Month: April 2009

Insta wants to know why the Tea Parties aren't getting more attention. He links to this post on "why the tea parties are so important to us":

The Tea Party Movement is merely a step in the right direction in the war against tyranny and socialism. Those of us working at the National level are under no delusion that we’re going to change the world on April 15th. To assume we believe such would be borderline absurd.

We do, however, understand that the original Boston Tea Party Protest only had a few hundred participants and set the movement on a path to ultimate victory against the King of England. We understand that it wasn’t “A-Listers” or “Top Shelf Speakers”. It wasn’t the usual “leaders” or well known faces. It was, instead, every day business owners and taxpayers who quietly met in pubs, taking the opportunity to network and contemplate collaborative strategy.

On April 15th, hundreds of thousands of Americans will gather in more than 360 cities across all 50 states to proclaim their lack of confidence in our Government. We the people will shake hands, network, share ideas, discuss our frustrations, let some steam out, and begin to develop new coalitions and citizen groups.

These people live in their own little worlds, don't they?

"I have a sickened feeling about the recent campaign in Gaza. No sovereign state can accept regular aggressions across its border, but Operation Cast Lead seems to have accomplished nothing. Hamas is again firing its rockets, Israel is again retaliating against them, and Israeli politicians are again making virile promises to finish the job. The suffering of the people of Gaza during the war was partly the responsibility of their own astoundingly callous leaders, but not entirely. Israel's choice of tactics and strategies was its own; and when it chose blunt instruments, it guaranteed harsh consequences," – Leon Wieseltier, TNR.

Megan's heart goes out to the auto workers:

If Obama follows through, and actually puts the companies into bankruptcy, I'll be awfully impressed–it's hard for any president to give up Michigan, but especially for a Democrat who wants labor support.  So then the question is, what next?  Which marques go?  Buick, for sure, and Pontiac.  Which plants close?  And what is the government going to do to help autoworkers?  They're not just out of a job–they're stuck in a state that will be absolutely devastated by these closures.  Their houses will be worth almost nothing.  What do you do with a 50-year-old auto worker who has lived in a factory town all his life?

Via the Washington Independent, Charlotte Dennett reports:

We had asked for the meeting to learn why [Patrick Leahy] supported a truth commission over the appointment of a special prosecutor.

Halfway through the allotted 30 minute meeting (with him taking up much of the time explaining why he was not generally opposed to prosecution, since he had been a DA for eight years and had the highest conviction rate in Vermont), he told us that his truth commission had failed to get the broad support it needed in Congress, and since he couldn’t get one Republican to come behind the plan, “it’s not going to happen.”

War crimes are worth investigating – unless our friends committed them.

If you're looking for a green poodle.

Ross on Iran:

An Iranian bomb wouldn’t be a new thing under the sun. But it would be a significant risk-multiplier – and so would the nuclearizations that would likely follow in the region. Overall, I agree with Massie (and many others) that it’s a risk the United States should probably be willing to take, given the alternative approaches on offer. But I think we need to be clear-eyed about what a Mesopotamian balance of terror is likely to mean for U.S. policy in the region. Saying that we can live with a nuclear-armed Iran is the beginning of managing the problem, not the end of it. Deterrence proposed is easier than deterrence implemented.

Agreed. So let’s start thinking hard about how to minimize the damage and maximize our interests in that context.

A new contribution to the debate some didn't even want to have. From a review of Richard E. Nisbett's book Intelligence and how to get it: Why Schools and Culture Count:

Even if genes play some role in determining I.Q. differences within a population, which Nisbett grants, that implies nothing about average differences between populations. The classic example is corn seed planted on two plots of land, one with rich soil and the other with poor soil. Within each plot, differences in the height of the corn plants are completely genetic. Yet the average difference between the two plots is entirely environmental. Could the same logic explain the disparity in average I.Q. between Americans of European and of African descent? Nisbett thinks so.

 

The racial I.Q. gap, he argues, is “purely environmental.” For one thing, it’s been shrinking: over the last 30 years, the measured I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped from 15 points to 9.5 points. Among his more direct evidence, Nisbett cites impressive studies in population genetics. African-Americans have on average about 20 percent European genes, largely as a legacy of slavery. But the proportion of European genes ranges widely among individuals, from near zero to more than 80 percent. If the racial gap is mostly genetic, then blacks with more European genes ought to have higher I.Q.’s on average. In fact, they don’t.

Nisbett is similarly skeptical that genetics could account for the intellectual prowess of Ashkenazi Jews, whose average I.Q. measures somewhere between 110 and 115. As for the alleged I.Q. superiority of East Asians over American whites, that turns out to be an artifact of sloppy comparisons; when I.Q. tests are properly normed, Americans actually score slightly higher than East Asians.

If I.Q. differences are indeed largely environmental, what might help eliminate group disparities? The most dramatic results come from adoption. When poor children are adopted by upper-middle-class families, they show an I.Q. gain of 12 to 16 points.

(hat tip: Sunil)

In a slightly confused piece on the rapport between Barack Obama and the British Tory leader, David Cameron, we get this nugget from Chris Stirewalt:

George W. Bush famously offered a more compassionate brand of conservatism, but it mostly amounted to allowing Democrats to go ape on domestic spending in order to preserve funding for the Iraq war. The growth of the government under Bush is regarded as a failure, not an intentional departure.

For some reason, I thought the Republicans controlled the Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court for the overwhelming majority of the time Bush was president, and his own budgets were altered not so much in that time. For some reason, I recall that $32 trillion of future unfunded liabilities was added in the Medicare prescription drug act by forcing Republicans to stay up half the night until they signed on the dotted line. But I guess you have to massage history if you are to maintain the fiction that small government conservatism – barely practised even by Reagan – only died at the hands of the left.

Nah: Rove killed it. And it was premeditated murder.

Palin continues her presidential campaign in Indiana. Alaskans are getting more skeptical of her games.