Right Wing Nut House

My latest AIP article is up, albeit with a different title: “CFPA Gone Elitist?” I like the title I gave my piece so there.

But really, if there was ever a case that revealed liberal elitism, snobbery, and their unshakable belief that they know what is best for everybody else because, at bottom, we’re just a bunch of goober chewing, gun toting, Jesus loving, inbred ignoramuses who can’t take care of ourselves, the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency is it:

The point is, Obama’s CFPA will play the role of National Papa by forcing financial services institutions - banks, mortgage companies, brokerage firms - to limit the sale of complicated financial products only to those customers who can grasp their complexity and hence, manage the risk.

This elitist idea is the result of the belief by some liberals that too many consumers were snookered by unscrupulous loan companies and bought mortgages that they should never have purchased. These sub-prime loans had balloon provisions that would kick in after a few years, dramatically increasing their interest rate and with it, their monthly payments.

No doubt some loan sharks did indeed either fail to follow the law and fully disclose all the risks associated with such a loan or simply lied. Laws are already on the books to deal with these criminals who prey on those who are less sophisticated in financial matters than others. Full disclosure laws have been a part of the financial industry for many years and there are clear guidelines regarding the disclosure of all risks and obligations of the consumer.

But that’s just not good enough, say the Daddy Staters. We’re too stupid to know what’s in our best interest and even if we read all the disclosure information, we’re too unsophisticated to understand it.

Enter the CFPA who will sit us down in the government family room not to help us make our own choices in financial matters, but to lay down the law and back it up with a shaving strop.

One of the recommendations to financial institutions who will segregate their products into easy to understand, “vanilla” offerings and more complex instruments, is to give consumers a test to weigh their knowledge of financial matters in order to determine whether they are capable of getting a home loan or purchase some other financial instrument.

Neat, huh?

The problem is that if a financial company sells a more complex offering to a consumer and it goes south, the customer can go running to the CFPA with a complaint or sue. In other words, if you like medical malpractice, you will love the new CFPA.

I would be unable to pass even a beginner’s test on financial matters. And devising a test to measure if a consumer has the knowledge to “understand” the risks involved in buying a product will be an interesting exercise. If they make it too easy, they leave themselves open to trouble. If they make it too hard, they lose a lot of business.

There are other problems with the new agency as well. Read my whole piece.

It is a titanic battle of the witless, a struggle to determine which paranoid, idiotic, nonsensical, and just plain loony tunes conspiracy nutcases take the booby prize for being the biggest threat to rationality and common sense in our politics.

In truth, I wouldn’t want to live off the difference. The fact is, a sizable segment of both the left and right have allowed their hatred for a president to so cloud their judgment and befuddle their minds that they have descended into a pit of irrational idiocy, and are drowning in their own bilious delusions.

There is no need to look very far for explanations. Driven by the internet, which is tailor made for attracting and gathering like minded twits into communities of conspiracy nuts who feed off each other’s flights of ever more spectacular illogical fancies, the Truther-Birther nexus can be found in how our information society has so splintered and fractured our national polity, that offshoots like these are inevitable.

Previous to the widespread use of the internet to get the bulk of one’s news about what’s happening in the world, information was a linear proposition; a straight line could be drawn directly from a small number of newspapers, magazines, and TV stations to the consumer of news. Alternative publications and viewpoints were out there but one had to expend an effort to find them.

While this may have led to a conformity that put enormous power into the hands of a few, unelected editors and publishers, it also prevented the nutcases from getting their hands on the means to widely disseminate their deranged theories and attract the dullards, the less educated, and those who lacked the critical thinking skills to differentiate between logic and logical fallacies.

Today - as was true in the past with Bush and a lesser extent (only because the internet was in its infancy) Clinton, hatred and fear are the driving force behind these irrational notions. Is it ideological or something deeper? Do blogs and talk radio contribute to the fact of their existence or do those media simply fan the flames of an already out of control conflaguration of stupidity?

I don’t like pat answers to those questions as both left and right pretend to have figured out what’s wrong with the other side. “It’s racism and Glenn Beck” screams the left! “It’s Bush hatred” screams the right. While I have no doubt all of that plays a role in what apparently drives perfectly normal (otherwise) people to believe demonstrably stupid things, I believe that at bottom, it has more to do with the times in which we live rather than any specific reason you can point to in order to explain the aberrant thinking.

Some Americans are afraid. They are afraid of crime, of their neighbors, of neighborhoods that are changing to reflect a more diverse society, of a world where globalization is making the future uncertain, and they are afraid of change. Most of us deal with these fears rationally. We buy good locks for our doors. We don’t walk alone at night. We accept the growing diversity of American society as part of our growth as a nation. We put the prospect of losing our job someday out of our minds.

For some, President Obama’s election represents all of those fears rolled up into one big bundle of trouble. He is their fears made flesh and his radical notions of change have some trying desperately to find a way to stop him. Couple that with the relative powerlessness that conservatives feel at this moment in history and the Birther Movement seems inevitable.

For the Truthers, September 11 knocked us off our comfortable moorings that we were a safe port in a sea of violence while the enormity of the attacks carried out by a handful of crazy terrorists didn’t quite balance out the books. Here you have this enormous world-historical event and it was perpetrated by people to which we have little more than feelings of utter contempt. “Towel heads” or “Ragheads” who blew themselves up, believing crazy stuff about going right to heaven for killing us could not possibly have carried off such an enormous attack.

For Democrats - 35% of whom believed in 2007 that George Bush had advance knowledge of the attacks - it was an acceptable way to express their bigotry against Arabs and hatred of Bush by rejecting the notion that he - or any other president ever elected - would have acted swiftly if foreknowledge of such a devastating attack would have presented itself. (Note: Please don’t bring up Roosevelt’s supposed foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor - nonsense that has been royally debunked by a wide variety of historians.)

To acknowledge that President Bush would have tried and prevent the attack rather than allow it to happen (or, in the extreme Truther-created world, actively plan and assist it), would be granting the object of their deranged hatred the benefit of good intentions - an impossibility if you actually believe that Bush was the second coming of Hitler.

Both Birthers and Truthers are trapped by their own fears, unable to break free and see the light of reason because they are in a comfort zone of having contact with like minded conspiracy floggers any time they wish. Alternative explanations - even when that information is compelling enough to satisfy the vast majority - are ignored because the Birther-Truther believes they are privy to the “real facts” and any challenge to their orthodoxy is a result of plots by the enemy (government, the press).

Should it surprise us that so many Republicans believe that Obama wasn’t born here or that so many Democrats believe Bush was evil enough to allow terrorists to attack us despite knowing in advance? Not when believing these theories allows one to see themselves as possessing knowledge that no one else is given the ability to understand. Interpreting the “facts” correctly - being able to connect the dots, no matter how scattered and fanciful they might be - is a way for the conspiracists to feel superior to the rest of us.

And they cloak this air of superiority in what they convince themselves is stellar research and hidden facts, with only those possessing superior insight able to discern the truth.

Richard Hofstadter:

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

As I have written before, this becomes a self-reinforcing feed back loop where the denizens of these conspiracy cultures try and outdo each other in positing ever more fantastic theories about what “really happened,” leaving reason and rationality even further behind.

Birthers who either fake or are taken in by a fake birth certificate of Obama’s
want to believe so badly, that the obvious becomes obscure. Truthers who want to believe in a government plot for 9/11 (or that Bush knew of the attacks), take similar “evidence” as gospel despite scientific findings that contradict it or the bulk of testimony that debunks it. The binds that tie these pathetic people together is their simple inability to accept the facts as the rest of us know them to be. This says more about humanity than it does either conservative or liberal ideology.

Talk radio on the right has pretty much rejected the Birther’s arguments. But they are not guiltless. Their out of control, exaggerated, hyperbolic criticisms of Obama have created a climate where one can believe anything bad about the president. The atmosphere of fear that they are deliberately ginning up to get ratings and audience is contributing in no small way to the Birther phenomenon.

Perhaps some strong statements against the Birther movement by Limbaugh, Hannity, and a few of the bigger names in the business might bring that 28% number down, just as strongly worded criticisms of by the Democratic leadership against Truthers would help dispel at least some of the paranoia on the left about Bush.

But as long as Democratic congressmen give credence to theTruthers while Republican congressmen refuse to categorically come out and say that Obama was born here and is an American citizen, the Birther-Truther problem will be with us to bedevil our politics.

Recently acquired Mark Kotsay avoids the tag of Yankees catcher Jose Posada, who had the ball in his other hand, in the eighth inning of yesterday’s game. The Sox won 14-4.

I have not written about my beloved White Sox this year, sparing most of my regular readers who either have no interest in baseball or the Sox.

The reason for this dearth of postings about my favorite baseball team is quite simple; the White Sox have stunk up the joint this year.

Wildly inconsistent, they can look like contenders for a stretch of 4 or 5 games and then tank for the next 5. Their starting pitching can look like Cooperstown candidates for a week while the bullpen appears to have de-evolved into a bunch of  manic chimpanzees, throwing the ball all over the park. Those roles can be reversed the following week.

Only in the last month or so has the team begun to hit the way they should. But even here, they fail the consistency test, being unable to buy a hit with a man in scoring position one day while turning into a bunch of Ted Williams clutch hitters the next.

It is perplexing in the extreme to see this team fumble, kick, drop, or simply miss routine plays in the field. This is the only thing they have done with any consistency all year . Their defense is so porous, if it were a shirt, it would have been given to “Save the Children” so full of holes it has proven to be.

But today, my Sox find themselves only 1.5 games behind the division leading Detroit Tigers (3 games down in the loss column). The fact is, both Detroit and Minnesota have proven to be as sucky as the Sox so that all three teams are bunched together at the top of the Central Division, waiting for one club to break out and get hot.

That may not happen. None of those three teams have the pitching to dominate other teams over long stretches. Each club has perhaps 3 good starters while the rest are Bozos in cleats. The Sox improved their staff marginally by acquiring former Cy Young Winner Jake Peavy from San Diego for a couple of real good pitching prospects. Ordinarily, this would have fans swooning in anticipation of another divisional flag flying over US Cellular Field.

Alas, Mr. Peavy has been on the disabled list for more than a month with a bad ankle and won’t see the mound at what many of us still defiantly call “Comiskey Park” until late this month - if at all. As former Sox pitcher Jack McDowell pointed out on his blog, that will give Big Jake only 6 starts before the end of the year - hardly enough to make an impact. In fact, GM Kenny Williams said that the Peavy move was done as much for the future as the present.

Williams may not believe the team has much of a chance to win this year either.

Be that as it may, we have the illusion of a pennant race this year anyway. But really, the Sox should have been eliminated after last week’s catastrophic road trip to Detroit and Minnesota that saw the Tigers take 3 out of 4 from the hapless Chicagoans (the Southsiders were ahead in 3 of those games but blew two of them in the last inning), and getting swept three straight in the Baggie Dome in Minneapolis.

But the Baseball Gods have a streak of comedy in them. Immediately after wiping the floor with the Sox, Detroit journeyed to Texas where the resurgent Rangers pummeled them. Thus, the Sox only lost 1 game in the standings while hanging a “Do Not Disturb - Ballplayers Sleeping” sign over the visiting clubhouse in Minnesota.

Their performance during that stretch did not generate any confidence for the 4 game Yankee series that begins the current 10 game homestand. It is a shame that the Yankee-White Sox rivalry has all but disappeared the last few decades. In the 1950’s and early 60’s, it was white hot as the hated New Yorkers went on a stretch between 1949 and 1962 where they won the American League pennant 11 times. Only Cleveland’s win in 1954 and the White Sox triumph in 1959 spoiled that historic, incredible run.

Games between the Yanks and Sox in those days were very intense with the crowds really getting into the action on the field. From 1957 to 1965, the White Sox finished second to the Yankees 3 times - five times a bridesmaid altogether. It seemed in those days before the playoffs where the winner of the 10 team American League went on to the World Series, the pennant was decided those last few days of the season with the hated Yankees winning when they had to and the Sox falling just short.

With the Cubs on the Northside and their record of futility, you wonder why Chicago baseball fans are so schizophrenic?

But today, the White Sox have an opportunity to do something they haven’t done since 1964; sweep a 4 game series from the Yankees. That’s because the previous games of this series that have been won by the Sox have seen the South Siders punish the Yankee pitching staff for 27 runs in three contests, chewing up and spitting out almost every hurler the New Yorkers have put out there. It has been an offensive exhibition that the Sox were known for in previous seasons but has happened all too infrequently this year.

Leading the charge has been the Kiddie Korps of Jayson Nix, Chris Goetz, and the probably American League Rookie of the Year Gordon Beckham who is tearing up the league at age 23. All three (and 26 year old second year man Alexie Ramirez) give the Sox something they haven’t had in a decade - speed at the top and bottom of the lineup. Ramirez twisted his ankle in Minnesota and missed the first three games of the series although he may be on the field today. But the rest of the kids are hitting very well while not embarrassing themselves too badly in the field.

Two other bright spots for the Sox of late has been the stellar play of outfielders Scott Posednik and Carlos Quentin. Posednik joined the team in May after being out of baseball for a few weeks, cut by the Rockies. Pods had been a big part of the World Championship team in 2005 but had been traded after a couple of injury plagued years following that glory.

Now hitting over .300, running the bases like a teenager, the 32 year old former all star seems to have found a Fountain of Youth.

And Quentin’s return from a painful bout with planter fasciets that has kept him out of the lineup until last week’s road trip, is finally starting to bear fruit as the slugger appears to slowly be getting his stroke back. How long he will stay in the field before he re-injures himself is anyone’s guess. If we’re lucky, he’ll stay healthy. But Quentin’s history of constant nagging injury would seem to make that a fool’s hope.

The dog days of summer are officially upon us. Between now and the end of August, the heat on the field and the constant pressure of the pennant race will take its toll on the players as the every game starts to take on a significance not seen in the early part of the season. One thing is sure. Unless the White Sox can find some magic that will help them play more consistently both at the plate and in the field, this season will almost certainly be a bad memory when the calendar next turns in September.

This is highly speculative but you’ve probably heard by now that a couple of Alaska liberal bloggers “broke” the story about Sarah Palin’s supposed impending divorce from her husband.

It sure sounded solid coming from Alaska Report News:

AlaskaReport has learned today that Todd Palin and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin are to divorce. Multiple sources in Wasilla and Anchorage (including a former Palin staffer) have confirmed the split.

A National Enquirer story exposing previous affairs on both sides led to a deterioration of their marriage and the stress from that led to Palin’s resignation as governor of Alaska last week.

The Palins were noticeably not speaking to each other for most of last Sunday’s resignation speech in Fairbanks. Sarah ditched Todd (MSNBC) right after the speech and left without him. Sarah removed her wedding ring a couple of weeks ago.

Sarah has recently purchased land in Montana and is considering moving the family there. Sarah Palin is originally from Idaho.

Very interesting. But not true, according to Stacy McCain who evidently talked directly to Palin or someone who was authorized to speak on her behalf:

“Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd? I may be just a renegade hockey mom, but I’m not blind!”
– SARAH PALIN

Yes, that is her OFFICIAL reponse, which I got via phone at 5:35 this afternoon. Take that to the bank.

I might add that Alaska Report has a about as good a record as Gawker in breaking news - which is better than some MSM outlets but far from perfect. And Gryphen, who apparently started the whole divorce rumor, is even worse.

Nevertheless, once both those sites hit the internet with the story, the blog feeding frenzy on the left began, with a couple of MSM outlets joining in.

As someone who doesn’t consider himself a journalist but who has been around newsrooms for many years, let me just say that if this had come across my desk, I would have smelled a set up. It’s too pat, the pieces fit too nicely together (an “explanation” for why she resigned) not to raise alarms with real journalists. So I think there is at least the possibility, that either someone in the Palin camp with an ax to grind with the media - or, less likely, Palin herself - whispered a few words to a birdie they were sure would get the word to people who would publish it.

The definition of “pwn” is “1. An act of dominating an opponent, and 2. Great, ingenious; applied to methods and objects.” If this was a set up by the Palin camp, it worked magnificently. Now, most of the lefty blogosphere has egg on their face.

Several Alaska bloggers  hounded the former Alaskan governor with bogus ethics complaints while she was in office - Alaska Report being one of them. Could a little payback be at play here?

Stranger things have happened.

Via Glenn Reynolds, this piece in Technology Review on a new twist to the Fermi Paradox makes the case that there may be an incredibly small number of intelligent, space faring civilizations in the entire universe - perhaps as few as 10:

The absence of alien probes visiting the solar system places severe limits on the number of advanced civilizations that could be exploring the galaxy.

The Fermi paradox focuses on the existence of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy. If these civilizations are out there–and many analyses suggest the galaxy should be teeming with life–why haven’t we seen evidence of them?

Today Carlos Cotta and Álvaro Morales from the University of Malaga in Spain add another angle to the discussion. One consideration is the speed at which a sufficiently advanced civilization could colonize the galaxy. Various analyses suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, a colonization wave could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy. Others have calculated that it may be closer to 13 billion years, which may explain why we have yet to spot extraterrestrials.

Cotta and Morales take a different tack by studying how automated probes sent ahead of the colonization could explore the galaxy. Obviously, this could advance much faster than the colonization wave front. The scenario involves a civilization sending out eight probes, each equipped with smaller subprobes for studying the regions that the host probe visits.

This is not a new scenario. One previous calculation suggests that in about 300 millions years, those eight probes could explore just 4 percent of the galaxy. The question that Cotta and Morales ask is this: what if several advanced civilizations were exploring the galaxy at the same time? Surely, if enough advanced civilizations were exploring simultaneously, one of their probes would end up visiting the solar system. So that fact we haven’t seen one places a limit on how many civilizations can be out there.

This is not only fascinating stuff, but a lot of fun as well. Next to politics, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been a favorite subject of mine since childhood. It parallels my fascination with space but, due to the speculative nature of the subject matter, forces me to stretch my thinking beyond facts and embrace a world of the mind unlike no other of which I am familiar. When contemplating the unimaginable distances and time periods that are necessary to give ETI serious thought, you exercise a part of the brain that is usually dormant - at least in rational laymen with an abiding interest in science but not the aptitude to get it down by the numbers.

Fermi’s Paradox, first uttered by Enrico Fermi at a lunch with several Los Alamos scientists in 1949, takes the statistical probability that there must be other intelligent species in the universe due to sheer numbers of possible planets, and asks an obvious question: So, where are they? Why haven’t they visited us? Why is there no physical evidence of them ever having been here?

Sorry, but as reliable as eyewitness accounts have been, there is no physical evidence that we’ve ever been visited - and that includes idiotic and insulting questions regarding who built the pyramids or carved the Easter Island statues. We humans are a very clever species and hardly need aliens to help us overcome small technical problems like how to haul a 10 ton block of stone the 4 miles from the Nile River to the Valley of Kings. It is insulting to humans to ascribe our ability to overcome these obstacles to anything except our own, native intelligence.

As for other “evidence,” no reputable scientist has ever come forth with physical evidence that could withstand the scrutiny of their peers. And even eyewitness accounts cannot confirm that what they report came from another planet. In short, as a scientist, Fermi was asking a perfectly legitimate question. We have no evidence of ET’s probes, or spaceships, or any other alien artifact despite the statistics that point to a universe that should be teeming with intelligent life.

And beyond that, there is the idea that a truly advanced civilization would probably require unlimited amounts of energy and would tap every atom and erg they could possibly get out of their own sun. Freeman Dyson speculated that such a race of beings would enclose their entire sun - perhaps their entire solar system - in a sphere in order to capture every atom of power possible (”Dyson Sphere”). The sphere would so alter the radiation signature of the star that it would be detected by even our crude by contrast instruments.

(A great treatment of a Dyson Sphere in pop culture was a Star Trek Next Gen episode that featured Scotty being trapped in a transporter loop for 70 years after becoming stranded on the surface of the sphere.)

A civilization that is advanced enough might attempt to re-engineer their entire galaxy. In Carl Sagan’s book Contact, Ellie Arroway sees a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy “eating” stars in copious amounts. It turns out that the aliens who brought her to this particular planet were trying to alter the mass of the galaxy to keep if from flying apart - a nice trick if you can do it. Again, statistics say there should be civilizations capable of such a feat but so far, we have been unable to detect such an obvious beacon of intelligence elsewhere.

So, where are they? This one should send chills down your spine:

Another possibility is that intelligent species beyond a certain point of technological capability will destroy other intelligence as it appears. The idea that someone, or something, is destroying intelligent life in the universe has been well explored in science fiction[35] and scientific literature.[3] A species might undertake such extermination out of expansionist motives, paranoia, or simple aggression. In 1981, cosmologist Edward Harrison argued that such behavior would be an act of prudence: an intelligent species that has overcome its own self-destructive tendencies might view any other species bent on galactic expansion as a kind of virus.[36]

This hypothesis requires at least one civilization to have arisen in the past, and the first civilization would not have faced this problem.[37] However, it could still be that Earth is alone now. Like exploration, the extermination of other civilizations might be carried out with self-replicating spacecraft. Under such a scenario,[35] even if a civilization that created such machines were to disappear, the probes could outlive their creators, destroying civilizations far into the future.

If true, this argument reduces the number of visible civilizations in two ways - by destroying some civilizations, and forcing all others to remain quiet, under fear of discovery. (see They choose not to interact with us) as we have seen no signs of them.

So are we being incredibly stupid in sending out signals into the void announcing our presence as an intelligent species? Some scientists have actually advanced that argument and indeed, common sense caution might be the better part of valor in this case. I can just imagine these thousands, perhaps millions of civilizations out there who are cowering in fear of some Borg-like race of bloodthirsty aliens. Very kewl. But not likely.

What is much more likely is that Einstein is right, that light speed cannot be exceeded, and that intelligent species are reduced to building multi-generational ships if they wish to explore. The biggest problem with that idea is one of technological development on the home planet outrunning the technology that built the ship originally.

Suppose we built a ship that could travel at one tenth the speed of light. We send them off to Barnards Star 10 light years away, a trip that theoretically would take 100 years (relativistic effects on time don’t become obvious unless you are traveling above 90% the speed of light).

But let’s say 10 years after the ship leaves earth, we build a vehicle that can travel at 1/5 the speed of light (2/10ths). That ship would pass the first ship in about 40 years, in which case you have expended an enormous amount of effort to build the first ship basically for nothing.

Much more likely is the probe idea outlined in the article linked above. It would take much less effort to deploy probes to search the galaxy for that “needle in a haystack.” Even given the time frame allowed - 50 million years or more - a truly advanced civilization would no doubt have overcome many mundane problems that we deal with like ecological disasters, or perhaps even death itself.

Time is an artificial construct anyway. To beings so advanced, it may even be meaningless.

The probability is, we can’t detect the aliens because we don’t even know what we’re supposed to be looking for. And the thing that always bothers me about pop culture treatment of ET is that just because the probability of life on other planets is fairly good (we may even find life in our own solar system before too long), it doesn’t necessarily follow that intelligent life - self aware, cognizant abilities, etc.) would arise.

There is even a question as to whether complex life forms beyond viruses and bacteria could ever develop elsewhere except in extremely rare cases. But intelligence itself is not where evolution on any planet would be required to end up. That’s because intelligence is simply one of a million adaptations made by living creatures, no more surprising or necessary than a giraffe’s long neck or a cheetah’s speed. It eventually made us into a super-predator, but that was only after millions of years.

So despite what the statistics tell us about life elsewhere, the Fermi Paradox might indeed apply. At any given time in the existence of the universe, perhaps no more than a handful of intelligent beings exist who have the industrial know how, engineering skills, and scientific knowledge to leave their home planet and go exploring. It certainly would answer the question “Where are they,” although it will never put the issue to rest as long as we continue to reach for the stars ourselves.

Michael Moynihan has a post up at Reason’s Hit and Run that identifies at least one conservative “leader” who isn’t a talk radio host, or some other pop conservative polemicist.

After excoriating Republicans for spending like Dutch social democrats (and elevating halfwits to important leadership positions), I was asked recently by a radio host to name a Republican qualified to be “leader of the party.” The pickings are slim, but there are a few exceptionally bright, market-oriented contenders out there. So I plugged, with appropriate obsequiousness, the always impressive Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan. When I sat down with Ryan last month to discuss Obama’s education policy, he quoted Hayek, talked at length about handing out Rand books to staffers, and discussed his previous life as an economic analyst. Such conversations should be de rigueur with members of the House Budget Committee, but I suspect Ryan is the only one that could name an Austrian economist.

Further proof that the Republican Party needs more Paul Ryans: Yesterday, he beat up on MSNBC host Carlos Watson and The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel regarding the “public option” and why Congress shouldn’t pass bills it hasn’t read. Imagine such a performance from, say, Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann:

Indeed, Ryan dispatches vanden Heuval with the greatest of ease:

Prior to hearing the Wisconsin congressman at CPAC, I didn’t know much about the guy. Michael Barone notes in The Almanac of American Politics that Ryan is pretty much a mainstream Republican, although more of a foreign policy centrist. He is a reliable conservative on fiscal matters and toes a pretty conservative line on social issues.

But this fellow is a thinker - a rarity among all politicians and especially among many legislators who call themselves conservatives today.

An example from his CPAC speech:

Our greatest leaders - from Lincoln to Reagan - succeeded because they anchored conservative thinking and policies in the founding principles of our nation. They did so not because of mere “history” or “tradition” - but because they understood the need to revitalize the unchanging truths that inspired the birth of America.

Let those truths inspire us again! Let them re-ignite the sparks of hope for a new generation of Americans who love freedom!

Without enduring principles we get “change” but no direction.

Guided by the founding principles we can direct “change” toward the ends that have made America the envy of the world: Individual freedom … growing prosperity … and equal rights secured by constitutional self-government.

America’s Founders did not discover ideas no one ever heard of. Their great achievement was to build a constitution of equality and liberty upon a foundation of self-evident truths as old as the beginning of mankind and as new as tomorrow.

What are those truths?

First is that the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” are the only sure touchstone of right and wrong … for individuals as well as societies.

A second is that all human beings are created with equal natural rights - the rights to live … to be free … to acquire property - and other means to fulfill our God-given potential for happiness.

Third, and most important for conservatives: The great purpose of government is to secure these natural rights: protecting every person’s life, liberty, and freedom to pursue happiness is the great and only mission of a government true to our founding.

There are very few congressmen who speak so eloquently of First Principles. Now, he frames those principles in a quasi-religious context, which is acceptable to me as long as it goes to fundamental truths espoused by the Founders who, like all natural rights supporters at the time, believed man was created by God and that these rights were simply self-evident manifestations of God’s desires.

His CPAC speech was necessarily more political than philosphical. But read this speech he gave at a Hudson Institute symposium on “Making Conservatism Credible Again:”

“Conservatism” at its best, defends the standards and qualities which define “people of character.” The original source for these standards is the Western tradition of civilization, rooted in reason and faith, stretching back thousands of years. The tradition as a whole affirms the high dignity, rights, and obligations of the individual human person. One of the glories of Western civilization was to break out of the mythological past which saw only groups and classes, ranked and organized by collectivist governments. Before the Western tradition began in ancient Israel and classical Greece, the individual person as a subject of rights was simply unknown.

Nowhere was the Western tradition epitomized more memorably than in our Declaration of Independence. By “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” all human beings are created equal, not in height, or skills, or knowledge, or color, or other nonessentials, but equal in certain inalienable rights – to live, to be free, and to fulfill their best individual potential, including the right to the “material” such as property needed to do this. Each individual is unique and possesses rights and dignity. There are no group or collective rights in the Declaration. Nor does basic human equality imply “equal result.” It means “equal opportunity”: every person has a right not to be prevented from pursuing happiness, from developing his or her potential. The results should differ from one to another because “justice” or “fairness” is giving each individual what each has earned or merited. That’s what fairness is.

The great conservative purpose of government is to secure these natural rights under popular consent. Protecting every person’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness should be the great and only mission of legitimate government.

After a stirring defense of the Adam Smith “invisible hand,” Ryan make a thoughtful attempt to unite libertarian and social conservatives by pointing to common ground:

A “libertarian” who wants limited government should embrace the means to his freedom: thriving mediating institutions that create the moral preconditions for economic markets and choice. A “social issues” conservative with a zeal for righteousness should insist on a free market economy to supply the material needs for families, schools, and churches that inspire moral and spiritual life. In a nutshell, the notion of separating the social from the economic issues is a false choice. They stem from the same root.

Take that Huckabee and all of you “crunchy cons.”

I tried to think of some other elected conservative who is making this kind of honest attempt to bring the factions back together and came up empty. Nor can I think of too many conservative legislators who quote Hayek, Mises, and Adam Smith, while speaking the language of social conservatives and espousing a decidedly libertarian economic viewpoint.

But he voted for TARP I which makes him poison to many in the base of the Republican party. I was disappointed so many conservatives voted for the execrable legislation except we have to understand the context. Everyone was being told that if this money didn’t get to the banks right away, there would be a financial meltdown that could lead to a panic which would plunge us into a worldwide, catastrophic depression. They were being told this by a president and Treasury secretary of their own party. They had no clue that the money would be used for everything but buying up those bad assets that were weighing down the balance sheets of the big banks. In my book, they were acting as responsible lawmakers.

For that reason, I am inclined to cut Ryan and others some slack for their vote on TARP I. And his subsequent statements and actions have shown Ryan to be an innovative and creative legislator. His alternative budget would have cut taxes to stimulate the economy the right way and done it in a revenue neutral manner. Just think where we’d be today if his plan had been followed.

I’m not the first to proclaim Ryan a future conservative leader. But I think he needs more exposure than what he’s been getting from conservatives on the internet as well as the pop-conservatives on talk radio. Elevating his stature would seem to be a smart thing to do given the man’s base intelligence and good ideas on a variety of public concerns. His criticisms of Obama have been reasonable, fact based, and without the hyperbole associated with more rabid conservatives in Congress. That too, is a plus in my book.

At age 39, he will be on the national stage for a long time to come. He may or may not run for higher office some day. But he will be an important voice for conservatives regardless of where his political career takes him.

Megan McCardle has a disturbing interview with Paul Campos, the author of The Obesity Myth (republished as The Diet Myth) that smashes the idea that obese people are necessarily more of a drain on health care resources than thinner people.

McCardle:

With health care in the news, everyone’s looking for magic bullets to save money. Obesity seems to be a growing favorite: wouldn’t it be great if we could make everyone look like Jennifer Anniston, and be cheaper to treat? There are a lot of holes in this theory–the morbidly obese are very sick, but die young, while lower levels of overweight/obesity aren’t so well correlated with poor health. But still, the idea’s power seems to be growing every day.

This week, Health Affairs published a new study showing that–quel surprise!–obesity accounts for an ever growing share of our health care costs. They put the number at about 10%. So I decided to ask Paul Campos, the author of The Obesity Myth, what he thought. The book, which everyone should read, argues that the health benefits of losing weight are largely imaginary; that we are using “health” to advance our class bias in favor of thin people, particularly thin women.

Following are some selected cuts from the interview that should open you eyes about the efficacy of studies touted by government health professionals as well as the difference between being thin and being healthy.

On trying to control health care costs by reducing the number of obese Americans:

It’s a terrible idea on all sorts of levels. There are three big problems with attempting to control health care costs by reducing so-called “obesity.” First, it’s a fake problem. Second, the solutions for the problem are non-existent, even assuming the problem existed. Third, focusing on making Americans thinner diverts resources from real public health issues.

Is being fat really being unhealthy?

The correlations between higher weight and greater health risk are weak except at statistical extremes. The extent to which those correlations are causal is poorly established. There is literally not a shred of evidence that turning fat people into thin people improves their health. And the reason there’s no evidence is that there’s no way to do it.

So saying “let’s improve health by turning fat people into thin people” is every bit as irrational as saying “let’s improve health by turning men into women or old people into young people”. Actually it’s a lot crazier, because there actually are significant health differences between men and women and the old and the young — much more so than between the fat and the thin.

Campos calls this obsession in the public health community over obesity “a moral panic” and debunks the statistics:

OK, the CDC honchos and the authors of this study you referenced are in hysterics because the obesity rate, so-called, has roughly doubled in the last 30 years. But let’s consider what that actually means.

Adding to the absurdity of all this, people with BMIs in the mid to high 20s actually have the best overall health and longest life expectancy — ,more so than those in the so-called “normal” BMI range.

Debunking diets:

If you put people on starvation diets, which is what these methods do, of course you’ll get huge amounts of weight loss. Then most or all of it will be gained back, which among other things is a recipe for congestive heart failure. I’d love to do a “reality” show on the contestants on shows like The Biggest Loser three years down the road. But that would probably be a little too much reality.

Gastric bypass is the most radical method available for weight loss, and it basically doesn’t work. Everything else is even less successful, though usually not quite as dangerous.

Finally, increasing government coercion to get obese people to lose weight.

It’s the classic pattern of moral panics. As public concern about the damage being done to the fabric of society by the folk devils increases, increasingly intense demands are made on public officials to “do something” about the crisis, usually by eliminating the folk devils.

I mean, there’s no better established empirical proposition in medical science that we don’t know how to make people thinner. But apparently this proposition is too disturbing to consider, even though it’s about as well established as that cigarettes cause lung cancer. So all these proposals about improving public health by making people thinner are completely crazy. They are as non-sensical as anything being proposed by public officials in our culture right now, which is saying something.

There is perhaps no part of government that bases its policies on flawed research, unproven assumptions, and is driven by politics more than the public health sector. From the Alar scare that cost apple growers $100 million to the myth that salt causes high blood pressure, our public health bureaucrats have not been as helpful as they should be in contributing to the health of Americans.

Beyond the question of how effective they are, there is the growing realization that altering personal behavior to conform to what some health professionals believe to be necessary for good health results in a loss of freedom for the individual to manage their own lives without interference from the government.

The excuse to intervene in such personal decisions as what we should eat or drink will be even more prevalent once national health care is a reality. The logic that eating certain foods or partaking in some behaviors results in an individual using more than one’s fair share of scarce health resources will be more than enough to tax, to ban, to regulate, to dictate the kinds of foods that should be available to us. It may even result in penalties if we fail to abide by these strictures, such as not treating people whose behaviors or diets are self destructive.

When I was 280 lbs (42 lbs ago), I felt tired all the time, caught colds often, and found it very hard to get around. I’m still about 50lbs overweight but am losing the weight without dieting. It’s a slow process - no more than 2-3 lbs a month, sometimes none at all. But I’m eating better while still enjoying all the foods I ate when I was 280. I figure that there are so few true pleasures here on earth - one of them being good food - that to shortchange yourself, even at the expense of your weight and ultimate life expectancy, isn’t worth it. Better to live well than make yourself miserable by dieting all the time. If that results in a few fewer years on this planet, so be it.

This may not be your attitude and that’s fine. That’s your choice. But the point is, it should be our choice, not the governments. This is the same mindset that forced auto manufacturers to make it impossible to start a car without buckling up. Is buckling up a smart thing to do? Sure. But the idea that the government is forcing you into a behavior - no matter how much money it saves (no evidence it does due to different injuries suffered while wearing a belt), - that isn’t and shouldn’t be the point.

Where does it stop? At what point do government diktats on health or controlling behavior become so onerous that the very idea of individual responsibility and personal freedom is destroyed? I am not that much of a libertarian to believe that ingesting anything we please - including drugs that are currently banned or illegal - should be the standard under which we measure our personal freedom.

But government comes perilously close to unnecessary intervention in our personal lives when it determines for itself what is “healthy” and what is not, and then tries to impose that idea on us by reducing our freedom to decide for ourselves.

To call the hysterically exaggerated, paranoid rantings of some talk radio personalities and conservative bloggers “whining,” as David Frum does in a series of now 4 articles on conservative despair, is being generous. These overwrought ninnies are the flip side of lefty loons who spouted about Bush turning the US into a Nazi state.

I wrote dozens (perhaps hundreds) of posts about this culture of hysteria on the left during the Bush years with many on the right wholeheartedly agreeing with me. I posed the question more than once, “If I really believed the country was descending into a fascist dictatorship, don’t you think that most of us on the right would be the first on the front lines to combat this evil?” Perhaps it’s time to turn that question around and ask if our freedoms really are being lost, what are you doing sitting at home writing spittle flecked rants about the dangers of dictatorship rather than taking your rifle and going out to battle this scourge?

So once again, I take my rationalist pen in hand and attempt to inject some reason into critiques of the Obama administration and debunk the hysterics who speak of the Republic as if it were in the past tense - or headed there full speed ahead.

Positing the notion that we are marching toward a socialist dictatorship or are losing our freedoms under Obama is just not supported by the facts. And Frum wrote in his second “Whine” post exactly what I have been writing and thinking since Obama took office:

The extremity of conservative pessimism attacks the foundational rules of the American political game. Since 1865, the United States has enjoyed amazing political stability. Americans have achieved this stability via tried and tested rules of the road, including the unquestioning acceptance of election results, an acknowledgement of the basic good faith of the other political party, and an absolute acceptance that people of all points of view are committed to the shared constitutional system.

If I lived in a country in imminent danger of a Bolshevik or Fascist seizure of power, I’d be a cowardly fool if I failed to use every means to prevent it, including violence if need be. If it were true that our political opponents wanted to impose tyranny on the United States – if (as Rush Limbaugh said the other day) a vote for the other party was a vote for “totalitarianism, dungeons, and torture,” then what patriot could possibly abide a political defeat?

Happily, none of those things are true. As wrong and harmful as the Obama administration’s plans are, the administration is playing by the rules of the game. To agitate people into thinking otherwise is to corrode the foundations of the American constitutional regime.

It is also to act and look like sore losers. If America has been sliding gently but irresistibly into soft despotism, where were all the valiant defenders of liberty before November of 2008? Soft despotism begins to look less like a profound sociological trend, more like undulations of the sine curve: It’s despotism when we lose, freedom when we win. We should have more confidence in the people and the country than this. We should also have more charity to our political opponents – who after all are contending with hideous problems bequeathed to them by … by … well suddenly we Republicans cannot seem to remember who preceded Barack Obama in office.

Frum is picking on Mark Levin whose book Liberty and Tyranny has sold 900,000 copies. Levin had a few choice words in reply but frankly, the Great One should know better. Frum’s point about conservatives being relatively sanguine when Bush passed the prescription drug bill, as well as No Child Left Behind is spot on. Sure, there was some grumbling and name calling, but Levin and other pop conservatives never spoke in apocalyptic tones about the massive intrusion of the government into the education of our children nor did many righties see the expansion of Medicare as the forerunner to today’s attempt to take over the health insurance industry.

This is what I’ve been trying to get across to those few conservatives who read this blog and are open to argument. Barack Obama is not a communist, or a socialist, or a fascist, or an anarchist. He is a child of the New Left, and most if not all of his agenda reflects ideas and programs that have been floating around liberal salons, think tanks, and symposiums for nearly 40 years, if not longer.

These ideas weren’t socialist then and they aren’t socialist now. Taking over the auto industry to save the jobs of his union supporters is stupid economics, not a slippery slope to communism. Buying preferred stock in big banks is government strong arming, not the end of capitalism in America. Spending and taxing us until we are a second rate economic power is bad governance, not the prelude to an attempt by Obama to destroy the country in order to set up a dictatorship.

I refuse to accept the liberal critique that this kind of opposition to Obama is largely race-based. That’s absurd on its face. Surely there is a small minority who harbor hate for Obama’s skin color, but this kind of paranoia and hysteria about Obama’s agenda is being fed by the need of many to be part of a great drama where our heroes on the right must save the Republic from its enemies. In short, the Levins, Limbaughs, and the rest of the pop conservative brigade who are standing up and screaming “Fire” in a crowded theater because some idiot lit a cigarette, are turning their listeners into a bunch of 11 year old drama queens.

It’s not enough that our political opponents have ideas that are wrong headed, illogical, resistant to reason, and profligate with the people’s money. These ideas must be evil, insidious, and transcendentally malignant - all the better so that the self-appointed watchdogs of democracy can ride to the rescue and save us from the Evil Lord.

It is, at bottom, an adolescent critique of the Obama administration because, as Frum points out, it substitutes emotion for reason, hyperbole for measured responses, and wildly accusatory rhetoric for a pragmatic approach to combating bad ideas.

Politics is not an exercise in self-expression. It’s an exercise in persuasion. The targets of that persuasion are not the already persuaded but the as yet unpersuaded. It is their concerns that need to be understand, their questions answered, their values appealed to. Harry and Louise did not denounce Clintoncare as fascism. They explained how it would harm the people it purported to help, and they made their case in calm commonsense terms and tone.

In today’s debate, conservatives could show that a public option will invite private employers to end their coverage and dump their employees into the government plan. Americans are practical people, and they’ll respond to practical sense. Because Americans start with a bias in favor of free enterprise, they’ll respond especially well to sensible conservative arguments. But if we elevate everything to an immediate 11 on the Spinal Tap sound amplifier, we’ll lose, and not just elections, but the deepest values we are trying to defend via elections.

In this year 2009, it often seems that liberals offer policies and conservatives offer emotions. True, the liberals offer bad policies and conservatives offer understandable or anyway pardonable emotions. Rick Santelli expressed something real and true in his famous CNBC outburst.

I think Frum is a little harsh with Levin, whose book - what I’ve read of it - is much more than a dark, emotional screed against Obama. There is an elegant defense of the free market as well as a passionate portrayal of conservatism as the antidote to Obama’s government overreach. But Levin can’t leave it at that and be successful. Talk radio is all about eliciting an emotional response from the listener, and urging conservatives to counter Obama with reason and pragmatism rather than gut busting anger and hyperbolic fear mongering cannot be done and still remain atop the talk radio ziggurat.

If I seem a little harsh with some of my fellow conservatives who see Gorgons and dragons behind every tree in Washington it is because the perception is gaining ground - fed by a media eager to falsely portray all conservatives as unbalanced weirdos - that we can’t be trusted to run the country because we are too angry, too emotional to govern dispassionately. I know that a majority of conservatives are not into the kind of over the top nuttiness exhibited by many on the right. This moronic cacophony is especially prevelant on the web where these memes are endlessly recycled and regurgitated in a kind of perverse feed back loop. It has become a contest to see which blogger or commenter can outdo the last one in spouting a riot of nonsense about Obama’s dark plans to cancel elections, round up opponents, even turn the country over to the Muslims.

Obama Derangement Syndrome is well established now. It is up to those conservatives who are more interested in returning to power than in despairing over how the United States has become a socialist country, to rationally critique the abominable policies of this administration, and regain the high ground in the debate.

Otherwise, we will continue to wander in a dark, depressing wilderness - one of our own making.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Jazz Shaw and Fausta Wertz for a discussion of the birther movement and its impact on the GOP. We’ll also look at the prospects for health care reform.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

My latest piece is up at AIP and its about how health care reform reminds me a lot of my ex-wife:

I think it would be extremely helpful if Americans began to think of President Obama’s health care reform proposals the same way I think of my first wife. The more you know about it, the less you like it.

And the fact that it lacks common sense, spends too much of your money, makes decisions that would be better left in your hands, and is attractive on the outside while being insidiously rotten on the inside is also reminiscent of my former beloved, although at least my ex-amour was a great dancer and a decent cook. Otherwise, I would recommend a Vegas divorce for this monstrosity of a bill.

One of the major selling points that the president used for his national health care reform was that it would lower insurance premiums substantially. He promised on his campaign web site, in the second presidential debate, and in the third debate:

“If you have health insurance, then you don’t have to do anything. If you’ve got health insurance through your employer, you can keep your health insurance, keep your choice of doctor, keep your plan. … And we estimate we can cut the average family’s premium by about $2,500 per year.”

We Americans can be a pretty cynical lot when it comes to believing politicians so it is a wonder that we actually fell for this little prevarication from Candidate Obama.

We know now that the prospects of keeping your insurance depends on how willing you are to overspend for it. That’s because Candidate Obama’s promise to lower your premiums by $2500 are about as believable as my ex-wife’s explanation for why she spent $1500 on a dress. “But it was on sale…” just doesn’t cut it.

Supporters will probably tell me I’m all wet, that we will save money on our premiums, that we won’t be forced on to the government plan, that costs will come down simply by government waving a magic wand,…

Sorry, but you can spin what’s in the bill all you want and it won’t change the practical effect of what is implied in adopting many of the measures in the bill. This is what supporters refuse to address.

Is there anything in the bill that would require you to drop your insurance that you have now? No - but the practical effect would be to make it prohibitively expensive and force you to choose less coverage for more money - unless you are eligible for the subsidy that doesn’t cover you if you’re part of an employer based insurance plan.

Faulty numbers, insidious requirements, stealth mandates - its all there.

Do I have a viable alternative? No, I don’t. But others do and, as I have said before, it is criminally negligent of the Democrats to present this monstrosity of a bill as the only alternative - that there’s no other game in town. Baucus is looking at some of those alternatives as I write this, although without including a public option in his compromise, it is doubtful that Obama will sign it much less the liberals in the House support it.

I have to believe there is a third way - somewhere. There has got to be a combination out there of public and private that will cover the uninsured and those with pre-existing conditions, bring down costs intelligently, while keeping the best of the private health care system in place, and not cost us $1.5 trillion I refuse to believe that this is not possible - even in our current partisan atmosphere.

I agree we cannot go on as we are now. Those who say we don’t need reform are crazy. Rising health care costs will bankrupt us in 20 years. But to support this bill is to support catastrophe for our health care system as well as for our fiscal situation. Don’t believe me? Ask other Democrats who are the ones standing in the way of passing this bill, not Republicans.

Don’t tell me this is as good as we can do “realistically.” I don’t believe that for a moment. They are big boys and girls in the White House and Capitol Hill. If things are as bad as they say - and they are, except it’s not quite the “emergency” we are being led to believe - then the judgment of the people who believe that this is a crucial issue will be severe if nothing is done.

And, I daresay, the blame will go to both parties. The GOP cannot be accused of “obstructionism” - not with the gigantic Democratic majorities in both chambers. But they will be blamed for not offering solid alternatives. Republicans should be out there every day touting their own plan. Instead, they have decided to treat it as a PR gimmick rather than a serious legislative initiative.

And I will repeat - Obama is not taking the lead on this as he should. He is not being realistic in his criticisms, nor is he doing much besides jawboning from the sidelines. His one effort at compromise - the health commission - was shot down by the CBO as being meaningless in controlling costs. Face it- the guy is an empty suit; all talk and no action.

In that respect, if health care reform is dropped or goes down to defeat, President Obama will be as much to blame as anyone.