Discussing “No Child” etc., Richard Hoste:
What are fair standards? I don’t know. But the hard truth is that there is a significant part of the population unable to learn any skills that will help them do anything beyond manual labor.
Hard indeed, but that doesn’t change it.
“It is very important that progressives help defeat Coakley,” says Gregory Martin at Firedog Lake. “Please read my explanation.”
It’s about enabling the betrayers of the leftist dream, helping the “Democratic Corporate Suck Up wing of the party” grow in power.
To do so
will, in fact, ensure that there will be NO progressive agenda. It was not the Republicans who failed us of late. It was the Democrats. We will never succeed as long as the Dem’s [sic] can talk liberal and vote corporate.
He’s right. They have nothing to lose but their chains. No, they also have elections.
Bill Clinton campaigning for the endangered Dem candidate, commenting on Tea Party members from Rhode Island and New York campaigning for Scott Brown:
“I thought Massachusetts knew more about American history than anybody else, and understood the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against abuse of power, not against government itself.”
Good point, if you concede that they are not anarchists, as he would have it, but rebels against abuse of power.
Ditka and the Bears: Changing coaches is a start, but we have little to hope for until there’s a change of owners, dropping those who fired D. in 1993.
“I was fired out of jealousy, plain and simple,” Ditka said for the Beyond the Glory special. “I had become the Bears. The greatest moment of my life is when George Halas hired me. The lowest moment of my life was when a guy that shouldn’t have been there fired me.”
But he’s still there, at his mother’s side.
2) Obama vs. banks: New tax purely political, as Geithner made clear on CNBC yesterday on the Kudlow Report, John Harwood asking, “You know Wall Street . . . . Is there something morally corrupt about Wall Street institutions and the people in them?”
Geithner:
I believe personally [dodge word: how else would he believe?] that what you’re seeing happen across the financial system, what you saw happen that caused the crisis, even what you see now happening, is just causing a huger damage to basic trust and confidence of Americans in the fairness of our system.
Fairness an Obama word: he used it in the ‘08 campaign to justify tax rate increases that result in reduced tax revenues.
Geithner continuing:
It’s just very hard for people to understand with unemployment at 10 percent, you know [yes, we do know, now that you mention it], with millions of Americans–this is the United States of America [yes, we know that too]–with millions of Americans on food stamps, worst recession in almost a generation, that you could see compensation practice produce such huge returns to people who were at the center of this mess. It is unexplicable [sic]. People cannot understand why it is fair. And…
Harwood: “But you understand because you know this culture. Why is it happening?”
I don’t–I don’t–I don’t understand it, really. I really don’t understand it. [Hand-wringing off camera] . . . but what it underscores is why it is so important to make sure that we put in place tougher rules, the kind of reforms that’ll make sure that we can wake up in the morning and tell the American people that we have done what is necessary to protect them from the risk of this happening again.
A political goal.
Harwood: “Is it pure greed?”
Geithner:
John, it’s a complicated thing. I don’t–I don’t know how to explain it. I can’t explain it, I don’t understand it, [distraught] and I think it’s very important for those people running these firms, for their boards of directors, for their shareholders, to work very hard to try to earn back some basic sense of trust and confidence of the American people.
Like the trust and confidence in Congress? He’s worried about that too? What about the sheer economics of it all? Is he the treasury secretary, or a highly placed morale officer?
He continued:
I think it’s very important to do that. [Of course you do.] And I think, as part of that, they need to not just make sure they’re making loans [with less available capital, of course] again to businesses and communities, helping solve the housing crisis [ditto], but . . . are working to support a package of strong reforms in the financial system that’ll be better for the country as a whole.
Vague, indecipherable, enough to drive a sane man nuts.
In the Mass. race, Brown v. Coakley, keep your eye on the big guy:
“If the White House thinks she can win, Obama will be there,” the Democrat says. “If they don’t think she can win, he won’t be there.”
Word is, they don’t think so and he won’t be there.
=============
Later: Word is wrong, according to The Hill:
President Obama will travel to Massachusetts on Sunday to campaign for Martha Coakley, according to sources.
Going for broke.
What if the successor to Ted Kennedy were someone who did not vote for ObamaCare, leaving Dems with a 59–vote majority?
That prospect isn’t as implausible as it once seemed in that most liberal of states, as Republican Scott Brown has closed to within striking distance of Democrat Martha Coakley in the January 19 special election.
A Boston Globe survey released this weekend showed Ms. Coakley with a 15-point lead, but a survey by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling found the race a dead heat, with Mr. Brown up 48% to 47%.
The scary prospect for Democrats is that the race is even this close on their home ideological turf, and turnout is always difficult to predict in special elections.
Oh to be in Massachusetts, now that a Republican might win.
See also at the Washington Examiner:
* Michael Barone: Wow! Republican leads in Massachusetts
. . . a statistical tie, given the margin of error. Still, this is big, big news.
and
* Hugh Hewitt: A Massachusetts Miracle?
Scott Brown is an impressive candidate — intelligent, experienced, good-humored and handsome.
Brown’s record of public service is distinguished as well. Not only is he in his third term as a state senator, he served three terms before that as a state representative. More impressive than even that, however, is his service in uniform.
As his Web site, brownforussenate.com, puts it: “Senator Brown is a proud member of the Massachusetts National Guard, where he has served for nearly three decades and currently holds the rank of Lt. Colonel in the Judge Advocate Generals (JAG) Corps.”
Hewitt finds negatives, however:
He is a die-hard red Boston Red Sox fan.
He is a die-hard New England Patriots fan.
And he’s a Republican in Mass.
Which is not a deal-breaker this year, when, per Byron York:
The race to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts is shaping up as a referendum on health care reform.
Free-market thinking seems to have got its start not with Adam Smith and his fellow Scots but with Dominicans and Jesuits at the U. of Salamanca in the 15th century.
Just price? The market decides that, etc. Such stuff does the social justice mantra in, or defines it in ways the world doth not dream of in these post-Marxist days . . .
Jesus Huerta de Soto has good material at Mises.com:
We stand for free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the oppression of collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities.
“So does this have anything to do with the Jesuit Luis de Molina?” asked Penny Ziemer Ford in reply to my Facebook posting.
Yes indeed. Consider this from the Acton Institute:
” . . . in Molina’s writings on economics . . . he affirms the importance of individual liberty in free-market exchanges, opposes government regulation of prices and markets, condemns the slave trade as immoral, and upholds private-property rights theory.”
Three wise men: Which three of these candidates for county board president know that reducing excessive tax rates increases tax revenue?
“I’m tired of being treated like an ATM by machine politicians,” Republican John Garrido said during the 75-minute forum at the Hotel Indigo on Northwest Highway.
He — along with Democrat Terry O’Brien, president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, and the Green Party’s Tom Tresser — said during the political forum they’d immediately repeal the remaining half-cent sales tax hike passed in 2008.
“We need to stop taxing our way out of our problems, bottom line,” O’Brien said.
Other Democrats in the race — Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown and Chicago Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th) — have vowed to roll the sales tax back after some belt-tightening. [Italics added]
Sorry. Time’s up. Garrido, O’Brien, and Tresser. Call them Friends of the Laffer Curve, which applies the law of diminishing returns to taxation.
This county board president candidate has some wizardry to perform for us:
Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown tried to hit all three opponents on how she’ll boost tax revenues by creating jobs.
“I believe in new ideas, not new taxes,” Brown said — a shot at Stroger’s penny-on-the-dollar sales tax hike. [Oh? No new taxes?] “Unlike my opponents, I have saved taxpayer dollars, [not] costing taxpayers by either voting themselves pay raises, voting to increase taxes or making bad decisions on investing our money.” [Not voting to increase them? When? Where? At the annual meeting of court clerks?]
It’s the round table approach:
Brown . . . placed . . . emphasis on economic development and tapping new sources of revenue that would not increase taxes. “We need to create jobs for our people,” said Brown, who proposed setting up an economic development “roundtable” to find ways to do that.
[Italics all added]
She wants to avoid increasing taxes, which is nice. Repeal the remaining half-cent Stroger increase? Oh yeah, that too. Later.
And she wants to create jobs! Like the jobs she has already created. You know the ones. Come on, think about it. Come on . . .
Slamming with faint damns: “O’Brien ad slams Stroger,” says Sun-Times head — hard copy, not online.
[Terry] O’Brien, president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, says “we’re running strictly a positive campaign here,” but his veiled references to Cook County Board President Todd Stroger in the ad aren’t exactly happy talk. [Cute]
Well he can’t do that. Won’t get away with it. He’s acting as if Stroger’s sales-tax hike were a major issue (as if Chi Trib were counting the days from hike to primary: Geez), as if Stroger’s hiring relatives and others from his ward to big-bux jobs without apparent overriding reference to qualifications were a major issue too.
Listen: O’Brien won’t get away with calling voters’ attention to these things, even without mentioning Stroger’s name. We, at least the Sun-Times, are up to this dirty pool. NOTHING DOING. [And leave Lisa Donavan’s cute stuff alone, you S-T copy editors, wherever you are.]
Blaming and doing: Meanwhile, in Chi Trib, a shot at perfectionism:
[S]ome Americans are hopelessly naïve in their expectations of what “the system,” much less a single person, can accomplish within an institution as complex as the federal government.
They are practitioners of the Blame Someone Syndrome that requires that someone be nailed for every conceivable misfortune under the sun. It’s as useless and adolescent as the Do Something Syndrome.
When something bad happens, the calls go out: “Do something!” Doesn’t matter what it is, something’s got to be done. And when that something doesn’t work, in kicks the Blame Someone Syndrome.
Thus spake Dennis Byrne. Yes. It’s a neurotic crankiness, of which if you promise not to tell anyone, I partake sometimes myself, expecting copy editors to see things my (far better) way. It’s not gonna happen, I tell myself, but then I forget.
As for doing something, “Don’t just do something; stand there” is often the best solution.
Saying “I do”: Finally, “South Africa’s Zuma takes his bride, again,” LA times and Chi Trib have.
“There are plenty of politicians who have mistresses and children that they hide so as to pretend they are monogamous. I prefer to be open. I love my wives and I am proud of my children,” Zuma has said, defending polygamy in a television interview.
I find this disturbing not because I oppose polygamy, which I do, but because by being open about it, this president makes light of the tribute to virtue offered by hypocrisy. Is nothing sacred?
Of course, we Americans should talk. Our president has a father he dreamed about who had three wives. So? You have a problem with that?
Blithe Spirit 