It Can Now Be Revealed

Ted Kennedy died and made the long trip South. After his many years in the Senate, he expected as much. Beelzebub greeted him, and asked which sector of Hades he would like to enter.

“Whichever one has the hottest women and the coldest Scotch”, answered the Lion of the Senate.

“OK, but that’s a long way away, in the circle for Envy”, replied the Father of Lies.

Unfamiliar with the territory and unaccustomed to making his own arrangements, the liberal royal family member ordered “Call me a car”.

“Of course, Mr. Kennedy,” Satan said, and dialed his phone. “Oh Mary Jo … our bargain is complete. Your fare is here.”

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George W. Bush, the Environmental President

The Left has been talk-pointing for years that the air is getting worse and worse, the sky is falling, and it's all George Bush's fault. But this is another thing they know that just isn't so.

From the annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators (pdf), Steven Hayward:

The latest findings are significant because they stand in sharp contrast to a refrain among some environmental campaigners and the media that air pollution is getting worse, and to the assertion that the Bush administration was “rolling back” the Clean Air Act. Final data for 2008 won’t be available for several months, but the EPA’s latest report shows that air pollution levels in every category fell from 2001 to 2007; moreover, air pollution levels in most categories fell at a faster rate than during the first seven years of the Clinton Administration.

Table 1 below displays the reduction in national mean ambient levels of the six criteria pollutants for comparable periods of the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Table 1: Ambient Air Quality Trends under Presidents Clinton and G. W. Bush

	Clinton (1993–1999)	Bush (2001–2007)
Ozone	–5.14%	–5.9%
Particulates (PM2.5)	N/A*	–9.1%
Carbon Monoxide	–24.6%	–39%
Sulfur Dioxide	–32.0%	–24%
Lead	–33.0%	–56%
Nitrogen Dioxide	–9.6%	–20%

*National PM2.5 emissions monitoring began in 199.
Source: EPA and author’s calculations

OBTW -- w/t NRO

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Hammer, Nail, Assembly Required

U.S. News and World Report's Peter Rolff puts steel to work:

It is true that the U.S. economy was in bad shape when Obama came into office. But he and his top appointees want us to believe that their preferred solution—pushing huge increases in federal spending in his so-called economic recovery act and his budget for the upcoming fiscal year though Congress to prime the Keynesian pump, putting money in the hands of their political constituencies—are in no way related to the just announced record $1.8 trillion federal deficit.

Perhaps the worm is turning. RTWT.

w/t TPM

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More Proof Robert Reich is an Idiot

As if more proof were required to verify his status as world-class moron, Robert Reich provides it:

We're in a deepening recession, in case you hadn't noticed. The biggest challenge is to ramp up aggregate demand. Yes, we have to borrow lots from the Chinese and Japanese to do this, and, yes, it's costly in terms of additional interest payments to them. But there's no choice. In fact, if the slump gets worse -- and I have every reason to fear it will because that's the direction we're heading in as fast as you can imagine -- we'll probably have to have a second stimulus. And if the second isn't enough, a third. And so on. FDR's biggest mistake was doing too little until World War II. (No one should interpret this as a recommendation for more military spending -- I'm just saying Obama will probably have to think and do much bigger than the $787 billion stimulus so far.)

Shorter Reich: A never works, B has worked before, and there is no C. Let's do A.

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Read Iowahawk

And for once, you will not laugh.

How many thousands across Africa die every year because someone decided DDT was thinning bird egg shells and killing bees? It does neither. The replacements for it, on the other hand,do kill bees.

Of course, those are all African bees, the eradification of which would have been a net positive.

But without the more effective DDT, uncontrolled mosquitoes spread malaria to thousands of Africans, many of whom then die of the disease.

But to the radical environmentalists, that may be the net positive.

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A Put Down for the Ages

It's from a whole blue-on-blue essay.

You're not a coward merely because you're afraid to seek the truth when it might not conform to your views ... rather your chickensh** views are shaped by the fact you're a coward.

w/t the indispensable Moe Lane

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Nannyconomics

We have reached the point in the US at which pain is treated not as a useful spur for individuals to accel, but as a barrier to be avoided or defeated.

The trouble is that economic problems are not fixed objects. If the government tries to cure the problem of increased home foreclosures by borrowing money to give to lenders or borrowers, the only possible results are increased home prices and a worse problem in the future.

A collapse in home prices, or a glut of homes on the market, make homes more affordable. Isn't affordable housing what the liberals claim to want? Home prices will fall until people start to buy houses. They won't fall while the government is promising to subsidize prices.

More generally, any time the government offers money for people to buy something, look for prices of it to increase to match the offer.

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Democrats' Three Favorite Words

Spend, Spend, Spend.
Via AoSHQ

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Of Envy and Admiration

Sometimes people are successful at what they do. Others are not. Sometimes people succeed, sometimes they fail. Having failed, we learn (or not) and try again.

When we see other people who are more successful, we have really only two options, though a third lingers: we can resent them, or we can emulate them. The lingering third is what most people end up doing, which is observing from afar and doing nothing. On some level we pass judgment, either in favor of or against the more successful. From the corrupt.org link above:

Some people assume that if any person they don't like is more successful than someone they like it is primarily or solely due to moral inferiority - a greater willingness to lie, cheat and steal. This mindset is common in underground subcultures, though some mainstream progressives also think this way. A more advanced version of this mentality adds the assumption that anyone who is successful in the "wrong" areas - for example dating or country music - must be a despicable and morally inferior individual.

There is a danger in giving up, in deciding that your sweat and diligence are no match for the world. But there is no higher virtue than working, being paid for it, and saving for a better future in which you no longer work for money, but money works for you. That, and not mere home ownership, is the American Dream.

When people decide that the only way they can get ahead is to lie, cheat, and steal their way to the top, they have one of two options: do it themselves, or vote for it. We call the first group criminals, and the second group liberals.

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Obama Stops Denying Facts by Denying Facts

President Obama declared that the days of denying the facts (of Global Warming) are over.

Has he not gone outside for the last ten years?

Because it's been getting colder, not warmer.

Unserious, incurious, and power mad.

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Key Unemployment Forecast Rises as Illinois Leads Nation

Unemployment among the nation's governors is expected to rise by 2% next month, a level not seen since the 1980's. The Illinois rate is forecast at 100% following action by the State Legislature.

Gubernatorial unemployment has been at a historical low of 0% for the past two decades or more. The move in Illinois is expected to dramatically increase the unemployment numbers, experts agree.

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-Chicago) blamed the move on a conspiracy by those who oppose his efforts to take care of sick people. The conspirators, meanwhile, blamed the move on the Governor's personal inability to tell the truth.

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A Post Which Roils

One of the blogs I troll is called In Socrates' Wake, written by teachers about teaching, especially the teaching of philosophy. I'm not a teacher, except by the abhorrent personal habit of forcing my wisdom on others, unfettered by their acceptance or appreciation of same.

Usually, ISW is instructive, even enlightening, and always thoughtful.

This post, while instructive and enlightening, just made me want to scream.

Teaching Feminist and Race Theory: problematic assumptions and positive transformations

I teach feminist and race theory to five students, four of whom are white, none of whom are female. Yet, for all their lack of diversity, they understand the philosophical relevance of gender and race. Critical theory for them, however, was remarkably new when they began. While they began their studies with me in order to broaden their perspective in social and political philosophy, none of them had ever reflected on some of the contemporary social structures and implicit patterns of thought that are implicitly sexist and/or racist. None of the students were sexist or racist when they entered the course, and they would have been quite defensive about being labeled as such. Yet, on campus, and in other classes, this was the challenge they faced.

I dare you to read it all.

Instead of screaming, I wrote this:

The most interesting aspect of this is how self-absorbed and myopic is the entire field of feminist and race theory. I am critical both of your methods and your goals, either of which you may accept or reject.

Because while you complain to young learners how difficult life is for someone who is not white and male, millions of non-white non-males are out in the world ignoring, sidestepping, or overcoming the hurdles placed in front of all of us, striving, excelling, and winning.

With the assumption of systemic "oppression", you doom all who buy into your world view to a life of learned helplessness. All of their hopes and dreams must go into cheating the system which they have been told oppresses them, or into the ballot box, which is cheating by official means.

Because individuals are not bound by the nature or the common limitations of the groups to which they belong. It is profoundly racist or sexist to say that they do.

I was struck by your statement that the students coming in had a remarkable lack of diversity, listing as your only evidence that four of them were open-minded white males. That displays an amazing lack of introspection, even hypocrisy. Because I'm sure you would agree that people are not defined by their skin or gender.

On another level, by stating a priori that there is "systemic oppression", you as the authority in the classroom establish that principle as an inarguable tenet of the class. This puts the student on the defensive. That's great for establishing the power of the teacher in the classroom, but not great for actually learning anything other than that racism and sexism are bad, which your students already seem to have known coming in.

Further, it makes the students feel guilty for being who they are. If that is your goal, you're nothing but a jerk with a lectern.

So I will assume it is not your goal. But it appears to be your major accomplishment.

As I said, it's one of the blogs I troll.

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What Year Is It

in your world?

According to Jonah Goldberg, the geniuses and mere honorees who think they are geniuses on the left are now changing their tune. Instead of calling for a new New Deal now that evidence is piling up that it made the Great Depression worse instead of better, they're saying we need another World War II.

There are at least two problems with that line of thinking.

First, World War II was caused by Hitler's ascent, which was caused by -- wait for it -- The Great Depression. If we're in an economic crisis of that magnitude, then a solution will present itself forthwith.

Or, if we listen to those who say that terrorist Islamicism is caused by economic conditions in the Middle East, perhaps a solution already has presented itself in the form of commercial jets colliding with New York skyscrapers.

Secondly, doesn't the left constantly complain about the amount of money spent on the war in Iraq? Or perhaps the problem is merely that they didn't get the money.

Just because a solution presented itself for the Great Depression, that doesn't mean it was the only possible solution, or that a solution would require government action. We had an economy before the Depression, and it's quite possible that we could have had an economy again without resorting to all-out war.

Simulating a war, as implied by a WWII without the fighting, implies that we don't have an enemy worth fighting right now.

Finally, the point I set out to make: the conditions now are not the same as in 1929, nor even 1941. We lack excess capacity of resources such as oil and steel. The resources we have are largely tied up productively, except where environmental laws keep them out of production. In particular, many of the "green" technologies the left hopes to create will require recycling items that currently have value, destroying that value (taking it out of the economy).

For example, if the government forces everyone to use electric vehicles, or if it becomes prohibitively expensive to operate or maintain them, that will mean that a lot of value on consumer balance sheets will simply disappear.

The economy is not as bad as the news says it is. We're in a healthy cycle of renewal, in which some people are finding that they lose money, or that their investments in 401Ks and houses aren't worth as much for a while. It's normal, and no government action is needed.

But the action we're going to get -- these huge bailouts and economic "stimulus" packages -- are going to deepen the crisis of confidence into a really bad time.

And now that Obama has been elected, there doesn't appear to be anything anyone can do about it.

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Teachers Union Stifles Obama Critics

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten told CNSNews.com that no one should criticize the decision of President-elect Barack Obama and his wife Michelle to send their children to private school.

According to CNSNews.com:

Democratic Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack echoed Weingarten’s comments at the conference, telling CNSNews.com that “it’s a very personal decision” that the president-elect and his wife need to make and the issue “should not be subject to criticism or comment.”

Weingarten said that since Obama loved his children, his choice was beyond criticism: "He loves those two children, and he’s going to make sure that they are properly educated."

Parents who send their children to the public schools in Washington, DC, do not love their children enough to see them educated properly.

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Socialist Democrats Feud With Marxist Democrats Over Power

News outlets are reporting a vicious fight in the wake of Democrats seizing power over Republicans in the recent US elections. The socialist wing of the party, led by the aging Steny Hoyer (D-MD), vows to defeat the marxist faction led by former homosexual pimp Barney Frank (D-MA) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in order to keep the radicals from destroying the nation too quickly.

Hoyer, remaining alert at the twilight of his career, still boasted of his hold on the majority of newly elected Congressmen. Voters are more interested in implementing the ideas of Karl Marx in a practical way than in finding enlightenment through ideological purity, Hoyer noted. "The 33 new Members of Congress coming to Washington to swell our side of the aisle are pragmatic, not dogmatic."

It is not yet clear if Hoyer retains the ability or the will to stand up to Pelosi and powerful incoming Executive branch official Barack Obama (D-IL). During the campaign, Pelosi and Hoyer squabbled over the role superdelegates should play in selecting the Democrat nominee for Obama's position. The Hoyer camp eventually won out. As Hoyer urged, the superdelegates disregarded the popular vote to select Obama over defeated socialist wing candidate Hillary Clinton (D-NY).

Speaker Pelosi argued during the campaign that after being vital to his selection for office, she and her marxists would be more bipartisan and ally with the more conservative socialist wing in support of Obama.

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Ayers: Terrorism Doesn't Exist

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn continue to say that it's not terrorism unless you are the U.S. Government.

Part of me really hopes Ayers stays in the news for four years. He's a walking, partially sentient trooth machine. Here he describes the Obama victory celebration in Chicago's Grant Park:

But they were also celebrating—there was—you could kind of cut the relief in people’s feelings with a knife. I mean, it was the sense that we were going to leave behind the era of 9/11 and the era of fear and war without end and repression and constitutional shredding and scapegoating of gay and lesbian people, on and on. And there we were, millions, in the park, representing everybody, hugging, dancing, carrying on right in the spot, forty years ago, where many of us were beaten and dragged to jail.

We're going to leave behind the era of 9/11 because we voted it away.

"Scapegoating" of gay and lesbian people? When have gays and lesbians been blamed for anything, falsely or not?

Al Qaeda gets a vote, too. And they really don't like gays and lesbians, pal.

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Typical Bush Derangement Syndrome at Salon

Somehow managing to type wearing a helmet and drool bucket, David Sarota writes:

It wouldn't be the George W. Bush we all know if our shamed president didn't spend his remaining White House days in a final fit of polarization.

Wha? Talk about paranoia! Mr. Bush wants the Columbia Free Trade deal to go through, and knows that it's union opposition which makes Obama also oppose it. And why are the Democrats so in favor of an auto maker bailout? The unions want it, to keep their fat, blood-sucking lifestyle going.

But Sarota harkens back to NAFTA, managing to blame Bush41 for forcing it on Bill Clinton, which in Sirota's alternate reality caused the unions to skip voting in 1994. Those things must all be Known Facts on the Left, but having lived through that era I could have sworn I heard the centrist Bill Clinton championing NAFTA. And the 1994 elections were all about conservatives rallying behind conservatism as expressed by Newt Gingrich.

In Sarota's fantasies, George Bush is some kind of Machiavellian mastermind, rolling the dice with the world's economy in order to depress voter turnout in 2010:

Therefore, if Bush successfully uses the economic emergency to hustle a faction of Wall Street Democrats into supporting the deal, he will have potentially engineered 1994 redux: Democratic infighting, a demoralized progressive base, and these newly elected fair-trade Democrats humiliated — and thus electorally endangered — by their own party's standard bearers.

Dude. No one will vote, or not vote, two years from now based on whether there is a free trade agreement with Columbia. Lots of union members may not have jobs without one, but what do they care? They have the One.

Update: I think I like Kim Strassel's take better.

If there was a moment that highlights to what extent the Democratic Party has become captive to its special interests, this might be it. Mrs. Pelosi and Harry Reid have spent this week demanding that Washington stave off a car-maker collapse. What makes this a little weird is that Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid are Washington. If they so desperately want a Detroit bailout they could always, you know, pass one.

w/t Yid With Lid

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Will Someone Please Tell Robert Reich That He Is An Idiot?

Floundering in dizzying circles at TPM, Robert Reich says:

Absent consumer spending, businesses are not going to invest.

That is his full argument, minus an authority appeal or three in the attempt at explaining basic Keynesian economics, followed by some wishful swiping at straw men.

Businesses invest because that is what they do if they have money left over after paying their bills, labor, and taxes. They invest in the expectation of making a profit.

Reich does what is his apparent best to come up with arguments against some kind of new-New-Deal-bailout-f0r-everyone, and says that there are only two such (emphasis added):

Expect two sorts of arguments against this. The first will come from fiscal hawks who claim that the government is already spending way too much. Even without a new stimulus package, next year's budget deficit could run over a trillion dollars, given the amounts to be spent bailing out Wall Street and perhaps the auto industry, and providing extended unemployment insurance and other measures to help those in direct need. The hawks will argue that the nation can't afford giant deficits, especially when baby boomers are only a few years away from retiring and claiming Social Security and Medicare.

They're wrong. Government spending that puts people back to work and invests in the future productivity of the nation is exactly what the economy needs right now. Deficit numbers themselves have no significance. The pertinent issue is how much underutilized capacity exists in the economy. When there's lots of idle capacity, deficit spending is entirely appropriate, as John Maynard Keynes taught us. Moving the economy to fuller capacity will of itself shrink future deficits.

So it's economic growth based on government spending, an economic five year plan without a specified time frame.

More pointedly, the dubious Keynesian belief that government spending generates revenue obscures a key detail: it depends what you spend the money on.

Because you'll get more of whatever you fund and less of what you tax. Pay people to sit around, and more will sit around. Pay them to have bad mortgages, and more will enter into foolish mortgages. Pay them to go to college, more will.

Also, even granting, for the sake of argument, that government spending will increase tax revenue, it stands to reason that some areas of spending would be more efficient at increasing that revenue; indeed, one can accept the notion that some government spending helps the economy more to produce revenue while other spending helps less.

Building a bridge over some river makes trade possible over the river, even as it puts the ferryman out of work. On balance, some amount of bridge-building is in the long run positive in almost every way. That doesn't mean we need to have a bridge within walking distance anywhere on every river, however, since after a certain point there is no advantage in having more.

But paying people money directly is the worst sort of expenditure. For every person delivered from homelessness into productivity by a government check, another (or a dozen or a hundred others) will cash the check and demand the next one, so they don't have to pay their own mortgages. It's a giant money pit, throwing the maximum investment at the minimum return. When such spending is done with borrowed money, compound interest paid on it will soon dominate.

The second argument will come from conservative supply-siders who will call for income-tax cuts rather than spending increases. They'll claim that individuals with more money in their pockets will get the economy moving again more readily than can government. They're wrong, for three reasons. First, income-tax cuts go mainly to upper-income people who tend to save rather than spend. Most Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes. Second, even if a rebate could be fashioned, people tend to use those extra dollars to pay off their debts rather than buy new goods and services, as we witnessed a few months ago when the government sent out rebate checks. Third, even when individuals purchase goods and services, those purchases tend not to generate as many American jobs as government spending on the same total scale because much of what consumers buy comes from abroad.

The insipidity here is breathtaking. The highlighted sentence in particular marks Reisch as a fraud, because saving money is a good thing. Where do people save money? Either in banks or in investments. Money saved in a bank allows the bank to lend money -- precisely as Reisch would have them do.

And what does he conclude after his violation of the rules of logic? That government must spend, spend, spend.

Which, oddly enough, is always what he concludes.

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48 are Happier

Thanks to Treacher, I do not need to explain why the 52 to 48 projectionism seems so shallow, but I will anyway.

A while back, Ace featured about an incredibly incurious study claiming to show that liberals are just better people than conservatives. When I read of that study, I wondered immediately whether our institutions of higher learning will soon reintroduce logic into the curricula of various disciplines which seem to have eschewed it in favor of Power Studies and Living Justice Seminars. In particular, the phrase Begging the Question leaps to mind, because the study proved not so much that liberals are better people, but that given the definition that "better people" are liberal, showed that liberals are better at it than others.

A commenter at AoSHQ pointed out that righties who aren't as successful as they think they should be can (somehow) rationalize their abject failure away.

As one who is not (currently) ruling his own country by personal fiat, I can vouch for this. I call it "optimism": while I'm (currently) not the benevolent autocrat of even a smallish country, I cling to the hope that someday I will be. Perhaps now that Barry has hit the jackpot, liberals will know that they too can create dictatorships, so everything will be fine.

I think it all goes back to not being spoiled as a kid. It just makes a person happier to have lower expectations, and to know that work and discipline are rewarded. We also know that when one fails to work or be self-disciplined, bad things happen.

We failed to work and be self-disciplined. We lost. Stuff happens. We will deal.

So there you have it, 52. Don't expect us to whine and throw tantra, and don't expect us to be impressed because yours has suddenly, and I predict briefly, subsided.

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Obama: Those Who Are Against Socialism Are Just Selfish

Barack Obama, via Treacher and Hot Air:

“The point is, though, that — and it’s not just charity, it’s not just that I want to help the middle class and working people who are trying to get in the middle class — it’s that when we actually make sure that everybody’s got a shot – when young people can all go to college, when everybody’s got decent health care, when everybody’s got a little more money at the end of the month – then guess what? Everybody starts spending that money, they decide maybe I can afford a new car, maybe I can afford a computer for my child. They can buy the products and services that businesses are selling and everybody is better off. All boats rise. That’s what happened in the 1990s, that’s what we need to restore. And that’s what I’m gonna do as president of the United States of America.

“John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic,” Obama continued. “You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.”

What about Envy?

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