Right Wing Nut House

I love that line from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The context, in case you are unaware of this pop culture reference, is here.

No, I’m not going anywhere. But your generous donations will certainly allow me to buy a lot of fish — and pay off some bills as well. Not that I’m a big fish eater, mind you. Sue will tell you that I turn up my nose to just about any fish except catfish and Brook Trout. Bass is pretty good (if I catch it myself) and Lake Michigan Pike perch, prepared at some restaurants in Chicago, is divine.

But as a weekly or even monthly repast, I forgo the pleasure. I have, it pains me to say, rather ordinary taste in food - beef, pork, chicken, and pasta filling out the menu at the Moran manse for the most part.

I realize that limiting donations by going through PayPal prevented some of you from contributing. I fully understand, having heard many horror stories from people about their “Conflict Resolution Center.” If there is another online credit card acceptance company you prefer, please let me know.

And I also realize that these “Blog Blegs” get on some of your nerves. Perhaps I should have taken this gentleman’s advice and sold my positions on issues.

From the comments to my post asking for donations:

All I am willing to do is wish you luck.

You publish too many falsehoods for me to donate.

And the health care lies really piss me off as my family is in the pre existing condition category.

But I’ll make you a deal. Publish the truth about heath care reform and I’ll gladly donate.

I must say I was tempted to take the guy up on his bribe. And why stop there? I could have posted a list of issues along with the going rate for betraying my principles. Something like this:

Write nice things about President Obama - $500
Support Cap and Trade - $300
Support Government Financed Health Care - $250
Write nice things about Democrats - $200
Write nice things about liberals - $1,000,000

Hey! My principles don’t come cheap, ya know!

At any rate, thanks from the bottom of my heart for your generosity. Sue, who left June 27, won’t be back until after August 14th so the extra cash was desperately needed and most appreciated. It always amazes me how generous people are in this country - even when times are tough.

Thanks again.

Rick Moran
Proprietor

As I have said many times over the nearly 5 years I’ve been blogging, I am not a journalist. I have no desire to be a journalist, to be thought of as a journalist, to think like a journalist, or ever become a journalist in the future.

It’s not that I hate journalists. With two brothers in the profession, I greatly admire their work and the work of many of their colleagues. I am perhaps a little more sensitive to the difficulties in bringing the news to the public than some, while a little harsher than others when laziness, or stupidity lead to erroneous or horribly biased stories.

I am a firm believer that much of what the right sees as bias in mainstream journalism is simple laziness on the part of reporters. It takes an effort to be as objective as possible and many journalists either fail to try or simply don’t want to be bothered with it. This is due to an underlying arrogance in many of the more prestigious newsrooms that feeds egos too full of self-importance to recognize how they are betraying their craft by allowing personal biases or animus to color the presentation of the news.

I believe that this explains why a solid, experienced journalist like Walter Cronkite, who passed away yesterday at the age of 92, may have become the “most trusted man in America” but who ultimately discarded his life’s work to become an arbiter rather than a purveyor of news.

The distinction is important. As Managing Editor at CBS, it was Cronkite who helped choose the stories, shaped them, had a big say in when they would be slotted on the newscast, and ultimately, used his on-air personae to impart an emotional context to what was being reported.

This, despite the fact that Cronkite was a newsman’s newsman. He worked in city newsrooms, and for the wire service UPI where he became a famous war correspondent, risking his life several times to get the story. When Ed Murrow called in 1950, Cronkite moved to the best news team on television and began anchoring important events like the political conventions. His coverage blew away NBC’s Huntley and Brinkley and he became a star.

Cronkite took over the anchor chair from Douglas Edwards in 1962 and the change from journalist to “Uncle Walter” was not immediate. But over the years, as TV news on the “Big Three” networks grew in importance, Cronkite’s editorial decisions - whether he intended to or not - not only shaped the nation’s agenda, but also subtly gave the news a “point of view.” Racism is bad. Viet Nam is wrong. The Space Program is good and can do nothing wrong.

We are used to this kind of “drama” today where the news perhaps doesn’t take sides overtly but nevertheless contains stories that through visuals and copy, impart the “correct” way for the audience to interpret the news. This is news as show biz not as political advocacy. In order to capture eyeballs for the 3 or 4 minutes most people will watch cable news at a time, editors spice the stories with built in conflict — good guys, bad guys, heroes, and villains. In many respects, they play to the ingrained biases of their audience rather than creating their own.

Print media isn’t much different. Except for the New York Times, which one can hardly make a case in defending their overt advocacy for liberals and Democrats, there is a better balance at many newspapers in reporting stories. But the way the story is usually told also contains many of the same elements of drama, and leading the reader by the nose to a particular conclusion. This makes for more interesting reading. It hardly makes for good journalism.

The tale told by two disasters reveals the difference between journalism and show biz. The reporting of the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and the coverage of Katrina in 2005 bookend two eras in journalism where the primary function of the reporter changed from news gatherer to newsmaker. With only phone lines that connected the country in 1963, the big three networks did as good a job as was possible in rounding up eyewitnesses, switching to their Dallas affiliate (where a young Dan Rather got noticed by CBS brass), running archival Kennedy footage, interviewing the rich and powerful in Washington and New York, doing the man in the street gig, and generally scrambling like hell to fill air time suddenly denuded of commercials.

It was hit and miss coverage - and it was riveting. The salient point was that the networks never lost sight of the story - Kennedy’s death. Sometimes it was trivial. At times, sublime. But the reporters and anchors allowed the natural drama of Kennedy’s death to drive coverage.

Contrast that with Katrina coverage in 2005. Despite satellites, cell phones, lightweight portable cameras, and a lot of “gee whiz” technology, what was the Katrina coverage about? What drove it?

It certainly wasn’t about the victims. It wasn’t about the effect of the storm on New Orleans. Nor was it about how the city was responding to the disaster.

The storyline of Katrina coverage - even on Fox News - was the lack of response by the Bush Administration. Every news item - from the rumors of babies being raped in the Superdome to the looting - was placed in the context of a Bush failure. Villains were made out of Director Brown and Bush. Heroes were made out of Mayor Nagin for his emoting on national television and sometimes the reporters themselves who never failed to pat their colleagues on the back for enduring such wretched working conditions.

The difference between the two eras in journalism were giants like Cronkite who created a whole new job for themselves; the National Sage. In this capacity, the anchors decided which stories were important, which should be ignored, and how to shape the news so that people were informed “the right way.” The key is that they took this responsibility on to themselves. While very cognizant of their influence, they sought to use it to promote their idea of the “greater good.” This was not done as overtly as it is today, but it had a greater impact because so many more people were watching.

It was perhaps the nature of the medium that this should have been so. But to have the kind of “news as drama” filter down to newspapers is one of the primary reasons for their decline today. People used to read newspapers to find out what was going on, not how to think of an issue. Perhaps they figure if they wanted that kind of news reporting, they may as well watch the cable nets. At least they have film and attractive people to read the news to them.

There is no denying Walter Cronkite was a great man. But for what he and others did to the craft of journalism, he should be criticized, not commended today.

When campaigning for president, Barack Obama went out of his way to reassure the American people that his health care plan wouldn’t require Americans who are happy with their insurance now, to give it up in favor of a government run insurance plan.

He was emphatic on this point, as his campaign website highlighted the promise: (PDF)

Q. I like my current insurance coverage. Will I have to change plans?

A. No, you will not have to change plans. For those who have insurance now, nothing will change under the Obama plan – except that you will pay less. Obama’s plan will save a typical family up to $2,500 on premiums by bringing the health care system into the 21st century: cutting waste, improving technology, expanding coverage to all Americans, and paying for some high-cost cases.

As recently as yesterday, he reiterated the promise:

At a rally in Holmdel, New Jersey, today, President Obama continued making a promise about health care reform that he has acknowledged isn’t literally true.

“Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you,” the president told residents of the Garden State. “First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.”

But last month, as the president acknowledged during a press conference, he doesn’t literally mean that you are guaranteed to be able to keep your health care plan, and your doctor, if and when health care reform passes.

“When I say ‘If you have your plan and you like it,… or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don’t have to change plans,’” the president said after we asked him about this, “what I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform.”

Importantly, the government might create circumstances – say, a public health care option that is less expensive since profit is not a concern and overhead is lower – where you might find your business forcing you into that public plan.

This is not only misleading, it is an outright falsehood:

PRESIDENT Obama promises that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it,” even after he reforms our health-care system. That’s untrue. The bills now before Congress would force you to switch to a managed-care plan with limits on your access to specialists and tests.

Two main bills are being rushed through Congress with the goal of combining them into a finished product by August. Under either, a new government bureaucracy will select health plans that it considers in your best interest, and you will have to enroll in one of these “qualified plans.” If you now get your plan through work, your employer has a five-year “grace period” to switch you into a qualified plan. If you buy your own insurance, you’ll have less time.

And as soon as anything changes in your contract — such as a change in copays or deductibles, which many insurers change every year — you’ll have to move into a qualified plan instead (House bill, p. 16-17).

When you file your taxes, if you can’t prove to the IRS that you are in a qualified plan, you’ll be fined thousands of dollars — as much as the average cost of a health plan for your family size — and then automatically enrolled in a randomly selected plan (House bill, p. 167-168).

It’s one thing to require that people getting government assistance tolerate managed care, but the legislation limits you to a managed-care plan even if you and your employer are footing the bill (Senate bill, p. 57-58). The goal is to reduce everyone’s consumption of health care and to ensure that people have the same health-care experience, regardless of ability to pay.

One begins to wonder if the president and the Democrats are capable of telling the truth about anything. Their lies about cap and trade not costing jobs and not adding substantially to American’s energy bills is disproven by how the program works in Europe where thousands of dollars have been added to the household energy tab and millions of jobs have been lost with precious few “green jobs” created in their place.

And here we are being told that we shouldn’t even read this health care bill being crafted in secrecy (with precious little input from the White House), that we should just trust the Democrats and the president on this.

To Obama supporters, I have a question: If your man had run on the kind of health care bill emerging from Congress, do you think he would have been elected? If you think so, you are out of touch with ordinary Americans. Being forced into a government run insurance plan is not what the American people had in mind when they elected Barack Obama. They expected cheaper insurance with the same benefits - just as he promised. What they are going to get - much to their shock - is the prospect of losing benefits and paying more for their medical insurance once they are forced to choose among the several plans that will be offered by the government.

They also didn’t expect a massive addition to the federal budget. That CBO report will be ignored by Democrats despite the fact that it gives the lie to their claims that going the public route will save money.

The bills that are emerging from both the House and the Senate are too complex, too expensive, rely too much on pie in the sky forecasts of both participation and cost, and point the way to a system where the vast majority of Americans will have the bare minimum of coverage for as much or more money than they are spending now.

And despite what Obama and the Democrats say, this is not the only way to reform the health care industry. It is the most expensive, least efficient, and most liberal way to do it. But it is a lie to say there are no alternatives to these bills that are cheaper, more efficient in that they utilize resources more effectively (bigger bang for the buck), and would accomplish the same goals that Democrats claim they want to achieve.

After all, the Obama bill will not cover everyone. After 10 years there will still be 17 million people without health insurance. And certainly, there are better ways to pay for this than raising taxes on the middle class - which will be the only alternative once Democrats admit they were lying about the other revenue generators in the bill. Medicare savings of the size and scope being postulated have no realistic chance of being realized.

Soak the rich if you want. But that will only get you so far. To go the rest of the way and fund the entire measure, tax increases (they will be called “fees” and “surcharges”) will be necessary. Even that won’t be enough. The CBO estimate of a little over a trillion dollars may be wishful thinking. Others have figured the cost going over $1.5 trillion and beyond.

Name one entitlement program that has ever met budget expectations. There isn’t one - they have all been more expensive than anyone realized when they were created. Why should something as gargantuan as national health insurance be any different?

This is a disastrous measure that will suck the life out of our health care system while adding hundreds of billions to our deficit. And the helluva it is, the bill will pass based on lies and deceit of what it’s true costs are and what it will actually do for the average American.

I was planning on doing a grand retrospective for next Tuesday’s blog post on the 40th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon. I still may do something but Buzz Aldrin wrote a piece in the Washington Post today that demands a response and I will incorporate some of my thoughts on manned space flight.

Aldrin wants America to set its sights on Mars for the “next big thing” that NASA should accomplish. I would love for the US to mount a mission to the Red Planet, but I also love rationality and realism. Unfortunately, the two don’t mesh very well at this point for a wide variety of reasons, and it appears that calling for a manned mission to Mars and being thought of as a rational human being won’t happen for the foreseeable future.

Aldrin, in short, is full of it.

On the spring morning in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh set off alone across the Atlantic Ocean, only a handful of explorer-adventurers were capable of even attempting the feat. Many had tried before Lindbergh’s successful flight, but all had failed and many lost their lives in the process. Most people then thought transatlantic travel was an impossible dream. But 40 years later, 20,000 people a day were safely flying the same route that the “Lone Eagle” had voyaged. Transatlantic flight had become routine.

Comparing Lindbergh’s 29 hour flight across the Atlantic with “homesteading Mars” is bat sh*t loony. Even using our Moon program as a comparison is far off the mark. If we knew then what we know today about the extraordinary risks taken by NASA to beat the Russians to the moon - putting the lives of the astronauts in extreme danger - I doubt if public support for the Apollo program would have been maintained long enough to make it.

NASA engineers figured that the astronauts going on a mission to the moon had a one in five chance of dying. There were just too many things that could go wrong. Most worrisome was the lift off from the moon by the LEM. If the engine didn’t fire, the astronauts would have been stranded. There was no back-up to that engine.

But beyond the political calculations of pushing on despite the risks, there was the practical consideration that these missions to the moon were basically stunts. They served no scientific purpose save bringing back a few rocks for analysis. We ended up spending more than $120 billion in today’s dollars for a couple of TV shows.

Aldrin proposes a much different mission - infinitely more complicated, with risks that would make Apollo look like a walk in the park. They key is systems reliability and how to keep vital parts of the spacecraft and habitat on Mars from breaking down and killing everybody. The number of disasters that could befall a Mars mission are so numerous that the thought of insuring anyone who would volunteer for such a mission would give an actuarial a heart attack.

NASA can’t even get its act together to get back to the moon and Aldrin wants these same guys to plan for a mission to Mars? NASA did not invent the cost overrun but they have certainly perfected the practice. The Ares 1 booster that will carry the crew vehicle (a capsule not dissimilar to Apollo) named Orion into space was supposed to have been tested by now. In fact, it hasn’t even gotten off the drawing board. It’s costs have already risen from $28 billion to $40 billion - and it won’t become operational until at least 2015. With the Shuttles being retired next year, that leaves a 5 year gap in our capability to launch humans to the space station. We will be hitching rides with the Russians until then.

If Aldrin were advocating a Mars mission in 40 or 50 years, I would be more inclined to think well of him. Instead, he thinks we should concentrate on getting to Mars in the next two decades. It is one thing to be a “visionary” about going to Mars. But it is quite another to ignore the reality of NASA’s bungling when it comes to manned flight and the risks associated with traveling 40 million miles to satisfy our curiosity about whether there is any life on Mars.

How much would such a plan cost?

Instead, I propose a new Unified Space Vision, a plan to ensure American space leadership for the 21st century. It wouldn’t require building new rockets from scratch, as current plans do, and it would make maximum use of the capabilities we have without breaking the bank. It is a reasonable and affordable plan — if we again think in visionary terms.

On television and in movies, “Star Trek” showed what could be achieved when we dared to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” In real life, I’ve traveled that path, and I know that with the right goal and support from most Americans, we can boldly go, again.

How much, Buzz? No guess except it would be “reasonable and affordable.” Jesus! We can’t afford national health care but we can afford a trip to Mars? And I would love to hear Aldrin’s definition of “reasonable and affordable.” Even using rockets in our stable now (none capable of providing escape velocity for a manned spacecraft from earth’s gravitational field) and given NASA’s history, it is foolish to believe that the last estimate of designing a trip to Mars ($100 billion in 1991 although some peg the real number at closer to $400 billion) can be beaten by today’s ossified NASA bureaucracy.

And using Star Trek as an example of what humans are capable may excite a lot of geeks out there but as far as forming the basis for a rational examination of whether we should go to Mars, I would expect something a little more from a guy who walked on the moon.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to overcome for a Mars mission would be the effect of space travel in Zero G on the human body. Almost immediately, the calcium in our bones starts to break down, our heart muscle weakens, other vital organs start to shut down, and our muscles begin to atrophy. Four to six hours of exercise a day helps some but on a very long duration flight, no one knows if the astronauts will ever be able to set foot on earth again. Can we solve a problem like that in two decades? Sure, if we want to spend the money. And Aldrin offers no compelling reason for that whatsoever.

Finally, it’s clear Aldrin knows little about what motivates the American people:

Mobilizing the space program to focus on a human colony on Mars while at the same time helping our international partners explore the moon on their own would galvanize public support for space exploration and provide a cause to inspire America’s young students. Mars exploration would renew our space industry by opening up technology development to all players, not just the traditional big aerospace contractors. If we avoided the pitfall of aiming solely for the moon, we could be on Mars by the 60th anniversary year of our Apollo 11 flight.

“Galvanize public support for space exploration?” What public? Which planet? The public has lost confidence in NASA and the thought of handing them a blank check to go to Mars is probably not uppermost in American’s minds.

And Aldrin is not much of a visionary if he is unaware that private, commercial spaceflight will soon supplant NASA as the primary way in which humans will go into space. By the end of the next decade, it is possible that some private company will have already gone to the moon in order to exploit some of its resources, beating NASA back there by a couple of years. But I think once private enterprise gets into the human space flight business, NASA will see the light and concentrate on what it is very good at; building robots to explore the universe. Their success in that field has been astonishing, adding immeasurably to our knowledge of the cosmos.

No, Buzz. Your ideas border on crackpot. Not because they would be technologically unfeasible but because in your dream world, the US government is as flush with cash as it was back in the 1960’s when the Apollo program thrilled us all with trips to the moon. The money isn’t there. The will isn’t there. And besides…

It’s not like Mars is going anywhere, right? It will still be there 50 years from now when Space, Inc. sends a mission to Mars to discover if it would be worth it to exploit the red planet for commercial reasons. This is what has driven exploration on earth. And it no doubt will drive exploration to the planets for the foreseeable future.

We have heard this same tale for 3 years or more; Iran is just months away from having a workable bomb - if they chose to make one.

This time it’s German intelligence who is making the claim - a claim an official spokesman shot down almost immediately according to this Reuters article:

Germany’s foreign intelligence agency BND denied a report in a magazine on Wednesday that its experts believe Iran is capable of producing and testing an atomic bomb within six months. The report, in German weekly Stern, cited BND experts as saying Iran had mastered the enrichment technology necessary to make a bomb and had enough centrifuges to make weaponised uranium.

It quoted one expert at the agency as saying: “If they wanted to, they could detonate an atomic bomb in half a year’s time.”

But a BND spokesman said the article did not reflect the view of the agency, which is that Iran would not be able to produce an atomic bomb for years.

“We are talking about several years not several months,” the spokesman said.

Iran says its nuclear programme is for electricity generation to help it export more of its oil and gas, but Western countries suspect it of trying to make a nuclear bomb.

The U.N. Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions on Tehran for defying its demands to suspend uranium enrichment.

Some analysts say Iran may be close to having the required material for producing a bomb, but most say the weaponisation process would then take one to two years due to technical and political hurdles.

That last is pure wishful thinking. It is more than possible Iran has a working bomb design, probably purchased from Pakistan’s “Father of the Atomic Bomb” A.Q. Khan whose black market nuclear shop helped North Korea, Libya, and other nation’s nuclear programs. Khan was a big supplier of technical knowledge to the Iranians as well as  hardware during the 1990’s and there are indications from a seized laptop and other documents that Iran does indeed possess a bomb design.

The real problem Iran has is in keeping the weaponization process secret. Right now, they have more than 100 lbs of enriched uranium. It is only enriched to a level of 5% which is suitable for nuclear reactors but far short of the 85-90% necessary for bomb making. The access they have granted the IAEA inspectors has been grudging but has been enough for the IAEA to be reasonably certain they are not enriching their uranium to bomb making levels - at least at facilities we are aware of.

Jeffrey Hart recently pointed out that Iran is in the process of speeding up the process of building and making operational centrifuges. I daresay that if they were contemplating making any deal at all with Obama, they might show a little good faith by slowing down or stopping the process of bringing those centrifuges online.Rather, this would seem to indicate a desire to push their program along faster - the ultimate goal of which is to install 50,000 centrifuges at their main enrichment plant at Nantanz.

This is still not evidence that Iran is building a bomb. But if they were contemplating such action, vastly increasing the number of working centrifuges would certainly help them along.

But there is one technical hurdle that Iran would need to overcome before becoming a significant threat; warhead design for their ever growing missile count. Most experts believe it will take at least two years for Iran to marry their bomb to one of their missiles - perhaps even longer given their inexperience in the field. But on the other hand, they don’t need a missile to explode the bomb which is probably small enough to fit in the trunk of a car. That kind of threat keeps Israeli leaders awake at night.

The CIA dismisses the notion of a secret military facility where the additional enrichment can take place but they too are guessing. Even the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran which stated that the mullahs abandoned their bomb program in 2003 acknowledged the existence of a secret military program until that date. It makes one wonder if such facilities could be reactivated and no one - including the IAEA - would be any the wiser.

The fact is, the entire reason for UN sanctions was that Iran has been less than forthcoming about many aspects of its nuclear program and the security council wants straight answers from the mullahs before they lift the milquetoast restrictions they’ve placed on the Iranian economy. Our intelligence people are still telling the president that Iran won’t have a bomb until 2015.

This won’t happen because Iran sees their nuclear program as a matter of national pride - as do most of the Iranian people. Even regime change might not stop the nuclear program in Iran which is something to contemplate before undertaking any such action.

It is extraordinarily doubtful the US will take any military action against Iran to prevent it from building a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, almost the entire world agrees that a nuke in the hands of Iran would be very bad - bad for the region, bad for Israel, and bad for the west.

Obviously, Israel has not decided 100% to go after the nuclear infrastructure of Iran itself. They realize full well that any attack on Iran by them would be seen by the Iranians as an attack by the United States. And there is no doubt that US officials have been very blunt with the Israelis about our opposition to such an attack.

But if Prime Minister Netanyahu receives intelligence that indicates the Iranians are on the cusp of possessing a nuke, no consequences to the Israel-US relationship would stay his hand from launching a military operation. Otherwise, the kind of cloudy, dimly perceived intel that the Germans are leaking doesn’t change the situation at all. It certainly isn’t enough for the Israelis to act on which at this point, would seem to be all that matters when it comes to war and peace.

The German intel guess is probably right. But whether the Iranians can keep it secret if they choose to boost the enrichment of their uranium is another question.

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 Sister Toldjah and Jimmy Bise to look at several hot issues, including cap and tax, health care, Sotomayor, and the president’s tanking poll numbers.

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.

Please scroll down for newer material. This post will stay on top until you all beg for mercy and ransom yourselves by paying me to take this offending blog bleg down.

Two years ago, I said that I would never hold another fundraiser for this blog, that I would either make a living online or quit.

Call me a liar because the situation I am in today was unforeseen. I am indeed making my living online - barely. Loss of revenue from PJ Media ads being pulled as well as a cut in salary at one of my jobs has really put us up against a wall. Sue is not working as she is dealing with a family emergency in Ohio.

So that’s it. No long winded pleas. No sob stories. No flowery rhetoric. No trying to make you feel guilty about reading this site everyday for free (well, maybe that last was another little fib, eh?).

Times are tough for all of us. If you can’t give, I understand. If you can, please be generous.

Sorry but all I can offer is PayPal for a donation portal. Amazon discontinued their donation program.

Please click the link below. Thanks for your generosity.

Rick Moran
Proprietor

It occurred to me this morning that I have not written a baseball post this year, a happenstance of which I’m sure most of you are profoundly grateful. No matter. I know full well that Americans have fallen out of love with the game and I could care less. For those few of us left who see baseball as more than a game, more than one more endless play for our leisure time dollars, we are charged with a sacred mission; keep alive that love in our breasts until the world is right side up again and baseball is restored to its proper place in the sports firmament.

In this respect, we are like Ray Bradbury’s old ones who, in Fahrenheit 451, memorize a classic to save it from the firemen, lovingly passing the words in the book from one generation to the next, hoping for the day when it will be safe to read Chaucer, Melville, Shakespeare, and Dickinson again. For us baseball fans - older, more conservative generally, and respectful of America’s past - there is the recognition that it is a classic game that achieved it zenith in popularity just as America was making its transition from a pastoral land to an urban industrial place. It was this change that perhaps condemned baseball to eventual decline although it was certainly hastened along by other, more destructive alterations.

Some consider the designated hitter rule to be emblematic of baseball’s self destructive tendencies. I wouldn’t go quite as far as all that. The DH was put in the game at a time when pitcher’s routinely won 20 games with ERA’s under 2.0 and baseball was a much more nuanced game. It is my opinion that owners misdiagnosed the problem back then, believing that the fans were leaving because of the low scoring games. The problem with the game was much more fundamental than that and no amount of tinkering would have prevented baseball from plummeting from the heights it occupied in the 50’s and 60’s.

The fact is, America was changing. And since baseball is a game built on tradition and history, it couldn’t change with the times. We tend to forget that until the NFL broke through in the late 1960’s with TV audiences to rival baseball’s, there was no other game in town - or the nation. Other sports were seen as diversions to mark the time until Spring training began in February. As popular as football is today, it will never capture the heart and soul of the country as baseball did in the decades immediately preceding and immediately after World War II.

No, Baseball couldn’t change. The game itself is draped in tradition, in memory. There is no other game seen through the prism of remembrance quite like baseball. Whether sitting on the back porch in 1950’s and 60’s suburbia listening to the hissing, static filled play-by-play on radio while the fireflies blinked to announce their presence and the sweet smell of Jasmine filled the nostrils with the scent of summer, of family, of a shared passion. Or perhaps in the city you sat on the front stoop with every other house on the block blaring out the call of the game, a broadcast legend conducting a city wide symphony of sound, mothers with babies, fathers with sons, and the young, the old, laughing, talking, arguing, loving. A neighborhood, a community united around a passion so intense that enmities were temporarily forgotten as “the boys” or “the bums” performed extraordinary feats of effortless athleticism with both the workmanlike attitude of the blue collar hero and the pizazz of a circus performer.

Yes, that America existed at one time. And while memory may skew some of the details and gloss over much of the unseemly realities from those times, there is no doubt that baseball for much of the country occupied a privileged position in the hearts and minds of the people. In a time before the total saturation of sports, before ubiquitous replays, before free agency made players into hobos, before steroids turned the players into Frankenstein monsters, before rape trials and murder trials and divorces and scandal after scandal there was the pitcher, the batter, and the lovely dance of strategy and possibility. To bunt or not to bunt. To swing away or hit and run. To pitch out, or put the rotation” play on, or simply to play “straight up.” This was actually part of the national conversation when baseball was king.

But America stands still for no one. Certainly not for a game that used to be known as “The National Pastime.” For that is what one did when a game was in progress; pass the time in other pursuits while the game itself functioned as the background to daily life. While we sat on the porch listening to the game, as a family we would be laughing, joking, carrying on, reading, knitting - all the things that families do together that cements the bonds of love and affection we hold so dear and make life itself fill up with joy and satisfaction. Of course, utter silence would reign when some pivotal point in the game was occurring. But otherwise, baseball was important for what it meant as a shared experience for the family, for the neighborhood, and for the larger community in which we lived.

It is Midsummer here in the Midwest. The corn has surpassed the “elephant’s eye” measurement and is almost ready for the harvest. Soon, little farmer’s stands will start springing up along Route 23 where you can buy corn picked within the hour, along with other crops that are so fresh and crisp you expect them to wiggle out of the paper bag in which the nice old lady or cute young teenage girl carefully packs your purchases. There may be no better meal on planet earth than any barbecued meat and fresh corn on the cob.

The temperature outside is at its usual July apogee, bearing down on 95 degrees with humidity that makes it feel as if a Swedish bath might be preferable. To escape the heat, Native Americans built steam rooms, probably figuring if they were going to be uncomfortably hot and damp, they may as well make a ritual out of it.

But there are some modern inventions that are not to be lightly dismissed. Central air conditioning is a fine example of the practical marrying with the sublime to create a luxury almost everyone can afford. And tonight, as I watch today’s incarnations of baseball heroes (or what passes for heroes in these cynical times), sitting in my air conditioned house, and watching the game on my 57″ HDTV (another good example of genius marrying up with necessity - you don’t know what you missed if you’ve never had an HD TV), I will remember All-Star games past and the now ancient Gods who walked among us; Mantle, Berra, Mays, Williams, Musial. Most of them I saw at the end of their careers. But that didn’t dim their luster or make them any less divine in my eyes.

The fireflies will be out early as they are this time of year. The owl will begin hooting at regular intervals while the as yet unseen hawk will screech out his warning from high above somewhere. Both owl and hawk help control the bunny rabbit population that exploded last year until they were overrunning the place. But nature, in its wisdom and in its need for balance, sent us the old barn owl last August and the hawk not long after. We don’t have a bunny rabbit problem anymore.

This is baseball’s all-star break, one of the hallowed traditions of summer and usually marks the period halfway between Independence Day and Labor Day. The older I get, the sadder I am that summer is half gone and soon - all too soon - the bitter Midwestern winter will arrive and baseball, the owl, the hawk, and everything I am enjoying this night will be but a distant memory.

But as any good baseball fan can assure you - there’s always next year.

An interesting piece in yesterday’s Boston Globe by Drake Bennett on some youthful (so to speak) conservatives who are trying to inject some new blood into the right’s intellectual firmament that lately has seemed to be suffering from some kind of iron deficiency according to liberal critics.

To be sure, the idea that conservatism is “dead” (Tanenhaus), or “exhausted” (Borosage) has been a favorite hobby horse of liberals for a few years. But for purposes of dealing with the reality of what is happening with conservatism, I prefer the notion that we have simply lost our way - politically, intellectually, and as a social nexus.

Tanenhaus (who actually had some relevant thoughts about the too ideological nature of the conservative “movement”) believes that conservatism’s decline is actually a boon to the right because the philosophical framework had been hijacked by decidedly un-conservative forces.

This is actually recognized by a couple of Bennett’s up and comers:

Luigi Zingales says it’s time for conservatives to fall out of love with businesses, and fall back in love with the free market. In an argument that’s begun to catch the ear of a few conservative thinkers, Zingales suggests that it’s often business itself, rather than the government, that the market needs protection from.

“I’m very strongly pro-market and very strongly against business,” says the Italian-born economist, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Separating the support of free markets from the long Republican alliance with business isn’t easy, says Zingales, but it’s important. As he and colleague Raghuram Rajan laid out in their 2003 book, “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists,” powerful companies, given the chance, work hand-in-glove with government officials to craft laws and regulations that protect them while limiting competition and transparency.

Many conservatives have been sensing this for years but either through cowardice or simple practical politics, refused to recognize the fact that corporations have become as supportive of statism as any far left Democrat you can name. In this way, they stifle competition, give themselves unfair advantage through regulation, and give money to candidates from both parties so that they can mitigate the effects of unfriendly legislation - usually through the earmark process but sometimes by their congressional lackey slipping an amendment into a bill in the dead of night when no one is noticing that favors them to the exclusion of others.

The Bush administration invited corporate lobbyists into government in order to regulate the businesses they most recently were employed by. Mr. Fox, meet Mrs. Hen. Zingales believes such a set up contributed to the financial meltdown last fall as financial corporations developed rules and regulations favorable to themselves and not necessarily good for regulating their activities.

The Zingales critique is not new but some of his solutions should raise eyebrows on the right, like helping “workers” instead of businesses during he current downturn and dispensing any stimulus based on an algorithmic solution rather than the kind of cronyism we have seen to date.

Four years ago I would have wondered what Zingales was smoking in order to call himself a conservative and not support business. But the Democratic takeover of congress should have convinced anyone on the right that big business cared little about markets and more about being able to control government for their individual aggrandizement. The latest example: Wal-Mart hopping aboard the Obamacare train before it left the station. By supporting the public option and the insurance mandate for companies to supply health insurance to their workers, Wal-Mart gets to influence the final package so that it is tailored more to their needs.

Bennett also explores the efficacy of the blogosphere in acting as a feeder program for conservative ideas - a function reserved in the past for the few conservative mags like NR and Human Events as well as some think tanks like AEI and Heritage. He uses as an example, the Atlantic’s excellent Megan McCardle as someone who has slipped into the role of gatekeeper and facilitator of conservative ideas:

“[Blogging] is decreasing the power of being part of the feeder system and feeder schools, and of being part of the ecosystem, which I certainly wasn’t,” says Megan McArdle.

McArdle, whose politics make her more a libertarian than a classic conservative, is one of the most prominent voices in the political blogosphere. Also an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, she came to both journalism and blogging somewhat sideways, after working at a series of failed Internet start-ups and going to business school.

[...]

McArdle and bloggers like her, in other words, have created their own intellectual ecosystem. William F. Buckley was widely admired for his determination and ability to bring a diversity of conservative voices into National Review, and similarly, McArdle’s blog is among the best at organizing the cacophony of the political blogosphere into something closer to a conversation. Blog posts on the Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination or the outlines of the stimulus package alternate with links to the insights of artificial-intelligence expert Jim Manzi, who writes on science and environmental policy, or Daniel Larison, a politically minded scholar of Byzantine history.

For all the connections she creates, McArdle is an often vehement disagreer as well, and a believer in the blogosphere’s power to kill off wrongheaded arguments on the way to something new and important. “It can take a long time,” she says, “but bad ideas do tend to die.”

No, McArdle is not a conservative in the classic sense but her blog is one of the best at collating right of center ideas and disbursing them around the internet. Her own analysis of economics is the best “plain English” explanations you can find - certainly better than any MSM business section writer and surpassing the Wall Street Journal by plenty. She has a first class mind and an excellent sense of being able to cut through the chaff and find the essence of an idea. A rare bird indeed.

Bennett hightlighted a couple of other “new” conservative thinkers but the only other one I was interested in is Reihan Salam, a former research assistant for David Brooks and someone whose writings have influenced me over the last few months.

It’s hard to peg Salam as a true “man of the right” for many ideological conservatives today. That’s because he is not in favor of repealing the Great Society and the New Deal.

He and I came to the same conclusion independently of one another; that a more pragmatic, realistic conservatism is necessary for political success; that conservatives should embrace government in order to reform it and make it as conservative as is practically possible.

If big government is necessary, Salam asks, and can even help create a society more agreeable to conservatives, then what should it be doing? Drawing in part on the work of scholars such as Wilcox, Salam and Douthat craft a vision of a government that is activist in a different way, putting priority on stability and responsibility, along with opportunity. They push for child-care subsidies, market-friendly healthcare reform, more affordable housing, and for wage subsidies to boost the incomes of poor young men and make them more eligible for marriage and stable fatherhood.

“The idea is, let’s actually reduce the scope of government in some areas, where it’s kind of pernicious, but let’s increase its role in some areas, insofar as increasing the role can actually increase freedom,” Salam says.

Under the Obama administration, Salam has continued to press the case for big-government conservativism in articles and as a blogger for both the National Review and the online Daily Beast.

Salam was an early Sarah Palin supporter which should give anyone pause about accusing him of being anything other than a pragmatic conservative. His argument is the same I have been making for many months on this site; the road back for conservatism is not through the ideological terrorists who have set themselves up as arbiters of conservative dogma, condemning those they determine to have strayed from their extraordinarily narrow minded and confining definition of conservatism.

Rather, it is through advocating the reasoned and pragmatic application of conservative principles to government as it exists today that will bring the right out of the darkness. And a couple of the conservatives mentioned in Bennett’s article will probably be leading the way.

By the way, that may be the first article I’ve read on conservatism in a while that made no mention of Ronald Reagan. Many ideological conservatives have deified Reagan while failing to recognize where The Gipper’s true genius lay.

Ronald Reagan did not create a conservative government during his 8 years in office. Government grew substantially (although at a slower rate than the previous decade) during his two terms as president. Neither did Reagan always stand fast on his principles as the 1986 tax increase proved - the largest tax increase in history at the time. He also made several other compromises including cutting deals on social security and numerous budget items.

When one considers that he ignored the vital principle of not negotiating with terrorists when he exchanged arms for hostages, it is difficult to understand why conservatives today can say that they wish contemporary politicians were “more like Reagan” in adhering to principled stands on issues in Congress.

Selective memory when it comes to Reagan and his actual governance gets in the way of returning to a more pragmatic conservatism that The Gipper supported in practice, even though his rhetoric sometimes belied his realistic approach to governing.

Ronald Reagan was a pragmatic ideologue who tried to make government as conservative as was possible during his time in office. Striving but falling far short of the kind of government those who invoke his name so reverently today envision as “true” conservative government. This continuously angered the conservative purists in and out of government - a fact long forgotten by those who see the historical Reagan as a civic saint and who believe conservative politicians should emulate everything from his personae to his agenda in order to find success at the polls.

The conservative mentioned in Bennett’s article - along with a few others like Conor Friedersdorf, Ross Douthat, (who collaborated with Salam in writing a book about how the right can make a comeback) and because he’d probably feel bad if I left him out, David Frum - are on the cusp of the new media’s attempt to recalibrate conservatism so that it reflects a more dynamic, and pragmatic, reality.

The ideologues dismiss their ideas at their own peril.

When the “Torture Memos” were released a couple of months ago, President Obama took what I thought was the correct course; acknowledge the episode in our history, condemn it, pledge that it won’t happen again, and move on into the future:

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence.

I still believe this is exactly the correct course of action, albeit with one caveat; investigate this “painful chapter in our history” so we can discover how this happened.

It is obvious to any rational, thinking, fair minded individual that the Bush Administration did not undertake this torture regime lightly, nor did they carry it out for self-aggrandizing purposes, nor did they believe they were in the wrong. Their motives were to protect the country - as it turns out, at too high a cost. They were not looking for political advantage. They were looking for information.

There is a dispute over whether they got anything of value from their illegal actions, but using hindsight to judge the torture regime purely on efficacious grounds is nonsense. In their view, they had to try. That was the whole point of what even they acknowledged several times was shaky legal activity.

I don’t happen to think it was that close of a call legally but others have made some cogent arguments that the Bush administration did indeed walk a fine legal line. I reject those arguments as sophistry because they are given “after the fact” as justification for actions already taken. There were enough lawyers in the Bush Justice Department who knew better and protested prior to the illegal torture that there should be little doubt that the fig leaf of legality supplied by Yoo and others was inadequate to the situation.

Surely, there must be some kind of investigation into how the Bushies arrived at the decision that what they were doing wasn’t torture despite ample evidence that it was. Their overriding argument appears to be that “it really didn’t hurt that much” because they took precautions (such as limiting the time a prisoner would be forced to undergo waterboarding) and that the pain they inflicted left few marks and healed in a matter of days.

Once the psychological barrier against torture was broken, it appears that things got out of control from there. So yes, let’s investigate. But prosecute?

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is leaning toward appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate whether CIA personnel tortured terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, 2001, setting the stage for a conflict with administration officials who would prefer the issues remain in the past, according to three sources familiar with his thinking.

Naming a prosecutor to probe alleged abuses during the darkest period in the Bush era would run counter to President Obama’s oft-repeated desire to be “looking forward and not backwards.” Top political aides have expressed concern that such an investigation might spawn partisan debates that could overtake Obama’s ambitious legislative agenda.

The White House successfully resisted efforts by congressional Democrats to establish a “truth and reconciliation” panel. But fresh disclosures have continued to emerge about detainee mistreatment, including a secret CIA watchdog report, recently reviewed by Holder, highlighting several episodes that could be likened to torture.

Holder’s decision could come within weeks, around the same time the Justice Department releases an ethics report about Bush lawyers who drafted memos supporting harsh interrogation practices, the sources said. The legal documents spell out in sometimes painstaking detail how interrogators were allowed to subject detainees to simulated drowning, sleep deprivation, wall slamming and confinement in small, dark spaces.

Prosecutions would no doubt please some on the left who want a pound of flesh from Bush administration officials. But is the administration really that keen on reigning in Holder and preventing him from looking at this “dark chapter in our history?”

Methinks the Obama administration doth protest too much. A distraction like this is just what the doctor ordered to take people’s minds off the fact that the stim bill isn’t working, that there is a growing call from Obama’s left flank for a second stimulus measure, that his cap and trade bill is in big trouble in the senate, and that it is far from certain that his his health care plan will come out the way he wants - with a public option that will be paid for without taxing the middle class.

Rallying his base to the cause of prosecuting Bush administration officials for torture will also take their minds off how he has betrayed them on a host of issues from gay rights to his agreement to indefinite detentions of terrorists.

So might this unleashing of Holder on Bush era torture crimes be nothing more than a distraction from the woeful economy that is resisting the president’s importunings to improve? Obama wouldn’t be the first president to use the tactic and he wouldn’t be the last if that is his game.

A good old fashioned investigation with strategic leaks and the spectacle of Bushies marching into the Justice Department to testify would serve as excellent bait for the media who no doubt would go overboard in their coverage of the hated Bush administration’s torture policies.

Bread and circuses worked for the Roman pro-consuls who used the spectacles to distract a populace constantly on the verge of starvation.

Why not Obama?