Quote of the Day
When a true genius appears in this world
you may know him by this sign,
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift
Raining on David Gergen's PARADE
David Gergen, presidential advisor to multiple Presidents (from Nixon through Clinton, except for Carter and Bush), in an essay today in Parade, dismisses all these gloomy guses whom seem to think that the country is going in the wrong direction. Gergen notes that we now have more women than men attending and graduating from college, most students in law and medical schools are female, our cities are safer than in the 70's (with murders, larcenies, and auto thefts down by at least a half), over 10,000 people of color hold elective office, that we lead in the doctoral degrees granted in science and technology, have been awarded with 30 Nobel Prizes in economics and science the last five years, earned nearly half of the world patents granted, and have been rated by the World Economic Forum as first or second most competitive economy the last 3 years.
Now I tend to be an optimistic person; for instance, I applaud Newt Gingrich whom during the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference called for a "party of yes". I don't like attacks which I consider to be uncivil (although I will often poke fun at Obama and his progressive cronies), and I've gone out of my way to outline alternative market-based solutions to problems. But David Gergen is somewhat overstating his case.
Let's point out a few of the problems with his case. First, I don't think that America is suffering from a scarcity of lawyers, male or female. I would like to see more men and women (in particular) in science and engineering. According to Vivek Wadhwa (who disputes the comparisons of often-cited many-to-one Chinese and Indian engineer versus American graduation rates for engineers on an apple to apple basis, but in bundled statistics including information technology, Duke University found they ranged from just below parity for India to somewhat under 3 times for Chinese), "Rather than encouraging our children to study more math and science and become engineers, we're turning them into lawyers."
Much has been made over China's $200B-plus trade surplus with the US. The Democrats argue vociferously over the Chinese lower standard of living and an allegedly manipulated currency, but fail to acknowledge the part our structural federal operations deficit have played in this regard, a direct consequence of higher domestic program and entitlement expenditures promoted principally by the progressives. We've needed Chinese financing of up to a third of foreign-held debt to keep interest rates low (which is of benefit to China, because its thin-margin factories hire a number of domestic workers, American workers don't buy as many Chinese goods in bad or inflationary times, and if the yuan became more expensive relative to the dollar, Chinese imports would be more expensive). There are other factors in decisions, including China's more attractive investment tax rates and the fact that American manufacturers, in an effort to wring out costs to compete globally, outsource to lower component and service costs.
This has hurt us in other regards, also the direct consequences of environmentalist and other progressive meddling in our investment in national infrastructure, especially power plants. I recently read a progressive post complaining about Obama giving away the store in a mostly token response to nuclear power and oil and gas exploration. (Even things like hydroelectric dams come under scrutiny for "environmental impact"!) Give me a break! No nuclear plants over 3 decades. One of the largest import categories we have (among the top two) is energy supplies. How pathetic is it that we have to depend on external energy suppliers because progressives fight tooth and nail against our investments in new power plants and domestic energy supplies?
But guess what? It's coming back to haunt us in ways we didn't expect just 20 years ago. Who could have guessed that China has displaced us as the largest customer of Saudi Arabian and Angolan oil? That they're entering into supply agreements with oil sands companies in Canada, not to mention other resource contracts with Venezuela and Brazil? And while American lives (not Chinese) have been lost securing Iraq and Afghanistan, China, which had an oil concession deal with Saddam Hussein, managed to get the deals restored, while American oil companies continued to be shut out by the new Iraq government; China also won a major copper deposit concession in Afghanistan. Oh, and by the way, China just ran its first trade deficit in years; why? Because of increased prices for resource imports. (Guess what country is competing against China for resource imports?)
Gergen will tell you that fewer senior citizens are poor and more kids attend school younger but didn't say a word about some $40T of unfunded mandates for social security and Medicare, which Democrats ignored in order to add yet another entitlement, against the will of the American people, with grossly underestimated costs, overestimated tax revenues (e.g., Laffer curve concepts), and unrealistic Medicare cost cuts. He also didn't talk about public servant pay (including teachers) and benefits (particularly pensions), with young retirees claiming in some cases up to $100K or more in annual benefits, bringing local and state governments (e.g., currently Los Angeles) to the point of insolvency. He didn't address abysmal graduation rates in inner cities and teacher unions and contracts that make it all but impossible to fire unsatisfactory or uncooperative teachers, or job-killing investment and upper income tax rate increases and tax-and-trade energy policies making us even more globally uncompetitive.
However, given Gergen's failure to acknowledge projected trillion dollar deficits for the future while exempting almost half of households from paying a single penny to federal operations, in honor of David Gergen's column in support of Big Daddy government, I have the following bonus video:
Filibuster of Obama's Second SCOTUS Appointment? No
Only a few commentators have explicitly seen Obama's criteria for his next pick as yet another explicit slap back at the Supreme Court for the Citizens United decision, which enabled corporations (and labor unions) to be able to advocate independent messages for election campaigns:
And Obama all but referenced the court ruling when he said from the Rose Garden on Friday that he is poised to choose a nominee who ''like Justice Stevens, knows that in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.''Let me note that Obama's position is self-serving in that he did not compete, as promised, under campaign reform financing of the general election campaign. He thinks that the large number of small donations to his campaign are the "voices of ordinary citizens". (I'm not going to argue again the nature of those donations from the campaign, but there were some internal control problems, including some deliberately bogus donor names; with today's technology, with available mailing lists, it's conceivable, say, that someone could take a $100,000 and break it up into small donations from a spoofed source.) For-profit corporations (including managers, employees, and shareholders/owners) pay taxes, just like individuals, and have a right to express their opinions. In fact, non-profit corporations (not to mention some for-profit media companies, like newspapers and magazines) were not subject to the same restrictions; at the very least, Obama is defending a double standard before the Supreme Court decision. And corporations already have some input anyway through lobbyists and/or direct interaction with lawmakers; for example, Obama met with special-interest groups during the Democratic Party Healthcare Bill, e.g., the AMA, AARP, pharmaceuticals, medical device companies, insurers, etc.
Of course, you have to strip the political hype from what Obama is saying. For example, he has conspicuously omitted attacking unions, which were provided the same rights as corporations in the Supreme Court decision to express their political preferences. If Obama REALLY wanted to eliminate the impact of so-called special interests, he would embrace a paradigm shift in terms of tax law, e.g., a flat or fair tax, to get rid of the convoluted mess of tax laws with exemptions and complicated calculations which defy the very ideal of the rule of law and confuse even IRS agents and accountants. And/or he would fully embrace term limits which would mitigate lobbyist investments in incumbent lawmakers.
Republicans refuse to rule out a filibuster, although one has not been done to date for the Supreme Court. It should be noted, however, Obama was willing to participate in one against Justice Alito, clearly based solely on ideological grounds. It depends on just whom Obama nominates. For example, if Obama decides to go for an ethnic hat trick by nominating a young, very progressive, inexperienced jurist Asian American like Goodwin Liu, already a controversial appellate court nominee, it would be red meat to the Republicans. (Obama might actually welcome that, figuring that the GOP misfired on its own standing among Latinos by going after Sotomayor; why not add Asian Americans to the list of groups disinclined to vote for Republicans? But then the Democrats did not lose the Latino vote by going after Miguel Estrada...)
I don't think that it is in the interests of either the President or the Republicans in a divisive battle over the Supreme Court. It would be a different thing if a swing jurist like Justice Kennedy was resigning; I don't think the Republicans will fight over a progressive-centrist appointment like Elena Kagan. She would attract some opposition due to some social conservative faux pas, such as her opposition to the Solomon Amendment. The Solomon Amendment ensured that the military had fair access to recruit students; Kagan and others argued that the military discriminates against gays and the Congress was infringing on the faculty's right to screen out allegedly discriminatory employers. The Supreme Court, of course, disagreed. (I will point out here that the military simply requires that gays be reasonably discreet over their sexual orientation. Federal employees have a number of restrictions on their involvement, say, in political activities, for obvious reasons.) I have zero tolerance for politically correct administrators or faculty imposing unconscionable restrictions over their students' future employment opportunities. These elitists think nothing ethically wrong with accepting funds from the allegedly discriminatory federal government, but they think there's something wrong about their students wanting to work for the federal government and want to micromanage the recruitment process; that's a rather self-serving, paternalistic argument. All the Solomon Amendment says, "Fine, if you won't let us recruit, we won't invest in you." It seems fair to me...
One might hope that Elena Kagan would think independently of formulaic, pervasive liberal/progressive ideology of universities like I managed to do. But nevertheless, if I'm Barack Obama, Elena Kagan comes without much of a paper trail (in terms of controversial opinions), she has already been confirmed by the Senate as Solicitor General, and she is a very young 49 years old. If he picks someone to the left of Kagan, he's all but inviting the Senate to come to a grinding halt to his other agenda items and putting incumbent Senate Democrats up for reelection on the spot to defend yet another difficult vote. Even though she is not someone I would prefer to be named to the Supreme Court, I do think elections have consequences, and one of those is the right to nominate their choice of qualified candidates. I would vote to confirm. I think that Obama can spin Kagan into his stated criteria, and I don't see how he doesn't pick her. But I've been wrong before...
Political Cartoon
IBD cartoonist Michael Ramirez shows us the result of morally perverse progressive ideology.
Musical Interlude: "Last" Songs
Etta James, "At Last"
Vanessa Williams, "Save the Best for Last"
The Motels, "Suddenly Last Summer"
Fifth Dimension, "Last Night I Didn't Get to Sleep At All"
