Month: March 2013

As the usual suspects flay Jeb Bush alive for daring to argue that a Grand Bargain would include both entitlement cuts and perhaps some tax reform that would add to revenue, Pete Wehner sighs. For one thing, Ronald Reagan would not be invited to CPAC in 2013:

Let’s consider Bush’s record as governor. While Bush never signed an anti-tax pledge, he never raised taxes. In fact, he cut taxes every year he was governor (covering eight years and totaling $20 billion).

Ronald Reagan, by contrast, signed into law what his biographer Lou Cannon called “the largest tax hike ever proposed by any governor in the history of the United States”–one four times as large as the previous record set by Governor Pat Brown–as well as the nation’s first no-fault divorce law and legislation liberalizing California’s abortion laws, which even people sympathetic to Reagan concede “led to an explosion of abortions in the nation’s largest state.” (Reagan didn’t anticipate the consequences of the law and deeply regretted his action.)

Now imagine the Norquist and Shirley standard being applied to Reagan in the 1970s.

On national security, it gets worse and worse:

In a year of intense public interest over deadly U.S. drones, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, terror threats and more, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times – a jump over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in Obama’s first year in office. The secretive CIA last year became even more secretive: Nearly 60 percent of 3,586 requests for files were withheld or censored for that reason last year, compared with 49 percent a year earlier.

A definitive take-down from John Corvino. His forthcoming book, “What’s Wrong With Homosexuality?” is now available.

Nick Holdstock reviews Game The News. Its creators call themselves “the world’s first news correspondents who cover global events as games”. I thought that’s what cable news does already. But no:

In Endgame: Syria, for example, you guide the political and military actions of ‘the rebels in their struggle’. Political events such as ‘Libya has recognised the Syrian National Council’ lead to changes in support for the rebels; troop deployments against the regime’s forces affect the levels of civilian casualties. At the end of each week there’s an instructive epigram: e.g. ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war,’ misattributed to Plato (it was George Santayana). The game ends with one or other side winning, or a peace agreement.

Simplistic and partial it may be, but no more so perhaps than many other news sources. More troubling is the way it apes regular combat games: in the ‘military phase’, you’re informed of new civilian casualties to the accompaniment of exciting explosions (then again, the TV news has been doing that for years too).

(Screenshot from the game Endgame: Syria)

After watching Jeb Bush’s Sunday show interviews, Beinart was convinced that “Jeb Bush will never seriously challenge for the presidency—because to seriously challenge for the presidency, a Republican will have to pointedly distance himself from Jeb’s older brother”:

No Republican will enjoy credibility as a deficit hawk unless he or she acknowledges that George W. Bush squandered the budget surplus he inherited. No Republican will be able to promise foreign-policy competence unless he or she acknowledges the Bush administration’s disastrous mismanagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. It won’t be enough for a candidate merely to keep his or her distance from W. John McCain and Mitt Romney tried that, and they failed because the Obama campaign hung Bush around their neck every chance it got. To seriously compete, the next Republican candidate for president will have to preempt that Democratic line of attack by repudiating key aspects of Bush’s legacy. Jeb Bush would find that excruciatingly hard even if he wanted to. And as his interviews Sunday make clear, he doesn’t event want to try.

(Photo: US President George W. Bush is embraced by his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, at University Air Center 31 in  Gainesville, Florida on October 2004. By Stephen Jaffe/AFP/Getty Images)

“The interesting thing about the New Albion was that it was so completely modern in spirit. There was hardly a soul in the firm who was not perfectly well aware that publicity – advertising – is the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced. In the red lead firm there had still lingered certain notions of commercial honor and usefulness. But such things would have been laughed at in the New Albion. Most the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertizing is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god,” – George Orwell, Keep The Aspidistra Flying.

(Hat tip: Shafer.)

Kevin Bullis makes the case for fracking as the least worst alternative to the more carbon-heavy alternatives:

The USA is the global climate leader, while Europe and Germany are returning to coal. The main reason is gas, which increased last year by almost the exact same amount that coal declined.” Fracking certainly isn’t without its problems (see “Can Fracking Be Cleaned Up?” and “Measuring the Climate Impact of Natural Gas”).

But if fracking is done properly, the natural gas power it supports can better for the environment than coal power. So why are so many environmentalists against it? Part of the reason may be that some environmentalists are comparing fracking not to coal but to solar and wind power, on the assumption that we could easily abandon fossil fuels for renewables. That’s a mistake. Solar and wind aren’t yet ready to replace even a large fraction of fossil fuel power. Costs need to come down, especially for solar, and we need better ways to deal with the fact that the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind is unreliable. It will also take a long time to build enough solar panels–in spite of phenomenal growth recently, solar power still provides less than a percent of electricity.

(Image by River Side courtesy of Marcellus Outreach Butler, July 2011.)