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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, September 04, 2004
Okay, All You Left-Wing Democrats Can Now Comfortably Vote For Ralph Nader Talk about a convention bounce! Time is reporting that Bush's lead over Senator Dukakis (whoops, I mean Kerry) is now double digits: New York: For the first time since the Presidential race became a two person contest last spring, there is a clear leader, the latest TIME poll shows. If the 2004 election for President were held today, 52% of likely voters surveyed would vote for President George W. Bush, 41% would vote for Democratic nominee John Kerry, and 3% would vote for Ralph Nader, according to a new TIME poll conducted from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2. Poll results are available on TIME.com and will appear in the upcoming issue of TIME magazine, on newsstands Monday, Sept. 6.The poll conducted by Newsweek is giving similar numbers: NEW YORK, Sept. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Immediately following the RepublicanSoros, Buffett, and the other billionaires are going to have to dig deep to buy their fellow billionaire Kerry the White House. If Michael Jackson Isn't a Child Molester, He Must Be The Stupidest Guy on Earth We all know that he settled out of court in 1993 for something in excess of $15 million to stop a child molestation accusation going forward. Now it turns out that Jackson admits to other settlements, shortly before NBC broadcasts about a settlement of $2 million in 1990 for the same reason: LOS ANGELES (AP) - Michael Jackson, saying he must respond to "untruths and sensationalism," acknowledged Friday that he has reached financial settlements with people in the past to avoid the public embarrassment of going to court.Look, maybe Jackson didn't do anything wrong in 1990--or 1993. Maybe it was a misunderstanding, or someone decided to extort millions of dollars out of Jackson by threatening to make such a charge. I guess I can sort of believe this. But if you had to pay out more than $17 million in two separate situations to protect your reputation and to keep from going to prison, why would you continue to put yourself in positions with children where you were at risk of being accused again? For someone who is fabulously rich, and has paid money to make such accusations go away in the past, being alone with a child is just plain crazy. Is it really so important to have little boys spend the night that you are willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to do so? Is it worth tens of millions of dollars, and the possibility of going to prison, where your nights aren't going to be so innocent? Michael Jackson: he is plenty weird. Still No Sign Of My Mother's Cat As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Ditto got away from her at the Motel 6 in Redding, California, while she was moving. If you live in the Redding area.... 
Monsters I know that the Russian government's attempts to suppress the Chechnyan rebels have involved a lot of horrible crimes. But so what? The children murdered by these thugs didn't do this. The adults murdered by these thugs might have been opponents of the Russian government's policies. There are 250 dead, and more than 500 hospitalized. Even in a perfectly representative government (which Russia really isn't), a random selection of voters is going to include people that supported the government's policies, and people that didn't. This sort of random murder is not only immoral, it is counterproductive to winning friends. Of course, one of the points to remember is that the Chechnyan rebels are associated with al-Qaeda--a group that killed 3,000 people in New York City, 200+ in Madrid, and 200+ in Bali. I think it is a pretty fair bet that a fair number of the victims in the 9/11 attacks did not support U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and the same was probably true for Bali and Madrid. These sort of indiscriminate attacks, like the murders by the Chechnyans, don't win you friends (although they may cow the cowardly and short-sighted into going along, at least for a while). They do not fundamentally damage the ability of any of the governments involved to continue their policies, so why do these terrorist acts? I am beginning to think that terrorism is not just politics by the terribly immoral. It should be obvious to all but the most incredibly stupid that part of why Russia continues to fight the Chechnyan rebels is that the Russian people are fed up with what the Chechnyans are doing. The 9/11 attacks didn't make the U.S. pull its troops out of Saudi Arabia, or cut off support for Israel. If anything, the 9/11 attacks hardened our resolve. Yes, the Spanish population cowered in fear, and gave in, but the Australians didn't do so in response to Bali. Any rational evaluation of the effects of terrorism would conclude these sort of crimes are not terribly effective methods for achieving political goals. I fear that what we are seeing is that terrorism attracts the sort of common criminal who enjoys terrorizing people, but now gets to put on a political banner so that he can feel more comfortable doing this on a larger scale. A common characteristic of gun predators (criminals who make use of guns on a very regular basis) is that they enjoy the sensation of power that it gives them over their victims. Even when they don't need to shoot someone, they will, sometimes putting considerable energy into letting victims know that they are going to die. These gun predators enjoy the rush of causing pain and suffering, and there are plenty of similar predators who use other weapons. Over the years, I've read about the tactics of the Provisional wing of the IRA, and it strikes me that most of them, if they didn't have a cause to justify blowing up people, or shooting them in the kneecap (rendering the victim forever unable to properly walk or run), many would be doing this as common criminals, just for the chance to cause hurt. Al-Qaeda isn't any different, nor does it seem that the Chechnyan rebels are either. The actions of many of the Palestinian terrorist groups are similar; when they have had chances to work out a settlement with Israel, they have rejected peace. The results have been more suffering and a worse economy for the Palestinian people that accepting a settlement that gives them part of what they want--instead of getting nothing, but constant war. I don't think that this leads to any great startling insights about how to solve the problem, but I do think it is worthwhile to clearly see these terrorist attacks for what they are: not misguided and immoral revolutionaries, but people that just get off on causing suffering. Friday, September 03, 2004
Eric Muller Compares Malkin's Argument To A Holocaust Revisionist Yes, really: Timothy Burke's point about David Irving and Holocaust revisionism deserves a moment's reflection. Let's consider a hypothetical. Suppose an author were to publish a book revisiting the pogroms across Germany in November of 1938 that we know as "Kristallnacht." Suppose that author's thesis went something like this: "Yes, German and Austrian Jews certainly and regrettably suffered in the attacks of November 9 and 10, 1938, and in the incarceration of some 26,000 in concentration camps for a period of many weeks that followed. We have seen, time and again, the images of the broken storefront windows and the burning synagogues that the Jewish grievance community and politically correct academics want us to see. We have been led to believe that this was an unprovoked outburst of baseless hatred on the part of the German people. But what Jews and academics do not tell you, and do not want you to know, is that the so-called Kristallnacht had a real cause: A Jew did, in fact, murder the German official Ernst vom Rath in Paris on November 7, 1938, at the German Embassy, and documents from the time show that Josef Goebbels knew this and saw the murder as proof of a larger Jewish threat to the Reich."Look, I don't want to defend Malkin's claims too strongly. I think there's some merit to her point, and I think the fiercely moralistic argument that Muller makes here--comparing Malkin's claim that there was more than just racism involved to a Holocaust revisionist--says a lot about the nerve that Malkin seems to have hit. Interestingly enough, when the Columbia University Conservative Club tried to arrange a debate between Michael Bellesiles and myself about the problems with Arming America, his response was to say that he would no more debate me than a reputable historian would debate David Irving. Thursday, September 02, 2004
More On Malkin's Book & The Truth Squad Over at Vox Popoli, there is a strong argument that there was no reason for the U.S. to be afraid of a Japanese invasion, hence no need to worry about Japanese-Americans. All very good in hindsight. After a number of years of assuming that the Japanese were too nearsighted to fly airplanes, and holding their military in considerable contempt, the United States was scared witless by the success of Japanese operations against the British and the Dutch. The success of Japanese troops bicycling in from the north to take "impregnable" Singapore, for example, was a real shocker. From "how can they fight white people" to "They are rolling all over Asia" may have caused an overreaction. The U.S. built air bases on the east side of the Sierras to fight off Japanese forces. If this was strictly a matter of naval battles, why build them hundreds of miles from the coast? It would take more than an hour for fighter planes to get out over the water. It seems pretty clear to me that our government, perhaps overcautiously, believed that it was going to be fighting Japanese troops on the ground in California, Oregon, and Washington. I don't really buy Malkin's argument completely, and I don't agree that the circumstances justified this mass arrest. I do think it is important to recognize the fear that Americans were operating under at the time. The fifth column actions of Japanese residents in China were probably known to the American government. It is possible that these similar actions by Japanese residents in the Philipines at the start of the war were known to our government as well. Perhaps a bit more willingness to acknowledge these issues--instead of portraying the internment in simplistic, moralistic terms, as many people have done over the years, myself included--might have prevented Malkin's book. Professional Standards My remarks here about the professional standards of historians has generated some irritation by Dr. Ralph Luker, here, who thought that I had been far too broad in my condemnation of the profession because of the Bellesiles scandal. Here's why I don't think I was too broad in my condemnation (which also appears here in the comments section on Dr. Luker's post). Let's turn the tables, shall we? Imagine if a historian published a book--Happy Slaves--that claimed that slaves were generally quite happy with their station in antebellum America. To advance this claim, he would point to the fact that there were only a few significant slave rebellions or conspiracies in the 60 years before the Civil War. He would point out that most slaves, even those in border states, did not run away. Indeed, only a small fraction, especially in the Deep South, ran away. He would point to accounts of slaves crying at the funerals of their masters, and he would quote from the WPA Slave Narratives taken down in the 1930s. He would point out that there are only a few contemporaneous written accounts by slaves calling slavery a bad thing--dozens at most, out of millions of slaves. Most slaves never wrote anything negative about their masters, or the institution. Now imagine that this bizarre and misleading claim made it into several peer-reviewed history journals, and then into a book that was widely reviewed in popular magazines and newspapers. Pat Buchanan type populists start to talk about how Happy Slaves has completely rewritten our understanding of the past, and that the evils of slavery have been greatly exaggerated. Judges start to write decisions in which they cite these claims from Happy Slaves to justify striking down affirmative action. Now, imagine that some troublemaker, not part of the history profession, started to point out both the logical flaws in the argument (most slaves wrote nothing at all, and the WPA narratives have some serious selection bias problems), and found serious falsifications of quotations, documents cited that were clearly not read, and this appears so widely that it isn't just a few mistakes. Now imagine that historians either dismiss the criticisms as "outside our community" or attempted to ignore it, or when it becomes a popular issue, they start to talk about the importance of "due process," while others emphasize that the troublemakers raising these questions are political activists, "who certainly have an agenda." Now imagine, once the controversy is underway--at least in the popular press--Columbia goes ahead and awards the Bancroft Prize to Happy Slaves, in spite of being warned that the book was fraudulent. That, in short, is what the Bellesiles scandal was all about. Of course, this couldn't happen--with respect to slavery. Go ahead, play with the scenario a bit. Try a number of bizarre variants: for example, a guy writes a book demonstrating that there were very few printing presses in early America, that there were laws against printing obscene materials, and used this as an argument for why the First Amendment's freedom of the press provision was stillborn. (That, by the way, is what Bellesiles's book was essentially trying to argue, with respect to the Second Amendment.) Looking in from the outside, are there any of you that would look at how the author of Happy Slaves got away with, while American historians defended him, instead of questioning him, and say that historians have high professional standards? Those who think that I should just be ignored should think about this. Your profession has a big nasty stain on it from Bellesiles. It wasn't historians that alerted your profession to the fact that he was a fraud. It was me, and it was James Lindgren (a law professor), who first sounded the alarm loud enough for this matter to be taken seriously. Your profession blew it. Labels: gun rights Bush's Dramatic Economic Proposal I heard at lunchtime that Bush's speech tonight will involve a dramatic domestic policy change that will force the Democrats to respond. I wonder: is he going to float the idea of a flat income tax or replacing the income tax with a national sales tax? I have mixed feelings about both, since the results are a little unclear. It would certainly injure the wealthy to have to pay a national sales tax. You can't spend the way most Hollywood celebrities do without paying hundreds of thousands a year in sales tax. I would expect Democrats to scream, "What about the poor?" Maybe I Should Have Watched The Convention Last Night This speech by U.S. Senator Zell Miller (a Democrat, no less) is powerful even when you read it. Here's just an excerpt or two--it's worth reading in full: In the summer of 1940, I was an 8-year-old boy living in a remote little Appalachian valley. Our country was not yet at war, but even we children knew that there were some crazy men across the ocean who would kill us if they could. Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Bad News, Good News The bad news is that some people convicted of fundraising for terrorists were convicted because exculpatory evidence was withheld from the defense. The good news is that the Justice Department is saying this, and asked the judge for a retrial on lesser charges--and is not retrying them on the terrorism charge: WASHINGTON - In a dramatic reversal, the Justice Department (news - web sites) acknowledges its original prosecution of a suspected terror cell in Detroit was filled with a "pattern of mistakes and oversights" that warrant the dismissal of the convictions.One of the most depressing aspects of the Congressional hearings on what happened at Waco was seeing a memo in which Justice Department officials told those interviewing BATF agents involved in the initial raid to stop taking written statements because they might become "Brady material": exculpatory material that the government must turn over to the defendants: In fact, less than 36 hours after the initial raid Johnson advised BATF Deputy Director of Enforcement Daniel Hartnett to stop the shooting review because it was creating Brady material, exculpatory evidence for the defense, according to a memo sent to Ron Noble, then Assistant Secretary of Enforcement, Sept. 17, 1993.I guess that's one of the big differences between John Ashcroft's Justice Department, and Janet Reno's Justice Department. Ashcroft's Justice Department was prepared to investigate conduct by its employees, and admit that they made serious mistakes that led to an improper conviction. Reno's Justice Department was so desperate to get convictions that they were prepared to suppress information that might demonstrate that the defendants were innocent. Professional Standards Another truth squad has shown up, intent on suppressing discussion of Michelle Malkin's book about the Japanese-American internment: We represent the Historians' Committee for Fairness, an organization of scholars and professional researchers. Michelle Malkin's appearance on numerous television and radio shows and her comments during these appearances regarding her book IN DEFENSE OF INTERNMENT represent a blatant violation of professional standards of objectivity and fairness. Malkin is not a historian, and she states that she relied almost exclusively on research conducted or collected by others. Her book, which purports to defend the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans, did not go through peer review before publication. This work presents a version of history that is contradicted by several decades of scholarly research, including works by the official historian of the United States Army and an official U.S. government commission.I've been following the discussion enough to know that I would not want to defend Malkin's point too strongly. I also believe, from a variety of materials that I have read over the years, that the conventional wisdom about why the Japanese-American internment took place is oversimplified. Yes, there was widespread racial hatred of the Japanese on the West Coast, going back decades. Yes, it is hard in retrospect to justify the undiscriminating way that all residents of Japanese ancestry were relocated. But the manner in which Malkin's critics have dismissed the very real concerns about Japanese spies scattered among both Japanese permanent residents and American-born Japanese (who were thus American citizens) is disingenuous. Our government, at least at the very top, knew that there were such spies present. They had no way to identify them, and the fear of imminent invasion when many of these decisions were being discussed was very real. Was the internment an overreaction? Sure. Was it motivated by racist assumptions about non-whites not being able to "assimilate" into American society? Doubtless. Did political concerns play a part in this decision? I would be surprised if they didn't. But pretending, as some of Malkin's critics do, that there was no national security motivations behind this is nonsense. Aside from the question of whether Malkin's book is partly right (my view) or completely wrong (apparently the view of the historians trying to suppress her appearance on talk shows), there is something wickedly funny about the "professional standards of historians" talk. The letter complains about "a blatant violation of professional standards of objectivity and fairness." Okay, fair enough. A professional historian has obligations in these areas. But the next sentence reminds us, "Malkin is not a historian, and she states that she relied almost exclusively on research conducted or collected by others." So why do the professional standards of the historian apply to Malkin, who is, by their own admission, not a professional historian? I suppose that I could take the "professional standards" argument a bit more seriously if we didn't have the recent memory of the Bellesiles scandal, where many professional historians did their best to prevent any serious examination of massive and obvious fraud from working its way into popular newspapers and court decisions. We also have the claims of professional historians about the origins of homosexuality laws that appeared in Lawrence v. Texas (2003)--claims that are clearly incorrect, at least to the extent that they make sweeping claims that I was able to quickly demonstrate are false. There are professional historians who take what they do seriously, regardless of the political consequences of what they find. But I no longer have any illusion that these "professional standards" are adhered to by the vast majority of history professors teaching in the U.S. UPDATE: Just to clarify, since Dr. Luker (among others) have chosen to put on the shoe, announce that it fits, and get very insulted. Let's learn to read, shall we? What does that last sentence mean? When I said that these standards are not adhered to "by the vast majority of history professors" what does that mean? It doesn't mean that the vast majority are failing; it means that less than a vast majority are meeting those standards. Is a majority meeting those standards? Probably. But there was a pretty substantial cadre of historians who defended Bellesiles's dishonesty even when it became apparent that there was something seriously wrong with Arming America--and a fair number of others who simply did not want to hear any bad news on this subject. Dr. Luker's unwillingness to admit that he misread my statement above (and I will agree that I can see how he could have honestly misread it that way) really tells me plenty about Dr. Luker, and especially his willingness to put on someone else's corrupt shoe, and insist that it fits perfectly. The Civil War Settled The Question, "May A State Seceed?" But can the United States expel a state or city? This set of poll results just scares the wits out of me: On the eve of a Republican National Convention invoking 9/11 symbols, sound bytes and imagery, half (49.3%) of New York City residents and 41% of New York citizens overall say that some of our leaders "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act," according to the poll conducted by Zogby International. The poll of New York residents was conducted from Tuesday August 24 through Thursday August 26, 2004. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of +/-3.5.I know that the left has pretty much a lock on New York City's intellectuals (for whom this conspiracy theory stuff has become an article of faith), but I didn't think New York City had that many intellectuals. I thought it had a few people that wouldn't starve to death if they weren't fed. Arnold's Speech I didn't see it (I don't normally watch political conventions), but I see the text of it here, and he has captured the essence of what the Republican Party stands for--and by and large, what the Democratic Party, liberalism, and the left, are in opposition to: My fellow immigrants, my fellow Americans, how do you know if you are a Republican? I'll tell you how. More Politics of Rage More evidence that irrationality is running a fair number of people: In one incident Tuesday night, a protester jumped a fence and ran onto a stage being used by MSNBC during a live broadcast of "Hardball." Host Chris Matthews was on set with former EPA chief Christie Todd Whitman, NBC Correspondent David Gregory, Newsweek's Howard Fineman and commentator Sherry Annis when the protester leapt onto the stage, ran in front of the camera and charged toward the set.And this gem, showing that the protestors are either ignorant, or liars: About 8:30 p.m., the protesters blocked two buses carrying convention delegates to Madison Square Garden before police intervened. They emptied the buses, and transported the delegates a different way. The protesters chanted, "This is what a police state looks like," and "the whole world is watching."They get arrested for blocking traffic, and that makes it a police state? Someone needs to spend a little more time in a history class, I fear. Terrorism In Russia Again I'm not normally up at this hour, but heartburn woke me up. (That's just one of those things that you get to look forward to as you age.) I turned on Fox, then CNN Headline News, and I saw that Chechnyan terrorists have taken about 200 adults and 200 children hostage at a school in southern Russia, threatening to blow it up. I have one regular reader with whom I generally find myself in agreement who keeps telling me that Russia has a long and nasty history of oppressing the Chechnyans. He doesn't say that terrorism is okay, but that the Russians have brought this upon themselves. I confess that I haven't followed the history of this fight in Chechnya closely. I do know that Czarist Russia, then the Soviet Union, had a really poor history of how they treated ethnic minorities. Stalin engaged in mass relocations of a number of ethnic groups that he didn't consider politically trustworthy. There are many peoples in the former Soviet Union who had legitimate complaints about "Russification," the attempt to remold many ethnic groups into Russians. Paul Johnson's The Birth of the Modern has an interesting account of how Russian expansion into Asia at the beginning of the nineteenth century paralleled American expansion into the West, subduing American Indian tribes. But as much as I want to be sympathetic to complaints about Russian abuse of the Chechnyans, I find myself asking the question: "What makes the Chechnyan situation so different from other ethnic groups?" The Chechnyans aren't the only ethnic group with a history of being victims of the Russians. I've seen news accounts over the years of other ethnic minorities in Russia (such as Kazakhs who aren't in Kazakhstan) who manage to acquire some level of autonomy. Yet I don't see these other groups blowing up planes and taking hostages. No other ethnic group in Russia seems to be engaged in a death match. This makes me inclined to think that the problem may not be Russian, but Chechnyan. There are ties between the Chechnyan terrorists and al-Qaeda. The struggle going on there is explicitly a struggle between the Islamofascists and "infidel" Russia: "We in the Islambouli Brigades announce our responsibility for this operation... which comes in support of Muslims of Chechnya," said the statement signed by the group, which had also claimed responsibility for last week's plane crashes in Russia.Russian actions in suppressing the Chechnya rebels leave a lot to be desired when it comes to human rights. I do not intend to make excuses for what Amnesty International calls: widespread and credible reports that Russian forces have been responsible for violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including "disappearances", extrajudicial executions and torture, including rape.But these actions by the Russian government in no way excuse attacks on non-combatants or taking hostages. Chechnyan terrorism has completely destroyed any sympathy that I had for their cause. If you want to portray yourself as heroic freedom fighters, you attack legitimate targets: combatants or political leaders, not children; you take prisoners, instead of executing them. It looks to me as though what we are seeing in the Chechnyan terrorism is not victims of Russian abuses responding badly, but an al-Qaeda farm team--a group that does not believe that there are any legitimate restraints on their use of terror. Tuesday, August 31, 2004
I Was Expecting Better of Mark Kleiman A few days ago, Mark Kleiman raised a legitimate, although minor question about whether Bush might have worn a decoration that he was not awarded back in his Air National Guard days. Kleiman made a snide remark about a Bush supporter who acknowledged that it was a legitimate question: Obviously, Rustler has some learning to do about how to Blog for Bush. Questions about the Beloved Leader are to be ignored, not discussed.Well, Rustler received some answers that would suggest that the decoration in question might well be legitimate, and informed Kleiman--who seems to be operating on the "questions... are to be ignored, not discussed" theory now. The Politics of Rage It may feel good, but what does it accomplish? This news report is utterly perplexing to me: NEW YORK (AP) - A 21-year-old Yale student, posing as a volunteer at the Republican National Convention, got within 10 feet of Vice President Dick Cheney and shouted anti-war statements before being dragged away, authorities said Tuesday.I can understand that there are people that passionately feel that the Bush Administration has made some serious mistakes, who have severe fundamental disagreements with the Bush Administration (and about 90% of the people of the country, which is why Kerry claims to be committed to continuing the Bush policy towards Iraq). But what value was there in yelling at Cheney? Does Frampton think that Cheney isn't aware that there is a loud and angry minority that thinks he is a monster? Does Frampton think that Cheney believes that there is no opposition to the Bush Administration's policies? What, exactly, did Frampton think this was going to accomplish, besides getting him a chance to explore the federal court system? Frampton wasn't trying to injure Cheney--he was just being annoying. Again: what does this accomplish? Unfortunately, the politics of rage is more about making the demonstrator feel good and self-righteous than they are about effecting political change. I've had way too many conversations over the years with people like this, who do not seem to understand the purpose of political demonstrations: 1. To get media attention for an issue that is being ignored. (Obviously, opposition to the War in Iraq and the Bush Administration is hardly being ignored by the leftist media echo chamber.) 2. To change the minds of people who see the demonstration. This can be an effective strategy if there are large numbers of undecided sorts who will be convinced by your arguments or signs. But inside the Republican National Convention? Could Frampton have actually thought that he was going to convince any delegates--much less convince Cheney--with the sentence or two he would get out before the Secret Service arrested him? I've done a few political demonstrations in my lifetime, and I doubt that anyone watching has been persuaded. There is a third purpose to political demonstrations, of course, but it is not really what I consider legitimate: to provoke a police overreaction, such as what we all saw on TV at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Frampton's actions don't seem to have accomplished even this illegitimate mission. UPDATE: A reader points out that Frampton could have been a test of the security procedures by groups interested in more than just yelling. Well, that could be, but if so, this would have caused a revision of the security procedures. If the goal was to see if it was possible to get an assassin inside, your tester wouldn't start yelling. He would just record how close he got, and report back to headquarters. Why Billionaires Back Kerry This Detroit News article points out that the net effect of the Bush tax cut was to increase the percentage of the burden carried by the top 20% of American taxpayers: Across 109.4 million tax-paying households — from the wealthiest 1 percent with incomes averaging over $1 million to the lowest-earning 20 percent of people with incomes averaging $14,900 — the report shows that all income classes have seen their income tax rates lowered thanks to Bush’s cuts in 2001, 2002 and 2003.If you want to criticize the Bush tax cuts for increasing the deficit, that's a fair argument. The goal of the tax cuts was to get the economy moving again with a classic Keynesian strategy: deficit spend out of the bust, and then pay down the deficit during the boom. It looked to me at the time that the recession was already underway, and perhaps the tax cut wasn't needed. The subsequent recovery hasn't been quite as strong as everyone had hoped, which leads me to think that perhaps it was needed. Thanks to Classical Values for the pointer. Monday, August 30, 2004
Did Gay Rights Activists Just Remove A Gay Congressman? Okay, if the allegations are true, then he's a hypocrite, in the eyes of gay rights activists, for representing his constitutents instead of his sexual orientation. If the allegations are false--and this House member is withdrawing from the race anyway, it says an awful lot about how deadly being homosexual is to getting re-elected, doesn't it? VIRGINIA BEACH -- U.S. Rep. Ed Schrock abruptly withdrew from his re-election race this afternoon, citing unspecified allegations. Short Memory, Bill? Bill Clinton expressing his opinion about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads: Former President Bill Clinton offered a hard-hitting attack against the Republican Party yesterday, telling worshipers gathered at Riverside Church that President Bush and the Republicans are distorting John Kerry's war record in Vietnam.How convenient Bill Clinton's amnesia seems to be: Bill Clinton was charged with lying under oath about his affair with Lewinsky to gain advantage in a sexual harassment case brought by Paula Jones, a case he later settled by paying Paula Jones $850,000. A Federal judge found Clinton also to be in contempt of court for lying in a deposition and ordered him to pay a $90,000 fine. This contempt citation led to disbarment proceedings to remove his law license. To avoid these Clinton surrendered his law license and is no longer allowed to practice law. Cipel Won't Sue McGreevey for Sexual Harassment Cipel claims that it wasn't about money: NEW YORK -- A former aide who claims New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey sexually harassed him will not file a lawsuit against the governor, the man's lawyer said Monday.He was already to file suit a few weeks back--now insists that it was never about money: At Monday's news conference, Cipel's lawyers also addressed a claim by McGreevey administration officials that Cipel was attempting to extort money from McGreevey.Oh yes, I believe that! Don't you? It should be obvious to all that Cipel was concerned what would come out at trial, demolishing Cipel's claim that he wasn't gay. Why, oh why, did McGreevey hire a $110,000 appointment secretary? On the off-chance that a straight man might submit sexually? Does anyone find Cipel's claim plausible? This wasn't about McGreevey's sexual preference; this was about putting McGreevey's boyfriend on the state payroll--and refusing to pay Cipel off when the relationship turned sour. The only way in which McGreevey's sexual preference became an issue is that even in a Democratic stronghold like New Jersey, homosexuality isn't completely condoned. It's Just Cheaper To Kill Them This news story reports on a lapse of professional judgment by an editor at Reuters: (CNSNews.com) - A Reuters news service editor sent an e-mail to a pro-life group last week, criticizing the group's stance on abortion as well as its support of the Bush administration. The angry email has prompted the pro-life group to question the editor's journalistic integrity.At least the way I read this, Eastham's brief for abortion is that it saves money. If a conservative made an argument this crass, it would be all over the front page of every paper. Labels: abortion Sunday, August 29, 2004
Someone Really Needs To Do This This New York Times story is really interesting: The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation and is demanding records regarding Internet postings by critics of the Bush administration that list the names of Republican delegates and urge protesters to give them an unwelcome reception in New York City.The story goes on to point out that the ACLU is upset about the investigation, and that the federal courts have taken a very narrow view of what is not protected speech in similar cases: Officials at the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Calyx, the Internet service provider, said they were aware of no postings that encouraged violence or intimidation of Republican delegates, and they said the site contained political dialogue and information that was protected by the First Amendment.The obvious although not perfect analogy is the anti-abortion activist web site controversy of a few years ago, that the article also mentions: Federal courts have traditionally set a high bar in deciding what constitutes threatening speech that goes beyond First Amendment protections, saying the threat of lawlessness must be specific and imminent.The ACLU in that case took the position that this was not constitutionally protected free speech: We view the jury’s verdict as a clarion call to remove violence and the threat of violence from the political debate over abortion. Many Americans disagree about the wisdom and morality of abortion. But violence and the threat of violence against providers of abortion services should not be allowed to determine the outcome of that debate.To their credit, the ACLU also argued that "that the defendants’ intent to threaten the abortion providers must also be proven...." The "Nuremberg Files" site did not advocate individual, unlawful violence against abortion doctors: Among the pictures of aborted fetuses and anti-abortion writings, the ACLA site displayed lists of abortion providers. Some 200 of the named individuals had their pictures, their family's pictures, the addresses of their clinics and, in some cases, their home addresses and telephone numbers, listed on the site. The posters and the web site advocated bringing these persons to trial as some Nazis were at the conclusion of World War II.The argument that the trial judge accepted was that this constituted a threat of violence--even though the most that you could say is that a person prone to violence might read between the lines and see advocacy of violence in the overheated language of the site. Just like this case involving the lunatic left and its demonization of the Republican Party. I do think it is time to make up a list of the lunatic left's leaders--people like Ted Rall, Michael Moore, Demi Moore, Meryl Streep, with their home addresses, maps to their homes, private phone numbers, what hours they keep, what cars they drive, and put it up on the web. I wonder how enthusiastic they would be about unlimited free speech then? Probably a bit less than they are now. Revolutionary War Gunsmiths In the process of revising my manuscript, I found that it made sense to break up a chapter on gunsmithing that covered the entire period to from 1607 to 1840 into three separate chapters: Colonial Gunsmiths; Revolutionary War Gunsmiths; Gunsmithing in the Early Republic. I also pulled quite a bit of material that I had originally thought to put in a separate book into these chapters. Unsurprisingly, this has caused me to spend a bit of time on reorganization of the materials, as well as figuring out how to turn what might have been a deadly boring series of accounting records into an interesting story of how the states dealt with the cutoff of gun imports from Britain. As I say at the beginning of the chapter: Unlike the Colonial period, where there is a dearth of official records, the public nature of the Revolution means that we have an overabundance of evidence--enough to fill a book by itself, if my sampling of the official records is indicative. The Great Gatsby (1974) My wife is preparing to teach a class on World War I and its effects on the literature of the 1920s through the 1940s. We watched the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby last night as a quick refresher. (The novel will be one of the assigned readings, and the students will watch the film as well.) I read The Great Gatsby in high school, and I can't say that it made much of an impression on me. I may re-read it, because the film (which I did not see when it came out) was so powerful. Part of it was the quality of the performances, which Sam Waterson, Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Karen Black doing a spectacular job. Bruce Dern was in it also, but he plays borderline (and not so borderline) psychopaths so well and so regularly that I can't tell if he's acting or not. The scene where Jay Gatsby and Daisy meet for the first time after the Great War was stunning; both Redford and Farrow portray a stunning depth of emotion with just a longing, pained look. A later sequence where Jay Gatsby meets Daisy's daughter--and realizes the full impact of what divorce will mean--is also stunningly well done. If you haven't read the novel or seen the film, it is a profoundly moral message, without being preachy, of a world where wealth without responsibility leads you, and of the horror of dealing with loss in a world without God. It is also completely unfair for any guy to be as good looking as Redford was in this film! I remember reading at the time the prediction that Redford was going to bring short hair for men back into fashion. It didn't quite do that (the shaggy 1970s continued for a few years more), but it is a powerful reminder that good grooming and a tuxedo or business suit does wonders for almost any man! |
