October 2004 Archives

More on the FEC complaint against John and Ken.

In a complaint to the Federal Elections Commission, the National Republican Campaign Committee accused radio station KFI-AM (640) co-hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou of "criminal behavior" for attacking Rep. David Dreier, R-Glendora, and endorsing his Democratic opponent, Cynthia Matthews.

By criticizing Dreier's positions on immigration, promoting a "Fire Dreier" campaign and making on-air appeals for voters to elect Matthews, the NRCC said, the hosts gave Matthews an unlawful corporate, in-kind contribution of more than $25,000.

"This behavior is illegal and must be appropriately punished," the NRCC charged, noting violation of the law carries a penalty of fines and jail time.

How utterly ludicrous... the idea that anyone in American can face criminal prosecution for advocating the defeat of an elected official! Disgusting. Totally repulsive. Why not contact the NRCC and tell them what you think?

Mailing Address

National Republican Congressional Committee
320 First Street, S.E
Washington, D.C. 20003

Phone Numbers

NRCC Main Number, (202) 479-7000
News Media Inquiries, (202) 479-7070
Campaign Assistance, (202) 479-7050
Information on Contributing, (202) 479-7030
Legal Compliance Questions, (202) 479-7069

Here's a link to the actual complaint. Go ahead and read it, but keep in mind that John and Ken have invited David Dreier onto their show numerous times, and he refused.

The French are becoming more Americanized every day it seems.

Despite the perception that the French are rude and scoff at American tourists, the country some Yanks love to hate apparently doesn’t return the bad feeling. Les Français continue to snap up, or at least reluctantly accept, all things américaines.

"Every time I go back, I am astounded by how much more prevalent American culture is," said Roy Caldwell, a French professor at St. Lawrence University (search) in New York.

So is it time for Americans to quit France-bashing? Or does that country's ongoing obstruction on international affairs warrant our continuing displeasure?

My mom is on the school board in my district and we frequently discuss the incredible harm inflicted on our public education system by teachers' unions. The thing is, I know a good number of teachers that I like personally, but the socio-political structure of the various unions is focused on one thing: not educating kids, but enriching and protecting teachers. Which is what you'd expect! Everyone is out for their own good. The problem is that our public education system as it stands now doesn't create an incentive structure to harness that innate selfishness and use it to benefit our kids.

There are two ways to redirect selfishness. The first is religion, or any other system that promises deferred, intangible rewards in exchange for surrendering present self-enrichment (like communism). This approach works very well if you can get everyone to play along by the same rules; unfortunately(?), history shows that you can't force a whole society to conform, and religion creates an unstable equilibrium wherein those who cheat the system can reap all the benefits without paying any of the costs. A system can only bear so many "free-riders" before it begins to break down.

The second way to redirect selfishness tends to be far more stable and better able to resist cheaters: competition, the foundation of capitalism's prosperity. Unlike religion, competition doesn't reward free-riders because in a purely competitive system (which exists only in theory) there are no free-riders. Each person earns the rewards of his own labor, and no one is forced or coerced into supporting his cheating neighbor. Competition leads to a stable equilibrium because cheaters are removed from the system and don't drain resources from those who choose to participate.

The reason, then, why teachers' unions are harmful to children is because their whole goal is to eliminate competition among teachers. Unions are, to the best of my knowledge, uniformly opposed to merit pay and insist that teachers' salaries be tied to seniority rather than performance. Unions are also against school vouchers or any other system that would allow parents to decide where their child goes to school. If parents are allowed to direct the "public" money that pays for their childrens' education (it's not really "public" money, it's their tax dollars) then teachers' performance will be implicitly evaluated by parents and reflected in their school choices. As Ed at Captain's Quarters explains about the National Education Association:

The efforts at educational reform have unnerved union leaders due to the [Bush] administration's determination to hold schools responsible for their performance -- a philosophy that threatens to undermine the ridiculous "tenure" model that makes removal of ineffective teachers an almost impossible task.

But what they truly fear is an effort to implement a school-voucher plan that would for the first time create a competitive market for educating the children of working families instead of just the richest families in America. Competition would either force public schools to reform themselves and their evaluation processes or face obsolescence. Good teachers, of course, could find work in a boom of private-school openings that vouchers would create or negotiate better conditions for themselves at the public schools that would want to hang onto them. The effect of the NEA's opposition to change is to protect the least competent among them, a fact not lost on several teachers I know personally.

The only way to truly reform our education system is to eliminate the socialist model currently in place and to introduce at least rudimentary competition that will weed out the incompetents.

Lest anyone think only leftists are against free speech, it looks like California Republican Representative David Dreier has filed a complaint with the FEC against John and Ken (local talk radio hosts) for advocating his defeat as a part of their Political Human Sacrifice campaign to stop illegal immigration.

Our contradictory laws on various sexual permutations have finally led to a (state) court case that may begin unraveling the issue of crossed consent and pornography ages.

LINCOLN, Nebraska (AP) -- The lawyer for a man convicted for videotaping consensual sex with his 17-year-old girlfriend argues that the former high school teacher should not have been prosecuted under a child pornography law.

Todd Senters, 31, was convicted last year for manufacturing child pornography after his roommate found the tape in their apartment and turned it in to authorities. Senters was put on probation and required to register as a sex offender.

In briefs filed with the Nebraska Supreme Court seeking to overturn the conviction, Senters' lawyer James Martin Davis noted that state law allows people age 16 or older to have consensual sex.

I guess the reason this topic interests me so much is that it's an incredibly clear example just how specious a great deal of modern morality is. We want to have everything both ways, but eventually all such internally inconsistant constructs begin to break down.

So what do you think is the proper resolution (for this court, and overall)? Raise the age of consent to 18? Lower the child pornography age to 16? Keep the current system and leave enforcement to prosecutorial discretion? In the past, fear of social ostracisation served to suppress immoral behavior and there was little need for legal involvement, but since we now live in a blameless society we seem to have no choice other than criminal prosecution.

(HT: Orin Kerr.)

One of features of the blogging is that it's easy to pretend that nothing you write really matters. It's easy to approach every situation from an aloof, unemotional vantage point that assumes all your readers will be detached as well -- or at least not intimately involved with the topic at hand. That's not always the case, however, as two comments to my earlier post about Gordie Bailey illustrate. I wrote that Mr. Bailey, a Colorado University freshman who died from alcohol poisoning, was responsible for his own death because he was an adult who freely chose to engage in harmful activities to impress his friends. I never really considered that anyone involved in the event could come across my post, but I recently received two comments, one from one of Mr. Bailey's best friends and one from his step-father. They wrote:

Michael-
First of all, a death of someone as special as Gordie, whom you never had the privaledge of meeting, should be mourned, not criticized in a negative way towards him. If you have any clue how offending it is to someone like me who was one of his best friends to hear some heartless fucking asshole critiquing whether it was his death was his fault or not. It hurts. Who the hell are you to try and call my friend out for drinking too much. I am in a fraternity, I am a pledge, I understand how peer pressure works. Not just peer pressure, but FRATERNITY pressure. Can you say the same? Why don't you get a life and mind your own damn business, if you have a problem feel free to call me out on it.

Posted by: Bradley at October 18, 2004 10:36 PM

I understand your "job" is to be on the unpopular side of an issue to foster conflict, so I take your comments as intended. I admire you sir if you educated your kid(s) before they went off to college to the fatc that they are totally responsible for their actions, even if it is after only 30 days on campus, and they have not yet learned their tolerance for hard alcohol chased with wine finished in 30 minutes if they want to join the "band of brothers" because they typically drank beer, and they are trusting people thinking no one would do them harm as that was the way their high scholl friends treated them. Unfortunately, most of us parents aren't as foresighted as you, and most of us, even today, do not know you can die of alcohol poisoning. You do a great service to us all to blame it on the 18 year old freshman. That way we, society, don't have to change things, except tell our kids that alcohol can kill, not just while driving a car. I wish we could all truly be as smart as you appear to be. Thanks for simplyfying the answer to our problems.

Michael Lanahan

Posted by: michael lanahan at October 28, 2004 03:52 PM

I stand by my earlier position on the matter, but I feel bad about inflicting additional pain on people who loved Mr. Bailey. Was my first post wrong or irreponsible? Was I out of line?

I think alcoholism is a huge problem in our country (and around the world), and it doesn't do anyone any good to shift blame off the drinkers. In the first post I closed by saying, "I'm sorry to say so, Mr. Lanahan, but Gordie's death was meaningless" -- and it was meaningless in the sense that, despite Mr. Lanahan's claims, neither the university nor the fraternity should bear any legal responsibility for Mr. Bailey's death or learn any "lessons". However, if we as a society choose to rightly attribute blame rather than attempt to shift it onto others, perhaps Mr. Bailey's death can serve an an example to other young adults and scare/encourage them to take responsibility for their own lives.

Igots is a former-engineer/current-law-student and he's got an amusing/disturbing account of a police ride-along. My brother is in the process of becoming a police officer, and it sure sounds like interesting work... at least based on accounts like the one above and Law & Order.

Two interesting pieces that illustrate how John Kerry's presidential campaign is dragging the media down with it. First, Kerry Spot has a source inside the Bush campaign who says that the President, with regards to the 380 tons of explosives story, is going to present America with a choice:

The campaign is going to avoid the Russian angle and go with the straightforward, “As the facts mount in this story, American people have a choice between believing Kerry-NYTimes-CBS or believing Bush and the Troops.”

Secondly, Dick Morris makes the connection Mike Wallace wanted to avoid at all costs and links "60 Minutes" with "60 Minutes 2" (starring Dan Rather).

Beyond our inability to determine the truth of the Times story lies the sense of dirty tricks that comes from a last-minute journalistic accusation — made even more heinous by the CBS News' now-exposed plan to break the story 48 hours before the polls opened on "60 Minutes." Voters will easily recall how the same show fell for forged anti-Bush documents and tried to palm them off on us just last month.

"60 Minutes 2" is the show that fell for the forged documents, and Mr. Wallace -- host of "60 Minutes [1]" didn't want to get entangled in that debacle... too bad I guess.

(HT: Power Line.)

Maybe I'm slow, but I'm only now realizing that I need to add Orson Scott Card to my sidebar. Here's a piece he wrote earlier this month about John Kerry's ignorance of science and his absurd position on abortion.

I was amused when Kerry said, during the second debate, "I believe in science."

That was a pretty clear contrast with George W. Bush, who believes in God.

The real difference in their faiths is that George W. Bush has actually read the Bible and gone to church, so chances are he knows something about what Christians believe about God.

Unfortunately, John Kerry has no idea what scientists believe about science.

As Charles Krauthammer pointed out in a sharply reasoned essay ("Anything to Get Elected"), Edwards's recent statement, "When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again," does not overlap with actual science at any point.

It's religion, pure and simple. And it's not really faith in science. It's faith in money spent on science. And, of course, faith in the gullibility of the American voter.

And regarding Mr. Kerry's position on abortion -- which I've dissected previously -- Mr. Card writes:

From the second debate between Bush and Kerry, when Kerry was asked about abortion:

"KERRY: I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I'm a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

"But I can't take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn't share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can't do that." ...

What I want to know is how you can possibly legislate anything at all that does not involve taking your personal belief about what is right and wrong and punishing those who don't go along.

Did John Kerry not vote for the notorious "hate speech" laws? Didn't he decide that certain words and ideas were so evil and loathsome that people who say them while committed a crime should receive extra punishment?

Didn't John Kerry support the ban on peaceful demonstrations anywhere near abortion clinics? Didn't he impose his beliefs on those who hope to save innocent lives by kneeling and silently praying in front of abortion clinics, when he voted for the law that allows them to be arrested for that? ...

So in his worldview, only religious people are forbidden to impose their beliefs about right and wrong on others. As long as you have no religion behind you, you can force your beliefs about right and wrong on anybody you want.

(HT: Greg Staples.)

I've written about illegal immigration and its relationship with common "street crime" (mere robberies, rapes, and murders), but now there's evidence that foreign terrorists are attempting to use Hispanic gangs in their fight against Western Civilization.

A top al Qaeda lieutenant has met with leaders of a violent Salvadoran criminal gang with roots in Mexico and the United States — including a stronghold in the Washington area — in an effort by the terrorist network to seek help infiltrating the U.S.-Mexico border, law enforcement authorities said. Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, a key al Qaeda cell leader for whom the U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward, was spotted in July in Honduras meeting with leaders of El Salvador's notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang, which immigration officials said has smuggled hundreds of Central and South Americans — mostly gang members — into the United States. Although they are actively involved in alien, drug and weapons smuggling, Mara Salvatrucha members in America also have been tied to numerous killings, robberies, burglaries, carjackings, extortions, rapes and aggravated assaults — including at least seven killings in Virginia and a machete attack on a 16-year-old in Alexandria that severely mutilated his hands.

Maybe Special Order 40 -- which prohibits the LAPD from enforcing federal immigration laws -- doesn't look like such a good idea anymore?

Near the end of the article we see exactly what John Kerry had in mind when he characterized global terrorism as a mere "nuisance".

In March, the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office filed an injunction against Mara Salvatrucha, charging that the gang's criminal activity constituted a "public nuisance" based on the number of killings, robberies and drug crimes. The injunction requires gang members, under public nuisance statutes, to follow curfew rules and regulations and prohibits them from associating, driving or appearing together in designated areas of the city.

Remember, Kerry was a prosecutor, so he knows the language and code words they use -- "nuisance" wasn't chosen accidentally.

PLO Terrorist-in-Chief Yasser Arafat has left Israel for medical treatment in Paris (where else?).

It will be the first time that Mr Arafat will have left his compound in Ramallah in nearly three years.

Israeli officials had already confirmed that Mr Arafat would be allowed to travel overseas to receive treatment.

Israel has never prevented Arafat from leaving Ramallah, they've just said that if he leaves the country he won't ever be allowed to return. This statement doesn't indicate to me that their position has changed, and if Arafat survives I doubt Israel will let him back in. It would probably be best for Israel and the Palestinians for Arafat to die.

Update:
For a first-hand description of Arafat's predation on the Palestinians, read this account by Issam Abu Issa, founder of the Palestinian International Bank. (HT: Power Line.)

Update 2:
Apparently Israel has promised to let Arafat return.

Instapundit guest host Megan McArdle posts about a problem she's having getting a driver CD for her mom's Hewlett Packard Officejet 5510, and someone from HP reads her post and arranges to solve the problem. You've got to be kidding me.

As much as we try to get along with and work with Russia, it's important to remember that Russia is not our friend in the way Britain, Australia, and Poland are.

Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."

What effect will this new revelation have on the election? Who knows... if it gets reported it'll probably be influential.

Update:
Russia denies involvement.

Could this article about small hominids use the word "hobbit" a few more times?

In this Captain's Quarters post about explosives in Iraq, Captain Ed Morrissey quotes a New York Sun article that uses an abbreviated form of Thomas Lipscomb's first name.

One of our favorite movies is the film Alfred Hitchcock made in 1940 called "Foreign Correspondent." It's about how civilization's enemy in what became World War II sought to manipulate a peace movement dubbed "well-meaning amateurs" and through them, the press. We wouldn't want to draw exact parallels to the Vietnam era - or our own wartime drama today - but we couldn't help think of it as we read Thos. Lipscomb's dispatch, issued on our Page 1 yesterday, on how the communists in Hanoi were viewing the activities of John Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Decidedly odd for a modern writer, no? Anyway, for those who are interested, here's a list of first name abbreviations. If yours isn't there, make one up and leave it in a comment. A thousand years from now, this post will likely serve as an authoritative historical record on names in the early 21st century -- so make your mark.

I'm still around, it's just been a crazy couple of days. Work is really busy, and I've been trying to leave early because there are tons of errands to run to prepare for my annual Halloween haunted house. Believe it or not, every Home Depot in the western US is out of the black plastic sheeting I need to build the walls of the maze... apparently they shipped it all to Florida because of the hurricanes. Fortunately I've found another supplier, and I'll spend most of this evening trying to make that acquisition.

Last night was beautiful. We got a dozen or so feet of rain and I sat at home reading about vampires, playing Evil Genius, and talking on the phone. EG is really fun so far; it's similar to Dungeon Keeper, except that you get to send your evil minions out into the world to wreak havoc, steal money, and execute nefarious schemes. Meanwhile, you build an underground island fortress to defend yourself from the various secret agents the world governments send after you. The perfect game for a Republican.

I've got a few things to write about, but I don't really think I can contribute much to the political discussions beyond making easy observations that other, more popular writers are already making. I'm on pins and needles over the election, and I'm planning to spend Election Eve at a Bear Flag League party in Westchester. I've never been to an election party before; this is the first Presidential election that's happened since my church moved our kids' program off of Tuesday nights, and I'd been working there for years and years. It's all very exciting, and I'm really looking forward to the price of oil dropping and the market improving once the votes are finally tallied (whenever that is).

You know you've been reading too much Tolkien when you read the Arab name "Kadhim" and mentally pronounce it "ka-THEEM". And if you understand this post then you've been reading too much Tolkien as well.

Lest anyone think this current presidential campaign is particularly nasty, consider the history of mudslinging.

History shows that these sorts of unsupportable attacks and seemingly childish antics are not new to the election game. Candidates for all sorts of public office have engaged in name calling and public denunciations of their opponents from America's earliest days as a democracy.

Not even one of our most admired founding fathers was safe from personal attacks. According to a BBC news article, during the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson was "accused of favoring the teaching of 'murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest,'" by his opponent.

Perhaps one of the most venomous elections was in 1828, when John Quincy Adams was running for President against General Andrew Jackson. According the same BBC news article, Adams was "nicknamed 'The Pimp' by the campaign of his opponent…based on a rumour that he had once coerced a young woman into an affair with a Russian nobleman when he had been American ambassador to Russia."

In response, Adams' supporters came out with a pamphlet which read: "General Jackson's mother was a common prostitute brought to this country by British solders! She afterwards married a mulatto man with whom she had several children of which number General Jackson is one!!"

Then, there was the relentless slander and ridicule that Lincoln endured. According to an article in the Bradenton Herald, his opponents made fun of his "slang-whanging stump speaker" style, Newspapers made fun of his looks ("a horrid looking wretch"), and cartoonists pictured him in racist scenarios. One man from Georgia proclaimed that Lincoln planned to "force inter-marriage between children - that 'within 10 years or less our children will be the slaves of Negroes.'"

Merely two decades later, during Grover Cleveland's election in 1884, Cleveland, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was accused of fathering an illegitimate child, according to a Scripps Howard News Service article. Cleveland's supporters in turn called his opponent a liar.

By the 1950's, with America's red scare shadowing over much of the country, sympathy with communism replaced sex scandals as the most vitriolic accusation one candidate could hurl at another. Scripps Howard News Service article reports that Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy even accused the entire administration of President Harry Truman of harboring communists.

My friend Mike Northover pointed me to an Economist article from 2003 that attempted to explain away Europe's lagging productivity and living standards as merely a love of leisure, but recent Nobel Prize in Economics winner Edward C. Prescott says that Europeans work fewer hours than Americans simply because they're taxed more. Writes Professor Prescott:

Here's a startling fact: Based on labor market statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Americans aged 15-64, on a per-person basis, work 50% more than the French. Comparisons between Americans and Germans or Italians are similar. What's going on here? What can possibly account for these large differences in labor supply? It turns out that the answer is not related to cultural differences or institutional factors like unemployment benefits, but that marginal tax rates explain virtually all of this difference. I admit that when I first conducted this analysis I was surprised by this finding, because I fully expected that institutional constraints are playing a bigger role. But this is not the case. (Citations and more complete data can be found in my paper, at www.minneapolisfed.org.)

Let's take another look at the data. According to the OECD, from 1970-74 France's labor supply exceeded that of the U.S. Also, a review of other industrialized countries shows that their labor supplies either exceeded or were comparable to the U.S. during this period. Jump ahead two decades and you will find that France's labor supply dropped significantly (as did others), and that some countries improved and stayed in line with the U.S. Controlling for other factors, what stands out in these cross-country comparisons is that when European countries and U.S. tax rates are comparable, labor supplies are comparable.

And this insight doesn't just apply to Western industrialized economies. A review of Japanese and Chilean data reveals the same result. This is an important point because some critics of this analysis have suggested that cultural differences explain the difference between European and American labor supplies. The French, for example, prefer leisure more than do Americans or, on the other side of the coin, that Americans like to work more. This is silliness.

Again, I would point you to the data which show that when the French and others were taxed at rates similar to Americans, they supplied roughly the same amount of labor. Other research has shown that at the aggregate level, where idiosyncratic preference differences are averaged out, people are remarkably similar across countries. Further, a recent study has shown that Germans and Americans spend the same amount of time working, but the proportion of taxable market time vs. nontaxable home work time is different. In other words, Germans work just as much, but more of their work is not captured in the taxable market.

I would add another data set for certain countries, especially Italy, and that is nontaxable market time or the underground economy. Many Italians, for example, aren't necessarily working any less than Americans--they are simply not being taxed for some of their labor. Indeed, the Italian government increases its measured output by nearly 25% to capture the output of the underground sector. Change the tax laws and you will notice a change in behavior: These people won't start working more, they will simply engage in more taxable market labor, and will produce more per hour worked.

There certainly are cultural differences that may account of some of the productivity gap (and the varying tax rates), but people are people. As marginal tax rates rise, the value of working an additional hour drops while the cost of working an additional hour continues to rise.

Bob Woodward of the Washington Post has published a series of tough questions he planned to ask Senator Kerry about the battle of Iraq. He says he was told he would get a chance to interview the Senator, but that Mr. Kerry and/or his people decided to back out. Even without Mr. Kerry's responses the questions are excellent and worth reading.

I'm sick of having to deal with all the people who apparently despise the Establishment but have no problem living fat, lazy lives afforded by same. I met a communist at a party who said he hated money, but then refused to open his wallet and give me his. Why? He then said he didn't need money because he could come to my house and steal food any time he wanted. I invited him to try, but advised him that I'm heavily armed and that I'm not likely to get many opportunities to shoot a communist.

So yeah, I'm pro-Establishment. I know which side my bread's buttered on, and if you're smart you do too. Is the Man perfect? Nah, but he's easier to change from the inside than from the outside, and it's sure a lot more fun to take control of your destiny than to just whine and complain all the time about how unfair life is.

I'm just another brick in the Wall, and I'm proud of it. The Wall holds out all sorts of nasty evil things that want to kill me, my family, and all my friends.