Politics, Government & Public Policy: April 2008 Archives
This stuff is child's play for an expert blogger such as myself, but I feel obligated to fan the flames as Barack Obama is hoisted by his own petard. Here's Obama in his "Lincolnesque" speech on race from March 18th, 2008.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.
And here's Obama disowning Jeremiah Wright yesterday, April 29th.
"At a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough," Obama said."That's a show of disrespect to me. It is also, I think, an insult to what we've been trying to do in this campaign.''
"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw.''
Perhaps it's fitting to let Jeremiah Wright have the last word:
We both know that, if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.”Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever’s doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they’re pastors. They have a different person to whom they’re accountable.
It's frustrating to me when people wrongly attribute substantial disagreements to a "failure to communicate". Here's Barack Obama speaking:
"I am confident that when you come to a general election, and we are having a debate about the future of this country -- how are we going to lower gas prices, how are we going to deal with job losses, how are we going to focus on energy independence -- that those are voters who I will be able to appeal to," he said."If I lose, it won't be because of race," Obama said. "It will be because ... I made mistakes on the campaign trail, I wasn't communicating effectively my plans in terms of helping them in their everyday lives."
No matter who wins the race for the presidency, the losing party should concede that they lost on substance, not merely on process. In the quote above, Obama basically asserts that voters cannot possibly reject him for the presidency once they understand his plans for America. In Obama's mind, if he loses it's because he just didn't articulate his ideas clearly enough, not because America both understood and disliked his ideas. An Obama loss would be due to process -- "mistakes on the campaign trail" -- not substance. He admits no possibility that his ideas are unappealing to voters. Anyone who doesn't vote for me doesn't really understand my positions.
I don't mean to pick on Obama, because this sort of phrasing is common among politicians and "commoners" alike. Sometimes it's legitimate. Most of my disagreements with my wife are due to miscommunication... but some are the result of real differences. Whether the dispute is domestic or international, it's important to recognize when it can be resolved by clearer communication and when there are substantial issues that need to be addressed through compromise, disengagement, violence, or whatever means are appropriate.
When conflict is wrongly attributed to a "failure to communicate" but there are actually substantial differences to be resolved, the conflict becomes harder to deal with from both sides. Unless you're willing to recognize that there's a substantial disagreement, how can there be resolution? Additional "clarification" is pointless when there's already both understanding and disagreement. Furthermore, the other party will be insulted by your continuing insistence that the disagreement is merely a product of their ignorance.
Part of the reason presidential campaigns drag go on for so long is to ensure that voters get all the information they need to cast their votes based on substance, not process. As Obama has pointed out, he and Hillary have debated each other 21 times -- by now voters have the measure of the man. If Obama loses to either Hillary or McCain, he would be wise to consider that his ideas, and not merely their delivery, may be to blame.
Despite being outspent 3-to-1 by her opponent Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton has won the Democrat's Pennsylvania primary by a convincing margin.
But for the second time in seven weeks, first in the Texas and Ohio primaries and now in Pennsylvania, Obama did not deliver a decisive blow against Clinton when he had an opportunity to bring the race to an end, despite heavily outspending her and waging an aggressive and negative campaign in the final days. His advisers had hoped to hold Clinton's victory margin to mid-single digits and appeared to have fallen short of that goal."He broke every spending record in this state trying to knock us out of this race," Clinton told her supporters in Philadelphia last night. "Well, the people of Pennsylvania had other ideas."
Obama's loss in Pennsylvania raised anew questions about his ability to win the big industrial states that will be critical to the Democrats' hopes of winning back the White House in November. In the coming days, Clinton's camp will try to play on those doubts with uncommitted superdelegates -- who have been moving toward Obama over the past two months -- urging them to remain neutral until the primaries are over.
As I wrote after Hillary's big wins on Super Tuesday, if the Democrats ran their primary as a winner-takes-all system like the Electoral College Obama would have lost a long time ago. Based on CNN's Democrat scorecard and 270toWin, my calculations give Hillary a hypothetical electoral vote lead of 284 to 202 for Obama, with 52 votes still undecided. Of course, it only takes 270 votes to win.
What's more, Obama hasn't won any of the critical battleground states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, New Mexico, and others all went to Clinton. Obama tends to win in states that are already guaranteed to one party or the other in the general election. If The Democrats' primary system reflected the electoral college, Obama would be seen for what he is: a popular regional candidate with narrow appeal and little chance of winning the presidency.
Even conservatives these days argue for tax cuts on the premise that revenues will increase if we cut rates. I personally think that if you cut tax rates and revenues go up, you haven't cut them far enough.
Anyway, Jerry Pournelle explains why taxes must always go up.
Clearly the government wants us to spend ourselves broke and throw ourselves on welfare. Then they will stop fining us every year. They fine us for speeding, for spitting in the streets, for doing things they don't want us to do: they also fine us for improving our property, investing money to grow the economy, saving money; the implications are pretty clear?Actually, of course, it's just that government employees consider themselves entitled to annual raises whatever they may accomplish for us, and that means they consider themselves entitled to a share of any money that can be found anywhere in the world. It's not that they want to fine you for saving money: it's that you have saved money, and there's some out there, and government employees are entitled to have raises, Q.E.D. See the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. If money exists, government considers itself entitled to it, and if you ask why, they have no answer except blank stares: after all, it's obvious isn't it? Good grief!
Maybe we need term limits for bureaucrats.
(HT: Instapundit.)
In the first post in this series I wrote that the Obamas tax returns show that they're more generous with taxpayer money than with their own. Well Hillary gave a higher percentage of her income away over the last few years than did the Obamas, but... the Clintons mostly gave money away to themselves.
After earning more than $109 million over eight years, the Clintons took tax write-offs for $10.2 million in charitable contributions. In most of those years, that money was donated to the Clinton Family Foundation, and a portion was distributed to charitable causes. ...In recent years, there were gifts that generated good will in ways that were potentially helpful to Hillary Clinton's presidential bid. Hillary Clinton, for instance, held a news conference to announce that the family foundation had given $100,000 to a South Carolina library last July, the day after she appeared at a presidential debate in the state. The library was named for Marian Wright Edelman, one of her longtime friends and mentors. South Carolina was host to an early primary contest.
The family foundation also gave $25,000 to support the McGovern Library and Center for Leadership and Public Service in Mitchell, S.D., in early 2007. Later in the year the center's eponym, the former Democratic presidential nominee George S. McGovern, said he would endorse Clinton for president. ...
The Clintons also gave $5,000 to the Jon Michael Moore Trauma Center at West Virginia University, which was named for the late grandson of Hillary Clinton's Senate colleague, Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.). Byrd, a superdelegate, has not yet endorsed a candidate for president.
So the Clintons take a tax write-off for donating money to a foundation that is essentially a proxy for Hillary's presidential campaign.
Examiner.com has a great twist on John Edwards' "two Americas" trope: tax payers and tax consumers.
Tuesday is the deadline for filing federal income taxes. Half of American taxpayers will pay 97 percent of the individual income taxes the government will collect for 2008, according to IRS data. The other half will pay little or nothing, yet receive billions in benefits in the form of cash, subsidies, “free” services and other benefits, and loans. There are indeed “Two Americas,” but the two aren’t the rich and poor, but taxpayers and tax consumers. It’s going to get even tougher for the taxpayers in the near future, thanks to legislation being readied by Democrats who control Congress.
(HT: Glenn Reynolds, who also thinks we should hold national elections on April 16th.)
After recently firing chief strategist Mark Penn because of his work on behalf of Columbian free-traders, Hillary Clinton is now laughing off questions about Bill's involvement with the same people.
Hillary Clinton used her trademark laugh Thursday to deflect a question about the $800,000 her husband earned in 2005 giving speeches for a Bogota-based group that supports the Colombia free trade agreement — the same trade deal she currently opposes.Asked by CNN if those earnings represented a conflict of interest given that she has dipped into her family's pocketbook to pay campaign bills, Clinton threw up her hands and laughed loudly for several seconds.
"How many angels dance on the head of the pin?," she responded, continuing to giggle. "I have really, uh, nothing to … I mean, how do you answer that?"
The reason she can't answer the question is because the truth is both self-evident and destructive to her campaign. What else is there to say about it?
Iain Murray has the best post I've seen so far about all the grounded flights and safety inspections: he says that the FAA is probably killing more people than it's saving.
With the FAA grounding flights in the name of safety, few people seem to have appreciated that the action may well kill people.Bear with me. Not all those whose flights have been canceled will cancel their trips. Some will find slots on other airlines, but some will choose to go by car (there being no appreciable competition from rail in most markets). Automobile travel is more dangerous than commerical plane travel for long distance trips. With the number of cancellations in the thousands, we can expect very many people to have gone long distances by road who wouldn't have otherwise. There is a chance that some of these people will be involved in a fatal accident. It is plausible, therefore, that grounding the flights will have fatal consequences.
But, you see, the FAA and the airlines aren't responsible for road deaths! Why should they care if, percentage-wise, these plane groundings kill twice as many people as they save?
See also, "Does the FDA Save Lives?".
