Month: November 2008

A reader writes:

Your reader wrote:

"What is missing is the step of coming to judgement . . ."

That’s the key phrase for me and it’s why I continue to find Gingrich a fascinating character.  He has begun to make noises about Conservatives addressing how the Republican Party has contributed to the past eight years of failure.  My very conservative family taught me that at the conclusion of any endeavor a reckoning would be imposed.  It is the fear of nasty and brutal consequences that has made me a fiscal conservative and a successful business woman.

We simply cannot continue to exist, as Conservatives, if the movement fails to render a honest appraisal of itself; its behavior during the last couple of decades, and how those failures are perceived by the public.

Palin certainly plays a part at the culmination of the last election and her appearance on the scene must measured and put in perspective with the collapse of the financial markets and national debt burden.  In what way is Palin emblematic of the ills that befall us all?  Answer that question and we will be a long way toward defining what Conservatives need to do next.

Yes, Palin is that important.

A reader writes:

You are totally correct on teachers’ unions. I am a teacher at a high performing charter middle school in an extremely low performing district. We randomly take students from surrounding schools by a blind lottery. I cannot stress enough that the success of our school is in large rooted in the fact that there is no teachers’ union presence here.

Teachers at my public charter school, including myself, routinely put in 12 hour days. We spend the time perfecting lessons, tutoring students, grading work, and working with families. We do it because we are dedicated to our jobs and want to close the achievement gap (all of our students, by random chance, are African-American and Hispanic-American).

Teachers’ unions inhibit the ability of schools to ask teachers to do their jobs. Certainly, many charter schools are terrible, and we need to copy the results of successful ones only (not the new one in NYC that pays teachers over $100,000). Obama’s support of charter schools and criticism of the teachers’ unions is heartening.

One more thought. If you listen to the teachers’ union, the rhetoric almost sounds like it is from SEIU or another union that represents low-income workers. Look, I’d like to paid more as much as the next teacher, but it is ridiculous to act like teachers (all of whom have college degrees, and in many states must have MA degrees) are an oppressed work force. Liberals and conservatives need to understand that whatever your opinion on unions in general, the teachers’ unions are clearly disasters.

Love him or hate him – and I do both all the time – he’s usually worth reading:

I certainly agree about "compassionate conservatism." I came in for some obloquy on this very blog a few years ago for calling it "turkey poop," but in retrospect I think I was too kind. At least one of its aspects — the determination to show kindness to poor people by making it easier for them to buy houses, by chucking sane credit standards out the window — contributed mightily to our current economic mess. And there are certainly people in the GOP who think our error has been that we weren’t "compassionate" enough. In fact that is probably George W. Bush’s thinking, and John McCain’s too. I’d like to see the GOP get its green-eyeshade image back; but alas, green eyeshades in the kind of deep recession we are entering are snowflakes in hell, politically. We must hunker down and look to the future.

Pretty honest assessment. He only likes Sarah Palin for Lowry-esque reasons. She gives his tweed trousers starbursts. I wonder how much of Palin’s male support never got past her ass.

That’s what Nico Pitney is reporting:

President-elect Barack Obama offered Sen. Hillary Clinton the position of Secretary of State during their meeting Thursday in Chicago, according to two senior Democratic officials. She requested time to consider the offer, the officials said.

The Dish will cover as many as we can. Find out your local protest here.

Sam Tanenhaus reviews Barton Gellman’s new book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. One paragraph:

Gellman’s book may well be the fullest account we will ever get of its subject. Cheney’s papers have been sealed and will remain inaccessible for many years to come, provided that he does not have them shredded or burned, which is altogether possible. It seems equally unlikely that Cheney will write an apologia or a finger-pointing memoir–testament to his discipline, and also to his oddly touching quality of genuine self-negation.

These attributes have made Cheney, seen so long as "the ultimate staffer," one of the most remarkable figures in modern political history and–in the Machiavellian sense–one of the most accomplished. He is an all-around master of the arts of power. His unique force as Bush’s "deputy president" is hardly a secret, but still the mind reels at Gellman’s summation: "Cheney reshaped national security law, expanded the prerogatives of the executive branch, midwifed the birth of domestic espionage, rewrote the president’s tax bill, shifted the course of a river out west, shut down negotiations with North Korea, and had a major role in bringing war to Iraq."

Paul Farhi doesn’t blame journalism for the downfall of newspapers:

The real revelation of the Internet is not what it has done to newspaper readership – it has in fact expanded it – but how it has sapped newspapers’ economic lifeblood. The most serious erosion has occurred in classified advertising, which once made up more than 40 percent of a newspaper’s revenues and more than half its profits.

Classified advertisers didn’t desert newspapers because they disliked our political coverage or our sports sections, but because they had alternatives. Craigslist and eBay and dozens of other low-cost and no-cost classified sites began gobbling newspapers’ market share a few years ago. What they didn’t wipe out, the tanking economy did. During the first half of 2008, print classified advertising nosedived more than 25 percent, as withering job, real-estate and auto listings erased $1.8 billion in revenue from newspaper companies’ books. Newspapers have been uniquely hurt – television never had classifieds to lose.

From later in the article:

…let’s not kid ourselves. The online business model is still uncertain, at best. An online visitor isn’t as valuable to advertisers as a print customer. Online readers tend to dart in and out, spending far less time on a newspaper site than a subscriber spends with a paper. And a portion of the traffic (how much depends on the paper) comes from outside the paper’s circulation area, making these visitors irrelevant to local advertisers. I’m not really surprised that newspapers haven’t figured out how to make the Web pay for all the things that print traditionally has. There may not even be a business model for it. But again: Can you really blame the newsroom for that?

Thoreau wants the detainee interrogations videotaped:

Terrorism suspects should be treated like any other persons accused of murder or conspiracy to commit murder, and any sort of interrogation in those cases should be videotaped. Several years ago, an Illinois State Senator pushed for videotaping of police interrogations.  I hope that that fine State Senator is still the man that he was several years ago, and I hope he holds fast to those principles when deciding what to do about terrorism suspects. 

We did tape interrogations, and the tapes were destroyed.

The Economist has an article on what to expect at the November 15th world finance meeting. Drezner is pessimistic:

…the basic conundrum is that governments would like to regulate financial institutions in such a way that private capital does not come up with a way to evade those regulations and engage in the exact same activities with a lower regulatory cost.  In the history of financial regulation, however, private capital has excelled at regulatory avoidance.  Given the complexities of financial markets, I have every confidence that even if the G-20 were to agree on common standards, they would not be airtight.  The loopholes that would be found would let the air out of any governance balloon that was inflated.