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A quiet June, too

Okay, for all sorts of reasons, June was a quiet month around here too, and July has been quieter still!We're still reading and furling a bunch of stuff, it's just not finding its way to this blog at the moment.

Some of the stuff eating up our time should ease shortly, but I'm still finding little time to add the longer posts (with excerpts) that we've been doing here. I have been experimenting more with link posts on the personal blog, though, and we could consider bringing those sorts of posts here, if there's interest (it would require a bit of tweaking to the templates though)....

Posted by Kevin Whited on 07 July 2008, 08:53 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: Administrativia
Positive votes: 15 of 28 | Vote (+ / -)
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Interview with Margaret Spellings (Evan Smith, Texas Monthly)

Well, if one were a critic of No Child Left Behind, one would say “enough” begins with as much as you mandate. A criticism that has come your way is that you put in place a program with certain mandates that cost X but then only partially fund it and tell the states, basically, “Deal with it.”

Federal policy works like this: If you want to take our money, these are conditions that have to be met. For the first time in the history of the world, we put a real condition in place: grade-level achievement by 2014. You and I agree that’s quite a modest thing to ask for.

Some might even say you’re slow-playing it.

Yeah, although in the education community you hear just the opposite: “Oh, my God! Do you know how many fill-in-the-blank kinds of kids we have in Texas? There’s no way we can get them up to grade level.” If you want our money, these are the rules of the game.

Right. But again, the states might fairly come back to you and say, “Okay, we get it. If you’re going to give us the money, we have to do what you tell us to do. But you’re not giving us the money—you’re giving us half the money. We have to find the other half ourselves.”

We have been a minority investor in public education at the federal level forever, and that will continue to be the case. It’s 8.3 percent. The bulk of the resources has and always will come from the states.

Do you think that’s an okay state of affairs?

I think it’s the right calibration based on the policy we now have. We have a system that says to states, because they are the primary investors, “You set the standards. You devise the assessments around them. You decide what a passing score is. You tell us your graduation rate and how many kids have to congregate before the group of students even counts for accountability purposes.”

Posted by Kevin Whited on 08 June 2008, 09:04 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Education/Academia, American Politics
Positive votes: 12 of 33 | Vote (+ / -)
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Obama, political Viagra (Mark Steyn, NRO)

A few months back, just after the New Hampshire primary, a Canadian reader of mine — John Gross of Quebec — sent me an all-purpose stump speech for the 2008 campaign:

My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.”

I thought this was so cute, I posted it on “The Corner.” Whereupon one of those Internetty-type things happened, and three links and a Google search later the line was being attributed not to my correspondent but to Senator Obama, and a few weeks after that I started getting emails from reporters from Florida to Oregon asking if I could recall at which campaign stop the senator in fact uttered these words. And I’d patiently write back and explain that they’re John Gross’s words, and that not even Barack would be dumb enough to say such a thing in public. Yet last week his demand in his victory speech that we “come together to remake this great nation” came awful close.

Speaking personally, I don’t want to remake America. I’m an immigrant and one reason I came here is because most of the rest of the western world remade itself along the lines Sen. Obama has in mind. This is pretty much the end of the line for me. If he remakes America, there’s nowhere for me to go — although presumably once he’s lowered sea levels around the planet there should be a few new atolls popping up here and there.

Marc Ambinder is right. Obama’s rhetoric is in a different “emotional register” from John McCain’s. It’s in a different “emotional register” from every U.S. president — not just the Coolidges but the Kennedys, too. Nothing in Obama’s resume suggests he’s the man to remake America and heal the planet.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 07 June 2008, 12:42 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 20 of 34 | Vote (+ / -)
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Looking ahead to June...

Many apologies for the silence during May.

A two-week trip to Greece combined with the annual float trip (getting underway today) and playing catchup at work have pretty much wiped out May.

We'll try to do better in June!

Posted by Kevin Whited on 21 May 2008, 08:57 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: Administrativia
Positive votes: 21 of 49 | Vote (+ / -)
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Chickenfeedhawks (Mark Steyn, NRO)

Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of the U.S. Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: “How To Win The War On Global Warming.”

Where to begin? For the last ten years, we have, in fact, been not warming but slightly cooling, which is why the eco-warriors have adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of “climate change.” But let’s take it that the editors of Time are referring not to the century we live in but the previous one, when there was a measurable rise of temperature of approximately one degree. That’s the “war”: one degree.

If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a one-degree increase isn’t exactly Pearl Harbor. But General Stengel wants us to engage in preemptive war. The editors of Time would be the first to deplore such saber-rattling applied to, say, Iran’s nuclear program, but it has become the habit of progressive opinion to appropriate the language of war for everything but actual war.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 26 April 2008, 10:09 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Environment, American Politics
Positive votes: 23 of 41 | Vote (+ / -)
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Time's environmental-war whoop (Jonah Goldberg, NRO)

The latest Gallup environmental survey shows that only 37 percent of Americans worry about global warming “a great deal,” a drop from 41 percent last year. Indeed, the share of Americans greatly concerned with climate change is about the same as it was a decade ago, which still sounds a bit high since the globe pretty much stopped getting warmer in 1998. Even among environmental concerns, climate change isn’t priority No. 1 for most Americans.

The editors of Time surely know this, which explains their real motive: They want to persuade Americans otherwise. And they are honest about it. Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor, who recently admitted that he doesn’t much care about “objective” journalism, insists that “there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change.”

Posted by Kevin Whited on 26 April 2008, 10:08 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Media/Journalism, Environment, American Politics
Positive votes: 22 of 39 | Vote (+ / -)
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The Democrats have a nominee (Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal)

Other than ensuring the Greatest Show on Earth will continue, does it matter that Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama Tuesday in Pennsylvania by nine-plus points? Barack Obama is the nominee.

No matter how many kicks the rest of us find in such famously fun primary states as Indiana and South Dakota, it's going to be McCain versus Obama in 2008.

I believe the cement set around the Clinton coffin last Friday. The Obama campaign announced it had received the support of former Sens. Sam Nunn of Georgia and David Boren of Oklahoma.

Both are what some of us nostalgically call Serious Democrats. They represent what the party was, but is no more: sensible on national security, spending and middle-class values. Obama receiving their imprimatur is like hands reaching out from the graves of FDR, JFK and LBJ to announce: "Enough is enough. This man is your nominee. Go forth and fight with the Republicans." Make no mistake: Superdelegates with sway took notice.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 26 April 2008, 10:05 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 21 of 42 | Vote (+ / -)
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Obama and the weird (R. Emmett Tyrrell, Washington Times)

Anyone who has followed politics studiously over the years is aware there are gifted politicians who for whatever reason eventually find their campaigns haunted. I do not mean haunted by accidental events or by a clod or two at campaign headquarters. I mean haunted. I mean visited by the weird, by supernatural pranksters, by what our Islamic friends call djinni.

Clearly, after months of suave upward mobility, Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat, is now in this unfortunate condition. The bizarre is his companion. The paranormal is a constant possibility. Though the members of the press are too stuffy to mention it, recent setbacks to his campaign are not normal.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 26 April 2008, 10:00 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 18 of 39 | Vote (+ / -)
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Obama's real Bill Ayers problem (Sol Stern, City Journal)

Barack Obama complains that he’s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city’s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist. But Obama and his critics are arguing about the wrong moral question. The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 26 April 2008, 09:57 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 25 of 45 | Vote (+ / -)
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Hungry like the ethanol wolf (NRO)

The federal government can do something right now to provide relief to Americans facing higher food prices: Repeal the ethanol mandate. The diversion of one-third of the American corn crop into ethanol production is a direct result of the 2005 law that required gasoline makers to buy 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol — a mandate that the 2007 energy bill President Bush signed in December increases to 36 billion gallons by 2022.

We realize that a repeal is highly unlikely, given that the machinery of government is currently calibrated to move in the opposite direction on biofuels, but as food prices keep going up, pro-ethanol politicians will find it increasingly difficult to justify their position. Food riots in developing countries are becoming more frequent. Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club has started limiting sales of rice because immigrants are buying all the rice they can and sending it to relatives in countries suffering from food shortages. In the U.S., the Labor Department reported this month that the price of bread is up 14.7 percent from last year. Milk prices are up 13.3 percent.

The production of ethanol is not the only factor driving food prices up. Demand for food is growing in China and India as more people in those countries move into the middle class. Fuel prices are up, making it more expensive to cultivate food crops and transport them to market. A drought in Australia, a major wheat exporter, has sent bread prices soaring.

But demand for ethanol has also had an impact on food prices.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 26 April 2008, 09:55 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Business/Economics, American Politics
Positive votes: 22 of 41 | Vote (+ / -)
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McCain's campaign finance revelation (Kimberley Strassel, WSJ)

While Democrats absorbed the lessons of Pennsylvania this week, John McCain was coming to a few realizations of his own. For one, "big money" in politics isn't so bad after all.

That's the takeaway from the presumptive GOP nominee's new fund-raising strategy, which his campaign has quietly rolled out these past few weeks. The McCain camp is teaming up with the Republican National Committee to tap into big, big donations from big, big donors – hoping to close the big, big money gap with Democrats.

Their effort to do so will involve some creative abuse of the campaign finance restrictions Mr. McCain authored a few years back. Whatever. The Arizonan may not yet fully understand that money is speech. At least he has come around to the view that more of the stuff is better when it comes to winning the presidency.

Sanctimony is great, unless you want to win the presidency. That requires cash. Lots of it.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 26 April 2008, 09:54 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 24 of 44 | Vote (+ / -)
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Dying Russia (Nicholas Eberstadt & Hans Groth, Wall Street Journal)

Russia is a European country, and its population patterns are unmistakably European in a number of respects, e.g. low birth rates, rising illegitimacy ratios and immigration tensions, and an aging population. But its demographic profile and future prospects differs in two important respects that bode ill for Russia's long-term economic outlook – to say nothing of the Kremlin's ambitious goal of becoming the world's fifth-largest economy by the year 2020.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 26 April 2008, 09:50 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, International Politics
Positive votes: 22 of 44 | Vote (+ / -)
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A Bush success, not that he gets credit (James Capretta & Peter Wehner, Weekly Standard)

For years, governmentalists have been able to dismiss the arguments of market reformers as nothing more than theoretical dreaming, with insufficient real-world evidence to back up the claims. Of course, all the while, governmentalists opposed every effort to give market forces a chance to work.

But that all changed with enactment of the Medicare prescription drug benefit. While congressional governmentalists, led by Senator Hillary Clinton, fiercely opposed the bill's passage because it included the introduction of unprecedented levels of competition, the bill passed in December 2003.

The governmentalists were right about one thing: The new drug benefit is unquestionably designed to encourage market competition. But on everything else, they were mistaken.

The drug benefit's market-based tilt is not complicated. Medicare beneficiaries choose every year from among competing, privately run drug-coverage plans. The government's contribution toward this coverage is set at a fixed percentage of the average premium, and no more. If beneficiaries want to enroll in a plan that costs more than the average, they can do so--but they, not the government, must pay the additional premium.

This structure provides strong incentives for the drug coverage plans to secure discounts from manufacturers and encourage use of lower cost products over more expensive alternatives. Drug plans that fail to cut costs risk losing enrollment to cheaper competitors.

Still, the governmentalists found this design wanting and predicted failure. Their argument was that private insurers wouldn't offer coverage, so the price competition would be weak. Costs would soar without government-set price controls. Beneficiaries wouldn't sign up because the premiums would be too high. The program would collapse under the weight of a public yearning for government-run simplicity.

On all these points, the governmentalists were wrong.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 26 April 2008, 09:27 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Health/Medicine, American Politics
Positive votes: 23 of 50 | Vote (+ / -)
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Is Obama Ready for Prime Time? (Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal)

The Democratic Party has two weakened candidates. Mrs. Clinton started as a deeply flawed candidate: the palpable and unpleasant sense of entitlement, the absence of a clear and optimistic message, the grating personality impatient to be done with the little people and overly eager for a return to power, real power, the phoniness and the exaggerations. These problems have not diminished over the long months of the contest. They have grown. She started out with the highest negatives of any major candidate in an open race for the presidency and things have only gotten worse.

And what of the reborn Adlai Stevenson? Mr. Obama is befuddled and angry about the national reaction to what are clearly accepted, even commonplace truths in San Francisco and Hyde Park. How could anyone take offense at the observation that people in small-town and rural American are "bitter" and therefore "cling" to their guns and their faith, as well as their xenophobia? Why would anyone raise questions about a public figure who, for only 20 years, attended a church and developed a close personal relationship with its preacher who says AIDS was created by our government as a genocidal tool to be used against people of color, who declared America's chickens came home to roost on 9/11, and wants God to damn America? Mr. Obama has a weakness among blue-collar working class voters for a reason.

His inspiring rhetoric is a potent tool for energizing college students and previously uninvolved African-American voters. But his appeals are based on two aspirational pledges he is increasingly less credible in making.

Mr. Obama's call for postpartisanship looks unconvincing, when he is unable to point to a single important instance in his Senate career when he demonstrated bipartisanship. And his repeated calls to remember Dr. Martin Luther King's "fierce urgency of now" in tackling big issues falls flat as voters discover that he has not provided leadership on any major legislative battle.

Mr. Obama has not been a leader on big causes in Congress. He has been manifestly unwilling to expend his political capital on urgent issues. He has been only an observer, watching the action from a distance, thinking wry and sardonic and cynical thoughts to himself about his colleagues, mildly amused at their to-ing and fro-ing. He has held his energy and talent in reserve for the more important task of advancing his own political career, which means running for president.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 24 April 2008, 08:15 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 27 of 45 | Vote (+ / -)
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The Great Terror at 40 (Robert Conquest, Hoover Digest)

As his classic work is republished, Robert Conquest reflects on how it threw open the doors of the Gulag’s secrets.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 24 April 2008, 08:10 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Books/Arts
Positive votes: 15 of 36 | Vote (+ / -)
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Obama's Gloves Are Off -- And May Need to Stay Off (Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post)

Obama himself took up the cudgel after Clinton delivered a victory speech in Philadelphia devoid of attack lines. Without naming Clinton, he suggested in Evansville, Ind., that she is a captive to the oil, pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies, that she "says and does whatever it takes to win the next election," and that she exploits division for political gain.

"In the end, this election is still our best chance to solve the problems we've been talking about for decades -- as one nation, as one people," Obama said.

But the candidate who rocketed to stardom as the embodiment of a new kind of politics -- hopeful, positive and inspiring -- saw his image tarnished in the bruising fight for Pennsylvania. Provoked by Clinton's repeated references to his remarks about the state's voters and her charges that he is an "elitist," Obama struck back in the closing days of the campaign.

"It's a real danger for Obama, and if you look at these recent ads, the messages they're delivering in all these conference calls, it's a far cry from last fall," when the theme of hope emerged amid calls for a more negative tone, said Democratic consultant Steve Elmendorf, a Clinton supporter.

Republican strategist John Feehery put it less charitably: "That's the danger of running as holier-than-thou. You have a lot farther to fall."

So much for the post-political, post-partisan Messiah.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 24 April 2008, 07:58 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 24 of 43 | Vote (+ / -)
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A Human Person, Actually (Peter Lawler, City Journal)

In their bold new book, Embryo, philosophers Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen defend the proposition that the embryo—the organism that comes into being as the result of fertilization, the union of sperm with oocyte—is in fact a human being. And that means that an embryo has “absolute rights.” An embryo should never be used as a means to pursue someone else’s ends, however laudable or life-saving, they say. Certainly, embryos shouldn’t be killed to assist frustrated parents attempting in vitro fertilization (IVF), or even to further pathbreaking medical research. The authors stop well short of recommending all of the potential changes in law that would necessarily follow from their argument. All they ask is that scientific research that involves the killing of embryos be outlawed—or, at the very least, that it be denied public funding, and that future IVF procedures be practiced in such a way that they do not produce surplus embryos that are ultimately discarded. The authors oppose what they see as brutality motivated in part by good intentions—brutality they hope to correct with moral reasoning based in scientific knowledge. Open-minded readers should find their case powerful.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 24 April 2008, 07:53 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Books/Arts, Society/Life
Positive votes: 21 of 41 | Vote (+ / -)
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Like-Minded, Living Nearby (Alan Ehrenhalt, Wall Street Journal)

"Americans," Mr. Bishop writes, "lost their sense of a nation by accident in the sweeping economic and cultural shifts that took place after the mid-1960s. And by instinct they have sought out modern-day recreations of the 19th-century 'island communities' in where and how they live." Not red and blue states, he is quick to insist; he calls that cliché an illusion. The reality is red and blue wards and precincts, suburbs and counties.

To be sure, a few obstacles confront anyone who wishes to accept this argument in toto. Research by the political scientist Morris Fiorina, for example, shows that, on most important issues, one doesn't find a wide ideological division according to geography. Counties do differ in their attitudes toward Iraq, abortion and foreign trade but not by nearly as much as Mr. Bishop's Big Sort would suggest. Mr. Fiorina argues that it's the political parties and their leadership that are fomenting political culture wars, not rank-and-file voters.

I accept the validity of this research, but I don't think it necessarily undermines Mr. Bishop's thesis. What if voters looked at the candidates in 2004 and decided – in clusters – that one of the nominees was the kind of person that they would like to have as neighbor, tennis partner or fellow-parishioner – and the other one simply wasn't? This is how Mr. Bishop explains the results in 2004, and he makes a decent case.

Certainly it is a case that the two major parties have come to accept. Soon after the 2000 election, Bush pollster Matthew Dowd reported to Karl Rove that there wasn't much point in focusing any campaign on independents or moderate voters anymore. The country was too polarized, essentially along the cultural lines that Mr. Bishop lays out. "If you drive a Volvo and do yoga, you are pretty much a Democrat," Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman said in 2004. "If you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you're voting for Bush." Mr. Bishop would agree. He would simply add that the yoga people have clustered in one set of culturally segregated enclaves and the gun owners in another.

Mr. Bishop has drawn a painstaking, and in my view, accurate picture of the first eight years of this century – certainly of its politics. Whether he has described the next eight years is not so clear.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 24 April 2008, 07:49 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Books/Arts, American Politics, Society/Life
Positive votes: 17 of 39 | Vote (+ / -)
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Denial is a Senator from California (Paul Kengor, NRO)

If one were to hold a “most dogged foe of unborn human life in the U.S. Senate” contest, the competition would be stiff, and the decision difficult. At one time, I thought the winner was Senator Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.). By 2004, I thought Kennedy might be surpassed by Massachusetts’s other Democratic senator, John Kerry. Then, after spending a couple of years researching Sen. Hillary Clinton (D., N.Y.), I was convinced no one could be worse.

Alas, along came Sen. Barack Obama (D., lll.), who has not been in Congress long enough, I suppose, to stand out from the bottom of the pit — though his shocking record in the Illinois legislature, most notably in voting against legislation to provide emergency medical care to newborn babies that managed to survive failed abortions, probably earns the prize for the most horrid anti-life action I’ve ever come across by an American politician.

That said, it may be impossible to beat Senator Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) for all-around crassness and truly breathtaking statements in this area. As a case in point, consider three examples, from 1999, 2003, and last week.

Posted by Kevin Whited on 24 April 2008, 07:33 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 18 of 38 | Vote (+ / -)
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Obama can't shake off Clinton (Roger Simon, Politico)

Barack Obama could not “close the deal” in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night. Hillary Clinton said so, and just about every talking head on TV used that phrase.

Though Obama has won twice as many contests as Clinton, this man clearly suffers from a failure to close.

Why? It may be because, as Clinton argues in her TV ads, he does not have “what it takes” to be president and lead the nation in crisis. (The ad features pictures not just of Osama bin Laden, but also of Pearl Harbor, suggesting, I guess, that Clinton will protect us not just from Al Qaeda but also from the Japanese.)

While Clinton did not actually call Obama a wimp in Pennsylvania, she did say he was “elitist and out of touch” and “demeaning.” She can also drink him under the table. (And he stinks at bowling.)

She's clearly trying to be the more manly candidate. But how will that benefit her as she tries to get the nomination in the mommy party?

Posted by Kevin Whited on 24 April 2008, 07:30 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 26 of 42 | Vote (+ / -)
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