Giuliani

beats everyone in lastest poll.

2008 Election

Yes, I'm back. For how long and how often will I post, I can't say. Just enjoy me while you can...

So, I hate to even bring this up because the election cycle/coverage/discussion is WAY too long and it pains me to be even a small part of that. But as I was driving to work this morning, listening to a right-wing (of course) talk show host giddy over the "Clinton-Obama" feud, it got me to thinking about this....

Who was the last "sitting" Senator elected President? If memory serves, it was JFK. And before him...? I have no idea and I don't want to find the answer on the internet. Guesses?

I've read/heard various discourses on why Senators traditionally do not get elected to the highest office, yet they seem to be the majority of the candidates. And in looking ahead to 2008, I would think that most pundits would agree that as of today, the winner will come from either Clinton, Obama or McCain. History (and who can argue against that), however tells us that it will NOT be a "sitting" Senator. So among those who have declared who are not Senators, who would that front-runner be? I'm glad to be able to say that while I know there are more than 3 declared candidates, I can only name 4 (the 4th is John Edwards). So, my fellow SSJ's, who is the non-Senator front-runner? I'm sure you 2 have been keeping up with this....

World's Ugliest Business Card

...is what I have in my wallet as of today.

The only good thing about it is that the accent color it has gone from aTm maroon to blue.

Print is too small.

Print is too light.

Worst aspect: the "notes" section on the back. As if I didn't know I could write notes on the back, but at least now I have half the space.

The only other only good thing is that they didn't make me put my picture on it.

Pardon my schadenfreude: Airbus a Disaster

From American Thinker via Real Clear Politics:

Yesterday, Airbus humiliated itself before the world civil aviation community. Already suffering a massive loss of credibility due to the repeated delivery delays for the A 380 super jumbo, the company was to have unveiled its recovery plan, dubbed Power8, consisting of restructuring and cost saving measures intended to save $2.8 billion per year by 2010.

Instead of triumphantly presenting Power8 to the world, the company admitted it could not come to an internal agreement on cost-saving measures, and word leaked out of heated arguments among the members of its board of directors. So much for boldly moving forward to solve its many problems. Airline customers cannot be comforted by the company's continued internal squabbling, the principal factor said to be at the root of the 380's repeated delivery delays. [emph. mine]

Victor Davis Hanson

I had the distinct pleasure of hearing one of my favorite authors speak tonight at a guest lecture sponsored by the University of Texas Liberal Arts College Western Civilization Program. Of course, that was Dr. Victor Davis Hanson.

The lecture and Q & A were taped for podcast and as soon as I find out where, I'll post a link.

The subject was "The Ancient Greeks & Western Civilization: Then and Now." Dr. Hanson was very engaging (much more so than on the radio). He certainly was unafraid of sticking his neck out in what he clearly believed could be a somewhat hostile environment. When asked about what could be done about the "clash of civilizations," he said, "I suppose I'm the only person in the room who believes the only solution is to bring transparent, representative government to the Middle East." I paraphrase but that was the gist...the Bush Doctrine or at least part of it.

I'm not sure I heard anything new in the lecture (except for his sense of humor) that I hadn't already read in his columns and books. He touched on Xerxes and Cortes and Alexander and Socrates and Phillip and Penelope. He discussed property rights and freedom of speech. Capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Democracies, Oligarchies, Theocracies all made the discussion. Heck, even female circumcision found its way in. Again, nothing he's not written about before.

In many ways the stereotypical professor. Balding and bespectacled, he was disheveled and his coat was missing a button. The tan (from his farming?) was a bit out of place.

I'm glad I didn't miss a minute.

My only Anna Nicole Smith post...ever.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I had any reaction at all the recent death of Anna Nicole Smith. Because she was originally from nearby Mexia? Maybe that had a tiny part in it. Because she married the rich, old guy in Houston with almost no perceptible phoniness...everyone involved knew what was going on and it seemed to make him happy? A bit.

But Larry Miller really seemed to capture it. As tragic and silly and sad as her life has been, there was something likable about her. Miller, from the Daily Standard (Weekly Standard’s site):

I DID the Tonight Show back in '93 or '94, and she was on it. Leno came in before and said, "She's a nice girl. See you out there." And she was. I've never had the slightest problem digging the different gifts people bring to show business and beauty is a gift as much as anything else. Anyway, it was a good show. And, frankly, sitting next to her wasn't exactly a chore.

But that's not the story. The story happened just a month or two later.

My wife and I were invited out to dinner with two friends of ours, other writers. We were newly married and they took us to one of the fanciest places in town. There were a couple of well-know folks there, but the place was so swank that no one even noticed. Then, very suddenly, the room got quiet. Hushed, in fact. My back was to the door, and my wife said, "Oh, wow . . ." and tapped me, and I turned, and, of course, you know who came in and stopped the presses.

Worth reading the whole thing. Great story about her date at the restaurant.

More on Recycling

Hat tip to Michael for a derivative hat tip to LGF further derivative hat tip to youtube for this Penn and Teller slam on recycling. The best point is that made about aluminum cans...profit makes the whole deal work.

Best point: aluminum recycling works. Why? Because you can make a buck doing it. No, that's not really right...better to say that the fact that you can actually make a buck doing it is evidence that it consumes less resources than it costs. Better Allocation of Resources than an $8B annual subsidy. If this were going to Exxon/Mobil, the screams would deafen us.

D--n Capitalists get it right again!

P.J. O'Rourke

You've seen her on Youtube! From Larry Kudlow on today's Corner:

It's worth noting that Hillary Clinton doesn't want corporations to pay any taxes at all-not a single penny. Hillary plans on confiscating their profits altogether! (In our CNBC interview Friday night, P.J. O'Rourke referred to Mrs. Clinton as "Hugo Chavez in a pantsuit.")

UT and Google Partner Up

From my Alma Mater's press release:

The University of Texas at Austin has become the newest partner in a broad book digitization project with Google.

The partnership between the University of Texas Libraries and Google is part of the Google Books Library Project, a project started in December 2004, initially to digitize books drawn from the libraries of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University and the New York Public Library.

In the course of the multi-year project, Google will digitize at least one million volumes from the University of Texas Libraries’ collections....

Reagan's Free Speech Legacy

Was just listening to a podcast of Michael Medved on the effort to bring back the "fairness doctrine." I'm sure it's not an original thought, but Reagan's greatest legacy, after the ruination of Communism, may have been the removal of the "fairness doctrine." I loved the battering of the air traffic controller's union, but what a legacy that was.

Political speech has never been freer than today and in spite of the current state of the Right's political position, I would never want it to change. If we regulate the radio and FoxNews, which is what they are really after here, how long before venues like this or any of those listed on the right side of this webpage are similarly regulated?

Let the marketplace of ideas work itself out. Even Air America found additional funding, even if Mr. Franken is leaving to test the waters in Minnesota. What does Congressman Hinchey fear?

MORE BLACK HELICOPTERS...

Ok, I’m not sold on the whole North American Union thing (not even close) and cannot abide the New World Order nutters, but this does bug me a bit.

It does appear that an affiliate of Macquarie did acquire a bunch of those Texas and Oklahoma newspapers. It also appears that a Macquarie entity is involved with Cintra, the entity involved in the Trans-Texas toll road/corridor. It just smells bad. What if Wal-Mart were to buy all the entities owning publications spewing bile at them? I’d hate that, too. The fact that they are foreign entities makes it all the more uncomfortable.

In light of Kelo, I'm a bit concerned about where all this is going. 500,00 acres?

The only article I could find today is at WND. Read if you like but watch out for those helicopters.

More on the Unnamed Health Insurance Issue

Jeff Jacoby makes a good start on the teaching needed on the subject in today’s JWR. As in education, we need to let the market back in to the world of medicine. I know it sounds simplistic, but it works every where else. Jacoby mentions the WWII point I made last week but the more interesting discussion involve the common thought that because medicine has become so high tech that the costs must soar:

Why is health insurance so expensive? .... The revolution in cardiac care, the myriad new drugs, the invention of CAT scanners and MRIs, the ability to transplant organs — these and so many other lifesaving medical miracles didn't come cheap. It stands to reason that insurance covering the cost of such miracles doesn't come cheap either.

But wait — [why does] it stand to reason? Information technology has exploded in recent decades too, yet computers have never been as affordable as they are now. Agriculture is far more advanced, and the quality and variety of food available to consumers far greater, than they were 50 years ago, yet the real cost of food has plummeted. The price of a primitive color television in 1954 was equal to three months' wages for an average American worker; today that worker gets a sparkling picture on a 25-inch screen for just three days of work.

"Why is it," asks David Gratzer, a physician and scholar at the Manhattan Institute, "that in every other field where enormous technological strides have been made, total costs have fallen over time, but in health care they have increased?" The answer, he writes in The Cure, a lively and engrossing new book on the American health care mess, is simple: Health care costs so much because most of us pay so little for it. And we pay so little — out-of-pocket expenses amount to just 14 cents of every health dollar spent in this country — because a third party nearly always picks up the tab. For most working Americans, that third party is an insurance company paid by their employers.....

Why does it matter whether Americans pay for medical care directly or let insurers cover their bills? Because thrift and price awareness usually go out the window when we're spending other people's money. Under the present setup, most Americans have little incentive to be economical consumers of health care. As a result, health care expenditures — and insurance premiums — have been racing ahead at three and four times the rate of inflation.

Scooter starting to see black helicopters?

I'm starting to get a bad feeling about the toll roads. An Aussie company partners with the Spanish company (Citra [sp?] building the first of the toll roads) and then the Aussie company buys twenty Texas newspapers along the toll road corridor. Of course, these were papers editorializing against the the toll roads.

I've got to look for some independent articles/sources rather than the scary source from which I learned this; but if true, it's ugly.

Tried to move SSG to the new format....

but got a message that only my scooterblog could be moved. Said the original creator had to do the moving...

Moving scooterblog was easy...just had to set up a google account.

More on the Health Insurance Plan with No Name (can you hear the crickets chirping?)

GWB makes the proposal and it’s DOA. But per Mike Franc at HumanEvents:

To [Dick] Armey [(R.-Tex.)] and [Pete] Stark [(D.-Calif.)]-, the solution [in 1999] was obvious: Use the tax code to help increase [health insurance] coverage. "We think Congress should create a new refundable tax credit to enable all Americans to buy decent health coverage." Other liberals agreed. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D.-Calif.), and Reps. Barney Frank (D.-Mass.) and Jim McDermott (D.-Wash.) sponsored legislation creating tax credits or deductions for individuals to purchase health coverage.

...

Stark refused to even hold hearings on it in the health subcommittee he chairs, saying the plan was "designed for disaster." Rep. Charles Rangel (D.-N.Y.), dismissed it as "a dangerous policy that … shifts cost and risk from employers to employees."

This knee-jerk opposition prompted some journalists to scold Democrats. The Post’s Steve Pearlstein noted that the plan "actually involves raising taxes on the rich and lavishly insured and giving the money to the working poor and the uninsured...."

Simple Health Insurance Plan needs better explanation (Does it even have a Name yet?)

How many people know that employer funded health insurance was the market’s not so great response to FDR’s wage freeze (itself obviously grossly anti-market)? Amity Schlaes has a pretty good article today at bloomberg.com explaining how this would work but this project is going to take a LOT of selling. I mentioned it to a medical technician about to give me an MRI a year and a half ago and he was dumbfounded, having assumed that this was the way things HAVE ALWAYS BEEN DONE.

Ms. Schlaes:

Back in the 1930s, Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security over corporate protests. A national system of payment for health care seemed next. (In 1945 Harry Truman would go around talking about "the right to adequate medical care.'')

Terrified employer raced to preempt FDR and Truman by proving they could handle health themselves. They contracted with Blue Cross and Blue Shield to provide benefits for employee pools. The tax treatment came last -- in fact no one knew for a while whether companies really could claim the insurance deduction.

But World War II made the new arrangement seem doubly logical. Congress imposed an "excess'' profits tax of as much as 90 percent and froze wages. Paying for health insurance was a way to reduce tax bills and keep workers, who were suddenly scarce. Unions were pleased. By 1945, 32 million Americans were in health-insurance programs, many sponsored by companies, up from 12 million to 13 million just five years before.

Bush has been awful at marketing his domestic agenda except for the early tax breaks, No Child Left Behind (and that was as much Kennedy’s doing as the POTU) and Medicare Part whatever.
I fear that she’s right and that these reforms will only begin to take root now while we most scratch our heads and try to think things through. For those of us who have decent employer provided coverage, we will be hard-pressed to allow any monkeying with it.

She concludes:

But if the Democratic leadership is already rejecting the Bush idea, is it still worth thinking about? The answer is yes. Parties come up with some of their best ideas when they are down -- ideas that tend to become law five or 10 years later.

Several other Bush proposals have been fakes -- programs that called themselves free market but actually extend the role of government, such as the Medicare Part D prescription-drug plan.
The standard-deduction plan, by contrast, truly is free market and anti-Washington. Though it may have come at the wrong time, this increase is one all can endorse -- even the tax warriors.

This is going to be a hard but necessary sell. First they need a great acronym.

Krauthammer Joins Scooter's Chorus on Ethanol

In today's JWR, Dr. K echoes my earlier post and Robert Samuelson's column from earlier this week:

This is nonsense. As my colleague Robert J. Samuelson demonstrated this week, biofuels will barely keep up with the increase in gasoline demand over time. They are a huge government bet with goals and mandates and subsidies that will not cure our oil dependence or even make a significant dent in it.

...

So much easier to say ethanol. That it will do farcically little is beside the point. Our debates about oil consumption, energy dependence and global warming are not meant to be serious. They are meant for show.

Mike Adams

I was a little surprised to hear Rush quote him today. Todd should be proud.

Re: Embracing the Suck

I have to assume you were protecting me.

Embracing the Suck

The best movie example I’ve ever seen of that concept is Tom Berenger’s character in Oliver Stone’s Platoon "encouraging" a wounded soldier to, "Shut up and Take the Pain!"