"Blue Wall" and "Red Wall" and Election Night 2016

Some helpful history to remember on election night

Excerpts:

Tuesday evening, after Election Day's tranquility, new clamors will erupt as analysts with agendas tickle portents and lessons from the torrent of election returns. Herewith some developments to watch.

• In the 17 elections since World War II, the winner has averaged 385.4 electoral votes, the loser 145.1. In six elections (1952, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1980, 1984), a major-party candidate won fewer than 100. In the seven elections after 1984, no Democrat has received fewer than 111 (Michael Dukakis in 1988) and no Republican fewer than 159 (Bob Dole in 1996). Measure Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump accordingly.
• Republican nominees' popular-vote totals this century are: 2000 (George W. Bush) 50,455,156; 2004 (Bush) 62,040,610; 2008 (John McCain) 59,934,814; 2012 ( Mitt Romney) 60,932,152. Measure Trump's total accordingly, bearing in mind that there are 10 million more eligible voters in 2016 than in 2012 and nearly 20 million more than in 2008.
• In 2012, Romney's totals in 10 swing states were: Texas, 4,569,843 (57 percent); Florida, 4,163,447 (49 percent); Pennsylvania, 2,680,434 (47 percent); Ohio, 2,661,407 (48 percent); Michigan, 2,115,256 (45 percent); Virginia, 1,822,522 (47 percent); Arizona, 1,233,654 (54 percent); Colorado, 1,185,243 (46 percent); Nevada, 463,567 (46 percent); New Hampshire, 329,918 (47 percent). Use these numbers to measure Trump's success at enlarging the Republican electorate.
• The "blue wall" consists of 18 states and the District of Columbia (totaling 242 electoral votes) that have voted Democratic in at least six consecutive elections: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington state, Wisconsin. Will Trump, who vowed to expand the battlefield, carry any of these?
• The Republicans' "red wall" (in at least six consecutive elections) consists of 13 states with 102 electoral votes: Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wyoming. Will Clinton come close to carrying Texas? Will she lose any age cohort there other than voters over 65?

Comment: I'll be tuning in but probably not until 9:00. This is not pro-Clinton, but I expect a big win for her.

The Blue Wall Crumbles https://t.co/7KdkgMDgOX pic.twitter.com/sFe8O9Ekjt

— National Review (@NRO) November 17, 2016

Mike Pence is Trump's Lap Poodle - Chemotherapy for the GOP

George F. Will: Trump's vile candidacy is chemotherapy for the GOP

Excerpt:

Because Pence looks relatively presidential when standing next to Trump — talk about defining adequacy down — some Republicans want Trump to slink away, allowing Pence to float to the top of the ticket and represent Republicanism resurrected.

This idea ignores a pertinent point: Pence is standing next to Trump. He salivated for the privilege of being Trump's poodle, and he expresses his canine devotion in rhetorical treacle about "this good man." What would a bad man look like to pastor Pence?  ....

Trump should stay atop the ticket, for four reasons.

1. First, he will give the nation the pleasure of seeing him join the one cohort, of the many cohorts he disdains, that he most despises — "losers."
2. Second, by continuing to campaign in the spirit of St. Louis, he can remind the nation of the useful axiom that there is no such thing as rock bottom.
3. Third, by persevering through November 8 he can simplify the GOP's quadrennial exercise of writing its post-campaign autopsy, which this year can be published November 9 in one sentence: "Perhaps it is imprudent to nominate a venomous charlatan."
4. Fourth, Trump is the GOP's chemotherapy, a nauseating but, if carried through to completion, perhaps a curative experience.

Comment: Can the GOP hold the Senate? The House? Looking to 2020

Grandes banques - Aux Barricades?

George Will: Time to break up the banks
Excerpt:

In a sense, TBTF began under Ronald Reagan with the 1984 rescue of Continental Illinois, then the seventh-largest bank. In 2011, the four biggest U.S. banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) had 40 percent of all federally insured deposits. Today, the 5,500 community banks have 12 percent of the banking industry’s assets. The 12 banks with $250 billion to $2.3 trillion in assets total 69 percent. The 20 largest banks’ assets total 84.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Such banks have become bigger, relative to the economy, since the financial crisis began, and they are not the only economic entities to do so. Last year, the Economist reported that in the past 15 years the combined assets of the 50 largest U.S. companies had risen from around 70 percent of GDP to around 130 percent. And banks are not the only entities designated TBTF because they are “systemically important.” General Motors supposedly required a bailout because a chain of parts suppliers might have failed with it.

... To see why TBTF also can mean TBTM — too big to manage — read “What’s Inside America’s Banks?” in the January/February issue of the Atlantic. Frank Partnoy and Jesse Eisinger argue that banks are not only bigger but also “more opaque than ever.” And regulations partake of the opacity: The landmark Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, separating commercial banking from investment banking, was 37 pages long; the 848 pages of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law may eventually be supplemented by 30 times that many pages of rules. The “Volcker rule” banning banks from speculating with federally insured deposits is 298 pages long. There is no convincing consensus about a correlation between a bank’s size and supposed efficiencies of scale, and any efficiencies must be weighed against management inefficiencies associated with complexity and opacity.

... By breaking up the biggest banks, conservatives will not be putting asunder what the free market has joined together. Government nurtured these behemoths by weaving an improvident safety net and by practicing crony capitalism. Dismantling them would be a blow against government that has become too big not to fail. Aux barricades!

Comment: Image source. My view:

• You can't call Big Banks a Monopoly (because there are more than 1)
• You can't call even them an Oligopoly because there are so many choices (consider for example Texas's Frost Bank) (I'm not sure about Citibank but the other big guys compete in Texas).
• So I still think, from the consumers' viewpoint, it is about choice and convenience.
• And there are efficiences that come from size. Two come to mind: BCP (Business Continuity Planning). The financial institution for whom I work has some really impressive failover capacities that, for example, Hibernia bank did not have in Katrina (two data centers under water .. no geographical separation of BCP data centers!). The second efficiency example would be spreading the cost of federal regulations. 
• And then there are consumer benefits. Of course not every consumer will weigh these the same. That's the great thing about a free-market economy is that consumers can choose. From my own personal viewpoint I appreciate Wells Fargo for these services:
• Instant transfer of monies between brokerage and banking. I have a family member who has an account with Frost and her brokerage account is with Edward Jones. She has a 3 day wait on transfers.
• Instant transfer from checking to credit card. When I pay my Chase bill from Wells Fargo that transaction takes several days
• One look: Checking, Investing, Credit Card, HELOC, Mortgage (although we no longer have a mortgage), Auto loan (ditto)
• Widespread choices at "a store". Need a mortgage? Walk into any Wells Fargo branch!
• Large footprint: In Texas, the East Coast, the West Coast, Arizona, Florida? Bank at Wells Fargo? Well one can find a branch

By the way, there is no coercion to solely shop at Wells Fargo. I have a Capital One 360 account for some services. I have a Chase credit card. While I can buy auto insurance from Wells Fargo, my auto insurance is with Allstate. I could buy life insurance from Wells Fargo but never did. When I've had auto loans, I've gone for the best rates. My most recent auto loan was with the Postal Credit Union in Saint Paul. Our mortgage? Was with US Bank. Conclusion: I don't share Will's Aux barricades (in essence - break up the banks) view. Image source (below):

Message to the N.B.A. - "Nobody cares!"

The NBA standoff pits the elite vs. the elite

Excerpt:

Kevin Garnett, 35, the Boston Celtics forward who has had a stellar career, was with the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2004 when a teammate, Latrell Sprewell, augmented the national stock of unfortunate pronouncements. Dissatisfied with a three-year, $21 million contract extension offer, Sprewell said: “I’ve got my family to feed.”

Remembering the ridicule that Sprewell received, Garnett must know the players’ public relations problems as their union, with his emphatic support, tussles with team owners over, among other things, the players’ share of the National Basketball Association’s almost $4.5 billion in revenue last season. With 25 million Americans unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to seek employment, why should anyone care that fewer than 450 jobs are jeopardized by a labor dispute? The jobs are those of America’s highest-paid professional athletes. NBA players’ average salary is $5.1 million, and even those receiving the NBA minimum ($474,000) are in the highest tax bracket.

Bryant Gumbel compares David Stern to “plantation overseer”

Excerpt:

Stern’s version of what’s been going on behind closed doors has, of course, been disputed. But his efforts were typical of a commissioner, who has always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer treating NBA men as if they were his boys. It’s part of Stern’s M.O. Like his past self-serving edicts on dress code or the questioning of officials, his moves are intended to do little more than show how he’s the one keeping the hired hands in their place.

Comment: As my wife (not even an NBA fan) said yesterday - "nobody cares!". The NCAA is a better sport anyway!

Solid Economic Policy: can be expressed in five one-syllable words: Get. Out. Of. The. Way.

Our floundering ‘federal family’

Excerpt:

The economic policy the “federal family” should adopt can be expressed in five one-syllable words: Get. Out. Of. The. Way. Instead, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department has become a venture capital firm for crony capitalism and costly flops at creating “green jobs,” praises the policy of essentially banishing the incandescent light bulb as “taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.” Better to let the experts in his department and the rest of the federal family waste other people’s money.

Comment: George Will ... read the whole thing!

George Will: On 2012, The Tea Party, Obama's "apostasy"

The debt deal and Obama's 2012 problem

Excerpts:

By affirming liberalism’s lodestar — the principle that government’s grasp on national resources must constantly increase — Obama made himself a spectator in a Washington more conservative than it was during the Reagan presidency. By accepting, as he had no choice but to do, Congress’s resolution of the crisis, Obama annoyed liberals. They indict him for apostasy from their one-word catechism, “More!” But egged on by them, he talked himself into a corner. Having said that failure to raise the ceiling would mean apocalypse, he could hardly say failure to raise revenue would be worse.

...

Regarding the political process: There are limits to what can be accomplished by those controlling only half of Congress, but the Tea Party has demonstrated that the limits are elastic under the pressure of disciplined and durable passion. As Tom Brokaw said in Washington on “Meet the Press” last Sunday, the debt-ceiling drama ended as it did because the Tea Party got angry, got organized and got here.

...

Obama’s presidency may last 17 or 65 more months, but it has been irreversibly neutered by two historic blunders made at its outset. It defined itself by health-care reform most Americans did not desire, rather than by economic recovery. And it allowed, even encouraged, self-indulgent liberal majorities in Congress to create a stimulus that confirmed conservatism’s portrayal of liberalism as an undisciplined agglomeration of parochial appetites. This sterile stimulus discredited stimulus as a policy.

...

America may be one-third of the way through a lost decade — or worse, toward a lost national identity. So, Republicans have their 2012 theme: “Is this the best we can do?”

Comment: Interesting read. Obama is looking weak right now but I think he will be a formidable candidate. Clinton looked beatable in '94

Time to exit Afghanistan?

The small footprint that eliminated bin Laden

Excerpts:

Many salient facts about the tracking of terrorism’s most prolific killer to his lair — some lair: not a remote cave but an urban compound — must remain shrouded in secrecy, for now. But one surmise seems reasonable: bin Laden was brought down by intelligence gathering that more resembles excellent police work than a military operation.

Granted, in nations as violent as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the line between military operations and police work is blurry, and military and other forms of intelligence gathering cannot be disentangled. Still, the enormous military footprint in Afghanistan, next door to bin Laden’s Pakistan refuge, seems especially disproportionate in the wake of his elimination by a small cadre of specialists.


Jim Lacey of the Marine Corps War College notes that Gen. David Petraeus has said there are perhaps about 100 al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. “Did anyone,” Lacey asks, “do the math?” There are, he says, more than 140,000 coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, or 1,400 for every al-Qaeda fighter. It costs about $1 million a year to deploy and support every soldier — or up to $140 billion, or close to $1.5 billion a year, for each al-Qaeda fighter. “In what universe do we find strategists to whom this makes sense?”

Comment: George Will also comments on Libya:

And the more we couch our thinking in military categories, the more we open ourselves to misadventures like the absurd and deepening one in Libya.

There, our policy — if what seem to be hourly improvisations can be dignified as a policy — began as a no-fly zone to protect civilians from wanton violence. Seven weeks later, our policy is to decapitate the government by long-distance assassination and to intensify a civil war in that tribal society, in the name of humanitarianism. What makes this particularly surreal is that it is being done by NATO.

Unpack the acronym: North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO was created in 1949 to protect Western Europe from the Red Army. Its purpose was, in Lord Ismay’s famous formulation, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.” NATO, which could long ago have unfurled a “mission accomplished” banner, has now become an instrument of addlepated mischief.

This is an episode of presidential malpractice. Obama has allowed NATO to be employed for the advancement of a half-baked doctrine (R2P — “responsibility to protect”), a quarter-baked rationalization (was it just in March that Hillary Clinton discovered that a vital U.S. national interest required the removal of Moammar Gaddafi because he “is a man who has no conscience”?) and an unworthy national agenda (France’s pursuit of grandeur on the cheap).

Final comments: I'm sure that we should not be in Libya and I think it is time to plan our exit strategy from Afghanistan

On Libya: Who are the rebels? Are they worthy of our support?

On Libya, too many questions

Excerpts:

• The world would be better without Gaddafi. But is that a vital U.S. national interest? If it is, when did it become so? A month ago, no one thought it was
  
• But how is imposing a no-fly zone - the use of military force to further military and political objectives - not military intervention?
  
• The Economist reports Gaddafi has "a huge arsenal of Russian surface-to-air missiles" and that some experts think Libya has SAMs that could threaten U.S. or allies' aircraft. If a pilot is downed and captured, are we ready for the hostage drama?
  
• [Is] it wise for U.S. military force to be engaged simultaneously in three Muslim nations?
  
  
  

Comment: And my question: Who are the rebels? Are they worthy of our support?

George Will: Why liberals love trains

High Speed to Insolvency
Excerpt:

Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute notes that high-speed rail connects big-city downtowns, where only 7 percent of Americans work and 1 percent live. “The average intercity auto trip today uses less energy per passenger mile than the average Amtrak train.” And high speed will not displace enough cars to measurably reduce congestion. The Washington Post says China’s fast trains are priced beyond ordinary workers’ budgets, and that France, like Japan, has only one profitable line.

So why is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.

Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.

Comment: Good read.

On the SOTU speech

George Will: Uncle Sam in the driver's seat

Excerpts:

The word "entitlements" was absent from his nearly 7,000-word State of the Union address - a $183 million speech that meandered for 61 minutes as the nation's debt grew $3 million a minute. He exhorted listeners to "win the future" by remembering the past.

On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, in the Utah Territory, a golden spike was driven to celebrate the joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. In the 1960s, the United States sent men to the moon. Obama said: Today's government should take more control of the nation's resources so it can do innovative things akin to building the transcontinental railroad and exploring space.

The nation heard: You should trust the government whose recent innovations include the ethanol debacle that, four days before the State of the Union, the government expanded. And you should surrender more resources to the government whose recent innovations include the wild proliferation of subprime mortgages.

...

The day after Obama told the nation that the key to prosperity is creativity defined by this government and propelled by more government spending ("investment"), the Congressional Budget Office said that this year's budget gap is widening to $1.5 trillion, making the national debt 70 percent of gross domestic product, up from 40 percent in 2008.

...

[On the Volt and Nissan Leaf]

The government already offers $7,500 tax incentives for people who buy electric cars such as the $32,780 Nissan Leaf and, more to the point, General Motors' $41,000 Chevrolet Volt. As The Post's Peter Whoriskey reported, these prices are "well above" those of "comparably sized cars with gasoline engines that can cost about $20,000."

Obama's goal of getting 1 million such cars on America's roads by 2015 cannot be met unless innovative government rigs the market. Introduced in 2008, the $7,500 bribe was limited to the first 250,000 cars. Under Obama's stimulus, it was expanded to 200,000 per manufacturer.

Peggy Noonan: An Unserious Speech Misses the Mark

Excerpts:

The speech was more than half over before the president got around to the spending crisis. He signaled no interest in making cuts, which suggested that he continues not to comprehend America's central anxiety about government spending: that it will crush our children, constrict the economy in which they operate, make America poorer, lower its standing in the world, and do in the American dream. Americans are alarmed about this not because they're cheap and selfish but because they care about the country they will leave behind when they are gone.

President Obama's answer is to "freeze" a small portion of government spending at current levels for five years. This is a reasonable part of a package, but it's not a package and it's not a cut. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who called it "sad," told a local radio station the savings offered "won't even pay the interest on the debt we're about to accumulate" in the next two years. The president was trying to "hoodwink" the American people, Mr. Coburn said: "The federal government is twice the size it was 10 years ago. It's 27% bigger than it was two years ago." Cuts, not a freeze, are needed—it's a matter of "urgency."

...

He too often in making a case puts the focus on himself. George H.W. Bush, always afraid of sounding egotistical, took the I's out of his speeches. We called his edits "I-ectomies." Mr. Obama always seems to put the I in. He does "I implants."

Humor, that leavening, subtle uniter, was insufficiently present. Humor is denigrated by serious people, but serious people often miss the obvious. The president made one humorous reference, to smoked salmon. It emerged as the biggest word in the NPR word cloud of responses. That's because it was the most memorable thing in the speech. The president made a semi-humorous reference to TSA pat-downs, but his government is in charge of and insists on the invasive new procedures, to which the president has never been and will never be subjected. So it's not funny coming from him. The audience sort of chuckled, but only because many are brutes who don't understand that it is an unacceptable violation to have your genital areas patted against your will by strangers.

I actually hate writing this. I wanted to write "A Serious Man Seizes the Center." But he was not serious and he didn't seize the center, he went straight for the mush. Maybe at the end of the day he thinks that's what centrism is.

Comments: Why I cannot watch or listen to Obama (I did read his SOTU!): He never really says anything. Just "mush".

Violence: Why Conservatives are blamed first

The charlatans' response to the Tucson tragedy

Excerpt:

A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first.

Comment: Worthwhile read from George Will.

Update on my health: Another day off work. Symptoms continue. Might be subsiding. I had a full meal tonight of: bowl of applesauce, 2 pieces of toast, a bowl of rice, a banana, and a glass of Gatorade. If there is improvement overnight and tomorrow, I would like to have pasta for dinner.

George Will: Income Tax quotes

Taxes made simple

Excerpts:

[on the FICA scream]: "Indignant children, holding in trembling hands their first paychecks, demand to know what FICA is and why it is feasting on their pay. "


"the tax code is 10 times longer than the Bible, without the good news."

"Many conservatives ... believe that although most Americans should be paying lower taxes, more Americans should be paying taxes. The fact that 46.7 million earners pay no income tax creates moral hazard - incentives for perverse behavior: Free-riding people have scant incentive to restrain the growth of government they are not paying for with income taxes."

"one-third of the 143 million tax returns filed by individual earners for 2007 that showed no tax liability, additional millions of households have incomes low enough to exempt them from filing tax returns. The bottom two quintiles of earners have negative income tax liabilities - they receive cash payments from the government via refundable tax credits. "

"Washington doesn't have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem."

Comment: George Will ... always a good read!

Tim Pawlenty: "A" grade in fiscal responsibility

A blue-state governor with red-state qualities

Excerpt:

In the four decades before Pawlenty was elected governor in 2002, the average two-year increase in state spending was 21 percent. During his tenure, the average annual increase has been 2 percent. He says that the current two-year budget cycle will be the first in 150 years in which spending will be cut in real, constant dollars.

It took, he said, "World War III" with the teachers unions to make Minnesota the first state to offer performance pay for teachers statewide. The state is second in the nation in health savings accounts: Approximately 10 percent of privately insured Minnesotans have these tax-preferred savings accounts that enable them to shop for routine health needs not covered by high-deductible insurance plans.

Pawlenty has benefited from an affliction -- Minnesota's Legislature. Currently, Republicans are outnumbered 47 to 87 in the House and 21 to 46 in the Senate. As a result, he has had, and has seized, ample opportunities to veto things, including increases in taxes on incomes, gasoline, beer and wine. He holds the Minnesota record for most vetoes cast in a single legislative session. The Cato Institute murmurs, "Be still my heart!"

A libertarian think tank ardent for government both limited and frugal, Cato gives A grades for fiscal responsibility to only four governors -- Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), Bobby Jindal (R-La.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), and Pawlenty, the only one governing a blue state.

Comment: I don't know why governments need to grow at greater the rate of inflation! Pawlenty get's an A in my book too.

On: "insubordination toward government that knows everything"

A nickel for big government

Excerpts:

The National Recovery Administration was an administrative mechanism for the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which envisioned regulating the economy back to health by using, among other things, codes of fair competition. The theory was that by promoting the cartelization of labor by encouraging unions, and the cartelization of industries by codes that would inhibit competition, prices would be propped up and prosperity would return.

Soon there were more than 500 NRA codes covering the manufacture of products from lightning rods to dog leashes to women's corsets.

...

Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.

Comment: Excellent read on Big Government. More on the National Recovery Administration. Not to be confused with the good NRA!

Prohibition and the law of unintended consequences

Another round of Prohibition, anyone?

Excerpt:

Americans abolished a widely exercised private right -- and condemned the nation's fifth-largest industry -- in order to make the nation more heavenly. Then all hell broke loose. Now that ambitious government is again hell-bent on improving Americans -- from how they use salt to what light bulbs they use -- Okrent's book is a timely tutorial on the law of unintended consequences.

The ship that carried John Winthrop to Massachusetts in 1630 also carried, Okrent reports, 10,000 gallons of wine and three times more beer than water. John Adams's morning eye-opener was a tankard of hard cider; James Madison drank a pint of whiskey daily; by 1830, adult per capita consumption was the equivalent of 90 bottles of 80-proof liquor annually.

Although whiskey often was a safer drink than water, Americans, particularly men, drank too much. Women's Prohibition sentiments fueled the movement for women's rights -- rights to hold property independent of drunken husbands; to divorce those husbands; to vote for politicians who would close saloons. So the United States Brewers' Association officially opposed women's suffrage.

Women campaigning for sobriety did not intend to give rise to the income tax, plea bargaining, a nationwide crime syndicate, Las Vegas, NASCAR (country boys outrunning government agents), a redefined role for the federal government and a privacy right -- the "right to be let alone" -- that eventually was extended to abortion rights. But they did.

Comment: Consider earlier post

Nation-building in Afghanistan - a "Sisyphean agony"

George Will: McChrystal had to go

Excerpt:

The military is charged with a staggeringly complex task, the completion of which -- if completion can even be envisioned -- must involve many years. But when given the task, the military was told to begin bringing it to a close in a matter of 18 months.

The not quite seven months that have passed since the president announced his policy have seen sobering military disappointments and daunting evidence of how intractable is the incompetence and how manifold is the corruption of the Kabul government. For as long as we persist in this Sisyphean agony, the president will depend on forthrightness from a military commander whose judgment he trusts. That could not be McChrystal; it is Petraeus. If McChrystal had been retained, he would have henceforth been chastened, abject, wary and reticent. It is unthinkable that he could still have been a valuable participant in future deliberations with the president and his principal national security advisers. The president demanded, and the Americans in harm's way in Afghanistan deserve, better.

It is difficult, and perhaps unwise, to suppress this thought: McChrystal's disrespectful flippancies, and the chorus of equally disdainful comments from the unpleasant subordinates he has chosen to have around him, emanate from the toxic conditions that result when the military's can-do culture collides with a cannot-be-done assignment. In this toxicity, Afghanistan is Vietnam redux.

In July 1945, with the war in the Pacific still to be won and Winston Churchill engaged in the Potsdam conference, the British electorate turned him out of office. When his wife, Clementine, suggested that this might be a blessing in disguise, he replied: If so, it is very well disguised indeed.

The shattering of McChrystal is a messy blessing if the president seizes upon it as a reason for revisiting basic questions about whether Afghanistan matters so much and what is possible there and at what cost. It may be said that with the Afghan mission entering -- or soon to enter; it is late and now may become more so -- a crucial military phase in Kandahar, the cradle of the Taliban, McChrystal is indispensable. Any who may say that should heed the words of another general, one of the 20th century's greatest leaders and realists. Charles de Gaulle said: The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Comment: Sisyphus

VAT would be just a gargantuan instrument for further subjugating Americans to government

A plan to tax everybody

Excerpts:

Corporations do not pay taxes; they collect them, passing the burden to consumers as a cost of production. And corporate taxation is a feast of rent-seeking — a cornucopia of credits, exemptions and other subsidies conferred by the political class on favored, and grateful, corporations. Because the income tax is not broadly based, it radiates moral hazard: Its incentives are for perverse behavior. The top 1 percent of earners provide 40 percent of that tax's receipts; the top 5 percent provide 61 percent; the bottom 50 percent provide 3 percent. So the tax makes a substantial majority complacent about government's growth.

Increasingly, the income tax is codified envy. A VAT is the political class's recourse when the resources of the minority that is targeted by the envious are insufficient to finance ravenous government.

...

Because a VAT potentially taxes everything, it would be riddled with exemptions. This is because it maximizes the political class's opportunities for showing favoritism — by, for example, exempting certain "green" goods. It also widens that class's scope for the pleasure of being bossy. For example, it could reduce a VAT's regressiveness — like rain, a VAT falls equally on the rich and the poor, but the poor devote a larger portion of their income to consumption — by exempting most foods but not those that the nanny state disapproves: "Put down that sugary soda and step away from the vending machine!"

Money is time made tangible — the time invested in the earning of it. Taxation is the confiscation of the earner's time. Although some taxation is necessary, all taxation diminishes freedom. Adding a VAT without subtracting the income tax would constrict Americans' freedom much more than the health-care legislation does. Because the 16th Amendment will not be repealed, adoption of a VAT would proclaim the impossibility of serious spending reductions and hence would be the obituary for the Founders' vision of limited government.

Comment: Worthwhile read!

"people wonder where to begin cutting government"

Climate science tantrums

Excerpts:

Last week, Todd Stern, America's special envoy for climate change — yes, there is one; and people wonder where to begin cutting government — warned that those interested in "undermining action on climate change" will seize on "whatever tidbit they can find." Tidbits like specious science, and the absence of warming?

It is tempting to say, only half in jest, that Stern's portfolio violates the First Amendment, which forbids government from undertaking the establishment of religion. A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.

Comment: Wiki Medieval Warm Period

"Falling Soldier" and the nature of Truth

George Will: An image evaporates

Excerpt:

In 1995, the controversy seemed to have been settled in Capa's favor when the fallen soldier supposedly was identified as Federico Borrell Garcia, an anarchist militiaman. But a 2007 Spanish documentary included a written eyewitness account of Borrell dying many miles away, behind a tree. There are no trees in the many pictures Capa took when he took "Falling Soldier."

The coolly analytic professionals at the International Center of Photography in Midtown Manhattan, which has the Capa archives, are commendably dispassionate about the "Falling Soldier" controversy. They also avoid postmodern mush, such as: All photographs are manipulative fabrications because the photographer chooses to point the camera here and not there, and, anyway, "Falling Soldier" is "basically" truthful because it illustrates the "essential truth" about war.

Capa was a man of the left, and "Falling Soldier" helped to alarm the world about fascism rampant. But noble purposes do not validate misrepresentations. Richard Whelan, Capa's biographer, calls it "trivializing" to insist on knowing whether this photo actually shows a soldier mortally wounded. Whelan says that "the picture's greatness actually lies in its symbolic implications, not in its literal accuracy."

Rubbish. The picture's greatness evaporates if its veracity is fictitious. To argue otherwise is to endorse high-minded duplicity — and to trivialize Capa, who saw a surfeit of 20th-century war and neither flinched from its horrors nor retreated into an "I am a camera" detachment. As a warning about well-meaning falsifications of history, "Falling Soldier" matters because Capa probably fabricated reality to serve what he called "concerned photography." But this, too, matters:

There was the integrity of constant bravery in Capa's life, which was a headlong rush toward danger. He arrived on Omaha Beach with the first soldiers early on June 6, 1944, and was only 40 in 1954 when, on the move with French troops in Vietnam, he stepped on a land mine

Resources (Wiki): Robert Capa and Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936

Comment: It's like those who claim to be Christian but disbelieve His resurrection. If He rose from the dead, He demonstrated His Messiahship. If he did not ... he is NOT the Christ!

Egocentrism and hollow clichés

An Olympic Ego Trip

Excerpts:

[In Copenhagen] Both Obamas gave heartfelt speeches about . . . themselves. Although the working of the committee's mind is murky, it could reasonably have rejected Chicago's bid for the 2016 Games on aesthetic grounds — unless narcissism has suddenly become an Olympic sport.

In the 41 sentences of her remarks, Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronouns "I" or "me" 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences. Still, 70 times in 89 sentences conveyed the message that somehow their fascinating selves were what made, or should have made, Chicago's case compelling.


...

... egregious cliches sprinkled around by the tin-eared employees in the White House speechwriting shop. The president told the Olympic committee that: "At this defining moment," a moment "when the fate of each nation is inextricably linked to the fate of all nations" in "this ever-shrinking world," he aspires to "forge new partnerships with the nations and the peoples of the world."

Good grief. The memory of man runneth not to a moment that escaped being declared "defining" — declared such by someone seeking to inflate himself by inflating it. Also, enough already with the "shrinking" world, which has been so described at least since Magellan set sail, and probably before that. And by the way, the "fate" of — to pick a nation at random — Chile is not really in any meaningful sense "inextricably linked" to that of, say, Chad.

But meaningful sense is often absent from the gaseous rhetoric that makes it past White House editors — are there any? — and onto the president's teleprompter. Consider one recent example:

Nine days before speaking in Copenhagen, the president, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, intoned: "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." What was the speechwriter thinking when he or she assembled that sentence? The "should" was empty moralizing; the "can" was nonsense redundantly refuted by history. Does our Cicero even glance at his speeches before reading them in public?

Becoming solemn in Copenhagen, Obama said: "No one expects the Games to solve all our collective problems." That's right, no one does. So why say that? Then, shifting into the foggy sentimentalism of standard Olympics blather, he said "peaceful competition between nations represents what's best about our humanity" and "it brings us together" and "it helps us to understand one another."

Actually, sometimes the Olympic Games are a net subtraction from international comity. But Obama quickly returned to speaking about . . . himself:

"Nearly one year ago, on a clear November night, people from every corner of the world gathered in the city of Chicago or in front of their televisions to watch the results of the U.S. presidential election. Their interest wasn't about me as an individual. Rather . . ."

Comment: Yada yada yada .... An obsession with self?