Jeffrey Tucker could teach Obama a few things.

The gas gauge broke. There was no smartphone app to tell me how much was left, so I ran out. I had to call the local gas station to give me enough to get on my way. The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car’s tank. And pour. And pour.

“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. Regulations began in 2000, with the idea of preventing spillage. The notion spread and was picked up by the EPA, which is always looking for new and innovative ways to spread as much human misery as possible.

An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009… it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”

The government never said “no vents.” It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans (more…)

Obama was busy slaying straw men during his Ohio State commencement speech:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.

Obama’s scant experience outside academia and government blinds him to common sense. He might actually believe conservatives want polluted water and corporations running amok, or that conservatives think government is the source of all evil.

The man needs remedial education, but famously listens to no one.

There’s a practical reason to limit the scope of government: human beings tend toward corruption. Government can referee a private economy to limit corruption. But when the government becomes corrupt, who acts as referee? The news media? Ha.

Let’s forget corrupt. How about incompetent? Incompetent companies eventually pay a price from the marketplace. They either reform or go broke. No such market forces work to police government bloat or incompetence.

Consider these examples, just from California:

• Los Angeles just discovered $43 million sitting in an account. The city is seriously strapped for cash, but cannot even count what it has.
• Los Angeles has a three decade backlog of repairs for sidewalks.
• The state parks department hid a $54 million surplus while threatening to close parks. Meanwhile, communities held bake sales to raise money to prevent park closures.
• The state has 19,700 felons with guns but can’t find the money to disarm them. Instead, they pass more gun control laws.
• The state wasted $371 million on an “upgraded” payroll system that does not work.
• The LA Unified School district spent $578 million to build one high school. For that, they could have built two Disney Halls and had money left over.
• The city leaders egged on Occupy LA, with the mayor handing out free ponchos when it drizzled. Eventually, Occupy cost the city $4.7 million.
• LA ran a public hospital that was so bad it killed patients in excessive numbers. Multiple reform attempts failed. In the most egregious example, a patient was refused treatment and bled to death on the floor of the ER while her husband called 911 to summon an ambulance to take her somewhere for treatment. Eventually, the hospital was closed.
• Public service unions have corrupted the political system, raising huge sums of money to elect union friendly politicians. As a result, average citizens support public employees with larger paychecks, longer vacations, earlier retirements and fatter pensions. We now work for the government.

One of my favorite Maggie Thatcher moments: so much wisdom expressed with a single gesture.

David Mamet in the Daily Beast:

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”

All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.

Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the first part of the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine the individual’s abilities.

As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred frequently to the “needs” of himself and his opponent, alleging that each has more money than he “needs.”

But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” Who elected him to speak for another (more…)

HT: Susan Gertson

New York Magazine’s Frank Rich predicts the right will survive (he won’t be happy, though.)

…Such is the power of denial that we simply refuse to concede that, by the metric of intractability, at least, conservatives are the cockroaches of the American body politic, poised to outlast us all. And so, after Obama’s victory in 2008, the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg spoke for sentimental liberal triumphalists everywhere when he concluded that America is now “in a progressive period” and that “the conservative movement brought about by the Gingrich revolution has been crushed.”

That progressive period lasted all of a year, giving way to the 2009 gubernatorial victories of the conservatives Bob McDonnell (in the purple state of Virginia) and Chris Christie (in blue New Jersey), as well as that summer’s raucous Obamacare protests. Few Democrats had imagined that the new African-American president would be besieged so quickly by a conservative populist movement whose adherents dressed in 1776 drag and worshipped the frothing-at-the-blackboard Glenn Beck. Or that such a movement would administer a “shellacking” in the midterms.

Fine, conservatives are roaches.

But liberals are termites. Miserable malcontents, their utopian project is never complete (by definition, it can’t be) so they never shut up, never stop whining, and keep nibbling away at the Constitution or anything that impedes their know-it-all imperatives.

Tigerhawk at his best:

The American left frames the current election in terms of debt — what one group of people owes to another. In their formulation, the wealthy owe more to everybody else, their “fair share,” in the politically correct expression of the idea. About a year ago, the now Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, Elizabeth Warren, won the hearts of lefties everywhere with a speech that claimed that successful businesses were fundamentally collective instead of individual accomplishments:

“You built a factory out there? Good for you,” she says. “But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

This summer just past, President Obama tried to make exactly the same point, but so botched his presentation of it that he handed the right a rallying cry (helpfully rendered in to out-of-context bold below):

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

In all the argument over whether conservatives were taking “you didn’t build that” out of context, few on the left acknowledged that he was trying to say what Warren had said to such acclaim from the Democratic base. Even in context, the argument that accomplishment in business is collective is deeply offensive to most people in business, at least when they are not camouflaging themselves at a college town cocktail party. Since many liberals are genuinely baffled about why this should be so, I shall try to explain. Suffice it to say that the reasons are legion.

The very argument is disingenuous. Neither mainstream Republicans nor the Tea Party activists who drove the 2010 election are against public roads, public education, police departments, firefighters (Warren) or, even, technology spin-offs from necessary spending on national defense (Obama, re the Internet). There has been a broad national consensus around each of these for between 100 and 200 years (I am sure we all remember that Eli Whitney’s invention of interchangeable parts was in the context of defense spending). To suggest otherwise is to erect and demolish a straw man — an (more…)

When my daughter was five years old, we visited the LA Natural History Museum. Upon seeing the animatronic mastodon moving its trunk, she insisted I pick her up and hold her. She knew the mastodon was not real, yet it frightened her anyway.

That incident exemplified a curious aspect of human nature: we can know something logically, but believe the opposite instinctively. Often the gut wins the argument.

This split nature is how I understand the “progressive” mind. Contrary to all logic, deep in their guts they irrationally believe in zero-sum economics. When turned into policy, zero-sum thinking creates negative numbers.

Writer Robert Bidinotto has a long and meaty post on the topic, one I consider essential reading.

“Why Let the Rich Hoard All the Toys?”

So asks New York Times’s columnist Nicholas Kristof, in an op-ed that constitutes a perfect, and revealing, distillation of the progressive Narrative—the Narrative that has become the central, if unacknowledged, issue of the 2012 presidential election.

Kristof writes:

Imagine a kindergarten with 100 students, lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys.

Yet you gasp: one avaricious little boy is jealously guarding a mountain of toys for himself. A handful of other children are quietly playing with a few toys each, while 90 of the children are looking on forlornly—empty-handed.

The one greedy boy has hoarded more toys than all those 90 children put together!

“What’s going on?” you ask. “Let’s learn to share! One child shouldn’t hog everything for himself!”

The greedy little boy looks at you, indignant. “Do you believe in redistribution?” he asks suspiciously, his lips curling in contempt. “I don’t want to share. This is America!”

And then he summons his private security firm and has you dragged off the premises. Well, maybe not, but you get the point.

That kindergarten distribution is precisely what America looks like. Our wealth has become so skewed that the top 1 percent possesses a greater collective worth than the entire bottom 90 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

***

This is America—according to the Narrative accepted and advanced by progressives like Kristof. It is the Narrative that has guided Barack Obama throughout his entire career.

And it is the reigning social Narrative that should be challenged during the waning days of this election campaign.

The progressive’s Narrative is erected on a zero-sum, tribal socio-economic model. In this model, the tribe’s wealth (“national income,” “Gross National Product,” etc.) is collectively owned, and exists in a limited quantity. Those premises are illustrated in standard economics texts by means of “pie charts” indicating various “shares” and “distributions” of “national” wealth.

Given these premises, it follows that any one tribal member’s “excessive” accumulation of personal riches could not have been individually produced (“You didn’t build that!”), but was instead swiped from the tribal pot of wealth, and thus acquired at the expense of everyone else. It further follows that the moral task of the tribal leaders (the President, Congress, regulators, etc.) must be to tax away that “excess” (stolen) wealth and pour it back into the collective pot, so that everyone in the tribe will have access to his equal “fair share.”

It is appropriate that Kristof chose a parable of children in a kindergarten to illustrate the progressive worldview. For progressivism is not a mature, adult philosophy, but a juvenile story—an immature, childish Narrative about how the market economy supposedly works. More specifically, it is a primitive Narrative, one rooted far back in mankind’s distant tribal past. This timeless Narrative has been resurrected and propagated endlessly in classic myths, allegories, and parables, such as Robin Hood, the Sermon on the Mount, Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” and Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It remains the central plotline of endless novels and films in which rapacious (more recently, carcinogenic) corporate tycoons crush the souls, jobs, and lives of hapless, hard-working “little people.” Arguably, it goes back to the Prometheus myth in ancient Greece: After all, Prometheus didn’t create fire as his gift to man, but stole it from the gods (Zeus: “Prometheus, about that fire—you didn’t build that!”)

Here, we see this same primitive, childish mythology put forth on the op-ed page of the New York Times, by an educated, pampered, and (hypocritically) wealthy member of the elite progressive media. In his parable of a schoolboy “hoarding” all “the” toys, the unstated premises are: All the toys are collectively owned by the kindergarten; they exist to be shared equally and in common; and this one greedy kid’s “hoarding” of contents taken from the collective toy box imposes losses on all the other kids.

Kristof’s juvenile myth reveals, by implication, another tacit premise of the “progressive” Narrative. Observe that in this zero-sum social world, the kid hoarding the “toys” had nothing to do with the toys’ production, or with their presence in the kindergarten. (“Kid—you didn’t build them!”) Yet, somehow, the “toys” are just there. The kindergarten has been magically, mysteriously, but “lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys.”

Supplied…how? and by whom?

***
From before the days of Marx, the left’s zero-sum Narrative evades those questions and their answers. It evades the issue of production and those who make it possible: individual producers. In the progressive Narrative, they simply do not exist. Goods and services are simply here, like the fruit that appears each year on apple trees. As liberal pseudo-economist (more…)

Rush Limbaugh’s take on the Romney tape:

…We ask ourselves, “Okay, have we reached the tipping point?”  Just like de Tocqueville said, have we reached the point where more people are comfortable being cared for and taken care of than they are providing for themselves?  And we’ve all feared that this election or thought this election was going to give us the answer to that question.  That’s been the fear that we’ve all had.  Where are we?  The questions being asked on the conservative blogs when somebody says, “How come Romney’s not 15 points ahead?” that’s what they mean.  What they really mean is, have we lost the country?  Have we lost the culture?  Have we lost the American work ethic?  Have we lost American optimism? Have we lost the thing that was talked about all over the Republican convention?

What was the theme of that convention? Every Speaker got up there and talked about how their parents had nothing, came from nothing, and America gave the speakers the opportunity to be the best they could be, using whatever talents and ambition that they had. This is a gold mine of opportunity that Romney has here. The real question is: Does he have anybody on his staff to tell him? Does he have anybody — any consultants — who will, or are they still gonna be wallowing in fear over this?

‘Cause it’s out there, and it’s gonna be dealt with, and it may as well be seized as an opportunity. Whatever happened to the drive to improve ourselves? Whatever happened to the drive to be better today than yesterday? Whatever (more…)

Ari Fleischer

If fairness in paying taxes means the amount you pay is based on the amount you make, then the only group in America paying at least a “fair share” is the top 20%—people who make more than $74,000. For everyone else, the tax code is a bargain.

You wouldn’t know this from President Obama’s rhetoric, but our tax system, according to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), is incredibly progressive. Consider: The top 1% of income earners pay an average federal tax rate of 28.9%. (See the nearby table.) The average federal tax rate on the top 20% is 23.2%. The 20% of taxpayers earning between $50,100 and $73,999 pay an average 15.1%, and so on down the line. The CBO report includes payroll as well as income taxes paid.

There’s also another way of looking at fairness, and that’s the tax burden. Here, consider the top 20% of income earners (over $74,000). They make 50% of the nation’s income but pay nearly 70% of all federal taxes.

The remaining 30% of the tax burden is borne by 80% of the taxpayers, those who make less than $74,000. In short, this group’s share of taxes paid, 30%, is lower than the share of income they earn, 50%.

Yet President Obama says that “for some time now, when compared to the middle class,” the wealthy “haven’t been asked to do their fair share.”

He’s right that the system isn’t fair, but not because the top 1% pay too little. It is because they pay too much.

Mr. Obama has said that some wealthy employers pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries. True, some are able to lower their effective federal tax rate by giving millions to charity. Or because they derive much of their income as capital gains or from tax-free municipal bonds.

But middle- and low-income Americans who do not invest also pay lower rates thanks to the deductions they receive, such as a $1,000 per child tax credit (which phases out for couples who make more than $110,000), or the Earned Income Tax Credit, which no one making more than $50,000 is supposed to receive…

Obama’s “You didn’t build that” statement has revealed a chasm between the left and right. Liberals find the whole thing, in it’s full context, “silly.” That how the LA Times Doyle McManus put it.

Conservatives see it as fundamental. Jonah Goldberg nails it.

“If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. . . . If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

— Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13

The president’s defenders have claimed he either misspoke last week at a Roanoke, Va., campaign event or that what he said is true. Both defenses have merit. Obama surely didn’t mean to say something that politically idiotic so plainly. And it’s true that no man’s accomplishments are entirely his own. We’re all indebted to others, and we all rely on government to provide some basic things. Only the straw-men conservatives of Obama’s imagination yearn for an America with no roads and bridges.

At best, Obama’s “gaffe” is a banal truism, and if the president’s praetorians want to defend him on grounds of platitudinous banality, fine. But even they have to know in their hearts that this is a pathetic maneuver, given that the reason they’re rushing to defend Obama in the first place is his commitment to the very philosophy they deny he’s espousing.

This is the great irony of Obama and his defenders. He is a progressive ideologue and a passionate believer in “social justice,” and that’s a large reason why his fans love him so. But if you ever say that he is what he is — if you take his words seriously — they ridicule you for believing he’s anything other than a pragmatist and a moderate.

Meanwhile, what many conservatives don’t appreciate is that Obama is not some otherworldly radical, importing foreign ideas, but that he in fact fits within an old American intellectual tradition. Indeed, you might even call him a reactionary progressive; he seeks to restore the assumptions and priorities of the Progressive Era.

Herbert Croly, the godfather of American progressivism, spoke for a generation of progressive intellectuals when he wrote that the “individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed.” For the progressives, society and government were almost interchangeable terms. John Dewey, the seminal progressive philosopher, believed that “organized social control” via a “socialized economy” was the only means to create “free” individuals. For the progressives, freedom wasn’t the absence of government coercion, it was a pile of gifts from the state. (more…)

Dennis Prager

According to conventional wisdom, the older the person, the less young people are inclined to listen to him or her.

This is probably true for some of you. But I do not believe that it is true for most of you.

Most young people have tremendous respect for older people’s views. I saw this firsthand in my own life. I began lecturing publicly at the age of 21, and I give you my word that young people (and certainly older people) are far more respectful of my views today than when I was their age. All things being equal, it is very rare for a 25- or 35-year-old to command the respect that a 50- or 60-year-old commands.

So, I am not afraid that you will dismiss what I have to say here as the irrelevant thoughts of an older person.

But just in case you need an argument to take an older person’s thoughts seriously, ask any adults you respect whether they have more wisdom and insight into life now than they did ten years ago, let alone when they were your age. The answer will always be yes. (And any adult who has not gained wisdom over the course of a lifetime is not worth listening to.)

Which directly leads to my point: Did you ever wonder why people are far more likely to become conservative in their views and values as they get older?

When this rather devastating question is posed to liberals, leftists, progressives, Democrats — you choose the label or group — they answer that people get more selfish as they get older.

Progressives have to give this answer. There is no other response that enables them to avoid confronting the quite embarrassing fact that just about every adult, at every age of life, thinks he/she is wiser than when younger — and that as they accumulate wisdom they become more conservative.

So the liberal explanation — that people get more selfish as they get older — is not only insulting, it is nonsense.

People get worse as they get older?

If you were walking in a dark alley at midnight, which would you fear more — a group of teenagers or twenty-somethings or a group of senior citizens?

Do older people or younger people give more of their time to charitable institutions?

Are our prisons filled with young people or old people?

The fact is that not only do people get more wise and more conservative as they get older, they get more kind and more generous, too.

But what about “idealism”? We are told that young people are more “idealistic” than old people.

Let me respond by asking: What does “idealistic” mean?

Presumably it means having ideals — a kinder, more peaceful world, etc. Well, who told you that as people get older they lose these ideals? This is so untrue as to constitute a lie. If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young (more…)

Governor Scott Walker is thinking — and doing — outside the box. Higher education is ripe for reform and he’s doing it.

Governor Scott Walker (R-WI), already well known for his efforts to curb union power, has now set out to tackle an equally big task: busting the higher education bubble.

The problem of college affordability is recognized on both sides of the aisle, but sadly, most efforts to abate the problem – such as increasing federal subsidies – have only exacerbated it. Walker wants to try a different approach for taxpayers and students in his state.

Last Tuesday, Walker released his proposal to create the University of Wisconsin Flexible Degree Program, a competency-based approach using both online learning and traditional college courses. He explained:

This unique competency-based model will allow students to start classes anytime they like, work at their own pace, and earn credit for what they already know… Students can use knowledge obtained on the job, through free open courseware, or anywhere else to quickly test out of a module or a course. A student may move ahead as soon as he or she can prove content mastery.

Obtaining a degree through the University of Wisconsin system will now be more affordable and customizable. By tapping into and giving credit for the knowledge a student has obtained outside the classroom or through another school, the Flexible Degree Program brings down the cost and the time required to graduate. If a student proves his mastery of a certain subject, he can obtain credit without taking a full class. Walker’s office notes:

Students can demonstrate college-level competencies – no matter where they learned the material – as soon as they can prove that they know it…

Rather than molding coursework around a set timeframe, these modules can be designed to contain only the knowledge required within a specific competency. This could benefit working adults who need to start and pause their studies because of work and personal commitments. It could also benefit highly motivated students who are able to move through course materials at a faster pace.

Courses in this new program will be based on competency, not seat time, so students can move on to the next topic when they have mastered the current material. Students will have broad access to high quality coursework and student services, and they can graduate as soon as they can prove their mastery of the material…

Students with extensive knowledge from the workplace, free open courseware, or other life experiences will be able to quickly move closer to degree completion by having their knowledge assessed and credited.

The classes can also be tailored to allow for a student’s busy schedule or career goals. What’s more, Walker expects the program to reach even international students, broadening the university’s student and revenue base…

But Julia gets it for free. One of the comments to the video: “Birth control is free. It’s called abstinence. Works every time.”

Theory of Mind is the notion that as human beings develop, we become able to intuit what others might be thinking. A test for this goes like this:

Child #1 is told to hide a teddy bear under a bed, then leave the room.

Child #2 (the subject of the experiment) enters and finds the teddy bear, then is instructed to hide it in a box. He is then asked where Child #1 will look for the teddy bear when he returns.

Children four and under will typically answer “in the box” because they cannot conceive how anyone else might think. Adults with Asperger’s Syndrome often answer as children, too.

Which bring us to liberals.

Nicholas Kristof in the NYT:

Conservatives may not like liberals, but they seem to understand them. In contrast, many liberals find conservative voters not just wrong but also bewildering.

One academic study asked 2,000 Americans to fill out questionnaires about moral questions. In some cases, they were asked to fill them out as they thought a “typical liberal” or a “typical conservative” would respond.

Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.

Now a fascinating new book comes along that, to a liberal like myself, helps demystify the right — and illuminates the kind of messaging that might connect with voters of all stripes. “The Righteous Mind,” by Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, argues that, for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity.

Those latter values bind groups together with a shared respect for symbols and institutions such as the flag or the military. They are a reminder that human moral judgments are often about far more than just helping others. Some of Haidt’s most interesting material is his examination of taboos.

His team asked research subjects pesky questions. What would they think of a brother and sister who experimented with incest, while using birth control? Or of a family that, after their pet dog was run over, ate it for dinner?

Most respondents were appalled but often had trouble articulating why; we find these examples instinctively disturbing even if no one is harmed. (One lesson of the book: If you see Haidt approaching with a clipboard, run!)

Of course, political debates aren’t built on the consumption of roadkill. But they do often revolve around this broader moral code. This year’s Republican primaries have been a kaleidoscope of loyalty, authority and sanctity issues — such as whether church-affiliated institutions can refuse to cover birth control in health insurance policies — and that’s perhaps why people like me have found the primaries so crazy.

Another way of putting it is this: Americans speak about values in six languages, from care to sanctity. Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some (me included) mostly use just one, care for victims.

“Moral psychology can help to explain why the Democratic Party has had so much difficulty connecting with voters,” writes Haidt, a former liberal who says he became a centrist while writing the book.

In recent years, there has been growing research into the roots of political ideologies, and they seem to go deep. Adults who consider themselves liberals were said decades earlier by their nursery-school teachers to be curious, verbal novelty seekers but not very neat or obedient.

As a student of human nature, progressives have long fascinated me. How can liberals, who count the vast majority of artists, writers and creatives as their own, be so narrow minded?

Many ardent liberal Democrats truly believe conservatives to be evil. Robert Schrum, John Kerry’s campaign manager in the 2004 presidential election, was quoted in the New Yorker as saying just that.

There is some of that on the right as well, but it’s mostly the fringe. I’d guess conspiracy minded folks are equally represented on the right and left.

Finally, what hope is there for political consensus when one party cannot credit the other with basic humanity?

The working class, he figures, would eat up his government giveaways. But as Daniel Henninger points out, the real hot button issue is personal freedom.

…What Mr. Santorum has discovered in this campaign is that for a large number of voters, a connection has surfaced between Barack Obama’s economic policies and the issue of personal freedom. The potency of the latter is what’s new, and a vulnerability for this presidency.

Freedom, or liberty, is a staple of conservative politics. Ron Paul speaks about “liberty” as libertarian philosophy, and that has drawn new support. In the Santorum version it comes out as “freedom,” and it wells up from something more akin to the “Don’t tread on me” motto and coiled rattlesnake sewn into the famous yellow Gadsden flag created before the American Revolution. The Gadsden flag was a staple at tea party rallies two years ago.

Rick Santorum has linked these concerns about the status of personal freedom directly to ObamaCare and beyond that to the broader policy legacy of Obama administration.

His 35-minute speech in Cuyahoga Falls touched an array of subjects that drew applause. But at the halfway point, when he tore into ObamaCare, his mostly working-class audience exploded into applause and cries of “Rick! Rick! Rick!”

Obama probably figures he just needs to explain it better.

Andrew Breitbart did not mislead anyone about Shirley Sherrod, no matter what the obituaries say.

Scientific American:

Drilling at Poland’s first shale gas exploration well using the controversial technique known as fracking has not harmed the environment, according to a government study published on Friday.

Stone-age Europeans were the first to get to North America.

Obama’s car of the future temporarily halts production. He’s planning to drive one once he gets out of the White House, he says.

Welfare reform worked, says LAT oped. That’s not exactly news, as the ten year anniversary stories made clear.

The Other GM Bailout: $18 billion in tax breaks

Bernard Goldberg

Some of the nicest, most decent, generous people I have met over the years have been people of faith. And so were some of the most hateful, bigoted ignorant bastards.

I thought of this after I was deluged with the most depressing emails I have received in a very long time, the reaction to my appearance on The O’Reilly Factor when I said there is a strain of anti-gay bigotry running through conservative America that I find deeply troubling.

What got me going was news that the conservative organization One Million Moms issued an ultimatum to JC Penney: either fire your news spokeswoman, Ellen DeGeneres, or we will stop shopping in your stores.

What exactly is Ellen’s sin? What has she ever done to any of those million moms? No matter how you cut it, it comes down to this: She’s gay.

One Million Moms issued a statement saying: “Funny that JC Penney thinks hiring an open homosexual spokesperson will help their business when most of their customers are traditional families. More sales will be lost than gained unless they replace their spokesperson quickly. Unless JC Penney decides to be neutral in the culture war then their brand transformation will be unsuccessful.”

I told Bill that while reasonable people may disagree on a controversial issue like gay marriage, this conservative strain of bigotry that demands the dismissal of of someone simply because she’s openly gay, had to stop. It is gays now that they can’t stomach, I said, but back in the 1950s and 60s it was blacks. I’m not talking about all conservatives, I said, or even most. But there undeniably is a strain of bigotry in the conservative movement. And a lot of it comes from people who call themselves Christians.

I got a truckload of mail about what I said, some of it thanking me. Some came from conservatives, some from libertarians, and some from gay people of no particular political leaning who simply were grateful that someone stood up for them – on national television no less. But the vast majority of my mail came from the other direction.

Larry, who obviously thinks being gay is no different than being a dangerous criminal wrote: “Stealing, raping, murdering, reveling, gambling, drinking, drugging, fornicating, child molesting, and perverting is all sinful behavior and it is never OK when it is flaunted in the faces of our children. There is always a price to be paid for sin and the price is death. God is not mocked.”…

Property rights, contracts, laws that apply equally to all are the bedrock of modern, prosperous — without them, we’re Egypt.

Amity Schlaes:

…Despite the name, “Monopoly” isn’t really about antitrust. It’s about trust. Trust and commerce, Sapienza said. If people want to buy properties, if renters pay their rents and the bank acts predictably, then the game will move merrily forward, and hotels will replace houses on the board.

But if the bank can’t be trusted — if it cheats or proves too erratic — there is a problem. The players walk away from the table.

The same holds true on the great American game board. Trust that everyone is playing by the rules, more or less, is critical. Around the same time she first talked about “Monopoly,” Sapienza and a colleague, Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, set about trying to measure the elusive sentiment of trust. They launched a survey, formally known as the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index.

In December 2008, they found that only 20 percent of Americans said they trusted the financial system. That rate climbed in successive “waves” of the survey to 26 percent in January 2011. But the index has bobbed up and down since then, and in Wave 12, in September, the trust level had dropped back to 23 percent, other positive signs in the economy notwithstanding.

Housing Problems

To many people, housing is one reason why trust in the financial sector remains so stubbornly low. U.S. home prices have fallen 33 percent since their peak before the recession. Declining home values have diminished consumer confidence and curtailed spending. About 12 million homeowners owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth. Many people are losing their homes, and the foreclosure process is a costly mess.

If only we could straighten these problems out, the housing market could recover and the rest of the economy would follow. Or so the logic goes.

One proponent of the Houses Ueber Alles theory is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who recently published a white paper on how housing-market fixes, especially involving mortgages, could restore growth. This is the moment, Bernanke and his Fed colleagues posit, that policy makers should “help reconcile the existing size and mix of the housing market.” Regulators and banks should consider a “broad menu of loan modifications.” Conversion to rentals from ownership may be appropriate. Mortgage servicers should get “incentives to pursue alternatives to foreclosure.” The paper recommends that regulators and lenders “tailor” vulnerable contracts.

In other words, details of paper contracts written years ago matter less than the immediate challenge of lifting burdens from the shoulders of borrowers. The lender’s contractual right to foreclose is subordinate. In Bernanke’s assessment, the rest of the economy will take heart once people get help with houses. It’s time for a new kind of Fed intervention, or Fed-inspired intervention, in residential mortgages.

Michael Barone argues that historians learned the wrong lessons from FDR.

…by a 52 to 45 percent margin, Americans see the gap between the rich and the poor as an acceptable part of the economic system rather than a problem that needs to be fixed. In 1998, during the high-tech economic boom, Americans took the opposite view by the same margin.

As Galston notes, these findings suggest that Obama’s much-praised speech at Osawatomie, Kan., decrying inequality, “may well reduce his chances of prevailing in a close race.” Class-warfare politics, as I have noted, hasn’t produced a Democratic presidential victory in a long, long time.

Where Galston misses a step, I think, is that he seems to regard the move away from redistributionist politics in this time of economic stagnation as an anomaly in need of explanation. He seems to share the Obama Democrats’ assumption that economic distress would make Americans more supportive of, or amenable to, big-government policies.

That, after all, is what we have all been taught by the great and widely read New Deal historians, and that lesson has been absorbed by generations of politicians and political pundits.

I believe that historians have taught the wrong lessons about the 1930s. And I believe there is a plausible and probably correct reason why economic distress has apparently moved Americans to be less rather than more supportive of big government.

To understand the lessons of the 1930s, you need to read the election returns. Franklin Roosevelt’s big victory in 1932 was a massive rejection of Republicans across the board. Republicans lost huge ground in urban and rural areas, in the West and Midwest and most of the East, and even in their few redoubts in the South.

In 1936, FDR won reelection by a slightly larger margin, but with a different coalition. The rural and small-town North returned to its long Republican allegiance, while Democrats made further big gains among immigrants and blue-collar workers in big cities and factory towns.

The New Deal historians attributed these gains to Roosevelt’s economic-redistribution measures: high tax rates on high earners, the pro-union Wagner Act, Social Security. These laws — the so-called Second New Deal — were passed in 1935. They replaced the different, non-redistributionist policies of the First New Deal that stopped the deflationary downward spiral underway when Roosevelt took office.

The problem with the historians’ claims is that the shifts in the electorate apparent in 1936 also are apparent in the 1934 off-year elections. Democrats won big that year, but compared to 1932, they lost ground in rural areas and small towns and gained much ground in big cities and factory towns.

The 1936 realignment happened in 1934. It could not have been caused by the redistributionist Second New Deal legislation, because that legislation hadn’t been passed before November 1934.

So why should voters be leery of economic redistribution in times of economic distress?

Perhaps because they realize that they stand to gain much more from a vibrantly growing economy than from redistribution of a stagnant economic pie. A growing economy produces many unanticipated opportunities. Redistribution edges toward a zero-sum game.

They miss growth when it is absent. They don’t appreciate it so much when it is happening.

…as compiled by John Hawkins at Rightwing News. A taste:

Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he’s lecturing us about how America’s gone “soft”? Really? — Jonah Goldberg

Why does the left hate free speech? Because they don’t know how to talk about the substantive merits when they are challenged. Having submerged themselves in disciplining each other by denouncing any heretics in their midst, they find themselves overwhelmed and outnumbered in America, where there is vibrant debate about all sorts of things they don’t know how to begin to talk about. They resort to stomping their feet and shouting “shut up”… when they aren’t prissily imploring everyone to be “civil.” — Ann Althouse

[The Tea Party] has to be the first “Totalitarian” movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone. — Ed Driscoll

If you read through Burt’s columns, you’ll find plenty more that Hawkins overlooked.

Here’s an excellent summary of conservative ideas from Daniel Hannan, writing in the UK Telegraph:

Chatting to some Occupy protesters this morning, I was struck by how wide of the mark were the beliefs they attributed to me as a Right-winger. In the interests of deeper understanding, here are ten things which – trust me – most of the Tory scum I hang around with think. Obviously, I don’t expect to turn my Leftie readers in a single post; still, they might get a clearer idea of what we actually believe.

1. Free-marketeers resent the bank bailouts. This might seem obvious: we are, after all, opposed to state subsidies and nationalisations. Yet it often surprises commentators, who mistake our support for open competition and free trade for a belief in plutocracy. There is a world of difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. Sometimes, the two positions happen to coincide; often they don’t.

2. What has happened since 2008 is not capitalism. In a capitalist system, bad banks would have been allowed to fail, their profitable operations bought by more efficient competitors. Shareholders, bondholders and some depositors would have lost money, but taxpayers would not have contributed a penny (see here).

3. If you want the rich to pay more, create a flatter and simpler tax system. This is partly a question of closing loopholes (mansions put in company names to avoid stamp duty, capital gains tax exemption for non-doms etc). Mainly, though, it is a question of bringing the tax rate down to a level where evasion becomes pointless. As Art Laffer keeps telling anyone who’ll listen, it works every time. Between 1980 and 2007, the US cut taxes at all income levels. Result? The top one per cent went from paying 19.5 per cent of all taxes to 40 per cent. In Britain, since the top rate of income tax was lowered to 40 per cent in 1988, the share of income tax collected from the wealthiest percentile has risen from 14 to 27 per cent.

4. Those of us who believe in small government are not motivated by the desire to make the rich richer. We’re really not. We are, in most cases, nowhere near having to pay top rate tax ourselves; our most eloquent champions over the years have been modestly-paid academics. We believe that economic freedom will enrich the country as a whole. Yes, the wealthy might become wealthier still, but we don’t see that as an argument against raising living standards for the majority.

5. We are not against equality. We generally recognise the benefits in Scandinavian-style homogeneity: crime tends to be lower, people are less stressed etc. Our objection is not that egalitarianism is undesirable in itself, but that the policies required to enforce in involve a disproportionate loss of liberty and prosperity.

6. Nor, by the way, does state intervention seem to be an effective way to promote equality. On the most elemental indicators – height, calorie intake, infant mortality, literacy, longevity – Britain has been becoming a steadily more equal society since the calamity of 1066. It’s true that, around half a century ago, this approximation halted and, on some measures, went into reverse. There are competing theories as to why, but one thing is undeniable: the recent widening of the wealth gap has taken place at a time when the state controls a far greater share of national wealth than ever before.

7. Let’s tackle the idea that being on the Left means being on the side of ordinary people, while being on the Right means defending privileged elites. It’s hard to think of a single tax, or a single regulation, that doesn’t end up privileging some vested interest at the expense of the general population. The reason governments keep growing is because of what economists call ‘dispersed costs and concentrated gains’: people are generally more aware the benefits they receive than of the taxes they pay.

8. Capitalism, with all its imperfections, is the fairest scheme yet tried. In a system based on property rights and free contract, people succeed by providing an honest service to others. Bill Gates became rich by enriching hundreds of millions of us: I am typing these words using one of his programmes. He gained from the exchange (adding fractionally to his net worth), and so did I (adding to my convenience). In a state-run system, by contrast, third parties get to hand out the goodies.

9. Talking of fairness, let’s remember that the word doesn’t belong to any faction. How about parity between public and private sector pay? How about being fair to our children, whom we have freighted with a debt unprecedented in peacetime? How about being fair to the boy who leaves school at 16 and starts paying taxes to subsidise the one who goes to university? How about being fair to the unemployed, whom firms cannot afford to hire because of the social protection enjoyed by existing employees?

10. Let’s not forget ethics, either. There is virtue in deciding to do the right thing, but there is no virtue in being compelled. Choosing to give your money to charity is meritorious; paying tax is morally neutral (see here). Evidence suggests that, as taxes rise, and the state squeezes out civic society, people give less to good causes.

Well, there you go, comrades. I don’t expect the tents outside St Paul’s to fold overnight. But perhaps we might at least engage honestly on some of these issues rather than talking past each other. ¡Hasta la victoria siempre!

Thomas Sowell:

…The more doctrinaire libertarians see the benefits of free international trade in goods, and extend the same reasoning to free international movement of people. But goods do not bring a culture with them. Nor do they give birth to other goods to perpetuate that culture.

Why do people want to come to America in the first place? Because America offers them something that their native countries do not. This country has a culture that has produced a higher standard of living and a freer life than in many other countries.

When you import people, you import cultures, including cultures that have been far less successful in providing decent lives and decent livelihoods. The American people have a right to decide for themselves whether they want unlimited imports of cultures from other countries.

At one time, immigrants came to America to become Americans. Today, the apostles of multiculturalism and grievance-mongering have done their best to keep foreigners foreign and, if possible, feeling aggrieved. Our own schools and colleges teach grievances.

European countries have learned the hard way how massive imports of a foreign culture can undermine your own culture, polarize your population, and create internal dangers that are irreversible. Victor Davis Hanson’s chilling and insightful book, Mexifornia, shows similar patterns in California.Moreover, in an age of terrorism, not everyone who comes across the border from Mexico is Mexican. It is the height of irresponsibility to leave that border open and the people who cross it a protected group. Punishing employers who hire illegals is punishing an accessory to an illegal act more harshly than the one who committed the illegal act in the first place…

A long, excellent essay from the Nov. 26 National Review by Yuval Levin

This fall, liberals from the president on down have begun to grasp the scope of the political and intellectual disaster that the past three years have been for the Left. Their various responses to the calamity have tended to have one thing in common: immense frustration. But the different expressions of that frustration have been deeply revealing. They should help Americans better understand this complicated moment in our politics, and, in particular, help conservatives frame their responses.

Liberal frustration has fallen into two general categories that seem at first to flatly contradict each other: denunciations of democracy and appeals to populism. In September, Peter Orszag, President Obama’s former budget director, wrote an essay in The New Republic arguing that “we need less democracy.” To address our country’s daunting problems, Orszag suggested, we need to take some power away from Congress and give it to “automatic policies and depoliticized commissions” that will be shielded from public pressure. “Radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.” Two weeks later, North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Beverly Perdue, made a less sophisticated stab at the same general point, proposing to suspend congressional elections for a few years so members of Congress could make the difficult decisions necessary to get our country out of its deep problems.

Orszag and Perdue both seemed to channel a long and deeply held view of the Left — that the complexity of modern life and the intensity of modern politics should lead us to put more power in the hands of technical experts who have the knowledge to make objective, rational choices on our behalf. Leaving things to the political process will result only in delay and disorder. President Obama has frequently expressed this view himself — wistfully complaining to his aides earlier this year, for instance, that things would sure be easier if he were president of China.

At the same time, the Left has been rediscovering the joys of populism. Populism can mean many things, of course, but in America it has often meant not only a faith in the wisdom of the masses but also a channeling of resentments into a case that the majority is being oppressed by an elite few. And that is just what the president has sought this fall. On the stump, he has been railing against wealthy corporate-jet owners and their Republican henchmen, who care not for the struggling working man and want only “dirtier air, dirtier water, fewer people on health care, [and] less accountability on Wall Street.” Meanwhile, a small but opulently publicized populist protest movement has arisen to “occupy” parts of New York’s financial district as well as parks and public spaces elsewhere around the country. Although it seems at times to be all fringe and no center, the movement does appear to be held together by resentment against corporate greed and crony capitalism, and a sense that the large mass of the public shares that resentment…

…says Edmund Wright at American Thinker. Read the transcript and decide for yourself.

Putting aside Rick Perry’s awful 53 seconds, the real story of the CNBC debate last night was how thoroughly the so-called weak field of Republican Presidential candidates collectively embarrassed the panel aggregated by the financial network.

This was not lost on questioners Maria Bartiromo and Jim Cramer, whose demeanor change was obvious as the debate wore on. Meanwhile, in the post debate questioning, manchild Carl Quintenilla asked perhaps the worst question in the history of American journalism by trying to couch Herman Cain’s “Queen Nancy” reference in light of his “problems with women.” Puh-leeze.

On the whole, it was a stunning display of free market and pro-liberty principles versus the nanny state mindset that government must be at the center of all problem solving. Every one of the eight candidates had strong moments against CNBC’s self-anointed experts. Especially promising was how the field almost unanimously fingered federal regulations as the main problem with our economy and society — and they did so as the faces of the questioners went into shock. Moreover there was near unanimity on the idea that the only answer to housing is, well, the economy stupid.

And in spite of repeated attempts to get the candidates to go after each other, only Rick Santorum fell for that bait. Meanwhile the attempt to bring up Cain’s sexual harassment issues was met with loud boo’s. Very loud boo’s.

It is fair to say that it was a fantastic night for most all of the candidates (Rick Perry and his lost department of Energy being the exception). Regardless of what you might think of the candidates, it would be hard to argue against clear wins for Mitt Romney, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich and clear losses for Perry and CNBC.

Here are some stream of consciousness thoughts in order:

Wow. Bartiromo asking strictly Wall Street based question to Cain and then to Romney. What about Main Street? The economy is not Wall Street.

Is Jim Cramer yelling at Ron Paul? Yes. Cramer was yelling. And now the same to Jon Huntsman. Cramer was all in for his stock market buddies — trying to shame the candidates into bailing out Wall Street at all costs under the guise of 401 K’s for average folks. Nice try Maria and Jim, but all four answers were good.

Harwood then trying to trap Romney, but failing, on auto companies. And Harwood, being the insider elitist he is, was having a chat with Romney and seemingly ignoring Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry. Oh, Mitt slipping one in on Newt with his “married to the same woman” comment. Then slipped one in on Obama also.

Perry very good with his “America is gonna be America again” answer.

Oh, Newt very good with “fired as rapidly as possible” comment about Ben Bernanke. Then made good points with the Reagan economy and the Contract economy. Well done.

Bachmann with great point about the regulatory burden and also her comment to “legalize American energy.” That’s a great line. Wonder if she’ll realize it.

Not falling into the trap of going after each other. These candidates are eating the lunch of these questioners.

The Cain character question: Crowd booing Maria Bartiromo — and Cain’s simple answer got a loud and hearty response. And Mitt didn’t go for the bait. CNBC guys getting booed. CNBC is losing this debate. Maria actually smiling. Hmmm.

Cramer is just being childish. His profit versus social responsibility question was simply kindergarten. Romney’s response was very good. Mitt is having a good night.

Cramer tried again with Perry: and Perry’s “they better be” was a good response. And then Newt. He embarrassed Maria.

Oh snap! Cramer stepped in it with Rick Santorum on the Dakotas, I guess without knowing what goes on in Pennsylvania and oil shale. Jim Cramer is having a very, very bad night. He’s been so pompous with every question and he’s been blown out of the park by everybody.

Cain’s tax response to Bartiromo was good and strong. His “visible” point versus the “sneak attaxes” was good. This is a huge plus for his 999 plan.

Bachmann’s point with 47% not paying anything was a good point. “Everybody has to be a part of this tax code.” Another good line for her.

“The disease is spending” line good by Paul, though his lack of emphasis on the code is misguided. Do love the trillion dollar cut idea while losing five departments though.

Romney and Gingrich with great answers on housing. Romney excellent on Frank and Dodd. And they’re right, it’s the economy stupid. Way to go guys. All of these folks are doing fantastic.

“It’s the regulatory world that’s killing America.” – Perry. Great line.

Bachmann’s good answer on Fannie and Freddie. Harwood just way over his head with Gingrich. I mean, waaaaaay over his head.

Cain with great point: “you don’t start there –” to an over matched Steve Leisman. This is an experienced businessman versus an academia nut economist theoretician. No contest.

Huntsman: awful answer on housing – the only bad one so far tonight. Well, that’s why we keep him around I guess.

Everyone on health care was good to great, except Santorum.

Is it just me, or is Maria getting less and less happy on being smacked down? Newt just took her totally apart.

John Harwood obsessed with tying Romney to Obama Care and to working with Democrats. Asked several questions on this — and then cut Romney short when Mitt was going after Harwood’s buddy Obama.

Perry with a decent answer on Caterpillar. Did not take a swipe at Romney even though that’s what Harwood wanted. He did a good job of brushing aside the idea of “working with Democrats.” I love that these candidates are not taking the bait.

Perry painful with Education, Commerce. The third one I can’t sorry. Oops. Indeed. It was painful. OMG. Is this the end? It will be the headline no doubt. Painful.

Cain with a good answer, but he keeps going back to 999 on every question. It is NOT the answer to every question Mr. Cain.

84 minutes in, and finally we hear from Rick Santelli. Poses a tough question to Gingrich. Newt handled it well, naturally. An hour discussion between Santelli and Gingrich would be informative no doubt.

Harwood again, and he seems only to ask questions of Romney. Mitt great with the “link the compensation of bureaucrats” answer. And then Harwood does one of those “show of hands” questions. Did Harwood read Dante? He should.

I like Rick Santelli, but he needs to understand that a question should not be longer than the time allotted for the answer. And why is he asking Huntsman anything?

The student loan question was so stupid. Ron Paul, thank you for saying they got a “poor education.” He really put the little questioner in her place. Paul’s answer was a great manifesto of what happens when government gets into any sector. But of course, then he went back to “the Fed.”

Perry: a decent self-deprecating response to his “lost department.” Good job of ignoring Harwood too, so I give points for that. But it won’t be enough.

Harwood’s “under a Republican governor” question to Cain was stupid. Oh No! It’s not 999 again. Come on Mr. Cain — there is other low hanging fruit here. Mr. Cain, what color is your tie? Answer: 999.

By the way, did Romney look a little “less perfect” and a little older tonight on purpose? You know, some research showing that he is perceived as too smooth? Just a thought.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/11/weak_field_spanks_cnbc_liberals.html#ixzz1dJzkYnjH

Victor Davis Hanson looks at the dismal present and foresees a glorious future.

We are living in an age of such morality tales, though the depressing cycle reminds us that the gloom is hardly fiction or artistry. For those with a little capital there is only a sinking stock market. It seems to wipe out more of their 401(k)s each week, as if each month cancels out yet another year of prior thrift. Near zero interest means any money on deposit is only insurance, not any more a source of income. Millions are trapped in their unsold houses, either underwater or facing an end to any dreams of tapping equity by sale.

And for the greater number without savings? Stagnant GDP, 9.1 unemployment, another $5 trillion in debt, $1.6 trillion annual deficits, and sky-high fuel and food prices have combined to crush any notion of upward mobility. (If in 2004 5.7% unemployment was supposed to mark a “jobless recovery,” what exactly is 9.1% called? If Bush’s average $500 billion deficits over eight years were abhorrent, what must we say of Obama’s average $1.6 trillion over three? Really bad?)

In response, the Obama administration — let me be candid here — seems clueless, overpopulated as it is by policy nerds, academic overachievers, and tenured functionaries (cf. Larry Summers’ “there is no adult in charge”). They tend to flash Ivy League certificates, but otherwise have little record of achievement in the private sector. Officials seem to think that long ago test scores, a now Neolithic nod from an Ivy League professor, or a past prize translates into knowing what makes America run in places like Idaho and southern Michigan.

Yes, I know that Steven Chu is “brilliant” and a Nobel laureate. But that means no more than suggesting that laureate Paul Krugman was right about adding even more trillions to the debt. My neighbors know enough not to quip, as the know-it-all Chu did, that California farms (the most productive in the U.S.) will dry up and blow away, or gas prices should reach European levels, or Americans can’t be trusted to buy the right light bulbs, or a failed Solyndra just needed millions more of taxpayers’ money.

Solyndra and Van Jones are the metaphors of these times, reminding us of the corruption of the very notion of “green.” In the age of Al Gore, it has eroded from a once noble ideal of conservation to a tawdry profit- and job-scam for assorted hucksters and snake-oil salesmen. Without the lofty hype and shake-down, most otherwise would have had to find productive jobs. Tragically, “green” is the new refuge of scoundrels.

But he sees great things ahead:

Quite Exceptional, In Fact

The American Constitution remains singular and ensures a stable form of government of the sort absent in a Russia, China, the Islamic world, and even (or especially) the EU. Yes, I know Obama has mused that democracy is suddenly “messy” and he lamented to the La Razistas that he couldn’t quite enact legislation by fiat. And, yes, the governor of North Carolina, in revolutionary fashion, just wondered why we could not suspend congressional elections for a bit, while former budget director Peter Orszag (did he not get his trillions in “stimulus” from a Democratic Congress before he fled to Citicorp?) now dreams of a way of running around democratic “gridlock.” But for all that sudden liberal lamentation that the noble ends cannot be achieved by any means necessary, our system of government remains. And it will ensure us a stability abjectly absent elsewhere in the world.

Saudi America

Second, even Barack Obama cannot stop the oil and gas industries. Their brilliant new technologies and entrepreneurialism may well turn us into a fuel depot like Saudi Arabia, doubling our proven oil and gas reserves. Soon someone is going to see that our own natural gas can power millions of cars, freeing our foreign policy from Gulf authoritarians. We are poised for an oil boom not seen since the age of Texas and Oklahoma wildcatting. With a friendly new administration and more exploration out West, offshore, in the Gulf and in Alaska to augment the Dakotas oil renaissance, we will soon save hundreds of billions of dollars in imported fuel costs, stop subsidizing our enemies, perhaps help to lower energy prices worldwide, create “millions of new jobs,” and give a larger window of opportunity for solar, batteries, and alternative energies to become more efficient and cost competitive in the free market.

Pressure Is Building

Third, private enterprise is hoarding cash, uncertain over the costs of ObamaCare, in fear of more regulations and higher taxes, stung by “at some point you’ve made enough money” harassing bluster, and still convinced that equally cautious consumers are simply not buying. Yet, the country is still growing, still needs new homes, more food, and more energy. There are few strikes. Americans remain more self-reliant than our competitors. We are not a shrinking nation with the demographic crises of a Europe or Russia. Soon the mounting pressure will be released by a new change in government and we will see a recovery that should have occurred more than two years ago when the recession officially “ended” in June 2009 — only all the more enhanced due to its delay. When Obama leaves office, there will be a sense of psychological release in the business community that will lead to a far greater “stimulus” than printing more money…

A UC Berkeley student group is stirring support and outrage nationwide over its planned bake sale Tuesday that is pricing items according to a buyer’s race, ethnicity and gender.

The satirical event — titled the Increase Diversity Bake Sale — is a reprise of similar cookie sales held on college campuses by Republican clubs over the years. It was scheduled to counter another student-led effort urging Gov. Jerry Brown to sign a bill to allow California’s public universities to consider race, ethnicity and gender in student admissions as long as no preference is given.

Leaders with the Berkeley College Republicans said their intent was to highlight the impropriety of basing decisions on race or gender. The sale, according to a posting on Facebook, will offer five pricing levels, with pastries described as “White/Caucasian” going for $2, “Asian/American American” for $1.50, “Latino/Hispanic” for $1, “Black/African American” for 75 cents, and “Native American” for a quarter. A 25-cent discount will be offered to women.

Ridicule social engineering? How gauche. How retro. How “racist.”

At the heart of the controversy is SB 185, which the student Senate unanimously endorsed earlier this month. Authored by state Sen. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina), the bill would allow the UC and Cal State systems to consider — but not give preference to — applicants’ race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, geographic origin and household income — along with other relevant factors.

“Consider but not give preference to”? Wink wink.

California voters in 1996 approved Proposition 209, which forbids using ethnicity as an element of college admissions decisions. In a legal brief filed recently in support of a federal lawsuit seeking to deem the initiative unconstitutional, Brown cited a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found race could be considered in admissions if it did not involve quotas or predetermined weight in decisions.

The Supreme Court ruled on a Constitutional matter. California has its own specific law banning the practice.

Associated Students President Vishalli Loomba said that while debate over the merits of the legislation was welcome, “I think their tactics are inappropriate. There are a lot of other methods. This method makes students feel uncomfortable and unwelcome on campus.”

Oh, boo hoo. Unwelcome? That’s how campus conservatives feel.