Nov 30^th

On Nov 21^st I did a piece pointing out some problems with a column by Mona Charen. The Record Eagle subsequently published that column and I decided that Charen’s reportorial sins were grievous enough that they should be exposed, so I wrote a letter to the Record Eagle doing exactly that. The letter was critical of the paper’s selection of Charen as a columnist so as expected it appeared today, Monday, a low circulation day.

Here is the letter so that you may judge for yourself:

Mona Charen has a curious column in the Nov. 24^th Record Eagle. In it she tells us that, “Bush’s errors were recognized and corrected before he left office.” How did he correct errors that left over 4 thousand Americans dead and resulted in more than 10 thousand amputees? Then there was the little matter of paying for the war with borrowed money, just less that two trillion dollars’ worth. (Borrow and spend is now a conservative value?)

Charen continues with an extended denunciation of Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and how the Obama administration had praised him lavishly in spite of his many shortcomings. A two minute internet search would have shown Charen that Maliki is not the Prime Minister of Iraq, hasn’t been the Prime Minister of Iraq since August of last year and stepped down at the insistence of the American government.

Surely the Record Eagle can find other more competent conservative columnists to present to their readers. On the other hand…maybe not!

Henry E. Klugh

There are enough local right wingers hereabouts so that someone will surely write in support of Charen, “Klugh has taken her remarks out of context” or something similar. The paper’s policy prohibits me from responding to such remarks for two months so if anyone wonders why I’m silent about such blowback, that’s why.

Now to Trump’s latest convulsion: The poor soul had expected that the 100 black Ministers organization that was scheduled to meet with him was going to endorse him. In fact he had announced that indorsement in advance of his meeting. When push came to shove this organization claimed that they did not plan to endorse him but rather just listen to what he had to say…so Trump cancelled that meeting. Then he promoted another meeting with black clergy who were willing to come, not all did. For those who showed up Trump claimed the results were “amazing, just amazing.” Trump repeated Bernie Sanders misleading statistic on unemployment among Black youth which Trump claims is 51 percent. It is bad but not that bad; that figure counts both unemployed and underemployed part-time workers who would prefer full time jobs. Trump’s focusing on that statistic got enthusiastic support from those black pastors who attended the event at Trump Tower. Does anyone doubt that Donald Trump, the ultimate salesman, could convince a black audience that he  would be as helpful as possible even if his followers were photographed beating a “Black Lives Matter” spokesman senseless while he, Trump, said that maybe he deserved it?

 

 

 

 

Nov 29^th

Dr. Ben Carson has been off to Jordan to enhance his foreign policy chops, or at least that tiny portion of foreign policy that deals with refugees. Carson visited two refugee camps in Jordan which shelter Syrian refugees. He now makes some claims based on his three-hour visit to Azdab camp and then some time at Zaatari camp. He claims that these refugees really just want to return to Syria.

There are 630 thousand UN registered refugees in Jordan; some estimates put the total number of refugees at one million. Just how many of those refugees do you suppose Carson talked to in the day long excursion he made to Jordan? As it happens most of these people recognize that it will be a very long time before it is safe for them to return to Syria. Assad’s barrel bombs have made them very nervous. Many of them have relatives who have already made the hazardous trip to Europe and they are encouraging their friends in the Jordanian camps to join them. As a result those refugees who still own property in Syria are trying to sell it to raise the several thousand dollars required for passage to Europe. Some are desperate enough to accept pennies on the dollar to raise the necessary capital.

The notion that these people want to return to Syria which they recently left for fear they would be slaughtered is naïve. Then Carson said, “Bringing 25 thousand refugees to this country does nothing to solve this crisis.” But the Obama administration never suggested bringing 25 thousand refugees here; it was ten thousand, and these only after an 18-month to two-year vetting process. The 10 thousand figure was widely circulated and most everyone was familiar with it…but apparently Carson was not. His handlers quickly came out with a revised comment which changed the 25 thousand to, “…from 10 thousand to 25 thousand....” That was a little late and not very effective; again, Carson had egg on his face.

Carson absolutely refused to have any journalists accompany this excursion so all we only know is what Carson and his handlers choose to tell us. Carson has been at war with journalists ever since they tried to verify some of his claims about his juvenile rage problem. They had trouble finding evidence that he was all that vicious and Carson made fun of them for bothering about something from his childhood. He has continued with this shtick of fulminating against the press at every opportunity. This is a smart move because it has kept him from having to answer questions about his policies and, as he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of policies to offer, his rants against the press nicely disguise that fact. The only time the man seems energized at all is when he is fuming about how the press has a double standard.

Nov 28^th

Mr. Trump is at it again; if a few Arab teens cheer the destruction of the World Trade Center they become “thousands and thousands.” In spite of many news agencies carefully investigating this claim not one was able to find evidence for it. The notoriously belligerent New Jersey Governor Chris Christie refused to suggest that the claim was bogus. That was rather gutless of him, but everyone is afraid of Trump.

Trump will meet today with a group of one hundred Black pastors. He claims the meeting will be to announce their endorsement of his candidacy. Their leader, one Dr. Cindy Trimm, appeared on CNN this morning and claimed that the meeting was not to endorse Trump but to listen to what he had to say. (I’d bet, from Cindy Trimm’s biography that Trump will get that endorsement.)

Then Trump says that he has met Premier Vladimir Putin when they were both on “60 Minutes.” They were indeed on the same program but they were several thousand miles apart so this is a curious definition of “meeting.” Never mind, for Donald Trump it was a meeting if that’s what he wants it to have been.

Trump has his own statistics, some of it taken directly from white supremacy web sites. In one case he copies the information that 81 percent of white murders are perpetrated by blacks; the FBI, which is probably more creditable, claims that 15 percent is closer to the truth.

Donald Trump is gloriously unconcerned with the truth. For Mr. Trump the truth is whatever he says it is. He might not be able to command the seas, or the storms, but he can command the truth because the truth for him is malleable and easily forced to conform to what he wants it to be. Make no mistake here; I do not believe that Trump is lying. I think that Trump truly believes what he is saying in much the same way a psychotic really does hear voices instructing him to take certain actions. I am not suggesting that Trump is psychotic, on the other hand most people are able to separate objective truth from their fantasy world and I’m not sure Trump can do that. What that says about his mental health is for a clinician to say. But then it’s also possible that he is just a consummate con artist who is well aware of the truth and chooses to lie instead.

It doesn’t matter very much which it is. People come to believe what they are told if they are told often enough and told convincingly. The Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels knew that and acted on it quite successfully …for a time. Trump’s followers have come to believe his exaggerations, particularly the fiction that he is a tower of strength and our elected leaders are “weak, very weak.” Here what you see is not what you’ll get!

 

Nov 27^th

Chicago is in turmoil; protesters are parading down the Magnificent Mile. This will limit the enthusiasm of shoppers on this Black Friday and that might upset the business community. The protest is the result of a video of a policeman shooting Loquan McDonald, a black teen aged kid waving a three inch pen knife. He was shot sixteen times in fifteen seconds. A large part of the issue here is why it took the Chicago cops 400 days to release this video. Could it have been a desire to avoid a problem for Mayor Rahm Emanuel who had to deal with re-election during that time? It’s true that the victim had PCP in his system and that he had used his knife to slash a police cruiser’s tire but it appears that we once again, as in Ferguson Missouri, have a cop who panicked. At least this time the officer who did the shooting is in jail on a second degree murder charge.

We have no idea how this will play out. The cop’s attorney, as usual, claims that the video doesn’t show everything and, of course the cop was in fear of his life. This same cop had had many previous complaints lodged against him but all were dismissed. Again, the union attorney earned his money.

 

On another matter: Texas seems to have a problem with religious freedom. Ted Cruz, the junior Senator from Texas is a strong supporter of religious freedom, but apparently only for Christians. He wants very much to exclude all non-Christian Syrian refugees from entering this country. His curious notion of religious freedom allows those of a fundamentalist persuasion to refuse to accept perfectly legal actions of their fellow citizens on the grounds of religious freedom. Thus, if you are opposed to gay marriage you can, by appealing to religious freedom, refuse to rent to a gay couple. It wasn’t all that long ago that religion was used to justify segregation and before that to justify slavery.

Now Texas has a problem: their insistence on religious freedom has come full circle. Governor Greg Abbott has instructed the state’s Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) to require all state agencies and volunteer community groups to stop any plans they might have underway to settle Syrian refugees.

This edict does not sit at all well with the Catholic Charities of Dallas. This group has said, “We are called by the Gospel to reach out to all those in need. Catholic Charities of Dallas will continue to serve all refugees.” Many other religious communities feel exactly the same way and have said so. So if religious freedom doesn’t necessarily mean supporting a conservative agenda will Cruz and his friends still support it?

Nov 26^th

Pat Buchanan has a column today and he takes a very predictable view of the recent carnage in Paris. He wants to put it all in perspective by which he means the death toll isn’t all that bad and the terror created is disproportionate to the bloodshed.

To this end he reminds us of the average loss of life by the French Army over the four years of the First World War. He cites the death toll of 130 from the Isil attack and he reminds us that France lost an average of 850 soldiers a day for the 51 months of that war. “But that was another country than todays.” It was indeed and France executed 918 soldiers for cowardice, a fact Buchanan fails to mention. He goes on to give the daily death toll in our Civil War. The comparison with the slaughter in Paris is silly. These wars had well-armed combatants on both sides. The ISIL attack in Paris had unarmed civilians ambushed by a few heavily armed assailants. Where was the ambushing of Parisian civilians by the Germans in either World War?

Then he presents this gem: “Russia lost twice as many people on that airliner blown up over Sinai as died in France. But Russia and Vladimir Putin do not appear to be terrorized.” First: If they were terrorized no one would know about it because Putin has completes control of the Russian media; Second: The terrorist incident happened 3 thousand kilometers from Russia, not on the streets of Moscow.

In spite of his curious addiction to odd comparison Buchanan makes a valid point: ISIL’s campaign has successfully terrorized the West and that is exactly what they wanted to do. We have even seen a rise in the jingoism we hear from Trump who is finally called a fascist by several prominent Republicans including Max Boot, Steve Deace, both right wing radio hosts, and Jeb Bush. More ISIL attacks, particularly if they are in this country, will push Trump and others on the far right to embrace a still more exclusionary political position. Buchanan would love that!

It wouldn’t be a Buchanan column if he didn’t take the opportunity to denigrate the absence of religious enthusiasm on the part of someone. He claims that, “The strength of ISIS, of the Islamist militants, of those willing to die to drive the “Crusaders” out of their lands,...lies in the emptiness in the soul of Western Man. They have repudiated their cradle faith Christianity…embraced La Dolce Vita, materialism and hedonism…turned their back on patriotism to celebrate diversity and globalism.” Oh, come now! Does he really want to bash materialism as well as diversity? How would this country’s economy survive without hucksters persuading one and all to buy, buy, buy! Buchanan will lose his chops as a Nixon conservative if he keeps this up.

Sowell Nov 25^th

Thomas Sowell, the right wing economist, maintains that the President, when saying that defeating ISIL will take a long time, really means that he will do “very little and do it very slowly.” He provides an example citing that of the thousands of sorties (air strikes) flown against ISIL most of the planes “have not fired a single shot or dropped a single bomb. Why? Because of the restrictive rules of engagement …”

These rules of engagement that Sowell so easily disparages keep us from killing non-ISIL people who are the majority population in the ISIL occupied territories. Quite apart from the ethics involved in these decisions, it is probably wise not to kill non-ISIL people whom we wish to help us eventually eliminate ISIL. Sowell would agree with that except he is so eager to present President Obama’s decisions in a negative light that he often makes poorly thought out comments…and that’s putting it as kindly as I can.

In the last few days our airstrikes have destroyed well over 250 tanker trucks used by ISIL to market their oil. These trucks will be difficult to replace as there are no tanker truck factories in northern Iraq. The rules of engagement that Sowell finds so unnecessary has resulted in our planes dropping leaflets warning the truck drivers to run away as fast as they can because the planes will soon return and destroy their trucks.

 Sowell then pivots in his column to discuss the plight of our black citizens: He is very unhappy with blaming their problems on “the legacy of slavery.” He is quite sure that the problems are due entirely to the increased social support system which he prefers to characterize as “our welfare state policies.” He wants to look at facts: He claims that by 1960 22 percent of black children were being raised in single parent families while thirty years later this had jumped to 67 percent. The increased murder rate is because “The welfare state vision was often part of a non-judgmental social vison that was lenient on criminals and hard on the police.”

What a simplistic series of comments!  Single parent households increased enormously in all segments of society because of no-fault divorce which was common by the early 1970’s. Divorce became cheaper, quicker and carried much less social stigma. Women regularly abused by their husbands could at last be rid of them and, of course, more women were working outside their homes. Sowell apparently doesn’t want to consider those changes in our society.

Then we have his “lenient on criminals and hard on police” remark. It is leniency on criminals that has increased our prison population to between three and four times the incarceration rate of any other western country? We have 700 people per hundred thousand in prison in this country compared with Britain at 148 per hundred thousand and Sowell claims we are “lenient on criminals.” Perhaps he would prefer Sharia law as in Saudi Arabia where they simply chop of various body parts or lash offenders.

 

Nov 24^th

“This is a fine mess you’ve gotten us into.” No, that’s not Stanley Laurel complaining to Oliver Hardy; it’s Reince Priebus complaining about the current state of the Republican Party to anyone who will listen. Who can blame him; but who is listening?

Who is emerging to lead the Republican primary horse race? This depends on which race we are talking about. The Quinnipiac Iowa poll at the half-way mark has Trump leading Cruz by half a head (25 to 23), Carson beginning to fade at 18, Rubio well back at 13, Fiorina barely out of the starting gate at 3 with Pataki and Graham refusing to leave the  gate at all, both at 0.

In the Massachusetts race Trump at 32 is several lengths ahead of Rubio at 18 who is a length ahead of Cruz at 10. Carson, Bush and Fiorina are at 5, 7, and 4 respectively. Graham is joined by Huckabee at 0, both going nowhere. OK, so the metaphor is strained, but how long can candidates who can’t poll at least 10 percent expect to get financial support? You may recall that when one of Fiorina’s supporters was asked why she hadn’t paid the workers for her Senate campaign against Barbara Boxer several years ago, his reply was that she had lost that election so her support staff for the election didn’t deserve to be paid. Now that Fiorina is well down in the polls I wonder if this fellow is getting nervous.

The leaders, and particularly Donald Trump, are absolutely in clover with these ISIL attacks because it makes their jingoistic, racist, comments and suggestions much more appealing. At the same time the majority of Americans are wondering how the Republicans will get back control of their party. It is obvious that the country faces dangers but if a candidate like Trump can simply lie so as to increase his appeal to those who see conspiracies everywhere they look, we will be in more danger from Trump and his followers than we could possibly be from ISIL. The Times  today had a list of Trump’s lies but the problem is that none of the other Republican leaders object to any of them. They are simply afraid of him…and these fearful people are competing with each other to lead the country.

The New York City Police Commissioner, Bill Bratton, has called on Congress take some legislative action that would make the country safer. It isn’t very complicated. We have developed a “no fly” list. These are people who, in the view of the FBI etc., should not be permitted to fly on commercial aircraft.  However, due to the power of the NRA, they are still able to buy all the guns they want. Now Congress, which is happy to pass legislation making entry to this country more difficult for refugees who already face an 18 month to 2 year investigation, can’t find the backbone to deny guns to those on a terrorist watch list who are already here.

Carson imploding Nov 23^rd

We begin with Dr. Ben Carson: He has taken a sudden and well deserved drop in the polls. Just today the New York Times had a front page article about his remarkable surgical abilities. He has been indefatigable in the operating room doing far more surgeries than most other surgeons of equivalent stature. And getting very good outcomes in cases other surgeons refused to take. His quiet unassuming manner helped to make other medical professionals see him as a truly noble figure.

As a surgeon he was always well known to be very religious. He would regularly pray before entering the surgical theater. Attitudes toward him began to change after his remarks at a prayer breakfast, remarks which were considered by many to be insulting to the President. The medical community that had so revered him was shocked by his comments about vaccinations being given too close together. Some laudatory awards were cancelled.

Now, after surging well ahead of Donald Trump in Iowa where Trump’s remark about “eating his little cracker” didn’t go over well with the fundamentalists, Carson’s poll numbers have taken a dive. This is not a surprising development: Carson has made some comments that do not reflect well on his chances to lead the country. First, he is badly upset by what he considers excessive political correctness. Political correctness can be carried to extremes but in its typical role it is no more than an effort to be considerate toward the sensitivities of others; hardly objectionable for someone professing a Christian ethic. Then we have his uncharitable comment about Muslims in which he compares Muslim refugees to mad dogs running loose. There have been other comments such as suggesting that Joseph constructed the Egyptian pyramids to store grain and suggesting, with an apparent straight face, that evolution is a myth created by the Devil to mock God.

Most recently he professes bewilderment that his foreign policy comments have not earned him any status in that arena. He claims that he has said over and over that “we should fight them over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here.” He tells us that other candidates have picked this phrase up from him but that the biased media does not credit him with originating it. The obtuseness of that remark requires no comment from me.

Finally we discover that Carson stands to earn a million dollars just this year just from his book sales. Then there are speaker fees that allow him to charge about 50 thousand dollars an appearance; five or six of those speaking dates a year will cover most of his taxes on the book royalties. Who says you can’t get rich running for President?

Database Nov 22^nd

As you probably guessed from the heading of this piece it’s about Donald Trump, the dyed and blow dried savior (scourge) of the Republican Party. Trump arrived on the scene initially to the cheers of several hundred supporters some of whom, rumor has it, Trump paid to attend. There are organizations in the City that will provide actors for such events. A couple of people attending Trump’s coming out party were recognized as working for this outfit. Naturally there were denials all around, by the organization and by the actors. Who would want to alienate Donald Trump, the money source? I mention this because it is evidence that Trump’s deceptive practices start from the very beginning of his campaign.

Then there is the absurdity of Trump low-balling the amount he has spent on his campaign, He claims to have spent far less than the other candidates. Do you really suppose he is counting the cost of flying his huge jet around various venues where he is scheduled to speak, then having the jet and its crew wait until he has finished erupting and then fly him off to somewhere else? Do you think he counts the cost of that big helicopter giving rides to kids at some county fair?

He tells us that he will insist that all new Syrian refugees appear in a database. Then he tells us that if he is elected President he will send them all back. Of course there is already a database developing on the Syrian refugees because they are being processed for admission to this country. A database is no more than a listing of names and some other characteristics of people in some sort of order; the phone book is a database. We are far more at risk from visitors who are not even required to have visas to enter the country than from refugees; the 9/11 hijackers were an example.

Trump attempted to contribute to the recent paranoia about Muslims and discovered that he had pushed a tad too hard. A reporter asked him if he would recommend setting up a Muslim data base to which he replied, “absolutely” and “certainly.” He also wants “heavy surveillance of mosques and closing some of them.”  His response then changed because there was so much noise that he hadn’t really understood the question, but he also responded in the same way to the question in print.

Senator Cruz, while he has been a consistent Trump supporter, does not favor the federal government collecting databases on anyone. He is joined by Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, John Kasich and probably others. Senator Rubio, however, seems to agree with Trump.

Maybe if Trump wins it all we’ll have laws requiring Muslims to wear a little patch on their clothes showing a crescent moon and a star similar to the Star of David patch required of the Jews by the Nazis. As Sinclair Lewis wrote, “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

Nov 21^st

Mona Charen says, “Perhaps President Bush was wrong to topple Saddam Hussein. I don’t think the verdict is clear. Excepting for the original decision to invade, Bush’s errors were recognized and corrected before he left office.” She doesn’t believe the verdict is clear?  Jeb Bush apparently agrees with her although few others do.

She tells us that, “Bush’s errors were recognized and corrected before he left office.” That statement is simply laughable. Tell us, Ms. Charen, how do we correct over two trillion dollars of debt we incurred by toppling Hussein? No tax increase; no pay as you go for this Congress. How would you suggest that Bush has “corrected” the well over four thousand American deaths and the thousands of amputees? How has Bush “corrected” Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth’s double amputation? What exactly did Bush “correct” before he left office?

To claim that the Congress voted overwhelmingly for this “war” is not an out. The intelligence about Iraq’s developing weapons of mass destruction was supplied by the Bush administration. The executive branch is in control of most of the intelligence that Congress gets and so the executive branch has considerable power to control Congressional votes on issues like this one. Naturally Congress voted overwhelmingly to support the Iraq invasion.

Then Charen brings up the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in 2011. She writes as if this was simply an arbitrary action on President Obama’s part; it wasn’t. Her hero, George Bush, had signed a “Status of Forces Agreement” with Iraq on Dec. 14, 2008 before he left office. That agreement committed the US to withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. If Obama had violated that agreement Charen and her right wing colleagues would have been all over him for prolonging the war. We were in negotiations to leave a few forces in Iraq but the sticking point was where they would be tried if they committed crimes. The Iraqis, naturally enough, wanted then tried in their courts while the US wanted any American lawbreakers tried by the army. No agreement was reached so the US withdrew. Some, like former Secretary of Defense Panetta in his recent book, have maintained that the President should have fought longer and harder to reach an agreement.

Charen finishes by claiming that in a recent election, “…the loser, Nouri al-Maliki hijacked the election and took power President Obama looked the other way because Maliki was Iran’s man…and President Obama has …leaned toward Iran’s interests in the Middle East.” Interesting! The fact is that Nouri al-Maliki resigned the Premiership at American insistence in August of 2014. He was succeeded by Haider al-Abadi who is the current Premier. Is this just Charen’s attempt to paint the President as a Iranian sympathizer hoping no one is bothering to pay attention? Maybe Charen is one of the 20 percent of Republicans who believe the President is a Muslim.

Nov 20^th

Cal Thomas begins this morning’s effort by writing, “College campuses are again in turmoil.” Cal is a bit late to the current “bash the college students” campaign of the conservatively correct. He finds it, “…amusing to read that Derek Bell, Harvard Law school professor, had claimed the Reagan administration had disengaged from civil rights causes and that…George Bush’s campaign about Willie Horton an African -American Massachusetts prisoner who had raped a white woman while on a weekend furlough was also a contributing factor to racial fears.” Yes sir, that sure is amusing. Of all the possible records of criminals committing violence while on furlough, George H.W. Bush just had to use a black convict raping a white woman. Then Thomas tries to blame Al Gore because, “…he raised the issue of furloughs for convicted felons in a debate with Michael Dukakis.” So Al Gore is to blame for this crime? The issue is whether it is responsible to use an account of this crime, that surely promotes racism, to push a political agenda. This is exactly what Bush did.

Then Thomas complains that, “Who is to blame for the…racial conflict…The left isn’t blaming the first African-American President although he has done very little to substantially improve the conditions of poor African-Americans.” First, notice how this conservatively correct columnist focuses on “blame’ and continues with his blame game as he lists other issues. Not once does he suggest a solution to any of these problems. It is not his job to suggest solutions; his job is to blame liberals for whatever difficulty exists.

We look into the record of Ronald Reagan and Barak Obama on unemployment; for the first five years under Reagan Black unemployment began at 14.6 percent and five years later had dropped to 14.5 percent. For the first five years under Obama, Black unemployment began at 12.7 percent and five years later was at 9.7 percent. (I’m using this five year period because these data were only available for the first five years of Obama’s Presidency.)

The peak Black unemployment under Reagan was 21.8 percent; under Obama it was 16.9 percent. The minimum under Reagan was 11 percent; under Obama it was 9.6 percent. Finally, under Reagan Black unemployment was higher than the rate under Obama for 26 consecutive months. These data are readily accessible on the internet if Cal Thomas had been interested. He wasn’t of course because they didn’t fit his agenda.

Thomas tells us that students should be “concerned about the falling value of their degrees.” For college graduates and beyond (advanced degrees) the unemployment rate is currently 2.5 percent. These are the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Very recent graduates will have a higher rate partly because many of them will have moved on to graduate school.

Nov 19^th

Mona Charen is holding forth today unhappy with college administrations succumbing in the face of alleged absurd student demands. Before I get to Mona I will write a few words about Speaker Scott Walker’s efforts to derail any influx of Syrian refugees. Speaker Walker is offering a bill that would put a hold on the admission of any Syrian refugee until the government can absolutely, positively, guarantee that they pose no danger whatever to the country.  Senator Bob Casey tells us that the various agencies now involved in vetting these refugees, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc., etc. will now take about two years before clearing any of them for entry into the country. This is not good enough for the Speaker.

I am curious about what vetting the Speaker thinks appropriate for the current crop of Presidential candidates. How about the checks on members of Congress and SCOTUS? Surely individuals holding these hyper-sensitive government positions should require equally careful scrutiny lest some miscreant bearing ill will toward our country be elected to high office. It is strange that the Speaker is totally unconcerned about such a possibility. (Personally, I would settle for a simple sanity test.)

And now to Mona Charen: Mona is very unhappy with college and university administrators for caving in to various student demands. It seems that according to Charen students have become hyper-sensitive to any perceived slight and are refusing to allow freedom of speech and association at their own protest meetings. She has a point: a faculty member participating in a protest at the University of Missouri is shown trying to block a journalist from photographing that student demonstration. The woman’s enthusiasm overcame her good sense which she recovered the next day when she resigned from the university.

Charen naively wanted the University of Missouri President to simply remove the scholarships from members of the football team if they refused to play on the upcoming Saturday. If they had not played the university would have been sued for one million dollars for breach of contract but that is of no consequence for Mona Charen. It costs her nothing to stick to her politically correct principles. The football team brings in altogether about 80 million dollars a year and so any administrator had better handle those boys with care.

There are other campus problems which Charen chooses to ignore, rape prominent among them. Many campuses prefer not to advertise this problem, bad for their image, but this problem unlike the simplistic student bellyaching about newly perceived racial slights gets little attention.

There have been much greater campus upsets in the past. The Students for a Democratic Society were far more disruptive that anything seen today, but Ms. Charen was only about ten years old when this movement was at its peak in the mid-1960s. If she is upset about the current campus problems she would have been apoplectic had she been a columnist in the 1960s.

 

 

Nov 17^th

George Will, the reigning conservative intellectual, has a considerable problem with Bill O’Reilly’s book, “Killing Reagan.” Will claims that O’Reilly has used shoddy scholarship to defame Reagan. He points to the many sources that O’Reilly should have interviewed but never did. O’Reilly’s book is not even sold at the Reagan Library.

O’Reilly claims that after the assassination attempt on Reagan’s life he was often seriously incapacitated; some days unable to work at all but on his best days truly brilliant. This assassination attempt occurred, March 30 1981, just a few months into the Reagan Presidency. O’Reilly claims that this accelerated Reagan’s Alzheimer condition. There is no medical evidence to corroborate such a suggestion although there is plenty of evidence for Reagan’s memory lapses.

In spite of his iconic status among the Republican faithful the Reagan Presidency was a disaster. His initial drastic tax cuts led to unemployment of 10.8 percent; he ballooned the national debt which was just 906 billion when he took office to 2.6 trillion when he left office. That’s an increase of 280 percent. This is a fiscal conservative?

Then there was the Iran Contra Affair. This happened in his second term when there was mounting evidence of his incompetency. There were seven hostages held by an affiliate if Iran in Lebanon. Our government arranged to have the Israelis ship certain arms to Iran and we would resupply the Israelis. The Iranians paid a premium for the weapons and the profit on the deal was spent to arm the Nicaraguan contras a right wing group fighting against the Sandinistas. This entire operation was illegal. Reagan initially claimed he knew nothing about it but eventually documents surfaced showing that he did. If he didn’t know about it he was incompetent; if he did know about it he was guilty of a crime.

Many of the incriminating documents were withheld or destroyed. The low level actors in this drama were convicted and sentenced to prison only to be pardoned by G.H.W. Bush when he became President. There is some evidence that Reagan’s principle aides were concerned enough about his competency to consider using the 25^th Amendment to replace him.

Then he had to deal with colon cancer surgery in 1985 when he was 74. That’s not much help for an elderly person’s mental functioning. Couple that with wife Nancy controlling his schedule according to the dictates of her astrologer and you have the recipe for the disaster that was the Reagan Presidency. Maybe George Will should find a different hero.

Nov 16^th

The morning paper today featured dueling columnists: Thomas Sowell was writing to chastise the press for its coverage of Dr. Ben Carson’s many unusual utterances and Eugene Robinson’s column suggested that Carson should stop whining about that very same coverage. Sowell was badly overmatched.

Sowell begins with a claim of “the media going ballistic over discrepancies in a few things he (Carson) said.” Then Sowell tells us, “…the biggest discrepancy has been between the furor in the media and the irrelevance of his statements to any political issue.” Part of the problem is that Carson rarely makes any political relevant statements. He follows the conservatively correct position on the minimum wage: he opposes raising it. On same sex marriage, he claims that this is tantamount to bestiality. On this he is to the right of the most righteous right winger! Most of what we know of Carlson comes from his books and from his recent utterances.

It should be obvious, even to Sowell, that some pronouncements by a candidate, which have nothing whatever to do with politics directly, are still very relevant to the public’s judgment of the candidate’s mental fitness for office. Carson has claimed he has a theory that the pyramids were constructed under Joseph’s direction for grain storage. Sowell claims that, “Carson was smiling as he said this so it is not clear whether he was using this theory to illustrate some point. But in any case he was not claiming it as fact.” Well, that makes it curious because most folks with even an elementary knowledge of Egyptian history know the pyramids were used to store dead Egyptians. Hey, Carson said that this was just a theory so what’s the big deal? His handlers need to be very cautious about any other “theories” Carson might have.

Sowell tells us that the media has, “… shown no such zeal to disclose Barack Obama’s associations and alliances with a whole series of people who expressed their hatred for America in words and/or deeds.” This is a bald faced lie. The media pounced on the President’s associations with Bernadine Dorn, Bill Ayers and Pastor Jeremiah Wright. If they hadn’t, how would Sowell and the rest of us know anything about them? Even now more than 20 percent of Republicans believe the President is a Muslim and the leading contender for the Presidency on their ticket harangued him for years claiming he was not born in this country. Currently Trump has not changed his mind.

Sowell’s final inanity is to claim that Obama, “…directly promote the destruction of governments in Egypt and Libya that posed no threats to American interests…” The action against Libya was a NATO effort and the notion that Libya posed no threat to American interests might not sit well with the relatives of the 270 men and women murdered by Muammar Khadafy, the head of the Libyan government, who confessed to arranging for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. That, Mr. Sowell, is more than twice as many deaths as in the recent ISIL attacks on the citizens of Paris. That Libya and Khadafy were “no threat to American interests” is absurd. So you sweep the deaths of 270 people under the rug because that suits your political agenda? How pitiful.

ISIL2 Nov 15^th

I usually watch Chuck Todd’s show on Meet the Press. This morning I thought Todd had slipped a cog, or maybe many cogs. The fact that ISIL has made several separate terrorist attacks on soft targets has everyone on edge. There is much handwringing and people asking, “What can we do about it?” We can hope our intelligence community is alert and monitoring those we believe might be up to no good. That’s about the extent of what we can do to protect people here in this country. As I said yesterday the country is alive with invitingly soft targets.

Todd had a guest, Ben Rhodes, White House National Security Advisor, and Todd was prepared to make him look silly. He began by describing the carnage in France, the bombings in Beirut and elsewhere. Then he played a tape of the President saying that we have ISIL contained and on the run. Todd followed up by saying that these killings didn’t sound like ISIL was on the run at all and what about that. Ben Rhodes didn’t take the bait; he pointed out that the ISIL forces had been driven out of Sinjar and Hol and that the Kurds now control highway 47, the only highway connecting parts of the ground occupied by ISIL. Todd wasn’t happy and reiterated his complaint about containment. Rhodes patiently pointed out that the containment applied to occupied ground and did not preclude ISIL striking at soft targets elsewhere.

 

 

ISIL Nov 14^th

Terrorists have struck a heavy blow in Paris. Now everyone is left with the repercussions; all of the political pundits in this country seem to agree that the same thing could happen here…and, of course, it could. You want soft targets; look at any football stadium on Saturday afternoons.

Now come the pundits: Congressman Peter King, a perennial guest on Fox news because he can be depended upon to say something derogatory about the President, was commenting at length (what else?) on the potential problem. Mr. King is Chairman of the sub-committee on Counter Terrorism and Intelligence, and a member the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. So how did he achieve this critical position? Not because of his intelligence, although you would think that might have been important in his selection given the committee titles; it wasn’t. He has been re-elected to Congress over and over again for 23 years and now has the seniority to get what he wants. Heaven help the country!

Fox presented another expert on security, or at least Fox said he was. I had never heard of him although he spoke authoritatively and had a foreign accent; these might have been very important to Fox in his selection. Fox played a tape of President Obama saying that we now had ISIL on the run, citing the Kurds’ recent recapture of the cities of Sinjar and Hol which had been held by ISIL for over a year. Those seemed to be important events as was the likely incinerating of Jihadi John the ISIL killer who had been the principal actor in the beheading of captives. There was also the claimed killing of 300 terrorists in these actions.

But none of this was convincing to the expert on Fox’s screen. He began shaking his head dismissively well before the President had finished his first sentence. He claimed these were unimportant victories because the Kurds had simply recaptured their own territory. What an odd thing for an “expert” to say. Every bit of territory that ISIL controls was once controlled by some other political entity. Any pushback of ISIL results in a recovery of territory previously held by someone else. Naturally no one on Fox challenged him on this point.

ISIL is being pushed from ground they once controlled so the “Caliphate” they aspire to is in considerable danger. Could that be the reason they are suddenly attacking soft civilian targets, first in Beirut where they have killed nearly 50 people in suicide bomber attacks, and now, a few days later, in Paris, where the death toll might reach 200. The Paris attack was designed to maximize civilian casualties; there were no government structures, no newspapers nearby.

ISIL has killed many Frenchmen and at least one American. What have they gained? They have made the French very angry. If the French had not been willing to take more than a nominal role in attacks on ISIL up until now, that will surely change to the considerable discomfort of the Caliphate.

Carson Nov 13^th

Trump ranted for an hour and a half last night and some of it was about Dr. Ben Carson. He said that Carson was “pathological; his own words.” He was right; Carson did say that about himself referring, of course, to his youthful behavior. Carson describes many youthful events that show a seriously troubled kid: hitting a friend in the face with a padlock, trying to stab another boy with a knife that, very fortunately, hit the belt buckle on the boy’s pants and then broke. There were other events as well. To put the kindest face on them, many are thought to be apocryphal. Carson, like the good conservative he is, blames the media for what he claims is excessive scrutiny.

Much of his background story appears in his books and because of that it is difficult to claim, as politicians often do, that he misspoke, or that his remarks were taken out of context. In today’s “Daily Mail” some of his backstory is quite successfully deconstructed. He claimed that his mother was one of 24 children; she wasn’t; she was one of thirteen. He claimed his mother divorced his father because the father was a bigamist; there is no evidence for that. The Daily Mail presents very complete documentation for all of their challenges. In addition they show that Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard did a very sloppy job of tracing Carson’s life history, as he did with a couple of other people, sloppy enough so that PBS cancelled his show. It will resume next year but with another genealogist and two more people “assisting” Gates.

There are online pictures of the interior of Carson’s home. The place is a shrine to Carson’s achievements; it serves as a showplace for his many trophies. At least one entire wall is completely covered with beautifully framed awards Carson has received, and there are lots and lots of these. There is also a portrait of a seated and smiling Carson with a smiling Jesus standing just behind him and with his hand on Carson’s shoulder.

Carson’s enormous success is important to him, as it should be. He has come a long way from a Detroit ghetto to become the pre-eminent pediatric neurosurgeon in the country. The important point here is to note just how far Carson has come. The further he has come the more credit he deserves. Now if he can construct a scenario in which he was in even more desperate circumstances as a child and as a young man, then that means he will deserve even more credit for elevating himself above the horrible circumstances of his childhood. This might explain his need to insist on these stories about his abysmal childhood.

If you want the maximum credit available for climbing out of a hole then make sure everyone knows that the hole was really, really deep.

 

Charen’s Christie redux Nov 12^th

Mona Charen takes issue with Chris Christie’s plea for drug treatment. She says the notion that anyone is opposed to drug treatment is a “straw man.” She asks, “Who is opposed to drug and alcohol treatment?” The answer is only those who have to pay for it. Then she gets to the nub of her problem with addiction: she says that “There are some (and I would include myself) who think addiction is not like multiple myeloma or autism; there is an element of choice in the former and not the latter.” I would guess, just offhand, that Ms. Mona Charen has never been addicted to anything and therefore she doesn’t really know what she is talking about.

This “element of choice” that Charen mentions is the standard excuse used by the Charens and other moralists to lay blame. Laying blame is of great importance for these people; if you cannot assign blame you cannot assign guilt; if you can assign guilt you can assign punishment. The result is obvious; drug offenders are guilty and surely should be punished so judges send drug offenders to jail and not to treatment. After all don’t we all have “free will?”

Referring to Christie, Charen maintains that, “Christie has raised some substantive issues in this race (entitlements for example)…But this looks like an exercise in the kind of moral exhibitionism that has become so common on the left and that Christie ought to be above.”  This “moral exhibitionism that has become so common on the left” is apparently totally absent from the right. It does seem clear that what conservatives like Charen are interested in conserving is money, not people.

 Then Charen tells us, “Treatment is not any sort of panacea for addiction, either, …a psychiatrist estimates that between 40 and 60 percent of participants drop out within the first few weeks or months…while effective treatment takes at least a year.” Treatment may not be “any sort of panacea” but it is considerably better than no treatment at all.  Alcoholics fall off the wagon all the time; the remedy is to get right back on.

Then Charen goes after Christie’s comments that it’s easy to be prolife while for the nine months they’re in the womb…but when they get out that’s when it gets tough. Charen says that this is “a tired and familiar charge from the left.” She goes on to claim that no post-partum care can possibly compensate for dismembering an infant in the womb. No one said it did. Charen says that “over 2000 Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPC)… provide aid during the first year of life (and sometimes beyond).”

The primary purpose of CPCs is to prevent pregnant women from having abortions, anything else is strictly secondary. From the available information about their policies it appears that they will do or say anything to achieve their purpose. They provide false information about the risks of abortion and even the risks of some perfectly safe contraceptive practices. Since CPCs are tasked with persuading pregnant women not to have abortions regardless of their circumstances,  a woman who requests information about how, or where, to obtain a safe abortion will find the CPC refusing to provide it. These CPCs were started by the Family Research Council, an ultraconservative fundamentalist Christian group based in Colorado Springs. Their concern for infants with severe congenital defects whose parents need financial help does not exist in their advertising. Charen here is simply directing women to an appallingly deceptive organization and she should be ashamed of herself.

Debate Nov 11^th

No, I didn’t watch the debate; I did read some of the debate transcripts available on the New York Times website. The questions were predictable and so were the responses. Kasich came off as sensible on the immigration issue. He pointed out that deporting all of the undocumented people would be nearly impossible. None of the conservatives have discussed how they would determine the country of origin for these people or how they would persuade the country to accept their return; yes, I know picky-picky! Kasich also went after Trump’s wall and Trump didn’t like that. At one point Trump reminded everyone that his companies were worth “billions and billions” and he, “didn’t have to stand here and listen to that.” But he did continue to stand there and listen to that. Someone should have advised him that he wasn’t chained to his lectern and could leave anytime he pleased.

Rubio tried to make a good point; educating people for trades pays off. He informed the audience that welders earn more that philosophers; they don’t of course, and Rubio could have determined that in four minutes on the internet. Welders make about 32 thousand dollars a year, if they can find year round employment; professors of philosophy earn about twice that much. The comparison is absurd because the Professor will have at least eight years of college and graduate school while the welder can learn his trade in considerably less time. Rubio did well until he made the mistake of using a terrible example to illustrate a valid point.

Then came the “Money Honey,” who asserted that 40 percent of the people in the country were unemployed and asked what was each candidate going to do about that. Quite apart from the hutzpah to copy write “Money Honey” Bartiromo needs to re-examine the factual bases for her questions. This 40 percent figure was debunked long ago even by conservative groups; it included children, retirees, college students and stay at home moms. (Carly Fiorina also used a similar statistic to complain about the 90 million Americans who were out of work; same problem.)

On to raising the minimum wage: the Republicans who were asked about it were against it. They claimed that has made the country less competitive. Rubio claimed that it would be a “disaster.” Trump said that he can’t be for it because “our wages are too high.” Note that his comment was not just about the minimum wage but about wages generally. (Trump had been commenting on the Trans Pacific Partnership and how we needed to start standing up to China Whereupon Senator Paul told him that China wasn’t part of the TPP; Oh Dear!) Carson who previously had favored a slight increase in the minimum wage no longer does. Once more he dredged up an early job he had in a lab that helped give him his start and served him well.

In 1943 I had a job after school as a printer’s devil. It paid 32 cents an hour. I couldn’t get time off to go rabbit hunting so I quit. I learned at an early age to avoid frustrating situations. That lesson has served me well too.

 

Murder Nov 10^th

Last night I watched a wonderful performance by a very excited guy; clad in a suit, his jacket flapping as he moved, he pranced quickly from one side of the stage to the other screaming his Christian message and holding what he said was his Bible high above his head. He was telling his audience that the Bible had instructed them to kill all homosexuals. This fascinating performance continued for some time as the Pastor Kevin Swanson became so agitated that I thought he would slip into a grand mal seizure right on stage, or perhaps have a stroke.

So is this guy a “one off,” an outlier? No he is not; the man has company. There is also Phil Kayer leader of the Dominion Covenant Church; there is Joel McDurmon, President of the Christian Reconstructionist Group, American Vision. The aim of McDurmon’s group is to make the country into a theocracy under Mosaic Law. (Which, by the way, is somewhat similar to Sharia Law.)

Pastor Kevin, at the conclusion of his performance, had several Republican Presidential contenders appear on stage with him; there was Senator Ted Cruz, Governor “Bobby” Jindal and former Governor Mike Huckabee. Their appearance on stage with this guy was risky, but surely carefully scripted. Not one of them was asked if he agreed with the principle theme being pushed by Pastor Swanson which was the immediate murder of all gays. Ted Cruz was asked what the first thing he would do every morning if he should gain the White House. He said that he would get down on his knees; that answer seemed quite satisfactory to the audience even though he didn’t discuss killing any gays. I guess you take what you can get.

So what is this Mosaic Law all about? It’s about Jewish law during the time of Moses as contained in the Torah (aka Pentateuch), the first five books of the Bible. Under Mosaic Law many misbehaviors could get you stoned to death and it’s true that being homosexual was one of them, but far from the only one. If your son was disrespectful and swore at you he could be taken before the elders who would then stone him to death (Lev 20:9). If you discovered that your new bride was not a virgin you could take her back to her father’s house where she would be stoned to death (Deut. 22: 20-21). If you decided that another outfit’s god was better than Jehovah and you became an apostate you could also be stoned to death (Deut. 13:1-10). Stoning was obviously the preferred method of execution for violations of Mosaic Law of that time. Stoning did involve the whole community, or at least a considerable part of it. Where we have the death penalty the death itself is not a community effort even if the guilty person is condemned by a jury.

Also Mosaic Law death penalties had no expensive appeals and delays that I know about, and of course rocks were cheap.

 

Email Nov 9^th

In today’s paper we have a citizen who tells us that Lady Gaga had Secretary Clinton’s email address….and of course Ambassador Stevens did not. This information is, I suppose, to demonstrate Clinton’s priorities. What it demonstrates is that the right wing will politicize anything if they believe it will give them a political advantage. The Clinton email thing and the Benghazi killings are now in the area of overkill. As Bernie Sanders said, “Enough with the damned emails already!”

Overkill or not, some light needs to be shed on the deaths in Benghazi. I find it interesting that no one seems interested in the complete back story of why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi in the first place. The accepted version is that it was partly because Clinton wanted to make Benghazi into a more permanent facility. Even the Republicans claim that this was just one of the reasons and they stop there. Our Embassy, the normal home turf of our ambassadors, was in Tripoli, the largest city and the capital city of Libya.

Stevens was well liked by the Libyans but obviously not by all of them. He had been warned by the Libyan government that this trip was dangerous but he went to Benghazi anyway. Perhaps there was something in his makeup that required that he not concern himself with personal danger. Still, much is made of the frequent requests for more security at these facilities. It’s unfortunate that the funds for State Department requests to increase their security were denied.

Shaun Waterman of the Washington Times, not a notable liberal paper, writes in 2012 about Congress slashing funds to upgrade security at various State Department facilities. According to Waterman Congress cut nearly 300 million dollars for security, but Representative Gowdy’s investigating committee never mentions that. The committee seems uninterested in investigating Republican contributions to this disaster.

Here is a McClatchy Newspaper report about Stevens’ refusal of security assistance; another bit of information Gowdy’s committee hasn’t discussed:

“In the month before attackers stormed U.S. facilities in Benghazi and killed four Americans, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens twice turned down offers of security assistance made by the senior U.S. military official in the region in response to concerns that Stevens had raised in a still secret memorandum, two government officials told McClatchy.

Why Stevens, who died of smoke inhalation in the first of two attacks that took place late Sept. 11 and early Sept. 12, 2012, would turn down the offers remains unclear. The deteriorating security situation in Benghazi had been the subject of a meeting that embassy officials held Aug. 15, where they concluded they could not defend the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi. The next day, the embassy drafted a cable outlining the dire circumstances and saying it would spell out what it needed in a separate cable.”

Isn’t it obvious that this tragedy was all Hillary Clinton’s fault!

 

Jets Nov 8^th

The Blue Angels and their Cherry Festival performance is an interesting local issue. If you haven’t been reading the Record Eagle, the issue of dropping the Blue Angels jet performance from the Cherry Festival has been raised by the local Veterans for Peace (VP) members.

They provide a number of reasons for eliminating this particular air show; the most compelling are the loudness of the jets (over 120 decibels) which can really traumatize those who suffer from PTSD, and the fact that these are war planes and the Cherry Festival is not about national defense or about war. There are other reasons as well: the racket is hard on pets, wakes and startles sleeping babies as well as the elderly and, coupled with other festival unpleasantness, drives some inhabitants to use the time to visit out-of-town relatives.

On the positive side we have a substantial increase in the Cherry Festival attendance when they appear. Some estimates are that they increase attendance by about 100 thousand people. Many downtown businesses increase their gross, others do not, haircuts, trips to the home improvement store and other purchases can be put off. Who wants to miss the spectacle?

The Angels are cheap for the festival because their cost is subsidized by the taxpayer. The jets cost 25 thousand an hour to fly, so the usual formations of four jets cost the taxpayers 100 thousand dollars an hour. The total cost of their visit to the government is far greater than that because of the required support people but the Navy writes it all off as “publicity.” Citizens concerned about “fraud, waste and abuse” are quiet about this particular government expense.

The Record Eagle has had many postings about this issue and reading them is instructive… and discouraging. This morning’s paper has sixteen posts, six are from women. (At least they are if one can judge from first names.) Among the shortest, just six words, is from one of the women, “Do it. Get rid of them.” Another post, equally brief, this one from a male, “JET noise. The sound of FREEDOM!!!!” The score, which is hardly “scientific” is 12 to continue the Angels and three to stop them (one was indeterminate). All three of the stops came from women; all of the men want the show to go on. Many of the men were very clear conflating the Blue Angels with patriotic fervor even to the point of using many caps and exclamation points to emphasize their feelings. They truly believe that love for the Blue Angels and love of country are one and the same.

It is obvious that the Blue Angels will be performing whenever the festival can get them. Patriotism may have something to do with it but increased income for local businesses have considerably more to do with it. Then there is the appeal of the spectacle, of the unusual and the rarely seen. This has an enormous draw for many people whether it is a bear up a neighbor’s tree or Donald Trump posturing and telling outrageous lies.                            

Sowell Nov 7^th

Thomas Sowell commented on education in his column yesterday. He tries, quite unsuccessfully, to counter the negative publicity gained by new revelations about charter schools. To review a bit: a recent article pointed out that much of the advantage charter schools hold over public schools in test score results comes from charter schools dumping students likely to be less successful test takers back into the public school system which must accept them. Thus, the charter schools critics claim, the comparison is unfair.

Sowell takes considerable umbrage at this “unfair” designation. By some quirk of logic Sowell says, “This criticism ignores the fact that schools do not exist to provide jobs for teachers or ‘fairness’ to institutions but to provide education for students.” Here Sowell is partially correct. The criticism that charter schools dump expected low achievers back into public schools has nothing whatsoever to do with providing jobs for teachers. The part about providing ‘fairness’ (Sowell’s quotes) to institutions is quite different. If you want to know if charter school students do or don’t do better than public school students then you must start with a level playing field, otherwise any comparison of the test’s results yields nonsense.

Sowell then continues to insist that when charter schools produce good results they “should be celebrated and imitated, not attacked by critics because of their ‘unfair’ exemptions from the counterproductive rules of the educational establishment.” Sowell is now being truly ridiculous. These “…the counterproductive rules of the educational establishment” include starting with equivalent groups when evaluating treatment effects. This “rule” is universal when evaluating any treatment effect and is not confined to “the educational establishment.”

Sowell says that the students who remain can get a better education without them (troublesome students) around. “If the critics are right and getting rid of the influence of uncooperative and disruptive students contribute to better educational results then the answer is not to prevent charter schools from expelling such students, but to allow other public schools to remove such students when other students can benefit from getting a better education without them around.”

That’s absurd; the critics have pointed out that if you dismiss or otherwise force out of your school, children who are likely to be low achievers you change the mix so that your school will show higher test scores.  Sowell has massaged this result so that now the removal of these kids suspected of being lower achievers somehow improves the performance of those who are left. That has simply not been found; Sowell has made it up!

 

Nov 6^th

 Dr. Carson, A Republican candidate for the Presidency, has produced some controversial new ideas recently. He has already relieved himself of some interesting opinions, opinions about which most people knowledgeable on the matters he is discussing find appalling. He uses the fact that the Warsaw ghetto held off a small portion of the German army for a time, to assert that if all the German Jews had just been armed The Holocaust would have been avoided. I would guess that Carson has never read William L. Shirer’s “Rise and fall of the Third Reich.”

He also claims that homosexuality is a choice because some long term prisoners become temporarily homosexual in prison. He believes that evolution is a plot by the Devil to discredit God. Global warming is a myth as well. The Earth was created by God in six calendar days of twenty-four hours each. He doesn’t believe carbon dating is accurate and apparently never heard of Argon-Argon dating. Never mind, he knows where the corpus callosum is.

Now Dr. Carson has added to this curious list of pronouncements: He tells us that the Egyptian pyramids were constructed by Joseph to store grain. Most authorities believe that the pyramids were constructed to store dead Egyptians. The fact that these structures are, for the most part, constructed of enormous blocks of solid rock would really allow for precious little storage of anything else. No matter, many of Dr. Carson’s other beliefs have little to do with facts. They do appeal mightily to non-fact-based conservative Republicans. His last book about the Constitution is high on the Times’ best seller list. Its reviews on Amazon are not uniformly glowing although most of the comments about the negative reviews insist that the unhappy, surely liberal, reviewer hasn’t read the book.

Dr. Carson is able to generate a lot of attention because the public assumes that he is well educated (He’s a brain surgeon after all!). His demeanor is one of calm self-control. One expects, after watching him for a bit, that he will shortly doze off. Then the man utters obvious absurdities and sticks with them. Of course that gets people’s attention. Part of the problem is the public’s conflating training and education. Medical school, law school and most graduate schools offer training; they do not offer education. Knowing where the Purkinje cells are in the cerebellum and what they secrete, or citing precedents to bolster stare decisis or winning a spelling championship does not prove that anyone is well educated. However, earning an M.D., or a J.D. or a Ph. D., means that the earners are surely able to continue learning and educate themselves. Most educated people are autodidacts, they are self-educated. Dr. Carson’s understanding of the world is apparently limited to the brain and a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible. That’s enough for many conservatives but surely not enough to win the Presidency.

Laughable Nov 5^th

Well, maybe not laughable but at least worth a chuckle. You may remember the ill-fated lovers Ms. Gamrat and Mr. Courser This pair had been carrying on an adulterous affair while both were first-term Republicans in the Michigan legislature committed to tea party principles and strong family values. Naughtiness will out and these two had been very naughty; both were married, but not to each other so this affair between them was a serious no-no.  To make matters worse they shared an office and used state money to try to cover their sins. Courser even went so far as to plant an ad suggesting that he was gay and seeking a gay companion.

They were outed. Gamrat was kicked out of the legislature; Courser, learning much from Richard Nixon’s troubles, resigned before he could be voted out. Now, in a display of hutzpah unequalled in modern times, both of these miscreants ran to fill their own now vacant seats. The voters had enough of them and both lost big time. Gamrat, the blonde femme fatale, got about 9 percent of the vote for her old seat while Courser, the presumed seducer, managed just about 5 percent for his return. They will now probably set up a consulting firm designed to help other wayward legislators avoid similar problems.

Now on to the national scene: Dana Milbank in his column this morning pretends to apply for the job as moderator at the next Republican Presidential debate. He promises to follow all of their requirements most of which he lists in this very funny bit. Among the requirements he agrees to is, “Not to ask any candidate to raise his/her hand at any time.” In a primary debate for 2012 election I remember the contestants being asked to raise their hands if they thought that the earth was less than ten thousand years old. All but Ron Paul raised their hands and when Congressman Paul was asked about that, like any good politician, he salvaged his fundamentalist credentials by saying that he wasn’t sure. That fascinating byplay won’t happen again.

These candidates have some odd demands: among them is a requirement that they be allowed opening statements of at least 30 seconds each and to allow candidates unlimited time to rebut one another whenever their names are mentioned. These people are serious about this. Can you imagine giving any politician, and they are all politicians even if they’ve never been elected to anything, an unlimited amount of time to speak? If they were unhappy about the length of the first debate just wait; they’ll probably wish that the monitors had furnished cots and sleeping bags…or at least strong coffee.

One effect of this curious list of requirements is sure to be watcher apathy. It is hard to imagine even Fox News carrying this farce or even commenting on it.

 

 

 

 

Addiction Nov 4^th

Governor Christie has a fascinating video out there. Check it out by googling Christie “pro-life.” Christie is pro-life but he has come down hard on those who he claims are only pro-life while the “infant” is in the womb. He is shown giving a truly impressive talk to a small group of supporters about the need to be pro-life after the child is born regardless of the person’s circumstances. He begins with the example of his mother who tried to give up cigarettes and could not. She died of cancer but no one suggested that she not be treated because the addiction was her own fault.  He contrasted this attitude with that shown toward a close friend who became addicted to Percocet, a pain killer first prescribed for a painful back. His point was that all lives are precious and that while being pro-life is easy when the innocent infant is in the womb we need to be consistent and support a pro-life position later in life as well, even if the life, by then, has been messed up.

Good for Christie! I don’t agree with some of his utterances but on this he is certainly right. I am not pro-life if this means that the fertilized ovum moving down the Fallopian tube is considered a human being. I find that equivalent to believing that an acorn is an oak tree and that squirrels are guilty of deforesting the country. Christie is not quite so pro-life when it comes to the death penalty. New Jersey does not have one at the moment but a push to get one on Christies’ desk for his signature was recently defeated. Christie, with typical right wing inconsistency, said that if it got to his desk he would sign it.

Republican Governors do occasionally have their moments of Christian charity. Recall Ohio’s Governor Kasich extending Medicaid…and then paying for it by not being invited to CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, holding a conference in his own state. Who knows what price Christie will have to pay; he is already suspect for making nice with President Obama who had come to New Jersey to inspect storm damage.

There is another fascinating angle here. How did this clip of Christie making his case for encouraging life after birth get on the internet? Apparently it started with “The Huffington Post,” a rather left leaning outfit. I picked it up from tuning in to Rachel Madow last night at nine o’clock. Rachel is very bright but sometimes annoyingly stretches 15 minutes’ worth of stuff to an hour so I just watch the first fifteen minutes. She showed the Christie tapes and they certainly surprised me. Madow thought this would re-energize Christie’s campaign and it might very well.

This tape, now with many millions of “hits,” must be a plum for conservatives, so where are the conservatives? David Limbaugh, the more vitriolic younger brother of Rush Limbaugh declares Christie’s comments platitudes. Apparently the tapes are arousing waves of apathy on the right; that would figure.

 

 

 

Rewrite Nov 3^rd

Our favorite economist, Thomas Sowell, has determined that “…having intervened in Libya to help overthrow the government of Muammar Qaddafi, who was no threat to America’s interests in the Middle East, The Obama administration was confronted with the fact  that Qaddafi’s ouster simply threw the country into such chaos that Islamic terrorists were able to operate freely in Libya.”

Mr. Sowell’s avowed point in his column is to call out Hillary Clinton’s change of position on various issues, particularly on the Benghazi affair. To do this he apparently feels compelled to present us with his version of what happened in Libya and how America, and particularly Secretary Clinton, is responsible for all of it. This won’t wash of course.

First of all, l the fall of Qaddafi was part of the “Arab Spring” series of uprisings. This also produced the fall of Mubarak in Egypt which was covered incessantly by our mainstream media. In Egypt the Islamic Party eventually managed to get control of the government as a result of an election. They won over 70 percent of the seats in the Egyptian Parliament. Then, naturally, the army decided that they objected so now there is an unelected General in charge of the government; and if you object to that you’ll get the same treatment you would have received under Mubarak. We continue to support the Egyptian military. I guess none of this is Clinton’s fault.

The same thing happened in Libya but with several differences: The first difference was that NATO, and that also meant the United States, became actively involved in helping the rebels against Qaddafi. Planes from Denmark, France, Britain, Italy and the U.S. were all involved in fighting Qaddafi’s forces. As a result Qaddafi was defeated and killed. We were involved militarily because this was a NATO operation; we were not involved militarily in the overthrow of Mubarak.

Post-Qaddafi the Islamists moved in but there was no effective counterforce; there was no new Libyan strong man to restore order, so order was not restored and as a result four Americans were killed.  This tragedy is obviously the fault of Hillary Clinton…according to Sowell and other  desperate Republicans.

Now, once again, consider Sowell’s assertion that Qaddafi was no threat to the United States. I presume Sowell has never heard of Pan Am Flight 103 It was brought down by a bomb over Lockerbie Scotland killing, altogether, 270 people. Qaddafi later proudly claimed the he arranged for this massacre. Perhaps this might have had something to do with our interest is his removal in spite of Sowell’s contention that “He was no threat to America’s interests in the Middle East.”

Nov 2^nd

Today we can report increasing consternation in the Republican ranks. I watched the ranting by Joe of “Morning Joe” for a few minutes this morning. Joe Scarborough was mightily upset about the totally unfair questions thrown at the Republican candidates in the last debate. Scarborough claims, and I believe him, that not one of the CNBC questioners had ever actually voted in a Republican primary. That, I guess, is clear evidence of bias. I would bet that none of them had ever voted in a Democratic primary either, but Scarborough makes his living by ranting, not by being reasonable.

Now the candidates have decided to divorce their debate supervision from the Republican National Committee (RNC) and control it themselves. Does anyone believe that these candidates who are in competition with each other can agree on anything substantive? Well, they have. They agree that the temperature of the room should not be too high and that the debate should not be too long and that the networks should not be entrusted to moderate the event. And they have agreed to cancel the next debate, so there! They want much more innocuous questions and, by golly, they will insist on that. They will be sorry about this requirement; much of the applause at the last debate came from Senator Cruz’ and others attacks on “the media;” if the moderators are all certified as friendly to conservatives that bogey man vanishes. (You might notice that Cruz’ rhetorical pauses are now getting long enough to leave his audience wondering if he might have forgotten his next line.)

So what was the questioning like at the Democratic debate? The questioning of Hilary Clinton, the clear leader in this competition, began with a summary of her position changes on various issues. The questioner finished off with this softball. “Will you say or do anything to be President.” So how much complaining have the Democratic candidates done? None that I know of.

An update on my friend Bill whose stroke I wrote about recently. He is recovering and doing quite well. The folks who adjudicate these things have now decided that Bill is eligible for social services such as Medicaid and no longer must prove that he isn’t working. (How could you possibly prove that you haven’t done something? Prove that you have never been disloyal to …) Now that he is in a hospital with a quarter of his skull removed such proof is no longer necessary.