The University of California system took some predictable steps to tighten its belt this week in the face of the state budget crisis, cutting some services and boosting student tuition. Equally predictably, students across the state have responded with a series of self-concerned protests, taking over campus buildings at Berkeley and UCLA.
Perhaps most predictably of all, the New York Times has started in with its faux-poignant protest coverage, as illustrated in this slide show (complete with a don't-tase-me-bro moment). Two things about this mess:
First and foremost, the protests are about privileged kids demanding subsidies from working people. The UC system will continue to be heavily subsidized by taxpayers, and the students who attend are among the most naturally gifted, with the highest future earning potential, in the country. This is especially true at the system's flagship schools of Berkeley and UCLA, where the protests have been most intense. Narcissism and self-absorption are the norm on college campuses, but it really is pushing the limits to throw such a tantrum at the idea that you will be getting a smaller amount of free money taken out of the paychecks of strapped taxpayers, most of whom could never dream of the advantages and opportunities you enjoy.
Second, these protesters claim the mantle of the free-speech movement, but it is a betrayal and a subversion of the principles of free speech to forcibly occupy a school building and block out its rightful owners and occupants (including other tuition-paying students). The very idea of free speech is to facilitate the peaceful exchange of ideas, without allowing the use or threat of force to distort the process. The whole enterprise suffers when thugs begin breaking out the chains and barricades and committing property crimes in order to get their way.
With the long winter nights drawing in, what NRO readers need is a puzzle to while away the hours. I have just the thing.
I subscribe to The Economist, and the November 21–27 issue arrived in the lunchtime post. The Economist has both text and pictures, of course. Most of the pictures are photographs, but some are little drawings meant to illustrate some point or other. Taken out from the surrounding text, these drawings are often very enigmatic — often teetering on the edge of surrealism, in fact.
Here are three from the current issue. You may either (a) try to figure out what news topic they are illustrating, or (b) supply spoof captions in the manner of the New Yorker weekly competition, or (c) just quietly congratulate yourself on being a wide ocean away from this sort of Brit-journalistic whimsy.
In the recent magazine, Mr. Nordlinger writes: "[H]is words give comfort and heart — plus ammunition — to those bewildered or dismayed by the present period, and unable to express themselves as a Krauthammer can."
I would say the same of all who write for National Review.
Ditto Yale, ditto So Cal. To complete the sad trifecta, I also work in Hollywood. For my penance, I will now give $100, say 10 Hail Marys, and thank You Know Who for Jack Dunphy.
I asked Ralph Reed, who, thinking she's probably not going to run for president in 2012, says: "Unless she runs, not much."
Reed doesn't doubt that Sarah Palin may consider running for president of the United States, but recommends a little space between 2008 and when she does. He adds: "My sense is that she is going to be a major force in the party—-and a force for good, by the way...."
So who in 2012? Reed says:
One thing you can count on in every presidential cycle in the Republican party: There is always a surprise. That was true for Pat Robertson in 1988, Pat Buchanan in 1996, John McCain in 2000, and Huckabee and Palin in 2008. No matter how many times you chart the primaries, you can't predict the unpredictable, and someone you least expect catches fire. Who will that be in 2012? By definition, we really don't know.
Rep. Lamar Smith, ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and immigration-enforcement stalwart, wheedled updated statistics out of DHS and found that, in the words of the Washington Times story:
Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.
And note that Obama's crowd didn't take over until after the first third of FY 2009, so the numbers are likely to fall even further next year. At a DHS conference on immigration yesterday for employers, J-Nap's comments made it clear that she would permit no illegals to be arrested at worksites — only Americans (employers) would be arrested, if even that.
I think this sentence from an essay in the current Time magazine pretty much sums up, not only the tension between Obama's campaign rhetoric and the present realities in the war against terror, but also his general policies abroad:
"Since then, experts within the government have struggled to come up with a policy that can reconcile the President's ideological opposition to indefinite detention with the apparent need to make use of it in order to close Guantánamo."
One can sympathize with Obama, who now faces bad and worse choices on all these matters. But why did the self-righteous Candidate Obama, in Manichean fashion, assert throughout 2007 and 2008 that the Constitution-shredding Bush had gratuitously trampled our rights under the pretext of national security? Moral clarity without responsibility then, complexity with the responsiblity of governance today?
I give up surfing the web during Lent every year, although I always grant myself a dispensation to read NRO — giving that up would entail too much suffering.
The stimulus money was supposed to be directed to job creation, remember? Well, you will be happy to know that instead the government thought, in this economic context, it would be a good idea to spend $452,000 on "Respiratory Health Impacts of Wildfire Particulate Emissions Under Climate Change," which is basically a study that will likely show that wildfires cause smoke and that smoke can cause respiratory issues.
There's Ponnuru (for SCOTUS!). There's Dalyrmple. Jeff Bell. Alex Alexiev. Brookhiser. Nordlinger. Brookhiser. Steyn. Rob Long. Kevin Hassett. And much more.
Surtaxes are the new rage this year. Nancy Pelosi wants a 5.4 percent surtax on the rich to pay for half of the health-care-reform costs and now senior House Democrats have introduced legislation that would impose a surtax beginning in 2011 to cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The bill would require the president to set the surtax so that it fully pays for the previous year’s war cost. But it would allow for a one-year delay in the implementation of the tax if the president determines that the economy is too weak to sustain that kind of tax change. It also would exempt military members who have served in combat since Sept. 11, 2001, along with their families, and the families of soldiers killed in combat.
Here is my question: If the Democrats believe that fairness requires that everyone shoulders a piece of the cost of the war, why shouldn't that rule also apply to health-care reform?
It appears I got my transcripts of yesterday's press conference confused. The remarks about global governance were not made by Baroness Ashton — although she doubtless agrees with them — but by the new president of Europe himself, Herman Van Rompuy.
Amnesty keeps receding into the future. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, the amnesty point man in the House, had pledged to introduce a bill in October, then promised it in November, and this week, in a conference call hosted by the Campaign to Reform Immigration for America ("a project of the Tides Advocacy Fund"), announced that he'll be introducing a bill in December. I wouldn't even count on that, given that lawmakers might not want to go home for Christmas break and hold town halls where people complain about both health care and immigration (which is why Chuck Schumer has said his Senate companion bill will be introduced in January, after lawmakers are safely back in Washington).
Where do you start? This is a really unbelievable bill.
Because the provisions that the CBO looked at are so jiggered, even though CBO's numbers are real, it's about an unreal assumption.
If you start with 2015, which is essentially where the benefits start, and you go into the future, every ten years you will have a plan that is not [costing] $800 billion. It will be [costing] $1.5 trillion. Which means that except for the early years — in which there are no benefits paid out and a lot of taxes paid in — you're going to have a huge net deficit which will probably be around half a trillion every decade.
Secondly, even if you had the revenue neutrality, which you won't, everybody assumes: Well, that is going to help us economically. In fact, to achieve revenue neutrality, you have to increase taxes, and you're going to have to have spending cuts.
Those increases in taxes, and cuts in spending, are now not available in reducing the other deficits outside of health care which are going to amount to $9 trillion over the next decade.
So you create a new entitlement, you support it with new taxes and spending cuts which you cannot now use in reducing the outside — the other — deficits, which are destroying the dollar and the federal budget.
… Of all the ways in which you can raise revenue, in the Reid bill it's done with raising the payroll tax in the middle of a recession with over 10 percent unemployment — exactly at a time when you want to encourage employment and lower the payroll tax. It's perverse.
On the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s mammogram recommendations:
People are reacting as if we never had a panel or a recommendation before. Years before, we had a recommendation from a panel like this who said start at age 40. Every day the FDA is deciding this new drug is a good one or not — and if it's not, you don't ever see it.
So it is not as if these kinds of independent commissions don't exist and determine what we get and what we don't. So the issue here is not panels in general or recommendations in general, it's the recommendation in and of itself.
… And the problem here is a mammogram is extremely inaccurate. One in ten tests which are returned as cancer are not, so you have a 10 percent false positive, which causes not just anxiety and suffering, but new tests, more [diagnostic] radiation, even a [surgical] procedure, and perhaps other harms …
And the balance of this is — how much that is worth [vs.] how many … real cancers are caught.
So when you have inexact tests and inexact screenings, you have to make a determination and decide how to balance them. I think the report is a fairly good recommendation. It's not aimed at saving money. It would, but that's not what its recommendations are based on.
In the primaries, Obama distinguished himself from Clinton on health care by opposing an individual mandate. In the general election, he distinguished himself from McCain by opposing taxes on health benefits. So now he is trying to pass bills with both an individual mandate and taxes on health benefits — and his supporters are saying that Congress should go along because he won the election.
this poll saying that a majority of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the election from McCain last year; I'd like to see some other pollsters ask the same question. But if it is true, it suggests a widespread disconnection from reality that's pretty troubling. It's not as though it was a close election.
McCain's share of the national popular vote also signaled trouble. On the surface, his total, 45.6%, seemed respectable. Many Republican presidential candidates had received less in recent memory. But all of those candidates save one, Barry Goldwater, had run races with serious third-party candidates. Goldwater aside, McCain's showing was the worst GOP result in a two-party race since Wendell Willkie garnered 44.8% in 1940. To look at it another way, Obama's 52.9% was the second-highest for a non-incumbent Democrat in American history, trailing only FDR's 57.4% in 1932.
Maine Republican who is a fan of Sarah Palin, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, which means I am pushing the left side of your supporters. Many would consider me a RINO, so "going rogue" here in making a contribution to NRO, but truly appreciate your reasoned thoughtful conservatism. Big fan of Rich, Jonah and Mark.
Thanks for your effort, I read and appreciate NRO writers every day. I just today emailed Senator Sherrod Brown asking him to rethink his political future, if he goes against Ohioans on health insurance legislation.
I donated a pittance a day or so ago but felt the need to send this observation. As an avid reader of NRO generally and The Corner in particular, there is an ethereal sense of union & camaraderie spilling from the various contributor comments being posted by KJL.during this fund drive. It seems to not matter the amount given or from what part of the globe contributions have come; whether the contributors are professional, blue collar, unemployed or stay at home – the certain sense of optimistic urgency threading through so many of the comments is palpable! Keep on fightin’…..
OK, OK, I surrender. I’ll make a contribution simply because you guys are the best. But please, please, please stop this never ending stream of contributor emails deifying your blog. It’s as if NRO were a holy shrine for conservatives and you guys were the high priests and priestesses of the tribe to whom we readers come annually to pay tribute and raise hosannas to the sky in thanks that you deign to bless us with your written word. I don’t mind the tribute part but this adulation crap does grow tiresome. Where do I pay?
I promise it won't last much longer. The Corner will soon go back to its regularly scheduled programming — and should be hopping tomorrow on the Senate, by the way.
In the meantime, other e-mails suggest to me many of you are enjoying the comments from your fellow readers, and not because you think we're priests and priestesses, but because you enjoy the company of your friends — even the ones you haven't met, but are in the same room with, virtually, day in and day out.
After taking Derb's advice and getting a government job (though one that is actually a federal function) I feel it's my duty to make a donation to NRO with my inflated government salary.
Without NRO and its crystal clear ideas and detailed debates to clear my head from hallway conversations at post, I'm sure I'd find my new office much foggier.
From a nobody who's feeling the squeeze of the era in which we live (Obamania?). Many co-workers here at the office were already let go (a "non-billable", good friend of nearly 10 years was abrubtly and unceremoniously escorted from the building yesterday). Those of us remaining know we're on borrowed time . . . suffice it to say the mood is not particularly jubilant, but we persist because that's what Americans do. I personally draw much strength from the spirit of Mr. Buckley (Nearer my God to Thee) and his legacy on display in the talented group of conservatives there at NRO. We're never giving in and, because you're important as well as entertaining, here's a little donation to see that y'all stay put as well. Blessings . . .
Thank you, National Review! We are subscribers to the hold-in-my-hands magazine as well as all-through-the-day readers of The Corner. Quick! Take this money before our government decides it knows better how to spend it than we ourselves do.
We've been doing these online fundraising drives for a few years now and I'm so overwhelmed this year in a special way by the volume of donations at numbers like $15 and $20 from students and the unemployed. From families with not a lot of disposable income. People care about what's happening in their country and see the need now in a critical way for smart debates, good ideas, and somewhere that highlights what works and exposes what doesn't. We'll keep at it — in no small part thanks to your support.
There's an excellent and ongoing response to this morning's post about conservative novels. Looking for some good fiction? Read the comments section at HeyMiller.com. Please feel free to join the conversation, too.
When I visited the DDay memorial last summer, I wished they did have something to acknowledge the USSR's role in WWII. It did have an impact on the Normandy invasion, because the Wehrmacht in June 1944 was a lot weaker than it was on June 22, 1941; and most of the combat that had weakened it was on the Eastern front.
I would propose instead of a bust of Stalin, a bust of two Red Army soldiers. One poor Ivan Ivanovich (or whatever the Soviet equivalent of GI Joe was) who died fighting the Germans, and his mate, Ivan Denisovich, the Red Army veteran who went off to the Gulag as the war ended because he had been captured by the Germans at one point. (Ivan Denisovich in Solzhenitsyn's novel was in the Gulag for having surrendered to the Germans).
We've seen a tremendous out-pouring of support in response to the fundraising drive. Kathryn's posts are just the tip of the iceberg. Well over a 1,000 of you have contributed, and I can't tell you how encouraging and inspiring this is. Some of you I've already thanked personally, but just let me say this to everyone else: thank you, thank you, thank you. For the rest of you, it's still not too late to give, and I thank you in advance!
My conservatism was recently awakened by my graduate work in finance and economics. I now realize that conservative principles not only work but are necessary conditions for freedom. NRO provides a great forum which both challenges and strengthens my beliefs as I try to awaken in others that which I know resides in nearly all Americans.
How much would you pay to watch Sarah Palin beat the stuffing out of Andrew Sullivan? What would Barack Obama’s official Kenyan birth certificate be worth to you? How about a videotape proving that Bill Ayers not only wrote Dreams from My Father, but also translated it from the original Russian? How about a new Christmas CD with Robert Byrd singing all of his Yuletide favorites (“I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” “I’m Dreaming of an Even Whiter Christmas,” etc)? What would you pay for a DVD of John Kerry saying “Do you know who I am?” one time too many at a biker bar?
Alas, I can’t promise to deliver any of those things any more than I can immanentize the eschaton or hold more than 46 Cheetos in my mouth at any one time.
But what I can promise you is that NRO will continue to be there for you, like the creepy dude at the local library who smells like cabbage and keeps following you around to tell you that nobody really understands the true story of the War of 1812. Except we’re not creepy (“Keep telling yourself that” — The Couch) and don’t smell like cabbage (except around the in-house festival of St. Stanislaus), and while we may have our theories about the “War” of 1812, we instead mostly share conservative insights, news, anti-zombie strategies, humor, timewasters, debates, philosophy, tips about how to maintain sanitary standards in public restrooms, and lamentations about the sorry state of hand-drying technology therein. And, of course, we share dog stories of high caliber while tastefully referencing rodents of unusual size, Cthulhu, Mendoza, cats, and the ghosts of Mecosta: all on account of the flies. We keep the mainstream media on their toes like Robert Reich at a urinal, and cause the Left to fume and fulminate like volcanoes uncowed by the presence of airborne laser-lancing equipment.
And you in turn keep us engaged like Picard’s Enterprise at Warp 9. Okay, that’s lame. You keep us on top of our game like Michael Moore sitting on a Parcheesi board? You keep us sharp like the crease in Mark Steyn’s trousers? (“Move away from the keyboard, Goldberg” — The Couch.)
Whatever.
We love our readers, but not in the sense that we want to take you out back of the middle school and get you pregnant. We’re grateful to you for so much. And not just your money, which — don’t get me wrong — we want more than Joe Biden wants to be taken seriously. You’re our fact checkers and our tipsters. Our best friends and our harshest critics. What was it John Cusack said about Nick in The Sure Thing? “Nick’s your buddy. Nick’s the kind of guy you can trust, the kind of guy you can drink a beer with, the kind of guy who doesn’t mind if you puke in his car. Nick!” Well, you’re our Nick, and we want to be yours, but not in a gay way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
And Nick, buddy, pal, Kemosabe, we really do need your help. Sure, I could give you the Tommy Boy Callahan-brake-pads speech, asking you to give for your sake and your daughter’s sake. Sure, I could show you the books and run you through the numbers. And you could also take a look up a steer’s you-know-what, but why not take the butcher’s word for it?
Please help. For me. Please.
Oh, I know what you’re saying: “Why should I do it for Goldberg? I had to kill a man with my bare hands in Machu Picchu for my money.
OK! OK! OK! KJL, your putting reader's comments in the Corner has shamed me into it. I donated last year, but this year I was going to claim "it's the economy." Ha! No excuse. I rely on NRO for my daily "right" view of the world which is so lacking elsewhere. So here's my modest contribution.
Oh, how the international community loves Barack Obama — loves to stiff him, play him along, and manipulate him. He’s the world’s celebrity ingenue, the slender naïf perpetually undone by the recalcitrance of foreign leaders.
And you thought the Pelican State had seen it all. Nearly five years ago, then–Louisiana congressman William Jefferson, a Democrat, hid $90,000 cash in his freezer. Following an FBI bribery sting, he was finally sentenced to 13 years in prison last week. Turns out he was a cheap date.
ABC News reports that Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, one of the last Democrats holding out on supporting Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s health-care legislation, has sweetened Louisiana’s slice of Obamacare by $100 million (via disaster-relief dollars) in a little-noticed provision on page 432 of Reid’s bill. Landrieu, of course, is not doing anything to hide this $100 million allocation. If anything, she’s proud of it. It’s “something she has been working on for a long time,” says Robert Sawicki, Landrieu’s press secretary.
Not all of Landrieu’s colleagues, however, are quite so happy about it. One reason: The $100 million provision was hammered out behind closed doors on Thursday in Reid’s office.
“I’m sure they were talking about more than the weather,” Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) tells NRO. Look, says McCain, “there should not be a surprise boost in Medicaid funding for states that have been declared disaster areas in the last seven years. If you look at what’s in that provision, you see the benefits those states (that are home to fence-sitting Democrats) will receive, especially Louisiana, which suffered from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.”
“We need to engage in an extensive debate over these things,” says McCain. By dispensing such fine-print favors, he adds, Reid could be seen as trying to “buy” Landrieu’s vote.
“In a 2,074-page bill, there’s a lot of room for mischief,” says McCain.
In light of the current debate over health-care reform and its cost, this video, narrated by Dan Mitchell, is a very good reminder of why government-run health care is a terrible idea that will cost billions more than what is announced. For instance, Mitchell reminds us that government's ability to forecast the cost of its new entitlement programs is terrible. When Medicare was created in 1965, the long-term forecast was that the program would cost $12 billion in 1990. Wrong. It turned out to be over $100 billion. Today, it costs $500 billion. The same thing is true with Medicare and pretty every other government-run program.
The important message of this video is that no matter what CBO, Pelosi, the Senate, or Baucus tell us, either version of these plans are budget busters and that we will, as taxpayers, have much to lose.
If I only I could give 10 times as much. As a conservative high school Latin teacher in blue-state New Jersey, I would be completely lost without my daily lunch-break dose of NRO. Every day I eagerly share your insightful commentary and brilliant reporting with my few but stalwart conservative colleagues. God bless you all.
Someone leaked thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit in the U.K. yesterday. I haven't had time to read them all or to assess whether or not they're genuine, although I understand the CRU's head has suggested they are. In any event, my better half has literally done my job for me and put together a round-up of links about the leak. If they are genuine, some of the remarks are damning and will be very hard to explain away. Despite that, I imagine the usual suspects will be waving their hands so fast they'll take off.
The National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va., plans to install a bust of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, according to this report. Sounds like a really bad idea. Okay, so the Soviets were a part of the Allied coalition during the Second World War. But I don't recall Cossacks storming the beaches at Normandy — and this is a D-Day memorial we're talking about. We shouldn't go out of our way to commemorate one of history's most murderous enemies of freedom.
UPDATE: E-mail:
you left out the best part of the D Day story with Stalin.
"the national parks service responded positively when we informed them of Stalin bust"
NRO's contribution to the maintenance of freedom is incalculable so I will have to start with a down payment of $100. Keep up the good work. Cheers from down under.
