The Buckshot Stops Here.

Intrepid reader Wade Harkema sends us this note concerning the Vice President's recent embarrassment. 

Thought you  would find this interesting. 50 of 54 hunting accidents in SD last year were attributed to upland bird hunting. They used to be more detailed in previous years reports and many of them were very similar to what Cheney did. In 2001 one of Cheney's secret service agents was struck in the forehead by a stray pellet and the truck he was riding in was struck 50 times! too bad the mainstream media doesn't know anything about hunting. I think we have a lot of people right now in this country who think what Cheney only happens a few times in this country and Cheney shouldn't be hunting. Most of us who have hunted in SD for awhile have either been shot, sprayed with pellets that bounced off of us, or heard pellets whistle past us.

Anywho, Wade

The conclusion I draw from this is not that Cheney shouldn't be hunting, but that no one should be hunting.  It sounds too dangerous to me, and to my car. 

Mark Shields on the News Hour said that this story would not go away.  The image of Cheney shooting someone with a shotgun would follow him around the way the vicious attack rabbit still follows Jimmy Carter.  I think that this is right.  Cartoonists preserve such images better than amber does ancient insects. But that said, you'd rather be Cheney than Carter.  Running in panic with a rabbit nipping at your heels is a good bit more demeaning than standing with a shotgun while everyone in front of you scatters.

This reminds me of a serious mistake that liberal cartoonists made when Ronald Reagan was first in office.  I was in Grad School in Southern California at the time, and I was treated daily to Paul Conrad's cartoons in the Los Angeles Times.  He drew Reagan with a mean face, frowning, always about to take candy away from some defenseless baby.  But that Reagan followed Jimmy Carter, who appeared in cartoons as a goofball, wearing a beany cap (often with a propeller atop it), sporting an adam's apple that was as large as, well, an apple.  After four years of that, mean looked pretty good.  Whatever Reagan was, he wasn't mean.  He was generous in spirit, and so the charge never stuck.  It took a long time for cartoonists to come around to presenting him as simple minded.  I think that was also off the mark, but it was at least plausible. 

Putting a shotgun in the hands of a VP from Wyoming just isn't going to hurt him all that much.

The Sound Of Silence

Let's let Charles Krauthammer have the last word on the silly Cheney shooting story:

The media laying these charges are the same media that just last week unilaterally decided that the public's right to know did not extend to seeing cartoons that had aroused half the world, burned a small part of it and deeply affected the American national interest. Having arrogated to themselves the judgment of what a free people should be allowed to see regarding an issue that is literally burning, they then go ballistic over a few hours' delay in revealing an accident with only the most trivial connection to the nation's interest or purpose.

Cheney got a judgment call wrong, for reasons that are entirely comprehensible. The disproportionate, at times hysterical, response to that error is far less comprehensible.

Democrats Torpedo Their Own

Nothing not to like about this story, if you are a Republican.  From Mother Jones:

Democratic Senate candidate and Marine Corps Major Paul Hackett is accustomed to waging quixotic battles and taking his hits. He just didn’t expect the lowest—and fatal—blows to come from his own party.

In an announcement that stunned many in Washington and even some in his campaign staff, Hackett declared on February 13, 2006, that he was dropping his bid for U.S. Senate in Ohio, ending his 11 month political career. “I made this decision reluctantly, only after repeated requests by party leaders, as well as behind-the-scenes machinations, that were intended to hurt my campaign,” he said, only hinting at what had gone down. The day after his withdrawal from the race, he told me about the backroom battles that forced him out.

I am waiting to read Tom Daschle's letter about this one.  It stops in Ohio! 

Hackett’s scorching rhetoric earned him notoriety and cash on the campaign trail. He declared that people who opposed gay marriage were “un-American.” He said the Republican party had been hijacked by religious extremists who he said “aren’t a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden.” Bloggers loved him, donors ponied up, while Democratic Party insiders grumbled that he wasn’t "senatorial."

Swift boats soon appeared on the horizon. A whisper campaign started: Hackett committed war crimes in Iraq—and there were photos. “The first rumor that I heard was probably a month and a half ago,” Dave Lane, chair of the Clermont County Democratic Party, told me the day after Hackett pulled out of the race. “I heard it more than once that someone was distributing photos of Paul in Iraq with Iraqi war casualties with captions or suggestions that Paul had committed some sort of atrocities. Who did it? I have no idea. It sounds like a Republican M.O. to me, but I have no proof of that. But if it was someone on my side of the fence, I have a real problem with that. I have a hard time believing that a Democrat would do that to another Democrat.”  In late November, Hackett got a call from Sen. Harry Reid. “I hear there’s a photo of you mistreating bodies in Iraq. Is it true?” demanded the Senate minority leader.  Hackett backers suspected the smear was being floated by [Akron Democrat Rep].Sherrod Brown’s campaign. A senior Brown staffer angrily dismissed the charge this week as “ridiculous.”

But of course it isn't ridiculous at all.  No one had a motive to torpedo Hackett's swift boat except Brown, who was running against him in the Democratic primary.  What is certain is that major figures in the Democratic national party stepped in to sink Hackett. 

Hackett had demonstrated his ability to shake money from donors during a January fundraising roadshow in California and New York. But he soon discovered that top Democrats were attempting to cut off his money. The hosts of a Beverly Hills fundraiser for Hackett received an e-mail from the political action committee of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) that concluded, “I hope you will re-consider your efforts on behalf of Hackett and give your support to Sherrod.” Waxman’s chief of staff, Phil Schiliro, said the e-mail was only sent to a handful of people and that “it probably came from a suggestion from the Sherrod Brown campaign.”

Sen. Schumer was also reported to be trying to turn off Hackett’s cash spigots. No one would confirm this to me on the record. But veteran political activist David Mixner, who described himself as “a fanatically strong supporter” of Hackett and who helped sponsor a New York fundraiser, confirmed that he “received calls from a couple people in Congress urging Paul Hackett to withdraw or not to contribute money to his campaign. The reasons ranged from he can’t win, to he’s too controversial, Brown has more money, is more centrist, and more appealing. It was that inner beltway circle crap,” said Mixner. “They are people who have no idea what’s going on in the country but believe they know everything.”

Hollywood Left

Actor Richard Dreyfuss is calling for President Bush's impeachment:

Richard Dreyfuss, the actor who starred in movies ranging from "Jaws" to "Mr. Holland's Opus," told an audience in Washington, D.C., on Thursday that "there are causes worth fighting for," and one of those is the impeachment of President George W. Bush.

"There are causes worth fighting for even if you know that you will lose," Dreyfuss said during a speech at the National Press Club. "Unless you are willing to accept torture as part of a normal American political lexicon, unless you are willing to accept that leaving the Geneva Convention is fine and dandy, if you accept the expansion of wiretapping as business as usual, the only way to express this now is to embrace the difficult and perhaps embarrassing process of impeachment."

Meanwhile, Alec Baldwin has called Vice President Cheney a terrorist:

Cheney is a terrorist. He terrorizes our enemies abroad and innocent citizens here at home indiscriminately. Who ever thought Harry Whittington would be the answer to America's prayers. Finally, someone who might get that lying, thieving Cheney into a courtroom to answer some direct questions.

Mr. Whittington spoke today telling the world that "accidents do and will happen – and that’s what happened last Friday," so Baldwin's dream of getting "that lying, thieving Cheney" into court isn't going to happen.  And, as I stated yesturday, it was an accident, hardly any reason to take him to court.  Besides, calling someone a terrorist (other than those who actually are) is about as intelligent as calling someone a Nazi.

Committee Approves Abortion Ban

Not much new in this story.  If I were in the South Dakota Legislature (shudder!), I would advocate making an exception for life and health of the mother, and then define with great precision what is meant by health, i.e., that we are not talking about emotional health.  This would make the bill far more likely to withstand Constitutional scrutiny, although even then its chances of success are slim.  This is not because of the merits, but because of the foolish notion in the federal courts that a right to an abortion can be found in the Constitution. 

Sign Of The Coming Apocalypse

More info here. 

Who pays more than half the taxes? The Rich.

From "The Myth of Spending Cuts for the Rich, Tax Cuts for the Poor," by Brian Riedl, published by the Heritage Foundation:

During the 2005 budget reconciliation debate, crit­ics trotted out the tired old myth that Republicans were cutting spending for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Many commentators accepted this as truth and repeated it, including Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, who accused the Republicans of passing a “cut-from-the-poor, give-to-the-rich budget.”[1]

However, the facts simply do not support these overheated claims. Rather than reduce entitlement spending, the budget reconciliation bill merely reduced its projected five-year growth rate from 39 percent to 38 percent. Furthermore, the “additional” tax cuts were nearly all extensions of existing tax pro­visions that would soon have expired.

More broadly, the accusation that poor families are shouldering more of the tax burden while receiving less of the spending is empirically false. From 1979 through 2003, the total federal tax burden on the highest-earning quintile (one-fifth or 20 percent) of Americans—who earn 52 percent of all income—rose from 56 percent to 66 percent of all taxes. Their share of individual income taxes jumped from 65 percent to 85 percent.[2] On the spending side, antipoverty spending has leaped from 9.1 percent of all federal spending in 1990 to a record 16.3 percent in 2004.[3]

Here's a chart detailing how much each fifth of Americans pays in taxes.

The idea that the tax burden is becoming less fair to the poor under Bush is nonsense.  It is something that can be believed only by someone whose idea of economic analysis is to look at a single program being cut and on that basis declares all Republican office holders despicable. 

Turkey: "Continental Suicide"

Dan of tdaxp has a very somber post on Turkey, which begins: "It is no longer clear to me that Turkey belongs in Europe."  To see what he means, check out the whole thing.  I may comment more on this later today.

Judges and Lawsuits

Kudos to the South Dakota Legislature.  I can think of few things more silly than opening up judges to lawsuits over official activity.  I have confidence that the people of South Dakota will reject this amendment when it comes before them.

Opponents of the ballot measure contend it would threaten the fairness and independence of the judiciary by making judges afraid they would be sued for their decisions. It also would allow lawsuits against members of school boards, city councils, county commissions and other state and local boards that make decisions of a judicial nature, they said.

Safe to Smoke? Part II

Piggy-backing Prof. Schaff's post below, the city of Calabasas, California, has banned smoking outside.  Now, I'm in the same boat as my colleague:  I don't smoke and I agree with everything he had to say.  This sort of regulation is just absurd:

The new Calabasas secondhand smoke ordinance, which would prohibit smoking in all public areas of the city including parks, sidewalks and outdoor businesses, will take effect by the middle of March, city officials said.

Final  passage  of  the  ordinance  is  expected  at  the  city council’s Feb. 15 meeting.

At  its  Feb.  1  meeting  the council outlined certain exceptions to the law.

Officials from the Los Angeles County Department of Health, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, Healthier Solutions, Inc., Smoke-Free Air for Everyone and the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Los Angeles expressed strong support for the new law. Of the 17 public speakers at the meeting, all but one supported the ordinance.

Last  month,  California  became  the  first  state  to  declare second-hand  tobacco  smoke  a toxic air pollutant.

“. . .The California Air Resources Board, which is the agency which regulates air quality in California, has adopted a regulation to treat secondhand smoke as a toxic pollutant of the air, like the kinds of things that come out of petroleum smoke stacks and out of the tailpipes of cars,” said Michael Colantuono, Calabasas city attorney. “That decision is the first time a state regulatory agency of any state in the nation has reached that conclusion."

More Bad News on the Economy II

The Economic Policy Institute loves to report bad news about the economy (when, that is, a Republican is in office).  But they are basically honest, and sometimes you have to just have to admit that the news is good no matter how much that hurts.

The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 4.7% in January—the lowest rate since July 2001— and payrolls expanded by 193,000 jobs, according to today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  Hourly wage growth also accelerated, up 3.3% over the past year, the highest growth rate since February 2003.  Also, the share of the jobless population stuck in long-term unemployment fell to 16.3%, the lowest rate since March of 2002, suggesting an increase in the availability of jobs.

In fact there is no question that the economy is very strong right now.   The only way EPI can find any bad news is by making comparisons with past recoveries. 

This pace of job growth, though solid, still remains well-below that of past recoveries.  Over the comparable period in the recovery of the 1990s, payrolls grew at a rate of 2.8%. If we were adding jobs at this rate today, the average monthly gain over the past year would have been 303,000.  For all recoveries that have lasted at least this long, the annual rate of job growth at this stage was 3.1%, almost twice that of today’s pace.

That's a fair criticism, but its difficult to know exactly what it means.  The contemporary economy is clearly much different from what it was a few decades ago.  Robert Samuelson makes these observations in the Washington Post:

A puzzle of our time is why the economy has become increasingly stable while individual industries have become increasingly unstable. The continuing turmoil at General Motors and Ford simply reflects this more pervasive industrial instability -- also in airlines, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and the mass media, among others. Hardly a week passes without layoffs from some major company, which is "downsizing," "restructuring" or "outsourcing." And yet, the broader economy has undeniably become more stable. Since the early 1980s, we've had only two recessions, lasting a combined year and four months and involving peak unemployment of 7.8 percent. By contrast, from 1969 to 1982, we had four recessions lasting altogether about four years and having unemployment as high as 10.8 percent.

I do not find this as mysterious as Samuelson does.  An economy in which specific industries are free to fail and restructure in response to changing circumstances should, as a whole, be flexible enough to ride out all kinds of shocks-like hurricanes or soaring energy costs.  That's what we have now.  Of course there are some disadvantages to this.  It makes everyone feel a little less secure.

Assuming there's something to this theory -- which seems a good bet -- it helps explain the riddle of why there's so much anxiety amid so much prosperity. As Americans stock up on BlackBerrys and flat-panel TVs, it's hard to deny the affluence. But people also look to their employers for a sense of confidence about the future -- and here doubts have multiplied, because more companies and industries seem assailed by menacing forces.

What is the bottom line?

Why does an economy of greater stability have industries of lesser stability? The answer is competition. An intensely competitive economy enhances overall stability by holding down inflation (which is itself destabilizing) and spreading economic disruptions throughout the business cycle (rather than letting them accumulate for periodic, massive downturns).

But the solution to one problem creates other, though smaller, problems. Except during unsustainable booms, say, the late 1990s, even good times are punctuated with insecurities, disappointments, job losses, broken promises and shattered expectations. What may be good for us as a society may hurt many of us as individuals. The unending challenge is to find the necessary social protections that help the most vulnerable without frustrating desirable, if sometimes painful, change.

But the insecurities have compensations of their own: new jobs open up rapidly as old ones are replaced.  The EPI report observes this:

The decline in unemployment was accompanied by increases in employment rates for some groups, particularly Hispanic workers (up one percentage point), and high-school dropouts, up 0.8 points.  While monthly changes in this value can be unstable, over the past year, employment rates are up half a point over all, 0.9 points for African Americans, 1.7 points for Hispanics, and 1.3 points for high-school dropouts, a sign that the tightening job market is reaching less-advantaged workers.

Another positively evolving sign is the improvement in the extent of long-term unemployment, measured as the share of the jobless who have been without work for at least half a year.  This share, which was stuck at or above 20% for 32 months, has fallen from 21% last January to 16.3% last month.

Lower unemployment among the most vulnerable subgroups, and decreases in long-term unemployment, that's hardly bad news.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Out For A Smoke

The anti-smoking radicals are at it again, and Aberdeen seems to be leading the way. 

Let's all agree that smoking is a bad habit, one that it is foolish to start.  I certainly don't smoke.  But is it one that needs this level of regulation?  The question is whether smoking is a public or private vice.  Some argue that smokers cost us money in higher health insurance bills and public health costs.  But smokers are a net plus to the public coffers, since they pay exhorbitant taxes on tobacco and die earlier, thus receiving Social Security and Medicare for a shorter period of time.  So arguments that smoking is a public matter must rest on second hand smoke data. 

But let me ask this question, and be honest.  What would cause more beneficial results for the nation?  Option one: all smokers stop smoking.  Option two: all drinkers stop drinking.  Yes, smoking attacks your health, but alcohol attacks the soul.  Think about it.  If everyone stopped drinking there would be no more alcoholism.  Far fewer families broken apart.  Less abuse.  Fewer days missed of work.  Fewer lives destroyed.  So why not go after alcohol?  Because most people drink, but few people smoke.  Smokers are an easy target.  To be clear, I think laws banning alcohol use would be just as dumb as laws against tobacco.  But I am sure that if we were to ban one or the other, the public benefit would clearly be greater in banning alcohol.

Smokers are also attacked because of a cult of the body.  It isn't just unhealthy to be a smoker, it's sinful.  This why radio talk show host Dennis Prager often points out that when he asks people whether they'd want their kids to be smokers or cheaters, they pick cheaters.  You see, cheating is simply a moral failing, but smoking is that modern sin against the body. As we all know there is nothing worse than death.  Certainly not dishonor. 

The anti-smoking extremists are puritanical in their approach to tobacco.  So obsessed are they at stamping out private vice that they use the public power to force people to be healthy.  Here how Alexis de Tocqueville concludes his discussion of the onerous laws passed by the original Puritans:

Finally, sometimes the passion for regulation which possessed them led them to interfere in matters completely unworthy of such attention.  Hence there is a clause in the same code forbidding the use of tobacco.

At Long Last

It's good to see Jimmy Carter's stalker has finally been caught. 

Cheney

CNN (infamous for the black "X" over Cheney) is now attacking Cheney for going on Fox News:

For days, the White House news corps has pounded the Bush administration, demanding to learn more about Vice President Dick Cheney's accidental shooting of a hunting companion Saturday.

Cheney finally addressed the incident Wednesday, but the forum in which he chose to do so  --  in an exclusive interview with Fox News host Brit Hume  --  quickly became another source of contention.

Fox News executives cast the scoop as the result of persistence and the growing clout of the top-rated cable news network.

"We've been after the vice president since Sunday, as everyone has, and our efforts paid off," said John Moody, Fox's senior vice president for news editorial. "I think he wanted to make sure he got a fair interview and a good interview  --  good in the sense of thorough  --  and Brit is sort of the pre-eminent journalist in Washington right now."

But some Democrats and competing broadcasters charged that Cheney chose to speak only with Fox News because of a perception that the cable channel is sympathetic to the Republican administration. They called for the vice president to hold a news conference with the rest of the media.

"Now that he feels forced to talk, he wants to restrict the discussion to a friendly news outlet, guaranteeing no hard questions from the press corps," Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said in a statement.

On CNN, commentator Jack Cafferty called the interview "a little bit like Bonnie interviewing Clyde. ... I mean, running over there to the Fox network  --  talk about seeking a safe haven."

My two cents:  this whole thing is much ado about nothing.  Maybe I'm that way because I'm from South Dakota and occassionally hear of these accidents more often than those on the coasts.  This was, after all, and accident.  The man has taken full reponsability for his actions, what more does the MSM want? 

Check out Michelle Malkin column entitled "American clown journalism 101."  Hugh Hewitt also tears into Washington Post columnist David Igantius who tried to compare the hunting accident to Senator Kennedy's Chappaquiddick and Nixon's Watergate.  Tony Blankley also reviews the media's puerility in "The shooting party." 

Daschle: Continue Wiretap Program

Tom Daschle was on "Meet the Press" a few days ago and stated he didn't want to see the NSA's wiretapping program end:

Former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, along with the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, said emphatically yesterday that President Bush should continue his controversial terrorist wiretapping program.

Daschle was asked by NBC "Meet the Press" moderator Tim Russert: "Knowing what we know now, should the president stop this program?"

The former top Senate Democrat responded: "No, absolutely not. I think it’s a very valuable program."

Moments later, Russert asked Rep. Harman: "Do you think the program should be stopped?"

"No," she responded. "I think the program should go on."

Both Democrats qualified their endorsements of the wiretapping program, saying it should be restructured to comply with the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"I think we’ve got to respect the rule of law," former Sen. Daschle explained. "I think there ought to be an investigation by the appropriate committees of Congress and look into NSA to see how we might [change] it effectively."

After Rep. Harman offered her endorsement, she added: "I think the program should fully comply with FISA."

The California Democrat also said that she "deplored" the leak to the New York Times that exposed the program in December.

DM&E Railroad

Senator Thune's project continues to advance:

The federal Surface Transportation Board gave the Dakota Minnesota & Eastern Railroad final approval Wednesday to extend its line across Minnesota and South Dakota an additional 280 miles south around the Black Hills to Wyoming's Powder River basin coal fields.

The reconstruction of existing rail line and building the new line is estimated to cost $2.5 billion.

The revenue generated from hauling coal to Midwestern and Eastern coal-fired power plants and additional traffic on the line would make the DM&E the nation's newest Class I railroad. That rail class is based on annual revenues of about $370 million.

Saddam's Secret Tapes

ABC "Nightline" had a very interesting broadcast tonight concerning some audio tapes that were recorded by Saddam Hussein before the U.S. military operation in 2003 detailing such issues as weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.  You can read ABC's news report here.  Note this doesn't necessarily confirm that weapons were in Iraq in 2003 (though I'm convinced otherwise), but rather that Saddam's regime had the intent to build weapons.

Apparently the MSM is more concerned with Cheney's accident than they are about a possible link between Saddam and WMDs.

History Strikes Back

From the Washington Times:

Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies.

"Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision -- we're not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people," Mr. Carter said Monday in Nevada when his son Jack announced his Senate campaign.

"And no one knows how many innocent Americans have had their privacy violated under this secret act," he said.

The next day at Mrs. King's high-profile funeral, Mr. Carter evoked a comparison to the Bush policy when referring to the "secret government wiretapping" of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

But in 1977, Mr. Carter and his attorney general, Griffin B. Bell, authorized warrantless electronic surveillance used in the conviction of two men for spying on behalf of Vietnam.

The men, Truong Dinh Hung and Ronald Louis Humphrey, challenged their espionage convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which unanimously ruled that the warrantless searches did not violate the men's rights.

In its opinion, the court said the executive branch has the "inherent authority" to wiretap enemies such as terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when surveillance is "conducted 'primarily' for foreign intelligence reasons."

Check out the whole thing.

Politicizing History

Students at the University of Washington are protesting a memorial to "Pappy" Boyington, a World War II hero and former student from the University of Washington.  One student remarked that she "didn't believe a member of the Marine Corps was an example of the sort of person UW wanted to produce."  And why not, pray tell?  Boyington was a fighter ace and commander of the VMF-214 (the Black Sheep Squadron, which was also once a popular television series) in World War II, spent twenty months as a prisoner of war, and was awarded the Navy Cross and the Medal of Honor.  Yet some of these students liken his service in World War II to murder and even had the audacity to state that UW "already commemorate[s] rich white men."  It should be noted that the student senate president has responded to protests by others, so be sure to read that to get the whole picture.

Michelle Malkin has much more on the scoop.

Its All in the Jeans

In Heaven Can Wait, an otherwise altogether forgettable movie, there was one unforgettable moment.  Warren Be atty is a soul just arrived in Heaven who insists that he didn't really die.  The crowd of archangels in business suits trying to persuade him otherwise grows rapidly until their chief,( James Mason) suddenly has second thoughts.  He states matter of factly that "the probability of anyone being right is directly proportional to the number of people trying to prove him wrong." 

If that rule is reliable, Judith Rich Harris must be dead spot on. 

In 1998, a kindly grandmother living in New Jersey wrote a book about child-rearing that created quite a stir. In "The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do," Judith Rich Harris had the temerity to suggest that the most important influences on children were not their parents but genes and peers. This was heresy, and critics immediately attacked the book in reviews with titles such as "Parents Don't Count!"

Nonetheless, Mrs. Harris had made a very convincing argument, and she stuck to her guns. Now, with "No Two Alike" (W.W. Norton & Company, 352 pages, $26.95), she has expanded her thesis and has attempted to formulate a new theory of personality formation - the first, in fact, since Sigmund Freud. More specifically, she has attempted to solve the mystery of why people are different.

If you are a parent and you want to hear this argument, your children must be behaving very badly.  I am inclined to think that Harris largely right.  How we turn out is almost solely determined by genetics and by our relationship with the web of people and groups around us.  I do not know what to think of her new theory of personality.

Basically, Mrs. Harris believes there are three "perpetrators" at work in the formation of the human personality, each associated with an aspect of a modular brain. One is the "relationship system," designed to maintain favorable relationships in society.Another is the "Socialization System," where the goal is to be a member of a group. The third is the "Status System," where we compete with our peers for status.

The interplay among these systems accounts for the emergence of differences between individuals. So it is that even identical twins develop different personalities because the members of their community see them as unique individuals and treat them differently. Their individual striving for status propels them into different modes of competing, which in turn differentiates their personalities.

But this is fascinating. 

 

Political Polarization

James Q. Wilson writes a long and thoughtful piece on political polarization.  I note that he shares many of the same views I expressed here, namely that the ideological purity of the parties contributes to our bitter politics.  Wilson writes:

By polarization I mean something else: an intense commitment to a candidate, a culture, or an ideology that sets people in one group definitively apart from people in another, rival group. Such a condition is revealed when a candidate for public office is regarded by a competitor and his supporters not simply as wrong but as corrupt or wicked; when one way of thinking about the world is assumed to be morally superior to any other way; when one set of political beliefs is considered to be entirely correct and a rival set wholly wrong...

In the 1950s, a committee of the American Political Science Association (APSA) argued the case for a "responsible" two-party system. The model the APSA had in mind was the more ideological and therefore more "coherent" party system of Great Britain. At the time, scarcely anyone thought our parties could be transformed in such a supposedly salutary direction. Instead, as Gov. George Wallace of Alabama put it in his failed third-party bid for the presidency, there was not a "dime's worth of difference" between Democrats and Republicans.

What Wallace forgot was that, however alike the parties were, the public liked them that way. A half-century ago, Tweedledum and Tweedledee enjoyed the support of the American people; the more different they have become, the greater has been the drop in popular confidence in both them and the federal government.

As they say, read the whole thing. 

 

Blanchard and Seeber on Morgan Lewis Case II

Here is the piece co-written by myself and Jim Seeber on the Morgan Lewis case.  For any reader who does not know about this, Morgan Lewis died of a gunshot wound outside Seymour Hall on the Northern State University Campus on November 1st, 2004.  For 15 months the Aberdeen police department conducted an investigation, during which time rumors grew like mushrooms after a warm rain.  Because Morgan Lewis was said to be gay, one of the common assumptions was that this was a hate crime. 

The police ultimately concluded that Lewis died by a self-inflicted wound.  For reasons unknown to me, the police were reluctant to divulge the evidence on which their conclusion was based.  Jim and I interviewed police chief Don Lanpher last Friday, and he was forthcoming.  This piece is the result of that interview.  From the Aberdeen American News:

Professors explain evidence in suicide

The death of Morgan Lewis on Nov. 1, 2004, was a traumatic event for Northern State University's faculty, staff and student body.

On Feb. 2, Aberdeen Chief of Police Don Lanpher Jr. held a press conference in the Johnson Fine Arts Center, where he announced the result of the 15-month investigation. The police concluded that Morgan Lewis died of a self-inflicted wound. On Feb. 10, Chief Lanpher returned to campus and was interviewed by Kenneth Blanchard and James Seeber.

This article represents our understanding of the evidence upon which the investigators based their conclusion. We apologize for its bluntness and graphic nature, but we believe that concerns for justice, public safety and the reputation of the police force are serious enough that these details must be made public. Any errors are our responsibility and not that of Chief Lanpher.

The physical evidence was decisive. The gun that killed Morgan Lewis was made in the early 20th century and proved impossible to trace. It was found in the Dumpster outside Seymour Hall, where Lewis had his office. The police were not able to lift any prints off the weapon.

However, powder residue indicated that Lewis had handled the weapon with both hands. Blowback, a term for blood, hair and other materials that were recovered from the gun, and blood spatter on his hand, both indicated that Lewis himself fired the shot that resulted in his fatal wound. The angle of entry is consistent with someone holding the gun in his left hand and placing it against his neck, under the left side of his jaw.

We asked Chief Lanpher a question that many of our colleagues have asked: How did the gun get into the Dumpster? The distance between the Dumpster and the spot that Lewis' body was found was approximately 40 feet.

Much gossip on and off campus was based on the erroneous information that the distance was 40 yards. When the gun was fired, the shell casing was ejected. Its location on the ground allowed the police to determine that the gun was fired next to the Dumpster.

The low-caliber shell passed through Lewis' neck, severing his carotid artery but missing his spine. Had the bullet hit his spine, he would have dropped where he stood. Instead he was able to toss the gun into the Dumpster and then walk a short distance, during which time he bled to death. A clear blood trail began at the Dumpster. It indicates that he fell once on the grass, and again where his body was found.

Sometime before 5:30 a.m. on the morning he died, Morgan Lewis went outside of Seymour Hall wearing a T-shirt and no jacket. He had left his personal items, including his car keys and the key to the building, inside his office in his backpack. He could not have re-entered the building nor could he have driven home. His wallet was found by his body, empty, but there was cash in his backpack in his office. Lewis had two life insurance policies. The beneficiary was a person with whom he had had a long-term relationship.

Chief Lanpher declined to speculate on any of this, but we will. It seems likely that when he left the building, Lewis had no intention either of going back inside or going home. He may have had thoughts of making his suicide look like murder.

Chief Lanpher said there was other evidence that he could not talk about because it would invade the privacy of Lewis and his family. He did tell us that the investigators called in help from a number of different law-enforcement agencies, including State's Attorney Mark McNeary. In addition, the Aberdeen investigators submitted their evidence to three outside consultants: a physician specializing in forensics, a firearms expert and a "cold case" specialist in Florida. All three, working independently of one another, reached the same conclusion as the Aberdeen police.

Police Chief Lanpher was candid and thorough in answering our questions. We found his account to be very persuasive.

Northern State University professors, Kenneth Blanchard and Jim Seeber, co-authored this article. Both are occasionally columnists for the Viewpoints Page. Blanchard is a professor of political science and Seeber an assistant professor of sociology.

Dr. Blanchard Immortalized by the Eppish Bard

I suppose being turned into a character in a satire is the second highest form of flattery, right after being plagiarized.  Todd Epp at Thunewatch (which spend precious little space watching Thune) does the one service for me and Jim Seeber.  I return the favor by carrying his satire away in a burlap bag and reproducing it here.  Working under the assumption that all fans of Deadwood are friends, I take this only in a friendly spirit. 

Fresh off of their crack work in the Morgan Lewis "suicide" in Aberdeen, NSU Professors Jim Seeber and Ken Blanchard are obviously ready to fry bigger criminal fish.  Exhibit 1?  The mysterious circumstances of Vice President Dick Cheney shooting his special "friend," Harry Whittington, down in Corpus Christi, Texas last weekend.

I bet it would go something like this (Warning: humor, not to be taken seriously.  This is all made up.):

David Gregory, NBC News White House Correspondent: "Dr. Blanchard, this is David Gregory with NBC News.  I've got Bill Plante from CBS News on the line with me.  We heard about your great work getting to the bottom of the Morgan Lewis suicide up there in Aberdeen.  We could really use you and Dr. Seeber to get to the bottom of this Cheney buckshot incident in Texas."

Bill Plante: "Oh, could you please help us, Dr. Blanchard?  We are mere journalists and you are a political scientist!  We are not worthy!"

Blanchard: "Oh, come on guys, you flatter me!"

Plante: "Dr. Blanchard, seriously, we need you.  We wouldn't know nothin' about interviewin' no Vice President!"

Blanchard: "Leave everything to me and Dr. Seeber!  We are Blanchard and Seeber, NSU's finest non-criminologists!"

Three days later after taking five Mesaba flights in order to get to Washington, DC from The Hub City, the dynamic Ph.D. duo interview Vice President Cheney.

Dr. Jim Seeber: "Mr. Vice President, it is a pleasure to talk to you.  God knows those damn pesky journalists don't know how to talk to a man of your stature and importance."

V.P. Cheney: (Gives half sneer, half smile.) "Yeah, they're all like that Adam Clymer from the New York Times, real a**holes."

Blanchard: "So, Mr. Vice President, what happened?"

Cheney: "Well, Whittington was trying to commit suicide."

Seeber: "Really.  I had my suspicions!"

Cheney: "Yeah, he's 78 years old and a lawyer.  Can you imagine the self-hate he must have?"

Blanchard: "I suspected so much."

Cheney: "In fact, he was dressed from head to toe in blaze orange so he would make a better target for me.  Orange hat, orange vest, orange pants, orange gloves, even orange boots."

Blanchard: "Do go on, Mr. Vice President!"

Cheney: "There he was, ten yards behind me to my left.  I raised my gun when I heard a quail flush.  I turned 270 degrees and there he was, right in the line of fire.  He even faked trying to fall down to get out of the way of the shots.  Clever bastard."

Seeber: "You know, I was just telling Dr. Blanchard that's what I thought happened!  Go on!"

Blanchard: "Shots?"

Cheney: "Hey, I'm not a very good shot.  You know, I had five deferments from the draft during the Vietnam War, so I didn't spend my youth learning the finer points of firing a semi-automatic weapon. Yes, several shots, as I'm not a good shot and I wanted to bag a damn quail.  That's DAMN Quail not Dan Quayle.  Make sure you get that detail right."

Blanchard: "Makes sense to me, Mr. Vice President.  You are actually a hero and saved poor Mr. Whittington by being a bad shot, foiling his devious plan, and saving his life."

Cheney: "Damn straight.  Now, go talk to that idiot gaggle of press and make sure they know the real story."

A few hours later in the White House press room.

Scott McClelland, President's Press Secretary: "Ok, settle down everyone.  Northern State Professors Ken Blanchard and Jim Seeber will brief you about what happened on Vice President Cheney's hunting trip."

Gregory, Plante, et al: "Oh, thank you Scott!"

Blanchard and Seeber relate their conversation with Cheney to a rapt White House press corps.

Blanchard: "And in conclusion, based on our interviews and analysis of the evidence, we find Vice President Cheney to be a highly credible witness.  We have no reason to doubt that Mr. Whittington was deliberately trying to kill himself via an unknowing and unwitting Mr. Cheney.  You should accept this conclusion too.  Why?  Because we say so.  Case closed.  It was a suicide attempt."

Gregory, Plante, et al: "Oh, Professors Seeber and Blanchard, thank you so much!  We could have never done this without you!  What can we do in return?"

Blanchard: "Stop being the liberal horde that you are and believe everything President Bush and Vice President Cheney tell you."

Gregoy, Plante, et al: "Oh, we will, we will!  Thank you blogging non-criminal justice Northern State University professors!"

Seeber: "All in a days' work, all in a days work."

The End?

Obviously, the above is parody and did not happen.  Mr. Whittington did not try and commit suicide.  There is no evidence that Mr. Cheney shot him deliberately.  But it does make you want to go "hmmmm." 

Yes.  "Hummm."  Epp keeps protesting that he doesn't take his own ideas seriously.  Methinks he doth protest too much.  Maybe he really thinks that Dick Cheney murdered Morgan Lewis.  Of course!  The scales fall from our eyes, and the puzzle pieces, with a lot of pounding, all fall into place.  The end?  Surely not.

A Grave Perspective On Free Speech

Master Heppler blogs below on SB156, which Governor Rounds has, apparently, just signed into law.  According to the Rapid City Journal article that Jason links to, the law

bans protests within 1,000 feet of a funeral, memorial service, procession or other ceremony one hour before and after the service.

You might suppose that this is another attempt by fascist Republicans to take free speech away from our homegrown Cindy Sheehans, but that is not quite the case.  The protests that triggered the legislation belong to a rabid, anti-gay church in Kansas.  I couldn't get the RCJ photo to load, but I found the one on the right, and these seem to be the same knuckleheads.  The RCJ says of its own photo:

Shirley Phelps-Roper and her son, Jonah, 8, protest outside Open Bible Christian Center during the funeral for National Guard soldier Paul Pillen of Keystone, who died in Kuwait on Oct. 17. They were among seven protesters from a Topeka, Kan., church that believes U.S. deaths in Iraq are America’s punishment for tolerating homosexuals. (Steve Miller, Journal file)

Of course, the despicable content of their signs does not justify restricting their free speech rights.  But that is not the question on which the constitutionality of this law will turn.  Someone at CCK blogged on this, and was under the impression that free speech rights are subject to no restrictions.  The blogger knew not what he was talking about. 

Free speech is subject to all sorts of restrictions.  It doesn't protect someone who threatens a public official, or participates in the planning of a bank robbery, for example.  Free speech is also subject to a class of "time, place, and manner" restrictions.  You can burn a flag in some places, but not in a national forest during a high fire alert.  You can protest in a public park during hours the park is open, but not after the park is closed for the night.  American Nazis (all 47 of them) can march down the streets of Skokie, Illinois, but not into a synagogue. 

The question is whether a funeral is a public forum for political expression.  I see no obvious reason why the South Dakota Legislature cannot designate a funeral as a time and place that is not a public forum.  So long as the law is content neutral, it would be up to the people holding the funeral what kind of expressions are within the decorum of the event.  Restrictions on time, place, and manner are essential to the protection of privacy.  I think this law is sound.

NAEP Results Above Average

Some good news from the Hot Springs Star:

Results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress were recently released, and South Dakota students consistently achieved scores that were among the top 10 highest scores in the country.

“The NAEP offers a national picture of how our students compare with students across the country,” said Gov. Mike Rounds, “and, once again, South Dakota students outperformed their peers. We were especially pleased to see improvement in our Native American students’ scores.”      

Commonly referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card,” the NAEP tests a random sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students in reading and mathematics. The test is given every two years in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and the Department of Defense schools.

A little historical perspective is in order

From the Daily Show with John Stewart:

“Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt ... making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting veep since Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, of course, [was] shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird.”

Funeral Protest

The Rapid City Journal is reporting that the funeral protest bill was fast-tracked yesturday.  Excerpt:

South Dakota lawmakers on Monday fast-tracked legislation restricting protests at funerals so it would be on the books by the end of the day.

The measure stems from protests by members of a Kansas church at soldiers’ funerals in Rapid City, Huron and Yankton. The group believes God is allowing soldiers to die as punishment for the United States’ tolerance of homosexuality.

Legislators used parliamentary procedures to expedite SB156 through the House and Senate so Gov. Mike Rounds could sign it into law immediately. If the measure had progressed in the usual manner, it would have taken effect July 1, as will all other laws passed by the 2006 Legislature that do not contain an emergency clause.

“It’s absolutely despicable that we have to deal with this issue,” House Speaker Matt Michels, R-Yankton, said Monday morning during a meeting of the House State Affairs Committee. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion and entitled to protest. But you are not entitled to cause grief upon grief on families and community members that are there to recognize a young man who fought and died so you could protest.”

The story is a little behind.  The Argus Leader is reporting that Governor Rounds has signed the bill into law.

UPDATE:  Keith Jensen of the Madison Daily Leader editorializes on the bill.

Intellectual Diversity

Professor KC Johnson has an article in Inside Higher Ed entitled "Proving the Critics' Case."  In full:

Inside Higher Ed recently reported on four University of Pittsburgh professors critiquing the latest survey suggesting ideological one-sidedness in the academy. According to the Pitt quartet, self-selection accounts for findings that the faculty of elite disproportionately tilts to the Left. “Many conservatives,” the Pitt professors mused, “may deliberately choose not to seek employment at top-tier research universities because they object, on philosophical grounds, to one of the fundamental tenets undergirding such institutions: the scientific method.”

Imagine the appropriate outrage that would have occurred had the above critique referred to feminists, minorities, or Socialists. Yet the Pitt quartet’s line of reasoning — that faculty ideological imbalance reflects the academy functioning as it should — has appeared with regularity, and has been, unintentionally, most revealing. Indeed, the very defense offered by the academic Establishment, rather than the statistical surveys themselves, has gone a long way toward proving the case of critics who say that the academy lacks sufficient intellectual diversity.

In theory, ideology should have no bearing on how a professor teaches, say, physics. Even so, should responsible administrators worry that the overwhelming partisan disparity is worthy of further inquiry? And, in theory, parents who make their money in traditionally conservative professions such as investment banking or corporate law probably do not encourage their children to enter academe. Yet, as money-making fields have always been attractive to conservatives, why has the proportion of self-professed liberals or Leftists in the academy nearly doubled in the last generation?

Had members of the academic Establishment confined themselves to such arguments (or had they ignored the partisan-breakdown studies altogether), the intellectual diversity issue would have received little attention. Instead, the last two years have seen proud, often inflammatory, defenses of the professoriate’s ideological imbalance. These arguments, which have fallen into three categories, raise grave concerns about the academy’s overall direction.

1. The cultural left is, simply, more intelligent than anyone else. As SUNY-Albany’s Ron McClamrock reasoned, “Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we’re just f-ing smarter.” The first recent survey came in early 2004, when the Duke Conservative Union disclosed that Duke’s humanities departments contained 142 registered Democrats and 8 registered Republicans. Philosophy Department chairman Robert Brandon considered the results unsurprising: “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.”

In a slightly different vein, UCLA professor John McCumber informed The New York Times that “a successful career in academia, after all, requires willingness to be critical of yourself and to learn from experience,” qualities “antithetical to Republicanism as it has recently come to be.” In another Times article, Berkeley professor George Lakoff asserted that Leftists predominate in the academy because, “unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake.” Again, imagine the appropriate outcry if prominent academics employed such sweeping generalizations to dismiss statistical disparities suggesting underrepresentation of women, gays, or minorities.

These arguments become even more disturbing given the remarkably broad definition of “conservative” employed in many academic quarters. Take the case of Yeshiva University’s Ellen Schrecker, recently elected to a term on the AAUP’s general council. This past spring, Schrecker denounced Columbia students who wanted to broaden instruction about the Middle East for “trying to impose orthodoxy at this university.” The issue, she lamented, amounted to “right wing propaganda.”

The leaders of the Columbia student group, who ranged from registered Republicans to backers of Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential bid, were united only in their belief that matters relating to Israel should be treated objectively in the classroom. Probably 98 percent of the U.S. Congress and all of the nation’s governors would fit under such a definition of “right wing.”

Indeed, it seems as if the academic Establishment considers anyone who does not accept the primacy of a race/class/gender interpretation to be “conservative.” To most outside of the academy, such a definition would suggest that professors are using stereotypes to abuse the inherently subjective nature of the hiring process.

2. A left-leaning tilt in the faculty is a pedagogical necessity, because professors must expose gender, racial, and class bias while promoting peace, “diversity” and “cultural competence.” According to Montclair State’s Grover Furr, “colleges and universities do not need a single additional ‘conservative’ .... What they do need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists — all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few ‘conservatives.’”

Furr’s remarks echoed those of Connecticut College’s Rhonda Garelick, who decried student “disgruntlement” when she used her French class to discuss her opposition to the war in Iraq and teach “‘wakeful’ political literacy.” Rashid Khalidi, meanwhile, rationalized anti-Israel instruction as necessary to undo the false impressions held by all incoming Columbia students except for “Arab-Americans, who know that the ideas spouted by the major newspapers, television stations, and politicians are completely at odds with everything they know to be true.”

To John Burness, Duke’s senior vice president for public affairs, such statements reflect a proper professorial role. The “creativity” in humanities and social science disciplines, he noted, addresses issues of race, class, and gender, leading to a “perfectly logical criticism of the current society” in the classroom.

At some universities, this mindset has even shaped curricular or personnel policies. Though its release generated widespread criticism and hints from administrators that it would not be adopted, a proposal to make “cultural competence” a key factor in all personnel decisions remains the working draft of the University of Oregon’s new diversity plan. Columbia recently set aside $15 million for hiring women and minorities — and white males who would “in some way promote the diversity goals of the university.” And the University of Arizona’s hiring blueprint includes requiring new faculty in some disciplines to “conduct research and contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the importance of valuing diversity.”

On the curricular front, my own institution’s provost, Roberta Matthews (who has written that “teaching is a political act") intends for the college’s new general education curriculum to produce “global citizens” — who, she commented, are those “sensitized to issues of race, class, and gender.”

Given such initiatives, it is worth remembering the traditional ideal of a university education: for faculty committed to free intellectual exchange in pursuit of the truth to expose undergraduates to the disciplines of the liberal arts canon, in the expectation that college graduates will possess the wide range of knowledge and skills necessary to function as democratic citizens.

3. A left-leaning professoriate is a structural necessity, because the liberal arts faculty must balance business school faculty and/or the general conservative political culture. University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, denouncing the “ridiculous and pernicious line” that major universities need greater intellectual diversity, complained about insufficient attention to the ideological breakdown of “Business Schools, Medical Schools, [and] Engineering schools.” UCLA’s Russell Jacoby wondered why ” conservatives seem unconcerned about the political orientation of the business professors.” Duke Law professor Erwin Chemerinsky more ambitiously claimed that “it’s hard to see this as a time of liberal dominance” given conservative control of the three branches of government.

Professional schools reflect the mindset of their professions: Socialists are about as common on business school faculty as are home-schooling advocates among education school professors. But, unlike business schools, liberal arts colleges and universities do not exist to train students for a single profession. Nor are they supposed to balance the existing political culture. If the Democrats reclaim the presidency and Congress in the 2008 elections, should the academy suddenly adopt an anti-liberal posture?

The intellectual diversity issue shows no signs of fading away. Ideological one-sidedness among the professoriate seems to be, if anything, expanding. And so, no doubt, will we see additional surveys suggesting a heavy ideological imbalance among the nation’s faculty — followed by new inflammatory statements from the academic Establishment that only reinforce the critics’ claims about bias in the personnel process.

In an ideal world, campus administrators would have rectified this problem long ago. A few have made small steps. Brown University’s president, Ruth Simmons, for instance, has expressed concern that the “chilling effect caused by the dominance of certain voices on the spectrum of moral and political thought” might negatively affect a quality education; her university’s Political Theory Project represents a model that other institutions could follow.

To my knowledge, however, no academic administration has made the creation of an intellectually and pedagogically diverse faculty its primary goal. This statement, it should be noted, applies equally as well to institutions frequently praised by conservatives, such as Hillsdale College. Such an initiative, of course, would encounter ferocious faculty resistance. But it would also, just as surely, excite parents, donors, and trustees. If successful, an institution that made intellectual diversity its hallmark would encourage imitation — if only because other colleges would face the free-market pressures of losing talented students and faculty. So, the question becomes, do we have an administration anywhere in the country willing to take up the cause?

Decline of Europe

Fareed Zakaria has a piece in Newsweek about the decline of Europe.  It includes many disturbing trends that we have commented on in this blog over the last year.

It's often noted that the European Union has a combined gross domestic product that is approximately the same as that of the United States. But the EU has 170 million more people. Its per capita GDP is 25 percent lower than that of the U.S. and, most important, that gap has been widening for 15 years. If present trends continue, the chief economist at the OECD argues, in 20 years the average U.S. citizen will be twice as rich as the average Frenchman or German. (Britain is an exception on most of these measures, lying somewhere between Continental Europe and the U.S.)

People have argued that Europeans simply value leisure more and, as a result, are poorer but have a better quality of life. That's fine if you're taking a 10 percent pay cut and choosing to have longer lunches and vacations. But if you're only half as well off as the U.S., that will translate into poorer health care and education, diminished access to all kinds of goods and services, and a lower quality of life. Two Swedish researchers, Frederik Bergstrom and Robert Gidehag, note in a monograph published last year that "40 percent of Swedish households would rank as low-income households in the U.S." In many European countries, the percentage would be even greater.

But he adds something new and important, the decline of basic science in Europe. 

Talk to top-level scientists and educators about the future of scientific research, and they will rarely even mention Europe. There are areas in which it is world-class, but they are fewer than they once were. In the biomedical sciences, for example, Europe is not on the map, and it might well be surpassed by much poorer Asian countries. The CEO of a large pharmaceutical company told me that in 10 years, the three most important countries for his industry would be the United States, China and India.

This is one more indication of social and political decrepitude. 

 

Day By Day

What Else Would She Plead Not Guilty To?

Argus Leader:

Murder suspect pleads not guilty to murder charge.

Islam and Modernity

The Cartoon Conflagration had been used of late as an argument against Arab/Mulim democracy.  I contend that this is misguided.  From Reuel Marc Gerecht at the Weekly Standard:

Like Christendom before it, the Muslim Middle East will have to work out its relation to modernity. The faster democracy arrives, the sooner the debates about God and man can begin in earnest. It will probably be for both Muslims and Westerners a nerve-racking experience. But we have no choice, since continuing autocracy will only make the militants' message stronger and judgment day, as in Iran, a possibly bloody revolutionary event. The electoral victory of Hamas should not give us pause. It should give us hope and encourage us to push for real elections where our national interest stands to gain the most--in Egypt and Iran. We should also not neglect to defend vigorously Christian, Muslim, or Jewish satirists, be they clever, banal, or ugly, wherever they may be found. Both elections and satire are basic to the evolution of the Muslim world.

Drapeaux Denies Ties to Abramoff

Brian Drapeaux, a former Tom Daschle staffer, is denying ties to Jack Abramoff in today's Argus Leader:

Brian Drapeaux, a one-time aide to former Sen. Tom Daschle, has been a target of criticism recently for once working with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

But Drapeaux, who worked at the high-powered Greenberg Traurig law firm at the same time Abramoff was there, said Friday he left the firm shortly after Abramoff was hired in 2001, and he barely knew him.

"Jack came to Greenberg with his own team of people," Drapeaux said in a phone interview. "I did not consider myself part of Jack's team."

Drapeaux, now the vice president of a small data recovery company in Pierre, has been linked to Abramoff because his name appears next to Abramoff's on three lobbying registration reports submitted to Congress.

Drapeaux, a Democrat, said attempts to tie his name to the Abramoff scandal are part of a larger Republican effort to implicate Democrats in the controversy.

"This is an effort just to blur the lines," he said.

Read the whole thing.  I had previously noted a report on Drapeaux here, which reported his ties to Jack Abramoff.  Note the implication that this is a Republican-only issue.  Nevermind that a third of the biggest receivers of Abramoff cash were Democrats, including Tom Daschle.  To be sure, Abramoff is not helping either party.  But the Democrats cannot paint this as a Republican scandal, as Harry Reid has been trying to do.

Its about the President, Stupid!

Ameircan politics, that is.  Some years ago, when the Republicans had just taken control of both houses of Congress, I gave a lecture on the shrinking significance of the Presidency.  My argument went like this: in the 19th century, presidents were less important than Congress.  The reason was that the most important national issue was the development of national territories, including the critical issue of slavery, and this was something over which Congress had almost complete authority.  In the 20th century, foreign policy became the dominant issue, and accordingly the Presidency assume central importance in American politics.  However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the absence of any comparable foreign policy challenge, the presidency was about to diminish again.

It was a bad argument.  Even if foreign policy had diminished in importance (I could hardly foresee the rise of Al Qaeda), the next most likely core issue was the economy, and here the role of the president as central manager was at least as important as that of Congress.  And foreign policy would return to the front burner with blood and smoke in 2001. 

Michael Baronne has a very insightful peace on what has actually happened in this regard.  From Real Clear Politics:

American politics today is not just about winning elections or prevailing on issues.  It's about delegitimizing, or preventing the delegitimization of, our presidents. This thought sprang into my head as I was reading the angry and sometimes obscene Democratic Web logs and noted the preoccupation of some bloggers with the impeachment of Bill Clinton now seven years in the past.

This certainly strikes me as true.  At least since Nixon, the legitimacy of each administration has been the prize of the party that owned the White House, and the target of the one that did not.  I have generally attributed this to the simple fact of Nixon's resignation.  That event showed that you could defeat a President even after he won an election if only because you got the goods on him.  I still think there is something to this, and I think the history of Supreme Court nomination battles confirms it.  But Baronne has something more, and it is probably closer to the mark.

It has been a habit of presidents to try to write their own history, to establish themselves as a legitimate embodiment of America's past and shaper of America's future. Franklin Roosevelt did it better than any  other 20th century president, relating his actions to those of  Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, and his onetime boss, Woodrow Wilson. FDR encouraged the idea that history is a story of progress toward an ever larger and more generous government. That version of American history was propagated by a brace of gifted historians and in  most mainstream media.  For decades afterward, presidents were judged by the FDR standard.

It is a commonplace that history is written by the winners.  What is not so obvious is that one can try to win by writing or rewriting history.

Blanchard on Gay Marriage

I have seen bits a pieces of this essay quoted in the last 24 hours.  I reproduce it here for public record.  It appeared March 14, 2006.

Wolves and Gay Marriage.

Most folk who have opinions about gay marriage have not been sufficiently attentive to the sex lives of wolves. These cantankerous canids breed pretty much like other mammals. But after the essential business of coupling is done, something remarkable fails to happen: decoupling. 

For up to two embarrassing hours after sex the male is unable to disengage. He dances and twists this way and that, as if he and his mate were attempting partner yoga. But he can’t get loose. It turns out that a bone in his penis swells after his initial ejaculation and locks him inextricably in place. Until the swelling subsides, whither she goest he goest also. 

So why are the sexual organs of wolves built like a trailer hitch? There is an easy Darwinian explanation. In order to sire pups, papa wolf has to engage with the female while she is fertile. But he also has to make sure that he is the only one to do so. His copulatory lock compels her to stick around until she is safely pregnant, and before some Johnny-come-lately gets a turn. This is especially important in species where the male invests time and resources in caring for his young. This is what passes for responsible male behavior among mammals. If it is to be preserved in the species, it must be rewarded with reproductive success. 

Human beings, you might insist, are more than animals. I would agree but would add that we are at least animals. We breathe and breed like they do, and we share one very important biological characteristic: men do not know who their children are. Ok, it helps if your son was born with black hair that turned blond in his first year and then darkened again, and that your Great Aunt Lucile knew this before she saw ever him because it was the same with you and every male Blanchard going back to the time of Henry the Eighth. 

But one cannot always count on such things, and so we invented marriage. It is ubiquitous across human cultures because it serves a common biological need. We get hitched in order to reassure fathers that this woman’s children belong to him, and so to encourage his natural instinct to take some responsibility for them. 

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this institution. Child abuse is least likely when the biological father is present in the home. So in fact are poverty and most forms of social dysfunction. Marriage is also healthy for men, who tend to be much less self-destructive when their role as caregivers is recognized and reinforced. Obviously some marriages are childless, but if not for the biology just mentioned there would be no such thing as marriage.

To legitimize homosexual marriage would be to extend this institution to cover an entirely new sort of relationship, with no connection to its original purpose. This is not to say that it’s a bad idea. Advocates of gay marriage have argued that it would encourage more responsible behavior especially among urban male homosexuals. This population has tended to be extraordinarily promiscuous and this obviously has contributed to the AIDS epidemic. Maybe gay partnerships would be more exclusive if blessed by marriage.

I have my doubts. The only thing that has ever effectively moderated male sexuality is female sexuality. Would the sanctity of marriage be powerful enough to overcome the allure of the bar and bathhouse? Maybe not. But this argument gets one thing very right. Marriage is about mutual responsibility. So long as that is kept in mind, homosexual marriage is worth thinking about.

Unfortunately, this idea of responsibility is largely missing from the contemporary debate. Instead, gay nuptials are defended in the name of a supposedly universal right to marry whomever one pleases. This is goofy. If we take the idea seriously, brothers have a right to marry sisters, fathers their daughters, and any two persons a third. Worse still, this argument treats marriage as a goody to be distributed to anyone who wants it, instead of a relationship of obligations to be socially reinforced. Even the wolves know better than that.

Intellectual Diversity

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe had an article entitled "Intellectual diversity?  Not on campus" two years ago.  Here it is in full:

Intellectual diversity? not on campus

Jeff Jacoby

Boston Globe, December 4, 2004

The left-wing takeover of American universities is an old story. As far back as the 1930s, Irving Kristol recalled in "Memoirs of a Trotskyist," City College of New York was so radical that "if there were any Republicans at City -- and there must have been some -- I never met them, or even heard of their existence." Soon the virus had spread to the nation's most elite institutions. In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. created a sensation with "God and Man at Yale," which documented the socialist and atheist worldview that even then prevailed in the classrooms of the Ivy League institution he had just graduated from.

Today, campus leftism is not merely prevalent. It is radical, aggressive, and deeply intolerant, as another newly-minted graduate of another prominent university -- Ben Shapiro of UCLA -- shows in "Brainwashed," a recent best-seller. "Under higher education's facade of objectivity," Shapiro writes, "lies a grave and overpowering bias" -- a charge he backs up with example after freakish example of academics going to ideological extremes.

No surprise, then, that when researchers checked the voter registration of humanities and social-science instructors at 19 universities, they discovered a whopping political imbalance. The results, published in The American Enterprise in 2002, made it clear that for all the talk of diversity in higher education, ideological diversity in the modern college faculty is mostly nonexistent.

So, for example, at Cornell, of the 172 faculty members whose party affiliation was recorded, 166 were liberal (Democrats or Greens) and 6 were conservative (Republicans or Libertarians). At Stanford, the liberal-conservative ratio was 151-17. At San Diego State, it was 80-11. At SUNY Binghamton, 35-1. At UCLA, 141-9. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, 116-5. At the University of Texas-Austin, 94-15.

Reflecting on these gross disparities, The American Enterprise's editor, Karl Zinsmeister, remarked: "Today's colleges and universities . . . do not, when it comes to political and cultural ideas, look like America."

At about the same time, a poll of Ivy League professors commissioned by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture found that more than 80 percent of those who voted in 2000 had cast their ballots for Democrat Al Gore, while just 9 percent backed Republican George W. Bush. Asked to name the greatest president of the last 40 years, 26 percent chose Bill Clinton; 4 percent said Ronald Reagan. While 64 percent said they were "liberal" or "somewhat liberal," only 6 percent described themselves as "somewhat conservative" -- and none at all as "conservative."

And the evidence continues to mount.

The latest campaign-finance records reveal that the most partisan organizations in America, as measured by employee donations to a presidential candidate, are the University of California and Harvard. Together, the two institutions accounted for $942,000 in contributions to the Kerry campaign -- 19 times the amount donated to the Bush campaign.

Last month, The New York Times reported that a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics shows Democratic professors outnumbering Republicans by at least 7 to 1 in the humanities and social sciences. At Berkeley and Stanford, according to a separate study that included professors of engineering and the hard sciences, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is even more lopsided: 9 to 1.

Such one-party domination of any major institution is problematic in a nation where Republicans and Democrats can be found in roughly equal numbers. In academia, it is scandalous. It strangles dissent, suppresses debate, and causes minorities to be discriminated against. It is certainly antithetical to good scholarship. "Any political position that dominates an institution without dissent," writes Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "deteriorates into smugness, complacency, and blindness. . . . Groupthink is an anti-intellectual
condition."

Worse yet, it leads faculty members to abuse their authority. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has just released the results of the first survey to measure student perceptions of faculty partisanship. The ACTA findings are striking. Of 658 students polled at the top 50 US colleges, 49 percent said professors "frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course," 48 percent said
some "presentations on political issues seem totally one-sided," and 46 percent said that "professors use the classroom to present their personal political views." That nearly half of the respondents expressed those views is all the more striking, since only 13 percent described themselves as conservative.

Academic freedom is not only meant to protect professors; it is also supposed to ensure students' right to learn without being molested. When instructors use their classrooms to indoctrinate and propagandize, they cheat those students and betray the academic mission they are entrusted with. That should be intolerable to honest men and women of every stripe -- liberals and conservatives alike.

"If this were a survey of students reporting widespread sexual harassment," says ACTA's president, Anne Neal, "there would be an uproar." That is because universities take sexual harassment seriously. Intellectual harassment, on the other hand -- like the one-party conformity it flows from -- they ignore. Until that changes, the scandal of the campuses will only grow worse.

As a footnote, as far as I know the Argus Leader--the state's largest newspaper--still has not mentioned anything about the intellectual diversity bill.

Phil Bredesen, 2008

Glenn Reynolds recently penned a piece for the WSJ touting the credentials of Tennessee's Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen, for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.  It is hard to argue with Reynolds's assessment of Bredesen's ability to win.  Contra Reynolds, I think the Democrats might be more willing than he thinks to accept a moderate candidate like Bredesen or Virginia's Mark Warner. 

It's a truism in politics that a united party beats a divided party.  In these days of close partisan competition between Democrats and Republicans this is doubly true.  It crucial for each side to get their folks out to vote; "energize the base" it is called.  There is nothing like being out of power to get a base energized.  Being out of power tends to unite a party around the one things they all agree on: they want power.  Conversely, when a party is power for some time, all the differences that were glossed over in pursuit of victory start to come to the fore and create fissures within the party.  Also, a party can become lazy and take power for granted.  This explains part of what happened to Democrats in 1994.  Also, the length of time out of the White House explains why Democrats could unite behind moderate Bill Clinton in 1992, and Republicans around George W. Bush in 2000.  Lest anyone forget, Bush ran as something of a moderate conservative in 2000.  I won't take time to defend that position now, but just remember that "compassionate conservative" was roughly synonymous with the "big government conservatism" of The Weekly Standard. 

The question is whether the Democrats have been out of power long enough to go for a moderate like Bredesen over a more polarizing figure like Hillary Clinton, and whether Republicans have been in power so long that they take victory for granted.  Both of those things are happening, I contend. 

Hillary Clinton does not bring anyone new into the Democratic fold, and she chases some away.  It is hard to imagine her winning any state that John Kerry did not. On the other hand, Bredesen likely breaks the GOP hold on the South without losing state like Pennsylvania or Michigan that the GOP could use to make up for Southern losses.  Surely the true believers on the left will balk at a Bredesen candidacy.  The question for the Democrats is do they want purity or do they want power? 

Pennsylvania Politics

Ok, so this is the South Dakota Politics website, but an interesting story coming out of Pennsylvania is that the path has been cleared for former Pittsburgh Steeler great Lynn Swan to gain the Republican nomination for governor against Democratic incumbent Ed Rendell.  I suspect Rendell will be tough to beat (in fact I think he'd make a great VP choice for the Democrats in 2008), but this race should be fun to watch.  It might prove a big year for the Steeler family. 

Sex Ed Follies

The latest lame efforts of the South Dakota Legislature to address issues of sex education remind me of this extraordinary piece by Leon Kass which contains the following passage on sex education:

Sex education in our elementary and secondary schools is an independent yet related obstacle to courtship and marriage. Taking for granted, and thereby ratifying, precocious sexual activity among teenagers (and even pre-teens), most programs of sex education in public schools have a twofold aim: the prevention of teenage pregnancy and the prevention of venereal disease, especially AIDS. While some programs also encourage abstinence or non-coital sex, most are concerned with teaching techniques for "safe sex"; offspring (and disease) are thus treated as (equally) avoidable side effects of sexuality, whose true purpose is only individual pleasure. (This I myself did not learn until our younger daughter so enlightened me, after she learned it from her seventh-grade biology teacher.) The entire approach of sex education is technocratic and, at best, morally neutral; in many cases, it explicitly opposes traditional morals while moralistically insisting on the equal acceptability of any and all forms of sexual expression provided only that they are not coerced. No effort is made to teach the importance of marriage as the proper home for sexual intimacy.

But perhaps still worse than such amorality--and amorality on this subject is itself morally culpable--is the failure of sex education to attempt to inform and elevate the erotic imagination of the young. On the contrary, the very attention to physiology and technique is deadly to the imagination. True sex education is an education of the heart; it concerns itself with beautiful and worthy beloveds, with elevating transports of the soul. The energy of sexual desire, if properly sublimated, is transformable into genuine and lofty longings--not only for love and romance but for all the other higher human yearnings. The sonnets and plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Keats and Shelley, and the novels of Jane Austen can incline a heart to woo, and even show one whom and how. What kind of wooers can one hope to cultivate from reading the sex manuals--or from watching the unsublimated and unsublime sexual athleticism of the popular culture?

More Cartoon Madness

Here's today's Mark Steyn, who forces me to rethink my own position:

The issue is not "freedom of speech" or "the responsibilities of the press" or "sensitivity to certain cultures." The issue, as it has been in all these loony tune controversies going back to the Salman Rushdie fatwa, is the point at which a free society musters the will to stand up to thugs. British Muslims march through the streets waving placards reading "BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM." If they mean that, bring it on. As my columnar confrere John O'Sullivan argued, we might as well fight in the first ditch as the last.

But then it's patiently explained to us for the umpteenth time that they're not representative, that there are many many "moderate Muslims.''

I believe that. I've met plenty of "moderate Muslims" in Jordan and Iraq and the Gulf states. But, as a reader wrote to me a year or two back, in Europe and North America they aren't so much "moderate Muslims" as quiescent Muslims. The few who do speak out wind up living in hiding or under 24-hour armed guard, like Dutch MP Ayaab Hirsi Ali.

So when the EU and the BBC and the New York Times say that we too need to be more "sensitive" to those fellows with "Behead the enemies of Islam" banners, they should look in the mirror: They're turning into "moderate Muslims," and likely to wind up as cowed and silenced and invisible.

Glenn Reynolds says when you reward violence you get more violence.  Hard to argue with that logic. 

File Under "No! Ya think?"

Men spend more than women on Valentine Twice as much on average, according to new survey

From Knight Ridder. 

US News: Presidents at War

Take the time to peruse this U.S. News & World Report entitled "Presidents at War."

Also, Professor Joseph Ellis in the New York Times is wondering about the place of September 11 in American history, specifically where it ranks in the list of events that have threatened America: 

...the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.

Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.
...

What does history tell us about our earlier responses to traumatic events?

My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport foreigners during the "quasi-war" with France; the denial of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919, which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950's, which used cold war anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in government, universities and the film industry.

In retrospect, none of these domestic responses to perceived national security threats looks justifiable. Every history textbook I know describes them as lamentable, excessive, even embarrassing. Some very distinguished American presidents, including John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, succumbed to quite genuine and widespread popular fears. No historian or biographer has argued that these were their finest hours.
...
It is completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency.

I believe Professor Ellis is a bit off track in his analysis.  To be sure, we have faced greater challenges in our past, but his analysis is too simplistic by implying that all of these conflicts were fundamentally the same.  Our current threat is defined differently in the context of international, non-state centered terrorism (albeit occasionally state-sponsored).  He doesn't appear to understand that a new threat requires a new response.

Curious George as Fascist Icon

I am not looking forward to the Curious George movie.  But then I don't have to.  My daughter is in college and my son in High School, so they can see the film without me.  I surely don't need exposure to such a politically incorrect manifesto.  Joe Garofoli, in the San Francisco Chronicle, has this:

For the politically correct Bay Area parent, the "Curious George" children's books are a minefield of cultural horrors through which to tiptoe. Imperialism. Animal abuse. Bad parenting.

Puh-leeeeze, George's defenders say. They're  children's books, whose charm has not dimmed -- 25 million books and countless swag sold -- even if ideas about political correctness have evolved since the first George adventure was published in 1941. Sometimes a speechless, mischievous monkey is just that -- a monkey, not a metaphor. Besides, George's tales are no more un-PC than those of that royalist warmonger, Babar.

Now I may have to watch the movie, out of political obligations.  This from Robin Roth, a "journalist, educator, and activist."

The celebrated children's classic Curious George is a seemingly simple story about an innocent - yet inquisitive - African monkey snatched from his jungle home. Children have loved this boldly illustrated story, in primarily primary colors, and marveled to the adventures of the curious little monkey for decades. The text is easy to read and immediately engaging, but a closer reading reveals a much darker side to the popular tale that spawned sequels, toys, and cartoons. Not only does the story reveal the sinister side of a corrupt wildlife trade with perilous roots in Western imperialism, but recent ethical, legal and scientific considerations on the personhood of primates makes a traditional reading of Curious George both impossible and irresponsible.

Activist, surely she is.  Educator?  Only if education means enforcing the party line.  Garofoli tells me a thing or two I didn't know about George.

The Curious George oeuvre was the work of the husband- and-wife team of H.A. and Margaret Rey, German Jews who escaped France with the first book's manuscript as the Nazis invaded. Most of the seven stories they wrote feature the antics of a monkey whose sweet curiosity gets him in trouble until he's rescued by the nameless Man with the Yellow Hat, George's keeper/parental figure/pal with bail money.

The vicious deconstruction practiced by Roth, if practiced consistently (like that would happen), would demolish not only Western fairy tales, but almost all tradition stories indigenous peoples.  Consider the Navajo Coyote tales, of which I am very fond.  Coyote is a trickster, if not a very successful one.  His tales are full of mischief and misogyny.  Surely they justify the eradication of an indigenous species!  This is the goofy left at its goofiest.

Hat tip to James Taranto, of the Wall Street Journal.