January 2008 Archives

The Clintons have worked hard to divide the Democrats along racial lines in order to defeat Barack Obama, but they may be less pleased if what they see as their white voting bloc gets sliced and diced by accounts of Hillary's tenure on the Wal-Mart board of directors.

In six years as a member of the Wal-Mart board of directors, between 1986 and 1992, Hillary Clinton remained silent as the world's largest retailer waged a major campaign against labor unions seeking to represent store workers.

Clinton has been endorsed for president by more than a dozen unions, according to her campaign Web site, which omits any reference to her role at Wal-Mart in its detailed biography of her.

Wal-Mart's anti-union efforts were headed by one of Clinton's fellow board members, John Tate, a Wal-Mart executive vice president who also served on the board with Clinton for four of her six years.

Tate was fond of repeating, as he did at a managers meeting in 2004 after his retirement, what he said was his favorite phrase, "Labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living." ...

An ABC News analysis of the videotapes of at least four stockholder meetings where Clinton appeared shows she never once rose to defend the role of American labor unions. ...

A former board member told ABCNews.com that he had no recollection of Clinton defending unions during more than 20 board meetings held in private.

John Tate's characterization of modern unions is basically right, and Hillary Clinton is a fairly smart person so she probably recognized his correctness at the time. That past position is no longer convenient however, so the woman who wants to be the most powerful person on earth -- protecting America, leading our government, and facing down tyrants around the world -- is forced to fall back on a claim of impotence.

President Clinton defended his wife's role on the Wal-Mart board last week after the issue was raised by Sen. Barack Obama in a CNN debate.

His wife did not try to change the company's minds about unions, the former Arkansas governor said.

"We lived in a state that had a very weak labor movement, where I always had the endorsement of the labor movement because I did what I could do to make it stronger. She knew there was no way she could change that, not with it headquartered in Arkansas, and she agreed to serve," President Clinton said.

Now that's what I call bold leadership for change! Or just a lie. Take your pick. My only regret is that this sort of baggage is coming out now rather than after Hillary wins the nomination.

Despite many proposals to "fix" the "broken" primary system, I may be the only American left who likes the undemocratic status quo. Most opponents of the primary system lament that a small handful of states do most of the winnowing, leaving the majority of citizens with only a few choices and little direct say in the nomination process. All true!

But remember: voting is not a "right", it is merely a means to an end. The goal is to create and maintain an honest, fair, and open government that will protect us and preserve our liberty. Democracy is one tool we can use to build that government, but democracy should not be seen as an end unto itself. Our Founding Fathers knew this, which is why the voting franchise was limited even though the rights protected by the Constitution were reserved for all people. They believed that the rights of everyone would be best protected by reserving the power to vote to a subset of the population. History has shown that they were right in some regards and wrong in others, but no one can dispute that America has been only somewhat democratic since its inception.

Even now there are a whole host of undemocratic controls built into our government to prevent tyranny by the democratic mob. The Senate is perhaps the most obvious example, its membership being based states rather than the citizenry. The Supreme Court is also undemocratic, as is the Electoral College, as is the President's veto power, as is the requirement that both houses of Congress approve a bill before it can be signed into law, and so forth and so on. These institutions are democratic to varying degrees in that the wielders of power somehow trace their authority back to the People, but that derivation is purposefully indirect. And these institutions have served us reasonably well for more than 200 years, preserving for us the most enduring Republic and the safest and freest society on the face of the earth.

And so the fact that my primary votes have never counted as much as those cast in Iowa or New Hampshire doesn't distress me. I think Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina are fairly representative of the population as a whole, and I don't feel like the results would have turned out much differently if Missouri has been an early primary state. Additionally, I like that a little-known candidate can compete in these small states and ramp up their campaign gradually rather than having to fight in California, New York, and Florida right out of the starting gate. Without a system like we've got, Barack Obama would have had no chance against Hillary Clinton, and Mike Huckabee would have been dead in the water.

I for one hope that we stick with something similar to the current system. I'm not adverse to any change whatsoever, but I think it would be a mistake to make drastic changes to a system that has served us pretty well thus far. Remember that democracy is only a means to an end, a tool to help us maintain our liberties and security. It's ironic that people simultaneously complain about the primary system and how "one vote can't make a difference". Be content as a cog in our wonderful Republic that somehow keeps chugging along despite its flaws.

John Edwards has dropped out from the presidential race, and my speculation is that he did so in exchange for a promise to be Barack Obama's VP.

The former North Carolina senator will not immediately endorse either candidate in what is now a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, said one adviser, who spoke on a condition of anonymity in advance of the announcement.

Obama needs all the anti-Hillary voters he can get for next week's Super Tuesday, and trading the vice presidential slot for those votes might be the only path he saw to the nomination. I don't think Edwards brings much to the potential general election Obama ticket based on his positions or geography, but you can't get to the general election if you don't win the nomination.

Then again, Edwards might end up only being offered a cabinet position. The guy's basically unemployed, so he'll probably take what he can get in 2009.

If my wife and I weren't married she would get a ton of grants and subsidized loans to pay for her education. Because of my income, however, she gets nothing. I guess we should have just co-habitated until she graduated.

From various sources is a plan by Robert Zubrin to break the OPEC cartel for $100 per car.

What is needed is for the Congress to pass a law requiring that all new cars sold in the United States be flex-fueled - able to run on any combination of alcohol or gasoline fuel. Such cars are existing technology - in fact about 24 different models of flex-fuel cars were produced by the Detroit Big Three in 2007, and they only cost about $100 more than the same car in a gasoline-only version. But, since alcohol fuel pumps (such as E85, a fuel mix that is 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline) are nearly as rare as unicorns, flex-fuel cars only command about 3 percent of the new-car market.

The reason E85 pumps are so rare is that gas station owners don't want to dedicate one of their pumps to a kind of fuel that only a few percent of the cars can use. If we had a flex-fuel requirement, however, then within three years of enactment there would be 50 million cars on the road capable of running on high-alcohol fuels. Under those conditions, E85 and M50 (a 50 percent methanol, 50 percent gasoline fuel mix; flex-fuel cars can use any alcohol, including methanol) pumps would start appearing everywhere.

But most important, this would not just be happening here. By requiring that all new cars sold in the United States be flex-fueled, we would be forcing all the foreign car manufacturers to switch their lines to flex-fuel as well, effectively making flex-fuel the international standard. So there would be hundreds of millions of cars worldwide capable of running on alcohol, forcing gasoline to compete everywhere against alcohol fuels that can be produced from numerous sources. This would effectively break the vertical monopoly that the oil cartel currently holds on the world's fuel supply and keep prices in the $50-a-barrel range, because that is where alcohol fuels become competitive.

I'm not in favor of government regulation to further social agendas, but this economic manipulation would be to enhance national security. Seems like a valid use of government power that both Lefties and Righties could support.

Why you shouldn't swallow gum.

A British boy is cured after a decade of deafness when a cotton swab pops out of his ear.

Jerome Bartens was diagnosed as deaf in his right ear when he was just two-years-old.

Over the next nine years, he struggled to live a normal life as a young boy — but everything changed when he felt a sudden pop in his right ear while playing a game of pool with friends.

He put his finger in his ear and pulled out a tip of a cotton wool bud that had been wedged in his ear since he was a toddler.

"It was just incredible — his hearing returned to normal in an instant," Barten's dad said.

"I had always suspected Jerome had stuck something in his ear when he was little and that was causing the problem. But the doctors and hearing specialists said it was wax and he would probably grow out of it."

"I am amazed they didn't spot something as obvious as a cotton wool bud."

Don't be amazed! Miracle cures are just another benefit of the UK's socialized health care.

This experiment to test the accuracy of "gaydar" appears to me to use a flawed methodology. (Or perhaps the brief article doesn't accurately convey the method and results of the experiment.)

Ambady and colleague Nicholas Rule, both at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, wondered about sexual orientation. They showed men and women photos of 90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds. When given 100 milliseconds or more to view a face, participants correctly identified sexual orientation nearly 70% of the time. ...

Psychologist David Kenny of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, says the finding demonstrates the brain's remarkable ability to make fast yet accurate appraisals. Still, he notes that with some of the images, accuracy regularly fell below 50%. It's possible that some faces are just hard to read.

Considering that far less than 50% of the population is gay, an experiment based on an equal number of gay and straight videos won't really capture the essence of the "gaydar" phenomenon. It's also important to break out the mistakes into false-positives and false-negatives.

For example, in real life a person "A" who assumes that every person they meet is straight will be right more than 90% of the time. That doesn't mean we all have highly-attuned "gaydar", it's just a reflection of the rarity of homosexuality. Person A will have a false-positive rate of 0% and a false-negative rate of 10% -- the highest possible in a real setting.

A useful measurement of "gaydar" should weight the false-negative error rate higher than the false-positive error rate, because otherwise it's very easy to "game" the measurement system by simply picking "straight" every time. For example, false-negatives could be weighted fives times as heavily as false-positives, which would give Person A a modified error rate of 50% instead of 90%.

(HT: GeekPress and SciTechDaily.)

A fascinating account of the least civilized place on earth, nearly untouched by Western Civilization through the end of the 20th century.

Epochs of history rarely come to a sudden end, seldom announce their passing with anything so dramatic as the death of a king or the dismantling of a wall. More often, they withdraw slowly and imperceptibly (or at least unperceived), like the ebbing tide on a deserted beach.

That is how the Age of Discovery ended. For more than five hundred years, the envoys of civilization sailed through storms and hacked through jungles, startling in turn one tribe after another of long-lost human cousins. For an instant, before the inevitable breaking of faith, the two groups would face each other, staring - as innocent, both of them, as children, and blameless as if the world had been born afresh. To live such a moment seems, when we think of it now, to have been one of the most profound experiences that our planet in its vanished immensity once offered. But each time the moment repeated itself on each fresh beach, there was one less island to be found, one less chance to start everything anew. It began to repeat itself less and less often, until there came a time, maybe a century ago, when there were only a few such places left, only a few doors still unopened.

Sometime quite recently, the last door opened. I believe it happened not long before the end of the millennium, on an island already all but known, a place encircled by the buzzing, thrumming web of a world still unknown to it, and by the mesh of a history that had forever been drawing closer.

Humanity needs new frontiers, but it seems like there may not be any left.

For decades mortgage lenders were damned for refusing to lend money to poor, minority, aspiring home-owners, and now they're being damned for for lending too easily.

"People of color are more than three times more likely to have subprime loans," concluded the organization United for a Fair Economy in a recent report which estimated that minorities have seen between 163 billion and 278 billion dollars of their equity go up in smoke since 2000.

With its weakened economy and a large black population more used to renting, Cleveland has become a poster child of the subprime crisis in a country where some 2.1 million borrowers are behind on their mortgage payments.

City officials estimate that foreclosures have swallowed some 70,000 homes and turned entire neighborhoods into ghost towns.

The city has responded by suing lenders, accusing them of targeting black borrowers and steering them to the loans granted with few formalities and at hefty interest rates to people with poor credit histories.

Naturally the people being thrown out of houses they can't afford want the rest of us to rescue them from the consequences of their bad decision-making.

In the hardest-hit suburb of Cleveland, "nearly 24,000 people have lost their homes to Cleveland's Katrina," he told AFP. ...

"More than two years later, 6,000 homeowners (in St. Bernard Parish) have each received an average 65,000 dollars in government funds to rebuild their American Dreams. But in Cleveland and its suburbs, there is no disaster relief, no presidential visits, no good Samaritans to helps us."

"It would have been better if it was an earthquake or a hurricane, we respond better to natural disasters than to men in suits disasters," said city councilor Zach Reid.

First off, it was ridiculous to hand out so much money to Katrina victims. But secondly, at least they were victims of a natural disaster and not just people who bought more house than they could afford.

It seems very simple to me: don't live beyond your means. There's all sorts of things I'd love to own, but I can't because I don't make enough money. If I went out a bought a $10 million home but then couldn't pay the mortgage whose fault would that be? Would these same people be lining up to bail me out?

Everyone was expecting Barack Obama to beat Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, but he got more than double her number of votes. That's amazing.

Sen. Barack Obama, vying to become the nation's first black president, has won the South Carolina primary today, boosted by a record turnout of African-American voters in a state whose electorate appears polarized along racial lines.

Obama overwhelmingly beat Sen. Hillary Clinton with 55 percent support to her 27 percent, and former Sen. John Edwards, trailing with 18 percent support, with almost all precincts reporting.

The Clintons are doing everything they can to cast this primary in racial tones, but wow, Obama trounced them tonight.

The Economist has a fascinating description of human-made environmental "crises" throughout history.

It is irrelevant to ask whether we would have been better off to stay as hunter-gatherers. Being a niche-shifting species, we could not help moving on. Willingly or not, humanity had embarked 50,000 years ago on the road called “progress” with constant change in habits driven by invention mothered by necessity. Even 40,000 years ago, technology and lifestyle were in a state of continuous change, especially in western Eurasia. By 34,000 years ago people were making bone points for spears, and by 26,000 years ago they were making needles. Harpoons and other fishing tackle appear at 18,000 years ago, as do bone spear throwers, or atlatls. String was almost certainly in use then—how do you catch rabbits except in nets and snares? ...

Incessant innovation is a characteristic of human beings. Agriculture, the domestication of animals and plants, must be seen in the context of this progressive change. It was just another step: hunter-gatherers may have been using fire to encourage the growth of root plants in southern Africa 80,000 years ago. At 15,000 years ago people first domesticated another species—the wolf (though it was probably the wolves that took the initiative). After 12,000 years ago came crops. The internet and the mobile phone were in some vague sense almost predestined 50,000 years ago to appear eventually.

There is a modern moral in this story. We have been creating ecological crises for ourselves and our habitats for tens of thousands of years. We have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point out that each solution only brings us face to face with the next crisis, optimists that no crisis has proved insoluble yet. Just as we rebounded from the extinction of the megafauna and became even more numerous by eating first rabbits then grass seeds, so in the early 20th century we faced starvation for lack of fertiliser when the population was a billion people, but can now look forward with confidence to feeding 10 billion on less land using synthetic nitrogen, genetically high-yield crops and tractors. When we eventually reverse the build-up in carbon dioxide, there will be another issue waiting for us.

Which is why I won't be worried about anthropogenic global warming even if it does turn out to be happening.

Only in California would an "environmentalist" fight to have redwoods cut down for casting shade on his solar panels.

Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett own a Prius and consider themselves environmentalists. But they refuse to cut down any of the trees behind their house on Benton Street, saying they've done nothing wrong.

"We're just living here in peace. We want to be left alone," said Bissett, who with her husband has spent $25,000 defending themselves against criminal charges. "We support solar power, but we thought common sense would prevail."

Their neighbor Mark Vargas considers himself an environmentalist, too. His 10-kilowatt solar system, which he installed in 2001, is so big he pays only about $60 a year in electrical bills. He drives an electric car.

It's obvious that Vargas cares more about the money his solar panels save him personally than about the environment in general. And obviously anyone who drives a Prius cares more about looking environmentally-conscious than actually being so. What a ridiculous situation, but that's what happens when your religion is ridiculous.

(HT: Environmental Republican, Instapundit.)

Bernard Moon was at a breakfast with ex-Clintonista Dick Morris and describes Morris' perception of the Clintons' brilliance.

Anyway, so Dick Morris discussed how over the past week or more, much of the media attention has been on Bill on the issue of race in South Carlina ("Bill Clinton Accuses Obama Camp of Stirring Race Issue" NYTimes). Morris stated that Obama has been a candidate not running on the race card, but the Clintons want to use the South Carlina election to make it about race to create a white backlash to the bloc-voting by African-Americans (more from Morris, "How Clinton Will Win The Nomination By Losing South Carolina"). ...

So it's not only luring Obama to hit the cape instead of the matador, but the star power of Bill draws the media to him and maintains the political status quo in the campaign. Morris described how Bill did this when John Kerry ran. During the Democratic convention in Boston that year, Bill came out with his new book two weeks before and held book signing events there right before the convention. The local press focused on Bill Clinton and not John Kerry. Morris said that this was a strategic move, so that Kerry wouldn't win and improve Hillary's chances to run in 2008. Brilliant (yes, I love Guinness beer). Evil but brilliant.

I may be out of touch, but I see Hillary as a far weaker candidate than Obama for a host of reasons. I hope she wins the nomination, because I don't think she'll be hard for any of the leading Republicans to beat. Am I deluded by my own echo-chamber?

Maybe so, because despite my analysis that beating Obama will alienate Hillary from the black voters she needs to win the general election, Dick Morris predicts the opposite.

If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama’s ability to attract a bloc vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight. It’s one thing for polls to show, as they now do, that Obama beats Hillary among African-Americans by better than 4-to-1 and Hillary carries whites by almost 2-to-1. But most people don’t read the fine print on the polls. But if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton. ...

Of course, this begs the question of how she will be able to attract blacks after beating Obama. Here the South Carolina strategy also serves its purpose. If she loses blacks and wins whites by attacking Obama, it will look dirty and underhanded to blacks. She’ll develop a real problem in the minority community. But if she is seen as being rejected by minority voters in favor of Obama after going hat in hand to them and trying to out-civil rights Obama, blacks will even likely feel guilty about rejecting Hillary and will be more than willing to support her in the general election.

That logic seems flawed to me. Only white leftists vote as a block based on guilt... the "oppressed" groups have been conditioned by the left to vote based on anger and resentment. I think Morris (and the Clintons, if this is their plan) are mistaken if they think black voters will react to their manipulations the way they're used to white voters reacting.

So the generous government elite have deigned to return to us plebeians some of the money they confiscate from us by force on a weekly basis. Consider me underwhelmed.

Congressional leaders announced a deal with the White House Thursday on an economic stimulus package that would give most tax filers refunds of $600 to $1,200, and more if they have children. ...

The rebates will go to 117 million families, according to a Democratic summary. That includes $28 billion in checks to 35 million working families who wouldn't have been helped by Bush's original proposal, the analysis estimated.

Republicans, for their part, were pleased that the bulk of the rebates—more than 70 percent, according to an analysis by Congress' Joint Tax Committee—would go to individuals who pay taxes.

By "working families" I assume the story means family with members who work, but not enough to pay any taxes... which means they probably don't work full-time and are already likely to be on the public dole.

As many other more knowledgeable writers have already said, this "stimulus package" is idiotic. Besides being deeply "progressive" (in that the amount is basically equal rather than being a percentage of income) there's no evidence whatsoever that this plan will do anything to encourage long-term economic growth. The only way you do that is with tax cuts, which Democrats hate because they reduce our dependency on government.

If somebody grabbed your wallet and then handed you back a $20 bill, would you be grateful? Realizing the money was yours to begin with, you would probably call the cops rather than thank the thief.

President Bush’s latest gimmick to stimulate the economy by giving back to taxpayers $800 of their own money is the Washington equivalent of the “generous” thief. The biggest fairy tale in Washington isn’t Barack Obama’s voting record on the war in Iraq, but the notion peddled by Republicans and Democrats alike that the government has a big pot of its own money that it generously gives to people by “injecting” it into the economy as a stimulus.

In fact, government has only our money or money it borrows from lenders. The problem is it costs the government a major portion of every dollar it takes from us in collecting it and paying the interest on dollars it borrows. Why not just let us keep our money in the first place?

Cut taxes, and make the cuts permanent so that people can make plans and commitments based on the lowered rates. That's how you stimulate an economy permanently.

Despite the imminent mockery, I will admit that I like Ryan Seacrest. The wife and I watch "American Idol" occasionally, and Seacrest's straight-man routine with the most bizarre and pathetic contestants is very amusing. When a screeching psycho bursts from the audition room swearing and raging and Seacrest asks him, "So what did the judges say?", it's great to watch the lunatics plunge off the edge of sanity into the abyss of madness.

He tends to give the weirdos plenty of rope to hang themselves with, and they generally oblige. "Why do you think the judges said 'no'?" "Are you going to train harder for next season?" "I can't believe the judges didn't like you!" "There must be some other reason they rejected you." Seacrest keeps a straight face the whole time and lets the clowns humiliate themselves, all for my enjoyment. Bravo!

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock asks "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" in an upcoming movie that takes him all around the Muslim world:

Spurlock traveled to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, Egypt and Morocco, interviewing dozens of people from school children to bin Laden family friends. The work was extensive, much deeper and more textured than anything I’ve seen on network news shows.

Indeed, Spurlock travels to bin Laden’s former farm, now a group of abandoned huts in Pakistan. He even goes into one of those caves we keep hearing about, a likely spot where the maniacal architect of Sept. 11 could be hiding. He’s shot at, bullied and reprimanded. Spurlock even had his cameras shut down. But still he persisted.

The result of "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" is extraordinary. Along the way, his meetings with regular people — man-in-the-street-type stuff — in those aforementioned countries are superb.

No visits to Iraq or Iran, alas, but it still looks like a fascinating production. If it isn't a trash-America movie then this is certainly one I'm going to want to see.

Brilliant and artistic: the Battle of Pelennor Fields made out of Candy.

(HT: GeekPress and BBSpot.)