The Fart Tax

Virtuous New Zealand is doing its part to reduce greenhouse gasses - by introducing another tax on fuel, of course. I can see how that adds to government revenues, and I can see how it makes some feel good ("You have to try something"), but I'm damned if I can see how it accomplishes anything else.

Governments love stuff like that.

The story from Right Thinking reminds us of that infamous Fart Tax, which was finally rejected by New Zealand. Turns out half of their greenhouse emissions come from cattle passing gas. It was never mentioned what percent come from human gas, but there aren't many humans in New Zealand, which is why it's such a lovely country.

Anyway, New Zealand, I guess I can say this: "You care." That's really really nice.

And there's an interesting twist in Oregon, another "We Care" place, which pushed hybrid autos hard and successfully, but now finds their gas tax income dwindling, so they're coming up with a plan to replace the gas tax - with a tax on mileage! So much for supporting hybrids. So much for govt. wisdom. Why doesn't the Oregon legislature just propose a fart tax on people? It might help solve the elevator atmosphere crisis.

Counting Coup Before the Battle for the Court

"Here comes the blind commissioner, they've got him in a trance,
one hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants."

Yes, it's about Desolation Row.

Indian braves, in inter-tribal warfare, found glory in counting coup – demonstrating that they could kill, without killing. Like Mountain Sheep butting heads. But when it came down to protecting their buffalo land, things got bloody quick.

Since the election, we have seen the Dems probing, posturing, testing, lining up their moderate Repubs, and counting coup, in preparation for the big war for which they are girding themselves – the battle for at least two seats on the Supreme Court. Nothing in DC can be viewed outside of that context.

And never underestimate the destructive impulses of the weak and the small.

The Condi hearings were part of it. The Bolton thing is another. I have no doubt that Mr. Bolton is a hard-ass, and pro-American. Two strong points in his favor. But the Bolton thing isn’t about Bolton – it’s about demonstrating the power to deny Bush his appointees. Everyone knows the UN is a Sacred Joke - that ain't news.

And everyone in DC knows full well that Frist was playing a game of poker with his nuclear option - it was obvious. It was always meant to be an empty threat and a bluff, and he got called on his bluff. Suddenly, now, he either has to go forward or go backwards. Bad poker player – doctors always are. They have a native tendency for trust which doesn't work in DC, even when the trusting try to be sneaky. Decent folks can't pull it off. He had never intended to go through with it – it would have been a disaster in the Senate. He will now try to quietly retreat while appearing as if he isn't, but he got hurt because he was a schlemiel. He tried to be crafty, but he got out-maneuvered by the big boys like Chuckie Shumer, with Hillary in the wings, doing the hard math and the mafioso work: two Real Greasy Men with sharp elbows and minimal conscience who know the difference between a schlemiel and a schlemozle.

It's a game for this kind of people, I am sorry to say. It is no longer a sport for well-bred gentlemen who respect their opponents with good cheer and and sporting manners - not that it ever was. Honest folk need not apply: "I'm a politician, meaning I'm a cheat and a liar. When I'm not kissing babies, I'm stealing their lollipops." (Hunt for Red October)

 But the Repubs – not Frist - could win the long game by losing the hand, and I suspect that is part of the calculus. Filibustering judicial nominees is a double-edged sword, or a double-edged nuclear weapon. Now that it has become “acceptable” for routine use, it will be used much more in the future by Repubs – and they may need it in time – maybe sooner than Repubs want to imagine. The gamble was hedged in that way. Karl Rove ain’t stupid and wouldn’t endorse an unhedged bet. But Frist gets to be the shmuck in the game, and he should suffer because of the impaired judgement in going public by showing a very weak hand of cards.

For the time being, the Dems have won the skirmish by playing rope-a-dope with Frist in the classic Cassius Clay manner. They succeeded in roping a dope and have made the super-majority requirement acceptable for judicial nominees, and for who-knows what else. Maybe everything. Frist blew it big-time, thinking he was clever. Pride goeth before a fall.

 
But these things are all minor skirmishes as the main battle looms on the horizon. Thanks to poor and arrogant calculations, the Repubs enter the battlefield weakened. There will be blood on the saddle and blood running on the prairie. It’s a damn shame and it didn’t have to be this way. We will have open warfare, with too much at stake, and tainted by the desperation of the resentful, weak but emboldened Leftys that remain. All because of pure stupidity and arrogance. At least this is what it looks like to me now. I hope I'm wrong, and there's still a little time for the bluff to work...

You couldn’t run a business this way.

Anti-Americanism

Mahoney reviews Revel's Anti-Americanism:

Revel "knows the United States quite well and has written about it with curiosity and sympathy since the publication of his international bestseller Without Marx or Jesus in 1970. In that work, he put forward the audacious claim that the United States was the world's only truly revolutionary society, a veritable laboratory for social initiatives and experiments in living."

 Revel seems to have a handle on something real:

"Anti-Americanism is a ubiquitous phenomenon, the closest thing in the contemporary world to a secular religion uniting intellectuals and demi-intellectuals across national boundaries and cultural frontiers. It is less a systematic ideology than a frame of mind, nurtured by deep-seated resentments against liberal capitalism and by quasi-nihilistic despair at Marxism's and other revolutionary ideologies' failure to redeem the human condition. In his timely dissection of the anti-American vulgate, the French political observer Jean-François Revel establishes the powerful continuities between the old "totalitarian temptation"—European and Third World intellectuals' attraction to Communism—and today's crude anti-Americanism, which does so much to distort representations of American society and U.S. foreign policy. In Revel's presentation, anti-Americanism is the totalitarian temptation deprived of any positive or coherent alternative to the established liberal order. It is, in important respects, a survival of the age of ideology and has inherited many of its predecessors' pathological traits."

Read entire here.

Illegal Immigration, etc.

Contrary to popular impression, not all businessmen enjoy illegal immigration. From my past posts, you will gather that I do not feel that "illegal" is OK. The Repubs and the Dems are weenies on the subject, and they get no respect from me. Nor do any politicians. They are tools - hope they are our tools.  I would write another blog rant, but VDH talks better than I can write, and he doesn't rant.  A fine interview with VDH by Olasky:

"With perhaps as many as 20 million illegal aliens from Mexico, and the immigration laws in shreds, we are reaching a state of crisis. In a multiracial society such as our own, are we to tell the Filipino, the Sikh, the Korean, or the Haitian, "Stand in line, come legally, wait your turn—unless you come across the Mexican border and break the law in doing so." So, we need to return to what is known to work: measured and legal immigration, strict enforcement of our existing laws, stiff employer sanctions, an end to bilingual documents and interpreters, and ethnic chauvinism, English immersion—in other words, an end to the disastrous salad bowl and a return to the successful melting pot."

And, as a bonus, VDH throws in this jewel of an ad lib paragraph:

"We have given our entire souls to the god Reason, and left little else to the mystery and inexplicable of the world of faith. By believing that money and education alone can remake man, we of this therapeutic age forgot that his nature is largely fixed and hence predictable—and thus saved through law, family, religion, and community that ameliorate and tame his innate savagery. In our arrogance, we think a millionaire bin Laden or an educated Mohammed Atta is simply misguided, or has legitimate grievances, or is in need of aid and understanding, rather than proud, bullying, full of envy—and, yes, evil—and thus must be defeated rather than understood if we are going to save the innocent from their murderous instincts."

Read entire interview here.

Social Security, FDR, GW, etc.

Truth is, only I really know how FDR feels about Social Security reform, because I've been channeling FDR ever since Bush proposed reform - don't laugh - and FDR has been following the issue closely. And he channels Maggie's Farm daily, I'm pleased to report. Anyway, here are some of the things he has communicated to me:

"I was proud of Social Security, but that was two or three generations ago. Times change, and solutions change. Experiment, and make it better. That's what I always tried to do with things."

"That young pup GW sure has some balls to him. I like him. A warrior with a heart."

"Any legislation is just a first draft. You see how it works in reality and then you adjust to reality. The real purpose was just to keep the elderly from dying in the gutter, not to advance socialism. That goal is my legacy, not how it's achieved. Economics was never my forte anyway."

"Don't listen to my relatives. They want me embalmed - well, I am embalmed - I mean they want my legislation embalmed. As a monument to their Gramps or great-Gramps or whatever. Ridiculous. Hell, look at the tricks I played with the courts - nothing is permanent as I see it. Even the Constitution."

"If you could channel me a double dry Beefeater martini, up, with two olives, I would welcome it very much right now. It's cocktail hour."

I missed a very good review piece by John Fund when it came out a few weeks ago, at the the time of the FDR flap - the Libs went berserko because conservatives quoted FDR on Social Security, but Mr. Fund doesn't have the channel to FDR that I have:

"One good spinoff from the debate over President Bush's Social Security reform is that everyone is finally discussing the program's "solvency." It's about time. Countless people still think there is a "trust fund" with real assets in it that is being held for them until they're old enough to collect retirement payments. It's time they learn the truth. As Harvard economist Martin Feldstein has noted, the system's solvency "is based on a complex accounting sham so duplicitous that it is hard to believe."  Click here: Progress for America

The New! Improved! Democratic Party

Maggie's has already covered Frank's What's the Matter with Those Moron Idiot Rednecks in Kansas, and now we address Lakoff's Don't Think of An Elephant. I swear to God - Please, Dems, study these profound, history-changing books deeply!...I mean these condescending, simplistic, elitist, self-congratulating books. 

Lakoff actually presents old ideas. His advice is for Dems to change the words they use - change nothing of substance. It's standard marketing advice. But the Clintons and Tony Blair wrote the book on that subject years ago. It's about faking out the voter while you press your agenda....well, more so for Clinton than for Blair, who doesn't make us vomit. And the agenda, as I see it, is to make so many folks dependent on the govt. that they'll be re-elected forever, thus getting themselves on the dole too so they don't have to contend with a real demanding job. And can strut around DC picking up underage chicks while the wife sits home in the boonies. Pathetic.

Of course, the problem is that only about 48% max of the voters want to buy the soft socialist soap the Dems are selling. And those voters are essentially all in major urban areas, when you look at that county Red/Blue map. Not many of them in real America unless they're on the dole, which includes the govt. payroll. So it is true that if you want to sell more people this soap, changing the packaging is the place to start - assuming voters are the morons they think they are. From Cooper's interesting review in The Atlantic:

"In his best-selling manual of progressive political advice, Don't Think of an Elephant!, Lakoff asserts that political consciousness, and therefore voter choice, is determined by deeply wired mental structures -- "frames" -- that reflect more-general views and values. "The frames," Lakoff writes, "are in the synapses of our brains, physically present in the form of neural circuitry." Notwithstanding this neuroscientific hooey, Lakoff suggests that reframing American politics according to liberal values -- in essence rewiring our collective circuitry -- is but a matter of simple wordplay. When conservatives invoke "strong defense," liberals, Lakoff says, must reframe the concept by referring to a "stronger America." Instead of "free markets," liberals should speak of "broad prosperity." Likewise, "smaller government" must be recast as "effective government," and "family values" as "mutual responsibility." Those greedy "trial lawyers" excoriated by the right should be reframed and praised as brave and selfless "public-protection attorneys." And perhaps most important, when conservatives start promoting more Bushian "tax relief," liberals should respond by defending taxes as "membership fees" or "investments" in America."

Read entire: Click here: Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (A Progressive G