the immigrants will follow in the footsteps of those newly arrived in the past who built the Democratic patronage machines in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere. I suspect that their interests would decline if the illegal immigrants voted Republican after becoming citizens. It’s not a stretch: socially, Mexican families are much more conservative than typical Democratic households and have more in common with Republicans on issues such as gay marriage and abortion.

In order for the lot of such workers to improve, demand has to increase for their work and the only way that is going to happen is for everyone in the USA to start farms to boost demand for their labor or for the supply of labor from abroad to be cut off. Once shut off, workers will be able to demand higher wages and better working conditions because they could not be replaced so easily.

Over 120 years ago a big chunk of my ancestors arrived from Eastern Europe and did manual labor. Back then there were no minimum wages, no OSHA or other such regulation, yet they did okay. While they arrived legally, I don’t completely begrudge the illegals for wanting to improve the lot the way my ancestors did. But I don’t want them to be treated badly either. Anyone who wants to improve the lives of farm laborers should support closing the border. It’s the only viable solution to improve the lot of illegal immigrants and to force outfits like the one I’ve heard about to treat their employees better.

In the Grand Scheme of Things it’s hard to get all worked up over naked pictures of a middle aged man who happens to be a Congressman – unless Representative Democracy is an important concept to your or naked pictures of middle age men are your thing. Being a middle aged man myself who is slowly discovering that certain parts of his own body are subject to gravity whereas in the recent past they weren’t I’m left to wonder what delusions men my age must be under. A 45 year old man cannot be as physically attractive as a 25 year old. Pick up a fashion magazine and I doubt that the only place you will find middle age men are in the masthead (or more likely, the corporate office that owns the publication). Yes middle-aged men can be attractive – consider geriatrics like Harrison Ford and Sean Connery – but such attraction is based on wit, ability, guile (according to PJ O’Rourke) and especially success in one’s occupation. Even Henry Kissinger recognized that power – not a shirtless torso – was the ultimate aphrodisiac. I doubt that Nikolas Sarkozy’s wife Carla Bruni was seduced by the French President’s Gallic chest. No, Sarkozy got a smoking hot wife by being a cut-throat, power-hungry and brilliant (by French standards at least) politician.

But the Grand Scheme of Things blinds us to the possibilities of roads – and pictures – not taken. Imagine pictures of a shirtless Nixon, or the “tented underpants” of a Ronald Reagan being released to the media in 1968 and 1980 respectively. It’s difficult for me to imagine that because such an indiscretion is truly unimaginable for either man – and I’m no fan of Nixon. Both were intensely private and devoted to their wives, and also had the sense to avoid making such stupid decisions – sense that Congressman Anthony Weiner evidently lacks.

Andrew Breitbart and his team at BigGovernment.com has done the type of investigative journalism that the mainstream media only enjoys devoting to shirtless or foot-tapping Republicans. They have released more pictures of Congressman Weiner in various states of undress taken with his cellphone camera. As a result Weiner has taken the podium and made all of his previous statements inoperative, to paraphrase one of the greatest events of one of the most important political scandals of all time.

Weiner has admitted he lied but he will not resign.

New York is becoming America’s cesspool for ethically-challenged politicians with Weiner joining Charlie Rangel. Just a few days ago the congressman gave interviews to several news outlets in which he claimed his email, Facebook, Twitter and yFrog accounts had been hacked – a federal crime (or two). Now Weiner has stood up and admitted that he lied to a media that had pretty much supported him (I wonder how Jon Stewart feels being played as a fool by his frat-buddy? He’ll probably joke that Weiner had surgery to add a few inches after he graduated from college.) Weiner said he would leave it to his constituents to decide whether he stays or goes next election. Given how liberal his district is, he’ll probably be elected in a landslide. Huey Long and the Tammany Hall crowd would understand.

In my last post on the subject I wrote that I expected Congressman Weiner to resign within days; and that was without knowing that the above photo existed. Breitbart also has another one which he is holding on to, an X-rated one, that he has said is too extreme for print.

When Chris Lee found himself in this predicament he resigned in 48 hours. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that an arrogant Democrat like Weiner would still be kicking. He lied numerous times to people’s faces and expects to get away with it. Chances are he just might. But the disdain he has shown his office diminishes the institution of Congress and weakens representative democracy. Congressman Weiner showed the judgement of a frat boy half his age, proving there is good reason why we have laws barring young people that young from being elected to public office. Weiner obviously is stuck in time, and his actions have shown that he lacks the maturity to represent anyone in Congress, even the liberals who will try to whitewash this incident as just a boyish prank.

Here are the judgement failures as I see them:
1. Thinking he is physically attractive. Judge for yourself in the photo above. The vanity belies an arrogance that is difficult for men like him to understand yet which is blatantly obvious to everyone else.
2. Taking pictures of himself. Not smart – ever – even between husbands and wives. Photos, especially the electronic variety, have the uncanny ability of turning up where they shouldn’t.
3. Having friendships with women that aren’t his wife. It’s very difficult for men to pull this off; I’ve argued in the past that it is impossible for men to be emotionally involved without going overboard and falling in love or lust. This is why I believe that men should only be friends with other men or their wives/girlfriends.
4. Conducting relationships electronically. I’ve been online since the late 1980’s in one form or another and learned that you shouldn’t say anything that you don’t want your worst enemy to know. A handwritten note can be burned or thrown away. Electronic communications last forever.
5. Sending explicit photos electronically. One has to be dumb as a bag of hammers or completely arrogant to think that this is a good idea. Congressmen should be neither.
6. Opening himself up to being blackmailed. He is a public official, a walking target by anyone who wants to exercise political influence beyond using the ballot box. Engaging in illicit activities just makes it so much easier for blackmailers to get what they want.
7. When caught, claiming he had been hacked. Arrogance strikes again. Does he think that there aren’t people who know more about electronic files and communications than he does?
8. After claiming he was hacked, not pressing charges. This gave the game away to most people including many in the press because they knew that if he lied to police he would be seriously in trouble after they discovered the ruse.
9. Maintaining the lies for days while your staff, colleagues and friends defended you. You should have named Jon Stewart as second only to your wife in your apologies because Jon took a credibility hit from his soft-pedaling of the story.

I think power has made this man soft in the head to believe that he could get away with first the lies, now the admitting of guilt. It’s an insult to New York voters to think he’s probably right. We’ll see, but while they may reelect him, the man is a true lame duck. Every initiative he champions, every law that he proposes will be met with blank stares from those who know that he has lost the honor to serve in Congress regardless of how his constituents vote.

How this entity still exists should be a mystery to me. Why its partners aren’t rotting in jail and their minions scattered through the economy working menial jobs should be as well. Unfortunately I know corruption when I see, as does Matt Taibbi. In Rolling Stone – a rare one without Obama on the cover of it – Taibbi lays out in scathing detail how Goldman Sachs has trashed the economy assisted by politicians on both sides of the political divide.

I don’t usually fall for conspiracy theories but when I do I inevitably find Goldman Sachs at the root of them.

As I recently wrote I’m not feeling good about my family’s tax bill this year. Here are some further thoughts on the matter as my checks go out in the mail.

1. All sense of fairness has been thrown out the window. The fact that Goldman Sachs, the Fed Chairman, CEOs, legislators (I’m looking at you Barney Frank and Chris Dodd) who oversaw the great financial calamity since the Great Depression have gone unpunished and are still in power would mystify the thugs of Tammany Hall. These people profited from the bubble they created and worse, from the tax payer funded bailout of the mess afterward. The problem is that they didn’t really clean up the mess; they just pushed it out a couple of years by kicking it into the future. Congress even made the situation worse by hiding the pain from the taxpayer. Instead of making the cuts necessary to pay for the bailout and causing the immediate taxpayer pain, they put it on America’s “credit card”: the national debt.

Had the American taxpayer felt the pain of the bailout directly, s/he would not have allowed Bernanke, Geithner, and the partners of Goldman Sachs to avoid paying for their mistakes. The bailout would have become like an economic 9-11, and the calls for justice would have been just as great as they were in Sept. 2001 when America couldn’t seem to get Marines to Afghanistan fast enough to find al Qaeda and exact revenge for the pain of 9-11. But Congress short-circuited this. It just added the sum to the debt, while promising to hold hearings into the matter. In the end nothing changed, and the people who weakened the world’s largest economy remain in positions of power and wealth – where they continue to do damage to the economy.

2. The term American taxpayer has become an archaic expression. It seems that taxes are for the little people judging by how large American corporations like GE don’t pay any, and Treasury Secretary Geithner and now Attorney General Eric Holder can’t pay the full amount owed. Meanwhile 47% of Americans paid no income tax at all – not even a token amount – while the super-rich saw their tax rates decline as a percent of their income.

So we have a system whereby the wealthiest game the system to avoid taxes and half of the population pays no tax at all. This leaves a large percentage of Americans bearing the weight of a state showering largess on the economic rungs above as well as below them. In fairness the majority of that 47% probably doesn’t understand that they aren’t paying any taxes at all. The details of withholding aren’t easy to understand, and most people overpay. So they see a hit on their checks every week – but the difference between their gross and take home pay also includes social insurance taxes like Medicaid/Medicare taxes, Social Security. This system gives the impression of fairness but that is only on the surface.

The IRS estimates that calculating and complying with the tax code is a process that consumes 6.1 billion hours. That is because the system isn’t about spreading the tax burden across all citizens equally; over the past century the federal income tax system has been hijacked to become a tool of social policy. Then that hijacking was in turn shanghaied by lobbyists to protect particular constituencies or businesses. Is it any wonder that something that costs billions of man hours can’t fund the government properly yet still manages to upset everyone – including the 47% of people not paying federal taxes?

3. S&P “downgrading” US debt. A good explanation is here.

What’s interesting to me is that the S&P thinks that politics will prevent meaningful deficit reduction before the 2012 election. Not a bad idea considering how low both parties think of the American Public. I think that the Public could handle the truth if the messenger was credible. Donald Trump isn’t that messenger although his frank demeanor could force another Republican to gather up his courage and talk in specifics – in contrast to Obama’s soaring rhetoric that means nothing.

The downgrade is bad news for the Obama and the Left. Krugman and other hard core Lefties have been calling for MORE deficit spending. Even one of my good friends threw Cheney’s quote “Deficits don’t matter” at me last week; this move by S&P proves they do (Cheney was wrong then and is even more wrong today). I think that Obama himself sides with these lefties and has only been pulled to the right to pay lip service to the deficit by his political advisers. This downgrade undermines their resistance and shifts the political ground towards the Tea Partiers and others who have been warning about rising deficits for years (since the “W” administration – there was a civil war in the Republican party against the expansion of government under his watch that was missed by the Left and the mainstream media infatuated with Iraq.)

The S&P is another tool of our banker overlords. All the ratings agencies were too happy to grant AAA ratings to toxic waste (mortgage-backed CDO’s) and should have paid a price for their failure. They didn’t, and now they are rattling the chains of the politicians again. What is their motive? Probably to prevent the government from inflating away its debt by more Qualitative Easing (QE3 had been bandied about by Krugman et al). I’m not sure though; I don’t believe in conspiracies as a rule but given the fact that the financial wizards who caused the meltdown haven’t paid any sort of price for their malfeasance makes open minded about a conspiracy here.

UPDATE: Here is a harsher take (and I’m tired of the comparisons to Rome):

Simply put, it is this: those responsible for the nation’s financial crisis and its catastrophic after-effects are not paying for the consequences of their actions—it is the innocent, those who were not responsible, who are paying the price.