Cox Crow

Peggy Noonan is tired of the security theater at the airport.

Why do we do this when you know I am not a terrorist, and you know I know you know I am not a terrorist? Why this costly and harassing kabuki when we both know the facts, and would agree that all this harassment is the government’s way of showing “fairness,” of showing that it will equally humiliate anyone in order to show its high-mindedness and sense of justice? … All the frisking, beeping and patting down is demoralizing to our society. It breeds resentment, encourages a sense that the normal are not in control, that common sense is yesterday.

She also has a suggestion for Barack Obama.

Oh, look, it appears that we’ll make the Arabs happy by leaving them alone. Who knew?

The government’s pockets are only as deep as yours.

Shall we choose the profligate candidate, or the spendthrift? Where’s the frugal choice when you need one?

I was listening to John McCain talk on NPR this evening, and I have to admit that he knows what to say to get my attention. However, the chasm between his talk and action is huge. Robert Siegel failed to ask obvious follow-up questions, perhaps out of fear of being too confrontational.

If elected president in November, McCain says, he’ll approve an additional $3 billion in taxes over 10 years. He also vows to immediately slash $100 billion in “wasteful” government spending — $65 billion from the federal budget baseline and $35 billion that was approved in spending bills over the past two years.

“The problem is that we’ve presided over a 40 percent increase in the budget over the last eight years,” McCain says, “and that’s got to be brought under control.”

And how, pray tell, are you planning to do that by spending $341.4 million per day keeping the Army in Iraq for the next 100 years?

Here’s a trick. Multiply 341,400,000 by 7. That’s 2,389,800,000. Then multiply that by a short month. That’s 66,914,400,000. Oh, look, I just saved $67 billion!

For those of you not paying attention, fuel costs are up. This change in circumstances changes the calculation of which mode of operation is optimal. In the case of transportation, the cost of long-haul packet shipping over railroads has dropped below that of trucks.

Commenting on this drop, Matthew Yglesias remarks,

Clearly trucks have a massive inherent advantage as a method of doing the last-mile of shipping, but for long-haul stuff a more rational federal policy environment in terms of carbon pricing and road/rail funding balance would give further momentum to this boom.

I think anyone who has bought wheat recently might suggest that Federal subsidies perturb the market substantially, frequently with severe unintended consequences. I highly doubt that Congress expected the price of pizza to rise because they were throwing buckets of money at corn ethanol. In light of the all-too-frequent confirmation that government intervention is a crude implement, perhaps a rational Federal policy environment would stop poking the economy with that stick. Perhaps we might remove subsidies for both highways and railroads, instead of increasing funding for the latter.

Would you like your opinion of the Fourth Estate lowered further? Thought it couldn’t get any worse? Suspect that journalists on deadline have less scruples than a Congressman on a junket? Then read Glenn Greenwald’s series on how the chattering classes have disconnected their brains from their mouths.

On the one hand, criticism of the media is a bit much like navel gazing, since one can find exceptional coverage of important matters. The Associated Press did notice that footnote, after all. But it is exceptional. The vast bulk is trivial. Where Greenwald errs is in asserting that this is exclusively a “right-wing” or Republican phenomenon. Perhaps the Democrats, as a party, are simply less competent in their manipulation, but all in power attempt to distract the People from their actions.

Bread and circuses, my friends, bread and circuses.

Perhaps there need to be word limits on legislation.

the legislation was a 262-page amendment to a far larger appropriations bill.

What Created This Monster”, The New York Times, via David Sucher, in re Bear Stearns.

“They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secretly? No! Let them come themselves and take us out.”

At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America’s shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one. [CBS News]

“Is it lawful for you to flog a man who is a Roman citizen and uncondemned?”

School budget season has started. This year’s spending increase: 7.2%.

I hope that Barack Obama will win the Democratic Party’s nomination. And I hope this, despite some evidence to the contrary, because I hope that he will not be Tweedledee to John McCain’s Tweedledum. I know Hillary Clinton would be. In her campaign speeches she’s taken to briefly mentioning defending the Constitution and our liberties, but her personal track record in this regard is not good. And if one includes her husband’s presidency — and for some reason her campaign wishes you to — then it is not at all better, and similar to President Bush’s in intent if not in scope: President Clinton had a hostile Congress.

I hope the President-elect, of whichever party, will appoint Bruce Schneier to a Cabinet post involving national security. We need to move beyond fear and brave the calculated risks of freedom.

I hope that the President- and Congress-elect will come to their senses, and repeal the PATRIOT Act, the REAL ID Act, and numerous other laws passed out of fear which contribute nothing to our security but hinder our liberties.

I hope that we enter a period of fiscal responsibility characterized by low taxes and governmental restraint.

I hope that I am not disappointed.

Why, in a speech about a more perfect union, does Barack Obama mention Israel?

… a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

What does that have to do with confronting the tensions in American society?

Perhaps because I’m not an international actor, it has always struck me as strange the reverence given to borders. They are, for states, like property rights are for an individual, inviolable. Borders are, to a great extent, an accident of history, settled through the time-honored mechanisms of war, diplomacy, and the maxim that possession is nine-tenths of the law. Trouble arises when lines are drawn on a map without the willing participation of those who live there, and assumed to have the same settled nature as more accidental lands. But even more arises when they are inflexible.

An article in The Atlantic Monthly wonders what the Middle-East will be like After Iraq,” and suggests, perhaps, that the artificial borders in the region might give way to arrangements somewhat more organic.

One Howard Kurtz appears to be employed by The Washington Post to read the web and regurgitate it with perspective. Must be nice. A while back, in evaluating whether Hillary Clinton had any hope against the swell of support behind Barack Obama, he wrote:

Here’s another example [of how Obama has not faced tough criticism from the press], from the conservative side. How many stories even took note of Obama’s vote on a Bush-backed bill to expand the government’s surveillance powers?

“As good of a campaign as Obama has run,” says Bull Dog Pundit, “you do wonder if he’s really given any thought to the fact that he actually might become the president. How else to explain his ‘No’ vote on a bill that was overwhelmingly supported 67-31.”

Perhaps he voted that way because the bill is wrong and unnecessary.

But why does Mr. Kurtz assume that Senator Obama would be pilloried for not giving the Executive everything it wants? Perhaps this vote appeals, not, as the ankle biter suggests, to “his far-left base,” but to his far-right base, and to innocent Americans world-wide.

One of the problems with government schooling is the textbooks, particularly the history texts, which tend to become little more than a combination of puff piece and indoctrination manual after the various interests get done fighting over what goes in them. One thing they should avoid, but don’t, are current events.

I just ran across this excerpt from People, Places and Change: An Introduction to World Studies (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2005).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, terrorism became a major threat to world peace. In 2003, U.S. military forces invaded Iraq. They were sent to prevent Iraq from using chemical and biological weapons. … The United States has protected innocent civilians or helped bring peace to a war-torn region.

A bit premature, don’t you think?

Because so many people have such trouble with logic — and do not understand that though A is a member of B, all B are not A — let me point out the following.

The perpetrators of the terrorist attack on the U.S. on April 19, 1995, were Christian.

By far the greater number of assaults on the United States or on people within the United States, with the intent of causing terror, were perpetrated by individuals or groups identifying themselves as Christian.

While the perpetrators of the attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, were Muslim, the fact that they were Muslim does not make all Muslims terrorists.

(The hijackers were mostly Saudi Arabian, but we didn’t invade Saudi Arabia, did we? But that’s beside the point.)

I was watching Thursday’s debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama this morning, but came up with some more important things to do shortly after they discussed Cuba. Mrs. Clinton’s comments were insubstantial. Mr. Obama’s were on target. (The debate transcript is behind that link, so I’m only including excerpts.)

CLINTON: I would not meet with him until there was evidence that change was happening, because I think it’s important that they demonstrate clearly that they are committed to change the direction. Then I think, you know, something like diplomatic encounters and negotiations over specifics could take place.

OBAMA: Now, keep in mind that the starting point for our policy in Cuba should be the liberty of the Cuban people. And I think we recognize that that liberty has not existed throughout the Castro regime. And we now have an opportunity to potentially change the relationship between the United States and Cuba after over half a century.

….

And it’s absolutely true that I think our policy has been a failure. I mean, the fact is, is that during my entire lifetime, and Senator Clinton’s entire lifetime, you essentially have seen a Cuba that has been isolated, but has not made progress when it comes to the issues of political rights and personal freedoms that are so important to the people of Cuba. [emphasis mine]

Why should Raúl Castro, or whoever will be the next president of Cuba, want to meet with us? Dictatorships are not like republics: they are not as much under the sway of popular opinion. Since 1961, we’ve restricted commerce with Cuba, in an attempt to remove Fidel Castro from power. It has failed. Death, not the United States, will remove Castro. And death will remove his successors as well. The embargo will not. They prefer death over defeat.

Cuba is playing a game of endurance chicken. Will they run out of money, or friends, first, or shall we? Will they blink first, or shall we? Meanwhile, we pretend that an embargo is an effective means of coercion. It is not. Like a cartel, the participants in an embargo have an incentive to cheat.

Whom do we harm with this embargo?

(In other news, the Cato Institute has analyzed Congressional votes on trade since 1999, and provided a tool for viewing the results online: Free Trade, Free Markets: Rating Congress. Here’s how the current crop of presidential candidates fare: Clinton, McCain, Obama, Paul. Gov. Huckabee has no record.)

It might be interesting for a while to have a “jackass of the week” feature, but there are only 52 weeks in the year, and many, many more jackasses than that. But just for starters, let’s include the entire Directorate of National Intelligence: jackasses.